Throughout American history, numerous Sepharadim have proudly served in the American Armed Forces to defend the United States. In the American Revolution, Spanish & Portuguese Sepharadim served in Washington’s Continental Army, and even helped to bankroll much of the war effort from communities in Newport and New York. During World War II, hundreds if not thousands of Sepharadim all throughout the country were drafted into the US Army, Air Corps, Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard and served bravely in both the European and Pacific theaters. Many Sephardic Brotherhood members served, including David Sarfaty, a navigator in a B-17 Flying Fortress Bomber in Western and Central Europe.
My grandparents were originally from Salonica and Edirne and were early Zionists. Menahem Sarfaty, my grandfather, was working at an Italian speaking synagogue in Salonica before he made aliyah in 1912. As a young rabbinical student in Jaffa, he met David Levy (our beloved Papu David, buried on the Mount of Olives, and his wife Miriam Benbassat) from Edirne who had arrived in 1907. Menahem received rabbinical ordination (semikha) and soon married Sarina Levy, David’s oldest daughter. Life in Ottoman and then British Palestine became increasingly difficult, and they were caught in the Jaffa violence against Jews in May 1921, but luckily survived. They soon immigrated to Marseilles, France where my father was born in August 1921, and eventually immigrated to New York the following year. Menachem quickly became involved with the robust Sephardic colony in New York as a Hazzan (cantor) and worked in the Congregation Shearith Israel Lower East Side satellite synagogue in the 1920s. He later moved to lead his own congregations in Atlanta, Georgia (Or VeShalom) and Rochester, NY (Congregation Light of Israel), eventually returning to New York City in the late 1930s, worked as a cobbler some years, and is buried among the Kastorialis.
David Sarfaty, my father, was shot down July 7, 1944 on his eleventh flight mission. Just 3 months before, he married my mother and immediately shipped out soon after to Europe.
Navigating a B-17, he and 11 buddies were bombing a refinery in Leipzig, Germany. In order to not be detected by German anti-air guns, they were forced to fly in the dark. All bomber planes were manually flown then with little to no computerized systems, which meant there was a limit to how high they could fly. Since German anti-aircraft guns were also pretty accurate, they would be flying straight into anti-aircraft fire. When the plane was hit, it immediately filled with smoke and caught fire.
Only he and two others survived in the end. They were forced to bail out of their plane into Leipzig city, and my father hit a building as he was parachuting down, broke his right leg, and his left arm was hit by shrapnel, becoming limp. He was unconscious on the ground by one of the main folks, and eventually two Nazi stormtroopers found him and were going to finish him off. Thankfully, A local German boy begged for his life and convinced the soldiers to take my father to St George Military hospital, where his leg was set off to the side to cripple him. From there, he was sent to Stalag Luft III, a German Air Force Prisoner of War Camp famously dramatized in the 1963 Film the Great Escape, and then later to Stalag IXC.
Conditions were brutal as a POW. He recalled receiving very few rations of water, turnips, and brown bread, with no heat available during the harsh winter. When the POWs were moved from Stalag IXC in January of 1945 to the camp outside Moosburg, they were forced to sleep in the rain and bitter snow. The worst part he recalled during the march to the new camp was watching tough dogfights overhead where German planes kept shooting down Allied fighters.
At the very end of April 1945, the guards at the camp began to abandon their post, as word spread that the American army was closing in on the region from the west and worse, the Russians were doing the same from the east. At that time, my father saw an opportunity. He jumped the lines of barbed wire surrounding the camp, running into the Black Forest surrounding the POW site.
He and others were stopped; there were fights, they stole vehicles and food from farms for three weeks, until he and his fellow escapees were picked up by American soldiers. He was in a constant state of fear. The escaped POWs were nauseous and scared of being caught at all times.
Fifty years later, sitting in his living room researching a book on the Jewish Christopher Columbus, my father received a phone call from a Canadian gentleman. The man said he’d been researching his uncle’s disappearance on July 7, 1944, and while he wasn’t able to find much, he did meet a man in Germany who said had saved the life of a man named David on July 7,1944 in Leipzig city as a young boy. My father was able to call that German man and thank him for saving his life. He spent the next 30 years writing a book on the Jewish roots of Columbus and died in his own home peacefully at age 100 in Island Park, New York in January 2022.
Comentarios