Chapter 5 Our New Country
The first year in New York is not a happy memory for me. We moved five times. We first
stayed at the Hotel Park Chambers on 56th Street, where Dr. Schuetz had taken rooms
for us. Then we moved to a very nice apartment on Riverside Drive, loaned to us by a friend.
When she needed the apartment herself, we moved to the Hotel Park Crescent on Riverside
by drive in 86th Street. For a while we stayed in a furnished apartment until, in 1942,
I found the apartment on the West End Avenue where we lived for so many years, and where
I still live today. Lew's spirits were at a low point during this time. Very often he
would say, if it were not for you, I would not want to live anymore. He missed his work,
his books, and his income. He had a very good salary in Switzerland, for in Europe teaching
Learning by a renowned scholar like Lew was valued much more highly than it was in the
United States at that time, not only from the monetary point of view, but also in the
eyes of the public. A professor was a learned man who had dedicated decades of his life
to studying, reading, and writing, and this time span of work had to be calculated and
paid for. Now, here in New York, we had to live from Lew's savings, and to see his money
Dwindle was a sad sight.
Lew did not talk about this to other people, but he had friends who knew his situation
without his ever mentioning it.
One of these was Henry Hazlitt, who at that time was editorial writer for the New York
Times.
He knew Lew through his books.
He had, as he told me, seen my husband's name for the first time in Benjamin Anderson's
book The Value of Money, which was published in 1917 by Macmillan.
The index lists no fewer than 14 references to Mises.
I was particularly struck, Hazlett wrote, by one remark.
In von Mises there seems to be a very noteworthy clarity and power.
His Theory of Money and Credit is an exceptionally excellent book.
Later I came upon many references to Lew in Lionel Robbins books.
In 1937 Hazlett wrote to Jonathan Cape and asked him to send a copy of Socialism to the
The New York Times for review. In his review of January 9th, 1938, Hazlitt wrote, among
other things, This book must rank as the most devastating analysis of socialism yet written.
He has written an economic classic in our time.
In an interview with Jim Cook in IRA Insights, Volume 1, Number 3, Hazlitt reports, One night
At home, I received a telephone call, and the voice at the other end of the wire said,
This is Mises speaking. As I later told some of my friends, it was almost as if somebody
had said, This is John Stuart Mill speaking.
Haslett was one of the first people Lew met in New York, and one of the first to take
an active interest in getting Lew established in America. They met for the first time on
August 21, 1940, less than three weeks after our arrival. They lunched together at the
Century Club and, on September 3, I met him and his wife Frances for dinner at their home
on Washington Square. Frances' intelligence and the interest she took in economics and
politics impressed me greatly. The Hazlets, well aware of Lew's situation, were extremely
hospitable and kind. Every day, Lew had a luncheon appointment. I mention it because
It is interesting to note that, in spite of his low spirits, he was full of ideas. Every day he met new people, and he had new plans. He soon decided not to go to Berkeley. He felt that New York was the cultural center of the United States, and it was here he wanted to stay. Very soon invitations came for him as a guest speaker or a lecturer. On November 1st, he was invited to the University of New York.
On November 7th, 1940, he delivered a lecture before a banking seminar at the School of Business, Columbia University, on post-war economic reconstruction of Europe.
On November 19th, he spoke at the Political Economy Club on the non-neutrality of money.
On November 25th, he participated in a discussion at the New School for Social Research.
On December 5th we went to Cambridge, where he delivered a lecture at Harvard's Littauer Hall, arranged for him by his brother Richard, who since 1938 had been a professor of mathematics and aviation at Harvard.
During our stay in Cambridge I met, for the first and only time, Professor Joseph A. Schumpeter, who had just been married for the third time.
His new wife was an elegant and intelligent American. They kept a lovely, well-run home. The discussion at lunch was lively but careful, both men aware of their parts as hosts and guests. Schumpeter knew, of course, that Lew did not agree with many of his views.
