By Natasha Josefowitz, Ph.D
LA JOLLA, California — It was October 1939—I was twelve years old. My parents, my brother and I were sitting in the basement of our Paris apartment building with gas masks on. We did this every night as the sirens screeched and German planes flew overhead threatening to gas us. We had been told that mustard gas was odorless and invisible. My six-year-old brother keeps taking his mask off—it is difficult to breath through it, and he cannot do it for long. My mother worries he might die if we are unknowingly gassed.
After several weeks of this nightmare, my father said that even though the French would win the war—after all we had the Maginot Line with the canons at the border facing Germany—we should leave.
We packed just a few belongings, knowing we would be back shortly, and were lucky to get on board the last boat out of Genoa in Italy. This saved our lives. The SS Saturnia took ten days to get to New York. We landed and were taken to Ellis Island. None of us spoke English, and it was scary. We were counted going in and out of the dining room and going in and out of the bathroom. We slept in a large room with a hundred cots on black-and-white-tile floors. When I visited Ellis Island sixty years later, I recognized the tiles.
After a few mind-numbing days of anxiety, we were brought in front of three judges. I was wearing my best smocked, silk dress and white knee socks. I had red hair in long curls and a large ribbon on top of my head. We were asked questions which were translated to us. Whenever I was asked something, I curtsied and said, “Oui, monsieur.” When we were allowed to stay in America, I was convinced it was because of my curtsies.
Living in New York was difficult. We did not know anyone, and we were staying in a small hotel room with a kitchenette. My mother had never cooked, having always had staff, first as a child in Moscow, then later as a married woman in Paris. I was in the eighth grade and my brother was in the second at Dalton School. He cried every morning not wanting to go; the kids made fun of him because—like many French boys—he had a bobby pin in his hair. I was teased because I couldn’t speak English. My family did not adjust to the strange city, so, after a couple of months, my father decided to go back to France even though the war was still raging. (He was sure that we were winning.) My mother suggested we visit California before returning.
My aunt and uncle joined us in Los Angeles, and we all decided to rent a house together for a couple of months before returning to Paris. But when France fell in the spring of 1940, we had nowhere to go home to.
At Beverly Hills High School, I was the only foreign girl that spring, and I was made fun of because of my strange accent and clothes. My mother was clueless about how American teenagers dressed. I was not allowed to go out to parties nor wear lipstick. I secretly bought lip gloss and put a lot of it on.
In the fall of 1944, I attended Scripps College—a women’s college with 200 students only a couple of hours away from our home. My mother drove me to Claremont; it was to be my first time apart from my family, and, sitting in my new dorm room, we both cried for a very long time.
I was one of three foreign girls there, and it took a few months before I felt like I belonged. I majored in philosophy with a minor in psychology and finished college in three years by going to summer school at UCLA and Berkeley. I loved college and the world that it opened up for me.
At twenty-one I was again standing nervously before three judges, this time for my citizenship test. Since I had just finished a course in American History and Government, I aced all the questions, and was granted American citizenship.
Even though I still have emotional ties to my upbringing—I cry when I hear the Russian songs my father taught me and I tear up at French poetry—my heart and mind are American. This is my intentional country and culture, not just an accident of birth. America not only saved my life and those of my family, it gave me opportunities to grow and become a person I would not been otherwise.
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This copyrighted story first appeared in La Jolla Village News. Your comments may be posted in the box beneath this article or sent directly to the author via natasha.josefowitz@sdjewishworld.com
Natasha, thank you so much for sharing this very moving story.