Issue link: http://ihouse.uberflip.com/i/703833
37 five Lithuanians – we went to the train station. The train was full, full of soldiers. But one of the Lithuanian men was tall, and he opened the window and pushed me through, and I sat on the lap of a soldier all the way to Stuttgart. We went to Stuttgart to be as close as possible to the front line – where the French had arrived. Near Stuttgart, in Ludwigshaven, I found some Lithuanians whose address I had. And there I was, walking down the street, when I saw three girls, and they were speaking Latvian, and I came up to one of them and said in Lithuanian, "Tamara, is that you?" And she said in Latvian, "Julie, is that you?" Because we had known each other growing up. Her mother was Latvian, but her father was Lithuanian and a friend of my father's. He used to bring Tamara to Lithuania when she was growing up. So then Tamara and I moved into our own apartment. But we didn't have Speisekarten, meal cards, because we weren't German. So we went to the American Army, which was feeding refugees. The French were there; they had defeated the Germans, but they didn't know what to do; they didn't want to be in the war at all; so they asked for the Americans' help, and the American Army sent a group, and later on they sent UNRRA, United Nations Refugee and Relief Association. But the Germans had brought thousands and thousands of Polish and Ukrainian kids to work in the camps – almost like slaves; also there they had the American war prisoners. And when the Germans, the big shots, ran away, the camps were not supervised, and nobody had any food or anything. So Tamara and I went to the American Army office, and there were all these hungry Poles and Ukrainians. Tamara and I were sitting at a table with all the refugees, and finally this poor American soldier stood up. He climbed up on a table and looked at all these Poles and Ukrainians and knew they were hungry, but he didn't know how to understand them. So, gesturing, he said: "Is there someone here, in this crowd, who understands us and understands them?" And Tamara looked at me and said, "I guess he means us." Because we knew so many languages. And so we raised our hands. So I started working for them. And later UNRRA arrived. And I collected, for UNRRA, children that didn't have parents. I don't say orphans because we didn't know if the parents were alive, or if they killed them. We collected children from Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. And I took thirteen children to America. How old were the children? Well, any age, as long as they had been weaned. I had seven babies. Their mothers were American and German girls; these were illegal children; they were war orphans. How did I take care of the babies? I didn't know how to take care of the babies. And there was nothing to take care of the babies on the ship. And besides that, the babies were hungry, they were alive and crying, and everything was closed – because we were lost at sea for twenty days; we were just floating, no motor, no radio. But at least the soldiers knew where we were