The Tuskegee Airmen were a group of approximately 16,000 Black pilots, air traffic controllers, technicians, navigators, ground controllers, maintenance workers, and other support staff. They were the first Black military aviators in the United States Armed Forces and were named after the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where they were educated during their training.

“The Pentagon did not believe that a Black man could fly, and therefore, they basically did not want to train him,” Brewster told Fordham News in 2018. “They still thought that the Black man was mentally inferior. This [idea of]  inferiority had to be eliminated. It had to be destroyed. Because there is no such thing as inferiority merely because you are Black.”

Brewster was stationed in England and France during the war, where he served as secretary to the Air Force Base Commander. He was honorably discharged after sustaining a shrapnel injury, but his return to the States exposed him to continued racism.

“The discrimination [in the United States]  was sharp,” Brewster said. “It was very critical and sometimes it was even hurtful.”

In the face of this discrimination, Brewster set out to get an education, studying government and math at Fordham College before attending and graduating from Fordham Law in 1950, working for the New York City Board of Transportation while he attended law school. He practiced civil law until he retired at the age of 90.

In 2018, Brewster was honored by Fordham Law’s Black Law Students Association (BLSA) as the recipient of its Ruth Whitehead Whaley Award, which recognizes alumni who demonstrate excellence in the legal profession and provide a model for emerging Black lawyers to aspire to.

“Through his groundbreaking efforts, Mr. Brewster served as a trailblazer for all Black students who attend Fordham today,” the BLSA said this morning in a statement posted on the Fordham Law News site.

Brewster was one of few remaining Tuskegee Airmen, and he told Fordham News that he wanted to keep the history of these service members alive.

“It’s not the height that we attained, but it’s the depth from which we came.”

Watch the 2018 Fordham News video featuring Reginald Brewster:

But on Sunday, September 13, the Yankees made Vitalone’s dream come true, in a slightly different fashion. The team played a video of his rendition of the anthem for the players and coaches in attendance, as well as viewers watching the broadcast of the Yankees’ afternoon game against the Baltimore Orioles.

For Vitalone, a World War II veteran, developmental psychologist, and former coach and professor at William Paterson University, the inspiration to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Yankee Stadium came from a desire to honor a boyhood friend who was killed during that conflict.

“The reason for all this is the loss of my friend Joe [Romano] during World War II,” he told Jack Curry, FCRH ’86, on Curry’s show YES We’re Here on the YES Network last April. “This has been a lifelong dream to sing at the Yankee Stadium, but after Joe was killed, every time I heard ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ I thought of Joe automatically.”

Vitalone told Curry that the boys grew up together and bonded over their common love for baseball.

“I think it says so much about you that a person that you met when you were both altar boys in Yonkers as 12-year-olds, that all these years later—and it’s so unfortunate that Joe was lost more than 70 years ago—but yet, that bond was so strong that you still think about him, you still talk about him, and he still brings you such calm in your life,” Curry said.

Singing the anthem was the latest achievement for Vitalone, who besides his service and teaching record, has won numerous Senior Olympics medals. Vitalone credits being active with his ability to “stay young.”

“I realize that the thing that has been my saving grace has been my attitude towards activity, which is something I developed as a playground athlete when I was a kid,” Vitalone told Fordham News in 2014. “The thing is, the more active you are, the more you can delay the descending curve.”

Watch Vitalone sing the national anthem for the Yankees.

A 1927 Fordham graduate, Father Ternan had served as a Franciscan priest for seven years, and as a U.S. Army chaplain for two, when he landed at Normandy on D-Day in 1944, attached to the 315th Infantry Regiment. Thirteen days later, during the Battle of Cherbourg, he responded to a wounded sergeant’s request that he pray for him, and while he was kneeling over the man, a German sniper shot him in the back.

Father Ternan died instantly. The sergeant survived.

Exactly 75 years later, on Wednesday, June 19, Father Ternan’s life and his sacrifice were commemorated in midtown Manhattan at the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, the mother church of Holy Name Province, where he once celebrated Mass and heard confessions.

“As a parish, as an order, as a province, as a city, we’re so proud of our brother and the sacrifice that he gave,” said Kevin Mullen, O.F.M., provincial minister of the Holy Name Province, during a Memorial Mass. “We are a community of memory. It is very important to remember—to remember those who went before us [and]sacrificed for us.”

Father Ternan’s story is detailed in a 2017 article by Brian Jordan, O.F.M., for Friar News, a publication of the province.

A first lieutenant at the time of his death, Father Ternan was posthumously awarded the Silver Star for gallantry in action, and was the first American member of the Franciscans’ Order of Friars Minor to be killed in the line of duty during World War II.

