I was happy go lucky boy going to elementary school.

And in 1940, right after I turned nine years old, the Germans invaded Holland.

Until then, I knew nothing about anything that was People talk about, you know, the late '30s and stuff.

I was to I was made aware of what was happening at that time when I went to school one morning and a teacher told all of us to go home and stay there until further notice because we were at war.

And I didn't even know what war was all about.

But anyway, I went home and an d she started crying.

Because my mom was an adult during World War I.

And so she knew was war was not funny.

Holland was a neutral country like Sweden and Switzerlan But if you look at the map of Europe, its location and its with England, you know that no way that the Germans were going to allow the coastline to go unprotected.

So the Dutch military wasn't very much.

I don't know how long they say the war lasted.

Well, it lasted about as long as it took the German forces to walk across th It didn't bother me very much.

I noticed, you know, it was kind of, to us kids the German soldiers march with their metal-studded boots.

And we didn't have blacktop streets.

All of So the sound was just deafening and we enjoyed that.

But then we went back to school and slowly things started to happen.

The persecution of the Jews started small, and kinda early, And I didn't even know I was a Jew.

I had aunts and uncles and cousins that were Jews because they went to the synagogue.

And I thought that's what it me Nothing about my forefathers.

Well, my dad was a full-blooded Jew.

My both my grandfathers, parents on my father's side, were Jews.

On my mot my grandfather was a Jew.

So under Jewish law, I'm a Gentile.

Because my mom was a Gentile, because my grandma was a Gentile.

But under the Nuremberg law, the German law, if you have three or four Jewish grandparents you're a full-blooded Jew, regardless of who they are.

And so I qualified, and my family qualified, except my mom, as a full-blooded Jew.

So they uh so when it came to prosecuting Jews, we were in line.

The the first thing that really happened to our family when they had the first razia, and that's when the Germans went with trucks through the streets of Amsterdam and rounded up Jewish men of working age.

And people ask, well how did they know they were a Jew?

In Holland at the time, it was not a very dive We uh, most Dutch were either blondes or redheads.

And if you saw somebody with black hair, it was a 99 percent chance you're looking at a Jew.

We had no Hispanics, we had no African-Americans.

And so my brother was caught up in that.

And what they did, they took him to a processing place.

And if they could prove they were But my brother ended up at Auschwitz.

He was eight years An d he, uh and then things, you know, started to get worse.

You know, next thing I knew, we had the teacher gave me an envelope to take home, give to my mom.

They, well of course, in those days, we as kids were not so rule-abiding, and the envelopes didn't have that good adhesive on 'em.

So a little pocket knife and a little spit to open up the envelope and inside was a piece of cloth with two yellow stars on it and a note that said I was to wear one of those on my outer garments, on my left chest.

But then it stated that failure to do so was punishable by death.

So that kind of got me.

And I took it home to Mo and she opened the envelope again.

She uh, she started crying again.

But nevertheless she put one on my jacket and it's funny that that particular star survived.

It's hanging right here in the museum.

So the following day I went to school.

We had about thirty kids in our class and there were only two of us with the star, a little girl and myself.

That little girl didn't survive the a funny thing happened.

The class bully, they had he asked me where he could get one of those stars, you know.

Well, I realized that later on he he didn't want one.

But anyway uh, banning all Jewish kids from public schools.

And they took one small school in Amsterdam, I don't remember the name of it, but became known as the Jew School.

And there was nothing but Jewish kids and that's where I met Anne Frank.

Of course, she was just a girl then.

She wasn't famous.

Her and her older sister once or twice a week, they would go after school to their d place of business and go home with him later.

Well, me and a lot of other kids lived in that neighborhood where he had his business, and so we'd walk as a group, and that's how I got to associate with Anne.

Uh, I wasn't too interested in Anne.

She was a little older than me, about a year and a half, I' m not sure, but, uh, I her older sister was a real nice lady, but Anne was what we would call today a tomboy.

You know, she didn't play with dolls or anything.

She played in the street, soccer with the guys.

But anyway.

And then things got worse and worse and worse.

And they uh, they banned all of the places of enjoyment in, in the cou uh, the parks, swimming pools, ballparks, you know, uh, and afte And what they did in each neighborhood, they took one mom-and-pop store and allowed it once a week to close early and then open up again and sell to Jews.

And the first time that happened, my mom took me with her to the grocery store.

And when we got there, there was a sign in the window and it says, no Jews allowed when humans are on the premises.

And so Mom saw that and I saw it and she never took me to the store again.

But then, people that have read these Anne Frank diary or seen the movie, they remember they went into hiding when her older sister was notified to report to the railroad station for By then we knew you're going to the camps.

