Both sides of my family, on my mother's side and on my father's side, are long-time Hungarian residents.

They side, going back to the 1780s.

And on my father's side, maybe not quite that long, but they they both were resident in Hungary.

We don't know exactly when they migrated from other parts of Europe or els I do know that I'm 100 percent Ashkenazi because I've had my genetic tests done.

And on my mother's side, my mother's mother was born just north of Lake Balaton.

And her father was born not far.

Actually, it's now a suburb of Belgrade in Serbia, right on the Danube.

So the other opposite side of Hungary.

Hungary was quite large at the time during th So it's not surprising that they would come from different parts of the country.

They both wound up in Budapest, which is where those grandparents met.

On my father's side, almost the entire family, both on his mother's and his fa were from what's now in Slovakia, in southern Slovakia.

My father himself was born in Bratislava, which is right on the Danube, on the north border of, north bank of the Danube.

And his family came from towns right around Bratislava, within 50 miles of there.

My father and his parents moved to Budapest when he was four.

And this was before World War I.

My father was born in 1908.

He and his family moved to Budapest in 1912.

The war broke out in 1914.

And at the time, he already had three brothers who moved with him, who were born in Bratislava.

My mother was born directly in Budapest.

Already both of her parents had moved to Budapest.

My mother's father somehow got into the business of film importing in the 1910s already.

And by the 1920s, he was a well-known film importer and producer.

He produced seven of his own films.

My mother was in some of them as a teenager.

She was a very attractive young woman, and it was obvious then my grandfather w They were Hungarian films.

He was ultimately bankrupted around 1930 when the film M came out, directed by Fritz Lang.

And it was a very risqué film.

Peter Lorre played a mass murderer-rapist kind of character.

And my grandfather decided to import the film into Hungary.

But soon after, the board of censors disallowed it.

They wouldn't And from then on, things got rough for him, and he had to retire.

And he was in his fifties at the time.

On my father's side, the the family was not particularly well-off, who had established themselves in the leather trade and had a very luxurious leather shop.

But my my grandfather himself was sort of a ne'er-do-well, and someone did him a favor and set him up in Budapest in a grocery shop.

So he for the rest of his working career he ran a grocery shop in the Jewish neighborhood in Budapest, on Do-bootza.

Now, his side of the family was quite religious, and my grandfather was Orthodox.

He he prayed every day.

He put on the tefillin and went to shul every morning and did the whole thing.

My my mother's side of the family was much more assimilated.

And as far as I know, neither her father nor her m believing Jews.

They they certainly were were Jews.

And they knew they were Jews.

But they they didn't go to synagogue.

They perhaps celebrated a Bu t that was the extent of it.

Whereas my father's parents were much more believing and Orthodox in their behavior, and they raised their kids that way.

So my father was brought up in an Orthodox hou where the father ran a kosher grocery store.

Both of my parents went to gymnasium and in fact, they met when they were both taking violin lessons together, which I only learned much later.

They didn't have anything to do with each other for years, but they had met.

The Jewish community was pr It was also very large.

Probably 30 percent of the population in Budapest was was Jewish at the time.

In the early years they were quite free.

There was a very liberal atmosphere until the fascists took over in 1919 already.

And while there was a sense that anti-Semitism was Jews were still pretty much allowed to do what they were A very large percentage of doctors A very large percentage of lawyers were Jews.

And people like my parents were able to move freely.

My mother dressed very nicely.

They were able to go out.

They went to theaters.

My father had a little I guess it wouldn't be a canoe, it would be more like a rowboat.

And he had a little rowboa shared with a friend of his right on the Danube.

And there was a little clubhouse there.

So there were opportunities.

It's just that as the '30s wore on and as the war broke out, things got much worse.

By by the 1930s, Hungary had a fascist government and they they passed a set of Numerus Clausus laws, which were quota laws that limited the the opportunities for Jews.

It limited the kinds of professions they could go to, the schools they could go to.

What they could And as the '30s wore on, and particularly as events in Germany became more menacing, the enforcement of the Numerus Clausus became stricter.

And by by the time the war began in 1939, they passed a whole new set of laws that were specifically intended to discriminate against Jews.

