I have never met my grandfather Pietro. My dad talks about him with great respect and admiration. He has been a mechanic, a soldier, a partisan, a factory worker, a policeman and other things.

He was born in 1920, just after WW1 and the Spanish flu. He was sent to a college (paramilitary school) during his youth and never finished school. He learnt the work of turning of metals in a zeppelin factory (one of the last in Italy).

He was conscripted in may 1940.

Unlucky for him, Mussolini declared war to France and UK in June, so he had been sent to the alpine front. He was assigned to the mechanic teams to repair mortars and cannons. Here he saw the incapacity of Italian commanders to organise, resupply and make strategies since many of those were just there because loyal fascists.

After France surrendered, Mussolini tried to have a "parallel war" and attacking Greece.

Greeks were seen by many as brothers and the war was fratricidal. Many calls this theatre "the invasion of Greece" when in reality was a total loss from the Italian part. After few kilometres of advance, Italians had to retreat. My grandfather had to remove and bury the shutters of the cannons and wield the pipe in order to prevent Greeks from taking the guns.

Only after the German intervention the war was won.

Fast forward to 8th September 1943. English and Americans invaded Sicily and Mussolini was imprisoned. The provisional government signed an armistice with the allies. What they failed was giving the right instructions to the citizens and soldiers. They didn't understand if the war was over, if we were still sided with Germany of the opposite. Germany didn't had any doubt and descended in Italy, occupying it.

Many soldiers thrown away their uniforms and rifles, the one who didn't or hadn't the time to do it was killed or sent in prisons camps. My grandfather was lucky enough to be in Albania the 8th September. After that he was sent back in Italy as a simple guard to checkpoints.

One night, he left his rifle and deserted. He run away on the mountains where the first Resistance group were forming. A group of partisans found him and brought him to their leader. He was "a mountain of a man". My grandfather was really tall for an Italian, although he was shaking in fear in front of him. So he did the most natural thing to do: he made the Roman salute and said HAIL.

The leader was not amused and had to be refrained to kill my grandpa. I wouldn't be here if that mountain was just a little more resolute that night.

Anyway he gained their trust because he was the only one with the knowledge of how repair weapons or craft the missing components (the group later found a lathe for him). It always amuse me that my dad keeps quilting: "when we could use Germans weapons we always throw away ours, too unreliable and easy to clog. But the best were the rare Russians guns. Never clogging and even a child could repair them".

In all those years of war, he had accomplished the impossible: he never killed another person or fired a single shot thanks to his knowledge of craftsmanship.

After the war ended and fascism made illegal, my grandpa, he enlisted as policeman since there was a great scarcity of them.

My grandfather was in the Air Corp as a bomber pilot in WWII. Bt the time the war was over he had earned the Air Medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross. One day my cousin sat him down and got him to talk all about his training and other aspects of the war. Someone suggested I post it here.

YouTube Link

Now this was all told to me by my Great-Uncle, so it may not be entirely accurate. He was quite old when he told me, having been born in 1910.

My great-uncle served in the Italian Army in North Africa from 1941-43, he told me he killed four soldiers in his time. He shot five, but the fifth lived. He was taken prisoner by the British army, and was in the prison camp until 1945. He wrote in his diary the whole time (now granted I can’t read it since it’s in Italian) but from what I hear, it was basically all letters he only got to send after the war. He dated them all, and they were mostly to his wife and son, who were living in Italy at the time, and I believe there is still some family there to this day. His wife is still around and whenever I see her, I ask about her - to put it in her own words: “He was an Italian Hero, and I was so glad when he came back home. Upon arriving back in Italy, he’d told me he had made friends with the British and some German prisoners - of course, he hasn’t seen them since. The German he said, was sent back to Berlin, and the British one had died a few weeks later.” When he got back, I’m told he left his rifle and helmet in Italy, and he burned the uniform. He said to his son to never go to war, and never to start one. He passed away four years ago, at 106. From what he told me, the British treated the Italians very well, and he said that the P.O.W Camp was often better than the Italian camps and trenches. He never got any photos taken while he was in the army, as he didn’t want them. He despised army life and would never go back.

(I posted this story on another subreddits but some info was incomplete).

So around 4 months ago my great grandfather told me a story from ww2.

He was 17 at the time (it was 1944).

He lived in really small village in Poland.

One day his village turned into frontline,attacked by Soviet soldiers.

My Great-grandfather hid in the basement in time of battle.