This might be a good opportunity to mention a little story that Joe Kikaizen, a former student of Lew's and now a professor at the University Francisco Marquin in Guatemala, has told me and is corroborated by Bettina Biangris through her shorthand notes.
One night in his seminar, Lew was commenting on the late Professor Schumpeter.
There are many people, he humorously disclosed, who stand steadfastly by the social doctrines of Professor Schumpeter.
They do not seem to remember that when the Great Professor was Minister of Finance, he was not able to protect Austria against the most disastrous inflation in its history,
and that when the Great Professor was President of a bank, Biederman Bank, the bank failed.
The afternoon after the visit with Schumpeter, Lew led a discussion in Littauer Hall, and the students asked questions about his lecture of the previous night.
In the evening, he gave another lecture at Fletcher Hall. In those years, he never seemed to get tired.
The same month in 1940, he also lectured as a guest at Princeton and had lunch with Winfield W. Reifler at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Riefler had worked for some time in Geneva, where he was a frequent guest at our house.
Lew always enjoyed his presence. He had written a book about the Federal Reserve System, which was very much talked about.
Consequently he became one of the permanent members of the Institute for Advanced Study.
Later he moved to the Federal Reserve Board as an advisor.
I remember Lew once told me that Riefler's job at Princeton was the only position that would really have made him happy.
It was very unusual for Lew to express a longing for something out of his reach. It was more revealing to me than any other remark or complaint he might have made. Mostly I had to feel my way, search in the dark like a mold digging its way underground. Questioning would have made him lock the door of his soul.
When I told Fritz Machlup, much, much later, about Lew's wish, he replied,
and he would have been the right man at the right place. To this I can only add, why did no one ever think of it?
From the moment we came to the United States, even before we had our own apartment and still lived in a small furnished place,
or in the hotel on Riverside Drive, Lew wanted company in the evening.
He needed people, he needed discussions, he needed to air his opinions and hear the reactions of different minds.
Our social circle was divided in two groups.
To the first one belonged his former pupils, who in time became devoted friends,
and various other scholars whom Lew had met in Geneva.
One of the most outstanding of his Vienna students, and a frequent guest of ours,
was Dr. Felix Kaufman, the witty and genial philosopher of social sciences,
He was used to expressing his feelings in poetry, and the reader will find two of his songs in Appendix 1 at the end of the book. His wife Elsa became a well-known pediatrician in New York.
We also saw quite a bit of Dr. Martha Steffi Brown, an always enthusiastic, gay and energetic former Vienna student of Luce, who later became a full-time professor at Brooklyn College.
Fritz Machlup, who since 1940 taught at the University of Buffalo and Johns Hopkins University, also came to see us whenever he could.
Later, when he was at Princeton, traveling and lecturing continuously, he had less time to spare.
Especially close to us were Dr. Alfred Schutz and his wife Ilse.
It was he who welcomed us at the Pier in New Jersey and who tried hard to lift Lew's sunken spirits.
He was a sociologist and a banker, and had never forgotten that he got his first job as a financial advisor through Lew, a job that he later hated but had to maintain for practical reasons.
It helped him to go on with his scholarly work. He taught for years at the New School for Social Research.
He was a most interesting personality, who not only looked like Beethoven, but had a special passion and understanding for music.
He also was an excellent pianist. He died in 1959. Ilsa, his wife, considered it her life task to publish his many unfinished writings, and thanks to her indefatigable effort, Alfred Schutz is today perhaps one of the most quoted and famous sociologists in Europe and the United States.
One of the few men Lew really worshipped was Dr. Richard Schuller, former undersecretary in the Austrian State Department.
His daughter, Dr. Ilsa Mintz, had been one of Lew's highly gifted students in Vienna.
She was loved and respected by everyone.
She and her husband, Dr. Max Mintz, in Vienna, a well-known lawyer, were frequent visitors to our home.
