Weiser resident experienced WWII up close and personal

Weiser resident Feda Martyn celebrated her 98th birthday on July 8 at the Indianhead Estates Residential Care. She was 16 years old when she watched the German Army march into Paris in May 1940. Over the next five years Feda was to live a real-life adventure and experience war in a close and personal way.

 Born Feda Pelligrini in 1924 in the mountain town of Osoppo in northeastern Italy, she moved with her family to the suburbs of Paris, France in 1930 at the age of six. Her father, a stone mason, wanted to get away from the fascist regime of dictator Benito Mussolini. In 1940, events caught up with them and they found themselves in the middle of WWII.

 Her family initially took to the roads as refugees when the German Army swept over northern France. Being strafed and harassed by aircraft, they were taken by the Germans and sent back home to Paris where they began life under German military occupation.

 Having immigrated to France ten years earlier, Feda and her family were still Italian nationals when the war overtook them. Feda’s older brother Dominic was soon drafted at gunpoint into the Italian Army and sent off to serve in Corsica. Feda’s father was forced to work for the Germans and sent all over occupied Europe to do masonry work for the Germans. Feda herself was soon also “requisitioned” by the Germans and was put to work at a nearby airfield on a crew of women who cleaned barracks and facilities.

 Feda has a natural facility for languages and learned to speak fluent German. She also speaks her native Italian, as well as French and English. Young, pretty and with an outgoing, friendly personality, she soon made many friends among the German airmen. As she tells it, very few of the German servicemen were actually Nazis, but were simply men serving their country in time of war.

 During five years of war, Feda experienced many dangerous situations. The airfield and surrounding area were bombed continuously by the Americans during the day and by the English at night. She lived through numerous bombing raids. On one occasion she came upon a train station that had just been bombed. There was utter destruction with bodies and parts of bodies strewn everywhere. 

 On another occasion, she was caught in a daylight bombing raid. She and a good friend were riding their bicycles across an open field with bombs falling all around. Feda dodged into a small gully while her friend rode on. After the raid was over, she found her friend had been killed. Feda sometimes refused to go into the crowded bomb shelters during bombing raids, preferring to take her chances and trust her luck above ground.

 On another occasion, she was waiting to board a commuter train at a station near Paris. Suddenly a truck load of German soldiers drove up to the train station and unloaded in the street. The soldiers pulled five men at random out of the crowd and stood them up against a wall and shot them in front of everyone. This was in retaliation for the French underground having killed a German. They loaded back up and drove away leaving their victims in the street. Feda received a cut on her shin from a flying piece of concrete and she carries a small scar to this day as a reminder.

 Being pretty as she was, before long, Feda was assigned as a waitress for the German fighter pilots’ table. As a result, she was able to meet many famous German fighter aces including Walter Novotny who had 258 aerial kills, and Robert “Bazi” Weiss who had 121 kills. Through this, Feda met and fell in love with a young German fighter pilot. His name was Walter Enser, and he flew a Fokke-Wolf 190 fighter and went up after the bombers every day. They became engaged but in August 1944 Walter was shot down and badly wounded. He was shipped back to Germany crippled and out of the war. 

 When the Germans retreated from Paris in the fall of 1944, Feda was determined to follow her fiancé and persuaded the German fighter wing to take her along on the retreat. Through many hardships and dangers, she amazingly was able to make the perilous journey to Walter’s home village where he was bed ridden and recovering from crippling wounds. Tragically, after all her efforts, Walter’s mother turned her away and she was never to see Walter. 

 She was then left alone in wartime Germany through the winter of 1944-1945. She secured a job as a nanny for a local family and survived that terrible winter. She then returned to France when the war in Europe ended in May 1945. She had survived World War II up close and personal and had not yet seen her 21st birthday.

 Feda met and married an American soldier in Paris and immigrated to the United States in 1946, still an Italian national. She settled in Longmont, Colo. as a home maker and raised three sons. Through a series of letters, she reconnected with Walter Enser many years later and was able to visit him in Germany in 1975. It was a wonderful reunion and the happy ending of a great love story.

 Feda visited her son Charlie Dunn of Weiser on several occasions in the early 2000s and fell in love with the small town, moving here in 2009 to be near her son and her two grandchildren. Feda has been at Indianhead Estates for the past seven years and is very popular among the residents and staff. She still maintains her sunny disposition and her uniquely Italian outlook on life. She is a World War II veteran in the truest sense and the story of her wartime experiences is worth the telling.