A German refugee’s journey to America

I turned 80 years old on Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2018 and vowed, on that day, to do something I have never done before. I’m going to turn the podium -- provided to me by virtue of my status as a newspaper columnist -- over to my new best friend.

The person I’m talking about is Eric Dietrich-Berryman, a 78-year-old German refugee who is now retired and residing in Virginia Beach, Va. with his wife, Bobbie, a Minnesotan whose family is all buried in Nebraska.

During their long and loving marriage, Eric and Bobbie had five kids, one of whom -- Kimberly -- married Tony, one of the Rotter boys from Trenton. Kimberly and Tony live far away -- in San Diego I think -- but, luckily, they come back to Trenton almost every year so Tony can go grouse hunting, which leaves Kimberlee, a writer, free to roam around. In her gadding about, she connected with Amy Frederick, the co-publisher of the Hitchcock County News.

That connection has proved to be a Godsend because Kimberly forwarded her father’s heroic, heart-wrenching letter describing his journey as a refugee to Amy for use in the Hitchcock County newspaper.

And Amy, bless her heart, saw fit to share Mr. Dietreich-Berryman’s letter and phone number with me. I called him directly and he gave me permission to have him serve as the first guest columnist in my 62-year career as a high school, college and community columnist.

Eric Dietrich-Berryman’s true life experience as a refugee is chronicled in the following dispatch:

By ERIC DIETRICH-BERRYMAN

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va, -- I have clear memories of trudging Germany’s highways in the autumn of 1945, headed for Berlin ahead of the Soviets coming to take over the rural Hartz region we lived in when the war ended.

We walked for weeks. My mother told me it was three months. She pushed a small child’s pram that held our one suitcase.

Food was unavailable. We gleaned fields for wheat kernels we made into a gooey paste. We set wire traps, never successful, to catch rabbits. Drinking water was hard to find. In a graveyard we passed the corpse of a German soldier in uniform stretched full-length atop a table tomb. Wind flapped the ends of his grey coat. Rain water ran down the face.

We were stopped so very often by men with guns in different uniforms. “Barbed wire. Go back,” they ordered. “Stay where you are,” they ordered. “Go here, not there,” they ordered. “Wait. Wait.” In one such encounter at a U.S. sentry post we were deloused with blasts of white powder. Down the front came the funnel, and then down the back. Poof. Explode in a cloud of dust. I howled.

We slept in bombed-out buildings. Came to a British soldier handing out corrugated, curved Quonset hut roofing. One sheet per customer. A surreal scene even in hindsight. My mother looked doubtful but took a sheet and propped it up in the alcove of a ruined building. We crawled under and went to sleep. We slept on pine straw in forests. All of us. Thousands of us. Of all ages. In any sort of weather.

No one has ever wanted to come to America more than me. And at the age of 17, unaccompanied, I succeeded. The compulsion to live in America and be an American is as raw today as ever. Sixty years of living here can’t erase the white-hot need that drove me.

After retiring from military service 25 years back I landed a job with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Good people. Critically important mission but by life experience we were badly matched.

If the decision were mine to make, that caravan dragging itself to our border would be given refuge, medical support, food and a clean bed.

Any uglies among them can be sorted out on site. Helping to identify bad actors was a job I had once as a U.S. Army military policeman/interpreter in Berlin in 1959/60. Doesn’t take rocket science. Create a sieve that doesn’t let them scatter. Sort them out one at a time.

But let them in with a smile and with open arms. Wash their feet. Wash their faces. They are me, 73 years ago. Infected with lice that my grandmother cracked between her thumbnails, one by one.

These brave people want a better life. Heck, the poor things just want a life. Have we so thoroughly buried the spirit of Emma Lazarus?

Postscript: Oh my goodness! How grateful I am for Eric’s graphic storytelling style. He speaks for me. He speaks for my family. Please, America, heed his words.