Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

intent may have been compassionate; mercy killing was then an accepted practice in Japan.

Twenty-one

Belief

BEHIND TORRANCE HIGH SCHOOL STOOD A HUDDLE OF trees. On many evenings in the months after her brother went missing, Sylvia Zamperini Flammer would drive to the school, turn her car under the trees, and park there, then sit in the quiet and the dimness, alone. As the car cooled over the pavement, tears would stream down Sylvia’s cheeks. Sometimes she’d let herself sob, knowing that no one would hear her. After a few minutes, she’d dab away her tears, straighten herself, and start the car again.

On the drive home, she’d think of a lie to explain why her post office trip had again taken so long. She never let anyone know how frightened she was.

——

In Torrance, the June 4, 1943, telegram announcing Louie’s disappearance was followed by excruciating silence. Many weeks passed, and the military’s search yielded no trace of Louie, his crew, or his plane. In town, hope dissolved. When the Zamperinis went out, they saw resignation in their neighbors’ faces.

Inside the white house on Gramercy Avenue, the mood was different. In the first days after the telegram arrived, Louise Zamperini had been seized with the conviction that her son was alive. Her husband and children had felt the same. Days passed, then weeks; spring became summer; and no word came. But the family’s conviction remained unshaken. To the family, Louie was among them still, spoken of in the present tense, as if he were just down the street, expected at any moment.

What the Zamperinis were experiencing wasn’t denial, and it wasn’t hope. It was belief. Louise, Anthony, Pete, and Virginia still sensed Louie’s presence; they could still feel him. Their distress came not from grief but from the certainty that Louie was out there, in trouble, and they couldn’t reach him.

On July 13, Louise felt a wave of urgency. She penned a letter to Major General Willis Hale, commander of the Seventh Air Force. In it, she begged Hale not to give up searching; Louie, she wrote, was alive. Unbeknownst to Louise, on that same day, Louie was captured.

Several weeks later, a reply came from Hale’s office. The letter said that given the failure of the search to yield any clues, the military had been forced to accept that Louie and the rest of the men on the plane were gone. It was hoped, the letter said, that Louise would accept this also. Louise ripped up the letter.

Pete was still in San Diego, training navy recruits. The stress wore on him. Sometimes he drove to Torrance to visit his family, and when he arrived, everyone quietly worried about how thin he was. In September, his last letter to Louie, mailed hours before his family was notified of his crash, came back to him. Scribbled on the front were the words Missing at sea. On the back, there was a stamp: CASUALTY STATUS VERIFIED. The photograph of Pete was still sealed in the envelope.

That same month, Sylvia’s husband, Harvey, left for the war. He wouldn’t see his wife again for two years. Living alone, Sylvia was racked with anxiety for her brother and her husband, and she had no one to share it with. Like Pete, she was barely able to eat. Her body had become a slender, taut line. Yearning to connect with someone, she decided to move back in with her parents.

Sylvia held a yard sale to get rid of all of her possessions. She had a clothes washer and dryer, both rationed items that were almost impossible to buy new. One woman wanted to buy them, but Sylvia refused, in hopes that she could sell everything in one lot. The woman promptly bought the entire house’s contents for $1,000, just to get the appliances. Sylvia took what little she had left and drove to Torrance.

She found her father just as he had been since the news had come: chin up, smiling bravely, sometimes through tears. Virginia, living at home and building military ships at Western Pipe and Steel, was as distraught as Sylvia. Their mother was the biggest worry. At first Louise cried often. Then, as the months passed, she hardened down. The weeping rash on her hands, which had appeared almost the moment she’d learned of Louie’s disappearance, raged. She couldn’t wear gloves, and could no longer do anything with her hands. Sylvia and her father took over the cooking.

Sylvia quit her job in a dentist’s office and took a new one as a dental assistant in an army hospital, hoping that the job might give her access to information about Louie. There, she heard talk of a plane shortage in the military, so she took a second job, moonlighting on the evening shift in the blueprint office of an aircraft factory. She was almost unbearably tense. One night, leaving work late, she came upon a group of workers sitting under a plane, gambling. She suddenly found herself shouting at them, saying that her brother was missing, America needed planes, and here they were goofing off. Sylvia was startled by her outburst, but she didn’t regret it. It made her feel better.

——

On October 6, Louie’s army trunk bumped onto his parents’ doorstep, heavy and final. Louise couldn’t bring herself to look inside. She had it dragged to the basement and covered with a blanket. It would sit there, unopened, for the rest of her life.

Everyone in the family was suffering, but the children wanted to insulate their mother. They never cried together, instead telling each other invented stories of Louie’s adventures on a tropical island. Most of the time, Anthony simply couldn’t talk about Louie. Sylvia spent a lot of time in church, praying for Louie and Harvey. Sometimes she and Virginia drove to San Diego to see Pete, and they’d all go out for a drink to cheer one another up. They never discussed the possibility that Louie was dead. When Sylvia walked through downtown Torrance with her family, she noticed oblique glances from passersby. Their expressions seemed to say that they pitied the Zamperinis for being unable to accept the truth.

Every evening, Sylvia wrote a letter to her husband. Every week or so, she wrote one to Louie. She made a point of writing as if everything were normal, sharing the trivial news of home. She had an address for Harvey; for Louie she had nothing, so she addressed his letters to the Red Cross. She’d tell her mother that she was mailing letters, get in the car, drive to the post office, and drop the letters in the box. Then she’d drive to Torrance High, park under the trees, and cry.

At night, when the lights were out and she was alone in her childhood bed, Sylvia often broke down again. When sleep came, it was fitful and haunted. Because she knew nothing of what had happened to her brother, her mind latched onto the image she had seen in the newspaper after Nauru: Louie peering through a hole in the side of Super Man. The image had fixed in her mind the idea of Louie being shot, and this was the point around which her nightmares circled: never a crash, never water, only bullets bloodying Louie as he sat in his plane. Sylvia was always trying to get to Louie, but she was never able. As bad as the nightmares were, in them, Louie was never killed. Even Sylvia’s imagination didn’t allow for her brother’s death.

In December 1943, the family prepared to celebrate their first Christmas without Louie. The mailman knocked at the door each day to deliver a harvest of cards and letters, most of them offering sympathy. The holiday tree was strung with popcorn and cranberries, and beneath it sat a collection of gifts for Louie. The gifts would be tucked