Elsa became a member of the staff at the National Bureau for Economic Research and later taught
at Columbia University where, before her death in 1978, she was a full professor. Dr. Schuler
was a small, fragile man, but when he talked about Vienna, about the past, about politics,
you had to listen. When he was 90 years old and had only recently retired from the new
He told me that he was taking up the study of mathematics, found it fascinating, and got real pleasure out of it.
He lived to be more than 100 years old, and I never saw a warmer, more affectionate relationship than that which existed between the members of his remarkable family.
One of the men closest to Lew's thinking was the late Dr. Ernest Geiringer, a Viennese industrialist whose keen mind Lew always admired.
Guy Ringer very soon left New York and lived for years with his family in the South.
Lew greatly missed the exchange of thought with this friend.
Very close to us were Dr. Fritz Unger and his wife Annie.
Both were former students of my husband in Vienna, and we had met them often when we traveled in France.
When we came to New York, they immediately tried to help us.
They showed us the town, came with us to the theater and to museums.
to Museums. Whenever Dr. Unger came to visit us, he immediately tried to have a few minutes
alone with me. He was deeply interested in Lew's work in future, and always had to get
the latest news. He knew he would never hear anything from Lew. He was a very good friend,
helpful, kind-hearted, and warm, and both Lew and I missed him greatly when he died
quite unexpectedly. Annie, his wife, was a passionate traveler. We saw her often, and
Although she was a lawyer, grandmother, and a tremendously well-read woman, she never
got over the feeling a student has toward her professor.
This is a typical European attitude, not usually encountered in the U.S.
Here, after the first meeting with his professor, a student may grasp his teacher's shoulder
with a merry, Hi, prof, how are you today?
The professor, to him, is simply another human being who does his work.
Then we had some lawyer friends, all of them former students of Lew's in Vienna.
After completing their studies here, two of them took up careers in New York.
One of them was Dr. Adolphus Redley, a very devoted friend.
He once wrote to me, deeply embedded in my mind is the recollection of the totality of
Lew's personality, devoted to the proposition that economics is not part of an etatist technology,
but has its deep roots in humanities.
This was the gospel which he spread, and for which he will be remembered with gratitude
and great affection.
The second lawyer was Dr. Oskar Heitler.
Heitler, a bachelor and a very frequent dinner guest of ours, was our steady companion and
guide on our Sunday excursions into the environs of New York.
Lew and I simply could not exist without walking and hiking.
We had no car then, and, with Heitler, we often went by bus to Terrytown to enjoy the
and Beautiful Rockefeller Estate, which was open to the public. In 1940 it was something
unheard of in America to see people strolling around the Rockefeller Gardens. More than
once we were stopped by police and asked to explain what we were doing. When Dr. Heidler
unexpectedly suffered a heart attack, he asked for me to be with him in the last hour of
his life. Another very lonely man. I was deeply affected.
Very good friends of ours were Dr. and Mrs. Otto Collier. He was a second cousin of Lew's.
He died in New York on November 30th, 1978. He, as well as his wife Fanny, were not only
very interesting and cultivated people, but, what should count more, they were good and
kind. Dr. Collier owned the Gallery of Saint-Étienne in New York City, where he was the first to
introduce the now-famous Egon Schell and Gustave Klimt to this country. Dr. Collier was one
Carl Menger was always interested in folk art. When, in 1939, he was shown some primitive American paintings, he was attracted to those by an old lady named Anna Mary Robertson Moses.
The paintings were uneven in quality, but in some of them Collier found an original and fresh approach.
He asked her to come and see him, she lived in Vermont, and he gave her a one-woman show in his gallery, calling the exhibition What a Farm Wife Painted.
This was the beginning of the fabulous career of the artist who has since become known all over the world as Grandma Moses.
Besides these friends whom we saw frequently, there was a steady flow of visitors from out of town or abroad.
I always had to be prepared for surprise visitors.
But, gradually, the circle of our friends changed.
