Brothers in Parallel Combat

Ikhel was studying for his last college examination when German soldiers attacked all along the Soviet frontier, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Four days later, on June 26, 1941, he finished school, and a week after that, Ikhel was in the army.

His brothers Shimshon and Isaak were also drafted. Shimshon’s unit was attacked on its way to the border to fight. He was the first of 20 family members to die as the Nazis marched farther and farther into Soviet lands.

In the United States, Sam Saltsman, the second son of Ikhel’s brother Joseph, went on active duty in the Navy that September.

At 22, he was three years younger than Ikhel, and he had also just finished college.

When he was a boy, he and his brother Louis had corresponded with Ikhel and their grandparents, writing in Yiddish at the request of their father, Joseph. Joseph wanted to show his parents that he was teaching his children something.

Joseph Saltsman, whose last name of Vodonos was changed by an immigration official at the Port of Boston, had crept out of Russia one night in 1913 and made his way to a ship bound for America.

He settled in the mill town of Lowell, Mass., and married the step-granddaughter of his Aunt Esther.

After World War I, Joseph set up a small factory, making parts for mattresses and daybeds.

He had three sons--Louis, Sam and Gerald. But he had not been in touch with Ikhel and the others since 1930, when communication was restricted by the Soviet government.

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He did not know that even as his own sons battled fascism for the United States, his younger brothers were doing the same in the Red Army.

And he would not know for decades afterward who lived and who had died.

While Ikhel and Isaak were at war, German soldiers came for their parents, Yankel and Reizl Vodonos, and for their sister Miriam, and for her husband and three daughters.

Leib, the oldest brother, fled for his life into the Ukrainian countryside. He had already survived a pogrom, leaping into an outdoor latrine to escape marauding horsemen, and now he evaded the Nazis. But it was no use. Leib, the most pious of the brothers, died of starvation during the Germans’ long march toward Moscow.

For the truth is that what the pogroms and the Communists had left of Belogorodka and the other Jewish towns, Hitler did away with once and for all.

In Berdichevin, an old Hassidic town not too far from Belogorodka, Soviet officials came around, asking Jewish residents if they wished to be evacuated.

Benzion and Tsilya Kooperschmidt, whose daughter Riva served in the Soviet army not far from where Ikhel was stationed, did not wish to go. They were caring for their 3-year-old grandson, the son of Riva’s sister, and they did not believe Hitler would make it as far as the Ukraine.

As the Germans advanced, a Ukrainian neighbor told them not to worry. He would hide them. He would take care of them.

But when the Germans arrived, the neighbor forgot his promise.

Riva’s mother and father, along with her tiny nephew, were marched to a ditch at the edge of the town and shot.

The neighbor came in their house afterward and stole their things.

Riva and her sister, hundreds of miles away, were frantic with worry. They wrote to the Soviet government for a list of evacuees. And when the list came, their parents and the boy were not on it.

On the other side of the globe, Sam Saltsman was finishing his first tour of duty in the Pacific. He served as first executive officer on a torpedo boat in the Pacific Theater, and by the end of the war would be a lieutenant commander in charge of 11 boats and a repair and supply ship.

On his first leave, after 18 months in training and at sea, he was invited to a party by an old friend back home. There, he met Helen Glagovsky, who was attending the party with her sister. “She was gorgeous,” Sam would declare years later, telling the story.

They corresponded, and when Sam was sent to Brooklyn to assemble a new squadron for his team of boats, Helen sometimes came down to visit.

When Sam had assembled his team, he took it for training in Miami, where he dined every night in the officer’s mess with a young man, also from Massachusetts, named John F. Kennedy.

“We talked about girls and sports, the Navy and the war,” Sam recollected. “We were a bunch of kids with the responsibilities of men.”

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When the training ended, Sam got a change of orders. Instead of returning to the Pacific, he shipped out for the D-day invasion in Europe. There, he and his men sank a Nazi ammunition ship and disabled a division of torpedo boats, which contributed to the British capture of Le Havre.

Sam ended the war back in the Pacific in Borneo, and was still on active duty, in uniform, when he married Helen in February 1946.

Ikhel was married the same year, and he, too, was still in uniform.

He had met Riva Kooperschmidt only once, while awaiting combat in 1944 near Poland. She was stationed there also, and one night some girls from her regiment came over to his outfit. They mingled, killing time and calming their nerves, acting like young people on a night out.

Riva had black-brown hair and flashing eyes, and Ikhel fell in love with her.

He found out her regiment’s mailing address and wrote to her every week.

At the end of the war, when he was an occupation soldier stationed in Berlin, he sent her this:

“If you like me even a little,” he wrote, “maybe you will come out here and marry me.”

She did.

To be continued Thursday