The German soldier who shot him would later show deep regret at having killed a chaplain; he insisted that Father Ternan’s raincoat had hidden the chaplain’s insignia and Red Cross armband, Father Jordan wrote.

A Jovial, Unassuming Student

A native of Brooklyn’s Cypress Hills neighborhood, Leonard Joseph Ternan graduated from Brooklyn Prep. At Fordham, “Butch” Ternan attended church avidly and played baseball and football, according to the 1927 Maroon yearbook, in which he is described as “quiet and unassuming.”

“[He] never sought the applause of the multitude,” and possessed “a certain modestly which greatly enhances his jovial disposition,” a classmate wrote about him in the yearbook.

He joined the Franciscans at age 31, taking Dominic as his religious name.

In addition to his duties at Manhattan’s Church of St. Francis of Assisi, he served as a substitute chaplain at area hospitals. Before being deployed to Great Britain for the D-Day invasion, he “provided religious instructions for more than 150 U.S. soldiers to be received into the Roman Catholic Church” over the course of 25 months, “in addition to celebrating the sacraments and offering wise counsel,” Father Jordan wrote.

Paying Tribute

After the war, when government funding helped Fordham establish eight temporary structures to accommodate the postwar boom in enrollment, one of them was named for the humble chaplain. Ternan Hall was a classroom building located on the current site of the McGinley Center.

The June 19 service included a U.S. Army Color Guard from West Point as well as clergy from the Jesuit schools Father Ternan attended. Alumni chaplain Daniel J. Gatti, S.J., FCRH ’65, GSE ’66, represented Fordham; music was led by William Mulligan, cantor at the church and assistant director of liturgical music for Campus Ministry at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

Toward the end of the service, Father Mullen made one last invocation of Father Ternan’s service to the people of New York: “Let us go forward and try to pass on the goodness of this day to the people we meet on the streets of our city.”

Assistant Director of Admissions for the Graduate School of Social Service (GSS) and the Fordham Veterans Entry Advisor.

What She Does

Treantafeles supports and assists the admission of students for the GSS, and also helps assist veterans who are interested in attending the University. “Instead of having all veterans go through separate doors at Fordham, it was decided that they would have someone there to greet them when they had questions or an interest in coming to Fordham, sort of like a concierge. So, my job is to send them to the right contacts in each department. Sometimes I get people that call and just want to have a chat. I once had a guy talk to me about the best pastries in Germany and how much he didn’t like the tea in Afghanistan. Another called and talked about dogs. But for the most part, people are focused, and sometimes nervous and anxious because they are looking at this university as a big deal, which of course it is. I always want them to feel more relaxed.”

Where She Is From

Hailing from San Diego, Treantafeles was the 8th child in her family.“I grew up with a great life, a lot of outdoor time, a big family, and lots of animals. I had horses growing up that I loved; often when I’m walking through the city I think, ‘I’m so lucky: I get to see,or at least smell, horses every day!’”

A Journey at Fordham

Starting at the University in December of 2005, Treantafeles worked as a secretary and eventually enrolled at the GSS. While earning her master’s in social work, Treantafeles had a palliative care internship with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

“I was really excited about working with veterans. Older men told me about their lives and families; one man had dementia but still talked in detail about his first love, who he met in Italy during World War II. I got to read one veteran a letter from his sister as he was dying; it was incredible and really a privilege.”

Developing a Personal Connection

“It made me do a lot of looking back at how much the military has been a part of my family, reaching back to the Revolutionary War, and up to and including my parents’ meeting. My dad was an officer on a destroyer in the South Pacific and my mom’s cousin was on that ship. My father hand-carried a letter home [for him]to San Diego to Capt. Ferguson, my maternal grandfather. When my parents met, it was love at first sight. I realized how much military service has informed a lot of my life.”

Importance of Social Work

“People think that social work is a soft science. But social workers have to present a neutral, empathic presence and an unconditional, positive regard with their clients, constantly taking in everything they are seeing and hearing, all the while being analytical and using evidence-based practices with their clients. It’s quite a skillset.”

Spirituality

Raised as an Episcopalian,Treantafeles chose to be Muslim for 10 years before returning to her native religion. “Even though I converted to Islam and was really happy with it and had wonderful women friends from all over the world, I always felt there was a connection to my family church. I knew that if anything ever went really wrong I could always go back there and they would open their doors and arms. It’s an interesting time to live in now because I know Islam from such a different experience.”

“My daughter Fatima passed away last year from cancer. My spirituality, faith, and community helped me. My Fordham family has really been there for me.”

Hobbies

Treantafeles enjoys reading, knitting, and attending an opera whenever she can. She would love to attend an opera in Bayreuth or Covent Garden one day.

