"In January of 1933, my family was living well in Berlin, the capital of Germany. My mother was forty years old, my father thirty-nine, my brother Hermann was eighteen, and I was four. Jews constituted 4 percent of the city’s 4.2 million people and less than 1 percent of the 66 million in the country. My parents had lived and worked in Berlin since 1919. Father rented and managed under his German first name the Siegmund Pressman Herren Kleider Fabrik, a men's clothing store and factory. It was located at 135 Skalitzer Strasse, the former location of the Dresdner Bank. My father manufactured men's clothing in back rooms for sale in the store. My mother and Hermann helped out in the store. In addition, my parents had recently bought a building consisting of forty apartments and four stores at 26 Koepenicker Strasse as an investment. We lived in a rented apartment at another address, 88-99 Kottbusser Damm, where full-time maids did the housework."

-from the memoirs of Sonia Pressman Fuentes, Eat First--You Don't Know What They'll Give You: The Adventures of an Immigrant Family and Their Feminist Daughter.