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Oral history interview with Dan Pavlovitch

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1993.A.0087.38 | RG Number: RG-50.091.0038

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    Oral history interview with Dan Pavlovitch
    Transcript
    I'm Donna Chernin.
    Today, we are interviewing Dan Pavlovitch, a Holocaust
    survivor.
    This project is sponsored by the Council of Jewish Women,
    Cleveland Section.
    Thank you, Mr. Pavlovitch, for participating
    in this important project.
    It's my pleasure.
    I think that we'll start out, if you don't mind,
    by getting a little bit of information
    about what your life is like today and your family
    situation.
    Certainly.
    Right now, I think my life is in fairly good shape.
    I have been married for 32 years.
    We have two boys, our baby is 25.
    I work.
    I'm trying to take some more time
    to enjoy some of the things, as opposed
    to doing things as a workaholic, because we've
    had friends that keep having heart attacks and dropping off
    like flies.
    And--
    What do you do?
    I am involved with the distributorship
    of paints and paint sundries.
    I also like to work with wood.
    For about 12 years, I have been involved with stained glass.
    And that's basically it.
    So you have one son that's 25.
    And the other child is--
    Yeah.
    They're both musicians.
    One lives in San Francisco.
    And he's running a computer department for a law firm.
    And he's been trying to put together a band off and on--
    well, actually, he's put together
    about three or four bands, none of which
    have worked satisfactorily because of the laid back
    attitude that it seems to be prevalent on the West Coast.
    And Joey, our younger son, is also a musician.
    He plays bass.
    And he plays both jazz--
    and also he's involved with a group called The Echoes that
    play music of the '60s.
    And they have a nice following around this town.
    Great.
    Does your wife work?
    No.
    She's not.
    She did when we first got married until we had the kids.
    And then, no, she hasn't worked since--
    no, I shouldn't say that.
    She has gotten involved with a few things.
    She worked for Fairmount--
    it was an art center--
    and that sort of thing for a while.
    Where do you live?
    In Cleveland Heights.
    OK.
    All right.
    And we have been in Cleveland now since 1963.
    And we found out that Cleveland, in particular Cleveland
    Heights, is a great place to raise a family.
    I don't know how I would have felt
    had I come here as a teenager.
    But I think it was a nice place to raise a family.
    We were in a terrific school system.
    And we met some people and developed friendships
    that are very solid and very basic
    and consider ourselves very fortunate.
    That's good.
    You are fortunate.
    And it's going to be a real amazing story
    that you're going to tell.
    I think that we'll start with what
    your life was like before you became aware
    that there was a war going on.
    Oh, OK.
    You could tell us--
    Well, first of all, I'm 56 years old.
    So I was born in 1928.
    I was born in Ploiesti, Romania.
    My father was involved with the oil industry.
    He was an engineer.
    And he worked for an American company
    that did drilling and also sold equipment in the--
    this was in Ploiesti, which is--
    actually, it's probably around 30,
    40 miles away from the main oil fields in that area.
    And I have two sisters who are still alive.
    Both my parents are dead now.
    And my life as a child, or up until the point
    that war broke out in 1939, was basically
    a reasonably happy one.
    My father earn a good living.
    I mean, we're very comfortable.
    And we were raised in the, I consider it,
    very unusual for time and place type of circumstance.
    Why is that?
    Well, first of all, I think this may help things or illustrate
    this a little bit.
    I am the product of what was considered then a mixed
    marriage.
    That is my father was a Sephardic Jew
    and my mother was an Ashkenazi Jewish.
    That was mixed marriage then?
    Oh, my God, yes.
    And my grandfather on my father's side,
    who died before I was born so all I knew
    was just stories about him, he was very much disliked
    by the Jewish community because in his heyday, which
    would have been probably in the '20s or early '30s,
    tried to do something that was just unheard of.
    And it was not palatable to anybody.
    And that was trying to get members of clergy--
    that is Christian and Jews--
    together.
    Right.
    That's radical for the time
    And the Jewish community didn't like him
    at all for that because the attitude then
    was we stay on our side of the fence,
    they stay on their side of the fence.
    And although there was no ghetto,
    I mean physical or geographic ghetto as such,
    but this was the attitude.
    Also--
    Excuse me, was this Romania?
    Yeah.
    So it was all there.
    OK.
    Mm, hmm.
    And the other thing was that--
    and this perhaps will illustrate the kind of an environment
    that I was raised in.
    My grandmother on my father's side--
    that was the rabbi's wife--
    who lived with us, her attitude on the dietary laws
    was that it was far more important what
    came out of one's mouth than what went into it.
    [LAUGHTER]
    OK?
    That's great.
    So--
    Was she the rabbi's wife?
    Mm, hmm.
    Right.
    So your grandfather was a rabbi?
    Yes.
    And he was the one who was trying to get
    everything ecumenical arranged?
    Yes.
    That was really radical, for a rabbi especially.
    For those times and for the place.
    Because don't forget this was in the Balkans
    in the '20s and '30s.
    So she believed that--
    Well, she felt that was more important to help implement
    this type of thing while we observed the holidays
    and the traditions and so on.
    I don't remember exactly when, but once we
    were old enough to understand the traditional things--
    well, in the subject of the dietary laws--
    were explained to us as strictly as a health measures
    to prevent people from dying in spite of themselves.
    And all of these things were explained to us as traditions,
    but that's all they were, as opposed
    to the very Orthodox view, which is sometimes taken--
    I mean there is no grays at all.
    Sure.
    That kind of a thing.
    So it was really a very enlightened household
    that we were raised in.
    We were exposed to all sorts of music, literature.
    I don't recall anybody ever saying to me,
    no, you're too young to know this or ask
    this and that sort of thing, which is something
    that we have tried to do.
    And I think we have done with our kids.
    Did religion play an important role?
    Not-- when you say an important role,
    insofar as in terms of going Friday evenings for the Sabbath
    services and on Saturday to the temple?
    No.
    I remember-- this is when I was just six, seven, eight,
    nine years old, or something like that,
    during the high holidays, the kids used to play
    in the yard of the synagogue.
    And then they were being dragged into for
    the so-called important parts.
    And there was something that just came to mind.
    In the town of Ploiesti, where I was born and lived up
    until I was about 13 years old, in the synagogue that my father
    belonged to, there was one man, whose name
    is not really important.
    But anyway, he was a jeweler by trade.
    And everybody, including myself, who
    was an eight or a nine-year-old, had heard more than once
    of what a thief he was.
    And I remember one Yom Kippur when
    I was dragged in the afternoon when there
    was the beating of the chest, it occurred
    to me that here is this man begging
    to be forgiven for all the thievery he has done all year,
    and starting tomorrow or day after,
    thinking that he has a clean slate,
    then he'll do the same thing all over again,
    which I found rather ironic.
    And I think to a certain extent at that point,
    I rebelled against organized religion as such.
    I remember-- this, I'm jumping things--
    I did not want to go into a synagogue or a temple.
    I think based on that experience as an eight or nine-year-old,
    I felt that if I wanted any communion or anything,
    I can do it at a time of my choosing
    in a place of my choosing.
    In other words, I didn't feel that I
    have to go at a certain time at a certain place.
    And my mother felt--
    and it gave her a lot of comfort going and observing
    the holy days.
    And I'm thinking about when I was in my 20s or so.
    She asked me if I would go with her to occasionally
    to a service.
    And my first attitude, no, I don't.
    And then I sort of realized that it was not much of a price
    to give a few hours out of one's life occasionally to someone
    that something like this was important,
    or something like that.
    Well, looking back at your parents,
    you know, I know your story is really a powerful one.
    And it seems that you're--
    I'll have to hear about both your parents.
    But were you aware of certain personality strengths
    about them at the time?
    Like that you had a particularly spunky and strong mother?
    Yeah, actually, they were both fairly strong people.
    And--
    What did your father do?
    My father was a mining engineer.
    Yeah.
    And he was more reserved than my mother.
    In retrospect, I can understand it.
    He lost his father when he was in his early 20s.
    He lost a younger brother and a younger sister.
    What-- were these two illnesses?
    Yeah, this was just illnesses.
    And then I think he found himself in his early 20s
    having to support his mother.
    And I imagine a certain amount of bitterness.
    I really don't know what his relationship was
    with his brother and sister, although I suspect
    it was fairly OK I would guess.
    So he was rather reserved by comparison.
    He was very loving, very attentive, very caring,
    very devoted.
    My mother was the second child of a family of seven
    and completely different from her brothers and sisters
    in terms--
    she was the kind of a person that
    always took control of things.
    Or if something needed to be done, she always did it,
    and that sort of a thing, as opposed to most of her brothers
    and sisters took a more passive attitude towards things.
    And later on, I think as we move chronologically,
    it's really thanks to her and her initiative and her guts
    that I and my two sisters are alive today.
    This is-- I'll go over this after,
    how we got out of the camp and so on.
    And she was also very business minded,
    although my father, as I've said before,
    generated a very good living.
    Once the kids-- that is myself and two sisters--
    were old enough, she opened up a dress store.
    Oh.
    Yeah.
    Oh, my goodness, now that was unusual, wasn't it then?
    I suppose for-- and this would have been in the late '30s.
    On her own, opened up a business, a dress shop?
    Yeah.
    And then I remember-- well, she and my dad,
    they would go on shopping tours and buying stuff
    in other countries, in Czechoslovakia and Hungary,
    and so on, which I mean physically it's a hop, skip
    and a jump.
    It's like going like from here to Cincinnati, you know.
    So that wasn't that much of a deal.
    But she felt, first of all, that she wanted to do it,
    and she did it.
    That's wonderful.
    Did your sisters work?
    Like how old were they?
    Younger than you?
    A lot younger or--
    One sister is three, about three years younger than I am.
    And then my younger sister is 12 years younger than I am.
    Oh, so there was a big--
    3 and then 12 years.
    OK.
    Yeah.
    Well, do you remember-- did you have close friends who were
    Christians in your community?
    Or--
    Yes.
    Again, I never thought--
    and I'm going back, honestly, as far as I can go back--
    I never thought of people other than they
    were I liked them or I disliked them for whatever I thought
    was valid to me, obviously.
    But I never--
    I don't recall thinking of people in terms--
    of course, I know the difference between boys and girls.
    But I never thought of people in terms
    of whether they were Jewish or non-Jewish
    or whatever they were.
    That was unusual, wasn't it, for that time?
    It seemed like the Jewish communities
    were more segregated--
    Well, as I've said, I think that I was raised
    in a very enviable atmosphere.
    Also, it seems liberal, more progressive than maybe
    somewhere else.
    I don't know that I would think of it in along those terms,
    that it's liberal or something.
    To me, it was just something this is how it was.
    And it never occurred to me as--
    I remember some people here in Cleveland, just
    to digress for a moment, where they lived what I consider
    a ghetto in University Heights.
    And they had a girl that was going to a camp.
    And as it turned out, this particular camp
    was a non, quote, "Jewish" camp.
    And she was very unhappy because she
    didn't think she would find somebody that she would like.
    I mean as opposed to the way, we were raised it was just not
    a question that you were or you weren't.
    Or pretty much people stood on their own.
    And they took their chances that had nothing
    to do with anything else.
    Did you notice any antisemitism?
    Oh, of course.
    Of course.
    But you just weren't real concerned about it.
    You were concerned.
    But that did not mean that everybody that was not Jewish
    was a rotten person, or that anybody who was Jewish
    was a marvelous person.
    Because no matter how you slice humanity,
    as I've indicated to you before, I became very painfully aware
    that nobody has an exclusive on anything, whether it's
    attitude, intelligence, humor.
    So that you have situations that they are, at least
    in my term of reference, human beings,
    and they behave in what I consider
    as acceptable behavior, or they're not.
    After that, if it happens to be, and they have to be,
    shall we say, identified, whatever they happen to be,
    that's very secondary.
    It certainly doesn't take preference.
    That sounds good.
    Did you think of yourself with any special qualities,
    when you look back, as being outgoing or shy, or assertive?
    I don't think I ever thought about it one way or another.
    I remember our house was the place that everybody came to.
    In other words, the kids from school
    used to come to our house.
    And we used to play football, which is soccer, and whatever,
    you know, depending on at what point in one's life one
    is talking about.
    Probably the reason for that was my parents
    encouraged that, as opposed to I remember some people that
    lived close to us, their house was the kind of a thing
    that nobody ever went into.
    Or there were rooms in the house that nobody went into
    unless, quote, "company" came.
    That was not the household that we lived in.
    The house was there to be lived in and that's on.
    It sounds like it was a really good background, a nice,
    pleasant--
    I thought so.
    I mean I was comfortable with it.
    And I have no feelings at this point
    that I wish that it had been different.
    When did you start to notice things changing in your life
    or that a war was going on?
    Actually, I imagine one was very much aware of things,
    especially, excuse me, in Europe in the middle '30s unless one
    was a complete blithering idiot.
    No, what I'm saying--
    OK, even at the age of 8 or 9, and I
    don't consider myself unusual for the times,
    but I was aware that Ethiopia had
    been invaded in '36, the Sudetenland
    in '38, and so on and so on and so forth.
    So even at that age you knew.
    Oh, yeah
    So you must have been--
    So that it became apparent that we
    were heading towards something.
    I'm sure that we were all hoping that it would not.
    But I remember very vividly in September of 1939, there,
    they don't have Labor Day so that school does not
    start after Labor Day.
    It started-- it was the end of August.
    And I was walking from school to home for lunch.
    And there was a store--
    it was basically a bookstore--
    the means of communication at that time,
    of course, there was radio and basically newspapers.
    This is how you got your information.
    Also, if there was something very, very important,
    back in this bookstore, they would make hastily a sign
    and sort of paste it, like letting
    people know what was going on, in this case
    was that war, that Germany had invaded Poland.
    This was September 3, I believe, 1939.
    At that time you were 11 years old?
    12.
    12 years old.
    Yeah.
    The one thing, though, that I remember
    was that for the first time I couldn't eat lunch that day.
    You were really that upset?
    Yeah.
    I didn't know that I was upset.
    But I just couldn't eat lunch.
    Did you kind of have a feeling looking back that something
    it meant something really bad for people--
    Not good.
    You knew that.
    I have to think that you were pretty aware and your family
    was also because 12-year-old, that's pretty young to take
    that knowledge and--
    It was just-- probably became aware of it
    or feeling that something has happened,
    and probably the feeling that before it would get better,
    it would get a hell of a lot worse.
    Did that happen right away for you in Romania
    or not right away?
    Not for a few months, although what
    had happened shortly thereafter-- and again,
    little things that happened.
    Right after the war started, it was a blitzkrieg.
    The whole thing ended up in a matter of weeks.
    And shortly after the start of the war,
    there were lots of refugees from Poland.
    And there was an appeal made, I guess probably by newspapers,
    by the local authorities that if anybody
    had any extra rooms where they could put people up
    and that sort of a thing, if they would
    make these places available.
    And we had some extra space.
    And probably something was sent in to the authorities,
    you know, that there was this space available.
    And I remember a man coming.
    And he spoke German because we didn't speak Polish.
    And he-- yeah, he spoke German.
    And my parents did too.
    And--
    Did you speak German?
    Some.
    I was raised speaking Romanian, English, French--
    Why?
    And then I picked up German and four other languages.
    But that's later on.
    And there was no question, in other words,
    of payment for room and whatever in our household.
    And he asked if we were Jewish.
    Huh.
    And said yes.
    Or my mother said yes.
    And he didn't want any part of it.
    So to a 12-year-old, that was a little bit strange,
    because I was aware of--
    I mean obviously this particular person could have used a help,
    you know.
    Sure.
    It wasn't a question that we were
    asking for payment for using the room or the meals
    or whatever it is.
    It was just something I suppose my parents felt
    that they wanted to do.
    And because of the accident in nature
    that this particular family, ours, happened to be Jewish,
    he didn't want any part of it.
    Oh, my God.
    So where did he go?
    Do you know what happened to him?
    I have no idea.
    You probably don't care.
    In retrospect, I don't give a damn.
    Don't care is right.
    That's amazing.
    There comes a point that who cares?
    Well, so life went on normally for a while at that time?
    Well, what happened-- and again, politically in Romania,
    there were many political parties,
    which is not uncommon in a lot of the Balkan countries.
    And there was a group called the Iron Guard, headed by--
    his name was Codreanu, who was the head of the party, who
    was a neo-fascist group.
    To give you an idea, they had a newspaper.
    And on the masthead, like for instance,
    in Chicago, the Tribune has what is "The World's Greatest
    Newspaper" or something like that.
    Anyway, they had a thing which rhymed in Romanian.
    But basically, what it said-- and that's a literal
    translation but it does not rhyme in English--
    they were hustling for donations and something,
    for instance, like if you gave a penny, a Jew died.
    And if you donated $1, a kike died.
    I mean that was--
    it was very much out in the open and so on.
    As a matter of fact, there was a Romanian clergyman
    that I think was just send to Portugal.
    He was an editor of that paper then.
    A clergyman?
    Well, he came here and he became a clergyman
    and a bishop In a matter of two years.
    That's-- so then there was a change in government.
    And German troops started coming into Romania ostensibly
    to train the Romanian army.
    About how long was this after the beginning of the war?
    Let me try to think.
    My guess this might be several months.
    This was late in the fall.
    And you continued going to school
    and pursuing your normal--
    Not normal.
    There was something-- things that happened.
    Like what?
    I was at that time in sixth grade,
    or the equivalent of sixth grade.
    The way school in Romania was broken up
    you had four years of elementary.
    Then you had a Gymnasium.
    And then from there you went to the university.
    In--
    Was this a public school?
    Or was it--
    No.
    --Jewish?
    No, no, no.
    It was-- there was a tuition that was being paid I remember.
    So therefore, it wouldn't make it public.
    Was it mixed both Christian and Jewish?
    It was basically--
    I'm sure there were a few--
    no, I think there were three Jews in the class.
    That's all?
    Yeah.
    Hmm.
    Because I remember when they were having a religion class,
    we had special dispensation.
    We could go out in the yard.
    So I would think it was unusual for you
    to go to school like that.
    And probably most of the Jewish kids were at--
    Well, again, the first four years, it was a Jewish school,
    or it was supported by the Jewish community or something.
    And when the changeover took place in terms
    when the Iron Guard became very prevalent
    in the government, the three Jews that were in the class,
    we were kicked out.
    We could not go to that school.
    And that, of course, happened to all of the Jewish students
    in all the other schools.
    So then the Jewish community tried and organized as fast
    as they could a school, or in other words, classes
    above the fourth grade, which was all that they had handled
    up to that particular time.
    And they were trying to find space.
    And as I recall it was back to the building
    where they had had the elementary school.
    And this went on for a very short period of time.
    There were things I remember.
    After the German troops came in, there
    were some of the stores that are owned by Jews,
    there were the Star of David, you
    know, soaped or whitewashed with Jude on it
    and that sort of thing.
    Do you think this was done by the Christians in the Romanian
    community or by the Germans?
    I would guess it was probably done by the Romanians.
    If I were to make somewhat of a generalization,
    there are probably more people--
    this again, and the people that I remember and it's somewhat--
    it's very vague because of the time.
    And the only people that I knew somewhat better
    were people that were friends of my family.
    And among them, most of them--
    actually the vast majority of them--
    turned out to be very decent, although the tide
    or the political winds had changed.