—Veronika Kero

The newly released book tells how the Germans, when “confronted with the global economic and political power of the western allies…  turned to Eastern Europe to construct a dependent space, tied to Germany [much] as Central America was to the U.S..”

Hamlin, who has lectured on Hitler’s Germany and taught seminars on the Third Reich and 19th-Century Europe, said the book was many years in the making because its focus changed as he researched and wrote it.

“Initially, I was expecting to explore how Germany transformed Romania into a dependency well before the First World War; it would be a story emphasizing continuity,” wrote Hamlin, an associate professor of history. “Instead, I found myself crafting a story of the impact of the First World War on German policy; it became a story of discontinuity.”

He described the book as “an examination f how the disruption of commercial, financial, and legal links during the war reshaped how Germans viewed the international economy, and thus their links to their neighbors.”

For Hamlin’s full interview with Nicholas Paul, visit the History Blog.

Related Article:

History Scholar Looks at Romania Through the Lens of the German Empire

A child survivor of the Holocaust was reluctant to share his family’s full story, until he saw a picture of himself as a 4-year-old boy at Auschwitz on a website denying the Holocaust

For years, Michael Bornstein, PHA ’62, wished he could wash away the serial number—B-1148—that was seared into his left forearm when he was just 4 years old. He’d mention Auschwitz, if asked about the tattoo, but he wouldn’t dwell on the Nazi death camp where his father, brother, and nearly 1 million other Jews were murdered during World War II. He’d seldom speak of being separated from his mother, who withstood beatings from female guards as she smuggled bread and thin gray soup to him in the children’s barracks, and who later smuggled him into the women’s barracks before she was sent to a labor camp in Austria. He wouldn’t say much about how his grandmother somehow, improbably, kept him alive long enough for them to be among the 2,819 prisoners liberated by Soviet soldiers.

His recollection of those dark days is dim—“a blessing and a curse,” he says. He seems to recall the stench of bodies burning, the smoke rising from crematoria chimneys, the quickening clack of guards’ boots. But he’s also aware of the malleable nature of memory, how the things we recall, especially from early childhood, are shaped by some inscrutable mix of perception, imagination, and the stories we’re told. And so for years he stayed mostly silent about his past, not only because it was traumatic but also because so much of it—the texture of his brother’s hair, the sound of his father’s voice—was inaccessible to him.

He preferred to look forward, with an optimism he says he inherited from his mother. Gam zeh ya’avor, she’d tell him, quoting the motto she and her husband shared during the war. This too shall pass. He can still hear the sound of his mother’s voice because she found him in Żarki, Poland, after the war. In February 1951, when he was 10, they immigrated to the United States, where he’d go on to build a career in pharmaceutical research and—with his wife, Judy—raise four children in what he calls “a life filled with soccer games, birthday parties, and bliss.”

As his kids grew up, they began pressing him for details about his past, but he’d always resist a full recounting. Now Bornstein is 77, and his children have children of their own. Several years ago, when Jake Wolf, the eldest of his 11 grandkids, started asking questions, wanting to use the information for his bar mitzvah project, Bornstein couldn’t say no. He began to open up.

Then he saw something that left him stunned and more determined than ever to tell his story: a picture of himself as a boy at Auschwitz on a website claiming that the Holocaust is a lie, that it never happened. “I slammed my computer shut in disgust. I was horrified. My hands shook with anger,” he writes in Survivors Club: The True Story of a Very Young Prisoner of Auschwitz, published last March by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “But now I’m almost grateful for the sighting. It made me realize that if we survivors remain silent—if we don’t gather the resolve to share our stories—then the only voices left to hear will be those of the liars and bigots.”

Bornstein wrote the book with his daughter Debbie Bornstein Holinstat, a TV news producer who for years had urged her father to work on such a project. She helped him plumb his earliest, darkest memories, and together they searched historical records and interviewed relatives and others who knew his family in Poland. In the process, they discovered a detail that helped solve one of the biggest mysteries of his survival, and he learned much about the resolute, resourceful father he never got to know. Together, they reclaimed a family heritage, illuminating stories of loss and resilience that had been left largely untold for 70 years.

Żarki, Open Ghetto

Michael Bornstein was born on May 2, 1940, in the Nazi-occupied town of Żarki, Poland, the second son of Sophie Jonisch Bornstein and Israel Bornstein, baby brother to 4-year-old Samuel. They lived in a redbrick house on Sosnawa Street.

In some parts of Poland during the late 1930s, Jews couldn’t own land, and their business dealings were restricted. But Jewish-owned businesses thrived in Żarki, where more than half of the town’s population, approximately 3,400 residents, was Jewish. Bornstein’s father was an accountant, and his mother’s brother Sam Jonisch (one of her six siblings) ran his family’s leather tannery in town.

