‘Their whole love affair was truly in these letters’
While on leave in 1943, Tom Wuchina visits Luby Toncic.
Lubjica Toncic and Thomas Wuchina, the couple to the right, pose for a wedding portrait on May 20, 1945.
Luby and Tom Wuchina in the year of their 50th wedding anniversary
Tom Wuchina at Fort Indiantown Gap, 1941
Tom Wuchina at Camp Livingston, La., December 1942
World War II made for many a stressful relationship.
“Imagine you’re writing to this person whom you’re in love with and you may marry one day, and all of a sudden, no letters come,” Remy Bibaud said. “And your letters started coming back ‘return to sender.'”
The Baldwin Township resident described the situation faced by Lubjica Toncic, her grandmother, as she waited to hear from Thomas Wuchina. Luby, as everyone called her, had no idea that Tom could write no more after being captured by Germans at the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944.
For the previous 25 months, the two had been exchanging correspondences. Those 386 letters form the basis for “The Trunk: My Grandparents’ Love Affair,” Bibaud’s 400-plus-page book she compiled for family members.
“I was bequeathed this trunk that was full of these letters,” she explained, “as well as various newspaper articles, photographs, my grandfather’s medals, everything down to his mess kit and his spoon and fork. I’ll tell you, it is the most beautiful gift that I’ve ever received and it probably is the most valuable thing that I own.”
She was intent on following Luby’s wishes before her death in 1997 to have her granddaughter tell the Wuchinas’ tale.
“It was so intimidating,” Bibaud said. “At the time, I was finishing graduate school, and I thought, oh my gosh, this is my responsibility to do justice to this story. So it sat for a while. But over the course of an eight-year period, I began to put this story together.”
The story effectively begins in the summer of 1942, while Tom was stationed at the U.S. Army’s Camp Livingston in Louisiana.
“He came home on a furlough and visited some family in Midland,” Bibaud said about the Beaver County borough where Luby lived, “which is when he came across my grandmother for the first time. When he returned to the camp, within a few short weeks, he had asked if he could write to my grandmother, and, of course, she gave him permission. And the letter-writing campaign began.”
The correspondences continued from wherever he was stationed stateside and eventually from Europe, when the Army sent him overseas as part of the 103rd Medical Battalion.
“He was home two other times, where they were able to have short visits with one another, but their whole love affair was truly in these letters,” Bibaud explained.
As the Allies advanced through Germany in the spring of 1945, Tom was liberated from his POW camp, returning to U.S. soil on May 5.
“On May 7, he was in Pennsylvania,” Bibaud said. “On May 20, they got married.”
Fast-forward to 1995.
“They decided to take a trip to California on the train,” their granddaughter said. “He probably knew it would be his last trip. They visited friends out there. And then, on their way back, he got very ill. When they came home, he was put into the VA hospital. He never left.
“He stayed alive, though, for their 50th anniversary, and he died the next day.”