By Douglas Graves © 2009
“I thought about stabbing myself in the heart with the two wooden pencils the North Korean had given me to sign the confession,” said former Navy man Frank Ginther as he described wanting to end his 11-month ordeal after his ship had been surrounded and then captured by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. “But I wasn’t sure where my heart was. What if I missed?”
“It was the most alone feeling I ever had in my life,” said the veteran.
Ginther was speaking Sunday night at the Agape New Testament Fellowship Church in Schnecksville. Pastor Dave Farnholtz had arranged the short program with veterans in mind. Several veterans and their families were in the audience.
In January 1968 twenty five-year old Ginther was a communications specialist aboard the USS Pueblo, a communications surveillance ship in international waters but very near North Korea’s maritime exclusion zone. It was his first time aboard a ship. Commanded by Commander Lloyd M. Bucher, the ship and its 84 crewmen were captured and tortured until they signed confessions stating that they were spying.
The ship had specific orders to keep watch on Soviet naval activity in the Tsushima Straits and to gather radio messages and to record electronic intelligence from North Korea but to stay outside the 13-mile limit considered to be international waters.
When they came under attack, the captain maneuvered the ship to keep from being boarded by Koreans while the crew, including Ginther, attempted to destroy secret documents and cryptographic equipment.
One man, Duane Hodges of Cresswell, OR was killed when the Koreans opened fire on the American ship.
“I could hear the bullets hitting the side of the ship,” said Ginther. “I told the men with me, ‘If you guys know any prayers, now is the time to start saying them.’”
Though armed with two 50-caliber machine guns mounted on the deck, Bucher decided not to man the two guns but left the protective canvas, now frozen stiff, on the guns. The ship’s .45-caliber Thompson submachine guns remained locked below decks.
The recently married father of a baby daughter, a native of Pottsville, had been captured and now was being tortured by the Communists.
He described the events leading up to what he described as “the first [U. S. Navy] ship captured in over 150 years.” (In fact, it is the second; Japanese forces captured the USS Wake (PR-3) on Dec. 8, 1941 in Shanghai, China).
“It was very cold,” said Ginther describing the day before the attack. “We had been seen by two fishing boats so we knew our mission was compromised.”
“The next day we were approached at high speed by a sub chaser and soon were looking down the barrels of two cannon.”
“We started destroying classified equipment and papers, but the shredders were useless,” said Ginther reliving his baptism of fire. “They could only shred a couple of pages at a time. The incinerators were on the deck which was under fire by machine guns.”
Ginther and his fellow Sailors and Marines started burning the documents in trash cans below the decks. Soon the spaces were choked with acrid smoke.
The captain couldn’t scuttle the ship because the former Army supply ship had no scuttle valves to let in sea water. Even so, the ship was in 30 fathoms or about 180 feet of water. Captain Bucher reportedly felt that even if he could sink the ship, North Korean salvage divers could easily recover the classified equipment and documents.
The idea of sinking the ship did not appeal to crew who knew that the near freezing water would take its toll. “If we had got in the water we wouldn’t have lasted,” said Ginther.
After the North Koreans escorted the Pueblo and the crew into the port of Wonson on the Pacific side of the Korean Peninsula, the ordeal began in earnest.
Commander Bucher, who had been injured by North Korean shell fragments, was subjected to a mock execution and beatings. Finally, after the North Korean’s threatened to kill his crew, Bucher signed a confession stating that he and the Pueblo were operating in North Korean waters.
“Whatever he did,” said Ginther, “he did it for us. Years later I personally thanked him for saving my life.”
Ginther, too, was tortured. “Three officers kicked me and beat me with a leather belt, hitting me in the head with the metal buckle.”
He picked up a chair and holding it over his head, demonstrated how he had been forced to hold a chair while being interrogated.
“They would strip a man naked and tie his hands and ankles together and put a two-by-four behind his knees,” said Ginther. “Then he would be forced to squat. They would open the windows and leave him in the freezing room.”
“I prayed: ‘Lord, please help me,’” said Ginther. “I heard a deep, powerful voice—I heard it in my mind, not my ear. ‘Trust me; every thing is going to be alright.’ It was so powerful that the feeling came over me from top to bottom.”