That changed on Friday, September 1, 1939, when German forces invaded Poland, reaching Żarki the following day with an aerial attack that torched some homes and businesses. Sophie, newly pregnant with Michael, wanted to check on her parents, who lived nearby. But Nazi storm troopers had already moved onto the streets. On Monday, when all Jewish men in Żarki were ordered to report for labor shifts, Sophie left Samuel with her mother-in-law, Dora, and set out to find her parents. As she neared the Jewish cemetery, she saw German soldiers command a family she recognized from synagogue to strip naked. As mother, father, and young daughter huddled together, the soldier fired three shots, and the family fell dead in the ditch the father had just dug. It was a scene that haunted Sophie Bornstein her entire life.

The Nazis murdered more than 1,000 Jews in Poland that day, including 100 in Żarki. Such atrocities brought out the worst in some gentile residents, Bornstein and Holinstat write. “Many Catholics had not liked living among Jews before the war. Now they blamed the town’s Jewish people for making them the target of German bombings.”

In October, as Nazi soldiers went door-to-door confiscating Jews’ money and jewelry, Israel Bornstein sought to safeguard his family’s valuables. He gathered what he could in a burlap sack—a string of pearls, a stash of banknotes, the family’s small silver kiddush cup—and buried it in the backyard.

Żarki was still an open ghetto at the time, which meant that it wasn’t surrounded by fences, but Jews couldn’t come and go as they pleased. The Nazis shut down or took over Jewish businesses, enforced a strict curfew, and made Jews wear white armbands with a blue Star of David on them. They also forced them to create a Judenrat, a council of Jewish leaders. The town elders elected Israel Bornstein to serve as president. It was not a coveted role. Many Jews in Eastern Europe came to see Judenrat members as traitors, simply doing the bidding of the Nazis, and in Żarki people viewed Israel with suspicion.

But in their research, Bornstein and Holinstat found a collection of essays and a detailed diary written in Hebrew that told of Israel Bornstein’s heroic, often successful efforts to make conditions more bearable. In Survivors Club, they describe how he collected money from fellow Judenrat members and used the funds to bribe Gestapo officers, helping to obtain 200 legal travel visas for families trying to leave Żarki, for example, and saving the life of a teenager who faced execution because he was too sick to work one day.

“Though it’s sometimes seen as a very negative position, my father used it to save people. He set up soup kitchens. He was a very good man. And it made a lot of difference to me knowing that he was a good man,” Bornstein says. “That’s one reason we called the book ‘Survivors Club,’ because my mother’s six siblings all survived, and part of it has to do with my father, who encouraged them to go into attics, basements, wherever they could go to survive.”

By October 1942, however, the call had come for Żarki to be made Judenrein, “clean of Jews.” Most of those remaining were sent by train either to labor camps or to extermination camps. The Bornsteins and approximately 120 others were allowed to stay behind as part of a cleanup crew, but eventually they too were sent away, to a labor camp in Pionki. And in July 1944, when that camp closed, they were packed onto trains bound for Auschwitz.

“Sickness Saved My Life”

Upon arrival at Auschwitz, like all families, they were split up: Israel and Samuel were assigned to the men’s side. Michael initially stayed with his mother and grandmother until guards shaved his head and tattooed his arm. He was sent to the children’s barracks, where some older kids looked out for him, warning him to hold his nose as he drank down the smelly gray soup. Other kids stole his bread. Sophie was sent to the women’s barracks with Michael’s grandma Dora. She risked her own well-being to find her son and eventually bring him into the women’s barracks, where he hid under straw, in corners, scattering at the sound of guards approaching to take roll call.

While Sophie was able to protect Michael, she was helpless to save her husband and young Samuel, who died in September from the effects of Zyklon B gas—the Nazis’ preferred method of execution at Auschwitz, where as many as 6,000 people per day were killed in gas chambers. “[My mother] later told me that her heart literally felt like it had been gouged from her chest with an ax” when she learned of their fate, Bornstein writes. Soon, however, she was sent to a labor camp in Austria, and Michael was left alone with his grandma Dora.

By January 1945, with Soviet forces closing in on Auschwitz, the Nazis started to evacuate the camp, forcing an estimated 60,000 prisoners on what came to be known as a death march to concentration camps in Germany. Many prisoners, already frail from malnutrition, died from exposure in the harsh winter. But Michael and Dora evaded the march, and Bornstein always wondered how.

