In 1944, Roman Socha was a 23-year-old sharpshooter in the U.S. Army when a German tank division surrounded his unit outside a small French town.
After the soldiers were captured, a German officer put his pistol to the head of one of Mr. Socha’s friends, a buddy who had been shot in the leg. The officer said, “We don’t take wounded.”
“Our lieutenant said, `Don’t worry, we’ll carry him.’ But we still couldn’t keep up,” Mr. Socha recalled for a 1999 article in the Tribune Magazine. Eventually, a Frenchman gave them a bicycle, and Mr. Socha helped wheel the wounded soldier to a train depot, where they were sent to prison camps.
The two soldiers were later liberated, and Mr. Socha returned to his hometown of Chicago. But every year, Mr. Socha got a Christmas card from the man he saved. At the end of the card, the man would always write, “Thanks for the bicycle ride.”
Mr. Socha, 84, a longtime resident of the Irving Park neighborhood, died of heart failure Friday, May 26, at Hines VA Hospital near Maywood, where he had been a volunteer for 15 years.
“The two loves of his life were his family and the veterans,” said his nephew Tom Lukaszewski.
Those twin loyalties never waned, from the time he quit school in the 4th grade to work to help feed his seven siblings in the Bucktown neighborhood during the Depression, to the hours he spent volunteering at Hines.
Born in Chicago, Mr. Socha was drafted into the Army in 1942 and was in the second wave of soldiers to hit the sands of Utah Beach in Normandy, his nephew said.
After being taken prisoner, Mr. Socha was transferred to several camps, where he survived on an inconsistent diet of moldy bread, potatoes and coffee.
Mr. Socha weighed 150 pounds when he arrived in France. By the time Gen. George Patton’s troops liberated the Czechoslovakian prison where he was being held in May 1945, he had been a prisoner for nearly 10 months and weighed 87 pounds.
After convalescing in Michigan, Mr. Socha returned to Chicago, moved into an apartment near where he grew up and got a job in a leather tannery, his nephew said. He later worked as a laborer for Appleton Electric.
In the early 1970s, Mr. Socha moved into a YMCA residence for men in Irving Park, where he lived until he was admitted to the hospital this year.
“He survived the war, and every day after that was a gift to him,” said another nephew, John Socha.
Nothing prevented Mr. Socha from appreciating life, his family said, not even the ringing in his ears caused by an exploding shell during the war, or the way he would jump every time a car backfired.
He loved spending time with his four brothers and three sisters and their more than 20 children, John Socha said.
Mr. Socha lived his life by the motto: “It’s better to give than to receive,” Lukaszewski said.
“If you told him you liked his shoes, he’d take them off and give them to you,” John Socha said.
He said his uncle once wrote: “The best part of a good person’s life is the little bits of kindness and love given to others. You are remembered and respected for the good you do to others.”
Mr. Socha is survived by his nieces and nephews.
Funeral services will be held at 8:30 a.m. Friday at Cumberland Chapels, 8300 W. Lawrence Ave., Norridge. Mass will follow at 9:30 a.m. in St. Rosalie Church, 4401 N. Oak Park Ave., Harwood Heights.
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mrdudek@tribune.com
