Collateral Damage: A World War Ii Orphan: Lost and Found

By Reda Reynolds

Young Reda Reynolds lived with her parents and little sister on the Upper West Side of Manhattan shortly after Hitler invaded Poland. Her parents and extended family showered the children with love. That idyllic childhood ended abruptly when Reynoldss father was drafted in 1944. In January of 1945, they received the news he was killed during the Battle of the Bulge.

Reynoldss life changed dramatically. Her mother, Maxine, became distant and withdrawn. When Maxine remarried in April 1947, she seemed driven to erase all memories of her former husband and his family. In Collateral Damage, Reynolds shares the story of life as an orphan, a term the US government used to refer to those who lost a father to war even though many of these childrens mothers were still living. Reynolds narrates the stressful life she lived with her mother and stepfather through her adolescence and early adulthood. She tells about seeking treatment for ongoing depression and anxiety and taking steps to reunite with her deceased fathers family.

In this memoir, Reynolds also discusses how, in her fifties, she sought to fill an emotional void by learning more about her father and his mission in World War II. She researched government documents and obtained a copy of her grandfathers memoir, covering life in Germany from the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, his imprisonment in Buchenwald, and his miraculous release from the concentration camp. It was the knowledge she needed to help her make sense of her past and present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Jun 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9781480844926

Reda Reynolds

Reda Reynolds earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and later attended graduate school. She pursued a career in counseling. Reynolds is a mother and grandmother. She lives in Florida.

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Copyright © 2017 Reda (Weil) Reynolds.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-4493-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-4491-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-4492-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017907084

Archway Publishing rev. date: 5/30/2017

Contents

Preface

Finding the American War Orphans Network (AWON)

PART I

The Telegram and Its Aftermath

1 The Telegram—January 1945

2 Sleepaway Camp

3 I Dreamed the World

4 My Stepfather, Sam

5 Where Did They Go?

6 Just Gone

7 Mommy’s Daddy

8 Third Grade

9 Saturday Afternoons

10 My Life Turned Upside Down—Sixth Grade

11 Mother and I

12 Deep South: My First Two Years of College

13 Mother and I

14 Deep North: Junior and Senior Years at Michigan

15 Finding a Life in the Big City

16 Mother and I (Reprise)

17 Mother and I and My Stepfather

18 Overcoming Trepidation: A Tentative Search for the Past

19 Seeking Help

20 Mother and Me (Second Reprise)

21 Finally, a Married Woman

22 Recording Holocaust Survivors’ Stories

Part II

Opening the Door a Crack

23 Finding the Past in My Fifties

24 My Opa: A Painful but Necessary Story to Tell

25 What I Learned about Opa

26 Opa’s Memoir

27 How Opa and Fanny Escaped Germany

Part III

Flinging the Doors Wide Open

28 First Tangible Evidence

29 What the Documents Taught Me

30 More Tangible Evidence: Individual Deceased Personnel File

31 A Memorial Service for Me

32 Finding My Voice

33 The Time for Questions Ends

34 My Search for Information Continues

35 Real Letters from My Father

Preface

Finding the American War Orphans Network (AWON)

O n Thursday, October 21, 1999, I was drinking coffee and skimming through the Sarasota Herald -T ribune before driving to work. A large headline, Reconstructing Dad, caught my attention. The subhead was equally provocative: Children Whose Dads Died in World War II Are Looking for Information from Other Veterans.

I couldn’t believe what I had just read. This was my story, except that I had not done any research into my dad’s wartime history. This article might have been written for me as a wake-up call.

Ellen Swatek, the subject of the interview, was a member of the American War Orphans Network (AWON), an organization I had recently joined. Reading the article carefully, I knew instinctively that I had to contact Ellen immediately. Because I couldn’t call her directly, I contacted the newspaper and spoke to the staff writer. He promised to call Ellen and give her my phone number so that she could get in touch with me if she wished. Before twenty-four hours had elapsed, Ellen telephoned me. During that short wait, I vacillated between feelings of excitement about talking to Ellen and anxiety over the fear that she wouldn’t call.

And then she did call, and how glad we both were to have found a fellow orphan living just a few miles away. Losing a father in wartime wasn’t the only thing we had in common. We had both gone to graduate school and begun careers in counseling in our late forties. This gave us another important connection.

To make certain the opportunity didn’t slip away, I invited Ellen and her husband, Hanford, to have dinner with my husband, Kelly, and me the following Saturday evening. When they arrived, Ellen was carrying a black portfolio filled with documentation detailing the military mission that had resulted in her father’s death. His plane had been flying at a low altitude, probably no more than one hundred feet above the ground, dropping supplies to American troops behind German lines. Small-arms fire had hit the plane, and the wing tipped. As the plane had hit the ground, it had burst into flames.

In a sense Ellen and I were on a mission as well, although, of course, of a personal and modest kind. I realized that I needed to do the kind of research she had already done. Ellen gave me the encouragement and technical assistance to get started.

