These thrilling and harrowing first-hand stories of fellow-survivors and their Spanish rescuers vividly reveal the unknown history of the Jews who found asylum from Hitler's Final Solution under Franco's Fascist regime. Originally published in hard cover by Simon and Schuster and by Harper/San Francisco in paperback, it was acclaimed as one of The Progressive's "BEST READING OF 1993" and won an award from the Jewish Book Council in the category of Memoir and Biography. It is the first volume of Alexy's HIDDEN IDENTITIES TRILOGY, followed in 2003 by THE MARRANO LEGACY, and in 2005 by IN SEARCH OF FORGIVENESS, recounting her own search for her lost Jewish heritage. Acclaimed in the "Progressive's," "Best Reading of 1993," these thrilling and harrowing firsthand stories of survivors and their rescuers vividly reveal the secret history of the Jews who found asylum from Hitler's Final Solution under Franco's Fascist regime. The Mezuzah in the Madonna's Foot Marranos and Other Secret Jews: A Woman Discovers Her Hidden Identity By Trudi Alexy Backinprint.com Copyright © 2006 Trudi Alexy All right reserved. ISBN: 9780595411597 Chapter One Girlhood in Prague When my father was born in Czernovitz, the capital of the province of Bukovina, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, ruled by Kaiser Franz Joseph, and most of the people who lived there spoke German. After World War I, Czernovitz was assigned to the kingdom of Romania. By the time I was born there, in 1927, its name had been changed to Cernauti, and its official language became Romanian. After World War II, the Soviet Union incorporated it and, of course, changed its name again. It is now part of the Republic of Ukraine, called Cernovci, and, with the rapid changes occurring as I write, I won't even try to guess what language is prevalent there today. In the late 1920s Czernovitz was a charming university town, alive with a bustling cultural life. My father's family owned a combination pharmacy-barbershop. His father was the druggist, and his mother, the official cast hairdresser for several theater companies in town, worked in the store with him. My father, Georg, was the middle child between a younger brother, Milos, and an older sister, Frieda. My mother, Norma, was born in Vienna and was an only child. In her family were well-to-do landowners with extensive farm, forest, and farm-machinery interests located close to the Russian border. Her father was killed during the first year of World War I, when she was only nine years old, and by war's end all of the family's holdings were lost to the Russians, never to be recovered. Her mother, my Oma Jenny, raised her alone. My father, whose photos as a young man reveal a striking resemblance to the dashing King Carol of Romania, was introduced to my mother when she was visiting her Czernovitz relatives, and was immediately captivated by her blue-eyed blond beauty and patrician air. After they were married, Father brought Mother to Czernovitz. Oma Jenny soon joined them, and my brother, Fredo, and I were born there, eighteen months apart. In 1929 all five of us moved to Prague and remained there for nine years. Several childhood memories stand out, not only because of their content but because of the exaggerated symbolic meaning they came to hold for me. Only much later did I recognize this flight into "magical thinking" as a child's attempt to explain the inexplicable, to make order out of chaos and to create a spiritual world where none exists. The first such event happened when I was two and a half years old. A minor throat infection turned into streptococcus sepsis, a type of blood poisoning for which there was no cure at that time. Fever kept me delirious for weeks. Huge boils, which appeared all over my body, had to be lanced without anesthetic due to a mild heart murmur. I have a clear picture of me sitting on a padded window seat in our flat, with my parents holding me still while the doctor cut open the abscesses on my legs, wrists, and back as blackish blood spilled into a basin on the floor. Later, one end of a strange glass coil resting on our dining-room table was inserted into my father's wrist, with the other embedded in my own. I can still see the blood coursing from his body into mine through the transparent coil while my own poisoned blood poured out through a cut next to it. This primitive blood transfusion saved my life. I have no memory of pain. I do, however, remember the color of the blood: my own was nearly black while my father's, bubbling through the glass coil, was bright red. That color contrast, and the fact that I soon felt better, made Father suddenly appear bigger than life, and the possessor of magical powers. Father's personality actively perpetuated this superhuman projection. His booming voice and his domineering manner discouraged all challenges to his authority. His frequent loud outbursts frightened us all, and I knew early on that the only way to escap