Childhood in the United States

My rather idyllic childhood in Germany was disrupted by Adolf Hitler. Sometime early in January, 1933, my parents went to a neighbors’ house several doors away to listen to a campaign radio speech by Hitler. We didn’t have a radio in the house, but those neighbors did. Hitler was a candidate for election as Chancellor, and even though this particular talk was somewhat subdued because of a bad cold he had at the time, my parents were sufficiently concerned by the tone and message of his campaign speech that they decided on the way home from their neighbors’ house to leave Germany the next day for Czechoslovakia to wait until this craziness was over; my father’s father had owned some property in Prague.