PFC Joseph Marmell was born in Warsaw, Poland to Morris and Bella Marmell. His father Morris was Bella’s second husband after her first passed away.
Then Morris passed suddenly, after which Bella emigrated to New York City with her two young sons, Milton and Joseph. She never married again.
Today, the Marmell family doesn’t know what prompted Bella’s decision to leave Poland for America in the 1920’s alone with her two sons.
But they do know that she left behind her entire Jewish family in Warsaw.
In 1940, when he registered for the WWII draft, PFC Joseph Marmell was 28 years old, 5’6” tall, 135 pounds, and he had brown hair and brown eyes. He enlisted in 1943 and served with the 19th Field Artillery Battalion of the 5th Infantry Division, and deployed to Europe in a Tank Division in the Fall of 1943.
He was Killed in Action in 1945, the only member of his regiment to be killed during their participation in the February Sauer River Crossing in Germany.
Recently we returned PFC Marmell’s Purple Heart to his nephew Howard and niece Judith, the children of his brother Milton.
They told us that when Milton came home after serving in the Pacific Theater he carried the loss of his brother with whom he had been very close.
His daughter Judith wears a locket that had been handed down through the family in Poland and into her grandmother Bella’s hands, who subsequently placed a photo of her son PFC Marmell inside.
Judith showed us a photograph taken in Warsaw, dated 1905, in which a great-great aunt wears this same locket. Judith will never forget that after Bella passed and she inherited the locket, her father Milton told her:
‘You can put any other photos you would like inside, but promise me that you will never, ever take Joseph's photo out of it’.
Judith has kept her promise.
Presumably, because it had been given to Bella who came to America - and just like Bella and her sons - the locket survived instead of being lost in the horrors her family faced in Poland during WWII.
When we commented on the tragedy that Bella knew, having lost two husbands, and then her son Joseph to a war fought while her entire family was lost to the concentration camps and the Holocaust - Howard said:
‘My grandmother was an indomitable woman’.
We can’t help but feel that Indomitable Bella was smiling on her grandchildren as they, and the locket of her ancestors, were reunited with her son Joseph’s Purple Heart.
Together after seven and a half long decades, a pair of tangible and precious symbols of loved ones lost.
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