    I'm talking, I guess it would be more significant here,
    the non-Jewish friends of my family.
    Were kind?
    They were decent people.
    I mean so it was not just because the political winds had
    changed, they did not.
    Oh, that was nice.
    So you had support.
    Yeah.
    I think so.
    Well, then what was happening?
    Then you had to go to a separate school.
    Right.
    So there must have been a feeling, like rumblings,
    that there was trouble and it was going to affect you.
    Oh, there wasn't rumblings.
    I mean you were aware of the problems and that sort
    of a thing, of course.
    No, there was no question about it at all.
    And--
    Did it start to get worse after a short period of time?
    I would say so probably.
    Then what happened to my father, who
    was running this American drilling company,
    one of the people that he had working for him-- and his name
    was Caneff.
    There are certain things that I do not forget--
    had a brother-in-law, who was in the Iron Guard.
    So what they did--
    this is-- it would have been in the spring of 1940--
    let me try to think.
    This is 1941.
    It would have been-- yeah, this would
    have been in spring of 1940.
    Basically what happened, they came,
    as it's been shown and depicted many times,
    in the middle of the night.
    They took my father away.
    And this is the Iron Guard.
    Did they wake you all up or just quietly--
    I didn't hear it.
    I didn't know anything about it till morning.
    And what they did essentially, they
    said they wanted him to resign in favor of Caneff.
    And if not that they would kill his wife and the three kids.
    So he did.
    Now, there is also another little thing,
    not a complication, but another additional bit
    of information here.
    My father was a Yugoslav subject.
    So he tried to--
    Appeal to--
    --connect or call the consulate, which is in Bucharest.
    And they wouldn't let him.
    Was he born in Yugoslavia originally?
    Yes.
    And what happened that within the next day,
    we were put on a train under guard
    with just a suitcase and the equivalent--
    at that time, 200 lei was probably maybe $5, $6,
    $7 in buying power then, and put across the border
    into Yugoslavia.
    Now, this was in one day's notice?
    Yeah.
    But he did say-- he did what they wanted him to do.
    Sure.
    So instead of killing the family they
    were just going to take you away?
    Right.
    And as I said, they wouldn't let him contact the Yugoslav
    consulate.
    And they just-- I mean physically,
    we were put on a train and this was under guard
    and put across the border into Yugoslavia.
    One suitcase for the whole family or one suitcase
    per person?
    No, one suitcase apiece.
    Now, was this happening to everybody
    who was Jewish in your community?
    Well, first of all, the vast majority of the people,
    the Jews, they were indigent.
    Oh.
    OK, so this was a little bit different.
    So you stood out.
    OK, so this was--
    I don't mean to interrupt.
    Was your father actively in politics?
    Was that causing a problem or--
    No.
    So it was more that he was prominent or not--
    I think the main reason--
    --indigent.
    --was that this man that was working for him kind of I think
    wanted a job.
    And I suppose by putting him across the border that
    would create less of a potential problem.
    I never really stopped to think about it
    more than along those terms.
    So then you were en route to Yugoslavia?
    Yeah, we were.
    And then we ended up in Belgrade.
    And again, there was a problem, of course, of money.
    And my father looked up a friend of his
    that he had gone to school with who was a banker.
    And the bank was in a, I suppose, a relatively new
    building.
    It occupied the main floor and then
    there were 6 or 7 other stories that were apartments.
    And they had an empty apartment there, which was just--
    I suppose would be called today a studio apartment.
    So we went in there rent free because there was no money.
    All your money was left there.
    Yeah.
    There was no chance of getting anything other than, as I said,
    the equivalent of 200 lei, which was really
    just a few dollars we had.
    And then my father trying to find some sort of a job.
    So it was a pretty rough time.
    And I mean even things which were, quote,
    "new" or novel to us, I remember--
    this was 1940.
    So there was a Shirley Temple movie that come out.
    I think it was the Bluebird of Happiness.
    Or was it?
    I think--
    It sounds familiar.
    And the other thing that was also novel,
    it was shown in a place that I had not seen before.
    Meaning it was a restaurant, you could
    eat there and watch a movie--
    Oh, I had never seen that.
    Which was-- right.
    This was-- but we obviously couldn't afford it.
    We couldn't go.
    So it was literally overnight one's, to borrow today's term,
    lifestyle was changed drastically.
    Did you feel that you could go back home eventually and find
    that money?
    It was in a bank.
    Or did you realize then that was it.
    No, we realized that was it.
    That there was nothing more that could be done.
    Also, my grandmother was still there.
    In Romania?
    Yeah, his mother, which she came to Yugoslavia about a month,
    month and a half later.
    And did she stay with you?
    Yeah, of course.
    What about your mother's parents?
    My mother's parents, her mother died in 1935.
    And her father was in Romania.
    He was born in Romania.
    Now, also there's a side thing about my mother's father
    around that time, that is shortly
    or I'm not exactly sure how many months
    before we were kicked out of Romania,
    the Iron Guard had raided a small synagogue, which
    he was a member.
    And for, again, I can't possibly think of any reason
    why other than just because they were Jewish,
    and they were held incommunicado.
    My mother tried to use whatever connections and people
    that she knew.
    And eventually, she got him out.
    Your mother, she sounds like a credible woman.
    Well, she is a very unusual person.
    And I think chronologically, as we
    move on, as to how we got out, it's quite unusual.
    Amazing.
    So then you were saying you were--
    wait, what point were we?
    We backtracked.
    We're back-- at this point in time, we're in Yugoslavia.
    Oh, you've lost your money.
    Spring of-- yeah, there was hardly any.
    So I said, overnight literally, we
    changed from a very comfortable life to one
    where really one did not know where the next meal was coming,
    which was a little difficult. But again,
    maybe it's because of the inner strengths
    that had existed in the family and so on, I
    did not worry about it.
    I don't remember worrying about it.
    My father found some sort of work.
    I mean he was generating a little bit of money.
    And historically, then what happened in the spring of 1940,
    the Italian forces were having a very rough time in Greece.
    So the Germans wanted to send some forces down south
    through Yugoslavia, which at that point was neutral.
    The Minister of Foreign Affairs was on his way
    to Berlin to sign some sort of agreement allowing
    German troops to flow south through Yugoslavia
    to help the Italians in Greece.
    And then there was the military coup, bloodless.
    What had happened, Paul, who was the king, but he was a minor,
    so he had his uncle, who was a regent.
    And then with some of the military people,
    they took over the government.
    And they didn't want any part of it in terms of allowing
    the Germans to-- basically, the country and most
    of the politicians were pro-Allies,
    as opposed to Romania, which was predominantly--
    they were pro the Axis, the Germans.
    And I remember-- this was March 27, 1940--
    everybody thought that we were going
    to get bombed by the Germans.
    It didn't happen until April 6 on a Sunday morning, early.
    And they overran the country within a matter of 10, 12 days.
    The city was badly bombed.
    This was Belgrade?
    In Belgrade, yes.
    And there were an awful lot of buildings
    that had burned because they dropped
    a lot of incendiary bombs.
    The building we were in was untouched.
    And they had a vault in the basement and so on.
    So then--
    Were you in the basement-- when they were bombing,
    where were you?
    Upstairs sleeping.
    Upstairs.
    I mean this was Sunday morning.
    But then we went down--
    again, you have to remember that in Europe
    from the '30s, from the mid '30s and so on,
    the thing had been building up to the extent everybody knew
    about air raids.
    Everybody had gas masks.
    I mean, it used to go through this thing in school.
    You would have air raid drills, that sort of thing.
    So you were pretty much aware of what to do.
    And as some of the buildings surrounding
    this particular building were either destroyed or burned
    or something, there were more and more people
    coming into the basement of this building.
    So again, in a matter of 10, 12 days,
    the whole country was overrun.
    And--
    And your building was safe?
    Pardon?
    Your building was untouched?
    It was untouched.
    Huh.
    Things also became drastically much more difficult
    because there was-- for a period of time,
    there was no electricity.
    There was no water.
    There was no power.
    So you would have to go in places,
    try to find where they were wells.
    And it's a wonder that we didn't die.
    Because when you have a well that probably services
    a small number of people, and then everybody and his brother
    goes trying to take water from it,
    God knows what the condition of it.
    And of course, you don't think about these things.
    You just needed water.
    And I remember there was wine.
    There was plenty of wine.
    The problem was just for the kids something
    to drink because the kids were little.
    And contrary to-- well, perhaps in France, the kids
    still drink a lot of wine.
    But there was a question of just finding something for the kids
    to drink.
    And by summer, my father was put in a labor camp.
    Now, was this happening to other people around there?
    Where there many people that were hiding out like you?
    We were not hiding out.
    We were out in the open.
    I mean we were not hiding at that point.
    He was put in a labor camp, a place
    called Topovske Supe, which probably
    might have been some sort of a military compound.
    And to this day, we don't know what happened to him.
    Never--
    My mother tried to--
    When you said goodbye, did you know he was leaving?
    No.
    No.
    Was it at night that he was taken--
    In other words, what happened, they were just--
    as most things were in Europe, you
    had to register with the police.
    So there is a record of who lives where and where you are
    and so on, even in neutral places like--
    to digress for a moment-- in Turkey where I lived from 1943
    till 1948 when I came to the States--
    Oh, really.
    --if I did not sleep at home one night,
    I had to inform the karakol, which is the police
    precinct, where I would be.
    Now, was this--
    That's inconceivable I mean to most Americans.
    It is inconceivable.
    But was this for all people living in Turkey?
    For non-citizens.
    People who were not born or didn't--
    Right.
    Because eventually what happened, and I'll go over that
    later on, we stayed in Turkey most
    of the time on a stateless basis, which I will tell you
    about as we go on.
    So you had to register.
    So your father had to--
    No, no--
    Were you wearing badges--
    No, my father-- where?
    Were you wearing badges in Yugoslavia?
    In Yugoslavia?
    Oh, yes.
    So--
    No, they were stars--
    Armbands?
    --here.
    Not armbands.
    There was front and back.
    Was that only--
    Yellow stars printed in black with the word Jude.
    Was that in Romania too?
    Or just Yugoslavia when you got there?
    No, just in Yugoslavia.
    So then how did he get sent to labor camp?
    All males had to report and they were put into a camp.
    Every day they had to report?
    Or like said, there was a notice up--
    No, they lived there.
    Wasn't he living at home with you?
    Yes.
    But there was a point that was--
    my guess is probably June, July--
    all the adult Jewish males were put
    in this camp, this work camp.
    And they were going out during the day doing God knows what.
    And they were coming back.
    And there was no communication.
    They stayed at the camp?
    Right.
    So--
    And then within a matter of two to three weeks,
    they were all-- like they all evaporated.
    They were sent someplace, no-- to this day,
    I don't know where.
    You don't know what happened?
    No.
    It's like one day--
    My mother tried.
    And eventually, when we got to Turkey,
    where at least we were in neutral territory,
    and time wise it wasn't that far.
    I mean it was from 1940 to 1943.
    And there were organizations--
    don't forget this was still in the middle of the war.
    And there were some neutral people
    that were trying to get information
    and that sort of thing.
    They never found out where these people
    were sent from Topovske Supe.
    Were there a lot of people?
    Well, again, the only thing that I can--
    I'd have to make an educated guess.
    In the camp where the women and children ended up,
    there were probably-- my guess is around 4,000 people.
    So that would probably mean between 1,500 to 2,000
    Jewish males, adult males.
    And they all disappeared.
    Yes.
    Oh, jeez.
    And those were-- these were mostly Jewish people?
    They were all Jewish.
    OK.
    Oh, yes.
    No, that--
    So he just disappeared.
    And you never heard.
    And your mother tried.
    And then what happened?
    Then you were living without him.
    Then what happened?
    I remember, again, things that are pick spots, as it were--
    What spots?
    My mother was trying-- you're picking spots--
    Sure, that's how you're remember it.
    My mother in the process of trying
    to find out what had happened to my dad, her husband,
    there was also a curfew.
    So that-- that was probably getting September,
    October, because I remember it was 7 o'clock, and it was dark.
    And she should have been home by then, and she wasn't.
    And, of course, things that ran through one's mind, usually
    it's a multitude of things.
    Number one, worried, afraid of what had happened to her.
    I am sure anger that here I am with two young kids.
    What am I going to do?
    I mean I was all of 13.
    So a combination of all of these things.
    And then fortunately, she did come.
    But it's well past curfew.
    So you were really afraid.
    Yes.
    Understandably.
    However, the point that I felt a greater fear than that
    comes much later, which I will tell you.
    And this came when we got out of the camp.
    And a long time after-- actually,
    when we were crossing from Bulgaria into Turkey in 1943.
    But I'll tell you about that later--
    Later.
    OK, talk about-- you had more fear than that.
    Yes.
    So she came back late.
    And was she-- because she was looking for your father?
    Right.
    And she was never able to find anything.
    The only thing she found there was a note written, something
    that if you come or something that I'll be all right,
    don't worry, that kind of a thing.
    Well, then you just kind of fended without your father
    for a while.
    Right.
    And did life get worse or stay similar?
    It was pretty lousy at that point.
    So there comes a point where lousier isn't that much worse--
    Lousier.
    Right.
    Now there comes a point where--
    although it possibly-- and there were rough spots.
    But once they fall below a certain level,
    they have to get very, very bad to become noticeably worse.
    And so then at one point, it had to get noticeably worse
    for your living situation to change.
    Yeah, well, shortly after that, we were put in a camp.
    This was in December of 1941.
    As a matter of fact, it was the day before Pearl Harbor.
    And we were dragged into camp.
    This was the women and children, the Jewish population
    of Belgrade.
    Overnight you were taken?
    Yeah.
    And everybody had to report to a port--
    it was like a park or something and just with a suitcase
    and that was that.
    The thing that's interesting, after having lived in Romania
    under very open antisemitism, in the Belgrade area where
    we were, it seems that the relationship between the Serbs
    and the Jewish population, which was rather modest in terms--
    my guess is the population of Belgrade at that
    time might have been 250,000--
    300,000 people.
    But there were only maybe, my guess is 6,000 Jews.
    That is women, children, and men.
    So it was not a large Jewish population.
    Small kind of.
    Also, the vast majority of them had been there
    for a long, long time.
    In other words, they were not transients.
    Their parents had been, their grandparents and so on.
    Most of them were Sephardic.
    And they were the offshoots of the Inquisition.
    So they had settled there for a long, long time.
    And the interesting part about it was, as opposed to the way
    that they were thought of in Romania,
    in Romania you were a Jew.
    You were born there--
    And then you might have been a Romanian citizen,
    but you were a Jew first.
    There in Belgrade, the Serbs, who were predominantly
    Greek Orthodox, thought of themselves
    as Serbs of Greek Orthodox religion.
    And the Jews were Serbs of Hebrew religion.
    But they were thought of first as Serbs.
    Interesting difference--
    As a national--
    Instead of Jewish.
    Right.
    They were not.
    In other words, the fact that they were Jewish was secondary.
    Secondary, right.
    That's really interesting.
    And again, for time and place, that was very unusual.
    That's unusual to notice that too though at your age.
    You were only a teenager at that point.
    Yeah, I was about 13.
    Well, let's take a little break.
    And then we'll pick up right where
    we were talking about your leaving and being sent off.
    This is Donna Chernin.
    Our Holocaust survivor today has been Dan Pavlovitch.
    This project is sponsored by the National
    Council of Jewish Women, the Cleveland Section.
    I'm Donna Chernin.
    Today, we're interviewing Dan Pavlovitch, a Holocaust
    survivor.
    This project is sponsored by the National
    Council of Jewish Women, the Cleveland section.
    Mr Pavlovitch, we were talking about what
    happened when your family was suddenly
    uprooted and sent overnight to a camp.
    OK, I think--
    We're in Yugoslavia at this time, Belgrade.
    What I would like to do is before I
    tell you some of the things about the camp,
    because of things that happened during
    and afterwards, I'd like to tell you a little bit more
    about my mother.
    As I mentioned before, it's thanks to her
    that we are alive today.
    She was born in the States.
    What had happened, her parents were from Romania,
    and somewhere around the turn of the century
    they came to Chicago.
    And her father opened up a store on Maxwell Street.
    What kind of store?
    Dry goods, something like that.
    And she was working there, and she was--
    I remember some of the story.
    She was keeping books for other stores.
    I'm talking as a young girl of 14 or 15.
    And eventually, he made enough money
    where he felt he wanted to go back and live
    the good life back in Romania.
    You know, everybody's got their own reasons for going.
    Is that unusual, to return like that?
    I have no idea.
    I mean, I have no desire to go back.
    So she returned as a teenager back to Romania
    after having spent most of her life?
    Yeah, her adult-- young adult life in the States.
    And then she met my father.
    I know they were married in 1925.
    And again, some of the things that
    happened, for instance, one of the things
    that I happen to think about, how we survived.
    I mentioned before that my mother had had a dress store.
    So she had taken for her own use some of the nicer dresses
    which, of course, we never-- she never had a chance
    to use in Yugoslavia because of what we were doing
    or not doing as the case may be.
    You said you had no money then.
    Right.
    And there were a few pieces of jewelry
    which were being doled out a piece at a time.
    And then I remember her going to--
    this was already the country was occupied.
    This was in Belgrade.
    And she would go-- there was a cabaret the name
    of [NON-ENGLISH],, and she was selling these dresses
    to the girls working in the cabaret.
    So in other words, this is how we survived.
    She took that with her in the suitcase when you
    were allowed the one suitcase?
    Right.
    This was not for any idea I don't think--
    I think it was just as personal belongings.
    Anyway, we got into the camp.
    The camp was situated across the Sava river from Belgrade.
    The Germans called it Zemblin.
    The Serbs called it Zemun.
    It's a small, I suppose, village.
    And the reason they had chosen this space
    was that one, or two, or three years before that,
    they had had some sort of affair.
    They had three very, very large buildings
    with very high ceilings that were used for God knows what.
    So what they did, they had built in three of these buildings
    what they called blocks.
    Now, what the block consisted of was a wooden structure
    with three tiers, probably,
    about three feet between each tier.
    And this is where people were living and sleeping.
    So what you had, you had just a room, you know,
    what you had for your bed roll if you
    happen to be fortunate enough to have a bed roll or a blanket.
    And most people had something because by that time
    you get to know what you try to have at least to survive.
    And,
    the more desirable space was on top, the third tier,
    only because there was some fresh air up on top.
    Would you climb their little ladders to get up there?
    Yeah, there were some steps that were made out of wood.
    The whole structure was made out of wood.
    I remember my grandmother, because she was elderly,
    she could not climb the steps.
    She was on the first tier.
    We were in the same block up on top.
    And the toilet facilities as such,
    which were not even footprints in the ground,
    they were outside.
    And, of course, at night, they were not allowed to go out.
    So people had buckets.
    That kind of a thing.
    And I remember we probably, or my mother, we
    brought a little bit of food into the camp,
    which went fairly fast.
    I mean, how much stuff could you bring?
    Yeah, it would go real fast.
    So what my mother tried to do in order to survive--
    now, my kid sister wasn't much more than a year, year
    and a half old.
    And-- no, she was two years old at that point.
    She was not weaned yet deliberately.
    And this is how, probably, that she is alive today
    because the food there was nonexistent,
    although they did try for the infants
    to give them a little bit more--
    something a little bit more nutritious
    than the stuff that was available
    for the other people-- that is, for the women and the children.
    I'm not talking about infants.
    So what my mother did, I don't know how she did it,
    but she got herself appointed as kinder kommandant.
    What's that?
    That is, like, in charge of the children.
    Kinder, it's the child, and kommandant
    is commander or something.
