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By Dan Olson, Minnesota Public Radio
May 25, 2001
Part of MPR's Voices of Minnesota series
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Along with the carnage and destruction caused by World War II there are amazing accounts of compassion and survival. Two Minnesotans, former prisoner of war Richard Carroll, and Holocaust survivor Sabina Zimering told their survival accounts to Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson.
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ROSEMOUNT NATIVE RICHARD CARROLL was a B-24 bomber pilot, flying missions from Italy to drop bombs on Hitler's war machine factories in Eastern Europe. On every mission, the Eagan resident recalls, German gunners created a vast black cloud caused by exploding shells - flak.
On his very first mission, Carroll says, one of the bombers ahead of them suffered a direct hit. "The largest piece of the aircraft or the crew was the rudder, which was about a foot square."
Carroll, 22 at the time, said he had to find a way to cope with the terror of war. "I decided that I had to surrender myself and say, that I don't want to die, but if it's my turn, then I put myself, I'm ready, I put myself in your hands, almighty God."
Flak hit Carroll's B-24 on his 15th mission and sent a propeller spinning out of control. With no parachute training, the crew bailed out over farm fields in Hungary. Local farmers, angry because of errant Allied bombs that had killed family and friends and destroyed homes, saw Carroll floating to the ground and came after him.
Carroll heard a shot. He felt a burning sensation in his chest. The villagers were intent on killing. Then, in a stunning turn of fortunes, local police arrived, extricated Carroll from the mob and brought him to a military hospital where other prisoners of war were being treated. That's where he learned he'd been shot in the heart. The bullet fragment remains there to this day.
Time and again, Carroll hovered at the edge of death, and time and again, compassionate doctors and nurses working for the Hungarian military kept him alive.
The compassion of friends and neighbors helped save the life of Sabina Zimering. The retired St. Louis Park physician who was born a Polish Jew was also enduring the terror caused by Hitler's war machine. Soon after Poland was invaded by the Germans in 1939, Jews were ordered to move to ghettos.
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When rumors circulated that the Gestapo was about to begin another round of mass arrests, Zimering's father said it was time to try escape the ghetto. The family split up and wandered their hometown. A patrol stopped Zimering's mother and brother.
"In the commotion of all these people, mother whispered to him, 'run', and he ran away, and they arrested her, and that was it, we never saw her again," she recalls.
Zimering's father got word to his daughters that they should use their false documents to get work in Germany. Zimering says the idea sounded crazy, but it worked. The Germans needed workers to keep the war going. After repeated close calls, fearing discovery and arrest at any moment, Zimering and her sister got jobs as cleaners in a German hotel, where most of the residents were German military officers.
Zimering says she and her sister stood outside the hotel on the day Allied troops arrived. "I felt like jumping up and down, and yelling at them, 'you young boys, you risked your lives to liberate us and to liberate the world,' but I didn't. I kept quiet and held my sisters hand and tried to hide my tears."
Zimering's mother and father and more than 50 extended family members were dead. She and her sister and brother left Europe to settle in Minnesota shortly after the war.
Russian troops liberated Richard Carroll's prisoner-of-war camp in northern Germany. Seventy percent of his group, the 15th Air Force, had been killed or taken prisoner. Carroll returned to Minnesota to become a civilian employee for the military.
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