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It would be my first of seven talks in California that I would give on The Cold War and my recently published book, “The Repatriate: Love Basketball and the KGB”. Our first stop was Mission Hills, a serene senior citizens community that has a notable museum, the Ararat Eskijian, on its spacious and plush site.
After describing some of the hardships that Soviets and Armenian American repatriates faced daily, the long bread lines, the night vigils at stores waiting for them to open in hopes of finding sugar or butter or any edible items in the morning to place on the table for their families, I spotted an elderly woman in the crowd with tears in her eyes. I continued with my talk, though I paused briefly to tell the woman that my story did have a happy ending – that I actually survived 13 years in the USSR. She smiled, but one could see torment on her face.
I was not there to arouse anger, or pity, or any other emotion…I was there to provide information about a group of 151 Armenian Armenians who in 1947 made history by returning to their ancestral lands, controlled by the Soviets at the time, to help rebuild a war-torn nation, a nation that was, incidentally, an ally to the USA during World War II.
“There was a lot of disinformation spread on both sides of the Atlantic,” I told the gathering. “The US was also eager to stop the repatriation of Armenians to a country with which it was now locked in an ideological war. I produced an article published in 1951 in a prominent Armenian publication that noted that the Soviets seized from Armenian Americans all their cars, refrigerators, stoves, and valuable possessions upon landing on Soviet soil. That was not true.
“But, after a month in the Soviet Union, living in fear of the secret police, and hungry, most repatriates would have gladly given up all of their possessions if the Soviets would have granted them exit visas.”
Shortly after my talk, the woman whose eyes betrayed her emotions, came up to me, hugged and kissed me on my cheeks – a typical Armenian greeting. She apologized for interrupting the talk, “You see, Mr. Mooradian, I was 11 at the time. My father had also decided to take us on that first ship, but my mother told him he could go but she and her two daughters would not leave America. We stayed here. I have heard many rumors and stories about what happened, but you have given me a first-hand account. I thank God that we stayed here. And I truly am sorry or what you and the others had to go through.”
It was Churchill who noted that facts are better than dreams.
For we can dream all we want of jobs, or a national health care program, or financial security, or peace, if we do not work for those ends, it just won’t happen.
To hope is good, but the word is too subjective. I can pray all I want to God for peace, but the fact is there is no peace. The 20th Century was one of the most violent centuries since man recorded history; and the 21st is shaping up to being no better. We have been involved in Iraq and Afghanistan for more years than we were in World War I or even World War II.
And to make it clear – I detest war as most men and women do. Death comes too soon in life to hasten it in battle.
Though I have heard during my fourscore and one years many false prophets preach of a “Judgment Day” for the evil and a Resurrection Day for the merciful, I have seen neither. So those who have died for the causes…the “isms”, for liberty, for equality, for fraternity and for their national security have apparently died in vain.
There is no justifiable reason to go to war, not even if it is a so-called “humanitarian operation”.
If by “we” means to place American lives in jeopardy, I say no…a thousand times “no”. Have we not sacrificed enough of our young men and women upon the altar of war? The world has long forgotten those who sacrificed their lives at Verdun and the Somme and Amiens and Normandy and El Alamein and Stalingrad, and Dien Bien Phu – to list but a few. Those millions of lives lost – on both sides of the battle lines – were lives of the young and our finest – what unfulfilled missions did they have before the fatal bullet struck them down? Which of those brave lads was the one destined to find the cures for our cancers, to create undersea and ocean apartment complexes – what were they destined to do before they were called to arms?
Isn’t it time for man to abandon violence as a means to settle disagreements?
Given a microphone to ask a question, one student at one of my recent talks, Schoolcraft College, Livonia, Michigan, said, “Mr. Mooradian, I have served in Iraq. Do not be confused. We are not there for the people. We are there for our buddies: to protect him and hopefully for him to protect me.”
Another student raised the question, “Should we not intervene to stop those in power from mass murdering ethnic groups?”
Strange, isn’t it – that that question should be asked of an Armenian author whose mother, at the age of 10, watched as a Turk plunged a saber into the belly of her pregnant older sister and saw the Turks slaughter her mother and father after they burned down their home in the village of Ererzum. Where was the United States? Where was France and England and Russia then? They stood by and asked the Christian Armenians to pray…
But then Armenians did not have oil.
