Well, it's been awhile, lots have happened since I started this blog. My purpose for this blog is to start a record of family history and how the events have evolved around each member of the family.
It has been my experience that there is always someone in everyone's family who is more interested in keeping records for the family or who knows the details and facts of the family. In my family this has been rather complicated since we are made up of little scraps of history from here and there!
Immigrants always lose touch with the ones that were left behind. At first, contact is always steady and histories are exchanged, but as the 1st generation ages, the 2nd and 3rd generations don't know or don't care, in many cases there is a language barrier and that makes things harder. Which is my case! My family history, as I know it, starts with my parents coming to Brasil after WWII. I don't know much of what happened to them or even much about relatives that were left behind. My parents fled the Russian dominion by going to Austria, where they remained for 3-4 years. They were called DP, or displaced persons, these were those who couldn't go back to their native country for several reasons. The jews didn't have where to go...they had lost everything, Polish, Hungarians, and many from other countries from the eastern side of Europe didn't want to remain under Russian government or had other political reasons not to go back.
I have tried to follow the history of WWII, and have tried to put myself in my parents shoes; I wanted to try to have a little understanding of what made them be who they were, what they had lived through and what was it that made them become who they became after the war. Of course I can't even begin to think that i knew what it was like back then for them. From movies, documentary movies, and reports from those years of war, I gathered that my parents had to leave their homeland if they wanted to have a chance of surviving in a better life. German occupation made it impossible for people to go back to what used to their life prior to this nightmarish war. I do know that hunger was a fact; fear of being killed or even living a communist regime was another fact.
The one thing that I could gather from the things I eventually learned as I grew up was the fact that my parents suffered for being away from their relatives and homeland, not matter however much appreciative they were for being safe in a free country. The fear of suffering persecution was alive even many years after being in Brasil. My mother became a suspicious person, not very trusting of strangers, afraid of opening up about her background and confiding in anyone. Whatever little I was able to learn about her experiences came bits by bits, here and there, usually during tender moments when memories were allowed to flow in through the cracks of confining walls.
I learned that she missed her parents, her father died during the war around 41-42, how? I don't know... I suppose it was during war situations. My grandmother died several years later, apparently from some physical condition. It happened when my brother was a teenager, so I supposed around 1955-60.
My mom was Vékony Emilia Ilona, and married Andreas Dakó in 10th Oct 1944. She was barely fifteen and my older brother was born in Oct 1945, in Frankfurt, Austria, when they were already settled in a DP camp in Frankfurt. My mother told me, Andreas was born in a medic tent while in the camp.
Reading about it I learned that conditions in these camps were not the best ... thousands of people, food was rationed and there were huge lines to get the food, there were not many jobs and consequently money was short for everybody, and I presume that medical care was handled by the military doctors assigned to these camps, but I don't know how long they remained in the camps. I do know that the last camps were closed by 1952. So this was 7 years after the end of the war. Longer than the war itself. thousands and thousands of people, displaced in foreign countries, without knowledge of who in their families were still living or not, in most of the cases not knowing where they would be.
Living conditions were not the best since the camps were former garrisons for military people during the war, stark and devoid of many niceties.
I remember my mom how she appreciated the warmth of a tropical country. All she could remember from her teen years was how cold it was!
The other thing she really appreciated was how one could grow anything in Brasil. She always had a beautiful flower and vegetable garden. I came to love plants, and flowers, I love flowers, from her!
Learning about the care one must have to grow a good garden. I remember how I used to be with her, side by side, planting and harvesting our small growth, tomatoes, carrots, green peppers, lettuce, spices and herbs of all kinds. How much fun it was to see the little seed become this delicious salad! I love salads. She always had chickens and ducks. She made delicious dishes with these animals. My father (stepfather) had bees, so we always had delicious honey to chew on... the wax with the honey, soon turned into something like a gum!
We were never well to do, but we certainly enjoyed good food thanks to my mom's expertise in handling our resources and always finding ways to make things do. I learned from her the importance of being pro active and learning as much as possible and doing things for myself.
I will forever be thankful to her for all she taught me and how she raised me to be independent and resourceful.
There is so much to say and so many memories, but this will be done slowly. I have a tendency to ramble as the thoughts rush through my mind and I get lost in them therefore losing objectivity. This is something I will have to learn, to be more organized in my thought and ideas.
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