Ritchie Boy gets his due

Kathryn Lang-Slattery didn’t know until a decade ago that her uncle had served with the Ritchie Boys, the unit of expatriate soldiers who joined the U.S. Army during World War II to help reclaim the countries they had fled.

For that matter, her uncle wasn’t aware of it either.

In 1991, Lang-Slattery began interviewing Herman Lang, her father’s brother, about his time growing up in Nazi Germany, immigrating to America and crossing the Atlantic again to serve under Gen. George S. Patton.

She hoped to preserve his story in a book, and Lang complied — although because of his reticent nature, his niece often had to take his summaries of facts and fill in the emotions herself.

Lang had received military intelligence training at Camp Ritchie, in Maryland, in the early 1940s, and he went on to interrogate prisoners as Patton’s army rolled through Europe.

Still, Lang-Slattery said, he didn’t believe that history recorded him as part of any specialized group. Then in 2004, Christian Bauer’s documentary “The Ritchie Boys” spotlighted a group of other men who had taken the same journey to America and back.

“It was because of that film that I found out about the Ritchie Boys,” Lang-Slattery said. “My uncle had no idea that they had this nickname. He knew he went to this camp and was trained, but he didn’t know anything about the nickname.”

By the time Lang died in 2006, he had read the first several chapters of what would become “Immigrant Soldier: The Story of a Ritchie Boy.” After his death, his niece finished the book and marketed it to agents and publishers, coming up empty. Finally, she opted to publish it herself. “Immigrant Soldier” came back from the printer at the end of February.

Now Lang-Slattery is busy living the life of a self-published author — making calls, sending emails and doing her best to drum up interest in her work. So far, she’s gotten some distinguished takers.

Laguna Beach Books hosted a signing and question-and-answer session in March. Two Oregon retailers, Powell’s Books and Black Sun Books, offer “Immigrant Soldier” in their catalogs.

Most importantly, the book resides at three locations closely tied to its subject matter. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York and Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center have all stocked it in their gift shops.

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‘An instant rapport’

When Lang-Slattery — the daughter of a landscape architect who became the namesake of a local park — was growing up in Laguna Beach, her uncle was little more than a name and a vague notion. She believes she may have met him as an infant, but with her family in Orange County and Lang working as a CBS cameraman in New York, she passed through childhood and early adulthood without seeing him.

She did, however, develop a trait that would help her bond with him later: a keen interest in history. As a teenager in the late 1950s, she learned that her family had Jewish roots, and she sought any literature on the Holocaust she could find. In her late 20s, she trekked to the East Coast to see him.

Lang-Slattery was interested in hearing about his war experiences. Lang was interested in talking about CBS. After the war, he had gotten a job in the fledgling television industry and covered sports, presidential inaugurations, the space program and a White House tour by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.

In 1987, Sports Illustrated spotlighted Lang along with NBC’s Cory Leible in a story titled “Two Straight Shooters,” calling them “the closest thing to celebs in the anonymous profession of operating TV cameras.”

Lang leaned toward anonymity as a veteran too. Still, he shared his memories, however tersely, to the niece who craved hearing them.

“I just had an instant rapport with him,” Lang-Slattery said.

In the years to come, the Laguna resident became a teacher and also volunteered with the Girl Scouts. She collected youth-market publications and, in her late 40s, hit upon the idea of turning her uncle’s story into a nonfiction book for young adults.

After years of work, which included a visit to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and long hours poring through her uncle’s wartime correspondence, Lang-Slattery finished her manuscript. She sent it to agents, but the responses disappointed her. One rejection, though, ended up proving helpful.

“One of the agents wrote to me and said she was very interested in it but felt it would be better as fiction for adults, and if I would rewrite it as fiction for adults, she’d look at it again,” Lang-Slattery said. “My first response was, ‘No way, I’m not going to do that.’ But after another year, I just thought about it more and more and decided she was right.”

By the time Lang-Slattery finished her second version, the agent in question had moved on from the job. Still, publishing deal or none, the author persisted.

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Evoking dark days

“Immigrant Soldier” comes officially branded as fiction. While the overall sweep of the narrative is true, the author fleshed out conversations on her own and sometimes added events. At one point in the book, Lang is busy with interrogations when he unexpectedly encounters a cousin on the enemy side. Lang-Slattery explained that her uncle had such a cousin, but she concocted the meeting for literary effect.

Much of the time, she hewed closely to the truth. At her home in South Laguna, Lang-Slattery keeps a folder of photocopied documents of Lang’s life, including the German passport with his middle name scribbled out. As the author describes in the book, the Nazi government slipped “Israel” between his first and last names, and Lang later covered it in protest.

“Immigrant Soldier” begins with the 18-year-old Lang in Germany, frequently hiding from authorities as the Nazis enact Kristallnacht and restrictions mount against Jews.

Lang does not consider himself Jewish, knowing nothing of the religion or culture, but is marked as such by the Third Reich. With four Jewish grandparents, his heritage is hard to deny. The book’s early chapters evoke the chaos of a country sliding toward genocide, even as forlorn hope persists. (“He won’t last long, don’t you agree?” the protagonist’s brother says at one point of Hitler.)

Through a tangle of bureaucracy and favors from friends, Lang manages to escape to America, where he enjoys a comfortable life in Southern California before the war effort summons him.

In Europe, as Germany’s last defenses crumble, the hero finds himself in the uneasy position of weighing prisoners’ true feelings with the atrocities they had to support. Much of the book’s final stretch covers Lang’s relationship with one such man — “the most cooperative of prisoners” — who becomes an unlikely friend.

In researching “Immigrant Soldier,” Lang-Slattery discovered an Internet chat room where she interviewed several other former Ritchie Boys. She also attended a reunion in Detroit for members of the intelligence unit and met Guy Stern, the director of the Harry and Wanda Zekelman International Institute of the Righteous at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Michigan.

Stern, who served in a different unit from Lang’s and is now working on his own autobiography, contributed the foreword to “Immigrant Soldier.” Like the book’s subject, he went years with little public fanfare over his contribution to the war effort.

Recently, though, he met a military historian who gave him an astonishing statistic: 65% of the usable and important information that U.S. intelligence received during the war came from the Ritchie Boys.

For Stern, the recent celebrations — including Lang-Slattery’s book — feel like a belated reward.

“To be honest, in all due modesty, it feels good to be recognized,” he said.