He was born in 1938 or 1939 in Poland, and was just a few years old when Hitler's Lebensborn program swept him into the chaos of war. Under Lebensborn, the Nazis kidnapped children considered "racially pure" from countries they occupied. Some were already orphans; others were stolen from their parents' arms. Thousands were transferred to Lebensborn centres to be "Germanised" up to 100,000 from Poland alone. Radkowski was given a German name, Fritz Radke, and placed with an Austrian adoptive family. By 1945, when the Allies tried to relocate kidnapped Lebensborn children, Radkowski couldn't even remember his birth parents. He and thousands of others drifted around refugee camps in Italy and Spain, until he was old enough, at 18, to migrate to America in 1957. "I was one of the lucky ones," he said.

He was drafted into the US Army, serving for three years, and then served in the Air Force for 16, first stationed at Clark Air Base in the Philippines and then in Thailand during the Vietnam War. He met and married a Filipina and had two children. "She wasn't interested in moving back with me to the US," he said, and they separated. By the time Radkowski retired from the civil service in the 1980s, he was living in and out of motels in New Jersey, uninterested in veterans' housing benefits. In 2016, the veterans centre provided funds to 992 veterans or veteran households to either prevent homelessness or put veterans back in homes. Outreach workers Javier Galindo and Douglas Woods heard about Radkowski through the grapevine. "He didn't want any help. He's highly independent, so it took us about a year to get him to even tell us his name and show us his military ID," Galindo said.

Still, it took some convincing. Radkowski's health was failing. After a year of talking with him and gaining his trust, the veteran finally agreed to allow the VMC to help him. "Doug and Javier found me a place," Radkowski said recently, smiling at the two men, also veterans. In November, Radkowski signed an apartment lease in Wrightstown, New Jersey. He's the leaseholder of his own two-bedroom unit. US Veteran Affairs department and the VMC also connected him with doctors for routine healthcare and several surgical procedures. The centre also worked to help him reconnect with his children, Stan jnr and Paz, whom he had not seen in more than 30 years.​

"My children didn't know I was living in the woods," Radkowski said. They had no idea of their father's history, or if he was even alive. They live in California and travelled here for a week-long stay earlier this year. Radkowski visits the military base often. He can do his grocery shopping there, and there's also a library on base where he spends a lot of time. "Yes, I've had a fascinating life," he said. "But really, I've had too much change in my life." The Philadelphia Inquirer