She immediately suggested that I contact Jack Forgey, a member of AWON. As a retired career military officer, Jack was familiar with the procedures involved in accessing files now opened under the Freedom of Information Act, which president Lyndon Johnson had signed into law July 4, 1964, although not without misgivings.

Since our first meeting more than a decade and a half ago, Ellen and I have been getting together for lunch once a month with several other AWON members in the Sarasota-Bradenton area of Florida. Although my friendship with Ellen began with her serving as my mentor, we long ago became mutually supportive. AWON members refer to one another as sisters and brothers, and we are often more closely bonded to other members than we are to our biological siblings. Ellen Swatek is certainly my sister, just as David Colinan, another member of our small AWON group in South Florida, is my brother and Barbara Pletchy, who also went back to school, like Ellen and me, and became a psychiatric nurse, is my sister. Sometimes, in contrast, our biological siblings would prefer to have nothing to do with this search into the past.

Ann Bennett Mix founded AWON in 1991, fifty-six years after the end of World War II. Ann had been trying to learn about her father’s experiences and death in the war and reached out to other "orphans" through articles. My friend and coworker Margot Joynes showed me one such article in Parade Magazine, sometime in the 1990s, and suggested that I join the organization. Although I did not take her suggestion at the time, the idea of learning more about AWON remained in the back of my mind. Eventually, I summoned the courage to join. Soon I began receiving the Star, AWON’s quarterly newsletter.

Orphans was the term the US government used to refer to those who had lost a father to war, even though many of these children’s mothers were still living. President Lincoln was probably the first to use the term in this way. The term appears in his second inaugural address, where he calls on the nation to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan. Was I, a sixty-year-old married woman with grandchildren, still to be considered an orphan? Although the expression, in this context, might strike some as odd, AWON was simply following the government’s practice of employing the term.

I soon learned that the wartime deaths of fathers had irrevocably changed the lives of thousands of children who were now middle-aged men and women. When I was growing up, I don’t think I ever encountered anyone who had undergone an experience similar to my sister’s and mine. We may have met people who had been orphaned by the war, but, like us, they probably didn’t talk about their losses.

As the organization increased its membership across the country, its orphaned adult members came to realize they had a good deal in common. Most likely, while they were growing up, few of the orphans had any helpful conversations with family members or other adults about the losses they had suffered. Nobody asked them what they felt about their fathers’ deaths. This was especially true of the orphans, like my sister and me, whose mothers remarried not long after the end of war. Over time, these children lost contact with their fathers’ families—grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. It was a revelation for me to discover that my life was not unique. Nearly all the other adult orphans I met or read about were familiar with the fear of abandonment I had felt all my life. But now we had a safe place to talk about our sadness and anger.

Most of the widowed and recently remarried mothers simply wanted to get on with their lives. The end of the war brought prosperity and a sense of renewal that enabled Americans to participate in a booming economy. By the 1950s, ration cards had disappeared, as had the need to save bits of soap, bacon grease, and tin cans. Factories that had been building tanks, guns, and submarines were retooled to produce construction materials for new homes, family cars, refrigerators, and washing machines.

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Mommy and baby, Lenox Hill Hospital, October 1939

PART I

The Telegram and Its Aftermath

1

The Telegram—January 1945

O n the night we were to receive that fateful telegraph, Mommy read Little Red Riding Hood to my sister and me. I think the story scared baby Susie, but I knew it was just a made-up story. The big bad wolf didn’t really eat up the little girl’s grandmother. Mommy tucked us in and kissed us good night. She turned off my Goldilocks lamp on the dresser, closed the door—almost but not quite all the way—and said, Sleep tight.

I answered, And don’t let the bedbugs bite.

Susie slept in my hand-me-down crib. I had a big kid’s bed because I was already five and going to the nursery school at the synagogue across the street from our apartment. The school’s name was written on the building in Hebrew letters, which Mommy told me meant House of Children.

A knocking on the front door woke me up. Then I heard men’s voices. I softly crept out of bed so I wouldn’t wake up Susie. When I opened the door wide, I heard Mommy crying. I ran through the living room to the front hall. Two men in army uniforms were quietly speaking to Mommy. She showed me a piece of paper. The paper was yellow and had black words stuck to it, but I couldn’t read it. Mommy told me that it was a telegram and that it said that Daddy had been killed in the war. She just kept crying. I started to cry too.

Soon Aunt Bea and Uncle Al came to our apartment. Aunt Bea was Mommy’s aunt and my great-aunt, but I just called her Aunt Bea. My grandma, who was one of Aunt Bea’s sisters, had died a long time ago, so Aunt Bea had become kind of like a grandma to Susie and me. Aunt Bea said she would put me back to bed. She took me by the hand and led me through the living room and down the hall to my bedroom. She tucked me into bed and gave me