I mostly remember of course at first tremendous sadness, which is part I think of any child’s experience when they are a refugee or even an immigrant. The difference of course — refugees don’t choose to leave, whether it’s a tidal wave, a revolution, a civil war, they usually leave hurriedly, they take nothing with them and they don’t know when they’ll ever return. So there’s a pathos I think involved in that, the children osmose. And it was so different. It was so very different from my island home. It was cold. And I had always felt warm on the coldest night. It was alien, the flora. And we arrived in February, the trees were dead. The bushes were dead. The grass was dead. My father would say el lugar de los muertos. “We have come to the place of the dead.”
But much like the topography, spring came. Spring in the south. Cherry blossoms, dogwoods, forsythias, tulips. And much like the spring, southerners came to life as well, many of them. And I’ll always remember their names. Dr. John P. Heard, who took Cuban refugees and didn’t charge them. Mr. and Mrs. Leslie gave us an apartment above their home to live in. Mrs. Leslie was a survivor from Bergen-Belsen. Her husband was a POW and they met after the war. And it wasn’t until I was an adult woman that I realized why she was so kind to me and to my sister. But to me especially. I was three, my sister was ten. She let me walk around and hold her dress while she worked in the garden and just follow her.
It turns out that Mrs. Leslie had taken care of children in the camp. And she died a sort of ignoble death. She fell one Christmas going down an escalator, her arms full of Christmas presents. She lived for a while in a nursing home in a coma. It just seemed like such a terrible death for such a kind person. So what was it like? It was like life.
