"H-I-A-S, which is the Hebrew Immigration Aide Society, used to help immigrants that come to the United States to acclimate themselves. [They] provided the bonding for us to come to America to guarantee that we will not become charge of the…

"I came to United States in June 1950. We arrived in New Orleans on Sunday, I think it was the 4th of June. We couldn’t debark on Sunday. We debarked on Monday. Monday night I was put on a-. What do you call it? Redeye train from New Orleans to…

"So we applied to go to the United States. When the captain found out, he said, 'Look, I can’t give you anything that’d be more valuable for you, more precious for you when you go to America than education.' He said get some education…

"Well, we started off in Bremerhaven, and I remember we were on the S.S. Marine Flasher... As we approached the Harbor of New York, and we saw the Statue of Liberty, it was really a feeling of a new life beginning-- perhaps a life of…

"[My parents] had friends in California that they knew there. So that’s the only place…all they knew was Oxnard, California. And from El Paso they went all the way to Los Angeles to Oxnard. Walked all the way...My dad went to work for...the…

"My parents, well, they were from Hiroshima, Japan, and they eloped. The day that my mother was supposed to get married to someone else, my [mother's] sister took my father to a woodshed and had all my mother’s Japanese clothes, you know.…

"We had a very small apartment in the section of New York called Sunnyside in Queens. Where [my mother] worked, the textile company was in Manhattan, so she would leave the house at 7 or 7:15 in the morning, catch the subway which was a block…

"On August 7, 1951, we boarded a very small former troop ship, which used to bring troops from the United States to Europe, the S.S. General Sturgis. When we boarded the ship, at eleven years old I was a pretty big kid, and they decided that I…

"We left Vienna and went to Bremerhaven, Germany, where the ships sailed from. They only sailed once a week and we wound up in what was called a Displaced Persons Camp. It was an old German Army camp. I don’t know if they didn’t want us to…

"In 1947, Romania became a communist dictatorship. They came to my father one morning and said, the factories he owned have now been nationalized, that he will still run them but he will no longer own them. As I said, my mother was stubborn;…