17
*LIBERTY'S PROMISE*
Sisters Lillian Lichtenstein and Bessie Lopatin recall Ellis Island.
native Ukraine had begun two years
earlier — stayed for almost two
months.
While on Ellis Island, the children,
whose father had been shot by
Cossacks in the Ukraine and whose
mother, soon after, had died in the
world-wide flu epidemic of 1919,
were given three meals a day and
slept in a large, dormitory-like
building with other detainees. But
they were not permitted to enter the
U.S. until a cousin in the Bronx was
finally able to post several thousand
dollars in bond as a guarantee that
none of the children would ever be
wards of the state.
On Ellis Island, they were left
pretty much to themselves during the
day. As one of the children, Ida
Quen, now 75, recalls, "At night, we
slept in an enormous room with
bunk beds, and I can still remember
that, every morning, they would
come and take the sheets away and
replace them with clean ones."
Quen now lives in Oak Park. She
was about nine years old when she
stayed on Ellis Island. She came to
Detroit shortly after her arrival in
America to live with her aunt and
uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Elmer Goldberg;
who owned the Eagle Coal Company
(The oldest Sokoloff child on the
Island' was 13; the youngest was
three. Two older sisters stayed
behind in Romania.)
"I remember everything being very
Sisters Ida Quen and Anna Bellibroff