Aftermath: Part II

Emery Gregus

Occupation and Liberation 1944-1945
Aftermath: The Postwar Years
Remembrances

Aftermath Part II:

O, Canada

We arrived in Canada on August 14th l951. We were aware of the fact at the time that all previous decisions about our future, the incertitude’s of emigration, the endless waiting, and our "temporary" status, which had lasted some two years in Paris, were now definitely over. Here and now, was the place where we were to put down our roots. It seemed to us that everything up until this point, childhood, youth, and the years during and after the war were only preparation for "real" life, which commenced with our arrival in Montreal.

We found ourselves in Canada, because it was the first country, from all our applications, which granted us an immigration permit. This was probably due to the outbreak of the Korean War. In times of war, the need for manpower made for more liberal handling of immigration requests. The crossing took eight days and was extremely unpleasant. We slept in separate dormitories, and I waited for Eva every morning as she climbed up the steep steps from the lower hull of the ship, overcome with seasickness. Most of the time we sat on a bench in the middle of the ship where it appeared to move the least and we ate mostly boiled eggs which for some reason didn’t have the tendency to come back as easily as other foods.

On the sixth day, we reached the mouth of the St. Lawrence River and finally the seasickness left us. Now we could enjoy the sights. One of the first things we noticed was that the grass was truly greener on this side of the Atlantic. Literary speaking, it was a darker colour green than the grass in Europe, and the houses were more colourful as well. On the night of the following day, we arrived at Quebec City where the Salvation Army waited for us on the shore with a bible and some cotton-like item they called "bread." At midnight, we boarded the train for Montreal and in the morning we arrived at Windsor Station. The same relatives who had waited for us when we arrived in Paris and by now had preceded us to Montreal, were again waiting at the station and took us to a room they had rented for us on Jeanne Mance Street where we caught up on eight sleepless nights. It was here in the home of a Polish-Jewish cutter that we were to spend the next couple of months.

This first room on Jeanne Mance cost us $ 40/month and this was exactly how much we had in our pockets when we arrived. The JIAS paid for our room for a few weeks until we were able to find a job. The transitional period was definitely over. We were now facing newer worries and humiliations in the types of jobs we could apply for, and we were aware that neither our past, nor our ambitions or education could have prepared us for this challenge. None of the jobs would ever fulfill our hopes and endeavours, but the years of persecution were still vivid in our memories, and for the moment we were content with our situation. We accepted it, but at the same time we were overcome with worry and anxiety, and we just didn’t see how we were going to break out of our present predicament. What kind of future lay ahead of us?

In Paris, the Joint had sent Eva to learn a trade, and now she finds a job in a factory sewing shirts for 0.55 cents /hour. Even in those days, the value was not more than the present-day equivalent of $5.00 /hour. After a few months of working, Eva approached the owner and asked for a raise. He was also from Kosice and knew Eva from back home and the circumstances from which she came, yet he refused her request by saying: "If you will hunch over your sewing machine more, you will earn more!"

I tried to find a job through the Yellow Pages, scanning the Optical sections. After contacting a few businesses, only now do I discover that in order to work in a store, one must have an optical license. Without a license, I am permitted to work only in a laboratory. Consequently I find myself a job at Kahn Optical, where I am put in front of a grinding stone, and I endure this difficult work 8 hours a day. My fingers were perpetually infected with boils from pressing the glass against the diamond stone. The manager tried me out for a week, and paid me $25/week and when he was satisfied, he offered a permanent position for $32/week. During the entire workday, I was continually counting the minutes until my shift would end. I calculated how much time was behind me; how much time still lay ahead of me (1/2 of the day, 1/8 of the day, 1/16 of the day, etc), and what was even worse, were the co-workers, the French Canadian milieu to which I was totally foreign. The other employees must have perceived me a strange bird indeed. I didn’t know whether it was safe to reveal that I am Jewish or not, but when Yom Kippur came and I asked for the day off, the manager out-rightly refused my request.

After one year at this job, I used my one-week holiday to seek out a new position at another laboratory, and after they had tried me out, they offered me $45/week. When I told my present place of employment, that I could get 10 dollars more elsewhere, they now granted me the same salary and consequently, I stayed with them. After two and half years the lab let me go, stating that there was not enough work. In hindsight, this was a lucky break for me, and I always wondered whether I would have had the courage to leave and strike out on my own.

At about this time, we left our rented room and moved into the home of another couple, recently arrived from Hungary, whom Eva’s sister had met in Italy while both families were waiting for their visas. It was a much more civilized rooming arrangement. The couple had come to Canada with their own furniture from Budapest and it was through them that we met a lot of people with whom we stayed in contact for a long time afterwards. This particular couple had a hard life trying to make ends meet. They boarded the children of working immigrant parents. The children were dropped off on Sunday nights and collected again on Fridays. The husband did odd jobs and gardening for others, but nonetheless, they were optimistic and well-intentioned people. They were not Jewish and perhaps that is why they were more cheerful and lively, and that was probably the reason they had so many friends. In the summer, they rented out rooms in a summerhouse in Rawdon beside a river, where they again boarded children. I can clearly remember one weekend when we went to visit them, and it remains, even today, 40 years later, a memorable couple of days for us. Here was sunshine and nature and, moreover, the illusion that we are living again a normal life--at least for 2-3 days.

