San Diego, CA (special) -- Sam Kimbarow threw away his U.S. Army dogtags identifying him as Jew before he was captured by German soldiers during World War II's famous Battle of the Bulge. Later, at a camp for prisoners of war, he was in the middle of a crowd when a German officer asked if there were any Jews among the prisoners. About five American soldiers stepped forward, but Kimbarow was not among them. He watched as they were led away to uncertain futures.

"A lot of us went through mental terrible feelings that we didn't go forward," Kimbarow told HERITAGE on Thursday, April 15, at an exhibit at the Veterans Administration's outpatient clinic in Mission Valley. "But years later I came to the conclusion that the guys who went forward were wrong because the Army said 'only give your name, rank and serial number.' By them identifying themselves as Jews when the Germans asked, they helped to separate us along religious lines."

Greenfield, Brenner and Kimbarow

Between the time he was captured as an enlisted man and the time he came to the conclusion as a veteran that he had not acted improperly, Kimbarow anguished over whether he and other Jews who had hidden their identities in POW camps deserved condemnation for temporarily forsaking their religion.

"What we did was to deny our mothers and fathers," he said. "It was a terrible mental thing."
Kimbarow retired to San Diego after a career as a New York City policeman. He recalled that "a guy wrote a letter in a Jewish newspaper that he still has nightmares because one of the other (Jewish) guys met him years later and told him 'you walked away and let me take it.'

"Those who were separated went through hell; most of them died in the camp. And those of us whosurvived had a tremendous guilt feeling...The only satisfaction I got years later was that the nazis went through the same thing. They had to deny that they were nazis--the lying bastards!"

Harvey Greenfield had been a bombardier in a B-17F "Flying Fortress" when he and other crew members had to bail out after losing a dogfight over Germany. He jumped from 18,000 feet, free-falling most of the three miles before pulling opening his parachute. He was captured a day later while hiding in a barn. He was wearing dogtags with the letter "H" indicating Hebrew, or Jew. "Since it was always the other guy who is going to get shot down and not me, I did keep mine on," he said. On arriving at prison camp, he was placed in solitary confinement for several days prior to being questioned.

"When I was interrogated by a captain who had been a former employee of some rayon lining company in New York, seeing the dogtags he said, 'you know we can make a lot of trouble for you.' At which point I remarked, 'I have been starved for three days, fought for many hours before that trying to stay alive, jumped from 18,000 feet, and now you are going to make trouble for me?"

Initially, Greenfield, a second lieutenant, was allowed to stay with other members of his group, but "near the close of the war--I am guessing around January of 1945--an order came out from the German command to segregate the known Jews into one barracks. They took us out of the ones we were in, mixed with the others, and put us into one barracks. There were many Jews who were not known to be Jewish who did not go into the barracks. So this lent an extra level of stress to our situation."

In the separate barracks, Greenfield said, "we were treated the same way as the others."

"We had very little contact with the Germans," he added. "They would just as soon shoot a Jew as a non-Jew who happened to poke their heads out of the windows during an air raid or who was late getting some place."

Greenfield said he later learned that the camp commandant, who was a member of the regular Germany Army--a Colonel Zemke--had refused an order to send all the Jews from the camp. He said he shall always remember the prison commandant for his courage in refusing that order.

Asked how he felt about Jews like Kimbarow who hid their religions, Greenfield replied, "I can't answer what I would have done had the request been made of me. I just don't know. You only know at the time it happens what you would do.

"He is alive," Greenfield added. "That is all that matters as far as I'm concerned."

As for Kimbarow's sense of guilt, he said: "I can't account for his feelings: I don't think he should feel guilty but I wasn't in his shoes at the time."

After the war Greenfield worked as a stockbroker in New York, then as a nursing home administrator in San Diego County before his retirement.

He said to this day he has nightmares about his time in prison camp. "There are things that bother me," he said, declining to amplify.

Seymour "Sy" Brenner was another Jewish ex-prisoner of war who participated in the exhibit. He had been a field medic when he was captured in France after being knocked unconscious by an artillery blast. A quick thinking non-Jewish member of his unit broke Brenner's dogtag in half, burying in the snow the part which had the "H" for his religion engraved upon it. When their capturers asked why Brenner's dogtags were broken, the buddy said it was because they had been engraved with the wrong blood type and were expected to be replaced.

The lie may have saved Brenner's life. Unaware that he was a Jew, the Germans decided to use his training as a medic to treat fellow prisoners at Stalag 5-A, which they reached after a 14-day forced march "without food or water."

Without proper supplies, Brenner was forced to serve as a surgeon. "The first person I worked with had a gangrenous toe, and I had to snip it off with a large steel snipper that looked like a garden tool that you cut shrubbery with," he recalled. 

"And we had several amputations and one of them was with a man who had no flesh from his thigh to his hip," Brenner said. "I demanded that the Germans give me a doctor to work with because I refused to do it. So they gave me a German doctor, who couldn't speak English, and they gave me a little can of ether, which was the first time we ever had any, and we got the job done. But I have had nightmares about that guy since."

Brenner said another recurring nightmare results from the time "when they took me down to a little room on the first floor and they told me to take the dogtags off a corpse, which was my job. While I was taking the dogtags off the corpse--the little room was like a walk-in closet--they slammed the door and left me there with the decaying corpse for three days and three nights. I was throwing up and it was a real mess. That is the thing I have most of my nightmares about."

In the camp, there were German guards and French prisoners who were part of the Resistance. On occasion, Brenner would be marched out of camp under the supervision of these guards, and taken to the home of a wealthy German woman, whose husband was a German general. The woman said she had no idea what kind of man her husband was when she married him, and was helping the resistance behind his back.

She then took Brenner into a basement where they tuned in the British Broadcasting Corporation, "and at the end of the news they had different messages for different people which were done like fairy tales," only with strange endings which were coded messages. Such cryptic messages as "Mary had a little lamb; its fleece was green as grass" were typical, he said. Using the code name "Kokomo," Brenner would be contacted inside the prison camp by visitors who did not have access to the BBC broadcast and he would pass the messages onto him. He said he was taken by the soldiers back and forth to the woman's houseseveral times a week.

While the public had been invited to the exhibit, the VA personnel at the outpatient clinic were the intended target audience, according to Frank Burger, San Diego chapter president of the American Ex-Prisoners of War.

"We really wanted to educate the V.A. personnel about the plight of the POW, what he suffered, what he had to go through and how he survived," Burger said. 

"What is happening is that we are getting such a generation gap between the majority of the POWs and the hospital staff. ...We have a 30-year-old person that has an 80-year-old person and really has no communication with him."

Greenfield agreed that such inter-generational education is very important. "Most of these (V.A.) people weren't born while we were doing what we had to do," he said.