Immigration Stories

I was born in 1910 in Strigehnen [Prussia]. As it was usual in those years, father believed in a good spanking to keep order and I got my fair share of it and learned to take it quietly as not to make it worse. A little joke from home says: to teach a farm boy where the borders of the farm are, take him around and give him a good thrashing at every corner so he remembers the spots.

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I still remember well the long flight and the mix of tiredness and jetlag, a new sensation for me.

Sure enough, I traveled before all over Europe, but I didn’t have to adjust my biologic clock since all the countries use the same time zone (minus one hour for England and Portugal). The airplane was about to land in New York’s Kennedy International Airport, six and a half hours after we took off from Barcelona (and after a short fly from my hometown of Gijón, in the Northwest of Spain). I was coming with a student visa J-1, valid for 1 ½ years, to work for Microsoft as a Spanish Language Specialist, after which, I will return to Spain to work again in the High School where I was working.

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I don’t know where to begin writing about all I’ve been through in my life. It would turn out to be a novel. I will do my best to let you into my world in the shortest format possible.

In 1968 the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia and my parents, sister and I crossed the border of Czechoslovakia into Austria. My parents claimed political asylum and on May 27, 1969 we landed at J.F. Kennedy airport from where we continued to Portland, Oregon.

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I was born on August 1, 1962 in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. I spent the first five years of my life living with my father Aladar Bilovsky born on October 4, 1937, mother Helena Bilovky born on May 4, 1940 and sister Renata Bilovsky born on October 1, 1963 in a old house, consisting of a kitchen, one room, no central heating and outside restrooms. At the age of five, after years of waiting, my father received a new apartment, which my parents longed for. My father worked hard to get finances so that we could live like human beings in an apartment with all its luxurious. In 1967 we moved in not knowing that that was only the beginning.

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