(flames billowing) (explosion blasting) (phone ringing) (voicemail beeping) - [Male Speaker] I'm calling about the filmmaking.

I fit your conditions as far as German born and being WWII veteran.

(voicemail beeping) - [Male Speaker] I'm a veteran of World War II and Holocaust survivor.

- [Female Speaker] Would you please call Mrs. Dublon?

I was in the army in England during the war but I was born in Germany.

- [Eric] Hi, this is Eric Hamberg.

- [Karl] This is Karl Goldsmith.

- [Manfred] This is Manfred Gans.

- [Herman] My name of Herman Cohen.

I'm also a soldier who happened to be from Gelzenkirchen and I returned back via Omaha Beach.

- [Leo] Steve, this is Leo in Baltimore.

How are you?

I, (laughing) you wouldn't believe it.

I have another soldier for you.

It's quite an interesting story.

So you'll hear from me and perhaps you'll call me back, then I'll give you more details, okay?

As they say in Cairo, shalom.

- First mortar shell I ever fired when I came to Anzio landed in a ditch where there was five German soldiers.

I wasn't just killing people.

I was killing my personal enemy.

- We had been motivated to fight the Nazis by having lived under them.

And I've always made the point that if I had lived under them for six hours or six days, it would have been sufficient.

- I had this feeling that I was going to be able to do something.

Being a European boy especially having gone through the Hitler period the way I went through, I was so gung-ho, it was absolutely a riot.

- There were some who said, "Well, we have been through enough "and let somebody else do it now."

And we would say, "To hell.

"This is ours."

Look what they've done to our friends and families.

Look what they are doing now.

The only way to end it is to strike back.

- [Male Speaker] I hereby certify that I understand the risks which have been fully explained to me to which I and my relatives may be exposed by my employment in the army.

Notwithstanding this, I certify that I am willing to be employed in any theater of war.

- [Narrator] Since the late 18th century though antisemitism was part of the European Jewish experience, in Germany as perhaps nowhere else, the Jewish population assimilated, making significant contribution to arts and sciences as well as to commerce.

- When I came in this world back in 1921, our parents made us feel very secure.

(deliberative piano music) And in the moment Hitler came, gone were our soccer fields, gone were permission to swim in the pools, even in the river.

- The period from 1933 through '38 is a period of build up and intensification of antisemitism.

And every Jewish youngster who experienced this remembers the sense of haunting danger that loomed the sense that life was before which had been normal and for many of them very pleasant and for most of them deeply German.

- I grew up like any German teenager, you know?

I was patriotic and totally assimilated.

My father served in the World War I. I grew up under the French occupation and that sort of engendered my patriotic feelings.

- [Narrator] In World War I, one in six Jews, more than 100,000 in total, fought for Germany.

Of them, more than 12,000 died on the field of battle.

- My father was a very good German.

He was in the army, so were his three brothers, all fought in World War I.

He never thought that anything could happen to him.

He had the Iron Cross 2nd Class.

He was a happy German.

He was making money, he was doing very well, he had a family.

And I remember when Hitler came in power and they were marching around in the uniforms, one day he said to me, "Eric, if Hitler wasn't against the Jews, "I would buy you a uniform made out of silk."

This was the German in him.

This now here is the street where I grew up.

It is for very few buildings completely different.

But it's still where I grew up.

This was my home right here.

When I went to high school, except for this one boy, nobody, nobody ever called me a name.

I was one of them.

They were the best boys.

I was the most German looking of my whole class.

I wore leather pants with the suspenders.

Wherever we went, I was the most Aryan.

- Hello.

(speaking German) (faint speaking) (speaking German) - I never knew that anybody would make a distinction between being Jewish and German.

There was a free and easy interchange.

We were into each other's home and sat at each other's tables.

And that's why it was such a blow to see that these very same people turned away from you in the manner in which they did.

(regal marching music) (people chattering) - The day that Hitler took power, I just thought it was the most wonderful thing.

We all ran across the streets and said, "Heil Hitler," you know?

And I bought myself a swastika, put it on my coat.

And that evening, I came home.

When I came home, my father saw the swastika on my coat and he said, "We have to have a long talk."

And he told me that I was Jewish.

Well, this was devastating at first, you know?

My first reaction.

My second reaction was I gotta find out what that is to be Jewish.

I had no idea.

Then I occupied myself more and more with this idea what is it being Jewish?

(speaking German) - [Narrator] On September 15th 1935, the Nuremberg Laws are promulgated by the Nazis, the law for the protection of German blood and honor, and the Reich Citizenship Law.

According to these laws, Jews could not marry non-Jews, could not employ women under the age of 45 in their homes, and are stripped of their citizenships.

- I will never be able to understand how people who were your neighbors and were close, they were so disciplined, you could call it that, that they immediately jumped through the hoop for Hitler.

- The attack against the Jews was unrelenting.

It was savage.

It was found in every dimension of German society from radio to the cinema to the newspapers to the school to the playground to the streets.

So these Jewish youngsters faced enormous oppression and it took a long time for people to understand that they were not the cause of it.

(speaking German) - You'd listen naturally to radio and there was Hitler, and Goering, and Goebbels giving all these speeches.

When people get talked to long enough, they're beginning to believe it.

And I said to myself they know all the facts.

Maybe there is something wrong with me.

- On this place right here where you see this apartment house and the Penny Mart, that's where my father's store stood.

Clothing store for men and boys.

My family finally had to close the store.

We had in front of our store the SA men standing there telling everybody, "Don't buy by the Jews."

My father naturally when we moved, he was a broken man.

And for me to see my father cry for the first time, it was a horrible, horrible experience.

These things stay with you.

- Hitler had coerced the Austrian government to legitimize the Nazi party again.

And they had put up a war newspaper.

It was sort of a wooden frame with glass on legs and it stood on the sidewalk a block from where I lived.

And I looked at in and in it were copies of Nazi newspapers and leaflets.

And one of them had a very primitive caricature of a Jew.

And on it, it said (speaking German).

Why had anybody any business to say this in effect to me?

What have I done to them?

Suddenly, you were a hate object not for something you had done but for who you were.

- It was a good country to grow up in provided you were not too politicized.

(people chattering) And again, thinking back, it really was a lousy country.

(laughing) - Well, the experience of Jews in Austria was everything that happened in Germany from '33 through '38 happened in Austria overnight.

On March 12th 1938, Germany entered Austria.

They immediately imposed the Nuremberg definition of who is a Jew.

They immediately persecuted Jews on the street.

