start at the beginning ok first of all i was born in czechoslovakia and i lived this is for your benefit i was born in crowd really i have relatives that live there and he sure was a wonderful wonderful life just didn't last long enough when i was about three years old my parents were receiving guests overnight guests some would stay two days some with stay as long as two weeks and i was too young to even ask a question i knew that they weren't friends or relatives but there they were and when they left they were replaced by others when i was five and this was going on all this time my maternal grandmother who mother you know these german jews who enjoy your hospitality must know something that you don't why don't you and your little family find a safer place to be until this insanity blows over and the the only time i ever heard my mother raised her voice to her mother she said how can you say a thing like that this is a perfect mark recy this is our utopia nothing is ever going to happen here oh unfortunately my mother regretted those words for the rest of her life because on march fifteen hundred thirty nine the nazis moved into czechoslovakia and life changed completely changed so drastically every time the nasties occupied a territory or or a nation the nuremberg laws came into effect and they were resend surely three major components one was the most important as soon as they occupied part of a country or a territory the jewish citizens of that country lost their citizenship rights their civil right and they're human rights and that means that you could be walking down the middle of the street in the middle of the day and somebody could put a bullet in the middle of your forehead and as you crumpled to the ground they could walk away with impunity because we didn't exist we had lost the protection of the law second and this happened within a very short period of time within weeks all of a sudden we could not get an education it started out at the top jewish students could no longer attend universities colleges high schools elementary schools public schools of any kind and then it became an offense punishable by anything from a fine to a sentence of death to home school your kids and the third very very important component was that all of a sudden we were not permitted to practice professions and i mentioned that my father was a physician six weeks after the occupation we could no longer practice medicine but along with all the educated men all the lawyers all the engineers and teacher isn't pharmacists and generally the educated population were put on labor brigades his particular assignment was to fill wheelbarrows with enormous rocks and then ferry those rocks across a very narrow plank that connected to hilltops it was truly a dangerous occupation particularly for people who had never done this kind of physical labor there were no breaks there were no no wages there was just humiliation abuse and then there were the minor annoyances like not being able to gather in groups larger than three being able to leave your home after the sun went down and before  before dawn not being able to go to a theater or or a park or any enjoyable public place and of course we all wore what they called the badge of shame the badge of shame was a yellow star of david six inches in diameter so those of us who didn't look jewish could be identified for harassment know not everyone looked jewish i still have blue eyes and i'm fair skinned but at that time i had a head full of golden ring let's and that certainly was more area and than many of the ariens who live there and so people like myself have to be identified but the icing on our cake came a few weeks after that when there was a knock at our door and when my mother opened the door the people standing outside said you don't live here anymore we do and we were given a half hour to pack whatever we thought would be useful in one suitcase for each hand not too heavy so we could carry them and we were homeless and at that point we realized that we had to do something because otherwise we were going to lose our lives as well so we became what i have been referring to as professional escapees we started out hiding  out in places that were owned by people who knew us people who were friends or people who were humanitarians and who said well here is a key to my little college and in that little village in the woods the spring of one nine hundred forty three at which time we were betrayed and captured during that time perhaps to me perhaps the most difficult part of it was uncertainty and it ratcheted up to the point where i didn't really care what happened i just wanted to happen right away but i was still with my parents and we were going from place to place as we went on and the war went on that was less food  but the fear the then the uncertainty perhaps was was the hardest in those years we spent more time in bohemia my hometown was in bohemia and we crossed into moravia and end up in slovakia very close to the gary and border and that was we were in an a at that time and i guess we cast a shadow that someone saw and we were decided by what they called the jewish property confiscation team which would have been really funny if it hadn't been so said we had nothing left to confiscate but a committee of four a member of the s s a member of the local secret well it was actually a useful this it because we knew that as soon as this happened we would be in the first transport to auschwitz and so my mother who was not one to give up decided that she needed to do something and she had heard that there was a group of farmers whose farms were in slovakia but part of their property was over in hungary over the over the border so it spanned two countries and some of them volunteered to guide potential victims across from slovakia to hungary it was an organization i guess a kin to the to the underground railroad for slaves my mother went from house to house trying to find a contact she had a lot of doors slammed in her face because people were afraid to talk but ultimately she made contact and we were told to first of all take off our badge of shame make sure that there are no doubt they'll threads on our clothing and they go to the local train station and take a local train to a little village if we were lucky enough not to be asked for i d s because the police would get on public transportation and go through and ask everyone for i d s it would have been lost but if we were lucky enough to get off in that village and when the train pulled out of the station we would see a young man at the end of the platform when he started walking we were to follow him to his home we followed him at a reasonable distance and we was about eleven o'clock at night pitch dark and we ended up on the edge of a far is just and he had a very poor little farm one one large room which has three generations of his family and some small farm animals the young farmer took a very tall ladder propped it up against the attic window and motion to us to go up there and as we were climbing he whispered please be very quiet because my mother in law is in this it ing and she's a nazi sympathizers so if she knew you were here you wouldn't be