Ignition

Nathan Fendrich's passion for war vets ran deep — and led to five of my books

Nathan Fendrich on the 60-year anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 2004.

A rocket won’t fly unless someone lights the fuse.
—Homer Hickam Jr., October Sky

AS VETERANS DAY (Monday) approaches, I want to write about a man who might have appreciated war vets more deeply than anyone I’ve known.

His name is Nathan Fendrich, a man who was patriotic, courageous and complicated.

After he died in Eugene in 2023, at 88, I was out of town and unable to speak at his funeral. But thanks to Substack, I now have a way to tell the story about a man who was partially responsible for five books I wrote; who, by proxy, inspired thousands of readers to read my stories of men and women who went to war; and who, like us all, had an Achilles heel. His was a hard-heartedness that made it nearly impossible for him to forgive his enemies, be they Germans who murdered his Jewish relatives during the Holocaust or the enemy looking back at him each day in the mirror.

If he wouldn’t talk about the ghosts of his past while he was alive, Nathan had great respect for the truth, and I believe he would have wanted both sides of his life told. Thus will I do so, beginning in December 2000 when Fendrich, then the 66-year-old retired owner of Brenner’s Furniture, walked into The Register-Guard with a briefcase in his hand. Wearing a heavy winter coat and fur hat, he looked like a Soviet spy from the cold war era.

I’d read a story or two about him in The R-G, where I was a columnist: how he had a passion for history and presented elaborate slide presentations to high schools on World War II and the Holocaust subjects.

Fendrich told me he’d come across a letter written by a World War II nurse named Frances Slanger in a book on Jewish women in the military. She had written the letter from a field hospital tent in Belgium one night in 1944 while rain fell and shells pounded. Her motive was to honor the soldiers she and the other nurses were taking care of.

“Bob, she captures the American GI — the citizen soldier, the government issue — in a way I’ve never seen. And I’ve read everything there is to read about World War II.”