The Paradox of Seabrook Farms

Sunday, October 19, 7:00 PM

All are invited to a screening with the filmmaker of an extraordinary documentary telling the story of 1950s Seabrook Farms in southern New Jersey, where a diverse workforce of post-World War II European refugees, interned Japanese-Americans and African-Americans lived and worked.

In the 1950s Seabrook Farms in southern New Jersey was the biggest frozen food processing plant in the US. To succeed, the plant needed over 3,000 farm and factory laborers. The plant’s founder and owner Charles Seabrook recruited a diverse workforce of refugees, immigrants and Americans, each with their own heart-breaking stories, to work grueling 7-day-weeks with ever changing shifts.

Through interviews with the children – now adults – from diverse backgrounds who grew up at Seabrook, and her extensive research, Dutch-Estonian documentary filmmaker Helga Merits tells the story of the rural “company town” where these workers – with two dozen cultures and 30 languages – lived, worked and raised their families. The film shares the true-life stories of the children who grew up on Seabrook Farms, stories of survival and perseverance, and stores that reflect the struggle for freedom from war, discrimination, and oppression experienced by refugees and immigrants today.

Seabrook Farms workers included over 2,000 Japanese-Americans released from World War II US Internment Camps, displaced persons from Estonia, Latvia, and other European countries, and African Americans fleeing the Jim Crow south and seeking work in the north. They all came to Seabrook Farms with nothing but suitcases, hoping to restart their lives free from oppression and discrimination. What occurred in Seabrook New Jersey 70 years ago is a universal story of hope and new beginnings about people who came with nothing and left with opportunity.

Merits interviewed nearly 50 people for the film – including Follen member Mart O., an Estonian refugee, whose family lived and worked at Seabrook. Mart shares some of his life story and encourages all Follenites to attend the screening. (Mart is not featured in the film, and unfortunately is not able to attend the screening.):

“I am most grateful that Helga Merit’s wonderful documentary film “The Paradox of Seabrook Farms” will be shown at Follen in the Community Center. I recommend that all who are able take the opportunity to see this relevant piece of history, still most relevant for our present time.

My family, mother, father and six of us children arrived at Seabrook Farms in May of 1950, after leaving our home in Estonia in September of 1944 just ahead of the Soviet army advancing to occupy Estonia. The intervening six years we spent as refugees in various places and displaced persons camps in post war Germany.

We arrived in America early the morning of August 9, 1949. The first 10 months we were still more or less refugees, first in Brooklyn, then on two separate dairy farms in central New Jersey. Finally Seabrook Farms became our home and our community. I spent the most significant part of my childhood, third grade through high school graduation in 1960, at Seabrook Farms. At that time, Seabrook Farms was the largest producer of frozen foods in the world, requiring a large labor force to farm and operate the factory. Most of this large labor force was provided by immigrants, Estonian and other refugees from post WWII Europe, as well as a large number of Japanese Americans – U.S. citizens, from internment camps in the Western U.S., who had been displaced in their own country by their own country.

C. F. Seabrook needed all of these folks to achieve his “American Dream” and we all needed a place to start to achieve ours. Seabrook became that place for us. We were the labor force that worked the farm and the factory, and we at the same time lived the full life that made the community. We all worked hard, and played hard as well. We did things separately within our groups, and also did things together. We learned from and about each other.

It took some years after leaving Seabrook to go to college, to get married, to start a family and to start our own life. And it took many years for me to understand what a privilege it was to grow up in a community as diverse as Seabrook Farms was at that time. Helga Merit’s The Paradox of Seabrook Farms delivers this message beautifully.”