here very long but we took that to heart we were very quiet when we heard noises the odd noises prove that we were not really alone because the rat population of the farm decided to live in the attic and i was twelve and i remember how frightened i was  because my father didn't have my chair and i was afraid that when he lay down on the ground those creatures would get at his head so i took off i had a little scarf and i took it off and put it around his head and i felt i felt really brave so we spent about twenty four hours up there being as quiet as we could and we heard the rain coming down but we didn't know what it was going to mean to us to our trenches so the next night we heard the ladder come up against the window and that was our signal to go down and start walking cross the border first of all by the time we got to the bottom of the ladder we were soaked to the skating and then we realized that that rich soil in the forest was full of water and we would sink down into it the mid calf and literally had to lift each foot out of the mud shake off the excess and then keep on going so that was labor intensive  and we weren't paying much attention to anything else but our guide of course was very vigilant and he saw a flicker of light at a distance that he wasn't accustomed to see g before and all he could think of was that there was a changing of the guard and the new guard mapped out a new patrol route and they might well run into us and that something he didn't want so he without saying a word he turned on his heels and started walking away from us leaving us in the middle of the night in the pouring rain in the pitch black forest i was actually relieved and i said to my mother you know i'm just going to lean against this tree back here and my logic of course was if i took a little nap when i woke up i would realize that this was all just a nightmare and then if i woke up and it was of my reality i wasn't interested in waking up my mother was not impressed and instead she was screaming and running after the man in the forest yelling you have children of your own are you going to let this one  well considering that he was already risking his life he was a very nice man and he stopped and motioned to us to follow him back to the cottage excuse me which we did and spent two more days being very quiet he would sneak us some food every so often and on the third night we a successfully crossed the border of the mud had dried out and we could we made it and of course we had to take a train in buddha and hungary to reach budapest and that was the only city left in all of central europe that still had a jewish population for four hundred fifty thousand hungary and jews had already been  among them of course my very smart grandmother and many many of my relatives so miscues me the allergy is getting to me anyway there were so many jews who tried to save themselves because survival was measured not in months or in weeks or even in days sometimes it was measured in minutes so if you gain time maybe there was a chance that you would survive the nightmare and so people who knew about this possibility try to get to budapest and this happened only because adolf eichmann had settled in budapest where this cronies because it was a nice place to have a good time berlin was already pretty badly scarred by the war and they were losing the war so he moved his headquarters over to budapest and somebody told him that if he left the jews sort of scattered throughout the city of budapest the allies would bomb his headquarters so that gained us two months two months was a lifetime but after two months he realized that somebody was just fooling him and he began with new energy and anger families that had been in hungary for a thousand years putting them into ghettos there was an area of about five square blocks within two weeks of his renewed activity there were seventy thousand people in there so you can see you can imagine how they lived we were labelled alien jews and the alien jews were taken immediately to holding prisons for the death camps so that night we were awake nazis did a lot of their things at night because people were disoriented and it was easier to drive them anywhere you wanted and we were being driven at night bridge we got into a yard where people were stuff like sardines we could take a few steps in and we couldn't go any further so that night we spent trying to sleep standing up if you're tired enough that that can be done in the next morning they t thousand people out of the dungeons another another very practical feature of another practical feature for destruction and those people those two thousand were taken in a transport to auschwitz and they made room for us in the dungeons the first thing i noticed well first of all it was certainly no improvement because after all those years we were miserable but we were together and at this point the men were driven in one direction the women and children in the other direction and we lost contact with my father so we found ourselves with other mothers and children and women who had no children other words women and children in this particular dungeon first thing that occurred to me was that there was nothing  there there wasn't a piece of furniture there wasn't a blanket not a chair nothing not a cot and then as my eyes got accustomed to the gra bugs and i don't think i need to explain who was their food supply for the next month or so and so by the time we were transported to the next holding prison closer to the military facility my mother was in the tailor shop making uniforms for the s s and i and the other children tried to survive as best we could until one day all the mothers and their children were called to were called to the court yard where the commander of the prison introduced us to three men and he said these men had come as inspectors from the swedish red cross and they can then stim that this was no place to keep children and so he was going to permit all children below well above the age of five and below the age of fourteen to join these men  and leave the prison provided their mothers let them go well i think you probably king guess that most mothers wouldn't do it and that's what he counted on my mother was unusually wise and very courageous and so she very gently pushed me into the arms of one of those men and when we were reunited she told me went through her mind was that if that night i was going to sleep in a bed and eat something you could call food and survive to tell the story then she had no right to hold on to me but it was such a momentous decision that she passed out and i turned around i wanted to help her two of the men bodily picked me up and carried me outside the walls of the prison where they had a hole off of cars and trucks in the hopes that they would pick up they went from prison to prison that they would pick up more and more children and they said to me we are really not members of the swedish red cross but we are friends of a swedish hero well well i'm burg and he asked us to do this because he would like to serve it would like to save as many innocent victims as possible but only children because children are humanity's hope for a better