San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
UKRAINIAN EXODUS STIRS MEMORIES FOR REFUGEES
S.D. County home to thousands forced from countries due to war
The exodus is staggering: More than 1 million Ukrainian refugees in the first week of the war. Humanitarian officials estimate 10 million could be displaced before it’s over, about onequarter of the country’s population.
Behind each person counted in those numbers is a story — a life on the run, filled with uncertainty.
That was true in 1944, too. Rose Schwartz’s mother told her to put on three layers of clothes. They didn’t know where they were going, or how long they would be gone. She was given one burlap bag for her other belongings.
Then they all headed to the train station.
Then, as now, this scene unfolded in Ukraine, in a region known then as Czechoslovakia. The Schwartz family — two parrose ents and eight children — lived in a small village called Seredne near the Hungarian border. They were Jewish, and Hitler’s storm clouds had been gathering for a while.
“It was time to leave,” said Rose. “We didn’t have a choice.”
She’s 92 now and, like a lot of people displaced by war over the years, lives in San Diego County. This is home to thousands of refugees, people sent to these shores by armed conflicts in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Central America, Africa. They are watching the forced migration unfold in Ukraine with a knowing, sometimes tearful, nod. Been there, done that.
still remembers how it felt to be in the train station, the biggest building she’d ever seen. The waiting, the mixture of excitement and dread, of hope and fear. She was 14 and had never ventured far beyond her village. She had no idea she was leaving for good.
They were herded onto rail cars usually used for livestock, packed in so tightly there was little room for anyone to sit on the floor. There was no food or water, no toilets. They rode for days. Rose looked at the faces of the adults around her, trying desperately to read their expressions.
When the train had left the station, destination unknown, Rose said to herself, “I hope it’s some place wonderful.”
It was Auschwitz.
‘We got lucky’
Jacqui Nguyen sees the images of Ukrainian refugees, hears their stories, and tears flow.
“It’s unbelievable that this kind of thing is happening again,” she said. “Just thinking about it brings back memories and heartaches.”
She was 3 when her family fled Vietnam in April of 1975, just a few days before Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) was captured by the North Vietnamese, ending the war. Her father, mother and younger brother escaped in the middle of the night with the clothes they were wearing and little else. They’d heard there was a boat that had room for them.
Not much room. “Packed like sardines,” Nguyen said. They rode for days and made it to Guam, and then to Camp Pendleton.
The sprawling Marine Corps base in Oceanside had been turned almost overnight into a resettlement camp. The Marines had been told to expect 1,000 refugees. Some 50,000 arrived over the next six months.
They lived in Quonset huts or tents, watched movies from bleachers set in front of an outdoor screen, played soccer on an empty field. And waited.
Waited for sponsors, often business people or churches, who would take them under their wings with housing, food, jobs. A sponsor could be from anywhere in the country. The Nguyens’ was from San Diego.
“We got lucky,” she said. They lived first in an apartment in City Heights, some 30 people crammed inside. Her father worked three jobs. Her mother collected aluminum cans, took in sewing. “Nobody spoke English,” she said. “We all pitched in to put food on the table and survive.”
In time, that part of City Heights became known as Little Saigon, a bustling hub of immigrant life, one of several such enclaves that have reshaped San Diego County in the wake of war and made it more diverse.
Recently, most of the refugees arriving have been people escaping the reemergence of the Taliban in Afghanistan. In January, when the county accepted 685 refugees, 552 of them were from Afghanistan.
Ukraine? Zero. That might change in the coming months.
Holding on to hope
Ask Rose Schwartz (married name Schindler) and Jacqui Nguyen (married name Greer) what they would say to Ukrainians displaced by war, and both say the same thing: Never give up hope.
It’s what Schindler writes next to her name when she signs copies of a memoir, “Two Who Survived,” which she co-wrote with her late husband, Max.
They met after the war, at a hostel in England for Holocaust orphans. They got married, settled in San Diego and raised four children, each named after a relative lost to the Nazi genocide.
For four decades, Schindler has been sharing her first-person account with school classes, civic organizations, churches and neighborhood groups. Last Thursday, she spoke to law students at the University of San Diego.
She’s honoring a request her father made in Auschwitz, the last time she ever saw him: “Stay alive so you can tell the world what they are doing to us.”
Around her neck, the first thing she puts on every morning, is a gold pocketwatch chain that belonged to him. He hid it in the house, in a box tucked in the rafters, before they fled their village in 1944. She went back after the war and retrieved it.
Honoring the past while stepping into the future — it’s a balancing act for all who are displaced by war. In Greer’s home in Vallejo, there is an altar honoring her Vietnamese ancestors, not far from an antique secretary desk that belonged to the family of her American husband, Brad.
“I still keep a lot of the traditions,” Greer said. Celebrating the Lunar New Year. Speaking Vietnamese with her mom.
Her dad dreamed of one day going home, splitting his time between San Diego and Vietnam. It never happened. He got a rare blood disease and died in 2019.
A different dream came true, though. He wanted his children to attend college. Greer went to San Diego State, where she figured she would be expected to take science courses — “I’m the oldest kid in an Asianamerican family” — and aim toward a career in medicine.
But her dad knew she liked to write and that she had been involved in student publications at Mt. Carmel High School. He suggested she study journalism.
“He opened that door for me,” she said.
She built a career in broadcast news at stations in San Diego, Sacramento and Palm Springs. “Did you see my daughter on TV?” her father would ask his friends. She works now in communications for a state senator.
It’s too soon to know what doors might open for the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing Ukraine, more and more of them by the hour. Will they be gone for long? Will they ever return?
Schindler thinks of her own story when she thinks of them, and of the times good fortune befell her amid so much misery. The guy on the train who advised her to tell the guards at Auschwitz she was 18, not 14. (Adults went to work camps, children to the gas chamber.) Her chance meeting with Max, which led to almost 70 years together.
How else to explain why she survived when so many others didn’t?
“While you’re holding on to hope,” she said, “also try to get lucky.”