Captivity

Journey Out of Darkness: The Real Story of American Heroes in Hitler’s POW Camps—An Oral History

by Hal LaCroix ’82,

photographs by Jorg Meyer

(Praeger Security International, 2007)

Americans have nurtured special affections in recent years for many who are now acquiring second (or third) hips and catching early-bird dinner specials, because these people worked and fought through the human proving ground known as World War II. Tom Brokaw called them “The Greatest Generation” in his 2001 book by that title. And while much attention has been paid to the men who fought, little is heard of the men who fought and were captured, particularly in Europe. In this moving collection of narratives, LaCroix, editor of the science magazine Apex, spotlights the American POWs (numbering more than 120,000) who were held in the camps in the Third Reich. Part of the author’s mission is to torpedo a lingering myth—that the captivity of these POWs was somehow benign, in contrast to the (indisputable) brutality that awaited soldiers ensnared by the Japanese. LaCroix pins the beginnings of this belief on movies like The Great Escape in 1963 as well as TV shows such as the popular Hogan’s Heroes, a situation comedy set in a POW camp, with its portrayal of Nazi prison-keepers as harmless dolts, flustered by inmates who could work up a shortwave radio from a car generator and some picture wire, and quote from the Geneva Conventions. Few viewers could have seen Hogan’s Heroes as realistic, LaCroix acknowledges, but he argues that such depictions nonetheless helped spawn a lasting and inaccurate image. In reality, these Americans who dove from burning planes and otherwise fell into Nazi hands fought “a second war” after combat, a struggle against disease, brutality, and conditions of slave labor. “And they starved,” LaCroix adds, noting that the typical American POW in Germany lost close to half of his body weight, many of them resembling Holocaust survivors by the spring of 1945 (although less than 3 percent perished in captivity). Journey Out of Darkness tells the stories of 19 men from New England, among them Joe Ciccarello, an infantryman from Boston’s North End who scrambled across a battlefield to drape a blanket over a sergeant’s blown-in-half body, only to look up into the muzzle of a German rifle. Sam Palter, a private from Dorchester, secretly held a makeshift Passover service with fellow Jewish-American prisoners in 1945, though they knew the Nazis had special camps for GIs identified as Jewish where survival rates were bleak. Emanuel Rumpelakis, a Greek Orthodox airman from Roxbury, parachuted safely to the ground near Munich only to have his skull promptly fractured by a mob of German children chanting “Jew, Jew,” because they were taught the bomb-droppers were all “filthy Jews.” LaCroix found that many of these men have been haunted by a sense of shame because they were caught; very few spoke of their POW experiences until they began meeting in support groups formed in recent years by the Veterans Administration. Nationwide, fewer than 16,000 Americans who endured the German Stalags survive, and they are disappearing. They, and we, can be grateful that LaCroix and Meyer were there to rescue some of their memories.

Exposure

Ocean Effects

by Brendan Galvin ’60

(Louisiana State University Press, 2007)

In 2005, the judges of the National Book Award noted that at a time when poets and critics seem skeptical about the capability of language to render external reality, Brendan Galvin, a finalist for the award that year, has been “quietly reminding us that the best poetry can deepen our understanding of the natural world and of each other.” Reviewers of his previous collections of poetry (this is his 15th) have spoken of how Galvin lets his readers see the “gifts that too often go unnoticed,” as one commentator said. That is something that Galvin surely does in his new volume, yet his world is far less sentimental, his poems more playful, at times rascally so, than his enamored fans sometimes suggest. In “Hard Evidence” in Ocean Effects, he surveys the silence after snowfall—the soft stars, cog-wheels, and compass roses—“and I see that I don’t own this land, am only paying / the taxes for these others, my signature / on the checks as meaningful to possession as / this itinerant leaf’s scribbled autograph.” His reverence for the natural world, though, has a quirky place for human characters like the carpenter whose jaded voice Galvin assumes in “Roy Olafsen, Cape Cod Craftsperson, Tells All,” which reveals the tricks of selling a piece of property to nature-venerating New Yorkers. That includes giving them “my Thoreau Moment . . . gazing off into the woods . . . even rolling the dirt between my thumb and fingers,” before the narrator raises his arms as if he were channeling the ghost of Henry David and announces, “Your new home wants to be here.” There isn’t much in the biosphere—or at least on the Cape, where he has dwelled most of his days—that gets by Galvin. “Stations,” his reflections at a roadside, turned my thoughts to what I must be missing each time I bound down a familiar back road with eyes to where I’m going:

