She was just nine years old when her brother Sandy Kahn went off to war, but Brunette Kahn Mallon can remember the day they said goodbye to one another at Penn Station in Newark.

It would be the last time they were together.

But more than 60 years later, she keeps his name and memory alive as the woman behind the men of the Sanford L. Kahn Post 538 of the Jewish War Veterans.

The post, organized in Kearny, is now based in West Orange.

Last week, Mallon described the decades she spent seeking the details of how her brother died in one of the bloodiest battles of World War II, seeking to assuage a grief she called “unbearable.”

“Sandy enlisted after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor,” she said. “He could have had a deferment because he had braces on his teeth and was going to college, but he had the braces taken off. He refused to take the deferment.”

All Mallon and her parents knew was that he was stationed somewhere in Great Britain.

“He sent a lot of letters, but of course it was wartime, and he couldn’t say where he was.” But the soldier tried to reassure his family that he was out of harm’s way.

In February 1944, he wrote to them back in Kearny, “Don’t worry about me. I still have a long time before I hit combat. For all anyone knows, I may miss it.”

Just six months later, Sanford Kahn would become the first Jewish soldier from Kearny to be killed in World War II.

Mallon was visiting cousins in Rockaway Beach, Queens, when she received the news.

“My father and mother had just gotten a telegram and they came to get me,” she recalled as she sat in her West Orange living room Dec. 24.

“My mother and father were devastated. Their grief was just unbearable. My father never believed he was killed. He used to meet the buses of the returning servicemen hoping that a mistake was made. He just didn’t want to believe it.”

What made the news so shocking to her parents was the way in which it was delivered.

“A little boy on a bicycle handed my father a telegram that said, ‘We’re sorry to inform you….’ Then he peddled away. That’s the way they did things in those days. It was a horrible way. My father went to the Western Union and asked if they would please give him a telegram that said Sandy was only missing in action. He did not want to tell my mother. But they wouldn’t do it.”

Mallon remembers “sitting on the porch and crying while the entire town came to pay condolences.”

The Kahns learned Sandy had been killed by a German sniper during the battle of St. Lo in northern France. But they wanted reassurance that he didn’t die alone.

Although he was not an eyewitness to the attack, Fred Goldstein was a friend of Sandy’s who was also stationed in St. Lo.

He wrote to the Kahns in 1945, said Mallon, and told them as much as he knew about what had happened to her brother.

“Sandy was one of my best friends,” Goldstein said in a letter mounted in a scrapbook full of family memories. “We were always stationed together. I just can’t describe to you what I felt when I heard what happened. The sky was blue but it suddenly turned black as night, as if the bottom had dropped out of everything. I still can’t realize I’ll never see him again.”

After the war ended, three of Kahn’s fellow soldiers visited the family.

“They asked whether they could name their Jewish War Veterans post after my brother and, truly, that’s what saved my mother and father,” said Mallon. “They became the parents of the post, and I became the sister of the post. All the guys would watch out for me. It was another family that we built. It was a very active post.”

Mallon and her parents immersed themselves in running the post and caring for the wounded who returned to New Jersey after World War II.

They paid frequent visits to the veterans’ hospital in Lyons to help heal the living and to the cemetery in Kearny to honor the dead.

“The post really saved my parents’ life,” she said.

Did he die alone?

And yet, a question nagged at all their souls: Did Sandy die alone?

Mallon’s mother and father died without ever knowing what their daughter would learn just two years ago through a friend in the JWV Ladies Auxiliary who had a chance conversation with a World War II vet.

When her friend mentioned the Sanford L. Kahn Post of the Jewish War Veterans, the man said, “Did they call him Sandy? I was with him when he was killed.”

The eyewitness said he watched as Kahn died instantly after being hit in the neck by a sniper’s bullet.

The friend put the vet in touch with Mallon.

“He told me, ‘I took him into the foxhole and covered him over.’ I said, ‘Why didn’t you ever tell my mother and father? We thought he was alone. To know that somebody was there with him would have been a great comfort to them.’

“He said, ‘It was the end of the war and I wanted to forget.’ It was unbelievable. I was relieved, and yet I was angry at him for not saying something to my mother and father.”

Finally, it was the end of a mystery that had lasted more than half a century. But Mallon’s commitment to the JWV has endured. A widow of Haywood Mallon, she is retired as a recreational therapist who worked at the Daughters of Israel nursing home in West Orange and Care One in Livingston.

The mother of three and grandmother of seven said her life “has revolved around the Jewish War Veterans” and the brother she lost when she was just a girl.

“I wish he was still here,” she said tearfully. “I miss him every day. I truly do. I just miss him terribly. I would like to have a brother. I would have liked for my sons to meet their uncle. And I’m happy for the post. It has kept his name alive.”