Note from Edith

(Submitted by Edith Harnik.)

Dear dear Kurt,

This is my final goodbye and you are starting your journey into the next world - better or worse - but surely different. How many decades does it take to accumulate so many memories? In the time we have known each other, we both became much older and a little wiser and I am grateful for both and for the many hours of talking about school when 6 year old Kurti and 6 year old Hanserl walked together to school every morning under the watchful eye of either mother. Also, the Austrian teacher’s belief in memorizing ever more poems by heart and when you and I tried to recite them, helping each other to fill in the gaps (and improving Goethe and Schiller). That was so much fun. We also compared the Elias and Bettelheim lifestyles which were so different, but I think both parents did quite a good job. Talking about a good job, there is your sister, Hanni, a role model for every woman. This very young widow with a baby arriving in a new country and living in a city of which hardly any refugee ever had heard and did not know how to pronounce - Detroit - coming to New York, working at a job while going to college and university undaunted and becoming an esteemed and successful psychoanalyst, encouraged by you.

The Austrian General Consulate in New York has the luxury of a Vertrauensartzt, a Vertrauensanwalt (called in our family a Mißtrauensanwalt) and a Vertrauensarchitekt. This triumvirate worked together year after year, then Dr. Hans Kaunitz retired and you, with your love of your profession and mankind, became the Vertrauensartzt cherished by all your patients.

I am not yet sure about which religion I will follow in my own after-life, but if I should embrace Buddhism I hope we will meet again, which would be wonderful.

Edith Harnik