Here’s mallow leaves the Greeks
    and Egyptians ate,
foxgrape that lives as long as that
    mossbacked
snapping turtle that floats like its
    own islet in the river,

and red highbush sparkleberries
    where the mockingbird
holds out all winter without a sound,
    concerned
but unafraid when I whistle a private
    tune a few feet away,
hoping to get it back from her next
    summer.

Liberation

Rethinking Work: Are You Ready to Take Charge?

by Cliff Hakim, M.Ed. ’74

(Davies-Black Publishing, 2007)

More than a decade ago, Cliff Hakim declared the end of job security in his bestselling We Are All Self-Employed: The New Social Contract for Working in a Changed World (Berrett-Koehler, 1994). In the midst of the downsizing frenzy in corporate America, Hakim called on workers of the world to begin acting like their own bosses, whether they happened to be working for themselves or within organizations. He urged them to take responsibility for their own success and job satisfaction, and to adopt the mindset of the self-employed, who work “with” rather than “for” organizations. A career consultant based in Massachusetts, Hakim still advises his clients not to snuggle down in any work environment; on that note he quotes his plumber, Dave, who says the only thing that lasts forever is PVC pipe. At the same time, Hakim has been spending most of his professional time with clients who want his help in mingling their work with things that do tend to last, their passions and values. The result is Rethinking Work, which lets readers eavesdrop on Hakim’s conversations with a diverse mix of clients, including Luka, a venture capitalist who wanted to blend his financial acumen with his love of food; and Angelika, who cleaned houses and wanted to do something else with her “innate sense” of every home’s unique character. Though Hakim invokes rugged values of independence and personal responsibility, as he did in We Are All Self-Employed, this new book takes a more idealistic, personal, therapeutic, and even spiritual turn. Rethinking Work is not about what Hakim calls the “outer economy”: how to, for example, scramble ahead of the competition. It’s about the “inner economy,” the desires and motivations that he says are leading people (read: baby boomers) to say things like, “I’m feeling hollow, and work feels empty.” Hakim has delivered his message about the inner economy to audiences in a number of institutional settings, including the semantically appropriate venue of the U.S. Interior Department, in Washington, D.C. And the message is that people need to invest in the inner economy. The first step, he says, is to reflect on “what part of yourself you’ve put aside to bring home a bigger paycheck.” Hakim, who believes in the power of writing (he says he spends two hours a day “experimenting with words”), has each of his clients compose a brief “personal” autobiography that details moments of importance in their lives, such as when they felt the greatest fulfillment. Having determined that he wanted to do something with his love of food, Luka, the venture capitalist, began offering financial consulting to mom-and-pop restaurants. Angelika, the cleaner, parlayed her “innate sense” about houses into a realty career. Hakim is frank enough to tell of clients who followed their hearts down professional paths that turned out to be wrong for them, which is part of why he urges readers to keep reflecting, exploring, and engaging. In the business-book marketplace, there’s no dearth of advice about careers and the inner life. Hakim is helpful enough to supply some practical tools of self-reflection, not to mention true-to-life stories, often absent from the homilies of workplace gurus.

William Bole is a writer based in Massachusetts.

A list of recently published books by alumni, students, and faculty is maintained at bcm.bc.edu/readerslist. Publishing houses and authors are invited to send books or book announcements to the editors.

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