Once They Had a Country: Two Teenage Refugees in the Second World War

Epilogue

Epilogue The Charter of the United nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights . . . have affirmed the principle that human beings shall enjoy fundamental rights and freedoms without discrimination. The United nations has . . . manifested its profound concern for refugees and endeavoured to assure refugees the widest possible exercise of these fundamental rights and freedoms. —Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, Preamble, 1951 It has been over sixty years since my parents arrived in the United States to start new lives: sixty years since Ilse stood on the deck of the SS America while her fellow refugees sang and cried as they passed the Statute of liberty steadfastly holding the torch of freedom high above her head; sixty years since Hans finally realized the goal first articulated in his schoolboy letter to Cousin bessie when he naively—and prematurely—wrote from berlin, shortly after the november pogrom,“you have no idea how grateful I am that you have made possible my emigration to America.” by any objective measure , their lives over those six decades have been remarkably successful.They are the first to acknowledge that after nearly nine years as refugees, they finally arrived in the promised land. The first years were not easy. My mother wanted desperately to fit in to American society, to feel that she belonged, but with her foreign accent and European manners, she was conspicuously different from native-born Americans. nothing was more shocking and disturbing than to be taken for a German—the vanquished enemy. My father wanted to make something of himself and was tremendously disappointed when the job he had been promised in Philadelphia fell through. He was frustrated when his social worker arranged for him to take an aptitude test, concluded that he was college material , and then announced that the refugee relief organization for which she worked had no funds with which to help him attend school. for years he was exploited by greedy employers who paid him as little as they could get away with, knowing he was grateful to have a job of any kind. And his demons— the nightmares, the panic attacks, the hypervigilance, all hallmarks of posttraumatic stress disorder—never left him. His psychiatrist, like most of her profession who cared for survivors of the war in Europe, attributed his prob- 188 / Epilogue lems to developmental problems, not to his wartime experiences.1 but despite the difficulties and the disappointments, my parents made it in America: they lived the American dream. My father began as a clerk, earning scarcely more than minimum wage. but he had a knack for numbers; he had strong managerial and analytic skills; and he gradually taught himself the equivalent of a comprehensive business school course. He was promoted several times, and after ten years, he was hired by a british steel firm as a manager. He spent the rest of his career with that firm, rising in the ranks to become vice president and ultimately president of the corporation. He was well respected in the steel business, frequently traveling to headquarters in britain as well as to meetings with important customers and associates across the United States. My mother began as a nanny and then advanced to the marginally better respected position of nursery school teacher. She read constantly—chiefly novels in English, french, and German—but felt vastly inferior to collegeeducated Americans even though she was often more knowledgeable than they were about history and literature. After I graduated from college, I cajoled her,with considerable difficulty,into quitting her job as a nursery school teacher and pursuing her own higher education. Apart from the nine-month practical nursing course in Switzerland, her last formal schooling had been in Stettin when she was twelve. She was intimidated by the very idea of seeking a high school equivalency diploma, which typically entailed taking tests in multiple subjects, including math and science. but I found a program at new york University called “University without Walls” that allowed students to enroll in college classes and be retroactively awarded a general education diploma if they passed their college-level courses. Moreover, the program offered credit for “life experiences” that corresponded in content to courses in the nyU catalog. My mother and I pored over the course list and I helped her make the case that twenty years of teaching nursery school presupposed mastery of the contents of assorted courses in early childhood development. Gaining credits for mastery of french and German was a no...