Toward a Better Life

by Peter Morton Coan

  The sleeping arrangements were highly regimented in that women had to sleep in their own dormitory and the men and boys in the other. I think it was the first time that my parents were separated. So it was pretty much a prison atmosphere I would say. And a fairly gloomy atmosphere most of the time.

  There really wasn't much to do. We were given permission to walk outside in the courtyard twice a day if the weather was so inclined and even then we had to walk single file and for one reason or another we were not allowed to talk to one another, which was almost like a prison courtyard.

  They fed us quite well though. We had not been used to many of the things that we received. I remember that most of the people, being from Europe, had never seen Jell-O before, and when Jell-O was served for dessert hardly anyone touched it, not so much because they didn't like the taste but because they didn't like the wobbly texture of Jell-O. [He laughs.] I remember the dining area had long tables where you just sat wherever you could as you marched in. But even that was under supervision. There were people standing around telling us when we had to be finished and leave. We were fed three times a day. Breakfast quite early, I think, because reveille was around seven o'clock or so with breakfast following shortly thereafter. And then lunch I guess maybe at noon, and dinner also quite early, maybe sometime between five and six.

  The medical examinations were quite cursory because we all looked in fairly good health and therefore we didn't go through any extensive exams. Others who did not look healthy were checked more thoroughly.

  I remember shortly before Christmas they put up a Christmas tree that was already decorated, somewhere near the center of the Great Hall, and it was an object of some criticism for almost everyone because it was not a very merry Christmas and it was almost ironic to have it there because the atmosphere just was not conducive to celebrating the holidays.

  I would say three-quarters of the Great Hall was an open space with benches and tables where everybody set up headquarters and kept their bags and attaché cases and other belongings and stayed in the same place every day. The other portion was actually the visiting area, and that was just fenced off by a barrier, and we were allowed to go beyond the barrier and sit with the visitors. But that was the only partition. Visitors came every day in the afternoon. Most of the people were just marking time, not knowing what would happen to them.

  We knew one family who came to visit us. In fact, they were very helpful in expediting our departure from Ellis Island. They retained a lawyer for us and also a clergyman, a Catholic priest, who was very helpful, and I think they were able to go to the various offices that required certification, such as the Yugoslav consulate in New York attesting to the fact that indeed we had been Yugoslavs and that my father was a prominent industrialist.

  The person we knew in New York was the doctor who actually brought me to life. He was from Vienna and became quite prominent in New York, Bernard Achner. He had a wife and daughter and I remember the frequent visits on their part, and then we became close friends for many years thereafter….

  One day, we were told my brother's papers were in order. The reapplication was accepted. There were a number of Ellis Island administrators and employees who circulated among the detainees from time to time, telling them the status of their situation or what was being done and if there was any change. And it was one of these individuals who came and told my parents that finally the papers were in order; we could begin packing to leave. This was a day or two before Christmas, and it was the biggest Christmas present we could have wanted. My parents were absolutely elated because until that point, we didn't know if we would be deported somewhere or if we would remain on Ellis Island for many months.

  I remember for days just before that looking through the huge windows from the Great Hall—not just at the New York skyline but also the Statue of Liberty, which was facing the other way. She was showing us her back as if sending us a message. So finally we were on the ferry back to New York, and we could see the face of the Statue of Liberty, and things brightened up. By the time we reached Manhattan, our friends were at the dock. This was the doctor and his wife, and they took us to the Hotel Franconia on West Seventy-Second Street, and we had a suite and two bedrooms, I believe, and a little kitchenette, which was something new in hotels as far as we were concerned. We had never seen a hotel where you could do your own cooking. But this wasn't the only new thing we would encounter. I remember the first night we went to Times Square, and my father took us to a cafeteria and I'd never seen so much food—the trays weren't big enough to hold everything. We had a marvelous dinner, and afterward we went to the Astor Theater and saw The Great Dictator with Charlie Chaplin. How timely, right? That was a marvelous introduction, really, because a film like that could not have been seen in Europe at that time. And seeing the spoof on Hitler made us aware that finally we were in the land of freedom….

  My parents adapted well here. They began taking intensive English lessons, and my father decreed that from now on we were not to speak any other language but English. And that was quite funny because their English was not as good as my brother's and mine. We often had to say things twice and in different ways in order to be understood, but as soon as we tried saying something in another language they understood—Yugoslav, Czech, German—they quickly shushed us and said, “Only English!” So that was the order of the day, and that remained the order from then on. They really wanted to project being American absolutely.

  My father quickly looked at various business opportunities. He was fortunate in that he was able to get money out of Yugoslavia before the war and invested it in a small textile enterprise in Connecticut and later also in Massachusetts. And those became very active businesses, particularly once America got into the war because he was producing a number of materials needed by the armed forces, so he did quite well.

