Nick Cherniavsky Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

University of Illinois at Springfield 

Norris L Brookens Library 

Archives/Special Collections 

Nick Cherniavsky Memoir 

C423. Cherniavsky, Nick b. 1924 

Interview and memoir 

10 tapes, 900 mins., 2 vols., 167 pp. 

Russian-born Cherniavsky discusses his youth in China: parents, education, 

government, and life in Shanghai; The Long March and the communist build-up 

in China; moving to Tsingtao and the outbreak of WWII; the Japanese invasion 

and military occupation; foods, rationing, and housing; languages; Boy Scouts; 

Japanese surrender and American occupation; postwar China; the Red Chinese 

Army take-over and evacuation of foreign nationals; life and experiences in a 

refugee camp in the Philippines; and emigration to Rockford, Illinois. 

Interview by Barbara Herndon, 1973 

OPEN 

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© 1973, University of Illinois Board of Trustees

COPYRIGHT @ 1985 SANGAMON STATE UNIVERSITY, SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS. 

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or 

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permission in writing from the Oral History Office, Sangamon State University, Springfield, Illinois 62708. 

- 

Nick Cherniavsky Memoir 

Nick Cherniavsky Memoir, vol. 2 - Archives/Special Collections - Norris L Brookens Library - University of Illinois at Springfield - UIS

Table of Contents 

Black Market .......................... 80 

Social and Military Interaction Bemen Armies and Natives ... 80 

Married Ufe .......................... 83 

IjOySCwts ........................... 84 

General Uvbg Conditions and Transportation .......... 87 

Ruployment/Rationing ...................... 89 

Russian Takeover ........................ 92 

Upionage ............................ 94 

Contacts with Red Russia and Efforts to fmnigrate ........ 96 

Wfe's Family Xstory ...................... 100 

Japanese Surrender ....................... 102 

Ufe Under American Occupation and Chiang Kai-Shek ....... 104 

Ehployment Opportunities .................... 108 

State of Ecanarry in W .................... 117 

.............. 

Impressions of Psrlerican h d Forces 117 

Relations Between bwicans and Chinese ............. 120 

Ieavlng T~ingtao ........................ 123 

QI to the Philippine Islands .................. 125 

Life in the Refugee Carp .................... 128 

Inmigration to the U.S ...................... 153 


I 

Nick Cherniavsky 80 

A: . . . level of trade and by the fact that so m y itarrs of merchandise 

which, dl too often, is either unavailable or available only to the 

highest paid level of local sociev. It's totally unavoidable not to have 

all the necessq ingredients for the creation of the black mrket in any 

country hre Pnnerican troops are being stationed. And in China &en I 

was there, that w no different £wan any other place. As I -timed 

before, you could hy anything on the black market. You d d bsy canbat 

boots and you could luy any other item that ws available to hrican GI 's 

or American navy personnel. 

Q: Haw do you account for this? Lack of discipline? 

A: That probably mld be one factor because again, I could not claim to 

be an expert in any sense of the mrd on every axmy in the mrld, kt 

certainly the discipline in the hrican Army traditionally has hen an a 

lesser degree that it had been in mst other arrmles. I 'm sure m y 

dm had ne through the service muld probably argue this point, ht 

neverhL8s re have nore of a d-fatically organized amy than in, 

let 's say, the Chinese Army or even mre so than in the Japanese Army. 

Certainly nuch nure so than the Russian Amy or the Gennan Atmy or the 

British Axmy. 

people 

Q: After our. troops occupied the tom, did you feel as safe with them as 

you had with the Japanese troops? Did the population as a whole feel 

safe? 

A: Actrrally I d d have to azlswx that in a smetJhat mxe dabrate 

manner because an outri&t yes or no type of an ansRr d d be misleading. 

I d d say that to mst of the people, with the obvious ezeption of the 

Gem colony for insme, the llrrrerican Amry arrived as liberators and as 

friends. And t-he contirrucxls partying that ent all aver town for weks 

and veeks following that a good illustration of that. 

The Japanese Army in Tsingtao as I mentioned, was entirely proper in its 

military behavior. There ere no ahs, there =re no mlestations of 

civilians. But: the Japanese Amy, nevertheless, was feared by people in 

tom and particularly by the U s e 

population. Very definitely, the 

&in- people ere almys scared when they -re passing by Japanese 

barracks in front of the Japanese sentry. And because of the fact that 

the war was going on, it ws not urnxsual Eor certain Chinese suspected of 

acts of terrorism or any other subversive activities or support and sympathy 

with the millas in the rmuntaim that I mentioned-the mnxntain of Lao 

Shan--to !r picked up and interrogated and certainly to be tortured by the 

Japanese military al5throriti.e~. 

On the other hand, *en the very same barracks ere taken weer by hrican 

military persumel, the biggest problem that American sentries encountered, 

as contrasted with the Japanese sentries whom the Qzinese people mld 

dce a detour not to ccl~le into close contact with, the Armrican sentries 

had to spnd mst of their time patroll the area to prevent the Chinese 

people-and particularly the ycungsters- 9 ran caning over the fences or 

throu& the barkd wire intent on pilfering the supplies that =re stored 


Nick brniavsky 8L 

And one of the curiosities of those days that I recall quite ~ 1was 1 that 

the colonel that vas the cmmanding officer of the Marine Headquarters 

Company in *ich one of the young Marines dm eventually became very good 

friends of myself and my family was one of the makers, this colmel 

issued slingshots to all personnel an guard duty with a supply of hck 

shot and orders -re given for than to use slingshots to get rid of the 

Chinese ywungsters tryhag to sneak around over to the grounds, kith 

presented scamhat of a ridiculous picture of Marine sentries engaging in 

slingshot fire at sonre kid, you know, out on a prank. But nevertheless 

this ms actually the big problem so I think that can illustrate quite 

wll the contrast betwen how the population felt about the Japanese Army 

and the hrican Amy. And at the sarne time dmn the troops =re on liberty 

or in town, mst of the people--and particularly mmm--did not feel safe 

be% downtom after hours dxm groups of boisterous and mst of the th, 

drunk Marines or seama mid be making their munds of the bars. So, on 

one side it ms a sense of being liberated and having fridly troops come 

into town d on the other hand it =S the realization that those friendly 

troops in certain circuustances, after one drink too my, ere not safe 

to be around with. 

Q: You mtioned that the krican troops =re friendly with p as a 

Russian. kre they also friendly with the Qlinese people as far as partying? 

A: %re ws very little social cantact ketwxn hrican troops and the 

m s e population. As a matter of fact the hrican occupatid forces 

stm& it on the wrong foot 411mst imnediately with the interim QIhse 

rwnicipal authoriq. TZle thing that happened ws that because there was 

no regular Wse Army units nearby,. tihe Chinese military forces 410 cane 

to Tsi3lgtao Ere those guerrillas that I mntioned earlier in the muntains 

of Lao Shan. And it was sa~bdy fTm this group Fjho becane acting mayor 

of Tsiqpo. kause of this averwhelming military presence of krican 

am& forces in Tsingtao, it was very soon that this C2linese dcipal 

authority of Tsimgtao cam into a numbx of conflicts and a nmber of 

probleras with the krican carmanding personnel, both Navy and Marine. 

I recall very shortly within a couple of ~3nths of the Japanese surrender 

reading an editorial in a Marine Corps local newpaper &ere the acting 

Wse myor ms called "a hbling idiot, £0-r bandit from Lao Shan 

Mountainll, which ws, to say the least, not d y 

a disrespectful my to 

address a person w b lo, after all, a highest ranking local Chinese civil 

mtbriy, kt also something that was, diplanatically speaking, a very 

bad position to take. So in this sense there Ere a lot of problerns 

bewen the Qlinese autbrities and tihe hrican authorities and very 

little actual social contact. Following the initial friendly cantact on 

the 1-r levels betwen & individual Marines and the ainese people, 

be- the individual Ngvy personnel and the m s e 

people, hrican 

ny?mbers af the anaed forces became generally exasperated with the Chinese; 

the life style differences and the lack of cdcation. All this led to 

a cmtirwous and ever-increasing rupture in the cdcatims and my 

initid atteoapts at rapport or co-operatian. 

Q: lib ere the U-dnese civil leaders? 

A: I really cannot ansEr that. I have never raet any of them personally. 

I know that tihe acting myor, whom I mtioned, ms one of the e r s of 


Nick Qerniavsky 82 

the local. Wse society. In other mrds he was a respectable natne in 

the region. I don't think he ws a mayor before and I don't think he ms 

a mmbr of the administration of the city or the region in any way. But 

to the Chinese he represented a respectable figure and this type of treatmnt 

fran krkan officials--wll, it was not official-but anyway, it was an 

organ of the kine corps in Tsingtao and it ISIS certainly an error as far 

as relations with the Chinese ere concerned. 

Q: kll ww he appointed or elected? How did he get to beta the hi& 

official? 

A: No, this vas strictly an ad bc type of arrangement. Smwm had to 

assum the authority there and later on, the guerrilla troops that cam 

into Tsingtao were replaced by regular army Wmse units. Later an, a 

mayor regularly appointed by the Nationalist goverrnnent, took over. But 

this did not make the relatiwhip any better. lhings ere going from bad 

to mrse in that relationship. And of course, the longer the American 

troops stayed in aim, the mre they =re being, almst against the will 

or desire of the Plmerican govemmnt as w all know fran many 'books that 

deal with this subject-and I was a witness to that on the scene--involved 

in the w s e civil war. 

And the bricans tried not to take sides at t h s and at other t bs they 

wire taking aides. No matter dutt they =re doing they wre always getting 

mre cleeply involved in this. They *re only creating more problems which 

they Ere trying to face and at the saaoe time still trying to igflore. 

Q: kre you there when the Nationalist Chinese care back into the tom? 

A: Yes, I WLS there. 

Q: us that SEiting? 

A: kll, no, it msn't -it*. It ws a rather sizeable conthgent. 

I d d say it ms probably a battalion la& that immediately indicated 

that it ms nothing canparable in mkrs to the krican division. They 

had a great deal of fire paer h~t it was not quite enough heavy fire 

powr. They =re very heavy in mchine guns hst b y didn't have any 

artillery. They had a great deal of autaanatic rifles and I remember I ms 

wrZcing at that tjlllle for the U.S. Navy as a construction supervisor. I 

remnber talking with sc~ae NCO's as te =re standing at the curb on the 

street as tk Chinese battalion ws marching by that they had mre fire 

powr per rrran than the lsmerican units had ht that ms strictly lwt, 

automatic Tire per. 'Ihey had nothing in the my of big fire pwr. And 

in a sea of hican military presence, one Chinese battalion actually 

bece invisible as soon as they arrived an the scene. After it marched 

dowin the street it just disappeared fran swt. brim presence on the 

other hand, ms ovemhelmhg. It ms all aver the town and Amrican jeeps 

-re zipping by and lknerican planes flew overhead and the harbor, as I 

rxlentionsd, ms just filled up with hrican Navy ships. me airport 

becam an kh air base. It ias a11 over. 

Q: k've gotten m again in aur story. Yau were mtioning abut getting 

married. W d 

you like to pick up there? 


Nick ~rniavsky 83 

A: k11, I met my wife a few months bfore I left for Tientsin for the 

military school, I wt her at a dance party at an anti-Camnxnist Russian 

cdttee, My dad at that time was chairman cJhich ws sort of an honorary, 

unpaid position. He w the chairman of the youth organizatim. It was 

typical for that type of an organization to have a middle-aged person to 

be named as chaimm of a youth group, ht my dad period quite well in 

that capacity. kt nevertheless it was certainly a rather poor choice for 

a middle-aged man to head a group of that nature. 

So e had a dance party and I had mt my future wife's sister before. Her 

younger sister was quite a talented girl who wrote poetry, did sketches 

for stage presentations, and things of that nature. This ms the first 

tirxle that I had a t my wife and R had not been introduced. She was 

sitting across the roan and in my typical, very brusque mmer--even 

though I am a very shy person by nature--I just sort of slid across the 

roan to her and introduced nyself and asked her for a dance. And she was 

te flabbergasted and I thirik ve did dance. That 's how vie raet and we 

I ted a mber of times following that and when I mt to school we 

corresponded occasionally. And after I c m back ~ from school within one 

year = decided to mrry. There as a great deal of oppositiun on the 

part of my parents which happens frequently I guess. You never pick a 

future mate that mld satisfy your parents' plans for you Ixlt w overcame 

that and E did marry. 

k mrried in June of 1945 and I r-r the day quite wll, not only 

because of that occasion but because that happened to be the second and 

last th that the krican Air Force hbed Tshgtao. Our viedding day 

was marked by this great deal of anti-aircraft gun fire and sounds of barb 

explos~. It was a small scale air raid--I believe only four or maybe 

five P-38's =re the planes that the Amxicans used which is actually a 

fighter plane. They also ere adapted I believe during the wr to carry 

small size aerial bh and they sunk tm or three small Japanese supply 

boats in the harbor. Che of the planes ws shot dawn and later was put m 

display in front of the mmicipal building I believe. 

In my case at happened, so far as I was concerned personally, was in the 

middle of the noorning I mt to a barber shop to get a fresh haircut and 

as I was just about finished with the barber shop, the air raid was sounded 

and that meant that nobody cwld go out into the street. I don't r d r 

the tb, it was a midday church eddhg ceremony. I had a mmber of 

other things to attend to and there tas no telling how long the alarm 

d d stay in effect. kcause Tsimgtao is situated on hills, there are a 

lot of back alleys--ac~lly footpaths--on which you can cross behind the 

houses through the hills and so that 's what I had to do to get back hcsne. 

I bellwe by the time I got ha^ the all-clear sounded and the rest of 

the arrangements were not, in any way, impeded by the air raid. 

Q: How rimy Russian youths Ere there at that t h as umbers of your 

organization? 

A: Members of the youth group? Oh, not tao mny. I d d say that 

perhaps E had a membership of fifty. Incidentally, when I came back from 

the school, my dad ms replaced as the leader of the group by myself. I 

inherited that, you might say. bk had a rarmber of interesting projects 

and things of that nature bst again, the whole structure of the c d t y 



was to be totally revamped because of the end of the wr, the end of the 

Japanese occupation, the termination of anti-Cmmmist activities and all 

that, % all those things =re actudly to contime only for a few mre 

mths. 

Q: You said yau had dances. W d 

A: There usually d d 

Q: Russian? 

A: Yes, definitely. 

Q: W d 

be a d l 

you have orchestras for these dances? 

band. 

you do other things besides having dances? 

A: Oh, there d d be lectures, and there wuld be, as I mentioned, stage 

plays. lhere wld be poetry recitations, and a mder of things of that 

nature. There d d be also private parties that d d be staged in 

private hmres of mire of the umbers of the organization. In other wxds, 

wen though all these people that d d attend d d be &rs of the 

group, it mild be mre in the my of a private party rather than a formal 

function. 

Q: bhat ages d d 

A: I d d 

these people be? 

say from older teens to mid--ties. 

Q: kre there similar organizations for the punger children? 

A: No, the only other organization d d be the Boy Scouts that I -timed 

I had organized aich, by that the, becam pretty much inactive. 

Q: Yau did mtion the Boy Scouts and ta ]re that d d be perhaps a traditional 

British sort of organization. Is that the wy the Boy Scouts originally 

got started? 

A: I believe Russian by Scats -re organized two years after Lord 

Baden-Pel1 organized the Boy Scouts in England. And of case originally 

Baden-Pel1 organized the Boy Scouts during the Anglo-Boer kr in Africa 

in what today is the Republic of South Africa. But in Russia, the Boy 

Scouts =re organized either in 1909 or 1911. If it m s 1911, then 1909 

FJpUld be the beginning of the Boy Scouts in England, And the person dm 

organized the Boy Scouts in Russia, ms, just as Lord Baden-Pnll , a 

military officer. Jb uw a member of the -rial Guard. 

Incidentally the Boy Scouts -elves were organized in Russia in Tsarskoye 

Selo which is a d l reeort: tom nearby St. Peterslug, or ~t now is 

uningrad . It ms a mxer palace for the tsar fdly and as a matter of 

fact, the fact that the officer ws a &r of the Imperial Ouaxd and 

stationed as a mber of the guard &tacbmt aich was doing duty in 

Tsaxskoye Selo. In other words he assigned the guard duty for the 

tsar himself ms an interesting £actor in the success of the venture 

*re. 


Nick Chemiavsky 

- 

85 

And the scoutmaster rho ms our chief scoumster in Slanghai riho ms rty 

instructor and -tor in the Boy Scout mrvment when I jolned the son 

of another young officer. Not at that the but a few years following 

that, bing the WWI days, he ms recuperating fran wunds received at the 

front in his participation in a battle with the German des, in a hospital 

hich WIS in Tsarskoye Selo. This MEU where the tsarina and her daughters 

and ladies-in-wit- -re participating and helping with carrying out 

activities and duties in the upkeep of the hospital. 

So again, the cannection &re my scmtmaster had a lhk to, for one 

thing, the very beginning of the scout mnranent in Russia and wen to the 

linperial family in Russia. 

He himself of course did not participate in WWI because he was too 

He ms a cadet in Siberia the Russian civil mr and saw SUE =t c 

action the Russian civil war, but not very much. And he ws me of 

those dedicated persons * took scouting so nu& to heart that it actually 

resulted in the break-up of his family life. His wife deserted him and he 

actually lived day and ni&t by his wrk with the scouting m-t. He 

lives in this country now, or lived here several years ago. I haven't 

been in touch with him for a ntanber of years m. 

Q: lhat's interesting because I as& that dxm you =re living in 

Shanghai at the British kter krks that it d d have been the British 

dm started the scout troop. You're saw that this was a Russian Scout 

troop frm Russia? 

A: Yes. mvanent itself was definitely Russian and it ws an accredited 

part of the international scout mmt. And in Shanghai, because of the 

cosmopolitan type of city, w had Boy Scout troops of every nationality 

starting with the mese dm ere very active in boy scouting and of 

course, the British =re represented very sizably. As a matter of fact 

the British Boy Scaut Association in Shan&ai had a beautiful camp outside 

the city in an area called Hanjow. They had a rustic type of a pavilion 

with sleeping accamrodatu if you had to use that, and also grounds for 

putting up your tents. k Ere allmd by the British Boy Scouts Association 

to c m at ~ a tine whm they =re not using it tkelves, to use all tk 

facilities there. I think I participated in a couple of camp-outs there 

of a few days' duration each the with our wZlole organization which cmsisted 

of three troops. I later becane assistant scautmaster or the leader of 

one of those troops, before I mved to Tsingtao, and w d d do a lot of 

our scat training at the campgrounds. kk had, I muld say, probably 

abut 150 members in our Russian Boy Scaut Association. 

Q: Wat other nationalities had troops? 

A: I think there w s an Italian organization, and there m s a rather 

sizeable F'rench Boy Scout orgdzation. There was Portugese and I think 

there vas a Geman Boy but organization and also very definitely a 

Japanese Boy Scout organization. 

Q: That's interesting. I've heard that ttae Boy Seas came about largely 

in this country because of urbanizatian. Do you feel that d d have been 

true in Shanghai? 



A: Yes, I mld feel that probably d d be part of the reason for it 

because it's actually pretty hard to b@ne anything mre urbanized than 

Smghai, wen in those &p. Of course there =re same typically local 

factors involved. 

For instance, w had nightmares in Smghai with our traffic patterns and 

our problan of traffic in those days and mbch more so than anything imaginable 

that could take place in this country. Because in Shanghai for instance, 

during the rush hours, the traffic cansistd of h s , including double 

decker ks--&@ah style--streetcars that ere rurming on tracks and 

also the trolley bes, the streetcars that =re nmning on rubber-tired 

wheels. All these had to sort of scoot aruund ane ano-r and a number of 

people *re not -rely wise. There w sizeable autambile traffic 

including a multitude of taxi cabs. %re -re thousands upon thousands 

of rickshaw carriages being pulled by rickshaw coolies manually and later 

on, just Wore wr, a mber of peddycabs appeared, which is a rickshaw 

that is attached to a bicycle so that the rickshaw coolie does not have to 

pull it manually, he pedals on a bicycle. And after the war, rickshaws 

=re h s t totally replaced by peddycab, but not cqletely. 

There ere also tens of thousands of people riding bicycles. There =re 

mn pulling or pushing single wheel f~i&t carts on Mch loads of any 

kid--it could have been sacks of grain or it could have been barrels of 

oil or whatever--dd k transported that my. There -re Qdmae laborers 

carrying loads on bamboo poles slung across their shoulders. And h d up 

with all this and almys overflowing the pavemats fran the sidewalk there 

d d be utilliorrs of pedestrians. And all this multitude of vehicles and 

hmmity wuld tend to pay very little attention to traffic lwts and to 

all those impressive ballet-type of gymastics that I described that the 

traffic cops =re engaged in. So here you have your urbanization carried 

to its extrme perhaps and mixed with typically Chinese behavior and also 

the need £ox transportation. That is also typically CZlinese and is not to 

be found in any krican city, large or d l . 

Q: k've been told that w hricans have the greatest myth of the rural 

sociev being the prre and good one. Do yau think that was one of the 

reasons for the strength of the Boy Scout rmvamt in Shanghai? 

A: ell, let me say this . . . 

Q: Perhaps this is not typically Elnaerican. 

A: Yes, I think it's not typically brican but also to respond to yaur 

*stion, the only manhgful answx muld be in regards to the Chinese 

Boy Scaxts. Because only minese Boy Scats mdd have any influence Eran 

the rural area. Because dl other Boy Scaut organizatiom Ere only 

Szanghai Boy Scouts, the organization of the foreigners of the people who 

lived in 3mnghai proper. And my ccmtacts with Qlinese Boy Scouts -re 

extremely mhbd bewe the only actual contact = had with them was 

that they had a couple of stores of boy scout type of supplies. Occasionally 

I wu.ldGbe delegated to go and place an order with than for any khd of 

Boy Scmt insigfb to be rnade or shoul&r patch or things of that nature. 

So I really cannot say Mhe&r lbt ms true or not. 


Nick ~ ~ v s k y 87 

Q: kt yet one of your prime points =s to go out camping, out of the 

city. 

A: Ch yes, most definitely. kt the canping facilities hich w =re 

borrowing frm the British, w did not use it that extensively because it 

ms strictly beyond the means of our organization ach was very poor in 

those days financially to undertake c ~ o u tof s this nature an a frequent 

schedule. 50 mst of our activities consisted of caning to the headquarters, 

which was a very thy facility, and carry out the ~rreetings with the various 

facets of ecout lore; trai.ning in hot-making and first aid instruction. 

Things of this nature d d take place. 

Another thing VE did participate in sandmt was with the older scouts--ht 

is called in this country Explorer Scouts--re bicycle trips without a 

campout, It ws a one-day duration bicycle trip out in the countryside 

and w did actually quite a bit of qloring of the countryside and did 

other bicycle hfking of this nature through Chinese villages. 

I r e r om time F ~ R explored the ruins of an unbelieveably elaborate, 

mmjxm d d be the proper tern kt dmt muld be the skeleton or actually 

the remains. It was cqletely overgrown ad ms miles and miles out in 

the countryside. bk never found out exactly h t it ms or dm lived 

there kt it -s an unbelieveably huge reumnt of a very impressive home 

at one the. It- reminds me sumhat, naw that I describe this, of Jack 

Lxmdon's Wlf House in Sonma Valley. kt it ws m a rmch larger scale 

than Jack Landon's house exlcept that the mhs =re standing up just as 

stark and in total disrepair as Jadc bndonls house. The roof WAS gane 

and d y the -11s =re standing. 

And mother occasion we cane across a place here apparently they had a 

huge stme type of construction of firing ovens rwt out ~JI the open in a 

field. mere was no evidence of that f5ey ere doing there. It could 

have been for instance brick mwks a r e they =re firing bricks. I don1 t 

recall my evidence of d-mt those huge ovens =re constructed for. &re 

=re rows upon row of than, I muld say maybe thirty or forty. Then R 

did a lot of exploring of M s type but because our organization was 

definitely operating on a sbstrimg, there =re many thhgs that rn just 

couldn't afford to do. 

Q: You rrrentioned bicycles. Wo mde the bicycles? 

A: k bought those in c~maercial stores. I had a bicycle since I was 

thirteen or fourteen. I baught it secondhand kt it was a fairly good 

bicycle and I used it extensively, particularly during the year when I 

attended night coll e as I mentioned. I brought it with me to Tsingtao 

and used it there. ? t rmch harder to use it there because of the 

rwuntainoua terrain. It was by the ay, a single-speed bicycle &ich d e 

it that rmcb. haxder to use aver hills that- =re there in Tsingtao. As a 

matter of fact, &en we ere married and I started working at the tobacco 

ccnapany which ~3 located in a small town outside of Tshgtao on the other 

side of the rmwntain range d~ich was same- like 1600 feet to 1800 feet 

elevation, I wuld walk the bicycle £ran ax hause to the top of the 

range. It mld take some mlking to navigate that, and then I mld climb on the bicycle and then I d d 

just coast dom all the way to my 

place of employmnt. It was a total of, 1 mid say, probably a six or 

eight mile trip each way and then I d d return ham in the eam mumex. 


Nick Uerniavsky 88 

Another detail that canes to my mind is that before got married, I 

transported all of my belongings and all of ny wife-to-be's belongings on 

that bicycle frm our respective hrrmes to the apartment which FLR =re 

renting. That ws also a trip of same Eiw or six miles and I had to make 

a nuaber of trips that way which is an indication of h lnodes of 

transportation that e had to we in Tsingtao durhg the war. Hardly 

anybod had autaaobiles. The only person in the Ehsssian camallnity that I 

hew &t had a car wrs a fellow who hos md&g his living as a jockey at 

the race track. We ms the son of a mrchant tlho in the last days of the 

Russian civil wr-in the Vladivostock area--- the top civil officer of 

that Russian Rite goverrnrrent for that region. 

END OF s1m ONE 

A: J3is father, following his deparmre frm Russia, and following the 

collapse of the Russian W te armies there, becam chief political advisor 

to one of those war lords in Shantung. This Fnklr lord, prior to that, tas 

his cook in Russia. So after he cam back to his native China and assed 

carmand of military and civil camand as military gwemor and cammder 

in chief of the Shantung province army and laming that his fomr employer 

was now in China, he appointed him chief politial advisor. He also azrployed 

a ruanber of fowr Russian military people, officers and enlisted men in 

his amy. And this particular episode is covered in a number of books on 

that era of Chinese history. 

Anymy, the son of this person was tihe only one dm had a car that he used 

in Tsingtao. And, as a matter of fact, it ww his car ddch ms wed for 

getting me and my wife to the ckrurch on the day of our tr~dding. k of 

ourfx~pi~usup]Lnthatcaranddroveustso~cl.rurch. 

- 

All other transportation in Tsingtao iq those days c e almst to a standstill 

because of lack of gasoline. All city kxses, for instance, =re being 

operated an the gas xhich was produced by coal firing paraphernalia hich 

installed in each bus in the back and had to be stoked every so often 

by the driver. He mld stop the h18 and of cwrae the dmle thing resulted 

in a trenrendaus loss of powr for the engine. So having to traverse 

through all the hills and grades in the city of Tsingtao, those bses 

were actually making very slaw and very painful progress. @ite frequently 

tk passengers d d be asked to get off the b and walk dang side it as 

the hts wild be very slowly and torturously coming up to the top of the 

grade. kerybody d d be Mted to ccane back on board again and the hs 

d d go on its my. 

Q: Umt =re they using for fuel? Charcoal? 

A: Charcoal, right. 

Q: Do you suppose this is one of the reasons the Japanese 

- 

brought so m y 

horses with them? 

A: bu're recalling my mntion of the profusion of Japanese horses in 

Sha@mi in 1932 and 1937 when they ere stabled. That in Shanghai. 

'Ihat ms a long time before that and no, that wasn't the reason. They had 


Nick O.-mrniavsky 89 

no problem w ith gasoline in tihose days but all military transport, meaning 

that all supplies in the Japanese Amy Ere horse-transport organized. So 

that's 41y they needed so tnany horses. It was strictly for the needs of 

the transport. 

Q: I'm sorry. I th@t the horses *re in Tsingtao. 

A: I believe I should add a couple of additimal notes to what I have 

just described. We: the father of this jockey in Tsingtao who had this 

car--there ws also another connection in regards to this. Because when 

he assured this post of political advisor to General I 

believe his name, his former cook in Russia, he also brought as his 

administrative assistant, my future wife's father. And my wife, at the 

tinre when she a little girl, spent I think a year or at Tsinan or 

Tsinan-Fb which is the capitol city of %an- province and was the 

capitol of General . So she could recall quite well the 

military parades and the Russian troops that =re employed by the Chinese 

war lord. And she hew quite well this jockey that I mentioned. And = 

had also In Tsingtao a beautiful b e 

an the side of a hill vhich General 

iave the Russian general, General 9 in 

canpensation for his wrk on his behalf during &t particular episode. 

Also, thi~ jockey drove his car a m d Tsingtao very sparingly but he did 

not fill it up with the charcoal-luni.ng paraphernalia because he didn't 

want to do that. So, since he ws not in any way in a position to tnry 

gasoline for his car &ich ms mt available for civilians, he would 

drugstores and he muld ksy kmne in pint or quart bottles. He d d 

try to acamdate as many of those as he possibly could and then he mid 

run his car on this. And I believe I should make a note that all military 

vehicles-cars and truck and military bes in Tshgtao at that th, 

Japanese military bes and cars--of caurse also ran on gasoline. So they 

d d usually zip by quite speedily and plt to shame all those civilian 

buses or cars which -re very few in nuraker, but ach d d be just 

barely making the top of the grade as I described before. 

