A Company of Heroes (8 page)

Dad never really struck the balance between being a family man and alcohol—it overtook him, particularly in the end. As a child and teenager, there was a lot of insecurity in the family. I always felt dread going home because I was never sure what I’d find. That was tough. When I was a kid I didn’t understand what was going on. I remember finding bottles around the house that he had hidden. Today, that’s not surprising to me because I understand alcoholism much better.

When I was probably nine, Dad took us camping one winter at a cabin in Julian, just north of San Diego. It was my dad, my sister, me, and my brothers. Dad became intoxicated and started hallucinating. He piled the beds against the windows because the Germans were “just outside,” he kept yelling. That kind of thing was terrifying for a kid, and it gives a good indication of the extent to which he continued to be haunted by the war, how the horrors he had seen spilled over to postwar life.

There were times where he became extremely introverted, such as around Christmas, which is when the men were in Bastogne. One Christmas he started talking about how Don Hoobler got killed (he had mistakenly shot himself in the leg with a Luger), and how Dad had been right there when it happened and had tried unsuccessfully to stop the bleeding. Some of the people in the company don’t remember my dad being there, but I can remember Dad talking about it. In the movie it’s portrayed as happening during the daytime, but Dad said it was more at night, and the men couldn’t locate where Hoobler had been shot. They weren’t able to get a good light on him because they could hear German tanks idling not far away.

It was about 1990, and we were trying to determine what unit Dad was in. We called his brother Bob. This was before the book or series came out. Bob Potter confirmed Dad was in Easy Company, 506th. We asked who his friends were, and Bob said, “Well, Hoobler was his best friend,” so that helped explain Dad’s introverted tendencies around Christmas.

I’d characterize the relationship he had with my mother as difficult. They divorced in 1967 or ’68. He was remarried twice more, although he didn’t have any more children. He was still married to his fourth wife when he died, so three divorces total.

In his last years Dad lived in Mt. Shasta, an outdoorsy type of town where he was able to be outside whenever he felt well enough. He’s buried there in the Mt. Shasta cemetery. He died from the flu. His health was not good by then, and the flu just kind of overwhelmed him.

I wasn’t interacting with him much toward the end. The last time I saw him was about ten years before his death. He wasn’t doing well then, from alcoholism, Valium addiction, and whatever else he could find. I went to his apartment to check on him, and he was really a mess. It’s tough to go into detail. He had lost much of his sense of reality. I guess as his son I needed to protect myself. I chose to put distance between us.

We kept in touch, on and off. He tried to regain some sense of control over his life, I think. He went to some kind of ministry school, one of these fringe religions, and became some kind of minister, perhaps working with other alcoholics, I’m not quite sure. The religion wasn’t enough to save him. The substances had pulled him down so far that he was never really able to climb back out. There were a lot of people at his funeral, though, maybe a hundred and fifty friends of his, so he was able to connect with people on a good level to some extent during his last few years. He died January 7, 1985.

It’s not easy being the child of an alcoholic. In my own life I’ve tried hard to break the cycle of addictions. I never drank much, but when my oldest daughter reached high school, I quit drinking altogether. It wasn’t like I ever drank much anyway: a six-pack of beer could sit in my fridge untouched for months. But I wanted her to see that alcohol didn’t automatically need to be part of every social gathering. If I went to a party, I didn’t need to drink to have a good time. That’s what I wanted to show her—to lead my family from the front. Seven or eight years went by where I didn’t drink at all. Occasionally I’ll have a beer now at dinner, but that’s it.

In the early 1990s I was a representative for Honeywell as a test engineer. I was commuting to Florida quite frequently at the time, almost on a weekly basis, and reading a lot. I had seen
Band of Brothers
on the bookshelf, but I didn’t know what unit Dad was in at the time. I had thumbed through the book but hadn’t seen any pictures of Dad, and his name wasn’t listed in the index, so I didn’t buy it.

A few years later, in the summer of 1997, my brother Tim was in an army surplus store in Connecticut where he lives. He talked to the store owner about our dad being a paratrooper, and the guy asked him what unit he was in. When Tim said, “Easy Company, 506th,” the guy recommended reading
Band of Brothers
. Tim went and bought the book, read it, and told me I needed to get it, so that’s when I bought it and read it cover to cover.

It was well worth the read. I recognized many of the stories Dad told us through the years. I was able to call Stephen Ambrose and we talked for some time. He put me in touch with Dick Winters, E Company’s commander, who gave me some other stories about my dad. I called and wrote other survivors of E Company, and have developed a good relationship with many of them. We’ve been invited to their reunions and have attended several. It’s been very good to go and connect with these men.

It’s true, Dad led a complicated life. When he wasn’t drinking, he could be a great father. I know he was always proud of his service. He volunteered, stepped up and did what needed to be done. That’s how I’d want people to remember George L. Potter Jr.

 

 

 

My father’s story is inextricably linked with my mother’s. Stephen Ambrose described her at the end of
Band of Brothers
with one simple line: “Carson fed an educated, beautiful, sophisticated Polish blond.”
¹⁰

That one line has raised questions over the years. Who was this Polish blond? Why was my father feeding her? And what was the mystery behind how they met and married?

Here’s how the story unfolds.

My mother was a blue-eyed dynamo who became a wife, widow, smuggler, slave, parent, and killer all before she turned twenty-three. Her name was Antonia Puchalska. Friends called her Toni.

When Toni was seventeen, she lived with her parents in Warsaw, the capital of Poland, right when the city was bombed by the Germans. Imag-ine it: Here was this pretty teenage girl, intelligent, sensitive, and full of dreams. One morning as she was getting ready to walk to school, bombs started falling out of the sky. Her childhood and young adulthood stopped at this point. It was September 1939, just before the official start of WWII, and Germany and Russia acted in tandem to simultaneously invade, ransack, and occupy Poland. Germany attacked from the west, Russia attacked from the east. The Polish army didn’t stand a chance, although it fought valiantly. It was vastly outnumbered and fell quickly. Thousands of Poles were arrested, executed, or deported to Siberia. Poland was divided between the Soviets and Germany and occupied by armed fighters.

