Sidney Shachnow (1934–2018)

Sidney Shachnow was born Schaja Shachnowski to a Jewish family in Kaunas, Lithuania. He was a small child when Nazi Germany invaded in World War II. In 1941, he and his family were sent to the notorious Kovno concentration camp, where they survived using bribery, their wits, and the occasional assistance of the Jewish camp police and local Lithuanians. He narrowly escaped death by getting out of the camp only days before the roundup and execution of the Kovno children on March 27–28, 1944. At 10 years old, he lived in hiding for months.

After the liberation of Kovno by the Red Army, he and his family fled the Soviets 2,000 miles west across Europe, often on foot, to seek refuge in the American-controlled zone in Germany. In 1950, the family emigrated to the USA, settling in Salem, Massachusetts, where he went to school for the first time and worked in the evenings. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1955 and served as an officer in the infantry. In 1962, he volunteered for U.S. Special Forces (Green Berets), in which he served from Vietnam to the Middle East to the Berlin Wall. He earned both a master's and a doctoral degree and became a much-decorated major general. Eventually he became the Special Forces' commanding general. He retired in 1994, after more than 40 years of active service. In 2004, he published his autobiography Hope and Honor.