Q: At the tim ycu =re married ycu =re wrking in the cigarette factory. 

This m s the hrican Tobacco W y ? 

A: ell, yes. The proper narne of the carrparry ws the British-krican 

Tobacco Company and it wes a subsidiary of the British Tobacco Company and 

the American Tobacco w, the producers of Lucky Strikes and other 

brands of cigarettes. And of course at the tine when I was employed 

there, it being memy property-~aning it was British and Amxican onned 

and d e s as far as the Japanese occupational forces were concerned--all 

the original persormel, administrative and executive personnel, ws by 

that time interned. The Japanese and Chinese personnel =re running the 

capany and a sizeable percentzge of the output ms going to the Japanese 

Amy. And there =re a xlamber of Russian people dm -re qloyed as 

guards. 

The interesting feature of the job in this ccmpany ms that despite the 

takeover by the Japanese administration or in fact by the Japanese Amy, 

most of the originally established procedures wxe enforced. The canpany 

ws haused in a mPnbew of canpamds covering a territory of a number of 

city blocks. 'ke min facility, the actuaL cigarette-making facility, 


I 

Nick ChemFavsky 90 

executive offices, and sane of the storage areas and processing areas, 

=re in me sizeable compound me city block square. It also had a well- 

£urnisbed and wll-e ipped c-y cafeteria &ere the company provided 

free nreals for all o its office personnel and the guard cantingent. 

P 

Q: Yau said yrru -re a guard. h t 

viere you guarding frm whom? 

A: N -re guard- the campany property fran pilfering by mybe mre 

than a thousand of Chinese anployees, because the product had tremendous 

value. Cigarettes mre very rmch in demand and in effect , to combat that, 

the campany started the policy of issuing an allotment of cigarettes to 

each person who was on the payroll. But nevertheless the temptation of 

came nas great and so they had guards stationed at entrances and &ts 

to just abut every bilding, and every warehouse and every machine shop. 

Zhat was to visually observe people mnring in and out and make certain 

that they =re not carrying, packages or Mles of any nature which, in 

most cases, wuld be cigarettes. And this w s going on surreptitiously, 

of course, lxlt to a great degree. 

To cmre back to the cafeteria: the cafeteria looked like a first-line 

restaurant. They had &te linen starched tablecloths. The tables and 

the chairs =re of the original old vintage and they =re the very, very 

massive, very high-priced type of furniture. Qlinese waiters in a t e 

starched jackets mrked there. It ws not a Wfet typ of a service. 

They =re senring the tables and ym d d 

c m ~ 

in they d d 

take 

your order, whatever you wnted, *ether you mted ham and eggs or &ether 

you mted bacon and eggs. In those days, this tine I'm describing is 

actually tk last year of the mr, and it was absolutely unbeliweable. 

It ms like sa~thing out: of a different era altogether. 

h d tbe British influence ws evident in the fact that at ten in the 

mrning, I believe, and be- ttrx, and three in the afternoon, there was 

tea and uuffins served in the cafeteria restaurant. And the people who 

=re m duty at that particular tb, the Ckimse waiters d d 

fan out 

all wer the properv with trays in their hands and deliver tea and &fins 

to different guards stationed at different entrances. The guards muld 

pick up their rmffins and have a nice cup of tea aich was another absolutely, 

ludicrously, unbelieveqble feature. And of couxse, those people dm Ere 

not on duty, who viere oq a heak or atever, they could caw directly to 

the restaurant and have their tea and dfins rwt there on the white 

starched linen cloths. 

We =re senring txelve-bnur shifts. Zhe shifts were six to six and I 

believe m had either me or tw of the day shift, and then w d d 

have a three-day break, and then we mld switch over to the night shift. 

And the duty was unbearably nmot:onaus; there was nothing to do except 

stand like an idiot in the front of the gate or door and eye the people 

going in and out, and looking like an absolute ass, and lazowing everybody 

that ws mlking by thought exactly that about yw. But the pay was the 

best in tom. It tas nuch better than what I ws making in my prerqploymnt 

at the steel *ere the conditions =re unbeliweably 

dirty. You had to stand, for Instance, an a watch towr where ym were 

open to the elmtents in winter, &ich is dismally cold in Tsingtao, and it 

ms ri&t on a bay, The winds d d be blowhg with ferocious force and 

there ms an apen Eire in the middle of the watch tmer and so yau =we 



continually roasting on anie side and freezing half to death on the other 

side. And switching over fran that type of employment to the tobacco 

campany WLS just an unbelievable charge. But nevertheless, the job ms 

mnotamus and meaningless to people who -re mrkhg there, for rae 

especially. kt the fringe benefits =re absolutely out of this wrld. 

Q: MIS this a five-day d ym ere wrking? 

A: s I believe so, at least to the best of my recollections that's 

what At WLS . 

Q: So there really m s no food shortage in Tskgtao. 

A: There ws no starvation, that is true, bst only because saw prudent 

xlleasures had been taken to ration those particular it- that ere in a 

short supply, There e could buy mat, E cdd buy bacon, w could buy 

ham, et cetera, but it wlss not plentiful. It ms not at all unusual to 

care during the second half of the day to the market to find out that 

there was no meat. 'Ihere d d be mat again the next morning bt again, 

it probably d d be gone by midday. And so it ms possible for that 

canpany to provide food fare that ws actudly excellent, bst it mld have k e hpossible ~ ~ for every- in Tsingtao to go and hy steak all in 

the saw mmhg at a given day in the =ek. 

Q: lhy do you suppose the Japanese all- than to continue this mre or 

less high standard of living? 

A: You mean in that caapany? 

Q: Yes, particularly since it m s British-awned. 

A: I d d strongly suspect that because there were a nmber of Japanese 

high, middle, and low echelon -cutives dm &en they cam to the cmrpany, 

,&en they =re appointed-and I'm sure it w probably unexpected to 

them--&ien they found mt the high level of living that ms available in 

the employ of this cqany or in the administration of it, and they liked 

it so mrch thawelves that they just continued it. If their superiors, 

like in Japan for instance, in the ministry of dmtever the division vas 

of occupied emmy property, if they ever hew that this t~as taking placeht 

I imagine that they just decided not to rock the boat and to continue 

the sai~ as it was before than. 'Ihey mjoyed the very soft livimg. 

Q: You -ti& rat-. MIS this a formal rationing or could you 

just by food until it ran out? 

A: Meat was not rationed, as I mtianad, but you just had to hy it &en 

it w available. Sugar you cdd mt bg exept by a ration ticket. 

Butter you could not by =ept in the sam manner. Flow you also could 

only lslry by rationing tickets and then only third or fuurth grade exept 

as a fringe benefit if yau ere mrk2ng for that tobacco company and 

again, as I umtid, coffee ms non-existent. Yau had to make your om 

and the mxe inventive minds made all kinds of coffee that had no 

relationship in fact to the true coffee. 



Q: h t 

=re som of the things they used to make coffee? 

A: An enonmus number of material products. only thing that I remember 

specifically was the father of this girl that I knew at the time was using 

pzune pits. Of course he d d have to acclp~ulate an wnmus quantity of 

those and he ms just railling than just like you wuld a coffee nut. It 

wasn't a bad tasting coffee by the my. It didn't taste exactly like 

coffee but I drank m y cups of that and it ms acceptable. 

Q: Ihem was the tobacco grom that you =re using in the cigarette 

factory? 

A: I believe that SUE of it ws dmestic, Chinese tobacco. Wen the 

caapany WB interned by the Japanese forces, there =re still stocks an 

hand of 7Mdsh and American tobaccos aich =re used in the higher-priced 

brands. 'Ihe carrpany ws very judiciously allotting those particular 

tobaccos for rrdxtng with b hstically g m tobacco. 

Q: Wlat happened to the British personnel M the Japanese took wer 

Tsingw? 

A: k11, the process ms , I believe, pretty much uniform thrm&out 

w. They wre all interned and there are a number of books written 

about Ws. I have read a couple of those by the people srlho had gone to 

those camps. The personnel of the British-hrican Tobacco Company, who 

had some technical skill in running particular mchines FJhere they 

=re ernployed or administrative positions, =re kept an their job for 

certain the to let the Japanese and Chinese personnel who ere to take 

over eventually, learn the ropes so to speak and learn how to do it 

themselves. This was the case in the British-hrican Tobacco Company. 

The Amrican and British personnel =re kept on the job for tm or three 

months. Then after the administrative personnel that ms put there by the 

Japanese occupatid forces ws considered have lead and to have 

been trained sufficiently, they took over and the British and krican 

people =re sent to those camps, too. 

Q: Did it disrupt the tom at all dm~ the British-kricans and the 

other maxlbers of the opposite party in the war m e sent: to camp? 

A: It 'a really difficult for me to judge because m =re rather new in 

tom. arrived in Tsingtao so very shortly prior to the Pearl Harbor 

attack vhkh signaled actual involvmmt of Japan in krld kr 11. Wtside 

of the brothers who owed this dairy farm dm, as I mentioned =re hrican 

citizens--naturalized hrican citizens-w didn't how anybody in that 

category. So I don't recall any personal knowledge or any indication that 

I was aware of certain individuals by name who that, because they =re 

hrican or British, had ken p i M up and interned and dm had to leave 

the city in this mmner. So it's really bpossible for UE to ccnrment on 

this in any mani@ul my. 

Q: Did you ever thirik that you mdght be interned? 

A: Not really. TZlle potential for that w s rmst improbable at that tb. 

If anything the chances of myself being personally Fnvolved in the wr, 

wen prior to my going to military school In Tiatsin in 1943 wxe small. 


Nick Chemiavsky 93 

Particularly because the Japanese war fortunes viere so rmch higher at that 

time when Japan ms victorious and successful at virtually every front. 

And b a lesser degree after I went to military school in the sense that 

Japan vm obviously losipg the war. But even then there ws a chance that 

since I had had this military training and Japanese language instruction, 

that I would have been ordered to join smre sort of a military effort. 

So, to the very end, there ws a potential of my being involved in the war 

myself. 

Q: It made no difference then &en Russia declared wr on Japan? 

A: It w quite olxriaus that Japan had lost the wax by then. The atomic 

bombs had keen dropped and even so, we didn't know at the the that only 

tw mre of war remained. k certainly realized that the tine for 

which Japan could continrue being in the mr was very, very short. And 

following Russia's entry in the war and eventual surrender by Japan, the 

only tNng &at personally applied to m was the news of s m people ~ that 

I have hun in various tines of TILY stay in Tsingtao or Tiatsin who had 

either been captured and arrested by the Russian Red Army or ccrrlxrdtted 

suicide prior to that. 

The chaiman, for instance, of the Russian Anti--st cam~~~Lty in 

Tienstin cdtted suicide prior to his be* captured. There =re a few 

o&r individuals who had done the same thing, and same people that I have 

hm, either personally or by IMIE as being imolved either in the military 

school which I attended or in carmanding positions of the volunteer training 

that tats gohg on and also either cdtted suicide or =re captured by 

the Rsd Russian Army. So, in that sense, there was a personal involveay3nt 

and understanding that a certain order of thhgs that had gone on fox a 

ntmber of years and in which, either voluntary or involuntary, I was 

involved myself, had c- to an end. For sam people it had come to an 

end in the mst drastic and fatal mnner. 

Q: How far did the Russian Red Amy get into W a ? 

A: %y occupied all of dxit was at that t h Manchuria. They did not 

really occupy the territory Exlt they sent liaison goups ddch I d d 

imgine cansisted preddnmtly of NKVP personnel into Peking and Tientsin 

and a rwnber of other localities which ere close to the CZlinese Manckian 

border. There =re a mber of interesting instances. 

I mentianed the suicide of the person w b WM the chairman of the Anti-Cammist 

Rwsian camdttee in Tienstin. The thing that came to light bmdiately 

following that was that his second in camrand, the mst active, the mst 

dynamic person who was in the anti-cammist camrbttee in Tientsin-whose 

son by the way was ane of the cadets with rae in that military school--that 

this person w an undercover agent. So particularly now in the days of 

tk ktergate revelations and all this, it ie interesting to note that the 

undercover type of political actidty have been going an, not only in this 

country hlt in every other cauntry. 

Wte Russian colony life in all the years following the end of the Russian 

rwolut~ and thrw brld &r 11 and the entrance of Soviet Russian on 

the side of the Allies for instance, had been shot through in every part 

of the wrld. In &ha, in Gemmy, kame, in the Balkan states, by 


Nick Qlemiavsky 94 

episodes and instances and incidents of this nature. There is a rather 

sizeable amxxnt of literature on the kidnapping and disappearance of tm 

Russian generals in France; General Kutepoff and General Wangel in Paris 

because of this underground type of political activities on both sides. 

bhite Russian groups had been involved in underctwer activities in Russia 

on a rather limited scale and quite unsuccessfully. But for a number of 

years follming 1921 and through the 1920s and 19308 the Red Russian 

govemrmt reciprocated by infiltrating the Wte Russian organizatims 

with its own agents and in m y cases, =re very successful. This happened 

in fiance and as I have mentioned, definitely in &ha. 

Q: How did this fact affect yow life? kre you conscious of it, =re 

you careful of your fxiendshtps? 

A: You mean following the revelations of this nature? Yes. 

Q: Yau =re not aware of it up until this tine? 

A: k11, most certainly I was -re of the events aich took place in 

France. For instance, the kidnapping of General Kutepoff was front page 

new in the media for many, manymths. %re ws a trial by the F'rench 

govemt . Again the second in c d , General Scobeleff was involved. 

He disappeared the same time and all the circumstantial but nevertheless 

very strong evidence pointed out: his involvement in it as a secret agent 

of Red Russian gwe-t. So things of this nature -re quite obviously 

present. The revelation abuut the similar activity of the number tw man 

in Timtsin of this Russian cdttee ms a shock to me at the time; the 

fact that I hew his son extremely -11. It's impossible not to know a 

person after you've spent almost a full year with him. J4e ms a very 

likeable person, he was also one of the tm Tartar cadets as I mtioned 

and very, very friendly and very sociable person. He was one of those 

youngsters than I personally was friendly with and it ms pretty hard to 

accept in the beginning that his father actually was an undercover agent 

and an extrely success£ul one. 

Q: Wen ere these undercover agents sent out from Russia? Did they cclme 

out about the same tirtle yaur father or did they cam out later? 

A: I d d say that this actually ms done in both mys. Also I think it 

wdd be erroneous to assure that undercover agents are born, that a 

person is an undercwer agent per se fran the very beginning. Solae are 

being brought in by various mans. Some perhaps c a on ~ their om because 

they can see certain Wits to themselves or because they-mll, that 

d d be a -fit too but try other thought was-that they feel that they 

could settle certain debts with people that thy disliked or hated by 

spying on thern or by inforuring on them. So it's really hard to say exactly 

hat this wrked out. 

To give another ~ l for instance: e during the tine when w ere in 

Shaqhai and my dad w.s wrking in the kter krks Company there was a 

young fellow hre-I mld say in his mid-twmties-vho obviously was too 

to have cark fram Russia as a gem-up. He either born in 

kt was braught to aina as a kid or, I really don ' t know his 

background at all or possibly he ws born in China or in Japan by parents 

FJho =re stationed there in varh Russian Zxlsinesses prior to Russian 

imigration . 


Nick &erniavsky 95 

But in any case, he ms wrking at the Shan&ai Wter brks Company and he 

WE a member of a volunteer corps which I ha. also nmtioned in a Russian 

canpany bt not in a Russian regkt, not in a full-time, fn a Russian 

volunteer &taclPlent, part-time organization. He ws a bachelor. Sat~ 

bachelors muld sometinues row tm or three in tihe same tomhouse in this 

company housing cqlex. He roomed with this old Russian general that ms 

the only general that w had in the kter bzks canpound c d t y 

that E 

had. My dad was a captain and the father of my childhod girlfriend ws a 

colonel of the Russian Guard reg-t and a mbr of tZle general sta£f. 

%re -re tw or three other officers and a mber of privates frrm the 

Russian army but there was only one general and he ms a Cossack general. 

I can't rtamber whether his rank dated to the Imperial Amy which d d 

be mre impressive, or to lh civil mr army &ere pramtiom =re ra&r 

freely distrikuted and it ws mi&red to be not quite as impressive. 

Wlt anpy this young person in his mid--ties rcxmed with the general 

and alnaost acted like the general's aide-de-camp. He took care of him yau 

might say, not in true nature ht being rmch younger no doubt he almst 

waited on the general when they viere together in the house and perfonred 

certain tasks and all that. In any case, one day, I remember ell it ws 

in smr because it MS sunny and wm, he disappeared. h t they did in 

that particular townhouse, they partitioned it in such a my that the 

second floor and the first floor mre separated so that they cdd--the 

general liked his privacy. I believe the general at that t b 

lived on 

the g r d floor kt I thbik eventually he mrved to the second floor and 

the young fellow lived on tihe secund floor. 

And he just didn't report to mrk at the shop and ms gone for a few days. 

They brought a ladder and plt it against the second story windm and a 

fellaw climbed up there, I remember I ms standing in the yard. They 

brought dawn his rifle and his volunteer corps d o m and his helraet and 

threw than through the winduw. And he left a note in his roan where he 

very sardonically pulled the leg of all the people with he lived and 

w i -he ~ rubbed his shoulders in the course of a couple of yeaxs. I 

believe he told than that he ms going back to Russia and it ms really 

nice hmhg you and all that sort of thing bt what kind of fools they 

-re because 'khat wasn't the only reason I came down here for." 

b~thing to that effect. Of course I didn't read the note but the whole 

carmm-lq vies buzzing with this sensational revelation for weks and meks 

f o l l o that. ~ 

Q: a0 yrm think he was there b spy on i5e general? 

A: Apparently so because that the gist of dmt he wrote in the note. 

I really don't lrnaw vhat purpose it served. Of course I was a kid and I 

had no nay of hmahg whether the general wu involved in anything of a 

similar nature, I msm tb undeqround activities frm the lihite side. I 

don't haw. It's possible. To lllention me of the groups that was involved 

Exan &rape at that t k, I don't m b e r the rime m, it escapes my 

memory. But there ms this underground secret orgdzatim which included 

awmg its original founders Boris Savlnkoff dm ms involved in the Russian 

revolution, as a terrorist as a part of the nihilist revalutionary groups 

that =re throwing tank, and engaging in acts of terror against the 

tsarist govenrmrent. But then they fell aut with the cclrmrjnist gave-t 

aich took aver and so Boris Savinkoff ws involved in this particular 



group. And eventually he ws lured to Russia by the Reds by an impster 

undercover agent that cam frm Red Russia and he was bm@t to Russia 

supposedly on a mission. He ws captured by the Red govenmmt and 

disappeared. The general asamption was that he ~~rrs tried and executed. 

In any case, this group ms pzblishing a =letter in Russian kite 

ccsmuniths throughout the mrld and soliciting funds to carry on its 

anti-cammist activities. As I recall my dad regularly cmtriluted and 

d d regularly mail in firm his very meager earnings in those days a few 

dollars at a time to help with these efforts. So hre were a number of 

activities of this nature go* on and it really d d 

be entirely inproper 

for m to speculate &ether this general ms involved in samething of this 

nature. The only thhg that I can report m with any degree of accuracy 

muld be the fact that this did take place. This young person did leave 

under these peculiar circumtances and he did leave this note which I did 

not mad ht to the dstence of vhich I can speak quite knowledgeably. 

Because I h aw that it ms quoted by my parents and by all the grown-ups 

of the carrmnity and of caurse the children ere discussing it too. It 

ms an mt of mjor magnitude in the camamity and people ere shocked 

and bedldered and they discussed it fox a long tlme follawing that. 

Q: Did you think at that th that there might be others, Russian agents, 

Red agents living among you? 

A: ks, I mentioned that it d d be mst natural to assume that that ukls 

the case. 

Q: At any t h did they try to enlist you or your father or anyone you 

knew? 

A: No, I can't say that. k, I'm not fdllar with anything of that 

nature. 

END OF TAPE 

A: As I started ta say, the only true cantacts that I have rnade with 

people Erm Russia--Red Russia of case--were, the very first me--and 

not in any sense nmnhgful in this respect--was my uncle. 

that he cam to W, to Shanghai from Vladivostock and stayed I y or a few 

weks ow a mnth or smrething like that and ent back to Russia following 

that. Wlt the tm contacts that I had wit31 people who came from Russia 

tJhen I as a teenager, the first one, and then &en I actually had left 

Qlina ard WM in the Philippines prior to my caning to this country, =re 

the mly cantacts that I had with people £ran there. 

The first me happened s w t k in the mid or late 1930s--actually mid-1930s 

I muld think, yes--and it was a captain of a Wet Rwsk freight ship 

that made a stop in Shanghai and this captain ms asked by sane people in 

Rush to see my mother's godfather's mother. She ms an old, old lady 

and they ere extremely walthy Ln Wsia prim to the Russian revolution. 

They had a huge estate in the Wtka Peninsula wit31 all sources of 

natural ~alth, gold and millions of acres of timber stands and hunting 

grounds and it ws just mblievable. They were m y times millionaires 

Nick Cherniavsky Memoir, vol. 2 - Archives/Special Collections - Norris L Brookens Library - University of Illinois at Springfield - UIS 

'

Nick &mFavsky 97 

of course and all of that walth ws lost. Both she and her son--my 

mther's godfather-died in W. He, by the way, w.s an engineer 

specialidng in geology could have had a very goad job FlZlich he refused 

to take. He spoke tw or three languages in addition to Russian kt he 

was one of those few Russian site fmrrlPrants FJho felt that the Red takeover 

ms very tanporary and so he mild subsist on part-th jobs. J!Ie ms a 

very religious person and his jobs =re mostly with the Russian church and 

he muld stay in a tiny roan h a rooming hmse and live out of a suitcase-he 

d d never even unpack his suitcases because he felt that in a couple 

of weeks there d d be a camter-rwolution and we wuld all be going 

back W. He died with thee suitcases atill fully packed. 

In any case, this captain-Red rnerchant mrithe captain--cam to Shanghai 

and delivered either written letters or just verbal messages to this old 

lady and I believe at that particular tim she stayed with us temporarily 

for some reason and so he caw to ow house at the Wter Wrks Carrrpany and 

spent, as I recall, a wary pleasant social evening with us and of course 

he ws being fired at wi& questions £ran my mother. As I recall, I think 

my dad did not get to aee him because he w mrking at the tirne. My 

recollection is that he ws errtranely open, surprisingly so to all of us. 

It d d 

seem to rrre as I recall that he carried himself very naturally and 

was not too hesitant to speak on just about any subject. He sed to be 

quite sure of himself and prcrvided proper reepcmses b just abaut any 

questions that they asked. Of course since I was just a kid I did not 

participate in the comrersatim but I w s all04 to be present in the 

roan. So that m s my very first contact with somebody who came frm 

quote, over there unquote. 

My other contacts with people frm over there =re: m were in & UN 

canp followimg ow migration from Wna after the Red Qlinese Amy took 

over and in that cap, in the Philippines, there =re tm Russian mm in 

their late tmties or very early thirties, I d d 

say, and they =re not 

mbers of the group of the evacuees dm left China under the sponsorship 

of the UN. lXle was a Eted Russian seaman and the other one ws a Red 

Russian military pilot and the seaman I believe jumped his ship in Japan 

and I don't know where the pilot had escaped to, lut there ms srme sort 

of a political, diploanatic problem with than. Apparently the brican 

authorities muld not keep thm in Japan any langer and the higher-ups in 

kshington had not given the final okay for them to cane to the United 

States proper and so even though it w strictly irregular, there was same 

sort of an agreement made with the UN that thy mld be tanporarily 

housed in that refugee c q of the UN. 

So they stayed with us and they lived by tbelves and =re mre restricted, 

as I recall, in their mavanents than w =re bewe their eventual status 

had not been determined at that tlme. And so witA those tm people I did 

engage in a discussion uyself and they ere entirely different fran the 

way the marchant marine captain WS. Perhaps the fact that their status 

w still pretty nuch in jeopardy ws me of the reasons but: they ere 

- 

aLraly guarded in whatever tihey wuld say. As a matter of fact, they 

really didn't say anything. They d d try to avoid my kind of a direct 

response. They wuld always amwr in som runabout manner and say things 

like, "kll, yes, that's the way it aver there. It really wasn't too 

bad or too good." You how, thhga like that. They might actually say a 

few sentences bt ym d d be just as rmch in the dark following this as 


when you just started talking to than. So actually this is the extent of 

my extremely liadted contact with people who had car^ directly from Red 

Russia. 

Q: Your uncle carte to see you in Shanghai about h t 

year? 

A: I muld say it ms 1927 or 1928 and now that you have asked IIE I 

recall the real reason for his caning to Sh-i was my aunt Evegenia, 

whose niJmame in the f mily WHS Baby. She w.s the second oldest dau&ter 

in the £aaily. My uncle ms the youngest mug the four children in that 

family. She ws dying with tukrculosis and that ms the reason for my 

uncle 's visit. Actually it ws not strictly social, it ms necessitated 

by the fact that his sister ws dying and he wanted to see her. That was 

the time in the Soviet Russian gaverrment's position *en there ms a 

small degree of laxity on allowing things like that just preceding the 

purge period when actually a mber of people mre allmd to leave Russia 

and take residency in &rope, in kame and Germany ddch very shortly ms 

totally cut off and people who wnted to leave, they muld mre than 

likely get arrested and sent to a concentration camp. 

Q: Your awt Evegenia m s living in %anghai at the time? 

A: Yes. 

Q: 'Ws is not the sam aunt that was in . . . 

A: Indonesia, No. That tas Valia, Valentina. 

Q: Was this aunt married? 

A: The one who was dying frm tuberculosis? Yes. She ms married to 

another off icer--Russian officer . Her husband vas a colonel, a veteran of 

brld W r I just as my dad, and also a general staff officer and he ms in 

%anghai trying to write his rrrernoirs and as I recall, participating in 

some venture t m to form a Russian-language newspaper or samething to 

that effect. Years later, when I was mrking in another Russian-language 

newspaper in Tsingtao, rJhose editor ms also a Eomr Russian officer, a 

captain in artillery, who ms a gOOd persanal friend of my ht Evegenia's 

husband and he also wts involved in that newspaper venture and there was a 

whnle closet full of papers, of all sorts of old issues of that newspaper 

and uy aunt: ' s b band ' s writings. I have gone over those papers and 

lead a great deal about many facets of the Ehsian civil mr in Siberia 

which up to that tinre I did not know. 

Particularly there ms--ft actually should be the subject of a separate 

interview kt there wm a fascinating episode in that part of the Russian 

civil WK involvetrrent which involved &nerd Ungern--it's a Gem nanae, 

he ws of Geman origin but he ms unbelievably enough a Cossack general. 

He todc his cantingent from Russia into what today is knom as Outer 

Ibngolia and fought his way into the capitol city of Fbngolia 

v 

called Urga 

t the Chinese garrison and threw than out of the city and then out 

o Mongolia itself, occupied bngolia. IJle ws married-I believe the 

marriage w not corwmmated, it ws a political marriage and there are 

different versions--to either a Mongolian or a Tibetan young princess to 

stablize his political situation there. He reorganized his aq, unifonrred 


Nick hmiavsky 99 

them in Mongolian unifoms and was on the verge of re-entering Siberia 

when there ms a revolt amng tihe ranks of his troops and he was captured, 

his second-in-ccrrmand was mrdered and he was brought to Siberia, placed 

in a cage and taken to different cities in Siberia on public display, 

tried and mcuted. In dl, I thhk he spent abut a year In lkngolia and 

it ms a very, very unbelievable and fascinating part of the Russian civil 

mr. 

- Another very surprising el-t which almst pu might say m ld cam out 

of Boris Pasted's "Doctor Zhivago ," with all the elarmts of chance 

meetings and meetings *ich ere planned bst did not take place on tJhich 

the book is so kavil hilt around, is that years later, when I care to 

this camtry, my daugKterls godfather--a native-born kricw , now a 

lieutenant colcnel in the a q reserve who ms in China during brld kr 

I1 and dm married a Russian wman in China and they live now in IiockEord, 

Illinois--hew very well General Ungern's nephew who lives in this country 

and *, if I'm not mistaken, at one tirw mrked for the CIA and wrote a 

bwk about his farmus uncle. So there I v m in Qlina learning abut the 

very fascinating story of General &gem and then pars later in hrica, 

came to how real -11 as my persd friend, a person dm hew General 

mgern's nephew. 

Q: Wen Fur mother's younger brother returned to Russia, did your family 

camunicate with him? 

A: b. %re ere no cammications &atsoever and my mo&r ma very 

upset abut it and as I mntid, she tried to contact her brother SlavLk 

on nunerous occasions through the Internatid Red Cross and only nruch 

later, years after krld kr I1 ended, when my mther ws already livhg 

for a mber of years in hrica in Fan Francisco, she received M s 

very 

short note frm the Red Cross that he died. I believe the year was either 

1936 or 1937, sathing like that. And only very recently a yomg Russian 

friend who care to this camtry at an age of about five or six, and had 

gone through hrican schools and is naw a college graduate and was teachhg 

in high school in Seattle, Whington and a couple of years ago obtained a 

temporary job with the hrican Cultural Mssion to Met Russia, was 

this friend able to visit my uncle's widow in Kiev and braught s a 

family mementos to my mother fran taer and personal messages fran her. 

Only in this m did my mther learn that her brother w arrested during 

the purges of late 1930s and was -cut&. 

Q: Does yaur mthex still cornspond with her sister-in-law in Russia? 

