LITTLE ROCK — The first 10 years of his life, John Karolson endured the raining bombs of World War II and then rickety military barracks in postwar Germany.
After a stomach-churning voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, he and his family finally caught their first sight of the Statue of Liberty rising above New York Harbor on Dec. 22, 1950.
"I knew I was coming to a country where everything was possible," he recalled. "It is a place where people who are destitute, people who never had any opportunities, suddenly have a chance." Karolson's experiences are exactly the sort of memories Mormon volunteers hope to preserve with their Leave-a-Legacy program. Since January, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in North Little Rock has partnered with the Patrick Henry Hays Senior Citizen Center to record people's oral histories and offer a family history class. Church volunteers do the interviews and lead the class for center members, while the Hays Center provides the space. The programs are free to center members.
Karolson, 68, is among 26 center members who signed up to share their life stories. Over the years, he had shared various childhood memories with his children, but this is the first time he set out to provide a lasting record of his life.
"I think it's wonderful," he said. "It's producing a treasure trove of information that the younger generation and future generations will have."
George Wing, a church member who helped launch the program in Arkansas, said he hopes Mormons across Arkansas will organize similar projects in their communities. He also plans to make the program a mainstay each spring and fall at the Hays Center, as long as members are interested.
The church, he said, isn't using the program as an evangelism tool. Nor are church members keeping a copy of the oral history interviews after they are completed. Only those being interviewed get the recording on CD.
But Wing said the project is very much in keeping with his church's emphasis on family.
"We do uphold the family as the most fundamental and sacred unit in society," he said. "By getting to know the people in our family, it helps create bonds of love.
When you hear about the struggles the grandparents went through, it has a way of tugging at the heart of even teenagers."
As a youngster, Karolson got a child's-eye view of war few Americans have ever shared. His parents had a little farm in Poland. But after the Nazi invasion in 1939, they and their eldest three children were carted by train and forced to labor on a farm in Germany. That is where Karolson - originally named Janek Karoliszyn - was born in 1940.
The growing family lived in a small house with no running water and only one or two electrical outlets. The family was fortunate, Karolson said, because they had a few chickens and pigs and his father had access to breadand milk.
At least once a week, Karolson said, sirens would scream warning of a bombing raid, and his family would run into the cellar or hide in the local morgue, which was heavily fortified by concrete. Karolson remembers sleeping on a coffin. One time, the family was trapped inside the morgue for four days as battle thundered just outside.
"Mother took a chance and ran out of there real fast to get us some milk, and she nearly got killed doing it," he said. "But you know, it was either that or we would have starved."
After the war, their life didn't get any easier. His parents and their now seven children were a family without a country. Likeother displaced Europeans, they ended up living in a series of refugee camps - many inside old, overcrowded wooden military barracks. Karolson still shudders at the memory of the lice and unsanitary conditions inside the barracks.
There were no formal schools. Instead, an ex-teacher or other educated professional would volunteer to give lessons to the kids in the camp - often multiple grades at once. What little paper they had, Karolson said, they fully used. They wore their pencils down to nubs.
Six camps later, his ninemember family finally could immigrate to the United States with the help of an uncle and the sponsorship of the Polish Hall of Alliance in New Jersey. Their trans-Atlantic journey on an old warship lasted 10 days. Karolson said everyone got seasick.
The family settled in Plainville, Conn., and despite knowing no English, the whole family went to work. His father worked for the manufacturer of Stanley Tools. His mother was a cook in a restaurant. After school, Karolson raked leaves, shoveled snow, delivered papers and did whatever other odd jobs he could get to help support his family. At 19, a lifelong fascination with airplanes led Karolson to join the U.S. Air Force. That is when he legally changed his name to make it easier for his fellow Americans to pronounce.
Eventually his Air Force career as an avionics technician brought him to the Little Rock Air Force Base. He retired in 1986. Today, Karolson lives in North Little Rock and works in real estate.
Martha Johnson, a Mormon volunteer who interviewed Karolson, said she has heard plenty of other experiences equally worthy of saving for posterity.
"We often think of recording our children, but not often the older people in our lives," she said. "But it's as wonderful to hear the way our grandparents say things as our children."
Karolson says the Statue of Liberty has more meaning to him today than when he was a seasick 10-year-old, queasily thinking of what life lay ahead beyond her torch.
He often speaks of how much he loves the United States, which - after many world travels - he still sees as the greatest country in the world.
Said Karolson: "My family proved that destitute people with no money, skill, education or knowledge of the English language can come to America and with hard work, frugality and no government assistance do very nicely."
Religion, Pages 17, 18 on 03/21/2009