Category Archives: Nationalism

European Diaspora, Identity, Nationalism

Steering Clear of Camps

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Little me in Altach, Austria, far from any displaced persons camp.

I like it when readers contact me. Particularly those who know how to put what I have written to good use. So I was delighted when I received a message from Celia Schiller, which included some requests:

. . . I am a first year IRPH (International Relations: Politics and History) student at Jacobs University Bremen, which was the former Camp Grohn. I am currently enrolled in a course where we discover the history of the campus and, as a final project, create an exhibition on Camp Grohn and the situation of the DPs that lived there. This is why I did quite some research on this topic and fortunately found your contact information. Would it be possible for you to give me a little bit more information on how you perceived the life at Camp Grohn and maybe describe how it influenced you in the years after? If you have anything else to share, I would really welcome that . . .

Much as I wanted to support Celia’s effort, I had to admit that I knew almost nothing about Camp Grohn. Or any of the hundreds of other DP camps set up in sectors of Germany, Austria and Italy controlled by the United States, Britain or France—three of the victorious Allied Powers—in the aftermath of World War II. And that I might even be the only one alive that I know from my native Latvia who could make such a claim. You see, my father, mother and maternal grandmother—together with one-month-old me—at some point separated from the masses fleeing the advancing Soviet Army and simply kept going. Once we reached the Austria-Swiss border, we rented a root cellar from a farmer and spent four or so years living amid the breathtaking beauty of the Alps. My mother found a good job, so we lived well compared to those warehoused in the camps. And avoided the constant fear of forced repatriation to our then Soviet-occupied homeland. Why more did not dare to go it alone I never understood.

Eventually, we had to reside in a DP camp, but only in order to emigrate. We first went to one nearby in Alberschwende. It was in the French Zone, and my mother, who had long been a francophile, was able to persuade the commander to let her leave each day to go to work. From Alberschwende, we transferred to the International Staging Area at Camp Grohn in Bremen, Germany. It was there, I believe, that we received permission to permanently resettle in Lowell, Michigan, not São Paulo, Brazil, as previously planned. Which was monumental for my family, but not, apparently, for me. The way I describe it in “Welcome to America,” all I did was rail at arbitrary rules:

As indignities go, it ranked relatively low. After all, I had been subjected to senseless fumigation. An insult to any little girl whose grandmother has taught her to wash her hands after everything and to always carry a clean handkerchief. But, somehow, making me look like a monkey in my first official photograph crossed the line. Some self-important functionary had said that my ears, which stuck out, had to be clearly visible on my passport photo or I could not emigrate to the United States. So my mother braided my hair and attached it to the top of my head, and I let everyone know precisely how I felt about that.

Or so I was told. The first thing that I can say for sure that I remembered on my own was merely a strange sensation: the way that my first dental filling felt—metallic and clunky—when biting through a sandwich made of a fried egg and two slices of squishy white bread.

But Celia needed something more substantial than Wonder Bread. Particularly when it came to understanding how DP camps might have influenced my later life. While there is no doubt that war and displacement affected me in profound and enduring ways, I cannot make a single connection to anything that occurred in the camps. Not like my contemporaries clearly could. The late publisher and author Juris Jurjevics, for instance, was able to state in an interview:

I think my familiarity with the aftermath of war made me a sympathetic and good observer when I got to the highlands of Viet Nam. It really felt like I had made that scene before. A war-torn society felt completely familiar, as if it were in my DNA. Despite the cultural differences, I thought I knew what the locals were going through, caught between warring factions. There weren’t any surprises as there seemed to be for my buddies. Where I had been the kid pestering American GIs for gum and comic books, now I was the American GI being cajoled to “souvenir” waifs with cigarettes and C-ration chocolate. One day I took a picture of a Eurasian seven-year-old at the wheel of a jeep. It was me eighteen years earlier in a gutted jeep in Germany.

Only after I had set aside the preliminary material I sent Celia did I come to see—for the first time in my life—that not spending substantial time in the camps might well have informed everything, from how I interacted with peers to how I viewed my place in the world.