A: k. As a matter of fact, the rrressage aich ws brmght back by this 

young friend of hers ms that her sister-in-law ms in poor health, lived 

in a goverr~r~lt-provided h h g and her only means of taking care of her 

needs was the d l goverr~nent-provided pension and that this housing in 

hich she had an apamt was -thing in the my of an obvious mark 

because everyme who lived in that housing =re dependents or survivors of 

political detainees, mst of dmn =re either exiecuted or still had their 

tim to serve in jail or in concentration camps. And so she was very 

happy to find out that mymther vas alive and mil and as I mentioned, 

sent those it- d-dch she had been saving that she received fran her 

bband. But she also asked ny mother not to camunicate with her because 

she felt that it d d not be a prudent lhbg to do. 


Nick krniavsky 100 

Q: So that's the last contact your family has had with her? 

A: Yes. 

Q: You mtid tihe young Fbssian going back into Red Russia. ks this 

cmn? kre there s- people coming out escaping and sca~ people go* 

back? 

A: kich young Russian are you talking abut? The one in Shanghai 4ho 

ieft US frm the Mter Fbrks capany? 

Q: Yes. 

A: b, I muld say that that tzis mst d. That was one of the 

reasons why, of case the whole nature of that particular episode ws 

sa~hat: sensational to the people he lived with in Shanghai kt it ws 

definitely not a typical thing to have o c m d because on the one hand 

mst of the people &o had emigrated from Russia muld be afraid to go 

back. R.r the other hand, chances of obtaining an entry visa d d 

almst nil. So things of this nature did happen occasionally kt very few 

and far betxea. 

Q: So *re eren't too many people getting out? 

A: No. (3utside of the blanket anmesty which I have mentioned &ich the 

Red govemxmt granted following the end of brld kr I1 which of course 

had proved to te an acnesty vdth loopholes because a number of people, as 

m found out later on, ere arrested and tried and jailed or sent to 

concentration c q for ~ various periods of the. &It: that ms the only 

period in &ich sizeable groups of people, thowands of people, did go 

back to Russia. mtil then, even individuals going back to Russia *re 

very llmlmal. 

Q: h& =re talking abut your wife earlier. Cauld you give re a little 

bit abut her background? 

A: Certainly. wife's dad ws Polish. His first name was Sigimmd or 

Sigmd actually kxt in Russia application it was proitzounced Sigipajnd and 

his fatEaerls m, which is important dum you think abut na~s in the 

Russian context because the father's n a is ~ used, his father's name ws 

January so in Russian usage he was called Si iPajnd Jamarievitch. hnd 

his last MIE was Sokolovsky and I believe h t they ere able to trace 

their fdly tree to me of the nobles in Polish, in the days of the 

Polish kingdan. 

wife's mther ms born, just as my dad, in Ukraine and my wife was born 

in Siberia. J3er dad, for a r#rmbaw of years ms a m e r of a zumber of 

gold mima an the bairn side of the hmur F2iver &ich is the bmdary 

line be- China and Ebmsia, or actually Russia and Manchuria, tihe point 

at &ich there is so rmch tension bewen Russia and aina and *re 

they actually had s m wnaLl skirmishes a few years ago, In any case, 

that's &re my wife spnt the very early days of her childhood. Her 

granchther, whm she greatly admired 4 wtao apparently left a rather 

distinct Impression on her, ms a midwife, not properly schooled--had very 

little education--kt ms a very capable midwife who traveled on horseback 


be

Nick hmdavsky 101 

in that *ole region, even in winterthe. Her family--my wife's family, 

her parents--wen thou& they ere not walthy-her father did not om the 

gold mines, he only managed than for the mner. 

They lived quite well and apparently just abut that t h her father, with 

his savings, managed to buy tw or three small gold mines, very tiny ones 

as I understand and he mtid to her that when she d d grm up and be 

ready to marry, one of tbse gold mines d d be hers FJhich of course 

never actually took place because very shortly following that the family 

had to escape acmes the river to China. 

I have nwer mt my father-in-law. He v w still alive at the titrre &en we 

were rrrarrjled but I: believe he died very shortly in the inland areas of 

Qlina and it is my recollection that he died violently. He m on sorne 

geological expedition sombre in the inner parts of &ina and he ws 

caught by bandits and they dug a hole Iln the ground-a sizeable hole--and 

they kept hkn there imprisoned in that hole tryFng to obtain sor&e information 

that they thm&t he had and I believe that's haw he died. That's my 

recollection, that he did sorrueth very shortly after w =re marzied and 

I have never seen him. 

I did meet my umther-in-law who ms a very kind person, extrennely warn-hearted. 

I got along very fine with her and I liked her very rmch and she died 

during our stay in the Philippine Islands and was buried there. I also 

met my wife's older brother, Ibnat, who ws among those who returned to 

Russia follcrwing the amnesty and never ws heard fim again. And I mt my 

wife's yaunger sister, brita, the only Catholic in the family because 

she attended a Catholic convent and she switched to the Catholic faith. 

@ wife's father was a Catholic kt a m-practicing Catholic. As a 

matter of fact he ~ 8 , 

I d d 

say, probably agnostic or samething like 

that and despised priests and ministers of every faith. And the rest of 

the family was Russian Orthodox. 9 wife's older sister Nina lives now in 

California. I also mt her brother Gleb K~IO died of cancer a few years 

ago ia California. 

The M l y mwed to W £011 the breakdm of the bhite Russian 

admidstratiun b Siberia and her ""fi ather managed to take a part of the 

gold Eran the mine at the time with him lut kcause they ere evacuated by 

the Japanese wpditimary corps, they had to go to Japan before they 

reached W. I don't know or recall any &*ls of how it happened, 

whether it ms for the safekeeping or whether the Japanese actually insisted 

on that, bllt *y took possession of the gold which was brought in. And 

it took nrg dfe's father sathimg like tm years of very heavy correspondence 

and legal efforts to obtain the release of only part of that gold. Psld 

again, I'm hazy on all the &tails there. I only Zaww about it through 

hearsay. But at one th M this gold or portion of it ms released, 

her father received fran fihe owners a payroent for his senrice uhich ws 

extremely sizeable and the fortunes of the Tdly shot up tramdously and 

they mwed into a msch better house, they employed b e servants again as 

they used to in Fbsia. 

And then one of his friends £ran Russia c a to ~ him ~ with sarre proposition 

for a biness venture and said that he needed a stake-out for that because 

he -8 pmnile~s himself but it =s a sure-fire proposition and there was 

no way he could lose, et cetera. He WLS not asking for my wife's father 



to join him as a partner, he just mted a loan so that he could get 

started and so her father agreed to that and mst of the fortune which he 

had at that time was given to that character and that ws the last that 

they haw seen of it. And so, very shortly their fortune had shot down 

again end they never really recovered frat it, Wen I rret my wLfe in 

Tsingtao they existed by letting out roam in the house ach all the 

trmbers of the fdly, by scraping every pemy that they had, including my 

wife who, prim to the time when she came to Tsi,ngtao, ws umking in 

Smqjhai as a mwie theater usheress and they m~~naged to buy W s house. 

So they Ere letting out marns and that's how they managed to exist. 

Q: Us her father a Russian nationalist? Of Polish extraction? 

A: EU&t, emctly, yes. 

Q: my did the grandparents, Ere tihey fran Siberia or did they go with 

their sun when he becam mmger of the gold mine? 

A: I don't laow that part of the family history at all. I muldn't be 

able to respond to that. 

Q: You =re married in June 1945, I believe and the Japanese forces 

surrendered shortly thereafter. Cauld you tell ~IE a little bit abut 

that? 

A: Certainly. In a sense, it ms not anywhere near as impressive a 

ceremmy ta me as it might be expected. hoking back at the tlme of the 

surrender cer-ny, the tine when hrican troops ere arriving in 

Tsingtao--which I have described before-there was rruch mre el-t of 

surprise and this very impressive display of powx tJhich accanpanied the 

krican arrival in Tsingtao which, to me at least, completely avershadotad 

the rather formdl nature of the sum~r ceremonies. It ms a strictly 

military type of an affair. Representative wdts of the brim Sixth 

Marine Mvision =re in foxaation at the race course track and the 

representative units of the Japanese garrison =re also in formatian. It 

isn't that the *ole &vision of either side or both sides =re in 

formatian &It the whole thhg m just cer&al, a formal thing just to 

mark this mt on paper and to carry it out for history and posterity and 

for administrative use that in fact, the Japanese Amy--or the part of it 

which ms garrisoned in Tsingtao--had surrendered and this sumendex ws 

accepted. Actudlly there, as in other parts of China, by the PPnerican 

Army or by representatives of the hrican Anaed Forces on behalf--& 

that ws technically important itan--on behalf of the CZllnese Nationalist 

Govezr~~lent, on behalf of Kai-Shek's govermmt because the surrender 

was taking place in China and the krican forces were there only on 

behalf of Wang Kai-Shek's govemt, to assure the peace-keeping facilities 

and insure that law and order muld prevail and that Eans of transporting 

Japanese wnits back to Japan mld be provided for. TZle *ole thing took 

very little t-. There ms mre time spent in bringing those units to 

the race course and liniryg thm up. And then in a matter of sam fifteen 

minutes or so, the surrender docurmnts =re signed and the victors mrched 

to &ir hrracks and those TJho had lost marched to their barracks and 

that th@ end of it. 


Nick &emiavsky 103 

Q: lhat happened nat? Did the Japanese forces start- out? 

A: Yes. The Amxican navy provided transport ships and in no tirrre at 

all, the Japanese forces =re removed. As a matter of fact, even prior to 

the day of surrender--not in Tsingtao ht tihe day the Japanese govemnrznt 

surrendered--as I mentioned the Japanese troops Ere restricted to their 

barracks so they became absolutely invisible in the city and of course 

their -what limited visibility ws lmnediately taken aver by a magnitude 

of a thousand or so hrican visibiliv because the Americans =re great 

in ramber and =re rmch more mobile with jeeps and trucks and personnel 

carriers. They just ovemred and ovenhelmed Tsingtao-they ere all 

over. 

Q: kre there any black troops arrrmg tihe krican forces that you can 

remenber? 

A: YRs. atere -re no detachments, there =re no segregated units. But 

there =re saw blacks. Not a great nmkr and mre ammg the navy rather 

than the wine corps and I d d say not too m y atmmg the marine air 

wing or the navy construction battalion, the seakes. 

Q: Did this create any sort of cgmrotiun in Tshgtao? 

A: No, not really. I don't think it really created any cmtion. 

Q: &re they a navelty? That's a t 

I mean. 

A: Not to any great extent. Perhaps because there -re so few of them. 

Q: bw large a crowd watched the surrender cererwny? 

A: Not an overly large ane, 

Q: It msn't a festival typ of . . . 

A: No, it ww just a scattering of people. The race course track is 

located, is situated in a bowl--not truly--but there are &l rises of . 

ground all around it and on the inland side there are the hills, this 

muntain chain that sumaunds Tsingtao and so an the wises of g r d of 

those bldfs there d d be scum people standing here and there and watching 

it, not with any great interest actually. 

Q: Did yau see any of the British and Americans who had ken interned 

during the war reappear at this th? 

A: No, I don't recall any. 

Q: Ihere .ere no camp8 close to Tsingtao? 

A: There were, so far as I can recall--not to my knwledge at that time 

lxlt th~ou&~ reading--I believe there WAS at least one or tw camps in the 

Shantxlllg peninsula which =re within a relatively short distance. But I 

don't red1 any of the British or hrican people reappearing on the 

scene. Rut again I should clarify this with my saying that, for osle 

thing, I d d not have hom any of than personally so that limited my 



personal hvolvawnt in this and for another w, a mmber of things 

ere hap- Wch directly involved me personally and =re of such 

nature that I was mre concerned w ith what vas happening to lrre and to my 

f d y than &ether or not the people that =re interned ere caning ba&. 

Q: at 

things ere these? 

A: kll , first of all, witZlin as I recall a ~ e or k tw following the 

surrender, I had lost my job and that involved me directly and personally. 

A: Becawe my job ws not with the British-hrican Tobacco Company as 

such, it ms with the Japanese occupational administration of that property 

and that occupational Rrtministratim collapsed at the same time that Japan 

surrendered and the factory rn shut do= because it took a long tine to 

have the British-krican omership of the factory take possession of it. 

The persame1 dm were in the camps, in many cases-and again this is not 

fran personal bledge but fran reading abut it--many of those people 

=re ill and undernourished and did not return to their prevl,ous job 

imnediately following their release. me hrican and British military 

authorities =re occupied with m y 

other very pressing problem an their 

hands so there vas a lapse of a rather long duration when things were very 

mch in the state of flux and no- really m.s happening empt for the 

fact that the Japanese occupational authority had been terminated. 

Q: So & plant vas closed down for the next tm or three mths and then 

resta£Eed with the original. British? 

A: 1 d d suppose so because . . . 

Q: Ihd you taken the place of a British guard? 

A: I d d say definitely no because in a colonial structure that edsted 

under the British aduhhtration, there as not such a thing as a British 

guard standing guard at the gate or the door. A job like that was attended 

either by Qlinese, ILindu or perhaps RussW because it ws entirely 

improper with the prestige of the colonial British administration to have 

British subjects doing that sort of assigrment. 

- 

Q: k11, hy didn't they allow the a s e guard to contime? In other 

mrds , why did you get the job? 

A: You under the Japanese administration? Because they had Chinese 

guards kt they wanted to rsupplemmt that because of the fact that met of 

the factory hands =re Wmse and if they muld have Chinese guards there 

d d be too rmch of a chance, too rruch of an assurance actually, of 

collusion taking place bemen tIae guards and the factory hands so *y 

wanted to have strmebody w b d d , by virtue of naticmd, cultural, language 

barriers, d d be not so likely to participate in that sort of arrangmt. 

Q: b t 

happed to you after you lost ytur job? 

A: For a namber of mnths I was without a job and there *re people all 

over tom who were in a similar situation. There =re no jobs to be had 


Nick ChemLavsky 105 

because the industry-what little there vas OE it in Tsbgtao--just stopped. 

As I mentioned, following the arrival of Amricans on the scene, a hand 

new industry blosscllned out and that ms the ~ t c l u type b of industry and 

I just had no erq>erience, no knuwledge and no interest to becarne a part of 

that hduatry. And so, for m y mths, e dsted most precariously and 

there ere people all around us, to a great degree at that th, w wuld 

almst, you mdght say, extst because of the newly made acquaintanceship 

and friendships in s m cases with the memher8 of hrican military. And 

all too often, fox instance, our d s mld be misting of the time 

M = d d be partying with those people and that d d be the only 

tine tihat e d d actually eat, or ~ r close y to it. My parents, for 

hstame, my dad also lost his job . . . 

rn OF SIDE ONE 

A: . . . for a restaurant and a bakery and confectionary shop vihich was 

being nm by the Russian Anti-Wst cdttee. It wm one of the 

my-maldng enterprises. And of course entire Russian Anti-cormmist 

Carmittee ms terminated imnediately followhg the surrender. The whole 

structure of life that w hew during the m r years came to an end. 

A: kll, because it was a creation of the Japanese occupational forces. 

The sponsors =re gone and the product of those sponsors ms out. So my 

parents strictly by chance, hit on an idea of providing hommade nu;& for 

the Pwerican mines and se-. I don't hm how nu& intention there 

vas in their original thhkhg, but as it turned out the clientele was 

predominantly of the type who wre mre of the shy or mre resewed type 

of pung people who really didn't care that- or didn't care fx do it 

on that large a scale, to spend all of their liberty hours at nightclubs 

or bars, and dw mld feel sarre sort of an elant of family life aich 

they had left back in the States by just caning to this strange fore* 

catple dm spoke very hdtlngly and in very brdcen English lxlt who ere 

obviously wmn-hearted and who provided wholes-, homecooked noeals for 

them. And sonre mans of drinkhg-q parents d d 

usually kuy vodka and 

thse kids, after they becam friends with mg parents, they muld cane 

back again and again and mld usually bring whiskey a c h they could 

obtain very inerrpensively £ran the PX store. And so tlxough the means of 

this idea of prodding bcodced rreals, my parents managed, just barely, 

to feed -elves in the process and to get a few dollars to pay their 

rent on the '1:- *ere they Ere staying. 

I contimed to le without a job for a nmber of mmths-I don't remmkr 

how my, My wife be- very upset with the &ole setup and felt that 

things -re getting to a rather catastrophic state where t ~ e wuld not have 

any means of supporting ourselves and she that perhaps it d d be 

s-thing of a temporary solution to the problem if she d d leave for 

Shan&ai and join her brother Donat *an she had not seen thraugh all the 

war years. And in that way I cdd join my parents aml stay with thern and 

some- in the wy of a reduction in overall expenses d d te accomplished. 


%re was no mans of transportation as of yet bemen various pohts in 

China. The railroad system w totally disrupted and there wis no regular 

ship service bebeen Shan%haj. and Tsingtao as there wxs prior to the war. 

So my wUe, thr- several acquahtences of mrs, lead that there vas 

an extrarely roundabout way of reaching Shanghai by taking a small fishing 

vessel north frm Tsingtao-which wis in the opposite direction from 

Sm&ai--and travel to sate point on the Shantung peninsula and then 

traveling part of the way by train and part of the wy by bat again, she 

managed to reach Shanghai and join her brother there and I maved in with 

my parmts. 

It was, at that time, just very shortly before my wife left for Shanghai, 

that rn xet this young Arrerican marine dm ms about my age at the timehe 

still is of caurse abut my %@--who today is one of the senior editors 

of Field's Publishhg Ccmpany's krld Book. This is in Chicago. I don't 

m t 

to sound disparaging kt the title "senior editor" does not man as rmch 

as it sounds like it mi@ man--there are scores and scores of senior 

editors. Eht, in any case, Ed Nelson, my very good friend, was just a 

young mty-ane-year-old marine whan w ~t at that titoe and with whcnn I 

and particularly my parents--they scad to have the facility of attracting 

young boys and providing sathing in the wray of surrogate parentship for 

thaw-and so e became very friendly. And vhen after about a year or so 

Ed returned to the States, it wm thr- his endeavors in representing us 

to his parents tJho lived and continue to live .In Rockford, Illinois and 

are quite wlthy and ell off--or perhaps mre than that--it ws throu& 

his efforts to his parents, he representing us to them and making such a 

good case of it that, even thou& they had never met us of course and the 

whole idea rmst have sounded extremely far fetched and ridiculous to help 

this f d y 

of Wte Russians in China to caae to this country, but tihey 

agreed to do so. They had taken the proper legal steps to provide sponsorship 

for both my wife and my parents and that enable us to care to this country 

in the later part of 1950. 

And, as I mtioned, my wife left for Shanghai and I stayed with my parents 

and s d r e at about mid-winter, I obtained my first job following the 

loss of job with the tobacco canpany. I got a job as civilian supe~sor 

with a private construction contractor dm was mrking for the American 

And Forces in rehabilitating and rerideling or constructing new facilities 

at variw installations where lbnerican troops =re housed, either in 

Tshgtao itself or the airport, sixteen miles away fran TsFngtao vihich in 

effect, becarre an Anoerican military air base. 

Q: It sounds to ue like the United States takeaver ms msch more disruptive 

than the Japanese takeover. 

A: ell, I don't think that the emphasis which is present in your question 

is really justified. It msn't SO mch because there ms an Amrican 

takeover-even though in effect that ms true, there ms an hrican 

*over--but it wasn't so rmch the takeover that was disruptive. It was 

r a ~ that r the Chinese govemtal structure was not prepared for the 

end of the war and there ms imnediate and cuntirwws and continuously 

mre aggravated collapse of that structure. As one elmt totally 

independent kt parallel to the disruption of the industry, for instance, 

was ever-increasing. Mation. 



lbmdiately folladng the Japanese surrender--imnediately means within a 

few =&s--the currency which xe employed at that th--and that ws the 

Chinese puppet govenment currency and I might mntim here, I know I 

failed to do so, the Qlinese puppet goverr~nent which the Japanese had 

installed was headed by an erhremly wll-knmm name in (hinese politics, 

bhg ki, who w an elder statesman in Qlina, dead many years naw, 

rmch older than Chiang Ui-Shek, and m s generally rumred to be the lover 

of the last Chinese ruling empress. He was of the Mandarin class and ms 

a mmber of the Chinese governrental circles preceding the ainese revolution. 

kt despite the impressive nam that he possessed, his government, as I 

mtioned before, was totally ineffectid. 

In any case, the currency hich w used in the Japanese-occupied territory 

was replaced very shortly thereafter with Nationalist Qlinese currency. 

And withb eeks after this currency rnade its appearance--= had to turn 

in all the curremy that m had on hand and w =re exhanging it for the 

Nationalist government currency-within a few eeks the Nationalist Qlinese 

currency, the inflation brou@t its value duwn to where it ms mrth 

sathing like one-fifth of &at it w when it was introduced. I r-ber 

that of course the only meaningful gauge for us to measure the value of 

Chinese currency v w its relative value to the American currency and 

hrican currency was eveere here the Amxican troops =re. And I 

rerrmnber that, I believe initially it ws one Qlinese yuan--one Wse dollar Wch in prewar days ws tm to one in regards to American currency 

and that WM a stable exhange rate for years and years in the 1930s--kt 

here, followbg the sumendex I believe it ws--and this I really don't 

remanber that mll--kt I thi& it ws at 100 to one. One hundred QI.inese 

yuans to one hrican dollar. 

- 

In no tlnre at all it ws 300 to one, 500 to one, 700 to one. In other 

mrds, the value of m s e currency was just disappearing before our eyes 

and within tm years, when I was in Shmghai mrking for UNRRA--United 

Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration--I being paid what 

actually w $60 to $70 in United States currency a mnth mr2cing as the 

chief guard in a mtow pool there lxlt I a quote millionaire unguote, 

because in Chinese currency I was getting sawwhere a w d 17 or 18,000 

Chinese yuans and that is a pretty good indication of the complete and 

total breakup of the mse govemmmts ability to govern the country. 

The ability w just not there. 

So to canre back after this long passage, I muld say that no, it wsn't 

the American occupation that ws disruptive. Very obviously it ms the 

Chinese goverrment's inability to govern that ms disruptive and that 

involved not orily us foreigrzers dm lived in Qlina at that time, it involved 

equally almst as badly the native Chinese population. 

Q: Woae decision ms it to use Nationalist Chinese currency? 

A: k11, it certainly was Chiang Kai-W's decision. The decision 

itself actually is above criticism--it the only logical thing to do to 

re-introduce hto the liberad-franJa~se-occupatian areas, the azinese 

Nationalist currency. The fact that rnade the currency so mrthless was 

the fact that the Wese goverrnnent was SO obvi(~1~1y not able to govern. 

If I could, at the risk of be- presumptuous, introduce a contemporary 

note into this discussion, this is ht is happening to Pnnerican dollars 


Nick &erniavsky 108 

today. The problems that our goverrmrent is having today, &ich Watergate 

demxlstrated so eminently, is the fact that it is driving dom the value 

of the Amexican dollar and driving up the value of gold on international. 

market. Naw w are witnessing a nrrch mre rwderate degree of lack of 

trust in brican gwermmt on the international, stage, as was present in 

China in regards to a la& of trust because the Chlslese gavemmnt's lack 

of ability to govern ws so ohriaus in so many facets, in every facet of 

a ' s 

I Q: b t 

nationalist life. W.ch in fact in three and a half short years 

drove that gwerrnnent dam and klmed over the dmle of Qlina to (Xlinese 

crnmts. 

are $om examples of their failure to govern ~ ll? 

A: Che of the prim exauples ws the fact that W's Nationalist Amy, 

was unable to physically take possession of the areas FJhich the Japanese 

Arlrry mcupied. In sme instances--because of the help which was provided 

by American armed forces-transport ships and transport planes ere provided 

for the Chiraese Nationalist Amry to bring them ahead of the Chinese Ccnnwnist 

Axmy into same k.ey regions. ht it ~ias impoesible to airlift or to sealift 

enough of the m s e Nationalist troops to assure that in no case muld 

the Red Amy b able b occupy such areas ahead of them. And in fact, 

Wna's Red Amy ms able to occupy all of Manchuria following the Japanese 

surrender there. And by the virtue of that action--avernight, so to 

speak-the Red Amy fell into possession of surplus armaments, equipmt , 

dtiun, that the me million strong, so called Kuanhtng Japanese Army 

had in its hands in Manchuria. And avemigt.lt, the Qlinese Red Amy becam 

a Eomddable fighting force, &ich it alwys ms in the way of military 

discipline and ability to Ei&t, tut lacking in the way of equipnent. 

Another my of demonstrating the minese govermnent 's inability to govern 

was that before the Chinese Nationalist gavermmt vies s e t hidden in 

the mre distant areas of Wna. Now &en it cane beck into possession of 

the Chinese coastal region which Japan occupied and in possession of the 

major cities such as Peking, Tientsin, NanWng and Shanghai, Canton, 

S u b , the degree of corruption of the highest-placed governmnt officials 

b- so evident, so obvFaus, so undeniably right in the plblic eye, that 

the mses of the CMnese people, even if they still had up to that point 

same lingering sense of layalv to the Nationalist government, becam very 

eager converts to the cmmmist message. And the same applied to the 

army, too; in the following resumption of Chinese civil wr, *ole units-and 

I don't rwm mall units--all the my up to divisions or corps, &dch 

ream tbuands and thousands of privates and NCOs and c d i n g officer 

personnel including general rank officers, d d switch over to the Ccmnslist 

side. Disintegration of the a s e gownanent and its army ws a daily 

news itan almrst irrmediately following the Japanese surrender. 

Q: About three sll.Reks after the switch aver in currency, inflation occurred 

and you ere without a job at that point. 

Q: Your wife at this point is still in SmgJd? 


Nick Qlerniavsky 109 

Q: ht happened next? 

A: After I obtained this job with a private contractor mrking for Plnrelrican 

a d farces, interestingly ~JIO@, I mt a couple who =re my wife's old 

friends frm Shar@ai, and he was chief supervisor for this contractor and 

I ws ane of the line supervisors. bk =re mrking at different installations 

at Tsingtao and also at the air base, and about a mnth or tw following 

my getting this job my wife returned fran Shanghai. and joined nu; in Tsingtao. 

Psld so w =re reunited. 

I wxked for this contractor for a few mcmths, I muld say probably no 

mre than three zrrmths, and by then I knewmy my around the new structure 

of our life in Tshgtao under, as you have said, hxican occupation now. 

And I carrre into possession of sosne piece of intelligence that if I muld 

wrk directly, not through a contractor but directly for the American 

military c d , 

I d d 

obtain a mxch better-paying job. And so I wmt 

to the personnel office &ere they ere taking applications for a job, and 

raade an application for supervisory position and for a while nothing m s 

hap- 

I'll have to backtrack a m311~~~t here; hen my wife was in Sxmghai with 

her brother, she had rrret at srme party at Wch her brother and a person 

with d-mn he as roormLng and ny wife had gone in Cathay btel I believe. 

This a party &ch ws predauinatley mixed of the natives in China-natives, 

predaninately of course, not ainese but Russian or any other 

nationality-and krican military personnel. Partying of this nature vas 

going on all aver; natives =re happy to see the mr years khind them, 

and the restrictions of food ratianing and so forth, and hrican military 

personnel were happy to met socially with citizens and enjoy drinking and 

dancing and so forth. 

And so at this party my wife mt a cammdhg officer of the 32nd Navy 

Construction Battalim, Seabees Camander Gillette. as unit ~ias in 

Tsingtao and he =s just an either leave or biness in Shanghai, and he 

-timed to her that he d d be going back to Tshgtao shortly. She 

mentioned to him that her 1Plsh-d ws in Tsingtao. 

In any case, I dted for any opming or any job directly with PPllewican 

a d forces for sum time and nothing ms happening. And so, I don't 

r-ber the details nw, but at one of the tinoes *n I vent back for an 

inte~ew, to inquire if there ms any possibility for the job, I was 

talking with a navy cammder FJtaose KMUE I don't recall now, who ms in 

charge of this whole construction phase of operation in Tsingtao. And so 

I becam a n a dropper ~ and I let the nam of Camander Gillette ccm into 

our corrversat3xm and tw days later I received a call to cane to the 

personnel office and when I cam there I talked to the Chjllese civilian 

clerk there dmn I had mt before, &o used to be errtranely indifferent to 

me. He ww extrendy attentive this tire and pulled out my application 

and looked at the annotation that appeared now at t3w bttm and was 

extrely impressed and said, "Oh, this is very, very good. You are 

getting a job as a semi-professional and that is very good." 

So I WB hiwed as a construction supemisor by the U.S. Navy. I = 

assigned a jeep at my disposal and at that time I was just leanzing bw to 

drive. In fact I ws learning just about a mnth or so before that vhm I 


Nick Chermlavsky 110 

was rn- for a private contractor at the air base hre I tmrked w ith 

those NCOs, and they showid IIE the basic rules of drivZng and I still 

extremely rusty. As a netter of fact, in one of the ths they =re 

showing me how to drive and I was driving the personnel carrier, which is 

a military small sized type of a truck, I d me right through a tennis 

court and took a tennis net ri&t with me, which wm actually negligible 

becawe R had plenty of replacement nets there. 

In any case, 1 was ass+ed a jeep and I ms pounded fran it very shortly 

after the motor pool officer observed me trying to jockey that jeep around 

the mtor pool canpaazd. But everything still msn't lost because I vas 

assigned a Chinese civilian driver, so I was being chauffeured around. 

