ABSTRACT
when friedl and i got off the night boat from Antwerp at Harwich on April 21, 1939, I was mighty glad that I had made it to England at last, after hanging around Antwerp for four dreary, lonely months. My father met our boat train at Liverpool Street Station. He had rented a furnished bed-sitter for us in a Victorian row house on Randolph Avenue in London’s Maida Vale district, up the Edgeware Road from Marble Arch. Located on the second floor, our room was equipped with a little gas burner for light cooking and a boarded-up fireplace with a gas heater. To make the gas flow, copper pennies had to be fed nonstop into a coin box attached to the main valve. My father and Friedl slept in the double bed. I spent the night on a couch in the landlady’s ground-floor parlor, which I could access only after eight p.m. and had to vacate by eight a.m. We had no private toilet or bath. It was only a marginal improvement over our Antwerp digs, but we were out of Hitler’s immediate clinch.