You have the immediate shaving of beards off religious Jews.

- I remember on March 11th 1938, it was a Friday.

We were dismissed early from school and told to make our way home as quickly as possible.

When we looked out, we saw horrible scenes on the street, people being arrested and mostly Jews being made to scrub off the anti-Nazi slogans from the street.

- When the Anschluss took place, a convenient ready way if you were an Austrian to prove that you were now ready to be a German in Adolf Hitler's Reich was to be more German than the Germans.

And the Jews were a convenient way of demonstrating that right there on the spot.

- My father one Sunday morning said we should get fresh air and go to the park.

And we had been there for five or 10 minutes when we were suddenly surrounded by brown shirts who'd come out from behind the trees.

And they asked my father, "Why aren't you wearing our badge?"

And my father said, "We are Jewish."

There were thousands of Jews being arrested that day.

And we went down this big boulevard they have there in that park.

They told us to undo our ties and to ruffle our hair because some SS men thought we look more Jewish that way.

And then they stopped in the place where people were screaming at us.

It was towards evening.

They made us stand at the Danube Canal facing the water right in front of us and we were told that anyone turning around would be shot.

I remember my father putting his arm around me saying that if they throw us in, the first thing you do is take off your shoes.

And then there was silence, so I turned around and they were gone.

My mother was frantic by that time.

And when we got home, my father went, looked out for the window for a long time, and finally said, "Now we leave."

(deliberative piano music) - Each child remembers the moment in which their parents made the decision to leave.

Walter Laqueur once said that the optimists died and the pessimists got out.

- Here in Germany that is, I wasn't wanted.

I was told I was inferior.

On the other hand, Zionism told me nothing of that but a hope of a future.

It was something that any young person really would embrace at that time and I wanted to leave and go to Israel, Palestine.

My father was very, very much against it, but I finally said, "What do you have to offer me here?"

And to that, he said, "Okay, you can go."

So I went with the Youth Aliyah and I promised to come back after two years, but of course, there was no coming back.

(singing in foreign language) - It was problematic to leave.

You lost your language.

If you were a lawyer, you lost your profession.

If you were a professor, you had to teach or write in a language you may not speak.

If you were a physician, you had to wait many years in order to be able to qualify as a doctor in the United States.

So many Jewish youngsters instead of getting academic training were getting physical training at that point and getting the type of profession that is mobile.

If you're a plumber, you can work on plumbing anywhere.

- I had gone and worked as a cook apprentice.

I figured knowing a profession or something would get me out much easier.

I remember very distinctly when I used to come home at night, I used to cry myself to sleep because the people that I was working under were not Jewish people.

It was hard work, it was a hot kitchen.

I knew that I had to do it in order to survive.

(speaking German) - It became increasingly uncomfortable.

When we left, it had not yet reached the killing stage so we were fortunate in that respect.

You didn't need a huge amount of foresight to leave.

- It's a legend that German Jews were deluded about what was happening to them.

There is this tendency to say well, why didn't they flee?

Most of them tried.

And if people didn't leave, then the reasons were either they couldn't get anyone to take them or there was something that held them in the country.

There were more applications on file at embassies and consulates in Berlin in 1937 than there were Jews left in Germany.

Most everybody knew by then not what was going to happen to them but that it was impossible to remain here.

- My father, he read "Mein Kampf" in about 1929 or 1930.

When he finished that book, he turned to my mother and said, "If this man Hitler comes to power, "we're leaving Germany."

And in January of 1933, my father got the papers and started the processing.

And by September of 1933, we were on a boat.

- My mother begged my father to buy a orange orchard in Israel, in Palestine at that time, anything.

My father refused.

When Hitler said, "Could Germans take all their money out of foreign banks "and bring it to Germany," guess who took the money out of the Swiss bank accounts?

My father.

He just didn't believe it.

He woke up after the Kristallnacht.

(flames billowing) - [Narrator] On November 9th and 10th, more than 1,000 synagogues throughout Germany and Austria and 7,500 Jewish owned businesses are ransacked, set aflame, and destroyed.

Looting and pillaging continues on into the night and the streets are strewn with glass, earning it the name Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass.

Afterwards, Jews are also fined for the damage done to all property.

- I vividly remember the Kristallnacht, the day all Jews were being arrested.

I started riding my bicycle at six o'clock on a morning throughout Berlin and I saw the burning synagogues.

My father starting riding the subways and fortunately neither one of us were arrested.

- Desperation becomes really extreme after Kristallnacht.

30,000 men were arrested and sent to concentration camps.

Their families were basically told they will not get out until you have completed the preparations to leave.

That meant until you have a visa, until you have liquidated your assets.

People were forced to moneterize their insurance policies before they left.

You had to cash it in, put the money in your bank account, and then the Nazis had a way of seizing your bank account.

- [Narrator] Despite the difficulties in obtaining visas to emigrate to countries willing to accept you as refugees, German policies forcing the Jews to emigrate are working.

130,000 of Germany's 520,000 Jews emigrate by 1938.

By that time, even those who held out hope that things might change realize that they would have to flee.

Between 1938 and 1939, the pace of immigration increases dramatically.

More than 118,000 Jews emigrate to any country that will admit them.

- The experience we went through in the American Consulate in Stuttgart, Germany was horrendous.

My father, a very proud man, he actually broke down and cried, a 60 year old man.

- [Narrator] Prior to 1938, many parents are unable to procure visas for themselves as well as their children.

In many cases, children are sent on alone to countries which would accept them.

In response to the Anschluss and Kristallnacht, the British government allows 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children into the country via the Kindertransport.

Reacting to the atrocities committed against the Jews, President Roosevelt convenes but does not attend an international conference in Evian, France, to discuss the plight of the refugees, the euphemistic term that meant Jews.

But the prevailing public attitude in the US and around the globe favors restrictions on immigration.

Legislation introduced to congress to permit German Jewish children into the US also fails.

It is not until after Kristallnacht that Jewish refugees are finally allowed to enter the US up to the quota limits.

(deliberative piano music) - I stepped off the boat with three dollars and 50 cents or something like that in my pocket.

And that's how I started out in America.

It was very, very wonderful.

It was like a, can I say it's like a dream?

I mean, all of a sudden, all this crap fell off me.

- I think those parents who managed to send their children out knowing they would never see them again were enormously brave.

My wife's mother had three little girls.

She sent all of them out.

The whole family that was left behind, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins were murdered.

The girls were the only survivors.

They didn't speak a word of English.

