We were entering into a displaced persons (DP) camp system that had been established by the Allied forces in late 1944 to house and feed the millions of foreign nationals in Germany and Austria who had been displaced by the war. The camps were administered by the United National relief agency working with occupation authorities.
Active fighting in the Korean War ended on July 27, 1953, just a few months into my training at Fort Meade. That seemed to make it less likely that I would be sent overseas, but it actually worked the other way.
My MI battalion continued training for some months after that, but there were rumors that the unit could be deactivated and its manpower reassigned to regular infantry. Even though the active war was over, infantry units continued to rotate into the Korean theater. So my father’s fear that I might be sent was not so far-fetched after all.
Repatriation, they called it. Yet in truth we were not really going home to Poland, the country in which we had lived before 1939. Quite the contrary, we were leaving the only home we had ever known and heading west into the unknown.
Citizens of the annexed Polish provinces had the option to be repatriated within the new borders of Poland, specifically to the areas in the west from which millions of Germans had recently fled or were soon to be expelled.
The solemn music playing from the loudspeaker on a pole in the town square died down and a voice crackled through the radio static. “Attention. Moscow is speaking.”
The hour was noon on June 22, 1941. All morning long, townspeople had been milling around, sharing rumors about the outbreak of war between Germany and the USSR. A few families had radios in their homes, but just about everybody else—Jews and gentiles alike—was in the square waiting for some official news.
I was aged 10 at the time. I jostled in the crowd to find a listening spot.
We didn’t know much about hosting a wedding but Florence got in touch with a catering company. She learned from them you could get a big discount on a reception hall if you hold the event on a day when nobody else does—specifically on Christmas day. We found out that was right when we visited the Paradise Theater, the movie palace on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx.
I started asking around among the landlords that I knew for buildings in the area that were available. Abe and I looked at a few buildings and eventually decided to go in together on what was called a “taxpayer”—a one story commercial building with a row of stores. Taxpayer buildings were simply built structures with brick bearing walls and wood or steel beams, usually with a common attic and basement. You wouldn’t get rich owning a taxpayer, but you could definitely get a revenue-generating property at a low entry price.
If you drive around the neighborhoods of Brooklyn today you can still see some Edelstein & Sons Roofing signs in various places. One is on the side of an apartment building at Westminster Road and Foster Avenue in Ditmas Park. You can tell that one is older because the phone number on the sign is CL1-7090—CL for Cloverdale, which was the name of the telephone exchange in our section of Brooklyn.
The population turnover [in Washington Heights] that my friend had told me about was happening very quickly right before my eyes. Long-established Jewish residents were either moving to the suburbs or retiring to Florida. In their place came upwardly mobile immigrants from the Dominican.
This did not mean the area was going downhill. Our new tenants may have been new to America, but they had jobs and were raising families. The neighborhood demographics were changing, but to me it was a positive change, a renewal of the area with a fresh community spirit.
Eventually in 2006, once the children were all settled in their own homes and we had no need for the big house in Woodmere, Florence and I moved one last time to a gracious apartment on Fifth Avenue.
Needless to say, ultra-fashionable Fifth Avenue is a long way from Skala-Podolsk—or for that matter from East Flatbush. Now we feel that we have finally arrived.