    And she made herself an armband out of some piece of something,
    and she put a double K in it.
    And she was involved in trying to do things for the kids.
    But the whole idea was so that she
    could get a little extra food for her own kids.
    And I remember, again, maybe it's
    because I was aware and being able to recognize some things
    even though I was only 13.
    But I remember some of the grown-ups--
    not the children so much, but the grown-ups--
    doing things for the sake of getting maybe
    an extra piece of cornbread.
    Because the meals consisted of in the morning,
    and everybody would line up in lines--
    Oh, they would line up in the morning to get--
    Yeah.
    And all you got was some tea and a piece of cornbread,
    but you had to say--
    it was-- I'm trying to remember.
    I think it was around 150 or 200 grams, which in terms--
    it's not quite half a pound.
    Less than half a pound.
    And that you ate a little bit with your tea, and of course,
    there was no sugar or sweeteners except for those people
    who had brought some.
    I remember we had some saccharin which lasted for a little bit.
    Soap was a problem because there wasn't any.
    How did you bathe?
    Cold water.
    So they gave you no soap at all?
    No.
    One of the things that we're doing for the young infants,
    they would take some flour with very little grease,
    burn the flour to give it a little taste,
    and then add water to and make some sort of a soup.
    It was considerably more nutritious
    than the tea for the adults.
    Then for your main meal, it was a soup
    of sorts which was basically some frozen cabbage
    without anything else.
    It's literally just some boiled cabbage,
    and I don't even think it was even salted.
    And you were metering out your piece of cornbread,
    and then the same kind of a thing,
    or like a potato soup in the evening.
    That sort of a thing went on.
    Was this a labor camp or a concentration--
    Pardon?
    Was this a labor or a concentration camp?
    Well, let's define what was what.
    It was a labor camp insofar, like for instance, I went out
    on labor details every day.
    Either we were lugging things, or sometimes for periods, I
    would chop wood for 10 hours a day.
    And look at the bright side.
    It gave me tremendous shoulders.
    [LAUGHS]
    The women were not forced to work.
    What'd did they do?
    Just sat.
    There was nothing else to do.
    So the camp was referred to just as a Jewish camp.
    It was a juden lager Zemlin, so I
    don't know if one would call it a concentration camp or a labor
    camp.
    One of the things that I remember,
    again, vividly, ever since I can remember,
    I tended to be, I suppose, what it's referred to as a lone wolf
    attitude.
    I do things by myself.
    And while out on labor details, I
    remember taking things and trying
    to contact some of the people on the outside
    to trade for just food.
    I remember having some fountain pens, or--
    Where'd you get them?
    These are things that we had brought with.
    Like you had a fountain pen, or you had a mechanical pencil,
    or--
    Just thinks that you would have taken.
    Just anything that you would trade or barter for some food.
    And then I remember one day, we came in and so on.
    Then over the loudspeakers, everybody had to go out
    and lined up.
    And the long and the short of it, what happened,
    there were a few boys who were also on labor detail.
    And they exchanged some things for food.
    One of them felt that he didn't get his fair share.
    And stupidly, he went and he complained or said something
    to the SS guard.
    And just for that, meaning for having gone and just bartered
    something, they knew none of these kids,
    or when we went out, that we would
    escape because they had the rest of the families in the camp.
    So they felt secure.
    So you knew you couldn't do anything stupid.
    But just because they traded or they bartered for food,
    they had them dig a mass grave, or a hole in the ground.
    And in front of these 4,000 or 5,000 people,
    they machine gunned these kids into--
    Just for bartering.
    Yeah, for that.
    So the thing is I know it happened.
    I know I was there.
    I still, to this day find--
    I don't know whether it's part of a defense mechanism or not--
    I find it very difficult to understand.
    I mean, I can see if you do something
    to me that I find hurtful, or distasteful, or something, I
    would react.
    But for this, I can't find a reason.
    In other words, if you had food and I
    needed food for myself or for my family, and that sort of thing.
    If I couldn't work for you to get
    it, or barter, or something, I would hit you over the head
    and steal some.
    I mean, I can understand that.
    But this thing for just having done this
    trade, to kill people for that--
    Oh, it's so awful.
    I cannot accept, at least by definition,
    human beings doing that to other human beings.
    There's no-- well, there is no--
    Was just by virtue of being born that way.
    I think it goes beyond that.
    I don't think that it had to-- they could have been anybody.
    They didn't have to be Jews.
    They could have been political undesirables.
    They could have been, as they had in some of the camps
    where they had the homosexuals, and lesbians, and Gypsies,
    and political undesirables.
    In this camp, they happened to be Jews.
    But this is the kind of thing that I know went on.
    And this particular case, I was there.
    I witnessed it.
    Was that horrifying for you to see that?
    Were you living in terror all the time?
    I don't think that it made an impact.
    I mean, there is, I suppose, the initial reaction,
    the ahh kind of a thing.
    But I don't think the implications
    and the full impact came until probably later.
    On the other hand, and then here is
    where the thing comes that I can only think of things
    and react in terms of on a one-to-one basis,
    my kid sister was only two years old.
    And I mentioned that one of the things that I did,
    I was chopping wood for the guard house.
    I spoke a little bit of German, not much, and there was a--
    You spoke English, too--
    --German soldier.
    Pardon?
    You spoke English, too, didn't you?
    Is that why you have no accent?
    English, French, and Romanian.
    Eventually, I picked up four other languages later on,
    and this is also part of the thing
    of trying to survive and become part of the background,
    not stick out as sore thumbs.
    Because as we're moving from place to place,
    we did not want to have people wonder, who are these people,
    or where are they from?
    So you had to fit in.
    So you try to blend into the background.
    Interesting.
    Talk about that.
    It's really interesting.
    So you spoke German?
    Very little at that point.
    But there was one German soldier who
    had the regular army, the Wehrmacht uniform.
    And chronologically, he seemed to be old enough,
    I guess, to have had a family and so on.
    And I have no idea why I talked to him, why did I talk to him,
    but I found myself talking to him
    and telling him about my kid sister, who was 2.
    And I'm sure he was aware about what the food situation,
    and so on, and he gave me a fresh egg.
    Now, nobody had seen an egg for three, four months.
    So then what I did--
    now, had he been caught in giving me that egg,
    I don't suspect that they would have machine gun him,
    but I would have been, as they say,
    his tail would have been in trouble.
    So he put himself on the line by doing that.
    Yes, he did.
    And then I remember finding some sort
    of a container that was like a community
    stove inside these buildings.
    And finding a container, I filled it with ashes
    from the stove in the water so that they couldn't
    see that I was cooking an egg because people
    would have wondered what the hell did I get the egg.
    And you could have gotten in trouble for that.
    I suppose, although my main concern was just
    to keep it cool and keep it hidden.
    And then cooked it and gave it to Dolly, my kid sister.
    Dolly was her name?
    Yeah.
    Well, did he ever do this again for you, this man?
    Mm-mm, no.
    But the important thing is not how many times he did it.
    But he did it.
    It's that he did it.
    That's a very good point I think you're making.
    That's right.
    That he did it that one time, it took--
    Considering I am sure that he was aware of consequences.
    You know, what's interesting, too, it's like we take--
    I cannot think of anything other than on a one-to-one basis.
    Yeah, because here he was good to you.
    You know, we take for granted food.
    We just offer people, do you want this?
    Do you want that?
    Or we throw it out.
    And here, one egg that a man gave you--
    Right.
    German, stands out in your memory
    as having helped your sister.
    It was not so much the egg, which of course, was important.
    I think the gesture in itself was, to me, far more
    important than the egg because all
    of the thing that went with it.
    I think it was trying to do something nice,
    and I'm sure he was aware of consequences.
    And yet he did it.
    Did you find that the Jewish people were helping each other,
    or was it more like each person trying to survive?
    Some did, and some, it was everybody for themselves.
    Were you making some good friends at the time?
    Not particularly.
    Because you were kind of a loner.
    Yes.
    And also it sounds like you were protecting your sister.
    I remember seeing some people doing things
    for the sake of a little extra food
    that I am sure they themselves would not have
    thought themselves capable of.
    Like what?
    Oh,
    if they would see anything--
    there were people who worked, although they were Jews,
    but they were working for the Germans.
    And they were sort of in between.
    They would go and tattletale and do things just
    for a little reward, and putting these other people
    into difficult, or problems, that kind of thing.
    So it really brought out--
    I think what it boils down to--
    --the best and the worst of people.
    --we really don't know what we will
    do until we are faced in that particular circumstance.
    Amazing.
    So what was your mother doing through this time?
    Well, one of the things that she was doing, and trying to,
    as I mentioned before, she sort of appointed herself as kinder
    kommandant.
    And then, somewhere along the line,
    she realized that we had to get out, or try to get out.
    So she devised a plan.
    Here's the plan.
    Like anything else, in retrospect, it
    seems very simple, but it built.
    But now wait one minute here.
    At this point, did you feel your life was in jeopardy?
    Well, you knew that something was going to happen.
    And so you had to get out because it could get worse
    than any moment.
    Right.
    So she went to the German authorities
    and said that she was not Jewish.
    She had been married to a Jew.
    See, they knew, because they had the records of my father,
    he was born in the area and so on and so forth.
    They didn't know anything about her.
    But she was, in fact, Jewish, wasn't she?
    Of course.
    She was an Ashkenazi Jewish.
    My father was a Sephardic Jew.
    And then, of course, the Germans are always then,
    and I suppose to a certain extent
    now, very impressed by officialdom.
    In other words, you have to have papers
    with signatures and stamps.
    So he says, where are papers?
    Said they were lost in the bombing.
    We were bombed in Belgrade.
    And of course, they didn't--
    they said, let me write to Romania, and they can send--
    She said this?
    Yes.
    So what she did, she wrote to friends
    and gave them, in essence, what she wanted, saying,
    I am in the camp.
    They don't believe that I am so and so born so and so,
    and so on, and so on, and so forth.
    So that's how she gave the information.
    Right.
    She didn't say write--
    So what they did--
    She didn't say write this for me, because then if somebody--
    She did.
    Says, can I write in once, and these friends
    are going to get it.
    So she sent the information saying
    that they don't believe I am so-and-so born so-and-so,
    and gave her certain dates.
    And in Romania, like in a lot of the Balkan countries,
    with a little money, with these people, these friends of ours
    did.
    So they went and they got affidavits
    signed by people, witnesses, that my mother was so-and-so,
    which proved that she was not Jewish--
    that she was an entirely different person, therefore
    making the kids half Jewish.
    If she had written a different kind of letter that said,
    I'm trying to get out.
    I'm trying to say that I'm not--
    they could have interrupted that because they
    could have opened the mail.
    This was the thing was, no, no, she wrote and she gave it
    to them, because we had no access.
    Post offices we didn't have.
    I mean, the only mail that would have gone out
    would have had to be mailed by the German authorities.
    So they checked it.
    So she had to write in a way--
    So she actually did give the information the first time
    around.
    And this thing came, and they were still hemming and hawing
    and that sort of a thing.
    In the meantime, what they had started doing, taking
    the people out of the camp, about 100 to 120 twice a day.
    They would have a huge van, like you see these 40 foot trailers,
    and they would put 100 to 120 people in twice a day.
    And then rumors started that these people--
    nobody knew where they were going.
    How long till the rumors?
    A couple weeks?
    That they were killing them.
    But did the rumors start pretty quickly,
    like after a couple of days?
    Yeah, because nobody found-- nobody
    was able to find out anything.
    And to this day, again, for sure,
    nobody knows what happened.
    I, at least, I don't know.
    The only bit of information that we found out later
    in Turkey in 1944 or something like that,
    that these people were being gassed.
    That there's no doubt about it that as they
    were put in the vans, they were being gassed,
    and then they were dumped in mass graves.
    But I don't know.
    And up to 1944 or '45, nobody had found these mass graves.
    So they were gassed in the trucks?
    Yes.
    And were you not picked because of this--
    Yeah, because we were still in limbo.
    I was going to say limbo.
    My grandmother, there was no way they could do anything.
    She was put in one of these vans.
    And I mean, that was the end of her.
    But was she-- was wasn't she your mother's mother,
    or was she your father's--
    No, my father's mother.
    Oh, so he was considered Jewish, so she couldn't get out.
    My mother's mother died in 1935.
    So then your grandmother was taken in that group and gassed.
    So eventually, it was the end of July 1942.
    And about how old were you then?
    14.
    We were out of the camp.
    Out of the camp?
    Yeah.
    We were let out.
    They let my mother and the kids--
    Did they say we've seen that you're--
    Well yeah, because the affidavits had come,
    and they accepted them.
    They were signed, and stamped, and that sort of thing.
    So they let my mother and the three kids out.
    And OK then, of course, other problems.
    How do you exist?
    So my mother found a room on the outskirts of Belgrade,
    Probably smaller, about 2/3 of this room.
    And we bought two old mattresses, and that was it.
    I mean, that was the furniture.
    And in order to survive, now, my mother still
    had a few pieces of jewelry that she was
    selling and trying to survive.
    And then I became a young entrepreneur.
    We had Dolly's little carriage, little stroller,
    which I dismounted and attached to it a basket.
    And I would go into the villages and buy whatever
    was in season, also milk.
    The profits, quote-unquote-- that was,
    a portion of whatever I had bought--
    would be left at home on the way to going into the city
    to sell it and develop customers.
    That was-- we literally ate the profits.
    And then with whatever I sold it for,
    there was enough money to then go buy something else
    the next day, then take part of it,
    leave it at home for us to eat, and then sell the thing.
    So you had food and a little bit of money that way?
    Not money.
    There was just a little bit of food.
    And it was very, very little.
    Were you going to school at this time at all,
    or did you just totally forgot about it?
    No.
    As a matter of fact, I only had six years
    of so-called formal education.
    And then later on in 1948, I went to Roosevelt College
    in Chicago.
    Oh, that's great.
    Which was the only school--
    no, there are two schools, that and a military school,
    that accepted me without having had the equivalent
    of a high school diploma.
    Where was this school?
    In New York?
    No, no, in Chicago.
    Roosevelt College became Roosevelt University.
    Well, you know what I'm just wondering about,
    I would think a lot of Jewish people
    would try to do what your mother did.
    Wouldn't Germans become suspicious of that and say,
    well, everyone's trying to pose as--
    Nobody-- oh, I'm sure that-- but again, they had--
    I think it's approach is so important.
    I think the only reason that this thing
    worked is because of the positive but devious way
    that she took in having this information passed.
    Positive but devious, that's right.
    And then having the friends that could do this for her.
    Because they had to be official.
    The friends that did it, they were not Jewish.
    So there again you're talking about Christians helping.
    They were not Jewish, these people.
    That's really nice.
    They were friends who happened not to be Jewish.
    And again, that's priorities.
    That is something that they--
    OK.
    So at this point, what my mother tried to do is for her
    and the children, the three of us,
    to go into some neutral territory.
    So she wanted to go to either Switzerland, which is--
    I think that was her main thrust.
    I have to remember now.
    It's 1942.
    The,
    Germans were fighting the Russians.
    They were moving an awful lot of equipment
    going from west to the east.
    The other place that my mother thought
    would be if not Switzerland to Turkey, which was neutral.
    So again, how to do it?
    That's right, yeah.
    There were probably, excuse me, not many Jewish people
    in your situation at that time.
    They were all having been killed.
    I didn't know of any.
    At that, once we got out, we didn't come across,
    and we didn't know of any other Jews.
    So she wanted to go-- and figure, go to Turkey.
    But how are you going to do it?
    Forget about money, forget-- but how?
    You need travel permits.
    You need visas.
    You need all sorts of things.
    So she goes to, again, to the German authorities saying,
    I'm a Romanian.
    I got to go back with my children.
    I have no money here.
    I want to go back to Romania, which
    was the last thing in the world that she wanted to do.
    But she said that she wanted to go there.
    Of course.
    But the only reason she said that because there
    was an ulterior plan.
    There's alternate plan B. And she said, no, you
    can't go because everything-- all the transports and trains
    are being used for military purposes.
    And she said, what am I going to do?
    And says, I have no money here.
    And, you know, they said, nothing you can do.
    And then my mother said, well, if you'll
    give me papers and visas to go, maybe we could go to Bulgaria
    and then go up North into Romania, which made some sense.
    So,
    one other thing, again, a little ingenuity.
    There were still, I think, one or two rings left.
    And the way she was transporting them,
    she would have a little jar of something like preserves
    and put it in there and put it in Dolly's pocket, who
    was two years old, or 2 and 1/2 years old at the time.
    So the official thing was give us
    papers, or visas, or something to go into Bulgaria,
    and then we could go up north because traffic--
    there wasn't much military traffic going north.
    And they said, that was OK.
    And she knew full well she didn't want to go to Romania.
    Of course not.
    So we got into Bulgaria.
    And then shortly after we were there,
    she decided to take the bull by the horn.
    She went to the Swiss consulate and probably the reason
    was to visit Switzerland or something as a reason
    to talk to him.
    And then she made a value judgment
    that he seemed to be a decent sort of a person,
    and she told him, but then again, with reservations.
    She told him that she had been born in America.
    She didn't say that she was Jewish.
    That was smart.
    Well, it's a question, how much to give.
    And that she wanted to get to neutral country,
    neutral territory.
    And what happened?
    He put us on a Swiss protection pass.
    Interesting.
    And then plans were made to go into Turkey.
    But did she want to go to Switzerland at first,
    or Turkey, or she didn't care?
    Because as long as--
    First of all, geographically, you were just--
    Nearer to Turkey, right.
    --nearer to Turkey.
    So she talked with him in order to get
    the protection-- his protection, kind of official.
    So we had a Swiss traveling document.
    And then my mother told him that we were leaving,
    and again, this was still war time.
    There was curfew.
    So if you were to catch the train,
    you had to-- in the morning, you had to go there the night
    before because you couldn't leave
    if you had an early train. because of curfews,
    and transportation, and so on.
    About what year was this at this point?
    This was Spring of '43.
    So we were planning to take a train the following morning,
    meaning that this particular evening we would go and sleep
    at the train station.
    And the Swiss consul came to our little flat that we had,
    and he said that he had information
    that they were very, very careful at-- they were stopping
    an awful lot of people, and they were-- in other words,
    there seemed to be some action-reaction at the border.
    And his advice was not to go and wait
    for maybe a few days or a week that things
    cooled down somewhat.
    So he warned you.
    Yeah.
    But my mother said no, we were going to go.
    And we did go.
    Did you have trouble?
    Was he right?
    Well, here's-- this is, I think I mentioned to you before,
    probably to me the most perhaps frightening moment of this
    whole thing up to that point.
    We got off the train at the Bulgarian-Turkish border,
    and there was supposed to be a train coming from Turkey,
    come across the border, pick up, and then
    it was going to go into Istanbul.
    We went through customs--
    Bulgarian customs.
    There was nothing other than my mother still has,
    I said, a couple of rings and a little jar of preserves
    in my kid sister's pocket.
    And it was in a little wooden building perhaps
    100 yards or so away from the railroad track.
    Two civilians come in.
    They were German.
    They were speaking German.
    They were obviously Gestapo.
    They opened up everything again.
    And among my mother's things, there
    was a notebook with names of people from Romania,
    and other people that we have met, and that sort of thing.
    Because a lot of the people that we knew in Romania,
    they were American and British.
    There were a lot of Anglo-Saxon names in this book.
