Читать книгу LOST AND FOUND, A Family Memoir - SARA APPLEBAUM - Страница 7

Various post-war documents from Refugee camp in British Zone, Transit papers,”Green Card” etc.

My parents were both born in Poland, but as Jews they were never quite “Poles” but kind of outsiders. I was born in Kyrgyzstan but I was never “Kyrgyz”. I never even had a birth certificate. Being born in Kyrgyzstan was a sort of accident of war. I never lost my homeland because I never had one.

We were one family of many thousands who escaped Poland into Russia, and were sent to Siberia, to the area of the Archangel Forest, ”Arkhangelsk”.

We were eventually released…only to be sent into Kyrgyzstan, one of the Asian Republics. The USSR needed workers in the cement factories and the oil fields.

There’s a 2007 documentary film you can see on youtube.com, about the Jews who were ”Saved by Deportation” from death in the Nazi camps of Poland like Bergen Belsen, Auschwitz and Majdanek.

“In 1940, a year before the Nazis started deporting Jews to death camps, Joseph Stalin ordered the deportation of approximately 200,000 Polish Jews from Russian-occupied Eastern Poland to forced labor settlements in the Soviet Interior. As cruel as Stalin’s deportations were, ultimately they largely saved Jewish lives, for the deportees constituted the overwhelming majority of Polish Jews who escaped the Nazi Holocaust….it retraces the path traveled more than 60 years ago from Poland to Siberia to the former Soviet states of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in Central Asia”

www.imdb.com/title/tt1260395/

After the war, our family documents said we were “stateless” and in Belgium illegally. My aunt and uncle arranged for us to be smuggled out of Germany where we were in a German Refugee camp in the British Zone. Pretending to be German Jews was how my family managed to get out of Poland, which by then had turned Communist. My parents were desperate to return to my sister. They were able to pull it off because they both spoke German well.

After the war, my family and I were “stateless”. We were displaced persons, and in Belgium illegally, and were only allowed there in transit to another country. We were granted only three months temporary residency in Belgium while we made transit arrangements to go somewhere else. We were there for five years.

On paper, we claimed to be supported by my aunt and uncle who mailed us a monthly check. In fact, my father worked for a cousin on his mother’s side who owned a leather purse manufacturing company, Traksbetryger’s. He periodically paid back my aunt and uncle who supposedly supported us. This state of affairs went on for five long years, until we got a Visa to come to America. The absolutely last extension that the Belgian Government authorized was until July 1952.

I remember worried conversations between my parents whether the fact that I was born in the USSR could keep us from being approved for entry into the U.S., and the certainty that being caught in a lie about my birthplace most certainly would.

Remember, this was the time of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in the U.S.

The visa came through for April.

On the beach in Belgium, dad, mom, Mark & me at 5 or 6