A returned letter, marked 'Missing' (bottom left) was the first sign that Chumas's fate was in jeopardy. A radiogram soon followed with news that he was a German POW. A Newburgh News article announced his release a year later.
By Nancy Peckenham
A War World II veteran from Newburgh figured among the thousands of area veterans whose service to their country was remembered Friday, Veterans Day. John Chumas was honored in a special display at the Cornwall Public Library, where his granddaughter, library director Karen LaRocca-Fels, talked about Chumas’s service in Europe and how the family learned he had become a prisoner of war.
The first sign that something was wrong for the Chumas family came in June 1944 when a letter sent to John at the front was returned, marked “missing.” Days later, a radiogram arrived with the news that John Chumas was a German prisoner of war. LaRocca-Fels says her grandfather would never speak about his experience as a prisoner, but military records reveal that he was on a bombing mission over some airfields outside Paris, France, when the Germans hit the plane, setting it on fire and Chumas parachuted into enemy hands.
Chumas remained a prisoner of war until the war ended in June 1945. In the display is an old yellowed copy of the Newburgh News reporting that he had been freed along with two other Newburgh men.
Antoinette Chumas (nee Barel) kept a photo album of her friends, many of whom fought in World War II.
Larocca-Fels also included a 70-year-old scrapbook that her grandmother had put together with snapshots of her friends, many in military uniform. “The Gang,” as she called them, posed for photos in Algonquin Park and Downing Park in 1944, smiling despite the ominous cloud of war that hovered above them.
Antoinette Barel was employed as a secretary at the Newburgh News at that time and her scrapbook speaks of her interest in becoming a reporter. When Eleanor Roosevelt spoke at the Broadway School in Newburgh in November 1944, Antoinette snapped her photo and wrote next to it “ my first real try at reporting.”
Barel never fully realized her dream of becoming a reporter. She soon met the returning POW, John Chumas, and the two were married in 1947. The couple raised a family locally, moving to New Windsor. John passed away in 2003 and his widow, Antoinette, recently found the old papers, a goldmine that her librarian granddaughter knew had to be preserved.
Cornwall Library Director Karen LaRocca-Fels talks about her grandparents' legacy.
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