    That had been born there?
    No, no.
    These were friends.
    People that we knew, like you have--
    Why didn't they have Romanian names?
    Were they born originally in America?
    If they were Americans or British,
    why would they change their names?
    So they were working over in Romania?
    Sure, that's all.
    So they take the book, and they tell my mother
    that they'll be back, or we're to stay there, and so on.
    And then this is like a B-grade bad movie.
    We hear the train--
    we see the train come in.
    It leaves?
    No.
    My mother said, let's go.
    We get on the train, and this is like really milking it,
    but it's true.
    Waiting God knows, it seems interminably,
    but waiting might have been five minutes,
    might have been 20 minutes.
    I have no idea, really.
    And then finally, the train starts moving,
    and I was sure that they were going to stop the train
    and take us off the train.
    And finally, we knew we were OK when we saw
    the red Turkish flag with the--
    so this is how we got into Turkey.
    You could have been stopped.
    If she hadn't said, let's get on the train,
    they could have come back and said,
    we are not letting you go.
    That's right.
    Like that.
    Or by saying, let's go on the train,
    you also run the risk of them chasing you and gunning you
    down.
    As I said, this is, to me, that moment
    from the time that we got on the train
    until I saw the Turkish flag, meaning that we were physically
    across the border.
    Were you helping her out much, or were you kind of thinking--
    were you like the man of the family at this point?
    I think probably more than anything else,
    sure.
    I remember I had all sorts of little jobs as a kid of 13.
    That she gave you?
    No.
    I went out to earn.
    Oh, as an entrepreneur.
    Oh, sure.
    Besides the business of selling vegetables, and milk,
    and that sort of a thing.
    I even had a job at UFA, which is the German film agency,
    as an office boy.
    This was in Yugoslavia.
    I also had a job at a confectionery store where
    I remember my main job was turning an ice cream
    machine by hand.
    So,
    basically, what happened, everybody
    did whatever we felt we had to do.
    And even later on, and I haven't thought
    about this in many, many years, there were four of us left.
    It was my mother, my sister Coca, my kid sister Dolly,
    and myself.
    And I'm talking when we were in Turkey and something.
    At least physically, we were safe.
    But even before that, we developed a rather close
    relationship from necessity, maybe, if nothing else.
    But the funny part about it is if there
    was a discussion, or an argument, or a fight,
    it was never three against one.
    If, for instance, Coca and I would have an argument--
    Coca?
    Yeah, that's my--
    Cute name.
    Sister?
    --sister that's three years younger than I.
    And then Dolly would come in and she would take somebody's side.
    If mom came in, automatically she took the other side,
    so there was always two against two, never three against one.
    That's nice.
    Yeah, that kind of thing.
    Was your sister-- the younger sister maybe
    was too young to be aware of what was going on,
    but Coca had to know.
    Yes, she knew.
    So was she--
    As a matter of fact, when we got to Turkey,
    we lived as non-Jews.
    Because this was 1943.
    The country was pro-German because of economic ties
    to Germany.
    They were selling an awful lot of agricultural products
    in exchange for industrial machinery,
    and that sort of a thing.
    And there was very much concern that Turkey would get involved
    on the side of the Axis.
    And there was only--
    as things were winding down in 1945,
    I think 24 hours before the Germans signed the surrender,
    that rather, Turkey declared war on Germany
    so they could be on the winning side.
    Crafty.
    We were living as non-Jews.
    Now, did your mother feel guilt about that,
    or did she try to give you any education at home?
    I knew it.
    Coca knew it.
    Dolly did not.
    And because first of all, she was too young.
    How old was she then?
    About four, five?
    Let's see.
    1943, she was probably all of four.
    Well, did you or your mother feel guilty or bad about it?
    I mean, you had to do it to survive.
    It was just there was no question of guilt about it.
    One little thing that was--
    and she started going to school there.
    And I think this is about maybe a year or so later--
    Dolly, this is?
    --might have been five or six-- no, Dolly.
    And Coca went there to the American College.
    I was working for the Office of War Information
    as a translator.
    Because in the meantime, I had acquired these other languages.
    But in the case of Dolly, she came home one day
    and asked mom.
    Says, mommy, what are Jews?
    And I remember my mother's answer.
    Said, they're very nice people.
    Oh my God.
    Now, she-- Dolly did not know that she was Jewish until much
    later, about 1950 perhaps.
    Really, not until she was until 12 or so?
    My mother and she were in Israel trying to make their way here.
    But that's a different story.
    So interesting.
    Until-- in other words, because until '45,
    there was concern that, as I said before,
    that Turkey might end up on the side of the Germans.
    So then we lived as non-Jews.
    Did she ever say to you I feel bad I have to do this,
    or she just-- it was survival, it was just a matter of
    had to do this.
    People that didn't were killed.
    First of all, really, I don't understand your question.
    Why should one feel bad?
    What one was trying to do was just survive.
    Well, at home was she saying--
    There was no guilt. I don't understand.
    Well, some people would die because they wouldn't
    do something like that.
    I mean--
    I think it's a matter of priorities.
    Life is more important, then.
    I think so.
    I would think in a similar situation,
    I would do the same thing.
    I think so.
    I mean, I think perhaps to some people,
    that might have been more important,
    but I think that's stupid.
    Yeah, they aren't alive at all.
    I mean, that's a matter of priorities.
    Were you doing anything religious at home?
    No.
    So you were just kind of-- were you actively going to a church,
    or just doing nothing and just saying we're Christians?
    As a matter of fact, apropos of this, while this was in, well,
    Belgrade, I believe, yes.
    My mother pretended she was Christian.
    And because-- and again, you have
    to understand her thinking.
    This before the camps?
    Is that right?
    No, no, no.
    This was after the camp when we got out,
    or she was a Christian, quote-unquote.
    Before you got to Turkey?
    Yeah.
    But she chose as her brand of Christianity
    that she was a Catholic.
    And there is a reason for it.
    In Romania, 99% of the people are Greek Orthodox--
    the Christians.
    But she chose to be a Catholic because most Germans are
    Catholic.
    Therefore, she thought there might
    be more empathy that they would help a Catholic more than they
    would a Greek Orthodox.
    Oh, is that interesting.
    But did she feel that she'd have to know about Catholicism
    that they could question her?
    I'm coming to that.
    The thing that it's funny, occasionally,
    because of the circumstances, she
    would have to cross herself on occasion.
    Yet a priest, a Catholic priest, she was crossing herself
    the opposite-- the Greek Orthodox crossed themselves
    one--
    in other words, this way, and the Catholics
    do so, it's the reverse.
    And he, for some reason or other,
    called her attention to it in a very nice way.
    In other words, he may have suspected something,
    but I think, again, it was a question of another human being
    helping another human being.
    Now, was he German-- a German priest, or--
    No, this was in Bulgaria.
    I have no idea what his ethnicity was.
    We did not inquire into it.
    But he kind of let her know that she--
    That she was doing it wrong, yes.
    So again, this is--
    Interesting little things that happen.
    --where you pick up little things and where--
    where you find humanity in a lot of different places
    and a lot of different levels.
    So then when you were in Turkey, you were working.
    When I got into Turkey, my mother
    went to the American consulate, and she got work
    as a translator.
    Now, what languages did your mother know?
    I was--
    My mother spoke English, spoke Romanian, spoke German,
    a little bit of French.
    That was basically it.
    So she started translating things from Romanian
    into English, and English into Romanian,
    working for the American consulate.
    I remember I got a job working at the-- they
    had a YMCA in Istanbul.
    I worked there for a little while.
    After that, I got a job.
    There was an American Hospital, and I
    was doing a little work in the supply room.
    And then I got a job as--
    I was 15 already--
    at the Office of War Information as a translator translating
    from Romanian into English.
    And what the job, as such, consisted
    of listening to broadcasts in Romanian,
    and translating them, and turning them.
    And that was not only broadcast from Romania,
    which was German occupied.
    There were three basic things that I was listening to--
    the Romanian broadcasts from Romania,
    Romanian broadcasts from Russia, and then
    there were some clandestine stations
    which, obviously, they were supported by the Russians,
    the communists.
    Their whole thrust was directed to people
    who worked in the oil fields that every time they
    would go by a pipeline and it had a valve, give it
    a little turn so there is less and less fuel
    available for the Germans.
    That was the thrust of that whole thing.
    And sometimes, those were mobile broadcasting stations
    because many a night, they were not there.
    They were probably shuttling or running back and forth,
    and that sort of thing.
    And I remember within about a year, a year
    and a half, something, again, because
    of having lived in the various places, and perhaps
    of the observations of what I felt made people react,
    one other department in the Office of War Information,
    what they did, they were taking news of the world,
    or news from the States, or war news, and that sort of thing,
    translating it into various languages of the countries that
    were occupied by the Germans, and broadcast them
    in the appropriate languages.
    And it occurred to me that with the same--
    obviously, all these things besides information we
    were trying--
    or the Office of War Information was
    trying-- it was a propaganda.
    Let's face it.
    But it occurred to me that it was more receptive and more
    sellable by either overemphasis or by withholding things.
    And again, from having lived a little bit of time in Bulgaria
    and having spent some time in Romania,
    and in Yugoslavia, that I felt that the Romanians would
    probably be a little bit more receptive to romanticizing
    it a little bit, perhaps a little sentimentality
    as opposed to the Bulgarians.
    They were very pragmatic, and therefore, appealed to them
    from a just simple,
    what is the word I'm thinking of, just that it would
    be to their economically--
    it's better for them economically
    to accept certain things.
    In other words, be more materialistic, perhaps.
    Who would be more materialistic?
    The Bulgarians.
    And the-- his name was Moore who was
    the head of this department, he bought the idea.
    And then I did some broadcasting from Radio Ankara.
    Where you would actually do the broadcast?
    Yes.
    And even I was doing my own writing, a kid of 17.
    That's amazing.
    How long were you in Turkey all total?
    From 1943 till September '48.
    So that's a long time.
    Yeah, about five years.
    You must have picked up Turkish, too.
    No.
    No?
    What language were you speaking in Turkey?
    I always found somebody that spoke either French, German,
    or English.
    How did you learn those languages, French, German,
    and English?
    Well, at home, we spoke French, and spoke English and Romanian,
    and picked up German along the way.
    So picked up Serbian, which also a little Bulgarian,
    which is very similar to it.
    Picked up a little bit of Greek while we were in Turkey,
    and a little bit of Turkish.
    Now, was there any desire to go to Israel,
    or would that have ruined your plan?
    None whatsoever.
    That would have made you look like you were Jews.
    Apropos of that, I have never had any desire then or now
    to ever visit Israel.
    Weren't you there, or was it--
    No, my mother and kid sister were there.
    So then at this point, in a little while,
    we'll talk about what happened after that.
    Did you just have a-- looking back,
    do you have a good feeling about Turkey, those years there?
    Did you feel a foreigner?
    Some parts I have made--
    I still have my best friend from Turkey lives now in Paris.
    And we visited them.
    We took our kids in 1974 with us to--
    to a trip in Europe.
    And we spent, I think, a week or so in Paris with them.
    Is he Turkish originally?
    Yeah, he was a Turkish Jew.
    And that's, again, it's very interesting.
    This group of friends in Turkey, again,
    considering time and place, there
    were people of not only different nationalities
    or ethnic backgrounds, different religions, and even
    more importantly for Turkey, from vastly different
    economic strata.
    For instance, Michel's father was a day laborer,
    and Mimi's father owned half of the real estate
    in the city of Istanbul.
    Now, did they get married, this couple that you're just
    talking-- these two people, Mimi and--
    No, no no.
    Michel is a man, and Mimi was a man, too.
    Oh, Mimi was a man?
    Oh, really?
    OK, so these were two friends of yours.
    It's a group of seven boys.
    Well then, did you hang out with some
    of the Jewish people in Turkey?
    Not as such.
    I mean, as it happened, Joe Mitz was Jewish.
    Mimi was Jewish.
    His cousin, Shep, was Jewish.
    The other three were not.
    It sounds like it was really good.
    Must have felt so relieved to be out of a camp.
    I don't think I thought much about it-- about the camp.
    Maybe it was a defense mechanism.
    It was the acceptance that the thing with the camp was done.
    The war was over, so there was the euphoria that happened
    after the war was over.
    So I never thought much about it to that point.
    Or you had gone through?
    Well, let's take a little break and we'll pick up from there.
    OK.
    I'm Donna Chernin.
    Today we are interviewing Dan Pavlovitch, a Holocaust--
    [KNOCKING]
    Hold it.
    Hold it.
    Hold it.
    Something's wrong.
    I'm Donna Chernin.
    Today we are interviewing Dan Pavlovitch, a Holocaust
    survivor.
    This project is sponsored by the National
    Council of Jewish Women, the Cleveland section.
    Mr. Pavlovitch, right now we were talking about your being
    in Turkey in the years 1943 to '48 and the life
    that you had there.
    And in summary--
    And in summary, it was--
    most of it was fairly good.
    First of all, there was not the physical fear
    that I remember having.
    As I mentioned before, in Belgrade,
    after I got out of the camp, the various jobs that I had,
    one was as an office boy for UFA,
    which was the German film distributing agency.
    And my main job there really was cleaning up
    and getting there early in the morning
    and setting the fire, the stoves,
    starting the fires in the various stoves.
    And I remember distinctly that any time I
    heard a Gestapo wagon going in the general direction of where
    we lived, the fear that, yes, they have found out.
    They came to get us, kind of a thing.
    On the other side of the coin, after I came to the States,
    which to me has given me the peace of mind, that knowing,
    barring an accident or something that one cannot foresee,
    that I would come-- if I go away, I come back,
    everything is going to be there.
    That's a real good point.
    And without having had the other side of the coin--
    it's true, without knowing the other extremes, we cannot--
    this may sound maudlin, but one cannot really appreciate
    the differences without having had the other extremes.
    And this is one of the things, most important thing to me
    in this country, is this peace of mind.
    Peace of mind?
    Did you feel you had that in Turkey?
    Well, you were in Istanbul.
    Is that right?
    Yeah, mostly in Istanbul.
    So it was not as bad as Belgrade.
    No, because there was always--
    I am talking at least up until 1945, the first two,
    two and a half years that we were there.
    There was always the possibility that we would have--
    we would be faced with the same thing, trying to--
    they would be invaded by-- not invaded by the Germans,
    but that you would have to try to run
    away and trying to survive and that sort of a thing.
    Never really felt comfortable about it.
    In retrospect, I don't think that I gave it
    that much thought.
    Part of it was also because of working for the Office of War
    Information.
    And I was making very good money and doing
    something that really enjoyed.
    Not most-- all of my friends were considerably older
    than I. I mean, I was a kid of, by that time, probably 17.
    Were you living with your family?
    Well, I had to get a small flat by myself
    because, when I was working in the early stages of the Office
    of War Information, the listening to the broadcast
    was being done outside of the city for reception purposes.
    They had had a building constructed,
    and they had various antennas so they
    could point at in the various--
    in the various direction, the V-shaped antennas, so they
    can get better reception and, again,
    to get away from, probably, static
    or whatever that was in the city.
    So this was about maybe a half hour away from the city.
    So we would all get picked up at the end
    of the tram, of the streetcar line, at about 6:00,
    7 o'clock at night.
    And we didn't get back until--
    oh, normally the last car would leave to take back to the--
    would go to the downtown probably around 2:00,
    2:30 in the morning.
    And you know, normally if it got done early, you had to wait.
    And there was no way for me to get
    to where my mother and my sisters
    were living because they lived in [PLACE NAME]..
    By streetcar it would have been about 40, 45 minutes.
    And after midnight, there was no public transportation.
    Nobody had cars in those days.
    So I had to find something very close to where
    the car would drop me off.
    And that's why.
    So I had my own place.
    And we had lots of fun.
    I mean, I enjoyed those--
    or most of it was enjoyable.
    Well, how then, did you leave Turkey?
    Well, it was an idea-- as I mentioned before, I only had
    six years of formal education.
    And my mother thought, and I felt too, I
    wanted to get out of Turkey.
    I did not feel that I wanted to stay in Turkey forever.
    So then it was a question of trying
    to find some school that would accept me
    because I never had the equivalent of a high school
    diploma.
    And there were two schools, among the many that
    were written to, this was Roosevelt College in Chicago,
    and there was some military school
    in Auburn, Indiana, which never considered it for a moment.
    Roosevelt was a very interesting place,
    insofar that it was organized by a group of teachers
    from the Central Y in Chicago in the mid '40s, who
    felt that no school should have a quota system, which
    of course, was prevalent in those days.
    So they felt that anybody who wanted and could afford
    an education should have it.
    So they started it with--
    I think it was financial help from Marshall Field in Chicago
    and some other people.
    And that's how that school was started.
    And were there many survivors of the Holocaust that were there?
    I don't recall coming across one.
    There might have been.
    Well then, you were accepted.
    I never-- in other words, I never made a point to search.
    Yeah.
    Well then, when you were accepted there,
    then did your whole family move over to-- emigrate?
    No.
    I came alone in 1940.
    It was September of 1940.
    '40?
    '48 rather.
    '48, right.
    And then--
    How old were you then, about 18?
    I was 20.
    20?
    Yeah.
    And my sister, Coca, came, and she went to Grinnell College
    about a year or so later.
    Where was that, Grinnell?
    Is that in Chicago?
    In Iowa.
    Iowa?
    Yeah.
    Oh, that's well known.
    That's a real good school in Iowa.
    It's a fairly good school.
    Actually, the city of Grinnell, it's a very small town.
    And there are more kids in the school than there are citizens
    of the City of Grinnell.
    And then my mother and Doly, my kid sister, came here in 1952.
    Where did they go for those four years?
    Oh, they were all over the place.
    They were in Austria.
    They were in Germany.
    They were in Israel.
    They were in Canada.
    And then they came here.
    How did your mother fend for herself?
    Did she always find jobs?
    Like everything else, she always-- no, she--
    either some job or buying things and selling things.
    What did she finally do with those last two rings that were
    [CROSS TALK]--
    I think one-- no, I'm sure-- one of them, my kid sister, Doly,
    has.
    It was a ring, oh, about the size of--
    it's an oval shape that had a small diamond in the center
    and sapphires around.
    And Doly still has that ring.
    The other one probably was sold somewhere along the line.
    And did they go to Israel in that period of time?
    They were there for a short period of time.
    Is that when Doly first--
    It was there that my mother told Doly that she was Jewish.
    Which-- and then talking to Doly later and so on,
    it was no great surprise or no great shock.
    It just didn't affect her that much?
    No, not in the least.
    Well, it's interesting to me.
    I'm curious.
    Did you-- you married a woman who's Jewish.
    And have you raised your children Jewish?
    She happens to be, but it was not by design.
    You didn't care that much then?
    No.
    And what about your sisters?
    What happened in their lives?
    My sister, Coca, married, and she has two children.
    She's also divorced.
    Did she marry a Jewish fellow?
    Yes.
    And my sister Doly also is married,
    and they have two kids.
    He also happens to be Jewish.
    But it wasn't that they felt--
    I don't think so.
    It could be, though.
    You never know.
    In my particular case, it was never--
    you know, it was not by design.
    And you were going to school.
    Were you feeling separate from the students, or pretty much
    did you feel--
    No.
    --comfortable.
    I felt fairly comfortable.
    I mean, one of the things that sort of appalled me--
    I'm going now back 1948.
    I was 20.
    There were a lot of ex-GIs at Roosevelt
    because it was not an expensive school to go.
    And they also had lots of night courses,
    so people could work and go to school at night.
    But as I mentioned, I said I was appalled at the fact
    that most people seem to parrot something that they had heard
    or read as opposed to having any thoughts of their own,
    which I felt, at least to me, it was a very strange thing.
    Well, I'm thinking that you must have
    acquired, either by watching your mother
