My name is Marie Aronson Turim. My maiden name is Aronson. I’m married to a very nice guy from Brooklyn, New York, whose name is Fred Turim. I came to the United States by ship the week before Pearl Harbor occurred. I was told that the ship was torpedoed on the way back to Europe. I think it was a Greek ship, but I wouldn’t swear to that fact. My parents were blown away that it was destroyed.

      My father’s name was Grigory Aronson. He was an historian of Soviet Jews. That’s what he taught and that’s what he wrote books about. My mother’s name was Anna Kaplan-Rubinstein. She was my dad’s student at Moscow State University (MSU). My mother was from Bialystok, Poland, and was incredibly bright. My mother’s mother died when my mother was six. Her father was very successful because he owned land near Bialystok and had forests. My mother also had a brother and a sister, grandparents, aunts, and uncles who all lived in a compound where the houses had a chapel. That’s how my mother grew up; where all the aunts and uncles lived close by, and a grandfather, who was a rabbi.

      My mother and Sonya, a girl who she knew from Bialystok, won permission to go to Moscow University in Russia (as opposed to Poland). This was considered a great honor. My father was very active as a Menshevik from the time he was a young man.[1] My mother became very active at the university. Anyone at the university who was known to be a Menshevik was arrested and sent to Lubyanka prison.[2] Both my parents and Sonya were arrested. Sonya was shot at the prison; my mother saw her being killed from her cell window.

      I don’t know how long my parents were in prison, but they were finally exiled and put on a train with a lot of other Menshevikswho were not shot. Most of them went to Germany to work in various fields. My mother went to the University of Berlin and received two PhDs in 1924 or 1925. One was in early childhood education and the other was in metallurgy. It saved her life in many ways because she was the first director of the first federally funded daycare system in Germany. She knew many teachers throughout the country. My dad worked as a writer, and wrote for different publications in Germany. He wrote about Russian Jews and anti-Semitism, and about Russian history. Both of them were very well-read, and bright, and fun.

      After Hitler came to power in Germany my parents lost work and sold whatever they had. They took books and a few photographs, and traveled by train to Paris. They arrived with two suitcases filled with Deutsche marks, but they were worth nothing. My dad knew all the other social democrats in France, not just exiles, and he was immediately able to get a job working at a newspaper. It wasn’t a lot, but they were able to get a tiny apartment. My dad knew Yiddish, German, Russian, and could read Hebrew.

      My mother had an bleed episode the day after they arrived and was rushed to the hospital. There was a screaming girl next to her who had just given birth to a baby boy and she didn’t know what to do. My parents said they would take him. Lucien was in my family for about five months before I was born. I grew up with him like he was my twin. Simone, his mom, would come and visit him. When we came to America my parents could not get him a passport.

      I was born in Paris on May 24, 1934. When we were in France, my mother was contacted by German teachers she knew. They wanted to get out of Germany because Hitler had come to power. My parents received many letters from people wanting to leave Germany. They rented a house in a suburb of Paris, in Plessis-Robinson, and wrote back to their friends to come to Paris. We moved in around 1938. Kids would come and go to the Catholic School up the street. My dad went to Paris to work and my mom stayed in the house. She told me she was worried that the neighbors would be concerned, because there were so many children and the grass was so high. My parents got a goat as a pet and he ate all the grass. Many teachers came and stayed. It was a three bedroom, one bathroom house and at one time there were 14 people there.

      I was about five when the Germans took Poland. I remember being watched by my mother and the teachers very closely. I also remember adults being very frightened, but I didn’t understand why or what was going on. Lucien and I didn’t go to school at the time. We stayed at the house and played. I remember having fun because there were a lot of adults and a lot of kids.

      France was invaded in 1940. I was aware of that because my parents had a meeting with everybody and said that things are going to be very different now. All the parents were notified that they had to get their children. The teachers were told to find passports and get out because the house was no longer going to be available. There was an organization made up of mayors who provided safety for translators who would deal with the occupying German forces. My parents decided, since my mother was fluent in German and French, that she would try to work in the village and that my father would go to Toulouse to try to get passports. I didn’t see my father for about eighteen months. My mother, Lucien, and I were in hiding in Île de La Réunion.[3] It seemed there was a large occupying German force there.

      We lived with a farmer and his wife in their shed. The story was that my mother was their widowed daughter-in-law and we were their grandchildren. Lucien and I went to school and to church. We would sometimes go to the beach, but that panicked my mother. She was working in a community center. The soldiers would practice marches, and we went to the beach and wanted to play with the patrolling German soldiers on horseback. My mother’s job was to find out what the Commandant wanted from the Mayor, and then the Mayor would tell the town. All meat, eggs, and dairy was turned over to the Germans. We ate clams and mussels because the Germans didn’t want that. My mother spoke to the commandant, and then to the mayor, and would report back; she was a translator and the contact between the Germans and the Mayor. This protected the villagers from having to deal with the Germans. This whole time my father was in Toulouse, trying to get us passports.

      One day, the Mayor told my mother he’d received a letter from her husband. My father had gotten the passports, but not for Lucien because he wasn’t their child. My mother was told by the Mayor that he would handle things for her. We illegally re-entered Paris and my mother placed Lucien in a school in the Notre-Dame Cathedral. His real mom, Simone, would visit him. My mother and I got on a train and went to Toulouse. This was 1941. We took a train that went from Toulouse to Madrid.

      In Madrid, everyone who was on the train was told to get off the train and sit in the station. We only had food if someone came through the station and gave us some. We brought a little frying pan and my mother would boil water because she didn’t trust the water that was there. There were about fifteen people in the room. We sat in the station for two weeks. Then it was announced that our train was available to go to Lisbon and we got on that train. We were in Lisbon for about a week when a ship came that would take us to the United States. We took the ship and came to America. My parents stopped speaking French, and only spoke Russian. Lucien came when I was in high school, but he didn’t like America and went back to France. He was drafted into the French Army and was killed in the Algerian war.

      Everyone in my mother’s family was killed by the Nazis. I am the sole survivor of the whole family. I remember when she was notified by the United Nations Relief Association (UNRA) about who was killed and when. She disappeared into one of the rooms in our tiny apartment, closed the door, and stayed in there for about three days. My dad forbade me to think about knocking or going in. He said, “Let her be.” When she came out, she shredded the letter from UNRA.

      My father’s family survived, which is amazing. His two uncles became gung-ho Zionists; in 1903 they went to what is now Israel. One of them was among the founders of Tel Aviv. I met the last two generations. My dad had two sisters. One of them died during the war, but the other one did survive. Her name was Marusya. She lived in what was Leningrad. She lived in a communal apartment with her daughter and son.

      My mother worked for a metallurgy lab in downtown New York and my father worked for a newspaper: the Russian Post. I went to a progressive school in New York, where many refugee kids were. I went to Queens College. I taught preschool for years in Maryland. I had two children who are very close, and they each have one child. My parents died many years ago. My mother had colon cancer and my dad almost took his own life because he stopped eating. We came to Tucson in 2003.

[1] The Mensheviks and Bolsheviks (“minority” and “majority”) were opposing factions of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party prior to the revolution. The Bolsheviks prevailed.

[2] Lubyanka – the popular name for the NKVD and later KGB headquarters in Moscow. It was also used as to hold political prisoners.

[3] Île de La Réunion is an island and a region in France.