EPILOGUE

THERE WAS SOMETHING symbolic in our crossing into Italy. German uniforms were everywhere but officers and men knew that the game was up and displayed little of the self-confidence we had become so accustomed to in the last three years. The once invincible army was streaming north along winding mountain roads and nobody questioned us, strange as our troop must have looked, hitchhiking our way southwards. The World of the German was disintegrating before our eyes. Not being part of it, we could observe the collapse with detachment.

During our brief sojourn in Trento, which we reached after a few amusing and even risky episodes, we passed under the Allied rule as a small British unit occupied the city without firing a shot. Having resumed our journey, this time as refugees from the Nazis, we eventually reached Genoa. Everything we encountered was unfamiliar but the adjustment to life in this dazzlingly colorful, enchanting country was accomplished with no difficulty at all.

I grew to love Italy, which I came to know well in the next two years, traversing it in every direction as I made my living by petty smuggling and blackmarket operations just sufficient to permit me to live outside the refugee camps. There was little money, sometimes none at all, but that did not matter in the least. Life was easy and independent and full of small adventures, nonetheless exciting because they were small.

As normality began to take hold, beggars like myself started looking across the ocean for an opportunity to start a new life. By the will of fortune I came to America but could have landed in Australia or Brazil just as well. With the arrival in New York yet another page of my life opened.

The great charm of life in the United States was in my feeling that I was no longer a foreigner, a feeling I had never had before, even in Russia. As I grew wise in the ways of this country, I learned that this feeling was not quite well-founded, that although all Americans were equal, some were more equal than the others. This discovery did not depress me. In the sea of conformity there was plenty of diversity to satisfy my requirements as I continued to follow my own path, jealously guarding the most prized possession man can have, his independence. For it is in the clashes with one’s environment rather than in a happy dissolution in it that excitement of living is found, and that ideas and interests and truly worthwhile associations most fruitfully develop.

Yet colorful as my life has been, I am not going to describe it because an effort at remembering the past takes something away from the present. And those who enjoy living today would not want to part with any of it.