美国国家公共电台 NPR 'Like Getting My Father Back': WWII POW's Art Returned To His Family

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LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

Tomorrow is Veterans Day. It's a time to remember those who have sacrificed to protect and serve our country, like Howard Weistling. Growing up, Weistling wanted to be a comic strip artist. But when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he felt compelled to enlist¹ in the Army. Reporter Laurel Morales of member station KJZZ picks up the story from there.

LAUREL MORALES, BYLINE²: Mike Weistling, Howard's grandson, loved to hear his grandfather's war stories.

MIKE WEISTLING: He probably told me a lot of stories that were not appropriate for a child to hear.

MORALES: Mike says after flight engineer training, Howard was shipped off to Europe. On his maiden³ flight, his plane was shot down over Austria. Mike has a memento⁴ of that event hung on his wall in Flagstaff.

WEISTLING: So this right here is the ripcord that my grandfather pulled when he bailed⁵ out over Austria in December of 1944.

MORALES: The entire crew of eight men landed safely, but a farmer found Howard hiding in his barn and turned him over to a prisoner of war camp in Bart, Germany. Howard's son Morgan Weistling says it was freezing and the men almost starved to death eating the guards' garbage.

MORGAN WEISTLING: German soldiers would open the door. And after they'd had their food, would throw their plates on the floor.

MORALES: Hungry and homesick, Weistling coped the only way he knew how - he drew a comic strip.

WEISTLING: The book made of cigarette wrappers, bound together with scrap⁶ metal, was sent around camp. Every couple days, he would add a new panel. One panel at a time would be passed around the whole camp. And they had something to look forward to.

MORALES: After an entire year of this, they woke one morning to find their guards gone. They fled before the Russians arrived to liberate⁷ the camp. Howard finally got to go home. Just lucky to get out alive, he left the book behind. Back home in California, Howard soon had a wife and kids to feed so he had to set aside his dream of becoming an artist. He took a job as a gardener instead.

Morgan also shared his father's artistic⁸ gifts. As a toddler, he would crawl upon his father's knee and learn to draw. At 15, his parents sent him to art school. At 19, Morgan landed his first job drawing movie posters. One night, Howard saw Morgan sketching⁹ ideas for a poster.

WEISTLING: And he just got tears in his eyes, like, you're doing what I always had hoped I would do. And he was literally¹⁰ - it could - just feel it living through the moment, like, that's his way of living that dream out.

MORALES: Morgan left illustration to paint. Howard got to see his son become a well-known painter before he died in 2002. That's how seven decades after the war when a stranger in New York Googled the name Weistling. He found Morgan online.

WEISTLING: I get an email from an older gentleman, and he says, I think I may have some drawings that your father did when he was a POW in World War II. Would you like them? (Laughter) And I just stared at that email and started crying.

MORALES: The man said his business partner bought a truckload of Nazi¹¹ artifacts.

WEISTLING: Amongst the things in this truck full of stuff were three of Hitler's watercolors, batons¹² from Auschwitz, uniforms. And this man explained to me, we're Jewish, we're Jewish. And he went and bought the worst thing he could have done. So we were disgusted. But there was this one thing.

MORALES: That one thing was Howard's comic book. Luckily, he had engraved¹³ his name on it, which is how the man from New York had connected with Morgan. A couple of days later when it arrived by FedEx in California, he couldn't believe it.

WEISTLING: It was like getting my father back. It was like him being able to tell me the story over again, only this time it was real in my hands.

MORALES: Today, Morgan shows the book to his two daughters who have also inherited their grandfather's artistic talents.

For NPR News, I'm Laurel Morales in Flagstaff.

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