“Once the bombs were dropped, we were completely out of the loop. Probably, the folks back home were the first ones to hear about it. People asked how I felt, but there wasn't any big celebration among us. Maybe it's because we'd been through a…

“When we heard that we were free, the girls (Tonneke and Monica) and I went to a kind of motel in Ambarawa. I made sure that we had lots of fruit, tomatoes and liver. Tonneke was my nurse when malaria got to me. She wrapped me up, gave me things to…

“I went to vocational school, and I learn about the culinary art and the restaurant business, and, you know, I liked it, so that’s what I did. I became a chef, and I worked in Rotterdam.. I worked in Switzerland for a year. I worked in Great Britain…

“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…

"My father was about eleven when Hitler came to power, and he had been enrolled in a school in Treuchtlingen, and was studying. And when he was 13 he became a Bar Mitzvah, and then the German government shut down the school that he was attending,…

I had a green ration book because of my age. My brother had the blue, and my mom and dad had white ones. And I was able to get orange juice on mine, and we could get an egg once a week, and meat was almost inaccessible. My dad would buy some black…

"Well, you know, we grew up watching Dallas. We think everybody’s rich and thin. And then you come to America and you’re going 'Oh. Oh. Okay. Huh.' But my first impression was like Snow White. I flew Eastern from New York to…

"And my father’s father owned a delicatessen, so back then, you basically took over your family business, and it was a four-year tutelage, four year school, to be a butcher, Charcuterie, which is basically how to make sausage and so forth,…

"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…

"That night we were taken off the train in Washington, in Union Station. Very, very late, late at night. This was the day before Thanksgiving of 1950. The five of us. My mom holding Ethel, and my dad holding my hand, and my, my sister…