No one can truly know why God allows wars. Why did babies and women die? Melvin Eakle, a POW in Europe, told his sister, Iree Eakle Francis, about the conditions at the POW camp: “Every morning they would take out the dead babies and women.”
How do you forget about what you have seen? One method was to rarely or never talk about it to your family. Perhaps soldiers would talk only to other GIs, knowing only they could understand the circumstances or why it happened to them. Unfortunately some GIs turned to alcohol as a way to forget the nightmares.
Many WWII veterans did not talk about what they saw and heard until now, as the end of the trail is near. As they are approaching the ends of their lives, many veterans are telling the rest of us how it was for them during the war. They are talking to newspaper reporters, to outsiders, and to another generation, talking even to a woman author. This is deeply humbling!
Former US Marine and WWII veteran Arlin McRae didn’t feel it was just unusual; the only thing that survived from his sea bag was the Bible that he read every night since he left home. The Griffin War Mothers gave it to him when he left for the military.
Former WWII soldier Scott Brown mentioned his faith several times. He became a minister when the war was over. When the Japanese surrendered, Scott was stationed at Pearl Harbor; as others were celebrating, he went to the chapel.
Ralph Myers said, “I have asked the good Lord to keep me going until He wanted me, and He has been doing a good job. I thank Him all the time.”
Richard Kolodey, US Navy, a WWII veteran, hasn’t missed going to Sunday school in sixty-eight years. His goal is to get his seventy-year pin of no misses. God bless!
Stories from Germany, Italy, and Ukraine
This book includes the stories of English and Australian women and what they endured during WWII. Other countries that were involved in the war, also suffered from the effects of the war. American soldiers and the American people sacrificed their young men, and the home front did without certain foods and supplies. It is interesting to know how people from the Allies and the Axis countries dealt with the war. The people in the following stories, eventually, became American citizens when WWII was over.
The next stories are not from countries that were our Allies; they are from countries that were our enemies during the war. The people and the situations are uniquely different. Their sacrifices were great, and sometimes beyond their control. Not only are their stories interesting, but give a view from the other side of the war. The German people had to ration food as well as the American people. Children during the WWII war time experienced many of the same difficulties whether they were in Italy or Ukraine.
The American people experienced bombing at Pearl Harbor. The German, Japanese, and English people were bombed in their cities, sometimes nightly. Ukrainian men and women were not allowed to make their own choices of how they would live. They were forced to work for the Germans, even though they did not share the same beliefs. These stories of hardship show the mental toughness of all the men, women, and children in this book.
Ivan Andrijiwskyj, Maria Lewcun, Stephanja Szahaj, Peter Szahaj
“The only way for them to survive the war was to follow orders.”
By Lesia Lampton
In June 1942 the Germans went to the village (cello) of Mukhaniv in Northwestern Ukraine. Stephanja was twenty years old, and Ivan was seventeen years old. They were the oldest of six children. Their father was a master tailor and the village arbiter of good taste. Stephanja, not wanting to do any housework, chose to work as her father’s apprentice, helping with the daily chores in his shop. Ivan also trained to be a tailor under his father. (Ivan “Dido” is pictured.)
As the Germans were advancing on their village, Stephanja and Ivan were sent to the nearby town of Radekhiv to work and hide. This proved to be unsuccessful, and soon they were both taken by the Germans to Lviv. They were bathed, had their hair cut, were changed into different clothing, and were sent to Germany. This is where their stories separate.
After his capture Ivan was conscripted to fight with the Germans against the Russians. He fled, hiding in a wheat field until he was recaptured. When the Germans learned he was a tailor, they sold him to work as such, fixing the German uniforms. When he was freed, the person he worked for wanted to hire him outright, but Ivan refused and went to the displaced persons camp in Regensburg. It was there that he met Maria Lewcun while attending church services.