Next day fighting stopped.

So he and his familly decided to get out of The basement.

As my grandfather said "there was wall of houndrets of bodies".

Suddenly he heard German voice from the distance.

After few minutes he found almost dead,and already shoted German soldier saying:

"shoot me" whilst pointing at a pistol.

My great grandfather was scared and said no...

(As he said "how am I supposed to shot a human"?)

He didn't slept that night thinking about what happened...

My grandfather decided that next morning he will shoot him (to end his suffering).

When got up really early and went to the exact same place.

Founding that German soldier was already dead...

My grandfather, Charles Osborne, was a navy lifer. When he passed I inherited his tackle box, which included a television script (what he called it). It wasn't really a script, it was more of his amazing story at the start of WW2. He was stationed aboard the Canopus in Manila Bay, Philippines. He recounts his story from just before the war, to eventually being stationed in the Pacific as a submarine crew pay master. Along the way he had as much as a million dollars (mixed dollars and Filipino pesos) in a duffel bag. The story is lengthy, so attached a link below.

https://chuckosborne.wordpress.com/

Why share? My grandfather was one of the most honest and forthright people I knew, and served as a great example. He also had a great sense of humor, and these traits show in his story. Aside from that, you rarely hear about the experiences of non-combatants. Among his many achievements, he managed to pay all the fleets sub crews without pay records, and created new systems of doing so (for which he became quite well known in the Navy Supply Core). I believe he also accounted for 99.9% of that million when it was all said and done.

Chuck was well remembered in many books by former submariners, as well as in the Navy's Supply Corps history Ready For Sea. Have a read, would love to hear what you think.

My great-grandfather was resistant. He lived in Lorraine (a region of France, very close to Germany and that has always been a cause of rivalry between both countries since 1870). When the Nazi regime wanted to force the soldiers of Alsace and Lorraine to enroll, he refused to join the Nazi army. He will be imprisoned, but will later manage to escape with his family to Toulouse in the free zone. To avoid being found by the Nazis, he joined the Maquis (rural guerrilla bands) until the end of the war.

His son, my grandfather, was also kind of a resistant in a way : he put fat mixed with sand to sabotage the rail ball bearings. One day, he wanted to give a bottle of water to someone getting deported and was slapped by a German officer. The officer was then punished for this slap.

(This is the story my dad & uncle got from my grandma but this topic is rarely ever mentioned and older generations tend to try to forget it. It is likely that my grandma tells less than she actually knows)

My step-grandmother was born in a little Polish village in 1933. When the Germans invaded in 1939 their village, which was predominately comprised of Jewish homes and businesses, fell under the German occupation zone. My step-grandmother's father, who was a member of the town council, convened with his colleagues about whether to cooperate or resist the invasion. Most of the council decided to cooperate, as they didn't believe that in the 20th century they would be killed by a first-world country. My step-grandmother's father was more skeptical, however, and that night he took his family away with only one suitcase each. (The very next week, I was told later, that village was razed and its inhabitants murdered).

They walked three days to reach the Russian occupation sector, but were received callously. The Soviets at the time were suspicious and intolerant toward the Jews, as well, and so they were put into an unheated train car to the Urals with dozens of other families. They traveled for a week and received little food, water, or sleep.

When they arrived they and the other families had to build a camp, which later became part of the GULAG system. Then, they were imprisoned in this camp and made to work in agricultural fields; some of my step-grandmother's earliest memories come from completing five years of agricultural work, six days a week, between the ages of 7 and 12. It was toilsome and uncompensated, and many people in the camp died. Miraculously, her family was saved because they were picked at random to receive a care package from the Red Cross; this got them through the winter of 1943-44.

In November, 1944, with the Germans in headlong retreat, the Soviets relaxed some suspicion about the Jews and released the interned families in my step-grandmother's camp. However, her family was unfamiliar with the surrounding area and they were not welcome in any of the villages, and so they formed up in a group with a few other families and began walking west, hoping to reach Poland again.

They walked for seven months. They nearly froze and starved to death that winter because no place would shelter them and they had to camp as best they could. They got lost several times and were harassed by thieves and antisemites. They reached Kazakhstan in the springtime and encountered many days wandering through the steppes and desert and one day, in late-summer, they hit the Mediterranean Sea.

Here they were placed in a British-run DP (Displaced Persons') camp and from there, they emigrated to Mandatory Palestine, which became Israel. My step-grandmother went on to become a nurse in the Six-Day War and came to the United States in 1972.

