Would you be capable of killing someone?

In a previous post, I mentioned the bravest man I’ve ever known — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2024/12/31/100-years-ago-and-still-relevant/.  He was a German Jew who married into our family after World War II.

His father got him out as an adolescent into England by giving his factory to the Nazis.  He became a commando, as did other Europeans who escaped, as they could pass for locals as their native tongue was German/French/ . . .

The English gave him a new identity and he operated behind enemy lines before the Normandy invasion.  One can only image what the Germans would have done to him if they caught him and found out he was Jewish.  I’ll let his son describe what happened next.  I’ve known this for years but kept it to myself as I thought it would be too painful for him, but 30 years after his father’s death, he wants it known.

“The British commandos had all been split up for the invasion of D Day because many of them spoke various languages and my father was fluent in English, French and German.  He recalled freeing one of the concentration camps during his time in Germany.  He had heard that his mother and sister were captured and were in one of the camps.  His mother and father were divorced but his mother had remarried and escaped to Czechoslovakia.  The Germans were very meticulous with their record keeping and lists were coming out on the murdered.  Pretty soon after the war was over, he confirmed that they were both on the list perishing at the Theresienstadt Camp (I had researched this with the American Red Cross in the 1980’s).

One of my father’s jobs was to interrogate captured German officers,  One of the captured officers evidently worked at one of the internment camps (not sure which one) but my father asked him what he did at the camp and the officer smiled at my father.  My father shot the officer between the eyes.  I had heard that my father was dishonorably discharged after that.  There was some time after that incident and the time he immigrated to the US so not sure what occurred during that time, he never spoke about it to me.  I had told my father that this was what I would have done as well.”

What would you have done?

I remember him as a very quiet man who never said much.  A family member who is an actress and movie producer described him as follows:

“I remember xxxx as quiet but warm and he had lovely sad eyes”