I trudged Germany’s highways in the autumn of 1945, headed for Berlin ahead of the Soviets coming to take over the Harz region where we lived as the war ended. We walked for weeks. My mother told me it was three months.
Food was unavailable. We gleaned fields. Drinking water was scarce. Men with guns stopped us. Barbed wire. Go back. Stay where you are. Go here. Go there. Wait. A U.S. sentry post deloused us with blasts of white powder. A cloud of dust exploded and I howled.
We slept in bombed-out buildings. We slept on pine straw in forests. Thousands of us. All ages. In any sort of weather.
No one has ever wanted to come to America more than I. At the age of 17, unaccompanied, I succeeded. Sixty years of living here hasn’t erased the white-hot need that drove me. That caravan dragging itself to our border should be given refuge, medical support, food, clean beds.
Undesirables can be sorted on site. Identifying bad actors was a job I had once as a U.S. Army military policeman/interpreter in Berlin in 1959-1960. Doesn’t take rocket science. Create a sieve that won’t let them scatter. Sort them out one at a time. Ellis Island made it work then. So can we now.
They are me, 73 years ago. Starvelings infested with lice. Let them in with a smile and with open arms. Wash their feet. Wash their faces.
Eric Dietrich-Berryman was born in Berlin, Germany and grew up in Aberdare, Wales and Gloucester, England. He came to the United States at the age of seventeen as an unaccompanied immigrant on the German quota for 1957. He served in the U.S. Army as a helicopter door gunner in the Vietnam War and retired from the U.S. Navy in 1994 as a commander.