Marta Hobbs tells Newsweek about fleeing communist Poland in 1987 in this original essay.
My sister and I both knew that our home phone line was tapped, and that our family was followed by police. Our parents would speak about it often—picking up the phone and checking if there was dial tone or not. Sometimes they spoke in code over the phone.
Shortly after my mom refused to join the Communist party, our home was invaded while we were all sleeping. I vaguely remember voices, noise and commotion. When I woke up the next morning, my mother was gone. She had been kidnapped, imprisoned with other journalists and activists, and interrogated. Arriving in the United States was traumatic and shocking. At the time, there was very little help for me to navigate school, especially without knowing the language or the culture. It was"sink or swim" and initially I simply drowned. I was bullied and beaten by girls my age because I was a foreigner. Because I didn't speak English I was an easy target. I had no curse words that I could shout back at them. They would surround me in a circle and yell, spit, pull my hair and punch me.
I did homework with a dictionary, falling asleep on top of my books often, not finishing. I got yelled at by teachers when I couldn't pronounce words right while reading text aloud in class. I was sent to summer school when I failed classes. It was here that everything cracked open and broke apart—and looking back, I can understand why. At the time it led me into deep depression, constant panic attacks and serious health issues. Life forced me to slow down, but I didn't know how to be"slow."
Who goes from a broke immigrant to a millionaire? Some. But not many."I was so lucky", everyone said. But deep in my heart—I didn't feel it. I felt lost instead. And it was this lostness and the crisis it triggered, which eventually provided a sacred doorway to a new way of living.
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