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Francine (d’Agostino) Korotzer Class of 1956 I can honestly say that camp saved my life, of that there is no doubt in my mind. My younger sister and I grew up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn with a deceased mother, a father overwhelmed by the task of raising two little girls and an aunt who was already known in the community as a determined communist. It didn't earn me any friends but I was good at delivering the paper and learning how hard for workers this world could be. One day while crossing over the Williamsburg Bridge by train I pointed to Wall Street and asked my aunt who lived there. She held up her two hands and said, 'The rich, but without these they've got nothing.' I liked that; it made me feel important. A few summers later Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were murdered. We all stood at Union Square Park but they killed them anyway. Would all of our families be killed also? I saw their sons, and I was terrified. That was the first summer my aunt was able to nag my father into sending me to camp, and a whole new world of songs about peace and friendship, folk dancing with Edith, laughing, discussions, swimming and, best of all, friendships. The girls of Bunk 18 were magnificent. When we cried about the Rosenbergs, we did it together. In the winter, we visited each other's homes overnight. All parents made us welcome. There were sleepovers, parties, films, occasional theater and just hiking through city parks and bridges. Throughout this time, there was not much political harassment, but when opposition to the war in Vietnam and protests over racism grew, FBI harassment increased too. The FBI visited family that had been putting me up, and warned them about unsavory people in my life. This had nasty shock value – they even visited me at work. After about a year, this seemed to cease. After my fiancé and I were involved in several minor protest arrests, they vanished again. Over time, demonstrations became re-focused on the Black Lives Matter movement, and the traditional political victims of the 1950s and 1960s have been replaced by Blacks, Muslims, and anti-Zionist Jews. Looking back, most of what I learned about what kind of world I wanted to live in, I learned at Kinderland. A world of peace and justice, where none would suffer, want or fear exploitation or cruelty, and people still wanted “to build a new world on the ashes of the old." I hoped we would have succeeded by now. I clearly underestimated capitalism.
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