My father himself was a direct victim of those laws.

He had been an executive, an accounting executive at a large construction firm, where he had worked for about a dozen years already when the war broke out.

And at the end of the year, on December 31st, 1939, he got a letter from his boss saying that he would no longer be able to continue working there because he was the last Jew employed in an executive position.

And what that meant for him personally is that he had to give up a career that he was trained in, that he had gone to school for and take up an entirely new occupation.

And it was those relatives who ran the fancy leather goods store who took him in and taught him the leather trade.

So at the age of 31, he had to take up a new profession.

And he eventually, wi started his own little leather shop during the war.

This was But the Jewish laws were such that he couldn't actually own the shop and they had to hire a non-Jew to be the literal, the the legal owner of the shop.

Even though technically it was owned by my parents.

By 1940 already, which was already into the war, a year into the war, the Hungarian government decreed that adult Jews, adult male Jews, would have to be interned.

And so my father was swept up, along with pretty much everyone he knew, and put into the first of multiple forced-labor battalion camps.

And he managed to be in and out of these camps throughout the war and survived them.

Escaped, would get caught, be put into another one.

And he actually documented this.

He has dates that he wrote down for when he was in which camp.

And he spent pretty much most of the war in and out of these, occasionally having leaves.

He was able to get out of a cam in 1943, visit my mother, see me as a baby, and then go back into the camp.

And he was able to bribe people and get his way.

And people He complained about this what he was made to go through both, both the indignity of having his superiors be people who used to be people that he had that had worked for him, or people who had been in servile positions suddenly were in charge of the people working on these road gangs, and the actual conditions under which he had to work, like sleeping out in the rain on the on the road, repairing roads, breaking rocks, creating trenches for the soldiers.

So he he did this more or less continuou until Budapest was liberated in January of '45.

And for the rest of his life, he complained that he had been made neurotic, nervous, that he he had rheumatism, he had gallbladder attacks, and he he never quite got over that.

I mean, it wasn't a concentration it wasn't life-threatening in the same way as being shipped to Auschwitz.

But it was certainly debili and it had an effect on him for the next part of his life, the next 50 years of his life.

In 1944, while he was at a forced-labor camp, a priest came along and said, anybody here among you, you Jews who is interested in converting, we'll save you.

We'll give you a papal document saying that you've converted and you won't be persecuted any longer.

So a lot of them thought, should I do this?

I mean, I don't about the papers, bu t if it's going to help save me, maybe I should do this.

So my father went to his father, who was Orthodox, and he said this, and at first his father.

I mean, the normal inclination to something like that among among the son And my grandfather did say that that would be the normal thing to do, but at the same time in the Torah it that you need to do whatever you should to save your life, that that's more i So he basically gave my father his blessing to go ahead with that.

And then an absurd situation came u where my father said, okay, I'll I'll go ahead and do th And the priest took a bunch of people into the church, and one by one he would call them up, call take a dip his finger into a bowl of holy water and sprinkle the person and say, you're no longer a Jew, at which point my father burst out laughing at the absurdity of the fact that here their lives were in danger for being Jews, but that somebody would sprinkle a drop of water on h and that that would make him no longer a Jew.

So he almost ran out of the place because he couldn't contain his laughter.

But he went through with it.

Although he never told me And it was only much later when I was an adult that I act certificate, which I have, to show that he did go through with the conversion.

So partly because of that, I'm sure he experienced a sense of shame.

He never considered himself Christian.

And there was no no question about that.

And he always considered himself Jewish.

As soon as my father went into the forced my mother took over the little business, which was really just a small manufacturing place where they made handbags and wallets and belts and had customers.

Not not direct customers.

They would they would supply other sho who would then sell their wares.

So my mother became the de facto boss of that factory.

She learned how to use a sewing machine, which is what she wound up doing for the rest of her working life.

She So she was able to carry on.

And even while the war was going on in 1940, '41, '42, conditions in Hungary were not as bad as elsewhere.

Partly that was because Hungary was allied with Germany, so it was not subjected to German aggression because Germany was a friend and the Hungarian government was a fascist government.

So they more or less let things alone until quite late in the war.