Still Bucher and his men found ways to fight back. Ginther showed propaganda photographs taken by his Communist captors with the crewmen each displaying a middle finger in the classic American symbol of disdain. However, because they told their captors that it was “the Hawaiian good luck sign,” the Communists released the photographs to the world’s press.
Ginther said that he had to write a confession and to say that he was being well treated. “I wrote that ‘these people are very nice; just like the people at St. Elizabeth’s [a then well-known mental hospital in Washington, D. C.]”
According to other sources, the widely-read Bucher selected a seldom-used word, “paean,” to let the world know he was repudiating his forced confession. A paean is a work that praises or honors its subject. The Koreans verified the technical meaning of his words: "We paean the North Korean state. We paean their great leader Kim Il-Sung." What they missed was that the pronunciation of “paean” is similar to “pee on.”
Ginther credited his faith in God with helping him through the 11 months of torture, privation and abuse. He said that two plaques given to him by a Sunday school teacher help him remember his faith in God.
“Two things helped me,” he said. “My faith in God and my faith in my country. My faith in God is unshaken.”
“My faith in my country is getting a little shaky,” he added. Still, he had chosen to wear an American flag-themed neck tie for the occasion.
“The message I bring to you,” said Ginther, “is that you’re going to have troubles in life. Just remember that God is love. Jesus never fails.
Ginther’s career combines his communications training and his faith in God. He is the station manager of WJCS 89.3 FM in Allentown, a station featuring a religious format. He lives in Bethlehem with his wife, Judy.
The Navy awarded him the Purple Heart Medal recognizing the torture he endured. He also wears the Prisoner of War Medal.
Pastor Dave Farnholtz concluded the evening by inviting local veterans to give their personal testimony and to offer prayers. The audience then sang patriotic songs.
The USS Pueblo remains a commissioned ship of the United States Navy. It is also still in North Korea.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Friday, June 26, 2009
My Number is A91432
By Douglas Graves © 2009
“The Germans came into our house while we were eating dinner,” said the trim, elderly lady. “They threw our food on the floor—and they kicked us out of our house with what we were wearing. We ended up in some form of a big place—people walking about—with Germans quietly killing people.”
Her name was Lieberman then but seventy years later 83-year old Yolanda Hamer was telling her story to her children in Bethlehem—a story about losing her parents and her brothers to the Holocaust. She had written a short story for her children--one of savagery relating how a young Jewish girl was ripped from her loving family in Roztoky, Czechoslovakia and sent on a terrible journey.
“We started hearing news from Germany about the Nuremberg laws [that] were coming into effect. We felt very secure, [that] this [would] not happen to us. We went to school, spoke about Hitler in class and [tried] to make sense of it all. ‘The Nuremberg laws will never reach us’ was our answer. He left us alone for two years.”
“We were expelled from school [and] were not allowed in public places,” she said. “Our new I D was a yellow star with black letters: Juole or Jew.
“One day we heard a rumor [that we would] be deported. Shortly we were instructed to pack a small bag; little food and nothing else. They pushed us into trucks and brought us into a brick factory which they converted into a ghetto.” There single families were crammed into squalid ten-foot by ten-foot cubicles with no water nor toilets. “Within a week we were infested with body [lice] and head lice. This was the first lesson of Hell on earth.”
“One morning we got up and saw trucks lined up. They loaded the trucks and off we went to the train station. We were pushed into cattle cars, 120 per car. The two little windows were about one foot long. We couldn’t count on fresh air. We were given a bucket for a toilet—no food or water. Soon people started fainting from the heat and thirst.”
Yolanda said she thought it was in May. “We were heading east. We spent four days traveling. Half the people were dead. The stench was horrible. It was a big, big train.”
“After a few days . . . we reached [Auschwitz],” she wrote in her story for her children. [We were] greeted by Dr. Mengele, the Angel of Death. He made his selection. My sister [Jean] and I . . . remained together. My mother and two brothers went by ambulance to the gas chambers. My father was sent to a work line. That was the last time I saw them.
“They took our clothes and shaved all of our hair. Next came a permanent mark on [our arms]. My number is A91432,” said Yolanda showing the bluish, faded tattoo. “I think the nine stands for 1939.”
