To Life: A Journey

FOREWORD"It was a game of life and death, of good and evil." A nine year old girl becomes the pawn of an intricate game between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in which Romania's oil fields are the prize. While her extended family is destroyed, she survives the war as an illegal with her mother and stepfather at Bucharest, always in fear. Her stepfather, a member of an opposition party to post war Communist Romania, must flee in order to join a government in exile abroad. Now fifteen, she is to follow with her mother, a seventeen year old boyfriend and an uncle who had made arrangements for them to cross illegally into Hungary and from there to Vienna. The uncle is arrested, while they continue to Budapest without money, documents, or the knowledge how to get to Vienna. The boyfriend becomes the leader and they succeed, against all odds, to join the stepfather. From there the girl and her family are taken over by the American occupation authority, while the boyfriend has several more borders to cross before rejoining the girl. They marry at Paris and visit her parents at New York, where her stepfather is a member of the Romanian government in exile.As fate would have it, her young husband receives a draft notice to report to the local draft board, even though on a visitor's visa. He is drafted, trained in intelligence and ends up in Korea during the war. He receives an Honorable discharge, but an Immigration agent is waiting at the camp gate with a warrant of arrest and deportation as visitor without legal residence in the United States. U.S. Senator Herbert H. Lehman champions their cause and they are allowed to remain and join in a creative and fruitful life living the American Dream.