And it was really only in the spring of 1944 that the Germans got wind of the fact that Hungary, that the leader of had concluded that Germany was losing the war and he was ready to engage in talks with the West.

And so Germany didn't like that.

And they th into what had been a friendly country and installed their troops.

And later that spring, they sent Adolf Eichmann to Budapest to take care of the Jewish question.

That is, to take all the Jews who were left in Hungary.

And Hungary was one of the last places that the Jews taken out of.

And so his mission was to eliminate the Jewish population in Hungary.

And he began that in earnest in the late At that point, the Hungarian government sort o and it was taken over directly by the Hungarian fascist party, the Arrow Cross Party.

And then things got really bad.

People like my mother eventually were forced to move th at had been designated as a ghetto.

So in the fall of 1944, she, her mother, her sister, my my father's sisters-in-law and me were rounded up and put into the ghetto, where we were.

It was a very small area, several blocks square where something like 200,000 or more people were put and expected to just stay there until they could be evacuated and sent to to concentration camps and eliminated.

My one grandfather, my father's, my mother's fa in the fall of 1944.

He was put on one of those trains and never heard from a My grandmother, his wife, was accompanying him right to the train.

And somehow, through a stroke of luck, sh put to the side and went back to the ghetto and wound up surviving and lived all the way to the age of almost 88 in the U.S. During the time they were in the ghetto, they had no idea what their fat They knew that the Russians were close to liberating Budapest, but they reall if that would happen or if they would be put on trains and sent to Auschwitz first.

So it was a harrowing experience.

My father wasn't there because he was in forced-labor My mother and I were there along with all kinds of families, her in-laws, my father's parents, her own mother, her sister.

And they were suffering terribly.

There was not enough food.

It was horrible.

I mean, she's written about this and it was clearly the worst time in her life.

I mean, there was nothing People didn't know where they would get the next loaf of b She was approached by soldiers who were An d somehow one of the soldiers took pity on her and was nice to her and let her go and g So there were stories like that.

We don't know exactly what else may have transpired between the soldier and my mother.

And, you know, we have our suspicions that she would have done whatever she had to do, but that that part was unspoken.

Anybody who was caught leaving the ghetto, leaving the walls of the ghetto was threatened with being shot immediately by the by by the Arrow Cross Party.

And luckily for everyone, Eichmann never completed the evacuation of Hungarian Jews.

He started with the Jews in the East, all the way in the East in what's now Romania, emptied that out and was working toward Budapest.

But fortunately for all the people in the ghetto who made it through, because there was a lot of disease and pestilence dying of cold in the winter.

But on top of that, bombs were falling and they were Allied bombs.

It wasn't the Nazis who were bombing B because they knew that Hungary was ruled by a fascist government.

Budapest was liberated and a lot of the Jews at the time felt a kind of euphoria, like they had they had been saved.

They hadn't been killed.

They hadn't been deported.

The Russians were here.

They were socialists.

Things would get better.

My father, who was a lifelong cynic and didn't believe it.

He didn't buy it.

And already in the first few months of the new regi this is beginning in the spring of 1945, he saw that a lot of the people who had been Arrow Cross fascists suddenly put new uniforms on and became guards with the with the new communist regime, or, let's say, pro-communist regime at the time.

And he didn't believe in in any of that.

And he already began looking for ways to leave Hungary.

So almost the minute the war ended, he contacted his brother in France.

He had three brothers living in France to try to resume his search for a visa to leave to go to France.

My family lost their apartment.

They had lived in a really It was a building that had been constructed by the company my father worked for, and they provided apartments for the high-l They they certainl and they they had to move into So when I was born, they moved into a different building in in the heart of Budapest, in central Budapest.

My mother was able to take a lot of her possessions with her from the apartment that they had to vacate into the new place that they lived in.

And somehow, almost miraculously, she was able to extract some of those possessions and take them with her to Paris when my family and I moved to Paris after the war.

She took rugs and there was a whole collection of photographs and paintings and artworks and managed to to hold on to them.

We don't know exactly how.

Some of them were were possibly sent to pawn shops and she kept the tickets and were able was able to retrieve them after the war.

She may have secreted them or left them in certain place she didn't lose everything.

