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Five WWII GIs Receive Medals from Israel

(Aberdeen [South Dakota] News) Emily Arthur - When Maynard Hanson of Aberdeen, S.D., traveled to Germany, Austria, and France last spring, the 79-year-old and a group of World War II veterans made quite an impression on an Israeli woman. While there, they visited a concentration camp they passed through during the war and they attended various ceremonies the woman also attended. "Her father was once one of the concentration camp inmates," said Hanson, a World War II veteran from the 65th Infantry Division. "We walked through that very camp during the war. As we were walking through, we walked by a bunch of bodies. One of the guys noticed one of the corpses had movement in his eye. He pulled him off the pile and we immediately got him to the hospital." "He was that lady's father," Hanson said. The lady was Miriam Griver-Meisels, president of Hadassah Israel. Griver-Meisels was impressed by the soldiers, who had traveled back to the area and shown such respect. On Nov. 11, Veterans Day, five men - Hanson of Aberdeen, Ray Callanan of Farmington, Mo., Robert Patton of Chapel Hill, N.C., Mickey Dorsey of Johns Island, S.C., and Lynn LaBarre of Diamond Head, Miss., who is now deceased - had medals and commendations presented to them at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, a living memorial to the Holocaust in New York City, by Amir Ofek, consul for public affairs from the Israeli Consulate.
2005-12-09 00:00:00
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