I was born in Stuttgart, Germany. My family identified itself as "German citizens of the Jewish faith" - and not much faith, for that matter. My paternal grandfather was a respected member of the Board of his Congregation. However, he once became the talk of the town after he was seen having lunch with a client in a Restaurant on Yom Kippur. And my maternal grandmother always put up a Christmas tree, "just for the housekeepers" she claimed.

When I was a small boy the Nazis were ratcheting up anti-Semitic discrimination - Jews could not stay at hotels or employ Aryans and in 1938, the shoe wholesale business of my family was "Aryanized". But we still led a pampered life, and my parents expected the political situation to improve. With two small children they were afraid to emigrate and, like so many other "Jeckes", they expected that this nightmare would not continue in their Germany of high culture and morals. They had plenty of Aryan friends who constantly reassured them nothing could happen to them in Germany.

On November 9^th, 1938 the horror of Kristallnacht shattered their illusions. My father, like thousands of other Jewish men, was picked up by the SS and transported to a concentration camp. One of my earliest memories is playing under the table with my toy cars after my father was seized and taken to Dachau, and seeing my mother cry. It was now clear that the only way to survive was to emigrate.

My father was released from Dachau after seven weeks, thanks to a fake Uruguayan visa obtained for a fee from a lowly consulate employee. My mother's cousin then secured a valid visa for the family to emigrate to Chile. My parents booked passage on a German boat that was scheduled to leave Bremerhaven on September 5^th, 1939.

But on September 1^st the Nazis invaded Poland, and our departure was cancelled. My parents were desperate, and even considered suicide. Fortunately, Italy was still neutral at the time; we managed to get on a boat leaving Genoa on October 17^th. The ship had a normal capacity of 800, but there were 2500 of us on board. I still remember my brother's feet on my face in our upper bunk. I also remember suffering from scabies and boils, no doubt caused by the poor hygiene and overcrowding in steerage.

The Nazis confiscated all our money and possessions as "Judenabgabe", the "handing over by the Jews". We arrived penniless in Valparaiso, where the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee put us in a flea-infested Hotel. Fortunately, a great-aunt living in London was able to send us some money, and within a few weeks we were able to move to more pleasant surroundings. My mother then found a job as teacher and dorm-mother at an English boarding school in the small town of Villa Alemana. Her pay was room and board for the family. After two years there, my father obtained a loan from a cousin and bought a small dry goods store, and they were able to make a go of it. I will never forget my Dad's pride when, in mid-1943, he was able to purchase a very run-down 1935 Ford automobile: They had made it!

Growing-up in Chile was hard for me. Speaking German at home, Spanish on the streets and English at school was not the problem. My difficulties were with my classmates, who accused me of being a Jew and of having killed Christ. Although Chileans treated my family and me very well and were always helpful, we were still considered "gringos" and outsiders. There was never a possibility to assimilate and really belong.

We belonged to the German-Jewish Congregation in Valparaiso, and attended Synagogue on the High Holidays. I did not attend Hebrew School, and at my Bar Mitzwa I read a transliterated Haftarah. There was a Hashomer Hatzair youth group that offered a summer camp, but my parents had never been Zionists; they had aspired for assimilation above all. So my Jewish education was close to nil, and I had little connection with Jews or Judaism until my adulthood.

I attended Medical School in Santiago, and bristled within the Chilean system of education. Medicine and medical education in Chile was modeled on the old European systems, highly hierarchical — you learned by rote, accepted the professor's word as gospel and didn't ask questions. Being my outspoken self, I had a hard time dealing with that. After graduation in 1960, I decided to come to the United States as an Exchange Visitor for post-graduate training, since I did not want to have the National Health Service decide how and where I would practice.

The five years I spent in the US opened up a new world for me, both personally and professionally. I could actively participate in the discussions during rounds and ask questions, even as the low man on the totem pole. I learned how to research a problem on my own, but I could also interact with anyone of any generation. Even as a newcomer, I truly felt welcome.

I returned to Chile - as required by my visa — fully intending to pursue an academic career in Valparaiso, where a new Medical School was getting off the ground. I was part of a group of 15 young, foreign-trained clinicians who got together to develop a modern curriculum in Pathophysiology, which is the study of mechanisms of disease. We had a wonderful first year, with highly enthusiastic and motivated medical students who challenged themselves and us. But the older clinicians felt threatened by our modern approach, and when it came time for decisions about our department's budget and laboratories, they nixed our requests. This made it clear to me that things in Chile would always be the same, hierarchic and bureaucratic, a lifestyle I did not wish to pursue.

So after three years back in Chile, I decided to emigrate to the U.S. I was a Chilean citizen, but I didn't have to wait for a visa because I had been born in Germany-for once, ironically, an advantage.

When I told my mother of my decision to emigrate, she replied "I hate to see you leave, but I understand your career needs"; when I told my father, he replied "I hate to see you leave, but you'll never find the right Jewish girl here" — they were both right! I met Doris within three weeks of my arrival in New York — unbeknownst to us, our encounter was arranged by relatives — and the rest is History!

Doris came from a similar German Jewish household: The Heines identified as Jews, but they kept a Christmas tree, too. They didn't belong to a Congregation, and they didn't provide a Jewish education for their kids. My need to identify and live as a Jew was unquestionably a result of the Nazi persecution and the subsequent experiences in Chile. Thus Doris and I wanted to provide ourselves and our kids with some form of contact with Judaism. At a Parlor Meeting at the Feiners' home in East Hills, we met Dennis Sasso, who was then the resident Assistant Rabbi of RSNS (Ira Eisenstein only came every second weekend). Dennis introduced us to Reconstructionist Judaism - the possibility of being an active, participating and religiously involved Jew without the need to accept the supernatural, anthropomorphic Deity was an immediate selling point. We joined.

We love our life on Long Island, and our life in the synagogue. In Chile, I was always considered an outsider, foreign-born and Jewish; in America, we have been accepted as equals and received with open arms by everyone, Jews and non-Jews. That is the contrast of my two experiences as an immigrant — the first one, forced, into a land where we were always "foreign"; the second, by choice, into a land where I was accepted as equal. Chileans are wonderful people, but their ingrained chauvinism makes it very hard for them to permit the assimilation of foreigners. The United States, being a nation of continuously replenishing immigrants, has always been accepting of foreigners.

My parents took a very different path. In the Allende days, when free enterprise was being limited in Chile, they began to fear that freedom of movement would be next. They did not want to wait until the last minute twice. So they moved to Mallorca, Spain. As they got older, and worried that the limited medical facilities could create a health hazard, they decided to move again. My father missed German culture, and he missed the German language. He still felt German, even after what had happened to him there, so they decided to move back to Germany. This was the second time in our lives that I could not understand my parents' decisions - the first, why they waited so long before leaving Germany, and the second, why they returned to a country where they had been so awfully persecuted.