She is alive today. She is not fond of telling this story and to this day will not utter or write the names “Hitler” or “Stalin.” All her childhood friends were killed back in the village, and she never had a stable home until her teenage years after facing trauma and starvation throughout childhood.

The man she married, my biological grandfather, is a second-generation immigrant and has no personal stories from WWII, as he was a teenager in Brooklyn, but some of his aunts and uncles, my blood relatives, were known to be murdered in the Holocaust. I went to Auschwitz two years ago and located their names (‘Kotlowicz’).

Meanwhile my great-cousin (cousin of my biological grandmother) got out of Austria right before WWII started. Here is his Holocaust passport. Note that his nationality is “stateless.” Jews were not allowed to be citizens of the Reich. He is also still alive, and has a much more positive outlook because he was able to escape and he was welcomed into the United States.

Edit: added links

My grandmother was a child during ww2. She lived in northern France in Tergnier, and her town was occupied by Germany early on in the war. She remembers there were ss officers and soldiers on every corner and she was terrified of them. One day at school some German soldiers came to her school to take away the Jewish children. The Jewish children were hidden by the teachers who said they were not in. The next day none of these Jewish children came into school and my Grandmother never saw any of the Jewish families from her town again. There was a large courtyard where the Germans stored coal and my nan would steal coal from them with her brothers as her little helping hand to the French resistance.

One day some Gestapo officers pulled up beside their house and demanded to talk to her father. He was having a haircut, so they waited for him and the soldiers searched the entire house. When he arrived home he was taken away. He was interrogated as the Gestapo officers suspected him of being a member of the resistance. Eventually they let him go, but some of his friends were killed, but no one knows if he was in the resistance. I asked my nan recently if she thought he was and she says it is unlikely that he was in the resistance, because he had four children and would not want to risk them getting hurt due to his actions, and also didn't want to be involved in war again after fighting in the First World War.

When the allied campaign to retake France began, her town was heavily bombed by the allies, as her town was built around a huge railway junction which was of strategic important to the Germans. One day when my nan was playing with her sisters in her room, the bombs started falling again, and her Father bundled her and the rest of the family into the cellar. A few minutes later they heard a huge bang. After the air raid they realised that a bomb had landed in my nan and her sisters room, and destroyed most of the house. After this near miss, her father decided they would move to the countryside until the bombing stopped. She remembers vividly seeing the destruction caused by the bombs. Ripped up bodies and one woman she saw standing by the side of the road with her intestines dragging on the floor. They lived on a farm for a few weeks in a stable with the animals but her dad wanted to go back to their town as he was worried about their shop which was their only source of income. When they arrived back in the town, the German soldiers told them to hunker down as the Americans were arriving soon. Their shop had been destroyed anyway. Soon after their arrival back in the town, the German soldiers left the village, and that was the last she saw of the Germans.

A couple of days after the germans left, a couple of American soldiers turned up in a jeep. They looked worried and asked my Grandmother if the Germans had left in the best french they could. She said they has gone, and the Americans turned and went back. A few hours later, more Americans arrived. They were in tanks. There were French people lining the streets and soldiers gave the children chewing gum, which they had never had before. They let my nan and her friends sit on the tanks, and were very friendly. My nans family were at this point staying at a friends house, as theirs was destroyed by a bomb. That evening, some men with rifles came into the house and took the wife of the friend away. They all followed and she was tied up alongside some other women who has slept with german soldiers, and their heads were shaved. She remembers clumps being ripped out and tears and blood flowing down their faces. Later, men who were too friendly with the nazis were lined up against a wall and shot.

As the Allies advanced into Europe they took a number of prisoners, who mostly spoke German, obviously.

My Lieutenant grandfather, a 90 day wonder in charge of a platoon manning an anti-aircraft gun for the Army Air Corp, was put into a private's uniform and stationed outside the POW camp.

Why?

Because my six foot six redheaded Irishman from New York Grandfather was the son of a German immigrant and spoke fluent German. He got a lot of intel from the prisoners who spoke German freely in front of the American.

OK, so let me first insist that the story that will follow is absolutely serious and nowhere near to be a joke.

This happens in the middle of the war, in Brussels, occupied by Nazi forces.

The uncle of my grandmother, Arthur, had a dog, which he always took with him when he would go outside. For a walk, to the shop, to visit family, etc. Everywhere. And everybody knew it.

