IN PRAISE OF COWARDICE
"My grandmother was always saying that everything in life was 'written down in the book.' I don’t know if she meant The Book of Life, the Judeo-Christian concept of the book in which God
writes the names of those who are destined to go to Heaven, or just the book of her life."
First, it came for my grandfather, then for my grandmother. Death comes for us all, but still Jews toast, l’chaim! To life!
When my mother and her brother cleaned out their dead parents’ apartment, they
found their father’s Bronze Star from the war.
“Do you know what was in the box with the Bronze Star?” my mother asked me. “A Nazi Iron Cross.”
“How did you know that?”
“Grandpa showed it to me
a bunch of times.”
“Where did he get it?”
“Off a dead Nazi.” That makes it sound like my grandfather killed the Nazi, but he didn’t. He never fired his gun, not once in the whole Allied advance.
My uncle convinced himself that my grandfather got the Bronze Star for doing something heroic, but I know otherwise. Bronze Stars were awarded to almost everyone who participated in the invasion of Europe. All you had to do was be there. If you did something special, you got a Silver Star, and if you were wounded, a Purple Heart.
There is no gold star medal in the US
military, only a gold star mother. A gold star mother is a mother whose son is dead. My grandfather’s mother, my Great-Grandma Nettie, wasn’t a gold star mother. If she were, I wouldn’t be here, telling this story.
Instead, my grandfather was one of a long line of cowards and draft dodgers — and also, survivors.
In the early 20th century, my grandfather’s father persuaded the town butcher of Bychawa, Poland to puncture his eardrum so he could avoid conscription in the Russian Army. My grandfather’s son, my uncle, escaped the Vietnam draft in 1968 with a doctor’s note about his bad knee.
I am grateful for these evasions, for my great-grandfather’s willingness to go deaf in one ear,
for the unfair privilege (and fiercely intrusive Jewish mother) that got my uncle his doctor’s note. Heroes die, and then someone else tells their story, but the cowards and draft dodgers live to tell their own...READ MORE
Susan's Note: This story is about a Jewish couple named Diamond. The Diamond's in the story are not related to my family. Although, strictly by coincidence, like grandpa Sam, my husband David Diamond is an accountant and possibly, under the right circumstances could be persuaded by cowardice :)
