After finding buried WWII dog tags, a Dutch man spent years trying to return them to the owner's family

Boston Globe

4 days ago

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Stemkens feels compelled to spend 'way too much time on Google Maps' researching the places where troops may have been in battle, or transit, or in camps. Then, he says, 'I just go and see.'
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In the forests he is laser-focused and silent, swinging his metal detector from side to side, like a priest with an incense burner during Mass. He's on his third metal detector in six years. The first two fell apart, 'because I used them so much.' His newest one is wireless and waterproof, and cost about 700 euros, or roughly $800.
He's used them to unearth hundreds of artifacts of US, British, and German origin: gas masks, canteens, mess kits, buttons, badges, service medals, a bayonet. He found a medal with a swastika insignia worn on military caps, and a
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'All of it has history,' Stemkens says. 'Everything has a story.'
And on a sunny spring day in 2022, something he found put him at the center of one of these stories. It has connected him, across space and time, to a very grateful family in Massachusetts.
A Nazi insignia is among Laurent Stemkens finds with his metal detector.
Thilo Schmülgen for the boston globe
It happened near a small village in the German municipality of Gangelt. The avid detectorist had been lucky there before — his research indicated the area was related to the Allied counterattack after the
He tells me this as we stand together in the dense and peaceful forest where he made his find on May 7, 2022.
As on this day, birdsong filled the air as his metal detector emitted its tell-tale high-pitched beep. Stemkens started digging. A few inches down, he spotted two heavy pieces of iron covered in rubber, which he recognized as parts of a Sherman tank track. He also found the large pins used to hold the track together. The rubber had been blown apart, which was 'clear evidence,' he says, that the tank tracks had been in some kind of explosion. An hour later, Stemkens got another hit from his metal detector, closer to the surface. It was a tiny piece of tarnished metal on a short chain — a US military dog tag stamped with a soldier's name, service number, next of kin, and address.
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Louis Gertzberg
31302796
Sally Gertzberg
91 Granville Ave
Malden, Mass.
'I thought,
holy [expletive],
' Stemkens recalls. His hands shook. In the parlance of metal detecting, a dog tag is a once-in-a-lifetime 'bucket lister.' Most of his finds are interesting but relatively soulless. A dog tag is personal. It once rested against a man's chest, ensuring that if the worst were to happen, his identity would still be known.
Somewhere,
Stemkens thought,
there might be a family in limbo.
'At that moment I wanted his family to know,' he says. If he couldn't reach them, he would 'feel eternally bad.'
But finding the dog tag was the easy part. It would take two more years of digging — this time in archives — to discover who the soldier's family was, because even though Louis Gertzberg survived the war, he had stopped being Louis Gertzberg.
Relics and metal pieces Laurent Stemkens has found are on display at his home in the Netherlands.
Thilo Schmülgen for the boston globe
M
ilitary records tell facts but not stories.
Gertzberg's record tells us he was drafted at age 18, on March 10, 1943. He was married, lived at 91 Granville Avenue, in Malden, and worked as a watchmaker. He fought in the US Army's D Company of the 66th Armored Regiment of the 2nd Armored Division —
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Gertzberg was swept up in the thick of battle across Europe, landing in Normandy and fighting with his company in northern France, the Rhineland, the Ardennes, and Central Europe. His regiment
After his military service ended, he returned to Malden, went back to work at the jewelry store where he'd been employed, and started a family with his wife, Sally. Like so many veterans, he put his time in the service behind him, rarely speaking about his wartime experiences.
Eventually, the veteran became an entrepreneur. He and a partner opened a wholesale jewelry and watch repair business at 333 Washington Street in Boston.
And Gertzberg also made a dramatic decision soon after he came home. On April 18, 1946, he legally changed his name. Louis Gertzberg became Lionel Gay.
A young Louis Gertzberg's Army photo, along with his dog tag, which lay in the soil of a German forest for decades.
Jason Paige Smith for The Boston Globe
'There was a lot of antisemitism back then, and he wanted to have a neutral name,' says his eldest son, Allen Gay, a 78-year-old who lives in Milford. 'He was afraid for his family and afraid for his business.'
In the years between the first and second World Wars, antisemitism was overt. 'There were Jews who felt it's too dangerous being a Jew in this world,' says Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University.
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The pressures of World War II only intensified matters, according to Kirsten Fermaglich, professor of history and Jewish studies at Michigan State University. Her most recent book,
A Rosenberg by Any Other Name,
explores the history of Jewish name-changing in the United States in the 20th century.
Fermaglich combed Manhattan city court records for name-change petitions in the 20th century and discovered that the practice during the war years was, she says, a 'phenomenon.' Jewish-sounding names were disproportionately represented in the petitions, which surged to the highest level in 1946 — the year Gertzberg changed his name. About 40 percent of the petitioners were veterans or veterans' wives.
'There were rumors and propaganda that peg Jews as war profiteers and draft dodgers and a lot of Jewish veterans felt really uncomfortable in the military,' Fermaglich says.
The name change threw Stemkens off in his search. From time to time, over the next two years, he Googled 'Louis Gertzberg' on enlistment record websites, but had no luck. Finally, he asked for help from an acquaintance who knew more about military documents.
