This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

And we continue with our American stories and with the story of an immigrant named Audrey Gruse.

And this is the kind of story that can only happen in America.

Here's Audrey.

My parents would never have left Lithuania.

My mother was a schoolteacher.

And my father was a dashing and quite handsome cavalry officer.

And the two of them met and had me and unfortunately when I was an infant,

Lithuania was nearing the end of the war, World War II, and my parents fled Lithuania because my dad would have

been forced by the communists to work with them. He had actually escaped working with the Germans

when they first came up north. He somehow escaped from a German prison camp because he would not work with them.

And then when the communists came down, they, of course, took over Lithuania.

And then Lithuania became a republic of the Soviet Union when it was a little bit sold down the river at the Yalta Conference.

Roosevelt simply gave Lithuania and the Baltic countries to the communists, and that was a terrible thing, a terrible period for the country.

What my parents used to say is the communists could take anything and everything away from us,

but they can't take away your education and your spirit.

My parents fled.

They fled by going south.

They went into Poland and Germany. They ended up in a displaced persons camp,

and my father became commandant of that camp run by the Americans.

And they were very lucky that they had relatives who lived in the United States in Newark, New Jersey,

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