Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Larry Wayne - 2005

Quotas

...and I was w...w...working--translating--helping translate for Mrs. Roosevelt when she was visiting the DP camps. And that time when the ritual started the organization called the Committee for Care of European Children. Now this is probably a very unknown fact, you know, what I'm just going to tell you now, that after the war, if you were a Jew and a Pole it didn't matter. United States had a Polish quota. How about that is they let, they let in one thousand Polish citizens to the United States. Didn't care were Jewish, Pole, it didn't, didn't matter. They didn't give any priority to Jews or anything else. So once they had the quota of a thousand--and at that time I think it might have been a hundred--they didn't let anybody else in. I was already, like, an adult. I was nine...nineteen, twenty years old or so, but my brother and sister were, like, children. So she started an organization that was called the United States Committee for Care of European Children. Now what it meant that children could come into the United States outside the quota. So I was very lucky that I was guardian of the two children, I came in with them. Came to New York July 1946. At that time I had a choice because I was very active in smuggling Bet Aliyah, I was back into smuggling children to Munich, Frankfurt, Bad Nauheim, Bremerhaven and Marseilles. And Bad Nauheim was one of, one of the stops--I still remember I had over here, a bunch of guests over here, ???. He was one of the guys from the UNRRA and J.O.I.N.T. He probably died a few years ago.

So where were... And these children were going to the United States.

No, they were, the...but not the one I wor...the one that I worked with to smuggle them, they were going to Israel.

Israel.

Israel, yeah. That time.


© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn