America's First Doughboy to Escape from a German Prison Camp Pvt. Frank Savicki - 28th Division, Pennsylvania National Guard The first American prisoner of war to escape the Germans and live to tell about it was a Pennsylvania coal miner who had emigrated from Poland four years before The Great War began. His name was Frank Savicki and his story was told in the US Army weekly Stars and Stripes on October 25, 1918 and reprinted in his local paper, the Shenandoah Herald, on November 20, just days after the Armistice. Savicki's story, unearthed from records at the Schuylkill County courthouse in Pottsville, PA., is similar to that of thousands of Eastern European immigrants who arrived in a huge wave lasting from around 1870 to 1914. He was born in Gaj, Poland, then a province of the Russian Empire, on December 26, 1894. He and his older sister Anna arrived at Ellis Island on the S.S. Pennsylvania on June 10, 1910, and made their way by train to Shenandoah, where they settled with an uncle. Frank, then 16, went to work in the coal mines. Like many boys his age, he began as a mule driver. http://www.worldwar1.com/dbc/savicki.htm http://lcweb2.loc.gov/master/ndnp/big_sample/sgpsas/2005032101/191810/19181025/0302.pdf
