18
Friday, June 13, 1986
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
*LIBERTY'S PROMISE*
f.
Gretl Frank has dark memories of Ellis Island and the Nazis.
clean," says Quen.
Shortly after their mother's death,
the children, terrorized by the
Cossacks, fled their Ukrainian home.
Between walking and getting an
occasional ride on horse-drawn
wagons, they eventually reached the
Bessarabian border. There, they
bribed a boatman with some of their
mother's gold jewelry to smuggle
them across. They eventually reached
Romania, where they were helped by
refugee services. They stayed with
several families until an American
cousin secured passage for them on a
boat bound for the U.S.
Ida remembers their long stay at
Ellis Island with little fondness.
"Everything there was so strange
to me," she says. "I was always
frightened, always nervous. How
could I not be — not knowing from
one day to the next what was going
to happen to us?"
Nevertheless, there were a few
times that still bring back a laugh
now and then, just in the telling.
"One day, were were out playing,"
recalls Ida, "and we saw this man.
He must have been a guard. I can still
remember my standing there looking
up at him so clearly. He had
something in his mouth, and he vas
chewing and chewing. I couldn't
understand why he kept chewing and
chewing like that. I wanted to know
why he was doing such a thing."
Sisters Anna and Yetta dissolve in
laughter, listening today to the story
of the well-remembered, peculiar •
image.
Before they came to America,
chewing gum was something the
Sokoloffs had never heard of.
In 1924, shortly after the Press
family, Lillian Resnick and her father,
and the Sokoloff children arrived in
this country, permanent quotas were
established by the U.S. These limited
the number of immigrants allowed to
enter the country. As a result, in
1932, for instance, only 35,000
immigrants passed through Ellis
Island, compared to more than one
million in the peak year of 1907. The
center was kept open, however, until
1954 — partly as a detention center
for a few criminals, partly as a
processing center for immigrants who
encountered special problems on
entering the U.S.
Gretl gamer (now Gretl Frank)
was one of those immigrants. Coming
to Ellis Island in 1937, her memories
of the Island differ considerably from
those who came there before her.
"There were all these absolutely
huge rooms, with practically nobody
in them," says Frank, who, you
might say, came to Ellis Island
through a back door.
The young woman left Hamburg,
Germany on New Year's Eve in 1936,