Not long ago, while visiting Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Israel, he discovered a document that solved the mystery. Nazi records indicate that he was in the infirmary at the time, diagnosed with either diphtheria or dystrophy (the writing is unclear). And his grandmother was with him. “The name doesn’t really matter,” he writes in Survivors Club. “That piece of paper recovered by a museum years after the war made one miracle clear. Sickness saved my life.”

On January 27, nine days after he found refuge in the infirmary, Soviet troops arrived. A couple of days after liberation, Dora carried Michael out to freedom, a scene captured on film by Soviet cameras. “Of the hundreds of thousands of children who had been delivered by train to Auschwitz, only 52 under the age of eight survived. They were the world’s best hiders,” Bornstein writes. “I was one of them.”

Postwar Dangers and the Cup of Life

Bornstein’s freedom brought with it a new set of dangers. “I would like to tell you … that all of us went home and lived happily ever after,” he writes. “But it wasn’t like that at all.” Four out of 10 Jews who survived the concentration camps died within a few weeks of the arrival of the Allied armies. Those who did survive found much of Eastern Europe unsafe for them, particularly in Poland, where anti-Jewish sentiments led to a series of murderous pogroms.

Soon after liberation, Michael and Dora returned to Żarki, where they found the family home on Sosnawa Street had been seized by a Polish family who now saw it as their home. Dora took Michael to a farm on the edge of town, where they found shelter in a chicken coop. They would periodically head into what had been the Jewish quarter, where they met relatives who were, miraculously, among the few dozen Jews (out of 3,400 six years earlier) to return to Żarki after the war. One day, as Michael and Dora walked in town, he spotted his mother, who had made her way back from Austria. “If we had both seen more horror than the world knew it could hold—then this moment was the opposite of that,” he writes. “This was the opposite of despair.”

Sophie realized that there was little opportunity left for them in Żarki. But first she tried to recover the valuables her husband had buried. “At night, even though the house was occupied, she went digging with her bare hands to try to find these things, jewels and money, and the only thing that she found was the kiddush cup, which is a cup that you make blessings with,” Bornstein says.

“And so this cup has been in our family ever since. It’s been at my wedding, at our kids’ weddings, at their bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, and so on. It’s not worth much if you buy it for the silver, but we cherish it quite a bit.”

In Munich, Waiting on Passage to America

After the war, Dora decided to remain in Poland, but Sophie determined that she and Michael would apply for visas to the United States. “She said the word ‘America’ the way a child says the word ‘candy,’” Bornstein writes. “She told me America was the most wonderful and welcoming place you can imagine.” That was not the case for them in Żarki or in Munich, where the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society assigned them to a displaced persons camp and, later, to a one-room apartment in the city.

“The German kids were bullies,” Bornstein recalls. “I had no hair on my head, I was skinny, and I didn’t speak the language, so I was bullied quite a bit.” Sophie bought flour and nylons from American soldiers and sailors in Munich, and sold the goods on the black market. It was a risky way to make a living, and Bornstein feared that she’d be arrested and he’d lose his mother again. But after nearly six years, they received their visas and set off on the USS General M. B. Stewart, arriving in New York City in February 1951.

With help from aid organizations, they eventually settled in a small apartment on 98th Street and Madison Avenue. Sophie worked as a seamstress, making $30 a week, and Michael attended P.S. 6. “I was this little kid who didn’t speak much English and had a tattoo on his arm. The teachers didn’t say anything, so I was pretty much alone and didn’t have friends,” recalls Bornstein, who soon found a job that would prove to be consequential. “I worked at Feldman’s Pharmacy, at 96th and Madison, getting 50 cents an hour,” he says. “The head pharmacist, Victor Oliver, was very good to me. He kind of took me on as a father figure and sparked my interest in science.”

Oliver even attended Bornstein’s bar mitzvah, held at Park Avenue Synagogue, after which his mother gave him a gift that she’d been saving for years to buy him: a gold watch. “You have to wind it a few times a day to make it work, but it’s great,” he says. “And on the back, it has a gimel and a zayin, which are the Hebrew letters for gam zeh ya’avor, ‘This too shall pass.’”

“A Can-Do, Get-It-Done Type of Guy”

Bornstein’s mother also instilled in him a deep appreciation for the value of education. Like faith, she’d tell him, education can’t be taken away. In 1958, he enrolled at Fordham’s College of Pharmacy, just as she embarked on a new chapter in her life. “My mother remarried and moved to Cuba because her sister was there,” he says. She would later return to the States and settle in South Florida, but at the time, Bornstein says, “I was pretty much homeless, and Fordham didn’t have any room in the dormitories, so they put me up in the infirmary.” It was the second time in his life that an infirmary saved him, he says. “I would probably have skipped college if it weren’t for that.”

