1947: La Guardia, not Ellis Island

    I've always known I came from immigrant stock. I mean, it's kind of hard to miss when your grandparents had a name like Lubinski, spoke 3 languages, and had an accent.  I think I was 10 before I realized that when Grandma Roma said très bien, she wasn't actually speaking English. I knew what she meant.

    I'm not sure when I realized they were also refugees, Holocaust escapees, and that they went through something so terrifying, so traumatic, they rarely talked about it.  No, not the concentration camps, though they had family that survived the camps. And family that died in them, too. They survived by hiding.

    Anyway, I grew up assuming that they had gone through Ellis Island, which has a certain romanticism. However, when my grandparents, their older two daughters (one of whom is my mom), came here, they did so not by ship, but on an airplane.  They flew into LaGuardia Airport in New York City, decades before JFK was built.

    They had intended to take a ship across the Atlantic, specifically the SS Île de France. They had booked passage and everything, but then the French government requisitioned it as a troop transport for the war in Indochina. That one surprised me, because I hadn't realized that the roots of the Vietnam War reached so far back.  

    The ship wore many hats: a luxury ocean liner, a prison ship, a troop transport, and a movie set.  The women of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion took the ship from the USA to England during WW2, and from what I can tell, it was more prison ship than luxury liner at that point.  In the late 50s, it was purposely sunk during the filming of a disaster movie, refloated, and quietly scrapped.  

    Anyway, my grandparents had to scramble to find alternate transportation and eventually got airplane tickets, but my grandmother was terrified to fly, so for the 2.5 months before they left, Grandpa snatched the newspapers before Grandpa could get to them, skimmed the papers for stories of crashes, and cut them out so she wouldn't see them.   I have no idea what he told her, or even if there were any airplane crashes at all during that time, but there you have it.

    So they went through customs and immigration not at Ellis Island, but at La Guardia Airport, and I imagine they were grateful to be on the ground again (my aunt was 6 1/2 years old, my mother was 14 months old, and I understand that both girls cried a lot, so I'm sure it was a flight from hell).  

    And when they emerged from customs, my grandmother's brother was waiting for them. I imagine it was a bittersweet scene.