Geneva

Mom's Memoirs:

the U of Geneva had to waive  their age restriction (minimum 18 years) and admit me. They called it a “dispense d’age” . By all accounts I looked barely 16!
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Everywhere in Europe the University year starts in the fall, I had matriculated in January, so I could devote the summer to learning French (I had only had two years of French in school). There was a course at the University  in summer for foreigners leading to a certificate in French. A strange combination of students - maybe not so strange but my first encounter with “adult education” This was a course designed for any foreigner to learn the language, and there were Swiss Germans in the course and all kinds of professionals needing a boost in French. I t ended with a “Certificat”, which I just about scraped through. But I had a fantastic summer (no time to study) ! Through Cornelia Schmalenbach (some name!), -her father was mentioned earlier in this narrative- who was older than I,  like just about everyone else, I met a bunch of graduate students, almost all of them Jews from Germany, and we spent a lot of time at the Beach “la plage” in Geneva (on Lac Leman). At first I stayed in a room that  we rented (my mother took me to Geneva and arranged for that) in a retired professor’s  apartment. The couple was recommended by friends of my parents’. I don’t know why they rented out, I think they expected a breath of fresh air in their pretty stultified atmosphere, or they needed the money, or both.(I remember Mrs. P. was trying to demonstrate to me how informal they really were by jumping up on a bed!) Professor Pringsheim[2] had been a chemist (in the field of sugars) of some renown in Germany, but as a non-Aryan (he never admitted to being Jewish) he was kicked out very early on.  It did not help him that his wife came from a very distinguished German family (related to Thomas Mann) . They had no children and I think they expected something like a substitute daughter from me. Especially Frau Professor (Pringsheim), because her husband very often stayed in his room, and the word was “Herr Professor leidet” (...is ailing). They had a charming French maid called Blanche, and I must say Frau Professor really tried her best to make it comfortable for me

What I was really supposed to do that summer, apart from learning French , was to make up my mind what I wanted to be! Europe did not give undergraduates the opportunity to explore what the University had to offer, you did not start with courses in Liberal Arts , but you had to decide on a major from  the beginning. I really had no idea what kind of careers were out there, especially for women, most women went into Literature or something like that. The only thing I knew anything about was chemistry,  although I never had a course in that subject in school! But my father was a chemist, I had worked for him in his lab a bit in the last summer before college, and as fate would have it, all the graduate students I had met that summer in Geneva were chemists! I also promptly fell in love for the first time:  You met him, his name then was Wilhelm (later William) Taub. His best friend was Martin Wertheim (later Wilson) who dated Heidi. That’s how I met her! We made a foursome. William’s parents lived in Hamburg, but that summer of 1937 he came for a prolonged visit to Martin who lived in Berlin, and thus W. also met my parents. Strangely the couples broke up, but the men and the women remained lifelong friends! William followed his father (also a chemist) to Israel, to work at the Weizman Institute in Tel Aviv and Martin later went to Jerusalem for a job at the salt mines at the Dead Sea (he was an inorganic Chemist)

So after I had spent the first (very short) summer semester taking my “Certificat de Francais Moderne”, which I passed with the minimum grade to get by, and had spent the vacation at home in Berlin, I went back to Geneva to start University in earnest. I moved away from the Professor and took a room very close to the “ecole de chimie” with a very nice young family. (Dormitories were unknown). The husband was a dental technician, the wife took care of the two preschool kids, my room was comfortable (shared bathroom , of course). 

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The summer before war broke out, and the war was really a foregone conclusion after the Munich compromise with Chamberlain, funds for my university fees were very much in doubt, so I tried to get myself some nonpaying jobs (paying ones were not permitted for foreigners) to further my education: first I worked in the hospital laboratory for a month, doing analysis on blood, urine etc., then in a research station for experimental zoology, which was fascinating, very early experiments in Genetics Some people called what we did “vivisection” and violently protested against it, but we used  anesthesia and sterile methods, and the animals (white mice, rats, and guinea pigs) all survived very well;  for my exam two years later they gave me a guinea pig I had operated on previously! 

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 Let me get back to the summer of 1939 I had finished my first year of Chemistry (after changing my Major from Chemistry to Biology, in order to avoid Math,  which I simply could not handle, Physics was bad enough!)

