Editor's Note: In September 1939, Eugene's family went on a trip to Germany to visit Eugene's grandmother Johanna. The family was required to return to Germany periodically to maintain Johanna's property in Hannover. On the same day that their ocean…

"My parents met in South America where my father was working at that time and my mother was visiting. They got married and bought land in the interior to raise cattle. I understand that it was a day to a day-and-a-half ride on horseback outside of…

"But I went back three or four times. Like I said, I've been here for 23 years before I got to go home the first time. And my neighbors had a party for me. And we had some good eating and everything, because they knew that was my first time…

"We lived there for a year and then moved up here. My husband got a job with Lockheed. He was a flight line mechanic. [Marietta was beautiful.] It was quiet. No traffic hardly. The Big Chicken was there, and it was a Chick, Chuck, and Shake…

"He was from a tobacco farm, so I thought that would be like a regular English farm which is very green, and very pretty, with horses and the whole bit, and I saw my first mule at his house. I'd never seen a mule in my life. It was just so…

"I just fell in love, and I couldn't have asked for a better person than the one I married. And so, you know, at that age, there again, I was 18. I had a lot of friends when we first got to New York. We went to the New York Port of…

"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…

"About two years [after we arrived in the United States], my father had an opportunity to buy a dress-making factory, and he had some money and my mother had some money, and they invested it with another partner in this dress company and he…

"They [my grandparents] went across the Pyrenees, and they ended up in, I believe, Madrid, one of those cities—[Spain] being a neutral country, so-called. And then eventually they got to Portugal, and they ended up getting a ship to New York at…

"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…