In the case of the former, I had clearly skipped some stages of social development, having spent my early years mainly in the company of adults, and not that many of those. How ill-prepared I was is illustrated by a story that my father liked to tell, always while smiling and shaking his head. Shortly after arriving at my first DP camp, I came upon a large group of teenaged boys hardened by the harsh conditions they had endured. Appalled that they were drinking rainwater from abandoned tar barrels, four-year-old me marched up to them and, without hesitation, schooled them on subjects such as sanitation. Lucky for me, all that they had time to do was laugh before my father came to my rescue. Over the subsequent years, I never lost that sense of standing apart, of never being able to fully embrace whatever it was that others so easily—so mindlessly—could share.

But camps did more than socialize children; they also strengthened a nascent national identity. At the time we fled, you see, Latvia had only existed as a nation for about a quarter of a century, and the Latvian National Awakening had only begun about a century before. My mother had been educated in German schools, and while my father did attend the University of Latvia, it was only established about a decade after his birth. However, the educated elite were disproportionately represented in the DP population. Instead of falling into despair at the conditions encountered in the camps, some set about re-creating the cultural institutions that they had left behind. Soon there were Latvian churches and schools and athletic teams. Even newspapers and orchestras and theater groups. As historian Laura J. Hilton states, this “provided them with a sense of belonging and a sense of purpose, preserving their idealized conception of who they were.” A sense of belonging and purpose that I never got the chance to gain. Which is just as well since “idealized” is the operative term. 

As Juris recalled, camp was no place for anyone, much less a child:

Knowing nothing else, it seemed perfectly normal to grow up in refugee camps in postwar Germany. What was it like? Creepy. Tense. Menacing. We were malnourished and constantly hungry and often shared quarters with other families, making dividing walls out of blankets hung on strings. I remember two families—ten adults—sharing two rooms and the embarrassment of a chamber pot for a toilet. I must have been two and a half. My sister, four years older, remembers a mass of people jumping from windows to their deaths after some announcement over the public address system. My guess is that they may have just been informed of their forced repatriation to the Soviet Union . . . The adult world seemed uptight and threatening. I was probably never fully comfortable in it again, truth be told. Deprivation was humiliating. It didn’t bring out the best in people. A Latvian pediatrician refused to go to the aid of a sick child whose parents were in dire straits and had nothing to barter for his help. Leaders pushed to the front of immigration quota queues.

Also, the nationalism evident there was cause for concern to some:

. . . the Allies had hoped that One World would emerge from the war, a world where victors and vanquished alike declare their solidarity in Humanity. But as occupation authorities tried to further these ends, they discovered that many of the DPs were stateless only according to diplomatic labels: these refugees revealed a tenacious attachment to their ethnic identity. The issue was faced by an American Quaker in Germany working with DPs, who wrote that he was concerned over “the growth of nationalism among them at a time when the world at large is suffering from too much nationalism.”

Ironically, the Allies themselves, or the American-dominated United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, might have fostered this. Europe had never seen such an onslaught of refugees, and no one knew what to do. The hope was that those displaced would go home once the war was over. However, some, particularly Poles and Latvians, saw themselves as being “unrepatriable.” According to Hilton, reasons ranged from “fears of political or religious persecution to uncertainty about economic stability and outright refutation of Soviet-dominated governments.” Thus, administrators had some cynical reasons to give DPs a free hand, even encourage them. (See Arta Ankrava’s doctoral dissertation, From Displaced Persons to Exiles.) If they could be made to miss their homeland enough, they might set aside rational reasons not to return. If so, even the most selfless DP leaders might have inadvertently served as stooges.

Both the bonds and the attitudes carried over to the Latvian American communities that I encountered once my family and I were re-settled Michigan. Although I attended Latvian Saturday school longer than I care to recall and participated a range of other Latvian activities, I continued to feel like an outsider. Try as I might, I was still that new arrival by the tar barrels, passing judgement on kids who acted like they had never left Latvia. Yes, I always seemed to be saying, Latvia is a lovely land, but there are plenty of beautiful places in world. Yes, Latvians suffered unimaginable atrocities at the hands of the Soviets, but so did countless other people. Also at the hands of that other invader, Nazi Germany, which Lutheran Latvians, at least, like to forget. And no, the current refugee crisis, is no less devastating than the one we and our families experienced. And no, the current refugees do not deserve any less help than we were once given. And—for God’s sake—NO, your vote for a president who puts America first and acts like he is Vladimir Putin’s puppet is not the way to safeguard the sovereignty of a small nation about the size of West Virginia situated on Russia’s western border. It will merely fan the flames of neo-nationalism that are increasingly evident everywhere.

