On January 14, 1930, we finally arrived in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina. I was from the city. However, I had never seen such a beautiful place. At that point, my father said, “What do we do now?” There wasn’t anybody there to meet us, because we didn’t come on the right ship. However, we disembarked and then my father said, “We will put all our luggage in the storeroom.” At that time, we were so ignorant that we did not know that houses were built at the port where immigrants could live until they found work. Then my father said, “Come, we will go on the streetcar. We will ask where we need to get off. We will show the address that Johann SELLNER gave us.” At home, he was our neighbor and he had written to us once, so we knew his address from the letter. He had emigrated the previous year. One time, I heard someone call my father. So, I thought, if someone is calling my father, he must know us. I stood still while the others kept going. When they stopped, my father saw that I was missing. Then he looked and saw that I had wandered off. I was standing with the men, two brothers, who had called my father. I knew them from home, because they had only left the previous year. They said they knew where the man we were looking for lived.

Outside the city, the Rio River came from the sea. We had to go over a large bridge there. And, as we drove over it, we said, “Now you are leading us to the Gypsies.” “No, it will become more beautiful again,” they said. We got out and continued on foot. There were people from our village, who left in 1928. They said, “We have a place and it is warm. You can lie down anywhere. You don’t need to heat it.” Then, we stayed there.

It was good that, except for our brother, who was barely five year old, we were all girls. Therefore, we got equal work. Our father was a sick man when he came home from the war. Also, our mother was not healthy. Then I went to work and, also, my other sisters Nanni and Mariann. Mariann went to care for someone’s children, and Nanni and I had places, too. Our mother went to work in a factory, where cleaning rags were made. Our father got work where we worked. My mother always searched for jobs where I could be paid more. Therefore, she took me away from one place and brought me to another place. We also found another job for my father, where he worked until we came home. He worked at a factory, where zinc and copper sheets were manufactured.

Our mother was operated on at this time, because she had a growth on her large intestine. We became acquainted with a physician. I still know his name today: LEMBERTSKI. He spoke German. He said, “She should not go home again. Perhaps, she will live until tomorrow—no longer.” In the hospital where he was employed, he performed the operation. It was far away from us. However, the operation succeeded. It only took one syringe to kill the growth. She asked the physician whether her husband could look at the ulcer he removed. My father said, “If only you had seen that.” One growth was as large as a stuffed pig’s stomach [Schwartelmagen, which is similar to haggis] and the others looked like a hen’s eggs and goose eggs. The physician said to him, “When she puffed up, she had to have stitches, or she would have died.” After six weeks, my mother went to work again.

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