Gone but not forgotten: Cousin tracks fate of lost family member

Edward Gorodesky went off to serve his country in 1939.  He left friends and family in Providence, as many others did during World War II.

Edward, who enlisted for three years, never came back.

His younger cousin, Sanford Gorodetsky (Edward dropped the “t” at some point), shared a little of Edward’s story in honor of Veterans Day 2016.

Gorodetsky, a lawyer in Rhode Island and a WWII veteran, is the commander of the Department of Rhode Island, Jewish War Veterans U.S.A. He said it’s taken some work to find out what happened to Edward.

Officially, Edward went missing in 1942, according to the Army. He was declared dead in 1944. But, said Gorodetsky, there was never an official explanation and “Nobody in the family knew what had happened.” 

Edward spent his first six months in the Army in the States. Then, he was sent to the Philippines and was a driver for officers.  He was supposed to come back to the U.S. for the last six months of his “hitch.” But that all changed when Pearl Harbor was attacked, on Dec. 7, 1941. He was just months away from coming home at the time, according to Gorodetsky.

Edward was taken prisoner by the Japanese.  He was in a couple of prison camps; the family has postcards that he sent them from those camps. He even survived the Bataan Death March.

According to Gorodetsky, who lives in Warren, it was believed that Edward was put on one of “the hell ships that the Japanese loaded up with prisoners to go to Japan to do slave labor.”

But there was no more communication.

“All these years,” said Gorodetsky, “nobody knew.”

Always curious to learn about people, Gorodetsky started to piece together the story. And each time he found a little information, it seemed to lead to more.

Then the federal government started to release information.

 “I discovered I could get archives,” Gorodetsky said. “I got plenty of information. And when the computer came along, it allowed me to do so much more.”

For example, he found a blog called Bataanson (bataanson.blogspot.com); Edward was in the same unit as the blogger’s father. Suddenly there was a lot more information about that time period, during the march: who was there, who they were with, who survived. 

It was in that blog that Gorodetsky found a record of Edward’s death aboard the Shinyu Maru, which was, in fact, one of the hell ships. It was torpedoed by a U.S. submarine on Sept. 7, 1944, according  to the records.

This further confirmed other information he had received that his cousin had been in Camp O’Donnell and the Cabanatuan POW camp after the Death March, and had been put on the Shinyu Maru.

Edward, who was awarded a Purple Heart, is memorialized at the Manila American Cemetery at Fort Bonifacio, in Manila, Philippines.

FRAN OSTENDORF is the editor of The Jewish Voice.