IT WAS in autumn 1925, when I went to a dinner party at the home of a journalist, Dr. Fritz Kaufmann, that I first met Ludwig von Mises. Kaufmann’s wife was the daughter of our beloved pediatrician, who—as long as Feri was alive—used to come to the apartment every Saturday morning to have a look at the children. (This was done for an annual fee. One can hardly imagine today that there ever existed arrangements like this with a private physician.) Only recently I found a handwritten letter of recommendation from Ludwig for Fritz Kaufmann, written in 1943: “Dr.

LU WAS at the station in Zurich to meet us. In the thirteen years we shared before our marriage, I had never seen Lu cry. (Nor did I ever see him cry in all the thirty-five years of our married life.) He wept—unrestrained and unabashed. Tears were streaming down his face and he was not ashamed of them. He took me in his arms; he kissed Gitta; he embraced me again and again, as if he never would let me go.

ON JULY 4, 1940, at 6:30 in the evening, our bus left from the American Express office. Lene Lieser and Tiny, our housekeeper, were there to see us off. We never saw them again.

THE FIRST year in New York is not a happy memory for me. We moved five times. We first stayed at the Hotel Park Chambers on Fifty-sixth Street, where Dr. Schutz had taken rooms for us; then we moved to a very nice private apartment on Riverside Drive, loaned to us by a friend, then to the Hotel Park Crescent on Riverside Drive and Eighty-sixth Street. For a while we lived in a furnished apartment until, in 1942, I found the apartment on West End Avenue where we lived for so many years and where I still live today.

IN NEW YORK, the winter of 1941, we met Senor Montes de Oca, former secretary of the treasury of Mexico and at that time president of Mexico’s Banco Internationale. Though he was of small stature, he was a great man, and he bore himself as such. He had an all-encompassing knowledge of politics, economics, and world affairs, spoke four languages fluently, was widely read, and knew everything Lu had ever written. He immediately invited Lu and me to come to Mexico for a series of lectures at the university, which he would sponsor.

THOUGH LU had tried incessantly, he had not yet found a position to relieve our financial worries. He asked little for himself and he never complained, but it hurt him, for my sake, that we had to live so carefully. Nevertheless, though we hardly ever went out for dinner, he insisted on going to the theater once a week.

I SHOULD know Human Action very well. I typed 890 pages of it, and after the index was finished, I checked it. Lu was a very strict “boss.” At least with me. Whenever he saw a typing error, he made me redo the whole page, exactly as I had to do at the Delehanty School of Business. Erasing was strictly prohibited there, and so it was with Lu.

Myself at fourteen.

Here I am in 1919, a member of the Deutsche Volkstheater. This photograph was on a postcard sold in Vienna at the time.

LU’S SEMINAR at New York University began in 1948 and ended in 1969. For twenty-one years the seminar gathered at the Graduate School in lower Manhattan every Thursday from 7:25 to 9:25 P.M.

WHEN FRIENDS talked about my husband, they spoke of him as being “gentle.” He was gentle with me of course—he was a gentleman and he loved me. But, actually, he was not gentle. He had a will of iron and a mind like a steel blade. He could be unbelievably stubborn, but people would not detect that in daily life, for he had excellent manners. He was brought up at a time when Austria was an empire and good manners and self-discipline were not only a prerequisite of the court, but a must for a member of every cultured family.