The journey to Ellis Island

The post-WWII era was a tough time for almost everyone in Germany. There weren't many opportunities for a young, ambitious foreign born engineer, so my dad decided the US was the place to be.
Although immigration from Germany to the US was heavily limited during that period, preference was given to those who had been displaced from their homeland by the war and those who were considered 'highly skilled'. As a Hungarian mechanical engineer my father ended up high on the list. To fully qualify he needed to have a job waiting for him in the US, and since he worked for the Army Corps of Engineers he was able to cultivate relationships with the defense contractors who provided equipment to the Corps. That led to a job offer in Michigan City, Indiana. I'm not sure exactly when he applied to immigrate but in 1951 (when my sister was a year old) all the pieces fell into place and his application was granted.

That was the easy part :-) He still needed to convince my mother to exchange the safety of her family for the uncertainty of life in a new country. Now, if she had been childless I don't think she would have hesitated - throwing caution to the wind was one of her defining characteristics. But the responsibility of being a new mother (at the age of 35) caused her a great deal of anxiety - she had become very cautious.
Of course, her sisters (with their apparent joint vows of celibacy) were dead set against it. My father respected Margarete (who was highly educated and usually rational) but he didn't have any use for the other two. He saw the three of them as something of a 'coven' (and we all know what that implies) :-)

Now, I must interject here. I don't know if all Hungarians are always absolutely certain they are right about everything, or if it's only the ones I've known...
Personally I'm never sure of much of anything... I'm not sure you exist... I'm not even sure I exist... Some of it goes back to my freshman year in high school when Dan Maslanka asked me "Just what the f*** is so special about you???". I'm sure he had no idea just how much psychological hell that stupid question would put me through... But I digress...
My point is that the word 'compromise' was not in the dictionary of any of the people involved in the battle that ensued. It was (by all accounts) epic.

At one point my aunt Annette said something that my father remembered for the rest of his life: "Der Mohr hat seine Schuldigkeit getan, der Mohr kann gehen." That is a quote from Fiesco (1783) by Frederich Schiller and translates roughly to "The Moor has done his duty. The Moor can go." Which my father interpreted as "Now that you've given us a child we have no more use for you. Go away." Needless to say, he was not amused and never forgave her.

Another interjection: One of the things about going to school in a foreign country that I didn't expect was the total difference in literature. The average German knows as much about Shakespeare as the average American does about Goethe. That is because great literature defies translation - it is the wording rather than the content that makes it great. At one point I had to memorize the Goethe poem 'Erlkonig'. It's about a father and his child fleeing on horseback in the middle of the night from some invisible force that was attacking and killing the child. The English translation does not have anywhere near the impact of the original German. (Talk about nightmares!) But I digress (again)...

Long story short, my dad won the battle and my parents and sister came across from Bremen to New York on the "USS General Sturgis" (a former troop ship) in 1951. It was a very rough crossing and, according to my mother she stayed in the cabin (seasick) while my dad spent his time socializing (he worked on the ship newspaper) . The only other story I remember from the crossing is that my sister developed a high fever and the ship's medical staff isolated her in the infirmary for a couple of days and wouldn't let my mother see her - that was highly traumatic for both of them.

Here's a picture taken on the ship:


I think the man to the left of my parents is Romildo Bianchi who would later become my godfather. (Yes, I have a real Italian godfather.)

My parents landed in New York and were processed through Ellis Island. My mother found the whole experience (especially the medical inspection) to be degrading and also worrisome - some people were denied entry for medical reasons. But everything went according to plan and shortly thereafter my parents settled into their new life in Michigan City where I was born in 1953.