Carville's Cure by Pam Fessler

Author:Pam Fessler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2020-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Fighting for Freedom

IT WOULD HAVE been difficult in May of 1946 to find a more appealing and heroic couple than Hans and Gertrude Hornbostel. Hans was sixty-five, handsome and tall, a ramrod-straight army major who had survived the Bataan Death March, when the Imperial Japanese Army forced tens of thousands of American and Filipino prisoners on a brutal trek across the Philippines. His wife, Gertrude, now gray-haired and grandmotherly at fifty-two, spent the war confined by the Japanese at an internment camp in Manila.

When the couple returned to the United States after the war, Hans made a startling announcement. He told the world, from a hospital in San Francisco, that Gertrude had leprosy and he planned to go live with her at Carville—germs be damned. The San Francisco Call-Bulletin broke the sensational news: “S.F. Wife Leper: Army Mate Begs to Share Isolation for Life.” A flood of other stories followed—“Bataan Hero Seeks Exile to Live with Leper-Wife” (Boston Globe); “No Greater Love Hath Any Man: Would Be Confined with Leper Wife for Rest of Life” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette); “War Hero Seeks to Join Leprosy-Stricken Wife in Exile” (Arizona Republic); “Mate Asks Leper’s Life to Stay by Wife’s Side” (Atlanta Constitution). The public immediately rallied in support of the couple, who were instant heroes, victims of tragedy heightened by love.

The Hornbostels had a romance straight out of Hollywood. They had met thirty-three years earlier in Guam, where she had been raised and where Hans, a marine corporal, had been sent to determine whether Gertrude’s German father was a spy.1 Instead, Hans fell in love. When her father (who Hans concluded probably was a spy) tried to prevent them from getting married, Gertrude left her home one night for a secret rendezvous with Hans. She threaded her way through mango trees and coconut palms and plunged into a river, swam downstream a half mile, then waded ashore and into her lover’s arms.2 The two were swiftly married by a navy chaplain before they set off for a life together, exploring the islands of the South Pacific, doing research for a museum, and raising three children. The Hornbostels landed in the Philippines right before the war and were soon imprisoned by the Japanese.

They now wanted to spend their remaining days together after years of separation. “Heck, I’m sixty-five. I’ve had my fling. I just want one other thing in life—to spend the rest of it with my wife,” Hans told reporters at San Francisco’s Letterman Hospital, where Gertrude was a patient in the isolation ward. The couple knew they would make a splash if they went to the media with their story. The Hornbostels invited newsreel camera crews onto the hospital grounds to record them walking arm in arm as they told their story of “deep devotion.” They hoped that public pressure would make the authorities agree that they should stay together.

But the U.S. Public Health Service was unmoved. Officials said they could not allow a healthy spouse to live at Carville with sick patients.

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