  We never saw my grandmother again—my mother's mother. She stayed in Czechoslovakia. We received word sometime during the war, I think it was 1942 or 1943, that she had died after an operation. My aunt, my mother's sister, and her daughter and husband perished in concentration camps, and my uncle and aunt and cousin in Zagreb also perished in concentration camps.

  We went back to Yugoslavia for the first time in 1985, some forty-five years after we left. After this trip, I wrote a book about my visit called Maribor Remembered, which was published in 1987, and there is a possibility they may make it into a movie. But they all say that, don't they?

  I guess I'm in America.

  She came from Letownia, a small, predominantly Catholic farming village east of Krakow near the Ukrainian border. She was nineteen years old when late the night of February 7, 1939, Nazi troops stormed her village and abducted her and thousands like her back to Germany to serve as forced labor on work farms to help feed the soldiers of the mounting German war machine. She was liberated by the English in 1945 and spent another four years in an Allied Forces military installation, where she met her husband and gave birth to her daughter, before coming to America with refugee status, eventually settling in upstate New York.

  The town was really just a lot of farms, and we worked on a farm. We also made extra money making baskets. All different kinds. They say “Made in Poland” on the bottom. They sent them all over the world. I remember even to Japan. America and Japan were the best customers for us. And we were busy. Almost everybody in town made baskets. There was no factory. Everybody made them in their own home. We had a big room, and my father, my brothers, my sisters, and I all did it. Most of them were made of the wicker—wicker baskets. They were wholesale. We made about a dollar or so per basket. At that time that was big money.

  I lived there about twenty years. I grew up in this town. There were about five hundred houses, farms, and they had straw roofs. Our house had about three or four rooms. We had no running water, and there was an outhouse, but we were happy because we didn't know any different. You have enough to eat and are well dressed, and it wasn't really too bad.

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p; The house was made of logs, heavy logs. The house was just one floor. It was heated by a brick stove in one corner. We'd make a fire and then cooked on the top of some kind of iron, not stone, and we baked bread there, too. We got grain from the farm. Whatever we had, we raised ourselves. We would just buy salt and sugar and things like that, but not anything else. We had everything. To store potatoes, we dug big holes in the ground because in winter it was below zero, awful cold, and we covered the potatoes with straw and dirt and then dug out the potatoes as we needed them. They were really nice and crisp. That's how we kept things. And we had a storage room where we kept the grain and milled it to flour. That was a hard job. I was a young girl. Part of it was because there was very little meat. We would butcher one pig, a big one, before Christmas, smoke it, put some salt like salt pork, and that's what we had.

  The summers were hot. I remember when I was about seven years old I watched cows and horses in a pasture on a rope. I had about two or three cows and one little calf. And they were so lovely I just hugged them. We would go to school and then come home and work in the field. There were other small children, ages seven, eight; we went in the field to get food for the cows. I mean, like, we'd go in between potatoes and wheat and dig the wheat for the cows. That was really hard work, honest to God.

  My clothes were nothing to be proud of, believe me. At least I was lucky: I had shoes. But most children, only wintertime you went to school with the shoes on because it was cold, and when you came home, you had to put the shoes away and just walk barefoot because you had to save the shoes for the whole season. The shoes, most of them were custom made from a cobbler in town.

  We went to school like eight o'clock in the morning for half a day, five hours, and so we didn't learn much, you know. There was no high school where I grew up. I had just a sixth-grade education. The school was four rooms. I lived almost across the street, so I walked to the school. But some lived six, seven miles, and they walked even in winter, through the snow, through the fields, to the school. It was just that way.

  I had one teacher. And she was a mean one. She was strict.

  If you did something they [the teachers] didn't like, they got out a big stick and they punished you [gestures with her hand] and sometimes you'd get it over here [gestures to her back], especially the boys.

  We made different kinds of dolls and played hopscotch, different things. We had lots of friends growing up, especially in my home; we were well off compared to others. My best friend, she was very poor, and in her family there were seven children. The mother and father died very young, so the oldest brother took care of them. Many times I stole bread from my home and gave it to her to give to the sisters because I felt sorry for them. They didn't have shoes; they couldn't go to school. That was poverty! But even the old people, they were poor, too. They were undernourished. They had no meat. Maybe they had some bread, some potatoes, but most of the time they were hungry. When I look back now, I think to myself, “My God, what some of these people went through!”

  So my mother, she had a big heart, she was a very good woman, and she felt sorry for them. So on Saturday or Sunday morning, she gave me cheese or butter or eggs or flour and milk to bring to the poor people to help them survive. The old, the babushki [women who wear head scarves], they said, “Oh, God bless you, child, and may God give you luck in your life, and your mother, too, because she's such a good woman.”

