How old where you when World War II started?
I was four years old.
Did you know why the war started?
What we understood was that Germany started or was thinking of taking over the war.
And Americans didn’t believe it,until they started to see the signs of what they thought was true.
What signs were those?
That Germany fought in England and they killed a lot of Russians and that’s when America had joined in.
How did you hear about all of these things?
Well I was just a little girl but if I remember correctly
through the radio and news paper because we had no T.V. back then.
What were some of the changes that acquired because of the war?
Well the only significant change was when my brother(Frank Jr.) joined the army.
That was the only change that I could tell. We all lived the same,
we didn’t think we were poor we ate every day and we ate good food because
we raised it. So we didn’t know anything about poverty either.
Until the war started and we couldn’t find things like sugar and thing like that.
They would make us ration it; we had to have coupons.
Was your community affected by the war?
Well in our small community there were a lot of young boys that went to war.
Did you know a lot of those boys?
Yes, in that community, everybody knew everybody, and if I can remember how many died…(pause) I
knew three personally; including my brother. And a lot of the ones that came back weren’t the same. Some of them couldn’t hear firecrackers, during Christmas time you would see them under a table, these grown men afraid of firecrackers.
Do you know why they joined?
Because they had to, if they didn’t joined they would have been drafted.
What was your brother's job in the war?
We never knew what it was. The only one who knew was my father, because my brother would write to my father, and he would write the letters in Spanish.
This young man who really went to school only when he could go, taught himself to write in English and in Spanish. My dad was the only one who read Spanish.
My mother didn’t know how to read and the kids that knew could only read in English.
So my brother would write the letters in Spanish.
Did your dad ever tell you what he did, did you ever ask?
No, I asked when I was already married, and for some reason I told my mom that I knew how to read in Spanish; and that I would like to read them.
She didn’t know what had happened to them.
Was the was ever the topic in the classroom?
Yes, a lot of it, and if you can believe this, there were some who were for the germens.
They believed that the germens were smart people.
When did you realize you were in war?
The only time I realized we were in war was when my brother left.
When it became personal, other then that we where just too busy playing.
Do you remember the day your brother left
Yes, I remember I didn’t want to let him go, for some reason I didn’t want him to go.
I remember he bend over and told me,
“ the reason I am going is because I don’t want these bad people over here. And were going to stop them, I don’t want them to come over here.”
Now that I ask why he had directed those things to me, my oldest sister told me it was because I was crying and I didn’t want to let go of him.
I was eight years old. I always thought of him as a much older person then me. I thought he was always so big and strong, and for some reason I never thought that he was just ten years older than me.
For some reason I always thought is he was home I was safe, he was very mature for his age.
How did your Dad handle the war?
Well, they would always talk about it, giving opinions just like they do today, but there was nothing much they could do. We didn’t know at the time, but we were barley making it, but we didn’t know; everybody lived the same in the same situation.
As long as we had candy to eat I never thought we were… like on weekends we would have chicken and that was like a party. They would kill the chicken, my cousins would come by and we would have baseball games that would last a whole weekend.
We would all pitch in and make dinner and just play games.
How did your mom handle the war?
Not well, not well at all, she was completely ill, can you imagine her oldest son go off. So she didn’t handle it right. We could tell that she would cry a lot and she was distant and distraught and quite all the time.
You could tell that she was unhappy she wasn’t laughing anymore.
Do you think you would have had a different childhood if it were not for the war?
Of course it would have been happier it would have been a lot happier if my brother would have been with us. We were very close, now people go this way or that way and at that time,
there was only one way and everybody went together. When he left it really really hurt me, I was very unhappy and we couldn’t bring it up because my dad would say, don’t bother your mom, she was the one that needed attention.
She was the one that needed protection from hearing about bad things. It was like don’t say anything to her so we just kept everything to ourselves.
What was the most vivid experience for you during the war?
That I can remember as if it were today…when these people, these two men came over to the house to tell us that my brother had been killed.
They were in the service and I remember them reading this paper and telling us that he had died. He had been killed and I remember I just went into the room by myself and went to lie down like not thinking about anything.
How can that be, we just gotten a letter that day before. And I guess I wasn’t smart to figure out that it takes a long time for the letter to get here.
And I just kept telling myself that cant be because we just got a letter. And then to make matters worse two or three days later or maybe longer we got two letters from him.
We just knew when we saw this black car, I still remember, this black car with some kinds of writings on the side, and some how we knew everybody knew.
How did your mom take it?
Very bad, so did my dad and of course the rest of us we were all heart broken and we just didn’t talk about it we just went our quit ways and that was that.
Do you remember the funeral?
We didn’t have a funeral until after the war was over and everything was over years later when we deiced to we brought his remains over to the united states we couldn’t open the casket we just had a small service.
At the beginning we didn’t have anything but the priest that came to the house. We went through the whole mass except we had no body we had it at home. We didn’t have the burial until years years later when we were all grown up.
By that time we all felt stronger and better.
Where did he die?
I don’t know but when they broke the line from France into Germany I understood that they had like an under rail and nobody could get over there nobody could get them cause they were underground.
They were in France and they jumped into Germany. My brother had five combats on the fifth combat he was killed.
That I knew cause they sent you papers and the Purple Heart and I forget what other metals he got. When he died that’s when they broke
the line when they went undercover that’s when they defeated the Germany and from then on they started winning the war and that was that.
Is there anything else you like to add?
Well, we got over all that and were still here we had a very good life but… there was that but right there, it was cause of my brother, it was the only thing and that’s all I can remember about the war.