Page 118 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Escape to New York
and we got up from the grass, ran across the railroad track, down the
embankment, and made a dash toward Poznan over a quarter mile of
sandy ground. We were headed for some houses in which there was a
saloon where the smugglers gathered. I had on those badly fitting
shoes and that long overcoat made of extra-heavy material, and
running on that sandy soil I soon lost my wind. I could not catch my
breath and it felt like my lungs were collapsing. Everything was
getting black, I was falling behind the others, and was likely to be
shot by the horsemen on the borderline. In desperation I grabbed the
bottom of the overcoat, lifted it and turned it over my head like a
blanket. Immediately it freed my legs and I picked up momentum,
reaching the saloon right behind the gang. A leader met us there and
took us to a clean German hotel, where we slept that night.
The great stream of emigrants trekking to the Golden Land were
mostly travelling to England, where steamship tickets were sold
cheaper than in other Atlantic ports. The German government did
not object to emigrants without passports passing through its land,
since they would buy steamship tickets to America on German lines.
It did send back passportless emigrants to Russia if they intended to
buy tickets on the English lines, so those of us planning to ship out
of Hull were instructed to tell the German authorities that we were
on our way to settle with relatives in England, not going to America.
But the German border police did not mind making some graft, so
they stopped groups of emigrants and threatened to send them back,
milking them of a few more rubles. Probably the smugglers were in
with them.
Like the Jews who went out of Egypt, who travelled forty years
through the desert when they could have made the trip much quicker,
so did we travel through Europe to save railroad fare. We left Poznan
in fourth-class cars, going through the Carpathian Mountains down
to Austria, through Czechoslovakia back into Austria, then back into
Germany to Dresden en route to Holland. We sat up all night in
stations, because we could have been arrested and sent back to Russia
if we had gone anywhere else—we looked like hoboes. Once on the
train, we could not get down from the cars and have a meal in the
stations when we stopped, for the same reason, even though food
was very cheap and I had a few coins in my pocket. All I could do

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