Notes

Now, another thing I did on vacations - you know, here you have summer camps for the kids - over there, we had something similar, but not in a camp-like setting but more in a resort-type setting. In other words, a big building which was sort of a dormitory and several hundred kids would go to that place. It was in a resort town, as a matter of fact, called Bad Dürrheim. The first word is "Bad" which means "bath" which means it's a water resort town. They had a Jewish vacation home there - I still remember the huge building - and many, many Jewish children went there during the summer. From there we used to take walks, excursions in the area, and had a lot of fun. It was a very pleasant change from what was in school those days. That vacation home was an exclusively Jewish vacation home. It was very nice. I went there during the summer, several years.

He was a very prominent lawyer. He was very much involved in Jewish community activities, too. In our state, the state of Baden, there was a council governing the Jewish community. It was called the Oberrat, which means the upper council, or superior council -something like that - and he was a member of that. He was pretty prominent and he was the head of the Jewish community in his city. He was pretty highly regarded as an attorney in his profession, so I looked up to him. He and his family lived just about maybe 30 miles away from our town.


Of course you try to forget a lot of these things too. At the moment, I can't think of any particular incidents. One thing that always struck me strange - I was talking about park benches just now - was that the city park in my hometown was donated to the city by Jews. The name of the family was Netter. In the park, they had a memorial stone in which the city thanks the Netter family for this city park and so I was actually rather proud of the contribution that this Jewish family made to my hometown. I always had a positive feeling about being Jewish - about being a Jew.