News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: A Mystery Unravels

Date: September 03, 2001

"Family Traces Footsteps of Joe Morton,AP Correspondent Executed by Nazis in WWII
By Andrea Lorinczova Associated Press Writer

MAUTHAUSEN, Austria (AP) - Mimi Gosney never knew her father, the only American journalist executed during World War II.

Now, after a "very sobering" visit to the Nazi concentration camp where Associated Press war correspondent Joseph Morton was put to death in 1945, she has new insights into the reporter who pecked out history on a portable typewriter.

Gosney, 57, of Lexington, Ky., and her son, Joe Gosney, 30, of Covington, Ky., toured the death camp Sunday where Morton was killed while covering what he once called "the story of my lifetime."

Morton, a native of St. Joseph, Mo., was captured with members of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, the foreunnner of the CIA, who were assisting in a revolt that liberated downed Allied airmen from enemy prison camps. When Nazis closed in, Morton and the U.S. intelligence officers were forced to flee to the mountains.

After a two-month trek through deep snow and bitter cold, they made it to a hut above the village of Polomka in Slovakia.

They holed up in the hut until their capture on Dec. 26, 1944, and the Nazis brought them to Mauthausen, where they were tortured and executed on Jan. 24, 1945.

At the camp, the Gosneys laid flowers at the "ash dump," a grassy hill made of the ashes of those put to death here and adorned with a simple wooden cross.

"To families of the victims, it offers a time for closure - a chance to say goodbye to loved ones," said Mimi Gosney, as rain pelted the complex at Mauthausen, whose barracks, gas chambers and crematoria are preserved for visitors to see.

Although a number of those who were responsible for the executions have been punished, many who committed atrocities elsewhere have managed to live full lives, Gosney said, urging that surviving perpetrators be brought to justice.

"That these people are becoming elderly means nothing to me," she said. "The victims did not have a chance to age."

Her visit to Mauthausen came after a weeklong string of commemorative ceremonies in Slovakia dedicated to Morton and the U.S. soldiers and agents who helped aid the Slovak national uprising against the Nazis.

Gosney told a gathering at the hut in Polomka that even though she never had a chance to meet her father, she believes they "share similar interests."

"Fifty-seven years later, I stand where he stood," she said. "I live and work in Slovakia as a member of the Peace Corps."

She and her son aren't bitter over what happened. But Slovak war veterans sobbed as ceremonial gunshots rang out over loudspeakers at Polomka's cemetery. At one point, the elderly widow of one Slovak partisan kissed the Gosneys' hands and expressed her sorrow over Morton's death.

Retracing his steps, the Gosneys ran into people who saw Morton in 1944 and wanted to share their story. Among them was Roy Madsen Jr., of Salt Lake City, a U.S. airman who left Slovakia on the very day that Morton arrived at the Tri Duby airfield.

"If I had not made it to that last airplane that left ... I might have been one of them at the hut," said Madsen, who makes a point of visiting the hut whenever he's in Slovakia to pay tribute to his captured comrades.

Hoping to get a sense of Morton's daily life while on assignment in Slovakia, the Gosneys visited the tiny village of Donovaly, where Morton stayed for some time - and where he allegedly hid his typewriter along with some stories that were never published.

"It was interesting to be walking in places where he once walked," Joe Gosney said. "It made me realize how much we take for granted in the United States - especially freedom." "