A good friend of mine, a fellow some years older than my parents, escaped Germany with his wife and mother-in-law at just about the last possible moment. He wanted to come to America, but had to first live in Uruguay for several years. He and I worked together in the drapery factory for about 8.5 years. Germany offered financial aid to Jews living abroad, if they would resettle in West Germany. Walter and his wife decided to do this following his mother-in-laws death. They lived there about two years and then suddenly moved to Israel. That would have been in the late 60's.
About 1975 I heard from another fellow I'd worked with, that Walter and his wife had returned, and were living in the same building they'd lived in years earlier.
I called him and we stayed connected until his death about 18 years ago. He told me that as much as he'd felt part of Seattle and the Jewish community, he and his wife had longed to return "home". When the offer came, they returned to their home town. "Of course, nothing was the same," Walter told me. "I learned then that you can't ever return home." So off to Israel they went, looking for some friends who had moved there. At first it was exciting, he told me. "But after a bit we began to be treated differently than the younger people moving in".
I've often thought just how lonely it must be to live in a land that is not really your own.
The drapery factory, Bartmann and Bixer, hired many displaced Jews. Most of us became close friends because we spent so much time working together and grumbling about the cheap wages, etc.
So you can imagine my shock when I dated a charming young lady only to be met at her door by her father. "I am sorry," he told me, "My daughter will not go out with gentlemen who are not Jewish."
Of course, later on when I faced discrimination as a blind man, I chuckled at how stunned I was to have been discriminated as a Gentile.
Curious Carl
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