In addition to providing Bornstein with room and board, Fordham gave him a partial scholarship. He spent summers working in the Catskills to help pay any remaining tuition costs. “I was a chamber maid, then a busboy, then a waiter, and finally a head waiter,” he recalls. “The salary was only about twelve dollars a month, but the tips made it.” On campus, he found a niche on the fencing team.

One of his former Fordham classmates, William Stavropoulos, PHA ’61, recalls Bornstein as a “nice, friendly guy.” He says he and his friends in G House at Martyrs’ Court never would have suspected the horrors Bornstein had been through. “I remember distinctly sitting around one day and a guy asked Mike about his tattoo. He mentioned the camp and said his mother used to hide him here and there, keep him out of sight of the guards, but he didn’t say much else. He was always upbeat.”

After graduation, Bornstein enrolled at the University of Iowa, where he earned a Ph.D. in pharmaceutics and analytical chemistry. But he says his greatest achievement there was meeting an undergraduate named Judy Cohan. “We obviously hit it off. He had the same interests I did, and he was persistent,” recalls Judy, who was studying special education. They attended movies and plays, and he accompanied her on visits to the children’s ward at local hospitals. “He was very caring of the children, and that was important to me.”

They were married nearly 50 years ago, on July 9, 1967, after Bornstein began his career at Dow Chemical in Zionsville, Indiana. While there, he reconnected with Stavropoulos, who had earned a Ph.D. in medicinal chemistry at the University of Washington and would go on to become chairman and CEO of Dow. The two, both newlyweds at the time, would see each other socially, and Stavropoulos even helped the Bornsteins move into their new apartment. But they lost touch over the years. “He went to work for Eli Lilly, and I stayed at Dow,” Stavropoulos recalls. In the late 1980s, Bornstein and his family moved to New Jersey, where he worked as a research manager for Johnson & Johnson, eventually rising to director of technical operations, a position that took him to Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, France, and elsewhere.

“He was a streetwise guy, and I always knew he was going to be a success,” Stavropoulos says. “When I think of Mike, I think of a positive, can-do, get-it-done type of guy. At Dow he was that way, and at Fordham too. It’s an incredible story. He’s obviously a courageous man.”

Fighting Intolerance with Compassion

Holinstat says her dad’s courage was especially evident during the process of writing the book. “My father is such a positive man, and he’s gone out of his way his entire life to show his kids and his grandkids nothing but positivity, so for him to dig deep and be willing to open up and talk to me about the deepest, darkest places in his memory was difficult for him, and it was hard for me because I knew how hard it was for him.” But the process has been well worth it, she says, explaining that they wrote Survivors Club with readers as young as 10 years old in mind.

“For my dad, a big piece of this was making sure that his grandkids understood the atrocities of the Holocaust. So it was really important to us to write something that the kids could grasp at this stage in their lives, and that they could share with their peers, because this next generation, most of them will grow up not having met a Holocaust survivor.”

In March, shortly after the book was published, it became a New York Times best-seller. The paper’s reviewer noted that the book combines the “emotional resolve of a memoir with the rhythm of a novel,” and that, although the book is marketed for young readers, “the equal measures of hope and hardship in its pages lend appeal to an audience of all ages.”

Holinstat waited decades for the opportunity to help her father tell his story, but she feels the timing of the book’s publication could not be more poignant or pointed, coming amid a recent surge in anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic sentiments in the U.S. “I truly believe that this story is being released now for a reason, to remind people what happens when bigotry goes unanswered,” she says.

The core moral lesson of the Holocaust, she and her father believe, is the ease with which any group of people can be dehumanized. “The world can never forget what happens when discrimination is ignored,” Bornstein said last April at Congregation Beth-El Zedeck in Indianapolis. “And it’s not just discrimination against Jewish people but against all minorities, and that includes Muslims, Mexicans, and African Americans. It’s time for compassion; it’s time for empathy.”

Bornstein plans to return to Poland this year with Judy, their children, and other family members. Holinstat has been communicating with people in Poland about establishing a Holocaust memorial in Żarki, and the family will be going to Auschwitz, which Bornstein visited in 2001 with Judy and in 2010 with his son, Scott.

In the meantime, Jake Wolf, the grandson who persuaded Bornstein to share his story, is preparing for his freshman year at Syracuse University, where he intends to major in both communications and business. “In our family,” he says, “it’s so important to know how difficult it was for my grandpa. He never had any hate toward the world for what he was put through. And that inspires all of us. If he could get through that with a smile on his face, we can do anything.”

A “Survivors Club” Reunion in the Suburbs

Since the publication of the book, Bornstein has heard from many people who have thanked him for telling his story, including some who understand all too well what he and his family endured. Sarah Ludwig was the 4-year-old girl standing next to Bornstein in the iconic photo from Auschwitz. Tova Friedman, then 6, stood just behind Ludwig as the children showed their tattoos to Soviet soldiers. The three survivors recently learned that they live just miles from each other in suburban New Jersey.

