Hanging Hitler's Long Johns (ePub)

In 2010 my new friend Roman Ward (nee Wisniewski) asked me

to look at the journal his mother kept during their six-year

odyssey of dodging the Nazis, Polish bounty hunters, neo-Nazis and

G.I. bigots during and in the aftermath of World War II.

Roman had promised his mother, Jadwiga, on her deathbed that

he would have her journal published in his lifetime. Three writers

had attempted to make a book of her journals but Roman felt all had

failed utterly. I would learn that Roman himself had never read his

mother's writing and, like many Jews who survived the Holocaust,

Roman and Jadwiga had never even talked about the dangers they

faced, the horrors they witnessed or the loss of over a hundred family

members.

Reading the journal made it obvious why the other writers had

disappointed Roman: The best story was his. In fifty years as a working

journalist it is the most astonishing personal narrative I have ever

heard; how a 12-year-old boy was entrusted by his father with saving

his older sister and mother. "You are the only one who will survive

this war," Roman's father told him in the Polish ghetto before Roman

fled wearing a Hitler Youth uniform.

This then is the story of Roman Ward from his birth in Poland,

through the War and DP camps, through his service in the fledgling

Israeli Air Force to finally reuniting with his mother in America. He

has honored his promise to his mother; each chapter begins with her

account of what happened and the book is filled with her accounts

wherever Roman could confirm and expand them.

It's a true and amazing story.

Frank Feldinger

Los Angeles, 2016