Marthe Cohn was born in April 1920 in Metz, Lorraine, France. Life was a little different from the rest of France as this area had been annexed by the Germans from 1917 to 11 November 1918 at the end of World War 1. Learning French was against the law, so her parents spoke Hochdeutsch, real German. She always spoke German with her parents. Cohn and her siblings only spoke French to each other, never German. They were an Orthodox Jewish family and very religious. She revolted when she was 12 because she wanted to learn the Torah and learn Hebrew. Her mother told her that was only for the boys. After that she refused to pray in Hebrew. They lived very far from the old Jewish neighborhood in Metz. Their neighbors were mostly Christian. They did attend the lycée [Annotator's Note: secondary school in France, funded by the government] which gave the best education they could get. Her parents worked hard for this to happen. Cohn only wanted to read books instead of any other studies and therefore did poorly in school.

Growing up in Metz, France, Marthe Cohn experienced some anti-Semitism. When she was six, she and her siblings were at the synagogue in a bad neighborhood with their father. A group of young boys started yelling "sale juif", which is French for "dirty Jew". It was the first time this had happened, and it was very difficult for her to understand because she was French like them. Her father chased these kids with his belt. She was shopping for eggs when she was ten and a young girl her age started calling her a dirty Jew. The girl kept repeating it, so Cohn broke the eggs on her head. She told her mother what she had done, and her mother praised her for standing up for herself.

Marthe Cohn was a Jewish citizen of Metz, France. French Colonel La Rocque [Annotator's Note: François de La Rocque; leader of the Parti Social Français, from 1936 to 1940] in Paris, started a revolution with troops dressed similar to the Nazis. The French leftists prevented him from taking over the government. [Annotator's Note: La Rocque had taken over the Interior Ministry following riots on 6 February 1934 but stopped short of trying to overthrow the Republic of France.] Marshal Pétain [Annotator's Note: French Army General Henri Philippe Benoni Omer Joseph Pétain] collaborated 100 percent with the Nazis. La Rocque did not like that and became part of the resistance and was arrested and sent to a concentration camp where he died. [Annotator's Note: La Rocque was arrested by German police on 9 March 1943 and deported to Itter Castle, Austria. He was interned in a hospital in Innsbruck, Austria in March 1945, freed by American soldiers on 8 May 1945, put under house arrest in France on 9 May 1945 and died on 28 April 1946.] Life is not black and white. Cohn read the newspaper since she was six and knew it all extremely well. When Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] came to power it was extremely frightening. The news was very detailed. After Kristallnacht in 1938 [Annotator’s Note: Night of Broken Glass; November Pogrom on 9 and 10 November 1938], a lot of Germans fled to France and several families stayed with them at various points. They never thought the Germans would overcome the French Army and never imagined that what was happening in Germany would happen to them. They just were not prepared for the blitzkrieg [Annotator's Note: method of warfare of using short, fast, powerful attacks to dislocate defenders and then encircle and annihilate them]. These families were still extremely German and were very attached to the country, despite being anti-Hitler.

The day after Kristallnacht [Annotator's Note: 11 November 1938], Marthe Cohn's oldest brother and sister went to Dusseldorf, Germany to get two cousins out at the request of their aunt who was pregnant with her third child. The Nazis had come to their relative's house and destroyed everything. Because she was pregnant, the Nazis did not take her husband who was able to escape to Holland. Their aunt was then hidden by her German housekeeper until she delivered her baby. Afterwards, she escaped to Holland as well. The two cousins, ages three and two, came to stay with the Cohns. Both cousins survived the war and went to Israel and one has 12 grandchildren and one was killed during the Six Day War [Annotator's Note: also known as June War, 1967 Arab-Israeli War, or Third Arab-Israeli War, 5 to 10 June 1967]. Despite all of this, Cohn and her family felt very secure in France but felt terrible for the Germans. Cohn was 18 years old and she learned how important it is to help other people. They never thought of leaving but they were afraid there would be a war. They knew Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] was building a large army and nobody was doing anything to stop him. She could not believe how the German Jews were being treated. There were a lot of pariahs to the Germans, but the Jews were talked about by Hitler constantly and they heard it all.

