Books

BOOKS

WAR STORIES

Uncle’s Gripping Tales of WWII Timberwolves Division Inspire First Novel

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.

Born more than two decades after the end of World War II, Monmouth College alumnus Peter Grable ’90 is a member of Generation X, but he also has a powerful, personal connection to the Greatest Generation.

Grable is the great-nephew of the late Stanley “Stash” Pokrzywa, a veteran of the remarkable 104th Timberwolves infantry division. He grew up enthralled by his uncle’s vivid tales of a grueling odyssey that included fighting in the Battle of the Bulge and liberating the infamous Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, where prisoners were forced to help build Hitler’s V-2 rockets. The Timberwolves set the record for fighting by an infantry division at 196 consecutive days.

Peter Grable ’90

“My uncle was always proud of what he did. He never wanted people to forget what his unit went through,” said Grable. “Right after my uncle died in 2013, I decided I wanted to keep his story alive and honor him and all the people who served in World War II for what they did.”

Grable has kept that story alive by writing his first novel, Nothing in Hell!, a three-year project based largely on Stash’s wartime experiences in Belgium, Holland and Germany.

From an early age, Grable was captivated by his uncle’s stories, which he heard regularly—whenever he visited his grandparents in a two-flat building in Chicago. They owned the building and lived on the second floor, while Stash and his wife (his grandmother’s sister) lived on the ground floor. After playing poker with his grandfather, Grable and his family would hang out downstairs listening to Stash’s war stories.

The most searing of Stash’s memories was helping to liberate a notorious concentration camp outside Nordhausen, Germany, in April 1945. Grable struggled with how to portray in his novel the horrors that the Timberwolves encountered and decided to tell that part of the story through the eyes of a fictional prisoner, a Polish carpenter named Tomasz Kowalski.

“That character was based in part on another Polish uncle, who actually spent time in a concentration camp,” Grable said.

A memorable chapter in the book, titled “The Farmhouse,” is based on a personal account that Stash loved to tell. He and a buddy volunteered to sneak into an abandoned house to observe German formations from a second-floor window. After one shell landed to the left of the house and another to the right, they ran outside, and just as they did, another shell hit directly behind them and sent shrapnel flying, driving 15 pieces into Stash’s back, causing him to nearly bleed to death. He recovered in a French hospital and returned to his unit, but he would be bothered for the rest of his life with shrapnel that was too close to his spine to be removed.

Stash and his wife never had children, and Grable said a big part of their lives was attending the annual reunion of the 104th Timberwolves. “It was their vacation,” he said, “and they never missed a single reunion.”

In addition to his uncle’s stories, Grable drew on personal experience for part of the novel. Although he was a pre-veterinary student at Monmouth, he initially went into carpentry, running his own contracting business for 15 years. That helped inspire Tomasz’s occupation and the story of a wooden ladder, which figures prominently in the novel.

Grable, who earned an MBA in finance and now works in product management for a German tool company, is currently working on three new writing projects, including a novel about a little-known episode before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, in which five battery-powered Japanese midget submarines sought to enter the harbor prior to the air invasion.

Nothing in Hell! is available for purchase or download at Amazon.com.

—Jeff Rankin