My dad got such a notice.

It was just a postcard, several months before that.

And he looked at that and he said, well they already got one of my sons and one of my He said, I'm not going to go.

My oldest sister, she was an interpreter and she the war broke out, with a group of British Farm Bureau people.

And we had hoped that they'd take her with them to England, but they didn't.

The Germans got her.

What happened to her we don't know.

But they my dad disappeared, but at the time there was no organized underground for helping the Jews.

But I want to say right now that we were fortunate to be in Holland because the population in general were very protective of the Jews.

They they'd hide them in the cellars and everything while in other parts of Europe, it was just the oppo They didn't want nothing to do with them.

But my dad would come home on weekends to have dinner with the family.

Well, that didn't work out too well, because after about two or three weeks, on Sunday afternoon, he was home for dinner and I went outside to play with my friends and four men in uniform showed up at the house and they went inside and they came back out with my dad.

And so I went over to there talk to him, but they wouldn't let me near him and they marched him down the street.

The guys were all bigger than him, much bigger.

And he looked so puny between those four guys.

And I watched him down walk down the street, and that's the last time I saw my dad.

He he ended up at Bergen-Belsen.

Oh, my dad was a gymnastics instructor, but he also also did some work for representing the government at events But um, basically was a in gymnastics instructor.

He was, his name was Elijah and he he was not a big man.

He was maybe bu t he was a slender man.

And, um, my younger sister had been at the junior college.

It was a junior college in the northern part of Holland, where they taught, uh, gymnastics instructors, sports managers and stuff like that.

And of course, when the sch And so, uh, they, they took my dad away.

And not long after that, my mom got -- what was left was my younger sister, who well actually six, six years older than me.

But, uh, she was the younger of the two girls and, uh, Mom said, she, she said, you know, it's time for us to, uh, disappear.

And she had it all planned out.

She had saved some paper grocery bags and she put some necessities in there.

And then one Wednesday afternoon, that was the afternoon that the store was allowed to sel we left the apartment and walked down the street with those paper bags, hoping people would think we were had been grocery shopping.

If we took a suitcase, you know, everybod she took us to one of the canal houses, a small one.

And it had been vacant for as long as I remember.

And that's where she took us.

And we went inside and the bu t there was a homemade ladder there.

And we went up to the attic.

There was three there was two stor and up in the attic there was nothing there.

There was just the tile roof, you know, the red tile r and some of the tile were missing.

There was no water, no heat, no toilet And we were not the first ones up there.

There were others up there, relatives of mine.

And uh, but we were the only kids.

And so my sister turned to me, she said, you know, this is not going to work.

I was 11 by then.

She said, you know, you have to be totally quiet up here.

They have to depend on people to bring food, bring wat So she talked to Mom.

She said, why don't you let me take where I used to go to--where she went to school.

She said, that's the farm part of Holland.

If you look at the map of Holland in the northern part, there's very few cities.

But in the central an and the dividing line is what used to be the Zuiderzee but it's better known as the Yselmeer.

She said, we can live there among the farms.

She talked Mom into it.

And we went to the Amsterdam harbor that night and they have ships going across the lake.

It's a long distance.

Every day and night, potentially hauling agricultural products an d then from the factory, stuff from the big cities to the north.

So she talked one of t captains of a freighter to take us w to Friesland.

It's a northern province.

And when we got there early the following morning, she she had it all planned out.

We would find a place to sleep at night and the farms there were pretty well scattered.

And they they were all had one thing in common.

They had a red brick, red roof barn, and they kept their gear, you know, in downstairs.

The had a horse stables and stuff, and upstairs they stored their grains and their hays and stuff.

And so we would find a barn and sleep upstairs when on whatever was there.

The following morning we would get up early because we did not want the farmer to get into trouble because hiding Germans, hiding Jews, was a was punishable by going to the camps themselves.

What we would do, we watched where the hands, the farmhands, went to work in the fields.

In Holland, they grew their ow They didn't use anything else but grass because grass grows naturally in Holland.

That's the national wheat.

And the reason it grows so quickly and everything is most of Holland is below sea level, so the ground is always wet and that stuff grows.

So anyway they had people going to work in the fields, and they climbed on a horse and a wagon.

There were no mechanical vehicles or motorized vehicles because there was no gas.

So we just followed the wagon with the most workers on them.

And when they got to the field, they got out and went to work and we sta and we watched out for German patrols.

And they were easy to spot because in Holland, like I said, it's below sea level and very flat, except for the highways and the roads they build up on dikes.

And so you could see a vehicle, you know, a long ways off.

And if they were motorized, we knew they were German because they were the only ones that had g And then we'd act like putting the things in the wagon, taking stu out of the wagon and stuff like that.