Marthe Cohn left school and became a modiste, or hat maker, with her sister in the center of Metz, France. Her sister had an elegant, successful salon there. She was very close to her sister and business was very good. In August 1939, rumors of war coming to France began. The French prefecture [Annotator's Note: Ministry of the Interior department in France; administrative office for each region] asked them to move to Poitiers, France. There had been a program started after World War 1 that assigned cities east of Paris to cities of west of Paris for residents to evacuate to in case of war. She and her family left. Her two brothers were in the French Army. The oldest was at the Maginot Line [Annotator's Note: concrete fortifications, obstacles, and weapons installations built by France in 1930s and named after French Minister of War André Maginot] and the younger was in Tunisia.

Marthe Cohn and her family arrived in Poitiers, France to stay with her father's brother. They had been asked to move there from Metz, France in advance of war with Germany. They brought only what they carried, and they totaled nine people: her grandmother, her parents, her sisters, and her cousin. They had taken a train to Paris first and then to Poitiers. She was 19 and considered it an adventure. They did not consider themselves to be fleeing and they thought they would be returning home. The war started ten days later. Poitiers is a medieval city and many of the streets have not changed. Because they were so religious, they were not allowed to go into the churches, but she did so anyway. Their maid in Metz had been Protestant and would take her to her church for Christmas which her mother did allow. Her grandfather was a rabbi and he was extremely tolerant of other religions. Cohn heard of the war starting over the radio and in the newspapers. It was a huge announcement. She and her family were terrified and worried about her brothers who were in the French forces.

While in Poitiers, France, Marthe Cohn's family started a business just before the war started. It was a dry goods store wholesaler that she and her sister ran. Germany invaded France June 1940. Nothing had really happened between August 1939 and May 1940. The news was constant and extremely bad though. The French where not prepared for a blitzkrieg [Annotator's Note: method of warfare of using short, fast, powerful attacks to dislocate defenders and then encircle and annihilate them] and they lost. Poitiers was in the occupied section of conquered France. The line between unoccupied and occupied territory had very little demarcation so there were a lot of German patrols. Cohn was young and hoped for the best. There was nowhere to go to if they left. They did not even think of going into non-occupied France. Her brother Fred was caught by the Germans at the Maginot Line [Annotator's Note: concrete fortifications, obstacles, and weapons installations built by France in 1930s and named after French Minister of War André Maginot] and was taken to Strasbourg, France. He was fluent in German but did not let them know. He escaped one night and had prepared to do so. He was able to reach Nancy, France where he had a clothing store. He called all of his customers when he arrived and had them come buy everything. That money got their family through the war financially. He was newly married at the time to a woman he met on the day he escaped from the Germans. Cohn had invited this woman to dinner when her brother showed up too. The family had had no idea he had been captured or that he had escaped.

Marthe Cohn and her family were living in the center of the Poitiers, France in a rented house after they left Metz, Germany. There were a lot of Jewish families now that the Metz residents had been assigned there by the French prefecture [Annotator's Note: Ministry of the Interior department in France; administrative office for each region] before the German invasion. The residents of Poitiers were extremely helpful and nice to the community. Cohn says that many risked their lives to save the Jews. If the Germans had known of the help, they would have been killed. Hundreds of people helped them throughout France. On 17 June 1942, her sister Stephanie was arrested by SiPo [Annotator's Note: Sicherheitspolizei, or Security Police, was the state political and criminal investigative agency in Nazi era]. SiPo had been created by a decree signed by Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] in March 1942. In 1942 things changed in France because Petain [Annotator's Note: French Army General Henri Philippe Benoni Omer Joseph Pétain, also known as Philippe Pétain, Marshal Pétain, or The Old Marshal was Chief of State of Vichy France from 1940 to 1944] was collaborating 100 percent with the Germans. The French resistance began to mobilize. Her sister was arrested not only because she was Jewish but because she, along with Cohn, had helped hundreds cross from occupied to unoccupied France. They went through Noël Degout's land which lay partially in both sectors. [Annotator's Note: Noël Degout was a French farmer who helped people cross into unoccupied France across his land.] He saved thousands of lives this way and received a Just Among the Nations title due to a book Cohn wrote later in life. She had made a request of Just Among the Nations for a friend, Odile de Morin, who was a classmate who saved her family the night they were going to cross themselves. Cohn and her sister helped people cross every day. Many, but not all, were Jews. She never knew who gave these people their address. If you helped one person, the news traveled, and you became known for it. One of the people they helped had forgotten his tobacco vouchers and he wrote for them. Her sister signed her real name to a note to Mr. Degout and the Germans found her name on a list of the children who had been registered in 1940. Her sister was interrogated by SiPo. Mr. Degout had no evidence against him, but was being watched by the police. Her sister gave no information even when her father was arrested and was taken in as well. Her sister remained in prison for a month, including her 21st birthday, 10 July 1942. She was transferred to Camp de la Route de Limoges south of Poitiers. She gave medical attention to the children in the camp, which contained only foreign Jews. French Jews had not started to be arrested at that time. Cohn and her family arranged for her to escape and two French guards offered to help. Her sister refused because the children needed her. Cohn tried to convince her to escape anyway, but her sister reminded her that if she escaped, the whole family would be arrested. Walking home from that conversation, Cohn realized the whole family needed to get to the unoccupied territory. They made it with great difficulty.

