Seventy years ago this month the first of 186 refugees to live at the Scattergood hostel east of West Branch arrived (see today’s Ramblin’ in The Gazette) to face a bevy of newspaper reporters and photographers. After all, it was 1939 and this was big news. Adolph Hitler had initiated his Kristallnacht pogrom (rounding up Jewish [...]
Posts Tagged as ‘World War II’
January 7, 2009
Little Joe And GI Joe After The War
More than 63 years after Ed Bernacki of Cedar Rapids befriended a 9-year-old Filipino boy while stationed in the Philippine Islands, they reunited in Cedar Rapids. (See today’s Ramblin’ column in The Gazette.)
Ed was 22 at the time and became known as Uncle Ed. The little boy, Juanito Page, became known as Little Joe. So [...]
March 31, 2008
Death March Across Germany
World War II prisoner of war Joe Koenig of Cedar Rapids recalls the 500-mile march in the dead of winter across northern Germany in 1945 in my Ramblin’ column in today’s Gazette. It was a gruesome march through deep snow and sometimes blizzard conditions with little food, threats of all sorts of diseases and guards who [...]