'Itae first job to Aich I was assigned to bild a Ebtler house which is 

a mtal . . . a pre-assanbled type of a building. It w s a Ixlilding that 

caes with units that are modular and then are assanbled an the site. A 

'butler-type of a house, back of the Strand Hotel or in their beach area 

. . . this little Wltler-type hause or =rehouse was suppose to have been 

a storage -rehouse for navy hspital facilities. They had sanebody else 

for the job before, and they =re not happy with that person-they fired 

&-and I was suppose to take aver. 

At the tirrre when I todr over, the constructian site consisted of rock 

pilings, which ere supposed to becane the foundation, and &re =re 

lines st- all over the poles to indicate the elevation. I believe it 

was scmething like one foot at one end of a rather sizable bilding , and 

about three feet at the other end. My fdliarity or my knowledge or rrry 

background of experience, ddchever yau mt to call it, in canstxuctbn 

ms totally mmdetent. They =re actually limited to my tw or three 

mnths participation in construction KO& I was wrking for a private 

cantractor. So I was abolutely at a loss as to a t 

I w s suppose to do 

next. And of course, the fact of my keeping the job ws directly 

proportional to my ability to conceal tbs fact of my Wrance of the job. 

So I cantimed to requisition txucks frm the mtor pool and requisition 

Chinese laborers fran the labor pool, and m wuld go to the sites around 

the city hre w cdd obtain more rock, d I contirmed to do vhat ms 

started by my predecessor. The job lasted for about a mth because like 

so many other things in the military, once it was started mbdy higher 

up decided that it WIS mt necessary, so the job ms cancelled. A d that 

Pleat oftent~s you had a job for a day. 

For a couple of mths after that 1 jobless again. bk had to rwve to 

another house because w could not pay the rent on the house *re m =re 

staying. So E mved to a former Japanese textile mill, I believe--housing 

on the autdcirts of tom. And there ere aparmts in this house. The 

blocks of the how- =re hilt along Japanese lines--not, yau knm, a 

traditiwral Japanese housing type. Everything was constructed of concrete 

and IPOdesn bsildhg mterial, kt for instame, the sleeping accamndations 

consisted of bdcs along the wlls, tm lxlnks along each side a1 

apparently wa~ living roan or dining roan type of accarmodatim. %- 

course w never used those bunks; e used a regular type, ~stern-style 

bed. 

h any case, this particular busing ws very, very cheap and PE stayed 

there for a nuder of mths. And that w the tine when E e re so broke 


Nick chemiavsky 111 

that for about a mth, the d y food tihat my wife and I had was a gallon 

can of peanut htter and smre Chinese bread--steamed corn bread, CZ.clnese 

bread--that e d d by and plt peanut bstter an. I dm't recall how I 

obtained this job, but ri&t around the comer fran the place where e 

lived, there ms a huge cappound which as called a Surplw Property 

Canpaund. And that wits the place where Amrican units--mine corps or 

navy as they Ere beginnkg already at that time, slowly, of course, and 

much. faster later an, to becm deactivated--dd bring their eqpipaent 

to. And then the personnel d d be shipped back to the United States. 

The surplus proprty yard, then, d d catalog the equipmt and that 

consisted of everything, fran socks to Me wlk-in type of freezer units 

that they used for mss halls for keeping perishables in, to self-propelled 

cranes--everything except rifles and rmnit1.0218. k had just enormous 

amxl~lts of all types of aaaterial. And the surplus pmperty ws catalogued, 

as I said; everything ms divided into three general categories: material 

to be destroyed-and I don't haw how many thousands or hundreds of thousands 

of dollars wrth of material was just hd, including probably millians 

of miles of cables, electrical cables that they cleared out--material that 

was to be shipped bck to the States, and raaterial that was to be turned 

over to the m s e Natidist gavemrmt. 

In any case, I obtained a job at this facility and mrked there for a 

rwmber of rrrmtb until I cpit that job on the spur of the mnrrent. 

Q: my did you quit? 

A: I was there as a head supemisor. I had tw Qzinese supervisors 

wrking under re, and w had a gang of Wnese laborers who -re do 

acm mrk of sorting our variuus material. And there =re four or 9 ive the 

navy searam nho viere also helping in the various activities around the 

ccmpound. A young junior-grade lieutenant hse ME I don't recall now, 

MIS in overall c m of the facility, and undex him wre tw kmant 

Officers. I don't recall their rimes either, but one ms Scottish, his 

nanre w Mac sm~thimg or otiher, and the other Warrant Officer ws very 

reserved and a very friendly and very urmoticable type of a person. T3e 

d d just go abut his mrk. And one of these krrant Officers had to do 

paper wxk in a mall Wlding right next: to the gate *ere they lxlnked 

and also had smthing in the way of a small office. 

The other one, Mac, on the o&r hand, had smething of a dual personality. 

He t~tzs drinking very heavily, and I don't recall now whether it was vhen 

he ws drunk or vhen he ws soher, or &ich wld cause him to be very 

friendly or very hostile. He almys d d 

fluctuate b t~en 

the m. On 

some days he wuld ignore my greet- as I wuld CUIE in at the faciliv, 

and ignore UE .thmu&wt the day, not say a mrd, and then perhaps out of 

a clear blue sky he muld make SUE dispar ing remark. And without any 

reason for a change, l3-e nexC day he might % extremely friendly and 

engage in all sorts of friendly chitchat and things of that nature. 

In any case, e =re engaged at that particular t b in tm enorarxts 

operations. k ere receiving frm the States boatloads and boatloads of 

coal and lhr. & =re my dow in a ravine; the whole campound ms 

sort of Mlt on a spiral around this indentation in the ground. And so 

in the center of the bottan of this compcrund we had a huge mound of coal 


Nick Qzerniavsky 112 

which m had received fram the States, and none of us =re actually fdliar 

with how coal should be stored in such huge quantities. And there ms s e discussion abut the possibility of it catching fire because of 

improper ventilation £ran the innermost parts of the mxxnd. It ms actually 

a hill of coal, and so une =re concerned about that. 

And following the conclusion of our stor coal, e started to receive a 

o six-by-six trucks in almst 

endless colmm bemen the facility and the harbor unloading this lumber. 

And I was very directly involved in this, directing the drivers and finding 

than different areas in which to unload lumkr , etcetera. 

few boatloads of ltllllkr. bk had a fleet 9 

So, on the rmming ~EII I wit my job there, I had journeyed with one of 

the mpty trucks to the harbor and ms involved in my task of directing 

mines@ drivers in their assignments. And I had just alighted from the 

truck in which I came to the harbor when Mac walked aver to me--and I 

remgnber this just as -11 as the day it todc place-and without any 

prelhharies, without saying hello or good morning or any explanation why 

he ww going to say this, told m, 'Nick, I 'm going to give you one tmre 

chance, and if you don't shape up that will be the end of it and I'll have 

to fire yw ." 

And I was still very yowg and -rely hot-headed in those days, and I 

could feel the flood rush to my face and without blink% an eye, I responded 

to him, 'Mac, I won't give you a chance to fire m, I quit ." And I hopped 

on one of the trucks that had just been loaded with lumber and wts heading 

back to the facility, and I rode back with it. And ve came to the 

gate, I juuped off and since w llved around the corner I walked back 

hme, and I told my wife, '"Well, this is it; I'm without a job again." 

And since this happed in the middle of the mek, a few days before the 

payday, and I was so rnwd I never wnt to the paymster's office to collect 

final check, s d r e in the innards of the U . S. Navy lkpartment there 

totally lyssed-up accounts [are] , where probably interest is growing 

on them or scmthhg. I have never collected it, and the pay ~kis very . . . 

the pay ms less for this job than it was for my previous job, my position 

grade was 1-r. But nevertheless, at the t*, whatever it ws--I don't 

r d r h many dollars there =re due me, but: I never collected that. 

A: I probably should, Ixlt it would take hiring a lawyer and all that. I 

imagine they have s- provisions for taking care of unpaid accounts. 

Q: &at did your wife say *en you cam ham= withnut a job? 

A: kll, I don't remember specifically what ranarks she made, kt in 

simations of this nature my wife has usually been quite understanding and 

sympathetic. gEe was not pleased with the turn of the events, but there 

wasn't mch that she could do abut it. And I was unemployed for a f ile, 

ht a number of events took place following that Wch drastically changed 

our situation again and necessitated mre travel. 

The first of these events ms that my father obtziined a job. He w hired 

in Tsingtao by a recruiting team which came to Tsingtao En3m Slxqhai frcm 

Unrra [thited Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency]. And at that tim 



Unrra WAS involved in a rather hge and mslti-faceted project of bringing 

food supplies and supplies of other nature, such as medicinal supplies and 

gasoline, oil, etcetera, to the war-ravaged areas of QIina. 

And at this end, the hrican Navy turned over to Unrra a fleet of TSTs. 

LST stands for Landing Ship Tank, and primarily is a cargo, amphibious-type 

ship designed and built during the mr by a number of various ship-lmilding 

yards--I think primarily by Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, California. 

It's a slow speed, flat-bottd ship, ideally desipped for amphibious 

operations or for delivery of freight or cargo to ports &ich do not have 

docking facilities. In any case, krra becarne involved in operation of 

this newly acquired fleet, and they Ere hiring ship personnel of all 

positions involved in operations of ships. They mxe Fn need of msters, 

captains for the ships, and deck officers and engine-roam personnel and 

deckhands. And because of my dad's techical background and years of 

experience as an engineer with Smghai kter brks bqany . . . 

END OF TAPE 

A: And so my dad got a job, an the basis of his experke with the 

Sbnghai kter FJoh Campany pr-ily. Even so, I d d suspect largely 

because of his lack of fluency in the English language, his initial position 

with UNRRA's fleet was not as an engineer, not even as a fourth engineer, 

ht as an oiler, and that's the lmst position there is in a machine 

shop. And so with this newly acquired job, my dad mwed to Shanghai where 

the headquarters for the whole operation was, started his new position, 

and my mther Eollo~ him to shanghai. Within a mmth or tw and at 

their insistence since it looked like jobs =re mre plentiful, 1 left my 

wife in Tsingtao and she stayed with her f&ly and I mwed dom to Shan&ai 

myself, reversing the prwious arrangement dua I stayed in Tsingtao and 

my wife mwad to Shanghai. 

Q: h t 

year was this? 

A: bt ms in . . . 1947, I beliwe. Either late 1946 or the beginning 

of 1947. Sawhere in that perid. I joined my dad and also my mther 

dm had gone on few cruises with my dad on bard of the ship on d~ich my 

dad wrked thrmghmt his eighteen months, I believe, of wrk for UNRRA, 

on the cruise from Shanghai to hfoo, which is also on Shantung peninsula, 

but not of Tsingta.0. In other mrds, on the other side of the peninsula 

beyond Tslngtao. As I mentfoned, it ws saraie time in the winter, and 

sarehow it seem to me it ws in Wstmas tb that w took that cruise 

so that m have arrived in Moo for Chrisms there-samething to that 

effect. It &finitely ms in the winter &m E came to Ckfoo; the whole 

shore was cavered with snm, It was quite cold. 

dad w hoping that I d d be able to get a job aboard one of those 

"K 

- 

s ps too, but it didn't wfk out. 'ke personnel, with exeption of 

deckhands or mhanics in the machine shop, ms all international. For 

instance, on my dad ' s ship aich was called Lon bnkien, the master, the 

captain Italian, the first mate ~ritm, arad then throughout the 

rest of the roster both the deck officers and the engine roan officers 

=re Russian and Gem and Italian and Arrrerican and British. Just about 


Nick U~miavsky 114 

every nationality t~as represented just like the character of SZlanghai 

tkr-t those years too. 

Tvm thbgs that I d d 

like to trention about the cruise to aefoo ms 

me, that as w wre approaching Chefoo, a sister ship of ours, sam kind 

of IST was canhg back £ran Chefoo, and w had this meting out ia the 

open sea, and they =re close amugh &re they could c-icate by the 

use of a lullhorn. They told us that as they =re caning to aefoo in 

their turn, a couple of days before us or so a Nationalist Chinese air 

force bomber Imbed them, and didn't hit than, ht straddled them with tm 

bmbs, and this of course ms a warning frcm the Nationalist Chinese 

govermmt for other ships not to deliver any supplies to the areas of 

&ha Mch =re under Cammist control, and hfoo was under CamaJnist 

Red Army occupation or control at times. So there ws same discussion 

aboard aur ship whether WE should continue to hfoo or turn back, and I 

blFwe they cammdcated by radio with 3mghai headquarters and -re 

told to proceed on, and R did arrive in Chefao without any problem. We 

unloaded our cargo, which consisted of did supplies, some grain, and 

55-gallon d m of oil and gasoline. 

All of us Ere able to car^ ashore in mefoo. k =re processed for the 

call on shore by Red m s e Amy officials, and there =re a mber of 

fonzlal dinners. 'he rnajor one aich was thrown in our honor by the Red 

m s e Cammist officials of the city wts a Wse-style dinner. There 

=re a lot of toasts for mtual friendship, et cetera, and all that junk 

that is usually said on occasions of that nature. And then w =re able 

to discaver a wry tiny foreign colony in Chefoo, which consisted of some 

Russians, s- French, I believe, scm &mums, those people. I remember 

that I becam some&& -re mil-acquainted in the c m e of our three or 

four day stay in &Em, with a young couple whose name w.s Bamgartner, 

and I believe the husband was G e m 

and the wife ms Russian, and I 

visited them a few t hs, had a few meals with them. Chfoo impressed UE 

as a mch smaller city than any ohr place &ere I had been, or mch more 

typically Qlinese than either Tientsin, Tsingao or naturally, Shanghai, 

and mst of the buildings ere typically of W.nese architecture. The 

streets Ere rmch mre mse in appearance too-mre crooked and winding 

and narmier, etcetera. 

In any cae, following the termination of our biness in Chefoo, w 

returned to Shanghai. And as I trentioned, I never obtained the positim 

with UNRRA's fleet Ixtt shortly thereafter I got a job as chief guard at 

UlWU motor pool in T&ang-pl, district of Shanghai, and ms there for-I 

don' t x ed1 how many mmths , lxlt for, I muld say, nearly a year, until 

the UNRRA mission in Q-dm ws closed. And my wife cam to Shanghai too, 

and joined me, and for a aile w stayed with my parents in their aparant, 

particularly during the tinle when me of than, or both my dad and my 

mother, mld b on a cruise. Sounds like a vacation cruise, and I 'm sure 

that's what it was for my mther kt for my dad of course that vim his 

wrk. 

Incidentally, my dad in the eighteen mnhs that tae had this job, managed 

to raise himself to the ladder of the hierarchy an boaxd a ship to a 

position of chief engineer kan the oiler, and I believe that during the 

last six~ll~lths or so of his mrk with this outfit he ws chief engineer 

aboard the same ship that he started, arnd in m y ways it was, for my 



parents, me of the mst enjoyable parts of my dad's mrk history. They 

both enjoyed the sea, and my dad enjoyed his wxk and with prarmtions his 

pay was sizeably increased, and they could live on a ruuch better scale 

than they had done during his time at the kter brks Capany or naturally 

during the war years &en the living itself vms sclmeht dubious at times. 

My job didn't pay nearly as wll at the mtor pool htt nevertheless it 

provided employmnt. As a chief guard at the -tor pool, I was provided 

with transportation to and frm mrk. 'Ihe colllpany mld send a truck for 

rank-&-file personnel, and this truck mld make, just like a bw, a 

circuit of people's places of residence and pi& them up and bring them to 

wrk. With people dm were in supervisory or at least steady positions, 

they d d send individual jeeps, and so a jeep d d care to my hmre and 

pick r E up. 

The company also provided a bicycle because it ws felt that I should, 

periodically, make spot checks at various t b s of the day or night to 

make sure that the guards *re performing their &t.les. And a mber of 

ths I wuld pedal on this bicycle before (phone rings) . . . So as I've 

been saying, a mber of occasions I wuld be pedalling on my bicycle 

before the sun d d be up through mst of the central part of Shanghai 

because e lived at that tfme on Rench concession and I had to traverse 

mat of the nationalist settlenrent in the Huang-pu area where the mtor 

pool was. 

One of the interesting sidenotes on life in Qlina is that of course in the 

Orient the people had been involved in ecology throughout their history 

for thousands and thousands of years--sanething that R in this country 

are just beginning to discover--and part of that, in any Chinese city, and 

on a great scale of course in a m t h size city of Shanghai, ms that in 

m s e a s , men in a big and d m city as Shan&ai or Chinese sections 

of French concessions or Wese sections of international settl-t, did 

not have flush toilets. m y had a t e d d recognize in this country 

today as camping type of toilets, in other wrds portable toilets. 

And each morning throu&out those sections of tom, they d d send out a 

fleet of lanu nu ally pl'lled tank carts, which mild come to each and every 

one of these Chinese houses and collect the mte, and take all that mste 

frm all wer tom to the countryside here it muld be sold to the farmrs 

and then be use to fertilize the fields. So traveling through the city in 

those eaxly hours of the mming mld not be unlike travel- through 

rural parts of Illinois, for instance, at the tim when the farmers are 

spreading mure on their fields. The aroma mld be just as werpowdng 

and just as rmch in evidence, and it made my bicycling nuch less enjoyable 

than it d d have been otherwise, of course. But I had to make those 

trips anpay on occasims. 

At other times I w dd go by jeep. And there is a rather cdcal , curiaus 

episode which imrolves jeep transportation to my place of mrk at that 

time, and I wnder if I should put that in. It involves ny mther, who as 

I mtid before is a character all of her om, extremely unpredictable, 

and with a deliberately vivid imagination. In any case, here is x bt 

happened at that tim. 



There ma sanu3 sort of a breakdown in carrmvlications at the dispatcher's 

office at mtor pool, and so they sent tm jeeps to pick re up, and my 

rmther ms not hare--that ms during the time when my wife and I were 

staring with my parents in their apartlnent-when the jeep arrived on the 

scene, picked m up and brought me to the mtor pool. And nobody else a s 

in the apartment as I -timed. But shortly after I had left the aparmt, 

my mther and a mmm friend of hers arrived fran their shopping trip, and 

wre in the apartmmt when the other jeep arrived. mother was totally 

at a loss. SZle knew that I was not h the apartment and so she presumed 

that I, ddch was the case, that I wm already at mrk. Nevertheless, she 

tried to carrrunicate with the Chinese chauffeur with total lack of any 

progress. He ws saying srmething in Qlinese and she ws saying somethbg 

in a very strange and all of her m mixture of Russian and English. 

Samhere in the process of all this she had a brainstorm, and she bdiately 

recalled that a very good friend of my dad's, who ws wsking with my dad 

years bfore that at the Shan&ai kter brks Canpany, ms now a chief 

engineer on bard of another WWtA LST ship and he was expected any day to 

cam to ShaqzJai. And it w also apected that he was going to bring 

samething In the way of sore delicacies. I thhk that it m s fran Canton 

that he as coming. 

So she Miately got the idea that this jeep was not my jeep frm the 

mtor pool kt a jeep fran U'NRR4 sea fleet, and so she asked the driver, 

'Wlolalai?" vihich was the narc of this friend of theirs, and the driver 

made s m 

kind of proper noises which she decldd to take with affimity. 

She said, 'hlalail bholalai." And the driver, you know, just did not 

deny the fact that it ms not klalai. So, being very carmanding in her 

person, and in her carrying on, my mther instructed her lady friend to 

climb in the back seat, climbed in the jeep herself, and told the driver, 

'Wlolalai! " And off they mt . 

And so about mty minutes later, as I was standing by the gate of the 

wtor pool, there drives in this jeep with a totally flabbergasted azinese 

chauffeur, who irmwliately started making Indian signs to m with his 

hands, and my mther calling to me, 'Wy did this Chinese driver bring 

us here? bk went to go see klalai." And it took a little while for m 

to cum to the ground floor of this whole &-up, ht this perhaps more 

than anything else that I could say wuld describe the my my man behaves 

on occasim, and the my her imagination has, an a mber of occasians in 

her life, put her in a mst uthlievable situation. 

Q: Spe&tng of mix-up in languages, what language m ld your father speak 

on this ZST with an international crew or how did they cdcate? 

A: Mstly In English--and my dad, thr- the years of mrk at Shaq&ai 

kter trJorks Caanpany, had built up not only a very advanced knowledge and 

understarding of variaus machinery bolved in this type of wrk, ht also 

a rather siezable vocabdary of technical tenis. So it was entirely 

possible for him to camanzicate to--whether his superiors or to those dm 

=re mrkbg below him--in hglish. It is actually the general cdcation 

or social type of ccmwnications in English that presented a problem in 

which he is not nearly as fluent in the Ehglish language. 



Q: h t 

was the general state of the ecanomy at this tim in Wna? 

A: Well, it was pretty rmch a disorganized and . . . many new factors 

became present &ich *re not present either during the mr years or 

cturjslg the years preceding the wr. For one thing, the foreign Fnvesmts 

began to be taken over by the ainese gove~gnent because the Nationalist 

goverrrment, when it occupied the areas that -re under Japanese occupation, 

called on the Japanese sponsored plppet goverrment in accepting the repeal 

of unequal treaties. fn many cases this meant that the special sbtus of 

foreign invesimmts in &ha ere dl and void. Also, because of the 

disarray in Nationalist g m m t 

structure and ability to administer the 

areas, the ecancmy was suffering and, as I said, ended in a state of 

disarray, and the mst direct result of that was inflation. 

Inflation had reached the stage *re, for instance, when I was mrking at 

U.N. mtor pool and was making an equivalent of about sixty U.S. dollars a 

mmth, I was being paid -thing in the wy of fifteen to seventeen 

million &se dollars. A d that payment, by the my, m not by check 

kt ly cash. And on pay day they muld bring a truckload of crates, 

moden crates, with Wles of &inese bank notes and each one of us muld 

have to cane to wrk on a pay day with a bag or suitcase, and literally 

haul away aur pay. The smallest Mle, as I recall it, there v m no way 

that you could pay by a Ell, you know, by bank notes like five dollars, 

ten dollars, those thhgs -re just out of existence. They -re all h 

htndles, and the smallest sized bundle as I recall was five hundred thowand 

yuans, which is the Chinese dollar. You d d 

go in a store and tnry a 

pack of cigarettes, or something of that nature, in other wrds a very 

minor pzrchase, and yas wuld toss a W le of five hundred thousand 

dollars on the counter. Sounds very far-fetched, kt that's the way it 

w actudly. 

And the inflation was not same- stationary. To mke a parallel, our 

inflation today in this country is not statlxmaxy. Tsz other wrds it has 

not reached a level and just stayed there. Inflation ms constantly 

growing so in effect it meant that dxm ym d d get your pay, and R 

=re wing paid twice a mnth, that the only my to try not to lose mmey 

xas to imnediately transfer your pay into staples. You d d 

hy so rmch 

food, you'd pay your rent, and dmt little ms left you muld go on the 

black market d transfer it to kited States currency, because that ws the only stable thing. And if you didn't do that, if you wld hang on to 

yaur m s e 

currency that you received, within a wek 's tim the value of 

the mmey that you had on hand ws drastically reduced. So the only 

sensible, practical way ws to follow the course of action that I have 

just described. 

I muld like to return at this tb to make a couple of catmats perhaps 

s d t out of context, but I recall a few things which d d bring us 

back again, maybe a year or tm, kt I believe are important. 

NLanber me d d be rq impression of American a d forces when I first 

started m&hg with them in Tsingtao in 1946. Particularly at the airbase 

where the tm wine air wings =re stationed. Che w that there Ere 

thousafide of marines stationed at tihe airbase. I don't remember the exact 

rxPnber kt there t#re tm air whip and a sizeable contingent. And there 

*re namerats barracks, and in ny job I had to supervise all sorts of 


Nick Qzemfavsky 118 

canstruetion-type wxk , remodeling the barracks , and our azinese gangs 

=re doing concrete mrk, and electrical wxk, carpentry, etc. Plus me 

of the biggest facets of operation was installation of @onset huts which 

m d d be getting the material frcm of course the marines. 

Anyway tm impressions. rJlrmber one was that there was a hard core on the 

airbas, of I muld say perhaps fifty at the mst, of enlisted m, NCOs 

and officers dm =re mming the airbase, literally mmbg it. And that 

d d include the people F&IO =re mnning the air traffic control towrs 

and supervising the mchanical maintenance, and the construction mrk in 

d~ich I = involved. And that ws people =re m&hg extremely long 

hours. &finitely not the traditional 8 to 5. They were early at mrk 

and they =re staying way past the tllme of the evening, wrking eekends, 

etc. They =re an extr-ly hard-waking bunch of people. 

lhe great mass of people who ere at this airbase =re doing nothing, 

literally nothing. And as I muld be walking through the barracks there 

wuld be rows upon rows of hrnks or mtal , collapsible beds that they had 

in krracks. And on each bed, there muld be sprawled a marine generally 

engaged in one of three possible endeavors: one, taking a nap at any time 

of the day, morning or ahmoon; tm, reading caaics or dime navels; 

three, either writing a letter to his wife or his girl friend or reading 

either a "Dear John'' type of a letter or atever other kind of a letter 

he w.s getting frm his wife or his girl friend. And that was it. They 

were doing nothing. They, all of them exlcept those FJho for scrtrre reason 

wuld not be getting their liberty on the tom that day, muld be just 

marking time mtil four o'clock in the afternoon hen the busses d d 

take thm sixteen miles to domtom Tsingtao where they d d 

Wade all 

those converted drugstores, dime stores, that became bars or nightclubs 

and get drunk, and mybe pick-up Chinese girls, or hopefully sorrre kstem 

girl, Russian or atever few other eatern nationalities =re represented, 

and before mLdn t return to the base drunk, and either feeling good or 

?? 

feeling bad. An that ms going on day after day after day. And to re 

this a tremndous mste of hrrman p er, hmm resources, of people who 

are so young, and uho have been out of the battle for mths now, and =re 

in generally good, very good physical condition. 

I found it very difficult that in every branch of the service that I was 

involved with there, I was with mted Mantry, artillery, I had my 

mals at officer ' s mess in the mirim corps, I had my meals on bard m y 

ships, particularly those at the a s e 

navy training center, and had my 

-1s with canstruction bttalions, with seabees, and everywhere, it was 

the same thing that when I ate my meals--particularly at the air base 

*ere the -1s =re the best, not quite as fancy as an officer's mess, no 

starched white clothes and no white-jacketed waiters and all that and the 

dishes were not quite as elaboratethe mds were usually very good and 

the servings =re larger than at the NCO mess. 

Another thing that struck me there ms another example of mste. And that 

wm that alrrrost witbut exception again, those healthy, young, vigorous 

mn d d be sitting there at the tables fussing with their food; trinmdng 

their mat this my and that ray, and when I say "tximdng,'' trimninp 

about half away, and eating about half of ht was on their trays ; and 

then falling back in line and dunping half of a steak, half of a pork 

chop, half of a serving of mashed potatoes or green beans, or &t have 


Nick Qlerniavsky 119 

you, into a garbage can. And again, for rce, after caning thou& four 

years of wartime where food t~as s d t scarce, as I have described, and 

som of it rationed, it was very hard to accept--that food ms so, so 

dispensible, so easy to get rid of without actually consuming it. 

Another illustration of this perhaps mld be the reaction of my Chinese 

mrker who at that tim tas be* paid fourteen to seventeen cents in 

United States currency, a day. And the range was depending on &at category 

they belonged *-carpenter, masons, electricians, etcetera. In any 

case, one day a delegation of Chinese straw bosses came to me and . . . 

after elaborate and profound preambles, announced that they wanted to 

su'hnit a petition for me to forward to the American officer in charge of 

construction. And that uas that they muld like to e-e being paid in 

currency for the privilege of emptying, at the end of each day, the garbage 

cam, the side of each mess hall. 'Ihey felt that they muld be rruch 

better off if they d d 

k allowd to take that food horn each day to 

their families, because the discarded food ms so p1entib.l that they 

could not only feed thmselws and their families, txlt sell the remnants 

to other QlitlRse, and that wy be provided with all the food they needed 

and make same extra mney on the side. I did forward that to krican 

officer-I don't x d r 

his or rank now-it ws denLed out-of-hand 

because it was considered to be utterly out of regulations and things of 

that nature. 

So rmch for this. The other observation that I wanted to make . . . is 

actually t w specific incidents. 

he will take re a few months beyond th.e th that I have just talked 

abut, and that will be at the tine I w wrking at salvage property 

yards which I have covered previously. That time ms the only time in my 

life when I have seen a &ad bdy. A person was just shot through the 

form--shot dead. And it happened this way: I'd taken a walk at the 

property yard in the rimming and the first thing the guards at the mh 

gate asked me was, 'Nick, have you see the dead chink?" And I said, 'No, 

where?" They said, "Go down yonder," and pointed to the loer section of 

the salvage property yard that I have described before-an the other side 

of the area where w ere storing the lumber and had that big heap of 

coal. There was a cirdar drive around a warehause &ere ve had stored a 

great deal of mchanical and accessories type of equiprent, hcluding 

barrels and cans of machine oil and things of that nature. 

In any case, I walked down and in the middle of this gravel drive there 

was a body of a &we, I d d say in tihe late mnties or very early 

thirties, and he was extremely clean for a Chinese--he s r ~ not ~ s a coolie, 

not a laborer. k had a fresh haircut, his hair indicated the use of hair 

tonic or srmething of bt nature. a s face, his hands looked clean, 

washed and -11-card for. He definitely ms not a mama1 labrer. Also 

his grooming [clothing] ws a s e in style, bt it ms not of cotton, it 

was of silk. I think he had dark m s e cut trousers and sarae light and 

flowred or with soane other decoration type of Chinese shirt, the type 

that was mrn Over the trousers. T3e was shot with a shotgun and there was 

a great deal of blood on the body and a r d it. And I vas told that he 

was apprehended at night *en the guards ere making rounds along the 

wall; and challenged, and did not stop, and the guards shot him. 