Marthe Cohn decided she and her family needed to leave Poitiers, France and cross into unoccupied territory after a conversation with her sister who had been arrested by the secret police. Her fiancée, who was not Jewish, helped them prepare for their departure. There were seven people in total. Cohn was in a nursing school of the French Red Cross at this time. The German military police had made her leave her previous job as a translator at city hall. She and her family could not use the previous land they had helped others cross since her sister was arrested there. They could not take anything other than what they could carry. Many of their friends kept their belongings safe for them until after the war. One friend had a cousin who was a priest in Saint-Secondin, France near the border between the two zones. The night before they left, one of her classmates, Odile de Morin, came to tell her that she had heard rumors that the French Jews were to be arrested and insisted that they go to her house. They stayed there all night and left in the morning. They had two bicycles. Some of them took a bus. They were to meet at a church in Saint-Secondin. The priest there said he would help because it was a Christian duty, but he also said he did not trust Jews because Judas was a Jew who had betrayed Jesus. This angered Cohn and she told him that she was not responsible for what happened 2,000 years ago. She also reminded him that Jesus was Jewish. He helped them anyway. Part of her family left, but Cohn stayed in the church waiting for her mother and grandmother. A friend of Cohn's came to the church and told her some children had just been arrested. Cohn cried and prayed all day. She did not know what to do, as she was only 22. She was embroidering the priest's clothes when her mother and her 80-year-old grandmother finally arrived. Odile had helped the two to cross the center of town and had removed the yellow stars [Annotator's Note: Jewish badges, Judenstern, worn on the clothes of Jews in Nazi Germany] from their clothes.

Part of Martha Cohn's family successfully crossed from occupied France into unoccupied France from Saint-Secondin, France in August 1942. Cohn had stayed behind waiting for her mother and grandmother. Once they arrived at the church, Cohn had to take her grandmother on a bicycle. This meant they could not go through fields and would have to take the more dangerous route by road. They walked about 500 yards to the demarcation line. There were farms along the route that only had old men, women, and children. Large posters everywhere offered 25,000 francs for anyone turning over a Jew. As they approached the farms, some people who were outside started praying for them. Cohn felt so wrong for having been worried that they would denounce them for the reward. They reached the other side and were reunited with the other members of her family. Her sister who was in prison was not able to escape and join them. The sister was later transferred to Drancy [Annotator's Note: Drancy internment camp, Drancy, France, 22 June 1942 to 31 July 1944] and then to Pithiviers [Annotator's Note: Pithiviers internment camp, Pithiviers, France] camps. She was deported on Yom Kippur 21 September 1942 [Annotator's Note: Day of Atonement, holiest day of the year in Judaism]. Her last letter to her boyfriend in Poitiers, France said she was going to Metz, France to work. She was actually sent to Auschwitz [Annotator's Note: Auschwitz; a complex of over 40 concentration camps and extermination camps in German-occupied Poland] and never came back. Cohn's fiancé was a member of the French resistance in Poitiers. He was arrested with four others, including his brother, and was executed at Mont Valérien [Annotator's Note: Fort Mont-Valérien, Suresnes, Paris, France; site of 1,014 recorded executions between 1941 and 1944] in Paris on 6 October 1943. Cohn was in Paris at the time working in a hospital. She had told him not to go back to Poitiers and wanted him to go Spain instead, but he returned, was arrested, tortured, and executed.

