Attu Boy: A Young Alaskan's WWII Memoir

By Nick Golodoff and Brenda Maly

In the quiet of morning, exactly six months after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese touched down on American soil. Landing on the remote Alaska island of Attu, they assailed an entire village, holding the Alaskan villagers for two months and eventually corralling all survivors into a freighter bound for Japan.
One of those survivors, Nick Golodoff, became a prisoner of war at just six years old. He was among the dozens of Unangan Attu residents swept away to Hokkaido, and one of only twenty-five to survive. Attu Boy tells Golodoff’s story of these harrowing years as he found both friendship and cruelty at the hands of the Japanese. It offers a rare look at the lives of civilian prisoners and their captors in WWII-era Japan. It also tells of Golodoff’s bittersweet return to a homeland torn apart by occupation and forced internments. Interwoven with other voices from Attu, this richly illustrated memoir is a testament to the struggles, triumphs, and heartbreak of lives disrupted by war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Alaska Press
• Release date: May 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781602232501

Book preview

PREFACE, 2012

Brenda Maly

NICK GOLODOFF’S GRANDDAUGHTER AND DESCENDANT OF ATTU

When you meet someone who has been through World War II and they tell you their amazing stories of what they went through or what they saw, from the listener’s point of view it’s very exciting to hear. But what if you put yourself in their place? Imagine what is going through your mind, your feelings, your wonderment, your losses, the unknown of what is going to happen, and the waiting. This can be a scary thought, especially if the stories are from someone you love dearly. Life does work out in mysterious ways, and you can’t help but go with it. An early life experience can change your future in bad ways, but also in good ways. What I’m trying to say here is that life is unexpected, and back during World War II it was harsher than it is now. It had to be, or we would not be where we are now. My grandfather, Nick L. Golodoff, had no choice. He was taken off his island of Attu, Alaska, by the Japanese when he was very young. He witnessed an amazing event, World War II, from another view than most people. A lot of people talk about World War II from the United States’ view. He tells the story of actually being captured by the Japanese. When you read this book, please keep in mind that Nick was about five or six years old when taken off Attu Island. Names and dates are blurry to him, and some things are uncertain. With Rachel Mason, our editor and good friend, and with our family, Nick and I have done our best to get any facts about World War II that are related to Nick’s story. Most of the information needed is from Japan, and some information they would not release to us. My grandfather Nick wishes to be done with this book as soon as possible. This is his last and final wish before passing. This book is written from his point of view as a child and as he tells it, with some minor adjustments. A book with detailed facts and information from other sources takes some time, and Nick is elderly and just wishes to get his story out now rather than later. Please understand that this book is not perfection but his honest experience. It is a story that is most interesting.

Editor’s note: This preface was written in 2012 for the National Park Service’s publication of Attu Boy. Nick Golodoff died on February 8, 2013.

INTRODUCTION

Telling the Story of Attu

Rachel Mason

EDITOR

When Nick Golodoff was six years old, he and his family were taken from Attu, Alaska, to Japan, where they were held captive until the end of World War II. Nick has recorded and written his memories. His granddaughter Brenda Maly transcribed and compiled them, and they are intertwined here with several other firsthand accounts of the Attuan experience.

I learned of Nick Golodoff’s memoir in 2008 while working on the Lost Villages of the Aleutians project of the Aleutian World War II National Historic Area, National Park Service. The project documents the history of four Unangan villages left empty in the evacuations and relocations of World War II and never permanently resettled after the war. The residents of three villages in the Unalaska Island area (Biorka, Makushin, and Kashega) were removed to southeast Alaska in 1942 and were resettled in other Unangan villages upon their return in 1945. Attu had a different and more tragic story. In September 1942, the Japanese army took the forty-two Attu residents to Otaru, on Hokkaido Island, where they stayed until war’s end. Many of them died, mainly of starvation and malnutrition. The twenty-five surviving Attuans were not able to return to their former village. Those who were not hospitalized (or sent to boarding school, as were several young people) were resettled in Atka.

In 2008, the Lost Villages project had already collected considerable material on the Unalaska Island area villages, thanks to a series of oral history interviews Ray Hudson collected in 2004. However, we had no firsthand information about Attu. At a meeting of the project’s steering committee in Anchorage, I learned from Crystal Dushkin that Nick Golodoff had been working on a memoir entitled Attu Boy, about his experiences as a young boy at the time of the Japanese invasion, during the internment in Japan, through the Attuans’ release and return to America, and finally to his life in Atka after he moved there at the age of nine. Crystal knew that Nick was looking for a publisher, but she did not know the status of his manuscript. She suggested that the National Park Service might be able to work out an agreement with Nick to publish his memoir as part of the Lost Villages project.

