May 16, 1948

Well, this is America! I arrived May 13 at about noon. The trip was unexciting. The boat was neat and clean, but otherwise "Polnische wirtschaft" exists in communist Poland as much as ever. About half the passengers were British, the rest Danes and Poles. There was nobody interesting on the boat. I slept, ate and read most of the time. The weather was mostly cloudy, windy, and cold. The last morning, when we entered the harbor, the sun came out again and it was a grand spectacle to move slowly into the port, passing the statue of liberty and seeing all the skyscrapers, just as one has seen in pictures, but in reality more impressive.The immigration authorities did not take 30 seconds to check my papers, but the customs authorities were very exact and looked through every trunk and case and bag. That took almost an hour. Then I was released into America. Funny, I had no feeling of being in a strange place. When we went into a drugstore to have a cup of coffee I felt almost as if I were in the PX in Nuremberg. The latest American cars look exactly like those my friends had in Germany. The traffic is not denser than in London.