Toni had been a child of wealth and privilege up to this point. Her mother was a doctor and her father was an engineer for the Polish government. They lived a cultured lifestyle in a large house on the outskirts of the city but were forced out of their house by the German army, who used it for a command center and officers’ barracks. Toni’s family was abruptly homeless with the war just beginning. A botanist family friend took them in elsewhere in Warsaw.

My mother was being courted by a young Polish army officer by the last name of Lewandowski. He was a longtime family friend, and they wished to marry soon, but delayed wedding plans because of the war.

Toni’s father and older brother were part of the Polish army and survived the initial invasion, but were soon murdered by the Russians while on a mission at a dam site.

In just weeks, Toni had lost her father, brother, and home. She longed for her homeland to return to a place of security and freedom and vowed to do whatever she could do to fight for her dreams—and her survival.

Despite her losses, Toni decided to press forward with her life. She went ahead and married her longtime love, the Polish officer Lewandowski, when she was just eighteen. Almost immediately they had a little blond-haired baby named Richard. It was a horrible time to bring a baby into the world. Toni’s new husband was a quick casualty of war. He died March 5, 1940, during the Katyn Forest massacre when some 22,000 Polish officers, policemen, intellectuals, and civilians were murdered by the Soviets.

In her grief both for her husband and her country, Toni, along with many other Polish young people her age, joined the Polish resistance. It was tough going for all. Her specific job was to smuggle bread to the Polish fighters at night, the fighters’ only source of food. Being associated with the Polish underground carried risks, but the botanist friend who sheltered Toni, her mother, and young son, Richard, had a secret double basement in his house. For the next year and a half my mother hid in the basement during the day while Nazis searched for her and other re-sisters. Sometimes she could hear the Nazis walk right over her head. She feared for her life every time she heard the familiar click of their heels.

Her mother looked after baby Richard during daylight hours. Even that task carried peril. Once, while grandmother and baby were outside, a bomb went off and the baby was hit in the stomach by shrapnel. Fortunately, he survived, although with permanent scars. At night, Toni continued to sneak out and take food to the Polish resistance. Each move by any family member was filled with danger.

Then one day the unthinkable happened. Toni came home and found that her mother and Richard had vanished. Toni had no idea what had happened until she started talking to neighbors and found out they had been picked up by the Nazis, thrown in the back of a truck. Nothing could be done. The grandmother and baby had been taken away to a concentration camp, but Toni didn’t know where. Toni was beside herself. There was absolutely nothing she could do but continue on alone.

Toni’s perilous work with the resistance movement continued. It was dangerous, secretive, and sometimes horrible work. One night while on a routine bread run some distance outside of Warsaw, Toni and her cousin Marie encountered an unforeseen Russian roadblock at a crossroads. A Russian colonel heard them from a distance and came out to investigate. Being caught would have meant certain death. The women hid in a ditch. Toni and Marie were armed. They ambushed and killed the Russian officer. Toni felt avenged, to a degree, for the killing of her husband, brother, and father by the Soviets, but knew she now had blood on her own hands. She was convinced the Russians were looking for her—and she was right. She needed to hide, even more than before.

Despite her extra precautions, she was more than ever motivated to help the resistance and help free her country. A strict ten o’clock curfew was imposed all over Warsaw. It was 1942, just before the start of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, and one night Toni was still outside five minutes after ten o’clock. She was caught by the Nazis for violating curfew. Toni was arrested, thrown on a truck with other prisoners, then herded onto a cattle train and sent to Auschwitz. The rumors of what was really happening at Auschwitz were just coming out in 1942. Being sent there was basically the same as a death sentence.

In Auschwitz, a prisoner was sent either to this line or that line: those marked for immediate extermination and those to be registered as prisoners. Some three million people eventually died in the camp. People often talk about how Hitler targeted the Jews—and that’s correct—yet he also targeted many other groups. Hitler didn’t just kill Jews. Anyone who got in the way of the Nazis was imprisoned. They usually ended up in the ovens. The Nazis considered Polish people
Untermenschen
, meaning subhuman, or less than human. Included in this group were Jews, Gypsies, Slavic people, and anyone else who was not an Aryan according to Nazi race terminology.

It was fortunate that Toni had blond hair and blue eyes, and that she spoke German fluently. (She had been raised by a German nanny who taught her the language.) Her captors found her both useful and attractive, so they didn’t kill her. Still, conditions in Auschwitz were horrible. Everywhere around her was death and dying. She knew she had to get out. Toni could think of only one plan—it was a long shot and risky, but she decided to take it. From prewar times, Toni’s family was acquainted with an influential German countess. Toni was able to smuggle a letter out to her, telling the countess her family’s story and begging for help. The countess received the letter, was able to pull some strings from the outside, and had Toni transferred to another Nazi labor camp, this one still severe, but less murderous than Auschwitz. The countess was more powerful than Toni realized. On the first night inside her new prison cell, Toni heard a familiar voice in the next room. She couldn’t believe it. It was Toni’s mother, along with baby Richard. The little family was reunited in the new prison camp.

The next three and a half years passed slowly and harshly. Toni remained in the prison camp with her aging mother and young son, sometimes hearing the Allied bombing of nearby railroads. Toni was not used as a translator this time; she worked at hard labor with a pick and shovel. Her specific job was to carry buckets of railroad ties and help repair the bombed railways. It was slave labor, but every night she was able to see all the family she had left in the world.