Goodrell Students Remember, Honor Nation’s Veterans
Students at Goodrell Middle School take part in their 13th annual Veterans Day commemoration.
As students filed into the auditorium at Goodrell Middle School this morning for the 13th annual Veteran’s Day assembly the band was playing some bouncy jazz. The audience was naturally noisy.
But the mood changed as soon as the American flag was presented by a Boy Scout and everyone rose to pledge allegiance to it.
Everyone took their seats as guest speaker Ron Levine was introduced. Levine’s father, Henry Sanford Levine, was a First Lieutenant in the Army Air Corps during World War II. He was a navigator on a B-17, or Flying Fortress, that was shot down over Nazi Germany. Lt. Levine spent the next year and a half as a POW in Stalag Luft I where he “risked his life to pray to his god,” by presiding over secret gatherings of fellow Jewish POWs incarcerated there.
Ron Levine remembers playing with two wooden triangles as a youngster that his father told him he’d fashioned during his time in the stalag.
“They were toys to me,” he said, “but my father used them to form a Star of David during those services, the Jewish symbol. To the German soldiers they were a pair of meaningless triangles. That’s why he didn’t fasten them together permanently.”
Levine told the Goodrell students that his father made his war experience sound like an adventure at summer camp.
“There was a military term ‘scramble’ that meant the bomber crews were to assemble for a mission,” he recalled. “Our father used to say ‘scramble’ when we drove into the driveway and by that he meant we were to hurry and get ready for bed.”
But there was one notable exception to the lighthearted way Lt. Levine tried to represent his past to his children.
“The rule was that pilots were to fly 25 missions. If they survived they were sent home. Our father had a boyhood friend who reached the magic number but was asked to fly just one more mission. He never returned.”
Levine also remembers that for many years after the war his mother wouldn’t allow a Volkswagen to park on the street in front of their house.
“She called VWs ‘Hitler’s car,’” he said. “Ironically, Volkswagens were actually designed by a Jew.”
“Kriegies” is what the POWs called themselves, short for Kriegesgefangenen, the German word for prisoner of war.
“It was like being ‘kriegies’ was the shared religion of all the POWs,” Levine said. “Non-Jewish prisoners helped keep the worship services secret from the guards.”
Veteran’s Day is always a big deal at Goodrell. The staff even has a Veteran’s Day Committee that arranged for Levine’s appearance this morning through the Jewish Welfare Federation. And the students buy in. When Levine was finished they gave him a standing ovation. He reciprocated, standing in appreciation after delivering his presentation sitting down in a sometimes halting cadence because he’s afflicted with multiple sclerosis.
Then the band shifted gears from the bouncy jazz to America the Beautiful. And a reader’s theater group of nine 8th graders paid tribute to an assortment of ordinary folks who did extraordinary things to combat genocide around the globe from WWII Germany to 1990s Rwanda. The Upstanders, they were called.
Chalk up another fine salute at Goodrell where the steady march into the future pauses regularly to honor the past.