    or also maybe inheriting it, a lot of her spunk
    and her resourcefulness.
    I have one fraction of 1% of my mother's energy.
    Did she have a lot of energy?
    Oh, tremendous energy.
    I'm trying to picture her in my mind.
    What did she look like?
    She looked-- she got a stripe of white hair
    right in the middle of her hair when she was in her mid 20s.
    She was a very striking woman, I think a good-looking woman.
    She looked very much like Ingrid Bergman.
    I happened to watch recently-- there
    was a two-hour thing, a biographical thing
    on PBS about Bergman, showing her
    from the early days in Sweden up until the time
    that she did Golda Meir.
    And there is a striking resemblance.
    Well, heads must have turned when she walked places.
    And so did she get married?
    In a way, yes.
    When my mother walked into a place, people knew it.
    Was she tall, imposing?
    Not very.
    No, I would say probably she was around 5' 6".
    It was her manner?
    OK.
    Yeah.
    Yes.
    Yes.
    And did she ever remarry?
    No.
    She felt she never wanted to.
    Probably it's because she was never sure
    that my father was dead because we never knew what happened.
    And I think until the very end, she
    was hoping against hope that he may show up or show up,
    something like that.
    So she never did remarry.
    Well, did she live in Chicago with you, or in Iowa?
    What happened with the--
    No, no, no.
    The only one that lived in Iowa was
    my sister, who went to school there at Grinnell.
    And then when she finished school there,
    she came to Chicago.
    My mother lived in Chicago from '52 until--
    my guess would be in the mid '60s.
    And then she moved down to Florida with my younger sister,
    with Doly, who still lives in Florida.
    With her family.
    Yeah.
    And she died in--
    I think it was 1968.
    She had cancer.
    It had to be a real loss to you.
    It sounds like she was a remarkable woman.
    Yeah.
    I'm sure it was.
    But the one thing that, again, I remember
    at the time of the funeral, of course,
    there is the sense of loss.
    Because how old was she?
    64, I think.
    64.
    The thing that was very apparent to Coca, Doly, and myself,
    that we felt no remorse in terms like wish we had done this.
    Because we did what we did when we did it, and that was that.
    I mean, there was not none of this stuff--
    that I wish I had done this, and I wish I had done that.
    For her or anything?
    For anybody.
    But in that particular case, of course, it referred to her.
    It seems like she was very matter of fact.
    She was a survivor.
    So she just did what had to be done and kind taught you
    all to do that by example.
    She was a survivor.
    She found great comfort in religion.
    She did then?
    Yes.
    So in her Jewish religion?
    Certainly.
    Again, going back now to early days in Romania,
    where I think I mentioned to you my grandmother's-- which was
    my father's mother's-- attitude towards the dietary things.
    Yes.
    My mother's feelings about that was
    that the tradition was very important to her
    because she attributed that importance to her mother's
    feelings.
    So it was like a tribute of some sort.
    So that, for instance, if she went places
    and they were serving meat, she was not hungry.
    I mean, as opposed to saying, "I don't eat because--"
    she just said she wasn't hungry, or she would just
    have a cracker or something like this.
    But-- and here again, where the modification came in.
    Shortly after Patsy and I got married,
    and we did not practice the dietary laws or any
    of those things, so that if my mother came,
    she would always eat something that was not interfering
    with her dietary beliefs.
    But then later on, she came to the realization that it was--
    it was more important to her to come to our house
    and have a meal with us and eat whatever we had,
    whether it was steak or something like that,
    than to abide by the dietary laws.
    So again, it was a matter of priorities.
    And the goal-- the effect was the more important.
    What became-- what becomes more important.
    And it was a modification of her beliefs.
    But she found great comfort in religion.
    Now, in thinking about it, when she
    was doing a lot of her resourcefulness
    and saying that she was Christian,
    she was like how old?
    She was in her maybe late 20s, early 30s?
    Well, no.
    She was born-- let's see.
    This would have been-- she would have been in her 30s.
    Yeah.
    Amazing.
    Well, how do you feel that religion places--
    is that an important part of your life today?
    Basically, to me, not the ritualistic phase of it.
    I am a Jew.
    To me Judaism is not a religion.
    To me it's an ethical way of life.
    There are certain things that I will do, certain things
    that I will not do.
    Very early in bringing up our children,
    we made it very clear what is acceptable,
    what is not acceptable.
    They learned some of these things fairly early.
    And of course, like labor and management,
    there were constant negotiations.
    But there are certain things that they knew that they're
    just not acceptable.
    Do you belong to a temple?
    No.
    I did, and then I found that the pompous ass who
    was my religious leader was not acceptable anymore.
    So then we walked out of it.
    And the-- a lá 1984, we belonged to a Mr. and Mrs. club.
    And we received in the mail, "D'Lite Pavlovitch,"
    which I thought was hilarious.
    Oh, is that funny.
    "D'Lite Pavlovitch," yeah.
    So do-- I almost feel, while we're talking,
    that you don't identify as much as some other survivors would
    with having survived.
    There are groups that are-- there
    are people that are in groups, in organizations specifically
    for the survivors of the Holocaust.
    Well, couldn't it be possible that they need the support?
    I think that's what it is.
    I think I've been very fortunate that whatever
    support I may have needed from time to time,
    it just came through, in the case of my wife Patsy,
    we've been married for 32 years, which
    have been terrific 32 years--
    Oh, that's wonderful to hear.
    --and a few friends that one has had over the years.
    Was she American-born?
    Yes.
    So she had nothing-- no part of the Holocaust or anything.
    No.
    In fact, she was saying to me before we began this interview,
    that she has a stronger feeling against Germans than perhaps
    you do sometimes.
    Well, I cannot and will not have anything other than
    on a one-to-one basis, for a very simple reason,
    because every place that I have been,
    I have found the whole gamut of humanity,
    from very good to very, very bad and anything else you want
    in between so that I cannot-- perhaps it takes a little bit
    more work to deal with people at those levels than to lump
    people together.
    But I cannot lump people together because of the things
    that have happened to me.
    Yeah, such a range in countries and experiences.
    Nobody has an exclusive on anything.
    Yeah.
    Well, you said something about Israel.
    Before you mentioned that you don't really
    feel that much of an affinity towards the country in general.
    No.
    Only because there are things that are going on there that we
    have all tried to avoid.
    And I just-- it's not the ambience
    that I would care to live under.
    You mean, the fighting and unrest in Lebanon.
    Yeah.
    And it's not the Lebanon.
    I am talking some of the things that are prevalent
    insofar between the various classes that
    are living in Israel.
    But again, all it is, they're just
    people who happen to be Jewish.
    And living in Israel.
    That's all.
    It's not any different.
    To backtrack just a little bit, when
    you were studying in the United States at Roosevelt college,
    what subjects were you studying?
    Oh, I suppose I took a number of general courses,
    anywhere from--
    you name it, and then ended up in music.
    Oh, music?
    What were you doing in music?
    Musician?
    Primarily interested in writing and arranging.
    And have you worked in that, doing that?
    Oh, no.
    Actually, I gave it up shortly after we were married.
    Patsy's father was a concert pianist,
    and I used to study with him.
    And I used to practice, while working, two or three
    hours a day.
    And then it sort of tapered off.
    In the meantime, our kids became involved.
    They've acquired-- yeah, it sounds like your children
    are the musicians.
    Yeah.
    And how did you get to Cleveland from-- was it from Chicago?
    Strictly economics.
    I was working for a packaging company in Chicago.
    And then I decided to try freelance photography.
    And I am a good photographer, except that I realized--
    or I found out, I should say, the hard way--
    that when you are trying to do it commercially--
    and I was trying to do it with the ad agencies
    without having the reputation, shall we say.
    It's one thing to do what you want
    to do when you want to do it, if you
    feel like doing it as an amateur, as opposed
    to when somebody is paying you for it
    and you have to do it on their terms, on their time,
    and so on.
    And it didn't work out financially.
    So then I decided to go back in the industry in which I
    had acquired a certain proficiency, therefore
    commanding a reasonable salary.
    So I passed the word around, and I was offered
    two things around that time.
    One was with Mead in Atlanta as director of purchases,
    but it would have entailed a lot of traveling,
    which I did not want.
    To me, if I am away one day out of the year,
    that's one day too many.
    Well, that's really nice to hear someone say that.
    I don't like traveling.
    [CROSS TALK] with your family.
    Then I found-- there was a job here
    in Cleveland, which ended up rather on a sour note,
    without mentioning names.
    And then I left that about 10 years ago.
    Well,
    When you came to Cleveland, did you
    go to any social services for help?
    Or-- it doesn't sound like you needed to do that.
    No.
    Uh-uh.
    Have you been back, or do you have any desire
    to return to Romania?
    None whatsoever.
    Or Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey?
    No, not really.
    As I think I mentioned before, we took the kids with us
    on a trip.
    But this was to England and to France.
    Patsy likes England, Scotland more than any other place.
    And that's it.
    No, I have no desire to go any of these places.
    Mr. Pavlovitch, when you look back, do you--
    it seems as if your mother was the central force,
    and perhaps something kept you back.
    Oh, if it weren't for her, I'm sure we wouldn't be alive
    today.
    But there had to be things in your personality too.
    I mean, would you say, if you had to name a few qualities--
    I don't-- in so far as--
    in going back and considering how old I was,
    it was just, perhaps, just helping a little bit
    here and there, but she was the driving force,
    the motivating force of starting the whole thing
    and getting out of the camp and surviving and so on.
    Do you think about those experiences often now?
    Not often-- occasionally.
    Are they painful?
    It doesn't sound that way from listening to you.
    No.
    Not really, because I think they're counterbalanced by--
    and I think, again, probably it's a defense mechanism--
    by the fact that, A, I am alive, have
    had a reasonably good life since I
    have been in the United States.
    Sure, there's been the loss of my mother, my wife's parents.
    There are friends who have died.
    There are that sort of thing.
    But then again, that comes under the heading of, quote, "life."
    Yeah, to everybody.
    So I think, for sanity reason, one
    should try to accentuate the positive, as the old song goes.
    That's a good attitude.
    Otherwise, I mean, people tend to wallow in things.
    And it's counterproductive.
    Well, do you feel that the experiences affected your life?
    Oh, I'm sure they have.
    Through the Holocaust and-- do you know how?
    Or how it's affected your philosophy?
    I couldn't begin to tell you.
    I would have no idea what sort of a person I would be--
    Otherwise.
    --had I been under, quote," "normal circumstances."
    You know, been born, died in Ploiesti.
    I have no idea.
    I mean, you're right.
    I suspect, though, would have been
    to a-- or maybe I'd like to believe that would be somewhat
    what I am now, only because of the environment
    that I was born into and raised.
    Which was unconventional at that time.
    For that time, yeah.
    But as to insofar as to how--
    it's one thing I learned a long time ago,
    not to play the "If" game because it's totally useless.
    You sound so well-adjusted.
    It's fantastic here.
    I have my moments.
    No, but how could you not.
    But that is true.
    How would you really know how you would have been otherwise?
    No, you can't.
    No way of knowing how you would have turned out.
    Well, do you feel that-- this is a generalization, of course.
    But do you feel that the survivors
    are different from other Jews?
    Every person is different from every other person.
    So insofar as to take that a group of this is different,
    sure they're different.
    But how they're different, I don't know.
    Well, what helped you to decide to share your experiences
    in this archive project?
    I think I felt it very important that there should be awareness,
    just on the basic humanities, I mean,
    that instead of just taking and blindly
    say that all the Germans were monsters.
    I know that a lot of them were, but I also
    found some that were decent human beings.
    And I think that's important.
    I don't think that, because life isn't that way,
    it's not all black and white, so it's mostly grays.
    And I think in situations such as this,
    as survivors, I think at least some of them, or most of them
    that I've spoken to, they have trouble acknowledging
    that there is gray.
    It's either black or white, and very little
    in between, for whatever reason.
    And I think that, as human beings,
    we have to be aware that there is a lot of stuff in between.
    But isn't it true that you were--
    your family were the only survivors from that camp.
    As far as I know.
    So that's like a couple people that were just--
    No.
    There were about 5,000 people.
    5,000 that were--
    5,000, and four of you survived?
    So somebody could look at that in another way
    and say that's real evil.
    There is nothing more evil than 5,000 innocent people.
    Oh, nobody says that was terrific.
    But I don't-- I don't know where you're going.
    Well, I don't know.
    I guess I'm just--
    I'm trying to understand the--
    I see what you're saying.
    That makes sense, that view that there were
    some people that were helpful.
    They all weren't bad, and some were following
    orders of the Germans.
    I don't think that I want to start counting how many good
    and how many bad.
    I'm just thinking that 5,000 people were killed.
    It's not 5,000.
    You had 6 million that were killed.
    6 million-- but no, just from that camp that you were in,
    there were 5,000.
    So I wonder if there were any relatives of those survivors
    would be able to look at it--
    I'm wondering if maybe because you had a positive outcome,
    basically--
    you lost your father.
    Yes.
    Which was pretty terrible.
    But if your attitude, your kind of tolerant attitude
    is a product of your having had--
    I don't know--
    --a much more positive--
    I don't look at it as a tolerant thing
    because taking the attitude of being tolerant about something,
    there are other connotations about it
    that I don't particularly care because one then
    presupposes that one is above certain things
    or is beyond certain things.
    Or maybe accepting.
    I'm probably picking a wrong word.
    Perhaps though, some of the survivors
    who have lost more family are more apt to be black or white.
    Does that mean, in other words, that losing
    a father and a grandmother as opposed to somebody
    lost their father, grandmother, and a cousin,
    they're entitled to more pain?
    No.
    No, maybe not.
    No.
    No, I don't think so.
    Because one could take the other thing--
    and this is one of the problems that I
    have with most religions that have-- you know, there is good
    and there is bad.
    And there is reward for the good and punishment for the bad.
    How do you explain to a four-year-old
    who has lost both parents?
    Yeah.
    If there's a God or there's any reason for it.
    You're right.
    Well, you know-- so insofar as doing quantitative
    pronouncements, it's--
    I don't think that I or anybody else is qualified.
    Well, do you feel that there's a need
    to try to commemorate the memory of those
    who lost their lives during the Holocaust?
    I think it's extremely important for history, which is people
    eventually, that these things have happened because I do come
    across people, as I'm sure it crops up in the papers
    and that sort of thing, that none of these things
    have happened, that there were hoaxes,
    and there was propaganda and so on.
    And I'm sure there's a number of people
    that believe that, these things have never happened.
    And it is important that people today, tomorrow, next year,
    and whatever is aware that these things have happened.
    And perhaps by presenting, if one may say,
    the other side of the coin, that perhaps not necessarily
    make it more believable, but might give it
    a little more food for thought.
    I don't know.
    I think that's well put.
    Do you have any personal message that you'd like to share, apart
    from what we've talked about?
    No.
    I don't have any particular message.
    Or anything else that you'd want to say
    that we didn't talk about?
    No, I don't think so.
    I mean, I leave messages through Western Union.
    [LAUGHS]
    I've really found this fascinating, this story.
    I'm sure there's many other things that
    have just been touched or not even mentioned at all.
    But sometimes it's difficult. And I have not even
    tried to prepare any sequence or anything like that.
    Well, it was done real well, very vividly.
    And it just seems like it--
    Well, that's only because it happened.
    And I am blessed with a halfway decent memory--
    not for yesterday or the week before,
    I remember things happened a long time ago.
    Just feel like your mother was extraordinary.
    And I would like to--
    Yes, she was.
    --be able to have met her.
    Yeah, she was a very, very unusual person.
    Was she bitter or angry about it all, or pretty much the way
    you are, accepting?
    I don't-- no.
    I think her attitude was somewhat different.
    She accepted it because it had happened,
    and you cannot undo it.
    And I'm sure, like me, I mean, we're not thrilled about it.
    But she was considerably more subdued about it.
    Plus the fact is that she had the responsibility
    of raising three children, at times in not only--
    without any money or--
    I'm talking, where physically there was the problem
    of shelter, food, and clothing.
    On top of that, the constant fear,
    during the period of living in occupied territory,
    of just ceasing to exist.
    So I am sure that left a mark on her.
    And I remember in talking to her--
    well, I'm talking in the last few years of her life,
    that she was, like, in her 60s or early 60s,
    that she did not have the energy,
    nor could she do and contemplate and do some of these things
    that she thought nothing of doing in her early years.
    Because my mother was never happy
    unless she had 17 million people to worry about or do things
    for.
    And she would find people that needed help.
    What she was trying to do, and try to find the people
    that needed help, not the ones that
    could go out and seek help or go to the agencies
    or stick their hands out or something.
    She was trying to find the people that needed help
    that couldn't ask for help.
    I mean, she had people--
    something comes to mind.
    She met somebody on a streetcar or on a park bench there was
    an old man-- this was in Chicago--
    who had a daughter who was in a mental institution in Elgin,
    Illinois.
    And what she would do-- and again, my mother did not drive.
    She didn't have any money or anything like that.
    But she would take this man and take some food
    to this daughter.
    I mean, like on a weekly visit.
    I mean she always had-- there was a woman named Tillie,
    who only had one leg, that was being kicked out
    of an apartment.
    Every now and then I would get calls from my mother at 2
    o'clock in the morning-- come and help Tillie move,
    and I did--
    that kind of a thing.
    She had to have someone or something
    to do something for someone.
    She sounds amazing.
    And she certainly did something for you all.
    I guess she did something right.
    Gave you life and continued your life.
    Yeah.
    So I think in some ways what I'm trying
    to do is pass this on to, I think the normal-- to our kids
    if we can.
    More than that we cannot do.
    Thank you so much.
    You're welcome.
    And I'd like to Thank you for participating
    in this important project, in a meaningful project for us.
    I found it really moving.
    I have to tell you that.
    Thank you.
    Glad to have been help.
    This is Donna Chernin.
    And I was speaking with Dan Pavlovitch,
    who's a Holocaust survivor.
    And the project's been sponsored by the Cleveland
    Section of the National Council of Jewish Women.
    Thank you.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Dan Pavlovitch, born in 1928, describes being the oldest of three children in a fairly unconventional family in Ploesti, Rumania; his parents and their attitude toward Judaism was one of respect for tradition rather than of religious belief; his grandfather, who was a rabbi; living in an enlightened household, which valued music and literature and open discussion with the children; his father working as an engineer for an American oil company and his mother owning a dress shop; the Iron Guard, a fascist organization, becoming powerful in the late 1930s and Jews beginning to suffer; his father being forced to resign from his job and the family being forced to go to Yugoslavia; being sent to Belgrade (Serbia); living safely in Belgrade until the German takeover; his father being sent to a labor camp and never hearing from him again; being put in a camp across the river from Belgrade in December 1941 with his mother and two sisters; conditions in the camp; his mother getting false identities for them and being released from the camp; going to Bulgaria and then Turkey; living as Christians in Turkey from 1943 until 1948; his mother working as a translator for the US consulate in Turkey; working at a YMCA hospital as a translator for the US War Information Office; working for a German film company in Yugoslavia; leaving Turkey and returning to school; attending Roosevelt College in Chicago, IL; his mother and sisters eventually settling in the US; going to the Cleveland area with his wife and two sons in 1963; and living in Cleveland Heights and working as a paint distributor and with wood and stained glass.
    Interviewee
    Dan Pavlovitch
    Interviewer
    Donna Chernin
    Date
    interview:  1984 August 28
    Credit Line
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of the National Council of Jewish Women Cleveland Section