To those who believe in intervention, let the United Nations – not the United States – act. After all, was not that the purpose of the framers of the United Nations charter…to establish a government body that would immediately act against those who would commit crimes against humanity.
“They don’t have the power…or the forces…to do so,” you say.
Then give them the power and the resources.
And, I will repeat what I have told the now thousands who have heard me, “If man cannot live on earth in peace, then damn it, we do not deserve to live on earth!”
I did not anticipate, nor was I prepared to immediately answer, the question. Over the years the memory of the events had been relegated to the farthest corners of my mind. It would take time to recall the story. And one thing a speaker doesn’t have when facing a group is time.
I had been on a coast-to-coast talking tour to promote my book, The Repatriate: Love, Basketball, and the KGB. This particular event was sponsored by AGBU/Chicago.
A petite, Victorian-dressed, French-speaking Armenian in Chicago had asked in a patois, consisting mostly of French and English and Armenian words, “Whatever became of the French women who had repatriated in 1947? I was to go with them,” she continued, “but at the final hour our family decided not to go.”
I pondered the question, as she provided me time and stirred my memory, “You mentioned in your book that there were French odars (non-Armenians) married to Armenians living across from where you lived. Do you know if they ever got out of the Soviet Union?”
Her distinctive accent led me back in time, to Kalinin Street, to the courtyard and the communal cistern where we would wash, brush our teeth, and chat with our neighbors. It was there on a daily basis the French and the Americans would pause and chat. Never behind closed doors for it would draw suspicion and possibly a visit from the secret police.
I had stored so many of those events away that it took several seconds to search my memory and recall what had happened. I told her the following story:
The French Armenians, especially the French women, were the most courageous of our lot, I began. In public, they were a silent, struggling hard to feed their family, and washing clothes at the cistern where they managed to learn some of their Armenian.
Then, an unprecedented chain of events in 1956 placed these French women in the international spotlight. In February, during the 20th Session of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev unmasked Stalin for his crimes, and within weeks it appeared that the Iron Curtain had dissipated. Later that year, French Premier Guy Mollet, and his Foreign Minister Christian Pineau were invited to visit Moscow to discuss with the Soviet Premier and other top Soviet officials the future relations between the two countries.
Pineau, I had been told (but I can’t find any supporting information to the rumor), was born in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. During a social evening, the French foreign minister apparently expressed a desire to visit “the city of his birth” and Soviet Minister Anastas Mikoyan informed him that that could be arranged. Little did Mikoyan realize at the time that he had opened up a Pandora’s Box.
News that the two top French diplomats planned to pay Yerevan a visit reached Soviet Armenia before their plane’s motors were even warmed up in Moscow. Scores of French Armenian repatriates prepared an unprecedented greeting at the airport and there would be no stopping them.
In the meantime, the French women were busy at home planning their own party. Their greeting went beyond the wildest thoughts of the KGB. During the evening, the women had come together to sew blue, white, and red cloth – the tricolors of the French Flag and made banners, embracing “Liberte”, “Equalite”, and “Fraternite”. Arm-in-arm the following evening, they marched down Abovian Street, the main thoroughfare of the capital, to the Intourist Hotel, where the distinguished diplomats were staying.
Confronted by the secret police and ordered to disband, the women stood their ground, and began to sing the “Marseilles”, the French national anthem. The commotion and the song reached the ears of the French diplomats who appeared at the balcony of the hotel, and looking upon a sea of faces below, most in tears as they sang, were moved by the crowd.
It is said that Pineau apparently rushed down to the street and met with the women. One stepped forward and said, “We are French. We want to return to our homeland. The Soviets have refused to allow us to go.”
The shocked Socialist Foreign Minister listened to her, and to the others who presented their grievances. The French Premier vowed he would help. And apparently did. The French would be the first to return to their homeland. There would be many, many others.
I believe I was the first of 300 Armenian Americans who would leave the USSR. And I also am convinced that if it were not for these courageous French women none of the rest of us would have been granted exit visas.
It is rather interesting to note that only one – just one – Armenian American, who had married a Russian and raised a family there, remained behind when he had an opportunity to get out Tragically the one who didn’t return home would, in the years to come, succumb in the disaster the world would know as “Chernobyl”.
I was hungry. My stomach craved, demanded food or it would definitely rebel. And there were no rest rooms or toilet facilities on the court adjacent to the building where I was assigned to teach.
