Today is Memorial Day, and our extended family is remembering a soldier killed in World War II.
S/Sgt. Stanley Bernard Angrist, United States Army, was my grandmother’s baby brother, a great-uncle I never met.
Uncle Bernard, as my dad and uncle knew him, was born May 26, 1915, in Dallas to William and Jennie Yonack Angrist, my great-grandparents.
Bernard was killed in action in France on August 6, 1944, two months after D-Day.
He is buried outside St. James, France, in Brittany American Cemetery (Plot I, Row 13, Grave 16).
Bernard was graduated from Dallas’ Forest Avenue High School, now James Madison High School, located just blocks from Fair Park on Martin Luther King Blvd.
During the Great Depression Bernard worked as a timekeeper on Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) construction projects near Sachse, Texas.
During this time Bernard lived with my grandparents, Ted and Sadie Angrist Solomon, sharing a bedroom with my father and my uncle at 2815 Twyman St. in South Dallas. Bernard was attending law school at SMU before he was drafted into the Army after America entered the war.
Bernard Angrist was the eighth of nine children who survived infancy. His death was mourned by his wife Sarah Gelfman Angrist, his extended family and his friends.
We remember him still.
The Brittany American Cemetery and Memorial website has an impressive and informative online brochure.
The brochure has photos, a history of wartime action in the region, details of the memorial – including deeply moving inscriptions – and more. The cemetery and monument are operated by the American Battle Monuments Commission, an agency of the federal government’s Executive Branch.
Bernard and other SMU students who died in World War II are remembered at SMU's World War II Memorial Plaza. More information is here, here and here.
Photo courtesy of the Dallas Jewish Historical Society.
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