Steve Anthony Ziembicki was born Dec. 29, 1921 in Brooklyn, New York. His mother, Mary Juszovyska Ziembicki, was a homemaker and his father, Stanislaus Ziembicki, a truck driver, general laborer, and by 1940 a packer in a meat house. The parents were Polish immigrants.

The son completed 9th grade before he enlisted in the Navy on Jan. 2, 1940. He’d worked the year before at a warehouse.

Mr. Ziembicki was a seaman first class on the U.S.S. Arizona when he was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

After his death a brother, Henry, wrote several letters to the Navy on behalf of his parents. He said his father could neither read or write and that his mother nearly had a nervous breakdown. In one letter, he asked whether the ship could be raised. “She would feel much better if she seen the body and buried it herself so she would know at least where” he was.

One other brother, Walter, also served in World War II. He was in the Army from January 1941 through December 1943.

Sources: Census; Navy enlistment records and muster rolls; U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs death files; Social Security Administration. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.