Friday’s Washington Post Sports section featured a story about the “Miracle on Ice,” the victory of the US Olympic hockey team over the much-favored Soviet team during the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York.

It was a stirring victory, and I did get to see it, but see I did with my father and young family between visits to a hospital room in the Bergen County, New Jersey, Hospital room in which my mother lay in a stroke-induced coma. She would die a day or two after that game on February 22nd 1980.

We had hustled up to New Jersey, having heard from my father in a 3 am call that he had found Ema unconscious in their house on his late return from work in New York City. It had been a routine day until then. My mother had retired a short time before and generally appeared to be in reasonable health. She spent her days quietly reading or puttering around the yard of the modest RiverVale house–the first home they ever owned, a home they couldn’t afford until I had graduated from college and entered the Marine Corps. My father worked on Park Avenue, near the Grand Central Station, and his commute, by bus, was a long one. Home was near the last stop, and the driver, by then having known my father for a long time, would often discharge other passengers and detour down Aster Lane and drop my father off at the mailbox. It was the peaceful life they had dreamed of and earned. Would they have had more time together.

Ema’s funeral was attended by a number of friends, including my father’s best friend, a prominent Estonian singer, who bid Ema farewell with an Estonian ballad.

Coupled with the now-continuous recollections of 75th anniversaries related to the end of World War II, it is impossible to let this day pass without some thought to the heroine who risked everything to haul this infant out of the way of advancing Soviet armies, first from Estonia in the “great” migration of 1944 noted in my most recent post and then from Germany in the Spring of 1945. Another 75th.

And then there is a more modest 70th anniversary forthcoming, Ema’s and my arrival in the United States in June 1950 (written of in a very early post here). Stayed tuned, as I hope to reconstruct, with the help of others, some outcomes in the lives of fellow passengers on that US Navy personnel carrier, the USNS Heintzelman. I have made contact with one fellow passenger–he as amazed as I that we were able to connect (with the help of stellar spousal unit and researcher Tracy). I hope with more help from Tracy and others to build the story and stories out in a time when “refugees” — so sadly still being created by the hundreds of thousands — are seen as such burdens in the land that was so welcoming in 1950.

Thanks for bearing with me, and here’s a toast to the memory of Hedvig Marie Rohtla Vaart, (January 1913–February 1980).