There were Russians who came in and out of the apa The Russians already had a reputation for being drunkards.

And the Russian soldiers, that is, drunkards who would steal anything, drink cologne.

I mean, these were stereotypes, but these were things that They they came in and bullied people, took possessions inside their apartments.

So conditions weren't great, but they were reasonable enough that my parents were able to resume a quasi-normal life.

My my parents put me into a fencing school, and at the age of less than four, three and a half, I was taking fencing lessons.

Fencing was considered among Hungarian Jews t like one of these socially upward things to do.

It was a way to get into higher levels of society.

My my mother commissioned an artist to come and do my portrait which is hanging in the other room here.

She had her own portrait done.

They had nice photographs done.

The pictures of me as a two-year- old, three-year-old, four-year-old, I look like a ha I had toys.

I was well-dressed.

But under the surface my father was seething and he c And finally, in the early summer of 1947, And at the time the Hungarian the Russian Iron Curtain hadn't been put down yet, and we were able to get permission from the Hungarians to leave.

We left as stateless people because our citizenship had been taken away during the war.

It was never restored.

And we emigrated to France in 1947, and joined my father's three brothers and their families In 1945, my father, along with a lot of Hungarian Jews, decided that carrying a German-sounding Jewish last name was at the least inconvenient.

Weisz, which was a very common Hungarian name.

It meant ' were the names of colors.

Schvartz, black, Weisz, white, Braun, brown, Grun, green.

And people, on the one hand, they didn't want names that sounded German because they had such a bad feeling about German.

And secondly, they didn't want to be tagged immediately as Jews because they knew that it in Hungary, for the most part.

So he, along with a lot of other people, went to the authorities, to the local city hall and petitioned to have their names changed.

And at the time, a very common process, and this had started already in the 1910s.

It wasn't limited to the end of the war.

It's just that at the end of the war there was a rush to do this wh ereas before it had been a periodic process.

What people typically did is they picked the name of a Hun and put an 'I' at the end of it, which meant that you were from th even though they weren't from there.

It they picked whatever they liked as a sound and made the name up.

So in my case, my Várad, which was the name, it was a generic name of a city.

And in particular there was a place called Nagyvárad, which is now in Romania.

It's called Oradea.

And he he picked Várad and put an "I" at the end of it So that was the way he picked his name.

And his motive was that he knew already that his next destination would be France.

He wanted something that could be easily pronounceable in French, and he had studied So he knew that Váradi would be easy to pronounce.

France, of course, had its own story with Jews.

And it was not a it was not a nice story.

My my three uncles were in hiding during the war.

They were Jews who had married non-Jewish women.

And luckily for them, the non-Jewish women helped hide them, but they bas be in hiding, even though two of them had actually been in the French army at the t One of them was captured for a time and somehow survived.

So the French had a very unhappy history of treating their own Jews.

And here we were in France.

The remarkable thing that I remember already, because two years after we mov to France, my father's Orthodox parents moved to for his parents to move.

And I would go with my grandfather to shul on holidays.

And I, I every week when school was out on Thursdays, I would spend Wednesday night at my grandparents' ho and my grandfather took me to shul in the morning every, every Thursday morning.

Other than that, there was no mention of Judaism in France.

People in France typically are areligious.

They don't talk about religion.

they don't talk about they don't talk about work.

Like around the dinner table, people don't talk about what they do for work.

They don't they certainly don't talk about religion.

So being Jewish in France was unspoken.

No one mentioned a word of it.

My parents never mentioned it.

However, all of their friends were other So while it was unmentioned in public, in society, among French speakers, among people that they worked with, it was not unmentioned socially because whenever they got together with friends, it was other Hungarian-Jewish emigres who had moved to Paris.

And there, the stories were constantly about what happened during the war.

So all of the discussions, and this is from my childhoo from the time that I was four until I was nine, all I heard on Saturday nights when my parents got together with friends was what happe camps, what happened with p having to stop bei or accountants or whatever they were, and and talk bitterly about their experience in Hungary and how how glad they were to be able to lea I wouldn't say my parents decided to leave France.

I would say my father decided to leave France.

My mother was already reluctant to have left Hungary because she left her mother in Hungar So she was happy to be in France.

