On Veteran’s Day, Israel honored five American veterans.
When Maynard Hanson of Aberdeen traveled to Germany, Austria and France last spring, the 79-year-old and a group of World War II veterans made quite an impression on an Israeli woman.
While there, they visited a concentration camp they passed through during the war and they attended various ceremonies the woman also attended.
“Her father was once one of the concentration camp inmates,” said Hanson, a World War II veteran from the 65th Infantry Division. “We walked through that very camp during the war. As we were walking through, we walked by a bunch of bodies. One of the guys noticed one of the corpses had movement in his eye. He pulled him off the pile and we immediately got him to the hospital.”
The hospital wouldn’t initially take the man, who had been left for dead. “They said he was too far gone,” Hanson said. But the soldiers persisted, and the man ended up pulling through.
“He was that lady’s father,” Hanson said.
The lady was Miriam Griver-Meisels, president of Hadassah Israel – a women’s Zionist volunteer organization dedicated to the enhancement of the quality of life in Israel in the area of health promotion, education, absorption, the status of women and child at risk. Griver-Meisels was impressed by the soldiers, who had traveled back to the area and shown such respect.
Not to mention that if they hadn’t, she wouldn’t be alive today.
Kudos to the American soldiers. Honor to the righteous.
On Nov. 11, Veterans Day, five men – Hanson of Aberdeen, Ray Callanan of Farmington, Mo., Robert Patton of Chapel Hill, N.C., Mickey Dorsey of Johns Island, S.C. and Lynn LaBarre of Diamond Head, Miss., who is now deceased – had medals and commendations presented to them at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, a living memorial to the Holocaust in New York City, by Amir Ofek, consul for public affairs from the Israeli Consulate.
The veterans were given the awards for fighting against the Nazis in World War II and to commemorate the memory of the Jewish resistance in the war against the Nazis. The awards were commissioned and signed by the Israeli Minister of Defense, Shaul Mofaz.
In the past, an award of that caliber had only been presented to Israeli soldiers.
“Really, it’s quite an honor,” Hanson said. “We’re the only five Americans that have ever been decorated by the Israeli.”