On the day after World War I began, my father, at 18, volunteered with enthusiasm to join the Bavarian Artillery. He survived the terrible Battle of the Somme, won two Iron Crosses and ended the war, defeated, in a military hospital in Alsace. Lieutenant Oestreicher (commissions were rare for Jews) was still well enough to walk. The medical officer shouted: “Lads, if you can, make a run for it, or the French will capture you.”
In 1918, he ran from the French. In 1938, with Jewish parents, he had to run from the Germans –all the way to New Zealand. My parents and I, now a refugee family, sailed on the SS Ormond.
The ship put in at Fremantle, our first sight of
