Displaced Persons 3: a kind of winning

These are my grandparents, Paulīne and Alfred, the photo taken in the 1950’s on the balcony of our Montreal apartment in Park Ex, short for Park Extension, a neighbourhood known then and now as ‘disadvantaged’.

When I was last there, I was an adult, middle-aged, and new refugees had moved in, Haitians and Vietnamese. Our family too were refugees when this picture was taken. During WWII, Latvia had been invaded by Russia, then Germany, then Russia again, each bringing their own brand of terror to the population by shooting, torture, rape or deportation, looting and pillaging at will. The second Russian invasion came in 1944. Paulīne and Alfred put bundles of belongings into a cart, and with their two children, my mother, then in her late teens, and her brother, seven years younger, walked away from their home on the outskirts of Riga.  

Alfred buried valuables in the garden – a milk churn full of honey, crockery and valuables – expecting to return once fighting died down. Paulīne was first to recognise this would not happen. In a stream of refugees on the bridge across the river Daugava, she looked back at the city and thought, “I will never see you again”, and fainted.

Like all refugee families of war, mine had stories of suffering – the near misses of death, the privations, the cold and wet and starvation, the fear and casual cruelties. But now Paulīne and Alfred were in Park Ex, in Canada, not in Latvia, not in the house Alfred had built within sight of his cousin’s, visible at the end of the garden, not in the house with the willow and cherry and apple trees, the rows of vegetables, and wine cellar dug deep enough to double as an air-raid shelter. They were in an apartment overlooking an alley at the back and the street in front. They were safe, and therefore content, though happiness was perhaps asking too much.

When the picture was taken, I was young, my age not yet in double figures. I listened to adults, heard the stories of war and sad songs, but I was a child of Canada and the alley. I lived for ball games and roller skating and double-dutch skipping. There were family excursions to Mount Royal, the hump of hill in the centre of Montreal, in summer feeding chipmunks and in winter ice-skating around Beaver Lake while the tannoy filled the air with strains of The Skater’s Waltz. These were joys. I had no sense, ever, of being ‘disadvantaged’.

The alley was a parallel universe of street kids, where I learned competition and power struggles, even perversity. Once, the man we all knew to avoid came into our yard, sat beside me at the sandbox, slipped his hand into my blouse and pinched my nipple, which was not then even the beginning of a breast.

I came across this long-forgotten photograph of my grandparents when I was a grown woman, living in England and with children of my own. I gazed at the faces I remembered as old but here were young, saw resignation in the expressions, and acceptance. Their relationship then could best be described as a truce.

Before the long walk that took them to the coast and a ship heading for Danzig, now Gdansk, Paulīne had been looking for a lawyer. She'd found out that Alfred had been having an affair with their neighbour’s wife, a woman who didn’t have to work but was at home all day “reading romance novels”. Paulīne had decided to divorce.    

She and Alfred had grown up together. His parents were tenant labourers on her parents’ farm. The betrayal cut deeply. But once in flight, there was never again a good time to separate. After the war, the family was granted asylum in England in return for providing labour, and something happened there. “He said such terrible things to me… I was ready to leave him but the children talked me out of it. They said he didn’t speak English, how would he survive?” She stayed. I was with them when they marked their 60th wedding anniversary.

After the war, the UN Refugee Agency added the family to the vast number of Displaced Persons in Europe, a status that enabled them to be registered, counted and eventually re-settled. My parents met in a DP camp in Germany and married, and there I began life as cells dividing, born the usual number of months later in Yorkshire.

In Canada, the family are no longer Displaced Persons. We are on the road to joining a new wave of Canadian ‘naturalised citizens’. But displacement isn’t a state of being that is easily dropped. The sense of being ripped from one’s home locks into a soul. Whatever dreams Paulīne and Alfred had had for their lives lay behind them, and were irretrievable. I see that loss in their faces, there's a veil of melancholy.

Alfred held on to remnants of his past by seeking out books in Latvian and Russian. He collected stamps, made redcurrant wine, whooped at the TV when Hockey Night in Canada came on. In Latvia, he’d been a Customs Officer, and also a school governor, volunteer fireman and town councillor. He was on the Board of a cultural society, Secretary of a local co-operative, Treasurer for his division of the Home Guard. He sang in a choir and made sets for his local theatre group. He was a lay advocate, writing up suits and counter-suits for others. In Park Ex, he worked in a factory, a human cog at an engineering firm.

Paulīne worked briefly as a nurse in the “Royal Vic”, a large hospital built into the flanks of Mount Royal, then as a private nurse for an elderly gentleman in his house. In Latvia, she had been a midwife. Attending births had been her greatest joy. There would be no more of that.

These are the hidden displacements, the displacements of self, common to immigrants everywhere. At best, the self becomes a kind of emulsion, elements of past and present co-existing, but not dissolving into each other to become a solid whole. The self that came Before is not the self that exists After. Like plants moved from a sun-lit sill to a shadowy shelf, my grandparents survived, but it could not be said they thrived. The world that had fed them vitality and self-worth was gone.

Survival is a kind of winning. But the loss of country, community, culture – the loss of a world – manifests in the winner as a rupture, as loneliness, as lack. Loss like that sits below the surface, invisible to others as tea is poured, politics is mulled over, iced vodka is brought to the table. Loss like that flowers in solitude, in the night, in the dark, when memory is most keen and most bleak, but one gets up in the morning and pretends it isn’t there, because after all, one has survived.

Paulīne and Alfred now lie in the Latvian Memorial Park Cemetery in the Catskills, in the state of New York. In death, they are re-united with their community, sharing space with others who faced similar adversities and survived to begin new lives in North America. In death, they reaffirm their allegiance: we are Latvians.