Marianne Steinberg Ostrand often talked to her children as they were growing up in New Jersey about her happy memories of her youth and young adult life in the 1930s in Germany. Especially when she brought out old family photograph albums she would reminisce about her various sports awards in school, her skiing adventures and bicycle trips with friends. She told stories about the good times she had swimming, dancing and playing tennis, often with her older siblings, Kurt and Lotti, and their, mostly non-Jewish, friends. She described how her family had celebrated Jewish holidays with neighbors from down the street in Altenessen, outside Essen. She always reminded her own children, Tom and Sue, of the birthdays of her mother and beloved Tante (Aunt) Henny. Marianne and her siblings had come to think of these two women collectively as their parents. Marianne, Kurt and Lotti did have a loving father, but he had become seriously ill in the aftermath of World War I, before the children were even teenagers. Yet Marianne did not dwell on memories of her father's debilitating illness; nor did she draw attention to how quickly her mother, Selma, seemed to age in her photographs, especially in the 1930s and 1940s.

Marianne only occasionally talked about what life had been like for her and her family under the Nazis. She rarely mentioned any specifics about the impact on the family of the economic boycott of Jewish businesses.