Over the past 20 years, I’ve become my family’s family historian. The passing of my father Hershel Herzberg the last of his generation inspired me to tell his life story in this week’s J.
Hershel Herzberg (1934-2020) was an Army veteran who aspired to be a lawyer. Instead he became a high school teacher, earned a master’s degree in American history and served the San Mateo Unified School District as a social studies teacher and curriculum writer for almost 50 years.
He and his family were fortunate to have lived in San Francisco during World War II. After the war, he was drafted into the Army, and from 1957 to 1959 he served as a soldier in postwar Germany, living in former SS officer quarters at Dachau, the concentration camp outside Munich. His role was to calculate the trajectory of big guns in the event of a Russian invasion.