The room was dark, the curtains drawn almost closed. Bosques looked down at me from his desk and said, ”Monsieur Weitz, you can never come to Mexico because you offered money to a consulate employee.”
I was at the end of my rope. I didn’t care any longer what anyone thought or did, but at least I was going to set the record straight. I answered that at no time had I offered money to a consular official (which was true, I had offered money to a Spanish general, not to any Mexican official), that the Consul had been told a lie and that I wanted to see what evidence there was that I had offered such a bribe, for that’s what it clearly was, a bribe which I would never make and whose very existence maligned my reputation. I went on like this at some length when, to my surprise, the Consul finally shook his head and said he would give me the visa after all. With a few swirls of his pen he set down his signature then called on his secretary to place the official stamp on our papers.
I could not believe it myself when I stepped out of the office with the signed documents. I’d done it! I had really, truly, finally done it! We were out of Europe, once and for all!
But nothing is that easy in life. Besides, I still had my brother Moor to worry about.
Somehow or another Moor’s romance with Louise had come to an end and he had been staying with us in Marseilles for a while. The visas the Mexican ambassador had issued covered all of us. so he would have no problem getting into Mexico. My only concern was getting him out of France safely.
France required not only an entry visa but also an exit permit. While in Germany, Moor had been heavily involved with an anti-Nazi youth movement called ”Die Eiserne Front,” which would periodically have run-ins With the black shirts before the National Socialists came to power. We were afraid that the Vichy government had a1ist of all the former members of the Front and that the moment Moor went to ask for his exit permit, the
collaborationist Vichy officials would turn him over to the Nazis. There was no way of smuggling him into the port of Marseilles, as it was well guarded, so we were really at wit’s end on what to do about my brother.
Curiously, getting passage on a ship was not all that difficult, even though it did ultimately cause us some problems.
* Extracted from the book My Story, My Life, By Herman Weitz. Ed.1991