She liked France.

She learned French very quickly.

My father learned French very quickly.

And they they enjoyed being there.

Of course, they they had the three brothers in the fami So they had a family.

They had made friends with these other Hungarian-Jewish emigres.

But two years in, so this would be around 1949, after my grandparents had moved there, they both realized that they were spinning their wheels economically.

They were working very hard and unable to save anything.

My father had become a leather worker, he went into the leather trade, and that was what his brothers, two of his brothers in Paris, did as well.

So it was relatively easy for him to set up a little shop where he hired one of his b the wealthy, well-off, long-term French brother, he had moved there in 1927, was able to get him contracts to to sell to.

So he was in the leather trade and my mother worked at the little shop that they had.

But it was very hard work, very long hours, and they were unable to save any money whatsoever.

My parents had somehow miraculously gotten permission to apply for visas to come to the States.

And it was a quirk that did it.

My father had found out earlier th that the U.S., which was categorically not admitting Hungarians, because Hungarians were on the losing side of the war, they were an A they had decided that Hungarians who had been born in what subsequently became Czechoslovakia, were eligible to emigrate to the U.S. under Czechoslovak quotas.

And my father, having been born in Bratislava, was eligible to come into the U.S., even though he had never been a Czechoslovak.

Czechoslovakia was created in 1919, by which time he had been living in Hungary for seven in Budapest for seven years.

He had never lived in Czechoslovakia, b decreed that he'd been bor got visas for the three of us, and we able we were able to get boat tickets and we left in June of 1952.

I spoke not a word of English because I spoke French, basically, and spent the whole summer with my parents, their friends, their relatives.

No exposure whatsoever to English.

And I was enrolled in school without speaking a word of English.

And because I should have gone into the fourth grade and because I spoke no English, they put me in the third grade, which I had already done in Paris.

But by the time December came along, I was already fluent in Englis and the following year I skipped the fourth grade and went directly into the fifth grade.

Still living in the Bronx.

What what was my relationship to Judaism?

I would say close to nonexistent because of the tradition in France that I referred to, that people didn't talk about religion.

Even when all of those Jewish f they didn't talk about being Jewish.

They talked about what they e And so because there was this generalized silence about religion, and my parents, my mother had My father, partly because he was brought up Orthodox, rebelled against it and became very secular.

He was not interested in religion.

We had moved to Queens and all of my friends were Jewish and they were all having bar mitzvahs when they w It was my turn.

So when I was 12 and all of the were going to Hebrew school, I said to my parents, I'd like to have a bar mitzvah.

And they agreed.

Up until then, there was hardly any menti of religion in my household.

My my parents didn't celebrate holi We didn't have a menorah.

We didn't celebrate Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur.

And I think it partly goes to to what my father felt, that he had somehow betrayed his his heritage.

And my mother, for her part, had no feelings.

She, of course, had to take religious training when she was a student in high school because all the kids did.

If you were a Christian, you had to g after hours.

If you w after-hour religious training.

So she she certainly knew she was Jewish and she knew that everybody in her family was Jewish, b religion was not part of her life.

And so I was brought up secular.

I have a feeling about Yom Kippur.

I like to I like the Kol Nidre.

I I'm not a believer.

I have a very strong Jew I'm very proud of being Jewish.

But I'm not a religious person.

We never called it the Holocaust.

In fact, the code word for it in Hungarian is just háború.

It's just 'the war.'

They only refer to it as 'the war.'

And obviously the war, for a Hungarian non-Jew to talk about the war would mean one thing.

For a Hungarian Jew to talk about the war meant what it meant.

It meant people being taken away.

It meant people being put into forced-labor It meant the Jewish laws.

So it was always referred to as 'the war,' never referred I don't remember the term 'Holocaust' coming into use in general language until maybe the late '60s, even in English.

I mean, so I in the U.S. prior to t So in my case, I was always aware that I was a survivor of that experience.

From the very earliest stage.

I mean, from from the time that we I knew th why I knew why we were leaving Hungary.

I was only four, but I was on a train with my mothe My father had left a couple of mo My mother and I were on a train.

We went from Budapest through Trieste.

So through what's now Slovenia and Croatia up to Trieste.

