Sophia Howard, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Becky B. Lloyd, May 2, 2002: Saving the legacy tape no. 452

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H nd put th ir hykikdth J ut nd th th li th . I 1 t n r bik to work alway b u In lland u fr m n it t an th r .It n t all that far. o anyway o I work d and I wa go1n t hom and th r tru soldier that was going to go to the front and they w re going to go past tr cht. th asked me if I wanted to go in the truck put my bike in the truck and they would drop m 1n Utrecht. You know, they would drop me off. But they never did. They went all the way to th front (laughs). It was awful. And it sounds like a real crazy story and I still remember it so good. So anyway they came there and the soldiers got out of the truck and right away you know how there's Germans standing at attention. And the officer came, it was the high ranking one, and the one guy, he put his rifle down and I don t know if he didn't have the _[unclear]_-shocked! Oh, and I have never heard such yelling as that guy, that officer, yelling. Then all of a sudden, he saw me-l was standing kind of behind-and (laughs) it was terrible, really. "What are you doing?" I'm telling it in- 'What are you doing here?" He saw my bike and he took my bike out of the truck and he took that bike and put me on the bike. "Raus!" he said. That means, "Get!" (laughs). And there I was in another city and in the meantime, it started raining real hard. BEC: Oh, my gosh. SOP: Yeah, and I pedaled all the way to Utrecht and I think it was an hour-and-a-half and drenching rain. I will never forget that. BEC: I bet that was scary wasn't it? SOP: It was. BEC: Did they just forget or were they playing a trick on you? SOP: Yeah, they just kind of being mean in a way. One guy took me under his arm-because I was really afraid. I thought they were going to rape me or something like that. So one guy was 24