In 1945 Ernest Weiner was a wiry 20-year-old Jew from Bayonne, N.J. who had boxed a bit and worked in an iron foundry before taking an all-expenses-paid trip to France.
But it was no vacation.
“As the war was winding down, the Nazis were using teams of kids called Wolf Packs. They were 14, 15 years old. They’d station them in front of what would seem like an innocent setting. A rooftop. A hallway. It was a seductive trap. And they’d have machine-gun nests in back of them,” he recalled.
His lapel was adorned with its normal decoration, a United States-Israel flag pin. But on Monday, July 9, French Consul General Frédéric Desagneaux pinned the National Order of Merit on that spot, largely in recognition of the blood Weiner shed defending La Republique.
Weiner, 82, the executive director of the local branch of the American Jewish Committee since 1971, pauses for a long time. He doesn’t want to talk about the day he noticed that pack of German kids loitering suspiciously on a hillside. But with some badgering, he relents.
“I have trouble talking about the battle and the carnage and the deaths of my buddies. They’re three feet away from you and you know they’re dead. They’ve got their Panzers and their big guns and it’s like someone taking a razor and here’s a field of grass and the razor just mows it down. And the sounds, the sense of terror — it is pure terror to listen to those volleys of shells going overhead. Nothing compares to that horror. And there is no escape. I hope you don’t ever have to experience anything so numbing.”
Weiner noticed the pack of German kids before he heard the Panzer tanks concealed behind them opening fire. The shrapnel ripped through his flesh.
Taken out of that hell to recover in Aix-en-Provence, he decided he liked France.
More than 60 years later, France has officially declared that it likes him back. In addition to honoring his wartime service, the medal was in recognition of the line of communication he’s fostered between French diplomats and local Jews in his 36 years atop the AJCommittee.
Weiner acknowledged that is has been hard to be a friend of France for the past five years or so, amid heated news coverage of French anti-Semitic violence. Through it all, he worked to serve as a conduit between Bay Area Jews and French government representatives, and helped sponsor forums where matters of French-Israeli relations and anti-Semitism within France could be discussed calmly and frankly.
“Our views and concerns and criticisms were heard and responded to by the highest ranking diplomats France has in this country,” he said.
Weiner’s self-taught French also went a long way with his Gallic colleagues.
“I have tried to learn, in my not-illiterate-but-uneducated fashion, some of the French language,” he said with a grin.