And then we wound up in Turin, where we stayed overnight, took a train to Paris.

I knew I was doing and I knew I was doing it because and we were leaving Hungary because of what had happened.

So I always knew that.

From the very earliest age.

Let me start with my mother, because that's the easi And I've already addressed some of the war's impact on She was very much into living for the day.

She she liked to have a nice time.

She liked to go out in the evening.

She dressed immaculately.

Everyone who met her thought she was just an ast elegant woman.

And she she was brought up That was the way she wanted to think of herself.

So for her, the war was a one-off.

It happened.

It was horrible.

She she was exchange views, but she didn't dwell on it.

So she lived her life and wanted to just continue living.

My father, on the other hand, did dwell on it.

He he first of all, he dwelt on it from a health point of view.

He had nearly died from a gallbladder attack during t and he resisted being operated because he said that at the time, the people doing the surgery were dentists operating on gallbladders, you know.

So he he he was out for long periods with gallbladder attacks, with terrible pneumonia and arthritis and all kinds of to the conditions that he experienced.

He was a very nervous person, neurotic in many ways.

Very hyper and cynical.

A lot of negativity, all of which he attributed to to the war years, because up until then, he was a very outgoing person who liked to go out dancing.

He played soccer, he had the rowbo It changed his life.

My father was embittered for the rest of his life, and it was mostly he he said he never wanted to And we went back together.

The first time he was back wa with my mother, my wife, and my daughter.

We were all there during the summer and he was really unhappy because he every time he saw a Hungarian face, he would think of who treated him like dirt, who treated people who had been at least their equals at the time, like they were worms.

And he couldn't look anybody in the face.

Every time he saw someone, he was ang He eventually, later on, toward the end of his life, he went back a few times, mostly to take advantage of the fact that he had a Hungarian pension.

And at the time, Hungarian currency couldn't be exported during the communist regime.

And so you had to spend the mo And his attitude was that he would flush it down the to before he would let them keep So he went back and went to some spas and took treatments and things like that.

But for the rest of his life, he basically hated Hungarians.

While my my father suffered because of it, he wasn't reluctant to talk about it and he didn't lay a trip on me.

I never felt like his experien made me an unhappy person or somebody who had trouble adjusting.

I mean I had to adjust to two different countries, learn two new languages.

And it came easily.

I mean, partly because my parents were very encouraging and I always felt that they didn't try to hide any of that from me.

They were open, and it was part of who I am.

From the moment that he found out that the Germans were offering reparations under certain conditions, he jumped on the opportunity and he began pursuing reparations for the which he did for the rest of his life until his By the time he died, he he had three different sets of payments that got from the Germans.

He had the pension that he got from the Hungarians, and he got a small pension from the French.

But the one that he relished the most was the German reparations.

And The first one was for just having survived.

But to do that he had to suffer incredible indignity.

The Germans to begin with didn't necessarily believ who said that they had gone through what they went through.

You had to prove it.

You had to hav were able to have documentation during those years.

During those terrible years.

And then because he claimed that he had a disability for his neuroses and nervousness, they made him go see a German psychiatrist repeatedly who would intervie and demand that he prove that he had the condition that he said he did.

So eventually he prevailed He got the first set of reparations.

And then, in a very peculiar thing, when he wa the Germans introduced a new kind of claim, and that was for people who were native German speakers.

For Jews who were native German speakers.

The theory behind this was that the closer you were to Germany, the more you were wronged.

In other words, the closer you were to being a real German, even if you were Jewish, the more you were wronged and the further out you were, the less you were wronged.

So if you could prove that you were a native German speaker, you were entitled to more than anyone else.

Well, it turned out that my father was a native German speaker because his mother was wh o only learned Hungarian as an adult.

And so most of the family conversations took place in German.

And my father had So at the age of 80, they made him go to the consulate in Miami.

He lived in Fort Lauderdale, in Florida, and prove by an exam a written exam that he could speak German fluently, which he did.

And he passed the exam and they gave him extra money for being a native German speaker.

And then on top of that, the whole time that he lived in in in Florida, every year he had to show up at the consulate to prove he was alive.

It wasn't good enough to have an affidavit notarized, go to the bank, wasn't good enough.

