Re: Veterans Day

Posted

On Veterans’ Day, November 11, 2013, I was remembering the following:

My brother, Staff Sgt. Hyman L. Banks is buried in the Veteran’s Cemetery in Lincoln Park.

Upon graduation from Classical High School in 1940, he felt he was needed to help our parents in the business.  He was then drafted and shipped overseas in July 1944.  He practiced writing in Yiddish so that the V-Mail letters could be read by my mother.

On October 13, 1944, we received a phone call to inform us that my brother was “Missing in Action.”  This was followed by a call that stated he was killed in action while leading a mission in Aachen Germany, just before the “Battle of the Bulge.”  We sat shivah that week.

When given the option of burial, my parents chose to have his remains returned to Rhode Island.  The Jewish War Veteran’s designated a plot at Lincoln Park as a burial site.  Five years after he was killed, his remains were brought “home” and we had a funeral and burial on that site.

I was pregnant at the time of the burial, and Howard L. Feldman, my brother’s namesake was born on May 9, 1949.

I believe I am one of the very few siblings of those buried at the site who is still living.

I wanted this story about that very sad time in our history to be kept alive.

Zelda Banks Feldman
Warwick