In Nice, we rented an apartment in a three story walk-up building on the west side of the city. I became fluent in French, but my circle of friends was mainly German Jewish refugee kids. We hung out on the Promenade des Anglais, the beachfront, which was where I flirted with flyboys from the RAF (Royal Air Force), who were based in southern France after the France and England went to war with Germany in September, 1939. Some of them were really gorgeous.

From Liege, we headed to Antwerp, a raucous port town near Holland with a large Jewish population. We would stay there for three months.

In Antwerp, we reconnected with Hilda, who, as noted, had left Germany earlier with her husband Herbert Peiser. He was a bad man, very greedy, and after we all got to New York he sued my mother in New York State Superior Court, claiming falsely that he had supported my mother and I while we were fleeing together with him and Hilda through France and Portugal and now we should pay him back. The charges were thrown out of court.

When we were ready to go, an official SS car came to pick us up at the door. Some SS officials did a nice business smuggling Jews to the border. We were placed in the back seat of the big black car together with a young Jewish man, who had also paid to be smuggled to the border. Two Gestapo men sat in the front seat. We were on a high-speed road that only official cars were authorized to use. We were sitting in the back, but sometimes the men in front would order us down on the floor.

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.