An original play and dedication of a World War II memorial round out the day
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – Rick Atkinson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian of Americans in combat from North Africa to Baghdad, is the recipient of the 2008 Stephen E. Ambrose Oral History Award. The Rutgers Living History Society will present the award to Atkinson during its annual meeting Friday, May 16, in the Rutgers Student Center, beginning at 9 a.m.Bencivenga, a 2006 Rutgers graduate, based the play on the experiences of his grandfather, the late John Czahor, who jumped into Normandy as a paratrooper on June 6, 1944. As Bencivenga was nearing graduation from Rutgers in 2006, he needed a subject for a semesterlong project for his playwriting class. At the same time, his grandfather, John Czahor, was dying in Florida.
“Growing up, I was told that Grandpa had jumped on D-Day, but beyond that, I didn't know much,” Bencivenga said. Two months before his death, Czahor finally told his family the long-suppressed details of his wartime experiences. Bencivenga transcribed his grandfather’s story, and then spent six months researching the facts and the history of his military unit before writing the script for Flight of the Iron Butterfly. In the play, he uses the metaphor of a caterpillar’s metamorphosis into a butterfly to plot his grandfather’s evolution from a New Jersey farm boy into a battle-hardened veteran.
Flight of the Iron Butterfly premiered at Rutgers in November 2007.
At 2 p.m., President Richard L. McCormick will join members of the Class of 1942 and their families and friends on the Vorhees Mall to dedicate the new World War II Memorial Plaza. The memorial, “A World Turned Inside Out,” honors the 247 Rutgers men and women who lost their lives in that war. Its centerpiece is the sculpture, “In Side Out,” which has stood in front of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum on Hamilton Street since 1963, but has been moved to the Mall for its new role in the memorial. There, the sculpture will be partly encircled by stainless steel plates bearing the names of the 247 Rutgers students who lost their lives in the conflict.
Atkinson, the son of an officer in the United States Army, was born in Munich in 1952 and started his journalistic career with the Morning Sun in Pittsburg, Kan., in 1976. He moved to the Kansas City Times in 1977 and won a Pulitzer Prize there for national reporting in 1982. Atkinson has been with The Washington Post – with time off to write books – since 1983. He is the author of The Long Gray Line (Houghton Mifflin, 1989); Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War (Houghton Mifflin, 1993); An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa (Henry Holt, 2002); In the Company of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat (Henry Holt, 2004); and The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (Henry Holt, 2007).
An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, the first part of a trilogy on the liberation of Europe in World War II, also won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. That book and The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 made use of some of the 750 oral histories contained in the Rutgers Oral History Archives. Atkinson is now at work on the third and last book in the trilogy, covering the fighting in Western Europe after the invasion of Normandy in June 1944.
“I'm delighted to receive the Stephen E. Ambrose Award for Oral History, and grateful to Rutgers for the honor,” Atkinson said. “It's a privilege to be associated with Dr. Ambrose, who was a trailblazer for many of us writing about the Second World War, and to be in the same company as the distinguished previous winners. Oral history can capture those fine brushstrokes of detail that bring the past to life.” Atkinson said he found the Rutgers Oral History Archives useful for the first two volumes in my World War II trilogy. ”I look forward to tapping the repository once again for the third and final volume,” he said.
The Rutgers Oral History Archives, headquartered at Rutgers in New Brunswick, preserves the personal stories of more than 750 men and women with a Rutgers or New Jersey connection who participated in or lived through World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War or the Cold War. To date, 464 of the interviews are accessible through the archives’ Web site, oralhistory.rutgers.edu. The Rutgers Living History Society consists of participants in the Rutgers Oral History Archives program.
Media Contact: Ken Branson
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