The veterans who spoke last Friday at Highland Park, Illinois' Congregation Solel were Courtney Shanken, Howard Haas, Jack Heiman and Marshall Domash.
Haas and Shanken were among six local WWII veterans who received the French Legion of Honor last week in Chicago for their roles in helping to liberate France.
Howard Haas dropped out of the University of Chicago in his freshman year in 1942 to join the Army Air Force where he was a bombardier stationed in Italy bombing strategic positions throughout southern Europe. He completed his required fifty missions from June to December 1944.
One of his missions took him directly over Auschwitz, but, at the time, he didn't know the extent to which the atrocities had occurred.
"We flew over Auschwitz, but we didn't know Auschwitz was a death camp. We just thought it was a concentration camp." Even had they known, "We couldn't have bombed Auschwitz from 22,000 feet. We would have killed more Jews than the Germans did," said Haas, the former president and CEO of Sealy Mattress Company.
More to Come.
The Greatest Generation. --Cooter
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