February, 1948

I finally received the good news that I will get my Visa. I have been waiting for this for almost three years!  I am planning to finish work here at the end of March and then, after a brief vacation in Italy, go to England and say good bye to my mother and the rest of my family. I will be sailing for the United States on May 7.
     I was in Vienna recently. Vienna has recovered very much indeed. The currency reform was a real success. Many goods are now available and the black market has lost and the Schilling has a recognized value.
     The political situation with the Czech crisis is a great shock. The plight of the Eastern refugees is worst of all. As Nuernberg is the nearest large town to the Czech border, refugees come here by the hundreds. No committees have been formed yet and millions of Sudeten German refugees, expelled by the Czechs a short time ago and living in camps all over the zone, doesn't make it easy for these Czechs to find friendly reception.

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.

May 23, 1948

The first week in America has passed pretty quickly. I had to go three times to different parts of New York in order to get my boxes released from the customs people. I had sent part of my belongings directly to New York from Germany and a  case like mine has not existed before, where one is not coming as Germany immigrant, but the mail is sent from an APO address, but not from an American either and still the army had taken care of the transportation. But everything eventually got straightened out and I had not to pay a cent. I have not decided yet whether to change my name. I shall not do it while I am here in New York. Pollitzer does not seem to have the tinge it has in Europe. People here seem to have the impressions that it is a good old English name, except for Europeans, who know better.
     America is a wonderful country and California more than all the other states. The greatness, the speed, the lack of tradition, and the dimensions of everything are more than impressive.
     I went to the top of the Rockefeller building last night - a 72 story building. It is actually a group of seven or eight skyscrapers, all built between 1932-1937. During the day 150,000 people work there and they are almost a town on their own with a post office, hospital and station. There are roof gardens on the 50th and 70th floors, or whatever is the top of the various buildings. Midnight on Broadway in New York is remarkable: so much light! There are still so many people, there are shops that are still open, restaurants and drugstores crowded, millions of neon lights, cars, and buses. The sky scrapers are overwhelming in their mass, one would be impressive, but hundreds are more than astonishing. The shops on Fifth Avenue are not like anything I had seen in Paris or London or anywhere in prewar days. The shops are open as much at midnight as during the day. The port with the Queen Elisabeth and Mary are five minutes from the town centre. Lights and traffic and people are overwhelming. New York is much more beautiful than one would think. Water is everywhere. There is a beautiful beach just 25 minutes from the city where one can swim or sail. You can also go to the port which is close to the center of town and you can see the Queen Elizabeth and other big ships. I am staying in a hotel on the 21st floor and have a nice little room for $4.00/night. I get clean linens daily, a radio, a bath room with a shower with hot and cold water and iced water for drinking.