End-of-life recollections of World War II combat make their way to the stage

Richard Bencivenga’s play about his grandfather’s parachute landing into Normandy, France, on D-Day during World War II, Flight of the Iron Butterfly, called for a special person to play the lead role.

“We were trying to cast that part for a long time,” said Bencivenga, a 2006 Rutgers College graduate and English major. “Then my grandmother said to me, ‘Isn’t it obvious? You are supposed to play that role.’ I was initially going to play the male chorus part. How did I not think of that earlier?”

With Bencivenga in the lead, Flight of the Iron Butterfly will be presented November 10 and 11 at 3 p.m. and November 17 at 8 p.m. at the Lucy Stone Hall Auditorium on Livingston Campus.

The Rutgers Oral History Archives, along with the Department of English in New Brunswick, is sponsoring Bencivenga’s production about his grandfather, Cpl. John Czahor. The Rutgers archive is a project dedicated to recording the memories of New Jersey men and women who lived through World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Cold War. It is one of the nation’s most valuable resources available to World War II scholars.

Cpl. John Czahor, a farm boy from Connecticut who lived in Hillsborough, N.J., was a young man with the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division when he jumped with thousands of Allied paratroopers into German-occupied Normandy in the early morning hours of June 6, 1944. He was awarded the Purple Heart – a shell exploded in front of him, propelling shrapnel into the left side of his body, leaving him unconscious for two weeks and with a metal rod in his left arm for the remainder of his life. Czahor also received the Bronze Star Medal for valor in combat.

He saw continuous combat from D-Day through V-E Day. After being honorably discharged in 1946, he returned to New Jersey and met Bencivenga’s grandmother, Noreen Murphy. He worked as a postman until moving to Clearwater, Fla.

Czahor never spoke of his experiences until two months before his death from cancer in his hip.

“This is something I think had been on his mind for 60 years,” Bencivenga said. “My grandmother said he was not a still sleeper. I think these memories of when he was wounded plagued his mind … I think he knew he was going to pass away and he wanted to get this out before he did.” Czahor was 87 years old when he died.

The seeds of Flight of the Iron Butterfly were planted in an advanced playwriting workshop Bencivenga enrolled in his last semester of college. Just a few weeks earlier, his grandfather had been diagnosed with hip cancer. When Bencivenga learned that the workshop project would be a one-act play, he followed an uncle’s advice and began researching his grandfather’s story.

Bencivenga called upon materials and speeches culled from the dozen or so regiment reunions his grandfather attended. “I used those to further flesh out his story. They were invaluable. I could pinpoint exactly where he was wounded.

"It was funny because I told him that I was writing a play about him and he said, ‘Well you’re going to have to use quite a bit of an imagination because my life is not that interesting,’” Bencivenga recalled. Yet a few weeks later, a casual conversation about Bencivenga’s first (and last) skydiving attempt prompted an outpouring of the details of Czahor’s time in Europe.

Bencivenga’s sister had been visiting him in Florida when her grandfather told his story. She called her brother, who immediately documented her and her husband’s recollections of the story. Those notes became the foundation of Flight of the Iron Butterfly.

“I am so appreciative and blessed. He was just so wonderful and giving,” Benivenga said. “He was one of those men who would wait until everyone else took something from the table, and then he would take something for himself. I’m glad that I could write this tribute to him.”