Paths lead WW II foes to friendship
CRANBERRY TWP — Friendship can bloom in the unlikeliest of places, even in the aftermath of war, and even after more than 65 years of healing and living, remembering and forgetting.
So it is with Harold Huckestein and Karl Bloss, two men who have chosen to spend their later years at the Sherwood Oaks retirement facility off Rochester Road. But their mutual decision to live at that facility is about the only thing these two men have in common after decades spent on different paths.
It was a journey that started for both on the battlefields of Europe and, in particular, on June 6, 1944. It was the D-Day invasion by the Allied forces on the beaches of France.
It was there that they stood only miles apart on Omaha Beach, fighting for their countries and against each other. Little did either know that they would meet much later in life.
Somewhere in the massive throng of guns, soldiers and heavy artillery stood the two teenagers, both thrust into the heat of war before their 18th birthdays. Perhaps their only difference on that day was that Huckestein fought for the Americans while Bloss fought for the Germans. On a day when thousands of men lost their lives on those bloody beaches, both men did their duty and survived the fight.
It's almost a miracle that both would survive one of the deadliest days in one of the deadliest conflicts in human history, only to reunite nearly 70 years later in Butler County.
But here they are on Memorial Day 2013, living proof that kinship and friendship can be found in the strangest of places.
The warHuckestein almost perfectly fits the stereotype of a young man growing up in World War II America.He dreamed of flying off to fight the Germans, and, if he was lucky, to see some action in the Pacific Theater against Japan.A teenager usually concerned with chasing girls and gawking at cars, Huckestein genuinely worried that the war would be over before he came of age to fight. That's why he enlisted in the Navy at age 17 and quickly found himself in England in February 1944, helping the Allies undertake the massive preparations for the D-Day invasion.He was a young man thousands of miles and an ocean away from his childhood home on the North Side of Pittsburgh. As he described himself, Huckestein was on his first adventure away from home.“I was thrilled to be there,” he said. “I'll never give those times up as a memory.”There he was, sailing across an extremely choppy English Channel while soldiers around him struggled to contain their sea sickness. Huckestein described his vessel as LST 316, an acronym he jokingly said stood for “large stationary target.”He couldn't provide a more formal name for his ship, given the fact that it didn't have one.“The generals never expected to see the boats come back out,” he said about the D-Day invasion. “So they never gave them names.”His unit landed on Omaha Beach about noon on June 6, 1944, six hours after the initial wave of Allied troops came ashore. What he saw on the beach became etched in his memory, especially after being called into service to treat the wounded and dying.“We'd light a cigarette for them, give them morphine,” he said of wounded comrades. “Anything to buck up their spirits.”The Allied forces had already taken most of the bluffs surrounding the beaches, although the troops still sustained heavy artillery fire from afar.Huckestein could not have known some of that artillery was put in place by Bloss, who was a surveyor for the German army. As part of his job, Bloss traveled to battle sites and mathematically determined the most opportune placements for artillery such as anti-aircraft guns.It is likely that the two men stood only miles apart, fighting on two different sides. They had gotten to that point in different situations.Bloss found himself drafted into the German army in November 1943, only eligible because Adolf Hitler lowered the age of boys to be ushered into service.Bloss' war story took a much different turn after D-Day. Unlike Huckestein, who shipped back to England and routinely undertook patrols in the English Channel, Bloss marched across Europe and eventually found himself defending the German city of Munich just before it fell to the Allies in 1945.
