International House Berkeley

36 Julia (Liesyte) Fraser 1946 - 1951 I was born in Harbin, China in 1918. My mother's brother and sister had been in Harbin working on the Chinese-Siberian railroad, and my grandmother visited there several times, and that is how she brought my mother there. When he was nine, my father had been exiled to Siberia with my grandfather by the Russians. They had found Lithuanian books – written in the Latin alphabet – hidden in my grandfather's old oak tree. You see, in the 19th century, the Russians were trying to introduce cyrillics to Russify Lithuania. So he was sent to Siberia. But, after he served in WWI, my father was allowed to go from Siberia to Harbin, to the Lithuanian colony, and that is where he met my mother. I was five when my mother died in Harbin. We had relatives here in America, and when my mother died, they invited us to come, but my father said, "No." He grew up in China, and he wanted his daughter to grow up in Lithuania, and so I grew up in Siauliai. That is the fourth-largest city in Lithuania, right in the middle of the country. So how did I happen to come to the US? Because I have relatives here. After the war [WWII], they started searching for me and when they found me, they invited me to come to the US. I was working for UNRRA [United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association] because I knew quite a few languages: Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish, Russian, German, English, and some Bulgarian. You see, when the Soviets started back into Lithuania in the summer of 1944, we fled [the Soviets were in Lithuania from September 1939 until June 1941; the Nazis, from the summer of 1941 until the summer of 1944]. They [the Soviets] had come looking for me at the University – because I was organizing the History Department; I was a good organizer. You know, they were still looking for me many years later: the Soviet secret police came to Washington, D.C., to the Library of Congress where I was working at the time and offered me a job. But I told them I didn't want their "job." "What kind of job is that?" I asked, "In Siberia?" Anyway, when the Soviets invaded Lithuania in 1944, we fled through the German-occupied part of Lithuania and eventually to Austria, on foot. There I was in a work camp in Herzogenberg, near St. Polten, just thirty kilometers from Vienna; we were refugees, and there was no place to live otherwise. While I was in the camp, I had a toothache. So I went to a man and told him my tooth hurt, and he pulled out five teeth. They were bleeding and wouldn't stop, so they sent me out of the camp. I went to a monastery in St. Polten, where they gave me food, and they introduced me to some people, and, because I knew some German, I was able to get a job in a Krankenkasse, a medical insurance office, in Vienna. Towards the end of the war, the Russians were coming into Austria, so we were running away from the Russians as fast as we could. When we got to Ulm – we were

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