My father did not stay at the farm. When Allied bombing campaigns intensified, my grandmother worried that the railroad tracks would be obliterated, so she brought my father back to Berlin. In an apartment building there, my father and grandmother would listen for the telltale tap of the Gestapo\u2019s hobnail boots and scurry up stairs to the attic to cross over and come down into another section of the building, where my grandmother\u2019s Catholic friend lived, so they could hide.<\/p>\n
That haunting piece of family history resurfaced for me when the \u201cBroadview Six\u201d and others protested outside a suburban immigration detention facility. Chicagoans blew whistles and filmed detainments while immigration agents patrolled neighborhoods with military-grade weapons as part of Operation Midway Blitz.<\/p>\n
64 days in Chicago: The story of Operation Midway Blitz<\/a><\/p>\n Once, toward the end of WWII, when my father and grandmother were in an air raid shelter, a few Russian soldiers came in, sat in the middle of the room and started cleaning their rifles. Dad told me: \u201cThey would aim the weapon at one of us, but not fire it. They seemed to have fun with it. I thought for sure I was going to die that day.\u201d He was only 12. I heard his words again when I read about federal immigration agents descending from a Black Hawk helicopter, breaking down doors, and zip-tying U.S. citizens and immigrants in Chicago\u2019s South Shore neighborhood last September.\n<\/p>\n With support from the organization that was the precursor to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, my father and grandmother immigrated to the United States aboard the General Henry Taylor. The ship sailed past the Statue of Liberty into New York Harbor. I imagine my father\u2019s dread and excitement, his sense of loss and hope, as he took his first steps on U.S. soil at age 16.<\/p>\n My father and grandmother were met by an affiliate of the refugee group, who arranged a place for them to sleep and then brought them to Penn Station. They caught a train to Chicago, where my grandmother had some friends, and they were on their own.<\/p>\n If they were seeking safety in the U.S. today, they might need to fly to Mexico as Ukrainians did after Russia\u2019s 2022 invasion. Or they might have to travel on foot across multiple countries, taking only what they could carry; cross the Dari\u00e9n Gap, with its extortioners, traffickers, sexual violators, thieves, flash floods and wild animals; and travel north through Mexico atop a train, eating instant coffee so they wouldn\u2019t fall asleep and roll off. They would arrive at the U.S. border having not bathed in days.<\/p>\n Immigration officials would look at them but not see the people they had been or who they were going to become.<\/p>\n My father and grandmother first settled in Englewood. Dad went to night school to learn English and was attending Englewood High School when he got drafted into the Army. He passed the GED test while completing his military service, earned a bachelor\u2019s degree in business from Northwestern University and built a comfortable middle-class living for himself.<\/p>\n Despite Executive Order 13269<\/a>, signed by Republican President George W. Bush, which grants expedited citizenship to noncitizens serving honorably in the armed forces, approximately 94,000 noncitizen veterans<\/a> were at risk of detainment or deportation as of 2024. Over the past year, 248 relatives<\/a> of former military members have been put into deportation proceedings, 125 former service members have been arrested for immigration violations and 34 former military members have been put into deportation proceedings.\n<\/p>\n Dad often credited the U.S. for saving his life. He was fiercely proud to be an American, but I am not sure he would recognize his beloved country today.<\/p>\n When the president lets immigration officers operate with expanded authority and limited accountability, threatens to send the military into U.S. cities, strips people of due process and tries to implement indefinite detention without bond hearings, the U.S. resembles the authoritarian country Dad and my grandmother fought so hard to escape.\n<\/p>\n The life my father built for himself in Chicago would have been impossible in postwar Berlin. In midlife, he taught himself how to sail and eventually served as the commodore of the Burnham Park Yacht Club<\/a>.\u00a0He once told me he couldn\u2019t believe someone like him was allowed to belong to a yacht club, let alone lead it.<\/p>\n Dad believed in the promise of the U.S. \u2014 that those seeking safety and opportunity would find them here \u2014 because he had lived it. That U.S. promise has enabled a pluralistic society that reflects the best of our country\u2019s values: hope and goodwill between peoples, care, concern and understanding. The ruptures in our nation, exemplified by family separation, indefinite detention, mass deportation and an absence of refugee resettlement for most everyone except white South Afrikaners, will destroy the essence of the U.S.<\/p>\n Alex Poppe is an award-winning author of four books of literary fiction and the bestselling \u201cBreakfast Wine,\u201d<\/a> a memoir-in-essays about her wild ride through Iraq. She has worked in conflict zones such as Iraq, the West Bank and Ukraine.<\/p>\n Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here<\/a> or email letters@chicagotribune.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He was the killer of big blond spiders, the fixer of household things, an occasional Santa\u2019s helper. Among…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":264319,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[70682,2035,9961,9,24,55,54,56,102406,14745,11937],"class_list":["post-264318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-deportations","tag-ice","tag-immigration-enforcement","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny","tag-operation-midway-blitz","tag-refugee","tag-world-war-ii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264318\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/264319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Author](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/CTC-L-alex-poppe-op-ed-father-01.jpg\")
Author Alex Poppe takes a photo with her father. (Family photo)<\/p>\n