I had had my stove-toasted, sawdust-filled, black bread early in the morning before I raced to my coaching job at the Pioneer’s Palace. I had taught two classes and it was now noon, and I had nothing to eat. I sat there on a tree stump waiting for my third and last class of the day to assemble, and wondered how I would make it through the day. The cold and refreshing water from the spring-fed stream by the Ararat had nourished me, but how much more water could it take. My stomach grumbled and rumbled and if I had to demonstrate another drive-in lay-up, I am sure that the water would squirt out like a water pistol.
My God how I missed my mother’s cooking; how I missed America. My country was my soul, and I had sold it to the devil.
I sat there in agony. It was my second year in the USSR. How many more would pass before the Soviets would open the door?
Could ‘they’ be watching me? Couldn’t they see that I was not ‘a sleeper’? Didn’t they know I had no secret means to exist; no American contacts? That I was but a young foolish fool?
They’d questioned me; they have released me. Was this their punishment? I would prefer death to starvation.
I looked up, there was a white-haired, elderly woman with a white flock standing before me.
“My son…my son…” she said. “Here, take this. Eat. Eat. We have been watching you. You look weak. And hungry.” She was one of the cooks who was charged with feeding the infants and the children at a nearby kindergarten (magabardez).
I could not accept the food. I knew it was meant for the children. But I thanked her.
She looked at me and said, “You must eat. You don’t have the strength to work. And I pray that wherever my son is, some mother will make sure he, too, is fed.”
I accepted the dish graciously. It was pilaf, a traditional rice dish, and made just as my mother would have.
The Soviets lost five million troops and more than 20 million civilians in their war against the Nazis. I would eventually learn that no family would be sparred and each would mourn in silence.
I had quickly learned to hate Stalin and the communists and what they stood for, but the people… the Soviet people were the most generous and courageous I have ever known.
From the beginning, it has been made clear that certain segments of our nation detest the 44th President of the United States, Barrack Obama, I have heard the wild rumors about this President in our dining rooms, our coffee shops, on the radio, and TV. This President is not acceptable because of the color of his skin and his life among the Moslem community. Some people are and will remain prejudice when they don’t understand and are ignorant of those who have not touched their lives. There is little anyone can do to change their attitudes, except hopefully they will in time overcome their fears.
Fine.
This is after all a democracy. A republic. A country whose Constitution guarantees free speech…if you do not violate the rights of others you may continue to live the way you wish. We also have in this country due process. Thank God we are free to “think” what we will and write what we want without repercussions.
But there are certain codes of ethics. Certain rules of conduct. Certain manners we are taught from Day 1 – we don’t go around calling people liars in print or in speech, unless we can prove it. Slander and libel laws prevent us from tainting the reputations of even those who are in public office.
When Congressman Joseph Wilson, a South Carolina legislator, disrupted our President’s address to the nation the other night, and called the president a “liar” he violated every code of civility, decency, and political protocol there is. His shameful conduct was followed up later with an apology to the President.
I, and I believe millions of others, were stunned by Wilson’s outburst. And shocked. Shocked because the legislator did not show respect to the person speaking, to a nation, or to the office he had. In this case the man happened to be the President of the United States.
Wilson’s defamatory remark ranks with the Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zurdi’s shoe-throwing disrespect for former President Bush. Wilson has fallen into the nadir of his legislative career, and he is a disgrace, an embarrassment to the State he represents. If not recalled, he should be censured by his Congressional colleagues.
The seemingly unperturbed and unnerved President Obama, showing greatest aplomb, calmly continued to present his argument for a national health insurance program to the nation.
Historically, in our country, legislators publicly and nationally do not offend their Presidents. The action by Wilson is unprecedented. They may criticize, even ridicule those who differ from their political views, but they usually have the decency to allow the speaker to express their view before they offer their opposing viewpoints.
I am reminded of another great American patriot, Patrick Henry, who patiently waited for one speaker to finish his pitch for loyalty to the Crown before he retorted “…I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend with my life the right for you to say it.” This philosophy is a sacred cornerstone of this great nation’s foundation. Though many may not think so, we are the envy of the world. I know for I have seen the eyes of those who covet the right to join us here in this land.
Personally, I fought the leaders and the ideology of the oppressive Soviet Union for 13 years before they granted me permission, the privilege, to return to my native land. I believed then as I do today that a man or woman has the right to express his or her opinion, without repercussion or humiliation. He or she does not have the right to disrupt others while they speak, let alone those we have elected to office.