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    3 videocassettes (U-Matic) : sound, color ; 3/4 in..

    Rights & Restrictions

    Conditions on Access
    There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
    Conditions on Use
    No restrictions on use

    Keywords & Subjects

    Personal Name
    Pavlovitch, Dan, 1928-

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    The interview was acquired by the United Sates Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993 from the National Council of Jewish Women Cleveland Section.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:11:11
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn504979

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    Summary (English)

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    Also in Oral history interviews of the National Council of Jewish Women Cleveland Section Holocaust Archive Project

    The interviews document the experiences of 136 Holocaust survivors, Righteous Gentiles, and former concentration camp liberators from the Cleveland, Ohio, area.

    Date: 1984-1985

    Oral history interview with Molly Akst

    Oral history interview with Molly Akst

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    Molly Akst, born in Bodzanow-Ktodzisko, Poland, describes being one of seven children born to Orthodox parents; her grandfather living with the family; her family owning a dry-goods store; the positive relations between Jews and Gentiles in her town; belonging to the Mizrachi youth group; how the only antisemitic acts in Bodzanow were perpetrated mostly by young boys; leading a quiet, studious life and planning to eventually go to Krakow to teach Hebrew; the German invasion; the many restrictions placed on Jews; most men, including her father, being forced to go to work camps; her father returning home shortly before they were deported in March 1941; being sent to Chasno, where Jews were still living in their own homes and moving freely through the city; the creation of a ghetto in Chasno; convincing four of her siblings to escape with her; hiding for two years with gentile families and fields; keeping the other children safe; her sisters being denounced by a former neighbor in 1944; the arrest of the girls and their release after two weeks, but never seeing their younger sister again; taking her brothers and her sister to live in the woods; remaining in hiding, living outdoors until their liberation in January 1945; returning to Bodzanow, where they lived in a cousin's empty house; several Jews returning to the town and learning that her parents had died at Treblinka; getting married and going to a displaced persons camp in Germany; becoming ill with chronic hiccups; going to Montreal, Canada in 1948 after the birth of her son; her brothers and sister eventually moving to Cleveland, OH and joining them in 1957; living in Cleveland with her husband; and her two children and three grandchildren.

    Oral history interview with Jennie Alpert

    Oral history interview with Jennie Alpert

    Oral History

    Jennie Alpert, born in Czechoslovakia, describes being the second of three daughters; her mother dying when she was three; her father remarrying and going to live with her stepmother's sister; becoming a dressmaker and having a small business, which employed several young girls; being sent with her aunt to a ghetto in Ungvar (Uzhhorod), Ukraine in 1941; her father, stepmother, and eight brothers and sisters being sent elsewhere; being sent with her aunt to Auschwitz and wearing red arm-bands since they were barracks workers; the mass killings in the camp, and the death of her aunt; being selected for death but being forced to wait three days and then selected for work; being given a piece of bread and a dress, and then being transported to Traxenberg; their work digging trenches in the woods and being forced to sing as they walked to work; becoming a favorite of the camp commander, who was not a member of the SS, but of the Wehrmacht; the camp being evacuated in November and being forced to march for three weeks; the emotional state of one of the guards; being taken to Bergen-Belsen, where she remained until the liberation in April; being very sick at the end of the war and taken to a hospital in Juttaborg, Sweden (possibly Goteborg, Sweden); immigrating to the United States along with her brother and two sisters; meeting and marrying a Polish man who had moved to the US in the 1920s; and having a daughter and living in Cleveland Heights, OH.

    Oral history interview with Emerson Batdorff

    Oral History

    Emerson Batdorff describes being drafted into the American Army on May 18, 1942; being classified as “limited service” due to his health problems, but eventually being accepted to Officer Candidate's School; being sent overseas in 1943 as a member of the 103rd Division, 41st Infantry Regiment; being assigned to Casablanca, Morocco, where he became an instructor in a leadership and battle training school; experiencing battle for the first time in 1944 when his unit landed at Naples, Italy; being shot in the leg and spending a short time in a hospital; rejoining his unit in time to enter southern France one hour after the main Allied invasion; his unit going through Alsace and Strasbourg, and then into Germany; not actively participating in battle; being assigned to the 15th Corps' historical section; arriving at Dachau one day after it was liberated and staying for four hours; seeing a transport train filled with dead concentration camp inmates; his current life and retiring from his position as entertainment editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer; living in Cleveland Heights, OH; and his son, stepson, and stepdaughter.

    Oral history interview with Estelle Beder

    Oral history interview with Estelle Beder

    Oral History

    Estelle Beder, born in Lutsk, Poland (Ukraine), describes her father, who was a tailor, and her mother, who sold hand-made clothes from a covered wagon; her two brothers and one sister; her family struggling financially; the German invasion and the restrictions imposed including curfews and mandatory armbands; the sexual abuse and fear during that time; the creation of a ghetto in 1942 and her family suffering terribly; her father being very ill and still sewing; helping her family by delivering clothes and procuring food; acts of great cruelty to the Jews while in the ghetto; her father being beaten and her brother being killed in public; she and her sister being separated from the family and sent to the Łódź ghetto, where they were treated very poorly; remaining in Łódź until 1944 when they were transported to Auschwitz; the great physical and mental cruelty at Auschwitz; being selected with her sister for death in the gas chambers, but the Germans ran out of their supply of gas; being sent with her sister to work in an ammunition factory for a short period, where they received better treatment; being moved from place to place without reason; passing through Bergen-Belsen and walking on thousands of skeletons, wondering if her family was among them; being selected with her sister to be exchanged for German soldiers in Sweden; enduring a perilous trip to Sweden and being nursed back to some normalcy; her entire family, except her sister, dying during the war; her cousin in the United States arranging for she and her sister to live in New York City; marrying another survivor, Sam Beder; having three sons and moving to Cleveland, OH, where she has enjoyed a peaceful life in a community of other survivors; still suffering from the physical and emotional effects of the Holocaust; and being thankful for her family and her community.

    Oral history interview with Adam Beer

    Oral history interview with Adam Beer

    Oral History

    Adam Beer, born in Liptovsky Mikulas, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia), describes his conservative Jewish family; his older sister, Gabriela, and his younger brother, Otto; his mother dying when he was very young and his father remarrying within a year of her death; his father owning a business in electrical contracting; the cultural amenities in Liptovsky Mikulas; the active Jewish community; the Slovaks separating from the Czechs in 1938; Tiso coming to power in 1939; finishing school in 1940 and problems for Jews beginning soon after; the restrictions placed on Jews; his grandmother being deported to Poland on April 2, 1942; his father losing his business in 1940 and preparing an emergency bunker in the mountains outside the town; partisans attacking the town and killing several Germans on August 28, 1944; his family and other families escaping to the bunker in the mountains; the Gestapo finding the bunker on December 15, 1944 and destroying it; his younger brother running away; building a second bunker; Russians finding them and taking them back to Liptovsky Mikulas; his family finding his brother hidden with a family; going to Bratislava, Slovakia to begin medical school; communists taking over the country in 1948; deciding to leave rather than finish his studies; going to Cleveland, OH with his fiancée; finishing medical school; opening a medical practice in Cleveland; and his wife and two children.

    Oral history interview with Susan Eisdorfer Beer

    Oral history interview with Susan Eisdorfer Beer

    Oral History

    Susan Beer, born on May 14, 1924 in Budapest, Hungary, describes growing up in Topolčany, Slovakia, describes being an only child of a physician; the family being very comfortable and Orthodox; the good relations between the Jews and the Gentile community; attending a Jewish public school and a gymnasium, hoping eventually to become a doctor; her studies being interrupted when the civil war broke out; Slovakia becoming independent and allied to Germany; the restrictions placed on Jews; her father being forbidden to practice medicine; her father arranging for her to be smuggled into Hungary, where she stayed with relatives; her parents later joining her; her father passing as a Gentile and being caught by the police; her father escaping the police and making plans for the family to Partisan-held Czechoslovakia; the family being arrested and held in a jail for three weeks; being deported to Auschwitz, and classified as political prisoners; her father working in the camp hospital; being sent with her mother to the "model camp," which was organized for the Red Cross inspectors who occasionally toured the camp; the evacuation of Auschwitz and being sent on a death march; being taken with her mother to Ravensbrück, where she worked as a camp translator; Ravensbrück being evacuated and being sent to a camp deeper in Germany, attached to a camp filled with French prisoners-of-war; the German guards running away and the French prisoners cutting the wires enclosing the camp; the prisoners discovered stockpiles of food; going to the nearby town; going with her mother to Bratislava, Slovakia, where a man recognized them in the street and told them that Susan's father was in Budapest; remaining in Budapest for a year; finishing her studies at the gymnasium; returning to Topolcany; beginning medical school in Bratislava; her family being anxious to leave Europe; going to Williamsburg, New York with her fiancé; moving to Cleveland, OH; her husband’s podiatry office; and their two children.

    Oral history interview with Sidonia Benedek

    Oral history interview with Sidonia Benedek

    Oral History

    Sidonia Benedek, born in 1924 in Caraseu, Rumania in the region of Transylvania, describes her large, religious family; her father’s role as the spiritual leader of the community; her happy childhood, having many friends, and doing well in school; her family supporting themselves through a small family farm and being very well-respected by both Jews and gentiles; first seeing antisemitism when Jews in Bucharest, Romania, were killed in 1937; the lack of physically-threatening antisemitism in Caraseu; her teachers having to fight for her status as class valedictorian; the fear and sadness in the Caraseu Jewish community; Germany's influence in the region growing and the Jews suffering the loss of rights and privileges; her family being split up and deported in 1944; the deportation of her brother and brother-in-law to work camps (her brother-in-law survived and her brother did not); the deportation of others to a ghetto in Szatmar (Satu Mare, Romania); her family being transported after five weeks to Auschwitz; her parents, two sisters, and her sisters’ children being killed immediately; surviving the camps along with her younger sister and younger brother; another brother dying in a forced labor camp in Russia; being sent to work in Stutthof, and then to Prost to build an airport; being evacuated in a two-week march during January 1945; escaping with her sister and being liberated by the Russian Army; returning home and reuniting with her brother; reuniting with a childhood friend, Les Benedek, whom she married in September 1945; her brother-in-law (who survived the forced labor camp) moving to New York; her younger brother, Martin Lax, who left Romania in 1946 and lived in Austria for several years before moving to the United States (Cleveland, Ohio) in 1949; leaving Romania in 1965 with her husband and three children (Aliz Benedek, Michael Benedek, and Vera Benedek); and settling in Cleveland.