Maria worked as a baker and a brickmaker in Germany. She and Ivan soon married, and their priest sponsored them to go to the United States. They settled in Salem, Massachusetts, and then moved to Philadelphia after learning that a large Ukrainian population had settled there. They lived together in Northeast Philadelphia until Ivan’s death in 2006. Maria still resides in Philadelphia.
Stephanja was taken to Passau, Germany, where she was lined up with other people, similar to a slave auction, and chosen according to her work abilities. She was taken to a dairy farm where she and a Polish man who had preceded her arrival worked for a family. She acted as a maid and milked the cows while the Pole worked the farm. Given the circumstances, Stephanja said, she was treated very well by this family and even ate dinner with them. Many other Ukrainians were in the area, and she met with them in the evenings during her three years of servitude. It was through this new community that stories of the war were spread, and they learned of the war’s end.
Like Ivan, Stephanja found her way to the displaced persons camp in Regensburg. Life at the camp was not easy. They were fed, but with so many people needing to be served they had very few other commodities. A black market thrived at the camp. Stephanja met Petro Szahaj at Regensburg. Petro had been conscripted to the 2nd Division German Army with the purpose of fighting the Russians. He and Stephanja were wed in June 1946 in a nearby town. Shortly thereafter Belgium announced a program where displaced persons could immigrate there. If they found work within three months, their families would be permitted to join them. Petro went to Belgium and found work in the coal mines. Stephanja joined him there, and their first child, Myrosia, was born in 1949.
In 1950, with the help of Ivan and Catholic Services, Stephanja and her family joined Ivan and Maria in Salem. They later moved to Hartford, Connecticut, and lived there until Petro passed away in 2012. Stephanja now lives with her daughter in Virginia.
Stephanja did not like to talk about her experiences until recently. There was a certain shame she felt for their involuntary participation in the war. Although she and Ivan were forced laborers, they felt as though they were helping the Germans through their servitude. The only way for them to survive the war was to follow orders. In all the time they were in Germany, their family did not know what had happened to them. Stephanja and Ivan were the only members of their family who came to the United States following the war.
Elisabeth Ford—German Child
“All the Americans were good to us, especially to the kids. When you see the movies, you think, shoot, I was one of them!”
Liz, a little curly haired girl of five years old, was born in 1939, just as World War II was starting in parts of Europe. Hitler had invaded Poland on September 1. Much of the world was wondering what was happening to their lives. Her family lived in Augsburg, Germany. She said, “I surprise myself that I remember some of these things. I can see myself just like it was yesterday. I don’t know why. Honestly, I remember everything that happened during that time.”
Allied bombing in Augsburg, Germany
“I remember my mom in February 1944, sitting in a chair at night, half-dressed because when the siren went off, we only had so many minutes to pack up and rush off.” The siren went off, and Liz’s mother, Theresa, had to put her clothes on and pack up. One time when the town was bombed, the kids were taken from school straight to the train and out to the countryside. “The children didn’t even come home,” said Liz. “My mom only had my sister and me with her. My sister was smaller than me, so she must have been two or three years old
. My sister lives in San Francisco today.
“We went to the bomb shelter, and the old people were crying and carrying on. Then they made an announcement that the top of the building was on fire. So they gave us so much time to get out. They started with the women with children first, then the older people, and then the rest of them. I remember that it was snowing like crazy.”
Liz recalled, “It was cold, and Mom was pushing the old-fashioned baby buggy with both of us in it. She pushed it many miles as the planes were flying over us. I saw one woman, still in her nightgown, going crazy. She just lost it! I don’t know if she made it out or not.” This vision is in her mind even today. Her dad, August, worked in the city. He wasn’t with them at the time. Liz doesn’t know exactly what he did, but he was in the German reserves not active duty.
“She [Liz’s mother] walked and walked to a big church. There was straw on the floor, so people could lay down and sleep.” Later they left the church. Then a bus came, and they counted off, and it took them out into the country. “We were taken to Baumgarten, which was sixty or seventy miles from my hometown.”
