The mid-Atlantic Ocean was rolling the morning of April 20, 1945.Maurice Vitsky grabbed his medical bag and settled into a boatswain's chair.

"Mush" Vitsky, 28, a Richmonder and University of Richmond graduate, wasn't long out of the Medical College of Virginia. He joined the Navy after one year of internship to fight in World War II. He knew well of Nazis' persecution of Jews.

His patient was a young private -- a German prisoner of war.

The doctor sent a blood sample back across the water to the USS Atherton DE 169, a destroyer escort, for Thomas J. Ciacco, 20, to count white corpuscles.

"There were lots of them," indicating serious infection, says Ciacco, a retired junior high school math teacher in Southern Pines, N.C. That confirmed Vitsky's diagnosis: appendicitis. He sent the patient across ahead of him.

Lee Roy Shepherd manned the lines for the breachers bouy. Someone took a photo. "What was amazing is that the man actually got up out of the bucket and walked to the operating room," recalls Shepherd, a retired warehouse manager in Cordova, Tenn. "If we hadn't had a doctor, he would have died."

Ciacco was busy in sick bay when POW Franz Krones walked in. Vitsky prepped to operate. Ciacco, a graduate of a six-week Navy pharmacy school, assisted. A textbook lay open. This was Vitsky's first unsupervised operation, and his first appendectomy. It went well, Ciacco says. Someone took a photo.

The prisoner recuperated in sick bay. Ciacco was his nurse. Krones spoke no English.

Land was in sight four hours out from Boston harbor when a German submarine U-853 hit The collier Black Point with 7,000 tons of coal. 12 men aboard the Black Point died. The chase was on. "I can remember being with the German prisoner when we were doing depth charges. The noise was deafening," Ciacco says. "The Atherton is the one that got credit for sinking the U-853 German submarine."

"I said to the prisoner, 'I bet you're glad you're not on that submarine.' He didn't understand. I was thinking, 'Here's a young guy who's supposed to be my enemy, and we're saving his life.'"

Fast-forward 61 years. Preston Davis, of Stafford, a government printing office retiree, was a sailor on the Atherton. He's now its unofficial historian.

Franz Krones' name and photos surfaced in his research. He was hard to locate, Davis says. Krones, a retired civil servant, lives in Otzberg, Germany. After the war, he was displaced from his home. His family lost everything. Now he is patriarch of his family at 85. Someone took a picture.

Vitsky, though, died in 2004 at 87. He had returned from the war to his bride, Betty Wallerstein Vitsky, in Richmond. He became a Richmond obstetrician who delivered nearly 6,000 babies. "My dad often wondered about what had happened to that guy," says his daughter, Pat Vitsky, of Richmond. "My dad worried about him his whole life after leaving him at a port hospital."

Vitsky didn't focus on his patient's Nazi connections, adds her sister, Sally Ucci, of Richmond. "I think he saw him as some young German farm boy."

In Germany, says Krones' daughter, Irmgard Pospischil, her father "told us the story more than a hundred times from his point of view." Pospischil, also of Otzberg, communicates with the Vitskys and Davis via e-mails translated by her husband, Frank. "He described your father as a good, friendly and likeable man. He remembers him often sitting by his bed," she writes.

Vitsky, whose Russian immigrant parents were Orthodox Jews, realized his patient was Catholic and gave him a rosary. "My dad always suspected that the doctor was Jewish," Pospischil writes. "He remembers him speaking 'jiddish'" that had some German words he understood. Yiddish is a Jewish dialect of German origins. "He always said, 'Der Arzt war ein sehr feiner Mann.'" That translates: "The physician was a very fine man.

Edited by Preston Davis
Franz & his family objected the classification "Nazi"