Don Waful was a prisoner of war during World War II for 28 months and 12 days.
During his time as a POW in Italy, he kept a notebook of his thoughts, ideas, dreams and fears from each day. Waful often wrote about little things that kept him going throughout his experience, like taking baths, shaving and occasionally getting hot meals.
But Waful always ended his entries thinking about one thing: Cassie.
Waful, who is a Class of 1939 Syracuse University alumnus, met Olga Casciolini — “Cassie” for short — an army nurse for the Fifth General Hospital, in July 1941 when they were both stationed in Belfast, Ireland. Waful, who had enlisted in the Army, saw Cassie at a dance and instantly fell for her.
After three weeks and three more dates, Waful proposed to Cassie.
“I was smitten,” Waful said. “And she was smitten with me.”
The couple announced their engagement on Christmas Eve 1941 and Cassie told Waful that she would wait for him until he got back from the war, no matter what happened.
In those days that was a very dangerous thing to do because we hadn’t gone into any war yet, and maybe you don’t come back.
Neither of them expected Waful would become a POW.
Waful said when you go into war, there are three things you mainly think about: making it through, getting wounded and getting killed. He said no one ever thinks about getting captured.
One of Waful’s commanding officers sent the Watertown, New York-native on a mission with about 10 other men and four tanks. Waful said the soldiers didn’t have all of the information about the mission and when they got there, they were smack dab in the middle of 14 German tanks.
It was a rainy day, Waful said, and the mud caused their tanks to get stuck. Waful and the other men bailed out of their tanks, but having very little weaponry on their person, were forced to hide in foxholes.
A German soldier found Waful in the foxhole, but decided not to shoot him because he did not have a pistol, Waful said. Instead, on that day — Dec. 10, 1942 — the Germans took Waful and seven other men as POWs.
For three Christmases and three birthdays, Waful was a POW in Italy, Poland and Germany.
What he remembered most about being a POW, he said, was the loss of liberty. He said the POWs never knew if one day the Axis Powers would get tired of feeding them and just line them up and shoot them all.
“You live with that every day … ” Waful said. “So you had all kinds of activities to get that out of your mind — letters to home and playing sports. Either that or you go nuts.”
Inside the POW camp — which Waful described as about 100 yards by about 50 yards with barbed wire fences surrounding the whole thing — there was a walkway that the soldiers had to stay on because if they took one step off of it, they could get shot.
As a POW, Waful said he often had to share “lousy” food, including German bread that was “black, damp and heavy” and “20 percent sawdust.” But, Waful said, it was something in your stomach.
Once in a while, the Germans would give them soup with a little bit of meat in it, but usually from the parts of the cow that nobody wanted to eat, like the eyes, he said.
The only way the soldiers survived, Waful said, was through the weekly parcels sent by the American Red Cross. The parcels contained powdered milk, spam, tea, salt, sugar and crackers, among other things.
If you were out busy playing music and playing sports, it was just to forget you were hungry. You were always hungry.
In January 1945, the Germans decided to move all of the POWs in Waful’s camp to a bigger camp about 20 miles away from Berlin. About 1,500 officers from the camp walked or traveled tightly packed in boxcars for weeks until they reached the new camp, where about 35,000 POWs were being held.
One day, Waful and another officer planned their escape. They had heard about American vehicles on the edge of a village several miles away, so they decided to take their chances and run.
After they crawled under the barbed wire fence, the Russians, who had taken over the camp, saw them escaping and fired warning shots to try to bluff them back into the camp. But the two soldiers kept running and eventually made it to the village.
The American soldiers took them in and they were able to cross the Elb River to get back to the American side of Germany.
The date Waful finally gained his freedom back was May 7, 1945 — the first of two Victory in Europe days.
In one of his last entries written as a POW, Waful wrote: “Tomorrow is another anniversary for Cassie and I. I’m building my whole life around her — never knew I could ever love one girl so much — if only a letter from her would come.”
Waful started looking for Cassie as soon as he was liberated. He asked every soldier or nurse he encountered if they had heard of the Fifth General Hospital. Nobody had.
Finally at Camp Lucky Strike, a big collecting station for ex-POWs near Normandy, France, Waful was able to locate Cassie through the American Red Cross tent set up there. Waful said he found out she had been wounded in the Battle of the Bulge.
“She wouldn’t take the Purple Heart. She said that was for soldiers,” Waful said. “That made me cry, then and now. She was a solider. She’d been there for three and a half years.”
Waful and Cassie were able to talk on the phone long enough to hear each other’s voices and know that they were both OK.
After about three years of being apart, the first thing Cassie asked Waful is if he still wanted to get married. Within 48 hours, on May 31, 1945, the couple was married in a ceremony put together by a few officers at the collecting station.
Waful returned to the U.S. shortly after their wedding, but Cassie’s service required her to stay in Europe for another 60 days.
After returning home, Waful got a job in the insurance industry from another SU alumnus who had formed the SU Alumni Glee Club before the war started. Waful managed a lot of the university’s insurance and said many of his customers were SU executives, such as former Chancellor William Tolley.
In 1998, after 53 years of marriage, Cassie died at the age of 80 from leukemia.
When asked to describe Cassie, Waful paused to look at a framed portrait in his living room from when she was 40 years old. On his right hand, he still wears her wedding ring on his pinky finger.
“Everybody loved Cassie Waful when they got her back here to the States,” Waful said.
Cassie knew how to run a house, Waful said, because she had run a ward. She also knew how to take care of their two sons, which he attributes to her army nurse history.
She was just marvelous to live with. ... She just aged beautifully through the years.
After Cassie’s death, Waful reunited with Jenny, his SU sweetheart, after about 60 years and picked up where they left off. They were married for nine years until she died.
Now, Waful, who will celebrate his 100th birthday in April 2016, lives alone in Syracuse and often reflects on his time as a POW and the two loves of his life. He’s known as the mayor of his neighborhood and will still occasionally drive his car around the block.
Published on November 10, 2015 at 2:13 am
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