Professor Theodor Heuss, President of the West German Republic, paid an official visit to the Jewish Hospital and to the Jewish old age home here, through both of which he was conducted by Heinz Galinski, head of the Berlin Jewish Community Council. He was accompanied by Berlin’s Mayor Otto Suhr.
In the hospital, whose 300 patients are today for the most part non-Jews, Prof. Heuss singled out a number of the Jewish invalids for chats, in which he reminisced about the time his half-Jewish daughter-in-law was a patient there during the Nazi regime. She is a former concentration camp inmate whom his son, Dr. Ludwig Heuss, married after the war.
Prof. Heuss than proceeded to the home, where he asked to be shown the small synagogue. Ninety-two-year-old Anna Schmersenz handed him a flower bouquet. Stirred by the encounter with the 160 elderly residents, he expressed his confidence that, after the suffering they had undergone, they would be privileged to spend the remainder of their lives in freedom from fear.
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