My grand­fa­ther, Mick­ey Heller, served four years in the Roy­al Cana­di­an Air Force, includ­ing two years in Europe as a nav­i­ga­tor in Bomber Com­mand. But that’s all I, or any­one else in my fam­i­ly, knew. He came home in 1944 and — still in uni­form — mar­ried his sweet­heart, start­ed a fam­i­ly and a busi­ness, and nev­er looked back.

In the decades that fol­lowed, any broach­ing of the sub­ject of his ser­vice was strict­ly taboo. He was already a man of few words, but when it came to that chap­ter there were no words at all. His for­ma­tive expe­ri­ence in the Air Force, and all he must have seen dur­ing World War II, was a con­ver­sa­tion he nev­er want­ed to have. 

But I was born with an inquis­i­tive streak, and his cagi­ness ignit­ed my curios­i­ty; I became sus­pi­cious there was a deep, dark secret to uncov­er. I spent years scratch­ing the sur­face of this top­ic to find out what could be con­cealed, all while try­ing to respect my grandfather’s desire for privacy.

Much lat­er, after I became an Israel-based cor­re­spon­dent for The Asso­ci­at­ed Press in 2005, I found I had a knack for earn­ing the trust of typ­i­cal­ly shy war vet­er­ans and Holo­caust sur­vivors and pro­duc­ing sto­ries that made them proud. 

But with my own grand­fa­ther I was still get­ting nowhere.

By May 2011, I had had enough. With my grand­fa­ther clos­ing in on his nineti­eth birth­day, I vowed to give it a go one last time and offer him an out­let to final­ly tell his World War II sto­ry. I felt he deserved an oppor­tu­ni­ty to leave some­thing behind and I, as his devot­ed, World War II – obsessed jour­nal­ist grand­son, was just the one to nudge him to do so.

That’s how our more than decade-long jour­ney began, and my quest to dis­cov­er his wartime past evolved into four mag­a­zine arti­cles I pub­lished in recent years.

That jour­ney will cul­mi­nate on Novem­ber 11 with the pub­li­ca­tion of my first book, Zaidy’s Band: The Untold Sto­ries of a Jew­ish Band of Broth­ers in World War II.

While I ini­tial­ly set out to solve the mys­tery of my grandfather’s wartime past, the pur­suit ulti­mate­ly evolved into a broad­er nar­ra­tive about the Jew­ish men and women like him who served in World War II, and whose lega­cy has remained jar­ring­ly absent in our col­lec­tive consciousness.

Ask any­one about the Jew­ish expe­ri­ence in World War II, and you will like­ly get one response: The Holo­caust. There is no doubt that the sys­tem­at­ic slaugh­ter of six mil­lion Jews remains the pre­vail­ing nar­ra­tive, as it should. But there was also anoth­er side to the sto­ry, that of the 1.5 mil­lion Jew­ish sol­diers who fought for the allies in World War II.

Like their respec­tive coun­try­men, these fight­ers were moti­vat­ed by patri­o­tism and alle­giance to their home nations. But they had an extra dri­ving force — to save their Jew­ish brethren in Europe from a Nazi regime bent on their destruction.

Some 250,000 Jew­ish sol­diers died for the cause, not in con­cen­tra­tion camps but rather on the bat­tle­field. For those who sur­vived, their time in the ser­vice was a life-alter­ing expe­ri­ence that spurred many vet­er­ans to chan­nel their mil­i­tary skills toward the fight for Israeli inde­pen­dence, to guar­an­tee a Jew­ish home­land as a bul­wark against anoth­er Holocaust.

Zaidy’s Band includes dozens of pre­vi­ous­ly unpub­lished sto­ries of World War II – era fig­ures, along with the unearthing of long-lost friend­ships, tragedies, and heroics.

We learn about the exploits of dar­ing pilots over Europe and of Holo­caust sur­vivors who fought for Israel’s inde­pen­dence, of mirac­u­lous escapes and dev­as­tat­ing loss­es, of qui­et acts of courage and unex­pect­ed reunions.

Part mem­oir, part his­tor­i­cal biog­ra­phy, and part mys­tery, Zaidy’s Band weaves togeth­er the sto­ries of excep­tion­al indi­vid­u­als. In par­tic­u­lar, it unpacks the plight of a long-for­got­ten crew of unsung heroes in Israel’s 1948 War of Inde­pen­dence, the over­looked World War II con­tri­bu­tions of a wide vari­ety of Cana­di­an Jews, and the tur­bu­lent effort to estab­lish a muse­um in Israel ded­i­cat­ed to the wartime ser­vice of Jews like my grandfather.

How­ev­er, I have quick­ly come to under­stand that this ode to his­to­ry remains remark­ably rel­e­vant today. 

These voic­es are not mere relics of the past. They speak to us now as we endure per­haps the most dan­ger­ous wave of anti­semitism world­wide since then and the most per­ilous peri­od for Israel as well.

In a jour­ney across con­ti­nents and gen­er­a­tions, Zaidy’s Band reveals not only extra­or­di­nary hero­ism, but also the emo­tion­al com­plex­i­ties and gen­er­a­tional trau­mas that pro­found­ly impact­ed these men and women and con­tin­ue to affect their fam­i­lies to this day.

As it turned out, my grand­fa­ther even­tu­al­ly did have some­thing to share after so many years of stub­born silence, and this book presents his sto­ry and the first-hand tes­ti­mo­ny of his con­tem­po­raries who were among the last remain­ing voic­es from that his­toric era.