Operation Shoebox aims to preserve WWII history
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Newsday.com
BY SUZANNE LABARRE
August 3, 2007
A prisoner of war in Austria for a year and a half during World War II, Michael Colamonico kept busy drawing in a notebook. He bartered with German soldiers to score crayon pencils and sketched visions of home: fighter jets, the Statue of Liberty, a pin-up girl bedecked in stars and stripes.
"In order to keep a healthy mind, I was active," he said. "I did whatever I could."
But after the war, he stowed the journal, along with newspaper clippings, photos and letters, in a shoebox. The war wasn't something he cared to discuss.
On Thursday, Colamonico, 86, of Huntington, visited the American Airpower Museum in Farmingdale, where a volunteer scanned much of the shoebox's contents into a computer.
It was the inaugural event for Operation Shoebox, a project aimed at preserving World War II-era imagery, in which the public is invited to the museum to scan personal archives onto a CD. The first 50 visitors tomorrow and Sunday are free.
With more than 1,000 World War II veterans dying daily, preserving collections such as Colamonico's is essential to building a rich historical record, said Julia Lauria-Blum, an oral historian at the museum.
"We're encouraging people to take out those shoeboxes and talk about those experiences, because it's a history they'll lose to time and death," she said.
On Thursday, Colamonico sorted through his memorabilia, spread on a table in the museum, where he's an occasional volunteer. There was his journal, fragile and yellow with age, and his postcards, each marked "gepruft," approved by German authorities. There was a photograph of him, fresh-faced and smiling with fellow members of the Air Force. And there was a mugshot, snapped just months later, of a young man with wild hair and a days-old beard. It was Colamonico, the day after he arrived at Stalag 17.
Colamonico, a top turret gunner and B-17 flight engineer in the 8th Air Force, 92nd Bombardment Group, 327th Bomb Squadron, was shot down Dec. 31, 1943, after bombing enemy airfields near Bordeaux, France. It was his first mission. He was captured, along with seven others, by German soldiers and forced into solitary confinement. Nine days later, a freight train carted him to the Austrian camp later made famous in Billy Wilder's epic film "Stalag 17." Colamonico was 22.
It was nightmarish living, he said. Mattresses were filled with wood chips and bunk beds were stacked three on top of each other. For breakfast, he ate a piece of bread, topped with jam and sawdust. Toilet paper was cardboard rubbed soft. As an American soldier, he didn't work, so he passed time drawing and staging plays with barracks-mates. He saved -- and Thursday scanned -- one of the playbills: "Parade of Stars: First Anniversary of the Cardboard Playhouse."
Colamonico was liberated May 3, 1945, in Braunau -- the birthplace of Adolf Hitler -- after a 30-day westward march. It was "the happiest day of my life," he said.
Only recently, though, did the Brooklyn native start discussing the war. Before, he said, "no one cared." But now, he's eager to share his archives -- and he hopes others will do the same.
Copyright © 2007, Newsday Inc.
