What if we had lost the Second World War?

Had we lost the war would this picture have be taken?

L-R Standing, Joel & me. Seated Gary, Mom & Bob - circa 1952

If you are new to my blog I suggest you read “A Child of the Greatest Generation” published on 08-20-2009 to better understand why this story was written.

more reflections

Unthinkable you say! How could that be? Consider for the moment how your life would have been had Germany and the Nazis won World War II. If you were born before 1945, would you still be alive? If you were born after 1945, would you have ever been born?

For a small part of the wartime Clarksburg community, the answer to what the future held, had the war been lost, was abundantly clear. They would have become the “Silenced Minority.”

For many of us, going to the movies, during the war, on Saturday morning, was a ritual. What you could get for 12¢ was a bargain. As a kid you got to go to the movies by yourself or with the gang from your neighborhood. As a mom, the house was much quieter and you generally had the morning to yourself.

We would walk downtown to the Robinson-Grand Theater to see the next edition of an exciting, never ending serial about the good guys chasing the bad guys. That kept you coming back every Saturday, Then there were cartoons that made the theater rock with laughter and boos, followed by either Movietone or Pathé newsreels, black and white stories “From around the Globe.” Before television it was a kid’s visual window on the world.

What we saw then…today would be called sound bites, a series of short black and white films covering what the editors thought we should not only hear about, but more importantly, see.

It was on one of those Saturdays in early 1945…and one of those sound bite stories that, at the age of 9, changed my life forever. It was a sound bite about the soldiers finding something called a concentration camp. As the newsreel’s gruesome pictures showed on the big screen, and the voice over explained, these were extermination camps where the Jews of Europe had been taken as part of Hitler’s Final Solution.

It showed piles of emaciated dead bodies, painfully thin survivors wearing pajama type uniforms with bold vertical stripes, and finally large ovens with their doors flung opened revealing human remains. As the voice explained, here was how the Nazi’s disposed of the dead.

I left the theater that day badly shaken, with the indelible imprint of those pictures in my mind, and to this day, in my memory. The war was all but won, but I realized, even at that tender age, if the bad guys had won, my fate and that of my family was sealed. I am Jewish and had the bad guys won, all of the Jews in Clarksburg, West Virginia, would have ended up in a camp like that, and ultimately in one of those ovens.

Living in our town, the 65 or so Jewish families were a white minority. If the story had turned out differently we would have been the “Silenced Minority.”

Should you wish to see part of what I saw at age 9, please do so with this admonition; The world should never forget. Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eoKJ-Zr6Rc.