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.