The littlest one was 10 years old, the littlest one of the three girls.

There were babies on the train.

But the 10 year old, her mother took her off the train three times.

People said, "Why don't you keep one of them?"

Well, she didn't.

She put her on the train finally and that's why she survived.

- I will never forget it when my parents said we're gonna send you to England.

I thought to myself this is wonderful.

I'll be able to talk to anybody on the street.

Borken, the town we came from, you couldn't talk to anybody anymore by '38.

Nobody wanted to talk to Jews.

(deliberative piano music) - [Male Speaker] When I came to America, I didn't have to look around the corner anymore to see if somebody was coming to kick the daylights out of me.

- Naturally, I could rejoice that I now could lead a life in freedom.

But in those days, the tail end of the Depression, it was not that easy to find jobs and when you did have a job, it was apt to be a menial one paying very little.

- We led an existence n Brooklyn which was very poor but very happy.

We were kept alive by the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

They gave us rent money and so on and I will never, never forget that.

- I had to go to work when I was 16 and I worked in a shaving brush factory and went to school, high school at night.

Now, I don't understand how we lived that way.

My brother and I slept in the living room.

We had no privacy.

We had no rooms of our own.

But I did not feel that I was suffering.

I felt that we were accomplishing things.

- I have always been able to find work.

I never went hungry.

I had no money, but I had lots of girlfriends and we went dancing.

I checked coats at the big dances because the tickets were $10.

I didn't have $10.

And my girlfriend at a certain time would wait at the door.

I came out and brought her in and we danced.

I mean, I didn't miss much.

- [Narrator] Between 1933 and 1939, 41,000 German Jews emigrate to Palestine, many of them due to the influence of a growing Zionist movement.

Palestine is the only place on Earth that is really ready to welcome to Jews.

- When I suddenly got to Israel and to the kibbutz, and they said to me, "Well, what are you going to do now?

"You can choose between growing oranges "or you can learn how to grow in the vineyards," or all the different kind of agricultural thing, and I wasn't very good at that.

Until one day I had to bring my shoes to the shoemaker and I saw them all sitting there and hitting their little hammers.

I said, "This is what I want."

And they said, "No, you're crazy.

"No woman is gonna be a shoemaker."

I said, "It's what I want."

So I finally convinced them that I would be very hardworking and I would do right, which I did, and I became a shoemaker.

- My aunt not only got me out, she got me a job as a farmhand.

So I would go across the fields at night to shut up the chickens in their houses.

And I would pretend that I was stalking Nazis.

- I knew, of course, that I myself now was removed from the danger, but (sighing) it weighed heavily on my mind that my parents were still there.

- I left Germany at the end of August and during October, my parents were rounded up and sent to Poland.

My mother who could not walk at the time was dragged and ultimately shipped off.

- All of the German policies were designed between '33 and '38, '39, to force the Jews to emigrate.

The reason that the policy failed is the German Reich kept expanding.

Germany went into Austria in March of 1938.

It absorbed parts of Czechoslovakia in 1938.

In 1939, it invaded Poland, and within one month, it had two million additional Jews under its control.

In 1940, it invaded France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Holland.

In 1941, it invaded Greece and Yugoslavia.

In 1941, it invaded the Soviet Union, and therefore had the capacity to have an additional five million Jews under their control.

So if there is nowhere for the Jews to go, forced emigration cannot work.

If the Reich continually expands and gains more and more control all over Jews and has more and more Jews under its domination, then you have a catastrophe that's about to happen.

(speaking in foreign language) - We were praying for war, not because you are a bloodthirsty killer but because if you don't, you and those you love will be killed.

- [Narrator] For refugees making a new start in the US and Great Britain, hope of rescuing family members erodes as the war spreads throughout Europe and the first of the deportations to ghettos and concentration camps begin.

- Brecht wrote of this period.

I know of course it's simply luck that I've survived, but last night that my friends came to me in a dream and they said survival of the fittest and I hated myself.

(siren blaring) - [News Announcer] Adolf Hitler's all out attack on Poland makes the long dreaded European war a certainty.

Prime Minister Chamberlain of Great Britain gave the Nazi dictator a zero hour for withdrawing his troops from Poland.

That zero hour ends now.

At this time, we transfer you to London for an important announcement by the British Prime Minister.

- Up to the very last, it would have been quite possible to have arranged a peaceful and honorable settlement between Germany and Poland, but Hitler would not have it.

The situation in which no word given by Germany's ruler could be trusted and no people or country could deem itself safe had become intolerable.

Now, may God bless you all and may he defend the right, for it is evil things that we shall be fighting against, and against them, I am certain that the right will prevail.

- [News Announcer] Six hours after Great Britain declared war on Nazi Germany, the Republic of France followed.

All France is in a maelstrom of activity.

- I had, of course, hoped once the war started in Europe that somehow, and I didn't know how, that somehow America would get into the war because I saw that as the only way to stop that tremendous evil.

- Hello, America.

This is Edward Murrow speaking from London.

There were more German planes over the coast of Britain today than at any time since the war began.

- [Narrator] For Great Britain already at war with Germany and sustaining losses at home and abroad, the panic over Hitler's blitz through Europe feeds a growing concern over the existence of a fifth column amongst its immigrant population.

It is widely believed these former nationals of countries that have declared war on Great Britain could be enemy agents disguised as refugees.

These refugees are labeled enemy aliens.

Though isolated from the events in Europe, the US adopts a similar policy to deal with its immigrant populations.

- The British government decided that they had to do something because the war wasn't going too well.

So they said, "Color the lot."

That was the headline in the newspaper.

Intern all the enemy aliens.

- [Narrator] The British government enacts a policy of internment and begins registering this population, arresting the males between the ages of 16 and 60 and placing them in internment camps.

Ironically, included with these enemy aliens are the Jewish refugees labeled as friendly enemy aliens who have just narrowly escaped from the Nazis.

- Internment was not a terrible fate if you were not the head of a family with responsibilities.

I was a teenager.

I played more soccer in internment than I played in Austria, and with better equipment because I got that before I got food.

Just then, the army lowered its age limit to 18 and I immediately enlisted in the Pioneer Corps.

- This company which I command is almost entirely composed of German and Austrian anti-fascists.

It is one of the 15 alien companies in the Pioneer Corps.

Each man has been subjected to the racial and political persecutions of his own country.

For them, the war started in 1933 when Hitler came to power.

They have gone through the hardest trials a man can endure for his convictions and their loyalty to our cause is absolute.

