"Jumpin" Joe Beyrle: A Hero for Two Nations,"...

Beyrle, who died in 2004, is a war hero both in the United States and Russia. He is also the father of John Beyrle, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, who attended the exhibit"s opening at the Russian State Museum in St. Petersburg and was to speak at a seminar dedicated to the 65th anniversary of victory in the war.

Beyrle, who was a paratrooper, was captured after parachuting into France"s Normandy in 1944. He spent 10 months in Nazi camps and successfully escaped in the spring of 1945 to get into a Russian tank unit. Knowing only two words in Russian, "American comrade," he served there for a month helping liberate the very POW camp from which he escaped.

He was severely wounded and sent to Moscow, where he was visited in hospital by Marshal Georgy Zhukov, top Soviet commander in World War II, who helped the soldier with no id and citizenship proof return home.

"When you consider that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were once bitter ideological rivals, our wartime alliance

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