My great-grandparents on my mom’s side both came from Eastern Europe. My great-grandpa was born in 1899 in Riga, Latvia, and came to America shortly after WWI. My great-grandma was born in 1910 in Poland and came to America in 1937 before Hitler invaded Poland. My great-grandparents were Jewish and left Europe before many Jews were killed. However, many of their friends and even some of their family members did not escape Europe. When they came to America they both lived in the Lower East side of Manhattan and this is where they met each other (they lived in the part of Chinatown that we visited). Eventually, they moved to Florida and bought land where they began to expand their family. 

All of this information I received from talking with my grandma. We had a 20 minute conversation and in this post I summarized the main points from our talk.