“I asked one of the men . . . ‘How do we get out of here?’ His answer was very simple. ‘You see the chimney? That’s your exit.’ I had no idea what he was talking about.”
“We spent endless hours just standing while we were being counted. Every morning when we came out the barbed wire [fence] was laced with bodies. They served as examples in case we decided to escape.”
“A slice of bread [and] a cup of water (they called it soup) sustained us for a day. We cleaned the streets—picked up garbage. [We were] supervised by SS [guards] and German Shepherds [dogs]. If there was no work, we stood in line. If they didn’t like the way you stood, there was no food for the next two days. [It was] another way of eliminating a body from the roster. We hoped for a miracle but none came.”
After about six months at Auschwitz the two girls were sent to Plaszow, a concentration camp near Krakow, Poland. The place was known as a slave labor camp that provided slave workers to several nearby armament factories. The death rate at Plaszow was very high.
“There we worked like true slaves: loading bricks on trucks, unloading coal, and shoveling coal down a shaft. From there we moved to unloading trains [coming] from the Russian front. [The trains were packed with] uniforms which were full of blood, body parts and, primarily, lice—we had enough of our own.”
“A bright side [for us] were the 200 children in the camp. They gave us hope for a new world. But one night we heard screams from the parents of the children and [we heard] children crying ‘Don’t take us away from our parents!’ They were taken to Auschwitz, their final trip.”
“Shortly afterwards we were shipped back to Auschwitz. We didn’t work, just stood in line, rain or shine. Our bodies were full of sores from the lice. We tried to hide it, otherwise we would be gassed. We slept in bunks—four to a bunk with one blanket. I don’t know how we survived on the ration of food. If you moved from your spot in line, you were the dogs’ next meal. If you had an itch you’d better not scratch.”
“The worst night was Kol-Nidre night [the first evening of Yom Kippur]. They brought a transport of Hungarian Jews. Among them were quite a few rabbis. They put the loud-speaker near the gas chamber to make sure we heard their cries and prayers calling to the Almighty while they were being pushed [into the gas chambers].
“Later they walked us [to a place] to watch the shooting of prisoners. After they shot them they threw them into ditches where the fire was ready for them.”
A few days later Yolanda and Jean were shipped out to Oberalstadt [Czechoslovakia]. On the way their train was attacked by Allied aircraft. “They must have known what the cargo was [as] they hit only the locomotive. The doors opened. We started jumping out—right into the SS’ hands. I [fell] on my knee, severely injuring it. We tried to get back on the train [but] they started beating us with their clubs. We were rounded up, re-counted and [forced] to walk to our barracks. I don’t ever remember being so hungry . . .”
Yolanda and her sister while at Oberalstadt worked in a yarn factory owned by Siemens [then, and now, a major manufacturer of electrical components]. “Our shift was 16 hours a day [with] one meal and very little sleep.” Yolanda now had a straw-filled pillow to go with their one blanket and four-to-a-person bed.
Some sources put the number of Jewish women working for Siemens as virtual slaves in 1941 at approximately 900.
Her knee, injured during the attack on the train and now and infected and gangrenous, didn’t stop the Germans from forcing her to dig ditches while watched by the SS and their growling dogs. “At this point I was praying and hoping I would die soon. The pain was unbearable. I was unable to work any longer. They took me to an infirmary [with] no medicine, not even an aspirin.”
“In spite of not having even anesthetic, a captured Russian woman doctor decided to operate. She was the angel who saved my life.”
Yolanda was transferred to a typhoid ward to recover. “I was positive I’d never walk out of there. The patients were delirious with fever. They screamed and . . . were praying for an end. Every few hours the orderly came in and pulled out a body or two. Those screams and cries! I still hear them sometimes at night.”
But they made it. “We started hearing rumors [that] the war was ending. Sure enough, one morning when we came out to go to work—no more SS! American and British soldiers greeted us. ‘You are free,’ they said.”
But, according to Yolanda, the next day the Americans and British left. Their zone belonged to Russians according to agreements made at Yalta. “Later that day the Russians rolled in. They saw girls and they were ready to party.” Yolanda’s expression as she tells the story reveals that “party” was a euphemism to describe much worse intentions. “We jumped out of windows and ran into the woods.”
