I am sure that you still hope to join us here and, as I promised, I am writing to tell you what to expect. In honesty I cannot tell you not to come. Our agreement was that I would send you the tickets when we had saved for them and I will do it. How long this will be I am not sure, for getting money here is a harder thing than we thought. But an honest picture of what we have found in this place is what you need to hear.
I'm sure that nothing of the journey will surprise you. After we crossed over to Germany I was not surprised that there were sharpers trying to fleece us--I was only surprised that there were so many and that so many were Jews (Howe 36). It is so welcome to hear people speaking Yiddish that many people, apparently, trust these men with their money. They must, they claim, guide you here or there and they must buy your train tickets for you or you will surely be arrested--once your money is in their hands, of course, it's good-bye. In Berlin the authorities inspected us like livestock and everyone passed on by train to Hamburg. The crooks in that town make everything else look easy. Two or three men had their passage money stolen outright. Since I will send you your tickets this will make you much easier for a large part of the journey (Howe 39).
The inspection at Hamburg, however, went on and on and they kept us in a quarantine for a whole two weeks. The anxiety of all this waiting is enormous and you keep looking at each other for any sign of disease that might keep one of us off the boat. It is ironic, therefore, that this anxiety made us very anxious to get on the boat for the worst 17 days of our lives. There is nothing to say again but that they treated us like livestock. There are tiers on which one sleeps and, practically speaking, lives, with dozens of strange people crowded into a small space. The children had never heard people like this before in their lives--the worst sorts with no e...