Just a year after her sister had been arrested for assisting people fleeing occupied France, Marthe Cohn's fiancé was arrested, tortured, and executed in Paris, France. When she learned of it, she was unable to even move. She had a final examination at nursing school that day and she decided she had to do that. She swore that she would never get married and for the next 11 years she refused to. Cohn passed her exams and went to Paris to live with her older sister. Earlier in Poitiers, France, she had been provided with forged identity papers. She worked for an agency instead of a hospital in Paris to keep from having to answer questions. She worked through the liberation of Paris, when she decided to join the French Army. She felt that everyone had to work to get the Germans out of France now. So many people had worked to save her family's lives that she felt she had to do something. The lines for people trying to join were very long. The Army knew her ID card was forged. She also had to prove that she had not collaborated with the Germans, which she could not do.

Marthe Cohn was finally was able to join the French Army in Paris in November 1944 once Poitiers, France had been liberated. She went to see her fiancé's mother there who was not doing well. Her sons had been executed by the Germans on 6 October 1943 and her husband was in Buchenwald [Annotator's Note: Buchenwald concentration camp, Weimar, Germany]. Cohn took her back to Paris with her and looked after her. They went together to the cemetery where her sons were buried when Charles De Gaulle [Annotator's Note: French Army General, later President of France, Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle] came to see the families there. Her fiancé's mother talked to the French Army and they let Cohn join the 151st Infantry Regiment. She went to Paris and then to the front in Alsace, France in November 1944. The bus she was on to the front kept breaking down on the way there and ran out of gasoline. The Germans had taken everything during the occupation. Cohn was the only woman on the bus. The American Army provided all of the resources for the French to fight but they refused to give them gas. The French soldiers then stole gasoline from unattended vehicles along the road. Cohn acted as the lookout for this. The Intelligence Officer in the unit in Alsace asked her what she had done in the resistance and then told her to go home because he thought she was too small to fight. She told him she was staying. He made her a sergeant instead of an officer, but she could care less. If she had not been a sergeant, she never would have won the Medaille Militaire [Annotator's Note: Military Medal, third highest award of the French Republic], which is the same medal Churchill [Annotator's Note: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill] received. He also made her a social worker instead of a nurse. The next day she put on her uniform which came from the American Army and decided to go visit the troops at the front.

After joining the French Army, Marthe Cohn wanted to visit the troops at the front in Alsace, France. She knew the French troops were on the western side of a canal with the Germans on the eastern side. She came to the foxholes of the troops and asked them what they needed, which was mostly clothing and food. Nearby villagers gave her a lot of supplies to give them. She was crossing the village square and met the colonel of the regiment, Pierre Fabien [Annotator's Note: Pierre Georges, known as Colonel Fabien; French Communist Party member who assassinated first Germans occupying France], who had never been in the Army. In 1943 the first German killed in Paris at the metro station was by him. Fabien put together a resistance unit. De Gaulle [Annotator's Note: French Army General, later President of France, Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle] decided to include these fighters in the mainstream army to reward them but also to control them. Cohn told Fabien she read and spoke German and French. He asked her to be transferred to the Intelligence Service of the First French Army and she accepted. She went to Colmar, France and underwent intensive training. She had to create her own alibi and then she was assigned to the commandos of Africa [Annotator's Note: African Commandos Group, paratroop unit of French Army]. In her training, Cohn was trained to recognize all parts of the German Army uniform, to be able to tell what units soldiers belonged to, to code, read maps, shoot and recognize every German weapon. She was a very good shot, an excellent marksman. Her alibi was that the she had been an only child and her parents had been killed in an Allied bombardment, so she hated the Allies for that. Her name was now Martha Ulrich and she had a military fiancé that was a German soldier. They made a German prisoner sign pictures and write love letters to her and then put him in isolation for the remainder of the war.

