A Girl's Journey to Ecuador

Meet Ina

In 1939, ten year old Ina Juretschke and her family left their home in Berlin, Germany bound for Quito, Ecuador.  Ina’s family were freethinkers and opposed to war, and her mother was Jewish by heritage. Nazi Germany was not a safe place for them. The family knew very little about Ecuador when they set out, they selected the country because it was the first one on an alphabetical list of refugee-friendly countries that was willing to take a family of four. They lived for over a year in Quito, Ecuador and then were able to immigrate to the United States.

It seemed that wherever Ina went, she stood out.  She was a freethinker in a society turning increasingly fascist, a Jew by heritage in Nazi Germany, a German in Ecuador, but not a practicing Jew like the majority of those in the German refugee community, and then a German in post-war America.

This is Ina’s story.

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