I left Vienna on a flight to Zurich, and from Zurich on a charter flight to New York arranged by AFCR. It was the first time in my life I had been on an airplane.

I felt better equipped for this journey than I had been for the last one. When I left Czechoslovakia a year earlier I had almost nothing. Now I had two hundred and forty dollars in cash, my original briefcase, and a large new suitcase filled with clothing I had accumulated during my year in Vienna. It was not much by any measure, but it was mine, and it felt like wealth compared to where I had started.