Philipson Warech Jewish Heritage Collection

Jewish Military

Alex Sesonske, WWII Jewish War Veteran

This scrapbook, kept by Alex Sesonske throughout his tour of Europe, is one f the most complete accounts of a GI's experience in WWII.

This collection preserves the wartime scrapbook of Alex Sesonske, a Jewish American soldier who served in the U.S. Army Field Artillery during World War II. Spanning his journey from training camps in Alabama and Texas to deployment in North Africa and Europe, the scrapbook offers a rare, unfiltered account of a GI’s experience in combat. Sesonske, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants and later a UCLA philosophy professor, documented his service as it unfolded—without hindsight or censorship—capturing the immediacy of war as he lived it.

What makes this collection especially powerful is its range. Alongside official insignia, maps, and battlefield souvenirs are deeply personal traces of daily life: letters from his mother, casual doodles, photographs taken on furlough, and, in stark contrast, firsthand images from the liberation of Landsberg Concentration Camp. The result is not a curated narrative but a lived one—where the ordinary and the horrific coexist on the same page. Through Sesonske’s eyes, history becomes personal, intimate, and impossible to distance.

*Stay tuned! This is just a sampling of highlights. Full collection coming soon.*

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Important Moments

November 19, 1917

Alex Senoske is born in Gloversville, NY.

January 1943

After about three months at Camp Bowie under the 8th Army Corps, Sesonske is granted furlough in New Orleans before heading to North Africa with the 937th Field Artillery Battalion.

July 6, 1942

He's drafted into the army (and begins keeping this scrapbook)

April 1945

Alex is part of the unit that liberates the Landsberg, Germany concentration camp (a subcamp of Dachau).

Highlights from the Collection

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Travel literature on New Orleans, where Sesonske spent several weeks on furlough before heading overseas.

Sesonske's commemoration of Victory in Europe Day—May 8, 1945—on which Allied forces accepted Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender, ending World War II in Europe.

The moustache in question. Yikes. Can't really blame Mom, can we?

More doodles on V-Mail from Mom.

A note from Alex's mom, sent around Halloween and complete with a witch doodle.

Leave it to Mom to be sure her war hero son's head can still fit through the door when he gets home. This poem affectionately mocking Alex's moustache is one of the many notes from his mom that he pasted into his scrapbook.

Photos taken at the April 1945 liberation of Landsberg Concentration Camp. Note Alex's captions—"Look and Weep" and "Lest We Forget"—and the way he's overlapped the photos to try to "censor" the horror from anybody not ready to see it.

"More atrocity pictures," writes Sesonske. Nobody knew the extent of the horrors occurring in the concentration camps, and liberators were shocked at the full picture.

The farewell message issued by General Dwight D. Eisenhower to the troops of the Allied Expeditionary Force at the end of World War II.

This page includes a varied collection of memorabilia: a pass authorizing temporary absence, a mess card, service stripes, and a 7th Army patch. The 7th Army, which evolved into the United States Army Europe (USAREUR) during the 1950s and 1960s, served in North Africa and Italy in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations and France and Germany in the European theater between 1942 and 1945.