When I’m doing events for a new book, attendees often ask me about the dedication page. Who is that person and why is their name there? This time, nobody asked. As a consequence, that unasked question went unanswered, but that night one of my fans sent an email asking about Sophia. In order to answer that question, we’re going to have to take a long step back in time.
Late in my senior year of high school, I was surprised to learn that I was being given a scholarship to the University of Arizona. At that point, Rachel Riggins who had been my homeroom teacher all four years and my Journalism instructor for two stepped up to the plate and recommended that I apply to live in Pima Hall.
Pima Hall was started as a co-op dorm during the Great Depression by a U of A Dean of Women named Evelyn Kirmse. The idea was to keep poor girls from having to drop out of school due to financial reasons, and it continued to do just that from then through the late seventies. One of my contemporaries at Pima Hall was the daughter of one of the Depression-era girls Evelyn Kirmse kept from dropping out of school.
Pima Hall had the cheapest rent on campus—$120 per semester. The term “co-op” meant that residents did all their own cooking and cleaning. In addition, we paid a dollar a day for board—including three meals a day six days a week and two on Sunday. On Sunday nights we were free to raid the fridge.
Pima Hall wasn’t called an honors dorm officially, but in reality it was. Smart but poor girls from all over Arizona were encouraged to apply, and part of the application process involved a recommendation from a high school teacher. Mine happened to be from the aforementioned Mrs. Riggins.
Every girl was required to do one duty a day. For cleaning the choices included Bath Up or Bath Down; PPV—Porch, Patio, Vestibule; Living room: Hallways. House Mother’s apartment. Cooking duties were as follows: Six o’clocks started breakfast, Seven o’clocks finished it and set out the buffet, Eight-thirties did the dishes. Ten o’clocks started lunch, Eleven o’clocks finished and set out the buffet, while one-o’clocks did the dishes. At dinner Four-o’clocks started the meal, Five-o’clocks finished; Five-thirties set the tables, served the food, and cleared afterwords. Six-thirties did the dishes.
A house manager assigned duties based on the girls’ stated preferences and class schedules. The Food Manager, often a Home Ec major, planned the menus and ordered the food. That dollar a day stretched far enough that at the end of my freshman year we were able to use leftover funds to buy an ice machine and an automatic washer!
Bath Up girls lived on the second floor. Bath Downs were on the first. As one of the latter, I was always closer to the downstairs girls than I was to the ones upstairs. Sophia Kaluznaiki was an upstairs girl a year ahead of me. She evidently lived in Phoenix, but she spoke with a distinctive accent that indicated she was from somewhere else originally. During our college years I learned three things about her: Sophia was very smart, her preferred dorm duty was starting breakfast, and she wanted to be a vet.
Several years ago, she came to a Pima Hall reunion at our home in Tucson. That’s when I learned, that, like mine, Sophia’s dreams for the future had also come true. She had indeed become a vet and has been operating a large animal veterinary practice in Green Valley for decades. In her spare time, she judges dog shows.
When I wrote Cold Betrayal and needed to find work for some of the Brought Back Girls rescued from the bigamy cult, one of them ended up going to work in her vet practice where, under Sophia’s mentorship, that once discarded character is graduating from Veterinary School in Overkill.
With all of that in mind, it made perfect sense for the book to be dedicated to Sophia. While in Tucson for TFOB, we managed to grab breakfast together, and it was there that I learned what Paul Harvey would call “the rest of Sophia’s story.”
The daughter of a Polish industrialist, she was born into a wealthy family. When the Nazis invaded Poland, they confiscated the father’s factories along with his home and shipped him off to a work camp as opposed to a death camp. One day while the prisoners were working in the fields, there was an Allied flight attack. The guards scattered, and so did the prisoners. During those brief moments of freedom, Sophia’s father somehow made his way to an empty farmhouse that came equipped with a working telephone. Remembering the number of a German friend who was also a factory owning industrialist, her father managed to let his friend know about his predicament before the phone went dead. At that point, the guards re-appeared, rounded up all the prisoners, and returned them to the camp.
Every few days the camp’s commandant would select a truckload of prisoners and send them off, never to be seen or heard from again. One morning Sophia’s father was chosen, but the commandant instructed him to get into the car that was following the truck loaded with the other prisoners. While they were being driven to their unknown destination, the car with Sophia’s father stopped at a crossroads where another car was waiting. The driver turned out to be his friend!
Soon Sophia’s father was reunited with his family. Using an assumed name, he worked with his friend until the family was able to cross the border into Switzerland where they lived in a displaced persons camp until the end of the war. After that they went to Sweden where Sophia attended grade school.
By the way, the friend who arranged the father’s escape was a Nazi, and Sophia’s dad testified on his rescuer’s behalf during the Nuremberg trials.
Eventually the family was able to immigrate to the US and spent some time living in Michigan. Later they moved to Phoenix where Sophia’s father was in the process of starting a new business venture when he passed away suddenly, leaving the family destitute and turning Sophia into one of those “poor but smart” Arizona girls who would find a college home away from home in Pima Hall.
Without putting Sophia’s name on the dedication page, I never would have learned that part of her history, and I’m glad to have done so.
I’m guessing my blog readers this morning are feeling the same way.