- We all had to join what's called a Pioneer Corps which was a labor unit.

It was not a particularly savory group to be with.

It consisted of British soldiers who had major physical handicaps or were not very fit.

And it consisted of foreigners, criminals, or people who were generally not trusted, and consisted of us German Jews.

- I spent a month rolling tar barrels across uneven ground.

And another enemy alien and I had to roll these tar barrels to the other side of the field where cranes would pick them up and put them onto another train.

I always suspected it came back again just to keep us busy.

- In the Pioneer Corps, you were really frustrated.

We wanted to get out and get into a fighting situation.

- From the moment I got in, I mean, I wanted to do something.

And I made a nuisance of myself and kept on going to the colonel everyday and telling him I've got to join a fighting unit.

I'm fit and I speak several languages.

And there must be another way.

I was looking forward to killing, I'm afraid.

Yeah, yeah.

- I responded to a notice in the Pioneer Corps in the labor unit that said anyone wishing to volunteer for special and hazardous duty, and I went, of course.

- Now, those of you who want to volunteer must report to the MI room tomorrow morning at 0900 hours.

You've got to be in absolutely tip top condition to qualify.

- And I was interviewed by an officer in disguise who turned out to be the commanding officer of a commando unit that had been formed of 87 refugees from the Nazis, a frontline fully trained assault unit where every person spoke flawless German, and what's more, was motivated to do whatever you could possibly ask of a person.

- [Narrator] In 1942, Chief of Combined Operations Vice Admiral Lord Mountbatten appeals to Winston Churchill to add a highly motivated and trained German speaking troop to the roster of 10 inter-allied commando special services brigades which consists of European exiles.

Commanded by a young Welsh officer, Bryan Hilton Jones, the unit would be comprised of 87 men, mostly Jewish nationals from Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.

- Among the questions we were asked was whether we are willing to undertake dangerous missions and that we fully understand, and we had to sign that statement, fully understand that the British government will not take any responsibility for us because we are not British citizens and that under the Geneva Convention, the Germans have the right to execute us as former German nationals.

- When I got to North Wales where they sent us for training, we were surrounded by guys in green berets.

And some of them were people we had known who had disappeared from the Pioneer Corps because they weren't allowed to communicate once they had been accepted.

- And I saw one, an Austrian by the name of Von Toiay, and I went up to him, and I said, "Where are we and what is this place?"

And he said, "I'll tell you one thing.

"There is no return ticket.

"Once you're here, you're here, "and you're lucky if you come out alive."

(regal fanfare) - [News Announcer] On the home front, women of the Auxiliary Territorial Service have played an important part in the forces since the outbreak of war.

Now in the Middle East, a large ATS training center is busily at work making women fit for army life.

From all parts of the Levant they come to do their bit against Hitler.

Girls from Palestine to Yemen, from India even.

Represented too are women exiles from the occupied countries of Europe.

- Everybody wanted to be the poster that they had put on was a girl in beautiful uniform driving a car.

That was just the heights of anyone's ambition.

And so I thought I want to be a driver, but I knew that everybody else would want to too.

Well, I didn't have very much money but what I had before I joined up, I said I'm going to a driving school and I learned to drive.

So I learned how to drive a car, and then I said well, I better learn how to double clutch and drive a truck too just to be sure.

So when we got to the camp after about a week of training, they said, "Well, now who wants to be a driver?"

And of the 500, 300, they said, "Who has a license?"

That put it down to about three.

And then they said, "Can anybody double clutch and drive a truck?"

And that was me.

(laughing) So I first became camp driver.

(explosion blasting) (sirens blaring) - 90 days after I arrived in New York, Pearl Harbor occurred.

And for me having just escaped Nazism and not being caught by them after three escapes, here I was and we were threatened once again.

- They did a miserable thing, those Japanese, and naturally, it was a matter of course that the Germans would follow, combining with them, and there was a declaration of war.

And I knew I had a job to do.

The job to do was to help this country win the war.

Maybe you think that's like a highfalutin idea, but that's the way I felt.

I had a grudge to settle.

I wanted to get in the army to fight for America.

However, enlistment is the privilege of citizens in this country, but since they instituted the draft and they did draft even enemy aliens.

- I went to the draft board.

I made a big noise at the draft board and said, "I want to go."

At that time, they took everybody who was eligible.

I thought that in my stead, a quota has to be filled.

If I'm not going, they have to take somebody else.

This somebody else might be a married man.

He might have children.

He might be killed.

So, he's doing this for me.

- It was something we felt that needed to be done that we might not particularly enjoy once it happened, although I now think it was one of the most important experiences of my life.

- I went to Whitehall Street shaking that they might refuse me.

This was still left from Germany, you know?

The authorities are gonna refuse me because I'm a Jew or because I'm too small or something.

There's something wrong with me.

But the army took me.

And when after I was inducted, I got my first solid meal in Camp Upton.

The first time I ate well in years.

I loved the army right away.

I mean, the army and I have always been pals.

(laughing) It was like a second family to me.

- [Narrator] No longer refugees, they are inducted into the military and sent off to camps and forts throughout the US to train as infantrymen, sailors, radio operators, and engineers.

For many of them, it is the beginning of a rapid Americanization.

- I was no longer among refugees.

I was among Americans of all stripes from all backgrounds from all kinds of locations, and I began to learn something about this country.

- We were on the rifle range shooting at targets and the captain came behind me and I said, "I would like to be assigned to a heavy weapons platoon."

And he said, "And what's wrong with the Jewish Army?"

The Jewish Army is the Ordnance Corps and the Medical Corps.

That was probably the first antisemitic remark.

So my answer to him was I don't think I should have to take the crap from anyone.

I think I used the stronger word but it doesn't matter.

The end of the exercise, we were marched back in the barracks and no sooner were we were there, I was supposed to immediately report to the captain.

So I went there.

He said, "I just want to apologize for what I said."

Now if that doesn't blow you out of water, then I mean, that was an unbelievable, that was unthinkable, unthinkable.

And you see this is a typical example of America.

You might have a guy who comes who's a coal miner, a redneck from Pennsylvania, but he also knows when to say I'm sorry.

- I had never met any really native born Americans before.

So, it was a way of Americanizing me.

And these people from the Midwest were very tolerant and friendly, so much so that I thought I'd lost my accent because they never referred to it.

- I must have made a mark because at one point, I was called into the Division G2 Colonel Porter who said, "Sergeant, at the request of General Allen, "we had make sure "that you will be made a citizen before we leave."