Nick Chedavsky 120 

There was some question and discussion afterwards as to why he ~s there. 

OE course the only reason anyone d d want to c m into a c m WB to 

pilfer something because there ms a lot of stuff to pilfer. But he was 

such an u d type of a person to te there because you mld expect 

tJho mula- look &here near of that high stadkg in soc'ieq. He 

did lo& like an intellecW1 or m r of the upper level of society, but 

that ka a middle level . . . well, ell-off? and there also was a 

question whether the guard actually had to shoot him, hther it ms not 

possible to stop him without his being shot. In any case, that vas another 

Fncident that ws mKth ~tionhg. 

Zhe other incident: happened also at the s e place, at the salvage property 

yard, and to me, and I r d r it very distinctly to this day, it ws a 

clear indication of *at m r , or potential powier does to tihe hwm 

character. This happened at the end of the mrk day dm the Chinese 

mrkexs ere being processed throclgt.r the gate on their way out of the 

cmpmd. Since IE had started to have a great deal of item being stolen 

from the compound, the wxkers =re searched as they were leaving the 

cmrpolmd, by the Navy guards at the gate. And so one of the Qlinese tho 

was being searched, was stopped and plenty of itans of clothinq--I don't 

reumber what it ws, but I think it ms smthing of a ladles undemar 

that was stuffed underneath his own shirt and jacket and trousers, etcetera, 

and so he was stopped and the navy guards =re giving him a dressing 

down, &en one of the four seamen *o =re mrking with me approached and 

took over the questioning, or actually the dressing dom of this particular 

Chinese. And this particular fellaw is the only guy whose I remmber, 

because he actually mre of my friend than other kids with &can I 

mrked. lk ws young; he ms nineteen at the th, and his nanae was 

Johnny Q l y of Orlando, Florida. I remmber this because, like I said, 

we were mre £riends than I was with other kids with tJhm I worked, and so 

the usual routine of showing the photographs of his girl friends, of his 

parents, of his family haw and around there had been taken care of. He 

and I participated in a great ice crean robbery when w robbed a few 

gallon cans of ice cream frcan the storage property, at the ccmpound, and 

had a day-long ice cream party going on. Stuffing ourselves with ice 

crem to the degree w couldn't wen think abut ice cream for weks 

afterwards. 

So here, at this time, Johnny approached this Chinese wrker and really 

started taking after him in hglish. Of course the m s e didn't 

understand a wrd -ept that he was being told that &at he did was very, 

very wrong. kt the mssage nas clear-and then, somehow Johnny got the 

notion, I preaim, of the £utility of dt he was doing. The Chinese 

didn't understand d-mt he was telling him. He ms getting the mssage, 

trut he ms not understanding the mrds. So he looked around and he spied 

a rather sizeable rock lying off the road by the gate. And he mtioned 

for thi~ mese to cae out of the line and stand in frat of one of the 

pillars af the gate, and just about *re the rock wis, and I d d say 

the rock was about the size of a conventional sized wastepaper basket. I 

d d say it mi&d fifty paunds, smething like that perhaps, maybe a 

little mre , myway it was a rock, you know, poorly defined shape--it va8 

a rock; and Johnny m o t i d to the Chinese to pick it up, which this 

Qlinese did. And then he mtioned to him to hold it with both hands over 

his head, which the &ires@ did. 



And so he stood there blding the rock above his head. Naturally enoetgh, 

in a minute or tm, he started to shake a bit--he ws not cdortable to 

stand like that and it looked as if he ms going to let the rock dam. 

And then Johnny stopped him with a very sharp re&, and told him that he 

had to hold the rock above his head. This had gone on for dle--I don't 

remember how m y minutes--ht it ms quite obviously, even if a mild 

fom, a form of torture, a form of third degree. It was obviously being 

done with an intent to dmmstrate to others what: d d 

happen to them if 

thy =re also stealing. It ms also obvious to me at that time, as it is 

olwious to me today, that it ms illegal--that Johnny had no right to do 

that. Wy could fire that particular wrker and tell Qllnese straw 

bosses dm =re hiring the help that this particular man us not to be 

ever re-hired again. But this w s a very god example of the . . . 

END OF SIDE ONE 

Q: . . . pick it up frm mre and mre. 

A: Yes. This ws an incident which vat3 beginning to surface mre and 

mre, as the duration of hrican presence--the military presence in 

---was going on, and conflicts of this type and of greater rnagnitude 

k-en the kricans in ,the and forces and the ainese, whether the 

mxkers , or the member of local W s e administration, =re caning into 

being. h d fran the original hnneymxm type of relationship betwen 

hrians and the (hinese. Men the hricans canre ashore, and =re happy 

to be ashore, =re happy to o t 

the civilians, Chinese and foreign, -re 

happy to be able to came to tom on liberty, and to date girls, and go 

through all those converted dmgstoxes and get dntnk. And go to private 

parties. And then, the haneymon ms aver, and the daily routine of work 

and relationship with all those people in a mrk-type of encounter, had 

taken aver. And so m y 

things that had been done in &ha ere so different 

to the krican point of view. So, lacking in unders-, this hostile 

encounter started to crop up. And I just felt that perhaps it was relevant 

to bring it up at this th. 

Q: You said that you =re paid in Chinese mmey, but the crews, the 

laborers, &inese laborers ere paid in American mmey? 

A: k. No. I only gave the equivalent. 

Q: I see. 

A: Because that d d be more meaningful, if I d d say they are being 

paid so may Chinese dollars, which d d be totally mmhgless as to 

*at the purchasing per of that amount wuld be. The hrican mmey, 

purchasing p r is also hard to understand because Amrican money in 

aina was Sxlying mre than it d d hy here. So actually, if we m1d 

want to transfer the thirteen or seventeen cents a day that I -timed 

for the Chinese cwlies into the unit of buyhg power, I wuld say that it 

was the equivalent of mayb half a dollar sarrzthing like that, a very tiny 

amaunt, anyway, ht nevertheless mre than thirteen to seventeen cents 

wild represent to us otherwise. 


I 

i 

Nick Chemimsky 122 

Q: hit did they do with the garbage? 

A: bhat did the bricans do with the garbage? They took it to the base 

dmp. Just as they & with the garbage around here. 

Q: And the Chinese ere forbidden to even go . . . 

A: 332e dunp ms within the perimeter of the base. It was under guard. 

Q: my do you suppose the Amrican didn't mrk? Wile &y =re in 

Tsingtao? You -timed that they =re, most of them, just lying around. 

A: kll, for one thimg, because under the administrative set-up, which w 

ham to this day, in Iknerican a n d forces, it's true in mst places, 

there is nothing for than to do. 'Ihe a d forces in this country are set 

up, and in m y others--Ebropean or &stern countries, kt not to 

scale of brican a d forces--and I understand it will be wen mre so 

once you go on wlunteer-based army. But there is nothing to do, for the 

people in senice, unless they are called to guard duty, unless they are 

members of a specific service unit. 

In other wrds, if ywu are in a maintenance shop-you are doing sarre mrk. 

If you are a member of an office detail, like the people who =re in 

charge of construction, they =re primarily office personnel. They =re 

providing schedules, the thetable for our construction mrk. They =re 

inspect? the job that cur laborers d d do. But if you are just a 

rank-and- ile m r 

of, let's say, like in a Marine Corps there, or 

infantry detachnent, there is nothing for you to do exept stand guard 

duty htever your frequency of guard duty wuld be. And then when you 

are on base, you are oaytnu: om. 

-re are nn restrictiom against taking a nap any time of the day. then 

you are in a boot camp that is mt true because they are in training then, 

only for the while; kt d-m your boot caq time is m r and you're not in 

canbat, the mrst part as I understand it, I've never been a member of 

American anaed forces but in talking dth so many who have been, the wrst 

thing is boredam. It's out-and-out boredan. This is so different for 

instance firm the tlay the Red Mmse Army is being run today--obviously 

because in the mse Red Amy they are a canrpletely self-sustaining 

unit. They run their cm ~bp. They do all of their om overhaul, not 

only on the mtorized or mchanized equipnent, kt overhaul their aim, 

their rifles, machine guns. The units elves produce their am 

amnmition. They have ttaeir om fa=. They produce their om vegetables; 

they produce their am mt. In other wrds, it is a canpletely selfsustaining 

unit. They procluce their om [dcines I . They have class. A 

story was in a very recent issue of Parade magazine aich cwered one of 

the m s e divisions that me &it-.rims--I believe it ms 

Americans--but mpy, a kstern correspondent. l3ut there is no my for 

anyone in a unit like this to have nothing better to do than just stretch 

out on his bk and read a "Dear John'' letter. 

Q: You think this is true with all branchs of the service? 

i 

~ A: I'm sure there are, this is som differential, ht in principle, yes. 

! 



Q: b printed all the money? Obviously they m ld have to have those 

printing presses going ni&t and day to keep up with the demand. 

A: I cannot say that I recall with any degree of assurance, but I believe, 

this is my recollecticm, that the mmey tjas Mng printed Fn the United 

States. kt I cannot say that for certain. This is just . . . it seems 

to carne back to my mind that that is what they did. 

Q: At any tine -re you ever paid in U.S. currency? 

Q: Quid you have requested it? 

A: EJo . . . This is a policy, by the way, of American and forces. To 

my howledge they don't pay in U .S. currency. They either use the dmstic , 

the local currency, or they use script, which is h y mey--mey that 

is, you haw, just like a 'Cxls token you might say, but it ltJDuld be good 

just in that particular area and it's valueless any place else. 

Q: You =re in Shan@i in 1947 and you mt baak to Tsingtao in 1948? 

A: Yes. 

Q: h t 

happened-when did you leave Tsingtao? 

A: Following this? Actually, my wife left for Tsingtao first from -i, 

and I folld in a few mths, and E stayed with her family--with her 

mther and her sister, and her nephew. There -re no jobs to be had, 

actually, by that tinre, and w stayed in Tsingtao till . . . the &--I 

don't r d r 

exactly the mth--ht I b elie to the end of 1948 or the 

early part of 1949. Tsingtao by that t k was cmpletely sumamded by 

Qlinese Red Axmy units. There wis no traffic, no transportation overland 

£ran Tsingtao. In other wrds Tsingtao was blockaded by the Red Army. 

'Ihe American military units, by that time, =re greatly diminished. 

Instead of the six Marine Divisions that =re originally in Tsingtao, it 

was cut dam to a brigade, when I came back to Tshgtao, and shortly 

thereafter it was further reduced to canbat regimntal teams, and also 

other units. The Navy, the seabees =re all likewise cut dom in size. 

And the end for Nationalist (3i.m ms pretty much in sight. 

It ms during this sbying in Tsingtao that the only cruiser that Chimg 

Kai-shek had in his tiny, and generally ineffectual navy, was a forrnex 

hrican old cruiser, I believe, that was given to him, and he r e d it 

the wrth capital of his govemnt. The crewmutinied on 

decided to take the cruiser north to a Manchurian port, to 

, and Qliang, [Chiang Kai-shekl having nothing else to do, I 

guess, his brmbers up there and they banbed and sunk &m&iq. So he 

lost Gwqgkhg hzt: the Red Army didn't get it either. 

Now it w also during this particular tb that I recall I played a 

sormdmt of a prophetic j&e on my sister-in-law &en I came hare one day 

and pretended a great deal of excitemnt on my part, and told her that I 

had just hard on radio that kricans had sent a rocket-ship to the mon, 

and my sister-in-law w.s the type of person who is very gullible, and she 



. . . at first she d d 

not believe it, but *en I insisted that that was 

the case she believed ne and imrediately started running around telling 

everybody else abut the rocket ship that ms sent frm the United States 

to the man. Of caurse, in retrospect, I I should take credit for 

being so scientifically-minded, since that did take place, if it ms abut 

a generatian later, 

There is actually now mrth covering of this period because nothing 

was happening, as I nmtiuned there =re no jobs. Tsingtao was cut off 

frcm the zest of tk wxld overland, and there was no regular passenger 

senrlce by sea. And so it m.s for this reason that after the Red Army had 

taken Peking and continued their successful march southward, it ms announced 

that the U .S. Navy d d 

provide transportation aboard an IST to all 

ksterners of any nationality that w dd be interested in taking up this 

offer, to Shanghai, with a view of people being able to leave China fram 

Smnghai mre readily than it wuld be horn Tsingtao. I don't r-ber 

what warning signs =re given at this tb--it msn't very rmch--I d d 

say perhaps couple of eeks, sc3mething like that--and so a very frantic 

period ensued of packing, and making decisims as to what w should take 

with us, bewe e =re limited to tvio hundred fifty pounds per person, 

M, of course, is not an awful lot of luggage to take with you. 

Qn a day hen our departure took place w, meaning all the people who are 

involved and particularly towards meaning men, had to do all of aur om 

loading of the luggage; which, generally, almst withnut exception, had to 

be crated because it w 

- 

epcified. So, w had to load it aboard the 

ship, with exlception that Navy personnel ere operating the hoists frm 

aboard the LST and so e engaged in this mrk for all or the better part 

of a day, and then we came aboard ourselves. The LST is the type of a 

ship that the lows deck actually one huge, undivided area. That's 

where they put tanks xhich this ship ws built to transport for 

amphibious operation. And so down beluw, in the hold, the Navy provided 

carup cots for m, nearly nine hndred persons, FJho =re taken £ran 

Tsimqtao, and there ms a second IST &ich folld the om which I and my 

wife s M l y left, uhich was the first one, and that cane frm Tsingtao 

with about five hundred, I believe. The figures of course are approhte, 

ht sometlhere in the neighborhood of that magnitude. 

In any case, aboard our LST the hold ms completely jamned with people, 

and, as I recall, they didn't have quite enough camp cots to accarmodate 

all the people aboard, and I and a few other nm slept on s a lifejacketa, 

I believe, or -thing of that mare, that =re piled up at the forward 

part of the hold, just in front of that huge trapdoor that ms being let 

dam the LST was involved in a ditching operation and sane tanks are 

caning out of the hold. 

Our trip to Smghai n s uneventhl--took about a--I think it's abut a 

tm or three day trip, and when se caa~e to Shanghai, of course, w had to 

repeat our operation d y unload the ship insbad of loading it. And then 

all of us had been transported an buses and trucks, which =re provlded by 

UNEU, by Wted Nations organization. Actually, to be cqletely correct 

abut it, it ms IRO, another branch of UNRAA, Intermtianal Refugee 

Organization, vhich is another unit of UN, and it ws this organization 

that caa;re into administrative control of this rescue operation. And m 

=re transprted to the forrner Ekench barracks of the ken& concession in 



Shanghai, where in previous times the French had a battalion of In& 

mse troops statiaed as part of that military bench presence that I 

talked abut before. kench concession. 

k wre housed in those barracks in an unsegre ted manner, males and 

females together. k =re fed with the usual g xracks-type operation, in 

a noess hall. Most of the senrlces had to be perfonred by the people dm 

ere living there; in other wrds, by ourselves. And m stayed in those 

barracks in Shan&ai for about tw mmths, I d d 

think, until May of 

1949, at aich time w *re transported from Smnghai to the Philippine 

Islands aboard passenger vessels which IRO had leased for this operation. 

I believe there Ere, perhaps, four or five boats that participated in 

this operatun. 

And I and nry wife left Shanghai on bard the second or third bat that 

left Shxghai for the Philippine Islands. My parmts preceded us and my 

wife's mother and sister and I think her sister's newly acquired husband, 

and her son, Eollod us and actually left Sha@mi when the Red Amy ms 

already on the outskirts of Shanghai, and as the bat ms going dom the 

?hng-pu River, there are old forts, fortifications, on the shore, and the 

Chinese gunners fired a couple shots from the cannon, from the old forts, 

without doing any damage to the ship, hst: anpy indicating their displeasure 

at this operation. 

Q: Did your parents leave Tsingtao ahead of you? 

A: No, my parents =re in Shan&i that time. Samewlzere in the the that 

I have described, my desk job also was terminated, because all foreign 

presence in China ws caning to an end. %re =re very strong anti- 

foreign feelings amng the CAineae masses, and mbs of Chinese at this 

particular time stormed the grounds of the British Consulate General in 

Shanghai, Aich m s situated on grounds very close to the bridge that I 

have described before, and broke every window in the hilding. They did a 

lot of damage on immculately manicured grounds, complete w ith flmrbeds 

etcetera, and banged with -rs and picks and shovels on huge British 

brass, or rather bronze, coat-of-arms on gate pillars, and splashed hckets 

full of tar on than. They did everything that they could, you knuw, to 

show their general displeasure at foreign presence there. 

%s was the tinu? by the way or close to this particular th, when I had 

my, abut the only unpleasant encounter with a Qzina man. I was returning- 

I tau still wrEcFng at UN mtor pool--& I w.s returning on my bicycle, 

as I mtioned before--Erm mtor pool to ham, and I was riding my bicycle 

on one of secondary streets, the major traffic artery as I rcmtid 

before, was Swenth Avenue. And as I have described, on mmber of occasions, 

I believe, there Awye muld be masses of mese walking up on the 

sidewalk and also an the pavaent. And so whatever mde of transportation 

you used, yau wuld have to sort of navigate in and out of these clusters 

of people mwching up and dom against and with the traffic on the pavement. 

It so happened that I hit this Chinarzlan with the front wheel of my bicycle, 

on the heel of his foot, as he happened to be walking ahead of rne; and I 

stopped and he stopped, and he was the biggest fellow (chuckles)--the 

truth ms I wasn't scared that mch (chuckles) but he was the biggest 

Chham I had ever seen. 



Ke obviously ws a northerner because southerners are mrch shorter statured, 

and he turned, and he looked me in the eye, and I ws dressed, by the my, 

as so m y ksterners =re being dressed by that tine, in all sorts of 

discards of brim military uniforms; and I had on m--I believe it ms 

in wintertime--and I had, I think, a flight jacket, a Marine Air WLng 

flight jacket an =--which of course ws vesy easily distinguishable, you 

know, and he looked m in the eye and said in somahat broken English, but 

still ernrnciatd clearly emu& that the wrds ere codmg out quite 

distinctly, Vou U. S. bastard! " and it ms so b y , and actually I, it 

w.s funny because I w not U.S. I don't knaw whether I was bastard or 

not, but one thing, I was definitely in the wrong, and second thin&, the 

comical side of the situation kind of stn& me, and so I just apologized 

in Qlinese. I hew enough Chinese to be able to say a cauple wrds of 

camrrn type of apology, and he looked scarewhat surprised, and I imgine 

placated to the degree I think, that he sort of grinned. 

It w s years ago, but I feel . . . . There was no contimation to 

this encounter. He wlked on and I got back on my bicyle and drove on. 

But anyway, the relationship betwen the native populaticm and all ksterners 

was deter;Larating very fast. 

In any case, after e left Shanghai for the Fbilippines, all of these 

bats made a stopover in Manila Bay, dthout anybody getting off the 

ships, they ere anchored, and so, that was the way in aich w became 

familiar with Manila. In those days, I am really not aware If there =re 

any salvage aperations but the harbor was filled, filled up with my, 

mimy lknerican Navy ships and transport ships that =re sunk during the 

war, and m cauld see them very clearly. bk came rather close to Corregidor 

Island, lut &ich of case everyone had heard of by that tine, and w 

to& aboard in W la a great deal of food supplies for the camp. 

Again, the work of loading was being done by people on board the ship. 

The F'ilipino lmgshoremen d d bring them in small boats alongside, then 

w d d take over. I remember that for same reason, I did not participate 

in that particular operation. I was walking on bard the deck, and then 

e sailed on to our destination, the Philippine Islands, which ms Samar 

Island, which is the major island, or to be more accurate actually, Tribaba 

which is a rather small island, separated by a narrow channel, for which 

there is a bridge, and that's &ere w dropped anchor. 

I d d 

like to retract a bit. The sail- d m the inland sea of the 

Philippines .was . . . a mst beautiful experience. The seas were absolutely 

placid, there w no wather whatsoever; and it w s just like sail- down 

the lake. bk =re almst conthwusly within close sight of land. The 

islands ere constantly coming, the shore of the islands d d constantly 

be caning into sight, and the greenery, the absolutely unbelievable eraldgreen 

hues, greenery of the jungle and of the meticulously cultivated 

plantations, copra plantations and whatever other planations they had 

there, w e extremely novel and very pleasant, a very beautiful swt. 

Q: Before you left Tsingtao, =re there Nationalist troops in the tom? 

You -timed that the tom was ringed by the Red Qlinese Amy. ht ms 

keeping them out? 


Nick hrniavsky 127 

A: Ihe American presence, I wuld say. I cannot say with any great 

degree of certainty ht I d d surmise that there =re s w -se 

military presence in the fmm. I really don't mmmber, but they =re not 

that obvious they =re there. kt I d d say there w sme small detac-t 

there, and it most likely, I crlrmld suspect, =S evacuated also by American 

Marines G&I the tom ms ccmpletely left by Amxican military detachts. 

Q: Betmen you and your wife, you had five hundred pounds of luggage. 

A: Right. 

Q: k t 

did you take with you? =at did yw feel ms important? 

A: bstly--almst without exception--= took items of clothing. There 

uas certainly no my, you how, any £umiUre cctuld be taken. My people 

felt very maddened about this. k to& sarre personal item of family 

history for instance you how, like perhaps jewlry that maybe ws not 

extremly valuable, really d d 

not represent any great degree, at least 

in some cases of monetary value, but passed dam fian one generation to 

another in a family, item of this sort ere certainly taken. Scme books 

wLthout any doubt, but so many things had to be left behind, and in mst 

cases, it nas impossible to sell any of than because no kstemers, no 

Eoreipers, no &te pople Ere staying behind; and no Chinese mld buy 

anything, There wu no need to buy because the stuff d d be left there. 

If any one of the (X1inese c d t y was interested in something, they knew 

all they muld have to do d d 

be to k the first to enter these honoes 

once the site invader wmld be pne. 'Ihe people FJho suffered the roost 

=re some people in foreign colonies, including Wte Russian colonies, 

who ere quite -11-off , who had their m W. Sarae of them had very 

expensive hams, not too many, but there ere some people who really had 

m y , and there was no way that they could sell their Ewrmes . I believe 

that there =re s m very, very rare cases where, when srme of those 

people vib had real estate praperq that ms really meptionally expensive, 

exceptionally high value on the mrket , and who also, because of the fact 

of their king in a colony for my, many years, d ~o had saw very good 

personal Wnese friends. There viere s- occasions of this kind of 

relatimship, [people] 410 sold their haws to these friends of theirs for 

a naninal sunof m y , kcawe that was the best they could do. Otherwise, 

everything had tx be abandoned, and SUIE people lost just about all that 

they had in tb ~n~ly of their personal walth. 

Q: Could you take codting ut~ils with you--silver? 

A: h, kst not nuch. Only the stuff that had mre of a utility value 

0 . 0 

Everyone understood that e =re entering into a period of a very, very 

spartan style of life. 

Q: k11, I am amzed that you wuld have enough to make five hundred 

pounds mrth of clothes. 

A: Ah, I am alm>st certain that the five hmdred pounds, the tm hundred 

and fifty paunds per person, included the crating. You know it w s not 

net eight; it ws gross. And &en you subtract fht, that muld leave 



you with very, very few itms that you =re able to take. Matter of fact, 

there were mmbr of people who =re grossly overnight with their luggage 

as e cane dawn to the harbor and sme people =re literally crying, right 

there, in front of everybody, when they ere ordered to open up their 

crates, and to discard sizeable mounts of the stuff they had packed, so 

that if they =re all- to take that, it d d be so oMously unfair to 

ohrs &m follc~wled instructions. 

Q: Ib you still have any of the itemsl that you brought out with you? 

A: Nozhe of the itam of clothing, of case, have survived (laughs) that 

long. &s, there are sarae items that cotne frm this particular time but 

not too marry. 

Q: &here . . . once yau got to the Philippines, where did you live then? 

A: You rean e r e FJF? %re staring in the Philippines? On Tribalma Island 

they had during the wr, an hwican Navy base and by the th e got 

there, which d d have been, oh say perhaps at least three or faur years 

after the base had been abandoned, the jungle had taken over in many ways, 

but SUE of the original barracks, sure of the origfnal. structures, had 

survived, and that's where E =re hnused. Eventually, the camp haused 

mre than five thousand people of m y different nationalities, kt mstly 

Russian; and it was entirely self-sufficient in the my of services. kly 

the upper administrative personnel in the camp, the director and a few of 

the otkaer top people in the administration of the cap, *re not refugees 

themelves. 7hy =re personnel that came frm different: countries, 

matter of fact, and =re hired by IFtO for this specific plrpose. Otherwise, 

every service in the camp-that d d include prepartion of food, the carp 

was divided, I believe, in mlve or fourteen districts of a few hundred 

people-4rmr three to five hundred or so people in a district-each district 

had its om district leader--- had aur om c q police force. bk had our 

om mtor pool m C ~TE to this former navy base with all, I believe, 

six or seven ah-by-six military trucks, uhich wre all inoperative, and 

we formed our om mtor pools . . . personnel. tk had amng our people a 

Illechanic, and frrm those six or seven trudcs, by cannibalizing--in other 

wTd8 by taking the parts ht ere usable frm, let's say, half of those 

trucks, -re able, I believe, to make about three of the trucks operative, 

and matter of fact, one of my jobs at me tb ws a truck driver on one 

of those trucks. The particular feabxe that I r d r of this particular 

job was that this truck was capable of running, even if it very, very 

tempermntal. and had to be babied along, kxt the met interesting feature 

~ias that t 3 brakes ~ =re shot. The canp ms located, not on the level 

ground, but w had gades, up and h, and there ms no traffic, exept 

traffic an foot in the cap. I lfhkdc there WAS one or tm jeeps that =re 

also used in the camp, There wre a great nunber of children in the carrp, 

and so it me redly a scary operation to drive this truck, knowing that 

&en I was going dawn the hill there ws no my that I could stop it until 

I muld caae to the bottm of tshe hill and start go- uphill. Ah, it was 

not one of my most enjoyable jobs. 

Another job in which I participated dwn I was in the camp was in a stone 

quarry, And that ms us' the old method of going to this place are there was an mtcmpping 9 o rock Ln this gully, and w ere just &acking 

away with sledge hamers, just like they do in a chain gang, in a broiling 



sun. The temperature ms never, except at night, lower than mid or high- 

nineties, and it ws during the day earenrely humid. As a mtter of fact, 

this is the job &ere my very brief--and rather unproductive in the wy of 

getting any information--encounters with the few Russians who -re not 

part of the general refugee group kt -re political escapees frm Soviet 

Russia. They ere a part of this chain gang in the stone quarry, and that 

was here these encounters took place. 

kll, I also mrked for a tb as kitchen helper which was generally an 

operation that had to b done by everyone in each district--each district 

had its o~kitchen, and people d d be assigud every so often to take 

part h that operation. I& had very good gasoline fires, military typ 

mss hdl kitchens, portable, but portable in the sense they could be 

transported £ran place to place. They =re the size of a regular kitchen 

range and each kitchen muld have, depending on the size of the district, 

of course, mld have h e r e betwen mybe six or ten of those stoves. 

7%~ nmms for each day usually tas very mnotomus and repetitiaw, it 

consisted to a great degree of things like hash and Spam obtained frm 

Navy stores, Eran Navy cdssaries. The vegetables =re being bought 

fresh in Manila for som reason, and transported by -11 boats to us in 

the camp, thich ms a distance--I don't know, I will have to look at a map 

to give yau the distance-considerable distance. And since the bat muld 

be a very d l type of a mtor boat in &ich it ms transported, it 

usually d d be sprayed with sea water along the way, and almost invariably 

d d 

be delivered ta us half-spoiled, or totally rotten. There was a 

great deal of disagreawnt ktwien the inhabitants of the camp and 

administration on that particular item. 

W had somthing of a minor rebellion or rmtiny at om time at the camp, 

primarily on the basis of food, because the-not the director of the camp, 

ht his boss, the person who stayed in Manila, in IRO main Philippine 

operatian, IRO office, carae to cap. There was a general meting of all 

those thousands of people at th& square which in old days was a volleyball 

and basketball court, and had a screen for mvies, mvies =re being shown 

regularly at canp at night--open-air mvies, and there wre also a stage 

cn &ich plays =re being put an, all a product of the local talent. 

And so this high, high official cane to camp on this particular day, and 

eveqhdy ms gathered there, and he nrade a speech in which he tried to 

cmtradict and canter-attack the mrs that he said he had heard about 

[with] displeasure and the protests that were being waged by the inhabitants 

of the camp in regard to the quality of the food. And he said, 'The food 

tas very good, very nutritional, the calorie count, rmch contrary to the 

recent letters of protest that I have been receiving frrm some of you 

troublemakers, mre nhre near as law as yau claim," etcetera, etcetera. 

And once he got into this particular part of his speech, a great 

wave of protest arose £ran the crd, and he was literally booed off of 

the stage; and at one point, the situation looked tense-the canp cops, 

all camp cops, atarted scurqhg around the mb--it wsn't really a mb 

yet ht (laughs) they =re afraid it was going to txrn into a mob, but 

there vies no violence q y . But he cut his speech short and made a 

rather hasty d t 

off the stage, ms taken in a jeep back to the 

administrative hzflding FJhich ws Fn one of the quonset huts and that ms 

the end of that. 


Nick Cbrniavsky 130 

Q: Ed ywu grow any of your awn feed? 

