Beginning in 1919, Armistice Day was celebrated internationally to commemorate the end of World War I on November 11, 1918. Woodrow Wilson announced the first Armistice Day here in the US, and Congress followed in formally recognizing the observance in 2026. Eleven AM, the hour the war ended, was observed by two minutes of silence, and people began to wear poppies in remembrance, a practice inspired by the poem “In Flanders Fields,” written by John McCrae, a Lt. Colonel in the Canadian army, and championed by UGA professor Moina Belle Michael.
In proclaiming that first Armistice Day in 1919, President Wilson noted the sacrifices made across the country as America mobilized to help bring about victory:
With splendid forgetfulness of mere personal concerns, we remodeled our industries, concentrated our financial resources, increased our agricultural output, and assembled a great army, so that at the last our power was a decisive factor in the victory. We were able to bring the vast resources, material and moral, of a great and free people to the assistance of our associates in Europe who had suffered and sacrificed without limit in the cause for which we fought.
Out of this victory there arose new possibilities of political freedom and economic concert. The war showed us the strength of great nations acting together for high purposes, and the victory of arms foretells the enduring conquests which can be made in peace when nations act justly and in furtherance of the common interests of men.
In 1938, Armistice Day was made a legal holiday honoring veterans of World War 1.
Sadly, as horrific as it was, World War 1 would not turn out to be the war to end all wars. An adjustment needed to be made. Following World War 2, in 1954, November 11 officially became a national day to honor all veterans who have served America in a time of war: Veterans Day.
Each November 11, we pause to remember, as we will do again tomorrow. We may wear a poppy. We may attend a ceremony. We may simply stop what we are doing at 11:00 AM and pause to observe two minutes of silence.
Our shared national memory actually reflects millions of individuals’ stories of service — men and women, soldiers and doctors and nurses and drivers and cooks. We particularly recall the service and sacrifices of individuals whose stories we know — family members or friends.
Perhaps, each Veterans Day, we should not only pause to remember the stories of the veterans we already know about but also learn another veteran’s story that we have not encountered before. Here’s one such story shared with me by my friend David W. Singer, Esquire, who has written of his father’s service in World War 2 and his father’s time as a prisoner of war. David kindly gave me permission to share Bernard Singer’s story for Veterans Day with readers of the Kotok Report.
Bernie Singer: A Narrative of His Capture and Life in Stalag 9B
by David W. Singer, Esq.
Bernard H. Singer’s captivity began in the chaos of the Battle of the Bulge, when his regiment — the 423rd Infantry of the 106th Division — was encircled and overwhelmed in the frozen Ardennes. He was a Technician Fourth Grade cook (less than even an NCO Sergeant). A commonly cited summary of the whole system states that technicians “had no command authority or duties, and could not issue orders to regular sergeants, corporals or privates.” As you will see below, the stripes that went with being a Technician, Fourth Grade Cook may have saved his life.
He had been part of the company’s lifeline rather than its firing line; but in December 1944, the front and the rear collapsed together; and cooks, clerks, medics, and riflemen alike were swept up in the same surrender.
When capture was imminent, Bernie threw away his dog tags, concluding that it wasn’t good to be Jewish and in the hands of the Nazis. At that time, dog tags indicated religion, and the Germans certainly knew that the letter “H” on the dog tags stood for Hebrew.
Forced into column under armed guard, he joined thousands of other Americans on a winter march east, stumbling for days through snow and bitter cold with little food or water. Those who fell behind risked being beaten or shot; those who kept going did so on willpower, encouraged by whatever comradeship they could muster.
After the march came the rail journey — boxcars crammed with prisoners, their doors shut against the cold yet offering little protection from it. Men were packed so tightly they could barely sit. They resorted to relieving themselves in corners or through gaps in the planks. Food, if any, was minimal: a bit of bread, a ladle of thin soup, water passed infrequently along the car. The journey blurred into a rhythm of shivering, thirst, and exhaustion as the train rattled deeper into Germany toward a place bearing a name that would later loom large in many of their memories: Stalag IX‑B, near the spa town of Bad Orb.
Around this time, Bernie‘s mother, Molly Singer, received a telegram at her home in Lynn, Massachusetts, stating that her son was missing in action.
Life inside Stalag IX‑B was a daily struggle for survival. The American compound was grossly overcrowded, with thousands of men jammed into barracks meant for far fewer. Many prisoners slept on bare floors in unheated, drafty buildings, packed shoulder to shoulder without enough blankets to go around. Winter seeped through the thin walls and broken windows; coal or wood for the stoves was rationed so tightly that fires could be lit only for a short time each day. Water leaked from roofs, dampening bedding and clothing and making it nearly impossible to get warm or dry. In that environment, Bernard — who had once fed men — now found himself among them, simply trying to get through each night.
