Timeless honor, timeless shame

It was July 4, 1944, less than a month after the U.S.-British-Canadian invasion of Normandy, and American boys weren’t celebrating with fireworks, but engaged in desperate warfare with Hitler’s battle-hardened legions to liberate our oldest ally, France, from the Nazi boot. A 19-year-old Jewish kid from the Bronx out of James Monroe High School, PFC Willie Kellerman, who landed on Utah Beach on D-Day Plus 5, June 11, lost his freedom that Independence Day when he was captured and ended up with other POWs in the hands of the SS. On the forced march towards Germany, Kellerman escaped and was hidden by a friendly farmer, who burned his GI uniform and destroyed his dog tags, with the H for Hebrew stamped on the metal. Wearing a beret, he walked and biked 600 miles across the countryside until he met the French Resistance and then made it to the U.S. lines, where an anti-Semitic captain sent him straight back into combat, where he was wounded in the war’s final weeks.

Kellerman, feted as a hero of France with the

Legion of Honor, was long overlooked by Uncle Sam. Last Tuesday, having denied his Purple Heart, Bronze Star and Prisoner of War medals, the Pentagon finally made it right when the Army chief of staff, four-star Gen. James McConville, came up to New York to bestow the decorations on Kellerman, now 97 years young.

That same day, in Germany, another very old WWII vet also received long-delayed official government recognition, when SS man Josef Schuetz, a Sachsenhausen concentration camp guard, was given a five-year prison sentence for being an accessory to at least 3,500 murders. At age 101, he likely won’t serve his time, but his trial, conviction and sentence are important, as were Kellerman’s medals.

War and its repercussions, whether through heroism like Kellerman’s or atrocity and crimes against humanity like Schuetz’s, no matter how years ago, must be remembered and either honored or punished. It took far too long, but here one-time enemies, the United States and Germany, finally did right.