One day when I was in third grade, I came home from school to find a stranger sitting in our TV room. Short, with short dark hair, he was no one I knew. I asked my mother, with whom he was chatting, who he was. "That's your Uncle Eugene." That was one of three times I met the one they all called "Junior".
My mother's family wasn't much in to nicknames, but to his five brothers and two sisters he was only, ever Junior. Far too smart for his own good, clever with his hands, Junior was a bit of a prodigy. He would take old radios he found put out for garbage, strip them, and build his own. He had a prodigy's ability to build and fix anything electrical, and was helped by his Uncle Bob. A bit too much it might seem. At seven or eight, his mother asked him to fix the family toaster. After fiddling with it, he set it down and said, "Well, that ought to do the bitch quite nicely." My grandmother was aghast, but Junior insisted that his Uncle had told him those were the magic words that helped finish any job.
He missed a year of school because, at 15 or 16, he lost his sight. While it was restored, the exact cause was never known. He still graduated a year early.
At 17, he came home and announced that he had fallen in love and was getting married. To a woman eleven years older. One of his brothers told me that his parents' reaction so horrified him he hid his own whirlwind marriage at 18 from his whole family.
Junior lined up with hundreds of other young men on December 8, 1941 to join the military. He decided on the Navy, and after boot campt at Great Lakes Naval Training Station in Chicago, entered military intelligence, and disappeared from view until he called his parents after V-E Day to tell them he was alive. Of his time in the service, I know a scrap or two. Among his many tasks, he was part of a unit that parachuted in to concentration camps ahead of the Allied advance. After the first couple had been discovered with the inmates murdered and the staff fled, Eisenhower insisted that the camps needed to be controlled before the troops arrived. The things he saw I can only imagine, but lives were saved because of what he did.
He also co-ordinated with the French Jewish community and the Swiss government to get Jews across the border from Vichy and occupied France, saving them from inevitable torture and death. Did he save them all? Of course not. While the Allies dithered over many aspects of the Holocaust, including refusing to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz-Birkenau, in this effort, at least, they did manage to thwart the attempted destruction of at least part of the European Jewish community.
He would go on, after the war, to serve his country in a civilian capacity. He was visiting our little house in Waverly that day back in 1973 because, as an engineer with Boeing in Seattle, he was meeting with colleagues at IBM in Owego, NY who were working on a project with him. Eventually, that project would become public in the guidance system of cruise missiles.
Like many people, his personal life was beset by tragedy. He lost a step-daughter in the mid 1950's to leukemia.
The last years of his life were spent struggling with diabetes and the various problems that come with it. He also struggled, as did many WWII vets, with the memories he carried with him. The added weight of having been told, over a half century before, that none of those events could be discussed, nearly broke him. In his younger brother, David, he found an outlet, as he and David both shared the same burden of being told to forget what could never be forgotten. They managed to console one another a bit, I think, or at any rate found a sympathetic ear in their older years.
There are only my mother, her brother David, and her brother Ivan left now. Of the eight children Eugene and Emma Johnston bore that survived to adulthood, these three, with their varying lives and families and fortunes are all that remain. God grant them peace and strength.
