NextChapterThree

Jim and Irene approx. 1950 Jim and his accordion 1947

"Don't give up hope," the woman cautioned. Maybe they are hiding somewhere, like we are." It was all Jim could do to pull himself together. He went back to the camp again to see if he could find any further trace of his family. He went into the barracks room he knew so well from his previous visit. He strode over to the closet, stepping over the debris, and looked inside for some hopeful clue. There, hanging in the closet as naturally as he remembered it at home in Cherson, was his mother's scarf filled with dry bread. "She always had a scarf filled with dry bread, for 'just in case', as she explained it," he thought. The opportunity to reunite with them had been snatched from him perhaps by the seventeen days he was held with refugees and German soldiers in the camp operated by the Americans in defeated Germany.

The next morning he walked through the displaced persons' camp which housed refugees of all nationalities. He found a twenty-year-old German-Polish woman, Irene Horek, who recalled seeing him at the labor camp several months earlier, and who had become acquainted with his sisters. She gave him the news that he didn't want to hear. He had been eight days too late to see his loved ones and to prevent them from being sent back to Russia. "They didn't know where you were or whether you were still alive," Irene explained to Jim. "The Russians demanded that all citizens of Russian nationality be turned over to them for shipment back to the Soviet Union."

He was now twenty years old, and he felt as though he had been a man for many years. He could not go back to Russia, he knew, even if it meant that he would never see his loved ones again. He moved into the refugee camp near Erlangen, left with no choice but to start his new life there. The young German-Polish woman he had met there was looking for a new life, too, as an alternative to the deprivation and subjugation which she had known in the past. Jim and Irene found each other at a point in time and a point in human development when they both had no alternatives. They were meant for each other, brought together by fate. They were married, starting their new life together in the refugee camp.