At 95 years old, Shirley Fein Sheriff is fearless.
While she’s grown a little more cautious over the years, she’s never been apprehensive when it comes to exploring the world. Her carefree way of living led her to join the American Red Cross, where she stared death in the face during World War II, developing her own ways to help soldiers with PTSD and later attending the Nuremberg Trials.
But after years of volunteering away from home, she said she never thought what she was doing was anything too remarkable.
“I always thought it was very ordinary, my experience. My friends did it. It’s not unusual,” Sheriff said. “But it’s become extraordinary.”
Sheriff now lives at the Beltrone Living Center in Colonie, where she was honored as a 2013 Legacy recipient by the American Red Cross Northeastern New York Region on Thursday, March 7, for her humanitarian efforts during the war. She joined another honoree, 73-year-old Tom Pillsworth, also an American Red Cross Services to Armed Forces Volunteer, for the “Our Legacy Continues Project” that serves to recognize American Red Cross members for their work in the military and highlight March as Red Cross Month.
Sheriff, the mother of three and grandmother of five, said she never expected to be honored but was very humbled. Her time working with the American Red Cross, she said, allowed the courage to take on any job because after all of her wartime experiences, she felt there was nothing she couldn’t do.
“I felt that no matter what job I ever had, I could do it. I had so much confidence in myself,” she said.
Growing up in Riverdale, Sheriff was one of eight children. In her late teens she began working in a pediatric hospital and later, the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the Anaconda Wire & Cable Factory in Yonkers. During World War II, she decided to volunteer with the American Red Cross and at 27 years old, she was sent to France in March of 1945. While staying at the Normandy Hotel in Paris, she was given her first assignment: working at a triage hospital with American prisoners of war who had just been released from Germany.
“They were skin and bones. The Germans had nothing to eat, therefore their prisoners had nothing to eat,” she said of the dying soldiers not much younger than herself. “They were half-alive. They actually smelled of death. So that really hit me.”
Although she had experience working in hospitals, she said it was the first time she had actually witnessed death.
“I felt, ‘This is why I’m here. This is what I had signed on to do.’ I was able to handle it fairly well,” she said.
Sheriff then moved onto an army hospital in Garches, a commune right outside of France, and worked with soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. She said she would take the GIs on walks and develop different games to ease their minds. Sheriff was in Paris on Victory in Europe Day, when France was liberated, on May 8, 1945.
In early 1946, Sheriff was reassigned to Amburg, Germany, where she began working as a club recreation worker at a former monastery. Although the war had ended, she said she knew very little about the Holocaust and the concentration camps. One of the biggest eye-openers for her while abroad was seeing a Holocaust survivor but thinking he was a Nazi because he was German.
“I realized at that moment that I was judging this human being. How can you just judge a person? That was another experience …. you can’t judge people. We’re all human beings,” she said.
After a year-and-a-half in Europe, Sheriff finally returned to New York. She said coming back home was “horrible” because the people around her had no idea how lucky they were.
“Everybody was complaining. They didn’t have a lot of stockings, they didn’t have all of these wonderful luxury items. I said, ‘My God, you have plenty of food,’” she said. “I couldn’t stand the people.”
Sheriff later returned to Europe as a tourist and spent the rest of her career in America working at recreational hospitals. Her fearless and confident demeanor did not diminish throughout her peacetime life and she made it a point to have experiences, including finagling her way into the O.J. Simpson trial while on a trip in California.
“I still have no fear of anything,” she said. “You’re a much freer person. Your life is more open to experiences.”