Berlin to embark on a period as a music student, studying both the piano and singing. Nazi takeover At the start of 1933 the Nazi Party took power in Weimar Germany and lost little time in transforming the country into a one-party dictatorship. The shrill antisemitism which had featured prominently in Nazi propaganda during the preceding decade became a key underpinning of government policy. During 1933 and 1934 many believed that the government, like others before it, would not last, but four years later the Nazis were still in control. At this stage arrest and imprisonment were still, for the most part, restricted to those Jews who were politically active: nevertheless, employment and business opportunities were being systematically cut away. In September 1933 Bertlies Weinschenk obtained an exit visa and relocated with her family, briefly, to Cologne where her sister had found a job in the garments industry. In 1936 she fled via Italy to Cuba. Bertlies would later recall that on the day they left Cologne she opened the balcony window of the hotel room where she was staying and played records of music from Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera – which had been banned in Germany since 1933 – for the benefit of passers-by. From Cuba, helped by American contacts, she was able to obtain the necessary permits to enter the United States of America towards the end of 1937. In 1938 she was joined in the U.S. by her younger sister, who had managed to make the journey from Nazi Germany with fewer hold-ups. New life in the United States It was also in 1938 that Bertlies Weinschenk enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia where, as before, she studied as both a piano and a voice student. She received a stipendium which funded her studies and covered her living expenses. Her teachers included Vera Brodsky and Elisabeth Schumann. Someone else whom she met at the Curtis was Ned Rorem, a composition student from the mid-west: she became the first singer to perform Rorem's songs in public. After graduating, during the early 1940s she performed regularly in clubs across the country as part of the two-piano combo "Yola and Lisa, the Mexican sisters" with Alberta Masiello, for which the two young women dressed "appropriately", "with big skirts and big earrings". The story is told of one night when the "sisters" were hired to perform at a