Old soldiers never die–they just wind up with a hip pocket full of memories.
Forty years ago, Leon Kotlowski played a key role at one of World War II`s most memorable scenes, the linkup of the Russian and American armies at the Elbe River. Today, he is white-haired, paunchy and, perhaps, a bit too much given to fighting back against old age by thrusting his reminiscences upon any passing target.
”You know, maybe, my friend Mr. Jack Leonard?” Kotlowski asked, hastily withdrawing a scrap of newsprint from a wallet he had just as quickly pulled out of his back pocket. ”He is a very big writer in England. He is putting the story of my adventures into a book about World War II.”
Kotlowski has a dozen or more faded and deeply creased journalistic testimonials to his soldiering, and as he unfolded one after another, the pieces of his military odyssey slowly came together until the bits of paper seemed to confer upon him as many honors as a chest full of shining medals.
His story began in the Jewish Quarter of pre-war Warsaw. Its most recent chapter was written in Highland Park, where Kotlowski was visiting an old comrade-in-arms.
The Warsaw of his youth, Kotlowski recalled, was one of the largest and most vibrant Jewish communities in the world. But when the Nazis marched into Poland at the opening of World War II, the fate of most of his childhood friends and neighbors was immediately sealed. Many were deported to the extermination camps; some managed to escape the death trains only to perish in the 1943 uprising of the Warsaw ghetto.
Kotlowski`s father, though, managed to sneak his family out of Warsaw and into the section of Poland that the Russians occupied during the period of the Nazi-Soviet Non-aggression Pact. When Hitler repudiated that treaty by invading Russia in 1941, the Kotlowski family was evacuated into the comparative safety of the Soviet Union itself. Kotlowski`s father was drafted by their Russian hosts, but as a boy of high school age, Kotlowski himself was exempt from military service. Still, it wasn`t long before he was seized by a desire to fight back against the Nazis.
”One of my Russian school buddies volunteered for the army, so I went with him when he reported to his brigade,” Kotlowski said. ”The commanding officer took one look at me and knew that I was lying about being 18. `I can`t officially take you into the army, son,` he told me, `but if you want, you can tag along with us as an orderly.”`
So Kotlowski began his military career polishing officers` boots, and cleaning up the mess hall. But given the fierce fighting that quickly engulfed their unit, this didn`t last. Soon he was serving in a tank crew. As the casualty lists grew, Kotlowski was rapidly promoted–first to tank commander, then as commanding officer of a company of tanks. Before his 16th birthday, he had already fought in the great battle of Stalingrad that was the turning point of the war against Germany on the Eastern Front.
After inumerable bloody battles, then a stint in the hospital recovering from shrapnel wounds, another as a tank instructor with the newly reformed Polish army, Kotlowski`s regiment wound up on the Elbe. Across the water, they could see the advanced units of the American Army.
Then a boatload of GIs crossed that stream to the cheers of their Russian allies. From somewhere, a bottle of vodka was produced and everyone toasted their mutual victory. Or, at least that was the common assumption. Nobody in the American party spoke Russian or Polish. No one from Kotlowski`s regiment knew English.
Finally, after all the other possibilities had been exhausted, Kotlowski played a linguistic long shot. Turning to their American guests, he asked:
Ratzs du, Yiddish?
”Jo,” replied an American major. ”Yes, as a matter of fact, I do speak a little Yiddish.”
So with the tanks and artillery of two mighty armies stretching out along both banks of the Elbe, the American major and the Polish-born Russian officer did simultaneous translations of the thousand and one questions their colleagues were dying to ask their counterparts. For their common medium, they called upon an age-old language whose life had just about come to an end in the burned out ghettos of Eastern Europe.
At the end of that evening, Kotlowski relayed an invitation from the Americans to come over to their side of the river the next day for another round of celebration. But before Kotlowski and his friends could take advantage of their allies` hospitality, the NKVD, the Russian political police, arrived on the scene with strict orders that there was to be no more fraternization with the Americans.
After the war, Kotlowski went back to Poland for a few years; then he immigrated to Israel. Although he was partially disabled from his World War II wounds, he managed to bluff his way by the medical examiners and into his adopted homeland`s army reserve corps.
During the Six Day War of 1967–when he was already 40–Kotlowski served with a tank brigade that helped chase Gamal Abdel Nasser`s army to the Suez Canal. Along the way, they captured hundreds of tanks that the Soviet Union had given its Egyptian allies. More often than not, it fell to Kotlowski to drive that bounty back to an Israeli base: He was the only one in his unit checked out on the finer points of operating a Russian-built tank.
With the Six Day War, Kotlowski`s soldering days at long last came to an end. But he remained active in veterans` organizations and in 1983 attended an old soldiers` reunion as a volunteer photographer for an Israeli veterans` magazine.
On that occasion, the State of Israel marked the 40th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising by hosting an international reunion for Jewish soldiers who had fought against the Nazis. From all over the world they came–ex-underground fighters, and troopers who had slogged through the battlefields of Europe in the armies of a dozen nations.
Among them was an American general whose gold braid and silver stars marked him as one of the highest ranking veterans at the gathering. Every time their paths crossed, it seemed to Kotlowski that the tall, fit-looking American was staring at him. For his own part, the more he looked at the general, the more Kotlowski had the feeling that he knew him.
Finally, one of them broke the ice to ask: ”Haven`t we met some place before?” But where? This was the general`s first trip to Israel. Kotlowski had never visited America. Then each recounted his World War II soldiering days, and they discovered that both of them had wound up at the Elbe River in 1945. At the time, the American general recalled, he was a major serving with the U.S. 7th Army.
”Oh, my God, so that was you?” they said, solving the puzzle virtually in unison. Then they threw their arms around each other in a spontaneous expression of the special kind of joy that is given only to old soldiers whenever they discover that a long-lost comrade still manages to cheat the angel of death.
— — —
”Imagine that!” Kotlowski said, sitting in his American friend`s Highland Park living room. ”First fate carries two soldiers, from different parts of the world, to meet each other at the Elbe River. Then 38 years later it manages to get them back together again.”
Behind him, a large picture window framed a tailored, suburban landscape whose late-afternoon serenity contrasted with the shell-cratered topography where so much of Kotlowski`s life was transacted.
”No matter how much has happened to me since the time we first met, it seems like it was only yesterday,” Kotlowski continued. ”There we were, representing the two mightiest armies in the world. Yet for lack of a common language, we couldn`t even celebrate our great victory! So I took a chance and said: `Any of you Americans happen to speak Yiddish?”`
” `Yes,` I answered, `I speak a little Yiddish` ” said Kotlowski`s host, breaking into his comrade-in-arm`s narrative at the same time as he was pouring some wine. And retired General William P. Levine and Leon Kotlowski lifted their glasses in honor of the Sabbath and in memory of their long-ago encounter on the banks of the Elbe.
