Another, and perhaps even more sobering thought, is the one about my sister.
She was born in Tel Aviv. At that time Polish children were being born in many parts of the Middle East where our parents, survivors of one of Stalin’s many mass deportations, had arrived from the USSR to form the 2nd Polish Corps and join the battle against Hitler on the Italian Front. When my sister was born she was issued with a birth certificate with the names of parents, dates, and nationalities - all the usual information. In the space dedicated to religion the registrar had written “Jewish”. This was all written in ink. The correction to “Christian” was written faintly, very faintly, in pencil. Thus it always struck me that should there ever be any resurgence of institutionalized anti-Semitism, we were done for. There would be, could be, no explanation.
Though by 1947 the Second World War was, for most of the world, a tragic but nonetheless closed chapter, the same cannot be said for the thousands of displaced persons and political refugees who still found themselves with nowhere to go. Even more dramatic was the situation of the Jewish survivors who, understand-ably, wanted to leave Europe which had treated them so vilely and needed a homeland, their own homeland, where they could finally feel safe.
This need for sanctuary also applied to people like my parents, whose countries had not only been moved westward, definitively clos-ing the route “back home”, but had actually been taken over by an enemy power.
