“It was a solemn moment in the drug store,” Tralka wrote in his new memoir, “Diary of a Replacement Soldier.”

Recollections of war  

By Bob Cudmore

A Virginia doctor has written a new book recalling his World War II memories of both the home front in Amsterdam and the last days of the war in Europe.

George A. Tralka was at his family’s James Street home in Amsterdam the afternoon that radio broadcasts were interrupted to report the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Tralka at first thought Pearl Harbor was in Alaska.

Tralka’s parents went ahead with their plans to go out that day and to have Tralka watch his younger sisters. The next day as Tralka delivered the Schenectady Gazette he heard President Roosevelt’s “day of infamy” speech on the radio when he made his newspaper delivery to Reid Hill Pharmacy.

“It was a solemn moment in the drug store,” Tralka wrote in his new memoir, “Diary of a Replacement Soldier.”

The first member of Tralka’s group at St. Mary’s High School to go off to war left in July 1943.  After their buddy’s train left Amsterdam, friends gathered at Rapello’s Pharmacy and, according to Tralka, “Raised high our chocolate sodas and wished him good luck.”

As his senior year in high school drew to a close, Tralka enlisted in an Army training program. His notice to report came a few days before his senior prom and he was so busy getting ready to go that he failed to notify his date that he couldn’t attend the prom. Later his brother accepted Tralka’s high school diploma and he was told the “applause was enthusiastic.”

For three months, Tralka attended a course in pre-engineering at the University of Delaware, followed by basic training in Arkansas. Once overseas he became an infantry replacement in France and a rifleman with the 103rd Division in the Rhineland and Central European campaigns. After the war he was discharged as a private first class and went to medical school.

His book benefits from Tralka’s artistic skills—many of his war stories are illustrated with his own drawings.  There are also photos and other visual reproductions in the book.

During his career Tralka practiced medicine in Washington, D.C. and Vienna, Virginia for government agencies and in private practice.

ORGANIST FATHER

Tralka’s father Joseph was for many years the organist and choir director at St. Stanislaus Church in Amsterdam. Joseph Tralka, whose own father was a church organist, emigrated from partitioned Poland at age 17 to play organ music for a settlement of Poles in Parana, Brazil.  He married there and even took part in a posse that went off to fight natives who had attacked their settlement.

He and his wife relocated to the United States and lived in a variety of places, including Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania. There he was a professor of music at Alliance College.  His first wife died in 1935 and he remarried. 

Joseph Tralka was not making much money at Alliance College. The work was enjoyable but all consuming. He left the college and moved from place to place playing organ at Polish Roman Catholic parishes, finally settling at St. Stanislaus in Amsterdam where he was church organist until 1954.

Joseph Tralka made a modest salary from the church and had a modest sign in the front window of his parlor offering private musical lessons. George Tralka wrote, “I remember that he could be a little deflated when requested by earnest and hopeful neighborhood mothers on occasion to teach introductory accordion to their fair haired nine-year-olds in as few lessons as possible.”

Joseph Tralka also made some money at the end of each year with door to door sale of Christmas wafers, a traditional holiday perk for Polish church organists. 

Friday, April 28, 2023

Episode 472-In Unearthed Meryl Frank tells the story of her cousin Frany Winter, a celebrated Yiddish actress in Vilna in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.  Frank spent many years researching how her cousin Frany died.

Bob Cudmore "History stories from The Mohawk Valley"

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