And we got away with that.

But then came the most dangerous an d that is when the workers went back to the farm.

We could not count So if they got to the farm and they climbed on their bicycle and went to because there was a bounty on the Jews, so we'd leave the area.

We never spent the night in the same area we spent the day.

We'd leave the area so by the time if anything did happen, we were long gone.

And then we'd start over again looking for a place to sleep.

And we got away with that for some time.

We couldn't go to the stores and buy anything.

So we depended on what we could find.

And in the beginning, we would at night before going to bed, we would raid the vegetable gardens of the farm and take whatever is there.

But the the farmers didn't l for their own consumption, not for the market.

So they were limited.

And the reason we found out they didn't like it, th so we didn't want them to get mad at us.

So we quit doing that.

Another thing we ate in the morning, when we left the barn, we always found grain laying on the floor, kernels of g some of the And so when we got hungry, we would just take some out of our pockets, blew the dirt out of it, And that worked fine.

But my sister decided we wanted some other stu We needed to eat some protein, so she decided we'd eat eggs.

And of course we couldn't rob the the farmers.

Because it's be the same effect.

So she decided we'd eat bird's eggs.

Because in Holland in the farmland, here you have ditches to feed the water to the field.

There, they have the ditches for drainage of the fields.

The fields, the fields are l so it would drain off.

These little channels then feed into the bigger.

And then the mills, in the old days, now they use, you know, elec But it used to be windmills would take that water and push it into the main canals and from there they push it up in the river.

They and on the side of those ditches, the birds nest.

And so the uh we'd take those bird's nest and take the egg out of that.

A the thing is, we didn't have a way to cook it or fry it.

So my sister told me how to eat raw eggs.

You take an egg and cup it and then take like a ballpoint pen and tap a little hole in it.

Put your finger over put your lips over it and suck the egg out.

Well, we didn't the best thing to use is a ballpoint pen.

Of course we we didn't And the first time I tried that, I got that second hole in there and I got it up to her and the stench.

Those birds fed on I got that egg here, And I almost gagged.

And my sister said, oh you dummy, you're supposed t hand and hold your nose.

I tried that and it didn't help eat one egg a week.

And another thing we ate a lot of is sugar beets.

Most farmers grew a lot of sugar beets and when they harvest them they pile them and they slowly haul them out of there.

So we take one of those sugar beets and cut the skin off 'em and slice it up and ate we ate one.

One sugar beet wou and they had a lot of nourishment, a lot of sugar.

So after the war, we found out why they had all those sugar beets.

And one thing is they fed them to the pigs to fatten them up faster for slaughter.

Another thing is they sold them to the candy companies for the sugar.

So we ate that.

And we got along like that.

And then one night we were looking for a place to sleep.

Uh, it was on a weekend, and it had been raining.

It was dark outside, clouds, and we were walking through the fields.

And all of a sudden my sister grabbed my arm and squeezed.

That was our signal.

If you thought of any danger in a wet, level country, you don't want to say, shh or, stop.

You know that you can hear t So that was our so we stopped and she whispere There's a caravan up there.

And on the elevated road there was a we could see outline of trucks.

And at the head of the column we could see some glows and some laughter.

Evidently, we had come upon a German convoy taking food and stuff like that to Germany.

And they were taking a smoke break.

So I turned around to leave.

But then she grabbed and she said, I wonder what's in those trucks?

I said, I don't care, but anyway she was in charge.

So we proceeded to the road and we climbed up on the side, up to the road level.

And when we got there, we went by the last truck, she went to the front portion of it, typical military truck with the and she went to the forward portion and I went to the back.

And I went underne and felt around and I got a hold of something but I couldn't get it out.

The canvas was too tig And I kept trying, kept trying, and I ha of what I had, and I really wante And so after a while, my sister came over and she says, they're breaking up.

Let's get out of here.

I said, I got a hold of something I can't get it out.

So she pul and it finally came out.

And then we turned around, we could hear footsteps.

And so dummy us, that hill we had so carefully climbed up on, we thought we could just walk And of course, the first step we took, we tumbled head over heels, and landed in a drainage d And it had about a foot to 14 inches of wate And when we came up I started laughing and my sister didn't think that was the thing to do.

So she grabbed me b and when she let go, I realized I'd better be quiet.

We laid there until the trucks moved out, and then we found a place to sleep.

And the following morning we took inventory of what we had.

Well, I had a wheel I mean, that big.

And my sister had a bag of coffee beans.

And we ate off of that cheese, we gave some to others that were hiding in the area and shared with them some.

But my sister and her coffee beans, they were useless to us.