Through Lew's work, his new connections, we met many interesting Americans who, together with most of the New York University seminar students, became, in time, our friends. They formed the above-mentioned second group.
Lew meanwhile had become connected with the National Bureau for Economic Research, and on Christmas 1940 he got a letter from Dr. William J. Carson, the Treasurer of the National Bureau, telling him,
I am very glad to advise you that the Rockefeller Foundation has approved a grant for $2,500 to the National Bureau of Economic Research to extend its hospitality to you for a period of a year.
This grant, Dr. Carson wrote on February 16, 1941, would be renewed for another year beginning December 1941. From this day on, life started to look a little brighter to Lew.
Though he had no books, no diaries to refer to, he started working during the last weeks of December 1940 on an autobiography, as he first called it.
It is not an autobiography in the usual sense of the word. It contains nothing of his personal life, tells almost nothing about his family. He speaks about his schooling, his intellectual development, his works and his ideas for future books.
He explains the political situation in Austria and Germany and deplores the conditions at Germany and Austrian universities.
The manuscript is handwritten in German and ends with his stay in Geneva. He gave it to me to keep, but when I read it, it was only two years after we were married. I was not ready for it. Only now do I know how fascinating these memoirs are. In later years I often urged Lew to write a real autobiography. I even suggested he dictate it to me. His answer was, you have my notes. That's all people need to know about me.
During the war, Lew had no hopes for a German book market in the near future. In a letter to Hayek, written on November 1941, my husband wrote,
As I do not want to increase further the collection of my posthumous books, I am now writing in English.
I hope that I will succeed in finishing a volume critically dealing with the whole concept of anti-orthodox doctrines and their consequences within a year.
I am, however, rather skeptical in regard to the practical results of our endeavors. It seems that the age of reason and common sense is gone forever. Reasoning and thinking have been replaced by empty slogans.
After we had been in New York a year, our belongings arrived from Geneva and we began looking for an apartment.
Lew was determined to live on the west side, on account of the good public transportation to theaters and the nearness of the New York Public Library, a very important factor in his life. Without this excellent library he could not do the work he really wanted to do during his first years in America.
I soon found the apartment I was looking for. At that time, in early 1942, there was an overflow of empty apartments. My sole wish was to find a place that was absolutely quiet and where no noise whatsoever would disturb my husband when he was working. Soon I found the house I thought was suitable. It had, at that time, a first-class landlord, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and the house was excellently kept. Only later I discovered that the apartment
The apartment actually was too small for us, but considering our financial situation at that time, I did not have the courage to choose a larger and more expensive one.
The room I selected for Lew was completely isolated. It had a view of the Hudson River and never, not even in the mountains, did we enjoy more beautiful sunsets.
On hot evenings the sky was fiery red and the colors were mirrored in the water.
Slowly the colors of the sky changed, became blue-gray and then completely dark. Shortly
afterwards, on the other side of the Hudson River, the buildings would be lighted and
on the tops of the high-rises beams of light would warn the planes and help them find their
direction. Far below ran the west side highway, parallel to West End Avenue, the street where
we lived. The apartment is on the top floor of the building, high enough for even the
When I once said I was married not only to Lew but also married to his books, I was correct to say so. When the neighborhood deteriorated, I tried for years to persuade him to move, but it was in vain. He did not want his books touched. He did not want to miss them again, not even for a short time.
Now they are all together at Hillsdale College under the special protection and care of Dr. George Roche, Hillsdale's president.
It was my most urgent wish and Lew agreed to have the library he loved so much preserved and kept together as a complete unit.
The University of Innsbruck made an offer, but it was Lew's special wish that the books be kept in the United States.
Dr. Roche, who for years worked with Leonard Reed at the Foundation for Economic Education, arranged a special room at the college for the Ludwig von Mises Library, where students can work.
The most valuable books are locked in cases, and special permission is needed to use them.
I gave them my husband's desk and the chair he used to sit on.
