You Can't Go Home Again

Abstract

My parents, bless their hearts, were remarkably prescient and self-denying. When early in 1933, a few weeks after Hitler had seized power in Germany, a longtime English friend wrote to them that a well-to-do Anglo-Jewish couple she knew was anxious to help and had offered to provide a London home for a German-Jewish boy, they quickly made up their minds to send me. Many of their friends tried to talk them out of this plan. The whole Hitler nightmare, they said, would blow over quickly; besides, a twelve-year-old child's place was with his family. But my parents stuck by their decision. True, Father had already been dismissed from his teaching position and Mother could no longer publish in German newspapers; still, they themselves would stay. But there was no future in the new Germany, they thought, for a youngster like me. As for that youngster's own wishes, in later years my parents often teased me about my eagerness to go. Macht Tempo! (Hurry up!) I'm supposed to have grumbled, using current Berlin slang. No sentimentalist, I! So in the following October Mother escorted her only child on the long trainand boat ride to London's Liverpool Street Station. I was given my first English lesson in the Mitropa Dining Car. How do you do? Good morning! Good evening! Please Thank You. Mother made me repeat such words and phrases over and over again. After all, I had to start from scratch.

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