GIs

My mother, Suzanne Ditmann of Rueil Malmaison, France, died on September 1, 2013. The picture I am publishing here I found in her papers. I should have published it years ago, and I am doing so today in the hope that it may mean something to someone out there. It also occurred to me that the picture was taken just in the aftermath of the liberation of Paris, 75 years ago. It was taken some time in the fall of 1944 on the occasion of the marriage of a young woman whose parents were friends of my grandfather's. Said grandfather, Berl Bercu, is the man in the center of the picture with the striped tie and the splendid ears I inherited. My grand-mother and my mother are not in the picture, which suggests that they were still in Saint-Etienne, where the family hid from 1942 to 1944. They returned to Paris in the late fall, after my grand-father, which again suggests that the picture was taken in September or October. This particular group of people is composed of members of a social club for Jewish families who came from Iasi, Romania to settle in Paris in the 1920s and 30s. Before the war, this group numbered about three hundred people. Those in the pictures are all who were left at the end of the War. One may note that the portrait of a young man was added to the negative, the Photoshop of the time, I guess. He was the bride's brother who had been deported and never returned. She still wanted him in the picture.

The scan makes it difficult to see, but having observed the original under magnification, I can observe that the GI on the far left, upper row, wears the patch of the US 103rd "Cactus" Infantry Division. He wears it on his right shoulder, however, indicating that he is no longer part of that particular outfit. As a military historian, I fully understand that the likelihood of any of these GIs still being alive is infinitesimal. At the same time, there may be someone somewhere who can still identify some of them, so please feel free to share. Perhaps my picture may be of interest to their descendants. I also assume that if the Jewish chaplains on the left were indeed attached to the 103rd, they were probably part of a very small group, in which case it also might be possible to identify them. In any case, I hope that this picture may be useful to some researcher.

This is not one of the fascinating combat pictures that a well-known LinkedIn military expert, Erik Villard, whom I encourage everyone to follow, enhances and publishes to the great benefit of his network. Still, it does tell a story. If you look at the upper left corner of the picture, you can see that the GIs are definitely strategically placed around my mother's cousin Dora. A few months later, she was to meet her future husband who was at the time the picture was taken fighting with the Free French army that had landed in Provence in August. It is easy to see that Dora was a rather appealing young lady. Hence the presence of the American soldiers around her. I absolutely love the smile of the sergeant on her left side. There is clearly something in his smirk that means, "This was worth getting shot at." So, whoever these GIs were, if they are indeed all gone, may they rest in peace.