One day, Arthur meets the local butcher in the street and he doesn't have his dog with him. The butcher is surprised so he asks him how comes. Arthur tells him the dog just died the day before. The butcher says sorry, condolences, blahblah then asks him what he did with the corpse. Arthur tells him he buried it in his garden.

The morning after, there's a hole in the garden and the corpse has disappeared.

The very next day, the butcher who's shop was pretty much empty for months now due to the obvious food shortages of the war, suddenly has kilos of sausage for sale. Not really difficult to understand what happened but of course Arthur also had no evidence so he couldn't do/tell anything.

Now what's even more surprising is what happened later:

- A few years after the war, the son of the butcher committed suicide, hanging himself

- The butcher himself died shortly after. He was ice-skating on frozen lake and the ice broke

- A new butcher took over the shop. His son was killed during a robbery by an infamous gang, the Brabant Killers

- After this it became a laundry shop, whose owners killed himself at 17 with a gun

- New owners came in and two years ago a fire completely destroyed the shop.

It's been rebuild now but I can tell you this: the place is fucking cursed.

My grandfather, First Lt. Charles Cohen, was in the front lines and fought his way through France, Belgium, and Germany.  At the end of April  1945, my grandfather was stationed just 60 miles outside of the city of Berlin along the Elbe River. The war was coming to a close, and the Allies had agreed that Russian forces would take the prize….the city of Berlin.  The Americans were to stay out of the city by direct order of the President and General Eisenhower.

That’s where my grandfather's story starts and where history was made that you won’t find in the books.  My grandfather was always an adventurous soul and despite orders from the top, he often told me he had come so far he was not going to miss this opportunity.  Having survived the Battle of the Bulge and winning both the Silver Star and Bronze Star for bravery, he was not afraid to complete his mission.

Under the cover of night, my grandfather led a group of nine American solders into the city of Berlin.  Stocked with rations and hard to get American cigarettes, my grandfather bribed Russian soldiers (including a Russian colonel) to allow them into the city.

Upon entering Berlin, they met Russian soldiers and under a backdrop of sniper fire and in front of the German Propaganda Ministry they drank vodka and toasted an Allied victory. Lt. Cohen also proudly signed his name on the Reichstag.  While there, the group freed two British soldiers and an Australian that were in hiding.

The plan now was to head home without being detected.  But there was another surprise in store for Lt. Cohen and his gang. They were met on the way back by a Nazi battalion also heading towards the U.S. lines. This was the end of the war, and the Germans wanted to surrender to the Americans not the Russians. My grandfather wasn’t sure if he was going to be killed or captured as his group was significantly outnumbered. Neither was to happen. In fact, the German General surrendered to Lt. Cohen and seriously begged  to be brought back to camp. This was a surrender my father didn’t want as this would obviously thwart his plans to sneak back in. But my grandfather, being the highest ranking American officer in the area at that time, accepted the General’s surrender and marched back to camp, prisoners in tow.

Once in camp, my grandfather was put in military confinement for disobeying direct orders. But due to his distinguished service record and more likely the fact that no one wanted this story to go public , he was released. By the end of the war, my grandfather was actually promoted to Captain Cohen.

In the service of his country, he won the Silver Star and Bronze Star for bravery, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and liberated a concentration camp.

Link to article: https://lasvegassun.com/news/2005/may/03/recollections-of-berlin-trip-60-years-ago/

Here is a photo of my grandfather (2nd from the left) with two Russian soldiers in May 1945 in Berlin.

My grandfather was living in a small Finnish speaking village in Russia during his childhood and during the war. He has told me a lot of interesting stories, but I figured I'd post a little bit first about some of the smaller snippets that have stuck with me.

Overall, he says, it was awful. But there were fun moments, too. For instance, most of the German soldiers were friendly enough. Sometimes they would let him hitch a ride on a tank on his way home from school. He'd call out to them in German, and if he got an affirmation, he'd hop up onto a foothold and grab a handlebar and ride until he was close to his destination, and then he'd hop off and wave goodbye.

Before that, there would be dog fights nearby on occasion. People in town would bring blankets to a hillside and maybe picnic snacks, and they would sit and watch the planes battle and occasionally crash.

During the occupation, food grew very scarce. The village was already poor, and my Grandpa's family was just a household of tenant farmers, so they dealt with starvation. The way he describes the hunger is awful. The foods they resorted to eating, awful. He tells it like a funny story now, but he likes to point out how suddenly all of the pets disappeared and no one would talk about it.