A: No. 

Q: Rab chickens? 

A: No. 

Q: How did yau get the job? Were you assigned to than, or did ytxl 

volunteex . . . 

A: k11, if yau hew of som job that was wrticularly attractive to you, 

yau could volunteer for it, and if yau had s m sort ~ of clout, or any 

o&r nears to get a job, ell, you might be able to get it. Otherwise, 

you ere just assigned a job, usually within your om district, unless it 

w s a job for general services, such as stone quarry, or police force, or 

mtor pool. 

Q: kre the wives and children also assigned jobs? 

A: bt the children, bt mst of the wives wrked in kitchen. The husbands 

mrked either also as kitchen helpers or [what] they called kitchen mechanics. 

That's the people that ere involved in maintenance and acquired . . . 

EM) OF TAPE 

A: lhere Ere also all sorts of other jobs in the camp. One, which had 

to b done periodically, unfortunately, wis to dig holes for the latrines. 

And that job included a great deal of manual labor because the soil on the 

island w clay predominantly, and it ws very thick, heavy, mist, hard 

to dig. The size of a ble that had to be dug was usually abut ten feet 

deep, and perhaps t-ty feet wide, and maybe thirty-f ive feet long, 

aomethiqg like that. It ws a terrible job. 

Usually tk younger people -re doing the job, and because it was really 

. . . hard ~~ type of assignxlent , the people dm wuld volunteer, and 

generally they muld ask for volunteers, they d d get srme sort of 

bonus. Usually it consisted of a box of rations per person, like K-rations 

ach is a designation for a special type of food rations that they provided 

during krld Wr I1 days, That's d~t the Army and Marines and Navy had, 

little packages of various bods, oh, each package of size suitable fox 

one ueal Fr person, and that mld be in the my of chocolates, and 

candies, and tiny package of cigarettes, six cigarettes to a package. 

Things like that and also Mt and small cans and it d d be in the size 

of baby food type of container . . . where there d d be, mybe, ham and 

eggs, in sort of a axanbled state and the ever present hash, and also the 

ever present Span, and things of that sort. And because mst people =re 

not really hungr~r--there ws no, I don't thidc my indication of starvation 

that carre up-it wasn't that at all. The food wts mmotmow bst it was 

rwnably plentiful. But the mrmotony of the diet was something that vas 

m ever present thhg for everyone in the c q , and so these -11 packages 

of K-rat- that were being given for wrking on latrine hole digging 

detail, Ere usually quite wlcaw. And I have done this job tw or three 

t h s b the tw years that I stayed there. 


I 


,Also, saw of wr people wded at our an wtemrks station--pumping our 

om water. Each district had a tank, usually elevated on s e sort of a 

support to the height of about mayhe ten feet above the highest point in 

the district, and m had some pumps at various locations. There was a 

small stream, a very tiny stream, running through the perimeter of the 

cq, and so te wuld be pumping mter fran that stream; and there =re 

also mr own per station, so there were also people dm =re wrking in 

the daily mintenance of the generators. 

Also, there ws mrk involved in building--or periodically re-building 

[of 1 skr facilities for those in each camp, in each 05 the districts. 

'Ihey muld usually have at least tm sbr facilities, one for girls and 

one for the boys. 

There was also a detail that: I was involved in. Driving that truck for a 

brief spell bring% crushed rock fian the stone quarry, and us- that 

for portions of our roads. All our roads to the camp *re a crushed rock 

type of a construction, and usually the repairs consisted of dumping a 

truckload of crushed rock in a veakned spot [&re] there muld be 

developing huge potholes, or where part of the pavaaent d d just sink. 

That muld happen quite frequently after the rainy season or during the 

rainy -son, &en the whole carp mld beccms- just a quagmire, because 

during the rainy season it d d rain incessantly, day and Wt, for 

at a tiole. And when you d d 

be walking through the caq, you 

mld be literally putting your foot, with each step, up to your ankles or 

deeper in mud, It was great diff irmlty to try to lift it out of the d. 

And it ms very crucial for the life of the camp to keep the roads still 

usable, so the trucks ddch muld be bringing food supplies to each district 

d d be able to get through; otherwise w muld have a real enrergency on 

our hands. 

And k ing the non-rainy season, it muld get so hot--you knuw hotter than 

it would be dwhg the rainy season, and rain would not fall Tor mnths 

and mths at a the, and the ground muld get absolutely pulverized, 

because it wuld be so dry, and actually cracks, great big cracks, d d 

open up on the surface. 

Q: kre there mxe people in the camp *en yrxl ere there there =re 

previously? 

A: No. 

Q: Yau said this ~s an Amy camp originally? 

A: Oh, yau m, kfore rn arrived there? I have no indication whatsoever 

how many people were in the camp . . . Mst of the barracks that =re 

there before had been tdce~~ apart. I ms going to say damlished, but I 

don't think that the Navy had taken them apart. I am almost positive that 

they =re just ripped apart by the Filipino population, Wen you d d 

drive into Wuan cJhich was the province capital, I believe, or at least 

the major town next to our cap, it 1- very mh, I wld suspect, 

never having been in Mexico, I cannot say definitely, but it looked very 

rmch like a small town in Mexico might look. 


It had an old, old, ancient Catholic cathedral in the center of the town, 

and there ws a square around it with a watering place for miles--1 don't 

think they had any horses there--and there was a scraggly looking cmn, 

with grass, alrmst absolutely dead, and a s-e of tiny, and very 

dilapidated-looking stores, ELlipLno stores, and some residential busing 

outside of this square. And mst of the buildings and particularly the 

residential private bs--&h usually ere no mre than cabh h the 

true nmnhg of the wrd--dd have at least part of the construction, 

including the pieces of corrugated iron that originally was the roofing 

material fox quonset huts, [or] whole window sections fran barracks or 

quomet huts. And wen on a talk through the town *ewe you wuld be 

passing s m individual cabins or huts along the road, yau d d see the 

s e raterials that obviouslv had been taken £ran the hrican base. So 

by the time w got there, mit of the Quomet huts had disappeared, exept 

I think, tm or three d~ich ere used for the administration, for the 

officers for the camp. 

Virtually witbut exception, the people nho =re housed in the camp =re 

housed in tents. I, my son, and my wife lived for tw years in a tent, 

and so did my parents . . . so did my wife's family and mst of other 

people. And only after the camp had been in existence for abut a yeax ox 

so did the administration contract for FLlipino help. That was abut the 

only job that was done, not by the hhabitants of the c q , to build 

U e n barracks, that: ere also typically for that area, hilt on supportsnot 

directly dom on the grd, and ere s e t sidlar in construction 

that you ~&#t find in smmr camps such as the YMCA c q or sarxle church 

c q arolind the state of Illinois. I &d say they Ere about twmty 

feet wide . . . and perhaps . . . at least eight to maybe [one] hundred 

feet long, and they had doors on four sides, I believe, that is screen 

doors, and -11s that d d 

cane up approximately maybe a yard frm the 

floor, and then the whole length, or the whole cirderence of the Zxlilding 

there m ld be screen runnhg q letely around on all four sides of the 

barracks. There =re no windows as such, there =re no glass windows, kt 

they had screens abut maybe . . . three feet high, and about three feet 

off the flwr, so that you could lo& cmpletely around the barracks fram 

inside. And bse barracks were used prhrily for elderly people, and 

those who =re infim, or -re sick with any sichess or particularly for 

the elder, because it PELS decided that they had to have some sort of 

better hausing than the tents. 

And so most of those people were med from their tents and the late 

arrivals, they took their place in tents. Or in m y other cases [where] 

the tents ere older, and -re leaking and s b d war, people =re allad 

to take than, as so m y had done, to put a second top over the old tents, 

to provide sate sort of an insulation Era tropical sun, because it could 

get extremely hot and stuffy under the tent and [from] the hot surrmer sun 

under that single piece of carwas in the tent. 

Q: ks this c q 

supported by the United Nations? 

A: Yes. International Re£ugees Organization, tJhfch was a branch of U .N. 

Q: ks digging the latrines harder than wwking in the quarry? 


A: k11 . . . probably so. he thing abut mrk in the quarry, it was 

hard mrk. Yau were wrking in the sun, and at least part of the day you 

mld not be able to mrk in the shade at all. Then, after the sun wuld 

be mwing from the opposite side of the outcropping of rock, you d d 

at least partially in the shade. 'Ihen, hitting hard rock with a sledge 

harmrer jars you up. You take that shock of the impact to all of your 

body. 'Ihere is virtually no my yau can Wfer it out. It is very, very 

hard and rau& wok. The only thing that perhaps rnade it not quite as 

hard WM the fact that it is not a supervised job. I& =re wrlcing under, 

you huw, under their o w supervision, so to speak, so w d d 

take as 

many breaks as e felt like. Anyth w didn't feel m11, e muld have 

hit rock long enough, 'ZRt's sit dom and have a smoke." & wild stop 

and have a smoke. At the satne tirne, w ere not trying to stand back, 

goldbrick, or what have you on the job, Ixlt there vm rm great drive to 

make us mrk. The same applied, by the my, in a similar way to digging 

the latrine. And there ms no charm in diggiq the latrine, Ixlt the job 

of getting the heavy shovelfulls of dirt and hefting thm up on the surface, 

£ran the hole, for hours and hum, m s also back-breaking. So, you could 

have yrmw own pick. We job was hard and the other was probably not 

really my easier. 

Q: bhat *re the rocks used for? 

A: For maintenance of the roads. Like after the rainy season there mld be whole sectians of the road that d d just sirk out: of sight. You had 

nothing but u d where before there WIS crushed rock surface. So you bring 

another truckload or mybe three or faur twuckloads and fill up the holes 

with crushed rock, and that wuld k a new surface on the mad. 

Q: hhy did you have to build so m y new facilities? Had the Filipino 

population really destroyed anything that ms there before? 

A: bkll, yes, oh definitely. There ms nothing really standing except as 

I nmtioned. The only thing that ms standing, there ere at least three 

m e t huts, FJhich =re wed for administrative offices which =re pretty 

mch in the center of the cmp. And then, on the highest elevation, and 

quite a distance £ran the main area of the c q , with absolutely the 

fantastically gorgeous view of the ocean, was the admiral 's house, thich 

still WLS in absolutely impeccable repair. It ms as good as the day the 

admiral picked up his hags and left for the States. And that was the 

director of the camp. I don't r&r his name; he ms either British or 

American; that was &ere he kept his residence. It was a far cry from the 

facilities, or busing, that e had in the camp. 

Q: &re you close emu& to the shore to use the ocean at all? For 

8-, or fishing? 

A: &11, smdmt. &np was--- had five filmusand people, as I mentioned, 

and so there =re sarne districts that -re relatively close to the shore. 

They ere not really facing on the shore, but they =re very close to it. 

The main road, the road that m did not build, the road that ms already 

there, the Filipino road, run from Guiuan across the bridge, and then d m 

into the cq. At the camp, and in the open-air marketplace, the Filipino 

renters had canstructed [with] every material that they could lay their 

hands on, you know-pieces of mod, and saw corrugated iron, fran the 


be


Quomet huts, and in m y cases, screens that they wuld lxlild f m bamboo 

fronds. 

And there =re so m y item of n-erchandise tkre, such as F'llipim-made 

scarves, *ich =re very colorful, and the type of scarf that you can find 

in h stores in Springfield or that cane primarily Eran Hang Kong or 

Japan today, and there ere s m very colorful Filipino skirts, and various 

other items of rrrerchandise of this style. 

[There =re] lukewarm, or s~tirres very mm, bottles of Coke hich ms 

in great demand-it ms extra qensive; as I recall, on very extra 

occasions, very rare occasiorrs, that w could buy Coke, w paid sixty 

cents Auerican mney for it. It ws -thing of a thrwbdc to reality 

because the camp life ms extranely mmotoncrus , and patently depressing. 

People lived in almst constant state of [an] ever-present, £ran day-to-day 

question: "Is this going to be forever, or are e ever go* to get out 

of here?" This is samething tihat I have not covered yet but: generally the 

people at the cmp were divided into the largest group which either had 

hope--and in sgxle cases it ws no mre than that, just ---or had established 

socrvz preliminary and valid attempt to realization of their desires to 

migrate to the bited States. Such as in our case, for instance, where we 

had people in the States who Rre willing to sponsor us. bk had the 

necessary papers, had been processed, and our papers =re actually in the 

mill, so to speak, and rn ere in the Fhilippines to d t for our quota 

mbers, &ich is each . . . wll, let rn cam back to that in a second . 

. . and that wuld be actually what w =re dting for. 

The admission to this camtry that, mayb not everybody knows, was actually, 

until after 3: believe it w s repealed under the Kennedy administratian, 

that's my recollection, but it was under quota system. That nneant that 

based on your place of birth, yau had so many quota raanbers allocated to 

that country, and so people dm -re brn for instance in Russia muld 

have, let's say, so many hundreds of possible entries per year:. And 

people tJho m ld be born in Japan m ld have a different nunber, etcetera, 

etcetera. The quotas -re set in such a manner that those with origins 

in kstern Europe ere benefitted. Those £ran Balkans and southern Europe 

Faere discrimjnated against , and Asiatics -re discriroinated the ms t . Tbe 

fortunate ones, in a my, ere Europeans born in Asian countries, such as 

my mother had me of the best quota mmhrs, if she wuld have been traveling 

under her om quota mmber, but she w s traveling under a Russian quota 

mber with my dad. 

Qlina's quota namber for Europeans like me ms beneficial. Because the 

quota numbers =re very few, kt being Exopean, you had a benefit there. 

But anyways, that was f3w system. And there =re some people who actually 

-re by no mans assured that they =re going to be able to caw to the 

United States. Others ere divided into groups, the largest group 

=re those + =re either interested or willing to go to Australia. And 

tk, in progressively smaller mbers ere people who were willing to go 

to the Domk.lican Republic . . . and to various kcopean countries, France, 

Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, etcetera. '&re viere a certain mber of 

people w h didn't have any place ta go, azhd =re actually relying on IRO 

to relocate them place. . . . 


Nick Cbrniavsky 135 

And as time wed on, the question of *ether the people &o mted to go 

to the States mild really be able to go or not, kept taking the positive 

aide and the negative side. Because at that time the Congress ws deliberating 

m whether or not to amd the Displaced Persons kt in such a mmer that 

it d d include th people r4ho =re . . . in the minds of som of the 

legislators cplified to be hcluded in that Act and that m t the people 

tJho ere Wstemrs, Ezlrapeans dm =re displaced fian their b s in 

W becue of mse civil mr , betwen the Ebd Amy and Nationalist 

Army. 

And m had, for instance a visit in the camp at one time by then 

Senator Drew Mullin of Ramxla, California, who ws one of the backers, or 

the supporters of this aanenchnent because of his very strong anti-Comrrmist 

position, and he felt that people who were in the cap -re actually 

victims of the Red takeaver of China. Since I mentioned the VIP's who 

have visited the caup, I mst mention at om time, President-then President, 

&o nuw is dead--Quezon [Marwal. his Wzon y Molina] of Philippines, also 

paid a visit to the c-. Of course these events =re red-letter days in 

the life of a amp bewe they Ere a distraction frcsn daily routine, 

which MBS, as I said, extremely mmotonous and boring, and also, 

psychologically depressing. 

Now another interesting &tor ws that because of these tangles with tihe 

Displaced Persons Act in the Xted States of the thited Nations or I310 

administration of the camp, or refugee senrices, was becaning impatient of 

getting all of those people out of the camp, The initial perrrdt issued by 

the EYlipino gavenmmt for the camp ms for duration of three or four 

mmh, sarrethhg like that, and the camp ws in erdstence well over tm 

years because even after I, and my family had left the camp, tm years 

after the opning of the c q , there were still scnre people left in the 

=up, and those =re & hard-core (chuckles) campers. They *re people 

who, for me thing, mst of the people dm hdd TI3 which made than idiately undesirable for entering other cauntriee, and a few others, and it to&, I 

believe, actually over thee years to finally close the c q dom canpletely. 

hd kwe of these factors, the administration of the camp, following 

abut the first year of the camp's existence, started [the] ever-escalating 

policy of pressuring people who mted to c q to ~ the States to change 

their mind and to apply instead for adtaission to sar~ other ccn~ntry. The 

camtry that was phed particularly by the administration WLS Australia. 

It wm the only country to actually send a recruiting tem to the c q . 

It -8 the only country tho supplied the camp administration with a series 

of recruitment type of mwie films Wch tended to picture life in Australia 

in a =st positive and attractive manner. Incidentally, the films ere 

very, very& of a failure, because met of the people =re watching 

those film had in all of the time that they spent in China, great majorities 

had urban background, caning fran a huge coa~~politan-type city of Shanghai 

wlth all the benefits and all the vice and everything else that was present 

in this type of a city. And the film, because the Australians ere 

primarily recmiting farm mdcexs, wre actually film of life on a fam. 

And they s w , for instame, ddch was really a revelatian to the people 

of the cemp that: by and large the farm labor in Austrdia was being done 

still with horse-drawn farm equiprent. It actually served in the opposite 

my, people =re ready to change their mbd~ and sign up for Australia 

=re going a r d saying, 'My God! Am I glad they shod those fib. 

I 'm never going to apply to Australia. If I 'm willing to stay here five 

or ten years, I will d t for Amrica." 



%re was a the *en &cause this recruitment program ws obviously not 

fulfilling the c q administration's expectation, that the administration 

fostered an old Wletin board, bewe m had a bulletin bard in each 

district for dissemination of local propaganda, as w called it, the 

administration fostered notices--and I don't know tJhetbr I still have a 

copy--I remember that before m left the cmp, I took one off the bulletin 

bard, because I tftought that ms really .important enough to k preserved. 

kt I didn't VJhether I have it in my papers . . . and I ranembr not 

verbatim ht pretty mch the gist of the raessage, and it W ~ B to the effect 

that because the chances for successful passage of the ammbmt to the 

Displaced Persons Act Pn & United States Senate appeared to be virtually 

nil at this tkm, the IRO carp administration had to bring to the attention 

of all residents of UCO caarps , Tribalma, Samar , milippine Islands , the 

fact that unless people who henceforth in applying for, or intended to 

apply for, &ssb to ~ United States rmst, and I believe nazst was 

underlined or capitalized or ezaphasized in sme other m r , within the 

shortest possible time, apply for admission to some other nation tJhich had 

expressed interest in helping with the resettl-t. And there followed a 

list starting with Australia and the Dumhican Republic and so forth. 

Australia, as I recall ww the only country that offered to take unlbdted 

nunber of entries. All other camtries cane under the quota, like thy 

d d be willing to take a hundred people, you huw, or tmty-five people, 

or samething like that. 

And the notice ende?d with a very ominaus type of a statement and that ms 

the fact: Should this mrning be not acted upon by the residents of the 

camp, the IRO administration mld have to, regrettably, consider the 

necessity of returning all such people to Wna. And that ws the end of 

the mssage. And that, of course, created tranendaw fear En the camp. 

And there ere people who =re hysterical, and people who Ere at least 

talking abut the possibility of suicide, and for weks, if not fox m n~s, 

that vas the mst prevalent topic of conversation any place tm or mre 

imhabitants of the camp wuld gather. Eventually, nofhimg cam out of 

that. I redly could not say *ther that WM only a threat, and was 

intended to be no mre than that, or ae-r there ere actual contingencies 

to that effect in IN'S planning. I w s rather swprised whether either 

one of these ws true. 

But in any case nothing cane of it and wenatally . . . the amxknt did 

pass, which created tremmdow jubilation in the caq, and shortly thereafter 

the bats started taking pople, bst first of all was the boatload of 

abut five hundred people, I believe, which took place in our camp, ht it 

was the fimt group of people that had left the camp, and it was the first 

concrete widence to the people at the camp that it was not going to be 

forever, that at least sane wre leaving the camp, and that first boatload 

of people w s for Australia. Then cam the first boat to take people to 

the United States and following that was a second bat . . . I feel like 

I'll have to change that. Ch the first boat, the bat for the United 

States, my wife and I had left. Should I stop and allaw you to ask 

questions about the cq, because otherwise e'll be leaving the camp. 

Q: I was ~~rlng how much privacy did you have In the camp? You said 

you lived in tents. How about the people who had to live in barracks? 


1 Nick Chemiavsky 137 

A: &re ms no privacy regardless of &ere- you lived. Zhe tents Ere, 

in size, from the size that d d accdte tm people, that's the size 

of the tent that I and my wife had, to the size of . . . there ere either 

circular tents that could accarmodate about six people and then the other 

size a£ tents that could accOrrmDdate ten people. In m y places they 

muld put just ten people tents st- out to where they d d actually be 

putting twenty or thirty people in one tent, because they mld just 

contirare, you lam, one tent after another. And there ere no inside 

partitions then. Otherwise, you'd have, the air wuld be very bad inside. 

So there was tent barracks, you might say, and privacy there was none. If 

you wld start partitioning roans inside of tents, the people mld 

suffocate. So &--in the mrning Filipino sun, [it] ms just impossible 

to stay wit21 any partition. 

The tmts -re low, about four feet off the grd, where the walls muld 

b, where the roof d d be joining the walls, and the d l tents ere 

about eight feet h the middle, tall, or high. And tihe larger tents Ere 

about -1ve feet in the middle and caning dom to four feet at the edge 

and the beds, the cots, muld be usually put a r d the law walls of the 

tent--low sides of the tent so that the people d d get up bmping their 

heads on top of the tent, and &y would be mlking inside the tent and 

they d d be going to bed, you knw, where the top of the tent wuld not 

matter so rmch. Wre ms no privacy whatsoever, absolutely. Eve thowand 

people clustered together in groups, and the groups separated by the 

thickness of camas tents. 

And of course I described the barracks. The barracks were not partitioned 

on the inside, and they wre open with those screens on all four sides. 

Perhaps before I leave Tribaba . . . you [asked] the question abut the 

ocean and swboing, and fishing, and I started talking about the stores 

and neglected to [answer] that question. Che of the item by the way in 

stores w s &rely popular, =re Filipino-made wmdm sandals, with 

plastic straps, aich had proved to be very ineffectual, they muld constantly 

rip. The -den aandals themselves ere very colorful, and almost every 

one [FJho] had left the catup brought with them, to therwer they had gone, 

whether it was the lhited States or other countries, at least ttm pairs of 

those for their own use and to give to their friends as a gift fim the 

camp* 

Tb things that w mentioned. ke: w had a pet, my wife and I, then e 

wre in this c q , and he ms a black raven, a young one, who apparently 

sanebody had shot, and one of his wings was damaged. He could not fly 

properly, he could just hop-and my wife, who almys takes care of all 

injured inhabitants of" this planet, of course had to nurse him back to 

health, and eventually he became our pet, and I usually muld be walking 

a r d the camp, and he mld be following nre, making his hops fran one 

fence after another, and constantly jabbering away at me, in his om 

tongue, of course, and occasionally he d d cane dawn and sit on my 

shoulder aa I d d 

be walking dom, or satetimes ri&t on top of my head; 

and I GIwuld be quite a spxtacle walking around the camp with this creature 

on top of me. 

Particularly after I be- ~ll, after my bout with dengue fever, uhich 

is a local variant of malaria. I t(as dam for about a mth, and it .was 


Nick Cbmiavsky 138 

the mst exhausting qerience, because you run high fever and you becane 

totally msted, your physical stamina just leaves yau altogether-I ws 

not able to me around, I was spending mst of this time on my back on my 

cot. And my mther , in her usual habit wuld of course be extremly 

mrried an$ muld constantly visit her baby and repeatedly inquire what 

she cdd do to make me wll. I told her there vas nothing she could do 

to make ~IE wel and so I wid very properly infoxm her of that fact, and 

thm gradually becane mre and more irritable, and finally scream at her 

there wasn't a darn thing she could do to make me ~11, and then she wld 

cry. But, eventually I did get wll and I particularly remember the th when I, for the first tine, I walked from our tent, and our raven, called 

%my, wm overjoyed, and he informed the rest of the c q 

that e =re 

out again and bpped up to trre frm one [tent top] to another, etcetera, 

etcetera. 

This whole thing m to a sad end- because when w =re leaving, rn 

felt sure that nobody mild provide for him and he d d not be able to 

survive on his because he was totally dmesticated by then. And R 

asked one of our friends, who ms a hunter and a fisherman, and had a 

pistol from San EkancFsco, to kill Sanmy so he d d not suffer tryFn% to 

live in the style that he had becm accustd with us. lhich, by the 

way, m had made him a great pet in the camp because despite the fact that 

he lid with us and x+as fed by us, he had to keep with his itiherited 

custam of flying ard the camp and picking up any brigfit object that he 

could fhd and bringing it all to our tat, and hiding them all under my 

pillow, on my cot. And so then I would have to make the r d s of the 

carp asking the people whether this spoon, or ring, or wristwtch was 

theirs, and scmetimts it ms hard to find the actual miners of all these 

items, and so w =re pretty sure that once w =re gone there was no way 

that he could survive. 

And the other thing that I wanted to mention that I have mntioned beside 

that here--fis %and swbcing. %re waa s-thing in the rsy of a very 

scraggly-lodcing ach at the end of that road which went down to the 

Filipino nrarketplace, on the edge of camp. Actually, the road ended at 

the camp harbr, yau might say. There mre . . . tm, I believe, rather 

sizeable iron-plate wmtructed floating pontoons left frat the time the 

camp was a navy base. And this was the place £ran which, &en people 

started leaving the c q , the small bats d d 

be loaded with both the 

passengers and luggage and mld carry them over quite a great expanse of 

mter to the ships, which =re taking them to their destination--Australia, 

United States, or other points of destination. 

And off to one side of this harbor, or the floating pontoans, there ms a 

beach. Scm~ people d d go and swim there, kt it was considered to be 

unsafe kmse it us not protected by a reef. There wre sharks, and so, 

there ms almst no swhmhg in this point. People muld Erapent this 

part of the island because there ms a palm tree growth right along the 

beach, and young couples particularly =re frequenting this area for night 

strolls, and the sunsets-that vas on the wstern side of the island--ere 

the best display of color and lighting effects that you probably mld see 

arry place. It was absolutely out of this wrld. 

END OF sm ONE 


As little swimdng as was done [that ms] had to k done on the ather side 

of Samr Island, the min island, and the only reason at all that anybody 

muld ever go there. Believe it or not, for the mst part of the th 

that people viere in the cartp, T~R =re not able to leave the c q , and if 

ny mry sewes me correctly, in the first mnths of the camp w were not 

allod to leave the camp because the adddstration cllas afraid there 

might be problems with local Hlipino ppulation, etcetera, etcetera. 

Later, wz could leave the c q , bst the only txm ways that w d d do 

that nwld be either by our rn c q transportation, nhich primarily ws those cannibalized six-by-four trucks, or later on, the Ellipino people 

£ran Guiuan started providing a jitlzey hs-type of cab senice. 

This, by the way, wiw what I believe present all crver l?ilipino islands, 

also in tklaya. They take the regular axmy jeep, and elongate it so the 

jeep becams nu& longer h the badc, and they had additional seats--so 

instead of the front seat and the bck seat, you have three r m of seats, 

and there ws like a standing platform at the very rear end; and they also 

d d 

brace it to provide kind of canopy aver the xhole thing. The canopy 

and the whole jeep becaw very colorfully painted, usually not in a 

single color kt: in a b l e spectrun of colors and all sorts of decoration, 

flmrs, and maybe lettered slogans, d &at have you, candy stripes, and 

anything. It ddn't lo& lib rear jeep any more at all. And they 

usually d d pack--oh, I don't how-ten people tes not unusual number 

for them to carry, not just six people for the seats ere available. 

And so these were used fox busses or taxicabs, whichever you d d 

want to 

call them, for taxi service bemen the camp and Ouiuan, a city or town 

that I =timed. 

Ek~t even if you pt to CXliuan you wld not be able to go !mhmhg, and a 

ntnnber of people occasionally d d make a trip to Guiuan to do a little 

shopping there, bst most of the people really didn't have any mmey , 

certainly not this m y to spend on a pleasure trip to hiuan, and there 

wasn't that rmch pleasure in going to G u k . It was a little, tiny, 

scraly-loow tam. But the people dm d d get a chance to go 

miming--a beautiful mimdng spot--dd be the people dm muld bf! on 

the mrk detail and who periodically d d be aasQpd to go in the truck 

across the bridge to Samar Island, and travel clear across the narrow 

point of that island to the other side of the island, to the ocean shore 

here there also ms in the time the hrican Navy base ms present on 

[Samar] Island, there wa also some facilities, at that point of Samar 

Island, *ere they still had som Quowet huts standing up and EXXE lmbr 

etores . 

And so rn udly go there to bring sonre 1uhr or to disassemble scrme of 

those @onset huts and &atsoever item vm needed like window sections, or 

some corrugated iron pieces, etcetera, etcetera, w d d king it over. 

Usually e d d go there for a whole day, fran early mming, it vas 

about, I d d say, at least an hour's drive, perhaps even mre, and once 

E d d get there e d d usually have, like late breakfast, or $-thing 

like that, sandwiches, *ich WE muld brbg with us--maybe not sandwiches. 

Nobody mde sandwiches there--C rations-and then start mrking at dmtever 

whadtodo. 

