When Mark Idisis arrived in the United States on July 4, 1990, he stepped off the plane into a nation celebrating Independence Day. Fireworks lit the sky. American flags waved everywhere. “I thought the celebration was for us,” he recalled with a smile.

For the nearly fifty-year-old Jewish refugee, the moment felt deeply symbolic. After a lifetime marked by war, loss, displacement, and decades behind the Iron Curtain, he had finally reached a country where freedom was more than an idea. His journey to America had begun nearly half a century earlier, during the Holocaust.

Mark was born on February 13, 1942, not in his hometown, but in exile in Kazakhstan after his family fled the Nazi invasion. His parents had lived in a small Jewish community in Moldova, where fewer than a thousand Jews made up a close-knit community. His father, Ben Zion Idisis, was a talented tailor, a gentle young man who loved music, enjoyed cooking, and spent his free time playing chess. Looking at old photographs today, relatives often tell Mark how much he resembles him.

“When my family looks at me,” he says, “they see my father.”

Ben Zion and Nechama Idisis married in the mid-1930s and welcomed their first child, a daughter. Their young family expected an ordinary future until June 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Everything changed overnight.

Nechama Idisis, Mark’s mother, fled east with her three-year-old daughter, her brother, and other relatives aboard an overcrowded cargo train. The journey stretched nearly 3,500 kilometers across the Soviet Union under unimaginable conditions. Food was scarce. Water was limited. Every day was a struggle to survive. She did not even know she was pregnant.

Months later, in the bitter winter of Kazakhstan, labor........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)