He Loved the Sky

by Geoff Yarema

Steve had been praying for this night for months—moonless pitch black would make him difficult to spot; bitter cold and snow would render the heavily armed guards less attentive; howling wind would cover betraying sounds. No clouds ensured bright constellations. Perfect for a navigator.

He just loved the sky.

At 22 years of age, he had survived exactly 195 caged nights in German prisoner of war camps. He was determined daylight would not find him again inside this hellhole.

Steve had run away from an abusive immigrant father, lied about his age and joined the Army Air Corps. He was determined to fly. And the quickly mobilizing war machine obliged him, sending his strong aptitude for math to Great Ashfield Airdrome, Suffolk, assigning him to the 385th Bomb Group and ranking him Second Lieutenant.

Soon his superiors were wedging his slight frame into the cockpit of a B17 Flying Fortress. His role was bombardier—to guide sorties into well-defended enemy territory, signaling the drop of payload after payload.

He excelled at understanding the heavens.

After a solid run of successful missions, the odds caught up. On August 4, 1944, German anti-aircraft fire tore into a brand new Douglas Aircraft-manufactured bomber nicknamed “Hair’s Breath”, sending it into a death spiral. He and the 8 other young crew members acted mechanically, simply locking eyes and doing exactly as they had been taught. In sequence, they threw themselves out the open cargo door and counted the requisite seconds before pulling rip cords.

The Infantry cleaned and slept with their guns; the Air Corps packed and slept with their parachutes.

As he fell through air and space, time stopped. His view of the night sky was no longer from the overstory. Breathing in the overwhelming stench of diesel and death, he bore witness to his plane crashing into a million tiny pieces, one of many deafening explosions around him. He could not see the rest of his falling crew.

Preparing to hit the ground, he knew his coordinates--inside Nazi-occupied territory, near what is today the Danish-German border. And the Third Reich had sent a welcoming party.
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His new captors lost no time in moving him southeast of Berlin, to German-occupied Poland, ironically the country of his ancestry. His new home was Stalag Luft 3, a truly foreboding compound. But its reputation for high security had been shaken just days before his arrival by the most ambitious breakout in WW2 history, immortalized later in the movie “The Great Escape”. Through painfully, painstakingly and clandestinely constructed tunnels, 76 men had crawled to freedom. All but 3 were soon re-captured.

Immediately upon entering this notorious camp, Steve was handed a shovel to help fill in the holes left by over 600 tons of excavated dirt. Over the first 2 weeks of digging, he was forced to witness the Hitler-ordered slaughter of 55 of the re-captured.

The scar, suffered long before PTSD became part of the vernacular, would wound him for life, with extreme mood swings and blinding fits of rage, among other reveals. As Faulkner admonished, the past is never dead. It’s not even past.

But the remarkable mass POW escape had negated the Camp’s reputation for invincibility. So the remaining prisoners lost no time concocting new schemes, even during Poland’s worst winter in 30 years. Steve soon had an elegantly simple idea and was determined to implement it—solo.

But the Soviets were advancing hard, right toward the camp and, as yet unknown to the POWs, would soon liberate it. Steve was not to be there, though.

A mere week before the Red Army’s arrival, the Nazis separated out the resident American officers from the rest of the Stalag POWs and force-marched them 400 miles south. His reward for surviving yet another trauma was a new internment--Stalag 7A, the Germans’ largest POW camp, then busting at the seams with over 70,000 prisoners. Several of the legendary Tuskegee airmen were among Steve’s new cabin mates.

At this point, he was done. Live free or die. The escape plan he had cooked up in Stalag 3 should still work at Stalag 7A, he concluded. His new abode came equipped with a hidden trap door those before him had built into the floor. The trick was getting from there to--and through--the camp’s barbed wire fence perimeter.

Steve’s simple answer—a white sheet he would pull over his slight frame in prone, face-down position, corners fitted to each of his 4 extended appendages. With that in place, he planned to crawl very slowly from the hut over the constantly Klieg light-scanned terrain, hoping to be indiscernible to the watching guards from the snow around him.

