to realize what was going on. He saw the handwriting on the wall the day the Nazis came to power. He was able to see it because his Zionist beliefs conditioned him to an awareness of the viciousness of anti-Semitism and to the utter hopelessness of combatting it.

So one day in January, 1933, my father went to the police department in Hanover to get his emigration permit. The police officers were astonished. "But Mr. Ostermann," they said, "you are a German like us. Your family has always lived in Germany. Nothing could happen to you here!''

Our relatives and friends were even more outspoken. Their worst suspicions about my father's peculiarities were confirmed. "You are completely crazy," they told him, "running away like this. Nothing can happen to us. This is a civilized country. This fellow Hitler is just making a lot of noise. He knows he can't exist without us. He'll evict some Polish Jews-and a good thing, toobut that will be all." We, the four children, heard and remembered.

But my father was a stubborn man. He knew he was right, even if he could not prove it. We sold everything and left.

The last days were hectic. Somehow we suspected that some of my father's business associates had denounced him to the Gestapo. So our family split, each parent taking two children, to cross the frontier as quietly as possible. For me, as a child, it was an exciting night. My mother kept losing things. Our train reached the French border, the Nazi officials checked our papers, a wave of the hand, and that was that. The train moved onwardinto France. (Since then France has remained for me a symbol of freedom. I love France. I kept on loving it when I set up the Israeli Committee for Algerian Liberation and supported the Algerian Front de Liberation National (FLN) in its fight against the French.)

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