On the desk is his bronze bust and a note I wrote to him, which he missed or forgot when he destroyed every single letter I had written to him during 48 years.
From the time of our arrival in New York in August 1940, Lew had been in contact with New York University.
On August 30th he had lunch with doctors Herbert B. Dorot and J.T. Madden, Dean of the School of Commerce and Finance.
Both men took a lively interest in him.
On September 7, 1940, Madden wrote to Lew that he was interested in Lew's remarks that totalitarianism really began in Germany at the time of the installation of the Foreign Exchange Control in 1931.
It occurred to me, Madden wrote, that it might be desirable to have an article for publication
sometime from you on the general topic of, say, about 5,000 words. As I conceive it,
it would perhaps briefly deal with the social and economic development after the war, leading
up to the crisis of 1931, with some references to the political conditions at the time, and
From that point lead on to the establishment of foreign exchange control and the economic
factors which gave rise to the increasing degree of governmental control over business
and imports and exports and how that led then into the continually increasing encroachment
of the government upon economic life in Germany.
I have been canvassing in the early week to see what possibilities there may be here with
us and I hope we may be able to come to some prompt conclusion.
To me it was this letter and the preceding conversation that had planted the seeds for my husband's book Omnipotent Government.
In 1977 I found among his posthumous scripts a German version of this book, which referred only to conditions in Germany and Austria.
It was written in Geneva shortly before the beginning of World War II, and it has an appendix added by my husband in 1940 in the United States.
The book was published in 1978 by Bon Actuel in Stuttgart, Germany, under the title Im Namen des Staates, in the name of the state,
Oder die Garhafen des Kollektivismus, or the dangers of collectivism, with the foreword by the late professor Alfred Müller-Armack.
Coming to the United States did not mean immediate Americanization for Lew. He watched, observed, read and learned.
He followed every phase of American politics, domestic and foreign, with deepest interest. He met new people every day and widened his outlook.
We both had applied immediately for citizenship, but we never considered ourselves Americans until we got our papers.
It was in January 1946 that Lew received his citizenship, almost six months before I got mine.
The importance of this was not the paper, it was the change in Lew's mind, his heart.
Deep inside he knew he belonged now. He was at home again for the first time in many years, and in a land of freedom. His joy in his new citizenship was so intense that even if I had not known how he suffered before, I could have deduced it from his happiness.
Lew was a very modest man, almost frugal in his habits. He slept in his studio on a narrow daybed with a firm mattress. I used to compare him to the former Emperor Franz Josef of Austria, who slept all through his life on a simple iron bedstead.
Once I asked Lew whether he had ever met the Emperor.
Yes, he said, and he even spoke to me.
What was the occasion, I inquired.
And he went on.
It was at a military exercise after I had finished my year of training.
I must have been nineteen years old then.
The Emperor came for inspection and he passed me sitting on my black horse.
He stopped and said, Beautiful horse, very beautiful horse.
And then, after he had uttered these profound and pregnant words, he wrote on,
He took my hand, kissed it, and pulled me down so he could kiss my face, my hair. It was almost a ritual. He always wanted to show me his love, his gratitude.
I took care to have his room cleaned while he was in the bathroom. He hated any disturbance while he worked, and I would say he started working in the bathroom.
He never could get used to an electric safety razor, and shaving with his almost antique apparatus took almost half an hour.
When he was dressed, Lew went immediately to his desk and started to write, simply continuing
During the flow of his thoughts he was working on while in the bathroom, only twice each
morning did I come into his room, once at 10.30 with a light snack, he was on a diet
under doctor's order, and a little later with the mail. During our first years in America
mail was delivered three times a day. With the power of the unions growing, the strikes
of the workers increasing, their performance and output was lessening. In the end we received
only one mail delivery daily, and sometimes there was no delivery at all on Saturday in
the residential parts of New York City. The Postal Service worsened to such a degree that
the delivery of a letter from one zone to another in New York City may have taken more
time than sending a letter from London or California to New York, a distance of three
thousand miles. He never answered the telephone. No bells, no street noise could be heard in
in his room, but we could see from our windows the never-ending traffic on the west side
highway. Only two or three times in the thirty-two years did the traffic stop. Both times were
in the middle of a cold winter, and the snow was piled so high that the cars buried could
not move. This motionless silence after all the years of never-ending movement was strange
and fascinating and beautiful to look at.