They needed to see you living and breathing before they would believe that you were alive.

Because the Germans suspected that peopl just, you know, do whatever they could to keep getting payments after they died.

So my An d how did I feel about it?

I didn't feel nearly as strongly as he did.

I certainly vicariously I was sympathetic to everything that he had experienced.

And I was very sympathetic to his feelings.

But I, I didn't feel personally the same way about seeing a German as he did.

I never, you know, I was too young to have seen a German actually, you know, kick someone or anything of that sort.

So my experience was like anyone else's, in movies and TV programs.

My father was a very, very determined person.

When he came to the States, he had to go into the leather business.

The leather trade.

He was living in New York.

And the leather trade wh ich means that there were long periods of the year when people were not working.

And he he was in that category.

So the first couple of years we lived here, he was unemployed a good part My mother was in the same trade.

She was a little less unemployed, bu And he spoke no English, zero zero Engli And for the first, I'd say four years that he was in t he whatever English he he knew, he refused to speak publicly.

But he would buy the New York Times every day, and he would get through the New York Times with a He was determined, that was the word you used.

He was determined to learn English.

And just at the five-year period, at the five-year mark, just when we were about to become citizens, he decided that he would speak English openly, publicly, albeit with an accent, but quite good.

And his grammar was very good.

He was very attuned to grammar.

And at that point he determined that he would go back into accounting, which of course he cou I am both first and second generation.

I'm first generation because I physically lived through that and I could have easily died as a baby and I.

And the impact that made on me when I realized that is that, and this goes to your questio that I would have been killed as a one-year-old, not for my beliefs, but for being Jewish.

And so for me, that was what being Jewish meant, that I would have been killed for being it, not for believing in the scrolls or, you know, davening every day.

That that wasn't why the Germans would have killed me, but they would have killed me for the mere fact of being Jew And I always knew that from from t I was always conscious of it.

And from the earliest age I told people that and I, I, I remember certainly as, as early as junior high school being willing to talk about that.

Certainly in high school.

I went to a special high school where the ki were very enlightened and most of them were Jewish.

And I certainly talked about my background.

I've always thought it was important to tell my story just reasons that I, I was proud of the fact that, you know, Jews could survive that kind of thing, that And I always thought that it was important for people to know that and to hear it And the obvious thing is, look, I'm going to be 80 next summer.

I was a baby.

I mean, the people who were ar e in their nineties and they're not going to be around.

So the idea that young generations will no longer be able to hear the direct thing makes it that much easier to refute.

And of course, we know we read the papers, we know it's being refuted every day in larger and larger volumes by more and more people.

So it's incredibly important to have people know that this really did happen and that people were capable of doing this.

What would be the lasting impact of te this story.

One would hope that it would enlighten people not to do this again, not only to Jews, but to other populations.

And if you if you look at the news and read it carefully, as I do, you realize that that there's not much hope for that.

That that just isn't what humans do.

They don't listen to stories and behave differently because of them.

But nonetheless, I think we, those of us who do this, do feel an obligation.

We have to tell that story and only hope that it will make a difference, at least among some of the people who hear it.

I like to think of my father as a cynical pessimist and I like to think of myself as a cynical optimist.

So I'm actually, in the big picture I tend to be I'm generally cynical and skeptical.

And, you know, it doesn't really take a cynic to to extrapolate from what we see in the news.

It would be easy to just say that the current rise in Nazism, fascism, anti-Semitism is due to a particular single cause.

But it's not.

And people draw parallels to economic conditions and things like that.

Other people say, well, anti-Semitism never really went away.

It was always there.

I don't have a pat answer for that.

Things do tend to come in in cycles.

They're not exact replications of themselves.

Conditions are never identical.

Context matters.

Populations do tend to be prone to listen to demagogues and and demagogues do come along.

And certain ingredients tend to be there that allow that to to flourish.

And I think we're we're in a period where that happens and the optimist in me tells me that this too will pass.

That, we're in such a period right now.

It it rises and it crests and eventually people will get on to the next whatever it is.

The next fad or seems to be in vogue for the time being.

And I think it'll pass.

But that doesn't minimize the damage that it does while it's happening.