Through Her Eyes
My grandmother’s living room sits like a shrine of family history in front of me. Vacation candids and graduation portraits stare back from their placement on the walls, hanging like movie posters. Shelves upon shelves sit lined with rows of faces in aged metal frames; some depictions are black and white while others stand out in vibrant color. Everything that my grandmother has lived through in 85 years is encapsulated here under glass panels, protected from dust and from forgetting. Next to a vase of flowers on a table, there is a stack of dusty photo albums with yellowed edges that hold more of my family’s story. One sepia photo shows my grandmother at fifteen, dressed in long dark clothes while sitting on a riverbank next to two other teenagers. In it, she bears a closed-mouth grin from her place on the ground next to a river in Germany in 1947, years after her family fled their Soviet-occupied homeland of Lithuania to seek refuge in a camp.
I look up to the sight of my grandmother, now aged and wrinkled like her albums before me on the table. I open them and begin my search.
Lithuania. 1941. At 10 years old, Irena Dubauskas was a hard-working student who was eager to learn. She went to church every Sunday for the hour-long mass, said her prayers before climbing into bed each night, and, as the eldest of all the siblings, she looked for ways to help her Mama and Tata. During long, cold winters she helped prepare dinners for the younger ones. She spent summers working on a family friend’s farm to help support her parents. When Christmas came around, she would help skin the meat that her father hunted, and she would be endlessly thankful for the presents she and her siblings received: a penny and a clementine each.
She had been obedient. She had been resilient.
With the onset of World War II, the humble living Irena was accustomed to slowly faded as the nature of her home country began to change. Tension and distrust spread like an infection throughout the community, and the Nazi following grew in numbers. Posters and pamphlets hung from storefront windows, and Irena wasn’t entirely sure what any of it meant. “Just mind your own business and don’t attract too much attention,” her mother would tell her. “It will be safer that way.”
It was late afternoon when Irena’s Tata burst through the front door of their house, startling Irena and Mama in the kitchen as they were preparing dinner. His movements were hurried but his voice was still calm. “Everyone needs to pack. Now.” Tata had been walking home when he ran into a friend who told him that he needed to move his family out of town immediately. The man had been working for the Soviets; his assignment was to rewrite copies of the lists that sealed the fate of hundreds of families who were left untouched after all of the Jewish ones were removed from the area. These lists documented those who would be put on train carts to the Siberian drylands where labor camps and unbearable temperatures were waiting. Their family was amongst the doomed names. Mama began to shake in protest, stating that she refused to leave the place where she grew up, and the place where she wanted to raise her own children. However, with few other plausible options, they each packed one piece of luggage and left everything else in its place. In the middle of the night, they ran into the darkness.
Once over the German border, Irena and her family settled into a Displaced Persons camp, where refugees from the surrounding areas sought safety in the arms of the German army. The Soviets had taken over areas of Germany while the Nazis had secured lands in Russia as well. Families like Irena’s were caught in the middle of the struggle for power. These times were confusing, and Irena’s family clung together like a pack of threatened animals. They weren’t sure if they would ever be able to go back home to everything that they left behind. Years passed, but they never truly got used to living their life in limbo.
In my grandmother’s home, there are more photos of my childhood than of hers. Ever since I was a young girl, my grandmother has been a huge part of my life. I remember her cooking, the jingle of her laugh, and her constant support as a highlight reel in my head. I never considered that the jumbled, misspelled script of my grandmother’s writing on my birthday cards was not just due to her arthritis-ridden hands. Like many disadvantaged immigrants, she was never able to go to school to learn English.
Before this I hadn’t truly put thought into what she has seen, what she has been through, or what other refugees have experienced coming to the “land of opportunity.” My search continued beyond photo albums until I was sitting with my grandmother at her old kitchen table. I asked my questions over cups of cooling coffee. I wondered with a new perspective what it was like for her and for so many others to see the Statue of Liberty standing tall and omnipotent over the waters of the Hudson River. What it was like for her to read those famous words at the Statue’s feet: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. . .”
Days passed on the ship to America, and the rocking of the ship kept Irena’s stomach constantly moving. The bread and soup were easy enough to keep down, but she was doubtful for how long. Nights were the worst part. Each of them slept in a hammock-like bed, suspended by heavy chains and hung in rows of three. Irena would awake to the sound of someone getting sick or to the violent swinging of her hammock in the viciousness of the Atlantic’s unforgiving waves. Night after night, she stared at the ceiling above her, thinking about uniforms, school, and her friends back home. The images seemed to haunt her sleep.
A few weeks later, a man stood on the edge of the ship’s metal deck making a commotion. People looked up at him with their tired, hollow eyes. “Look! Look!” he insisted, pointing frantically at the horizon. As they got closer, each of the passengers began to see the outline of the land beyond the mist. Irena held onto her mother’s side, their arms wrapped around each other as if that were the only way that they could keep standing. Scared, unsure, and vulnerable, Irena felt like she was 10 years old again.
“So, you signed your name there and your family went to Boston, just like that?” I asked, back in her kitchen. My coffee on the table had since grown cold.
“You have to remember that there were so many of us, so many people to document. Many didn’t have official papers — they had been lost, amongst other things. Everyone was in a hurry to get where they needed to be. You have to realize how lucky we were; there were people standing in line there alone, one suitcase in hand with no family members to be accounted for.” My grandmother looks up again, as if she’d traveled back to that moment long ago. “When the ship arrived at Ellis Island, I remember staring into those large eyes of that woman on the Statue.”
“The Statue of Liberty?” I pressed. “What were you thinking about when you saw her for the first time?”
She raised her coffee mug to the front of her thin, wrinkled lips. “She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.”
Creative Nonfiction by Colby Hoffman
Colby Hoffman is a current undergraduate at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, studying Communications and Sociology. She is originally from Hingham, Massachusetts and is the current Editor-in-Chief of an online collegiate magazine staff and will be interning for Boston Magazine in Summer 2018. She hopes to pursue writing and become a published creative nonfiction author in the future.
