VE Day

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“Yes! A few days before the war was actually declared over, we knew the war was over, because my particular unit bypassed Munich. Because there was no real combat in Munich. Germans did very little, and then they retreated out of Munich. So now we're on a two-lane road. We had a short journey somewhere along the German autobahn, didn't last too long. Then we were back on a two-lane road, headed to the Austrian border.

Everything was backed up.  Convoys, trucks, tanks, jeeps, you name it. And it was 20 minutes of not moving forward. And I remember very distinctly, when we went through several villages, German civilians in southern Germany lined on both sides of the road because the houses that had second storeys of buildings had white flags, and the civilians, it was like, a rehearsed chorus. By that time, my brother and I both could speak pretty good German.  Because growing up, our parents spoke Yiddish in the house and Yiddish is really similar to German. A lot of words are the same, a lot of them are very similar. So, it was easy for us to pick up German. So, the civilians amazingly, in German, we’re repeating the same message. 'The war will not be over until you defeat the Russians.' They were scared to death of the Russians.  It was the Russians in revenge mode, so to speak. Wherein Allied forces were welcome, knowing they would get better treatment than they would from the Russians.  So that was what they were saying over and over.”