By Todd DePastino
As I circulated at our Veterans Breakfast at the Town and Country Diner in Bordentown, New Jersey, Dimitry Olhovsky caught my eye. White hair, piercing blue eyes, a Slavic accent, and “U.S. Air Force” on his name badge. That combination told me he had a story to tell.
Dimitry was born in 1940 in what is today Belarus, then part of the Soviet Union. When Nazi Germany invaded the following year, he was just an infant. But his earliest memories are shaped by war, German troops occupying his homeland, then the Red Army driving them back.
At some point, the Germans seized his family and forced them west into Germany as laborers. They worked in a war plant. Dimitry would call his family slaves, but the pay was just enough to keep them alive to work. He remembers the Allied bombing raids and hiding in the woods until the bombers cleared.
When the war ended, his family found themselves in the Soviet occupation zone. That’s when things got tough. Displaced Soviet citizens, especially those who had lived under German control, were branded as traitors by Joseph Stalin. Many were rounded up and sent east—to labor camps in Siberia.
So, the Olhovskys fled again, this time west into the British zone of Germany. From there, they entered the uncertain world of Displaced Persons camps. They were stateless people, waiting and hoping for a country that would take them in.
In 1948, Brazil opened its doors to some Soviet refugees. Dimitry’s family made the journey across the Atlantic to Rio de Janeiro and settled in São Paulo. I
In 1961, at age 21, speaking some English, Dimitry came to the United States. Not long after, he received a draft notice. Someone gave him good advice: join the Air Force and get ahead of it.
The Air Force, for its part, didn’t quite know what to make of him—a Soviet-born refugee with a recent arrival date and a thick accent. They sent him for interviews and even a lie detector test to be sure he wasn’t a spy.
The Air Force figured this Russian kid probably didn’t mind cold weather.
So they sent him to the coldest assignment in the American military—Thule, Greenland in the Arctic Circle.
At breakfast, Dimitry showed me a photo from the recent Vice Presidential visit to Greenland. There’s JD Vance in a green parka gesturing with the strangely symmetrical Mount Dundas in the background. Then, Dimitry pulled out another: himself, standing in the same stark landscape in 1963. Mount Dundas hadn’t changed.
After a year at Thule, he was transferred to Goose Bay, Labrador, another remote, cold-weather post.
In 1965, the Air Force offered him the chance to stay in. He chose not to reenlist.
But he never lost his sense of what the country had given him.
Here was a man born under Stalin, displaced by Hitler, nearly disappeared to a Gulag, and finally settled in the United States, which he said at our breakfast is the greatest country in the world.
Dimitry is proudly patriotic and an active member in the veterans community in New Jersey. It’s people like him and stories like his that keep our events so fascinating and unpredictable.
