“There was a great deal of concern among Jewish soldiers that if they were arrested and their dog was marked as Jewish, they would receive treated differently from the Germans”. “A large number of Jewish soldiers hid their Judaism not only from the enemy but also by keeping it out of their official records, and official records are what the military must continue if they were killed.”
Some soldiers also fear the anti-Semitism they might face from other American soldiers.
Barbara Belmont, 80, a retired executive in Virginia, was three years old when her father, Albert, was killed in action. His dog tags identify him as a Christian. His brother Belmont later told his niece that his brother wanted to “feel like one of the men,” she said.
“There was a lot of anti-Semitism and he didn’t want to be ‘that Jewish soldier’ or anything,” she said. “He just wanted to be one of the soldiers.”
Miss Belmont has spent her life trying to learn about her father, a photographer who moved the family from New York to Kansas City shortly before the war. Ms Belmont said her mother had remarried and rarely talked about her first husband, in part due to social norms surrounding grief at the time.
“In that generation, the people who came back from the war, they didn’t talk about it,” she said. “Families that have lost military personnel, they don’t talk about it.”
Thera herself until the 1990s, when she visited his grave for the first time and saw the cross there.
Ms Belmont, who also attended a dedication ceremony last month at the Lorraine American Cemetery in France, said it felt like meeting her father for the first time and saying goodbye. “I felt like I went to my father’s funeral,” she said. “It’s the greatest gift you can give me.”
