World War II Artifact Unearthed

Many of us have friends or relatives who lived through or participated in World War II. It is known as history's greatest armed conflict. Movements from that era were so influential, they were represented with their own icons such as Rosie the Riveter, and these icons have become quite collectible over the years. One such memento has been unearthed on a beach in Wales, but it won't end up on anyone's shelf. An American P-38 fighter plane ran out of gas and crash landed some sixty-five years ago, where it was buried in surf and sand. The pilot, Second Lt. Robert F. “Fred” Elliot, 24, of Rich Square, N.C., was not injured in the crash, but died three months later during a flight over Tunisia in North Africa.

Due to unusual weather last summer, the sand began to shift and erode, revealing the long-forgotten WWII relic. The Lockheed “Lightening” fighter has a distinctive twin-boom design and based on its serial number as well as other records, “the fighter is arguably the oldest P-38 in existence, and the oldest surviving 8^th Air Force combat aircraft of any type,” said Ric Gillespie, who heads a U.S.-based nonprofit group dedicated to preserving historic aircraft. Check out the original article for more details about the plane and the only remaining Elliot family member who learns more about his namesake.

Mystery Behind Holocaust Painter's Album Partially Solved

It has been 60 years since the end of World War II, and as the number of Holocaust survivors dwindles, the mysteries of that horrific era become more difficult to solve. Recently, the story behind an album of historically unique value has been partially solved.

Shari Klages' recalls wandering into her parents bedroom as a small child and thumbing through a leather-bound album that held around 30 pages of ink-and-watercolor images, depicting the horrors of Dachau. She knew her father had spent the last few weeks of World War II in Dachau, but did not know how he came to possess this album. He had immigrated to the states on a ship with more than 60 Holocaust orphans and had taken his life in 1972. The signature “Porulski”, found on the bottom of a few of the pages, was her sole clue as to who the artist was.

The album begins with an image of four prisoners in winter coats. They are carrying their suitcases and marching toward Dachau's watchtower, which was armed with SS guards. The next depicts two inmates being stripped for an exam by a kapo, a prisoner who worked for the Nazis. As the drawings continue, they become more debasing and humiliating from the inmate's perspective. In the final image, a man is lying on the ground next to the barbed wire fence that separated him from freedom, but he has been killed under the looming watchtower. The album also contained 258 photographs, including copies of well-known images of the dead, but also those that portrayed Dachau an an idyllic summer camp, which the Nazis used for propaganda.

Thanks to modern technology archiving and a little help from the Associated Press, Klages located records that documented Porulski's journey. He had enrolled in the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in 1934, after completing two years in the Polish army service. After Germany invaded in 1939, he worked on painting postcards of Nazi-occupied Poland. Two of his postcards have survived and are currently located in the Warsaw Museum of Caricature. He was rounded up in 1940, arrested “without any reason,” and was moved from camp to camp before being recorded at Dachau as Michal Porulski, Profession: Artist in 1941. It has been assumed that Porulski created his works after his release, due to the fact that they are all done on the same paper and that no prisoner would have dared to draw such horrors under the Nazis' watchful eyes. Porulski was tragically unable to resume a normal life after the years he had spent in concentration camps, and he wandered from country to country before finally becoming homeless and painting in England, where he passed away at the age of 74.

Though Klages is unsure of where her father and Porulski crossed paths outside of Dachau, it is certain that he treasured Porulski's work as a documentation of what the two men had been through. If you have any treasures of historical value, document and catalog them for the generations to come.