Over 12 million men, women, and children pass way. Pass through rooms and corridors haunted with a special stillness which remains only in places once noisy with human life. Philly bought tickets for a thousand places in America. Here they traded their drachmas, their liras, and their rupals for dollars. Here they sang their first American songs, experienced their first American Christmas, and Hanukkah.
Here they waited to be given permission to pass over to the new land. Tens of millions of us have relatives who... came this way sat in his part of the largest human migration in history of the many who came some were turned away but even they would leave part of themselves in america to remind us why they had You never know how hard it was to leave her. That was the hardest thing I ever had to do.
She said, if you leave, why, I don't ever want you to come back again. Long, hard life. Europe had always lost its children to America, and now there were new reasons to leave. Industrial change and political unrest had brought increased joblessness and poverty to Italy and southern Europe, reaching as far north as the industrial cities of Poland and Russia. In America, they were saying, there was a future, perhaps a fortune to be made.
In the southern European ports of Naples, Piraeus, Trieste and Constantinople, they gathered to board the ships to America. Some were birds of passage, leaving to seek work and return. Others with hopes to find at the end of the journey the good permanent life that awaited. They were told 3,000 miles across the sea. In the rural areas of Eastern Europe, they had, in addition to poverty, other reasons to look to America.
The government was taking young boys to the army. In a mother's lifetime, she might not see him again. And always, there was the historic persecutor of the Armenian, Slovak, and Jew. You know what I see now? I see the peasant with a wagon and hay to take me, take me away.
The whole town was around my wagon. Everybody came to say goodbye. I didn't know how to say goodbye. Making their way to the railheads, they sought passage to the sea.
Some had money for the journey, and some did not. But turning back was seldom an alternative. I didn't pay no tickets. Get out on the train and pray for luck. They carried us just like they would carry a load of a bunch of pigs.
If you're going to move a bunch of calves or a bunch of pigs, would you put them in a passenger car? That's the way they looked at us. For many, entering the great port cities of northern Europe... had reached the sea and the immigrant was now in the hands of the steamship.
Immigrants from the east and north swarmed into Bremen, Antwerp, Hamburg and Liverpool to be processed for the passage to America. They stood in line together, who saw America as an adventure, those who saw America as a beacon of hope. It was a business of numbers, an operation designed to house, feed, and process 4,000 people at a time, to identify those whom American authorities might reject and return to Europe at steamship expense.
First thing they do with you is deload you. Look your hair all over. Your hair, if there was a net in your hair, you'd have to shampoo.
Fearing epidemics, huge facilities were established to fumigate clothing, baggage, and people processed and ticketed for their ship. They boarded in many parts of Europe, but they had one thing in common. We're traveling steerage. Steamship companies understood the profit and began a journey that could last. It was the last time it ever ran again.
It never made that one either. Some it would be a voyage without incident. The crossing line days for which they were ill.
They gave us a tin plate. With a fork, cup of soup, and that much bread. It's all from big room.
It was in the cellar. Little lights going on there, all the little lights. Sitting in the steerage, animals. You could see a lot of water, but we didn't see the sky.
To escape the throbbing engine, I didn't know where the toilets were. I was so dead. One night that that ship would go down. Horrible. It had to stop for a while, you know, trying to go down.
One thing in my mind, I wanted to get out of there, come to America. It appeared. Fuck. And everybody went over to railing, just admiring.
I thought I was in heaven. My God, this is a city on earth, but this is a city in heaven. I've never seen a building this beautiful.
Everybody was just waiting to get off that ship. Coming to, what was going to happen to you? No, in your mind.
Still separated from the first class and cabin passengers who were processed by immigration officials on board, the immigrant from steerage waited yet another boat ride. This one from the Hudson River Pier to an island in the upper bay. Crowded into barges and ferries, they approached the place that had become a legend in the...
Glad all of a sudden I had a situation. I forgot the house I left in my town. This was like a whole city.
I came through these doors and saw all these people there. I said, well, I guess I'll have to stay here for good probably. But all these people, what are they doing here? And nobody was happy. What's going to happen?