Baumgarten, Germany
Liz went on to explain that “each farmer had to take someone in. They hated it, but they had to take us in. We were lucky that we had a place where a lady lived in the house by herself. She locked everything up but two rooms. Then the lady went to stay with her son. She liked my mom, and she said I know you won’t mess up her home. Here you are, bringing in people you don’t even know. We had a kitchen and a bedroom we were allowed to use. It was only my mom and the two kids, as my dad had to stay in the city. The other children, we didn’t know where they were.” Liz had two brothers and two sisters who had been taken by the Germans on a train elsewhere when the bombing started in Augsburg. “They didn’t come home that day, since they left from the school for the country.”
“They announced on the radio that from two to four, they would give out names of the kids—where they are at,” stated Liz. “We found my sister and my two brothers, but we couldn’t find my sister Anna. Mom was crying every night. My dad would ride around on his bicycle for hours looking for her. We didn’t have a car or anything. He would knock on every door and show her picture. At that time you didn’t have much as far as pictures. My mom said she wasn’t giving up.” So finally someone said, “The old couple up the road has a little girl up there.” They went up to the farmhouse and found her. “We were all happy to see her.”
Liz explained, “They didn’t want to give her up. I mean, she had it made—she had everything, but she wanted to go home.” Anna was about eight years old at the time. The couple had no kids, so she had everything. “They didn’t mean no harm. We went visiting them later, as though they were relation, but they weren’t.
“The farmers at the time, at five o’clock, had to donate so much milk. It depended on how many were in your family, so we had this good milk, better than what you get in the city. It wasn’t watered down. So we loved it out there, at least the kids did.
“The mayor lived right below us, and he had nine kids. He loved us kids. I mean, he was really good to us.” Liz continued, “A funny story was we were all running around barefoot because the shoes we had, we had to save them. We played with the mayor’s kids. In Germany the chickens ran everywhere. Mom said that the mayor told her to come down to his house around noon. She wondered what had happened. The mayor said, ‘I want you to watch what Liz does.’”
Liz laughed. “Well, the chicken would go into the outhouse every day around noon and lay an egg.” The mayor explained he saw Liz go into the outhouse every day at noon. He found out Liz would go in after the chicken laid the egg and take it home to her mom to cook. The mayor said not to mention it to Liz, because he got such a kick out of watching her coming out of the outhouse with the egg.
After the war, in 1945, “when we still lived out in the country, the Americans came with their tanks. They came through the middle of the village to search the houses. They stayed there overnight. They came in and had the things to see if anything was buried. It was the first time I had ever seen a black person, other than the chimney guy who cleaned the chimneys. It was cold and raining outside when they came in. My mom asked, ‘Are you hungry?’ So she made a Bavarian dish made with eggs—pfannkuchen and fruit, which was all they had.” Pfannkuchen was similar to a pancake, but not as sweet.
“All the other rooms were locked up, and the house had really nice, shiny white doors. So we are not speaking English, and they are not speaking German, and it is hard to communicate with them. There were five guys staying with us, and they asked her what is here and here, and my mom said, ‘Nix, nix,’ which they knew meant no. My mom didn’t want to get in trouble with the woman who owned the house.”
The soldiers didn’t like the fact that there were all these rooms and her mom and the kids were only in two rooms. “We were all sleeping in one bedroom. The soldiers were all staying all night too.” The soldiers may have also wondered if there were other people hidden in the other rooms.
“The soldiers were not being mean to us or anything. They were really nice to us. It was more like, ‘Why are you all living like this when there are all these rooms?’ Mom dried their clothes.” Her mom said, “I have two boys, and you never know where they may be someday. I hope someone takes them in.”
The American soldiers kicked the shiny white doors open and went into the other rooms. They found jars of food that the farm woman had canned. Liz said, “They said, ‘Come on, babies, look at this food,’ and they made us eat it.” Liz laughed. “My mom was about to have a heart attack, as she never wanted to take advantage of anybody. So we sat down and ate, and they [the soldiers] ate with us. They stayed all night, and when they left the next morning they waved and hugged us. They also said, ‘Go, go upstairs.’” Maybe they left us something, five-year-old Elisabeth thought. When they went upstairs, under the pillows were Hershey bars and other things. “They were nice guys; they really were.
