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A graduate of Boston City Hospital’s School of Nursing, Frances Slanger, RN, was one of 18 nurses to splash ashore on Utah Beach four days after D-Day in June 1944. Along with another unit, Slanger and her fellow nurses were the first American nurses to arrive in France.

In December 2000, columnist Bob Welch received a call at the newspaper where he works, the Register-Guard in Eugene, Ore. The call was from a retired man, Nathan Fendrick, who puts on World War II Holocaust programs in high schools. Fendrick had come across a letter by a Jewish-American GI nurse, and he wanted Welch to write a column about the woman, Frances Slanger.

At 5-foot-1, Slanger, RN, was one of 18 nurses to splash ashore on Utah Beach wearing Army fatigues and 3-pound helmets four days after D-Day in June 1944. Along with another unit, Slanger and her fellow nurses were the first American nurses to arrive in France.

Welch resisted initially, but acquiesced to Fendrick’s persistence. Soon after the column was published, Welch received a phone call from a local reader, 82-year-old Sallylou Bonzer, who served as a nurse in the 45th Field Hospital Unit in France with Slanger. Her husband, John, was a doctor in the same unit. “Goodness,” she said, “you wrote about my friend Frances Slanger this morning.” In disbelief, Welch marveled at the chances that a woman who lived 10 minutes from his home had known a woman who had been born in Poland, grown up in Boston, and died in Belgium.

That afternoon, Welch was at Bonzer’s home looking through her and husband John’s photo albums of the 45th Field Hospital. Bonzer had kept in touch with a handful of nurses. Though most were dead, some on the East Coast were still alive. As he drove home, Welch thought, “Could I write a book about Frances Slanger?” A month later, he was working on a trail that had been cold for nearly 60 years.

True patriot

“Three things made Slanger different from the other nurses in her unit,” Welch said. “First, she was Jewish, which was extremely rare in that the Jewish culture was dead-set against its young women getting into nursing in the ’30s and ’40s. Second, she was a Polish immigrant who had an extra-keen appreciation for her freedom as an American. She was uncommonly patriotic, her poetry and prose full of thanks to God for America. And, finally, as a writer, she had a deeper-than-normal sense of what was going on in the world — she was well aware of what the Germans were doing to the Jews in Eastern Europe in the late ’30s — and well aware, really, of herself.”

Slanger’s relatively short life was characterized by hardship, starting with her first seven years in Lodz, Poland, a city notorious for the suffering of its civilians, especially those who were Jewish like the Slanger family. Although her family immigrated to Boston, all of her relatives who remained in Poland died in camps.

From early on, Slanger was intent on being a nurse. “I want to serve [those] who are less fortunate than I,” she wrote in her admissions letter to Boston City Hospital’s School of Nursing. After briefly working in a factory, she entered the school in February 1934 and graduated three years later.