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Genora and Sol wanted to go to Spain but not while dictator Francisco Franco was in power. A Basque exile persuaded them not to wait: the Spanish people had to have contact with the outside world, he asserted, so the Dollingers reworked their travel schedules. Spain’s philosophical climate manifested itself to the traveling couple one day at lunch. They struck up a conversation with a young physician, Elias, whose name was unusual, Sol thought, for a Spaniard. Elias’s family had been Jewish but converted to Catholicism. Medical doctors, he said, were paid on a par with ordinary laborers because the medical profession, by and large, opposed Franco.36 When Elias took Genora and Sol to the University of Madrid, he told them he feared to speak in public places against Franco because there were spies everywhere. Both Dollingers immediately remembered their own FBI surveillances of just a few years before.37 One night the Dollingers stayed out late and the door of their pension was locked when they returned. They could not attract the attendant, and for a while pondered a night on the street. Then an elderly gentleman walked up to them with a key. His job was to patrol the streets and open pension doors to latecomers. “Apparently,” Sol wrote, “Franco solved his unemployment problems by providing these elderly people a form of work. At the same time it was a method to demonstrate the power of the state in every block of the city.”38 The Dollingers left Spain believing they had a better understanding of the nature of dictatorship.

They returned to Europe in 1973. The most memorable part of this tour was the trip to Holland, where Genora met someone she had helped long ago. In the late 1940s, reports arrived in America of how horribly some Trotskyists had been treated in German concentration camps. Each Trotskyist chapter in the United States was asked to send food, clothing, and medicine to help these survivors get on their feet. The family assigned to Genora for help was that of Henrik Sneevliet, who had protested the German treatment of Jews in the Netherlands. He was executed, leaving behind a family, including a daughter named Bep, who later married Sal Santen.39 Genora had gathered up and sent (sometimes barely scraping up enough for postage) huge boxes of food and cooking paraphernalia to the Sneevliet family. Now in Amsterdam, she wanted to visit this family she had never met but felt close to. It was a joyful and tearful meeting. While Genora was resting in the Santen’s home one day, Bep waved an aluminum frying pan as she came into the room—it was the one Genora had sent in a shipment years before.40

After visiting Amsterdam and other parts of Europe, Genora and Sol traveled once more to Spain, with Franco still in office: in 1971 Genora had spent two full days in the Prado, and the only way Sol could get her to leave was to promise another trip, so here they were again. She wrote to her son from Barcelona, adding in a postscript, “We are following Watergate and enjoying developments immensely. So is everyone in Europe.”41 On another trip to Europe in 1977, they arrived in Lisbon and saw a long parade of Fiat auto workers marching out to lunch. Genora joined them in a small eatery and found that many were Socialists; she was right at home. It was the same with university students she met later that June day. Everywhere Genora went, she seemed to find people dedicated to the cause of Socialism. The couple dined with three young members of the Communist Party. The conversation was engaging until Sol noticed what he took to be some government agents trying to overhear. Later, they visited the Lisbon headquarters of the Communist Party and were flattered when one of the staff asserted that “Trotskyists are good people!” Each member present predicted that the United States would be “the last bastion of capitalism to fall.”42 This was quite a safe presentiment.

The Dollingers rented a car and traveled around the beautiful country