When I came back to our barracks, they started calling me Citizen Spiegel.

(regal fanfare) - [News Announcer] 92 members of the Allied Fifth Army in Italy become United States citizens in naturalization ceremonies conducted by Lieutenant General Mark Clark and government officials.

(regal fanfare) A state department representative distributes naturalization certificates.

Good citizens and good soldiers.

- He says, "Well, you're Eric Hamberg.

"You want to become a citizen?"

Yes, sir.

You can change your name if you want to which I did at that point.

And finally, he says, "You know, we have to ask you one very important question "before we can make you a citizen."

What is the question, sir?

The question is, and think very carefully about this, are you willing to fight against the country of your birth?

When I heard that, I laughed too.

(deliberative piano music) - The inclusion meant a great deal to me but by the same token, it really did not make me feel elated about it until I had a chance to confront the Germans.

- I was only hoping and praying that I would be sent to the European theater.

But this is what it did to me knowing that I was doing what I wanted to do from the very beginning.

Go in the army, be accepted, become a citizen, and do the best I can.

- There was to be put on every doggone bulletin board where the American Army is a announcement that the army is looking for people who speak languages.

And if you are interested in that, to apply directly to the War Department.

Hallelujah, a window opened up.

- Suddenly, orders came from Washington.

Herman Hirschbein transfer to Camp Ritchie, Maryland.

Why?

Because I spoke German.

- I went on the train.

All of a sudden, I looked around me in the car.

All of a sudden, they all looked like refugees who were on the train with me.

And we went to the stop.

All these guys got off.

We were all the same kind of idiots, you know?

And there was a truck and they loaded us in the truck and off we went to Camp Ritchie, Maryland.

- [Narrator] Although military intelligence was a crucial aspect of the American war effort since the United States' entry into the war in 1941, it was not until 1942 that the army centralized its intelligence operations at Camp Ritchie, Maryland.

At Ritchie, troops arrive under classified orders from the War Department to a location shrouded in secrecy 79 miles from the nation's capital in Hagerstown, Maryland.

Among the different ethnic groups that occupy the classrooms are German Jews who are rigorously drilled in field maneuvers and in highly specialized courses that include learning the enemy's table of organization and their order of battle, both necessary in the establishment of small interrogation teams.

- [Kurt] They had some extremely interesting and intensive courses in everything to do with military intelligence and the make up, the order of battle of the German Army, and everything about the German Army.

To show what we had learned in the courses, we would go and field problems where some of us were dressed up as German soldiers and we had to capture them and then interrogate them.

I thought I couldn't have gone to a place that was more fascinating than Camp Ritchie.

And I often think back to that quite fondly.

- [Narrator] No less extraordinary than other British commando units, 3 Troop is comprised almost entirely of refugees from German occupied Central Europe.

These new commandos would be known as X Troop or the British troop and are ordered to anglicize their names, create false personal histories, and lastly, to don Church of England dog tags to conceal their identities in the event of capture.

- You were discarding all the things for which you were deprecated and abused.

And you are a new person.

And that person is legitimately assuming another identity.

I wanted to keep my initials and having been Peter Arany, I wanted to be Peter Arlen.

But we were called in alphabetically and the first person to be called in was my friend Abramovicz who was an Austrian boy.

Abramovicz gets called in and comes out and says, "Gentlemen, let me introduce myself.

"My name is Richard Arlen."

And I said, "You bastard."

It's not all I said.

I'm cleaning it up for you.

You stole my name.

So I leaned on to my grandfather's name, Metzger, and became Peter Masters.

Peter Tischler had become Peter Terry, Manfred Gans had become Freddy Gray, and Oscar Henschel was the Sergeant Major and was Sergeant Major Oscar O'Neill.

- Well, we were on the move continuously.

We had continuous marching with a lot of equipment going uphill, downhill, climbing, learning to shoot just about everything that we could lay our hands on, throwing hand grenades.

It just was incredible.

- Manfred has phrased it this way.

He said, "I had a lot of classmates in Germany "who became officers in the German Forces, "and the SS, and what have you.

"And during and after my training, "I felt I could take them on."

That's quite a thing to say.

I knew exactly what he meant.

- Many people have said this.

We were reborn in Abu Dhabi.

As far as I was concerned, five years of living as a pariah and four years of being an enemy alien were behind us and we were somebody new.

- You went into the metamorphoses of being a hate object and then if you were lucky and not killed, you were a refugee.

And then you were, in my case, a farmhand.

They were all things I had never dreamt of being.

After that, I became a soldier in the Pioneer Corps in the labor unit without weapons.

And now comes the transformation.

Like a butterfly out of a cocoon, you are the elite of the elite.

Try and tell me that this isn't affirming to a young guy.

- My office asked me, "Bonin, do you speak English?"

Well, I didn't very much but enough to understand that.

I said, "Yes."

She said, "You want to be an ambulance driver?"

And I thought ambulance driver?

I drive from one hospital to another, I don't know.

They do frontline duty.

(gasping) Yes, yes, that's what I want.

Oh yes, I speak English fluently, yes, yes, send me.

We were the only girls.

There were some Palestinian girls in Egypt, but nobody at the frontline except our unit.

- [Narrator] On May 7th 1943, the Allied Expeditionary Forces captured Tunisia.

And one week later on May 13th, German and Italian troops capitulate.

On July 9th, the allies land in Sicily.

Palermo is taken.

And in the second week of August, the Germans evacuate Sicily.

The slow allied advance in Italy begins in September.

- I got to Anzio with a LST.

We jumped off the back into the water.

We went to the first little village we came to which had a very, very cute name, cute because it was called Campo de'Morto, the Camp of Death.

(explosion blasting) And we started firing the heavy mortars.

And firing this first shell and killing five Germans, I knew I was in it.

Gratification, I can't call it that.

I didn't know at that time if my parents were alive or not because they were still in Germany.

But I was fighting an enemy that I knew.

- It's a burden to carry the idea that you're going back to fight the people in the country of your birth, but they had an awful regime and they were killing people including my family and I never saw it as a choice.

- Untrained starving people can't mount a revolt efficiently.

They did it in desperation in the Warsaw ghetto and so on.

But by and large, their chances are very, very small.

We came to the conclusion that the thing to do was to get out, get trained, get equipped, come back, and strike back.

- [Male Speaker] These men will never surrender.

They know by bitter experience what they are up against.

For them, there is no going back.

Every shot they fire is a shot against the ghosts of their past.

At last, these men are on the right side of the barbed wire.

