|
|
|
|
Articles: Moral Stories | My Father's Gift
- Mr. Kiran Ravuri
| |
“Most of Poland is flat, open country, easy for troops to march through. We were not like Switzerland, safe behind her mountains. I remember my father saying: ‘We are a great country with great people, but we are in the wrong place.’
“In The Great War, when the Polish men were conscripted, my father was forced to fight for the Russians. He said it was almost embarrassing, they were so disorganized and ill-equipped. They didn’t even have enough guns and ammunition. And during battles, when they radioed their troop movements, they didn’t even put them into code.
“It wasn’t long before my father’s battalion was surrounded and captured by the Germans, who shot the Russians then sent all the Polish soldiers to fight on the Western Front.
“For three years, my father fought and dug trenches for the Germans at Verdun, the Somme, and Passchendaele, until the fall of 1918, when they were retreating. He wondered if the Germans would decide to get rid of the Poles like they’d gotten rid of the Russians, so one night he crawled 300 yards across the no-man’s land between the two trenches and surrendered to an American company.
“After the Armistice, other men came home with things they’d stolen or taken from the dead. My father came home with something more valuable—a piece of paper with the name and address of an American soldier.
“To get into America, if you had no money, someone had to sponsor you, to vouch that you would not need the government’s support. My father and the soldier, Thomas Stafford, exchanged several letters, discussing how they would open a series of bakeries in New York. Then Poland’s fight against Russia began, and my father went off to war again.
| Be first to comment on this Article!
| |
|
|
|
 |
| Advertisements |
|
|
|
|
| Advertisements |
|
