Generation Bubelah: WWII and the rise of anti-Semitism

This entry is the fourth in a series of an oral history I did with my grandmother before her passing. In her stories, she speaks of  her parents' immigration to America from Russia, growing up Jewish in a German neighborhood and simply being a Jewish girl in the Midwest. Here are the entries in the order they were written

• Midwest Judaism in the 1920s
• Jewish in the Midwest during WWII
• Adjusting to Jewish life in the 1930s

We lived on the South side of Columbus and most of our neighbors were German. 890 South 22nd street, which was my house, was one of the only Jewish houses on the block. Our house was red brick and we had a kitchen, living room, basement and one bath for six people. The kitchen had a refrigerator, stove and table. We didn't really play in there because that was Mama's space. So we took over the living room. There was one brown table in the living room but the best part of the room was the sofa and chairs. The sofa was dark mohair and the chairs were soft and fuzzy. The bathroom was in the hall from the kitchen to the living room and Ruby would always yell at me to get out because I was taking too long, and then I would yell at David and David would yell at Martie. The basement was where we had a double dexter washing machine, coal furnace and the bathtub. The bathtub was my favorite. It was white and was held off the ground by four claw feet. The basement was were we would always hang our clothes and bake liver in the furnace.
 
Israel was declared a state on May 14th, 1948 and Jews all over Columbus celebrated in the streets. There was dancing and singing, and it felt as though everyone who was there had been friends forever. It was very important for Israel to become a state and it took an extremely long time for it to come into being. The belief in a Jewish state was one of the most controversial ideas for the Jews in America. There were many different Zionist movements, but each one was dedicated to the creation of a Jewish state.
 
The Holocaust played a huge role in expanding Zionism in America. It also established some form of unity that brought the Jewish people together to fight for the survival of their people. I believed in Zionism. Our entire family was Zionist. Many of the Zionists who came to visit Columbus would come and stay with us. I was not a religious Zionist. I believed in Israel and I wanted it to be a state. I worked hard for Israel. I went door to door and collected money in blue boxes. There were some Jews who didn't believe in the movement, but to each his own.
 
I wasn't aware of what was happening in Germany until I was in high school but my parents had known for some time. My parents received letters from home telling them of the situation in Russia, which was one of the reasons why they came to America. The pogroms were closing in on their villages and killing off all of the Jews. We had the radio turned on all day and all night. The government was trying to keep the events in Germany and Russia out of the papers. They said that there was nothing to fear but we knew that there was. We got most of our information from my parents' relatives that were still in Europe and through the Jewish newspapers: The Forward  and Friday Night.
 
I couldn't believe that people could be so inhumane and that others could be so ignorant. All of the things that Hitler made people believe made me sick to my stomach. The fact that the United States did nothing for such a long time and turned so many away from America made me lose faith in my country. I felt helpless knowing that so many of my people were dying for being themselves. To think about how the homes and villages of my parents were being destroyed, and to see them watching from a distance, unable to do anything physically to stop it, was horrible. All my brothers and I questioned our existence as Jews and felt guilty for walking down the street with no clouds in the sky. It made the whole Jewish community come together and believe in our religion more than ever before. It was hard to escape my thoughts when the war was going on. The idea that my parents would have been shot in cold blood or gassed in a concentration camp if they had stayed in Russia and that their death would have also been ours consumed me the most.
 
My parents were very happy that they had left Russia and were in America. My mother and father almost had their entire families with them except my mother's brother and my father's sister.
 
Oh, they were horrified when they found out what Hitler was doing; they tried to save people by sending money and talking to politicians. It seemed that all the Jews in Columbus had come out of the woodwork. They came together to try and fight the war in Germany. There were meetings to sign petitions and many people protested in the streets.
 
We never lived in the ghettos like the people in New York. We lived in an integrated area where people could be friendly if they wanted to be. Many of the people who lived on my street didn't like Jews and there were a lot of kids in school who would make remarks, but as people got more intelligent the anti- Semitism in the neighborhood cooled down. It is sometimes weird for me to use the term anti-Semitism because there was no name for the discrimination against Jews when I was younger. I don't think many Jews thought they had been the victims of anti-Semitism because they didn't know what it meant. 
 
By the time 1941 came around, Harold and I were still at it. In that same year, he was drafted to the South Pacific and lived on Christmas Island. When he came back to the US, he went to the Officers Candidate School in Wyoming and that was where we had our wedding. I had to take a train to get there and my mother insisted that she come with me. She said, "No daughter of mine is gonna go along and get married."
 
The wedding was wonderful; not a lot of people were there because it was expensive to take the train. We didn't mind it being small.
 
During the war, Harold was sent all over the United States, and since I was a medical technician, I would travel with him and do volunteer work. As time went on and the war became more serious, Harold told me to go back to Columbus. I went back to work at Children's Hospital and he was shipped overseas to England. When I got back to Columbus in 1944, I had Barry. I sent Harold pictures of our son and told him he'd better come home soon. We never stopped writing letters; they were our only means of communication. We had to be careful with what we told each other. If there was too much information about the war, the letters would be confiscated. I guess they didn't want anyone to know the truth or were scared the letters would fall into the wrong hands.
 
Harold was a commanding officer in the US army. He was right in the midst of the Battle of the Bulge and in the Battle of Normandy. His company was the Salvage Repair Unit. He told me that during the Battle of the Bulge, there was a horrible snow, so his company took parachutes and made white uniforms to go over their regular ones. Without the white uniforms, they would have been like sitting ducks. I know that Harold received an award for that. He came home with so many medals pinned to his chest.
 
I knew that Harold would never die there. He had a wife and a child to come home to. He never would have done that to me. When Harold came home in 1946, he couldn't talk about the war. He said he saw too much and everything we read was true and worse. People were freezing to death, falling all over the place. They walked all over corpses. It was terrible. I think he didn't want to tell me all of the horrible stories because he didn't want to re-live them, and he didn't want me to be a part of them. The thought of having something that was in no way related to the war must have been what kept him going. I remember meeting one of Harold's fellow officers and his wife. They had never met Jewish people before. Can you believe it? They never imagined we would look like normal people. Knowing how much that bothered me, I knew that Harold wouldn't tell me all of the horrible things that people said to him about his religion.
 
Even after Harold had come back from the war, we experienced anti-Semitism. Harold and I once had to leave a hotel because the person behind the counter saw the Magen David around my neck. His face looked like we were pointing a gun to his head. He didn't even make eye contact when he told us there weren't any rooms available. Harold and I didn't make a fuss over it. What could we have done to change his mind? The man was set in his ways. He was obviously very ignorant.