At last, they are on the right side of the gun.

- The Jews who fought in the army were fighting three battles.

They were fighting the Nazis, they were fighting for the dignity of the Jewish people, and they were fighting against an enemy whom they understood as deeply as they understood anything whom they understood wanted them dead.

And the German Jews understood that with an intensity that no one else could understand.

- People would, in England, would often say, "Aren't you looking forward to going home "when the war is over?"

And I said, "There is no home."

- At that time, I couldn't write to my parents anymore 'cause the war was on.

And so I bought my first diary book and I said I can't write letters to them, but I'm going to write a diary so that when I see them, they can read everything that happened to me.

And of course, I never did see them again.

- I cannot tell you the excitement and the thrill I felt when I heard that we're gonna go overseas, we're gonna see action.

At last, you know?

I'm gonna get into this war.

- I was at that point in time a very proud American.

And I was doing something that it was high time that we were all doing together.

I was going to still show those SOBs what we could do.

- My first year away from home, I was 18.

I was going off to combat and we always celebrated Hanukkah, so I went to the local radio station and I had a record made in which I wished the family a happy Hanukkah.

This is Bernie greeting you from Lawrence, Kansas.

I just can't remember when we weren't together as one big happy family for Hanukkah.

That's why I thought a record of my voice would shorten the distance between us.

I hope each and every one of you will have the best time of your life.

The day isn't far away when I'll celebrate with you again.

But just remember that it's the happy times like this in the present that make life worth living.

Well, it's time to go.

So once again, happy Hanukkah everybody.

- [Narrator] As a mass of allied troops in England mobilized during the first four months of 1944, plans were underway to move nearly 175,000 allied soldiers across the English Channel in one of the largest amphibious invasions in military history.

For most of these soldiers, it would be the eve of their introduction to war.

- We were taken to a camp in the south of England.

This camp was gigantic.

It had 40,000 troops in it, like a big Woodstock (laughing) sorta.

I must say that's when it got exciting.

- [Narrator] On the morning of June 6th amidst rough seas, six allied armies of nearly 200,000 soldiers and sailors begin a slow procession toward five heavily defended beaches.

- During the crossing, I said to myself this could very likely be the last thing I do.

And then I said well, I can't complain because I've had a rich, full life, and I was 22 years old, and it seemed to me I'd done almost everything.

(laughing) - I'm a German Jew.

They threw me out.

I went from Mainz to Cherbourg in 1935.

And I came back here to this place in 1944.

D-Day was the day where I had the greatest fear for my life.

- The last half hour, being sea sick, and being mortared, and small arms fire was certainly without a doubt the worst time I ever had in my life.

(explosions blasting) (deliberative music) - The ship had been hit.

Things started breaking from the wall.

And the ship started listing.

I went down the ladder and I started swimming to shore and I almost drowned.

I crawled up the beach just with my last strength, and I looked around and there was nobody alive.

All my buddies' faces come up to me.

I'm having emotion.

In the afternoon, I was sitting in my foxhole and I was looking out toward the ocean and I said, "My god, if I survive this, "won't I have some tale to tell?"

- The idea of following through with what you had to do was really the main motivation at this point.

You didn't have time to be afraid.

(explosions blasting) - We ran on this enormous beach there 'til you could find some cover.

And people were falling left, right, and center.

It was really dreadful.

And suddenly, a German came running towards me.

Somehow in my mind, I don't know whether he had his hands up or not, but I fired.

(gunshot blasting) I don't know whether I killed him.

I think it may have been the first time I killed.

- We came over the last hill to go down to the bridges and the lead cyclist was killed by machine gun fire.

Captain Robinson in charge of the bicycle troops said, "Ah, Masters, now there's something you can do.

"Go down to the village and see what's going on."

But I was gonna get killed in this experiment.

So I'm thinking how can I improve the odds and I remembered the movie "Gunga Din" where Victor McLaglen, and Errol Flynn, and Cary Grant get overwhelmed by rebellious Indians on the Khyber Pass and just before they get overwhelmed by 2,000 rebels, Cary Grant delivers a line I always thought was funny and he said, "You're all under arrest."

So I thought that might work and I started to shout in German, "You're totally surrounded.

"If you want to see tomorrow, "now is your chance to surrender."

So, nobody came out.

And then a guy got up and fired at me and I fired at him and my gun jammed.

And Captain Robinson had seen what he wanted to see and he had the riflemen fix bayonets and charge.

- We went into the valley and there's a German bunker and I heard voices.

And I yelled, (speaking German), and they all came out with their hands up, about 10 or 12 Germans.

We were very excited.

The first prisoners, our prisoners.

And then I marched them down to the beach and on the beach, there was a guy from the 29th Division.

He was cocking his M1 rifle.

They killed all my buddies and I'm gonna kill them.

And I said, "Now, wait a minute.

"Hold it, don't do this."

I said to the German noncom in German, (speaking German).

Go, you know?

And I prevented this.

That would have been a war crime there.

(deliberative piano music) - [Narrator] After the fierce fighting in Normandy, the allies are able to break out in August.

The Atlantic Wall is crushed and ahead, the slow march to Berlin.

- We had to come on the beach at the time when we could go with the vehicles.

We've never seen so much stuff in our life.

The stream of vehicles bumper to bumper to bumper to bumper, go, go, go.

And that is totally demoralizing to the Germans obviously.

Our POWs, they always stood on the barbed wire that was surrounding their section.

And all the did was look.

I wanted to stand on top of my jeep and shout hooray.

(gunfire blasting) - [Narrator] As the war moves across Europe, soldiers are deployed by the tens of thousands.

Among them are interrogator teams sent to frontline units to aid in the allied advance.

- Any combat commander will tell you that his success is determined in some degree not only by his manpower, not only by his weapons, but what he knows about the enemy intentions, the enemy defenses, in effect, the intelligence function of war.

A German interrogator was better equipped to extract this kind of information.

- [Male Speaker] Sergeant, will you ask this man how much military training he's had?

(speaking German) - I was frightening some people by being able to tell them, prisoners, who their commanding officer is and how many guns they have left in this particular company and why they hated their superior, et cetera, et cetera.

And they were quite astonished that somebody would know to have this information and then sort of made them speechless.

- I had a school teacher who came in and I talked to him and he said (mumbles), of course, may I inquire where you learned to speak such good German?

And I told him I learned how to speak German in Germany and I learned how to interrogate prisoners while I was in Dachau.

When he realized I was a former inmate of Dachau, he got so scared, he lost control over his bowels.

