On October 24 we flew with part of our group to Brussels. High above the clouds we unpacked the food packages Walter had handed to each of us as we boarded.
At the Brussels airport the immigration officials looked at our documents, and one said “vierundzwanzig Stunde heraus” (twenty- four hours out), but we were able to stay in Belgium for a week, mostly in Antwerp. My father went alone to London to find money to continue our journey. Hugo, my favorite cousin from my parents generation, a Bohemian who remained a good friend of mine until his death, had arrived earlier and did much to take our minds off the sad reality we were experiencing.
I think many members of our group of my generation felt as I did. We were sad that the life we had known had ended, but we did not really worry. It did not occur to us that my father would not find a way to take care of things. There were new things to be explored, and this is how it would be for a long time. In Brussels, Hugo took me along to a coffeehouse where he met a native English speaker. At Antwerp harbor I for the first time saw Africans, probably from the Belgian Congo. From Antwerp the thirty-nine of us then took a boat across the channel to Harwich, England.
In England we took a train through the Midlands, and saw Manchester and Liverpool. I had never seen streets in which all the houses looked so alike, gray, dirty and barren. What we saw of the countryside looked equally depressing. In England I came to realize how beautiful home had been.
On the channel crossing and during six days on the ocean, from October 4 to 11, most of us were seasick.
In Montreal, the Lederer family left us to go to Nova Scotia, and the rest of us took the night train to Hamilton, Ontario.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 16f