They said if I stayed in the orphanage for another month or so, I basically would not have been able to be alive.
Growing up in a very poor orphanage in Ukraine, there wasn't much food.
My education was paid for by the RAF Benevolent Fund, so a charity school, run like an orphanage, with uniforms and beatings. It was tough, but it got me to Cambridge - like being a chrysalis suddenly becoming a butterfly.
As a youngster in the little orphanage home in New Orleans, I was the bugler of the institution. When I got to be around 13 or 14 years old, they took me off the bugle and put me in the little brass band.
My mother was a great typist. She said she loved to type because it gave her time to think. She was a secretary for an insurance company. She was a poor girl; she'd grown up in an orphanage, and she went to a business college - and then worked to put her brothers through school.
Oliver Twist has asked for more!
It was honestly like 'Annie.' One day I was alone in a cold, dark Eastern European orphanage, and then the next day I was in an enchanted, mystical land known as Walmart.
I grew up in different orphanages in Israel, and if they gave me a pair of shoes, a shirt, and pair of pants every year, I was lucky. The rest was handouts, leftover clothes. So I appreciated clothes because I only had one new shirt each year.
At twelve I looked like a girl of seventeen. My body was developed and shapely. I still wore the blue dress and the blouse the orphanage provided. They made me look like an overgrown lummox.
