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My Lafayette Experience
CONNECTING
My Life After Lafayette
Hell’s Palace to Passion Flats
BY WALTER HARTL '49
World War II was in its final weeks in Europe when I rolled into Germany as a 21-year-old private first class with the 246th Signal Company, attached to the First Army.
We crossed the Belgian border at Aachen in March 1945. Two months later we got into Weimar, and the war was over.
Our unit, a communications outfit, took up residence in a barracks once occupied by
the German Luftwaffe. Directly across the street was an elaborate wrought iron fence decorated with golden flourishes. You’d have thought it was a palace. But as I quickly discovered, they were the gates to
a palace of hell—the gates of Buchenwald.
The concentration camp’s prisoners had been liberated but could not leave, because there was no transportation from that nightmarish place. I can still see them banging on the window of a nearby bakery, begging for bread. The German baker would give them a few loaves. It wasn’t just Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals. They were people of all stripes and persuasions who ran afoul of the Nazi government, and that wasn’t hard to do.
The image of these skeleton-like prisoners in their striped outfits of the condemned was still fresh in my mind when I arrived at Lafayette
the following February. I came to Lafayette very much by chance.
In August 1945 the Army unceremoniously dropped me off a
troop ship at 2:30 a.m. on a dock on
the Hudson River. “Leave your rifle here, take your gear, and go home,” I was told. “We’ll send you a postcard when we’re ready to discharge you.”
I had a beer in every bar and a malted milk in every candy store in New York, and I put on 24 pounds in just a couple of weeks. The postcard finally came, and I reported to Ft. Dix, N.J., where
I was discharged on Nov. 23, 1945. I made it home for Thanksgiving.
Even before being discharged, while still employed by the U.S. Army, I got a job packaging dinnerware for $45 a week in a Manhattan warehouse and enrolled in Queens College under the G.I. Bill. Then, a bit of what I’ll call divine intervention changed the course of my life. A seminarian at my church, Madison Avenue Presbyterian, cornered me and insisted I go to Lafayette College in Easton, Pa.
“I’ve already enrolled in Queens,” I pleaded, but he refused to take no for an answer. “This is Thursday,” he said. “You report to Lafayette on Monday, and everything will have been taken care of.”
My best friend, Jack McDonald ’49, and I walked into Pardee Hall, were introduced to a dean, and handed a schedule. The seminarian said I’d get a first-class education at Lafayette, and he was right.
Post-war Lafayette was a different place. For one thing, the student-professor ratio was about 25 to 1. There was a shortage of professors after the war. The war was a tremendous disruption that affected people in different ways, some fortunate and others not so fortunate. People were still sorting out their lives.
I was sorting mine out, too. In June 1947, I married my sweetheart, Helen Piva, in Madison Avenue Presbyterian. We lived on campus and, when Helen was expecting our first child, we moved into veterans’ housing on Hawks Field along Sullivan Lane. They called it “Passion Flats.” In the 1947 Melange yearbook there is a surrealistic cartoon of the campus that shows Passion Flats with storks flying over it, carrying babies.
They were tiny spaces with a galley kitchen. Those three rooms would fit in my family room now. We had the first of our three children, Linda, while living in veterans’ housing. Helen and I just celebrated our
60th wedding anniversary.
Looking back, I consider myself blessed. I didn’t do anything during the war that will go down in the history books, but I’ll never forget what I saw.
Before dawn on June 6, 1944, I was sleeping in a
six-man tent in Bristol, England. At 4:30 a.m. I was tapped on the shoulder and told, “You have 10 minutes —get ready. You’re going on a trip.” The powers-that-
be had decided the First Army would need a signal outfit along during the D-Day invasion, and I was
one of 17 men selected for the detail out of 300 in my unit. I asked, “Where am I going?” and the answer was, “There’s no need for you to know.” Less than 48 hours later I was in Normandy.
I still can taste the turkey dinner the Navy prepared for the troops on the landing craft on the D-Day mission from Plymouth, England. From my LST I watched the sky light up as Navy destroyers unleashed an artillery barrage on the French beaches in the twilight on June 6. We got to the Normandy coast on D-Day plus 1. The water was red with blood. During a Sit Rep briefing in a huge tent just inland from the beach, I brushed shoulders with Gen. Omar Bradley, second in command to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. Bradley—along with the rest of us—was learning the latest intelligence about the progress
of the invasion.
The Germans surrendered the following May, and some weeks later, in July, a contingent of Russian soldiers burst into my barracks in Weimar, across from Buchenwald. They kicked open the door without as much as a how-do-you-do, took some notes, and left. The scene foreshadowed the Cold War to come.
Three days later, my unit left for Marseilles, France, ceding the territory we’d occupied to the Russians,
in accord with the Yalta Agreement.
In Marseilles we boarded a troop ship called Marine Panther, part of the invasion force heading for Japan. On August 6, 1945, we were 100 miles south of
Cuba when the captain made an announcement.
“I just received word that an atomic bomb has been dropped on Hiroshima,” he said.
We stood and looked at one another and wondered, “What’s an atomic bomb, and where’s Hiroshima?”
Two days later, the captain made the same announcement about Nagasaki and added,
“We’re turning around and heading for New York.”
You couldn’t sleep from that point on. If we’d had booze, we’d have had a party.
Walter and Helen Hartl live in Putnam Valley, N.Y. After graduating in 1949 with a major in business, he took a job selling commercial insurance for Liberty Mutual and went to work for Allstate about five years later. He retired in 1990 after a 35-year career in Allstate’s New York office.
In “Connecting,” alumni present first-person reflections that connect their student experiences and lives after college. Submissions are welcomed, as are suggestions for writers.
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