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9 german Jewish immigrants tell Their stories Gerda Gross Bergmann is very grateful to Chile for taking her in: she feels Chilean at heart and every January 14, the date on which she arrived in Chile, she gives a present to a Chilean friend to celebrate the event and to never forget it. Gerda was interviewed by the author. The difficulties—and occasional joys—of the german Jews who found refuge in chile have been explored in previous chapters. incidents from their stories have been interspersed throughout the book. What follows is a more extended version of the interviews that i conducted, or in some cases, that Brigitte altmann conducted. personal stories of interviewees, organized by When They left Europe Señora Plaut,1 when she was still very young, worked as a nanny for some distant relatives in paris and went with them to chile in 1936 on the Reina del Pacífico. she worked for them for a while in the new country. Then she decided to advertise in an English newspaper, the South Pacific Mail, to seek work teaching English, german, latin, greek, and French. she was called by the principal of saint peter’s school, who believed everything she said without asking for any documents. He had two positions to offer her, one at a boys’ and one at a girls’ school. she decided on the boys’ school, which was located in villa alemana. she taught latin, French, and math. The school began to fail financially when it was sold to people who didn’t understand how to manage an educational institution. señora plaut saved it, immigrants tell Their stories / 153 talking to the suppliers and paying them what was owed little by little. parents had asked her to do this. she liked her job and stayed there until 1943, when she got married. Ruth Goldschmidt was able to leave germany with her family in 1936 when she was eleven years old, going first to Holland to visit friends. From there they took a dutch freighter, the Breda, which carried very few passengers. They passed through several latin american ports that she thought were “crummy” and was afraid that valparaíso, chile, would be like the others, but she was happily surprised. Before leaving Europe, ruth attended a public school in germany, whose teachers at that time were already anti-semites. in 1936 only a small percentage of Jewish children could still study in public institutions, so the Jewish community created schools for their children and teachers. ruth’s family went to chile because they had an aunt already living there. Their trip from valparaíso to santiago was impressive, but she was unhappy with their first lodging, which was quite bad. They had never seen a bracero2 as a heating device. she was also surprised that in august, a cold winter month in chile, people would dress in only summer clothes with a coat on top. she went to a private English school from august to december, which was the end of the school year, and the following year she went to a liceo, a public school. Because she wanted to start working, she stayed two years at the liceo and then studied in order to become a secretary. at nineteen she entered the Zionist Jewish organization Kidma, where she met Walter, her future husband. ruth remembers only one incident of anti-semitism. she and her husband had opened a business in a poor neighborhood, and their clients were all very nice, but when she went to collect money at a certain house, they called her a “shitty Jew,” which was not uncommon to hear from the lower class. outside of this, she remembers no anti-semitism. When the war ended, there was rejoicing in her Zionist group and they all celebrated in the street. she never was in a chilean home when she was young. she feels good in her adopted country and is thankful that chile received her and her family. The immigration had been difficult for her parents , but she herself doesn’t remember suffering from it. all her friends lived in economically modest conditions, so they were all in the same boat. Ilse Dahlberg and her parents felt very happy when they escaped germany in January of 1938 and boarded the Oropesa, an English luxury ship in which they traveled first-class. ilse was then thirty-one years old. an aunt had already gone to chile in 1913 with a...

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