I have just finished watching the new Ken Buns documentary called The United States and the Holocaust. In the film an older survivor of that horror tells of his very moving arrival in America. Both he and his sister were German Jews, and had been separated from their parents in the maelstrom that was the Jewish experience at that time. They had managed to get themselves out of Germany into France and then on to a ship to safe haven. This journey, which took two years, had started when the girl was ten and the boy eight. The brother, now an old man, speaks on film of waking up early in the morning, going on deck, and seeing the Statue of Liberty looming up out of the fog welcoming them to America and safety. His voice breaks in telling of this scene and he finally says softly, “You can see what this still means to me today.”
I can relate to this in a very small way. I too had been overseas with my mother in 1955 for a year-long stay in Europe, and was returning home by ship on a wind-tossed, winter- gray Atlantic Ocean. I had been laid low in my bunk with seasickness as the liner pitched and tossed its way across the ocean. But now I had been urged up on the deck to watch our early morning arrival in the harbor of New York. As I leaned over the rail, as if on cue, the fog parted and there before me was the huge statue facing out to sea, holding aloft her lantern. I had memorized the words on the statue’s base for a school project and the phrase “yearning to be free” sprang into my ten-year-old mind. I was not someone looking for refuge from the cruelties of the world, or the hope of peace from persecution. I was merely a small American returning home after being away, but I could feel my heart lift and fill with joy as I looked on this stalwart lady welcoming citizens and refugees alike to her shores.
Unless we are native born Americans, we have all come from some place else. Our predecessors arrived by ship to various ports or overland, but all came looking for something that could not be found in their countries of origin. They fled famine, persecution, religious intolerance, war, and poverty as do people today. I can trace my ancestors back to the 1600s, but that does not make me any less of a descendant of a refugee than someone who arrived yesterday. Would it not be wonderful if we could all become small statues of liberty, holding aloft our welcoming lanterns to all those who “yearn to be free.”