After I had been fired from my job, I tried to sell light bulbs, and then watches and various items with someone who needed my French, but all these endeavours were futile, and the only good that came from all this was that I learned to drive as I had purchased a car together with my partner, which I later bought as my own.

It was around this period of time that an inheritance that was owed to my late mother--through her late brother’s factory in the States--materialized, and although the monetary sum was not great, the extra money came at just the right time, because no longer was I obliged to accept just any job, but I could now wait until I finished the course for my optical license, which I acquired during the year of my unemployment. Consequently I accepted a position with an optometrist and it was only now that I really had the chance to gain Canadian experience in the optical field. The optometrist came in only for his appointments, and otherwise I was left on my own during the day in his shop. Sometime later, an ophthalmologist employed me with the idea that it would be beneficial for him to have an optician on the premises of the building he owned and to whom he could send his patients for eyeglasses. The doctor was not an unfair man, but quite unpleasant, and knew nothing of small talk. His haughty attitude heightened my feelings of vulnerability and being at someone’s mercy. It was now, however, that I learned the trade more thoroughly while familiarizing myself with the suppliers, and laboratories, and what was of most comfort and relief to me was that no one hovered over my shoulder and watched.

In the meantime, our first child, a daughter, was born and we moved for the first time to our own apartment on Randall Avenue. We bought the furniture of the previous tenant for $350. I didn’t want Eva to work and leave the baby in the care of others, so Eva found work she could do from home. We discovered an opportunity through a wholesale jewelry company which contracted out the soldering and packaging of earrings. Eva worked during the day and I helped her in the evenings, and we packed thousands of earrings and other bits of costume jewelry in little cellophane bags. I picked up the supplies and delivered the boxes when the work was ready. For people like us, who were living on a fixed income, it was a satisfying feeling to be able to earn some extra money—even if the money wasn’t much, but the work itself was not nearly as unpleasant as the salesmanship jobs I had tried in the past. In the evenings I went to people’s houses to sell eyeglasses. My prices were cheaper than those of the stores and the customers had the convenience of being served in their homes, and, perhaps, some of them wanted to do me a favour as well.

It was around l954, that I acquired my car and from now on we could spend the weekends in the summer discovering the pleasures of driving, visiting the Laurentians, Vermont, Lake George and the Adirondacks, and we spent an occasional night in one of the small motels in the woods. We prepared the picnics and shared Sundays with our friends and their children, but nonetheless these innocent diversions could not eliminate the persistent preoccupation as to where the future would lead us and would we ever establish ourselves sufficiently to create an acceptable way of life?

In 1958, our second child, a son, was born, and not long after that, when I had been working with the ophthalmologist for about 2 1/2 years, the doctor called me into his office and declared that he no longer felt any need to continue with the dispensing business. He continued on to say that he might be willing to help me find another job, or if I would be interested, he could sell his equipment to me. I was totally shocked and bewildered and understandably very upset, but I quickly realized that here now was the chance to be truly on my own. I found a location close by the ophthalmologist’s office and set up my own shop with his laboratory equipment, which I bought with a bank loan of $2000. The ophthalmologist promised to refer his patients to me, and at least, in the beginning, he kept his word. I rented two back rooms on the first floor in a building on Sherbrooke Street, and from the very first day, I was able to make a modest living from my shop. Month by month, year by year, the turnover increased to the extent that we could save money for the children’s summer camps and later we rented a house for the summer in the Laurentians. Twelve years after we had arrived to Canada, we had saved enough for the down payment on a house. It is only now that we experienced some feeling of security and permanence, and we begin to live a more active social life, mostly with other immigrants.

Our children, who had many heartaches and problems in our old apartment, were now enjoying the luxuries of a home, as we too enjoyed their excitement. They were becoming acquainted with the neighbourhood’s kids. My son made many new friends, though my daughter had a harder time mixing with others, and I am sure that the fact that we were relatively new immigrants kept her apart from the social circles of the neighbourhood. I have to admit that this feeling of alienation might have been more our fault than theirs. For my daughter especially, it would be only later in her university years that she would mingle more with other young people. It seems to me, that in our case at least, the effect of immigration influences the life of the next generation, as well as our own.

In those years the newly arrived immigrants were starting to live a social life through the "New World’s Club." They hosted parties, Bar Mitzvahs, and weddings on such a scale that would have been unimaginable in the milieu these same Jews had left behind in Europe. At these events the women dressed in evening gowns and the men wore their tuxedos. Many of these new immigrants were in the needle or building trades, and money came quickly and easily to them; most probably, many were trying to catch up with the years lost due to persecution, war and the humiliations they endured in the early years of their immigration. Sometimes those people went overboard in overindulgence, but the reasons are somewhat understandable.

