Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

hosts balked: a Star of David hung in the window. To be seen there, they said, “might prove harmful to us.” The group found a gentile restaurant, then visited a public swimming pool. As they walked in, Lubin saw a sign reading JUDEN VERBOTEN . The sign hadn’t been there during the Games. All over Berlin, such signs were reappearing, and the Nazis’ virulently anti-Semitic
Der Stürmer
, nowhere to be seen during the Games, was back on newsstands. Lubin had won a gold medal in Berlin, but when he left, he felt only relief. Something terrible was coming.
    The Olympic Village wasn’t empty for long. The cottages became military barracks. With the Olympics over and his usefulness for propaganda expended, the village’s designer, Captain Fürstner, learned that he was to be cashiered from the Wehrmacht because he was a Jew. He killed himself. Less than twenty miles away, in the town of Oranienburg, the first prisoners were being hauled into theSachsenhausen concentration camp.
    ——

    On the evening of September 2, when Louie arrived in Torrance, he was plunked onto a throne on the flatbed of a truck and paraded to the depot, where four thousand people, whipped up by a band, sirens, and factory whistles, cheered. Louie shook hands and grinned for pictures. “I didn’t only start too slow,” he said, “I ran too slow.”
    As he settled back into home, Louie thought of what lay ahead. Running the 1936 Olympic 5,000 at nineteen on four races’ experience had been a shot at the moon. Running the 1940 Olympic 1,500 at twenty-three after years of training would be another matter. The same thought was circling in Pete’s mind. Louie could win gold in 1940, and both brothers knew it.
    A few weeks before, officials had announced which city would host the 1940 Games. Louie shaped his dreams around Tokyo, Japan.
    * Louie would later recall eating at a restaurant only once, when a family friend bought him a sandwich at a lunch counter, but according to his Olympic diary, after his 5,000-meter trial, a fan treated him to dinner in a Manhattan skyscraper. The meal cost $7, a staggering sum to Louie, who had been paying between 65 cents and $1.35 for his dinners, carefully recording the prices in his diary.

Five
Into War

    A T THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, LOUIE found himself on a campus infested with world-class track athletes. He spent mornings in class and afternoons training with his best friend,Payton Jordan. A sensationally fast sprinter, Jordan had seen nothing but Jesse Owens’s back at the 1936 Olympic trials and, like Louie, was aiming for gold in Tokyo. In the evenings, Louie, Jordan, and their teammates wedged into Louie’s ’31 Ford and drove to Torrance for Louise Zamperini’s spaghetti, considering themselves so close to family that Sylvia once found a high jumper asleep on her bed. In his spare time, Louie crashed society weddings, worked as a movie extra, and harassed his housemates with practical jokes, replacing their deviled ham with cat food and milk with milk of magnesia. He pursued coeds by all means necessary, once landing a date with a beauty by hurling himself into the side of her car, then pretending to have been struck.
    Between classes, Louie, Jordan, and their friends congregated near the administration building, sitting at the foot of the statue of Tommy Trojan, the symbol of USC. On some days, they were joined by a neatly dressed Japanese émigré who lingered on the edges of the group. His name was Kunichi JamesSasaki. Known as Jimmie, he had come toAmerica in his late teens and settled in Palo Alto, where he had endured the social misery of attending elementary school as an adult. Among Louie’s friends, no one would remember what Sasaki studied at USC, but they all recalled his quiet, anodyne presence; saying almost nothing, he smiled without interruption.
    Sasaki was an ardent track fan, and he sought Louie’s acquaintance. Louie was especially impressed with Sasaki’s scholarliness; prior to coming to USC, Jimmie said, he had earned degrees at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Bonding over shared interests in sports and music, the two became good friends.

    Training for the Olympics, 1940.
Bettmann/Corbis

    Louie and Jimmie had something else in common. Sometime over the course of the friendship, Louie learned that his friend was making daily trips to Torrance. He asked Jimmie if he lived there, and Jimmie said no. He explained that he was concerned about the poverty of