Working in an automobile garage is really different. As a medical student in Berlin, clean hands were a must; now, as you learn to repair automobile engines, dirt under your fingernails is a mark of success. It takes you three years to graduate from apprentice to journeyman mechanic, and you are very proud of your accomplishment.
Three years is also the time it takes for the war to end. Now, you can travel freely throughout western Europe, but where? A representative of ORT, the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training, finds you in Spain and asks you to come to Paris to teach young refugees engine repair in the new ORT school. You like the idea of training a group of Jewish refugees and passing your new skill on to them; you accept.
Your students are often weak, still suffering from the rigors of concentration camps or their flight from the Nazis, but they are eager to learn. Many of them progress quickly, but, soon after graduation, they disappear. You wonder where they have gone. You later learn that they have been rushed to the new country of Israel and are among the mechanics for the new state's air force and army. You feel a tremendous sense of achievement. Your work has helped Jewish survival in a way that you can never have imagined.
END