Pogrom Night convinced Rachel Lewin that she needed to leave Germany and emigrate to Palestine even if she had to do it alone. (Her Hamburg Hakhshara group had by now been smashed by the authorities.) In Königsberg there were frantic discussions within the family. Her father thought it unrealistic to leave the country. They had never been prosperous and now most of what they had previously owned had been destroyed or stolen. Even rich people by this time faced prohibitively high and frequently arbitrary "emigration taxes" if wishing to emigrate using official channels. From the south-east of Germany there were now organised underground groups devoted to smuggling victims of political or race persecution across the border to Czechoslovakia, but Königsberg was nowhere near Czechoslovakia and it seems in any case unlikely that the Lewins would have had the relevant contacts. Rachel's mother, in particular, was already in failing health and considered herself more German than Jewish. Things could not go on getting worse for ever. Rachel's parents, and in particular her mother, found it unthinkable that the situation would not in the future improve for Jews in Hitler's Germany. It is not clear how Rachel Lewin made her way from Königsberg to Trieste, which had been an Italian city since approximately 1920. She left Germany, according to one source, on 20 April 1939. On 29 April 1939 the last legally sanctioned ship destined for "British" Palestine (till after the war broke out five months later) set sail for Haifa from Trieste. Rachel Lewin was on board.