We look to our elected officials and statesmen for guidance. That is why they are in office. They have, I believe, the qualifications, the wisdom, and the intelligence to lead our country. If they show otherwise, we, the people, have the right to put them into the unemployment lines.
If he truly believes that the President was lying, Wilson has an obligation to present his case to the people of the United States. I am sure the Media and the Press will be eager, as they have shown in the past, to interview him.
As Emil Ludwig points out in his brilliant biography of Napoleon, “In his highest embodiment, the statesman shapes all our destinies.”
These past eight years it seems that Congress has shown us there are not many statesmen in their midst.
The President has accepted Mr. Wilson’s apology, but the people, especially the voters of South Carolina, should not. Do we need yet another legislator of spurious character in Washington?
Wilson should feel fortunate that he lives in the US. If I had the power to take him with me back into time…to Moscow…to the Stalin Era…and those frightening evenings when we all feared those knocks on our apartment doors at midnight. If Wilson had publicly called Stalin a liar during an open forum, surely he would have been visited by the KGB and, before dawn, Wilson would have stood before an execution squad.
Free speech is a sacred altar where all freedom-loving people bend their knees in prayer.
I watched and listened for nearly one hour to the 44th President of the United States’ speech and, yes, I, too, questioned some of his arguments specifically where this nation would get the money to pay for the massive overall of a much-needed national health and medical program. And we await our legislators presenting this program to us. Let us hope the plan is a viable one.
But I also sat and listened in awe at Obama who continued his delivery unnerved and undaunted by the rude and inappropriate outburst by one who embarrassed me and his constituents in South Carolina by his inappropriate behavior.
I know not how other Americans feel, but for myself I am proud to say that I am confident in this President and that I know in this moment in time I have a President in office whom I can truly trust, can be proud of, and who I can believe in and respect.
To paraphrase another great president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was in office at the worst of times, who, after four years of trying to lift his fellow country men out of the Great Depression, said during his second inauguration speech, “…this generation of Americans has a date with destiny.”
This President and this Congress also have a “date with Destiny”.
And I personally believe when historians look back on our times and study the incredible challenges we faced and conquered – the financial collapse of our financial institutions, the world-wide unemployment, the famine, and the end of wars and genocides…that they, too, will stand in awe of this generation and place us among the greatest generations in American History.
As a stunned American U-2 spy pilot Francis Gary Powers was heading for the frozen tundra of the Siberian nether world, I was on a Soviet jet soaring high above the clouds over Moscow, flying to Copenhagen and to my freedom. Below me were blocks upon blocks of drab, depressing, monotonous Soviet-build apartment complexes that I had known so well.
After 13 years behind the Iron Curtain, someone in the elite Soviet oligarchy decided to set his – or her – signature on a piece of paper that would eventually set me free. I was returning to my birthplace, Detroit, after living in the Soviet Republic of Armenia for more than a decade.
I had had all of my earthly possessions with me before I arrived at the airport: $100 dollars and a one suitcase filled with clothing. That was what the Soviets allowed its citizens (former citizens) to take out of the country during the Khrushchev Era. But the $100 mysteriously disappeared from my wallet during a drinking party with some Iraq pilots training in the USSR.
It all seems like a dream now, but it wasn’t then; it was a nightmare. The question that continues to haunt me and had remained unanswered over the years: Why, during the height of the Cold War (The Cuban Crisis was still to come) did the Soviets allow me to leave the country? Rest assured that I am grateful everyday.
But as the plane touched down in the capital of Denmark, I could only say “Thank God I made it!
Once safely inside the US Embassy in Copenhagen, I knew the 13 years of Soviet repression was behind me. I would be home soon. That was all I cared about.
The US Consulate official informed me that I would depart from Denmark that evening, for New York and then for Detroit. He asked if there was anything I needed or wanted and all I could think of at the time was that I wanted to go home. Since there was plenty of time before my departure, would I like to see the city? I hesitated to answer but found myself saying that it would give me a glimpse of what Europe looked like. The official offered to accompany me, but I said I would prefer to go alone. He nodded as if he understood.
