70 Years Later,
Medals Arrive Home

He remembers ripping the red cross off his uniform so the Japanese, known to shoot at medics, wouldn’t target him.

He remembers picking up the wounded by driving an ambulance on narrow roads with sheer cliff drops, and with the headlamps lit only by a slit of light.

And he remembers taking care of some of the 65,000 casualties at the Battle of Okinawa, where he served with the 87th Field Hospital as a surgical technician. He was so eager to come home from WWII, Roman Gensicki forgot to stick around to get his medals.

Roll the clock ahead 70 years, to this Tuesday. Just before he turned 90 his family made sure he got those medals.

In a ceremony on Cottage Street, in the home Gensicki has shared with his wife Helen of 65 years, and just before July 4th, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro made the formal presentation.

“I was surprised to see how good they looked,” Gensicki said of the badges and service medals. Because his records had been lost, along with those of many others, in a 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, DeLauro’s intercession was required to reconstruct Gensicki’s service.

But he never actually put on the Asiatic Campaign Medal or the Marksman’s Badge or the others. His family had them framed. That was quite all right with him. A family man who went on to work at the Winchester rifle factory upon returning from war, he gave in to the wishes of his kids and grand kids who kept asking about the medals.

DeLauro said her office has interceded for approximately 200 G.I.s over her 22-year career in Congress. She was visibly moved by Gensicki’s modesty and recollections.

“You saved lots of lives,” she said.

“He also delivered a lot of babies,” said Helen Gensicki, whom Roman met, on a blind date, in 1947.

Gensicki’s compatriots used to gather for reunions every year. That stopped in the 1980s as the numbers survivors dwindled. Now only three men, including Gensicki, are left from the unit.

Before the press left his living room Tuesday, he recalled that on Franklin Street, where he grew up, seven friends who lived there didn’t return from the war. FOrty-three members of his St. Stanislaus parish also died.

“I’ll always remember this,” he said.

“Cent anni [may you live a hundred years],” said DeLauro in Italian.

Gensicki’s daughter Barbara replied in Polish.

“Stolat,” she said. May you live a hundred years.