After running into what she described as a regiment of Nazis, they came back to the barracks. But soon they were able to return to their childhood home in Roztoky.
According to Robert B. Pynsent of the University College at London’s School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, “Jews returning [to Czechoslovakia] from concentration camps were often faced with being treated as Germans.”
“There was a priest living in [our] house. He was rude to us telling us point-blank [to] ‘beat it’. [This] was my first mis-giving about surviving.”
The sisters went to Prague where they read in a Jewish newspaper that an aunt and uncle in the United States were advertising for Lieberman family survivors. Abraham and Margaret Howe, living in The Bronx, agreed to sponsor both Yolanda and Jean. They got permission to travel to the United States but, “It took four years of waiting . . . under constant scrutiny [by the Communists] because they knew we were leaving they country.”
Yolanda made it to Canada and then to New York. There, on a blind date, she met her husband, Barry, at a dance. They married in 1952 and made their home, first in Brooklyn and then in Queens, raising two children, Sharon and Joseph. Yolanda and Barry now make their home with Sharon. They attend the Brith Sholom Congregation in Bethlehem.
“When I look back [on my life]--the hunger, the beatings, the lice and the abuse were worthwhile. When somebody says ‘the Holocaust is a Jewish myth’ I am here to tell them I was there! It really happened!
“The Germans came into our house while we were eating dinner,” said the trim, elderly lady. “They threw our food on the floor—and they kicked us out of our house with what we were wearing. We ended up in some form of a big place—people walking about—with Germans quietly killing people.”
Her name was Lieberman then but seventy years later 83-year old Yolanda Hamer was telling her story to her children in Bethlehem—a story about losing her parents and her brothers to the Holocaust. She had written a short story for her children--one of savagery relating how a young Jewish girl was ripped from her loving family in Roztoky, Czechoslovakia and sent on a terrible journey.
“We started hearing news from Germany about the Nuremberg laws [that] were coming into effect. We felt very secure, [that] this [would] not happen to us. We went to school, spoke about Hitler in class and [tried] to make sense of it all. ‘The Nuremberg laws will never reach us’ was our answer. He left us alone for two years.”
“We were expelled from school [and] were not allowed in public places,” she said. “Our new I D was a yellow star with black letters: Juole or Jew.
“One day we heard a rumor [that we would] be deported. Shortly we were instructed to pack a small bag; little food and nothing else. They pushed us into trucks and brought us into a brick factory which they converted into a ghetto.” There single families were crammed into squalid ten-foot by ten-foot cubicles with no water nor toilets. “Within a week we were infested with body [lice] and head lice. This was the first lesson of Hell on earth.”
“One morning we got up and saw trucks lined up. They loaded the trucks and off we went to the train station. We were pushed into cattle cars, 120 per car. The two little windows were about one foot long. We couldn’t count on fresh air. We were given a bucket for a toilet—no food or water. Soon people started fainting from the heat and thirst.”
Yolanda said she thought it was in May. “We were heading east. We spent four days traveling. Half the people were dead. The stench was horrible. It was a big, big train.”
“After a few days . . . we reached [Auschwitz],” she wrote in her story for her children. [We were] greeted by Dr. Mengele, the Angel of Death. He made his selection. My sister [Jean] and I . . . remained together. My mother and two brothers went by ambulance to the gas chambers. My father was sent to a work line. That was the last time I saw them.
“They took our clothes and shaved all of our hair. Next came a permanent mark on [our arms]. My number is A91432,” said Yolanda showing the bluish, faded tattoo. “I think the nine stands for 1939.”
“I asked one of the men . . . ‘How do we get out of here?’ His answer was very simple. ‘You see the chimney? That’s your exit.’ I had no idea what he was talking about.”
“We spent endless hours just standing while we were being counted. Every morning when we came out the barbed wire [fence] was laced with bodies. They served as examples in case we decided to escape.”
“A slice of bread [and] a cup of water (they called it soup) sustained us for a day. We cleaned the streets—picked up garbage. [We were] supervised by SS [guards] and German Shepherds [dogs]. If there was no work, we stood in line. If they didn’t like the way you stood, there was no food for the next two days. [It was] another way of eliminating a body from the roster. We hoped for a miracle but none came.”