Starting in 2004, Nick began recording and writing his memories at his home in Atka. This account originated in tapes Nick made and sent to his granddaughter Brenda Maly in Anchorage. Over the next few years, Brenda transcribed and edited the accounts. When I began work on the project, I rearranged Nick’s statements in chronological order. I researched other accounts and found several other firsthand narratives of the Attuans’ experience. Besides Nick Golodoff, these include Innokenty Golodoff (Nick’s father’s brother), Olean Golodoff Prokopeuff (Nick’s mother), Mike Lokanin, and Alex Prossoff.

Innokenty Golodoff, Nick’s father’s half-brother, was born in 1917 on Attu to Metrofan and Anastasia Golodoff. Anastasia was Metrofan’s second wife. Innokenty was known throughout his life as Popeye. After the Attuans were settled in Atka, Popeye married Vasha Nevzoroff there in 1947. They had two daughters and a son. Popeye died in Anchorage in 1998.

Olean Golodoff Prokopeuff, Nick’s mother, was born Olean Horosoff in 1910 in Atka to Peter and Anna Horoshoff. She married Lovrenti Golodoff and moved to Attu, where they had seven children, all of whom were taken to Japan. Lovrenti and three of their children died in Japan. Nick’s older brother John survived, as did his younger siblings Gregory and Elizabeth. Olean and her children were resettled in Atka after the war, and in 1947 she married Ralph Prokopeuff. They had three children. Olean died in Anchorage in about 1976.

Mike or Mihie Lokanin (sometimes written Lukanin) was born in 1912, either in Attu or Unalaska, to Ephem and Anna Lukanin. His mother was from Makushin. Mike’s first marriage, to Mary Tarkanoff, ended in divorce in 1939. In 1940 Mike married Parascovia Horosoff, Olean Golodoff’s younger half-sister, on Attu. Their first three children died, two of them in Japan. Parascovia had six more children before Mike died in Unalaska in 1961.

Alex Prossoff was born in 1916 on Attu. His parents were Mike Prossoff and his first wife, Marina. Alex married Elizabeth Prokopeuff aboard the Coast Guard cutter Itasca in 1939. Elizabeth already had a daughter, Fekla, who took her stepfather Alex’s name. Alex died before 1949.

The first-person accounts of wartime events are quite different in style and form. Innokenty Golodoff’s story was published in the Alaska Sportsman in December 1966, as told to Kent W. Kenyon, a biologist for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Olean Golodoff Prokopeuff was interviewed by Knut Bergsland, and her account appeared in the Aleutian-Pribilof Island Association newsletter. The translation was later revised by Moses Dirks and published in The Aleutian Invasion, a project of high school students in Unalaska (Unalaska City Schools 1981). In 1946 or 1947 Mike Lokanin and Alex Prossoff wrote their own stories, which were published verbatim in Ethel Ross Oliver’s Journal of an Aleutian Year (1988). In this 2015 edition of Attu Boy, Mike Lokanin’s written account has been edited for readability.

Following common usage in America during World War II, the Attuans who told of their experience referred to the Japanese as Japs. The word has been retained in the first-person accounts. It is notable, however, that unlike other Attuans who remembered being held prisoner in Japan, Nick Golodoff never used this term in his recollections of Japanese people.

Much of the Attuans’ experience in Japan has remained obscure, partly because few of the survivors were inclined to talk about their experiences there. There is not much of a written record either. They did not keep diaries or write letters from Japan. In addition, participants in the wartime events have divergent memories of what happened. Perhaps especially because they have not discussed their experiences with one another, there are multiple accounts of these traumatic events.

To provide a context to the firsthand accounts, I added background material, culled from published and unpublished sources, about Attu history, prehistory, and the events of World War II. Nick Golodoff’s is the most complete account yet of the years in Japan, from the unique perspective of a young boy. His book is a gift not only to the descendants of Attu and to other Unangan but to all of us who need to hear this previously untold story. Thank you to all those who helped assemble this memoir. I would like particularly to thank Shannon Apgar-Kurtz, Anna Bateman, Francis Broderick (designer), Omar Chavez, Janet Clemens, John Cloe, Linda Cook, Debbie Corbett, Crystal Dushkin, Nicole Ferreira (cartographer), Ray Hudson, Janis Kozlowski, Bruce Greenwood, Jennifer Jolis, and Dirk