A harsh 5 yearsAnd again unlike Huckestein, who found himself on a ship headed home after the war, Bloss endured more than five years of hard labor as a prisoner of war in a Russian labor camp.He found himself face to face with the Allied troops in Munich at a time when any German soldier would have chosen to surrender to the Americans rather than the Russians, given that Joseph Stalin had already developed a reputation as an iron-fisted despot.“We thought the Americans would act as they did at Appomattox Court House (in the American Civil War,) when they told the Confederates to take their horses and go home,” Bloss said.Instead, the American forces handed him over to the Russians. It was the start of a five-year saga that wouldn't see him released from a Russian labor camp until 1950. As Bloss tells it, his skill as an experienced surveyor is probably the only reason he made it out of the Soviet Union alive.For Bloss, the end of World War II didn't coincide with a return to peace and civility.Quite the opposite, he said, as he undertook a daily struggle to stay alive in Stalin's Soviet Union. Nearly three million Germans were sent to the socialist republic after the end of the war, while more than 1.3 million died there, according to German estimates.“It was very much a struggle with those living conditions,” he said.Bloss first landed in Sumqayit, the third largest city in what is now Azerbaijan near the Caspian Sea. At the time, the country was one of dozens that had unwillingly become part of the Eastern Bloc nations that acted as a buffer of sorts for the Soviet Union, which invaded the country in 1920.It was here that Bloss was ordered into hard labor helping to build the massive Azerbaijan pipe-rolling mill, a structure that is still in place today. The facility would be instrumental in producing the tools and technology needed by the Soviet Union to drill for oil during the Cold War.The Soviets eventually transferred Bloss to Stalingrad in 1948 to work on another project, before finally taking him in 1949 to a quarry prison camp about 50 miles from the Ukraine.It wasn't the memories of hard labor or mistreatment that has stuck with him after these many years, but of the minus-40 degree temperatures endured during long nights of isolation. But that doesn't mean the labor wasn't a constant nightmare.“There were 1,100 of us prisoners there who produced one million tons of quarry products per year,” Bloss said.It was by the grace of God, Bloss said, that Soviet officials eventually discovered his talents in science and surveying, and eventually sent him to the communist-controlled East Germany in 1950.“Before leaving I was told to spend all the money I could,” he said. “We weren't allowed to take Soviet money outside. So I bought 200 packs of cigarettes. They worked as a second currency back then.”Things settled down significantly after that. He was allowed to attend the University of Frankfurt in Germany, where he earned a master's degree in chemistry. He then took a job in a laboratory in nuclear and isotope development and settled down with his wife, Lieselotte.But it was in 1957 when his life changed again, a time when one of his best friends was enrolled in medical school at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. Bloss had extensively tutored this friend in chemistry and had helped him get into medical school.As it turned out, Cornell University so desperately wanted this friend to stay in America after his visa expired, that they offered to help bring family over to the United States as incentive. Having no family, the man chose Bloss, and so he came.“People wonder how I got to America,” Bloss said. “It wasn't by sheer accident, but certainly by accident.”Bloss flourished even further in his studies after making it to the U. S. He earned a doctoral degree in chemistry from Auburn University before moving to Pittsburgh to take a job with PPG Industries to help develop a new glass coating process.He moved to Sherwood Oaks in September 2006.
Governmental careerHuckestein's post-war career certainly didn't involve as much instability. He returned home in 1946 and attended Duquesne University on the G.I. Bill and eventually earned a master's in urban and regional planning from the University of Pittsburgh.He spent a long career in municipal government, eventually becoming the manager of both Ross Township and Franklin Park in Allegheny County. He settled down with his wife, Doris, and moved to Sherwood Oaks less than a year ago.
A lucky friendshipBoth men's lives have slowed significantly since they were teenagers fighting a war in Europe. As Huckestein said, he no longer has to fear sleeping on top of rockets in the bottom of a Navy ship.Bloss and Huckestein have developed a unique, albeit relatively new, friendship. It was by luck that the two soldiers ended up in Cranberry Township together, and it was luck that kindled their friendship.“We never knew it until we got here,” Huckestein said. “I was shooting my mouth off like I usually do. Someone heard me who knew Karl's story, and said we should get together. So we did.”Neither man prefers to talk much about the war when they're together. There's no need after so many years to reminisce about the war and destruction each man saw in the 1940s.But Bloss has no problem talking about his past and how he came to where he is today.“I have nothing to hide,” he said, “as long as people show interest in what I'm saying.”Both men's lives have been filled with adventure and fear, love and friendship. Now they mostly spend their days together under the same roof, reading or eating or just talking.To the two men, and especially to Huckestein, their friendship isn't as unlikely as it seems.“We're just two ghosts passing in the night,” he said with a smile. “Karl is a nice man, and I'd like to think I'm a nice man. That's all that matters.”