I strolled onto the street and immediately everyone and everything looked strange. The people were better dressed, smiling and all seemed to be moving on bikes. There were only a few cars. Then, something very unusual caught my eyes. I came upon a bakery…there in the display window was bread. All kinds of bread. Cakes. All kinds of cakes. And pies and… there were no lines. No people pushing and shoving to get into the store to buy bread. And I moved closer to the window and pressed my nose to it. My God, the entire store is filled, there are no empty shelves. Only my pocket is empty. Not one ruble. Not one penny. Not one franc. My heart was pounding like a drum. I swear I could have eaten everything in that bakery.
I continued my stroll.
Men, women, old and young on bikes, whizzed past me as I strolled on the sidewalks of this fairy-tale city. I arrived at a park. Tired from my ordeal, I sat down on a bench to ponder my fate. My eyes suddenly caught a glimpse of a bright object in the calm waters before me. There, bathing in the silence of a July afternoon was the copper statue of the Little Mermaid. She greets visitors with a subtle smile and listens to their secrets, never revealing or uttering a word. It is this glorious icon made immortal by Hans Christian Andersen that I would share the most unforgettable, most wonderful day in my life. I would share my most inner thoughts, my greatest joy…if only you could understand…that truly was the happiest days of my life. Destiny had brought me there, before that sweet, gentle statue. If it was a dream, I begged that no one would shake me back into the world where I had been. I had aged much. Lost my youth. I felt like “Alice in Wonderland.” If I had awakened back in Erevan, I knew it would truly be the end.
I felt so alive there.
Before the sun would rise again, I was home. In America. And the nightmare that was the Soviet Union was no longer mine…yet there are times when the memories haunt me.
It was also in Vilnius (Lithuania) that I saw my first ‘man of color’ in years.
It would be lesson-learning, one of my strangest encounters in the Soviet Union. I would not see anything like it until much later when Porky & Bess was staged by an American troupe during the Khrushchev Era in Moscow.
It happened on a bright August morning. From my third-floor room window in the hotel I could see a flower garden which displayed a calendar created by row upon row of a variety of colored roses. Each morning a team of elderly women – babushkas – would rearrange these flowers to indicate the month and the day. I was fascinated by their labor of love.
One morning as I watched them work, however, a person, a black person, strolled past these women. The black man stopped, exchange words with the workers, and then continued his stroll. Black, as in Negro. American Negro, I thought. An American in Vilnius! I ask for your indulgence for a moment when I say that I had not seen nor heard a person of color speak now for more than three years. I quickly tossed on basketball warm up sweat pants and jersey, opened the door, raced down the corridor, down a flight of stairs into the street. A teammate, who shared the room with me, startled at my quick movements, sat up in his bed. I was down on the street face to face with this stranger before my teammate caught up to me.
Speaking in my beloved English, so rarely used, I asked the stranger if he was a tourist…when he was going back to the States and what he was doing in Vilnius. Unsettled, the stranger looked at me as if I was mad. He responded with a litany of Russian words that expressed his dissatisfaction of my behavior. I was intimidated by his Russian, but I continued to question him in English. Alas, to no avail. I became extremely frustrated.
Sometime during my monologue my teammate joined us. He pointed out to me that the stranger spoke Russian fluently and that the stranger believed that I needed help from the medical profession. My teammate apologized to the stranger and pointed out to him that I was one of the repatriates. He learned that the stranger’s father was an African diplomat who sometime ago had moved to the USSR and had married a Russian. He lived in Moscow and was studying to be an actor. He walked away and disappeared from my view and I thought that would be the end of this story.
It wasn’t.
Years later, the two of us would meet again. The encounter would take place in Soviet Armenia, on the main street, Abovian. Now an actor, the gentleman was leaving the Hotel Intourist, where he and several other Soviet actors had rooms. They were in town filming a Russian movie about life in America and since there were so many repatriates in Armenia who could be used as “extras” the Soviet crew believed Erevan would be the ideal place for the shoot. The actor was no longer a stranger to me, for I had seen him on Soviet movie scenes usually in cameo roles, playing the exploited, horse-whipped slave, begging for, but never getting mercy from his white Southern plantation owners.
I don’t think he ever won an Oscar.
It was an age of suspicion. It was a time within the Soviet Union that all foreigners, especially an English-speaking foreigner and more so an “American” came under immediate suspicion by the NKVD. Americans and those who knew or had relatives in the West had to be shunned, after all, the USSR was surrounded by its enemies.
Stalin and his sycophants had spoken, and their words were sacred to the Soviet masses.
