MUMBAI: Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania, owes a lot to Mumbai.

Amy, who controls an annual budget of around $4.29 billion (about Rs 19,000 crore-plus) says, “Mumbai is the reason why I am.”

The history to this statement lies in what Amy’s father, Kurt Gutmann, did before Hitler started the prosecution and systematic extermination of Jews. In 1934, before World War II, Kurt Gutmann had left Germany for Mumbai.

Kurt had been in college when Hitler began his climb to power. “He had been apprenticing to be a metallurgist and had travelled to India and Afghanistan. So, he decided to pick up and leave and go to Bombay, now Mumbai,” Amy explains.

Kurt spent 14 years in Mumbai, and even set up a company in the city. “He stayed in a building called Roxana in Colaba. I visited the place and met an 83-year-old man who remembered my dad. He was aged just 10 at that (when he saw my dad) time,” Amy says.

“My dad was the youngest of five children of a German-Jewish family. He got the whole family out and saved them from the Holocaust,” she adds.
Kurt Gutmann and his wife, Beatrice, had actually honeymooned at the Taj Mahal hotel in 1948.