Story that appeared in the Summer 2007 Issue of
New Horizons Magazine in New York City
For Ruth and Jerry Selman, residents of The Village at 46th & Ten, memories of the war remain clear to this very day. It is World War II that brought them together during in their days in the service during that global conflict.
Jerry says that recently some of the more disturbing memories of the war have resurfaced vividly.
The daughter of Russian Jews, Ruth Selman spent the first 18 years of her life growing up in Coney Island. When the war broke out, she was all of 19 and going to Brooklyn College “writing, drawing, doing a lot of arty things.” And like many 19-year-olds of many generations, she had been engaged in peace activities. Her whole family had.
But once war came, she felt she needed to help. The war against fascism was too important to sit out. She looked around and saw her fellow male students who looked baby-faced and immature. Most of the men she admired wore uniforms and were involved in the war effort.
“I didn’t feel that going to school at that time was appropriate,” she said. So she dropped out and tried to help anyway she could.
At first she joined the Women’s Land Army, which the Department of Agriculture had set up to help farmers replace men who had been drafted into the army.
As a woman who would be stretching the truth if she said she was five-feet tall, she was a bit lucky to get in.
“They were looking for more stockier women and I was then as I am now. But, they accepted me,” she said.
She trained with about 25 other women in Farmingdale, Long Island, which then resembled its name. There the city girl learned such basic farming knowledge as the difference between a bull and a heifer and her trainers, who she says had a problem with women doing man’s work, had fun with her lack of experience.
“Do you know the difference between a bull and a heifer? Well, I didn’t. And when it came time to milking, instead of giving me heifer, they’d give me the bull. It’s great fun to think about now, but at the time it wasn’t fun at all,” she recalled.
After about three months of training she was sent to work as one of many farm hands on a Connecticut farm, which had about 100 cows, a shockingly large number at the time.
It was here that her view of America received its first big shock.
On the farm “there was this Catholic family with about seven children. They were dirt poor. I was really in shock. I didn’t expect that in the United States of America there would be anything like that,” she said.
After about two months she asked to ship to a smaller farm, one that would be more representative of the family farm. She was assigned to a six-cow farm in upstate New York. And her American idealism received another shock.
She recalled that the couple running the farm was very young and “neither of them had any teeth. They were wearing false teeth. I always thought that, you know, you lived on the farm, you were healthy.”
She helped out for about four months and lived in the house with the couple and then another shock. One of the cows—“its name was Bessie, I think”—came up lame and Ruth helped take it to the slaughterhouse.
“The scene there was so upsetting to me that I became a vegetarian for about 15 years. And I still have that vision in my head. I still don’t eat red meat,” she said
The scene made her move off the farms, but “I have to admit, even though it was terrible, it was a great experience.”
It wasn’t long after that she saw an ad on the subway for the Women’s Army Corps.
Her mother had recently died and her father was becoming more and more depressed and overbearing and she wanted out. And she wanted to keep helping with the war effort.
“While part of me felt I was abandoning my father, he had a job, he was working. I didn’t have a job. I didn’t feel like I wanted to go back to school. I told him I wanted to fight against war and fascism. My father was very left wing and very anti-fascist,” she said, and he approved.
Again, because of her height, she said she was lucky to get into the corps. “You had to be five-feet tall to get in and I was four-feet-and-eleven-something,” she recalled of her induction. “And I get up on this little measuring something where they weigh you and measure you. And this tall, very genial captain looks down and says, ‘do you really want to join?’” He’s holding a stick at the five-feet mark, about an inch over Ruth’s head. “I said ‘yes.’” He smacks the top of her head with the stick and says, “five feet.” She was in.
She trained at Fort Oglethorp in Georgia and her idealism was shocked yet again, giving this description of her impression of The South:
“Georgia at that time, before the civil rights movement, was a hell of a place to be. Jim Crow was everywhere and I was in shock. I had heard about what was going on, the lynchings and so forth, but to be in the midst of it and to see water fountains for white only was a shock for me. And I was homesick. It was the first time I was that far away from home.”
