Joseph Abramovitch

When I joined the army, I didn’t get that much of an examination. He said, do you want to be in the army, I said, sure. I was 20 years old. Sure, well, all my friends are in the service, why shouldn’t I be? And that was it back then. The girls went after you if you had a uniform. When I was in Debert [Nova Scotia], I knew I was going to go overseas. Well, I knew right along I was going to go overseas. My brother was overseas, I met him in Italy. It was a long voyage, we had a long convoy. We got on the boat and they went out in the bay. We had to wait for other boats. When we finally went, there must have been about 40 boats in the convoy, went to Italy. We had escort destroyers escorting us there because the German submarines would bomb this boat. And there might have been a few boats with troops. We landed in April [1944], we got out there and they went to a certain camp and then we went here and we went there, had a bit of a training and then again, then up the lines and that’s it. What happened to me there, wanted to know how my eyesight was. It was a colonel asked me. I said, I see with one eye. He says, you have no business being here. So they sent me back. I went to rehab, was there about six months altogether.