My brother and I shared a bedroom, but we had other rooms that remained empty. We also had a room for a cook and a room for a chambermaid. These were live-in help. My father was one of the most prominent individuals in town and financially very comfortable. He was not involved in politics—only in that, from the beginning, he drastically opposed the Nazi movement in Germany and made it well known throughout the town what his position was. And that was really the reason for our leaving Yugoslavia when we did. He knew that with a German takeover he and his family, and his property, would be the first victims if it came to pass. The fact that there were so many German-speaking people in the town—many with families in Austria and Germany—meant there was a considerable contingent of Nazi sympathizers. He knew this was a dangerous situation for us.
My parents were Jewish, but we became Catholics in the thirties. As far as the Nazis were concerned it didn't matter [laughs] because it was Jewish origin they were concerned with. My parents were not particularly religious. They did not observe many of the Jewish customs and observances. And since Yugoslavia was predominantly Christian—that is, either Roman Catholic or Serbian Orthodox—we wanted to conform pretty much to the rest of the population, so rather than stand out, we changed our religion.
So we went to church. We had two churches in Maribor. Church played a big part in everyone's life, particularly for children because religion was one of the required courses in school. And we had to go to church on Sundays and conform to all the various practices.
I enjoyed sports a great deal. Maribor is situated, as I mentioned, near a mountain, and in the winter we would go skiing. I began skiing at age four. My mother was the instigator there because she began to ski, and we enjoyed it ever since and went on ski vacations for Christmas and to Austria and other parts of Yugoslavia. Skiing was a very big part of our lives in the winter. In the summer we went to a little island in the middle of the Drava River which had swimming pools, and the rest of the time we would go on hikes and we also had horses. My brother and I became very fond of riding, and so every spring, summer, and fall we would be with our horses. We had a stable that was right in the middle of town, and many people in town knew us for galloping through the streets and holding up traffic once in a while.
My mother went to the Music Conservatory in Czechoslovakia but unfortunately didn't keep up with her piano, but she did ask me to take lessons, which I did at the same time I started school. I was not particularly fond of my teacher, who was a very demanding older gentleman. He required a great deal of my exercise time and I didn't always perform very well, as much as I enjoyed music. Many years later, I picked up the clarinet, and I still doodle around once in a while. But that's about as far as my musical education went, except that my brother and I were very fond of American jazz.
When the war began in September 1939, my brother and I were in England. My parents had sent us to Switzerland to learn French and then to England to learn English. We were about to return to England from Yugoslavia after our summer vacation when the war broke out and we didn't return, so we spent one more year in Yugoslavia. This was a touchy time because my father expected an invasion of Yugoslavia at any moment. And, in fact, we made various trips out of Maribor, which is so close to the Austrian border, to Zagreb and to other towns whenever he suspected something was happening at the frontier.
We spent the next summer, 1940, on the Adriatic at a resort, but by this time our papers were in order and we had received visas. My brother and I had student visas. My parents had visitors' visas. And without even returning to Maribor, we left from our vacation place to Zagreb and picked up our personal belongings, which we had with an uncle, an aunt, and cousin of mine who lived there. The aunt was my father's sister.
We said our goodbyes and took the train from Zagreb to Belgrade, then Belgrade to Sofia in Bulgaria, then Sofia to Istanbul. We stayed in Istanbul for about ten days awaiting papers that would allow us to spend some time in Bombay because we knew that we would have to wait for a ship there. My father had preplanned it all. By that time, the war had started. The Italians had occupied the southern part of France, so to go west, for instance, to reach Spain or Portugal where we might have gotten passage to the States, would have been very difficult.
So he decided on a longer but safer route, and that was to go through India and then take a ship. It could have gone west to New York or east and ended up in California. We weren't particular. We took the first one that came and ended up in New York. My brother and I were absolutely delighted. We were very pro-American in many respects, listening to a lot of jazz records, but we were also fond of American films, American books. We read Jack London a great deal, and we were very eager to come to this country. We knew very little American history. The schools in Europe, particularly Yugoslavia, were much more preoccupied with European history, particularly the history of Yugoslavia, which was difficult enough, the country having been first the kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes and then united as one country with three basic ethnic groups—the Slovenes, the Croats, and the Serbs—and a few minor groups such as the Montenegrins and the Macedonians. There was a great deal to be studied there. Also, there were periods under the Ottoman occupation from the Turks and the occupation under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So we had to know this pretty well. America was a far-off land that we knew about only as the “great democracy” in the world and a land that “promised progress and freedom” and all the good things that we read about and wanted to be a part of.
My parents studied English. They took private lessons from professors in Maribor, but their English was never particularly good. They spoke well, but they both had very heavy accents.
In Istanbul we were staying at a hotel on the Bosphorus, a place called Tarabya, which was a beautiful Turkish resort place, and we had a wonderful time. I remember going fishing in the Bosphorus and the Black Sea and waterskiing and visiting Istanbul and the various places of interest: Topkapi Palace, the mosques, the Hagia Sophia. For two teenage boys, this was absolutely fabulous. Both my brother and I kept diaries. Just recently I rummaged through some papers and I found my brother's diary. I reread the story of our journey and he sketched some of the sights that we had seen, such as the minarets in Istanbul and later on some of the sights in Bombay and South Africa.
