Museum Holds the Key to Honor a Father’s Legacy

The voice on the other end of the phone gasped.

“Oh no! You must not destroy it!”

Relief flooded me. She had an answer--an answer I could accept--to the quandary my father left me: what to do with a symbol of hate, while meeting the obligation Dad’s legacy carried.

It was an obligation rooted in a story that began before I was born.

*

Fifty-three years ago, a skinny sergeant in the U.S. Army’s 1468th Engineer Maintenance Company reached out and plucked a souvenir from a building somewhere in Germany.

It was a common act for the citizen soldiers of World War II who had fought their way across northern Europe foot by bloody foot. Now, in early March 1945, his unit had taken part in the crossing of the Rhine--the climactic battle of the U.S. Army in Europe. And like victors throughout time, they wanted trophies of their triumph.

Sgt. Albert Franklin Rudinger, 34, my father, was relatively modest in his acquisitions: a set of binoculars from a German tank, postcards from the Nazi era taken from bombed-out houses, someone’s pass, written in German.

And a Nazi flag.

Chances are he had slim pickings for souvenirs. His company was a mobile garage and repair shop for the engineers of the massive 9th Army, who bridged the Rhine. They worked behind the lines, one of several strokes of luck he had when it came to staying alive in the greatest war the world has seen.

Drafted in 1942, he missed being shipped out to combat in the Pacific because of injuries suffered in a minor auto accident. Instead, he was sent to the 1468th Engineers training at Camp Cooke, Calif.--a place now known as Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Lucky again, he did not arrive in Europe until early 1945, too late for Normandy, the campaign across France or the Battle of the Bulge. After time in England, France and Belgium, he finally made it to the war zone, earning a campaign ribbon for the Crossing of the Rhine.

By June, he was back in the states, again training for combat in the Pacific, only to be saved by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombs in August. By September, he was home and in his wife’s arms, a civilian again.

With him he brought a few mementos of his Army time, in a briefcase-size Army shipping case, bound by canvas straps. Into a closet it went, buried with the past.

*

Janice Edith Weaver met the skinny sergeant on a July evening in 1944 on top of the RCA building in New York City, while he was on leave. Spotting the dark-haired, waif-thin young woman in uniform, and presuming she too was in the military and on the town, he strolled over and started pointing out landmarks. He figured his 14 years’ residence in Manhattan would impress the hell out of her.

When she turned, he saw the “RCA Guide” badge on her lapel.

Feeling foolish, he kept talking and finally asked her to dinner. By November, they were married.

So when Al came back from Europe, he and she essentially were strangers. They had no money. Housing was in short supply. He needed an education. So they struggled, as did thousands of other couples who built the postwar world, settling in a one-bedroom walk-up in Trenton, N.J. Al went to the Art Students League in New York on the GI Bill while Janice worked as a secretary, although she had a master’s degree in education. Awhile after I was born in 1947, they started moving to progressively more spacious houses in better and better neighborhoods and mom returned to teaching.

They supported the budding civil rghts movement. They voted for liberal Democrats. They collected eclectic friends, including the Pressmans, who were Holocaust survivors.

Over the years, the ex-sergeant didn’t mess much with his souvenirs, except for the binoculars from the German tank. He’d take me out to the backyard and we’d gaze at the moon through those heavy binoculars as he explained the vastness of space, light years, how the star images we were seeing originated millions of years ago and were just now reaching us.

My dad died last December, just a month after his 53rd wedding anniversary. In our last talks together, he never mentioned the war. After a memorial service in St. Petersburg, Fla., where my parents had retired, Mom found the old Army case as she sorted his things, brought it into the living room and asked if I wanted it.

I unbuckled the straps and there was the Nazi flag. Bright red, with a black swastika, it assaulted our eyes, an ominous, unwelcome presence in the room.

My daughter would not touch it.

“Maybe we should destroy it,” Mom said.

Confused as we were by this repugnant object, my daughter and I were reluctant to destroy it. To my father, it had been a symbol of his part in his generation’s defining moment, their victory over the Great Evil.

But how should my daughter and I treat it? To keep it was unthinkable; I couldn’t bear to have it in my house. To sell it was to chance its falling into the hands of some loathsome neo-Nazi, an insult to my father’s memory. To destroy it seemed like a rejection of his legacy, a waste of something of historical worth that he valued enough to keep until his death.

So, I brought it back to California with me, wondering all the way home on the plane: What is the right thing to do?

I tried to think of who would have the standing to help me with this decision. I thought of the Pressmans. I thought of what that flag represents--the greatest crime in the history of humankind.

Months later, I picked up the phone and called the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.

*

Masha Loen, originally from Lithuania, answered in her warm, rich, accented English. Stumbling through a confused explanation of my problem, I got to the possibility of destroying the flag.

That’s when she gasped.

“I am a survivor, and I tell you, do not destroy the flag,” she said. She had been a child in the Stutthof Camp.

She put me through to Marcia Reines Josephy, the museum’s director. Yes, Marcia said, we do get calls from people whose loved ones have died and left behind all manner of World War II memorabilia, including quite a few flags.

She seemed to instinctively understand feelings that I had a hard time articulating. Do not destroy the flag, she said. “It is very important. It is important for the family. It is important for history.”

The museum would take charge of it. “We will accept it, preserve it, but not display it.”

Marcia, a Columbia University graduate in anthropology who has worked in several museums, remembers her father’s desperate attempts to raise money to get people out of Europe during World War II.

“I had no grandparents on that side of the family,” she said, a devastatingly understated comment on the Holocaust. She mentioned her own family’s past only at my prompting, but that background is one reason she now works for the Holocaust museum. The first of its kind in the United States when it was established in 1964, it is supported by the Jewish Foundation, grants and donations.

It is dedicated to bearing witness not only to the horrors of the Holocaust, but to preserving “The World That Was,” the richness of European Jewish culture before the destruction. “We show the flavor of Jewish life in Europe and North Africa, real people doing ordinary things--farmers, storekeepers, teachers, inventors.”

The baby boomers, born in the renewed hope of the post-war era, should talk to their fathers and mothers, before they die, about the history their attics hold, she said. They should seek out advice on how to preserve artifacts like my father’s. In fact, she said, her museum hopes soon to hold a preservation workshop to instruct people in how to keep fragile objects from disintegrating.

I marveled at her calm detachment as she handled the flag and the other articles that bore the swastika. She meticulously gave me a receipt--one Nazi flag, one postcard, one ID card, three Nazi insignias--and relieved me of my burden.

I know that skinny sergeant would have approved.

*

Ardith Hilliard is the editor of The Times’ Valley Edition.