Angress was one of \”The Ritchie Boys,\” a special Army unit made up mainly of young Jewish refugees from Germany, whose World War II exploits have been recorded for the first time in a documentary by German filmmaker Christian Bauer.\n\nThe German-Canadian co-production is one of 12 documentaries still in competition for Academy Award honors.
Approximately 550,000 Jewish Americans served in the armed forces during World War II, about 4.23 percent of the total number of troops. Both Roosevelt and General Douglas MacArthur praised their bravery specifically. During the war, 52,000 Jewish soldiers received an award or decoration of some kind and 11,000 were killed.
Now, close to 60 years after World War II, veterans of the conflict have aged and their numbers are dwindling, but despite current ambivalence toward American war-like nature, America\’s participation in World War II and relative success in making the world \”safe for democracy\” is never questioned.
So you\’ve roamed the Coliseum, marveled at Florentine art and gamboled in gondolas and you\’re ready for a different side of Italy. Or perhaps you\’re about to dip a toe into Italian culture, including its little-known Jewish heritage, for the first time.
The highly controversial French documentary film, \”Terrorists in Retirement,\” offers a striking revelation that, on reflection, should come as no surprise at all — Eastern European Jews played a prominent role in the most daring exploits of the World War II French resistance movement. This truth comes as a jolt only because French popular myth and official histories have so thoroughly suppressed it, considering it harmful to the nation\’s heritage to admit that stateless immigrants, facing deportation and almost certain death, fought harder for France\’s freedom than did many citizens who were content to collaborate with their German conquerors.
A German corporation that used slave labor to produce some of the weapons that killed American soldiers is now building a monument in Washington to honor the Americans who fought and died in World War II.
\nPlaywright Arje Shaw\’s first memory was crawling across the floor, finding a piece of black, moldy bread and dipping the crust in water in order to chew it. He was 18 months old. \”I looked like a Biafran baby,\” he says.
On Friday, Sept. 7, 1945, 1800 hours, at the corner of Freiherr von Stein Strasse and Eppsteiner Strasse in Frankfurt-on-the-Main, a ceremony took place.
The horrific racial persecution of the Holocaust is all too familiar to us. That dark period in history was marked by the brutal deaths of millions of innocent people and also involved the virtual enslavement of more than 10 million foreign laborers in Germany.
After we made \”Schindler\’s List,\” more and more Holocaust survivors came up to me ,and every one of them said, \”Now let me tell you MY story.\” And each story was different and compelling. – Steven Spielberg
Fred Rochlin can\’t understand all the fuss over his monologue, \”Old Man in a Baseball Cap,\” about his adventures during World War II.\n\”I\’m not an actor,\” he insists. \”I\’m an old guy.\”
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