His commanding officer had cleared his tactics--but only after looking deeply into Steve’s eyes and saying out loud what Steve already knew--that any detected movement would draw strafing machine gun fire.

On this carefully chosen, miserably bleak night he had been impatiently waiting for, the white sheet camouflaging his slow motion across the heavy new snow actually worked. Reaching the thickly protected fence, Steve produced wire cutters fashioned from metal utensils and slowly cut through the bottom. His small size proved an asset.

Soon he was outside. His escape had been undetected. For a moment the euphoria was overwhelming. But he quickly returned to business. He knew he was still well inside enemy lines. Many Germans--and German shepherds--lay ahead. But the Red Cross had discreetly provided intel if the need were to arise. The resistance had a safe house less than 7 clicks away. At least that’s what he had heard. Things could have changed.

Despite malnutrition, injuries from multiple beatings and frostbite, Steve moved quickly away from the compound.

After only a couple of hours through thick forest and flitting along deserted village roads, Steve approached a nondescript door and took a deep breath. He knocked 3, then 1, then 2 times. Just a few seconds later, an old man appeared, then quickly swept him through.

Thankfully, the Red Cross information was still current. For the very first time that night, he allowed himself to breathe. His plan had worked. He was no longer a POW.

The man and his wife wrapped him in blankets and served warm broth. Steve told of his journey and thanked them deeply for being there to guide him on his next challenging steps. But the couple quickly laid waste to Steve’s euphoria.

The good news was that the Germans were losing. Soon NATO forces would be occupying the area and the war would be over.

The bad news was that the routes Steve might take from there were safe for no one. The Allies were carpet-bombing the countryside all around them. With only one exception—the POW camp from which he had just escaped. The truth—the safest place he could be for now was back in Stalag 7A.

Steve couldn’t believe his ears. Did he comprehend what they were urging? Reverse his escape and return before being missed to maximize his safety? Should he trust these strangers’ war intelligence? The cognitive dissonance was mind blowing.
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Two months later, on April 29, 1945, 268 days after parachuting into enemy hands, Allied forces liberated the prisoners of Stalag 7A. Steve was among those celebrating his freedom, this time permanently. The night sky had faithfully guided his return to captivity, unnoticed, just like it had his escape.
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Soon after his liberation, Steve was on a military transport plane headed stateside. 2 years later he would marry my mother Doris. I became the first born. My brother Tom and sister Stefanie would follow.

Steve’s life spanned what is rightly called the Greatest Generation and in many ways he personified it. When Hitler was raging in the European theater, Steve was crewing bombing missions over German territory until bailing out of a crashing B17. When Khrushchev was shipping nuclear weapons to Cuba, Steve was airborne daily over the Florida Straits in a B52, armed with intercontinental ballistic missiles and awaiting the order to launch. And when the Apollo 11 crew kept their President’s promise and took one giant leap for mankind, Steve was joyously trading back slaps with his fellow Saturn V rocket engineers inside the Kennedy Space Center.

Each time, looking to the sky and offering thanks.

As the years marched by, Steve was blessed with a growing family. He was over the moon to see my daughter Valerie come into this world. Several years later, he headed with Doris to Kauai, where his grandson—Tom’s son Avalon—was to be born. The joyous moment came and was followed by the older couple’s early bedtime.

Later that night, during the balmy and serene hours before sunrise, Steve stirred and wandered outside. The heavens were extraordinarily clear, no moon, the constellations bright, reminiscent of another such night, now sixty years before. He lay down on the soft cool grass.

After first light, my brother Tom arose, weary but deeply emotional from the birth of his son. Before making breakfast for the family, he strolled outside to check on his orchids. There, he found our father Steve lying peacefully in the grass, without a pulse, but with a broad smile on his face and a gentle gaze fixed upon the sky he had always loved.

In loving memory of Steven Yarema (July 6, 1922-August 26, 2003)

Steve Yarema

He Loved the Sky