Adele and Miriam, a story of seeking asylum in the United States

The thousands of Latino refugees seeking asylum in the United

States reminded me of the story of an earlier generation of

refugees who also experienced family separation and extreme
hardship after being denied entry into the United States.

They were children, 10 and 9, from Zamosc, Poland when the

Germans invaded. Adele and Miriam hoped to escape Nazi

persecution and reunite with their parents who had immigrated to

the United States earlier, But they, and their three older siblings

, were denied entry by strict immigration rules.

The Germans immediately began rounding up all the Jewish men

including Adele and Miriam’s teenage brothers. They were

stripped naked, ordered to dig their own graves, shot and

dumped in those graves.

Every few weeks there was another roundup. Trucks were

waiting, Jews were loaded and driven to the nearest forest.

Graves were ready and the killing commenced. Miriam recalled,

” It is impossible to describe our lives….”.

Adele, Miriam, Anna, their sister, and Anna’s child were

rounded-up along with hundreds of others. They were ordered

to take off their clothes. Hoping to avoid certain death, they ran,

eventually  seeking refuge in a deserted building. Adele and

Miriam climbed a ladder to safety.

It was very quiet. Suddenly, the stillness was broken by Anna’s

voice pleading for her baby. Two shots rang out. They would

never see Anna or her child again.

Adele and Miriam waited. It was silent again.  Thinking it was safe

they climbed down. But a collaborator must have heard them. He

entered the building. Aiming his rifle at the two frightened girls, he

ordered them out of the building where German soldiers were

Waiting. One of the soldiers looked at his watch, and said, “Let

them go. "Enough for today.”  

A Christian family the girls had befriended hid them. Providing

them with one set of false identification papers, they urged them

to flee to Russia.“ Tomorrow is Sunday. Lots of people will be on

the road. Start walking and don’t look back.”

In the Ukraine Adele and Miriam found safety living and
working  under assumed Christian identities even after the
Germans invaded.

Following  the German defeat at Stalingrad In the winter 1943,

Adele and Miriam were separated and shipped out of Russia as

slave laborers.Miriam was sent to Italy where she worked as a

cleaning woman and later

in a hospital helping comfort the gravely wounded. The irony of a

Jewish girl comforting Nazi soldiers was not lost on her. Before

she was deported she had given  Adele her address.

Adele was eventually sent to Germany were she worked as a slave

Laborer in factories, offices and shops. The sisters wrote to each

other weekley. But only one of Adele’s postcards with a  return

address in Stuttgart got through. By then Miriam was working in a

hospital in Germany near Kaufbeuren.

Despite the Germans defeat, Miriam and the Russian women she

was with were treated like a slave by the German doctors and

nurses. They were given little food and three were forced to sleep

in a five by ten foot room. Miriam Complained. With the assistance

of a Jewish survivor working for the Americans was moved to a

better room in a convent.

Desperate to reunite with her sister, Miriam walked and hitched

hiked the 110 miles to Stuttgart joining tens of thousands of

refugees who crowded the roads much like the thousands of

Latin American refugees seeking refuge in  the US.

Once in Stuttgard Miriam walked the streets searching for her

Sister. When she noticed a handwritten menu with Adele’s

distinctive handwriting on a tavern door,. Miriam asked for

her”cousin” by her Christian name. The barmaid yelled

upstairs and in a few minutes the two sisters were hugging

in a tearful reunion. A few days later they returned to Miram’s

room in Kaufbeuren

Needing work, Adele went to the U.S. base where she met an

American GI, Robert Hillibrand. He recalled the meeting.” She

appeared...fearful as a mouse, tentatively looking in, wondering

whether she could advance another inch without being swatted

or crushed. She was like a line drawing of a person, an

amorphous being… She stood silently. She had learned that

you don’t speak without first being spoken to….That was a

ardinal principle of survival…””

Hilliard helped Adele secure a job on the base. Eventually Adele

introduced Hilliard to Miriam, “a slim young woman with

sparking dark eyes and a small round mouth, her face framed

by shining brown hair.” They told Hilliard that they were Jewish

and asked his help in reuniting with their parents in the United

States. It wasn’t easy, but eventually Hilliard reunited the two

girls with their parents in New York.

Adele married another survivor, Bernard Green. They settled in

Brooklyn and had one son, Howie. Miriam married my mother’s

youngest brother, Arnold. They had two daughters, Sylvia and

Karen. Adele and Miriam became Americans and lived quiet,

productive, lives of dignity. They rarely spoke of the terror they

had experienced.Nor did they harbor any resentment against

the country that had rejected them. But they never forgot.

Miriam died of cancer in 2004. Adele,92, died, two weeks ago

surrounded by her son and Miriam’s children. Their legacy

lives in every refugee who seeks safety and a better life; in

those who walked thousands of miles through Latin America

seeking safety and a better life in the United States; in the

children at the border who are have been cruelly separated

from their parents.Never forget. No Retreat. No Surrender.