- I usually show a picture which is well known to many people, particularly refugees, of a little boy who has his hands up because the Germans stand around him with carbines.

And I say you all know this picture and they always tell me they do.

And then I say you don't know this picture.

And that one is not a little boy but it is Moritz Levy.

And these are, these are not little boys, they are German soldiers.

- So I had a rifle on him and I said, "All right, let's start singing."

And there was a song in wartime Germany called (speaking German).

So I had these German prisoners of war marching up and down.

(singing in German) Zeig Heil!

(In German) It's all over!

So, that was my revenge with these guys.

- To be able to do this to your enemy, to conquer him, it's a tremendous feeling.

You also have to feel sorry about that all this had to happen.

Like all wars, it's crazy.

- There came a terrible patrol, awful.

100% casualties and I was one.

I don't really know exactly what happened but I was thrown forward and I felt something on my back.

No real pain, but I couldn't breathe properly.

And I just remember calling out, "I am hit."

I was in a pool of blood and I passed out.

And I spent seven months in the hospital.

That was the end of my war.

(explosion blasting) - I had a deep appreciation for the sacrifices of the GIs from remote areas in this country who had very little contact with anything European had made in the name of defeating this tremendous evil.

- [Narrator] Though the allies took the first German town Aachen on October 21st 1944, seven months of fierce fighting still lay ahead.

- Being part of this enormous undertaking, this enormous machine, and you're just like a little wheel in this, your convoy, your ambulance as it moves forward, it's a tremendous feeling.

I never, never doubted that even in the worst time of retreat that the British would not win this.

(deliberative piano music) - I felt exactly as Churchill described it in his book, that when he took a boat across the Rhine on the day of the Rhine crossing, and he was there, he took the occasion to pee into the Rhine.

(laughing) He says that now I was convinced that nothing could go wrong anymore and the war would be over very soon.

And I had the same feeling watching it.

- It was an odd feeling to be back on German soil but at the same time gratifying to see that I was now with the American forces and we were the ones in power.

At the same time, I was mindful of the great losses that we personally had sustained.

And when I came back, nothing was the same as it once had been and it was a heavy price to pay.

- I had a unique experience in Solingen where we were told that a German general was hiding out.

So we surrounded the house and got into the place and there was this middle aged guy and I started questioning him and he said, "Yeah."

(speaking German) So without undue delay, I told him (speaking German).

Pointed my rifle at the son of a bitch and he turned white.

Then I told him (speaking German), and this man was in an absolute state of terror.

He couldn't believe that one little Yid should get him out of five million American GIs.

- We started marching and suddenly, I hear one of the prisoners saying "Hans?"

I said, "Who was this?

"Who's talking?"

So he said, "It's me.

"Don't you know me anymore, Lorch?"

I said, "Where should I know you from?"

He says, "We used to go to school together."

I said, "Where?"

He says, "In Dieberg."

I said, "Where did you live?"

He said, "Theobauld Street."

And I knew immediately who he was.

(deliberative music) (explosions blasting) - We took Aachen.

And I don't know how I got it in my mind, I wanted to go to a Jewish cemetery.

I found it and it made an incredible impression on me.

You know, that was once my home all shot to hell.

No great heroes there.

And, It made me more and more proud to do what I was doing.

I didn't have rage, I didn't have rage.

I just said that they stole my country away from me and everything had gone to hell and I knew you can't let these people run the world, that's for damn sure.

And it was worth everything.

- We were in the SAAR basin, three or four guys came up.

They were slave laborers.

They were nothing but skeletons.

And I said this is terrible what they did to you.

"That's nothing," he said, "You should see what they've done to the Jews."

- [Narrator] The taste of victory in the spring of 1945 now realized by the conquering allied troops would be eclipsed by the shock and horror of the concentration camps and slave labor camps, expressly set up to ensure the systematic murder of their prisoners.

- I believe the 2nd or 3rd of May, we came across a concentration camp by the name of Woebbelin.

This concentration camp was only three miles from the town and no one knew anything about it.

The typical excuse, "we didn't know."

The bodies that we found were buried in the town square.

I was certainly emotionally very distraught.

There's always a possibility you can see my mother and sister meaning you find the bodies among the dead or the half dead.

- I had gone to Europe fighting the Nazis with hatred in my heart for all they had inflicted so gratuitously on Jews and on the world and had expected to find nothing but that devastation and have to witness the results of what they had done to my people.

All that was true, of course.

But for me personally, it was the key to my own future.

Once we reached the border between Germany and Czechoslovakia, I happened to have what I call my rendezvous with destiny.

We came across a group of young Jewish women from Poland and Hungary who had been abandoned by their SS guards in the town whose surrender we were taking just days before the end of the war.

- Suddenly, I saw a strange looking car coming down a gentle hill.

On its hood was the white star of the American Army.

The hood was rather splattered with mud but it was the brightest star I've ever seen in my life.

- I walked into the place where the SS had locked them up in a factory.

I met a young woman who was standing at the entrance and who left quite an impression on me.

- I weighed 68 pounds.

My hair was gray.

I was in rags.

I didn't have a bath in three years.

And he was this very handsome sunbrowned young American officer.

He looked to me like a young god.

Of course, I felt I was well indoctrinated to tell him immediately that we were Jewish.

I said it with some fear and trepidation and he didn't answer me.

He was wearing dark glasses and I didn't know what his expression was like.

And suddenly, his own voice betrayed his emotion, and he said, "So am I."

It was the most incredible moment of my life to be liberated not only by an American but by a fellow Jew.

- The fact of the matter was that she was at the end of her strength and collapsed once our medics took them all to the field hospital.

- I was in the hospital.

I think I've lost consciousness for quite some time.

Nobody expected that I would recover and he came to see me all the time.

I was in an upper bunk and he used to stand for hours talking to me.

- Out of that developed a friendship with a person of rare caliber.

She impressed me by what she said at the time and by what she wrote, an ode of thanks to the troops of the American Army who liberated them at a time when she was hovering between life and death.

And so our friendship developed and it led to our engagement later in the summer of '45 and our marriage a year later in Paris.

- [Narrator] As the allied armies pour into occupied Germany, command selects native German speakers, many of them former Jewish refugees, to serve as interpreters.

These interpreters will assist the highest ranking allied officers as they demand the unconditional surrender of Hitler's remaining generals.

- It was certainly the most momentous moment in my life helping dissolve the supreme command of the Luftwaffe.

