Max Gendelman - A Tale of Two Soldiers: The Unexpected Friendship Between a WWII American Jewish Sniper and a German Military Pilot
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A Tale of Two Soldiers: The Unexpected Friendship Between a WWII American Jewish Sniper and a German Military Pilot: summary, description and annotation
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A Tale of Two Soldiers is a memoir about the unlikely friendship an American Jewish G.I. and trained sniper for the US Army, formed with a German Luftwaffe pilot during WWII. On Dec. 18, 1944, twenty-one-year-old Max Gendelman was captured in the Battle of the Bulge, one of only a handful in his company to survive. Starving and dazed, his dog tags blown off, he was marched through German villages and eventually arrived at a farm the Reich had commandeered from a German family. The familys grandson, Karl Kirschner, a lieutenant in the Luftwaffe conscripted against his will, was hiding out in one of the barns. To Maxs astonishment one day Karl spoke to him through the fence; they discovered a shared passion for chess, and began to secretly meet to play the game. As they got to know each other, they recognized what they needed to do; they formed a pact, a plan to escape together. This was the start of a friendship that would endure for more than six decades.
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Copyright 2013 by NBB LLC
www.taleoftwosoldiers.com
Two Harbors Press
322 1st Avenue North, Fifth Floor
Minneapolis, MN 55401
612.455.2293
www.TwoHarborsPress.com
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 written permission of the Gendelman Family, inquiries at www.TwoHarborsPress.com
Photograph of the Gendelman Family, 2007, by Pamela Busby
Cover Design by Sophie Chi
ISBN: 978-1-62652-290-9
The American soldier Max Gendelmans story of his six-decades long friendly relationship with the German pilot Karl Kirschner gives a rare glimpse not only of the personal toll of WWII but also of the triumph of personal friendship against improbable odds.
Klaus Scharioth, former German Ambassador to the U.S.,
2006-2011
A fascinating and inexplicable story about an American POW and a German officer that will move readers even as they learn about the hardships that American soldiers endured.
Deborah E. Lipstadt, author of The Eichmann Trial
This World War II memoir is a remarkable history of survival and friendship. If an American military snipera young Jewish man from Milwaukeecan befriend a German Luftwaffe pilot and become lifelong friends, then we can all certainly hope for a better world.
Wolf Blitzer, CNN
This is truly a love story, and a grand tale of courage, faith, honor and most importantly, friendship. It is also the story of bigotry, and the injustices of anti-Semitism. May their memories be for a blessing.
Hannah Rosenthal, Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism under the Obama Administration, 2009-2012
1945. An American Jewish GI from Milwaukee confined to a POW slave labor farm in far eastern Germany unexpectedly meets another young soldier, a German Luftwaffe pilot. The American was our father, Max Gendelman. The German, Karl Kirschner, having crash-landed his plane in order to go AWOL from the Nazis, had been hiding out in his grand-mothers barn.
From the day they met, Max and Karl formed a lifelong bond.
Family celebrations over the years were punctuated by our fathers emotional speeches, which came to be expected and even clamored for. His thoughtful focus on sincere and heartfelt subjects and his word choices often left family and friends alike reaching for tissues. Our fathers mother, Grandma Feigel, always added a predictable coda to these speechesAnd Maxie came back from the warwhile she hugged her son, with tears streaming down her face. As children, we mimicked this often-heard phrase in a sing-song chorus, having no idea of the gravity of the events.
Whenever Karl visited Milwaukee, he was treated like a deity. Our four grandparents, each touched by the Nazi murder machine, heaped love, respect, and gratitude on him, as well as tasty Jewish delicacies. For us, the anticipation of Karls arrival was like waiting for a rock star. It gave our father great pleasure to enjoy his own familys life-cycle events with this very special person. We knew only the outline of their story until recently, when the details unfolded as Max shared the writing of this book.
Our father wrote this story after our urging of many years. It is a true American story: immigrants chasing the American dream, weathering the Depression, and then sending their son back into the cauldron of hate in Europe. He revealed to us not only the horror of combat and prisoner-of-war camps after the Battle of the Bulge, but more important, the rewards of opening ones heart to the possibilities of friendship, with trust and respect, even to an enemy.
In memory of our dear father, we dedicate this book. His enormous strength and suffering made our lives possible. He was the guiding force in our family.
Nina G. Edelman
Lisbeth Amy Rattner
Bruce Paul Gendelman
2013
Mortars coughed.
Rockets launched.
88s roared.
Screaming meemies belched their death song.
All the explosions turned night into day.
John Toland, Battle: The Story of the Bulge
It was a very cold, dark night. I was on the Belgium-German border.
It was 5:30 a.m., December 16, 1944.
The world exploded in front of and all around us.
The ground shook as hundreds of enemy tanks pressed forward, bombarding our positionsCompany L, 394th Infantry Regiment, 99th Division. This was the area of the Losheim Gap, where the German army planned to break through our lines, encircle our forces, destroy two armies, and then demand an end to the war.
Hitlers master plan, called the Watch on the Rhine, had officially begun.
This is the story of how one of the biggest battles of WWIIor of any war that the United States has ever foughtled to an improbable friendship that would last my entire life.
E very story has a beginning and an end.
I know my beginning and can foresee the end.
In between, I have lived a life that has been full of promises, sadness, happiness, adventure, and success.
My main success is in my wonderful, devoted family one that I am so lucky to have, a family that has been my blessing, my inspiration, my goal.
My family: a beautiful, devoted wife and three lovely and talented children. Each child is married to a wonderful spouse, and their unions have blessed me with ten splendid grandchildren. I am truly a lucky man.
But, to the beginning.
My name is Max Gendelman. I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on August 15, 1923. I have celebrated that day all my life as my birthday. However, late in my life, when requiring an official birth record, I learned that my birthday was really August 14. Having given birth to me near midnight on the fourteenth, my mother told me that I had been born on the fifteenth. My dear mother, Feigel, which means a little bird, always felt it was the fifteenth, and my wonderful, devoted mother was always correctso the fifteenth it remained.
We lived in a Jewish neighborhood in Milwaukee, in an area around Tenth and Walnut Streets. We were a poor family but not destitute. I never had the privilege of ever meeting and knowing my fathers parents, my paternal grandparents, but we lived for several years with my maternal grandparents, Lable and Itka Zilberbrand, affectionately known to me as Zaide and Bubbe, who had come to Milwaukee from the Ukraine.
Most immigrants who arrive in this wonderful land of America end up in New York. So what happened? Why Wisconsin? That is a story in itself.
In 1912, Lable left the chaos of Russia. He had lived with his family in a small village in the Ukraine area near Minsk, Ugederrga, but feeling threatened by the Russian regime that had become very anti-Semitic, he decided to leave and get a new start in America. Lable left behind his wife and six children, but he promised to work hard and save money in order to bring them to the free land.
When Lable came to America, he arrived where his cousin, Shalom Roitblatt, was living. Shalom had a small farm in Wisconsin. Lable decided almost instantly that being a farm laborer didnt suit him, and he moved to live with other distant relatives in the city of Milwaukee.
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