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Submitted by: Mildred Radish
This is the memory of: Mildred Radish
Relationship to submitter: Husband

90th Division, 3rd Army. We were in Germany going across armaments 17 miles deep, leap frogging I the middle of the night to take over pill boxes maintained by Germans. One night we captured 40 prisoners and a pillbox. We couldn't fire out of the pillbox. It was a German soldier's sleeping pillbox. We stayed three or four days, surrounded by German troops. Then we were captured.

Harold Radish was terrified especially since he was Jewish and knew the Germans might single him out. He threw away his dog tags marked H for Hebrew, so that he wouldn't be identified. His non Jewish comrades threw their tags away, so that he wouldn't stand out. They were marched to a train and held in a freight car for seven days with no food. When they arrived at the POW camp, the situation was no better. The men were always freezing and were given only one loaf of bread to feed 13 men for a day. Then, one day, after concealing his Jewish American heritage, Harold's true identity caught up with him. A Waffen SS officer addressed him in German and Harold slipped up and replied in Yiddish, the Jewish language that sounds similar to German. The SS officer beat Harold until he was unconscious. He still remembers. This type of extreme trauma continues to disrupt the minds of ex POWs the rest of their lives.

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