ABSTRACT
I was born in Berlin on January 28, 1921. My father, the descendent of a line of rabbinic scholars in Prague, came to Germany from Vienna at the beginning of World War I, leaving behind an unhappy, arranged first marriage and the beginning of a rabbinical career in order to seek out a new life as a student of medicine at the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Universitat in Berlin. My mother came to Berlin from Galicia, part of Russian-occupied Poland, fleeing before the advancing Tsarist Russian army into the welcoming safety of Germany, also in the earliest days of the first world war. They met and were married in 1919 when my father was in his medical residency training at the Charite Krankenhaus in Berlin, within the defeated, war-ravaged, inflation-ridden, postwar Weimar Republic.
