An Honest Man

Ernest Wachtel is a man who sees the importance of sharing his experiences. However, when I first spoke to him on the telephone in 2009, I noticed a certain reticence to open up. As I explained my project to him, there was silence on the other end of the line. Finally he said, “I’ll tell you what I can about Camp Ritchie, but I don’t want to talk about your uncle. I really didn’t like him much.”

Here, I thought, is an honest man.

Ernest’s memories of World War II are lucid and delivered with punch. He is a stickler for details. At the Detroit reunion, he was troubled by what he felt was an inaccuracy in the list of Ritchie Boys and their assignments during the war. Though the list showed Herman assigned to a different team, Ernest insisted that they were both part of interrogation team #62 attached to 3rd Army headquarters and that Herman was his superior officer. “I was a private,” he said, “Lang was the Lieutenant.” He remembers his other officer, too. “Captain Jann was a minister. He was a prince of a guy.”

Ernest, born and raised in Vienna, Austria, was thirteen years old when his country was occupied by the Nazis. Suddenly his pleasant life came crashing down. One of his most vivid memories is of a boyhood friend who pointed out the family apartment to the SS and then stole his new blue bicycle. The same day, Ernest was rounded up with a group of Jewish men and forced by a taunting mob to use toothbrushes to clean anti-Jewish graffiti from the walls of their synagogue. The anger and frustration from these experiences remain with him. The poignant story of betrayal by a school friend is so evocative that in Immigrant Soldier, I give it to Herman’s driver, though this character is not meant to be Ernest.

Ernest’s family soon fled Austria.  His father’s business and all their possessions were abandoned.  By June of 1938, with purchased temporary transit visa from France, they were in Paris waiting for US immigration papers.

At the age of fourteen, Austrian born Ernest traveled alone to New York where he lived with an uncle and aunt and attended  high school. Because the US quota system was based on nationality, his Polish-born parents waited another year before their visas arrived. Finally reunited, the family settled in New Jersey where his father, who in Vienna had owned a retail store selling silk and lace, became a chicken farmer. Ernest was fascinated by the soldiers from the nearby Army base and eager to join their ranks to help the country that had opened its doors to him.  In 1943, at the age of 18 and too young to be drafted, Ernest forged his father’s signature on the enlistment papers and became a soldier in the US military.

It wasn’t long before an officer noticed his strong German accent and he was on his way to Camp Ritchie. In Europe, attached to 3rd Army, Ernest was a POW screener. “I was a noncommissioned soldier,” he explained. “We didn’t wear the ordinary uniform of a soldier, but wore leather jackets similar to the jackets of the officers. And we didn’t have our grades on the jackets so a captured officer wouldn’t have an excuse not to talk to a soldier of lower rank.” Often Ernest’s job required him to climb up on a tank destroyer vehicle that was fitted out with loudspeakers.  From there he addressed the crowds of German prisoners, separating them into various companies and regiments to be sent for interrogation or to the rear to a prisoner of war compound.

As the Third Reich crumbled, Ernest, like Herman, visited the notorious Dachau concentration camp. There he spoke to several survivors and took them under his protection. He was able to find them a place to live and provide them with much-needed clothing and food. Later, in Austria, he located his father’s brother who had survived the war, protected and hidden by a Christian woman.

These days, at the age of 90, Ernest tells his story wherever he can—from the congregants of his local temple to the reporters from a Detroit news channel, from the Holocaust Memorial Center Oral History Project to myself, an author writing a novel about the officer he worked under. His is a story that is both typical and special, as are all the stories of the Ritchie Boys.