I cannot say for certain that I would have turned out differently had I been forced to spend my formative years in DP camps. After all, Juris was and he sounded a lot like me. But I will encourage Celia to consider the likely link between conditions in refugee camps and identify politics if she remains part of the project. Surely the concentration of so many people who have experienced such traumatic loss and displacement and have then been forced to endure such deprivation are more likely than most to display some degree of radicalization. Studies such as the one conducted in the Middle East during the current crisis by University of Maryland researchers for the US Department of Homeland Security certainly show that refugees living within the confines of camps are more prone to hold extreme beliefs than refugees living outside of them. Regardless, I see it as a good sign that a former DP camp—the unfortunate result of rampant nationalism— is now the site of an institution of higher learning that actively embraces internationalism, with students coming from 110 countries and exchange programs in 26 nations.

Note: The planned exhibition, Military Base, Displaced Persons’ Camp, University—Exploring the Past at Jacobs, based on research conducted by students of Jacobs University Bremen under the guidance of historian Rüdiger Ritter, seeks your support. For more on the area, see “Bremerhaven Today,” prepared by Amanda Lauer for this site (Displaced Person.)

 

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Generations, Migration, Nationalism

Welcome to America

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Five-year-old me photographed for emigration to the United States.

As indignities go, it ranked relatively low. After all, I had been subjected to senseless fumigation. An insult to any girl whose grandmother has taught her to wash her hands after everything and to always carry a clean handkerchief. But, somehow, making me look like a monkey in my first official photograph crossed the line. Some self-important functionary had said that my ears, which stuck out, had to be clearly visible or I would not be allowed to emigrate to the United States. So my mother braided my hair and attached it to the top of my head, and I let everyone know exactly how I felt about that. Or so I was told, at least. I have no actual memory of anything from my first five years, when I was a little displaced person from war-torn Latvia.

Similarly, I have no memory of the turbulent transatlantic crossing in a converted troop carrier, the General S. D. Sturgis, in the middle of a mid-October hurricane, where almost everyone but my father and a cook was too seasick to eat. Or of refusing to be labeled like luggage at Ellis Island, where I not only tore off my tag and drew a picture of a girl on the back but also snatched those identifying other refugee kids. Or of the 730-mile train ride to Michigan. Or of my mother bursting into tears once she disembarked in the Lowell station and saw the bleak surroundings. Or of the meager meal of canned tomato soup and Saltine crackers that our sponsors, a Lutheran minister and his wife, served us before putting my mother to work. Meaning that she was to hand-wash the dirty laundry accumulated since their washing machine had broken down, except that my mother—a clever lady shaking from exhaustion—diagnosed the problem as a short and fixed it with wire strippers and electrical tape and then only had to repeatedly load and unload the machine and carry everything out to the yard to dry. Or of the cramped, unheated space above the garage that they deemed suitable quarters for four people, including an old woman and a small child, during a chilly fall and the following freezing winter. Or of my urbane father being tasked to single-handedly turn their fallow fields into a functioning horse farm. Or of him walking 26 miles in deep snow to Grand Rapids, the closest large town, to secure a factory job. Or of us moving to a nice flat on Ethel Street.

The first thing that I do remember is staring at a large Coca-Cola clock on the cloakroom wall at Sigsbee Elementary School, where I sat for what seemed like an eternity, terrified that no one would come to take me home from kindergarten. Before you conclude that this was the same sort of separation anxiety seen in American kids starting school, let me remind you that Europe had been decimated by World War II and dealing with the devastating aftermath. As a result, my father and mother and maternal grandmother had been the only source of stability that I had ever known. The thought that I had been left to fend for myself was unbearable. Which is why I am appalled when Americans refer to the “zero-tolerance” policy of separating children from parents who cross the Mexican border to seek asylum—their right under both US and international law—as sending them to “essentially summer camps” or “basically boarding schools.”