Early that summer I met René. A friend (Claire Doblin) introduced us, she was an Economics major like he. He specialized in Statistics and had got a job with the International Labor Office (ILO). A friend of my parents’ from their Geneva days was the Professor of Statistics [4], (small world!), and my mother on her last visit to Geneva met René and liked him, so did Aunt Franka and Uncle Tramer. I never knew who his father was, (I don’t think he did either),  certainly not the man Boris his mother lived with, a carpenter who made excellent furniture, but didn’t know how to market it and did not seem to be able to speak any language properly. Rene’s mother was German, her father had been a Social Democrat and had to flee in WWI for political reasons.  She was not particularly educated , but a great woman with a lot of understanding and common sense. She also had two daughters, half-sisters of René I suspect. I guess I was in love with René, certainly very infatuated, but the war messed all that up. There exist somewhere fragments of a diary  - a book that my father started when I was born,-  and which contains some entries by my mother in Polish; I used this diary for occasional entries myself, mostly in the form of essays, but then used it to pour out all my raw feelings about René. Later I destroyed that part of the diary, because I found it too embarrassing! Looking back I think it was my first encounter with sexual attraction and didn’t know how to handle it. In  Summer 1942 the ILO moved to Canada and René followed to Montreal; I went to England the same month. 

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One friend was the brother of a girlfriend from  Geneva, Helga Bernfeld. I may have mentioned her before, we lived in the same house for a while in Geneva (rue Emile Young[3]), Peter was a doctoral candidate, in chemistry Helga a chemistry major a year ahead of me. Both were from Leipzig. They belonged to the same group of people we would meet at the train station Sunday nights after our hikes or ski trips in the French Alps. Helga and Peter were more adventurous than the rest of us, went rock climbing, and Helga dislocated her shoulder a couple of times!

From a text exchange (2008):

janka2k4: Of course Dad and I never were in dorms, and did not get home so easily, I had a 23 hour train ride to get home from Geneva!

Letter to Jeanne Hersch:

You may not remember me, but I hope you do.[4] My maiden name is Jonas, and my parents were very good friends of yours in Geneva during WWI; when I came to Geneva in 1937 as a 17year old student my mother introduced me to your family and they sort of adopted me. My very special memory of you is when you gave me some very solid advice when I was at lose ends you invited me along on a hit a rough spot in my "love life", and when late winter skiing trip in 1939 with a number of your friends; what I remember best of that excursion is that it was gorgeous weather, the snow had melted on all the southern slopes but was still abundant on the others, and this was the first and only time I ever was on skis in moonlight, a truly exciting experience!
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Anyway, so much to reintroduce myself. I amuse myself with surfing the internet occasionally, and that is how I came across an article about you in the series "Jahrhundert schweizer" and learned about your forthcoming 90th Birthday! It gives me enormous pleasure to join the many others who are probably celebrating and commemorating this day with you and to wish you good health and maný more years of productive life.
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I also would love to know about your sister Irene and your brother who was teaching mathematics in Zürich, if I remember correctly. Once more, my very best wishes for a very good year

PS. Is it possible that you still live in the old house with the wonderful lilac bushes? The address sounds so familiar!

Notes:

1. Don't where this is from (a Berlin paper?). Found it on a photocopy! If she was 18, then it was presumably in 1938.

2. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/pringsheim-hans

3. Found a listing and discussion of the building Mom lived in at 15, rue Emily Yung, so it still stands!

4. Mom had found (and printed out) an article from May 2000. Unfortunately, Jeanne Hersch died before Mom even wrote her letter. Her secretary/executor responded warmly, but she had no knowledge of the Jonas's. The German Wikipedia article has a lot more information about her parents, who were Polish-Jewish immigrants and arrived in Geneva in 1904 (and clearly of the sort that the Jonas's would have consorted with in Geneva). In fact, her father, Liebmann Hersch was a professor of statistics, so presumably the same professor of statistics referenced with Rene.

5. Presumably Claire Dobbin as mentioned in her memoirs; don't know who Jurgen is--maybe her brother (see Postcard to her father later that summer).

6. Her father is in London at the address at which her mother will be when she gets to London later that month.

7. The 1939 Swiss National Exhibition, or Exposition Nationale Suisse (see front of card).  

8. So, perhaps this being Claire's brother (see 5, above)

9. Maggi bouillon cubes was a Swiss company; I tried to look at the exposition map in 7, above, but don't see a booth for that!

10. Again, one of these mysteries of why this was kept. Don't think we have any knowledge of who Karli/Podi Schindel was, or meant to Mom. I did find a "Dora Schindel" from Munich, who then went to University in Zurich, and then was in Geneva prior to departing Lisbon on the same April 26, 1941 to Brazil, but no evidence to connect these names.