Barbed Wire Wings

In Ohio 1925 a boy named John Gualtier was born. He grew up on a farm with his family during the Great Depression. When John turned 18 he enlisted, serving as a medic in France. As a medic, John went into battles unarmed, with a big red cross painted on his helmet, and one on a band on his arm. Every day, John had to make difficult decisions about who lived or died. In 1945, just four months after he arrived in France, his unit entered a small forest in Austria and saw people who were so thin he could see their bones. These people had been held in the Gunskirchen Lager concentration camp, which was a sub-camp of the larger camp Mauthausen. All these people had been imprisoned simply for the "crime" of being Jewish. Shortly afterward his unit liberated another camp, this one near Staubling, Germany, that contained not only Jewish people, but also Russians, African-Americans, and others who were not Nazi Germany's ideal blonde-hair blue-eyed people. When John returned home, he was traumatized by all that he had seen during the war. He went to therapy with other WWII vets, and after they all passed away joined a group of Vietnam vets. John now speaks to people in central Iowa about the war.