"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 went to the Hungarian-Austrian border. Again there were people there to guide us. We crossed over and we were getting ready to board a bus to go into Vienna, and we were arrested by the Austrian police... We were with a group of other…

"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;…

"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…

"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…

“When I graduated from NYU I was drafted by the Philadelphia Warriors who are now Golden State of the NBA, and I played two years of professional basketball.”