Some two weeks later we stood on the deck of a ship as the shores of Palestine slowly approached. For the children it was a new and exciting world. We knew about it from books, from the wonderful stories our instructors in the Zionist youth movement in Hanover had read to us.

But what did our parents feel at that moment? I have often wondered. What immense courage must have been theirs! Here was my father, having led an ordered life for 45 years, encumbered by a wife and four children, having to start a completely new life in a strange country, struggling with the words of a strange language (one he was never to learn).

It was a hard country, a different life. The little capital my father brought with him he quickly lost in various endeavors. He did not want to invest the money in real estate in the new country. He did not want to have anything to do with commerce, banking, and speculation. By the end of our first year, our position was desperate. As a last resort, my father and mother set up a laundry delivery business, both of them working twelve hours a day. This they did for eighteen years until my father died, more or less from overwork.

Long before that he had learned that all our friends and relatives, those who had mocked us when we left, perished during the awful years the Jews call The Holocaust. Later, when I covered the Eichmann trial as a journalist, my thoughts went back to my father, whose intuition had saved our lives. I am deeply grateful to him. I remember him carrying the laundry on his bicycle, dead tired but irrepressibly cheerful, happy as he had never been behind an executive desk in Hanover. He was a real human being.

* * *

As a boy in Palestine, I was sent off for a few months to learn Hebrew in Nahalal, the legendary settlement in the valley of Ezreel. After I rejoined my parents in Tel Aviv, I went to elementary school until I was thirteen.

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