داستان کوتاه انگلیسی

Sponsoring Relatives and Safety from Nazis in the US (part2)


We had to move two more times, each time to a new apartment with several more families. My mother contacted an immigrant aid society to find relatives in the US. They were able to sponsor us to get to the US, and promised to support us for 5 years so we wouldn’t have to get any kind of government welfare. We got an American visa. We found out that we were supposed to leave for a concentration camp in a week.

Q: Could you describe what it was like arriving in the US, and how you were able to get here?

A: We got on a train to Italy with only what we could carry. Since the Nazis had taken all of our money our American relatives bought our steamship tickets. We went right around Christmas of 1939, when I was eight and a half.

Half way there a German submarine stopped the ship and took several people off. One’s name was Schneider, and my dad thought they were saying Schreiber. Luckily they weren’t. I’m not sure what wound up happening with the people they took.

We got to New York just after Christmas. These relatives waited on the pier in Manhattan for hours for us so they could take us somewhere we could stay the night. They were there in the cold from 7:30am until we finally got off at 4:00pm. They took us to a brownstone where a family lived in Brooklyn, NY. They found us a 1 bedroom apartment. The kitchen was about six by eight feet; it just had a sink, stove, and fridge, no counter, no table. We lived there for a number of years. The landlord was a Jewish man that charged us 25 dollars a month in rent. I went to grade school in Brooklyn. I was one of 5 white kids in a class of 43. I remember one night my mother got mugged on the way home from a PTA meeting. Then we moved to a different neighborhood in Brooklyn. We had a very small apartment there also. It was right across the street from my grade school. I wrote a poem about the flag that I could see at the top of the school. I applied for the Brooklyn technical high school, which was an elite school; you had to take an entrance exam and be in the top of your grade school class. I got in and went there for four years. After I went to Cooper Union where I met grandma in the Cooper Union hiking club.

Q: What did you think when your family revealed you would be moving?

A: I was very happy because it meant we would get away from the Nazis.

Q: Was there anything that stood out to you as being different when you first arrived here?

A: In school here they threw stuff around the room. I had never seen that before. In Austria everyone was always very quiet in class.


Q: What helped you assimilate to a new country where you did not speak the language?


A: When I got into grade school I didn’t speak the language. Luckily my teacher from the first class I went to was a Jewish lady who spoke Yiddish. It was similar enough to German that I could understand. She set it up so I could eat lunch with a German-American girl. She would help me with my English at lunch, and that’s how I learned English.


Q: Were you treated as an outsider by your peers?


A: Oh yeah. I spoke like the Nazis. They identified me as one of the Nazis in the radio programs they heard.