This is an interesting angle on the story.
Maj. Gen. (ret.) Sidney Shachnow, who helped initiate the letter released this week by the Trump campaign from 88 military leaders endorsing the Republican nominee, says Trump “has the temperament to be commander-in-chief.”
Shachnow knows from temperament, although not perhaps of the Trumpian variety: As a child, he and his family survived the Holocaust in Lithuania by keeping their heads low and showing restraint. According to his autobiography, “Hope and Honor,” the same level-headedness guided him through the pains of assimilation as a young refugee living in Salem, Massachusetts, and then through a career in the military.
His stint, including a turn in the Green Berets in Viet Nam and as an officer in an undercover unit infiltrating East Germany (he still speaks English with a Baltic lilt, as heard in this 2012 appearance at the Kansas City Public Library), ended with his command of U.S. forces in Berlin when the Wall came down in 1989. Among the medals he has earned is the Bronze Star, the Silver Star and the Purple Heart.
Shachnow is also on the board of advisers of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and has appeared at a Jewish War Veterans event.
His childhood was about as shattering as it could have been.
At the age of seven, Shachnow was imprisoned in the brutal Kovno concentration camp during World War II because his family was Jewish. For three years he endured countless brutalities in the camp and was forced to watch helplessly as almost every single one of his extended family were slaughtered. To increase his prospects of survival, young Shachnow performed heavy manual labor under harsh conditions. He narrowly escaped death only days before Kovno's gruesome "Children's Action", of March 27–28, 1944, when Nazi troops rounded up all children in the camp and marched them to The Ninth Fort for execution or to Auschwitz to be gassed. After smuggling out of the camp, Shachnow lived in hiding for months, mostly in austere seclusion, where he nearly expired from starvation and malnutrition. Shachnow fled west after the Soviets liberated Kovno from the Nazis and began to implement Communism. His grueling 2,000 mile, six-month journey across Europe, mostly on foot, took him across Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, and finally to American occupied Nuremberg, Germany
That is a man who knows what it takes to survive.