Padlocked begins,
“The day dawned like any other, but ended like no other.
Hank Mullins was a long way from home.”
Indeed, Hank was nearly 5,000 miles from his home in America on January 27, 1945, and from his wife, Dottie, and their three children, Mary, Susanna, and Ray. He was born in 1898 in rural North Carolina to the publisher of a small newspaper and his homemaker wife. When he turned 18, he joined the military to fight in the Great War. It was 1916, and he spent the next two years, from 1916 to 1918, trying to survive the war and return home to Dottie, whom he had married the day before he was deployed.
During his deployment, he realized he was far more suited to carrying a camera than a weapon. When he returned home, he worked for his father’s newspaper before moving to a magazine as a junior foreign correspondent. He covered the aftermath of the Great War in Europe and the rise of fascism in Spain, including the Spanish Civil War and the rise of dictator Francisco Franco.
After Franco seized power in 1939, he was sent to the border between Poland and Germany. The assignment was expected to last four weeks, and Hank was looking forward to working in America, closer to home, when his latest assignment ended. But as he photographed the border at Festungsfront Oder-Warthe-Bogen on September 1, he witnessed the Nazi invasion of Poland.
Caught behind the lines with his co-correspondent, Rafe Cabrera, Hank would spend the entire Second World War trapped in Poland.
Hank embarks on an odyssey that includes an initial capture by the Polish Army, followed by the Nazis, and finally, the Red Army. His talent with a camera makes him ideal for war propaganda, pitting his survival instincts against his morality, and the war will change him in significant ways.
Image by Larah Vidotto, Pixabay. Used with permission.