You know, we didn't kids didn't drink coffee in Holland.

So but coffee doesn't grow in Europe.

The coffee evidently had come from South America by submarine to the harbor in Rotterdam and was being transported to the German high command or something, you know.

So my sister sees this.

It's it's worth something.

So the following day, she she borrowed a raincoat from one of the farm workers.

She could have talked him into giving her the farm.

But she was real, she was a pretty girl, you know, petite, but pr And she had been going to school where Dad had graduated.

She wanted to become an athletic instructor.

And so she put on that raincoat a And she took me to a field and put me by a haystack.

And she told me to stay there until she got back.

And she went to the city.

And after she left, I got scared, you know, what happened if they c I'd be there without her.

I didn't know what to do.

So finally, late afternoon, she came back.

And she started telling me what had happened.

And I said, before you finish, let's make a deal.

We're not playing this again.

I said, we don't separate.

And she agreed to that.

And she had gone to the town and they had a school made into a German garrison.

And she went there and got a hold of the the guy And she told him, she said, I can get a hold of a bag of coffee beans.

Are you willing to make a trade?

Of course he was.

He'd the the substitute coffee there was burned and ground wheat.

You know, and she had not loaves of bread, but sl and stuff like that, pudding powder and other stuff.

And so that that really helped our diet And the pudding powder, it it was an adventure in itself because they were different from the pudding powders today.

I know when Mom made pudding, she put milk on the on the stove and brought it to a boil, put in the pudding powder and stirred and stirre and kept stirring and kept stirring.

And then finally she took it out and put it on the floor underneath the kitchen sink.

And the following morning we had pudding.

Well, we didn't have any of that.

We got a hold of a couple of I don't re kind of buckets they w out of the drainage ditch and we put pudding powder in And we stirred and stirred but it was it became nothing but lumps, you know.

So my sister said, well, let's leave them here.

And we left the area and hid the buckets.

And then when we came we got It was still lumpy, so we stirred it some more and we ate off of that People ask me, you know, hey, that sounds like fun, you know, gr Well, we lived with that for two years.

And the we didn't know what was going on in the world.

We were completely isolated.

We saw planes go over so we knew the war was still on.

And the we had no way to shower or anything like t And the drainage ditches were not very clean water.

I wore shorts because in Holland, kids under 14 did not wear long pants.

I don't know why, but I remember wintertime.

Mom would get me ready for school.

She put on my shirt and a sw and wool cap, wool shawl and Bermuda shorts.

But anyway, we had no spare clothing or anything like that.

So after two years we made a mistake.

One I keep saying rainy weekend, rain is as common in Holland as sunshine is in Arizona, and looking for a place to hide.

And then we finally found a barn, and we went inside and we just went up the ladder.

And right by Well, the following morning, early I'm a light sleeper, I still am.

I woke up to a strange noise.

So another thing the attic had in common all had in common.

On one end it'd have a set of doors going open to nowhere.

It had a beam sticking out for a block and tackle to hoist things up to the attic.

And the attic we were in was maybe one-and-a-half times the size of this room.

And I jumped up and I headed for those doors, and I noticed there were over a dozen other people sleeping there, and they'd been there for two and three weeks.

And you don't get away with that.

Somebody is going to collect the bounty.

So I got to those doors.

I opened them up and I sa So I turned around, got to my sister and I said, Th ey're coming.

So we headed down and when halfway down I hollered, back up to the rest of them.

I wanted to make sure we got out of there first.

So we got out and we started running.

I don't know why.

Where you going to go?

So but anyway we were running and then the gunfire started and I looked over my shoulder where my sister had been, but she was no longer th I, I kept on running and then I remember running on a narrow alleyway between two buildings.

And all of a sudden something hit my leg and I went down and I laid there and I looked at my leg and there was a little bit of blood, but not much.

And later it was determined I'd been hit b So I decided to get up again.

And but then I looked right into the barrel of a rifle of a soldier standing there, and he took me to where those and dropped me off there.

And then after a while, their gunfire stopped and I was devastated by then.

Had they shot my sister?

So at the end of the day, they hauled us off.

And they took us to one of the two processing camps.

One of them was Westerbork, where the Franks went.

That was the bigger of the two.

And the other one was Vught, which was a combination processing camp and concentration camp.

The concentration part of it w But anyway, we went there and the following weekend they hauled us out of there.

They at Westerbork they hauled out every two every twice a week, and Vught was once a week.

And from they didn't take those trains to Auschwitz like they did at the other camp, They went to Mauthausen.

So they took us to the platform and the we walked but the cattle cars were there.

We walked here and I looked between the cattle cars and they there was another platform and another train and that platform had nothing but women on them.

