looking after the five children, cleaning the house, and preparing meals appropriate to her employers' "exquisite French palettes". That was followed by work as an assistant in a care-home founded by a Jewish doctor. The hours were shorter, but she was still only 18 and there were some unanticipated challenges, including teaching reading to someone with Down syndrome and looking after an elderly lady with cancer. Later in 1940 she accepted a position as a Kindergarten assistant at a children's home operated by the "Asociación Filantropia Isrealita" (AFI), founded by a long-established Jewish merchant family in Buenos Aires in anticipation of the flow of Jewish refugees from Europe. Family developments and community involvement At a musical evening held by the "Jewish Cultural Association" in the Buenos Aires quarter of Belgrano she met a pianist called Erich Marx, a German-Jewish refugee like herself. He had studied piano and voice at Mainz and in 1935 followed his brother to Argentina. His parents were murdered at Theresienstadt. On 11 March 1942 Erich Marx and Ellen Pinkus were married. By 1964 the marriage would have produced four children. Long before that new began to come through about relatives who had remained in Germany. During 1942/43 a message on the edge of one of the anodyne postcards that her mother was able to send stated "Frau Pinkus ist jetzt ganz alleine" ("Mrs. Pincus is now quite alone"). Her mother's postcards stopped after Gertrud was arrested and transported to Auschwitz, used for forced labour, and then, a year or so later, killed by gassing. Although a steady trickle of grim news emerged during the war years, it was only many years later that Ellen Marx learned in greater detail of father's death in Berlin in July 1942, of her mother's final years, and of the fates of nine other relatives who had been "hauled-off" by the authorities in Germany. Three of the couple's four children were born in 1943, 1947 and 1948. Between the births Ellen Marx taught German at the Pestalozzi School which had been founded on the north side of the city in 1934 by Ernesto Alemann. Most of the pupils were from Jewish families that had fled Germany and Austria. As her own children became less full-time, for around twenty years she found enormous satisfaction from helping to look after children with the Lamroth Hakol Community (loosely: "Despite everything community"), established in 1944