It was very difficult for Marthe Cohn to get into Germany as a spy. She worked for Colonel Bouvet [Annotator's Note: Georges-Regis Bouvet, French general, head of African commandos] in January and February 1945. The Germans had attacked in Belgium in December 1944 [Annotator's Note: Battle of the Bulge or Ardennes Counteroffensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945, Ardennes, Belgium] and had lost the battle. The Allied Armies had retreated West for several weeks during the German counterattack. She first met the commandos of Africa [Annotator's Note: African Commandos Group, paratroop unit of French Army] very late at night. Those commandos had just returned from a battle in Cernay, France [Annotator's Note: Battle of Colmar Pocket, November 1944 to February 1945] where they lost 192 people and had 200 wounded. The fighting to stop the Allies from entering Germany was vicious. She questioned the commandos to get information regarding the German plans of retreat back to Germany. She later received the Croix de Guerre [Annotator's Note: Cross of War, military decoration of France for distinguished heroism involving combat with enemy forces] for this work. Bouvet asked her to cross the front in Alsace. She tried to do so 13 times without success. One night around midnight she was taken by jeep to a field covered in snow. Her officers explained that she had to cross the field and find a small city to the northwest. She would meet a small group of German soldiers who were retreating. She was to infiltrate them and get information. She had no compass, no radio, no map, no gun, no flashlight. As she started to cross, she felt ice crack and she went into a canal. This kind of thing happened quite often as the war is fluid and people are human and make mistakes. She tried to get out, but everything was too frozen. It took a long time to find a place where she could get out and she almost gave up. She walked all night and towards daybreak she discovered that she had walked in circles all that time.

French Intelligence decided that Marthe Cohn should sneak into Germany through Switzerland. A Colonel Reinhard [Annotator's Note: fictitious name] chief of Swiss Intelligence in Basel, Switzerland asked a Mr. Le Mer [Annotator's Note: fictitious name] to take her Schaffhausen, Switzerland on the border close to Singen, Germany. He dropped her near a small forest where they crossed on foot. The forest and field were in Switzerland, but the road was German. There were two heavily armed German sentinels on each end of the road patrolling it all day. She was to crawl the field to the middle and then get on the road to going toward Singen after the guards were walking away from each other. She was 24. Le Mer told her that she might be killed that night and he suggested they have a good time, but Cohn was not interested. She was thinking that she had no compass, no radio, no map, no gun, no flashlight. She did have vouchers for everything she needed in Germany that she would have to buy. She also had a lot of German money. She did not how to use the vouchers though. She crawled and hid behind the bushes. Once there, she became very terrified of the soldiers and was paralyzed by fear. She had never had time to think about what would happen to her in Germany or how she would accomplish her mission until now. She also realized that she did not know the address of where she was supposed to go. It took her a very long time to overcome the fear, but she did and saluted the soldier with Heil Hitler and gave him her papers. He let her pass and she went into Singen. Singen had been bombed by the Allies and she fell into craters along the road in the darkness, tearing her stockings. She came upon two men watching for aircraft and asked them for directions. Once in town, Cohn recalled her training and went to the house as planned and spent the night. The next morning the woman there asked her directly if she was a spy due to her torn stockings and Cohn lied successfully. The woman took her to the train station and handled the voucher for Cohn. That's how she learned how to use them. The woman had no idea that she was saving Cohn's life by doing that.

Marthe Cohn took the train from Singen to Freiburg, Germany. That was the last time she took a train because every few minutes the German police would check identity papers and that made her fearful. In Freiburg, her job was to learn how the Germans were living day-to-day. There was no transportation in the daytime, only at night due to the Allied bombing raids. The Germans always walked in groups during the day. She was walking in a group with an SS [Annotator's Note: Schutzstaffel, the German paramilitary organization] officer in from the Russian front. He told them of the atrocities that the Germans did on the Eastern Front. It was thousands of times worse than what was happening in the western areas. He even bragged that he could smell a Jew a mile away even though one was walking with him. He suddenly fainted while they were walking. Since she was a good German nurse, she took care of him. He then invited her to meet him at the Siegfried Line [Annotator's Note: line of defensive fortifications built by Germany in the 1930s] to have lunch with him. She had heard that Freiburg was about to be attacked by the Allies, so she took him up on his offer and went to the Siegfried Line. She walked the line and discovered that it had been completely evacuated. The SS soldier was gone already, and the other Germans were leaving as well. She returned to Freiburg to find the city deserted as well. She was very frightened. An Allied tank came into the town and drove towards her and she did not know how to prove she was not a German. She raised her hand as high as she could making the Victory sign of Winston Churchill. The tanks stopped and did not kill her. The officer came down to talk to her. Luckily the French Army was the invading force. She had the officer take her to headquarters so she could share the information she had. Their commander thought it might be a trap and he called her commanders who were happy she was still alive. She was treated as a VIP that night and the next day she requested a bicycle to return to Alsace, France. She was coming down a steep road and came across German military ambulances. The German colonel was a doctor and he told her they were going into Switzerland and then Austria to avoid being captured. She said she had escaped from Freiburg and was terrified of the mixed races of the French Army. The German soldiers then saw her as the model of a German patriot. The colonel told Cohn where the remnant of the Germany Army was hidden in the Black Forest. She went as quickly as she could to Switzerland to get this information back. She did not even try to code the message as she did not want to take the time.

