Farewell my Homeland

One day in the early sixties in Yugoslavia, my father came home all flustered and very frustrated. Sitting with my mother at the family dinner table, he recounted how at work today he was poked and prodded to begin a more active role in our local division of the Yugoslav Communist Party.

Our family being secretly Catholic, being more involved in the Communist Party was not an option.

My father recounted a plan to leave Communist Yugoslavia and join my Uncles Charlie and George and their families in Toronto Canada.

As he reminded my mother, we had building supplies on a lot in town to build a house for our selves which one of his sisters and family are willing to buy from us giving us traveling money along with a small amount of cash savings.

My mother would have to apply for a visa for me and herself as my father already had one from when he drove a Communist General all over Europe when he was in the Army. Each male in Yugoslavia had to spend two years serving their country at a certain age.

It was fairly common for Yugoslavs to go to Germany or Italy to work and live temporarily as the pay was much better than in our homeland. So it was not unusual for a woman to apply for a visa.

What was unusual was for a complete family to have visas at once as they usually were only granted to one adult in the family at a time. I guess the authorities overlooked the fact that my father already had a visa when they granted one for me and my mother in the coming months. A God shot of many more to come!

One night, late in the evening without a word to anyone, we headed for the local train station to catch a midnight train to Triest Italy.

Most of the cash we had, had been converted to Italian lira on the black market and was hidden on my person and in the bottom of a fairly large cold creme container my mother carried in her purse.

When we got to the Italian border the authorities on the train re-checked our passports and searched our belongings and my father and mother. Neglecting to search a pretending to be asleep five-year-old boy and thinking nothing of the cold creme container when they came across it. Some more God shots.

When we got to Triest we were transferred, along with many others also fleeing repressive conditions in their homeland, to an Italian Refugee camp as we had disclosed on arrival that our final destination was Canada.

When we arrived, women and children were housed separately from their husbands and fathers to ensure everyone could be interrogated without collusion between the individuals traveling together. Interpol did background checks on all would-be travelers. If there was a criminal record or even so much as an outstanding debt in the past those individuals with their families would be sent back to their country of origin.

This original interrogation period lasted several months before families were reunited and given shared accommodations. After a couple of more months, the men were allowed to leave the camp and seek gainful employment in town, the money well received, to provide their families with items not provided at the camps.

Around the time my father gained employment, I became extremely melancholy and sad, missing my family back home, to the point that I stopped eating. As the days passed I ate sporadically and started losing weight at a dangerous rate to the point that I was transferred to a nearby hospital.

The staff of young intern men and female nurses tried to cheer me up by teaching me Italian children's songs and jokes and Italian words and phrases particularly ones which were somewhat colorful in nature, such as paco, which means stupid...

My mother took a bus to see me every couple of days but the cost of my care and bus fare was a drain on our meager earnings and our savings were being depleted rapidly.

After several weeks I was reunited with my parents at the camp and the administration introduced rice pudding into the diet of the younger children, once a day at lunch. I survived on this for the remainder of our stay there. Another God shot.

One day my adult cousin Laci came from Germany to visit us. We had been there several months by then. And it buoyed our spirits to actually see some family after all this time.

One day the four of us hitchhiked to a nearby river and spent the day swimming and lounging in the hot Italian sun. My father and cousin would scare my mother and I by diving off of the cliffs directly into the whirlpools below and staying underwater as long as they possibly could to make us think that they could not resurface because of the whirlpools and under tough.

Nearly a year after our arrival we and many others were bused to seagoing vessels on a coast of Italy and started the next leg of our adventure by Ocean Liners. Some, like us, were headed to Canada but many others were going to Australia or New Zealand on other ships.

I had turned six while we were in the camp and while we were on the ship I was allowed to wander around on the refugee floor, the exercise room, and the galley nearly the lowest point of the ship. One day while on the lower deck, I saw the kitchen staff throw kitchen scraps of food overboard near the back of the ship and I saw huge sharks swirling and jumping, eating the scrap meat and fruit and vegetables.

The realization that if I fell overboard the sharks would make short work of a skinny little boy like me, terrified me and I stayed well away from the back railing.

After a while, we arrived at port in Halifax and were unable at first to arrange travel to Toronto as we were well out of funds. Some people from the Salvation Army came and enquired where we were from and where we were headed. They gave us some bible tracks and train fare and we were on our way once again. Another God shot.

Upon our arrival in Toronto, we were able to contact my Uncle Charlie, my Aunt Marika, and my cousins Isabel and Jenny, taking turns talking to them on the telephone. Jenny was seven and Isabel was eight and so we got along beautifully.

They came to the train station to pick us up in a full-sized Ford convertible and we all piled in for the trip back to their house. My mother sitting in my father's lap for the trip while Isabel and Jenny and I huddled together beside them in the back seat. Their house was more like a mansion in a well-to-do Jewish neighborhood.

My Uncle Charlie was an automatic transmission mechanic and businessman who owned his own business, several taxicab licenses which he leased out, and several rental houses along Bloor st. where his shop was located.

My Uncle gave my father a job at the transmission shop and taught my father a trade he would work in for many years to come. My mother cleaned houses and I went to school with Isabel and Jenny.

We lived with our family for about a year when my parents had saved enough money to put a downpayment and secure a mortgage to buy our first home in Canada on Holland avenue in an immigrant neighborhood in another part of Toronto.

We were a young immigrant family living the Canadian dream.

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