NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
When I was 12, my father came and spoke to my seventh-grade class. I remember feeling proud, for my rural school was impressed by a visit from a university professor. But I also recall being embarrassed -- at my dad's strong Slavic accent, at his refugee origins, at his "differentness."
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I'm back at my childhood home and reflecting on all this because abruptly I find myself fatherless on Father's Day. My dad died a few days ago at age 91, after a storybook life -- devoted above all to his only child.
Reporting on poverty and absentee fathers has taught me what a gift fatherhood is: I know I won the lottery of life by having loving, caring parents. There's another reason I feel indebted to my father, and it has to do with those embarrassing foreign ways: his willingness to leave everything familiar behind in the quest for a new world that would provide opportunity even for a refugee's children.
My father, an Armenian, was born in a country that no longer exists, Austria-Hungary, in a way of life that no longer exists. The family was in the nobility, living on an estate of thousands of acres -- and then came World War II.
My father was imprisoned by the Nazis for helping spy on their military presence in Poland. He bribed his way out of prison, but other relatives died at Auschwitz for spying. Then the Soviet Union grabbed the region and absorbed it into Ukraine, and other relatives died in Siberian labor camps.
Penniless, my father fled on horseback to Romania but saw that a Communist country would afford a future neither for him nor his offspring. So he headed toward the West, swimming across the Danube River on a moonless night. On the Yugoslav side of the river, he was captured and sent to a concentration camp and then an asbestos mine and a logging camp. After two years, he was able to flee to Italy and then to France.
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