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Christmas Story from a MyFolsom member


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#1 webmaster

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Posted 26 December 2002 - 11:12 PM

This is taken from this week's Telegraph, it is interesting to note that it's from a member of the MyFolsom community! smile.gif


Christmas 1950 evokes strong, happy memories

By Valentina Doss Joyce

It's strange that when asked to recall my favorite Christmas, I always think of the Christmas that I don't remember at all.

Instead of a real-life memory, I have an impression that's been stamped in my mind by a story that's been told and re-told by my father, before he died, and by my mother, even to this day.

It was Christmas 1950. I was born just six weeks earlier. It was the day our family arrived in the United States, or as Europeans called it "America." It was the first important turning point in my life.

Being the most important turning point in my parents' lives, their thoughts have turned to that day every subsequent year when we've celebrated Christmas.

Christmas of 1950 marked the end of a dark journey from a life of hunger, oppression, death and war to a new life of economic, political and religious freedom.

My parents were born in the Ukrainian republic of the U.S.S.R. Growing up in the years following the Russian Revolution, when the fledgling Communist Party was building the Soviet state, they experienced firsthand what it was to go hungry, to lose a child for lack of medicine, to fear gossiping neighbors who might turn you in to the secret police for a careless slip of the tongue.

My mother was orphaned when her parents perished in the famine of 1922. She was just three years old when my grandfather found her in the wheat fields surrounding the rural town in which she was born.

She and her three brothers were gathering bits of grain left behind after the harvest so they'd have something to eat.

My grandfather took only my mother. He and my grandmother couldn't afford to adopt three children. My mother never saw her brothers again and doesn't even know their names.

My grandparents raised my mother as a Christian—they were Baptists-- in the industrial city of Kramatorsk. By the time she was in her teens, churches were closed and religious gatherings were banned by government edict. Her family continued to pray and read their Bible secretly at home.

My father grew up on a small family farm which was confiscated by the Communists during a campaign to collectivize all Ukrainian farming. His family lived modestly, perhaps poor by our standards, but they never went hungry. Farm kids worked hard, but enjoyed a freedom to roam and be wild in a way that city kids never knew.

But by the time my dad was 19, the government had seized his father's farm, ousted all the small farmers and plunged their families into cycles of poverty, all in the name of the great socialist experiment.

Eight years apart in age, living in different parts of Ukraine, each of my parents survived the government-imposed famine of the winter of 1932-33. The Soviets used famine as a weapon against Ukrainian nationalists and the handful of farmers who refused to assimilate into Russian culture.

The majority of that year's particularly small harvest was simply carted away at gunpoint and exported to other provinces, while the harvesters themselves starved.

My parents' lives crossed in 1938. My dad was studying to be an engineer, my mother a nurse in the small industrial city of Kramatorsk. With churches banned, they were married at a bureaucrat's desk. A child was born a year later, bringing joy and responsibility. My parents both worked while continuing their studies.

These years of relative stability ended when Germany went to war with the U.S.S.R. My father was drafted and sent to the front lines to fight Germans. The women left behind tended babies, factories, stores and farms.

As the German Army marched into Ukraine, pushing closer to Kramatorsk, the government ordered evacuation of civilians.

Some people left their homes, moving eastward, while others stood firm. They'd survived czars, famines, revolution and civil war. It mattered little to them whether they served Russian or German masters. Their history was a sort of revolving door of oppressors. I suppose they wanted not much more than most people want -- a chance to work, raise a family, enjoy the company of friends, family and neighbors and worship according to one's personal faith.

At this time, my father went AWOL. After seeing how Stalin was using Ukrainian soldiers as human cannon fodder, he seized a chance to steal behind the front lines to return to his German-occupied home.

It must have given him quite a fright to swim across an icy river in the darkness of night, with Russians shooting at him from one side and Germans from the other. Reunited, my parents began a new life as prisoners.

In a short time, the German troops were pushed back and, in retreat, they removed my parents to Germany. There they lived out the rest of the war in camps. They had an "apartment" consisting of one room which they shared with another family. My father worked in a factory while my mother peeled countless potatoes in the camp kitchen. Their baby son died. And a daughter was born. Their days and nights were often interrupted with the blare of sirens signaling them to run to the underground bunkers to escape the Americans' bombs.

In early Spring of l945, the condition of the camp's inhabitants had grown perilous. Food rations had dwindled to the point where children and the elderly were dying and the bodies of otherwise healthy adults bore the sign of late-stage malnutrition — swollen feet.

In desperation, my mother left the camp to beg for food. During her absence, the camp was liberated by Russian troops.

In the next few days, my parents had to make a hard decision. They could identify themselves as Ukrainians and be returned to Soviet territory, but they knew what fate awaited them. As "traitors to the motherland," they'd be shipped off to Siberia.

They chose, instead, to pass themselves off as displaced Polish citizens. They knew this placed them in "limbo," not knowing where they would end up and most likely never seeing their families again.

Displaced Persons Camps were maintained in Germany in the years following the war until all who resided in them were accepted for immigration to some country. While living in those camps, my parents lost their second child. After the war, three more daughters were born, but only two of us survived. My sister and I were born in Munich, the city closest to our parents' camp.

In 1950, the United States of America accepted my family's immigration application after a Baptist Church in Los Angeles agreed to sponsor us. Just five weeks after my birth, we traveled by train, ship, and airplane to arrive in New York.

Engine trouble in the converted military aircraft that bore us over the Atlantic provided unwelcome excitement and a stop-over in Canada. Finally landing in New York, we were put on a train for Los Angeles. With one suitcase, a toddler and a baby, a few American dollars and no English skills whatsoever, my parents boarded that train tired and apprehensive.

Somewhere in Arizona, the train made a short stop and my father disembarked to buy something to eat. The language barrier proved insurmountable and the train left without him.

My mother still smiles when describing the American passengers' curiosity and kindness upon realizing my father had been left behind. They got word to the conductor, who wired the station to ensure that my father would be put on the next train, and offered up fruit and candy bars. It was Christmas day.

I don't remember the friendly passengers, or their gifts. My mother's milk was all I needed.

I don't remember the church members who greeted us at Union Station and brought us to their home for a hot bath and a hot meal.

I don't remember how it felt to be warm, full and cozy in my mother's arms that night.

But I cherish the thought that the love and comfort we enjoyed that night was on American soil and that God had brought us here.

What better gift could He or my parents give me than the one I received that Christmas in 1950. It will always be my favorite Christmas.

Editor's Note: A resident of Folsom, Joyce's mother, Katherine Dubowski resides at Creekside Oaks. Her sister, Nadia Cervantes resides in Los Altos


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#2 cybertrano

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Posted 27 December 2002 - 08:29 AM

good story.

My family and I and many other Vietnamese refugees had the similar experiences.

rolleyes.gif smile.gif




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