Two months later, on 4 November 1936, he married Diana Croft, daughter of Henry Page Croft (later Lord Croft), against her parents' strongest wishes, and they remained close and happy for nearly fifty years. On 3 September 1936, Fred Uhlman landed in England with no money and unable to speak the language. The wallet and passport arrived the following day. The next day he received a telephone call at his hotel the caller informed him that he had the wallet and passport and would mail them to Uhlman the next day, because he was a co-réligionnaire of Uhlman's, but would retain ten percent of the money in the wallet 'to cover expenses'.

Demoralised and in despair, he gave the café proprietor his Paris telephone number and continued his journey to Paris. A foreigner in France without a passport effectively became a stateless person and subject to official harassment, internment and possible expulsion. Here, while making a telephone call from a café to Diana Croft, a friend in London whom he had met in Tossa de Mar, his wallet, containing most of his money and his passport, was stolen from his jacket left unattended at his table. In April 1936 he moved to Tossa de Mar, a small fishing village on the Costa Brava in Spain, but shortly thereafter the Spanish Civil War broke out, and in August he decided to return to Paris, via Marseille.

Uhlman's star as a painter was in the ascendant, but buyers were hard to come by. At one stage he supplemented his income by selling tropical fish. Uhlman supported himself by drawing and painting, and selling his work privately when he could. In March 1933, two months after Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor, Uhlman moved to Paris to start a new life but, as long as he had been living in France, he encountered lots of difficulties foreigners were not permitted to take paid employment, and were immediately expelled from France if caught doing so. He studied at the Universities of Freiburg, Munich and Tübingen from where, in 1923, he graduated with a degree in Law followed by a Doctorate in Canon and Civil Law.

Fred Uhlman was born in Stuttgart, Germany, into a prosperous middle-class Jewish family.

L'amico ritrovato by Fred Uhlman