A German machine gunner mowed down most of the men exiting Baumgarten’s boat. There were 30 soldiers in the craft, and only two of them — including Baumgarten — survived.

Once on the sand, a shell exploded nearby and ripped off Baumgarten’s cheek and left a hole in the roof of his mouth.

After being bandaged, he was rescuing another soldier when more shrapnel hit him in the head.

That night, Baumgarten was advancing along a road with some other soldiers when they came under fire from a German machine gunner, and he was hit in the jaw. At that point, he gave himself a pain-numbing shot of morphine.

“I took a morphine sleep,” Baumgarten said. “I thought we lost the war, because after all I’m laying with six dead guys around me.”

Baumgarten believes that during that night, some German soldiers searched for cigarettes on the bodies of his dead comrades. Baumgarten, who is Jewish, had drawn a Star of David on the back of his field jacket, as an act of defiance against Nazi Germany’s brutality against European Jews.