Then, one day, we crossed the Bosphorus by boat to the train terminal on the Asian side of Istanbul and from there took a train to Baghdad, which was a very long journey. It took two days and two nights. I remember the train compartment was not particularly well ventilated. This was September and it was hot, and I remember looking out the windows as we went through Turkey and later on Iraq on our way to Baghdad and [seeing] the extreme poverty of the people, some living under wooden planks made into a living area and maybe a goat as their only possession. Having come from a rather privileged background, this was the first time we were confronted with this kind of poverty.
We were in a first-class compartment, which was upholstered, but the ventilation was nonexistent so we had to open the window, and this was a coal-fired locomotive so we received a lot of soot. [He laughs.] It was a very uncomfortable trip. We had a dining car, which was adequate, I suppose, in terms of the food that was being served, but that was also hot and uncomfortable. And we were sitting next to people the likes of which I had never seen before up to that point. Some of them were Arabs, others were Turks, and they all looked very fierce to me.
I think we felt bewilderment, going through unknown places and into a bigger unknown as far as the future was concerned. I'm sure my parents were wondering if they had done the right thing. Did they take a step that was really necessary? We had left family and friends behind. What was going to happen to them? So knowing that we very likely would not see them again, certainly not very soon, there was a mixture of excitement in terms of seeing new things. but also sadness in leaving many things behind.
We were in Baghdad I think two days. I remember arriving after this long, tedious, and bori
ng journey. Then, all of a sudden, we were surrounded by a mob of people who were trying to outshout one another, each one telling us they represented the best hotel in Baghdad. And so they were grabbing our luggage and beginning to load it on their various taxis, and finally we decided to go with the one who was the most aggressive because he had already gotten half our luggage and we ended up in a hotel that was not the best in Baghdad. But so be it. We had no other choice.
The hotel was, too, very warm. In Baghdad the temperature was something like 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade and there really was not very much shade anywhere. [He laughs.] The hotel was ventilated primarily by fans. The hotel rooms also had fans. Some of them were working, others were not. But we were so tired that we decided to make the best of it. I remember my brother and I shared a room and couldn't sleep because of the heat at night so we filled the bathtub with cold water and took turns lying in it. Then around five o'clock in the morning the sun came up and we walked out into the garden of the hotel and I remember some employees were lying on the benches in the garden and flies were all over them, going in and out of their mouths and noses. [He laughs.] It's a memory I still keep to this day.
The next day we all bought topees, tropical hats, to try to keep cool under the hot sun and we also went to a doctor to get shots. I think it was for diphtheria and various other diseases that we would likely catch in the Orient. Then we took a train from Baghdad to Basra and spent a couple of days there. Basra was a port city heavily involved in the oil industry. But we stayed in a hotel constructed by Germans and that was our first exposure to air conditioning. It was a wonderful change from what we had gone through the last few days.
I remember my brother and I went to a movie theater in Basra that showed a Tarzan film [laughs] with one of our heroes at the time, Johnny Weissmuller. The movie was interesting in that the film had some African natives fighting Arabs who were trying to capture natives for the slave trade. And when some of the Arabs were beaten by the African natives, the audience was not particularly pleased and started to heave things at the screen. [He laughs.] But then the theater manager gave a little speech in Arabic, which I didn't understand, and everything was much better.
After two days we boarded a ship from Basra to Bombay through the Persian Gulf. The name of the ship was the Barpeta. It was a British cargo ship, and the major cargo it carried was dates. It had maybe twenty passengers; half were American and English. They were all involved in the oil business in Iran, Iraq, and Arabia. The other half were Arabs. I don't know what nationality, but they all looked the same and they all dressed the same. One was a sheik who was traveling first class. His attendants, however, traveled second class, and my brother and I were in second class, so we got to know the attendants. The boat ride must have lasted a week.
We stopped in many ports in the Persian Gulf. We were able to go ashore in the ports. We saw Bahrain and a few ports on the Iranian side, and I remember the morning we spent in Karachi, Pakistan, which was a fairly large city, but half the traffic in the city was people riding camels or leading them! And it was very hot, so we didn't spend too much time in town. We went back to the ship, which then continued down to Bombay. The cabin was fairly ordinary. It had bunk beds for my brother and me, a small cabin. My parents had a much larger stateroom, which was quite comfortable, and the shipboard life was fairly ordinary.
In the morning we would get up early. Sometimes we slept out on deck because it was cooler. However, we had to get up very early in the morning because they started sweeping the deck around five or six in the morning. And then we spent the rest of the morning lounging in deck chairs being served bouillon. [He laughs.] I remember there was even some skeet shooting.
At night all the lights were out because of the possibility of U-boats [military submarines operated by Germany in World Wars I and II], so the crew was very attentive. There were English officers, and I got to know the captain, who had me up to his cabin because he said he had a son who was my age who was in England—in fact, who went to school very close to the school that I had gone to when I was in England, which was Brighton College. And so he wanted to know a bit about us. I guess he wanted to know who we were with Yugoslav passports going to India, which was sort of unusual.