After about six months at Auschwitz the two girls were sent to Plaszow, a concentration camp near Krakow, Poland. The place was known as a slave labor camp that provided slave workers to several nearby armament factories. The death rate at Plaszow was very high.
“There we worked like true slaves: loading bricks on trucks, unloading coal, and shoveling coal down a shaft. From there we moved to unloading trains [coming] from the Russian front. [The trains were packed with] uniforms which were full of blood, body parts and, primarily, lice—we had enough of our own.”
“A bright side [for us] were the 200 children in the camp. They gave us hope for a new world. But one night we heard screams from the parents of the children and [we heard] children crying ‘Don’t take us away from our parents!’ They were taken to Auschwitz, their final trip.”
“Shortly afterwards we were shipped back to Auschwitz. We didn’t work, just stood in line, rain or shine. Our bodies were full of sores from the lice. We tried to hide it, otherwise we would be gassed. We slept in bunks—four to a bunk with one blanket. I don’t know how we survived on the ration of food. If you moved from your spot in line, you were the dogs’ next meal. If you had an itch you’d better not scratch.”
“The worst night was Kol-Nidre night [the first evening of Yom Kippur]. They brought a transport of Hungarian Jews. Among them were quite a few rabbis. They put the loud-speaker near the gas chamber to make sure we heard their cries and prayers calling to the Almighty while they were being pushed [into the gas chambers].
“Later they walked us [to a place] to watch the shooting of prisoners. After they shot them they threw them into ditches where the fire was ready for them.”
A few days later Yolanda and Jean were shipped out to Oberalstadt [Czechoslovakia]. On the way their train was attacked by Allied aircraft. “They must have known what the cargo was [as] they hit only the locomotive. The doors opened. We started jumping out—right into the SS’ hands. I [fell] on my knee, severely injuring it. We tried to get back on the train [but] they started beating us with their clubs. We were rounded up, re-counted and [forced] to walk to our barracks. I don’t ever remember being so hungry . . .”
Yolanda and her sister while at Oberalstadt worked in a yarn factory owned by Siemens [then, and now, a major manufacturer of electrical components]. “Our shift was 16 hours a day [with] one meal and very little sleep.” Yolanda now had a straw-filled pillow to go with their one blanket and four-to-a-person bed.
Some sources put the number of Jewish women working for Siemens as virtual slaves in 1941 at approximately 900.
Her knee, injured during the attack on the train and now and infected and gangrenous, didn’t stop the Germans from forcing her to dig ditches while watched by the SS and their growling dogs. “At this point I was praying and hoping I would die soon. The pain was unbearable. I was unable to work any longer. They took me to an infirmary [with] no medicine, not even an aspirin.”
“In spite of not having even anesthetic, a captured Russian woman doctor decided to operate. She was the angel who saved my life.”
Yolanda was transferred to a typhoid ward to recover. “I was positive I’d never walk out of there. The patients were delirious with fever. They screamed and . . . were praying for an end. Every few hours the orderly came in and pulled out a body or two. Those screams and cries! I still hear them sometimes at night.”
But they made it. “We started hearing rumors [that] the war was ending. Sure enough, one morning when we came out to go to work—no more SS! American and British soldiers greeted us. ‘You are free,’ they said.”
But, according to Yolanda, the next day the Americans and British left. Their zone belonged to Russians according to agreements made at Yalta. “Later that day the Russians rolled in. They saw girls and they were ready to party.” Yolanda’s expression as she tells the story reveals that “party” was a euphemism to describe much worse intentions. “We jumped out of windows and ran into the woods.”
After running into what she described as a regiment of Nazis, they came back to the barracks. But soon they were able to return to their childhood home in Roztoky.
According to Robert B. Pynsent of the University College at London’s School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, “Jews returning [to Czechoslovakia] from concentration camps were often faced with being treated as Germans.”
“There was a priest living in [our] house. He was rude to us telling us point-blank [to] ‘beat it’. [This] was my first mis-giving about surviving.”
