by Barbara Probst Solomon

Arriving Where We Started is a memoir about an American girl's personal odyssey in post-World War II Europe. While the war against Hitler raged on in Europe, most young American girls were contemplating college. But as Hitler was rounding up Jews to send them to the gas chambers, and Franco was cracking down on student underground resistance in Spain, Barbara Probst Solomon was persuading her parents to approve her passpost application for a trip she felt impelled to make to Europe when the war was over. In high school she noted to herself: 'Make sure you get to Moscow--danger is in not arriving.' Mer 'Moscow' was post-war Europe: France, Germany and Spain. Her urgent need as an American Jewish girl was to understand the Holocaust. Shocked at Europe's indifference to the genocide of the Jews, she involved herself in the Spainish anti-communist left, and in the rescue of intellectual dissidents from Franco's prisons. She took with her to Europe a sixteen millimeter movie camera, and Arriving Where We Started is the basis for her recently internationally released documentary made from those carefully preserved films, When the War Was Over.