On Sunday, June 4, they gathered with kids, grandkids, and other relatives for a reunion brunch at Holinstat’s home that included prayers of remembrance and celebration, and the use of one precious silver cup. For Holinstat, it was a remarkable coda to the experience of helping her father tell his story after all these years.

“The last time they saw each other, they were kids wearing prisoners’ stripes,” she says. “Now they’re surrounded by family.”

—Ryan Stellabotte is the editor of this magazine.

Watch NBC Nightly News‘ coverage of the reunion.

The Mercedes used by Adolf Hitler was, fittingly, a monster: an armored behemoth weighing five tons, it was 20 feet long and big enough for eight people. Its steering wheel was as big as a life preserver, its gearshift knob as big as an eight ball. When it arrived in America soon after World War II, it was greeted with revulsion but also with deep fascination. It was, after all, a relic of a mammoth historical event whose wounds were still fresh.

Robert Klara describes, in piquant detail, the American odyssey of this and another nearly identical Mercedes also manufactured for the Nazi leadership. In the decade after the war, the cars were greeted with crowds and headlines across the United States during tours that raised money for charity or for the government’s war-related expenses. They would later draw six-figure sums at auctions, helped by the nascent culture of antique car collecting. Sometimes, ownership of one of the cars brought infamy and outright threats that made the owner all too glad to get rid of it. It was often hard to use the cars for educational purposes, given the strong emotions roused by the criminal regime they signified.

The book, of course, is about more than cars; it’s also about the way people relate to big events through symbols. Given the threat Hitler had posed, and the war’s human toll, some people seemed drawn to the car for the simplest of reasons, as noted by a press report the book cites: “[T]he significant fact seemed to be: They were here and he wasn’t.”

It was an important reminder during dark, perilous times. Hartmann participated in the D-Day landing at Normandy and several other brutal battles with the Army’s Fourth Infantry Division. His Fordham heritage, he wrote, had become “an infallible yardstick in peace and a mighty bulwark in war.”

Hartmann’s son, Alfred Hartmann Jr., M.D., FCRH ’63, discovered the letter among his father’s things after his death in 2000 at age 89. “It says a lot about his relationship with Fordham, and Fordham’s relationship with the world,” he said.

Hartmann may never have had the chance to send his letter, but FORDHAM magazine is proud to share his enduring message of faith and gratitude with our readers.

The full text and an image of the letter appear below.

Men of Fordham on the Campus,

Your “Catholic Prayer Book for the Army and Navy,” via a circuitous mail route, reached me here. I want to thank you for a most thoughtful and useful remembrance. It gives a man a lift to realize that he is not forgotten, and the prayer book, by virtue of its pocketing ease, is a real adjunct to the service man.

When still on the beaches I used to ponder over such seemingly unnecessary incongruities as “good is derived from evil.” It is unfortunate that it takes a world holocaust to revive the merits of such institutions as Peace, the Home, Loyalty, Friendship and the like. It is too bad that man’s more shallow criteria of success are adequately exposed only by a global upheaval.

That “man does not live by bread alone,” furthermore, is proven conclusively only by the advent of chaos and sudden death. It takes more than finite equipment to weather the exigencies of total war. Without the sanctuary of our Faith, the multiple heartaches of the present added to the unknown and ominous forebodings of the future could drive men to the point of despair.

Fordham has always taught, teaches, and will continue to teach the true worth of human institutions, and the Faith without which mankind gropes in exterior darkness. What is more, Fordham propounds these principles even in the absence of … catastrophe. She affords to her matriculants the ability to evaluate the world about us, and to derive benefit from good times and evil times alike.

I am proud of my Fordham heritage. It is a heritage that becomes an infallible yardstick in peace and a mighty bulwark in war. It is the intangible something-extra which always pays dividends in the heart. You too will come to the realization of this appreciation, as even now “with prayerful remembrance from the Fordham Men on the campus” indicates.

Sincerely,

Alfred A. Hartmann ’32

Now, finally, he has received that medal—eight children, 22 grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren later. At age 97.

His extended family members came together on Nov. 1 to see Schneider receive the Silver Star, the U.S. military’s third-highest combat award, for the courage he displayed during the engagement over Dogna, Italy, in 1945, when he was a major in the U.S. Army Air Corps’ 310 Bombardment Group.

At a ceremony, Air Force Maj. Gen. Christopher Bence praised Schneider as “a man who not only answered his nation’s call, but whose actions directly saved the lives of fellow Americans and helped defeat the Axis powers.”

