Arnold Leinweber as a boy scout

This is Bugaz [currently Zatoka in Ukraine], where the Dniester River flows into the Black Sea. I was in a boy scouts camp in 1936. From left to right, in the upper row: Alexandru Chiritescu (who became a dentist), Zoreanu (who became an electrician); in the lower row: Gherman (who worked for the telephone company), one of the commanders, wearing white, and myself, Arnold Leinweber. At 16, my school sent me to the seaside [by the Black Sea]. I was sent there three times. The third time, the reason was the good job I had done as head of my group at school, which determined the camp's commander, doctor Dumitrescu, to call us there. The water there was clearer than a spring's, and the beach was very wide, with sand dunes in which the foot would sink. When we had to return to the camp at noon, after having frolicked for hours, we couldn't walk, but we had to run like crazy to reach the ground, because the sand was too hot to walk on. One of my classmate from the vocational school got drowned. The news was published in the newspapers, but the name wasn't mentioned, so, naturally, everyone got worried. I didn't write to my parents that I was alive because I was upset with them: at my request, they were supposed to send me 100 lei of their own money, but they took it from my personal savings, which were kept by a cousin of my mother's. So I got angry and didn't write anything. When I came back from the camp, my mother was so happy I was alive that she burst into tears. She immediately sent me to Aurora St., near the Malbim Synagogue, to a brush maker's workshop where my adoptive father worked. I got there in the afternoon and found him resting on a bed. When he saw me, he jumped up and he embraced me with tears of joy in his eyes. What more proof did I need that this noble man loved me? To him, I was an adopted orphan, but he raised me and treated me nicely. How could I not cherish his memory and continue to bear his name with respect?