In the summer of 1941, our first real summer in New York, we were very much affected by
by the Heat and Humidity to which we were not accustomed.
I believe you have to be brought up in New York to be able to endure the climate.
To survive, we went on vacation in the White Mountains.
We stayed at Glen House, at the foot of Mount Washington, a place then frequented mostly
by Europeans.
From the hotel, buses went up to the top of the mountain.
Most of the visitors who came for the day left their cars in the parking lot.
Before boarding a bus they took a quick try at one of the slot machines set up near the
filling station. The one-armed bandits, as they are called, were busy since the buses
left frequently. The passengers took their chances a few times and then left in a hurry
to get their seats on the bus. At that moment the attendants, mostly young boys, rushed
to the machines and after risking a few coins usually hit the jackpot and emptied the machines
with a roar of laughter. Lew and I were always amused to watch them.
Now everything has changed. Glenn House is nothing more than a store for postcards and
knickknacks. The one-armed bandits have disappeared. Only the gas station and bus stations remain.
In our first year at Glenn House, we climbed to the top of Mount Washington three times.
On Sunday, August 17th, we left Pinkham Notch Camp at 9.35 a.m. Our goal was to climb up
via Tuckerman ravine. When we were above the timber line a terrible gale started. There
was nothing but stone and rocks and no possibility of return or shelter. We could not even see
the nearest rock to hold on, for a terrible snowstorm had started. The gale was driving
the blinding white mass into our eyes. I became frightened but Lew never lost his coolness
and courage. He shouted to me against the noise of the storm and signaled every rock
When we opened the door, exhausted but relieved, a waiter hurried toward us with two glasses of brandy on a tray. They had watched our climb in our flight with the gale, through their telescopes, ready for the moment when they would have to rush out to help us. One thing I knew, without Lew I would never have made it. We went back by train. The following week we went back to the hotel.
We went to the top again, but this time by bus. We both had a deep, unexplainable longing to be at the top of a mountain and see the world from there.
We managed to take every one of the excursions that the visitor to the White Mountains usually makes.
On August 24th, a clear day, we climbed Mount Madison via Osgood Trail, and on another beautiful day we walked with friends to the Great Gulf Shelter,
Seven hours of difficult climb on badly marked trails, with roots of trees constantly slowing
us down.
The mountains of America should not be compared with those in Switzerland, Italy or Austria.
They are wild, rocky and full of stones, with few paths leading to the summits.
At least it was that way in the 1940s.
This last decade, however, when skiing became fashionable, a great deal has been done for
the environment and upkeep of the paths.
That summer we learned to love New England, and in most of the following years, when we
did not go to Europe, we summered in New Hampshire or in Vermont. But in September we were always
back in New York, and Lou started to work.
One of my husband's regular visitors was Arthur Goddard. Even before the books arrived
from Europe, Goddard helped him with his language problems. Goddard was recommended to him by
Dr. Schuetz, whom he had helped with similar problems. In the course of the years, Goddard
really became irreplaceable for Lew. He regularly came twice and sometimes three times weekly, staying for hours. Besides being well-read, studious, always desirous of learning, and interested in art and theater, he had a pleasant personality. After his visits, Lew was always in a very good and relaxed mood. Goddard knew how to listen, and that was important for Lew. Sometimes I asked Arthur to correct one or two of another word of Lew's mispronunciations, which I had
I had noted in the seminar. I felt being corrected by an outsider would be easier for Lew to take.
He kept a little book in which he noted down the words that he had mispronounced incorrectly,
the result of learning the basis of a foreign language by reading and not by speaking.
