A Jewish Story
by
Sheldon Cohen
Copyright 2012 Sheldon Cohen,
All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0742-5
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
CHAPTER 1
PRELUDE
1904-1936
BERLIN, GERMANY
Ben Frohman arrived in Germany with his Torah wrapped in leather; a Torah penned by his great-great grandfather and passed down from generation to generation. He kissed it and stored it for safekeeping. He would breathe easier now, finally free of the pogroms that plagued the Jews of Eastern Europe.
His father, also planning to leave Tiktin, Poland and follow his family was not as lucky, falling victim to the violence.
Upon hearing the news of his father’s death, Ben and his mother sat in mourning for the traditional seven days. Their grief knew no bounds, but they sought comfort based upon the knowledge that he would want them to survive and live in peace in their new country.
Although there was some anti-Semitism in Germany at the time, it was not government policy as it had been under the Czar. The early part of the twentieth century was a golden-era for Jews in Germany and beside the occasional anti-Semitic rant, verbally or in print by individuals, there was no organized anti-Semitism affecting Jewish life and the ability to make a living.
As Ben grew up, his ambition remained to become a physician. His academic collegiate achievements allowed him to enter the University of Berlin medical school in an era when Germany and Austria were the world leaders in medical education and care.
When he graduated, he went to a dance with a friend and fellow male classmate to the Jewish Community center. It was here that his life changed when he walked into the dance hall and caught a glimpse of a young woman sitting against the wall who took his breath away. She was short and slim with coal black hair fixed upon her head in a bun. There was not a hint of makeup on her beautiful face, nor was any necessary he thought. He was close enough to see her large, brown eyes. She was dressed in a long green skirt with a green sweater. Tremulously, he approached her. “Uh…excuse me, please. My name is Ben Frohman. Would you care to dance?”
She looked at him, a slow smile crossing her features, and as Ben stared back nervously, she said, “Why yes, I’d love to. My name is Leah Friedberg.”
As they danced, she said to him, “Do I sense an accent?”
“Yes, and I thought I lost it all.”
“Your accent is very, very faint. I’m good with languages,” she answered.
“That’s a Russian accent. My mother and I came here in 1904. My father was killed in Russia during one of the pogroms many years ago.”
“Oh, I see. I’m sorry to hear about your father.”
“Thank you,” was all Ben could say.
Leah added, “We know all about the pogroms, and we’ve had many people flee to Germany. I’m sure that your life has been much better here.”
“Yes, it has been. Very much better.”
They sat together after the dance, and as they did, he was relaxed and comfortable in her presence. Before he had to leave, he whispered, “Leah, would you care to accompany me Wednesday evening to the Burgerstrasse Café?”
Ben saw her turn and smile at him. There was a moment of silence as he could feel his heart thump in his chest. Then she said, “Why, yes. I’d love to.”
A mutual interest was there from the start for the both of them. He learned that Leah was a nurse working in a private clinic. Her parents were Reform Jews and had arrived in Berlin from Byelorussia.
Both of them found that they had many mutual interests and they spent every moment together that he was free from his medical responsibilities.
This was their first love and every passing day brought them closer. They married shortly before he completed his internal medicine residency. He started his practice and Leah continued nursing. They were on the threshold of a happy life.
They thrived in this milieu, but worried as the newspapers told of Europe’s unstable search to form alliances in preparation for the war that many feared would soon engulf the continent. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Serbia set the conflagration in motion that everyone had feared. In 1914, World War I started, and Germany called up many young physicians including Dr. Ben who had to turn over his developing practice to an older physician while he fought for the glory of his adopted country.
Germans, overcome with an intense patriotic fervor, gathered in street rallies to support the war. At one of these rallies on the Marienplatz in Munich, a young man stood in the sea of cheering faces. He screamed his support for the Fatherland. This twenty-five year old vagabond in search of a destiny would later write, ‘to me those hours seemed like a release from the painful feelings of my youth. Even today, I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by stormy enthusiasm; I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of permitting me to live at this time. A fight for freedom had begun, mightier than the earth had ever seen; for once Destiny had begun its course, the conviction dawned on even the broad masses that this time not the fate of Serbia or Austria was involved, but whether the German nation was to be or not to be.’
His name was Adolph Hitler. Even though he was an Austrian, he joined the German army where he distinguished himself by earning the Iron Cross and after the war would enter politics, join and then lead the fledgling party, the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (Nazis, for short), and, in the next twenty-five years, almost bring the world and the Jewish people to complete destruction.
Dr. Ben charged into the quagmire of World War I where destiny would take him far beyond his wildest dreams. His first wartime act was to pass through the trenches near Ypres. The battles had begun. The French countryside had already become desolate, with ruined villages, fields pockmarked with shell craters and littered with the bloated corpses of men and horses and cattle. The soldiers walked around with hollow eyes, their uniforms caked with mud, sweat and blood. In the first few weeks, they became battle-hardened veterans. Ben’s arrival coincided with these first bloody battles. He worked around the clock and the days merged into one utilizing his skills as a diagnostician on occasion, but mostly assisting in and performing surgery trying to save the lives of young soldiers with wounds of all degrees of severity on every part of the human anatomy.
The time was the time of the damned. The atmosphere of anesthetic agents and gangrene clogged the bronchial tubes like a thick, suffocating gruel. Two surgical masks helped a bit, but made breathing more difficult, so he often operated without them. Nothing prepared him for the volume and intensity of injuries, disease and death as both sides fought for temporary gains measured in meters.
He kept thinking about the Kaiser’s statement when the war started, that “The war would be over before the leaves start falling from the trees.” But his never-ending emergency schedule necessitated continuous work, and as the leaves fell three more times he garnered more experience than he could ever have achieved in a lifetime of practice; there was no part of the human anatomy he didn’t treat. He had learned to live on less than four hours of sleep a night.
Germany and its opponents were involved in the killing fields of a stalemated trench-warfare. Four years later in November 1918, by the