Rossmoor Writers Share their Tales of Surviving World War II

On Memorial Day, we understandably honor the men and women who died while serving in the U.S. military.  But we all know that war has many other victims, including the soldiers who survive combat, civilians caught in battles, the families back home, and refugees displaced by fears of violence and genocide.

Some of these war survivors, including refugees, live in Rossmoor, and they are members of the Rossmoor Writers Group. This group has recently published a collection of memoirs,  "Designated Heroes Remember" about living through World War II. The book contains the works of 20 writers who come from a variety of backgrounds and from different sides of the global conflict that killed more than 70 million people between 1939 and 1945.

The authors, aged 60 to 90, had been writing and sharing their stories, essays and poems with one another for years before several members realized that some of their works shared a similar theme: World War II.  Some of the writers were Jews who fled Europe to escape the Holocaust.

Another was forced to serve in the Hitler Youth.There are stateside tales, too, including that of Ruth Roque-Wood, who recounts how her hometown of Soledad, in the Salinas Valley, became the home for a POW camp for German soldiers. In another story, Eileen Schnepp recounts being a young Jewish girl living in Boston, and dreaming of the day she will meet her baby cousin, Little David, whose parents disappeared after escaping to Russia from Poland. 

Some authors for "Designated Heroes Remember" only started to write about their wartime experiences once this project was conceived. But, as the editors note, "all were amazed at what vivid memories, minute details bobbed to the surface once they began putting thoughts to words, then words to paper."

Following are excerpts from the works of four writers.  The book is available at Hooked on Books in Walnut Creek.

In 1945, Steffi Plumb was 13 years old and living in Dresden, the gracious German city that her family hoped would be free from Allied bombing. They were wrong. On a February night,  Plumb was walking home with her mother and grandmother from a community air defense meeting. The memory of what happened next is so painful that Plumb, now 78, could only write it in the third person.

The sirens wailed. She walked holding on to her mother's and grandmother's hands. Suddenly, the plains arrived, flying very low, fully loaded on their way to Berlin. …

As she looked up, the air turned gold, the stars, the buildings, the people all wrapped in gold like a beautiful present—but instead, an ugly surprise! Now they were running to their home, terrorized by noises and flashes of horror at the sudden knowledge that her life as she knew it would never be the same. More than 1,478 tons of explosives and 1,182 tones of phosphorus bombs were dropped on 1. 2 million people!

In March 1938, the German government annexed Austria, and the life of a Otto Schnepp, a 13-year-old Jewish boy living in Vienna, changed forever. That year, Schnepp, now 85,  survived a beating by Nazi hooligans and the terror of Kristallnacht. His parents scrambled to join 20,000 other European Jews emigrating to Shanghai. But, it quickly fell on them to make the kind of excruciating decision that was all too common for Jews facing the specter of Hitler's Final Solution. To ensure the family's survival, the parents would have to go ahead and leave Austria—without their son—and hope he could join them soon.

His voice faded out. He was actually crying now. I had never seen my father cry! His armor cracked. He did not comfort me. I now believed he was too conflicted about the decision to leave me behind and was afraid of losing control even further. My mother hovered in the background…

My legs felt weak. I was scared. I cried openly in spite of trying hard to hold back the tears. The logic was indisputable. My father was the one in greatest danger. …

My father tried to comfort my mother: "He cannot help crying," he said several times….

The time came, and we all went to the train station by taxi. There I met the couple I would travel with. Tearfully, I parted from my parents, and at this point, they both hugged me with sadness in their eyes, and their embrace gave expression to their love and, I imagine their feelings of guilt.

The train started up, and they were gone. … Over a half century later, I still cannot recall the event without my eyes filing with tears.

Joelie Pehanick, a professional writer and one of the editors of the book, crafted this tale based on her the memories of her husband, Joe Pehanick. In 1944, he was a 15-year-old boy living in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1944, excited about landing a job delivering telegrams for Western Union. Unfortunately, one of his duties was to deliver telegrams bearing the news that a soldier had been killed in action.

Joe gripped the telegram with the stars, the last on the route, because the address was just two blocks from his own. In front of the house he stood on the iced sidewalk, his bike propped up against a tree. … Sky, snow and trees were shades of pewter gray around him in this limbo between dusk and night. He shivered, straightened his cap, and walked up the steps to the front door and knocked. A pretty woman, slender with a heart shaped face and long dark hair, opened it. After a quizzical glance at Joe, her eyes fell on the telegram. He handed it to her, his throat too constricted to speak. She ripped it open and scanned the few pasted on words. He had never heard such a sound from anyone. It was a scream but so raw, so primal that he felt itmore in his gut than heard it with his ears. He backed away from her and stumbled on the porch steps, grabbing at a balustrade. Pedaling towards home as fast as possible, he couldn't tell if she was still screaming, or if they were echoes in his skull. With one hand, he steadied the bike over the slick road, and with the other, tried to brush tears from his cheeks. But they were frozen there.

Not too long after Joe Pehanick delivered this telegram, one of his co-workers delivered one of these telegrams to his own house, letting his parents know that one of his older brothers had been killed in the Battle of the Bulge.

On April 11, 1944, U.S. Air Corps bombadier Lt. Leo Bach had to parachute from his burning plane about 50 miles west of Berlin.  Two days later, Bach was captured by German soldiers and imprisoned in a Luftwaffe POW camp.  When Bach's Jewish heritage became known, he was segregated into a separate camp with other Jewish officers. He learned that the Germans planned to march these officers "off to oblivion." Liberation by the Soviet Army in May 1945 probably saved their lives. In March 2007, U.S. Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher presented Bach, now 91, with a belated Purple Heart, three bronze stars and a Prisoner of War Medal at a special ceremony at Travis Air Force Here Bach writes about how life in a POW camp took a physical and mental toll on otherwise strong, healthy young men:

By and large the boys that flew our planes and fought our wars were young, unsophisticated warriors who learned the mechanics of war and used them with a skill that radiates from a young body That is the beauty of youth. The young are graceful, fearless, indestructible fighting machines. Add a few years to their lives and they become cautious, calculating and not so eager to jump into the breach. They are now ready to point the way for other young men to take their places.

War, and particularly combat, culminating in incarceration, drove people to do things that they would not ordinarily would have dreamt of doing. I know now that which I considered battle fatigue was in reality depression.

I often felt that a closely related matter to going home was the fear of being forgotten… left forever in this God-forsaken land… that I never existed… that there was no home to go to… that I was invisible.

Look at us now: we are old men, those of who are still left, but we made it. We are home. We are home. Sometimes I still can't believe it.