“We made piston rings…some of them went to companies that made ship motors and some of them was just like a finger ring.”“You just had a certain time to come in. And you had a certain time for lunch, and to leave, and you didn’t have no spare time.…

“When I got older, I found a job in restaurants ‘cause I was cooking at home and they knew, so I got a job as a pie baker in a city restaurant.”“I met Miss Cline and her husband, who worked in some kind of a factory in Baltimore.”“They gave me room…

“Oh man, the people were really pleased that it was finally over. And also around the same time, the Red Cross got permission to start dropping food while we were still officially occupied, but people were dying on the street. The situation was…

“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…

“I remember things gradually getting worse. The rules and regulations they became harsher and harsher. And there were all kinds of things you really had to watch out for. And they were starting to take things. There were no more cars. They were even…

“During the war, we only had part-time school. I remember having to go quite a distance to go to a school that was still available, but it had to be shared by other schools that had also been taken over by the Germans. And I believe I went to…

“My earliest memory is the beginning of the war. I remember my 6th birthday that everybody was forgetting about my birthday because the city of Rotterdam was burning. I remember the sky being all orange because of the fires. That’s one of my…

“I weighed 135 pounds when I was captured, and when I was released from prison I weighed 87 pounds. Just a bag of bones covered with skin.”

“If you were not in the mines, you would take and unload coal off the ships onto railroad cars. We would work every morning about 4:00 am and you did not know where you were going to be, whether in the mine or on the ship or where. Then the next day…

"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…