so at thanksgiving Dude’s aunt told the story of how they arrived in the United States, she and her parents and baby brother, as refugees after the end of WWII. Now, she explained, we’d come from a warzone-- well, the war was over, but we all remembered, all of us. They’d spent most of the war in a displaced persons’ camp in Germany; for part of the time they’d lived in a decommissioned hotel, which wasn’t just decommissioned but was actually abandoned. To say they’d lived rough, been through a lot, well. They’d seen some shit. She was very small; they fled the family farm when she wasn’t quite three, and had spent several years moving around. Her brother was born in the refugee camp.
They came to the US, and they got off in New York Harbor and she remembers that it was the third of July, but she couldn’t remember if it was 1945 or 46. The man who had sponsored them, a farmer in Virginia who’d been relying on prison labor and thought he might get better results out of refugees, came to get them in an open-backed pickup truck, with hay bales for them to sit on. She can’t remember exactly but she figured there were probably a dozen people with them, including her and one other child, but everyone else was an able-bodied adult. They rode down from New York to Virginia in the back of this open truck, and didn’t arrive until the next day. It was horribly hot, they weren’t prepared, they were all wearing their best clothes which were wool; Latvia is on the same latitude as Montreal, and none of them had ever experienced summer before, not really.
They arrived, finally, and had been given a house to live in, which had no furniture except a table and two chairs. Some of the rooms the floorboards were rotten so you couldn’t go in. There were no beds. So they had to take their clothes out of their suitcases-- each of them had one suitcase, with all their worldly possessions, and that was it-- and arrange those in a pile on the floor, and try to go to sleep on them.
The sun went down, and they all lay down to sleep on their makeshift beds, and then--
The refugees all huddled together, the women crying and screaming, the children incoherent, even the men frightened. None of them knew what was going on. To have come so far from war, and then war had followed them here! Explosions, whistling shells, heavy artillery sounds-- they all wept, and finally it stopped, and then there was silence. Nothing. No sounds of tanks, no more explosions.
The next morning, the more educated among the adults took their dictionaries and tried to ask what was going on. The Americans were baffled, but finally someone managed to explain that it was customary to let off fireworks in celebration on the fourth of July.
So that was the first Fourth of July dude’s aunt experienced in America.
By the end of the week two of the men were dead of heatstroke, and the police came and took them away and dispersed them to other farms.