“It’s not often you get to stand in the presence of a true hero,” he said.

The ceremony, held at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in southern New Jersey, culminated four and a half years of tracking down the necessary proof that her father was supposed to receive the award, said his daughter, Heidi McKay.

“Five years ago he said something about it, and I said, ‘Well, you know, I can probably see if we can still get it,’” she said.

But it proved to be no easy task, given the dearth of records about her father’s actions. On Feb. 23, 1945, he was serving as flight commander aboard a B-25 bomber, directing an 18-plane formation sent to disrupt German supply lines by destroying a heavily defended rail link. Anti-aircraft fire damaged many of the other bombers and crippled Schneider’s plane, knocking out the right engine, propeller control mechanism, and airspeed indicator, and smashing an elevator trim tab, but he still directed the B-25s to complete a highly accurate bombardment of their target.

“During the arduous return flight over enemy territory, Schneider skillfully assisted the pilot in the landing procedure and was greatly responsible for the successful emergency crash landing that followed, and for the safe return of all members of the crew,” the Air Force said in an Oct. 25 statement.

After the battle in Italy, Schneider  received a letter from his commanding officer recommending him for the Silver Star, but he never followed up on it, McKay said. With the war’s end, Schneider was busy with other things, McKay said, like returning to earn his business degree at Fordham—he graduated in 1946—and starting a family with his wife, Lucille, whom he met at the University. (She passed away in 2014.) They settled in Hillsdale, N.J., and he spent his career working in sales for National Cash Register and in sales and management for Volckening, a manufacturer in Brooklyn, McKay said.

Staffers for two New Jersey legislators, the late U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg and U.S. Rep. Scott Garrett, helped with tracking down records for Schneider’s award, McKay said. She learned that the needed records may have been among the World War II-era files destroyed in a building fire in the 1970s. “Finally, this one Air Force historian was able to piece together enough to say, ‘Yes, he really was supposed to receive it,’” she said.

Schneider had a modest reaction to the award, according to an Air Force statement.

“I don’t think I deserve what they’re proposing for me to get, but I think it’s good for generations to come to be able to understand what happened,” he said.

The photographs, which were first shown this time last year, pay homage to the 369^th Infantry Regiment that fought in both world wars and  broke ground for African Americans seeking to serve in the U.S. military.

But Caruso, a junior at Fordham College Rose Hill majoring in chemistry with a concentration in American Catholic studies, has spent the last decade getting to know John Caruso in other ways.

This semester, he published “The Greatest Generation: A Case Study,” in the spring issue of the Fordham Undergraduate Research Journal (FURJ). The essay features a dozen photos and reproductions of letters that investigate the pride that “the greatest generation” inspires in Americans.

It’s a subject that Caruso has been interested in since middle school, when he first began cataloguing any artifacts he came upon that were related to his grandfather, who died when he was an infant.

“My parents would tell me stories,” he said, “because they were very proud of their parents and the times they went through, from the Great Depression and my grandfather’s upbringing in a very poor community in Newark, to World War II, and afterwards, [when they came]back to create this great country.”

When he first started asking his parents about pictures, they assured him there was nothing noteworthy that he hadn’t already seen. He was skeptical, though, and eventually found a box in the back of their basement with roughly 75 photos and letters that his grandfather had brought home.

The pictures provided vivid details about grandfather Caruso, who enlisted in the U.S. Marines in 1942 when he was 18 and eventually became a member of the Third Marine Air Wing infantry unit. During the war, Caruso installed communication wire in trees, drove transport trucks to the front lines, and participated in the capture of the Japanese airfield on the Zamboanga peninsula in the Philippines.

The picture of him standing with a captured Japanese transport plane was especially illuminating for Caruso III.

“When I was first learning about his involvement, I didn’t know exactly what he did. So when I saw this photo and saw this airplane, I thought ‘Wow, he was there when they captured some of these key locations that were significant to winning the war,” he said.

Of the 75 photos and letters in the collection, Caruso III chose 12 for his photo essay. The essay starts with a picture of his grandfather at age 14 and ends with him safe at home with his wife Anne in 1947. Pictures, letters, and flyers from the Philippines are interspersed in between.

Although Caruso III’s interest in World War II is not directly related to his academic pursuits, the reception to the photo essay has been positive enough that he’s considering revisiting the story of his other (maternal) grandfather. That grandfather also served in the armed forces during World War II as a stenographer in Europe; because he had access to a typewriter, he wrote hundreds of letters back home to his sister.

“When I first started writing this essay, I had no clue where it would go. I just wanted to tell the story,” he said.

“Now that I see people like the story, I’m very happy.”