The sisters went to Prague where they read in a Jewish newspaper that an aunt and uncle in the United States were advertising for Lieberman family survivors. Abraham and Margaret Howe, living in The Bronx, agreed to sponsor both Yolanda and Jean. They got permission to travel to the United States but, “It took four years of waiting . . . under constant scrutiny [by the Communists] because they knew we were leaving they country.”
Yolanda made it to Canada and then to New York. There, on a blind date, she met her husband, Barry, at a dance. They married in 1952 and made their home, first in Brooklyn and then in Queens, raising two children, Sharon and Joseph. Yolanda and Barry now make their home with Sharon. They attend the Brith Sholom Congregation in Bethlehem.
“When I look back [on my life]--the hunger, the beatings, the lice and the abuse were worthwhile. When somebody says ‘the Holocaust is a Jewish myth’ I am here to tell them I was there! It really happened!
A Lonely Ceremony on Saturday
By Douglas Graves
© 2009
A lonely ceremony on Saturday, May 30 marked the service and sacrifice of the men and women who lay in the South Bethlehem hillside cemetery. Many lay in unmarked graves, the ground sunken in on them when their wooden coffins gave way. Some lay with toppled granite obelisks beside their resting place, the bases, the shafts, and the crowns all asunder.
“The ones with level bases were knocked over by vandals,” said one of the men who supervise the county-provided work release grass cutters that do their community service time here. “The ones with un-level bases were knocked down by Mother Nature.”
“Some people just treat the cemetery as a vacant lot,” he said.
The memorial organizers have been meeting here on May 30 for the past couple of years because that is the traditional date of the old “Decoration Day” that was supplanted by “Memorial Day.”
Decoration Day was when families took the children to the cemetery to remember their ancestors and decorate their graves and tombs. Usually, they would tidy up the grave site. It is a tradition largely given over to trips to the beach or mountains to make the most of a long weekend--or for shopping for “Memorial Day Specials.”
A cooling breeze came up the slope from South 4th Street bringing relief from the bright mid-morning sun. A group of about 20 gathered in the shade to commemorate the dead. The officials, veterans and clergy out numbered those without an official duty to perform.
The pastor of the church, Monsignor Robert Biszek, came to offer a prayer. “We remember with a sense of gratitude and humility the thousands and thousands of people and the torch of freedom they so gallantly carried,” prayed the pastor.
Representative Joe Brennan was there with his son. Mayor John Callahan offered a brief history of Memorial Day, saying that its beginning was in the simple task of mothers and wives of dead Confederate soldiers who, while cleaning up and caring their men folk, decided to extend the kindness to the dead Federal soldiers.
Three Cub Scouts were there with their Den Mother, Paula Gabriel and Assistant Den Mother, Sonia Moser. They represented Pack 397 sponsored by the Holy Infancy School. Gianni Gonzales, 8, Angel Negron, 9, and Luis St-Amand weren’t the only ones in uniform.
About 75 feet up the hill American Legion squad of veterans, armed with 30-06 M-1 rifles, prepared to render honors with a salute. American Legion Post 379 members Eric Shimer, Steve Melnick, Ralph Romano, and John M. McCulloch shouldered their weapons and fired in quick, sharp volleys.
A baby, startled from deep sleep in her stroller, began a fitful cry. She seemed to calm as the bugler, Marine Ralph Brodt III, began to sound “Taps.”
The Holy Infancy Church has responsibility for the cemetery that is owned by the Allentown Diocese. All of the mowing and minimal maintenance is done by volunteers and people sentenced to community service.
Many of the grave stones in the St. Michael’s Cemetery bear the names of Civil War era soldiers who ensured that their country would endure.
There are no new graves in St. Michael’s said the monsignor. He pointed to the crest of the hill toward some trees. There are more graves overgrown in the woods, he said.
The proud Bethlehem Iron men and their families who are buried here surely never imagined that their grave markers—some magnificent and expensive, others humble—would some day be tumbled about. They must have thought that being buried in the church’s cemetery would assure them of perpetual care and respect.
The vandals have been no respecters of nationality. Stone memorials with Italian names lay cast down in the same grass as do those with Irish names.
The cemetery faces a row of squeezed-together houses that once would have been tidy and well cared for—filled with citizens who built the community and the church and entrusted their loved ones to its perpetual care. They couldn’t have known that their faith was so misplaced.