Back home in Augsburg
“We walked on the autobahn with a wagon of our things—dishes and things. We didn’t have much to take back home.” When they returned to their home in the city, all the windows were blown out, and they had to replace them. Liz remembered, “My dad had been in and out of the house, trying to repair the damage from the bombing.” The town of Augsburg had been bombed because there were many factories there, including a U-boat engine factory. Augsburg was a very old city located in Bavaria, sixty miles northwest of Munich, Germany.
Liz said there was rationing in place too. Because there were six kids in the family, they didn’t have the money to get some of the stuff. Her mom would trade with other families to get a little bit of food. “My mom would just walk away and say she wasn’t hungry. I know she was hungry, but there wasn’t enough to go around. And my dad wasn’t the kind to say, ‘I’ll give you some of mine.’ He just wasn’t that type.” Liz’s parents were Theresa and August. They were orphans. By the age of six or seven, they had been by themselves, given away to farmers to work.
After the war Liz’s mom found her sister and brother. Her mom’s sister lived in the mountains. Some of the kids went to visit her. Her brother lived in East Germany. With a visa secured by Liz’s mom, he came for a visit to Liz’s family and never returned to East Germany. “He had money in the soles of his shoe, since he was only supposed to bring a certain amount of money with him to West Germany,” said Liz.
Her German friend Gerda married an American soldier during WWII. When Gerda first came to America, she couldn’t believe all the food at Kroger. She was afraid something would go wrong or something might happen to her family in Germany while she was in America. Liz and Gerda’s children grew up together.
Many years later Liz married an American soldier and moved to America. “My husband would say, ‘Thanks for the good meal.’” She said, “You are working and putting the food on the table. I never heard my dad say anything like that to my mom.”
&
nbsp; Food from the American soldiers
The Americans used the Drei Mohren Hotel since the German barracks were damaged by bombing. Liz said, “That’s when the fun started. At four o’clock, when the soldiers got done eating, what they had left they threw out. The German people would go in and get what was left.” Liz said, “My mom said, ‘I would like to try that sometime.’” Liz said she would go with her mom to try it. She recalled, “I didn’t have a chance. People were just running over me, I remember that.
“This one guy, I assume that he was a cook, as he had an all-white uniform on, he saw me not getting anything. I saw these donuts, and I wanted to get one. I remember today when my kids would ask me what kind of doughnut I want, it flashes back to that time when it didn’t matter what kind it was. I just wanted one.
“So he took me out of the mess, where everyone was fighting. My mom was a little lady too.” Liz’s mom said, “I don’t think this is a good idea for us—we are going to get killed here.”
Liz continued, “She had a bag that she was going to put the food we were going to get in, but we didn’t get anything. So the guy picked me up and put me over to the side, as he said, ‘No good for baby.’ In other words, you have no business over there! So he said, ‘One minute. Wait here.’ He came out with a big brown bag. There were all kinds of foods in there. It was the first time I had ever seen a banana. I didn’t even know what it was.”
There was Spam and all kinds of food. The cook said, “Tomorrow, don’t go over there. You come here.” Finally there was food for the family. “We did that for a couple days, and Mom said, ‘I feel bad taking it all the time. What can we do for him?’ So she asked him if he needed his washing done. The cook said, ‘Yeah.’ So her mother took his clothes and washed them for him as payment for the food he was giving the family. Mom would scrub his clothes on the table and hang them in the kitchen to dry and try to press them. She and Liz would return the clothes when they went to get more food. “Then one day we found a little gold chain in his uniform, and we opened it up and found a little girl with curly hair about my age. We thought that was why he gave us the food. He was thinking of his little girl.
WWII Heroes: We Were Just Doing Our Jobs Page 26