Mary tells the story of growing up in Vienna to Austrian parents surrounded by a large extended family including her mother's sisters and both sets of grandparents. She recalls seeing Hitler in person in a parade with her nanny, and tells how the SS came looking for her father at his office, and he cleverly avoided being arrested. At that point, Mary and her parents were forced to leave Austria, and did so legally as they were lucky to have recently acquired passports. Mary then recounts the sequence of events by which she and her parents were able to cross the border into Italy without any money, and without her grandparents and eventually ended up in Switzerland, where they lived until 1948 when their American visa number finally came through. Many members of Mary's extended family perished as they left Vienna to go to France and Belgium from where they were deported. She and her parents came to New York city where Mary studied English and qualified to get into went to Hunter College. She married Gerald Salton, a fellow refugee who came to Cornell, and she raised two children in Ithaca.
