"We went into hiding in our own apartment. The windows had been darkened; blankets and sheets had been shoved under the door so no sound would come out. That is where I spent the next sixteen months of my life, in that apartment building. My mother…

“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…

“The earliest memories were good ones. Even though Romania was part of the allies of Nazi Germany, and they followed the Nuremburg laws, up until December 1942, when my father was arrested, we had a fairly decent life. Of course they had confiscated…

"The day I was eighteen, I was inducted into the military. And I actually became a citizen afterwards, in the military, in a place outside of Jacksonville, Florida, I was sworn into the—as an American citizen. I stayed in the military through…

"when we went to England, the only thing we could take with us was the equivalent of about ten dollars each, one ring and one watch…each. If we had—I mean, we were children. I had—I think—I didn’t have no rings, but I had a watch. So we came…

"We were able to leave there one year later, in April 1940, because our visa became valid, and were able to come to America and started life from the beginning in America.” “When he first came to America, we came across New York, and we were…

“We found that most of the palm trees had been cut off where the Navy had, with their big guns, had just blown everything on the island down. And I didn't see any live Japanese except, we saw a few dead ones. You could, every now and then, you…

Editor's note: Lorenzo Wallace shipped out of San Diego with the 51st Defense Battalion.

“When I got there, they had built a lot of, I guess I would call them huts. They had a lot of huts in a line, and they started with the first platoon…each platoon, the first platoon, second platoon, third platoon, were housed in these huts. They…