International House Berkeley

41 Library: "Lithuanian Public Relations with the Soviet Union." It was my future husband, Joe Fraser, who talked me into getting a Masters. I didn't meet Joe at I-House. I met him the first day I arrived in San Francisco. He was a friend of the husband of a Lithuanian girl who was living with my mother's cousin in San Francisco. Joe was a student at Berkeley, and he encouraged me to apply. He didn't live at I-House, but he used to come and visit. Joe and the wife of a Lithuanian friend of mine were in the Cal Glee Club. Joe was a very high tenor, very beautiful. We never had a radio in the car. We got in the car and he sang. Yes, Joe urged me to get a Masters. I was going to go on to a Ph.D., but the professor, who was of Russian descent, said to me, "Don't you want to eat? Why don't you go to Library School?" I applied to Library School, and I got a job six months before I graduated. And after I worked at the Library of Congress for five years, I came back and worked at the library at UC Berkeley for twenty years. I came to the I-House in February of '46, and I left in June of '51 – five-and-a-half- years. How did these years at I-House change me? I don't think they changed me at all. I just felt that I finally found a home, because I didn't have one before; nobody wanted us. I was a displaced person. We didn't have a country to go to. And then when I came here, I found a home suddenly. For us, it was home. We found a place. Like Lottie, who lost both of her parents. Her father died in Auschwitz and her mother, in Stutthof, and Lottie escaped from Stutthof. She and four other girls somehow stole through Germany, slept in barns, until they finally came to Denmark. And then they admitted that they were refugees. Did Lottie and other people at I-House talk very much about their experiences in the War? Sure. I never heard Lottie complaining about the loss of her parents, but there were some people who had been of Jewish descent, and they were complaining. You never heard Lottie say that. As a matter of fact, once, as I will always remember, we stupid guys, we went to see a movie about the war. And when we came out of the movie – it was such a horrible movie, a movie about the war in Italy – we came all the way back to I-House without saying one word to each other and then, when we were almost back to our rooms, we both began laughing. And we said, "Why did we go to that stupid movie?" And then we were sitting on the front steps, talking about the war and laughing. And there was a guy standing on the steps, and he said, "How can you laugh, talking about the war?" And Lottie looked at him and said, "Don't you think it's too late to cry, now?" Lottie always had something to say... Were there poetry readings at I-House? Miss Carneiro loved that sort of thing. You see Miss Carneiro was from China. She was Portuguese from China. I helped Miss Carneiro lead the folk dancing. And Miss Carneiro helped me with many kinds of

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