In a strange way, if I look back at those years and at those who had " made it," few really remained well-to-do afterwards. Perhaps they weren’t prepared for the occasional economic downturn in their business activities, or perhaps they did not possess the needed expertise for their trades, but, nonetheless by the l960s and l970s they had established a fairly comfortable lifestyle for themselves—a lifestyle in many cases, well above what they could have ever hoped to have achieved in the "old world."

Those years were somewhat easier for us as well. Eva’s mother now moved to Montreal to live with us permanently. She was the one who waited on the children at lunchtime, allowing Eva to spend more and more time at our store. Grandmother’s presence gave a certain old-fashioned atmosphere to our house. Even in her eighties and nineties she took an active part in our parties and weekend trips and she enjoyed all these outings with old world enthusiasm.

When we relocated the optical store to a street level location, we became busier and better known in the district and it gave us a certain satisfaction to be trusted in a milieu other than our own. I can be grateful to my late brother- in- law, who knew me as a young boy and offered me the opportunity to work in the optical field at a time when further academic studies were no longer available to me as a Jew. I still remember him fondly. He and my sister and her children all perished in the Holocaust. He took part in the First World War at eighteen where he lost his hair from typhoid, and in the Second World War, he lost his life.

Now too, we began to travel to Europe on yearly holidays. Our first trip took us to Italy to places about which we had learned and only dreamt about: Rome and Florence, Sienna and Assisi, and these holidays still remain the most memorable for us. We sent the children to Europe to study French at camps in Switzerland and France, hoping at the same time that these trips would give them more self-confidence. Our later trips to Hungary and Slovakia were very satisfying in an other sense as well; not only were these trips to our past, but we relished the fact that we now were free, where before we had been hunted and persecuted. Our old friends came to Budapest to meet us and their presence gave us many enjoyable and colourful vacations.

The 1967 Expo in Montreal brought together our family from London, Israel and the States and those were happy times. These events brought an atmosphere of a more consolidated "olden" times, and the few days everyone spent in our home left behind pleasant memories and old-fashioned jealousies. It was entertaining to stand in line in front of the Czech pavilion with its Black Theatre, the Italian pavilion with its architecture reminiscent of old catacombs, eat waffles at the Belgium pavilion and sauerkraut at Slovak Koliba. All these images brought together the colours and atmosphere of the world, and for all this we just had to embark on a little train.

Naturally we had our problems with the children as they grew up. Raising children is always a difficult period in one’s life and perhaps more challenging by virtue of their being the first generation. One always tries to influence the children according to one’s own childhood ambitions and experiences; we helped them in their studies in the evenings or sent them to extra lessons. In America, the very gifted will easily succeed in their studies and the untalented ones are left behind. Often the majority in between could become easily lost without help. We never forced our children to work during the summer holidays; it was more important to recognize the value and importance of work than to practice it for a few weeks, and we preferred to leave them at liberty during those few months.

The years passed quickly. My daughter finished her studies and married in l978 and it was at her wedding that the entire family was brought together for the last time. If future generations would wish to look back at their predecessors, the family picture made on this occasion would serve the purpose. My son- in- law finished his doctorate and he and my daughter moved to Toronto, and my son, who finished his medical studies, took up residence in Chicago where he married in l995. Now we were alone, but grateful, that both our children managed to get away from the unpleasant situation in Quebec.

A chapter closed on our lives. We had been transformed from a busy and active family, to an elderly couple. However, parents’ worries remain even if their children are far away. Their problems are ours as well and they remain forever our responsibility; but what would life be without the problems and successes of your children?

From the late eighties onward, our life revolved around the optical store. After so many years in one place, we had become a permanent fixture of the neighbourhood and the store became part of us as well. It replaced our diminished family and social life. As time went by, however, it became more and more burdensome and after many years of inquiries, a serious buyer approached us. After some minor negotiations, he came in one afternoon with a cheque and we handed over our keys. An hour later we walked out of the store, which we had owned for 40 years and never looked back again. It still amazes me, that after so many years, how easily I left the shop behind, and I cannot find any other explanation other that most likely I had seen it merely as a means of making a living, not as a particular achievement in life.

The more recent years are more blurred in my memory and only the travels, the celebrations, and weddings stand out and these events are recorded in photos and film. Now that we have reached retirement, we live comfortably; we need not rise early every morning and we no longer need suffer the whims of customers and the responsibilities of running a business. Slowly, we are returning to the Shakespearean second childhood. When we were young, the days seemed so long for us, and now that we have aged, the days again seem long, but we cannot play anymore. Instead of hoping, as in we did in childhood that something exciting will happen to us, we now hope that nothing will happen to us. We worked, we travelled, and we lived some social life. One mustn’t complain--except that life is emptier around us now. The contact with our children fills some gap in our life, but that life is theirs now, and we are watching only from the sidelines.