"After Kristallnacht, which was November of ’38, my father had already talked about leaving, I think, and when that happened, he said, 'I’ve got an idea. My wife is an American citizen. We might be able to get out through her.' And he was right.  We…

"I was born in Paris, France. My father was a salesman for a fabric company, and they made dresses out of those fabrics, and curtains and things, and my mother was a— I guess you’d call her a housewife. I was born in 1934, and I grew up in…

"He was sort of a playboy kind. He wasn’t [a] very big entrepreneur, but you might call him the black sheep of the family. His first wife had died in New York, and he wanted to see Europe and he wanted to travel the world, so he said,…

"Rationing started, which would’ve made daily life quite tough. Just getting the food on the table, et cetera. But we were never—it never got to the point where we were gonna starve, I don’t think. And later on, of course, we got a lot of…

"Well the government required you to put up any material that would block light being emitted from windows to aid German bombers. But although the war started on 3 September ’39 the bombing didn’t start until June of 1940. Although Hitler…

"I started out in the services—not in the retail side of the house. I was in the services department. I first of all started in plans and headquarters. Later on I got into the field in services. So I had two careers at first. I spent a…

"It was a jubilant time. I think a friend and I, we even went up to the West End with all the crowds, you know. Of course the thing that’s so, left me with deep impressions, were all the foreign troops in London, in England, during the…

"They evacuated the London school kids again ‘cause he concentrated on London pretty much this next time. And so, once again, the kids were rounded up and this time we went to Torquay in Devonshire in the west coast of England. Actually, quite…

"Once the bombings started seriously—and that was in June of 1940—that’s when the government said, 'you should evacuate your children.' And most families complied. There were a, well a few wealthier families went away to—as a family…

"Well, I do remember hearing the radio broadcast because the very next day my father, who could rent his cab—he had to pay the owner of the cab, but he could rent it himself—he took us away into the country, right away. Because the government…