The Choice

CHAPTER 11

Immigration Day

Immigration day, October 28, 1949, was the most optimistic and
promising day of my life. Aer living in the crowded room at the
Rothschild Hospital for a month, and spending another ĕve months in
a tiny apartment in Vienna, waiting for our visas, we were on the
threshold of our new home. A sunny blue sky lit the Atlantic as we
stood on the deck of the USAT General R. L. Howze. Lady Liberty
came into view, tiny in the distance like the little ĕgurine in a music
box. en New York City became visible, a skyline emerging, intricate,
where only horizon had been for weeks. I held Marianne up against
the deck rail.
“We’re in America,” I told her. “The land of the free.”
And I thought we ĕnally were free. We had taken the risk. Now
safety and opportunity were our rewards. It seemed a just and simple
equation. ousands of miles of ocean separated us from barbed wire,
police searches, camps for the condemned, camps for the displaced. I
did not yet know that nightmares know no geography, that guilt and
anxiety wander borderless. For twenty minutes on the upper deck of a
passenger ship, standing in the October sun, my daughter in my arms,
New York in sight, I believed the past couldn’t touch me here. Magda
was already there. In July she had ĕnally received her visa and sailed
to New York, where she now lived with Aunt Matilda and her
husband in the Bronx. She worked in a toy factory, putting the heads
on little giraffes. It takes an Elefánt to make a giraffe, she had joked in