Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts

b. 1920

Hardware

“Hitler wanted all the POWs slaughtered,” says Hyman Fine. Total liquidation, a directive straight from the Fuhrer.  That was the rumor in Luft Stalag 1, a camp for airmen on the Baltic Sea.  Why else had the SS taken control from the Luftwaffe?  Why else had they cut rations to starvation levels and denied the POWs coal in the coldest weather to hit Europe in decades? And the Jewish POWs segregated into two barracks, of course, they'd be killed first.

“I knew Hitler was doing a job on the Jews,” says Hyman, “but not how bad it really was.”  When they asked the flight navigator his religion at the Oberusal interrogation center, “I just stood there mute,” he says—age 24, old and wise in this war of slaughtered boys—and for some reason they never looked at his dog tags, stamped with a big fat H for Hebrew. 

“The guy who interrogated me spoke better English than I did,” says Hyman.  He followed the name, rank, and serial number routine but added his wife's address in hopes the Germans would contact her.  Six weeks earlier Eve had given birth to their first child, Carl.  The news had spurred him to fly even when he was sick—a towel wrapped around his neck, toilet paper in his back pocket—anything to make the mission limit and go home.  Thirty-one got you sprung.  Now Hyman had a feeling he wouldn't see his kid for a long time or maybe ever.  

As soon as he received his German POW dog tags (prisoner 5677), he hid his American tags with the H underneath a board in his bunk.  Hyman remembers one airman back in England who collected hardware around his neck: Christian crucifixes, the Greek Orthodox cross of St. George, Turkish scimitars, the Jewish star, you name it.  I don't know which God will look over me, the man liked to say—so what the hell, I'll wear them all. 

What happened to that fellow, Hyman doesn't know, but he, too, believes that religions are not separate and exclusive.  The Last Supper, he points out emphatically, was also a Passover Seder.  Jesus was a Jew.