“I felt very bad. I was upset because when you leave the States and you don’t know when you are coming back or not. It gives you a funny feeling.”“Well you see, they are all in civilian clothes. And I’m the only one in uniform, and you assign them…

“There was some [secret work]. And too when I had the secret work of somebody who would walk in where I was at my desk. I had to roll this under — down in the typewriter. Or if I had it out, I had to turn it over where nobody could see it. I didn’t…

“Well, you live in the barracks. A lot of people. And basic training means you learn all army. You have the drilling — everything. You dress for army dress and what you would be doing in the army. And it’s just a lot of stuff you’re not used to. But…

“We made piston rings…some of them went to companies that made ship motors and some of them was just like a finger ring.”“You just had a certain time to come in. And you had a certain time for lunch, and to leave, and you didn’t have no spare time.…

“When I got older, I found a job in restaurants ‘cause I was cooking at home and they knew, so I got a job as a pie baker in a city restaurant.”“I met Miss Cline and her husband, who worked in some kind of a factory in Baltimore.”“They gave me room…

“Oh man, the people were really pleased that it was finally over. And also around the same time, the Red Cross got permission to start dropping food while we were still officially occupied, but people were dying on the street. The situation was…

“Well the one thing with this letter here also, the whole page is about food. That’s the only thing you were living for, you know. I remember my father saying, looking at a poster in the bakery, 'that’s what bread used to look like.' That was…

“I remember things gradually getting worse. The rules and regulations they became harsher and harsher. And there were all kinds of things you really had to watch out for. And they were starting to take things. There were no more cars. They were even…

“During the war, we only had part-time school. I remember having to go quite a distance to go to a school that was still available, but it had to be shared by other schools that had also been taken over by the Germans. And I believe I went to…

“My earliest memory is the beginning of the war. I remember my 6th birthday that everybody was forgetting about my birthday because the city of Rotterdam was burning. I remember the sky being all orange because of the fires. That’s one of my…