Military Mystery and the Forbidden Gift

SCOTIA, NY - 'I saw it 50 years ago,' said the soldier's 84-year-old widow, Katie.
'I'd heard the stories,' said Maia, the late soldier's teenage granddaughter. 'I knew it was there.'

The stories she had heard were the same ones her mother Jean had been hearing for a half-century, going back to the time she was a little girl growing up at the family home in Slingerlands.

'He told us those stories for years,' Jean De Porte said. 'I knew of Daddy's forbidden closet. And I knew that inside of the closet was the forbidden gun.'

Katie De Porte sways back and forth in her rocking chair on a lazy spring afternoon, and remembers how it was growing up in Albany in the early 1920s.

'David and I knew each other since we were born,' she said. 'Our parents were best friends at the state college, now it's called SUNY, but back then they used to call it the New York State College for Teachers. The strange thing is both our parents ended up getting divorced, right about the same time. Divorce was pretty unheard of then. Anyway, David and I got married.'

The De Portes relocated to New York City, moving to a seventh floor apartment in Stuyvesant Town on Manhattan's Lower East Side. It was where the couple raised their son and daughter after the war was over. A few years earlier, with the war in full swing, David sought to join the troops overseas but was stymied in his effort by a physical disability.

'He had very poor eyesight,' remembers Katie. 'He wanted to be in combat, particularly being Jewish, but bad eyesight prevented him from being allowed to go. He hated that. He wanted to fight, but instead he got stuck at Camp Shanks.'

Fourteen miles north of New York City, Camp Shanks was erected on a sprawling plot of land in Orangeburg. At one mile wide and 2½ miles long, it had a bunk capacity of more than 46,000 and featured a number of bowling alleys and gymnasiums for troop recreation, as well as a half-dozen movie theaters and multiple, fully stocked libraries.

For soldiers, the camp was the final staging area after it opened in the first days of 1944. It was close to the Eastern Seaboard, making it a popular spot as the final spot before shipping the soldiers overseas. So many passed through the camp that it earned the battle-ready nickname among the troops as 'Last Stop, USA.' For De Porte, Camp Shanks was his destination.

'They put David in charge of the Special Service Unit where he became friends with another guy, a Disney artist whose name was George Peed,' Katie said. Among the dozens of popular animations, Peed is probably best known for his characterization of the old cartoon 'The Mighty Hercules.'

During its years of operation, more than 1 million soldiers passed through the camp. Thousands more were semi-permanent residents, prisoners of war with Italian and German backgrounds. Katie knows of a handful that came from Yugoslavia. Asked why there were Yugoslavian prisoners being held in upstate New York during World War II, she turns her palms upward and shrugs. 'I have no idea why. Those Yugoslavian boys hated the Germans. But David became friends with them, with one of them in particular. His name was Frank Trebec.'

If no one seems to know the exact reason why Trebec and his Yugoslavian countrymen were being held as prisoners of a war they had apparently had no part of, it might explain the relaxed rules while they were held 'in captivity.'

'Those boys had pie and ice cream every night with dinner. Some nights they would go out on the town and take the short train ride to Manhattan. They must have thought they landed in heaven,' Katie said.

'David was in the Army for four years, and he and Frank became good friends. This was around 1945 that they were there together at Camp Shanks. They were very young then, these boys. Just before they got shipped back to Yugoslavia, Frank wanted to give my husband a gift.'

The gift of friendship was a .32-caliber pistol, a Rheinische automatic.

Katie shakes her head. 'Can you imagine? How could a POW be allowed on American soil with a gun?'

After the war, the family relocated back to the Albany area, settling in Slingerlands. He showed the gun to his wife and then put it in a box inside his closet where it remained for more than 50 years.

When the family relocated, Jean De Porte was 2 years old. While she hadn't seen the gun, she was told the circumstances of its existence and her dad's friendship with the Yugoslavian prisoners during the war.

'My father always spoke friendly of Frank,' she said. 'There were pictures and an ongoing correspondence of letters that went on for a number of years.'

March 7, 1951:

David, how are with all you? I think to you always...

I remember always you and your country and how we was work together. How it was for me! Everything was enough good. Cigarettes plenty...

David De Porte passed away in August 2004. The remaining family members decided it was time for Katie to move into more accommodating surroundings in Clifton Park. That meant relocating from the house in Slingerlands that served as the family home for more than 50 years. A half-century of memories and a lifetime of possessions needed to be packed. There was also the mystery surrounding the existence of the gun. The duty fell to Jean.

'I had heard so many stories for so many years that I felt great trepidation going into the closet - that forbidden closet with the forbidden gun. You just didn't go into daddy's closet. It was scary. Horrific, because it was a mystery for all those years.'

On Katie's moving day, every story of the era held true when Jean reached into her father's closet and emerged with a box. Inside, was the gun. It is the lasting legacy of a friendship between two young men from opposite sides of the world. As boys they were thrown together by the circumstances of war and came away friends.

Jean showed the gun to her husband. He called the Saratoga County Sheriff's Office and brought the gun in for processing.

Today, a statue marks the area where Camp Shanks once existed for more than a million World War II soldiers. And Yugoslavia is now a splintered land that sits on the east side of the Adriatic Sea.

Katie said she and her late husband often wondered what became of his friend.

'Frank had said he wanted to move to America and the letters went back and forth until 1951, but then suddenly, the letters stopped. Something happened, and they ended just like that,' she said.

'David wondered what happened. He was depressed that Frank might have gotten killed. He wrote and he tried to find out through the embassy, but never heard back. What happened to Frank? David never knew.'

The gift of the gun and the closing lines of their last year of communicating in letters will have to suffice.:

David,

I please you excuse me for all. I'm a little in worry,' it reads, concluding:
The best wishes to you and your family.
With great regards sent, your friend Frank.


by Thomas Dimopoulos
published in The Saratogian, May 29, 2005.