DP's

My German grandparents, toddler (my mother) in tow, immigrated in the 1920's.

A lot of their landsmann also came over. One of my grandfather's brothers (he had a raft of them) sponsored my mother's family, bringing them over to join him in Chicago. My grandmother also had family in the "new world," but I think most of them were in Canada. The only one of my great-aunts and great-uncles I remember is my grandmother's sister Tante Teresa, who lived in Windsor, Ontario, and would come down to Chicago when we visited there. She also came to Worcester once, with my grandmother. I remember dancing with Teresa at my Aunt Kay's wedding in 1963. 

There was a lot of family in Canada - cousin this, cousin that - who would also sometimes show up in Chicago, including the infamous Kissing Cousin Joe, who, Euro-style, liked to greet men by kissing them. My father and my Uncle Ted - two staunch Irischers - wanted nothing to do with men kissing each other. Ted and Al perfected a stiff arm handshake so that Kissing Cousin Joe couldn't swoop in for a smacker.

Cousin Joe was also famous for his appearance in Chicago for my grandfather's funeral. As the story went, some relatives took it upon themselves to raid my grandfather's closet, and gifted Joe with his overcoat. Cousin Joe was a slight fellow, and was swimming in the coat as he modeled it for the family, back at my grandmother's post burial. "Doesn't Joe look good in Jake's coat?" someone asked. Not!

My grandparents were more prosperous than some other parts of the family, and I'm sure that Jake's coat was a nice one. Still...My grandfather had died suddenly and young, leaving my grandmother a widow at 52, with two young kids still in the house, Kay who was 7 and my Uncle Bob, who was 11. Imagine rifling through my grandfather's closet before my grandfather's body was cold...

I don't know whether Joe actually made off with the coat, but supposedly, Joe et al. also stopped by my grandfather's grocery store to stock up on food before they went back to Windsor, charging their supplies to my grandfather's account. 

Unless I was napping, I would have been a witness, but I wasn't even two and have no recall of this at all. And I have no way of knowing whether any of this actually happened IRL. You know how stories take on a life of their own...

But, Canadian relations aside, I do know there were plenty of cousins around the Chicago area, and they were always part of the scene when we were visiting. One cousin, a youngish guy named George, lived with my grandmother for a while. I can remember what he looked like, but not why he was living with Grandma.

Once when we were at my grandmother's summer house on the lake in the country up towards the Wisconsin boarder, Pete, a youngish cousin who was considered kind of a punk, showed up with some friends and wanted to take my sister Kathleen, my cousin Ellen, and I out for a ride. We were all in our early teens. These guys were 19 or 20. My father and my Uncle Ted chased them off. That was pretty exciting.

And then there were the DPs...

While some of my grandparents' large multitude of siblings had come over, others stayed behind in the old country.

My German family had been pioneers, leaving Swabia (part of what is now Germany) for the outer reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where they farmed in entirely German towns. After the first World War, the borders shifted and, while my mother was born in the same village as her parents had been, she was born in a different country: Romania.

After World War II, it should come as no surprise that the Romanians wanted the Germans out of their country. And so, a lot of my family members became Displaced Persons. I believe that those who had married Romanians were welcome to stay in Romania, and some of them did. But those who had stayed in the tribe and married ethnic Germans were booted out.

Some went back to Germany. (My mother had a cousin she corresponded with.) Some came to the United States. And some of those were sponsored by my grandparents and came to Chicago, where my grandparents, and later my grandmother on her own, put them up in property they owned, and even, temporarily, in their home, a prairie-style bungalow at 4455 North Mozart.

So throughout the 1950s, DP's were in the picture.

Do I actually remember some guy - a cousin? Caspar? - in a Wehrmacht greatcoat with the swastika buttons cut off and replaced with something neutral? Probably not. Other than for my grandfather's funeral (October) we only went to Chicago in the summer, and there ain't no one wearing a greatcoat in Chicago in July. So this may not be a real memory.

But the memory of the cousin with the French wife and the two little French daughters is definitely real. I don't recall his name, or the names of the two little girls in their stiff nylon dresses, but her name was Madeleine. What was their story? Was he stationed in France during the war? Had she consorted with the enemy? Was her head shaved for being a collaborator? Did he somehow stay in France during the war? 

Who knows...

In 1965, bizarrely on the anniversary of her marriage to my grandfather, my mother remarried: a widowed DP. He was from their home town, had served in the German army during the war - he was in his forties; he worked as a surveyor, I believe - and was part of the horde kicked out of Romania. I only met him a few times, but found him to be thoroughly unpleasant. But he was a companion to my grandmother and gave her someone to cook for and squabble with. (He outlived my grandmother, and don't get me going on what rotten, venal a-holes his children turned out to be...)

DPs. 

Do they even use that term anymore? Is there a difference between a refugee and a displaced person?

I look at all the pictures of the Ukrainian refugees.

America is taking 100,000 of them in. Yay, us, I guess. Most European countries are also welcoming Ukrainian refugees, and a lot more proportionately than we are. The stories of Polish and German citizens showing up at train stations with signs indicating how many refugees they can take into their homes is so touching. I cried the other day just reading about a woman in Berlin who had taken a woman, her two kids, and a cat into her home. A flat that had housed a family of 5 a few weeks ago, now had 8 people (plus the cat) living there. The Berlin woman had also reached out to her network and found homes for a number of other refugee families. 

Reminds me of my grandmother...

There's some chat around and about that Americans are more sympathetic to refugees from Ukraine than they are to, say, Syrian or other brown- and black-skinned refugees. There's probably something to that. (There always is.) But I think it's as much that Ukraine (rather than "just" its people) looks like us. Ukraine is a democracy. The streets, the shops, the clothing people wear. It all looks pretty American. Kyiv looks more like an American city than Aleppo does. (Or did before Aleppo was smashed to smithereens.)

And I do have to confess that, when I see pictures of Ukrainian refugees, I think that this is what my extended family - minus the puffer coats and smart phones - looked like, what they went through, what they survived, in Europe in the 1940's.

That's just the way it goes, I suppose.