All went hungry. A lack of food became the central fact of existence. Instead of running a field kitchen, he received the same meager rations everyone else did: watery soup, small chunks of dark bread, occasionally a bit of ersatz coffee or a smear of margarine. Red Cross parcels, when they arrived at all, were rare and were often picked over and pilfered before reaching the prisoners. Hunger gnawed constantly; men cut bread into tiny portions, argued over crumbs, and devised elaborate trading systems around a single potato or spoonful of powdered milk. Bernard’s experience as a cook likely made him both painfully aware of how inadequate the rations were and especially skilled at stretching, bartering, and sharing what little reached his barracks. But expertise could not conjure food that simply was not there.
Sanitation and health deteriorated quickly. Given primitive latrines, scarce soap, and no real laundry facilities, clothing became filthy and infested with lice. Open sores, trench foot, and skin infections spread easily in the damp cold. Dysentery, pneumonia, and other illnesses cut through the population; and medical care was rudimentary at best. Men helped to pick lice from each other’s seams and tried to keep the sick warm with shared blankets or extra layers. In these conditions, Bernard’s days were filled less with structured tasks than with endless small efforts to stay alive: finding a slightly warmer spot, protecting a piece of bread, tending to a sick bunkmate, and enduring long roll calls on the freezing parade ground while guards counted and recounted their charges.
The emotional strain was as real as the physical hardship. News of the war filtered in only in rumors — a snatch of conversation from a guard, a scrap of newspaper, a whispered claim about Allied advances. Many prisoners worried constantly about families back home who did not know whether they were dead or alive. For someone born on Christmas Day (in 1922), like Bernard, the winter of 1944–45 must have felt especially bitter: The holidays were marked not by celebration, but by hunger, cold, and the sight of gaunt faces under shaved heads and tattered uniforms. Yet even in that setting, men clung to rituals — sharing stories from home, marking holidays with improvised “services,” or quietly imagining the meals they would cook or eat when the war was finally over.
As the war turned against Germany in early 1945, conditions in the camp did not improve; if anything, they worsened as supply lines frayed and the Reich struggled to feed itself, much less its prisoners. Some POWs were sent out on work details; but many Americans remained in the main compound, growing thinner and weaker with each week.
One of these work details was particularly deadly. At this point in the war, the Germans were desperate, and they began to use some prisoners from Stalag IXB for slave labor far away from the camp at Berga-Elster. On February 8, 1945, 350 Americans were stripped of their POW status, packed into freezing boxcars, and sent to work in the mines. For this fateful detail, the Germans chose Jews and “troublemakers.” Bernie Singer, now housed with other Jews in the camp, was passed over because the Germans, respectful of authority, wouldn’t take an “officer.” It seems that Bernie’s technician’s stripes made it appear that he was an officer, though his actual rank was no higher than a private. Most of the famous slave laborers of Stalag IXB perished in the mines.
For Bernard, captivity became a test of endurance measured not in battles fought but in nights survived — and of learning how to conserve strength, rely on fellow prisoners, and keep a sliver of hope alive.
When Allied forces finally approached Bad Orb and IX‑B was liberated in April of 1945, the men who emerged were emaciated and ill, but alive. Among them was a former T/4 cook from Lynn, Massachusetts, who had seen his role as a provider of food transformed by war into a long, harrowing lesson in what it meant to live without adequate sustenance.
Bernard weighed 90 pounds when he was liberated. He flew back to America and was hospitalized in Lake Placid, New York, to begin his recovery.
You would think that, after all these harrowing experiences, his military service would end. However, by the time he was well, Germany had surrendered, and the army was getting him ready for further combat in the Pacific theater. But the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing Japan to surrender, ended Bernard’s future combat.
To this account, David added in his correspondence with me these comments, which capture the kind of man veteran Bernard Singer is,
One would ask him, “Bernie, do you feel like a hero?”
His answer… “We were there to do a job.”
Additionally, one would ask him, “Weren’t you scared the five months you were in captivity?
His answer… “I always thought that America would find a way to get me out of there.”
For Veterans Day, let us remember amid all else the unassuming, courageous service of a veteran who did not fire a shot but kept his fellow soldiers fed, and who faced with faith and courage a harrowing time in the hands of the Nazis, waiting for an Allied victory. Readers who wish to reach out to David about his father’s story, may email him directly.
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Sources and Further Reading on Armistice Day and Veteran’s Day
“Armistice Day,” Encyclopedia Britannica
“How Armistice Day Became Veterans Day,” New York Times (November 10, 2019)
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