Pena Blanca

Lina Martinez Cordova

By Katherine Sayre

Lina Cordova prayed each night for her husband's safe return to her and their two children during World War II.

"I used to pray every night, every night I would pray, 'Please God, bring him home,'” Cordova said. "I didn't care how he [came] home – without an arm or without a leg – as long as he came home to me and the kids.''

While Alfredo Cordova was away fighting on Europe’s battlefields, Cordova wrote him two or three times a week. When he wrote back, the letters were sometimes censored, some passages blacked out, she says.

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