By Khalida Sarwari
Minutes after Pauline Carmona pinned the Legion of Honour medal on the lapel of Donald Gustafson’s suit, then sealed the deal with a light kiss on each cheek, the 91-year-old decorated war veteran sat on the ledge of a window overlooking San Francisco’s Inner Sunset neighborhood, behind him panoramic views of a scenery that on this day was blanketed by gray clouds.
“Today is a special day,” Carmona, the French consul general, said from behind a podium in a room filled with the families and friends of the eight veterans that were presented with the medal symbolizing France’s highest decoration. “Today we celebrate eight heroes. You saved France and Europe from hell. You saved people you didn’t even know. I’m here today to say the French people have not forgotten. Their children and grandchildren have not forgotten.”
It’s not easy to forget, after all, an event that changed the course of history, and so many lives along with it. Gustafson hasn’t forgotten either: the horrors of war, the imprisonment at the hands of the Germans, the hunger and thirst, the close calls, and especially losing his friends and comrades. Gustafson would give back all the awards–the two Purple Hearts, the Bronze Star, the Legion of Honour and countless other accolades–to have his friends back. The friends who fought alongside him but just weren’t as lucky as he was. The friends he watched die right beside him.
“I tried to forget,” Gustafson said days after the April 21 medal presentation, sitting in his Saratoga home, surrounded by his medals that symbolize his acts of bravery. “I used to dream a lot, how was I lucky?”
Gustafson landed with the 103rd infantry in Marseille on Oct. 4, 1944. It took his convoy 24 days to cross the Atlantic from Boston on the Monticello, an Italian luxury liner that had been converted into a troop ship that took American soldiers to the war front and returned with German prisoners. Because the ship was top-heavy, some of the soldiers were allowed to go up on the deck only twice a day. On one such occasion, Gustafson remembers seeing a passing ship on fire. To this day, he wonders what happened to the people on that ship.
More than 70 years later, Gustafson can still remember how rainy and wet Marseille was on the day they arrived, but there was no time to think about how miserable they were. He and his comrades marched on, crossing the Vosges Mountains and making it to Germany by the end of November.
Three days after he marked his 21st birthday, Gustafson was captured by the Germans during the battle of Selestat in the early morning hours of Dec. 3. The Germans took Gustafson and the other prisoners to Dresden, where the allies were bombing the city the night they pulled in. It is in Dresden where Gustafson experienced one of his many brushes with death.
He recounts an incident where a guard got too excited and accidentally fired his gun, narrowly missing Gustafson, but instantly killing three people in front of him.
“I survived one more time by the luck of the draw. I don’t know how I did it,” he said.
Some of his memories are bittersweet. He vividly remembers being in a boxcar on Christmas Eve and seeing another boxcar pull up full of young Polish girls who “were being processed to go somewhere.” When the ladies saw Gustafson and the other prisoners, they started singing Christmas carols in Polish. So Gustafson and his friends joined them, singing the same hymns but in English. The last image he has in his mind of them is their train fading into the night, their voices trailing as planes roared overhead.
Gustafson would move on, too, to Stalag 14B, a prison camp with the works: barbed wire, guards and dogs everywhere. He was assigned to work 10-hour days on the railroad in old, thin clothes and wooden shoes.
“One of the many jobs that we did–the steam locomotives would pull up and take up water,” he explained. “We were assigned on a daily basis to chip ice and clean up the tracks so the locomotives could move and get water.”
On good days, they’d find Brussels sprouts hanging from trees in the back yards of homes along the track. But most days were spent eating very little and drinking even less. They were so starved for water, Gustafson recalled, that he and the other prisoners would rub their hands on their jackets and then place their hands on the windows of the trains, wipe off the frost and lick their hands. “That’s what we had for water,” he said.
It was little wonder that by the end of the war Gustafson had dropped from 215 to a paltry 138 pounds.
Six months into the work camp, a day came when by some miracle there were no guards to be seen. Gustafson and some of the other prisoners mustered up the courage to leave, and as they were making their way out, a soldier shot at them from a German plane, but they managed to continue on their way.
The group of five splintered until it was just Gustafson and his friend Johnny, who would remain his friend until his death just a few years ago. The two of them first went to Prague, where the Russians had arrived, and once again Gustafson was filled with fear as he recalled eavesdropping on German soldiers who’d speculated that Russia and the U.S. would be going to war any day. When a Russian soldier plucked him from a crowd, Gustafson said he backed with all his might into the crowd until they lost him. Twenty-five thousand others, however, were not so lucky. They were captured by the Russians and never returned, Gustafson said.
When Gustafson and his friend finally made it to the front, they underwent a daylong interrogation by the Americans. “Of course they didn’t believe we were Americans,” he said. “They asked us all kinds of questions like who’s Babe Ruth and where’s Chicago.”
Eventually they were sent to recuperate in France before being placed on a Coast Guard ship to America. In four days they were in New York, greeted by the Statue of Liberty, but things would never be the same again. Before heading home to his parents in Pennsylvania, Gustafson spent another month in Florida, where he was treated for frostbite and malnutrition, which he said he suffers from to this day, along with post-traumatic stress disorder. He had other physical wounds, too, one on his right arm from a gunshot and another on his right leg from shrapnel.
While in the process of healing, Gustafson fell into a new normal, taking on a job at a casket factory. He then went on to study at the University of Miami and graduated with a degree in chemistry. Around that time, he met his wife, Beverly, at a resort in Chautauqua Lake where his parents had moved to and where Beverly, who was in college at the time, worked during her breaks. They married in 1952 and lived in Iowa, where Beverly was from. His job took them to Minneapolis and ultimately to Saratoga, where they settled with their family in 1972.
Gustafson worked for Memorex and other high-tech companies before retiring in the 1980s. He spent the first few years of his retirement traveling, and even returned to France and Germany, but found it much altered.
“It’s changed so much since ’44 to now that you don’t recognize it,” he said. “It’s all rebuilt.”
Beverly, who was an art teacher, died last year. These days, Gustafson said he spends much of his time “staying alive” and with family. He has two daughters, Kim and Chris, one son, Scott, and five grandchildren. Most of them were in the room and beamed proudly when Gustafson, wearing a simple black suit and grasping a cane, stood before the French consul general as she declared, “In the name of the president of the French Republic, I award you the Legion of Honour.”
“We’re lucky he survived,” his daughter, Chris, said. “He thinks every day about the friends that didn’t.”
Despite everything, Gustafson chooses to maintain a cheerful outlook on life.
“You might as well enjoy each day as it comes,” he said. “I look outside and I look at the sun and wish I could live forever.”
Link: French consul general presents Donald Gustafson her country’s highest decoration
