The Truth about Seymour
Private Seymour Schwartz
1924–1945 (Battle of the Bulge)
Families have their stories, told and retold by sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, and friends. This is definitely true of my family where some of us know things that other folks don’t, where near truths become truths and where lies, at the very least, become near-truths.
My Great Aunt Helen married a bootlegger. He wore spats and gambled and drank. The marriage was annulled, discretely. No one spoke of him. She married a second time, my Uncle Abe, who told lots of Yiddish jokes and davened so quickly that no one could keep up with him. She never had children and she suffered from depression. I heard whispers of shock treatment and visits to institutions. Then, she died suddenly. My mother sorted through her belongings, carting a few boxes up to our attic.
The stories about my Uncle Seymour, my mother’s only sibling who was killed in the Battle of the Bulge on February 9, 1945 were confusing. He was handsome, over six-foot tall, although both of his parents were barely five foot two. He was athletic, the captain of the baseball team at City College, CUNY where he spent three years as a pre-med student. He was engaged to a beautiful girl named Ruth or was seriously dating her. In the only photo of her, her hair is pulled back at the nape of her neck and she is wearing what looks like a cashmere sweater with a strand of large pearls.
Seymour was born in Brooklyn but spent his childhood in Providence, Rhode Island, moving back to the city when he was 13, after a family feud, where cousins cheated cousins, so the story goes, out of all of their money. One side went on to become multi-millionaires, founding the Hasbro Toy Company, famous for among other American icons, GI Joe. My family left New England, returning to NYC where they worked hard and struggled to be middle class. My grandfather sold belts for women’s dresses. My grandmother sewed piece goods in a garment factory. My mother, who was a graduate of Classical High School in Providence and who had attended Pembroke College (Brown’s sister school) was forced to transfer first to Rhode Island Teacher’s College, when the family lost its money. She returned to NYC in late 1937, enrolling in Brooklyn College and graduating with a teaching certificate.
Her bother Seymour, a graduate of the local public schools was accepted to Townsend Harris, an elite public high school then located on the top three floors of Baruch College’s 23rd Street and Lexington Avenue building. In the fall of 1941, like so many other Townsend Harris Graduates, he traveled uptown to attend City College.
At this point, the family stories diverge. We know that he was drafted into the US Army late in 1943, right after he completed his third year of college. According to an obituary in a Brooklyn paper with the headline, “Patton Comforts Hero’s Parents. General Writes of Brooklyn Boy’s Sacrifice,” Seymour, who was a medic and a litter carrier with the 3rd Army’s 94th Division, was killed while he was rescuing wounded comrades in a minefield.
“Death for the Brooklyn boy,” said the writer, “ended his fight against his bitterest disappointment –the fact that although medicine was his passion and he made a brilliant record in his pre-medical course at City College, not one of the 50 medical schools in the nation, to which he applied for admission had accepted him.”
Sixty-five years later, my mother, in her nineties, disputed the newspaper account. She reminded me of the version of Seymour’s story that I had heard throughout my childhood. That despite his acceptance to Chicago Medical School, his local draft board in Brooklyn did not grant him a deferment because the school only had a B rating. There was no letter proving her claim.
This, however, is the age of the Internet. The triumphant age of Facebook and Twitter. Empowered by social media and Google, I was determined to find out the truth about Seymour. Was he accepted to a medical school? Did the school have a B rating? Did medical schools reject him because he was Jewish? And, what was the politics of his local draft board in Brooklyn? Were they, as my mother claimed, also biased, even anti-Semitic?
Proving her accusation would not be easy. Military history was the logical place to start. The draft for World War II, which started in 1940, was extended by one vote (politics?) in 1941. It included all services, the US Army, the US Navy and the Marines. Although figures vary, it is generally believed that over 12 million men and women served in the US Armed Forces in WW II. Over 400,000 died, some 257,000 (source) in combat. My uncle Seymour Schwartz was one of them.
Fighting Hitler and the Nazis was a cause of honor for Jews. Unlike the protests of the Viet Nam War, few sought Conscientious Objector (CO) status. Doing so would have been deemed not only unpatriotic but anti-Semitic, violating the ethical ideals of Judaism. How could a Jew refuse to fight a man who called for the annihilation of the Jewish people?
Chemistry professor Henry Linschitz, professor emeritus of Brandeis University, desperately wanted to serve in the military. According to an account published in The Daily News Tribune in Waltham, Massachusetts, Linschitz recounted how he tried to join the army after abandoning his studies as a chemistry graduate student at Duke University. “I left graduate school,” he said, “because I wanted to serve somehow in the military but I was not drafted because I was a student of science. The local draft board in my home of New York City had a certain quota to fill. I was given a deferment to allow me to finish my studies. They thought I could be of greater service as a scientist than carrying a gun in the infantry.” There was no mention of discrimination because he was Jewish.
Linschitz took a job at an explosives research lab outside of Pittsburgh in 1943. The lab was testing out a new weapon, the bazooka, which could fire a rocket from a tube that could be carried by a single soldier.
Taking the job at the lab was the “most directly warlike thing” Linschitz could do. While there, he met Harvard professor George Kistiakowsky who invited him to become involved in a top-secret project out west. Linschitz traveled to Los Alamos, NM where he began working on the Manhattan Project, developing atomic bombs. The project ultimately took him to The Mariana Islands, where teams of scientists assembled nuclear weapons. While Linschitz was never officially in the military, he did hold the “quasi-military rank of captain” as part of the 509th Squad, comprised of civilians and soldiers from the U.S. Army. Only after the war, in 1946, did he return to Duke to finish his graduate studies.
Seymour Schwartz never returned to City College. Instead, he is buried in Beth David cemetery in Elmwood, Queens, having been interred first, after the minefield was cleared, in the military cemetery in Hamm, Luxembourg, in Grave Ni. 20, Row 1, Plot F. His foot stone now rests between his father Morris and his mother Sarah, both of whom spent their lives grieving his loss. Another stone, on a plaza at City College, the gift of my sister, Prof. Lily Hoffman, an urban sociologist at CCNY, reads: “Seymour Schwartz, October 17, 1924 –February 9, 1945. “Gave his life to save his comrades. Battle of the Bulge. City College 1941.1943.
No one knows the truth about Seymour’s case. Why did his local draft board deny his deferment? In all of my recent WWII research for my novel, The Girl Who Counted Numbers, I have never found out the answer.
