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The Guttman Collection: The Two Stanleys

A story of two Jewish American soldiers and their mothers back home.

The Guttman is one of my favorite examples of how collecting and preserving artifacts can really personalize elements of history we often only see sensationalized in textbooks and blockbuster films.

Two Brooklyn boys, both named Stanley, went to war in 1944. Stanley Schachne, of Stockholm Street, and Stanley Kenneth Guttman, of nearby Stanhope Street, served together in the 357th Infantry Regiment, 90th Infantry Division. Both boys wrote home to Mrs. Guttman. Schachne, concerned about his own mother, asked Mrs. G. (as he called her) to shield her from worry. So, Mrs. Guttman became the connective thread between both families for the better part of a year—writing, reassuring, sending packages, and reporting back on each mother to both sons.

This collection follows both Stanleys through 1944, through V-mail from the beaches of France to the fortified towns of the Siegfried Line, a soldier's diary kept in the back of a Jewish Welfare Board calendar, and the telegrams that reached two Brooklyn families within three weeks of each other: One Stanley (Guttman) was injured and the other (Schachne) Missing in Action—never recovered but later reclassified as Killed in Action.

Important Moments

July–September 1944
Schachne, already fighting in France with the 90th Division, writes to Mrs. Guttman rather than his own mother: "All I'm asking of you is to help keep her mind off me as much as possible." Over the following weeks he reports champagne "liberated" from retaken French towns, a chaperoned dance with local women, and rumors — premature — that the war might soon be over. Stanley Guttman ships out in late September; a chaplain's letter confirms his safe arrival overseas.
December 5-7, 1944
Two days before the 357th crosses the Saar River into the Siegfried Line, Schachne writes Mrs. Guttman a Hanukkah greeting, still hoping for a pass to Paris, still reassuring her: "Don't worry too much about Stanley, he'll be all right." On December 7, during the assault on the fortified town of Pachten, Germany, Pfc. Stanley Schachne is killed in action. The chaos of the battle — followed within days by the German breakthrough that opened the Battle of the Bulge — makes recovery of the dead impossible.
November 14, 1944
Guttman's diary tracks the 90th Division's grinding advance through Lorraine — river crossings under artillery barrage, nights dug in through cold and rain — until an entry marked "Casualty": waking in a flooded foxhole, unable to fit his own swollen foot back into its shoe, evacuated by jeep and ambulance. A War Department telegram to his family, dated November 29, confirms he was "slightly injured in action" on that same day.
After
V-mail Mrs. Guttman addressed to Schachne comes back to her, undelivered, name and unit crossed through by an Army stamp — sent to a soldier who was already gone. Schachne's remains were never recovered; he is memorialized on the Walls of the Missing at the Lorraine American Cemetery in Saint-Avold, France. Stanley Guttman recovered from his injuries, was later associated with the Army hospital program at Camp Butner, North Carolina, and returned home to Brooklyn, where he lived for decades after the war.

Highlights from the Collection

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