Ira Hirschmann was getting ready to leave Turkey. Herbert Katzki and the secretaries, Harriet Bixler and Virginia Henderson, would remain. But since there wasn’t any progress getting Hirschmann into Romania, he needed to go back to work at Bloomingdales. He no doubt looked forward to an added bonus–writing a book about his work in Turkey (which he had already started to plan) and giving lots of speeches to interested groups.
So, on Sept. 30, 1944, Virginia Henderson compiled HIrschmann’s statement of accounts beginning in July 1944. He was on a fairly healthy per diem (ca. $30/day) but his actual expenses were covered by the WRB. If you get into this a bit, it’s really interesting. The exchange rate is about $55=100 Turkish lira (or 1.8 TL to the dollar). So if a flight from Istanbul to Ankara for two people was 80TL (40TL each), one ticket was about $22 in 1944. (Or about $300 in 2014 money. So, about right, I guess.)