And about, about $50 I guess. My basket, my little basket, that's all I had with me. Lucky to have the one. The bank, we had none.
The club. We had no Clinging to their possessions, they entered the great building and climbed the stairs. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I says, where am I? They would come right into the big hall, and there they were told to sit and stay there. And they didn't know where they were.
It was a new land, but they haven't been in land. It was just a big hole. You'd get those tears and crying of the children. For the vast majority, the process would last less, but now they waited. Those who were the first in their family to come to America, those who came to make money in return.
So they all had this fear, this worry. They were worried about police because they were all near the... Gov-Government Office idea that the mockery the policeman will help you is very new hooker It's interesting for everybody to go through the dreaded disease of the immigrant certainty There's anything that put a chalk mark here chalk marker Those identified be set aside for possible rejection Represented a small percentage examined each day. But this was little consolation to a family separate.
You didn't have to know the people, but you know that somebody's missing. The agony they went through. So you know that somebody's missing in the family. All of a sudden the thought, my goodness they're separating us.
Police are always... separated the men from the women, took care of the women and children. As long as some loving member lived family, a family you didn't know you could verse. I had a feeling that I'm left all alone. It's a terrible feeling.
All of a sudden they were gone. America did not want the burden. America wanted a person who was not bringing into the country an infectious disease. Your back, your lungs, and you were sent from one to the other.
One doctor. And a lot of people were put away on the side. I wouldn't want to be sent back.
People were rejected because they showed outward signs of illness, what they considered mental difficulties. We didn't call it psychiatry, they called it neurology. And we said we're sorry.
And the ship that brought them had to take them back. That was a tragedy. I decided if they ever have to send me back, I'll jump down to the water and never go back to Russia. I never wanted to see it again. Built for 1500, the dining room often fed 3000. There would be dishes and forks and knives and white napkins.
Long tables, well set, but when the people went in, it was like chaos. They handed us food. Food was not something people gave you. I didn't like it, but then I tasted it again.
I never had seen a banana before. To me, this white bread was like cake already. At night, Ellis served as a dormitory for thousands. Waiting the new day. Each morning the Great Hall would fill and the noise would begin again.
Hopefully their papers were in order. A clean bill of health. A letter from a relative guaranteeing they would not become a public charge. Proof that they were not a contract laborer or a dangerous alien. In adjacent rooms, the detained were given additional scrutiny and an opportunity to make their case.
But accepting an appeal to Washington, the Board of Inquiry was the rejected immigrant's last chance. Through an interpreter, they did their best to persuade and to overcome the complexities of a changing immigration law. But it was in the Great Hall where the vast majority faced their first and their last test. In his hand, the men at the registry desk held the ship's manifest. In his power, the right to interpret questions intended to identify those who should be let in or kept.
There's no word of English. I couldn't. Not one word.
First question, how much money have you? She had to have five pounds. My father, I remember, gave me that five. Years, two and three years. Neera called out.
My mother turned to me. Who's never here? How does she?
They ask them, how do you spell it? And they didn't spell it L-I-C-H-T. It's alright for me, I don't know. But then they say, alright, you can go.
You're free to go. To Hoboken. There would still be questions of what food to buy for the railroad trip to Chicago, to Boston. It was still the strange names, the strange numbers, the fear of losing one's money. It was the process of buying a ticket to places with unpronounceable names like Pittsburgh, Amtramck, and Keoka.
But those were details. The island had passed them through. I've gone into a free land.
I don't think I ever can explain that feeling that I had that time. There isn't such a thing to be explained. It came out of my system. It's over.
It's not my native land, but it means more to me than my native land. It means more to me than my native land. Any country has never had and become a human being again.
It's a miracle. I'm glad I'm here. It wouldn't be any better could it? And everybody had hopes. One thing I was sure, thousands like me, that the degradation, the abuse, and the privation that we had in Europe, we wouldn't have here.
God is hoping for centuries. Thank