Weiss was born in Vienna in 1914, 11 days before the start of World War I. His father, Ferdinand, was in the lumber business. Weiss remembers him as "a man who would have liked to study law but had to go to work every day."

Weiss did study law and belonged to an organization for young Zionists -- a 19th-century movement seeking a homeland for Jews, whose dispersal around the globe began in biblical times. By the time Weiss joined the movement, hundreds of thousands of Zionists already had emigrated to Palestine, chased there by European hatreds or drawn by Jewish idealism.

As Weiss was finishing his studies, Hitler's troops were beginning to rampage across Europe. In his last year in school, he told his father he wouldn't take his final exams because he didn't think the Nazis would ever let him practice law in Austria.

"Do it," his father advised. "It may come in handy some day anyway."

Weiss passed the exams, only to be told that "by the grace of the Führer," only Aryan students could get a diploma.

"I went to graduation, but I went in street clothes," he said. "There was no graduation party. I had to leave my family at home. And I had to sign away any rights or privileges that might arise from the diploma they wouldn't give me. For us, everything came to an end when the big liberator came along."

It took courage and meticulous planning to run from Hitler's evil. But it didn't take brains.

"There were many signs," Weiss said. "People just had to see them."

He saw signs when the German soldiers took over the lumber business and closed the office; when the police appropriated Ferdinand's Fiat; when the coffeehouse they had patronized for years displayed a new sign: "Juden Verboten"; when the family dentist stuck a swastika in his window.

"And one day a truck driver at the sawmill accused my father of not paying his wages and the police came to arrest him," Weiss said. "My father told them he and the man were both employees of the company. My father didn't own the company. But that didn't matter. The police accompanied him to a bank to withdraw a great deal of money to pay the man. And when my father came home, we were just glad to see him, money or no money. We were glad he wasn't dead."

"We decided there was a rule: If you want to live, leave. Everyone who wasn't in a dream world had to know it was time to go."

Weiss stood in line for days, with hundreds of other anxious people, to get a visa for his parents to go to America. He stood in long lines at the chamber of commerce, looking for American companies with officers who had names like theirs, so they could write, "Mr. Weiss, you don't know me but maybe we are relatives to you and you could help me get to America . . . "

Hitler had come to Austria in March of 1938. In June or July, Eric Weiss caught a boat to Palestine. His sister, Frances, joined him there the next year.

By 1940, their parents had also managed to flee Austria, though they made their way to the United States.

In all, some 350,000 Jews foresaw the Nazi future and took flight between 1933 and 1939, when Hitler closed the borders. About 90,000 sailed across the Atlantic to the United States; more would have, historians say, if they'd been more welcome here.

Ferdinand and Pauline Weiss were among some 18,000 who took an arduous route across Russia and Asia. They finally settled in Portland and started their lives over again. Eric Weiss wasn't to see his parents for 12 years.

Copyright © 1998 The Seattle Times Company