The wind-swept hillside with its graves and head stones is still a solemn and once beautiful place but it contrasts sadly with the carefully maintained and honored graveyards in the care of the American government who make an honest effort to keep faith with fallen veterans around the world.
According to the pastor, there is very little money for maintenance and repair of the sacred site. Any one that wants to donate money or labor for the care and restoration of the formerly magnificent resting place can call the church at 610-866-1121.
© 2009
A lonely ceremony on Saturday, May 30 marked the service and sacrifice of the men and women who lay in the South Bethlehem hillside cemetery. Many lay in unmarked graves, the ground sunken in on them when their wooden coffins gave way. Some lay with toppled granite obelisks beside their resting place, the bases, the shafts, and the crowns all asunder.
“The ones with level bases were knocked over by vandals,” said one of the men who supervise the county-provided work release grass cutters that do their community service time here. “The ones with un-level bases were knocked down by Mother Nature.”
“Some people just treat the cemetery as a vacant lot,” he said.
The memorial organizers have been meeting here on May 30 for the past couple of years because that is the traditional date of the old “Decoration Day” that was supplanted by “Memorial Day.”
Decoration Day was when families took the children to the cemetery to remember their ancestors and decorate their graves and tombs. Usually, they would tidy up the grave site. It is a tradition largely given over to trips to the beach or mountains to make the most of a long weekend--or for shopping for “Memorial Day Specials.”
A cooling breeze came up the slope from South 4th Street bringing relief from the bright mid-morning sun. A group of about 20 gathered in the shade to commemorate the dead. The officials, veterans and clergy out numbered those without an official duty to perform.
The pastor of the church, Monsignor Robert Biszek, came to offer a prayer. “We remember with a sense of gratitude and humility the thousands and thousands of people and the torch of freedom they so gallantly carried,” prayed the pastor.
Representative Joe Brennan was there with his son. Mayor John Callahan offered a brief history of Memorial Day, saying that its beginning was in the simple task of mothers and wives of dead Confederate soldiers who, while cleaning up and caring their men folk, decided to extend the kindness to the dead Federal soldiers.
Three Cub Scouts were there with their Den Mother, Paula Gabriel and Assistant Den Mother, Sonia Moser. They represented Pack 397 sponsored by the Holy Infancy School. Gianni Gonzales, 8, Angel Negron, 9, and Luis St-Amand weren’t the only ones in uniform.
About 75 feet up the hill American Legion squad of veterans, armed with 30-06 M-1 rifles, prepared to render honors with a salute. American Legion Post 379 members Eric Shimer, Steve Melnick, Ralph Romano, and John M. McCulloch shouldered their weapons and fired in quick, sharp volleys.
A baby, startled from deep sleep in her stroller, began a fitful cry. She seemed to calm as the bugler, Marine Ralph Brodt III, began to sound “Taps.”
The Holy Infancy Church has responsibility for the cemetery that is owned by the Allentown Diocese. All of the mowing and minimal maintenance is done by volunteers and people sentenced to community service.
Many of the grave stones in the St. Michael’s Cemetery bear the names of Civil War era soldiers who ensured that their country would endure.
There are no new graves in St. Michael’s said the monsignor. He pointed to the crest of the hill toward some trees. There are more graves overgrown in the woods, he said.
The proud Bethlehem Iron men and their families who are buried here surely never imagined that their grave markers—some magnificent and expensive, others humble—would some day be tumbled about. They must have thought that being buried in the church’s cemetery would assure them of perpetual care and respect.
The vandals have been no respecters of nationality. Stone memorials with Italian names lay cast down in the same grass as do those with Irish names.
The cemetery faces a row of squeezed-together houses that once would have been tidy and well cared for—filled with citizens who built the community and the church and entrusted their loved ones to its perpetual care. They couldn’t have known that their faith was so misplaced.
The wind-swept hillside with its graves and head stones is still a solemn and once beautiful place but it contrasts sadly with the carefully maintained and honored graveyards in the care of the American government who make an honest effort to keep faith with fallen veterans around the world.
According to the pastor, there is very little money for maintenance and repair of the sacred site. Any one that wants to donate money or labor for the care and restoration of the formerly magnificent resting place can call the church at 610-866-1121.
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