After training she stationed at the General Hospital in Staten Island.
She chose stateside because of a promise she made to her father, who “had read somewhere that women who were stationed overseas got pregnant.”
So Staten Island it was. She stayed in the Woman’s Army Corps until 1946, when, she laughs ironically when recalling it, she got pregnant. But more about that later.
By the time the war broke out, native New Yorker Jerry Selman had already graduated from Cooper Union with a degree in chemical engineering and was working as a civilian for the Army’s Chemical Warfare Service in the city. He wanted to join the Army at once, but he kept getting deferments because he was already working at a high-level chemical warfare unit.
Then the Allied Forces invaded Europe. When the invasion confronted the German army in the Battle of the Bulge, where Hitler made a last ditch effort to break everything apart, “the army took cooks and bakers and everything they could get a hold of to fight him,” he recalled.
One day his boss asked him if he wanted to be an officer in the Army and he jumped at the chance. In 1944, he joined Patton’s Third Army.
He received his infantry training at Fort Croft South Carolina then onto England and into France, where he received some more training. He said the fact that the Army was taking anyone and everyone, was fairly apparent there. “They sent people that didn’t have guns or had grease in the gun and they didn’t know how to take it out. It was funny. These were the people that were going to stop Hitler and they didn’t know how to shoot a gun,” he said.
Then it was into the fight.
His first combat experience was while guarding a road with his unit. They had heard rumors that the Germans were sneaking into camps at night and cutting the heads off soldiers and placing the heads back on their bodies, the idea being that when the person was roused in the morning, his head would fall off.
“That was a nice rumor to have. Especially for new soldiers. They had said that if you lasted a week, you were a real soldier.”
Jerry dug his foxhole as he was trained and a buddy dug his own about five yards away. Because of the work he had done for the Army as a civilian, Jerry had brought a few experimental mines, precursors to today’s claymore mines. They were about the size of cameras and filled with little nail-like shrapnel. He placed them in front of his foxhole, facing out.
In the middle of the night another soldier roused him to return a watch he had borrowed and Jerry couldn’t get back to sleep.
“About an hour later or so, I’m not sure of the time, I thought I heard noises in front of me. I thought ‘how can that be? I’m here, and my people are here and there …’ It took awhile for me to think about it. Then I thought, Gee, maybe we have visitors. So I thought I’d try these things out,” he said.
In the morning they found three dead Germans dressed in black, killed by his mines..
“The idea of burying someone for the first time is very frightening,” he recalls.
On January 21, 1945, after a couple of more fights, Jerry was shot. It was a wintry night and he and another soldier, a friend, were returning from a nighttime ammunition run. Bandoleers loaded them down as they tried to make their way up a long hill. Suddenly the sun popped up.
“I didn’t even know it was that time. The sun just came on us.” In what seemed like an instant, he and his friend were in broad daylight, wearing dark green against the snow, half way up the hill.
A German sniper opened fire and shot his friend in the shoulder. Jerry moved to him and gave him his sulfur pills. Jerry thought they should stay still because of his friend’s injury. His friend thought they could make it to a rock wall nearby. After some debate, they tried it.
“As soon as we started moving a German sniper or two started firing. They killed my friend and shot me,” he said. The bullet ripped into his left leg and lodged in his femur.
It was about six in the morning when he was shot, and he had to stay put until nighttime fell again, about 14 hours later. When they came for him, he asked what they were going to do for his friend and was told, “We’ll take his nameplates.”
After an initial field dressing back at camp, he was loaded with another injured man onto a jeep that was equipped with cat-eye lights so it wouldn’t be seen at night as it made its way down the hill. Every once in awhile the Germans would send up a flair and the jeep driver would stop, jump out and run for the woods, leaving Jerry and the other man helpless.
They made it, and because of the seriousness of his wound he was shipped further back from the front lines, and then further back, and again further back until finally he ended up in England. Once there, he was asked his name, rank, serial number and religion.
