John Pino, a Rutgers Class of 1944 alumnus, was a young man when he went off to Europe to serve in the infantry during World War II.
He had come from a modest working class coal mining family, with aspirations of teaching some day, but he said the military changed his plans, according to a 1999 transcript by the Oral History Archives.
"I mean, you know, you go in with everybody else, nobody's ever been in combat before, and so, it's a terrible experience," Pino said in an interview with Director Sandra Holyoak and Assistant Director Shaun Illingworth of the archives. "You know somebody's going to shoot you, or somebody is going to get killed, and there were a lot of people killed, young."
Pino's story is one of the 700 oral histories preserved in the Rutgers University Oral History Archives. The collection of archives has been stored since 1993, but many students outside of the history department are unaware of their existence, Illingworth said.
Many of the Oral History Archives outreach initiatives are geared toward the history department and people of the World War II era who gave their personal stories, Illingworth said, but the archives are open to the public. The archives have been available online since 1996 by visiting http://oralhistory.rutgers.edu.
The Rutgers Oral History Archives has one of the largest collections of World War II histories in the entire world. Although the archives are best known for their military histories, the stories of women, families, and children from the war are also available, Illingworth said.
"The project is so multifaceted," Holyoak said. "We're not just documenting World War II - we're documenting immigration history, education history, New Jersey history, they cover many facets."
As an intern for the Oral History Archives, Hanne Ala-Rami, a senior at Rutgers College, traveled to Finland over the summer to record the histories of veterans in Europe.
"When Finland lost territory to the Soviet Union in the war, they had to give up a lot of territory and half the people moved over to the western side of the country to the eastern side, so I got to meet some of those evacuees," Al-Rami said.
While in Finland recording histories of World War II veterans, Al-Rami discovered a personal history of her own. She got to speak to her great uncle who was a war veteran.
"He told me so much about my grandfather and his experiences in the war," she said. "I've always asked my parents and he never told my dad, and there was this big gaping whole about what happened to my grandfather. He was really affected but he never talked about it."
Al-Rami was not the only one to find a personal history in the oral histories. Ben Jaffe, a Livingston College senior, made some discoveries of his own.
"In the 1940s at Rutgers, this guy had the same last name as me. And I was intrigued, so I googled him, and it turned out that this guy was the editor-in-chief for the Targum."
Jaffe said the man was killed in 1944 in Germany.
"I never knew [him], never heard of him, but he was at Rutgers, he was editor-in-chief of the Targum and he could very well be a distant relative of mine," he said. "So it's distant from me, but at the same time it was very personal."
Rutgers College senior Matt Lawrence feels that the histories are still relevant today. He traveled to California on a grant paid by the Rutgers Alumni Association over the summer and interviewed 12 University alumni who had served during World War II.
"It really shows the sacrifices they made and puts ours into perspective - What that generation went through and how it was a total group effort in the war," Lawrence said.
After Pearl Harbor, Pino said there was a "tremendous mobilization." Young men were either being drafted or decided to volunteer. But he felt his experience gave him a sense of self worth.
"I felt my worth, in a sense, because I was able to do almost anything, just about anything, that anybody else did, and the military showed me that," Pino said.
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