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268 Blend and Belong Renee Scialom Cary First, I would like to set the scene. Mount Holyoke during World War II. Visualize two wars going on and very slight communication from the outside. The only news that we had about the war was through the newspapers or through the newsreels. We were told only what they wanted us to hear. We were not on the battlefield. My own journey to Mount Holyoke was a very long one. I left Turkey at the age of seven. My family moved to Prague because my mother, who had been educated at Barnard and at the Sorbonne, felt she needed more cultural nourishment than she could get in Turkey. Prague at that time was the cultural center of Europe, and there was plenty to entertain all of us. But we were there on a very limited basis. We lived in a hotel for three years. We were in Paris, visiting my grandmother, when the first invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Nazis started, and we were not able to return to Prague. I went to school in Paris for two years, and during the summer of 1939, while we were vacationing in St. Malo, the war broke out. The war between Germany and France was supposed to last only three weeks, they told us, so we went back to Paris, checked into a hotel, and waited for the three weeks to be over; I don’t have to tell you what happened. The next move was as far south as possible for protection. We chose a city called Pau because it had an English school and I was able to continue my schooling in English. I was bilingual because my father spoke French but not English and my mother spoke English and French. So my first language was actually French. I didn’t learn English until I was six. We waited for the war to be over and lived during that time in hotels or furnished apartments. Then came the Armistice. Luckily, our town was in unoccupied territory. Unfortunately, when we decided that we had better leave the country, our passports were tied up in Bordeaux. Bordeaux was occupied, so we didn’t think that we would be able to leave. In those days, when you left a country you had to have an exit visa. So we had sent the passports to Bordeaux . But, lo and behold, one day a miracle happened and the passports arrived . Within one hour we were in a taxi to the border with Spain. And after about five hours of paperwork and having to wait at the border—you’ve seen all this in movies, so you know what that looks like—with one suitcase, my family crossed the border at 11:30 at night. It was dark, and in a group of thirty BlendandBelong 269 people or so we walked to the nearest town. Spain was in a terrible state at that time, and most cities were in rubble. We eventually went on to Barcelona because that was one city that had been saved during the civil war.And we waited for a boat.You’ve heard that expression many times: waiting for the boat. We had missed the last boat from Marseilles to the United States. It was the SS Washington, and we had missed it because our passports had been held up in Bordeaux. So we waited for a boat, then finally, two months later, sailed from Lisbon to Brazil in a converted freighter dating from World War I. You can imagine what that was like. There were probably twenty-five or thirty refugees on board, and it took us twenty-four days to cross the ocean.We ran out of food on the way, but we finally arrived in Rio. There again we had to wait for a boat to sail to New York, where we arrived at last in March 1941. And everywhere we had traveled and stopped, my parents put me in school. By the time I got to Mount Holyoke in 1944, I had been to nine schools. And I think I had become a master in something we called “blend and belong.” Blend and belong. The proof is that when I got to Mount Holyoke, the Speech Department called me in and said that I had to take corrective speech classes because I had a New York accent! For four years we weren’t able to get rid of that accent...

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