May Day protesters are pictured in front of the State House in downtown Concord on May 1. In front row center, Adolphe Bernotas and his wife Marguerite are pictured, each wearing a blue jacket and cap with the letter B. ZACH LAIRD photo
Adolphe Bernotas is a well-known retired Associated Press reporter and union activist. He and his wife Marguerite split their time between Florida and Concord, N.H.
By ADOLPHE BERNOTAS
On the 250th anniversary of the country on Saturday I couldn’t help but wander through remembrances of my own journey to become a new American.
An ABC July 4th TV segment about the Statue of Liberty bounced my memory to a February morning three-quarters of a century ago when a ship of immigrants taking me and my family to our new world sailed into New York Harbor and a view of the magical Statue. I was approaching my 12th birthday.
(I had recounted our journey as World War II refugees about the statue’s refurbishment in 1985. This account updates our story.)
My family, whose ancestral nation was raped by the Nazis and Soviets, fled Lithuania and bounced around refugee camps in Germany between 1944 and 1952 during and after the war, before we were allowed into the United States as “displaced persons.”
We had become the flotsam and jetsam of the war, brushing against the Holocaust, a three week unwelcome residency in Dachau, by heaven’s grace not the murderous side of the death camp but the “Durchgangs Lager” transit center where the Nazis culled Jews, homosexuals and Roma for extermination from the wandering hordes of war refugees. To this day I have to look away from the iconic images on TV and photographs of ghostly humans staring from bunks, identical to the ones in which we slept.
During those years I was a foreigner before refugee, an immigrant before I became an adult nourished by two equal life sources –
American pride and millennia of old world Lithuanian roots.
Becoming an American was hard. It began with the trials of war, an eight-day winter crossing of the North Atlantic in a converted Liberty ship, the USS General W.G. Haan, and anticipation for at least five years as green-card aliens, giving up that identity once we took the citizens’ oath administered by a judge in a Waterbury, Conn., courtroom.
(The judge asked the applicants proforma questions to test their knowledge of the new country: who is George Washington, how many states in the United States, et cetera. At my turn, “Let’s see what you’ve learned at UConn,” the magistrate said. “What state has a unicameral legislature?”
I was well prepared for the gotcha. “Nebraska, your honor,” I replied. “Go Huskies!” he responded as the courtroom broke into laughter.)
In Germany, the locals called us “Verfluechter Auslaender” – damn foreigners. Before the war ended, we would cower in basements from Allied bombers: British bombs by night, American bombs by day.
In the United States, an adult with a foreign surname (probably son of immigrants) told me when I was 13, “You know what DP means?” Of course, I said, ‘displaced person.’ “No,’ he said. It means dirty pig. You fucking people came here to take our jobs!”
I recall that encounter every time politicians bash immigrants. I believe it sparked my activism in labor unions.
In the winter of 1952, for much of the crossing between Bremerhaven and New York, I was seasick. But news of approaching New York erased that queasiness. We are in America! My sisters, mother and father were transfixed by the Statue of Liberty. “Laisves Statula,” I called her in my native Lithuanian, my English vocabulary consisting of “umbrella,” “aerodrome” and the rote singing-recitation of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.”
While my three sisters and I marveled at our new world of skyscrapers, my mother wept. What thoughts she must have had! – leaving her land of ancestral generations on the Baltic Sea for a foreign home.
Our arrival in New York completed an odyssey that began as World War II was ending and my father, pregnant mother, sister and I found ourselves refugees in profound irony fleeing Soviet Communism into the maw of Nazi Germany.
After years in Displaced Persons camps, surviving through the grace of United Nations charity and my father’s wits, we arrived in America.
As we migrated from camp to camp, refugees from every corner of east-central Europe emigrated to every corner of the globe, preferably the United States. Our relatives who had fled with us found their way to the United States, Australia and Canada. Before the war ended, my blacksmith-turned-welder father provided best he could for the family, which by 1952 had grown to four children. After the war we became wards of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and International Relief Organization.
My father collected dollars from relatives and the profits of gifts from America – coffee, nylon stockings and cigarettes. The dollars would make it easier to leave Europe. By 1952, we were in the last wave of World War II Lithuanian refugees to come to the United States. Most had reached North America’s Lithuanian-American enclaves by 1949.
We were delayed entry by my oldest sister’s chronic illness, rejected repeatedly by her medical status as we applied annually to emigrate to the U.S. Yet it was her condition that made us the very few immigrants who arrived in the 1950s to pass through Ellis Island.
The legendary immigrants’ island had been abandoned as a major gateway to the U.S. and by 1952 was used for medical detention. Two years later it was closed. It was not until the late afternoon of Feb. 8, 1952 that the medical authorities who had examined my sister at Ellis Island were satisfied that we could stay in America.
In New York, we were picked up by a Lithuanian who drove us the 100 miles to our relatives and new home in Middlebury, Conn., in his 1938 Pontiac. What a marvelous machine, dash radio that played even as the car moved! Our driver was the second Lithuanian-American we met since sailing from Germany. The first was a sailor aboard our ship. He regaled us with stories about a place called Florida where pink flamingos strutted among palm trees! He treated us to heavenly oranges – fruit rarely seen in the refugee camps – especially of such heroic soccer-ball size. Yes, America would be heaven.
It was not heaven for my father, who never adjusted to America, nor for my mother, who retired from the clock and textile mills of
Connecticut after slaving 30 years for piece work or the minimum wage, nor my late sister, who never overcame the illness that for years kept us away from our new world. She died in a moped accident.
But the rest of the family thrived, two sisters contributing four sons and several grandchildren to the melting pot – adding Italian,
French-Canadian and Jamaican to the Lithuanian lineage. I am married to an Italian-American woman.
By 1965, I was a naturalized American citizen, living in New York in what was to become trendy SoHo and commuting to New Jersey as a reporter at the Bayonne Times. I had several ways to get to Bayonne from Manhattan but usually took the ferry across the Hudson to Jersey City and the Jersey Central train to Bayonne.
The ferry and train offered stunning views of Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. By 1966, I was reporting at the Jersey Journal in Jersey City and writing stories about the Statue, reminding the Journal’s readers that its home, Bedloe’s Island, is in New Jersey, not New York.
New Jersey’s claim to the Statue was reinforced by the blackouts of 1965 and 1977, when New York lay powerless in darkness but the Statue, whose electricity came from New Jersey, gleamed ever more the beacon she is.
The attraction for Americans, especially immigrants, to the Statue is equally obvious and mysterious. She is not a mere model for tacky souvenirs. Her appeal is emotional and visceral. She is not only the American but also the universal symbol of all-embracing welcome.
Perhaps her appeal is best explained by Johnny Johnson, a character in the eponymous 1936 Broadway opera by librettist Paul Green and another immigrant, composer Kurt Weill. Johnny, a soldier from the South, addresses the Statue from his troop ship as it sails from New York for France in 1917:
“There you are standing like a picture in that history book I read, your hand uplifted with a torch, saying goodbye to us, good luck and bless you every one. And God bless you, oh mother of liberty.
“That’s what you are, a sort of mother to us all and we your sons.”