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A survivor’s story

Walter Schacherl fled Nazis, then became secret Allied mapmaker

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First of two parts.

Walter Schacherl made battlefield maps that top Allied generals used to plan the lines of attack against Germany and Italy in World War II. Naturally, his work was top secret.

Seventy years after the war’s end, Schacherl, 97, of Merrick, does not believe he was ever released from his soldier’s oath. When his wife, Ryfka, 93, and their daughter, Berta Weinstein, 57, encouraged him during an interview to answer questions about his clandestine service in the British army, he steadfastly refused.

Military map-making capabilities are still state secrets, he noted. Besides, “you never know who could be listening,” he said, showing how thoroughly his training had ingrained this wartime admonishment.

Schacherl (pronounced SHACK-er-ul) did not make it this far without being resolute. In 1957, he, Ryfka, and their 9-year-old son, Meir, immigrated to the United States with just $80, but Walter had already started over in new countries with far less. Before finding middle-class success in America, his life was almost constant trouble.

Prewar Vienna
Schacherl spoke with the Herald Life in the south Merrick house he shares with his wife, daughter and her family. (Berta was born a year after her parents and brother arrived in the United States, settling in Long Beach.) Dressed in beige wool pants, a button-down shirt and red sweater, Walter sat beside Ryfka on a love seat in the living room and was conversational and good-humored, demonstrating a penchant for punch lines. He spoke in hoarse, accented English, except for quick asides in German to check details or joke with Ryfka, who grew up in Dresden before British Palestine.

Born in 1918 in an Austrian Jewish family, Walter recalled growing up in Vienna, surrounded by anti-Semitism. Things were worse for him because he was one of the brightest students in his grade, he said with more than a hint of defiance.

“There was always some kind of trouble for the Jewish people,” he said.

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