Long-missing WWII medal awarded in LA

Aside from wedding photos of Markel in uniform, Merin never glimpsed him.

But on Sunday, decades after he won it, Merin received her father's Purple Heart, along with a Silver Star she never knew he'd won and a half-dozen other medals.

Merin wiped away tears as the Silver Star was pinned to her lapel during a short ceremony attended by friends and family at her home in Westlake Village, a community straddling the Ventura and Los Angeles county lines. The other medals were presented on a plaque.

"It just confirms what a great man he was," Merin said tearfully. "He gave up his life for our country and our freedom. I'll put it up in my house as a memorial to him and to those who served."

Merin's mother, Celia, married Markel in 1941 when he already was in the military. They met at a Jewish temple in Buffalo, N.Y.

About four months ago, the manager of a West Hollywood apartment building where Merin's mother lived in the 1960s found a box containing papers and the Purple Heart while cleaning out some lockers in the laundry room, Merin said.

The manager contacted Purple Hearts Reunited, a nonprofit organization that returns lost or stolen medals to vets or their families.

A search led to Merin.

She became "kind of emotional, because I don't have a lot of pictures, I don't have a lot of stories, and I've always been a crier," she said. "My mother was always the stoic one, very strong."

Markel was killed in the last days of World War II on May 3, 1945, in Italy's Po Valley while fighting German troops as an officer with the 88th Division of the 351st Infantry Regiment, said Zachariah Fike, the Vermont Army National Guard captain who founded Purple Hearts Reunited.