She took a second to think about it. “No. Obviously there’s your former father-in-law if those were Ukrainian letters. I never heard him refer to anyone as a DP.”
“Would it be possible that was his nickname for a close friend from the DP camps?”
Mrs. Chimchak considered the possibility. “DPs were the lowest rung of society in post — World War II Europe. We were the Untermensch, the subhumans. Being called a DP was an insult. In my experience, certain types of men enjoy insulting each other. ‘Hey DP,’ or ‘You’re just a DP.’”
“You’re right. The closer some friendships, the more the men insult each other. I never thought of it that way before.”
“It’s just that… DP camps are a painful part of our past. Most people who suffered through the camps, they prefer not to talk about them. They started new lives here. They had children. Their children have had children. They don’t want their families exposed to what they went through.”
“That would explain why my father never talked about his life before he came to America, and, just today, my mother danced around the issue when I asked about it.”
“As I recall from the New Year’s Eve balls in the early days, back when the joy of being Americans exceeded all our cumulative sorrows, your mother was always a good dancer.”
“Will you talk to me about the camps?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Anything you’re willing to share, anything you’re not willing to share, that sort of thing.”
She smiled and nodded. This was more like it, she was saying. I knew I’d come to the right person. I reached for a cookie in celebration, dunked it in my tea, and ate half of it. Then I ate the rest, sat back, and listened.
She started with the salient facts. There were approximately two hundred fifty Displaced Persons camps in 1946. Most of them were located in Germany, a few in Austria, and one in Italy. The British administered approximately a hundred of them, while the Americans tended to most of the rest. Ukrainian refugees clung together.
“My camp was in the American Zone,” she said matter-of-factly. “The first thing we did was get acclimated. Then we went about the business of creating our own society within the camps to help us survive as a community. We formed schools. There were about seven thousand Ukrainian children in the American Zone. We had fifteen hundred teachers. The children were battle-tested. They were used to moving and leaving home on a moment’s notice. They were used to bombing and shelling. So it wasn’t that strange for them to work in a classroom without tables or chairs. Without chalk or a blackboard. The children learned while standing. They wrote in pencil on window sills and on the floor.”
She told me that the DPs created the Ukrainian Free University in Munich, and published a Ukrainian newspaper as well. A few men got jobs in military installations, in manufacturing plants, or as engineers with construction firms. But most sat around the camp speaking about hopelessness and dreaming of a better tomorrow. Meanwhile, a black market and barter system evolved.
“Cigarettes were the gold standards in the Schwarzmarkt,” Mrs. Chimchak said. “One pack bought you illegal entry into Berlin. Two packs got you some bread, potatoes, or meat from a German farmer. Twenty-five packs might have won you a German radio, and thirty bought you a bicycle.”
“Was my godfather a good scrounger?”
“He was the best. Anything you needed, you went through him. The second-hardest thing for him to acquire was fresh fruit and vegetables. Food was scarce but we got our hands on it. But the diet wasn’t varied, and we all looked gray and lifeless. That didn’t stop us from being productive. We organized a theatre. Uncensored productions without the watchful eye of the NKVD. What joy! We focused on our religion, too. Orthodox, Catholics. Most Catholic priests made it out of the USSR alive. In the camps, most people attended Mass every Sunday.”
She paused to sip her tea. Her hand trembled as she lifted her cup to her mouth. I hadn’t noticed any tremors beforehand, and was left wondering if this was an ailment or an indication of the emotional toll of recalling her past.
“Did my godfather develop any enemies back then? Something personal, that may have lingered for decades?”
Mrs. Chimchak laughed. It was a full, open-mouth laughter that showed her teeth. They were small, slightly stained, and ferocious looking. “Enemies? My God, child. It’s hard for you to understand, isn’t it? It seemed like we were the enemies of the entire outside world. But in the camps themselves? Please… You know what they say about Ukrainians. Put two in a room and you’ll get three political parties. Sure, there were politics. There were always politics. But we were too consumed with our survival to create grudges among one another.”
Something had struck a chord but I couldn’t place it. I took a few breaths and remembered.
“You said the second-hardest thing for him to acquire was fresh produce. What was the hardest thing for him to get?”
“That which could not be scrounged. Freedom. A destination. A new home for everyone who refused to go back to the old one.”
I nodded.
“That is what we lived for,” she said. “And we dreamed our dreams in a constant state of fear. The ghosts of concentration camps loomed large. There was residual fear from the war — the fighting — but mostly there was constant fear of repatriation. It was there, in the back of our minds, from the moment we arrived. But then the Americans and the British authorized the use of force to send DPs back to Ukraine toward the end of 1946. The stories of their violence spread and we knew things would only get worse.
“Violence? What kind of violence?”
“The British and American soldiers were given orders to herd people onto trains to send us back to Ukraine. When we refused, they hit us with their rifles. In our stomachs, our backs. They cracked foreheads open. They told us we were going back one way or another. They had orders.”
“And they beat DPs? Allied soldiers actually beat refugees?”
Mrs. Chimchak nodded solemnly. “There were two types of soldiers. The men from the European campaigns who’d fought the Germans were horrified. I watched battle-scarred veterans with tears in their eyes slugging DPs with their rifles. A black American doctor by the name of Washington. I will never forget him. I saw him leaning against a shed as they herded us on board crying uncontrollably. Tears rolling off his cheeks. You see, these were the same trains that had been used to bring survivors from the concentration camps back to civilization. Back to freedom.”
Neither of us spoke for a few seconds. Her words sank in.
“Who was the second type of soldier?” I said.
“The new recruits. They had no wartime experience. They bonded with postwar German society, the people who hosted them, provided them services. To them we were DP scum and while there were exceptions, most of them didn’t shed any tears when they were ordered to use force for repatriation. The new American soldiers hated us as much as the locals did.”
I imagined an American soldier happily slugging a malnourished refugee to force him or her to board a train. A knot tightened in my stomach. I loathed the thought of any American having done anything evil, especially during the war when our country had helped liberate Europe. It was silly, naïve, and unrealistic, and I didn’t care. We were the lucky ones. We were Americans. We were supposed to stand for absolute good at all times.
Then the image took on a new dimension. Mrs. Chimchak entered the picture.