Karen Torgaly

And at that time, in a big part of Eastern Europe, there are lots of pogroms, persecution against the Jewish people, and especially in their little town of Bielostok.

Businesses were being burned, people were being murdered, and there was no support from the army or the police.

They just were on their own to defend themselves.

So when he was born, they did not even go out and register his birth because it was too dangerous.

One of the stories Sabin remembered as a five-year-old was he had been born with an eye condition that caused him not to have sight in one of his eyes, and he was walking home with a friend of his from school, and some Catholic children who had just gotten out of their church started taunting them and calling them names, and then they began to throw rocks at them.

And one very sharp rock hit Sabin a quarter of an inch from his eye that he still had vision in and bled quite a lot.

But he said if it had been any closer, if it had hit his eye, he probably would have been blinded.

So that was a very traumatic experience for him.

Part of their family immigrated in 1910, but Sabin's family couldn't go yet because the mom's mother was very ill and she couldn't travel, and they didn't want to leave her to die by herself.

So they started their process in around 1918 when Sabin was 13, and it took them 18 months.

to get to the United States.

But when they got there, there were other family members who welcomed them into the new country.

And Sabin, he remembered seeing the Statue of Liberty.

And by then, he was 14 and didn't speak English.

The family, the mom and dad, were both weavers and textile workers in Bialystok.

And fortunately for them, there was a city nearby, Patterson, New Jersey, that was just near New York City, where they had lots of jobs for textile workers.

So they were able to get work right away.

And Sabin applied to go to school in Patterson High School.

They couldn't read his transfer records at all because they were in a foreign language.

So they just asked him, what would you do if you were us?