Hello ,
It was clear and sunny in Sicily when Eugenie Rutkowski and a dozen other U.S. Army nurses took off on a flight to evacuate a backlog of wounded soldiers near the front lines in Italy.
In November 1943, as a member of the newly formed 807th Medical Air Evacuation Transport Squadron, Eugenie was one of the few American women to ever have flown in an airplane. The weather changed during the 90-minute flight and a violent storm blew the plane off-course, forcing the pilot to crash-land in Nazi-occupied Albania.
Lieutenant Eugenie Rutkowski (right) is pictured looking at a map with Lieutenant Lilian Tacina after they arrived home from their 60-day, 800 mile trek through snowy mountains fleeing for their lives. The downed passengers had two pieces of luck right away. None of the nurses were hurt in the crash and only one of the 16 men on the flight, medics and plane crew, was injured. And as they crawled
from the wreckage they were met by Albanian partisans friendly to the Allies, one of whom spoke English.
But Nazi troops prowled nearby and they had to find a place to hide. The partisan leader led them to cover in a nearby
village, and they soon discovered they were in a poverty-stricken country rife with the chaos and danger of civil war.
Luckily, Eugenia said, "both sides seemed friendly to us and they all seemed to hate the Germans.” The partisans led them from village to village over rugged mountains through severe weather, trying to avoid the Germans.
"Some of the girls were sleepy and insisted on
lying down in the snow, The rest of us slapped their faces and dragged them along. I wiggled my face muscles up and down to keep from freezing, Oh, It was cold!” The bottoms of the nurses shoes wore out before the end of their two- month ordeal behind enemy lines.
Often gunfire sounded in the night and before dawn villagers would urge them on their way, because food was so scared they couldn’t afford to feed them more than one day.
Occasionally, they were able to borrow mules to ride and once they
hitched a ride in trucks, but the road Nazi troops patrolled the road and every time traffic approached they jumped from the trucks to hide in the hills.
“I saw the truck I’d been riding in demolished by German machine guns. One of the pieces landed in my lap," Eugenia said. But they hid in the thick underbrush and escaped. When the nurses and medics finally reached the coast to meet a U.S. ship, more than half the group had dysentery, and two were sick with jaundice and one with pneumonia. This book tells the harrowing story of the army nurses and medics escape from Albania.
The author Cate Lineberry said, "If the villagers had been caught helping the Americans, the village likely would have been burned and many of its residents killed.
Because of their sacrifices and risks, the Albanian partisans and the Albanian people are heroes of this story to me."
It's been on my to-be-read list for 18-months. I'm not sure I will get to it, so let me know if you've read
it.
My only news this week...the weather, the bugs and the powdery mildew are conspiring to destroy my garden, but it looks like I'm finally going to get my first ripe tomato. Have a good week!
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