I remember that they started taking the situation seriously when my father
couldn't continue working, because then times got very bad. They had a very hard
time, they just didn't have enough money to pay their rent, to pay for food.
We all pitched in, but it wasn't enough. And that's when they said that we have
to go someplace, and they were always wondering, you know, where can we go?
They started going to the American consulate to take out a number, a quota number.
That was the first thing because they did want to go to America, very.
That was their country. They were thinking of going to Palestine, I don't know why they didn't.
In those times, it seemed very hard but they were hoping to go to the
United States. My brother once brought home a telephone book from New York
I don't remember-- he found it someplace. He came home with this heavy book, we have
never seen a telephone book like that in our life and what we did, we were all
sitting around that book and looking for Jewish names: Levi, Horowitz,
all the Jewish names, Israel. And we wrote, we spent most of the little money that we
had writing letters to Americans begging them to give us an affidavit.
They needed an affidavit in order to immigrate to America.
You needed a quota number, you needed to know someone who
would give you an affidavit, which meant putting away a certain amount of money,
I think for one or two years, as far as I remember, that's how it was. And so we
always said that we will not be, we all have professions and we told them we can
sew and we can do all kinds of things. And we begged, and we even enclosed a
reply stamp, something like that, so it wouldn't cost them any money. We had a
few responses but no affidavits. So we were really...
and this went on into '37, we were-- but in '37, the situation of getting into--
you could get out of Germany, but it seems that one country after the other closed
their doors. They-- because, meanwhile, many of the Jewish people had gone to other
countries, and I guess many of the countries realized that if they're
getting a lot of Jewish people, and I remember it was very hard to go to any
place. I remember my mother saying, "I will I'll go to the jungle if I could just go
any place, and just live on bread and water." But it was...we just couldn't go
any place. We had no place to go to.