And a r d noontim = mld usually take a break for lunch, and that 

d d be a good th to go swimning. The reason the swimnislg there ws so 


Nick Chmiavsky 140 

good ws because there ms a coral reef that campletely protected the 

water imnediately next to the bautiful sandy beach. The mter ms crystal 

clear. You could actually m1k into the wter ti11 the mter ms aver the 

top of your head, and see anything a r d you under the wter. Yw could 

see all the fishes and all the other sea life that wuld be in great 

ahmdance ard you and you could see the sand and the bottan of the 

beach, dropping dew under your feet, and you could see quite a distance 

under the mter. It ms unbelievable, and the swimning wts also--with the 

exeption prhaps of miming in Tsingtao, was also very, very good. 

kt in Tsingtao the water vas not as clear because here, the reef protected 

this pool of wter nwt to the beach in such a my that it was actually 

like enterh a lake rather than a sea. So e d d 

feel fortunate to 

really enjoy-ourselves tremkbusly mimbg tm or three times, or mre 

during the days ve ere there, and caning out on the beach and taking in 

the sun for mayb half an hour or an hour, and then finally, very lazily 

getting up and realizing that w hadn't canpleted even a small fraction of 

our assigned task. And with gat umifestatiom and display of vigor w 

muld first start cutting those pieces of lumber and dmtever else e viere 

stealing £~m the abandoned facility. And that ws the only way the 

people who =re in the camp cdd enjoy the absolutely out of this mrld 

swhmdng that ms available and unforwtely quite a distance fsm the 

camp- 

Q: And very few got to enjoy it? 

A: kry few. lktter of fact, I believe on maybe no mre than one or tcm 

occasims, a group of young people, boys and girls, young males and young 

females, hired one of the taxis for S~IE exorbitant amount of money and 

made the whole trip across the neck of Samar Island, and had a pimic 

r e . I wasn't one of the people ht I did go with mrk details at least 

three or four ths, in the three years that I nas there and so, with 

exception of &ese very, very few lucky individuals FJho ere without 

ezeption, young people, with the exception of that one picnic event, they 

*re all males. Thy =re the only people really enjoyed that swiming 

in this fantastic place. It w s really beautiful. 

But there WAS a little tiny island--not an island, kt just a little speck 

of coral-a distance away frm the beach at this place. It looked almst 

like ane of bse artificial islands you might see in a Japanese garden-type 

of a setting, p hcm, with these w e d bridges and little pagodas and 

things like that, and there ms this little absolutely tiny island aich 

had, maybe, half a dozen palm trees an it, and few other . . . bushes and 

trees al-t campletely covering it, and it m s almst entirely coral 

formatian, And so, one of the things that m wuld do when w wre swiming 

around in this lagoon, and then swim over to this absolutely tiny piece of 

coral sti- aut of the mter, and stretch out there and just laze it 

out for an hour or so. 

Q: You said saw of the people had enough mmy to get over there. How 

muld they get the mmey? 

A: kll, saxe, I muld say, almst me*-ly, the people had mey 

because people brought mxley with them fran Chiha. As I mentioned before, 

sorru; of the people who left Wna =re definitely walthy people, as I 

* nmtid, sare of thanhad beautiful b s , and so even if they had lost 



a great deal of their ~ alth fran leavhg China, nevertheless, sane people 

still had qdte a bit of mxley in the camp. Those, of course, Ere very, 

very few exeptions, it vies not werall a group of walthy people. It was 

mstly pple dm didn't have mney, Zxlt scm people had money. 

Q: You mmtioned the m~notorry of the food. k s there any choice? 

A: No. There ww n~ choice of food. Only one item per day, the mm for 

each day consisted of not one itan, but, pu larow, tm or t5ree itas on 

the m, which d d just make up one nreal, but you could not select £ran 

different choices. You just d d , let me gut it this my. You would 

have, let's say . . . bee£ stew . . . 

Q: For dinner? 

A: For dinner. That was the itern for dinner. You had beef stew and that 

w it, There ws nothing else. The only thing that you d d be drinking 

with this wuld be either tea ox coffee, and people who ere sick or on 

special diet because they had tukrculosis .would be getting special rations, 

supplementary items, kt the rations e *re gettimg fran the kitchen each 

day was the sau~ for every one. You cdd not make a selectim betmen a 

T-bone steak and pork chops or beef stroganoff or what have you. There 

d d be just one zlleal. 

Q: If yau had beef stew that mld be the entire mal? 

A: That depended an what was the situation at the district pantry, the 

district food stores; and a great deal de- on who was the mss officer 

for the district. SUE uere very ineffectual people for that job and the 

food in their district ms even more terrible than it could have been. 

h~ ere extremely talented people and they d d engage in all sorts of 

trade and barter with Filipino people, and pick out iteras of food that 

=re not available throq$ regular channels, and supplemmt our diet in 

this manner. 

In our am district, *ich =s District Number Six, the mesa officer, d~o 

WLS one of the inhabitants of the caq, a Ebsian person, by the m y a 

fo-r Russian axmy officer. J~E was an absolute wizard, and he was tdcing 

his assigmat with a great deal of pride, and he felt that his people had 

to b satisfied, or he vies not doing the job. And so he mld be mkbg 

rounds of the district, constmtly pestering people, '#Is the food good? 

Are you happy? Fhat do you think I should do? Shauld I trade this."--for 

what- item available Era Filipinos--#'Or should I not do it?" And 

FJhmever, and of course there ere people 1410 =re still complaining--it 

really was good. I mean given the limitations of the cmtingeflcies, the 

choices that =re offered to him, he ms do- a mrvelc~~ job. 

But the minute sanebody wuld canplain and say, 'Z'm tired and sick, and I 

m' t eat: this slop any more, " he muld imnadiately start canposing his 

resignation. Jk d d say, "All right, That is enough. I an not going 

to take thee insults any more. I 'm resigning. " And so then a dele ation 

d d have to approach him and say, "k11, you how, this is just a f ew 

soreheads. bn't txke it so serimsly." And he mid mellow and say, 

'%ill, yes. I think you're right. Mybe 1'11 give it another chance. 

You hm that I 'm doing & best that I can." And e'd say, 'Yes, 



definitely, you're doing a fantastic job," and he ws. And I think he 

stayed on all through the tinre that I m s in the cap. 

But there were sane districts *ere people ere en rnasse ccmplahing 

because all that they ere getting ms the staples that ms cdng £ran 

the supplies £ran IFtO. %re ws no imagination, there wms no variation 

irrvolved and people Ere just getting sidc of having every third day or 

every fourth day exactly the same thing, and hmwing the next four days 

d d 

be repetition again. And given all the hardships which people had 

to put up with--due to climate and due to pscyhological problems of ha* 

to adjust to live in such close contact with people whaa they had nwer 

known before, total lack of privacy, emotional outbursts aich -re cropping 

up everywhere, because people =re just, you hm, they had taken as rmch 

as they can, and wuld let their amtiom run wild. People getting drunk 

and people getting extremely distressed because they felt, 'W11, IIE are 

not going to leave here-there is no chance to get to the UnLted States, 

and I 'd really hate to go to the Dominican Republic or Australia." So, 

food, the importance of food actually had taken totally illogical significance. 

It ES not j&t food, it was saething that people w

Nick sky 143 

A: % tents? Almst no selection of the site on your m part. 'Xhe 

tent site usually muld be assigned by the district leader. 

Q: Wzll , it sounds like a cooperative camp, but: it really wasn't. 

A: No, it wsn't. Actually it ws on a rather authoritarian basis. The 

district leaders had rather great degree of authoriq and =re answerable 

to the district, I mean to the camp director, and if the district leader 

wld choose to be damcratic in his admhbtration of the district, and 

w did have, for instance, district trreetings, you Imw, where announcements 

mld be made by the district leader, etcetera, and if this particular 

district leader d d try to get some feedback, some information £ran the 

people frm his district as to &at they desired, then the district mld 

be run, you knaw, in a moze demxratic Illanrner. There =re SUE district 

leaders, perhaps mre so amng those dw -re old army officers, d ~o muld run 

it like an army contingent, and usually there wis just mre of dissatisfaction 

anmg their people. So, there ere a lot of instances of unhappiness and 

protest, in local district or in over-all canp politics, present during 

the history of the camp. It wasn't just a mmier-cmp type of d r o m t 

where people carre for a few weks and live in tents and rou& it in--and 

take a lot of sun and a great deal of swimming, and come back hare feeling 

rejuvenated and happy, and looking back with very fond nmmries. It ms 

an errtirely different type of camp. 

Q: You mtioned *at you had for dinner. Could you start at the beginning 

of the day? khat d d you have for breakfast? ht =re your choices? 

No choice, but bw wuld it vary? Did yau lhe up? 

A: Yes, %st definitely, you had to line up. Yes, the old army queue 

with your mess kit, or people didn't have mess kits--they had pots and 

pans and Ixtckets, and what have you. At the start of the day, I don't 

believe-I 'm dmst positive--m didn' t have breakfast. Wat we did have 

was lunch and dinner. Breakfast, everybody prepared himelf. Mst of the 

people had mnaged to acquire snilall portable, kerosene or gasoline-fired 

stoves, and d d be making their coffees and their teas on those. And 

that wmld be the my pu mid be preparing your breakfast. kll, people 

an special rations ae I recall in the cmp, the camp aristocracy, the 

people on special. prescribed rations, they muld be getting, I don't 

r-ber how may, so many eggs per wek--an egg per day--'i really do not 

recall ht they had that. ?hey muld have a ration of butter, *ich ms a 

very rare food itan. They muld be getting sar~ vitamins. All of this 

had to be received, not fian your district, but from the administrative 

office, from the camp hospital, actually. kk had our om camp hospital. 

And so the brealdast muld be pretty much whatever individual families 

wuld be able to c a up with. That is my recollection. 

I really don't r d r completely, but, as I mtioned, for instance 

Grations, you law, that d d probably be one of the itam for breakfast. 

Because one of the reasons for abence of break£ast, or at least it is my 

recollection that there m8 ~ZO breakfast. And I my be wrong about that. 

Perhaps other people frun the cap d d correct me in that, ht the 

reason I am Wing, about that there ms no breakfast, a s that the time 

to prepare the food 6r breikfast d d necessitate sane of the people on 

the kitchen detail getting up at four o'clock in the mmhg, you how, 

and going to the Utchen and fir- it up, and I don't feel that ms the 



practice, siamehow, it just isn't my recollection at all because preparing 

food for a few hundred people ws an enonmusly time-can- endeavor, 

and so the people h muld go and wrk in the kitchen on that day, muld 

spend vizfxally all day there, peeling potatoes for instance, or chopping 

meat for beef stew, or cleaning all the rotted outer leds of cabbage, 

things of this nature, and then cooking it, and maybe spending an h r 

dishing it out &en people d d carre to pick up their share of food. So 

it is my recollection that breakfast vas not a c d 

thimg, rather 

individual, and then the lunch and dinner ms provided by the district 

kitchen. 

Q: Wlere d d you have gotten your supplies for breakfast? Did you have 

coffee? 

A: I don't recall that. This is smething I really cdd not say for 

certain, I d d suspect, if I am correct in my recollectims , or the 

asslanptlon that Ws was the way it ms being done, perhaps there d d be 

a ratim of coffee . . . 

Q: W t 

mld you have for lunch? 

A: Usually, something very similar to &at E would be having for dinner, 

excepting not the sarne neal, kt similar, and in smaller quantities. 

Q: Beef stew? 

A: I wmtld not rule it out. After all, as I mzntioned before, the choices 

presented to the mss officer =re very limited. 

Q: You had bread? Did they make their awn bread? 

A: You had to ask that question. 

Q: Forget it. Jbw about the children? Did they get milk? 

A: Yes. There ws milk ration for children , . . 

Q: Did ymr have babies being born? (laughs) In three years, you nust 

have had a few! 

A: I feel sure that w did. he udorbmate occurrence, I think, was a 

child that had been born to a mentally deficient girl, tJho I suspect n u t 

have been rapad, or smeW,ng like that, and I think there may have been a 

few others. There have been not nearly as many births of children in the 

cap as prokbly the similar ~~tllber of people d d have produced in any 

othier erwirom~~~t, generally, the reason that there w so little privacy, 

and so this particular duty had been definitely greatly decreased. &I the 

other hand, per hap^ mre pple died than five thousand people d d 

nrmber amozlg fihe dead in the sme period of th, because of the privation 

which people had to encounter. My mther-in-law died there, and after a 

while, the camp administration had to enter into contract with F'ilipino 

authorities, and a small adjunct to Filipino cerrretery, on the main island, 

on Samar Island, was provided as a c q cmetery, and a number of people 

had k n hied there-people who had never made it to the United States 

nor to my other place. 



Q: Ws there a funeral ceremony? 

A: Yes. There Ere, I believe, at least tm or three Russian Ort-hodox 

prieats amng the people in the c q . . . and I believe a few other 

ministers, a hptist minister, I haw there =re a group of people dm 

were of different other hurdnaths, and there #re saw sexvices in 

-, and I believe there ws at least one, and maybe more, (tents of 

course) Russian church, in camp, and eventually, the Ftu~sian church was 

mrved to an area mtside of the rarm, proper itself, in a t used to be a 

base chapel befok, and I rerrrember particularly one Easter Day senrice 

there. 

Q: Did anyone attend the Rotestant se~ces? Were there any Protestants? 

A: I d d think so, yes. Yes, there -re definitely members of different 

Protestant dennminations, like, for instance, the people frm Baltic 

states d d be predcmhmtly Protestant. 

Q: b t 

other social life did you have? Did you have mnries? 

A: Yes. Movies were plentiful, tw kinda of mJvies were present. Ck-le 

-re umies provided by bit4 States Infomation Office, mostly educational, 

informational type of a me. They ere not very great in number. k 

did hear &ice of Prmerica nightly, sonmihere around six o'clock in the 

evening, and those broadcasts =re usually very mch attended by-the only 

place yrru could hear them, by the my, me at that square &ere the stage 

and the major camp infom&ianal armomcanents ere being de, the place 

of near riot, a8 I described before, and that t~as also where the mvies 

=re sw--so the people who mted to listen to the Voice of PPlverica 

muld there, usually with their folding chairs, most of *ich, by iihe 

way d d be made by the people th-elves, you hw. People had to 

tinker tbir t h away with doing srmethhg, and mst who rere better 

crdtsmen than others d d start making item of furniture out of old 

crates, and dmt have you. 

And particularly after the ICorean bhr started, tlhich started at the the 

when m =re in camp, the bice of hrica broadcasts ere very popular 

bcause that w e actually the only new link for us with the outside 

wrld. There Ere no newspapers at all. The only place &.ere e could do 

any reading of current mterial in the my of news magazines and newspapers, 

was in me @onset hut which after a aile the administration ~ rdded as 

a reading &an, and they Ere stocked with copies of Time, New&&, 

magazines like bt, lxlt quite dated usually, and the'y newspaper that 

was available to us that .kao of at least questhble currency was Manila 

Times. Usually it d d be at least a week old, and that w aur 07 

wed link with the mtside mrld in the my of news. The hice of 

hrica, on + other hand, was daily broadcast which d d give us sorne 

kind of infomation for what ma happening in the rest of the wrld, and 

d d suppl-t what little we muld be learning fran letters fran asr 

friends and relatives. 

Oh, now as to the other tyj~ of mwies, they =re mlusively, I mld say, if not predatly, Hollywod &es, so all the current, or nearly 

current mvies that ere available at that th, -re shown, it seems to 

me once a wk-that wmld be ray recollection. The really curious note 

about rwvies being shown was that in tropics you Wt have a star-covered 



sky in the early part of the evening with not hisper of breeze, and the 

mvie wuld get started, and perhaps, not necessarily every tb, kt 

perhaps at the mst dramatic part of the &e, the skies wld open, and 

unklievable thunder and lightening, a thunderstorm d d take place, and 

the waters mld just be pouring dawn in cascades, and there wuld be 

those Wreds, if not even thousands of people, j d in that square, 

sitting there, watching a mrrie getting soaked to the skin; eventually, 

after people became mre familiar with the drormmt in ~ c they h 

lived, a profusion of protection for this particular occurme was produced 

by just about everyone. 

k11, sane people mld hy a very simple w, an unbrella, for instance, 

£ram FTlipino store aich in mst cases ws not su£ficient to protect you 

frm tropical hpour, and so those who =re inventive and perhaps more 

of the mind of a craft-, they d d produce all sort of a canopy-type 

of accessory for their folding chairs. And the view £run the fringes of 

this concrete square, with people sitting there watching a m e through 

the hpr, sane under mbrellas, sane just with raincoats and plastic 

head-coverings, same just under a sheet of plastic, which they d d 

themselves in, and sitting in chairs, all sorts of different sizes, 

different colors, different shapes and types of canvas or plastic canopy 

over --it ws really unbeliwable. 

Q: Did you ever have any m ic in yaur camp? 

A: Yes. & had uusic to ory on performances. k had stage plays; ve 

had operettas ; E had, I believe at me time, an attempt ws rnade to 

produce an opera on stage. 

wrap 

A: Yes. You see, we =re actually rather rich in artistic talent in this 

caq because Shan@ai had very strong artistic c d t y . k had mstly 

Russian; in Shaghai e had light opera and m had regular, serious opera, 

which ww , the perfomes %re not nearly as frequent as light opera. 

(pause) So, all the people, perhaps not all, but very sizeable mbew of 

these artiats were in camp, and te had performnces periodically. k had 

people dm perfod in China, in Shanghai and also wuld go on tours in 

China, tho Ere very talented acrobats; had people who =re members of 

a bllet trq in Shanghai; and so in this sense, in addition to the 

mnries I mentioned, Wch was ane form of relartation, ac-lly a very good 

form of relaxation because it m ld let people take their minds off present- 

day probleu~, etcetera; and particularly wmld give them sonrething very 

relaxing if the shmbg of the mvie mld be interrupted with that thunderstorm, 

as I mtioned before. 

But there Ere other forms of entertairnment. I think they had a mber of 

stage presentat- during the time I m s in camp there, so Ln many ways 

life in WIS extremely boring--mofzotomus, ht there =re certain mys 

in &ich this boredan, frun th to th, d d 

was, of course, extrely wdcome. 

Q: You mtianed . . . Radio F'ree mope. 

A: No. No, Voice of hrica. 

be broken, and . . . that 


I 


Q: Vbice of hrica. EKcuse me. (lau@) same station, wrong tom. 

And also the mila newspaper. ere all of these publications, all this 

new in English, almst? 

A: Yes. 

Q: %is oust have been very hard on the Russian-speaking people could 

not read them. 

A: Yes. It ms extsr-ly hard on those rrmnkrs of the group dm did not 

have knowledge of the English language. 

Q: You also mentioned getting mil. 

A: Yes. 

Q: How did that cane about? 

A: k11, there muld be the regular mail delivery and after all we had, 

yau knuw, all practical sense [the camp] ms small tom. Matter of fact I 

think E had more people in c q than there =re mber of Filipinos 

living .in Q.tLuan, the real town; that is just a guess on my part at this 

time, kt I d d say that was probably a true situation. Guiuan ms not 

a big tm at all. And so the mil d d be arriving regularly for people 

Fazo lived there. 

We wuld get a mber of letters Sran our Amxican friends, fran Rockford, 

Illinois, during that tb--not too m y letters, ht I d d say w 

probably d d get five or six letters in the course of tm years that FR 

=re there, and those letters =re extremely important to us as morale 

builders, because our friends prsisted in tbir efforts to secure our 

admission to the Lhited States and they d d inform us about what they 

=re doing in great detail, usually, and ere always telling us not to 

lose faith, that despite all the setbacks and the time-cmstrming wed tap 

that ms involved, w mld c- to the States and look back on this as 

just an episode in our lives, and perhaps even ramnber it with a smile, 

something like that. They also sent us a few packages. 

PJbrgaret, being a very practical-minded person, after I wrote to her that 

or during the rainy season aver there, w had all these problans with d, 

and also that WE didn't have any raincoats, she sent us a M e piece of 

plastic mterial that she said could be used for any covers like-I described 

that there Ere people sitting in plastic W they wuld mtch mes, you how, etcetera, and she sent us, I believe a few it- of food, and a 

aerosol can of wsquito spray, and a few other things of that--I don't 

recall m. kt there definitely ms mail, FJhich TJ~S another very important 

my of people keeping their mrale hi.&, because there =re mm~rolts tks 

in the course of our stay in the czpnp where individuals, in fact, at 

different ths, almast everyone in the c q d d be really feeling dom, 

and hopeless, and it s e d like, ~ 1 one 1 year had gone by and now it is 

a year and a half, and how many mxe? W it ever going to end? And 

things of this nature. 

I Q: Were and *en did you apply for ycrur visa? 


Nick Qlerniavsky 

A: Zhe very initial letter that I wrote, king the mst versed in English 

language, w b during the t- when I ras rarkimg in U.N. mtor pl in 

Saq@i. *at I actually did ws, seeing that the situation in China was 

deteriorating so fast, and that bfore too long because of all the factors 

that I already have noentioned, the economic situation, the absence of jobs 

fox foreigners, etcetera, I felt there ws no question If vie =re to 

survive--FR meaing my family. 

END OF TAPE 

A: a t I did at that time, I picked up all the names and the addresses 

of those &rim--and h s t all of them as I recall -re Marines, we 

actually had very few friends amng the Navy personnel, and almost without 

exzeptim they =re ~ p l &om e w originally got to how when they cam 

to my parents ' hcodced raeals enterprise-and as I recall, there was a 

total of 21 names, each one with an address, scattered through almst as 

m y states of the union. I wrote sanething in the wy of almst a form 

letter, so to speak. In other mrds, the biness part of the letter was 

pretty much identical thraughout the 21 variants addressed to the 21 

individuals. Of course, there was a little bit of individuality in each 

letter. And I described aur situation in aim. All of these people, 

during the tine that E hew them, ere urging us to write to them and to 

get in bwh with than. 

So I d d write that I realized that it was a very, very great and big 

thing to ask, but ff there w any my in which they could help us to 

imnigrate to the United States, w d d appreciate it greatly. Out of 

these 21 letters that 1 miled out, I received one anser, and that ms 

frm Ed Nelson. 

Interestingly enough, Ed Nelson wrote that he had actually started on this 

project dmst imdiately after he arrived back home, and so the initial 

steps had already been taken. IKs parents =re campletely agreeable, and 

they had taken all the preliminary information, made all the preliminary 

inquiries that ere called for Erm Washington frm the Department of 

Inmigration and Natztralization. They =re supplied with the proper forms 

and they had -cuted the dfidavit to that effect, the affid&t*ich 

ms required that an herfcan citizen has to take out in FJhich he states 

that in case the persons dm he m t s to spansor as itmigrants to this 

country d d becorrre, as the saying goes, a public charge, or mdd rather 

be in danger of becmbg a public charge--in o&x words, they mld not 

have their om nr;keu~s of support, they d d be without a job and d d not 

have mmey to provi.de for themselves--that the sponsor, the person ho is 

executing the affidavit, d d 

see to it that they m ld not in fact 

kc- a public charge. That mans that the sponsor m ld either have to 

take sane steps to provide the person or his family with a job or d d 

have ta care for k himself. They had already had t&en that step, and 

as far as they ere concerned, the initial steps in the case -re already 

in the mill. 

Following that I received a letter from the United States Consulate in 

Shan&ai, which ws to that effect. And they sent a questionnaire where I 

had to give them aur family tree, etcetera, you knaw, give background 



infomation, provide them w ith a resume on members of the fdly, et- 

cetera. 

A nunber of visits to the Consulate were involved, first in Shanghai and 

later on in Tsinpo when, prior to atr leaving m, I tm in Tsingtao 

with my wife. And a nunber of pieces of correspondence had to go back and 

forth be- us and the Nelsons in Illhis, and betteen myself and the 

American Consulate in Skghai and Tshgtao. 

Q: You mtid that there w.s a hospital there as part of the camp in 

the Philippines. ks this staffed by Russian doctors? 

A: Yes, Russian doctors and Russian nurses. 

Q: So in dfect, the five thousand of you in the camp really had all the 

skills necessary to make a whole cammity? 

A: kfhitely. kk had btors, nurses, engineers, mchanics, technicians, 

artists, police officers, cooks, -s officers that I mentioned, school 

teachers, singers, ballet dancers. The Russian colony in SJmghai--and of 

course the five thousand that w had in the camp cas only a small fraction 

of the Ruseian colony in Shanghai, as I mmtioned before--8- of those 

people in fihe original colony, a sizeable group of thm, as m y or mre 

of than ln fact, had gone back to Russia, after the amnesty, and some left 

Shangl?ai on their om, precedhg the final stages of Qninese civil war. 

But even in this rather d l fraction of Russian colony in Shanghai, 

my, many professions and classes of people =re represented. had 

people dm =re virtually illiterate in the camp, and PR had people who 

=re of extremely high intellectual standing. 

Q: Did a social structure evolve there? You ere dl in the sane bat 

together, but did people sort themselves out into indiddual classes? 

A: Yes, most definitely so I wuld say. %re wis not just one group in 

that sawe that you are asking. There ere definitely social classes. 

There -re ethnic graups. There ms, for instance, a group of Russians, 

all of whm I believe -re Baptists in their church affiliation, and they 

=re not refugees Ewan either Shanghai or Tsingtao or any of the big 

cities &t I have uentimed up to now. They =re all from Sinkiang 

Province, aich is one of the nortl~~stem-mst prwinces of China, right 

next to the Russian border. And they =re, I don't want to rmke it sound 

as a pt-down in any sense, kt they ere of a mch 1-r intellec-1 

lwel than mst other people in the camp. b they lived in Sinkiang 

Pravince, many of thm made their living as famrs. Also, because of the 

isolation of thousands of miles fran those urban centers of Qlina that I 

have mtioned, they -re an extremely rural type of people in all of 

their behavior, their mde of dress, their culture. So they were very 

definitely, in that sense, a group of its own in the camp. 

One additional thing about this particular group of people that canre £ran 

Sinkiang is that, for instance, they believed that it was improper for 

wmm to go around bareheaded, and so all of them wre soaoe type of hair 

covering at all t b s and all of them wre very long skirts, wen in the 

tropical heat of the camp. In many ways, they =re very distinctly different 


Nick &emiavsky 150 

£run the rest of the people who, for one thing, cane firm higher classes 

of Russian society and, for another thing, spent all of their tb, or 

met of the time that they lived in China, as I said, in rmch larger urban 

centers. 

Q: W d the people of these different classes congregate in certain 

sections of the cq? 

A: To a certain degree, yes. 

Q: Particularly with housing? 

A: Yes, that's true. 

Q: That 's interesting. 

social class. 

So there WLS a khd of segregation, in a a y , by 

A: %t mid be putting it with greater qhasis perhaps than you should 

use. The people £ran S , for instance, definitely stayed together. 

I think same of the our district colony mre or less stayed 

together, lxlt definitely not all of them. So there t\as s a tendency ~ to 

join with people of similar interests or similar backgrounds ; by the 

virtue of the way the camp was administered, it was mt always possible to 

do so. 

Q: Ebw abut the other nationalities? Did they have trouble getting 

along w ith all of you Russians? (lauj$ter) 

A: Yes, I feel sorry for all the other nationalities having to get along 

with all of us Russians. (l&ter) M11, other nationalities viere a 

minority; they had to get along with all us Russians. That is actually 

the acarate statement because all the other nationalities were such a 

tiny minoriv that the Russian part of the camp population was a clear 

majority of all other groups. And not all the minority nationalities 

combined d d c m close ~ to the mber of Russians. They muld just have 

to live and bear it. 

Q: You Ercm Tshgtao via %anghai. bts of the other Russians came 

£ran Shq@i. Wre there any other mjor cities that these IiusaW czmre 

£ran to that camp in the Philippines? 

A: Yes. 05 course, the debarkation point for Tribaboa camp ms Shanghai. 

No boats cam frm any other port; all of them cam from Shanghai. Wzt 

the people who =re in the camp cam E ra Shanghai itself, Tsingtm, 

Tientsin, Peking, hfoo, Canton, and a few ohr places. But with the 

exeptim of people frm Shanghai, and they e re a mjority , and Tsingtao , 

which ms close perhaps second in the nuder of people I&O =re present in 

catnp, and then following with Tientsin and Peking, all the other places 

=re probably only a few individuals in each &e from each other place. 

Q: So @te a few of yau knew each other before you'd even gotten to the 

A: 'Ihat is correct. %re -re many families who had been friends for 

many, many years prior to getting together again in Tribaboa. 


Nick QzemFavsky 151 

Q: Us school set up for the children? 

A: There ms sorne attempt at that, not too fruitful actually, ht there 

were some classes for children. As a mater of fact, as I might also 

m a t h , there ms also a not too effective attempt for a revival or for 

setting up of a Boy Scout organization, in which I participated before in 

Shanghai. And there ws, in fact, a troop organized and I participated on 

a rmch dler scale because by this time I was married and samehow I just 

didn't feel that kind of a c d m t 

anynrore. But I did participate and 

met w ith a mber of my old friends, and our old chief scoutmaster £ran 

Shanghai ws present here, too. So that also was part of the camp life. 

Q: Md they provide bedding for you, or did you have to bring that frm 

your last ham? 

A: No, they didn't provide bedding. They provided-with the exception of 

cap cots, they prwed that-but in regard to pillows and blankets and 

bedsheets or atever else you mted to put on your bed, all that had to 

be yaur ow. 

Q: You nmticmed earlier a good friend of yours FJho was half-fiinese. 

ks he evacuated at the sarne tim? 

A: He left for Russia with the group that left for Russia with amnesty, 

or under the provisions of the -sty. 

Q: From &at you've read since you've been there, wuld you say that the 

carp you ere in ms fairly close to a concentration carp? 