Lew has given special recognition in his great treatise Human Action and in Omnipotent Government to Arthur Goddard,
who is today Vice Principal of the School for Printing in New York.
Arthur gave first aid to almost all of Lew's writings in the United States. When I one day saw the monthly check Lew gave Arthur, I was most surprised until I realized that for Goddard, the work with Lew was not a source of earning, but a way of learning.
During the winter of 1941, Lew very often had conferences with the former Archduke of Austria, now Otto von Habsburg, who was interested in Lew's views about Austria's future.
Lew foresaw that Austria would never again be a monarchy, and he wrote a long and detailed report for Dr. von Habsburg, perhaps the last important essay he wrote in German, some book reviews accepted.
This document, which he marked confidential, is now, with permission of Dr. von Habsburg, among my husband's posthumous scripts in the Library of Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania.
Lew often told me he was convinced that history would have taken a different course if a man like Otto von Habsburg had been at the helm of the Austrian government in 1914.
Lew had the highest esteem for the Archduke's moral and intellectual qualities, and maintained this regard for him all through the years.
When we later met Dr. von Habsburg at the Mont Pelerin Society, I was also charmed by him.
by him. He frequently sat next to me at dinner or luncheon meetings, and I was always impressed
by his knowledge of history, his human understanding, his diversified interests, and especially
by his natural kindness and warmth. All who worked with Lew became fascinated by his personality
and became ardent admirers of him. There is, first of all, his former, very efficient secretary
in Vienna, Mrs. Wolf Theiberger, who was with Lew for more than twenty years. She became
I became a very close friend and helped my husband tremendously.
Later, when Lew was at New York University, Mildred Schrockinger, a young, very talented secretary, was working with him.
Many years later she wrote that she wished she could still be with him.
Lew was patient with everyone who worked for him.
He explained the work and expected the best.
It was perhaps one of his most remarkable qualities that he never found fault with a person's character, only with his or her intelligence.
Once, at NYU, he had a secretary who often brought him to despair through her incompetence.
Why don't you send her away and get another one? I asked him when he once again complained to me.
I can't do it, was his reply. She needs the job, and how would she find another one?
The whole first year of our stay in America, while Lud developed various plans for the future,
I tried to help Gitta get out of occupied France.
It was an almost impossible task, for there was no way of getting in touch with her.
For the first time, I saw that Haslett's friendship consisted not only of enthusiasm for Lew's ideas and thoughts,
but also included a warm and personal regard not only for him, but also for me.
Haslett was the one who helped us get Gitta a visa for the United States.
He was on friendly terms with the Assistant Secretary of State, Mr. Breckenridge Long,
and only through diplomatic channels could Gitta be reached and given the necessary papers.
It was a very, very complex procedure, but it worked so well that on the same day she got the visa we received the news.
Only the mother of a young daughter will understand what this meant to me.
Haslet himself may long have forgotten about this incident. I haven't and I never will.
When Gitta finally arrived in the United States she did not stay with us long.
An agency in Chicago had heard about her experiences and occupied France, and engaged her for a lecture tour through the United States.
When she came back to New York after a few months, she enlisted with the UNRRA, United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, and was sent overseas back to Vienna.
There she met Don Honeyman, an American photographer born in Iowa, who, after his release from the army, got an excellent position with Vogue,
and worked with them for more than 20 years.
Gitta and Don were married in Vienna, in the same church and by the same clergymen who had baptized Gitta.
Because of the war, neither Lou nor I could be present at her wedding.
After a few years in Paris and in America, they settled in London, and Gitta took up writing as a career.
Today, Gitta Cereny is a recognized journalist.
She worked for many years for the London Sunday Telegraph,
authored three books and is now working for the London Sunday Times and the London Times.
Lew was very fond of Gitta. Her ambition, her energy, her diligence, her unfailing courage to overcome the most difficult situations
as well as her love and care for her husband and her two children, commanded his respect.