When he was arrested on the ground by the Germans, they threw him into a prisoner of war camp and asked, “Papolsky?” Meaning, “Are you Polish?”
He said, “Yeah. Yeah. Papolsky.”
For nineteen months, he was in a Stalag Luft, an air force prison camp. He got through it, but he never would have made it if the Germans found out that he was Jewish.
We held our breaths for a month and a half until we got word from the Red Cross that he was alive and a prisoner of war. The Red Cross went to prisoners of war and they did a lovely thing, they recorded them saying or singing things and they sent those recordings to their loved ones back home.
Lenny loved to sing so he recorded a song called “Miss You.” My mother would put that little cardboard record on every night and cry. Every single night! Finally I said, “Mom, maybe just hold the record? Maybe don’t put it on so much? I mean he’s alive, but it’s depressing hearing him sing every night!”
Even though we loved him dearly, truth is he was slightly off-key.
* * *
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In early 1944, I was seventeen years old and in my senior year at Eastern District High School in Brooklyn. One day an Army recruiting officer came around and said that if anybody in the senior class scored high enough on an aptitude test they could join the Army Specialized Training Reserve Program. If you were accepted you would receive early graduation from high school and be sent to a college paid for by the government. Then when you turned eighteen and joined the Army you would be in a better position to choose your field of service. This sounded great to me. Besides, I knew I was destined to be drafted anyway.
So I took the test. I think they really wanted everybody they could get. Some of the questions were not too difficult, like “2 + 2 = what?” Needless to say, I passed. I was not in the Army yet; I was in the ASTRP, the Army Specialized Training Reserve Program.
I was sent to college at VMI, the Virginia Military Institute, founded in 1839 and known as the “West Point of the South,” for special training. After a long overnight train ride I arrived in Lexington, Virginia, the home of VMI. I was stunned by the setting of the college in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley. I’d never seen a vista like that.
When we got to the campus we were issued military garb. Wow. An Army uniform! I felt like a soldier. Well, almost a soldier. For a short time, I was an honorary “rat.” That was the affectionate term for freshmen cadets at VMI. It was popularized by the 1938 film Brother Rat, starring Eddie Albert, future president Ronald Reagan, and his future wife Jane Wyman.
Being from Brooklyn, VMI took a lot of getting used to. I had never even seen a cheeseburger before, and they had a cola drink that was only popular in the South then called Dr. Pepper. Talk about a little Brooklyn fish out of water!
Even though I think they were speaking English, the language was very different. In restaurants down there, after I ordered, the waitress would often add in a Southern drawl, “Youwantgrisswiththa?”
It took me a long time to figure out exactly what they were saying. And what they were saying was, “Do you want grits with that?” It turned out that “grits” were a Southern dish that was a kind of porridge made of ground corn. So my previous answer of “No thanks!” still worked.
Life at VMI was wonderful and terrible. The terrible part was getting up at six a.m. to shave, shower, and have breakfast. And also having to make my own bed with hospital corners. （I won’t take the time and trouble to explain what hospital corners are; you’ll have to find that out on your own.）
Here I am as a soldier cadet at VMI, the Virginia Military Institute.
And here I’m surrounded by my Army VMI buddies; most of them were also from New York and New Jersey.
The wonderful part was that the VMI cadets were so welcoming to us, the Army Reserve trainees. They never resented our sharing the school with them. VMI was not just an academic college. Like I said before, it was “the West Point of the South” and truly a great school. So in addition to my academic studies of electrical engineering and learning all about cosines, tangents, slide rules, and such, they also trained you to be a cavalry officer. So I learned to ride a horse and wield a saber—something I had never seen any kid from Brooklyn do.
It was thrilling—if you didn’t fall off. To get the horse to really gallop, you’d yell “Yah! Yah!” and at the same time you had to wield your saber and cut little flags off the tips of bamboo poles. I loved it. I felt like Errol Flynn in They Died with Their Boots On. I kept telling myself: “Wait till I tell the kids back in Williamsburg what I’ve been doing. They’ll never believe me!”