Actually, around that time, Ogi acquired a suitor. His name was Herr Repper, and he was a refugee from Prague. He had a wife and two boys there, but he happened to be out of the country on a buying trip when the Germans marched into Prague and he never went back. His wife and children were rounded up and died in Auschwitz.

At the end of that first summer, I was set to go back to school, where I hadn’t been in three years. Frankie, the elevator man, who was black and a very nice guy, gave my mother information of nearby public schools, which he warned us were not very good.

I really became an all-American girl and embraced American culture in a big way. I loved the Brooklyn Dodgers and went to a lot of games at Ebbets Field with Sandy Count and other guys. We loved the Dodgers because they were the underdogs against the hated Yankees, and because they were the team that brought Jackie Robinson, the first black player, into Major League Baseball.

I was also one of the bobby-soxers who screamed for Frank Sinatra outside the Roseland Ballroom when he sang there. I adored Frankie and his music for a long time.

I was one of hundreds of kids who used to hang out on the beach in front of the Nassau Hotel, which Ogi used to call the Nauseous Hotel. As I said, I arrived in America with a little English from grade school and lessons I took in Lisbon, but it was on the beach in Long Beach that I really learned how to speak English fluently. We were there not only during the summer of 1941, when I was 16 going on 17, but every summer for the rest of the war years.

When we got to New York, we found a place to live in a rather shabby apartment building at 101st and Broadway on the sixth floor. We shared a common bathroom with the residents of six other apartments. My mother quickly found work in a small hat-making factory in the Garment District in Manhattan. Meanwhile, in those first days, I managed to connect with my friend, Ruth Nash, a beauty my age who was also from Berlin and had been part of our refugee crowd in France and Lisbon.

I must say that my mother performed magnificently in that crisis. As already pointed out, she had been a society lady who left all business to my father. And yet, when things were really desperate, after we had been cheated, she did not fall apart, but instead, turned herself around and did whatever she had to do to get us out of there.

My father died suddenly in June of 1938 after developing blood poisoning (sepsis) during a vacation he took with Ogi in Czechoslovakia (Ogi was a nickname for Elli she acquired in the early 1950’s when her toddler grandson Walter Ruby called her ‘Ogi’ instead of ‘Omi’ (grandmother)). If penicillin had existed at that time, Hermann Ringel surely could have been cured.