And all of a sudden I saw my sister and my, I was so happy, so I hollered out as loud as I can.

But she didn't hear me.

And by the time I could holler agai hit me in the back with a rifle butt, knocked me down.

So anyway, they put us in those cattle cars and they put us in there so tight you couldn't move.

I went in there my and I couldn't even reach up and touch my nose.

And the guy in front of me was much bigger than me.

Everybody was bigger than me.

But I had my nose righ and that's where they stayed.

But they I could hear the train on the other platform, with the women and we were still standing there.

After the war, we researched that and found out that the night before the Allies had bombed the railhead into Mauthausen so they couldn't get in.

The train with my sister in it had already left, so they sent a message down the line for it to turn south a little earlier.

And she ended up at Dachau, the oldest of the camps.

And they stopped my train and then they later sent a message to them and said, take the train to Bergen-Belsen.

And then it said, take the last two carloads Papenburg.

Well, I was in the next to the last car, so had I gone to Bergen-Belsen you be talking to somebody besides me.

Papenburg was one of the Emden camps.

That's an area of Germany next to the Dutch border.

They at the time had originally it was organized there for, uh, political prisoners, primarily labor unions, But then it quit in 1936.

They closed it up, and then they reopened it, And again, it was primarily for political prisoners.

And they had three camps with Papenburg as the head.

They had the camp I was in it was the largest of them.

It was Westerbork and the uh---Esterwegen, not Westerbork.

But the the camp there was a slave labor camp.

Had a lot of deaths but that was due to the and the some of the industry there profited from the labor, had free labor.

They had shipbuilding.

And there were two car manufacturers there.

One of them was Mercedes-Benz, and the other one is GMC.

They made the European version of the Chevrolet.

And, uh, but of course General Motors had no control over it at that time.

But, but I never worked at any of those places.

The majority of the work that I performed was in the moor.

You know, they had the peat.

They dug it out.

Found out from the encyclopedia that what his intent was is to dig it down and then fill it with farm farm dirt so they could grow things.

There was nothing growing in the moor.

So the guys went in there and they dug out the and me and a couple of old guys and something like that we and the crew, we would take those bl and stack them up so that the wind could b And then when they got dry so they could be stacked, we put them on barges and they hauled them off.

And they used them for fuel.

But the biggest thing was to dig that place out.

It was miserable.

And then the the barracks, when we got there, uh, they put me in the first barracks.

They just opened the door.

Shoved me inside and closed the door.

And I remember sittin and thinking, you know, where is my sister?

Where's the rest of the family?

Why am I here?

What did I do so wrong that I des And I don't know whether I cried or not.

I most likely did.

But the following morning a whistle blew and the door opened up, door opened up and all.

And then I could see the barracks.

There was nothing there.

It was just a one-story barrack and it had two boards sticking out like tha And on one side of that it was straw.

And that's where about 60 guys were sleeping.

And then and then they had the propaganda.

How many tons of shipping they had destroyed, and how many aircraft they had shot down, and then they went off to work.

But during the roll call, if if anybody didn't answer the roll they'd go inside the barracks and see if they were still there, and mostly and they were.

They were dead.

And so they hauled them out.

And in different c they did different things.

In in our camp, uh, they had two-wheel garden carts and they just put them in there and hauled them off.

I don't know what they did with them.

I never worked on that either.

But in other camps they put them on blankets and hauled them into the woods and just dump them there.

At Bergen-Belsen, they sta then the first day they didn't sent me off to work.

They kept me the got me ready, you know, to be recognized as a prisoner.

They put a yellow stripe down the back of my shirt that indicated I was a Jew.

And in the barracks I was in, there was only one other Jew.

The rest of them were all political prisoners, most of them from Belgium and France.

And people write about their life in the camp, you know, and the organization of all the prisoners.

I didn't find anything like that.

Nobody wanted to--- because if the g there was nothing they could do.

So they didn't want to be real close Everybody just look out for number one.

And so we didn't have much to eat either.

In the mornings there was no But when we went o they had somebody, a woman, farm girl or farm helper come out with a basket, with bread.

And it was the dark sourdough bread coated with lard.

And that was it.

We get a sli and we drank water just out of the puddle that you find.

But the other Jew that was in the in the barracks with us and he was on a detail with me, which was very frequently he wouldn't eat that because of the lard.

And every rabbi I've talked to said under the circumstances.

But--he wouldn't.

Well they didn't eat, the girls, the farmers didn't eat So she wanted to get rid of tha I was the only kid on the detail, so I always so about maybe twice a week I'd get an extra slice of bread, which was a lot.

And then when we went back to the barracks and we got dinner, which consisted of what they call potato soup.

