VA waiting rooms as "social media"? Man learns more about father’s WWII imprisonment after chance encounter in Fresno VA waiting room

When Orville Lewis first met Les Beck, they were prisoners at a Nazi POW camp near Krems an der Donau, Austria.

The B-17 bomber that Lewis, an Oklahoma native, served in was shot down on July 30, 1943. Four days earlier, another B-17 carrying Beck had suffered the same fate. The two men were placed in the B 36 barracks of Stalag XVII, where they and hundreds of other prisoners from dozens of countries would remain for more than 21 months.

Nearly 72 years to the day after he first entered the POW camp, Lewis, now 95, met another Les Beck nearly 6,000 miles from Austria.

Les Beck Jr., a 69-year-old Vietnam veteran, spotted Lewis’ Army Air Corps hat while sitting in the Veterans Affairs hospital in Fresno earlier this month. The hat was identical to one owned by Beck’s father, who passed away in 1995, and the younger man struck up a conversation with Lewis.

“It was just such a remarkable occurrence,” Beck said Saturday while sitting at Lewis’ dining room table in Orange Cove. “Not only were they in the same camp at the same time, but they were in the same barracks.”

Since their first meeting in early August, Beck has kept in contact with Lewis over the phone and driven twice from his home in Coarsegold to Lewis’ house in Orange Cove.

During Saturday’s visit, Beck set a heavily worn journal down on Lewis’ table. It belonged to his father, who had kept it throughout their imprisonment and until the day he died.

Inside, there were a few newspaper clippings and black and white photos. However, most of the journal was filled with hand-drawn portraits and pictures scrawled during Beck’s time at the prison.

The artistry ranged from professional-grade, beautiful pencil portraits of Beck and others drawn by soldiers who put their art careers on hold to serve their country, to quick sketches perhaps more suitable for a refrigerator door.

One drawing, however, carried a lot more weight than the thin, damaged journal page it rested on. It depicted, in what looked to be crayon, two soldiers in front of a large, brown guard tower and a barbed wire fence.

One soldier seemed caught on the fence, streaks of red pouring out of him. The other appeared to be standing on the ground with his arms raised. A German soldier stood primed on his perch, apparently firing a gun at the men.

The younger Beck said the drawing depicted a botched escape attempt. The man on the ground was urging his fellow soldier not to try to scale the fence.

Both men, Beck said, were shot and killed.

Lewis remembered the incident. When Beck flipped to the drawing, the WWII vet’s normally cheerful expression gave way to a slightly sullen stare toward the journal resting on his table.

“We all knew that if we tried to escape, we’d either get out or get shot,” Lewis said. “There was nothing else.”

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