ФБ-пост of
Eugene Ostashevsky Paris. Yesterday morning. During a casual conversation with an NYU parent learned that her Silesian German family, resident in the US in the period leading up to the war, had been interned near DC as German citizens. "Repatriated" in 1944 (read that again) through Italy (by train) in an exchange for German-held US civilians, they returned to Silesia just in time to become refugees from the Soviet advance. THEN, in the evening, I dined with an older French gentleman, a physicist now unfortunately sick, whose parents married in France and produced a child (him) during the war. The father was from Kishinev, the mother from Vilna, but the mother had lived in Palestine before moving to France at the end of the 1930s. So, when they were interned at Drancy, instead of being deported to Auschwitz they were held as subjects of the British Commonwealth (she had Palestinian papers, he had none). The aim was to exchange them for German civilians interned in the UK (отсебятина: ironically, as one would say, many of those "Germans" in camps on the Isle of Man were Jews fleeing Germany). The war ended before that exchange could take place. Plutarch's parallel lives. Там ещё интересное в комментах