Marjory Linheart Babinetz joined the Women’s Army Corps to help rescue her mother and brother from a Nazi concentration camp in Europe.

Both of her parents were Hungarian immigrants. Marjory was born on Feb. 26, 1923, in Masontown, Fayette County, Pennsylvania.

Her father, John Babinetz, was a concert master, and her mother, Anna Mondy Babinetz, was a homemaker to Marjory and her older brother, John Jr.

John Jr. was studying in Vienna when Hitler seized Austria in 1938. Worried for her son’s safety, Anna went to Vienna to bring him home. She and John Jr. were instead arrested by the Nazis and thrown in a concentration camp.

Marjory dropped out of Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh and enlisted in the WACs on Nov. 24, 1943. A private, her service number was A-312631.

“She joined up to do her part in trying to free her mother and brother from Hitler’s Europe,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported at the time.

She was sent to Tinker Field in Oklahoma City to be a recruiter for the WACs in the state of Oklahoma. An amateur actress, she became known as “G.I. Jane in a plane.”

“She barnstormed the state’s towns and cities, enticing women to sign up, share the excitement, and serve their country,” the Gazette in Indiana, Pennsylvania, reported in 1995.

On July 27, 1944, she and a pilot flew to Stillwater, Oklahoma, where she was to deliver radio broadcasts over the city from the cockpit of an A-24 Douglas dive bomber.

They were about to begin their low-level aerial announcements when the A-24 crashed onto the main street of Stillwater, taking out a garage and a tree. Pvt. Babinetz and the pilot were killed instantly.

Pvt. Babinetz, 21, was buried back home in Pennsylvania. Her father died in 1957 at the age of 77. Her mother and brother perished in the concentration camp.

Marjory L Babinetz