Meyerowitz Arthur - The lost airman: a true story of escape from Nazi-occupied France

This edition published by arrangement with Berkley Caliber,
an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2016 by Atlantic Books,
an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright Seth Meyerowitz, 2016

The moral right of Seth Meyerowitz to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78239 893 6

E-Book ISBN: 978 1 78239 895 0

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78239 896 7

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

2627 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For my grandfather Arthur...
and the men and women of France who saved his life.

CONTENTS

THE

LOST
AIRMAN

FOREWORD

January 2012

So, here I am, sitting on a plane on my way to Europe. It is the middle of January 2012, and this will be my first time in Europe. I am headed on an adventure, a personal pilgrimage of sorts, some sixty-eight years in the making. I am hoping to pay tribute to Arthur Meyerowitz and a valiant band of French men and women who saved his life in 1944. Im filled with excitement and unable to sleep. I have no idea what awaits me in France, what vestiges remain of Arthur and what or who I will find when I arrive. The thought that I might talk with people who actually knew the airman Arthur Meyerowitz conjures emotions I could not have imagined a month ago.

Less than a month ago I didnt know Arthur Meyerowitz, at least not in the way that you can really know someone. I knew he was born in the Bronx. I knew he had a brother, Seymour, and his parents were David and Rose. I knew that he went to war to fight for his country at twenty-five (a few years younger than I am now) and when he took HIS flight to France aboard a B-24 bomber named Harmful Lil Armful he too didnt know what to expect or what awaited him. What he did know was, more likely than not, he wouldnt be coming home. Staff Sergeant Arthur Meyerowitz was a top-turret gunner in the U.S. Armys 8th Air Force and he was going to war.

I knew that Arthur hadnt made more than two flights before he was shot down by the Luftwaffe and that his family desperately hoped for news from the War Department. It was months before any news would come. He was considered MIA, an American Jew in Nazi-occupied France, and he was in trouble. No one knew if he was alive or dead until he stumbled into Gibraltar more than six months later. And, lastly, I knew that people in France had saved his life. I could remember that the French national anthem was played at my bar mitzvah and other big family events but never understood the magnitude or the true significance of what it had meant.

This is what I knew for my whole life about my grandfather Arthur. Then, in December 2011, all of that would change.

How it all started:

It started with an invitation to Spain. I had met some people while vacationing in Mexico and they invited me to visit them in Madrid. I looked at the logistics and realized I could make it work, in under a month no less. I asked my father, Arthurs son, where Arthur had been in France. I wanted to see if perhaps I could visit those places and look around. There was no information to pass on; my father simply didnt have insight for me. Arthur died more than ten years before I was born, and a box of letters and a couple of vague stories were the only things that remained of Arthurs wartime experiences.

A challenge, I thought to myself. I was pretty computer savvy, having grown up fascinated by computers and the Internet. I learned to build websites at the age of twelve and had transitioned that into a career in the online marketing world. In some ways, I had been training most of my life to crack this case. I could not have imagined, however, just how remarkable a story awaited me.

First I looked through a forgotten box of letters written in French to my grandfather from the French men and women who had saved him. Once I got online, it took me only about twenty-four hours to make my first major discovery: Arthurs recently declassified government file and debrief from when he turned up in Gibraltar some six months after the Germans blasted Harmful Lil Armful out of the skies above France.

Within thirty-six hours I found a book about the Resistance by a scholar name Bernard Boyer, whose pages included some of the French men and women who had written to Arthur after the war. By the end of the first week, I was on the phone with Patrick, the son of Gisle Chauvin, a brave and amazing Resistance operative who took Arthur in at one of the most perilous points of his journey and surely saved his life.

So, here I am, flying to meet Patrick and his family. Going to meet Bernard, whose father was the head of a Resistance group who saved Arthur as well. I have appointments to meet museum directors and local historians who could help me unravel my grandfathers harrowing odyssey in Occupied France all those years ago. I even persuaded my father to accompany me on this search, this once-in-a-lifetime journey. All of this has happened in about three weeks.

January 3, 2015

It is just over seventy-one years since Arthurs journey into France and just about two years from my first trip there. I was lucky enough to make two more trips to France in November of 2013 and then in August of 2014 with some of my family. There were eight of us and it was truly incredible to be able to bring my family and the Chauvins together. We spent several wonderful days with Patrick and his family, and three generations of Meyerowitzes got to experience what it was like to be in France, in the towns and places our father, grandfather, and great-grandfather survived in. We went back to the Chauvins home in Lesparre, went to the maquis outside that town, visited Toulouse and the landmarks there and made some amazing memories that Im sure Arthur could never have imagined.

We are just days away from submitting our first draft of this manuscript and I cant believe how far the story has come and how much more we have uncovered. With the help of countless experts, archive visits, solid research by our writer, Peter Stevens, and some lucky finds, we have been able to piece together this incredible story, one that is so much more in-depth than I ever could have imagined.

I have taken the time to put the story Ive discovered down on paper and hope I have done it justice. I hope it pays respect to the French families and individuals who risked and, in many cases, gave up their lives for Arthur. A single man in a massive war.