Zionism made sense to me. I saw it as a movement striving for a place Jews could consider their own, free of all the evils of big cities and industrialization. All of the photographs from Palestine showed healthy tanned young people in sandals and without ties. I was sure that Arabs, in case there were any there, would of course be part of that society.
One Jewish girl from Teinitz, Kahler-Gretl, was the only person I knew who went to Palestine. She went around 1930, against the wishes of her parents, and lived in a kibbutz. I met her and her two little daughters, who only spoke Hebrew, during her only visit to Teinitz and we continued to correspond until we had to leave in 1938.
In the mid-thirties I became friends with Hans Stein, a young Viennese who wanted to learn agriculture from the Kompanie and then to go to Palestine. He was one of the idealistic young people who wanted to have nothing to do with their fathers’ businesses or factories. Hans, who had just finished the Gymnasium, was assigned to Uncle Leo. For me he was a window to the outside world. After some time, however, he was transferred to Uncle Alois’ much more distant farm. I suspect that my mother felt uncomfortable about us reading Freud together. We were still corresponding when I was in Canada and he was guarding sheep on the Dutch island of Texel. There Hans married a Romanian Zionist. She and their child survived, but Hans died of tuberculosis in a concentration camp in Poland shortly before the end of the war. He had talked to me about lyric poets such as Bialik and Rachel, not about problems one might encounter in Palestine.
My thoughts about Palestine were vague. In 1938, when our plans to emigrate were becoming more concrete, I did not want to go to Canada. To stay where we were out of solidarity with the Czechs made sense to me, regardless how the Sudeten crisis might turn out. Going to Palestine was also a possibility, but not Canada. I wanted to at least graduate from the Gymnasium before leaving. But, to be honest, I would not have stayed against my father’s will.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 14