Tales of migration: Your stories

As part of MSNBC.com's Frontier: Europe series, we asked you to send us your tales of migration, legal and illegal, in Europe and the United States. Here is a sampling of some of the stories we received. For complete coverage, click here.

Life in Bulgaria

Born in 1976, I was only 13 years old when communism ended in my country. I remember growing up so fast in the months following this so important November day and becoming politicly involved by listening to my parent comments and concerns. I was not alone. My classmates were in the same situation and mind frame. We were not allowed to participated in demonstrations, because our parents were afraid for us, but I remember hanging off the balconies, waiving the blue flags (democratic union colors) and screaming on top of my lungs "freedom" and "democracy". Then the next year my aunt, uncle and cousins without telling us decided to not return from a visit in Switzerland and this is how I lost important people in my life for the first time. As time passed and all that was there from communism started to get demolished to give way to the new, things got more and more dificult. I remember standing in line to be able to buy milk, sugar, flour, toilet paper, cooking oil. Everything was missing from the stores and the only way to be succesful in your hunt of supplies was to network and share knowledge with neighbors to find out which store was promissed what supply and when. Since my mother was working to get some money in, I was the one hunting for those supplies. I was 14, 15 years old. Money was not worth anything by the day. Then my mother met by accident her now husband — American traveling and working throughout Europe. She married him when I was 16 and started traveling months at the time. I did not complain. This is what she had to do to insure our future. At 17 I finished high school and was accepted in the Economics University in Bulgaria. This is when my mother decided to move to Prague, (Czech Rep.) which was doing better then BG. She gave me a choice to go with her, but at 18 I opted to stay in University in BG. 2 years later, my boyfriend moved to Berlin (Germany) to study. I followed first to Switzerland, then to him. By that time a lot of my friends my age have left the country to study abroad. Part of them studied, part of them just had the student visas and worked any job they can find to help their families in BG. In Oct. of 1999 I made my final move to U.S.A.- FL, looking for prosperity, success, things I believed I could not get in my country at that time. Few years later my brother (5 years younger than me) followed me. Suprisingly for me, after he finished his degree in University of South Florida, he returned to Bulgaria 1 and 1/2 ago and is sucessful stock broker in Sofia, Bulgaria. Going back home is the trend for his generation. Mine got lost... I have been thinking lately, that Bulgaria is now the land of opportunity, but I have now husband and child, house, obligations. I feel at 30 I'm too old to go back... and start all over again. I find the same feelings in friends that are scatered all over the World (France, Greece, Belgium, Germany, U.S.A.) that are my age, turning or just turned 30... --Samouila Smith, Palm Harbor, FL (submitted on June 21, 2007)

Escaping Hungary

I escaped Stalinist Hungary as an 8-year-old child, with my father, during a bloody revolution in 1956. We left my mother and 10-year-old sister behind, to liquidate our posessions, so we would have some financial resources, when we arrived in a new country. We finally were reunited with my mother and sister 3 months later, in Vienna. My sister and mother were robbed of all the posessions and money that she risked her life to salvage, while crossing over an undefended border, full of bandits from the ex Hungarian border police. We were given food and shelter by the Austrian authorities and the UJA purchased tickets on a ship to Canada for us. After a stormy 7 day crossing of the Atlantic in February 1957 during which time we were constantly sea sick,, we arrived in Halifax Canada with $5.00 in our pockets. The Canadian government gave us train passage to Toronto the next day, and we were housed in an Army barracks for 3 days. My parents immediately started looking for any type of work, and both being skilled, soon found jobs in factories that needed skilled European workers. Both my parents worked hard to allow me to get an education, and Canada gave us the opportunity to rebuild our lives. Since both my parents were Holocaust survivors of the Nazis, this was the second time they had to start their lives from nothing. Today, I am a dentist with a very successful practice in Toronto, and a staunch defender of democracy and the British judicial and humanitarian culture, which has given the world so much, and has created multicultural societies such as Canada, the U.S., Australia, and New Zeland. Without the English culture leading the world, with America in the forefront, I believe we would be living in a world controlled by despots. --Dr. Peter Aldor, Toronto (submitted on June 20, 2007)

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