1933-39: German forces occupied Austria in March 1938. Anti-Jewish measures were quickly imposed. My father was prohibited from doing business and his store was seized. He left for America in early 1939 with the intention of having my mother and me join him there. But in the interim, the situation for Jews worsened and my mother and I were forced to flee to Belgium to escape deportation. I was 2 years old.

1940-44: My mother gave me to a man from the "underground." It was because I was Jewish, he said. I was taken to some nuns who renamed me Suzanne LeDent. At the convent's school I played only rarely with the other children, because they might have asked me too many questions. I learned to pray using a string of beads called a rosary, and won medals for memorizing Catholic prayers. In 1943, when the Germans learned the nuns had been hiding Jews, I was moved first to a family and then to a Protestant reform school near Brussels.

After the war, Renee was reunited with her mother. Five years later they emigrated to the United States.

1933-39: In the years before I was born, my father owned an iron and coal factory. The Germans occupied Wierzbnik on September 5, 1939. While some Jews fled, most, including my parents, remained.

1940-44: The Nazis established a ghetto in May 1940. I was born there eight months later. In 1942 my father, learning the ghetto was to be emptied, arranged for me to be hidden in a Catholic convent in Cracow. Perhaps because the convent was bombed, I was put out on the street--I was 3. A woman picked me up and took me to an attic above a candy store. It was dark and I was alone. The only person I ever saw was this woman who fed me and taught me to make the sign of the cross. I didn't know my own name or why I was in an attic.

Henry was discovered by a Jewish social worker and taken to Israel. He was reunited with his father eight years later, and settled in Ecuador. In 1980 he moved to the United States.

1933-39: When I was growing up, the Nazi party was in power. Many Jews left Germany-- Grandmother Lang and one of my uncles sailed for America. But father didn't want to leave his business. He opened a new store in Mannheim, where we moved. On November 10, 1938, the Nazis rampaged, wrecking Jewish stores and arresting Jews [Kristallnacht, The Night of Broken Glass]. They padlocked my father's store and took him to the Dachau concentration camp. He was released in 1939.

1940-44: When I was 6 years old, my family was sent to a detention camp in France. An aid society managed to get me out and I was hidden with a French farm family--the Didiers. For safety, I was taught to be a "Catholic." When my classmates made their first communion, I wanted to also because everyone wore such a pretty white dress. But Madame Didier said no. She didn't say I was Jewish, just that I should "wait for my parents so they could be there." How I cried. After all, I no longer realized that I was Jewish.

In 1946 Freya was reunited with her father. She learned that days after she had been taken from the camp, her mother had been sent to Auschwitz, where she perished.

Describes her decision, while posing as a Polish Catholic, to work on a farm in Germany