Wartime Memories of Death, Duty and Prayer for Memorial Day| National Catholic Register

My first vivid childhood memory was the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. I was 4 years old. That day is finely etched in my mind, translating into images that still evoke intense emotions in me.

I recall that I was bundled up in a heavily insulated jacket and trousers with a long yellow muffler wrapped around my neck. Like Linus and his blanket, I never parted with it, even in the heat of summer. I was attempting to create a snowman with the help of my friend, who lived next door. Building snowmen seemed to be my chief preoccupation in the winter.

Suddenly, my older sister, Julia, came outside and told me that my mother and father wanted me to come into the house. When I entered the kitchen, I heard something that rarely occurred in my family. Silence. The only thing that could be heard was the solemn voice of someone on an old Stromberg radio precariously perched on a wobbly oak table in the corner of the room.

My mother, father and aunt sat around the kitchen table. My sister and older brother stood near the radio. My uncle stood near my siblings. Everyone had sad expressions on their faces.

When the radio announcer completed his description of the tragedy that had occurred in Hawaii, my mother and father, joined by the rest of the family, spontaneously knelt on the linoleum- covered floor and recited the Lord’s Prayer. I, too, joined my family in prayer.

I had no idea at that moment why we were kneeling and praying in our kitchen. We usually knelt and prayed in church. It didn’t take long for me to learn the answer.

Little did I realize on Dec. 7, 1941, that so much of my childhood would be determined by the sounds and images of war, including my toys and the games I played with my friends. The war dominated my dreams. Sometimes, I even experienced nightmares involving the deaths of my father, uncle and brother, who appeared in these grim scenes as soldiers. But the reality was that my father and uncle were too old and my brother was too young to serve in the armed forces. 

The horrors of war touched me and my schoolmates when the bells of St. Michael’s Church began their doleful clanging, seemingly echoing their own grief for the soldiers and sailors who had been killed and now returned home for burial.

The first time I heard the bells, I was 5 years old, a first-grader in St. Michael’s School, located only a few feet away from the church. When the bells began their sorrowful clanging, Sister Leokadia told us to close our grammar books and nodded approval for the students to go to the windows that gave us an unobstructed view of the entrance to the church.

Our beloved teacher, a Franciscan in her early 60s, stood near me. I remember looking at this pious nun as she traced the contours of Christ’s image on the crucifix hanging from her neck and later whispered prayers on the large brown beads of the rosary that hung from the rope tied around her waist.

When two flag-draped coffins were removed from the black hearses and carried by uniformed soldiers up the steps of St. Michael’s Church, Sister Leokadia, choking back tears, recited the eight verses from the Book of Ecclesiastes (3: 1-8). Every child in my class knew from memory most of these verses: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die. …”

At the front door of the church stood our kind pastor, Father John Dronzek. He was a man in his 50s with black hair combed without a part to the back of his perfectly round head. Impressively dressed with a black cope over his other vestments, he wore a biretta on his head.

Father Dronzek clasped a slim black-covered book from which he read prayers before the coffins were carried into the church.

As a young boy, I saw Father Dronzek as one of God’s gatekeepers, who helped open the doors to heaven for the young soldiers and sailors who had died during the war. I felt reassured that if Father John presided over a funeral, the soul of the deceased would have easy entry into paradise.

To a young boy growing up during World War II, it was natural for me to use military metaphors in describing priests as part of God’s army on earth.

I witnessed these sad funeral dramas many times during my childhood. Too often, in fact. I, along with my classmates, had an acquaintance with, and even a kind of understanding of, death that few children our age in peacetime ever could.

Much to the dismay of my brother and sister, who thought I had a very bad voice, I became a member of the children’s choir, which often sang at requiem Masses at St. Michael’s.

I vividly remember one Mass when I saw Father John lose his stoic composure and cry as he recited the final prayers over the coffins of two brothers, who had been killed on different military fronts — Italy and Asia. 

Father John had buried so many of these young men during the war years that the strain on him was unbearable. Virtually every requiem Mass Father John conducted was for a young man he had baptized as a baby.

These men were little more than teenagers when they died. Most of them, like me, grew up on Gene Autry and Roy Rogers movies. They heard the same music that I did from the great bands of Duke Ellington, Tommy Dorsey and Cab Calloway. We listened to the ubiquitous voice of Bing Crosby, the top crooner of the 1930s and 1940s. Hardly a single day passed without hearing the close-harmony style of the Andrews Sisters on the radio.

They were decent boys who had paper routes or held part-time jobs with local merchants. They dated their high-school sweethearts, stealing kisses from them at proms. Few of them were married before they were called by their country to serve in the bloodiest war in history.

These young men grew up in a generation that valued integrity, honor and devotion to family, church and country.

I did not know as a boy what I know now as an elderly man — namely, that war is the vilest of human activity. The Greek writer Aeschylus said it best when he wrote: “They send forth men in battle, but no men return and home to claim their welcome, come ashes in an urn. For war’s a banker, flesh his gold.”

Every time I hear church bells, I remember the fallen heroes who died for their country during World War II and the wars that followed.