This was told to me afterwards. When one morning at five o'clock the Gestapo woke our neighbors next door, jumped over the wall and broke into our house and took my father and threw him into the truck. They wanted to take my mother, but she wouldn't go because she told the Gestapo officer, "You can kill me here, but I can't leave my daughter."
And they pulled the blanket off and saw that my sister was in a cast from here all the way down, and they told my mother that they would be back for her. You know that they came back, and by some miracle my mother had made one last phone call to a Catholic hospital, and they took my sister. And that's how my sister was saved.
My brother went to a Christian home for boys, and he stayed there.
And once my sister was gone, my mother went to hide in a pre-arranged location, which was a nursing home.
And the reason that my mother was okay, as John said, there was a stereotype. Jews had dark hair, hook noses--that was what they said we looked like. My mother was blonde, blue-eyed. She didn't fit the picture, so she was okay, you see. She was just a person working in the nursing home. No one knew that she was Jewish because she didn't fit the quote-unquote stereotype of what a Jew looks like.
