'Ritchie Boy' shares WWII experience
By Michele Alperin
Feb. 29, 2008

Fran Zeitler, a member of the Jewish Center in Princeton, saw "The Ritchie Boys" at home and urged adult education co-chair Helaine Isaacs to show the film and invite Victor Brombert, one of the men featured in the film and a professor at Princeton University, to speak. On Feb. 12, an audience of 50 watched the film and listened to Brombert talk about his experiences as an intelligence officer for the United States Army during World War II.

The film documents the training of European refugees for intelligence work during World War II. They spoke the languages of the enemies and were trained primarily to interview prisoners of war.

The training at Camp Ritchie, the isolated "school for intelligence and psychological warfare" near the Blue Ridge Mountains in Maryland, was primarily intensive classroom study, with a smaller amount of standard military training.

Brombert spoke after the film about how he has asked himself, having seen the film several times: How did the Ritchie boys feel about the war?

"We knew better than anyone else that this was a war that had to be fought," he said. "Even my parents knew that, and they were pacifists." Even though they had lost a daughter in her early years, they accepted that their son had to go to war and wanted to go to war. "They knew we had to win the war without loving it."

It was the Normandy landings that gave them the harsh dose of reality that destroyed any illusions about the beauty of warfare. "It was a lesson in fear and trembling I learned on the first night of the landing at Omaha beach. I was on a bluff -- too lazy or tired to dig a foxhole," he said.

A German plane strafed the soldiers, and Brombert felt like machine gun bullets were going through his back. "I was terrified," he said. "I didn't pray, but I made myself a promise: If I survive this moment, I will never complain and will devote myself to giving pleasure to myself and others.

"It was the joy of survival, a deep love of life that I learned there," he said. "I feel like life is a gift." He compared his feeling to the beauty of convalescence from an illness, and the joy one feels in returning to life: "The smallest things, the taste of water, a fruit, the air, is wonderful."

Brombert pointed out to the audience that the documentary had been produced by a German filmmaker and scholar Christian Bauer. "He has been particularly interested in the emigration from Germany -- the loss through emigration, expulsion, and annihilation of the Jewish population of Germany," said Brombert. "This is then a German's story, and quite obviously the film is somewhat slanted."

As a result, the former Camp Ritchie servicemen who appeared in the film were largely German. "I was a bit of an anomaly -- the only refugee in the film not from Germany," said Brombert. In actuality, the refugees were not all from Germany and Austria, but also hailed from Belgium, France, and Italy. The film also doesn't state clearly that the refugees who trained at Camp Ritchie were mostly Jews.

Brombert also related an extraordinary coincidence that came to fore in the course of the filming. The filmmaker Bauer's mother and Guy Stern, one of the featured ex-intelligence officers, had gone to school together in Hildesheim in a Jewish school; she was sent there by her father because it was an excellent school.

In an aside alluding to what it was like to be one of the refugees in the film, Brombert referred to the title of his book Trains of Thought. "It hints at many things: my childhood passion for trains, trains from one country to another, trains that crossed borders of a politicized Europe, trains to Auschwitz," he said.

In its hardback version, the book also had a subtitle that acknowledged Brombert's experience as a refugee: "Memories of a Stateless Youth." He explained, "It is about the statelessness of my parents, myself, and my family that existed ever since the Russian Revolution."

The book includes a chapter on Camp Ritchie that was used by the filmmaker and also chapters on the landing in Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge, which were both part of the documentary.

The film might leave viewers with the impression that the Ritchie Boys were one small, tight group who had established lifelong connections. But the training at Camp Ritchie lasted only six weeks, after which the men were shipped to Europe and attached to different battalions. And there were many separate "classes" of Ritchie Boys.

Brombert felt that it was the film that brought together these men and gave them a name. "We never had a reunion," he said. "We never knew we were the Ritchie Boys."

But there is a sense of connection to others who went through the same thing. Brombert recently met Guy Stern, and they had dinner together. Brombert said they may have met at Camp Ritchie, but it didn't really matter. "It was very emotional," he said. "I feel about him as a long lost brother."

Brombert's parents left Russia in 1917 after the Russian Revolution, lived in Denmark, London, and Germany, and settled in Paris in 1933, where Brombert grew up and attended lycee. In July 1941 Brombert and his parents escaped to the United States with other refugees on a banana freighter by way of Spain. After the war, he returned to the United States and went to Yale University under the GI bill of rights, where he received both a bachelor's degree and a doctorate.

He taught at Yale University for almost 30 years before coming to Princeton University in 1975 as the Henry Putnam University Professor of Romance and Comparative Literatures.

After the film, audience members had many questions. One observed that all the Ritchie Boys in the film seemed to share the same joy of living that characterized Brombert. He gently suggested that as the filmmaker sought former Ritchie Boys, he was likely referred to those who had had successful lives.

"I doubt this is typical," he noted. "Just as all the Ritchie Boys are not from Germany, they are not all professors, judges, and ambassadors to the United Nations."

Only one of the men in the film, a painter, said Brombert, seemed to have been "demolished" personally by the war. He had spent much of his artistic endeavor trying to come to terms with his war experience.

Ted Deutsch, another audience member, referred to the camaraderie among the emigres in the film and then asked whether, when they were attached to fighting units, it was difficult to earn the trust of the American soldiers.

Brombert responded that when he was in the mess tent in England as probably the youngest master sergeant in the American army, the other men at the same rank did a double take. "There was no possibility of contact," he said.

After the landing, the Ritchie Boys did not spend a lot of time with Americans, but rather with prisoners of war and civilians.

At the Battle of the Bulge, some Ritchie Boys got into trouble, with their suspicious foreign accents, and were suspected to be enemies. One was even shot by friendly fire.

Nelson Obus asked about how the intelligence that the Ritchie Boys gathered was treated.

"It was rare to get something really important," said Brombert. When he was in Luxembourg, however, he did have some interesting information from people who had been sent across the lines and come back with clear evidence. He and his team drove to headquarters to report the news, and the colonel in charge listened but then said, "Even if it is true, our lines are thin and there isn't much we can do, so you might as well go back."

That night they returned to the village, close to the German border, where they were stationed in a small inn. Early in the morning Brombert heard noises and thought, "Thunder? No. It's December."

Then he realized that the offensive had begun and he rushed out of his room. "In my hurry, I left my camera in the room," he said. "Other people found cameras in the war, and I, the great hero, lost my camera because I was scared."