to ensure greater financial security for the future, Hennig enrolled in 1943 for a degree course in architecture, with a view to opening the way to a sure second career. He was subsequently joined by his family in November 1939 and together they began their Irish life, with its twists and turns of good and bad fortunate as they found congenial accommodation in a cottage with garden at Sutton to the north of Dublin, but the wife and children went down with whooping cough and other health problems soon after their arrival. The elder girl, Gabriele, developed a lung complication and in desperation the family sought the help of a paediatrician, Dr Robert Collis, who treated the girl free of charge and in effect saved her life. In 1942 another child was born, Margaret May Joan (Maggie). The earlier years were made easier by the friendship and social acceptance of a number of other German-speaking exiles, such as Erwin Schrödinger (1877-1961), an Austrian Nobel prize-winner for Physics, the medievalist Ludwig Bieler (1906-1981) and the bacteriologist Hans Sachs (1877-1945). On the other hand, for practicality the couple adopted anglicized first names, Hans becoming John and Kläre becoming Claire, names they then kept for the rest of their days. During the war years, the Hennigs managed to keep some contact with their Meyer in-laws in Belgium. Neither young nor fit, but a man of considerable character, Felix Meyer took up the cause of other Jews in Belgium, playing on his standing with Belgian industrialists to obtain medical supplies for prisoners, and with sheer bravado even complaining to high-ranking Gestapo officers about the legality of some of the detentions, Often, he was able to exploit the fears for civil unrest or for postwar personal retribution of the components of the military government in Belgium, and not rarely he played off Gestapo and German military against each other, obtaining release of prisoners or at least improvement of their conditions. He was also instrumental in establishing old peoples homes and residential hospitals for Jews, aiming always at strictly legal methods. Most of all, he impeded many of the deportations of Jews that the Nazis organized in foreign territories they had occupied. After the reconquest of Belgium by the Allies, Meyer stayed in the country. With the end of the European war the full truth about the Nazi concentration camps became fully public and Dr Robert