Marthe Cohn needed to get the information she was gathering as a French spy in Germany, back to her headquarters often. A German farmer near the border of Switzerland, was Catholic and very anti-Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler]. The farmer's sisters knew Cohn was a French agent and they helped her get her communications to her service through these people. Once they had helped her through the barbed wire and into Switzerland. Nobody answered the door at the customs house which surprised her. She looked in the window and saw a picture of Hitler and several Nazi items. She realized she was at the German customs house and she ran away. She then saw a Swiss customs man frantically waving to her through the woods. He thought she was crazy for knocking there. The person who sent her that way had made a mistake and was horrified about it later.

After leaving the intelligence service in January 1946, Marthe Cohn worked in Lindau, Germany. She registered to go to Vietnam as a nurse for three years. She was in Cambodia as well. She then returned to Poitiers, France and worked for a short time in the family shop. Her sister had married a Swiss violinist and lived in Geneva, Switzerland. She then went back to school in February 1953 in Switzerland and received a nursing degree. In October 1953 she met her husband through his roommate who was giving her English lessons. She had a job with the World Health Organization and was to go to England and then Paris, France to school to become a Director of Hospitals so she needed to learn English. Once she met her husband, the lessons stopped, and she did not learn the language until she later came to the United States. She worked in a hospital in New Jersey despite not understanding a word being said to her.

While in Germany as a spy, Marthe Cohn was only in the south where there were no concentration camps. On the day of the armistice they left the south of Germany to the Rhineland. There were camps there. Her commander asked her to do interviews in the factories where they had discovered stolen French items. She was in a jeep and saw people with strange outfits on. She told the driver to stop and she talked to them. She thought they had escaped from a psychiatric hospital because she could not believe a civilized people like the Germans could have committed such crimes. After the initial shock, she did believe them and then understood that her sister, Stephanie, who had been captured in France and taken to Auschwitz [Annotator's Note: Auschwitz; a complex of over 40 concentration camps and extermination camps in German-occupied Poland] was likely not alive. The family remembers Stephanie on the day of Yom Kippur, the day she was deported from France.

[Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks about two ships, the Patria and the Struma that carried Jewish refugees to the British Mandate of Palestine.] Marthe Cohn only knows that her cousin's parents were on a ship to Palestine just before the war started. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks about the extremist Jewish groups in the British Mandate of Palestine.] The revolutionary elements were helping the British at the beginning of the war. The British did not allow the ships bringing refugees to dock at the pier so the revolutionary groups would swim out and bring the people in. She was not very aware of what was happening in Israel at the time of its creation because she was in Vietnam at the time. She was asked to go to North Africa to fight and help the North African Jews to get to Palestine. She offered to help with that for six months, but she was told she was needed for her whole life, so she did not go. Her most memorable experience is saving her family from the Germans. That she was the one to save them counts more than anything else she did. She felt it was very important for everybody to fight against the Germans because they were too wrong and had to be stopped. The war taught her to do things she never thought she could. She is very proud of her service. She feels that most people do not know much about the war today. She still gives talks to groups and some of them are quite large. The war is an important subject in France. People believe that there was very little resistance to the Nazis in France which is not true. Many people were executed and deported which shows there was resistance and it is important to teach this to students. One has to know the past to prepare the future. Humans make very small progress at a time. With time we may perhaps make a huge step and stay there.