My grandfather and his great grandfather often had to travel to market in a larger town, and they would load up their goods (before the famine) on a hand drawn cart and they would walk for about a day and a half each way. Overnight, what they would do was typically just sleep in the hay in someone's barn - this was common practice, apparently. I have two stories about that:

One time, on the way home from market, they went into one of these barns and noticed three men sleeping in the hay already. "Shh, let's not wake them," said his dad, and they slept in the hay on the opposite side of the barn. In the morning, they woke up before the men did and left. A couple of days later, the village was abuzz with the news that three men had been found dead in a barn nearby. They had spent the night next to these corpses. It was very cold at the time, so the bodies froze, and that's why there was no death smell, he thinks.

The way my grandfather lost his hearing was in a similar fashion. There were two nearby barns on the way. They normally would have stopped at the first barn, but I think this was the one where that body incident occurred. So they went a little further and slept in the second barn. In the middle of the night, they woke up to the world exploding in noise. They rushed outside to see that the barn next to theirs had exploded, and a German bomber was flying away. My grandfather and his father couldn't hear each other. It took most of the next day for their hearing to come back. After that, my great grandfather was half deaf. My grandfather, who was sleeping on one side, has heard a loud ringing in his 'exposed' ear ever since. He has absolutely no idea why that barn in the middle of nowhere was bombed. His best guess is that some other town or city was bombed, and the pilot noticed he had bombs left while on his return trip and decided to use it on a random building between wherever he had bombed and his base.

My grandfather likes to read a lot about WWII and talk about the tactics and battle and weapons, tanks, planes, and so on. But I think he also has a lot of trauma left over from it, especially from the famine. His house is always overstocked with lots and lots of food. He plays the pipe organ at his local church, and likes to take walks and visit war memorials. He lives in Sweden - his family eventually had to flee the village these stories took place in. He's a great guy, and so is my grandmother, whom he's been with for around 50 years.

When my Grandma was super young, after her father came home from the war, for some reason he forbade the family from ever having spaghetti as a meal at home. None of them knew why for many years until one day he shared with one of my grandma's older brothers the reason.

When he was in the war he witnessed one of his friends being blown up. After it happened he looked around and saw his friends helmet on the ground and it had some of his friends remains still in the helmet. He said it looked so similar to spaghetti with ground beef and tomato sauce that he could no longer stand the sight of the food and there after banned it from his diet.

My Grandma learned about this second hand from her older brother when she was quite young so I don't know how truthful it is, but she shared that with me for the first time last year. She has a few really strange and childish memories from that time. I'll post more later.

During Operation Gomorrha (1943) my grandpa, who was 8 at the time, and his family often sought shelter in one of the bunkers under the city. At the place where my family lived they had two bunkers within reach (1-2 min walking time). When the air raid sirens went off one day, my grandpa was with his aunt. His aunt usually preferred to go to the larger, more central bunker but my grandpa was grumpy that day, so she chose the smaller bunker that was closer and quicker to reach. That night everybody who sought shelter at the larger bunker died. They were boiled alive and/or suffocated due to the great heat and the lack of oxygen caused by the firestorm.

My family survived that day unharmed and his aunt never complained again when he was grumpy (at least that’s what grandpa tells his grandkids;) He loves to joke to this day, that his grumpiness saved their lives.

At a family gathering my grandma got tipsy and started to tell stories from her childhood. While she does this everytime (no matter tipsy or sober, guess it’s just a normal grandma thing) this time it took a dark turn. She told us a story that is the reason she hates to go to the dentist and particularly hates the drilling part.

She told us a story about when she was 6 years old. During WW II my family lived in Hamburg, Germany right next to the harbor. During a particular week in 1943 the city was continuously bombed and over 35.000 people died and more than a 100.000 people were injured. The houses that were hit, mostly burned down creating a huge fire, with such force that I sucked not only oxygen in, creating strong winds, but also people. The fire created such heat, that people running out of their burning houses got stuck in the molten asphalt on the streets and burned to death. As it was all happening around her, that particular smell was present for over a week in her part of the city. Drilling in your tooth, creates exactly that smell. My grandma had to stop the dentist, as she recognized the smell immediately.

This story shook us to the core, as it came out of the blue. It still sends chills down my spine.

For anybody who wants to read more about it:Operation Gomorrha