With center’s aid, vet out of woods

Stanislaw Radkowski finally came in from the cold.

The 79-year-old retired Air Force and Army veteran had been living on the edge of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, camping in the woods, because his pension and Social Security benefits couldn’t cover a motel.

For Radkowski, camping behind McGuire Air Force Base “was what I could afford. I started camping out about 10 years ago in a sleeping bag, with a poncho, in case it rained.”

Radkowski — kidnapped as a child by the Nazis, later becoming a naturalized American citizen, a Vietnam veteran, and an Air Force and U.S. civil-service retiree — had been chronically homeless since the early 2000s. After a year of gaining his trust, the Veterans Multi-Service Center in Philadelphia was able to house him with the cooperation of the Veterans Affairs Department.

In November, Radkowski signed an apartment lease in the Wrightstown, N.J., area. The Veterans Multi-Service Center also worked to help him reconnect with his children, whom he had not seen in more than 30 years.

Radkowski was born in 1938 or 1939 in Poland and was just a few years old when Hitler’s Lebensborn program swept him into the chaos of war. Under Lebensborn, the Nazis kidnapped children considered racially pure in countries they occupied.

Radkowski was given a German name, Fritz Radke, and placed with an Austrian adoptive family.

By 1945, when the Allies tried to relocate kidnapped Lebensborn children, Radkowski couldn’t even remember his birth parents. He, along with thousands of others, drifted around refugee camps in Italy and Spain, until he was old enough at 18 to emigrate to America in 1957.

“I was one of the lucky ones,” he said.

He was drafted into the U.S. Army, serving for three years, and then served in the Air Force for 16 years, first stationed in the Philippines and then in Thailand during the Vietnam War.