My Mother's War: An Army nurse, she tended troops overseas

Barbara Steinfeld was born and raised in Berlin. Like many kids growing up there, though a thriving mill town, a goal of my mother's was to get out as soon as she could. But it was, after all, just a mill town, and being half-Jewish in a city dominated by mostly people of French-Canadian descent probably added a layer of discomfort. And living on the third floor of a triple-decker with a father who gambled away any savings that might gone to buying a house, also was a factor. 

She got out by becoming a nurse and then joined the Army. After graduating in 1944, she embarked on the greatest adventure of her life. It began as newly minted second lieutenant with a voyage aboard the Queen Mary, repurposed from a luxury liner into a troop transport.