Constantino Diaz-Duran is a fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University. He is chronicling his walk from New York to Los Angeles to celebrate his eligibility for American citizenship. Follow Constantino’s progress.

I met Lili a couple of weeks ago in Philadelphia. Her grandson, Josh, introduced us. Lili – known as Bubbie to her grandsons – is a naturalized American citizen. She was born in Poland, and came here at the age of 15. She spent the years prior to her arrival in America as a prisoner in Auschwitz.

As we sat for dinner at a loud diner you would not have been able to guess the horrors Bubbie endured as a child. She radiates kindness, and her smile is full of life. She finds joy in the accomplishments of her grandsons, and immense pride in her American citizenship.

“I became a citizen in 1950,” she told me. “I just went down to City Hall [in Philadelphia] and a judge swore me in. When he told me I was an American citizen, I was so happy. I held on to my certificate, and for the first time in years, I felt safe.”

Bubbie was pregnant with her first child when she became a citizen. She was anxious because she worried that if she wasn’t a citizen, her baby wouldn’t be one either. Her husband was a native-born American, and she had been a permanent resident for five years, but those facts did nothing to ease her fears.

“What did I know back then about the law?” she said. “I was just afraid. I was so afraid that they would send me back to Poland, and that my baby would have to come with me.” Being able to officially call herself an American was the only thing that would ease her mind.

Bubbie’s fear of returning to Poland expressed itself in another interesting way. When she arrived in the U.S. she did not speak a word of English. Within five months, she had completely forgotten her native Polish. “My mind just blocked it,” she told me. “It’s my native language, and within five months I could not speak a word of it.”

I’m sure it’s better that way. As it is, Bubbie has had to live with memories anyone would want to forget. God only knows what’s behind the vault to which the Polish language might be the key.

Bubbie shared her memories for the first time when her grandsons asked her to give a talk at their school. “I did it for them,” she told me. “They asked me to do it, and so I did it.” Since then, she has talked at other schools and universities, but it is always a difficult experience. “It drains me,” she said. “I get home, and it takes me days to get over it, to go back to normal.”

I thought it best not to pain Bubbie with recollection, so our talk centered mostly on the topic of being American, and her life after she arrived here. To fill in the gaps, I asked her grandson to share with me the speech she gives about her experience during the Holocaust.

Bubbie grew up in Sosnowiec, near the German border. It was one of the first cities occupied by the Germans. “At the time, I was nine years old, an only child of a prominent and wealthy family,” she wrote. “We owned a cigarette factory and an apartment building. I went to a private school, played with other children, played with my dolls, and read lots of books. We had no television and children were unaware of the political situation. I knew nothing of wars and little did I know what this monster, Hitler, had in mind for us.”

Soon, Bubbie was forced to leave school. Her parents arranged for private tutoring at a Jewish teacher’s home, but she and her classmates (about 10 in total) had to go there secretly. One day, some two years later, the teacher was discovered by the Nazis and she disappeared.

Meanwhile, at home, things got crowded. The Nazis brought a family of German Jews to live at Bubbie’s apartment. “We were happy to receive black bread and potatoes,” she remembers. “My grandmother concocted various ways to make potatoes so we would feel like we were eating something special.” Eventually, rumors of labor camps began to spread, and they “noticed some of [their] people were slowly disappearing never to be seen again.”

Bubbie’s mother escaped to Warsaw using false papers to pose as a Christian. She hoped to send for Bubbie and her father, but she died in the ghetto uprising of 1942. Around that time, Bubbie, her father and grandparents were taken to a farm house by a man who said he could keep them safe. They lived in constant fear.

“One night,” says Bubbie, “there was a knock at the door, and we all jumped with fright. In marched several Nazi storm troopers. They insisted my father leave with them to a labor camp. My grandmother threw herself at the officers’ feet, begging them to take her instead. She cried, ‘Take me, take me, I am old, he is young, he has a child here, let him stay!’ The officer kicked her in the face and took my father away. I cried and cried and I never saw my father again.” Later a family friend would tell her that her father was put to death in a gas chamber at the Buchenwald concentration camp.

After her father’s kidnapping, Bubbie, her grandparents, an uncle, an old rabbi and his family went into hiding in a cellar. But they were discovered. It is hard for me to even picture what the sweet-natured woman I met saw that morning at the age of 12. “They dragged us out into the yard, and lined us up by the wall. They dragged the rabbi by his beard and made him pray, and one by one, they shot everyone except me.”

And that was just the beginning. She spent the next three years at the now infamous camp in southern Poland, living amid gas chambers and ovens, where the remains of those murdered were burned. Her forearm still bears the number tattooed onto her skin by the Nazis. Unconsciously, perhaps, she puts a hand over it when talking about the past.

Bubbie is one of the proudest Americans I have met. But life here wasn’t always easy. She spent her first few years here going from family to family in the foster care system. One of those families had an apartment in Atlantic City. “The ground floor of the building housed a burlesque show,” she told her grandson and me during dinner. “The family’s daughter, who was 10, made me take her. ‘If you don’t take me,’ she said, ‘my parents will send you back to Poland.’ So I went. I saw everything. And I was bored. The comics, they were so stupid, and so boring.”

She met good people during that time too. One of them was a teacher named Ms. Whitney. She took Bubbie to a place where they said they tried to remove her tattoo, but the process was very painful, so she gave it up.

“I am happy for my children and grandchildren because they are able to take so many things for granted,” she said to me when her grandson got up to use the restroom. “But I will never take anything for granted, because I know what evil is out there.” For Bubbie, who was unjustly imprisoned, “America is freedom.” And when you consider that it is in some ways a miracle she survived the ordeals of her early life, it is no wonder she would add that “it is also safety – here I feel safe.” She ended our conversation saying “I am so proud to be an American. I am so proud to live here. I would never want to live anywhere else.”

As for myself, I felt both proud and humbled when she put her arm in mine to walk back to the car.

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*Photo by Constantino Diaz-Duran.