Being saluted by Grand Admiral Donitz and knowing that they were defeated, totally defeated.

- There was seven generals and the whole big brass of the American Army.

And on the other side was General von Fritsch, Field Marshall Kesselring who had been the commander in chief of all these Southern German armies, and I was the official interpreter.

They were long negotiations.

Finally, I said to General von Fritsch, (speaking German), meaning unconditional surrender, and this man could hardly bring it out of him.

He finally sputtered out (speaking German) and it was an indescribable feeling because here's this German refugee who wouldn't even have dared to pick up after the general eight years earlier in 1939 or '37.

And for eight years later, I can ask this from the German general.

(regal fanfare) (people cheering) - [News Announcer] Throughout the world, throngs of people hail the end of the war in Europe.

It is five years and more since Hitler marched into Poland, years full of suffering, and death, and sacrifice.

Now, the war against Germany is won.

- The war finished and I immediately put in to be involved in the denazification of my hometown.

I wanted to do that so badly.

They kicked the **** out of me so much.

You just can't imagine.

And I got the transfer.

- The German Jewish veteran who finds himself back in Germany towards the end of the war or at the end of the war has a fingertip feeling for the country.

He knows the German psyche, he knows the German culture, he knows the German geography, and he would be far more valuable in the occupation and in the military government than someone who just had a glancing knowledge of Germany and that would not be able to draw from the Germans exactly how they behaved, how they were liable to react, knew what buttons in effect to push in German society.

- Naturally, people come to you who knew you before and they want this or that and I did nothing.

How can these people have the temerity to face me and say these things to me when they knew what they themselves have done to me?

You know what they called me jokingly, the (speaking German), the uncrowned king.

That was it.

No, because what I said went in their town.

- I obviously having lost many members of my family to the Nazis had considerable animosity towards them.

But even with this, arresting people is no fun, to see crying wives and children.

It's not anything that gave me any great satisfaction.

- Revenge is something that doesn't send me very far.

- There was sort of a rumor chain in Europe towards the end of the war that in Terezin, in the camp, there were some survivors, and that Manfred's parents might be among them.

- As far as we were concerned, the war was over on May 7th.

So I persuaded my unit to let me go, give me a jeep and a driver.

We would go and find my parents.

There was a camp just outside Prague behind heavy barbed wire with the Russian guards (mumbles) outside.

Drove up the Russian guard and I told him what I wanted and I went over into the camp.

A massive number of people there and a lot of the people were too weak to get out of the way.

I went up to the central register and there was a girl working there.

She looked through the list and she found the house where my parents were supposed to live.

We took this girl on our jeep and she directed us to the house and they were living on the second floor.

And I went upstairs.

I just stood and it was about half dark there.

There were no lights inside there.

And after maybe a minute or maybe less, there my parents came out.

Of course, they were in an unbelievable state.

My father was hardly recognizable.

He was so decimated.

And they were totally swept up, crying.

They could hardly speak.

And then, of course, downstairs on the street, a lot of people crowded around.

They were singing.

We spent the evening and the night in that fashion.

- And I remember my father when he came out of the concentration camp weighed 68 pounds.

And when he came here, he was still very undernourished.

But between his wife, and his children, and the love that he found, he finally came back to life.

And I said to him one night, I says, "You know, papa, "your son, that little German refugee boy "became a staff sergeant in the war.

"If the war had lasted eight more days, "your son would have been a second lieutenant "in the American Army.

"Can you imagine that?"

And he looked at me and he says, "Son, if the war had lasted eight more days, "my son, the second lieutenant of the American Army "wouldn't have had a father."

- Jewish courage in the 20th century has taken many forms.

So we not only have the image of the quivering Jew, but the image of the Jew who responds to oppression with defiance and puts his life at risk in order to win war.

When these soldiers came from being refugees and then entered the army and withstood the travails of combat, and re-entered Germany as conquerors, having defeating the most menacing society in the history of humanity, that was a triumph of courage.

- The thing that struck me was that the Jews can fight back.

It's not just all ghetto, and gas chambers, and all the tragedy.

- [Interviewer] Fritz, what do you want people to remember about this?

- Never let a fanatic get ahold of your country.

I think that's the big lesson.

(waves crashing) (people chattering) - This Hitler part and even the war is a small, small part of German history.

Many of my Jewish friends do not understand that and they cannot make peace with it, but I have made peace with that.

- The style of town where we're in now where I lived was naturally 100% German.

This section now is practically 80% not German people.

If you see the people in my background, they're not German.

Which to me is very funny 'cause when Hitler was in power, he stressed and stressed (speaking German) means race clean.

In other words, a pure race.

And now when I see that pure race, how they now have taken in all these people who are not their race, in a way, it does me good.

Let them live a little.

(people chattering) - I did not go back to my hometown and I did not go back to it when that town invited me some 16 years ago to come back for a reunion.

I sent them a formal letter in which I declined.

In fact, I quoted their poet Goethe that too many shadows would assail me if I were to go back there.

I could simply not see myself sitting down with people about whose past I would have to wonder.

(deliberative piano music) - I really think I tried very hard to what I consider fulfilling a debt.

This is you as a born American cannot possibly truly appreciate how wonderful this country is.

I can't say that enough.

I'm sorry.

I'm just a flag waver.

Sorry.

(deliberative piano music) - I feel I have a mission and that mission is to say A, that the Holocaust took place, and B, that all Jews didn't go like lambs to the slaughter.

My first talk was at the Austrian Embassy.

They were waiting to introduce me and my then five year old granddaughter Hannah was looking around and saw 300 people in the audience which was intimidating to her.

She came up to me and said, "Grandpa, are you scared?"

And I said, "Hannah, I'm a commando soldier.

"I'm not scared of anything."

And then I thought you mustn't tell a kid in Washington nowadays not to be scared of anything that's wrong.

So having been trained to improvise, I said, "Hannah, if there were a reason to be scared, "that would be different."

And I thought well, that'll put her at rest and I had underrated her because she said, "What is a reason, grandpa?"

So that was a little more difficult, but having been trained to improvise, I said, "Hannah, "if I heard that a lion had escaped from the zoo, "and if I heard the lion were in this building now, "then I would be scared."

And I thought well now I've really settled it.

Not so.

Hannah said, "But grandpa, a lion has escaped."

So I said, "In that case, I'm scared.

"Let's get out of here."

Being a good kid, she felt sorry for me now and she said, "But grandpa, I'm not quite sure it's in this building."

(deliberative piano music) ♪♪ (deliberative orchestral music)