What it really was is when they boiled the potatoes for the guards they boiled them in the skin, and then they took them out and pushed them And the water that was left over, that was our soup.

Now, when they they had them they put s but that was it.

So they had a lot of guys that for quite a while were i The like I said it went on like that until the end of the war, which was about 11 months, if I remember right.

And then we knew there had been an invasion because all of a sudden, you know, we found increased amount of airplanes going over and then one morning we were out for roll call and we could hear a thum thum.

One of the guys had been a French artillery officer and he told us that we were hearing mortar fire.

He said, So and then one morning, a tank came up to the front gate and we were all excited.

Because they didn't have the German markings on them.

And while we were watching it down the road, an 88 fired and blew the turret right off of that tank.

So that was it.

But then a couple of d gunfire became closer and closer, and then an d the guys in our barracks, they were all rushing to the window to see what was going on.

I went over there but they would And so but then all of a sud all run to the door and started banging on the door.

That's when I went to the window and I saw a big tank.

And then I saw soldiers come from behind the tank.

And about that time, the guys in the barracks succeeded in busting the door down.

an d those soldiers all went back behind the tank.

I said, why they were afraid of us?

Well, they came back out and they had a handkerchief and couple were wearing gas masks.

Uh, we didn't have toilet facilities in the barracks, and diarrhea was a very common thing, so when they opened the door, the stench was so much that these soldiers couldn't handle it.

But anyway, we were liberated by t At first I had no idea who they were.

When they started talking to us, I couldn't understand.

give any indication.

So then they fed us.

And that was a procedure they learned the hard way.

You know, when they went to the these starving prisoners asked them for something to eat and they gave them like the goodhearted Americans, what they give them?

Hershey bars.

You know and hundreds of them be cause the system couldn't handle it.

And so when they came to us, they gave us a biscuit about that round And I put it in my mouth and I bit down on it a So I had thought to myself, I know who they are.

They're Canadians.

They're giving us hockey pucks.

But that wasn't so.

They gave us those hard biscuits f so we wouldn't eat them too fast.

It took me, I think, about two hours to eat And then later that day they well, after they take all of our clothes off and they walked us through a line and sprayed us with a white powder, and that was because of typhus.

We had lice, but we didn't have typhu You know, what happened at Bergen-Belsen.

So then they gave us a [unintelligible] piece of clothing to put on, and they gave us another biscuit.

But this time they gave us a little cup, a tin cup of lukewarm tea.

That was a dead giveaway.

There's only one army that goes t We were liberated by the British.

And then they started hauling.

They had taken a school in the city and set up a processing center there, and they took a truckload at a time.

I went, I didn't go on the first truckload.

I went later that evening and some of the guys, it took them about three days to take all of the prisoners from Papenburg.

But before that happened, when we were liberated, the British had a problem because our camp commandant was an SS officer, had been wounded, ha and he carried a little dagger and he liked to carve on prisoners.

And so when it opened up, the guys all stormed the administration building and the British went in after to to stop them from what they thought was going to be a massacre.

Well they didn't kill anybody except the commandant.

They killed him with his But then they they hauled me to the school and we went, they took a card with a piece of twine around our neck and they made all kinds of notations on it.

And I came to the station where th our blood pressure and the nurse was from Holland.

So it was for the first time I ha to talk to somebody that, you know, I could understand.

And, you know, you picked up a few words from the German guards because they made yo and the so I ask her how things were in Holland and she said, oh, things were getting better.

And so every day as we were treated and stuff like that, I made a point always to go see my nurse and I was there for about eight, nine or ten days, I don't remember.

And I came to see her one time and she weighed me and took my blood pressure and she says, you know, how would you like to go home?

I said, that's what I've been waiting for.

She said, well, you know, when you came here, we categorized the prisoners in three parts.

Those that were too far gone.

We sent them to a place where they could die in peace.

She said, others, we had to send to a hospital for treatment.

She said She said, you were in that category.

And she said, you responded real well.

You've gained 17 pounds since you've been here.

I said, great.

How much do I weigh?

She said, you're now at 96 pounds.

So I was 79 pounds.

I went home and found in the apartment, it actually was my grandma's apartment, Grandma was there and my mom was there.

They had survived that attic.

Grandma hadn't even gone there.

She'd stayed in the apartm she was not in jeopardy.

So so they were there and I was there.

And then maybe the hardest time for Mom came.

Because she would go every day to the railroad station, to the lot where they dropped off the truckloads, and asked people if they knew Nothing happened.

And so after a while, she well, about two weeks after I got home, an ambulance pulled up to the door and they brought my sister.

She was in bad shape, but but she was alive.

