They left Havana in the same order they had arrived. Florence Loeb first, then Jeanne Akerkar and Ingrid Altman, and, finally, Rose Cunningham.
It was 1946, just four years after they had sailed from Europe, away from the ravages of World War II to safety.
“We were lucky,” Cunningham said.
But in a rare reunion of three of them — Loeb was ill and unable to attend — Sunday in Atlanta, luck seemed to play only a partial role when compared to the advantages of family and resources.
“We could not have escaped if our parents hadn’t moved heaven and earth to get us out of Europe,” Altman said.
But the long odds — their escape from Germany and Nazi-occupied France, their good fortune in the U.S. and their continued relationships — add up to nothing less than a miracle.
Their lives first intersected in 1942 in Cuba, one of the few countries still accepting Jews fleeing the Nazis.
“We were strangers in a strange land, children chased from one country to the next,” Altman and Akerkar said, explaining their alliance.
They hailed from upper-middle-class families — Loeb and Cunningham from France, Altman and Akerkar from Germany.
They all spoke French, which would also become important.
“We were naturally drawn to each other like junior high school girls, but it was the language that brought us together,” Cunningham said. “To this day we do our arithmetic in French.”
For the next four years, they were inseparable. They joined the guild, the equivalent of the Girl Scouts. They went camping. They talked about boys and the war.
“We were glued to the radio all the time,” said Akerkar, 80.
Every year their fathers made the annual trek to the U.S. consulate to request visas to America and every year their request was denied.
Then in 1946, it happened. Their visas were granted at last.
Loeb left first, then Akerkar and Altman, flying first to Miami and then taking a train to New York, where they each enrolled in high school.
Meanwhile, one night before she could leave Havana, Cunningham met a U.S. Army Air Forces pilot at a USO dance.
“I didn’t speak English, and he didn’t speak anything but English,” she said.
They connected, however, on the dance floor.
“There is such a thing as body language,” she said, laughing.
John Cunningham, an Alabama native, returned to the States, but he never forgot her. While pursuing a degree in architecture at Georgia Tech, he wrote her letters.
He’d never met a girl like her, he told her. He loved her. He wanted to marry her.
A few days before Christmas, John Cunningham returned to claim his bride. They were married Dec. 23, 1946, 11 days after Rose Cunningham celebrated her 18th birthday.
The next day the couple boarded a Pan Am flight to Miami, then took a Greyhound bus to Atlanta.
Even as she settled into her new life, Cunningham, never forgot her friends.
While she busied herself raising two daughters and became a multilingual ambassador for this city too busy to hate, her friends headed off to college: Akerkar to Wisconsin; Altman to Southern California.
Their lives were soon filled with husbands, children and careers. They managed, however, to send holiday cards and an occasional letter. Distance made visits virtually impossible. Loeb had returned to Paris years earlier. Akerkar lived in India, Altman in California.
But with the advent of email, “Our correspondence became much more frequent and lively,” said Altman, 82.
In 1999, more than 50 years after they left Havana, the four decided it was time they visited one another. It would have to be in Cuba.
“All of us at the same time got the desire to meet,” Akerkar said. “I half-jokingly suggested Havana, and we did it.”
For an entire week, they visited their old homes and schools — if they still existed. They toured the city and sunbathed on the beach.
“It was very emotional,” Altman said. “That’s where the whole story started.”
It started a pattern. In 2003, Altman and Akerkar visited each other in New York. In 2008, Akerkar and her husband visited Altman’s family in California. And just this summer, Akerkar and Loeb visited each other.
Recently, they decided to meet here at Cunningham’s home, taking up where they left off — the way old friends do. “It’s been fun, yakking and teasing,” Akerkar said as Cunningham’s home began to swell with visitors.
It was hard not to feel the absence of Loeb, 81, they said.
Illness had kept her away.
They’ll do it again soon, they said, most likely at Altman’s place in California.
On Monday, as their four-day visit drew to a close and the friends said their goodbyes, word came that Loeb, the first to arrive in Havana, had become the first to die.
“We’re going to miss her,” Cunningham, 83, said, whose husband passed away six months ago.
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