A Pelican Rapids, Minn., woman is featured in a book about Army nurses during World War II.
She's Marcella "Marcy" Korda, whose story was told here last year; how she escaped two bombings, one on a hospital ship on which she was serving, and one in the hospital tents in which she was working in Anzio, Italy.
She met and married Henry Korda of Duluth, Minn., and a physician in her unit, and they spent their honeymoon in newly liberated Paris. After the war, they moved to Pelican Rapids, where he practiced medicine and she was a nurse for many years. Henry died in 1990.
After that story ran, Lowell Busching of Valley City, N.D., came across a book titled "Angels of Mercy," which contains the stories of many Army nurses, including Marcy, the Iowa native who the book says was nicknamed "Schlem," which, Lowell speculates, is another word for slim.
The book goes into detail on the German bombing of the 95th Evacuation Hospital's tents in Anzio. It says Marcy, who was not in the tents hit by the bomb, rushed to the scene. There, she said, "some of the tents looked like a sieve. We didn't know how many people had been killed."
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They soon knew the worst: Three nurses and a Red Cross worker were dead.
"We couldn't function as a hospital (after that)," the book quotes Marcy, "because we lost quite a few personnel and all our X-ray equipment had been destroyed."
The area was bombed again a few days later, and two more nurses from another unit were killed.
Lowell says the book, published in 1999, also has a photo of Marcy.
So this woman from Pelican Rapids is having her proverbial 15 minutes of fame, and then some.
And she deserves it.
