Waiting for the Sick to Get Better on Ellis Island
Latvian immigrant Naomi Fader recalls staying on Ellis Island when she was thirteen, detained for days because of her mother’s illness. Fader stayed in the dormitories on the women’s side as her mother recovered. She recalls visiting her mother in the facility’s hospital. She would have to sign out of the dormitory so room supervisors could count detainees on their way in and out. “Oh, they counted you wherever you went.” Fader continues, “I was never in the jail, I was never in the police station, but I knew that they keep counting the “prisoners.” She would leave the dormitory building and cross over into the hospital buildings. She could only visit her mother through a window. Her mother never discussed her experience at the Ellis Island hospital, as “Mothers don’t tell children bad things… She was they type that everything was good.”