Sylvia what a sad yet delightfully inspiring story about your parents' escaping and you rising from the ashes of communism, very nice. It brings to mind my younger son's grandfather--Fred, Sr.--the only Polish Jew in his small village near Gdańsk to escape extermination from the fallen "Free City of Danzig." Being only a boy, he was sent to work in a munitions factory in conquered Paris, as part of Hitler's "Vernichtung durch Arbeit" program ("extermination through forced labor"). For 3 years Fred's job was operating a machine that made machine-gun bullet shells casings.
Once, when I visited him in Wooloomooloo, he admitted he almost died several times in that Parisian work camp. Interestingly--not only because Paris has always been a mecca for art--Fred credited his survival in the early '40's, a caged boy, to his natural ability to draw. In fact, by the time he was 12 he could re-created any art masterpiece, as an exact duplicate (although he did not sign the artists' names). So by the time he reached Paris, the camp guards and officers on occasion would give the boy a loaf of bread in return for a portrait.
This forced bargain with the devil kept Fred, Sr., alive, he told his son-in-law, "but it killed my spirit!" In fact, after the war, when he was once again free, the old man said he never again picked up a paint brush. Instead, he became a crystal artist and made & sold individual jewelry pieces shortly after migrating to Australia. With that money he built himself a Thunderbird sailboat from a blueprint he saw in a Popular Mechanics magazine. Shortly after, his neighbors wanted one, and--suddenly--grandpa was in the sailboat building business.
But this last of the Polish Jews did not stop there, Sylvia. Like your parents, he did not stop halfway. With the small profit from his boat-building business at nearby Elizabeth Bay, Fred began buying art. Every few days he--with my son's mother often--would go to estate sales (auctions of dead people's possessions); and, invariably, he would return home with two or three art pieces that most eyes would not recognize as valuable--but, being an artist's artist--Fred had a premonition about them.
Indeed, it wasn't too long before Fred had one, then two, then three art galleries in Sydney. They were in business for some 30 years, before Fred, Sr., finally decided to retire from the world of art.... Their house is one of the grandest in Wooloomooloo, and now is a private museum; Fred's extensive art collection is today part of the Australian Trust....
Sylvia, sorry for such a long story, but in conclusion let's say Fred, Sr., has also tasted both the bitter, and sweetness, of "The California Dream"? (:
