BOOKS
WAR STORIES
Uncle’s gripping tales of WWII Timberwolves division inspire first novel
B
Nothing in Hell! (Based on the true-life events of one soldier who proudly served with the Timberwolves Division in World War II) Paperback, 256 pages.
18
orn more than two decades after encountered and decided to tell that part the end of World War II, Monmouth of the story through the eyes of a fictionCollege alumnus Peter Grable ’90 is al prisoner, a Polish carpenter named a member of Generation X, but he also Tomasz Kowalski. has a powerful, personal connection to “That character was based in part on the Greatest Generation. another Polish uncle, who actually spent Grable is the great-nephew of the late time in a concentration camp,” Grable Stanley “Stash” Pokrzywa, a veteran of said. the remarkable 104th A memorable chapter in the book, Timberwolves infantry titled “The Farmhouse,” is based on a division. He grew up personal account that Stash loved to tell. enthralled by his uncle’s He and a buddy volunteered to sneak into vivid tales of a grueling an abandoned house to observe German odyssey that included formations from a second-floor window. fighting in the Battle of After one shell landed to the left of the the Bulge and liberating house and another to the right, they ran the infamous Mitteloutside, and just as they did, another bau-Dora concentration PETER GRABLE ’90 shell hit directly behind them and sent camp, where prisoners shrapnel flying, driving 15 pieces into were forced to help build Hitler’s V-2 Stash’s back, causing him to nearly bleed to death. He rockets. The Timberwolves set the record recovered in a French hospital and returned to his unit, but for fighting by an infantry division at 196 he would be bothered for the rest of his life with shrapnel consecutive days. that was too close to his spine to be removed. “My uncle was always proud of what Stash and his wife never had children, and Grable said he did. He never wanted people to forget what his unit a big part of their lives was attending the annual reunion went through,” said Grable. “Right after my uncle died of the 104th Timberwolves. “It was their vacation,” he said, in 2013, I decided I wanted to keep his story alive and honor him and all the people who served in World War II “and they never missed a single reunion.” In addition to his uncle’s stories, Grable drew on perfor what they did.” sonal experience for part of the novel. Although he was Grable has kept that story alive by writing his first a pre-veterinary student at Monmouth, he initially went novel, Nothing in Hell!, a three-year project based largely into carpentry, running his own contracting business for on Stash’s wartime experiences in Belgium, Holland and 15 years. That helped inspire Tomasz’s occupation and the Germany. story of a wooden ladder, which figures prominently in the From an early age, Grable was captivated by his uncle’s novel. stories, which he heard regularly—whenever he visited Grable, who earned an MBA in finance and now works his grandparents in a two-flat building in Chicago. They in product management for a German tool company, is owned the building and lived on the second floor, while currently working on three new writing projects, including Stash and his wife (his grandmother’s sister) lived on the a novel about a little-known episode before the bombing ground floor. After playing poker with his grandfather, of Pearl Harbor, in which five battery-powered Japanese Grable and his family would hang out downstairs listening midget submarines sought to enter the harbor prior to the to Stash’s war stories. air invasion. The most searing of Stash’s memories was helping to Nothing in Hell! is available for purchase or download at liberate a notorious concentration camp outside NordhauAmazon.com. sen, Germany, in April 1945. Grable struggled with how to portray in his novel the horrors that the Timberwolves —Jeff Rankin
MONMOUTH COLLEGE MAGAZINE
