Holocaust survivor an illegal immigrant who lives with purpose

Las Vegas resident Edgar Vovsi knows about life in the shadows. He knows about living in fear.

He knows what it means to be an illegal immigrant.

In 1940, Vovsi immigrated with his parents to the United States at age 7. Luck, he notes, helped them escape the Holocaust, which saw 6 million Jews murdered in concentration camps.

Though his father, a law professor and correspondent for the London Times, couldn’t persuade every member of his family to leave Latvia, he had learned enough about Adolf Hitler to know that death was almost certain for them and fellow Jews if the Germans invaded and occupied a country.

At first, leaving seemed simple, the 83-year-old Vovsi recalls as he sits with his wife, Mary, in the northwest Las Vegas home they bought 20 years ago. The Vovsis had the required sponsors. An uncle already was in the United States. But they learned that because of quotas on immigrants from Latvia, they wouldn’t be able to leave for years.

That hurdle seemed cleared, however, when officials learned Vovsi’s father was born in Russia. He used that heritage for immediate immigration for both himself and his wife.

Offspring, however, weren’t allowed to go along.

Vovsi’s father learned that if he bribed a Russian official with $500, papers for his son would materialize.

And so it happened. But they didn’t make it to America without a harrowing close call.

Told the boat to the United States would leave on a certain date from Norway, the Vovsi family nearly missed a train to Oslo when the date was moved up.

“The train was leaving and a porter carried me and we all ran to get on,” Vovsi says.

Once in the United States, the Vovsis lived in the Jewish ghetto in New York City before moving to a cramped apartment in Peoria, Illinois. At age 39, Vovsi’s father, who’d been working in a factory in Peoria, died of a heart attack.

Vovsi was 12 and heartsick.

“The stress of getting us out and not being able to support us as he did in Latvia killed my father, ” Vovsi says.

Vovsi’s mother, reeling from the deaths of her parents and in-laws in concentration camps, worked as a bookkeeper to support the pair.

After high school and a stint in the Air Force, Vovsi used the GI Bill for college. He briefly wrote for small Illnois newspapers before joining the American Heart Association.

To show what life was like for Jews who escaped the Holocaust, Vovsi wrote “The Refugee: A Story of the Holocaust,” which now is part of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Vovsi went on to become mayor of Pinole, California. In the 1970s, he convinced Ronald Reagan, then the state’s governor, that state land should be used to widen freeway entrance ramps in the small Bay Area city. Vovsi then took the lead in building new tennis courts for kids.

Later, as part of a stepped up American Heart Association anti-smoking campaign, he helped write 1988 legislation banning smoking on U.S. commercial airline flights.

“I enjoyed using government to make positive contributions,” Vovsi says. “They weren’t earth-shattering but helped quality of life.”

Vovsi says he’s had no choice but to work hard to try to help people have better lives.

“I often ask, ‘Why am I alive and hundreds of thousands of other kids didn’t make it?’” he says. “I don’t know why but because I’m alive I believe I must try and make a difference.”

With immigration a key issue in this year’s presidential election — many people want illegal immigrants denied legal status and deported — Vovsi can’t forget how he immigrated.

“I was illegal,” he says. “And I know many who’ve come here illegally did so because they, too, were escaping lives of no hope and death. We must have some compassion.”

Paul Harasim’s column runs Sunday, Tuesday and Friday in the Nevada section and Thursday in the Life section. Contact him at pharasim@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5273. Follow @paulharasim on Twitter.