As you might expect from the way that my family and I were welcomed to the United States, I was not nearly as shocked as many of my progressive American friends were by the way that a recently empowered segment of our society views foreigners who have been forced to flee their native land. That was always there, if not always so openly expressed. But back then, at least, no one kept me from my family. Despite my worst fears, someone eventually took me back to Ethel Street. Still, the memory of sitting alone in that cloakroom with that ticking clock stays with me to this day. I wonder what traumatic memories and subconscious changes will stay with the 2500 some kids recently separated and sent to shelters in at least 16 states. Some are only a few months old. Hundreds have been apart from their parents for several weeks. And there is no good system for reuniting them, so who knows how many will ever see Mom or Dad.

 

A border patrol agent takes a youngster into custody in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, where at least three facilities are holding “tender age” migrants. (Photo: John Moore / Getty Images)

 

Children are held in a US Customs and Border Protection detention facility at Rio Grande Valley Centralized Processing Center in Texas. (Source: US Customs and Border Protection/Reuters)

 

American Civil War, Nationalism, Public Art, Racism, World War II

Monuments and Museums

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One portion of a polarizing Soviet-Era war memorial in Riga, Latvia.

Like many people in the United States, I was appalled by the violence that erupted this weekend at the white supremacist rally ostensibly organized to protest the removal of a Confederate monument from Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, Virginia. And, like some of them, I could not believe that it was happening again. You see, my native land, Latvia, was invaded by Nazi Germany during World War II. And support for this and other atrocious acts was spread by similar torch-lit, flag-waving, slogan-chanting rallies—first small, then massive—that Adolf Hitler used to fan the flames of racism and nationalism.  Only then, it was the United States and its Allies that fought to restore sanity at considerable cost. Which few, I fear, tend to recall.

Which is why we do need concrete reminders such as monuments in public places. For me, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is the best example. While the war and, initially, the memorial itself were divisive, the main section was designed in a way that provided a place for people of all persuasions to contemplate the past while considering the future. Composed of two walls etched with service member names, it was configured to represent a “wound that is closed and healing.” It was also given smooth surfaces that reflect people standing nearby, symbolically bringing the past and the present together.

In contrast, the Charlottesville monument was never meant to have a unifying effect. Situated on a tall pedestal astride a spirited steed, a larger-than-life Robert E. Lee, the military leader of the Confederate states that seceded from the Union after Abraham Lincoln was elected president on a platform opposing the expansion of slavery, stares straight ahead with unseeing eyes. Rather, it serves as a constant reminder to African Americans, among others, that defenders of slavery are still revered, over 150 years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation and Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant. Ironically, such a statue might have dismayed even Lee, who had presciently argued against erecting such monuments, writing:

I think it wiser moreover not to keep open the sores of war, but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered,

Worse yet, data dug up by the Southern Poverty Law Center show that most of Confederate monuments did not exist until decades after the end of the Civil War. Installation peaked in the 1910s and 20s, when Jim Crow laws were being enacted, and the 1950s and 60s, when the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum. The Charlottesville statue, finished in 1924, might have been more a tribute to nationalism and racism than to a Southern soldier. The statue’s defenders underscored this by chanting “Blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us” while on their way to Emancipation Park.

The question now is what to do next. For what it is worth, I offer my peculiar perspective. While I spent the first 35 years of my life in the United States north of the Mason-Dixon Line, I have also lived three years in Alabama, a former Confederate state, and the past 20 some in Maryland, a slave-holding state that stayed with the Union but played a complicated role. Moreover, I was born in Latvia, which has its own divisive history and, not surprisingly, a similar monuments problem. Putting all this together, I would like to make three points.

No monument tells the entire story

Consider the Victory Memorial to the Soviet Army. Situated in Riga, Latvia’s capital city, it celebrates a win by Communist Russia over Nazi Germany. While Latvians were expected to love it, it did not have the desired effect. You see, this victory was accompanied by the Russians re-occupying the Latvian homeland, which, alas, lasted from 1944 to 1991. (The original name was “Monument to the Liberators of Soviet Latvia and Riga from the German Fascist.”) Moreover, the monument was completed in 1985—some 40 years after the fact—during Perestroika, a reform movement that loosened the Soviet stranglehold on Latvia and strengthened the push for independence. So certain parallels with Confederate monuments can be drawn.

