"My dad entered the war in President Roosevelt’s first peacetime military draft. The family appealed to the draft board because he was the breadwinner of a family he cared for since age ten, but he shipped out. Dan was gone for…

"I am not sure how Mother was recruited.  She may have seen a poster or heard an advertisement on the radio. The WAVES primarily used newspapers, radio, and personal contact to recruit. Mother wanted to be a flight attendant, but…

“Well, I was in the recruiting duty when I was in the Wac’s. I did public relations; I tried to recruit other Wacs. And I think perhaps there that it was an asset, being able to speak easily like I do. I suppose that might have had something to do…

"We were stacked in the hull of the ship. We were just stood up in there with no bathroom facilities, no nothing. A little food once a day, if you were fortunate enough to get some food, if not, you waited until the next day. We were packed in…

"I believe they [Carl, Selma, and Ilse Simon] only were there [at Westerbork] a night or two before they were sent to Poland, to Sobibor concentration camp. And on the 21st of May, they were asphyxiated. And my mother and her sisters did not find…

"Well, as it turns out, the Nazis were eradicating Jews at that point in all their occupied countries, as well as in Germany. And in 1943--I believe it was May 18-- they [Selma, Karl, and Ilse Simon] were arrested, and they were sent to Westerbork,…

"[My grandparents] did correspond with [my mother and Aunt Hiddie] quite a bit, and the last letter – I have a copy of it-- it told the girls in England that they had a lot of faith in God, that the girls-- Hilde and Ruth-- shouldn’t worry about…

“Steering a city through troublesome times is just like piloting a ship through stormy waters. You don’t know what you are going to run into but you are going to be ready for anything. You may have to go through obstacles instead of around them. Or…

“So everybody got out and then I got out. This was my first parachute jump. I went out through the navigator’s hatch below and I said ‘Lord, help me get through this.’ I knew I only had two things. One was to get killed or do it. There was no…

“I was happy as I could be or dumb and happy shall we say until I saw the first flight coming up. Our mission was to hit the V-1 bombs. They looked like ski jumps, so we called them ski jumps. They were on the coast of France... So our first mission…