Travel can be a broadening experience. It can offer opportunities that you would never encounter at home. Like when Herbert Fierst traveled around Europe the year after his graduation from Yale University back in 1935 and wonders what if things had turned out differently. Fierst was interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy beginning in 1996.
A few weeks before graduation I was awarded a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, which provided the munificent sum, in those days, of $1500 for a yearâ??s travel abroad. The only conditions attached to it were not to get married during that year and not to stay in any one place and study, but to broaden yourself by traveling. A wonderful, wonderful fellowship! So I changed my plans altogether and spent a fascinating year abroad traveling in 15 countries. This was from July 1935 to June 1936â?¦.
I had a very unusual experience â?? it almost embarrasses me in retrospect to tell you how it startedâ?¦ I had no intention of going to Nazi Germany, although I had been invited there by the father of a then 12-year-old boy my parents had taken into our houseâ?¦ But, well, we are about to have the Olympics here â?? this was half a year before the famous 1936 Berlin Olympics â?? the Nazis were supposed to be on their somewhat better behavior. There was much talk of a boycott of Nazi Germany which I was prepared to observe. In visiting the Brussels Worldâ??s Fair, somehow or other I got duped by three confidence men and they deprived me of practically all the money I had at the time. Another increment of my Fellowship money was due in a couple of months. So I decided that I would take advantage of the invitation that had been extended to me. I wouldnâ??t really be violating the boycott, since I didnâ??t have any money left (I had a little), and I would be staying in Berlin with this Jewish family. So thatâ??s what I did.
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