"In 1939, I was eleven years old, and our family happened to be vacationing in the Carpathian Mountains... Life seemed absolutely beautiful. I splashed in a brook, and I just thought the future was full of promise. Somehow in the middle of…

"I had an uncle who lived in Leipzig, Germany, and the letters were coming from him, and the family would get together and worry what’s going to happen. And he used to say that his boss was a Nazi but that he would protect him. He liked him…

"When I was six we moved to my mother’s hometown of Horodenka., At that time I started elementary-- Polish elementary school-- every morning, and every afternoon from three to five, Hebrew school."

"It was subtle but it was there. In 1935, when President Piłsudski died, and the right wing party took over, there were some, laws propagated that were definitely anti-Semitic, like ritual slaughter forbidden. What I recall that was really painful…

"One beautiful memory is going traveling to the neighboring town of Horodenka, my mother’s home place, for a Passover seder-- for a Passover meal. And the whole family, my mother’s family was there. My grandfather in a white silken robe as was…

"I was born in 1928 in a little resort town Zaleszczyki on the Dniester River, in Poland. Today this is part of the Ukraine. In that little town lived my [paternal] grandmother, my uncle Rosenbaum and two cousins. My father worked in export…

"When he was liberated-- Russian troops came through and liberated Romania at the end of 1944 beginning of 1945. He was freed, but of course he was sick. So they put him in a hospital for him to recover. He came back and when he walked into the…

“Romania did not have an extermination camp. They did not systematically murder the Jews like they did at Auschwitz and Dachau and Bergen-Belsen and so forth. They had a slave labor camp known as Transnistria. That’s where my father, when he was…

“Well my parents were Orthodox Jews. They were very observant. My mother lit candles every Friday night. Holidays were observed. When I was born it was against the law to have Jewish ceremonies, so my father smuggled in the mohel, the one who does…

"When my mother and I got to the Romanian-Hungarian border and these people saw that I was an eight-year-old boy they panicked. They were afraid that I would make a noise and give them away. In addition to what my father had paid them-- there…