We signed up on a boat, cruising, with General Howze, France, and Sydney or Melbourne, somewhere there, and while we were waiting for to be called on the ship, somebody in Chicago who knew us from Lithuania and then, up there made papers because you had to have, for anybody from displaced person camps to come to United States, somebody had to guarantee that they will give a job, that they will support you, etcetera. So, without us knowing even, they prepared papers for us and then we just received, you know, from the camp’s office that we could go to United States. There are papers for you. So, okay, what, why not? I mean, makes no difference.
So, we came to New York and it was sponsored actually by the United Nations Refugee Organisation. So, we were not, we were really actually correctly speaking, we’re not immigrants, we are, we were brought in here and dumped by United Nations Refugee Organisation. And you know, knowing how, the way I see it, and I, you know, have said this many times in other, on other occasions, that if one is really very much rooted in one’s place like I was in, I mean, in nature, in the country, there, in that, in language, in songs in Lithuania, then once you are uprooted then it makes no difference where you are, absolutely no difference.
No my, usually, anecdote is that if you drop me in the desert and come back three days later, I will have my roots already in the desert, all over. Because it makes no difference because you’re not home because you’re always there and it doesn’t matter where you are. It’s not the same with the, let’s say, Italian immigrants. Italians, they were not uprooted, nobody deported them to America, they need to earn money for their families to send back to their families. So, they come on their own free, by their own choice and their countries are still there if they want, they can always go back, of course they miss it, and the mothers cry, but they can always go. So it’s, it’s a completely different situation. Now why I’m saying this, there was some other reason.