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Sidney Shachnow, who survived the Holocaust as a child and fought in Vietnam as a green beret of the US military before becoming a major general, died. He was 83 years old. Shachnow's wife, Arlene, said over the phone …
Sidney Shachnow, who survived the Holocaust as a child and fought in Vietnam as a green beret of the US military before becoming a major general, died. He was 83 years old.
Shachnow's wife, Arlene, said by phone Wednesday that he had died Sept. 27 at a hospital in Pinehurst, North Carolina. They lived in the nearby town of Southern Pines.
Shachnow has been involved in some of the most important events of the twentieth century, from the persistence of the horrors of Nazi-controlled Europe to the conduct of US Army troops in Berlin during the fall of the Berlin Wall.
He has served in the US Army Special Forces for over 30 years, a career that has been enlightened by a childhood spent avoiding death. The loop was complete when he lived in a house in Berlin that once belonged to Adolf Hitler's finance minister.
"He was a really tough guy," said LeeAnne Shachnow Keister, one of Shachnow's three daughters.
"Chances were against him," she says. "But he had a very strong work ethic. And I think that's what got him into the army. "
When Shachnow was 6 or 7 years old, his Lithuanian Jewish family was forced to take refuge in a Nazi concentration camp. Very few prisoners survived.
"I developed a survival instinct," he wrote in "Hope and Honor: A Memory of the Courage and Survival of a Soldier," a book he co-authored with Jann Robbins.
"If I saw any problem, I was hiding," he wrote. "I learned to disappear in an alley, a door or behind a shrub."
He was finally put in fraud, living in the basement of a Catholic family. But life was hard even after the liberation of Lithuania by the Soviets.
He asked for food and sold tights and chocolate on the booming black market, said his daughter.
In 1950, he and his family arrived in Salem, Massachusetts, where he met his future wife, Arlene. He then enlisted in the army as a soldier before going to the school of candidate officers and volunteering for the Special Forces.
He finally went to Vietnam.
"He felt the United States was helping the Vietnamese," said Robbins, co-author of his memoir. "He was very strict in his conviction of the war."
He then commanded American forces in what was then West Berlin. The irony was not lost for him.
"Here it is the very capital of Fascism and the Third Reich. The buildings and the very streets where they walked on the ground and the system that put me in the camp and killed many people, "he told The Fayetteville Observer in 1994.
"Here we are 40 years more or less, and I become commander of American forces in this city and Jew again. That adds an insult to the injury, does not it? he said.
Shachnow told the Jewish post office in 2012 that he lived in a villa that once belonged to Hitler's finance minister.
Shachnow retired as a Major General in 1994. In 2016, he was among the 88 former military leaders who approved Donald Trump's candidacy for the presidency.
He spent much of his retirement speaking publicly about his life and working with various charities, including those that helped veterans.
His wife said that during a recent trip to a Walmart pharmacy, he had paid for the order of a woman who could afford to pay only half.
"He said, 'Give the woman the pills, I'll pay them,'" she said. "That's the kind of guy he was."
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Jennifer Farrar and Rhonda Shafner, Associated Press researchers, contributed to this story.
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