Please click on images at left to hear audio excerpts.
"I was awakened the morning of December 7. I can remember the flag going up at 8 o'clock. And they always played reveille, you know. And just as it did, a .50-caliber machine gun bullet went over my head into the wall opposite my bed, and it woke me up. And I looked out the window, and I saw all these planes with the rising sun on them. And they were flying so low. They were flying - we had palm trees near the hedge lining the road to the gate, and I looked, and I thought - oh, we're having maneuvers. This is just a realistic - I didn't even think that it was the Japanese. So I climbed out my window, and I sat on the roof of the house because it was right outside my window and just sat there and was watching. And they were machine gunning all along the road, and the phone rang, and my mother was on the phone. She had gone next door to have coffee with her neighbor, and she said, she said to me 'For God's sake stay in the house. It's the Japanese'. So I got in the house, and I got dressed. And
downstairs was our little Japanese maid, and she said 'Oh, I wish I was Irish; I wish I was Irish'." Lydia Diane Smith-Grant, 14-year old civilian eyewitness of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
"Do you know how they found out that you were a Jew? The Jewish people were circumcised in Poland - all over Europe. The Jewish people had to go through a ritual when you were born. You went through a ritual, and you had to go through circumcision. And you were made - the Jewish family made a little party. And the Germans got a feel of that. And when they found out, they asked you in the middle of the street to pull down your pants. They were so brutal, so ignorant, so demanding. And they had such dispositions of hate. Their tactics made them lose the War. The way they approached people. They were so arrogant. And they had such a pompous disposition about themselves. They could murder you in the middle of the street and not even blink an eye. You were nothing to them. And the Jewish people took a toll - took a toll." Stephen Ross, Holocaust Survivor.
