Marienbad "holiday"
This is an except from The Ruby Family Histories (2006), written from Helga Ruby's point of view.
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.
His death threw my parents’ plans to get out of Germany up in the air. My father had been squirreling away money out of the sight of his firm’s clerk/accountant who by this time was reporting to the Gestapo. Actually, my father had also hoped to buy a factory legally and move to Holland, but by 1938, it was too late for that.
After my father’s death, my mother and the junior partner plotted for a month. He too was planning to get out of the country. Then, one morning in late August, she went out at 6 A.M. to meet the partner. I heard her go out and came downstairs and saw the milk bottles on the doorstep. Soon thereafter, she came home very upset.
The partner had cleaned out all the company funds and disappeared. He had tricked and betrayed her.