Up popped Gertzberg's draft registration card, with a Malden address and the name of his employer: Joseph Gann, 387 Washington Street, Boston.
M
ore than 90 years later, Joseph Gann Jewelers
is
still at 387 Washington Street. Joseph Gann worked there until he was 98, and the business passed to his son Herb.
Late last July, one of Herb's four children, Joshua Gann, who co-owns the store now with two of his siblings, got a WhatsApp text from the Netherlands. It had been forwarded to him from the store's customer service number, which Stemkens had found online:
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This might seem like a weird question but 2 years ago I found a world war 2 dogtag here in Europe with my metal detector. And after some research I found his registration card. He must have been employed at your store when he went into world war 2 as a soldier. It would be nice if you could help me find the family of the dogtag owner.
Joshua asked his father if he remembered Gertzberg. He didn't, nor did his sister Shirley Saunders. But she volunteers with the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Boston and consulted her friend David Rosen, who does research there and happened to be from Malden.
Using Ancestry.com, Rosen found Gertzberg's 1942 draft registration card, listing his address in Malden. A 1940 US Census record showed a Gertzberg family at the same address — and a son listed as Lionel who was the same age as the soldier Louis.
Laurent Stemkens's metal detector.
Thilo Schmülgen for the boston globe
Rosen then searched Gertzberg family trees on Ancestry.com, and confirmed that Gertzberg and Lionel Gay were the same person. Louis was his legal name, and Lionel his nickname. Rosen immediately messaged the person who'd published the family tree: Jason Gay, the soldier's 49-year-old grandson, who lives in Sharon. 'I was like,
holy [expletive],
' Jason says.
The family and Stemkens held a celebratory 45-minute Zoom call. 'I talked about my story and how I found the family,' Stemkens says. 'They told me stories and their memories about Lionel in the war and showed me pictures.' Afterward, Stemkens texted Joshua Gann to fill him in. 'It was amazing! It was just wonderful and they were so happy.'
Happy, yes — and awed by such kindness. 'This was a 25-year-old kid,' says Allen Gay, Jason's father. 'He had no reason to do this. It was so heartwarming.'
Terrified that the dog tag might get lost when he shipped it, Stemkens packed it in a cigarette box wrapped in layers of bubble wrap, which he placed inside a large shipping box and sent to Jason Gay, tracking its journey across the Atlantic.
It arrived the week of what would have been Lionel's 101st birthday. 'I put it in my hand and I was actually shaking,' Allen says. His father had died in 1989 at age 66, from heart disease. 'It was like he was there with me. Like being contacted from the great beyond. I was very, very touched, almost to the point of tears.'
With a little help, Dutch detectorist Stemkens had sleuthed the identity of the US soldier who'd worn that dog tag in a German forest at the height of war. But one mystery remains unsolved by Stemkens — or by anyone else: Why was Gertzberg's dog tag left there to begin with?
For Jeffry Gay, Lionel's youngest son, this unanswered question is as much of an enigma as his dad sometimes could be. 'My father was not of a mind to speak of those things,' Jeffry says. His father never marched in Veterans Day parades. His uniform was consigned to the attic.
'I asked questions all the time and he would not answer me,' Allen Gay tells me on a Saturday morning in May, when three generations of Lionel's family — two sons, grandchildren, and cousins — gathered at his home in Milford, and on Zoom, to reminisce. 'A couple of times I'd put his uniform on and he put a stop to it. He said, 'I don't want you wearing it again.''
Jason Gay, at home in Sharon, holds his late grandfather's Army uniform, photo, and newly-found dog tag, in June.
Jason Paige Smith for The Boston Globe
It seemed hard to reconcile the man they remembered as jovial and funny — who once posed for a picture sporting a top hat with his uniform, and who was a whiz at card tricks — with the man who'd grow taciturn if questions probed too much.
'I once asked him if he'd ever killed anybody in the war,' Allen's wife, Carol Gay, says. 'It was the only time I saw him get upset with me. He said, 'Yes I have, and don't ever ask me again.''
No one understood why he brought a Nazi armband home from the war. Or why there was a three-week period when he stopped writing letters home. Or how his wedding ring got badly broken while he was away.
'There were conversations that occurred on our front porch where we sat almost every night, or at the kitchen table,' Jeffry says. 'He opened up more to me than my brothers because I was the youngest and more time had passed since the war.' In hazy clouds of cigarette smoke, Lionel would divulge snippets of information about his wartime experience. He'd been a tank commander. He'd been involved in the Battle of the Bulge. He was held behind enemy lines for three weeks. He hid in a coal bin in a German basement.
'A German soldier came down and either found him, or homeowners told him he was down there, and roused him out of the coal bin,' Jeffry says. 'My father said the other guy trained a gun on him and marched him up the stairs.' His father had grabbed both railings with his hands and kicked backward, 'so the guy would fall or something. He was very clear about this.'
The family has been trying to cobble together these collected anecdotes into a complete story. Maybe his tank had been hit by a shell in that forest in Gangelt, blowing him out and smashing his ring. Or maybe he ripped off his dog tag and flung it on the ground so the Germans wouldn't identify him as Jewish.
One thing they are certain about: Lionel Gay would have been thrilled that his dog tag found its way home. 'He would have eaten this story up,' Carol says. 'He wanted to be sure we thought about him on his birthday.'
The dog tag bearing the name Louis Gertzberg, meanwhile, rests on Jason's desk at his home office in Sharon, waiting to be framed and preserved forever.
Linda Matchan is a frequent contributor to
Globe Magazine.
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