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"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." - John 8:32
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Author:  Bruce Walker
Bio: Bruce Walker
Date:  March 31, 2006
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Sara's Story - An Immigrant's Love Affair with America

Immigrants make us stronger, much stronger, if the immigrants who come to America come to America out of love for America.  Immigrants make us weaker, much weaker, if the immigrants who come to America come to America out of hatred for America, as Leon Trotsky did when he came to New York City in January 1917. 

Immigrants make us stronger, much stronger, if the immigrants who come to America come to America out of love for America.  Immigrants make us weaker, much weaker, if the immigrants who come to America come to America out of hatred for America, as Leon Trotsky did when he came to New York City in January 1917. 

So much has been said about illegal immigrants who come to America with a sense of entitlement, a sense of resentment, a sense of reclaiming from an exploitative and imperialist America wealth and lands presumably taken from them, that it is worthwhile to relate a true love story between immigrants who had every right to feel the bitterness of misery, of poverty, of degradation and of anger, but who saw America rightly with joy and love.

The story begins in Poland when a young man and a young woman whose offense was being born into the wrong faith and wrong race were sent to a place of torment and deprivation whose horrors surpassed anything today in Mexico and whose vile transport system made treks across arid deserts of the American Southwest seem like a garden stroll.

The young man would wear a tattoo for the rest of his life.  The young woman was never tattooed, because her destiny in Auschwitz, according to the Nazis but blessedly not according to God, was simply a nameless death in a gas chamber or some equally odious species of cold blooded murder.

The young man, a slaver laborer for six years at Auschwitz and later at Bergen-Belsen (the camp where Anne Frank died), lost every single member of his family during those six years of Hell.  The young woman, whose journey through Hell also led  from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, lost much of her family as well.

When the British liberated Bergen-Belsen in 1945, the torture and the starvation and the enslavement ended.  People had enough to eat (recalling, of course, that the Brits themselves - you know, those awful British imperialists - were forced to ration food for their own population for years after the war ended.)  Americans and British soldiers brought humanity and what help they could.

Bergen-Belsen ceased becoming a concentration camp of barbed wire and snarling dogs – German SS or other breeds of canines – but it remained a camp, and in a melancholy way, a home.  The people had who survived in these camps became “DP” or “Displaced Persons.”  The horror of six years of godless dictators savaging Europe had left a lot of people as “Displaced Persons,” but most of these had a Czechoslovakia or Netherlands or Poland to go home to.    

The young man and the young woman had no home any longer, but only a camp full of horrible memories.  But in the midst of this liberated camp, the two met, fell in love, and married.  Within a few years, their marriage produced another miracle, as every new life is a miracle, named Sara.  She, too, was in the hard, cold world of war and of politics, a “Displaced Person,” except that no baby is ever displaced in the eyes of God.

Do any illegal immigrants in America today have more cause to cry to Heaven for justice than this tiny family in 1949?  Who today had more reasons to rail against red tape and green cards than these three souls trapped in a nation that had tormented them and murdered their loved ones?  But they did not call the wrath of God upon America during their four years in Bergen-Belsen after liberation. They rather asked God to….bless America.  They understood that parents in America had their own sons’ blood and bodies on beaches like Omaha and in towns like Bastogne and that this precious blood was shed to defeat evil.   

Baby Sara and her parents came to America to find a new home, legally, and they took their place in line and waited like people who respected America. They needed sponsors, and, in time, sponsors came. They arrived in New York in 1949 and lived in tenements as immigrants, not citizens.  But they worked and became part of the American dream and they earned citizenship as so many millions before them had done.

Sara became a contestant in the Miss America Pageant (for the scholarship) and with the scholarship, she became a physician.  Her mother, who never lost faith in God or in people, lived the life of a loving mother, a loving wife and much more.  Sara’s father, who like her mother is now dead, spent the last fifteen years of his life as the volunteer guardian of a city park in the Bronx, once overrun with drugs and thugs, but under the stern eye of his thin body, the park became an oasis of safety and happiness for families and children. 

Sara told the press, when the park was renamed after him a few months before he died, that he did this because: “He wanted to give something back.”  When he died, the typed note telling park patrons of his passing was next to the American flag.  He, his wife, his daughter Sara – all of them – loved America for being America.  Immigrants who have a love affair with America have always been the hidden treasures of our nation of immigrants. 

Perhaps our immigration problem could best be addressed by finding out why each immigrant wanted to live here. Any reason less than love is should never be enough and any reason truly love should always be enough. 

Bruce Walker

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Biography - Bruce Walker

Bruce Walker has been a published author in print and in electronic media since 1990. He is a regular contributor to WebCommentary, Conservative Truth, American Daily, Enter Stage Right, Intellectual Conservative, NewsByUs and MenŐs News Daily. His first book, Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie by Outskirts Press was published in January 2006.


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Copyright © 2006 by Bruce Walker
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