    Oral history interview with Alice Ben-Horin

    Oral history interview with Alice Ben-Horin

    Oral History

    Alice Ben-Hurin, born in Hungary (along the Danube between Budapest and Vienna, Austria), describes being the youngest of three children; her father working in the import-export business and her mother assisting him with the bookkeeping; her prosperous family; how education was very important to the family and several cousins stayed with them while attending school in the city; finishing high school in 1939; the German takeover and her father being temporarily arrested; working for the local Jewish committee with her older sister; her brother joining the army and disappearing in 1942; trying to persuade her family to escape from Hungary; being sent to the ghetto with her family the day after her brother returned; being sent to an old army post with Jews from the city and the surrounding countryside; her brother returning to the army and being the only survivor of the massacre of his unit; being deported to Auschwitz; the immediate killing of her family except for herself, her cousin, and her sister; being sent to Dresden, Germany, where she worked in a munitions factory; being evacuated in a march to Bergen-Belsen; being liberated by American and British troops along the way; working for the Red Cross for a short time; going to Austria with a friend's brother who worked for the US Army; working as a high school teacher in Philadelphia, PA after coming to the US; living in Cleveland, OH; and her three children and three grandchildren.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Benson

    Oral history interview with Joseph Benson

    Oral History

    Joseph Benson, born in Strasin in the Northern Bohemian section of Czechoslovakia (now in Czech Republic), describes his German mother and Czech father; having a happy life on a farm with his family and receiving a strong Catholic education; acquiring a love for aviation early in life; being a teenager when the Germans occupied the Sudentenland; being loyal to the Czech ideals and people at that time; becoming involved in anti-German activities; joining the underground movement when he turned 18; being smuggled to England to join the Czech Army in exile; eagerly volunteering for intensive combat flight training and mastering all facets in a short time; his plane being shot down over Germany during an early combat mission; being discovered by the Gestapo and imprisoned for interrogation; suffering torture and imprisonment in Nuremberg, Selenstrausse, and Stadelheim prisons; being in isolation for a great deal of the time; refusing to divulge any information; being transferred first to Dachau and then to Buchenwald; performing labor in aircraft component factories; being transferred to Schoenbeck and escaping with a friend to the American lines; his methods for survival; being a strong believer in personal freedoms; and lecturing to youths about the dangers of totalitarian governments.

    Oral history interview with Jack Beigelman

    Oral history interview with Jack Beigelman

    Oral History

    Jack Biegelman, born in Łódź, Poland in 1930, describes being part of a large family, where music was the major vocational and recreational focus; being a young boy when the Germans invaded Poland; the turmoil and the powerful images of the German military force; life in the ghetto; doing forced labor; being transported with his family to Auschwitz in 1944; the death of his mother and younger brother; his father surviving several months, but dying from illness; enduring the horrors, starvation, and work at Auschwitz; being transferred to Glechamberg camp, where he was liberated by the Russians; returning to Łódź; living with an uncle in Germany; going to the United States and, with the aid of Jewish organization, being placed in the home of a retired school teacher; his studies in music; enlisting in the Air Force during the Korean War; getting married and having three children; his life in Cleveland, OH; and his commitment to Jewish organizations, especially those dealing with education and commemoration of the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Leah Binstock

    Oral history interview with Leah Binstock

    Oral History

    Leah Binstock, born in Jaroslaw, Poland, describes the prevalence of antisemitism before the war; the large and active Jewish community; her parents’ candy factory; her sister; her family being very religious; attending a private Jewish school; belonging to a Zionist organization and hoping to someday go to Palestine; being 14 years old when the Germans invaded; the anti-Jewish measures; all the Jews in Jaroslaw being forced to move to Krakow, Poland; escaping with her sister and going to a work camp for Polish women; assuming the identity of two Ukrainian girls they befriended on a train; living as Christians in Terezin, Poland, where they worked for the telephone company; her sister learning to speak German and getting a better job; being denounced to the Gestapo by their co-workers; being deported to Auschwitz in February 1943; being evacuated on foot with the other prisoners; escaping on the second night with four others; being hidden by a priest for several days until the war officially ended in May 1945; returning to Jaroslaw with her sister; learning that their parents died in the Krakow ghetto; moving to Germany, where they opened a grocery business; meeting her husband through a girl she knew in Auschwitz; registering with a Zionist organization that helped refugees immigrate to the United States; settling in St. Louis, MO; moving to Cleveland, OH after experiencing antisemitism in St. Louis; living in Mayfield Heights, OH; working for her husband's business; and her three children and four grandchildren.

    Oral history interview with Elias Cala

    Oral history interview with Elias Cala

    Oral History

    Elias Cala, born in Dobrzyn (Golub-Dobrzyń), Poland, describes the Jewish population in the area; being the third of five children in a close, loving family; his father being extremely religious; the lack of anti-Semitism in Dobrzyn prior to 1934; working at a cousin’s shoe store in Łódź, Poland in 1936 when he was 16 years old; his father’s death in 1938; being drafted into the army in 1939; his unit being on the German boarder when Germany invaded; a fierce battle lasting several days; his unit being taken prisoner by the Germans; the Jews being immediately separated from the rest of the unit and pretending he was a gentile with the help of his fellow soldiers; the non-Jewish prisoners being released soon after their capture; staying with his cousin in Łódź; going to Dobrzyn, where the Germans were persecuting Jews; being expelled from Dobrzyn; settling in a town near the Russian border with his aunt and uncle and their children; getting married; being deported to a camp at Dzialdowo, and then sent to a ghetto in Piotrkov; escaping with his wife and going to Warsaw, Poland; going to Nalewaj, where they found his wife's family; working on a road crew, but getting sick and being hospitalized; being badly burned during a fire; his wife giving birth to a daughter; being deported to Auschwitz; being separated from his wife and baby; being sent to an I.G. Farben factory; the bombing of the factory; being evacuated and forced to move from camp to camp; going to Mauthausen and Oranienburg; being left at Flossenbürg; being transferred to a work-camp near Stuttgart, Germany; being evacuated from Stuttgart and traveling again from camp to camp; hiding in a haystack with 21 others; being discovered and many of them being shot; surviving and being taken in by villagers and given food and clothing; being liberated by the Americans on May 1, 1945; remaining in Germany, where he got married again; moving to the US in March 1949; living in Beachwood, Ohio; and his five children.

    Oral history interview with Vincent Cochrane

    Oral history interview with Vincent Cochrane

    Oral History

    Vincent Cochrane, born in 1919 in Cuyahoga Falls, OH, describes enlisting in the US Army in 1937 and serving until 1950; serving in Germany from 1944 to 1945; being a captain and commanding a medium tank company; being present at the liberation of three concentration camps in Ahlen near Hannover, Gardelegen, and Salzwedel; his unit only staying about an hour until back-up units and medical units arrived; how it took a while for the liberators to realize what they were seeing; becoming an operating engineer after his service; being the on the security staff of Cuyahoga County, OH; feeling that his experience in the war may have helped him become more sensitive person; and wanting to be interviewed to help make sure the Holocaust is never forgotten.

    Oral history interview with W. Louis Cohn

    Oral history interview with W. Louis Cohn

    Oral History

    W. Louis Cohn, born in Berlin, Germany in 1925, describes having a younger sister, born in 1927 as well as an older brother; his father, Waldemar, who was an attorney with the German government; his father working from 1925 to 1931 in the German embassy in Nice, France; his mother, Lottie Epstein, who came from a prosperous family; his family moving to the outskirts of Berlin in 1937; being assimilated into German life and belonging to a Reform congregation; attending elementary school from 1931 to 1935 without problems and attending gymnasium from 1935 to 1938; being kicked out of school in November 1938 and attending an improvised Jewish school; antisemitism increasing; the deportation of men to concentration camps; his brother going to the US; being sent on December 10, 1938 with his 11-year-old sister and his ten-year-old cousin on a train to Holland, where his cousin's grandmother lived; missing the train and being sent to a refugee camp for two to three months, then a children’s home, and then to a camp near Utrecht; his mother finding then in May 1939 and taking them to Brussels, Belgium; attending school in Brussels for a year; being arrested by Belgian police in 1940; being sent to Paris, France then moved from camp to camp; finding his father in Gurs concentration camp; working in the censorship office at Gurs and being able to smuggle news out; getting caught smuggling letters; being deported to Mauthausen and escaping with some other young men in August 1942; going through France to Spain; being sent from Barcelona to Africa for basic training; going to England where he was trained in counter-espionage by the Office of Strategic Services; being assigned him to parachute into France and blow up wheels in a German motor pool; completing his task and searching for his sister and parents; finding his sister in a convent under the false name Elise Carpentier; returning to England and receiving further training from the US Army 82nd Airborne Division; parachuting into France on D-Day and being wounded on the beachhead; staying in a hospital for three days; fighting with the Allies in Northern France, Holland, and accompanying them into Berlin; going to his family's apartment building, which had been bombed and finding his family’s possessions, which were buried in the yard; losing all his family except his sister and his uncle’s family; going to Palestine, where he worked on a kibbutz and helped train the Haganah; having special status because he was a captain in the US Army and becoming a US citizen; going to Cleveland, OH in 1947 and attending college to become an engineer; marrying Lottie Wolff in 1951; believing he survived because he worked hard and took care of himself; receiving help from Quakers in Spain and counseling from Catholic chaplains during the war; and missing out on his youth but feeling that perhaps he learned something from the experience.

    Oral history interview with Peppi Dekker

    Oral history interview with Peppi Dekker

    Oral History

    Peppi Dekker (née Chajes), born in Apeldoorn, Holland, describes having a twin sister; her parents’ successful textile business; attending public school until the war began; Germany invading Holland and being forced one year later to attend the local Jewish school; her family escaping the first roundup of Jews in May 1942; her family being deported the following September; being sent with her sister, mother, and grandfather to Westerbork, where they found her father; her father becoming a "law and order officer" at Westerbork and the family acquiring special status; being sent in 1944 to Bergen-Belsen with a transport of Dutch orphans; staying at Bergen-Belsen for two years; being sick often; her mother’s strength and determination to survive and maintain the family's dignity; her mother’s cleaning job outside the camp; her mother being beaten and sexually assaulted; being evacuated from the camp and sent by train to Elba; being liberated by the Russian Army; her family being given a home which had been occupied by a German officer; moving to the American zone after several incidents with Russian soldiers; returning to Holland; receiving reparations from the Dutch government; her father sending she and her sister in 1957 to the United States, where they stayed with her father's brother and his wife; getting married and moving with her husband to Chicago, New Jersey, and then to Cleveland; living in Strongsville, Ohio; and her two children.

    Oral history interview with Maury Feren

    Oral history interview with Maury Feren

    Oral History

    Maury Feren describes being a member of the 2nd Infantry Division, 5th Division, Medical Detachment from 1943 until 1945; his unit being located near Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic) in early May 1945 when they suddenly came upon 75 emaciated, dying women between the ages of 20 and 35; how these women had been among a group of 500 who had started on a death march from Auschwitz and most had died along the way; the horror and pain of discovering human beings in such a state of suffering; how the army tried to help these women medically and emotionally in their struggle for recovery; being moved and disturbed by his role as liberator; and feeling heartened by the courage and devotion of those who tried to help the survivors.

    Oral history interview with Simon Fixler

    Oral history interview with Simon Fixler

    Oral History

    Simon Fixler describes being one of 16 children, born to a prosperous family in Kelca, Czechoslovakia; his happy childhood, with religious freedom and no sense of antisemitism; the introduction of antisemitism with the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Hungarians; the anti-Jewish atmosphere escalating; the Jews being forced to perform menial work in labor camps; evading conscription to the labor camps for a year and a half; being discovered by the government and sent to a parachute factory; getting married in 1943 and being able to see his wife after the work days; being sent in November 1944 to a more severe forced labor camp in one of Eichmannfs last transports; enduring terrible working conditions and witnessing mass murders and atrocities at the labor camp; being transferred to the concentration camp at Mauthausen in April 1945; he and his brother supporting each other physically and emotionally throughout this horrible ordeal; being liberated by the Americans in May 1945; wandering through the countryside with his brother; seeking the aid of the Jewish Federation in Prague, Czech Republic; moving to Budapest, Hungary, where they reunited with the six other surviving family members; moving with his wife to Germany, where they remained for three years; being selected for sponsorship to Cleveland, OH by a knitting mill; having several knitting jobs and building his life in the US; becoming interested in Jewish fund raising and Holocaust memorial activities; enjoying the freedoms of the US; believing that it is his duty to share his experiences; and believing the best investment in the future of Judaism is education.

    Oral history interview with Herman Frank

    Oral history interview with Herman Frank

    Oral History

    Herman Frank, born in Łódź, Poland, describes being the only child of a well-to-do family in the textile and fur business; having an active and happy childhood, attending concerts and the theater and vacationing abroad; the antisemitism in Łódź; his father’s death before the war and deciding not to emigrate; the German invasion; his mother’s preparations for the war; being moved to the ghetto; his mother’s death in 1942 when he was 17 years old; attending a textile engineering school in the ghetto; his various jobs in the ghetto; the liquidation of the ghetto and the deportations to Auschwitz; being transferred to Gleiwitz; being evacuated in January 1945; escaping but being captured and sent to Gross-Rosen; being propositioned sexually by the camp commander; being evacuated to Buchenwald; being moved a few weeks later to Berga-an-Elste; being assigned to work in the kitchen because of an injury and getting more food; the evacuation of the camp and escaping with his friends; convincing SS that they were Polish civilians; how after liberation he went to the American zone in Weiden, Germany, and worked for the US Army; marrying another Polish survivor in Germany; the birth of their first son in Germany; his wife’s aunt sponsoring their entry into the US in 1949; the difficultly of adjusting to life in the US; owning his own carpet cleaning business; living in Pepper Pike, Ohio; and his two sons and two grandchildren.

    Oral history interview with Helen Fried

    Oral history interview with Helen Fried

    Oral History

    Helen Fried (born circa 1926) describes being the third of ten children in a large, orthodox family in Hust, Czechoslovakia (Khust, Ukraine); the Jewish community of Hust; her mother supporting the family by running a leather store, while her father was a Torah schlar; her grandparents living in an adjoining house and helping to raise the children; her family having good relations with their gentile neighbors; the start of the war and her family losing their store; the Hungarian invasion of Hust; the store being returned to her family under the Hungarian occupation and living a relatively good life; anti-Jewish measures being imposed when the Germans were in control again; the creation of the ghetto in 1943 and the deportation soon after to Auschwitz; her parents, four brothers, and one of her sisters being killed immediately; remaining in Auschwitz with her four sisters until late 1944 when they were sent to work on a farm; being evacuated and forced to march; escaping with her sisters and taking the identity of Polish maids who had worked for the German army; maintaining their identities until liberation but being separated; going to work in a factory with 60 Russian women; being liberated before the official end of the war by Russian soldiers; reuniting with several cousins and her sister in Dobrzyn, Poland; going to Prague, Czech Republic; living in a displaced persons camp in Leipheim, Germany to wait for a visa to the United States; marrying a man she met in Budapest, Hungary; going to the US in 1949; settling in New York, NY; the Joint Distribution Committee helping them find a place to live and a job for her husband; moving to Cleveland, OH; not telling her son about her Holocaust experiences; her feelings about Judaism; the effects of the Holocaust on her life; and her thoughts on why she survived.

    Oral history interview with Marcel Friedman

    Oral history interview with Marcel Friedman

    Oral History

    Marcel Friedman describes having a comfortable childhood with his family in Presov, Slovakia; his numerous non-Jewish friends; having a religious home life; his educational and recreational interests; being denied admission to the University of Bratislava in 1939 due to a Jewish quota; deciding to go to Palestine, as he had been an active Zionist; beginning his journey to Israel in 1940 and encountering political problems, a shipwreck, and bombings; being interned on the island of Rhodes in a tent camp; being moved to a camp in Southern Italy; being treated fairly well during his internment; being liberated by the British in 1943; joining the Czech Army and being part of the weather department; being transferred back to Czechoslovakia, where he was reunited with his brother and sister in 1945; his parents' fate in the concentration camps; being recruited for Palestine in 1948; joining the Israeli Army and serving in the weather service; determining that life was too difficult in Israel in 1953 and moving to the United States; his American family members sponsoring and financially aiding he and his wife and child; working in a travel agency in the US; joining a synagogue and becoming active in Jewish activities; believing his luck, personality, and religion contributed to his survival; his belief that survivors have a responsibility to make others aware of their experiences; still feeling some bitterness; and his interests in learning more about the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Ann Frum

    Oral history interview with Ann Frum

    Oral History

    Ann Frum, born in 1925 in Zdunska Vola, Poland, describes her Orthodox Jewish family; experiencing antisemitism before the war, but enjoying a fairly stable, carefree childhood; the German invasion and fleeing for safety; being forced to live in a ghetto in her small town; the liquidation of the ghetto in 1942 and being sent to the large ghetto in Łódź, Poland; the terrible living conditions during her transport and her internment in the ghetto; being sent to work in a munitions factory in Czestochowa, where she met the man she later married; being transferred to a concentration camp in Ravensburg, Germany, where she was forced to dig trenches for the burial of other Jews; being sent to Bergau (Burgau) and Turkine (Türkheim), smaller concentration camps, where she again was forced to work amid horrible conditions; being liberated at Allach, near Dachau, by the Americans on May 1, 1945; reuniting with her future husband and getting married in 1946; going to the US in 1951 and settling in New Jersey; moving to Cleveland, OH; having three children, and creating an extended family of close friends in the Cleveland Jewish community; and her belief that it is essential that survivors tell others of their experiences.

