Brockton, Massachusetts

b. 1923

 

Holy Ghost Soup

It was his first night back in the States, after nearly three years away, and Anthony Dears sat on his bunk at Camp Miles Standish, just a few miles from his home in Brockton, Massachusetts.  You can call your folks in the morning, soldier, they told him, but he couldn't wait one minute longer. 

“I jumped the fence,” he says. 

At 11 p.m., Anthony knocked on the door of the house where he had lived since he arrived as a boy from Portugal in 1933, where he still lives until this very day.  His mother appeared in the doorway.  She saw him and screamed, and she held her Antonio and wouldn't let go.  His father was there, too, happy beyond words and shocked that his son had withered from 175 to 119 pounds. 

Right away, Mary Dears heated up a bowl of Holy Ghost soup.  “I used to love it,” says Anthony, “and I still do.”  There's nothing like it, an earthy, long-simmering brew made from meat, bone marrow, chicken, cabbage, onion, and garlic, fragranced with bay and mint leaves, and poured on top of thick Portuguese bread.  That night he jumped the fence, the Holy Ghost soup that poured from his ma's ladle into Anthony's greedy body tasted very, very good. 

In Stalags 344, IIIB, and IIB, Anthony had starved.  At night at IIB, he watched American bombers strike the nearby airfield and he wondered if they'd get hit—especially when the airport lights were turned off and the camp's were left burning.  The guards taunted the prisoners: “You're gonna get bombed tonight!”  But Anthony knew they were scared, too. “They were human beings, I didn't hate them,” he says. “They had guns at their backs, too.” 

The march out of Stalag IIB that winter might have killed him, as it did hundreds of others, if he hadn't bolted the column.  A farmer gave him the location of the American lines and he just ran like crazy through the woods, for hours, until he knocked smack into a company of GIs. 

A couple of months later, Anthony sat in his kitchen in Brockton slurping Holy Ghost soup, surrounded by family.  Almost like he'd never left.