Coming to Colorado: A Young Immigrantâ??s Journey to Become an American Flyer

CHAPTER 5. Coming to Colorado

Coming to Colorado CHAPTER 5 { 59 } COMING TO COLORADO The dingy pier with its rusting steel pillars had been crowded a few years back with thousands of American soldiers loading on ships to invade Hitler’s Europe. Five years after war’s end it was empty, except for a string of army buses lined up nose to tail waiting for passengers from the just arrived USNS Goethals. Families boarded the first two buses; the soldiers, who spent their voyage in the belly of the ship, boarded the others. While we strolled down the gangplank in haphazard family groups, the soldiers exited the ship the way they had boarded—orderly and disciplined. Our bus took us through an aging part of New York City, not a scene that matched the vision I harbored in my mind of the land of the Mohicans. As we rode along, my disappointment deepened, as did my melancholy. I closed my eyes, let my new world pass unseen. Everything looked too much like what I had left behind—old, grimy, dirty. When the bus stopped and I opened my eyes again, we were inside a large courtyard at Fort Hamilton, an old army post in Brooklyn across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge from Staten Island. We were assigned one room for the three of us in on-post quarters, a room which smelled of the hundreds or thousands of people who must have slept here over the years, each leaving behind a little of themselves. The room had seen neither paint nor paper in many years, its furniture dark, functional, nondescript, appearing in search of a junk pile or a fireplace. I sensed the ghosts of the past, smelled their presence, couldn’t breathe, and ran outside into the courtyard, leaving behind a startled Hedy and Leo. The feelings the room aroused in me were dark, oppressive, and terrifying. It all smelled too much like a prison, and I dreaded the night because I feared I would have one of my nightmares. But that night I slept soundly and had no dreams. The first hours in this new land, my land, were bleak and forbidding. I was glad when the afternoon sun broke through the gray layer of cloud, instantly raising my spirits. Even the weathered red brick buildings of the old fort assumed a more hospitable aura under the bright, if cold, rays of the New York winter sun. Nothing changed just because the sun emerged for a brief moment, yet it brightened my spirits. It was a trick played on the mind, and I welcomed it. { 60 } COMING TO COLORADO After Leo received his orders assigning him to Lowry Air Force Base in Denver, Colorado, he and Hedy joined two other couples, friends from “Fürsty,” and we all went into New York City—to Times Square. Lots of people strolled around the square which wasn’t square at all. The lights were bright and dazzling. Huge signs flashed messages into the fading daylight. Small shops displayed their wares in the open, in front of their doors. Seeing this, my anxiety faded. Again Leo acted strangely, at least I thought he did, as he had earlier in the day when we first came off the ship and stepped onto the dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. There he touched the ground, concrete, with his gloved right hand. I understood that was his way of saying he was glad to be back in America. I thought it was a childish gesture. He acted as if Times Square was something special as well. I couldn’t follow Leo’s exuberant explanation but acted interested, smiled, and nodded my head as I always did when people spoke excitedly and I felt that they wanted me to share their enthusiasm. Hedy spoke English well. The one-time German farm girl had a natural facility for languages. When we still lived in the Russian zone in 1945 and 1946, she quickly learned enough Russian to enable her to trade on the black market with Russian officers. She only had to hear a word once and it became a part of her vocabulary. In the English zone, Hedy found a job in the British NAAFE at the Fassberg airfield, the English equivalent of the American Base Exchange and Commissary, and soon began speaking English. I, on the other hand, could count the English words I knew on...