“I had heard that if you tell them your religion, they will send a letter to your parents saying you’re seriously injured. So I said I was a neo-Druid. They said ‘what’s that?’ I said ‘I don’t know, ask the chaplain.’ So I got visits from every chaplain in England. Finally this Jewish chaplain visited. I gave him some money and told him to telegram my mother and tell her I wasn’t seriously injured. So he did that first and it beat the letter telling her I was. So that was a victory,” he said.
While he was in England he picked up some books that had been banned back home, books that were controversial for their ideas.
After Jerry shipped back to the States on the Queen Elizabeth, he was put in a hospital on Staten Island, where after two days, Ruth took notice of him, and his books.
“I was in shock,” Ruth said. “All the other men were playing cards, shooting craps, betting on horses, exchanging off-color jokes. And here was this guy with a bunch of books which were illegal in the United States.”
Because he had been lying in bed for so long, Jerry’s back was hurting and it was sore and he needed a backrub. Ruth was one of the nurses to give him one and they started talking about his books. He hadn’t been cleaned up yet and looked a mess.
During a recent interview, Ruth said, with a laugh, “He had a big head of curls standing up as if they put stick in them.”
“I don’t think it was quite that bad,” Jerry retorted.
He was an inpatient for the next 18 months. He and Ruth saw each other everyday. They went to plays together, saw movies, taught painting and started a writing club. The Red Cross became interested in the club and helped it bring in guest authors to lecture and critique work.
It was quite the popular club, Ruth recalled, “Men came in their pajamas. Enlisted men who worked there came, a lot of the women I worked with came to the meetings. And every week, every session, we had someone come in and talk to us. It was very exciting.”
Ruth and Jerry’s engagement and marriage both took place while he was convalescing. And while marriages at the hospitals were hardly rare, theirs was a bit controversial.
“The wife of the commanding officer, who we had become quite friendly with, about had a fit,” Jerry said. “I was a corporal and Ruth was a sergeant.
She just couldn’t let a man walk down the aisle with a woman of higher rank. She yelled her head off trying to get me a promotion to sergeant, but it was a whole big complicated process. I didn’t care in the least.”
Jerry and Ruth Selman left the hospital about a year later, after Ruth became pregnant.
It’s been more than 60 years since the war ended, and Jerry and Ruth now live together in The Village at 46th & 10. They have three children, all artistic like them. And even though it’s been decades, Jerry and Ruth are still dealing with the war’s aftermath, perhaps now more so than ever.
A few years ago Jerry’s leg started bothering him. Ruth says that no one who ever knew him could tell that his leg was injured and that he used a built-up shoe. But the pain started growing and it wouldn’t stop.
After awhile, “Jerry wanted a divorce from his leg,” Ruths says with an ironic laugh. So after living with his wound for six decades, his leg was amputated just below the knee. Now he has a special bed with a swing mounted above it to help him get in and out, and for the first time since they were married, Ruth and Jerry sleep in separate rooms.
He’s also been having nightmares. Throughout life, he hasn’t been bothered that much about the war, but a number of months ago he was confined to a hospital bed for a couple of long stretches and he says that’s when they started.
There’s a few memories that have come in strong. They were always there, but now they’ve become a bit more vivid.
One stands out:
“We captured some Germans and we put them in a little enclosure. One of them called over and said, ‘Do you have any cigarettes?’ He spoke better English than I did. So I went over to him and asked him where he was from. He said outside of Chicago. I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ He said, ‘I went to visit my grandparents and they forced me into the army.’ I said, ‘Well, now you can go back.’
The soldier never made.
When it came time to ship the 20 or so captured soldiers back to a holding area where there were more facilities to deal with the prisoners, Jerry recalled, one soldier was sent to escort them.
“To go to the headquarters, to take these prisoners, should have taken a minimum of three hours,” Jerry said. “I saw him back in less than an hour.”
He said he asked the man what happened. He replied that he’d shot the prisoners.
“It got me very angry,” Jerry said.
And the memory of that German from outside of Chicago still haunts him 60 years later.