Because her family lacked the funds, she could not finish High School. At 16, she apprentices with her aunt, who manufactures knit wear out of her home. At 17 she joins the Zionist youth movement, not because she wants to follow the Zionist dream. It is the only group where she feels accepted as a Jew. She is not religious at all, nor are her parents. By the time she reaches her early twenties, Hansi is building a business. She buys a couple of sewing machines from her aunt, expands and hires seamstresses. Twelve employees manufacture socks, gloves and sweaters. More and more of the work is contracted out to home-based seamstresses outside of Budapest, as Hansi’s business grows rapidly. She is perfectly bilingual in German and Hungarian. That is why she gets called in as an interpreter to the Kibbutz-like organization "Hachscharah", where she meets Joel Brand. They marry in 1935. In the 1944, the most turbulent year of her life, she is 32 years old.

In Hungary, he is considered a foreigner in his own country. He has a difficult time learning Hungarian. But German is spoken by a large portion of the population in this former part of the Austria-Hungarian Empire. The events in Germany and the Soviet Union force him to revise his political views, and he becomes a Zionist, harking back to the tradition of his family and his own early youth. He gets a job at the Budapest Telephone Company, which his father had founded. In his heart, he is finished with Europe and he wants to emigrate to Palestine. He joins a group of young Zionists who prepare themselves for life in Palestine. There he meets Hansi Hartmann. Joel is 38 years old in 1944.