India was another revelation to us. We had never seen anything like it. Bombay was a huge town with low buildings, crowded streets with people and cows wandering at random. These were holy animals and therefore were admitted anywhere. We arrived in Bombay about the middle of October, I would say, and it was still very warm. The monsoon season was about to start, and we were fortunate in obtaining an apartment rather than a hotel because we were waiting for a ship to take us to the States, to California or the East Coast. And we made some friends, my brother and I, in Bombay. We had met a Hindu couple on the ship, and they said we had to meet their children, and so we had a crowd of friends that we spent time with, both bicycling and going to a swimming place with pools both indoors and out. And we spent most of our time there.
In the evening my parents and I would sometimes, if it wasn't too warm, walk the various parts of Bombay, visit Malabar Hill and various restaurants, especially if they were European. There were some fairly good French and Italian restaurants in Bombay. The population was enormous, and all the people were Hindu. The European population could be seen primarily in some of the newer apartment buildings and some of the better hotels—the one we stayed at had four o'clock tea, including dancing, and they had their own swimming pool. We were in Bombay close to a month.
I remember many trips with my father to the American Express office and the American consulate in Bombay, so by the time the ship arrived we were ready to go. At that point we didn't know that our papers were not in order. For some reason or other, the American consulate didn't realize that my brother's visa was about to expire, and that's what really brought us to Ellis Island.
The boat was the SS Polk, for President Polk, part of the President Lines. The trip was from Bombay to Cape Town, South Africa, where we stayed for a day, and then to Trinidad and then New York. That trip was also long. It took about a month, from the beginning of November to the beginning of December.
The SS Polk was much larger than the Barpeta, and it was very comfortable. It was primarily a passenger ship with all kinds of distractions including a jukebox, which we had never seen before. There was dancing; there were games on deck such as deck tennis and shuffleboard. And we had our [jazz] records, and we immediately had a crowd around us because they all wanted to listen to the same music.
There were mostly Americans and many people from the Persian Gulf region who were in the oil business, either returning from a tour there or maybe just back from a visit with the family. Others were refugees like us. We had a Turkish family on board, some people from Greece, some people from Poland, all escaping the war in Europe.
The ride was quite smooth, except as we approached Cape Town. I remember huge waves, and there were some people who were seasick. We had regular updates as to what was happening in the world. Every morning a news sheet was posted on the bulletin board so we could read the events of the war, and again we were reminded of how fortunate we were to be on our way to America.
I remember one morning my brother woke me up very early and said, “You've got to come out and see this!” and he dragged me up topside. I was still in my bathrobe, and in the distance he said, “Now take a look,” and there was the Statue of Liberty, and it was a beautiful sight. We had, of course, seen pictures of it, but you really have no concept of size and grandeur, so that was just marvelous. Of course, beyond the Statue of Liberty was the Manhattan skyline, and that was equally impressive, if not more so. We had seen that in various films in the past, and to be there was just a terrific experience!
At this point we didn't realize that my brother's visa had expired. We thought this would be a formality and it could just be renewed because my visa was intact and we thought the authorities would take a look at this and say, �
��Well, since everybody's papers are in order, just the expiration of one visa is not going to be a major problem.” It turned out to be quite the opposite.
On arrival, as happy as we were to be in New York and a new life for all of us, we were disappointed almost immediately when the immigration officers looked at our papers and realized that my brother's visa had expired and that he would have to be taken to Ellis Island to await processing of a new application.
The rest of us were permitted to land in Manhattan, but my brother was only sixteen years old and we didn't want to leave him on Ellis Island by himself, so we joined him. We spent a little over three weeks there.
Most of our time was spent in the Great Hall. The day we arrived, we were given a physical exam. We were told that my brother's papers would be processed and that we would be advised as to the outcome “in due time.” We were given no time frame whatsoever as to when this would happen, so we had no idea how long we'd be detained. We entered the Great Hall and found someplace on a bench that also had a table, and we set up our headquarters there for the next three weeks. [He laughs.]
The place was filled. There were people in similar circumstances who had their papers looked at and processed. There were others who had been there for weeks, some for months. Some as much as a year. And there was a feeling of desperation because we had no idea when we would get out, and neither did anyone else. The other feeling was that this being wartime, and the influx of immigrants at such a high level, it was understandable that the United States would be very careful in screening the people that it admitted. And so there was a great deal of suspicion as to who was being admitted, and for that reason also, there was a feeling of privacy that you wanted to observe and not mingle with too many of the other detainees because you had no idea who they were, what their political persuasions were. There were rumors that half the people in the Great Hall were Axis spies or infiltrators so that we kept pretty much to ourselves, except my brother and I had met people our own age and we mingled quite a bit, playing various games such as Monopoly and exchanging pictures we brought along showing what Yugoslavia looked like. And the people we met showed us what various parts of the globe looked like where they came from.
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