Within two or three days after he tuned the piano at the General's house, Jim and Irene received a form letter from the International Refugee Organization at Munich, asking them whether they wanted to immigrate to America. They replied affirmatively. A few days later another letter arrived from the IRO informing them that an affidavit assuring sponsorship for them if they wanted to go to the United States was on file in the Munich office.
An Army Counter Intelligence Corp agent came to interview them. Jim and Irene were surprised at the amount of information the agent already had collected about their lives. He even knew of Jim's false registration as a naturalized German citizen from Poland. "Why did you give the German authorities false information?" the CIC agent asked Jim in clear, precise German. "To save my life," Jim replied quickly and directly. "I was paralyzed and confined to a hospital. Attempts were made to kidnap me," he explained. The CIC agent nodded affirmatively, as though he already knew those details. Jim was glad he had not engaged in black market activities, like so many refugees he knew. Any evidence of such violations of American occupation regulations would have made him ineligible to go to the United States.

At long last good fortune shines upon the Fras family but oddly enough during medical exams Irene found out that she was going to have another child and they would have to return to Erlangen for a year or so. Several months after the arrival of their second son the young family returned to the task of processing for the trip to America. It was just twenty minutes until midnight on December 31, 1951. They had barely made the deadline for going to America. The Marshall Plan, under which they were immigrating to the United States, expired at midnight.

In Memory Of Jim W. Fras

May 15, 1925 - September 9, 2002

      

     

              
Winters came and went, but Jim and Irene and their young son never got used to them in Erlangen. The Bavarian cold granted no respite to people who had little food to eat and little wood to burn. It just pressed in on them from all sides, allowing no escape, offering no hope, oppressing every effort to attain an easier life. One night Jim awakened with nightmarish suddenness. He felt his ear and it was numb. It seemed as though he were choking. He and Irene had not had anything to eat for several days, and their young son had been crying from hunger. Momentarily, in the bitter cold of the night, it dawned on Jim that he was freezing to death. He knew that Irene could not be any warmer, and it was a wonder that their son was still asleep. Jim nudged Irene and found that she was awake.
 
Quietly they dressed and went out into the cold, crisp night, leaving their son in bed. They tramped through the snow to a forested area not far from their ramshackle barrack. There they chopped down a small redwood tree of a variety known to burn when fresh. They took the tree home, cut it up, and used it to build a fire in their combination cook-stove-heater. Jim began to wrestle with his conscience over the hunger which gripped his wife and only child. He could not bear to see the suffering. Had he and Irene not gone into the woods and taken a tree which did not belong to them, they and their son might have died, he thought. A man could justify an extreme act as a humanitarian deed under such circumstances, he told himself.

Cold and hunger prevailed through the winter, and then came warm weather and more hunger. Jim was finding it harder and harder to get jobs as a musician.