  Our town was about 99 percent Catholic, and every Sunday we had to go to church. There were no excuses. We did have friends, neighbors, who were Jewish. And they were really friendly with us, but they were so strict about Kosher and what they wouldn't eat. But I was brought up that you had to go to church no matter what. In wintertime some people didn't go because they didn't have shoes. But summertime, all the older women, they went barefoot. They walked about six, seven miles to church, and High Mass lasted about three hours. And there was no pew for anybody, just a cold cement floor, and we had to stand or kneel, very few pews. There were choirs and an organ. This was a big church. It was the only church in town.

  My mother married twice to two brothers. During World War I, my mother's first husband was hanged over by the church by about eight men because they thought he was queer, but he wasn't. They hanged him near the church. I have two half-sisters from him.

  My mother later married his brother. I was the first child of the second husband. And my father, I'm going to tell you the truth—I don't even want to talk about it with my granddaughter. He was a very strict and mean man. He didn't respect us at all. But my mother, she was an angel.

  Her name was Mary. She was from the next town over. She was a nice-looking woman when she was younger, but after my father, she was worn out. She had a tough life. She lost all her teeth, and there was no way to get [new] teeth, but she was an angel. She wouldn't hurt anybody. She was friendly, talked to everybody, respected everybody, and she was a very good mother. She gave us things which she couldn't have, because we were young, and she said, “You girls, you need it, you take it.”

  There were five children in the family: two half-sisters from the first husband, and then from the second husband, my father, I was the oldest, and then I had a brother—he was younger—and then the youngest was the sister. But between us children there were no differences.

  My grandparents had died except for my father's mother; she lived with us. She died when she was about seventy-eight years old. She wasn't sick. She just lay down and died. She watched us when we were small children, and she was very good with us. She had big pockets in her skirts, and she always had something in them for us. And she said, “When you're good, you're going to get something.” So she'd get things for us.

  My father took care of the field with the horses and plows, heavy job. But the women, they did much more than the men. They worked in the field, came home, took care of the livestock like milking the cows and feeding every animal, and then cooked. I don't know how they did it. Believe me, they worked about twenty hours a day, summertime anyway.

  I peeled potatoes; that was one of my jobs. We had a great big pot to cook potatoes, so I peeled them. And I got the vegetables ready, too. When I got older I worked from morning till night, and then I made the baskets. And then my father, he went to the city with the baskets to sell them, but he didn't bring back much money.

  I knew about America because my uncles wrote to my grandmother. And they sent dollars once in a while. One dollar was worth nine or ten zloty, so you could buy an awful lot. One uncle was in New York and one in Massachusetts. But then when my grandmother died, they stopped writing. To me, growing up, America was like paradise.

  There was a tavern in town, but the women, they didn't drink, they didn't smoke. They just worked the fields, made baskets, bore babies. But the men, they went to the bar and they got drunk, and they got nasty, mean, and beat up the women, the wives, and children. Oh, God, believe me. It was an awfully hard life.

  My father was in World War I in Russia and he said how they almost froze to death, and how he prayed to God there would never be another war again. Well, when World War II came, I remembered his words. I was twenty years old. Everything was shut down, and the people were afraid because the Germans came with tanks and bombs, and the people didn't know where to go.

  It was all so sudden. I remember it was February 7, 1939, when the Germans came and the war started. They dragged thousands of young people away, just picked them up. They dragged us to Germany to work on farms there, but you're a slave, because you don't know if you're going to be alive the next day or not; they might pick you up and put you in a concentration camp and kill you for nothing.

  When they first came, they came right away with bombs and bombed part of the town, and many people were killed. After that, there was chaos because they had police soldiers in the fields, and the Germans, they came with the big tanks. They were bad. I can't even describe how bad they were. And then they took the people to Germany, boarding us on trains. They took me on February 7
. We stopped in Krakow. I remember it was a high school, and we stayed there, and we slept on the floor for about four or five days, maybe more, and then we came to Germany. It was February 14 when we got to a farm there, and they were waiting for us.

  The next day soldiers woke me up. I didn't understand German, but it didn't take me a long time to learn—especially when you're young, especially when you're with them all the time. They [the Nazis] showed me that I'm going to milk cows, clean them, clean the barn, everything. And I said, “Oh, God, I can't.” But they forced me. So summertime was really bad. We got up about three o'clock in the morning, and they would knock on the wall of the barn, and we went out to the field—there were eleven of us, all women—and we got food for the cows, came back, fed them, milked them, cleaned the barn, had something to eat, coffee and bread, and back to the field, worked until noon, brief rest, then back on the farm, cleaned the barn again, milked the cows, and we had dinner. I mean, I couldn't say that I was really hungry. I tell myself, “God punished me.”

  We did have bread in Germany, thank God. And then we finished up and were ready to go on the field and work till about eleven o'clock at night. I was the strongest one, or the foolish one, because I got the men's job: we cut with a [gestures] scythe all day. I don't know how we did it. And then the next day, two o'clock in the morning, the knock on the wall came to get us up.