When I read of people from Romania coming to find a place in Irish society, he said, I remember a story told me by a friend, of emigration in the other direction - that is, eastwards to Romania. He was strolling along a street in Heidelberg with a companion one night in the late 1930s and stopped at the window of a bookshop. A middle-aged man in a grey plus-four suit was hovering around. "Excuse me," he said, after a while, "I don't often get the opportunity of speaking English. Would you care to join me in a drink?" After a chat they agreed. "Let me lead the way," he said. "There's only one pub I can safely go into; you see, I'm Jewish, but the landlord doesn't object if I keep to a quiet corner. He pretends he does not know me." So the others followed the stranger into a quiet, rather dark establishment, where he sat with his back to the crowd.
He explained that he had been a lecturer or professor in the university (they didn't remember), which was only a couple of hundred yards away, but had been fired because of his Jewishness. In spite of that, he told the pair, students came to him secretly by night for extra tuition. Including members of the SS, he said. He was waiting for a passport to leave Germany, his native place, for Romania, where he had an uncle who was willing to give him a home.
A man of 40, the Irish youths thought, quietish, not married, and obviously used to dealing with the young without condescension. They went to the pub again a couple of times but didn't see him. This would probably be 1936. One of the two Irish youths had noticed a similar professional withdrawal. He needed reading reading glasses and his landlady recommended an oculist, with the caution that he go only at night. He, too, was Jewish. The same oculist was invited to her musical evenings. Otherwise, Heidelberg was a tourist draw, as always. Not much parading of phalanxes of Stormtroopers in brown or SS men in black. Flags aplenty hanging down the main streets - red, with the black swastika on a white circle. Brilliant open-air plays at night in the courtyard of the historic remains of the castle, all classics, produced with enormous lighting and set against the lovely, rose-coloured stone of the building, which features on every brochure of the city. Quiet drama elsewhere, as the two young Irishmen had seen.