Mostly We Walked: The Werners from Russia—One German Family's Story of Immigration

"We must have walked a thousand miles," wrote my grandfather, Ernst Oscar Werner, about his family’s journey from Siberia to Danzig in 1918–1919. This ethnic German family, who had lived in Ukraine and Russia for three generations, survived war, exile, typhus, and privations and immigrated to America in 1920, when they landed at Ellis Island and found a home in southern New Jersey. Their story is told against the background of the dramatic historical changes that were reshaping Russia, Europe, and America.