If I had not been born a Jew, I might have become a Nazi. I was born in Germany.
My parents, Oscar and Selma Gompertz, and I lived through Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, November 9, 1938. It was the dress rehearsal for the Holocaust that followed. We fled to America the following year, when I was 11 years old, and settled in Los Angeles, California.
In 1987, I returned to my hometown, Krefeld, in the Rhineland, at the invitation of the city. I was asked back the following year to deliver a 45-minute keynote speech in German on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht.
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