A: ah, no, no, I muldnt go that far at all. It certainly wasn't anything 

of a concentration camp! bk -re free to the eat that e were not 

behind the barbed wire. k -re free to the extent that w? cdd, if w 

had mney to pay for the jitney hts, go to Wum. k viere not free in 

the sense that we mld not be able to leave the carp and e =re not 

actually alld, for instance, to go and stay ovemiat in Wuan or stay 

anmere in Sawr Island. Of course, CIR Ere not free to leave the Philippines 

or Samar Island itself. Our mil ~nas not restricted, it ms not censored 

as far as I knaw. I don't think anything of this nature was taking place. 

There =re sane actions on the part of the admhistxatian which =re 

obviously designed to suppress us, in a sense. For instance, the notice 

that ws on the bulletin bard, as I mentioned, abut the possibility of 

being deported to China again which quite obviously w a very, very 

troubling type of a notice because for me thing, perhaps they actually 

mld have not been able fm carry it out because it's very dubious that 

the Chinese Red goverrmrent muld have given them the permit to bring all 

those foreigners back to &,ha. And also, should, on the other hand, the 

Qlinese gwemumt concur in their desire to bra those people back to 

Qzina, it d d be ramr likely that same of these people who muld have 

to came back to Qlina d d suffer h saw way or the other from the 

Chinese goverrment because the Chinese EM gavermmt was not friendly 

toward these people .Ln the first place. Having gotten.- back under its 

jurisdiction, it probably mld be rather harsh on these people. 


0 

Nick Uiemiavsky 152 

There were also sane mmifestations of people being drunk with pomr and 

&at pmer does to people in positions of authority, as I mntioned. For 

htance, my friend Johnny Mngly before. Something of a similar thing 

apparently happened to scae people in the administration of the camp. 

This took place before I arrived in the camp, bt my dad actually was a 

participant in this particular episode. It misted of the fact that a 

group of pople , with my dad being one of these dm =re selected, were 

told that they =re going to be ass- to do s a mrk at the food 

warehouse, *ere food of different kinds ws stored in paperboard boxes. 

And they ere told that the hildhg ms going to be used for samething 

else, and all this food had to be taken out. So they ere assigned to the 

task of taking all these cardboard boxes out and stacking them up until it 

d d be remwed to another =rehouse. Then after they had emptied the 

warehowe, they Ere told that they had to put the boxes back in. 

So the people felt that, ~11, just typical administrative snafu and they 

just don't kncw what they want. The next day, they mre told to do the 

same thing again, and when people protested that thy =re not really in a 

chain gang or in a concentration c q , they =re told, "kll, you are not 

in a concentration cap, but you have to do samething; and people who do 

not wdc do not eat. Since w don't have any other type of wrk for you 

right nuw, you are going to do ht you are told. You will take those 

bo~s out of the wrehouse, and then you are going to put them back in the 

warehouse. 'I 

And that ws a cause for another d l uprising in the camp, and protests 

were written, there w a hear- on that, and they stopped doing that. 

There taas a great deal of discussion in the cmp at the time M I arrived 

there, which was soslrethhg like a couple d s , perhaps, following this 

incident. % reason that ms given to those people about those *o do 

not wrk do not eat is actually a slogan £ran the Russian Revolution, a 

Bolshevik slogan, and so it ms rather amusing to all those Russian political 

refugees from Russia to be told that very st~rre cdstic slogan under a 

kstern capitalistically-oqanized camp in Tribalma. So there ms a great 

deal of mrriment on that point. 

Q: Haw you ever seen any of the people again dm =re in the camp w ith 

you oth@r than you om close family? 

A: Not too many, actually. I have met a mahr of t h s my parents' 

vmm friend who actually king the tine that she spent in the carp wm 

staying in my parents tent. They built an addition to their tent so she 

was actually staying with than in the tent. She lives In Daly City 

[California] naw, and my parents and she continue to be very good friends. 

I have run into maybe tm or three other individuals, bst not any great 

mmber of people that I knew in the camp. 

Q: Did all the bketemers get aut of China, as far as you knuw? 

Q: There ere a few who stayed, wren' t there? 

A: Wxe =re a few who stayed, rwt. There =re a few who stayed and 

tried t~ get out later. And sane of them succeeded, lxlt it took them a 

few years to be able to obtain exit visas. 



Q: As far as yau know, all of them got out of this camp, th,o~&, in the 

rnlippines? 

A: So Ear as I know, yes, but I remmber reading in papers after I was 

already in this camtry, and also getting sos~le letters--one or tm letters 

firm people that I knew there--that som individuals, a small handful 

actually, -re in almst a hopeless situation because those =re primarily 

tbse &m had TB. kt eventually sar~ provision was made for them, I can 

remmber. I do not how where they =re resettled, but the camp itself 

was findly closed dawn. 

Q: And so yrm came on to this country, by bat, and landed where? 

A: Yes, in San Francisco. 

Q: And yrmr parents came d~m? 

A: My parents arrived also in San Francisco sixmths later on another 

boat, I believe. The mure of the boat on which I and my wife arrived was 

the U.S. Navy transport ship General Hemhey. I do not knaw *ether it 

ms for General Hershey ws chiet of draft administration, ht that 

sounds wry likely, perhaps that was the one tht it was rimed for. 

Ckae incident cares to my rmLnd ddch I feel w should include in this. 

bhn w received the wrd frm American Naturalization and Irrmigration 

Service at the camp--, my wife and I--that our visas had been processed 

and our quota mmber had been reached and wz- =re called in for an interview 

with the interviewing officer for the Nahtralizatim and hnigration 

Srvice, w =re asked a mber of questions. Same of those questions 

=re perhaps of the nature that was designed to elicit some responses that 

a person might give in an unguarded nmmt perhaps. They =re political 

questions and they -re probing questions about uur position in regard to 

the camunist government in Russian, things of that nature. 

I particularly recall ttm subjects in ddch I, in my typical manner, had 

gotten in an argunf3nt with the interviewing officer. bk have to remember 

that at that tk the bxean ME ms already raging, so the officer asked 

nre to %hat are my vim about the camunist pvemaent in Russia. I gave 

a rather leveled anster to that and in the context of my ansmr, there was 

sanething to the effect that I felt that there ms a good probability of 

this country going to w with Red Russia. He w flabbergasted by this 

answer, and said, 'No, that's not true at all! The United States government 

and the Soviet Urn govewrarrent are good friends. The relationship betmen 

the tw countries is very good," etcetera. 

I countered that by quoting £ran the speech dxLch ms made about tm ~ eks 

ago, [earlier] Wch I had read in a current copy of the Manila Times. A 

speech which uas IPade by a menber of President Trwnan's cabinet ascussed the great likelihood of exactly the siwtion that I described as possibly 

might e. lhe officer actually had nothing to respond to that and ms 

somewhat armoyed, I believe, by my attitude. 

The other thing that happened during this interview was that in general 

the questioning m s quite friendly and rather mild, kt the person kept 

coming back to the name of our family friends +se narrre I had included, 


Nick Umdmsky 154 

as a mtter of fact, all mmbers of my fmily had included as a reference 

for the tim that rn had spmt in Shanghai, because this persm had been 

the mst well-knam and the mst successful person in business in Shanghai 

in all the time that e had lived there. 

I was arewhat surprised that time and again the interviewing officer 

d d come back to this nam and kept probing around this, and finally he 

care right out in the open and said, %ll, actually, there is nothing in 

your application for a visa, there is nothing in any papers that are in 

your file, that is throwing any clouds in your application except this one 

name." This person had tried to get admittance to the United States 

himself and vas denied a visa because of his very questionable tusiness 

badcground in the black mzket and other types of operatians in Shanghai. 

So when I cam back frm the interview and told my wife and my parents, 

that mw a twarrendous shock to the rest of the family. 

Q: He m s denied admission? 

A: Yes, as a matter of fact, he, his wife, and their; adopted Qlinese 

scm-they adopted a boy who ms the son of their Qlinese cook--they =re 

not able ta ccme to the United Sates and they writ instead to Brazilia, 

to Brazil, sorry, I mas using the Russian term for the natre of the country. 

Q: Or Brasilia, the city. 

A: Yes, will, I don't think they =re living in Brasilia, the city. But 

that's where they've been for a nwnber of years nm, and they opened up 

their own hssiness there. Their Chinese adopted son has received a college 

education and at one tinre, at least, was mmagimg their hllness. I don't 

know vhat he is doing now. They had been quite ealthy in Shanghai, in 

the later part of their life there, and I understand they had managed to 

bring mst of their sdth w ith thein to &dl. 

Q: &re they in the camp with you? 

A: No, no, they had never--they left Shan&ai on their uwn before us. 

Q: ks anyone in the camp that you =re m e of denied a visa to the 

United States? 

A: I mild not be able to cite any particular instances, you know, like 

tbse people or others, but, yes, sorne m e people =re denied visas. 

Also, e of the people h =re issued visas upon arrival in the States 

=re detained by the rlepartment of Naturalization and Imigratim in San 

Francisco. h for days, sarne for mnths. 

Q: were d d 

they detain thall? 

A: I haven't been detained, so I wouldn't haw the address, (laughter) 

bst apparently, they have a facility in San E'rancisco. 

Q: &re they tihen released, as far as you haw and granted admission? 


Nick G~rniavsky 155 

A: As fax as I knaw, all tbse who had been detained eventually, after 

their cases had been processed, =re released and admitted to the country. 

Q: bhat -re they loddng for, spies? 

A: Smr? of the people had sarre adverse report in their files and so, for 

sarne reason, rather than process this prior to their arrival, the Departmmt 

did it following their arrival. Sme of those people actually had a 

rather unpleasant experience as a result of that because it doesn't really 

matter *ther you call it arrested or detained or whatever, they =re 

behind the bars. 

Q: Can yrxl tell ICE about packing up to leave the cap in the Philippines 

arad boarding the ship? 

A: k11, in many ways, for 801f)le people, packing for the final trip to the 

Sates ms less of a job, less of a problem, because after tm years at 

the camp, very few new possessions had been acquired and the war on 

clothing, for instance, in tropical clbete is unbelievably heavy. The 

clothing just disintegrates because of heat, humidity, the necessity of 

tnearhg your clothing thmu& the rain, and inability to provide proper 

care for it. The hmidity in FJhiCh the clothing had to be kept inside the 

tats wm cmtritxlting to the deterioration of it. And very few item of 

any nature had been plrchased outside of, as I ~llentionad, some Filipino 

sandals and things of this nature. So it really vas nohre near as 

manmental a task to perEorm as it was in Wna. 

Wzt at the th when w =re leavbg Tsingtao and later on, Shanghai, e 

still had to pa&, of course, and I really don't recall my great physical 

labor involved in this or anything of this nature. It w s mre in the m y 

of having to get all your shots and innoculations before leaving the caq, 

and many visits to the United States Imdgration and Naturalization Office 

before all your papers w ld be pic in order and you finally wmld receive 

a whole folder of all the necessary docuwnts. [&re =re] many 

administrative processes thr- which you had to p~ to obtain copies of 

birth certificates and things of this nature. 

-P 

So finally the ship arrived, General Hexshe as I roentioned before, anchored 

a rdle of so offshore, and the process o rmvFng first the luggage and 

then the people began frm that pntoan, floating pontoon, at the end of 

the mdcet street or atever you d d call that main street. And w 

boarded the ship. I believe our group nunbred mmhere bemen five 

hundred and a thousand people, I mild not remanber the exact Wr, but 

I mld say &ere in that vicinity, sevm hundred and fifty or eight 

hundred people probbly is what m had on board. 

k rnade the &ole trip without any stops; it took sixteen days. There 

ere great hop BtI13ng the people that perhaps E d d make a stop in 

hii or something like that, you haw, and feel like tourists, but none 

of this had taken place. Tbe wather as cold and r@ tkough most of 

the trip. The mip to the States took place in the second half of November, 

or it stated Zrefore then. And E -re all segregated by sexles on bard 

the ship, and wie had tw IRO escort officers . chief officer was 

Fretlch, tho was a forraer mber of the French underground and ms very 

proud of the fact and had on the chest of his shirt, the cross of 'loxraine. 


Nick Cherni.avsky 156 

J3e was generally a pretty nice fellow and w got along quite wll with 

him. He had a young girl as his assistant, and I don t remember too mch 

abut her. She probably wasn't too good-looking, or something like that. 

In any case, m =re all assigned, with the emeption of pple who ewe 

elderly or children, ne =re all assigned different tasks aboard the ship. 

scam people wr2ced in the galley, s- people -re assigned to cleaning 

operations on various decks; and rn people had to clean the restrooms, 

etcetera. In other wrds, m again -re self-sufficient aboard the ship 

because at the first general meeting, w =re told the IRO w e t is very 

limited and because of that, the ship did not have a full complex of crew 

and rn mld have to help make the trip possible. 

There ms an incident in regard to this on the second or third day of the 

trip. The vmen mo -re assigned ta clean the lavatories mutinied because 

the lavatories =re, when w got on bard the ship, in very bad condition 

to start with. 'Ihey =re told that they wuld have to use scouring powder 

and whatever mane they d d 

be able to use to get all the rust and all 

the marks off all the porcelain surfaces in the lavatory and restrooms. 

They said they w ld be mre than willing to keep the ship clean in resrd 

to our own use, kt they didn't want to contrihte their labor to cleaning 

up the dirt that was left by smrebody else on the previous trip. So there 

ms some discussion about that, and the administration on board the ship 

capitulated, and they didn't have to do that. 

Generally the trip was not really eventful in any meaning. I bellwe, I 

can't say with any certainity, I believe that I rn assigned the task of 

sweping the stairs beWen the first and second deck or sanething like 

that, which was a ask to be perfomred, I guess, and scmbdy had to steep 

the stairs, so I was meping them. 

I recall one thing abou the trip specifically, and that was that when e 

=re on board the ship, the ammuncanent came over the radio one evening 

as w -re sitting ln the lounge that the aninese Red Armies had invaded 

North Iforea. Of course, e left the camp at a tjme when the South Koreans 

and the Awxican troops =re wing victoriously in their seep northward, 

and sentences like, '%'re going to dip our sabers in the Yalu River," and 

things of this nature =re scattered across the newpaper pages. Then all 

of a sudden, or at least to General MarArthur all of a sudden, the Chinese, 

despite his assurances that they ere not going ta join in the wr, did 

cam across the Yalu River and £ran that day on, the radio reports =re 

being listened to very closely. With each day, the reports =re becmdng 

mre and mre adnow in the nressages that =re being carried because the 

Sauth Koreans and the American Eighth Army and the Marine unfts =re being 

very badly muled by newly introduced m s e units into the battle. 

I believe it ms on the 30th of November, I'm not absolutely certain of 

the date, but I think it wm the 30th of Novanbew that rn came to San 

Francisco. 'lib were approaching the Golden Gate Bridge in the mry early 

mmhg burs, and I was down below when the mrd w passed that the 

Golden &te Bridge was just barely visible in the distance. I went up on 

the deck; it was still dark ht just a pre-dawn, greyish type of a dark, 

not really the pitch-black dark of the night. 'Ihe fog was heavy and very 

dimly, thraugh the greyish li&t of this early h r of the day and great 

masses of fog obscuring mst of the bridge, you could see this mmunental, 


Nick chmnimsky 157 

unbelievable structure erg* £run one shore to the other. As e were 

passing directly underneath it, everybody craned their necks upwards. It 

was really canpletely an unbelievable sight. 

bk stead very slowly thraugt.1 the bay, Alcatraz Island slipped by on our 

left, and we started to veer to the starboard side, towards the San Francisco 

side of the shore. !?amhere I believe a r d nine o'clock in the mming, 

when it ms cqletely light, the ship berthed at one of the Navy piers, 

sawwhere close to the foot of Market Street, and inmigration officers 

came aboard again and the processing of new arrivals started anew. For 

sorne it ms very perfunctory; it took just a few minutes and another stamp 

on our docurxlent. For m, it todc m y burs and, as I mtioned previously, 

sac people =re not let ashore, ox at least not on their own. They =re 

detained. 

Even tbugh my wife and I were processed very @ckly, ve had to wait 

before w c dd leave the ship altogether. But w =re allowed to ccnae on 

the pier, uhich a s barricaded. I should go back for a minute or so. ke 

of the very impressive and wlcome things that to& place W the ship 

just be- ms that there ms a Navy band an the pier and they played, 

''Califomla Here I Come" and that w@ a very merrpected and extremely 

pleasant thing. 

Em OF SIDE ONE 

They played ''California Here I and that ws very, very pleasant and 

very wlcomed by all people wJm -re on bard. But the thhg that impressed 

me thenrost, whennywife and I cam dclwn m the pier into that section 

that vm barricaded and where the people who had been processed could CUE 

and just stretch their legs and me around and just get the feel of 

Amrican sail, I guess--although it msn't: really soil; it ms all 

concrete-lmt my very first and very positive impression of hwica was a 

result of a little hospitality group fran the Plmerican Red Cross dm gave 

us all kinds of mlcmhg sawdrs. I think they had little tiny American 

flags and srme Wornratha1 material abut San Francisco, etcetera, etcetera. 

'Ihey had a little canteen there, and they served scglething like 

cookies and coffee and milk in those d l cartans, half a pint ow a pint, 

FJhichever that size is. 

I had not drunk milk in all the time that I was in camp, since I was not 

tubercular and certainly not a child and so d d not be receiving special 

rations. I don' t think I had dnmk any fresh milk at any th in Shanghai, 

and the last time I believe I actually drank milk b~ aina ws when my dad 

was mkhg at that dairy farm and he had, of course, fresh milk, as nu& 

as ve mtd, or any milk product: sour crean and cottage cheese, htter , 

you mme it. Wtt here I had this carton of milk, and it tasted so rich, 

so absolutely unbelievably tasty and rich that it was beyond the wildest 

j.magina- and that ms my mst positive IdcaIE to this country. 

Q: Did yau have paasports d such, similar to what kricans use? 

A: No, w had none. bk -re traveling strictly on U.N. special 

recarmendat ions. 


Nick ChernFavsky 158 

Q: bt =re your thoqjhts, caning into San Francisco Bay? kre you, can 

you remanber, u~re 

you pleased, =re you frightened, =re you hopeful? 

A: hfiniely not frightened; tremndously pleased. I imaghe everyone 

who w cor&g after tm years in a c q where, as I mtioned before, at 

times I wild say, virtually everyone h ms there, at least at som time 

ms losimg hope that the c q mild eventually terminate and people d d 

get out. So certainly this ms very ccmcrete evidence of the fact that E 

=re finally coming to our chosen and final destination. So there ms, I 

wuld say, satisfaction and hope for the future. 

Q: ht =re your expectations at that the? 

A: 1 d d say that they =re very general and arerely vague and 

undetermined. The future w a big question mrk . I had no idea what, 

specifically, I mld be doing, what kind of job I mld ke involved in, 

d~thex the people who =re our sponsors--- hew that they had a mber 

of fanas--d&her they mld want [us] to wrk on one of their farms, 

whether I d d be mrking in the city, or in what line of wrk. I had 

really no idea tihatsoever. So in this respct, the future ms not 

clear-cut and definite, but nevertheless the fitwe appeared t~ be, after 

all the setbacks, after all the privation W h was behind us naw, the 

future sea& to be positive. 

Q: Did yw have to pay anything at all fox your passage? 

A: No, yau nnxst have paid sanehcrw, in me my or another, at least a cent 

or tm as yaur share, because the money c a from the U.N. and of course 

the Wted States had been providing 46 percent of the U.N. budget, and 

thank you for the trip. 

Q: I'm glad you came. (laughter) Md you stay in San Francisco? 

A: No, we spent only that ane day in San Francisco. Wen PE arrived in 

San Francisco--I don't remember how it -8 delivered now, the details like 

this--there ws a wire for us £ran our spansors and it told us that a 

reservation had been made for us to take the train frm San Francisco, and 

it ms dl paid for the trip to Roddord. Wen w =re completely processed, 

w took a ferry across the bay and boarded the train. 

I believe it todc five days, if my m r y serves IIE correctly, for the 

trip across. bk had to change trains in Des Wines, I-. It was late at 

night, I remember, and the trip =S mstly uneventful. I raember that at 

Waterloo, Iowa, where e had satething in the my of maybe a mnty minute 

stop, 1 think. My wife and I decided that w wanted to get off the train 

and have a cup of coffee in a little diner by the track. k got inside--& 

of course e =re quite apprehensive that the train d d 

go off without 

us--and m hi our cup of coffee. This m s the first time that I had seen 

sugar dispmsers of the type that are being used, of course, all over the 

country, the kind of dispensers that yau just pour the sugar fran a little 

opening in the top, nickel-plated or chrcm-plated. I looked just like 

one of the barbarians who care to see the next country, 'Row do you use 

this particular piece of equipmt?" Wlt w managed, of caurse. 



It was cold; there trkls snow on the ground. bk got 'back to the train in 

th. It didn't leave without us. Black porters aboard the train =re 

very friendly and very mch trying to go out of their my to be helpkl 

and 'be of service. And generally the people dm =re aboard the train 

=re also nice or indifferent; R didn't have any bad incidents and nobody 

at that time had told us that e should go back where R came fran. 

kk could not caw directly to Rockford because by that time, Rockford did 

not have a transcontinental direct train service, and the train made a 

stop at Davis Junction, kith is about sixteen miles outside of Rockford. 

And w hew that that's the place where m ere getting off. Wen the 

train stopped, m started looking apprehensively through the windows to 

see if the Nelsons, our sponsors, d d 

be there. tk had ane or tw 

photographs fran than, a snapshot actually, so that E knew how they wuld 

look, and sure emqjh, pretty som there ms Ed, Sr. running around the 

side of our car, looking in each window. I& recognized him Wdiately 

and ran out and got out of the train, and they wlcorrred us in a mst 

ex~zkrant and fridly manner. k felt like w =re mbers of their 

family ri t away, and so our stdf wis pickad up and piled up in their 

grey, 194 8? Oldsrmbile, I believe it ms and e got in. Oh by the way, 

very shortly thereafter, dxn I asked him haw I should call him, he told 

IIB that weryone called him Dad. O£ course he ws abut twice my age and 

to this day that's h t I call him. 

He drwe us to Rockford and w came to their house. lhey had a rather 

substantial brick h e on half an acre on the outskirts of Rockford. In 

fact at: that the it ws actually outside of the city lixnits, lxtt it isn't 

anymre. It's been armed. And shortly after w arrived, their younger 

son Jim and his wife Doris, with their three-year-old, I believe at that 

th, daughter Nancy, arrived and mre embraces and mre welcaming xernarks 

ere being passed ard. Nancy nw, of came, is abut anty-five years old and about tm years 

ago married a fellow fran Switzerland and lives in Switzerland rurw in a 

very beautFM. place. I visited her parents a few months ago and they 

=re showing me photographs, and there is a sketch that hangs m a wall of 

their living roan that depicts the view from Nancy's and hex husband's 

widow in their house, and it's an absolutely gorgeous view of the Alps. 

So ME stayed with our sponsors, with the Nelsons, Sr. for, I believe, a 

couple of nrmths in their house. For ane thing, it m s the holiday season, 

Chrisbnas was upon us very shortly thereafter. ?he thing that tuuched my 

wife and myself very much ms that even thou& we didn't know a single 

person in Rockford, of course, w received quite a number of Christmas 

car& fran all their nei&brs and friends, which was a very nice and 

friendly tou&, At a kishnas party, w received gifts from the Nelsons 

and frm sure of their friends and other mkrs of the family, etcetera. 

Q: &at did you use for mney on the train trip? 

A: It WB strictly by our sponsors, and it ws prepaid and there ms a 

sum of mney aich ' k ~ received cJhich they cabled to us, wired to us, which 

w US& for our daily expenses aboard the train. 



Q: For food? 

A: Right. Because w =re absolutely broke. I cam with one pair of 

shoes and, 1 don't lam, mybe bm pairs of slacks and I thb& one coat 

and one heavy mater. As matter of fact, throughout the first winter in 

Rockford, I didn't have a topcoat, and I m s running. around tom and go@ 

to work in rather severe cold. It gets quite cold in Rockford. The 

tanperatwe that particular winter and at least one other winter that w 

stayed in Rockford w dd drop consistently, night after night, to 26 

degrees belaw, and that is pretty cold. 

Q: Did three families living in the house present any problem? 

A: No, but there =re only tm families. Their son and his wife lived 

separately, and my parents did not cme with us. They came six months 

Later. 

Q: Oh, I'd forgotten that. So there ere just the tvm of you. 

A: Right, and the Nelsons have a rather sizeable hause. They have a 

kitchen, dining room and living roan on the =in floor, three 'bedroans and 

a den on the second floor, and a playroan in the basement, a three-car 

garage. Of course we didn't have any car yet, and they had tm cars. 

One of the things that I a t bring in at this titne, one of the things 

that ws very ruuch on &ir minds at that time, ws that our friend Ed, 

Jr . , who instigated the whole affair, tas shortly before that tb, called 

back into semice and firet he WLS in Camp Pendleton in California, training 

Marine recruits. By the tirne whm w caue to Rockford, he w in Korea. 

Of course, with the situation very chaotic and very dangerous in Korea, I 

r d r many W t s when Dad Nelson and I d d be sitting for hours in 

his dm, listening to radio newscasts, and particularly to very dramatic 

presentations of the situation in Elorea by Gabriel Heater--of course, I 

don't fhink he's ard anymsre. kt when m arrived, the Nelsons had a 

great ded an their mind because their son ww in Korea and they =re of 

course extranely mrried abut whether he d d m safely through, which 

he had dme. He had never even been wmded, Ixlt he spent about a year in 

brea at that time. 

Q: Ns your bglish pretty good by this tine? 

A: Well, it certainly isn't pretty good ncm, and it vas wrse then. 

Q: W d your wife speak hglish also? 

A: Yes. 

Q: *re did you go to look for mrk? 

A: Since I didn't know my way around Rockford at all, there was nowhere 

that 1 could go to wrk, and my first tm jobs here in Rockford =re 

obtained throq# Nelson's assistance. My very first job vas only three or 

four blocks fran their b, and it was in a small farm implement shop 

called Baxxer Farm Supply. The place had about eight people wrking 

there, including three partners in the venture. And so abut tw mmths 


Nick b m s k y 161 

or six weks after-I muld say it ms probably closer to six weks 

after--= arrived, with Nelson's recamrendation, I obtained a job there as 

a jack-of-all-trades and m c ' s assistant and at have you. 

It as a very good job in the my of relationship with the people dm were 

my bosses and the people with whom I mrked. It was a very easy-going 

type of an orgardation. d d take coffee breaks anytire Flhen scmebdy 

muld say, '!kt's walk across the street and have coffee." brk ms dirty 

and heavy$ I had made m y trips with those fellows on the truck that they 

had, same -re fifteen, m t y miles outside of Rockford to saw God-forsaken 

farm, where te d d dig out of a mcrwbank s m piece of farm mchimry 

that had to be tak.en back to the shop and reconditioned or overhauled. I 

had helped unload combines and otherr pieces of farm equipmnt frcm railroad 

flatcars, and I did all sorts of other mrk that you do around a shop of 

this type. 73~ pay for the job that I was doing wm very law and the 

hours ere very long. I was wrking six days a eek, ten hours a day, 

sixty hrxlss per wek, and I was being paid $45 a d witht any overtb. 

After I got this job-I believe I was wrWng there for tcm weks or a 

1~~1th or whatever--m started looking for a place of our om. The Nelsons 

muld drive us around tam so that WE could take a look at apartments, and 

I believe after two or three days re found a small, studio-type of aparmt 

and med thq. It ms very shortly thereafter that I realized that on 

that pay, it d d be virtually impossible to buy tshe groceries and pay 

the rent. 

In any case, M? didn't stay very lmg in that aparmnt because after tcm 

udcs of our stay in that apartment, the landlady told us that she made a 

mistake and the apartment was actually not for rent. bk got a very distinct 

impression that sm~body had probably set her mind to the fact that, well, 

she ms mking a big mistake letting scnne foreigners roan with her. In 

any case, Dad Nelson was extrely upset about that and he catne with us to 

have a showbm, and told her that rn d d wider taking legal steps 

because of that, and that since she ms in effect thr 

thing that she could really do to square things up mld '=')?em to Out* return our Only 

rent or m y 

that u= had paid her. Dad is the type of a guy dm can 

bluff quite effectively, and so she got all flurstewed and returned our 

mmey, which ms of SUE help. k faund a nu& nicer apartment in an 

apartmnt Mlcling, &ich ms also a studio-type aparmt but rmch nicer, 

and ~le stayed there for about six mmths or so, until the tim when my 

wife got pregnant and e needed a little larger place where there mld be 

roan for our da@ter, whm she wuld be born. 

Mter tw mths with that farm implarent place, I decided I just had to 

get a different job, so I started asking a rd and I asked the Nelsons if 

they muld be at all able to give me information about better-paying jobs. 

Dad's sister, Florence, ws mrking as a nurse at Wte Faundry, and she 

said that she tlmght that she muld be able to get -.a job there. So 

one day Jlm, the younger son, drove m out there and I had my interview 

md was hired as a pattern repairman at nearly double the wages that I was 

dcbg at the farm implement place. 

Pattern '&pair m& is the cleanest work there is in a foundry, ht the 

foundry w~rk itself is of course very dirty. There is a lot of mke, 

there is a lot of dust, coal dust. It's dangerous mrk. The place was at 


Nick CIremiarvsky 162 

that the--I believe the conditions have improved considerably; the place 

has 'been sold since, and the present new managerrrent there had installed a 

lot of rnodern equiptllent there--kt at h t time, they =re usually killing, 

in industrial accidents, on the average of one person per year. As a 

msstter of fact, during the tm years that I stayed there, tm people had 

been killed. 

END OF TAPE

Nick Cherniavsky Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

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