A Jewish Chaplain in FranceLevinger, Lee J. (Lee Joseph)
Religion
A Jewish Chaplain in France
Levinger, Lee J. (Lee Joseph)
World War, 1914-1918 -- Jews
Naturally, one of my tasks was to gather accurate statistics of the 65
Jewish boys in our division who had been killed, to find exactly where
they were buried, have their graves all marked with the _Magen David_,
the six-pointed star, and keep the list for the benefit of their
families when I should return. I even made one trip to Tours to discuss
the possibility of making such a list for the other divisions which came
into the area, though the task was too complicated to carry out
completely in any but my own. Often men were lost to view entirely when
they went to hospital; sometimes it transpired months later that a
certain man had died or been assigned to another unit or sent back to
the States. But little by little the facts all came to light. Even here
humorous incidents would occur, such as the time when I read a list of
dead from their unit at one battalion service, only to have one of the
men on the list speak up: "Why, I'm not dead, Chaplain!" It transpired
that this man had been wounded on the head in an advance and had been
reported as dead by two comrades who had seen him fall. So I had him in
my records as "killed in action--grave unknown," when he was actually in
the hospital, recovering slowly but completely. If he had been returned
from the hospital to another division, as was often the case, I might
never have known his fate.
In spite of such conditions I found the exact graves of all but three of
the men on my list, and in the entire division, with its almost 2,000
dead, only fifteen graves were unknown at the time we returned. This was
largely due to the untiring efforts of Lieutenant Summerfield S.
Curtiss, the Division Burial Officer, who was my room-mate in Corbie and
with whose methods I became familiar at that time. With the cooeperation
of the various chaplains and line officers, he was able to inspect and
certify to the valuables left by men killed in action, to record every
grave, and in the few instances where both identification tags and
personal acquaintances were lacking, to take the finger-prints of the
men before burial and thus preserve the only remaining traces of
identity.
At this time I had the opportunity of seeing our division reviewed by
General Pershing. The review was held at the Belgian Camp near Le Mans
in massed formation. The men marched by in heavy masses; the General
bestowed decorations on over a hundred heroes, including six Jewish
boys; at the end he gave the officers an informal talk, telling us of
the special need that existed for keeping up morale during the tedious
period of waiting to go home.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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