And she had 11 surgeries on her back.

And all they did is is painkilling.

They cut nerves out and stuff like that.

She had three of them in Holland at that tim and the rest of them in the United States.

We never thought she could pas to the United States.

But somehow or another she did.

So we came after a lot of this happened, Mom got us together, the three of us, and she you know, this is not going to slow down.

This is too many empty chairs.

She said, I think we ought to try and find a country to take us and start a new life.

So I uh she put us in for United States, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa.

And one I don't remember.

Anyway, New Zealand.

responded real quick.

And when we were still talking about going there, uh, came uh, acceptance from the Unite And we Mom had a brother that had left for the United States long time ago.

He was in the United States.

So we had somebody we could go to.

So we decided to wait for the United States It had a long processing time.

But Mom got us together, and she says, now, you know, the good Lord had saved us, she said, she said, and given us a new home and a new lif So let's not talk about the war anymore.

So we agreed to that.

And then we came to the United States.

Well, she was the first one to blow it.

When I was in training in South Carolina, I called her up and she says, how are you doing?

I said, I lost 15 pounds.

She said, you sick?

I said, no.

I said, I was a little heavy so I went on a diet.

She said, you did what?

I said, I went on a diet.

She said, that's just like you.

For a long time you had there was nothing to eat.

You almost starved to de placed you clear across the ocean wh and now you refuse to eat?

None of us spoke she [Mimi] spoke a few words of English.

I didn't speak any.

But right from the beginning she pushed, you know, quit thinking in Dutch, quit talking in Dutch and even when we talk now, we talk English.

And that's been all the way through.

She's been pushing that, pushing that.

And our our oldest sister was a linguist.

She spoke seven languages and that's she said, that's what keeps me having an accent.

Her.

She said, I cannot think, I think in Dutch but then I have to talk English, talk French, you know and stuff like that.

And she said, and that's what gives you your you So even today, I people that have been here longer than I have, they have a heavy accent because they think in their own home-country language.

After I came, before I could speak English, I got a letter and it looked official because it had the seal of the United States as a return address.

So I took it to the landlord who had been in Germany and spoke some German and I could understand some German.

So I took it to him and he opened it up and started I said, what's so funny.

He said, you've been dra So I was drafted.

And after basic training they were going to ship me to Germany.

And boy, that really set me off.

And so I went to see the first sergeant and and he sent me to see a psychologist and she was terrific.

And then she took me to the regimental commander and she said, sir, I don't think it'd be a good idea to send this man to Germany with a loaded rifle.

Because at the time you know I was still very--- anything German was pfft.

But the After they took me off that order and gave me orders to go to Korea, instead she talked to me.

And that was the biggest help She said, quit the hate.

She said, you gonna go the rest of your life hating people, he won.

Cause he may not have taken your body, but he's got your soul.

She said, don't let that idiot dict the rest of your life.

For long years I actually hated Germans.

And that was a common thing.

Because I met another friend of my dad's that I knew and he had two sons.

Now he died over there, but the two sons and their mom came to the United States.

If they'd have come earlier, they would have been football players.

I mean, they were like six-six Big strong guys.

And the dad had a contracting job.

In Holland you know, the transportation of things is by barge, you know rather than And their job, they would contract out unloading the barges and in particular they did the potatoes.

And they had one of the boys stand it up to his son on the deck, his brother on the b who then handed it to his dad, who then put it on t I mean, they were brutes.

Can you imagine standing all day with bags of potatoe And and I remember they got into trouble one time.

They were not the smartest guys.

Redheads.

They we went to a soccer game.

And somebody in the yard had started talking German.

And one of those two guys, he he went over to the man and he said in his broken English, we're in the United States.

Speak English.

And the main thing that caused that is his hatred for Jews because they killed his dad.

Wait---for Germans.

Yeah, he hated the Germans.

So the guy gave him some lip, so he hit the guy, knocked him cold.

So the police came and arrested him.

And I remember going in to testify, you know, what was happening.

And I said same way.

It bothers me to hear But at the time for quite a while it bothered me to hear the German language because I always associated it with the war.

Our youngest son in the early '80s, he he was a singer and Tivoli Gardens and my wife went there to pick him up.

And he had all these thi He wanted us to come and go to Tivoli Gardens and we did.

And on we flew to Amsterdam and from there we took the train to Copenhagen, Well in the train, we had a compartment, I noticed in the walkway there was a trainman in the same uniform they wore during World War II.

And I thought, you know, I'm gonna put myself on trial.

I got up and I went in the hallway and started talking to the guy and he spoke some English.

So we talked and I had no ill feelings, you know.

It was so great.

And my sister came to also to Copenhagen and her husband.