Enter this young, naïve, 19-year-old American-born, educated in Detroit, into the Soviet world to learn about the Soviet culture. Ah, the lessons he would learn. Old textbooks would not help; Soviets played by different rules, rules they made up as the game of life was played out daily. This was a world of dialectic materialism, of “he who works, eats”; of socialism where everyone is paid according to his ability, not yet of communism when everyone will be compensated according to his needs (and who would determine my needs, dear comrade?)
It would take time for me to digest this and the black, sawdust-stuffed, water-drowned bread to digest.
Despite the intense and increasingly aggressive anti-American propaganda and its omnipresent billboards, depicting Americans as rattle snakes or rats, parasites crawling and gnawing at the carcasses of the working class, the word “American” continued to carry some respect among those who somehow knew the truth. No amount of Soviet propaganda apparently could erase from the minds of the Russian people the fact that had it not been for the United States and its Lend Lease program, the geography of Europe may have been different.
In the summer of 1950 as a member of the Institute of Physical Culture’s basketball team, I took my first trip into the heartland of the USSR. I traveled by train from Erivan to Vilnius, a journey of more than a thousand miles. Vilnius is the capital of what was then the Soviet Republic of Lithuania and remains the capital today of a free and independent Lithuania.
When we arrived in Vilnius, the Soviet capital, our team was driven from the train depot by bus to what appeared to me to be once the stables for Nicholas II’s cavalry unit. My teammates accepted the accommodations without comment. Even if I had known the language, I would not have complained. One just didn’t complain in Stalin’s Russia.
I placed my duffle bag on a cot and sat down and waited for further instructions from our coaching staff. As I sat there wondering where the other teams would be housed. My thoughts were interrupted by my coach who ordered the team to gather our belongings for we were going to be moved to another site. I was told that maybe our coach, a decorated World War II hero, had complained and the Lithuanians decided to upgrade us to the university’s facilities.
A few minutes later, a bus pulled up and we boarded it. The driver drove to a newly-opened hotel, located in the central business district in Vilnius, and our players got off the bus, entered a beautifully decorated hotel and were assigned two to a room with all the modern conveniences including running water and a toilet. The food was edible.
I was stunned at the reception our team would receive during the next 10 days. Later I asked one of the players what caused the Lithuanians to change their attitude toward our team.
The player responded, “You did.”
“Me?” I was speechless. I had done nothing and, in fact, had stayed out of sight most of the time. My teammate explained…one of our team members let it be known to the hosts that “there was an American on the team.”
And that one word “American” apparently commanded the respect of the Lithuanians. It was obvious to me that no matter what the Soviet propaganda machine churned out here, there were those who remained profoundly grateful and respected the people of the United States for what they have done for them over the years.
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Available Now
Miraculously surviving 13 years behind the Iron Curtain, Tom Mooradian had the opportunity to see what no foreign correspondent, no western journalist, no diplomat was permitted to see: the Soviet Union as the Soviets lived.
5 Star Reviews from Amazon.com
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The Little Girl with Brown Eyes
There was a flush of questions that immediately dominated my thoughts as I listened to the woman’s voice on the other end of the telephone.
“This is the Shirley Temple look-alike, you wrote about in your book,” the voice said. It was a voice I had not heard for more than a half of a century. “And I want you to know that I do not have blue eyes; they are brown.”
Before my burst of questions to the caller began, she identified herself as Christine Karibian. “I loved your book, especially your description of me, but for the record my eyes are brown and not blue.” Christine went on to say that she had heard I would be appearing in the Providence area, and that she and her friends would definitely be attending the talk. Unfortunately, her brother, the lanky, sandy-haired Michael, would not. He had passed away in the USSR several years ago.
Christine and Michael were among the youngest of the Armenian American repatriates. Their father, Harry, and mother, Jean, who was of Polish descent, left Detroit in 1947 to live in Soviet Armenia. Christine’s father unsuccessfully attempted to get his family out of the USSR and was arrested after leaving the US Embassy in Moscow. He was tried and convicted as an “enemy of the state”.
“Dad survived the gulag,” Christine said. “In fact, he and mom actually made it back to the States. When you get here I’ll tell you the whole story.”
Christine married an Armenian American repatriate, Ara Lafian, and they had two children while in Armenia. The Lafians made it back to the United States and settled in Rhode Island.