Gordon Sondland Quotes

I won't start quite at the beginning... but the emigration of my parents from Nazi Germany and their new life in the U.S.A. A one sentence summary of these events is that after some years of trouble and considerable hard work, my parents established a satisfactory if not comfortable life for themselves and their two children.

My great-grandfather came here as a refugee from the pogrom in Ukraine.

At age 14, my paternal grandfather fled Poland to escape the pogroms that killed tens of thousands of European Jews. He worked full-time for a cobbler in Boston, making his way to California and eventually starting his own business in Taft - the Goldman Oil Supply Company.

My grandfather was facing this terror, my parents, myself.

My grandparents got out of Poland right before the Holocaust and came here, and the only thing that mattered was surviving.

People traverse the dangerous journey to the US because of deep fear. They are often escaping brutality, even life-or-death situations.

My Aunt Erna was smuggled out of Nazi Germany in 1939, alive, in a coffin with a spider plant at her feet. When I moved to Los Angeles from New York City in 1974 for 'Happy Days,' I took a cutting with me.

My grandmother - my mother's mother - was a German Jewish refugee, an only child who came here from Berlin in 1936 at the age of 17.

My parents sent me to Switzerland on a Kindertransport.

My grandfather arrived in Houston in 1942 as a refugee from Nazi Germany. He had lost everything - his profession, his language, his money - but the city welcomed him, as it has hundreds of thousands of immigrants over the years.

If not for the Kindertransport, I would not be here today.

We cannot calculate the numbers of people who left, fled or were fished out of Europe just ahead of the Holocaust.

My novella, 'The Lucky One,' is inspired in part by my dad and also by a Holocaust survivor I interviewed for the Steven Spielberg Survivors of the Shoah Foundation.

As I was growing up, you know, I'm a white Jewish American born to Holocaust parents. My father fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and my mother's family had fled the czars of Russia before that.

So an autobiography about death should include, in my case, an account of European Jewry and of Russian and Jewish events - pogroms and flights and murders and the revolution that drove my mother to come here.

My mother's family didn't speak much about Europe: My mother was born in 1935, and her new-world parents were the sort who didn't want to worry their children about the war.

My parents came to this country after World War II, Jews from Czechoslovakia who had survived Auschwitz and Dachau. They settled with my sister in rural Ohio in the 1950s, where my dad became the town doctor and I was born.

I read a lot of history. The passive Jews in Germany didn't survive. The smart ones got out.

My feeling is that if all Catholics or Reformed Christians had been deported to Germany, the Dutch government in London would have instructed the population in the occupied Netherlands to help them.

Migrants are essentially escaping from countries with dysfunctional social models.

Had my grandparents not emigrated when they did, I might have been born Jewish in Eastern Europe during World War II, or I might not have been born at all. Instead, I was born in 1942 in New York City.

I have this dream where I get chased through a park by Nazis in the Second World War. They finally catch up to me in an apartment somewhere, but I don't know what happens next.

While migration is inevitable, the fact remains that most people leave their homes to escape violence and the certain persecution that comes from it.

I grew up learning firsthand what it was like to flee communism and oppression.

My parents are Vietnamese refugees; they left Vietnam after the war. They were part of the boat people, and they ended up in a refugee camp in Thailand after being on the water for three days, and I was born at that refugee camp in Thailand.