And one night traveling by Volkswagen bus we stopped in a little German farming community for the night.

And we got, uh, two rooms, you know, o We got our rooms, we had dinner, went to our room, and after dark we noticed there were some farmers outside unde were talking.

You know, we couldn't understand a lot.

But then they broke up.

"Heil Hitler."

My sister came she didn't even knock.

She just storm She said, did you hear that?

I said, yeah.

I said is alive and well in Germany.

When I really opened up, was in '96.

I had just retired and the Anne Frank exhibit came to town.

Well, one of the guys affiliated with that knew me.

We knew each other.

He was a good friend of my dad's, and he, uh, he got a hold of me.

He said, you know, we'd like you to com and talk to the kids as they wait to go through.

I said, well, I did it, you know.

And one of the first groups I, I was addressing.

And all of a sudden I realized in the back, way in the back, was my grandson.

He had never heard about this before and neither had his dad.

You know, nobody knew about it.

I kept it completely to A burden had fallen taken away from me you know, that some other people knew what I went through and, uh, but I didn't even tell my wife until well after we got married.

But I'm glad I did.

And my sister, she will not talk about her time in She's still alive.

She's 97 years old.

And she's still sharp.

She has troubl We talk on the phone, maybe 5 minutes, and then her voice gives out.

But her thinking is still sharp.

She'll talk to me about the time we were in hiding.

But she will not talk to me about what happened to her in the An d the, uh, when Steven Spielberg's organization did the interviews, she turned it down and she finally got a notice that Steven Spielberg would like to meet with her.

She wouldn't do that.

So she never told anybody.

But she's another success story because she met a fellow, a survivor, and they married.

Of course, my sister couldn't have any children.

Uh, so.

But he had a sister, her and her husband, in the early part of the war had a baby.

And neighbors, they lived in an apartment house, and a couple of the neighbors told the don't have that child in your apartment.

Do not have any evidence of a child in your Bring the child, have the child, bring your child out keep them bottles, diapers, everything in our apartment.

And they did.

And so they came for the c and they perished.

But when the girl's uncle, the mother's brother married my sister, they adopted that baby And of course, she was already grown.

I think she was six or seven years old by the time that happened.

And that gal had 11 children.

So my sister has and she's been very fortunate.

Her husband passed away, but one of her granddaughters married a So she has an apartment in that house.

She has her own bathroom.

her own TV, her own Sh e has dinner with the family, but that's it.

And, so they're taking well care of her.

They take her to the barber to have her hair d And we still talk about two or three times a week, but I'm grateful to my sister for what happened during the war, but also after when we came here.

We never practiced the Jewish religion, but I feel closer to the Jewish community here now, you know, because of what happened.

I have some rabbis I talk to.

In fact, three of the rabbis pronounced me an honorary Jew.

Well, that means the but it doesn't bother me.

I judge people by the way, they treat me rather than what their religion is.

You know, most religions states, things happen because God wants them to happen.

I can't bring myself to believe that a true God would allow something like that to happen.

No way.

And even some of the people that are doing things today, He allows it, you know, these ma I, I can't believe that there is a God that plans everything, you know, here on Earth.

If there is such a God, he doesn't do that.

He lets us do our own thing.

Totally.

Uh, you know, like, I heard of a--- I've refereed some volleyball and I I heard a team captain of a religious team, during the game, prayed with the others so they could win.

But what about the other team?

You know you m To me, it just doesn't make sense.

So I am not a very religious man.

I think the kids need to know about this.

They need to know how dangerous certain things can be.

Because people have forgotten.

I've aways voted Republican.

But when the Republican Party started to worship a person like they did, that scary.

Because if you go any country that did that ended up in a dic or totalitarian system of government anyway, an You can go all the way back to Rome, to Hitler.

Hitler was elected, you know but when he got in he became totalitarian.

And, uh, Putin is elected over and over again.

But he's a totalitarian system now.

And, uh, I, I, I don't like that.

It's scary.

Well, you see it, you see it now.

Anti-Semitism is, and if it isn't the Jews, it's some other.

It, it's, it never stopped.

You know, you have mass executions in Africa and stuff like The only way it would stop, in my opinion, is the two most evil things on Earth, if we get rid of those.

Number one is greed, the cause of every war.

And number two is prejudice.

And the prejudice is the same thing.

It's you you're against somebody else because yo Why do people have to be that way?

There's enough on Earth for everybody.

All we need to do is get along and we can't do it because of greed.

You know?

They want more, they want more, they want more.

If you are a believer in the Bible, you remember one commandment is there: love one another.

And I think that's that the truth thing.

You know, love let's love one another.

It's not that hard.