Zajac - It Started With Patton Teresa Leskas Story A Memoir

It Started with Patton

Teresa Leskas Story

A Memoir

Amy E. Zajac

vii

Copyright 201 A my E. Zajac

The photographs are a compilation of collected and assembled material from Teresa Leskas family. This compilation, as used here, refers to the original selection and arrangement of preexisting photographs .

T he noted Copyright includes authorship of text, compilation, and editing.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions of it in any form.

In cooperation with Chattahoochee Publishing.

All rights reserved.

ISBN - : 098820701X

ISBN-13 : 978-0-9882070 -1-1

In Your Honor, Mom.

Amy

My acknowledgment of support ive family and friends.

To my daughters, Sabina Zajac and Teresa Waller, for the hours of conversations supporting every step of the journey to this first book.

To my friend and fellow writer/author, Donna Sundblad, for her treasured advice and her patience with my unending questions.

To my friend and fellow writer/author, Maureen Pierre, for her encouragement and teaching me to stay in the moment.

To my friend, Sharon Grimson, for reading and re-reading every new edition giving me her great readers perspective.

Contents

Introduction

For years my sisters and I urged our mother to tell us her early life story in more detail than she ever told us before. Mom described her life to us very generally and stated many times, she thought her life to be nothing special. She just happened to live in a time of history when the whole world was in turmoil. As she approached her sixties, she finally started to think about her own history a little more. The 50 th anniversary of her freedom brought it all into perspective. There was a time when she believed, she would never be living a free life, let alone celebrate a 50 th anniversary of her freedom. On the actual anniversary she visited the General Patton Memorial Museum in Chiriaco Summit, California. Seeing so many war artifacts, pictures, and medals honoring, not only General Patton, but all the men who fought so gallantly with him, enlightened the idea that these moments leading to her new life were important. After that, she and I started a process of writing down her story. She talked and gave me what I call snippets of information and always with the caveat, who would want to know this or Amy I just dont remember. In any case, her story of survival is sad, horrifying, and joyous, filled with more perseverance than any of us ever knew. Self-taught in not only English, but also, every subject we Americans need schooling for, she is even an award winning quilter, mastering American Quilting to perfection. She reinvented herself over and over, before the term became fashionable.

Her current complete name is Teresa Maria Leska Thomas. However, when she arrived in the United S tates in 1946, her name was Teresa Maria Leska Lejman. Growing up, her family called her Terenia or Terecia, the familiar versions of Teresa in the Polish language. Born in a unique time in the history for Poland, with Germany to the west and the Soviet Union (Russia) to the east, Poland lands were in high demand by both of these bordering countries. During World War II this conflict overtook the Polish people. My mothers perspective comes from a childs memory of the conflict with an adults rationale.

Amy E. Zajac, Her Daughter

The orders were given; the trek was a prance,

Orders were followed what ere consequence.

Forging ahead is all that they did,

The Third Armys glory was just up ahead.

A woman ran crying in front of the charge,

The tanks were so loud, no voices were large.

One soldier jumped down, to be at her side,

He moved her away from a tank in its stride.

They didnt just stand round and wait,

They kept on going to liberate,

They gave so many the chance to flee,

To find their families and again be free!

Chapter

Spring 1945

In the spring of 1945, we worked in the potato fields. I dove for a ditch when bullets hit the dirt near me. They sounded like spitting. The dust flew in tiny clouds all in a row. I looked up at the plane, its humming engine whined when it pulled out of the dive taking its place back in formation. The sky, dark with so many planes, shaded us in the fields just like a big cloud floating between the sun and the ground. My guardian angel hard at work saved not only me, but the other forced labor camp workers with me. No one died during this shooting, not even the mean Gestapo guards. I knew the war was not going well for the Germans. I could tell by the frequency of bombings and with so many Allied airplanes in the sky every day.

Very early in the morning the next day, about 5 a.m., I suspected something unusual was happening. The rumble of tanks on the road could be heard coming in from the west. I didnt know what tanks were, but they were loud and everyone I heard comment about what it was, something was changing and it was big. The few guards which still remained with us, no longer carried weapons, this added to our speculation. We could always tell when the war went well for the Germans on the warring fronts; the guards were meaner to us. And vice versa, when things went badly for the Germans, the guards were nicer, but, no weapons meant something different altogether. I continued my early morning chores.

At 7 a.m. , there were no guards anywhere in sight. If I walked away from the Hartman Farm, the labor camp where I lived for two years near Sehlen, Germany, no one would see me. SoI did. Moments later, when I ran out on the road, at seventeen years of age, I saw my first American tank bearing down quickly toward me. It had a big white star on the front of it. I could not believe my eyes, butcrashing reality hit me. I was free. I stood frozen. The enormous vehicle came closer and closer. It made a loud clackity sound. The soldiers riding on it waved frantically at me, but my legs wouldnt move. One of the men had black skin. I never saw a man with black skin before. He yelled the loudest, but his words were alien. That was the first time I heard English. He waved and waved, almost frenzied, for me to get off the road. In the shock of the moment, I guess, I still didnt move. With the army tank no more than ten feet away, the American jumped off. He literally pushed me to the side of the road. I would have been killed if it wasnt for the tall black man. He jumped right back on the tank, waved and I never saw him again. That was Good Friday, April 3 rd , 1945, and I have no memory of the next few hours. I knew one thing. I wanted to find my sister, Lodzia. She should be fairly near, at another farm with displaced person laborers. Being able to make a decision on my own, without anyone stopping me, exploded an odd feeling inside me. I was happy!

With so much turmoil and all the telephone wires torn down by the Allied Forces, communications were very limited. There were no German soldiers anywhere in sight. I thought they were captured and transported as prisoners of war. I found out later the German guards scattered all over the fields. They ran when General Pattons Third Army came through. The Third Army didnt work through the fields in our locale until later.

My driving thought, find my sister. When I got closer to where I thought she would be, about a twelve kilometer walk, I saw German guards carrying pistols and rifles and realized Lodzia was not on Pattons main liberation track. With all the confusion, I feared being captured again by the Germans. The only clothes I had clearly showed the big yellow and green letter P, identifying me as Polish. But thennobody paid any attention! I hid out until Lodzia was freed by

finding a small abandoned cabin where I spent the night. Dark, dingy and vacant of furniture, the dilapidated shack sheltered me for the night and from being seen by Gestapo still hiding in the fields. It was very cold and I shivered all night with just my dress, and of course, my horrible wooden shoes.