Which is why I can dismiss a suggestion that the  Friends of C’Ville Monuments made, stating Confederate statues could be improved simply “by adding more informative, better detailed explanations of the history of the statues and what they can teach us.” Apart from the fact it is unlikely that the real reasons monuments were erected would ever be included, attempts to summarize the complete story of the people and events being commemorated is way too much to ask of, say, a poor plaque. Historical context is best left to museums. Fortunately, there are two large ones that fill this need: the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, which opened its doors just last year, and the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, which has been around in Riga since 1993.

Removing monuments is about making, not destroying, history

For all the earnest talk about preserving the past, toppling statues that commemorate oppression is a time-honored tradition. In the United States, civilians and soldiers pulled down a statue of King George III in Manhattan a mere five days after the ratification of the Declaration of independence, an act depicted in a Johannes Adam Simon Oertel painting. Which is more or less what happened to a statue of Vladimir Lenin in Riga in 1991 once Latvian independence was restored. Except that engineers were involved and a video is  available. In fact, historians such as Sergei Kruk document both the rise and fall of monuments in scholarly works such as “Wars of Statues in Latvia: The History Told and Made by Public Sculpture.”

Knowing that the past is replete with missing monuments, those wishing to preserve particular ones put restrictions in place. This is often an imperfect deterrent. Officials in Riga reference a 1994 treaty with Russia as reason the Victory monument must remain, leaving it to radical nationalists to try—unsuccessfully—to burn it down, then blow it up. Much like officials in Durham, North Carolina, who cite a 2015 state law, then leave it to protestors to successfully— albeit with some arrests—pull down a Confederate statue and stomp on it. Officials also bring up cost and logistics considerations. According to one report, there are still over 700 Confederate monuments in public places. And monuments can be massive. The Victory memorial includes two statues and a 260-foot obelisk that some say resembles the Citadel complex from the video game Half-Life 2.

Of course, there is nothing quite like a crisis to grease the wheels of government. Unless, in the United States. it is being put to shame by a black woman. Citing public safety concerns in the wake of the domestic terrorism act that capped the Charlottesville rally, Baltimore mayor Catherine E. Pugh—with no public notice, no fund-raising, no re-loction plan—”quickly and quietly” had construction crews remove all four Confederate statues. Which led University of North Carolina history professor David Goldfield to say that this could be part of a “rolling cascade” of cities and states ridding themselves of or relocating such statues. Which seems to be what is happening.

Unless countered, missing monuments continue to exert influence

Just because a monument is gone does not mean it is forgotten. According to Kruk, communists still flock to the spot in front of the government building where the Lenin statue once stood, celebrating his birthday and the anniversary of his death as well as Revolution Day by laying flowers on an empty walkway and foiling plans for a new monument to fill the space. So even if the Lee statue is removed from Emancipation Park, I would not be at all surprised to see some strange combination of white supremacists and Lee devotees congregating there. And installing, say, a more acceptable version of the current Emancipation Memorial or something showing the release of Latvians from the Soviet yoke might only make matters worse.

You see, both the United States and Latvia are deeply divided nations for reasons that date at least as far back as the Civil War and World War II, respectively. According to some, the 2016 election revealed “two large coalitions, roughly equal in size but radically different in demographics and desires,” with “race and identity as the main political dividing line.” Similarly, there is a serious split in my native land between ethnic Latvians and ethnic Russians, with the former constituting about 62 percent of the population and latter representing the largest minority at about 27 percent. Moreover, there was a drop in ethnic Latvians from 77 percent in 1835 to 52 percent in 1989, and this is attributed to the Russian occupation. As a result, Russian residents have been subjected to a range of discriminatory practices, including those regarding the granting of citizenship.

It seems to me that new types of monuments must be built that allow both sides to acknowledge past losses and heal old wounds that prevent them from moving forward. That would require honest national conversations from which a shared vision of the future could emerge. But even if that cannot occur anytime soon, there could  be some agreement to construct a few monuments, large and small, along the lines—but not in imitation of—the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, providing both nations with places of temporary respite.

Note: Optimist that I am, I can see a day when people with different perspectives can, at least, smile at some of the inherent ironies. The Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville, for example, was created by the combined efforts of Henry Shrady, a New York sculptor better known for his memorial of Ulysses S. Grant, and Leo Lentelli, an Italian immigrant. And the Victory monument in Riga commemorating Nazi defeat was designed by Lev Bukovsky, who had once served in the Latvian Waffen SS Legion.