Memoir details true story of eastern European.

"We fled by horse and buggy to the west. We were unbelievably lucky to make it. Thousands perished on those roads."
– Sigrid von Bremen Thomas

The memories of World War II from the eyes of Northport summer resident Sigrid von Bremen Thomas have
come to life in Goodbye Stalin: A True Story of Wars, Escapes & Reinventions, which is due to be released Sept. 1.

The book begins with Thomas and her husband, Rich, returning to her childhood home in Estonia in 1990 — 50 years after she and her family began an odyssey in which they escaped communism amid the threat of gunfire , not once, but four times.

Goodbye Stalin took several years for the former Life Magazine photo editor to write. Her war-time experiences simmered below the surface for decades.

“It seemed like it was so soon after the war (to write) and the real story was the Holocaust survivors,” said Thomas, who worked for Life initially through a training program and then as a film editor, beginning in 1958. “Everything that I experienced paled in comparison to what happened to them. It wasn’t until I began having children that I decided I needed to write it down.”

THE COVER of Goodbye Stalin
by Sigrid von Bremen Thomas.

Initially, the author tried to tell the story as a fiction but changed her mind after instructors suggested that she “tell it straight.”

Before her birth, the revolutionary government in Russia arrested her father and imprisoned him in Siberia. The von Bremens fled to Poland in the early days of World War II and were part of a massive exodus west from Poland as the tide of the war turned in favor of the Allies.

“We fled by horse and buggy to the west. We were unbelievably lucky to make it,” she said. “Thousands perished on those roads.”

As a refugee, Thomas experienced first-hand rejection from unwilling hosts.

In Potsdam, Germany in August 1945, American, British, and Soviet leaders agreed they would all get part of Berlin and in return the Allies gave up the part of the territory occupied by America.

“We were in that territory,” she said, adding everyone was hungry, including the local villagers who shared their rationed food with the refugees. “Twenty-four hours later, the Americans left and the Soviets came in … That eventually became East Germany.”

Sigrid von Bremen Thomas, who is shown at her
Northport summer home with her husband Rich
and Dr. Richard D. Schultz. (left)

It was in 1950 when Thomas fled under gunfire, this time without her family, to West Germany.

“I said goodbye to the East, to Lenin and Stalin,” Thomas said. “Whatever my problems in the future, I knew for a certainly that I never wanted to go back there.”

At the end of World War II, some 13 million Eastern Europeans fled or were expelled from eastern Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and a dozen other countries. Most were Germans or ethnic Germans. But hundreds of thousands of other nationalities — including Jews — were displaced. They came from Estonia and Latvia in the north to Romania, Moldavia and Bulgaria in the south.

“Their sufferings, deaths and dislocation are still dwarfed by the unique horrors of the Holocaust,” she wrote.

Collective guilt for just being an ethnic German struck Thomas while working for Life after emigrating to the U.S. in 1955.

Many of the staff photographers were Holocaust survivors, who were less than pleased that Thomas, with her thick German accent, would be responsible for presenting their work.

World renowned photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, famous for his photo of the “V-J Kiss” featuring a sailor embracing a woman in Time Square celebrating victory over Japan, would not allow his work to be edited by Thomas.

“He said, he didn’t want ‘that Nazi’ to edit any of his pictures,” Thomas recalled of the photographer, who later became one of her closest friends. “It was up to the editors to represent their work in the best light … to be there to fight for their story.”

Thomas was among some 600,000 refugees, over and above the ordinary immigration quotas, who were permitted to come to the United States by the Refugee Relief Acts of 1948 and 1953.

Her experience as a displaced person — a refugee — also gives her a unique perspective of the plight of thousands of Iraqis fleeing violence and chaos in their worn-torn country. She believes the U.S. should formulate a refugee program similar to the one that brought her here more than 50 years ago.

Sweden has provided shelter to more than 18,000 Iraqis since 2006. Conversely, the U.S. has given refuge to fewer than 800 Iraqis since 2003, according to State Department records.

“There are hundreds of Iraqis who have helped us as interpreters, kitchen workers. Those people are going to be killed after we leave,” Thomas said. “It seems like the administration is not doing anything.”