    Oral history interview with Jack Gildar

    Oral history interview with Jack Gildar

    Oral History

    Jack Gildar, born in Tarnowa, Poland, describes his the strong Jewish community in his town; his close, loving family; his father’s death; going at the age of nine to attend school in Lomza; becoming an apprentice carpenter; antisemitism in Tarnowa; working in a town near the German border when the war began; returning home and discovering that Tarnowa had been bombed; the Russian occupation; the German occupation beginning in 1941; being sent to a ghetto in 1942 in Lomza; being sent to a camp in Zembrov (Zambrów); being sent with his family to Auschwitz; being separated in Auschwitz and never seeing his family again; being sent to Birkenau, then to another section of Auschwitz, where he worked in an SS hospital; being able to trade for extra food, medicine, and items such as soap and razor blades because of his work; sharing much of his good fortune with others, sending food and medicine to friends and cousins in other parts of the camp; remaining relatively strong and healthy; the evacuation of the camp in January 1945 and being walked for four days to the Czech border, where they boarded trains for transport to Mauthausen; volunteering for a transfer to Ebensee; being liberated by the American Army; spending June through November after liberation in an abandoned lake house in Austria; going to Germany, where he lived on a kibbutz in Landsburg; the closing of the kibbutz in 1949 and discovering relatives in Cleveland, OH; going to Cleveland in June 1949; living in Beachwood, OH and his work as a butcher; his wife Sara, who is also a Holocaust survivor; and their two children, Rochelle and David.

    Oral history interview with Ileen Green

    Oral history interview with Ileen Green

    Oral History

    Ileen Koslov Green (née Chaia Koslovsky), born on September 23, 1926 in Holsczaly, Poland (near Vilnius, Lithuania), describes being the middle child of three daughters in an orthodox Jewish family; her father owning a dry goods store and the family living in 13 rooms located behind the store; living with her parents, sisters, grandmother, aunt, and cousin; her father leaving in 1938 to live with his brother in Cleveland, OH; the family planning to follow her father later but their plans being interrupted by the war; the Russian occupation, during which the family's store was closed; surviving by trading merchandise for food with local farmers; the German occupation in 1941; being sent with her mother and sisters to a ghetto; Gentile friends supplying Jews in the ghetto with food; being sent to a labor camp in Lithuania soon after her sister was sent there; her work building streets; her mother and other sister arriving in the camp a year later; being sent to Dunjeje in Estonia, and then to Kaiserwald in Lithuania in 1943; going to Stutthof and life there; being beaten for stealing food; volunteering for farm work; being sent to Dresden, Germany, where she and her older sister worked in an ammunition factory; the bombing of the factory and being forced to march to Prague, Czech Republic; being liberated by French and Russian soldiers; returning home; going to Fahrenwart displaced persons camp and contacting her father in the US; immigrating to the US in 1948; living in South Euclid, OH; and her son, daughter, and five grandchildren.

    Oral history interview with Phillip Green

    Oral history interview with Phillip Green

    Oral History

    Philip Green describes his Orthodox family; his older sister and younger sister; the vandalizaton and boycotts of his family’s dried-goods store; being 14 years old when his family moved from their small Polish town to Łódź, Poland; the creation of the ghetto in 1939 and moving there soon after with his family; he and his sisters being forced to work in factories; his father dying after being attacked by the Gestapo in his home; surviving in the ghetto with his mother and sisters until 1944; returning home from a food search one day to find a note saying that his family was taken; surrendering himself and being taken to Auschwitz; being transferred to Braunschweig, a truck factory, where he worked under deplorable conditions and near-starvation for over eight months; being moved to the Hermann Goehringwerke airplane factory for a month's work; being transferred to Ravensbrück; being moved around until the Russians liberated Philip and his group of near-dying men on May 5, 1945 near Ludwigslust, Germany; being taken to a hospital for treatment and slowly began to recover their health and their lives; trying to locate his family in Łódź and finding no one; going to Munich, Germany, where he joined a displaced persons camp, and later worked in the office of an American aid organization; meeting his future wife, also a survivor, and going to the United States in 1948; getting married in 1951; working for a plumbing supply company; his daughter and son; and how he is a strong supporter of Israel.

    Oral history interview with Ervin Heksh

    Oral history interview with Ervin Heksh

    Oral History

    Ervin Heksh, born in a village 60 km northwest of Budapest, Hungary, describes how there were few Jewish families in his village; having a happy and active childhood; not being able to attend a university and going to yeshiva instead; entering his father’s grain business; the rise in antisemitism after 1935; his father being forced to take on a partner; the deportation of many Jews and his near deportation because he bought a house that a Hungarian gendarme wanted to buy; being sent to a forced labor camp in Crimea, Ukraine in 1942; witnessing many instances of brutality; being transferred to Belopolye, Ukraine in October 1942; working through a harsh winter, which few of the men survived; the cruel commander; a group of Italian prisoners joining his unit in Belopolye and the kindness they showed to Jewish prisoners; working at a hospital in the Bryansk forest; returning home that summer, where he found his family and his son, who had been born while he was in Russia; working for a while as a traveling salesman; the creation of the ghetto in Budapest, where his parents, wife, and son were confined; working in a mine; he and some friends being arrested and placed in the ghetto when they were caught sneaking in to visit their families; being taken out of the ghetto to work; being arrested and sent to a labor camp, which he escaped; finding his wife and child in a Red Cross community; being deported to Bergen-Belsen; hearing rumors that they would be sent to Switzerland as part of a special exchange; being evacuated to Theresienstadt in April 1945; their train being stopped between stations and the SS guards abandoning them; being liberated the next day; spending time in Hildenheim, Germany; returning to Budapest; learning that his parents died at Auschwitz and his wife died at Bergen-Belsen after liberation; finding his son in Budapest, living with his wife's parents; his son dying from illness when he was two years old; secretly crossing the border into Germany and living in several refugee camps; working for the UNRRA; eventually remarrying; going to the US in 1948; working at a plumbing supply company; his son and daughter; and his reasons for sharing his story.

    Oral history interview with Karel Hoffman

    Oral history interview with Karel Hoffman

    Oral History

    Karel Hoffman describes being 21 years old when he was ordered to report to Terezin, Czechoslovakia to help in the construction of a model prison camp; how Terezin was originally a fortress town from the Austro-Hungarian Empire; the many ironies and falsehoods of this model camp; how the Nazis touted Terezin as having many services, such as a bank, but money was totally worthless within the town; the outward appearance of Terezin versus the actual treatment of inmates within the concentration camp; the poor living conditions; the food rations and overcrowding; the inmates suffering beatings, physical abuse, and intimidation from the Nazis; remaining at Terezin for three years; being one of 5,000 taken to Auschwitz; the horrors of induction at Auschwitz, especially in the later years of the war; being transferred to Gleiwitz, where he participated in the construction of platforms for cannons and machine guns; being liberated at Gleiwitz in 1945; wandering through the woods, witnessing the chaos and confusion; returning to his home to search for family members and being unsuccessful in his search; moving to a displaced persons camp in Germany, where he remained until 1949; being sponsored for immigration to the United States by his aunts in 1949; pursuing furniture and carpentry work in the US; and getting married and having one son.

    Oral history interview with Al Horwitz

    Oral history interview with Al Horwitz

    Oral History

    Al Horwitz, born in Ohio, describes being part of an American Army division that liberated Nordhausen concentration camp; being drafted into the army in 1941; serving as a staff sergeant in the 104th Infantry Division, 387th Field Artillery; being stationed at Camp Adam, Oregon, went on maneuvers in the California and Arizona deserts, and spent time in Washington state; being sent with his unit in June 1944; landing in France and being part of the battle to free the port of Antwerp, Belgium; being active in Holland; moving into Germany through Aachen, as part of the drive to Koln (Cologne); going to Nordhausen, in the Hartz Mountains; how Nordhausen was attached to a German bomb factory, and the inmates were Jews and political prisoners; being there while Generals Eisenhower and Bradley toured the camp; moving on to Leipzig, Germany, where he helped set up the "Lucky Strike" displaced persons (DP) camp; being in Leipzig when the famous conference was held to divide post-war Germany; returning to the US in June 1945 and being discharged from the army shortly after; living in Cleveland, Ohio; working in the life insurance business; and his wife and three children.

    Oral history interview with Rose Ickowicz

    Oral history interview with Rose Ickowicz

    Oral History

    Rose Ickowicz, born in Vicovu de Jos, Romania, describes enjoying a pleasant family and community life as a child before World War II; being the oldest of seven children and raised in an atmosphere of strong devotion to family and pride in country; the invasions of Hungary in 1944 and life changed drastically for her family; being taken to a ghetto for three weeks and then sent to Auschwitz; arriving at Auschwitz near the end of the war; suffering the atrocities of the Nazi regime and also the cruelty and jealousy of other Jews who had been imprisoned much longer; believing she survived because of her strong faith, clear values, and what she calls "miracles"; doing manual labor; being transferred to Bergen-Belsen; being liberated a year after she entered the camp; trying to immigrate to the United States and going to Canada with her husband; life in Canada; encountering difficulties; moving to the US; building an economic and social foundation; and retaining great pride in America and being grateful for the opportunity to start over in this country.

    Oral history interview with Munci Katz

    Oral history interview with Munci Katz

    Oral History

    Munci Adler Katz, born in Rakov, Czechoslovakia, describes her hometown, which had 60,000 people, was near the Polish border, and was later part of the Soviet Union; the large Jewish community in Rakov; belonging to Mizrahi, a Zionist youth organization; her very orthodox family; her father working in a factory and being financially stable; her mother dying when she was 13 and her father remarrying; her three sisters; attending a Czech public school for eight years; learning the trade of dressmaking; the increase in antisemitism in Rakov after the German invasion; the Jews of Rakov being ghettoized briefly; being were sent to the crowded ghetto in Matejovce (possibly Matejovce nad Hornádom, Slovakia); being deported four weeks later to Auschwitz; the death of her father, stepmother, and two sisters; being selected with her sister to go to a work camp in Geistlingersteiger, Germany; being the camp seamstress and receiving extra food and better treatment; being evacuated to Dachau then Allach; being the seamstress under the same commander from Geistlingersteiger; staying behind at the camp with her sister while most of the women were evacuated to the Tyrol mountains; being liberated on May 9, 1945 by a unit of black American soldiers; finding her father's brothers in Tsiget; being forced to get engaged to her uncle’s friend; returning to Rakov and finding a farmer neighbor living in their house; returning to Tsiget and going to Bucharest, Romania to escape her fiancé; getting engaged to Harry Katz; losing touch with her sister; received permission to emigrate in 1964; going to Cleveland, OH, where Harry had an aunt; working as a dressmaker; and their two children.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Klein

    Oral history interview with Joseph Klein

    Oral History

    Joseph Klein, born in Strabyczowa, Czechoslovakia (a small town in the Carpathian Mountains that was later part of the Soviet Union), describes being part of a large, orthodox family; his three brothers and three sisters; his father working in the lumber, sand, and gravel trade; his youngest sister dying in childhood and his father dying of liver cancer in 1943, one year before the family was sent to Auschwitz; how the Jews of Strabyczowa were among the last to be deported; being sent to the ghetto at Munkacs (Mukacheve, Ukraine); being sent to Auschwitz; the death of his mother and sister; being sent to work camps with his other sister; spending ten days in Buchenwald, then going to a work camp near Leipzig, Germany, where he repaired a bomb-damaged petroleum refinery; being evacuated by train and escaping the train with another prisoner; being recaptured several days later and returned to their unit; being marched back and his friend being shot by their Gestapo guards; being forced to march to Theresienstadt; remaining in Theresienstadt for one month; being liberated by the Russian Army on May 8, 1945; becoming gravely ill with typhus; obtaining a train ticket to Czechoslovakia when he was well enough to travel; returning to Strabyczowa and finding his brothers, uncle, and sister in Chop; crossing the border into Czechoslovakia before it was permanently closed; going to England in May 1946 through an orphan-refugee program; immigrating to the United States three years later; his surviving siblings settling in the US; serving in the American Army for 19 months during the Korean War; working as a printer at the Cleveland Press; travelling to Israel for the country's tenth anniversary and meeting his wife, Bela, there; living in South Euclid, OH and working as a property manager; and his two daughters, Audrey and Mona.

    Oral history interview with Paul Kuper

    Oral history interview with Paul Kuper

    Oral History

    Paul Kuper, born on December 31, 1933 in Brussels, Belgium, describes being the youngest of three children; having a sister who was four years older and a brother who was six years older; his mother, who came from a White Russian family; his Polish father; living in a small apartment with no running water; his father working long hours as a baker; the German invasion in 1940; hiding in a basement with his mother when the Germans bombed the city; the Germans establishing their headquarters in a school on their street; being required to wear the yellow star; Jews being banned from theaters, movies, and hospitals; the deportation of his brother and sister; being taken by his mother to the Tuberculosis Society, where the underground was active; being placed in a sanatorium in a suburb, under a non-Jewish name, and staying there in 1941 and 1942; his parents being sent first to Malines and then to Germany; staying with a non-Jewish family friend, Seline Sinn, in his old neighborhood; attending a Catholic school; living with Seline’s sister in a different neighborhood; being discovered by the Germans in 1943 and sent to a village near Brussels, which was controlled by Jewish youth; being sent to another camp in Aix-la-Chapelle, where he lived in an old castle; the liberation of Belgium and being told by underground members from nearby Peruwelz to run into the woods so the Germans would not use them as hostages; the children being taken to stay with families in Peruwelz; going back to Brussels; attending Catholic school and living with his godparents; immigrating to the United States on his 21st birthday; living with his godmother's cousins and becoming a truck helper for Dean Supply; settling in Cleveland, OH and being in the military; living in South Euclid, OH; and being married with four daughters.

    Oral history interview with Bertha Lautman

    Oral history interview with Bertha Lautman

    Oral History

    Bertha Lautman (née Berkovitch), born in Banska Stiavnica, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia), describes her religious family; her Hasidic father; attending school in Swidnica; being taken by train to Auschwitz on March 23, 1942; her mother taking her out of hiding to send her to Auschwitz instead of her father; her parents, along with her youngest brother, being taken to Majdanek three months after her; the death of her parents and her brother’s survival; being a teenager and put to work digging ditches in Auschwitz; being moved to Birkenau in August 1942; working as part of the Leichencommando, taking care of the dead bodies; being taken from Birkenau to Bergen-Belsen on October 31, 1944; being liberated by American soldiers in April 1945; reuniting with her sister and brother; getting married another survivor; going to the United States in 1949; and visiting the concentration camps she was in three times over the years as well as Majdanek, where her parents were killed.

    Oral history interview with Dina Leiser

    Oral history interview with Dina Leiser

    Oral History

    Dina Leiser, born in Paris, France, describes her parents, who had immigrated to France from Poland to escape antisemitism and worked as tailors; her younger brother; her family not being religious; experiencing antisemitism from her schoolmates; wanting to be identified more as French than as a Jew; staying with her brother for several months on a farm in Souillé as part of a school-sponsored program; the war beginning in 1939 when she was 12 years old; her father enlisting; joining her brother on the farm; her mother obtaining false papers and joining them on the farm; the villagers in Souillé being very protective of them; remaining in Souillé for the duration of the war; finding out her father had been deported and learning only recently that he had been sent to Auschwitz; studying shorthand and typing; experiencing antisemitism at work and going to work for a Jewish firm; immigrating with her brother to the United States in 1947; her mother going to Canada and then the US five years later; teaching herself English by listening to the radio and reading; her brother being drafted into the US Army; getting married to one of her brother’s soldier friends in 1952; her son and grandson; living in University Heights, OH; and working for the Jewish France.

    Oral history interview with Sylvia Malcmacher

    Oral history interview with Sylvia Malcmacher

    Oral History

    Sylvia Malchmacher, born in Vilna, Poland (Vilnius, Lithuania) in 1926, describes the Jewish community in Vilna, including the many synagogues, Hebrew schools and universities, and the many Zionist organizations; her older and younger sisters; her father, who was a printer, and her mother, who kept house; experiencing antisemitism after 1939; living in the Russian zone of Poland; food rationing and being forced to work for the government; the German invasion in 1941; the collaborators in Vilna; the creation of the ghetto; her sister’s work in a fur factory; the liquidation of the ghetto in 1943; being ordered to report with all the children under 18 and old people and going with her younger sister; being sent home because she was 18 and her sister never coming home; being deported on May 16, 1944 on trains to a camp in the Kaiserwald, where they remained for three weeks; being sent in August 1944 to Stutthof; remaining in Stutthof for two weeks under horrible conditions; selections for work and being sent to Milldorf, a camp near Mannheim; clearing the debris as tunnels were blasted into a mountain; washing clothes for the German camp staff; being liberated by American troops on May 2, 1945; going to a displaced persons camp; learning that her father, mother and sister had died; attending a training school and marrying Israel Malchmacher in 1946; going to Cleveland, OH in 1949, sponsored by the Jewish Family Service; and her two grown daughters.

    Oral history interview with Marguerite Morris

    Oral history interview with Marguerite Morris

    Oral History

    Marguerite Morris, born in Paris, France, describes her parents, who had emigrated from Poland; enjoying a comfortable childhood; keeping kosher, but not being orthodox; living in a predominantly gentile neighborhood; her father enlisting in the French Army and returning to Paris in October 1940; her father being sent to Beaune-la-Rolande concentration camp in 1941 and never seeing him again; fleeing with her mother to unoccupied France; going first to Limoges then Oradour; living on their savings; returning with a Gentile friend to Paris to retrieve family valuables they had left with a neighbor; staying with 20 other Jewish families in Oradour until liberation in August 1944; going to Limoges and returning to Paris after the war ended officially; her mother receiving government assistance to reopen the family business; attending an accelerated school; being depressed and deciding to move to the United States to live with cousins in Akron, OH; studying accounting and working for Firestone; getting married to an American, who had been stationed at Normandy during the war; her two sons; and becoming certified public accountant.

    Oral history interview with Anna Moses

    Oral history interview with Anna Moses

    Oral History

    Anna Felsn Moses, born in Milicz, Poland, describes her large, traditional, religious family; her family moving in 1933 to Krakow, Poland, where her father was a businessman; acts of antisemitism carried out by the Poles of Krakow before the war; the boycotts of Jewish businesses; the German invasion and life rapidly becoming more difficult for the Jews; "Black Monday," when Torahs were desecrated and synagogues were burned; her family being among the 10,000 Jews enclosed in a ghetto; living in the ghetto from 1940 until the end of 1942, when she became separated from her family and was sent to Płaszów concentration camp; remaining there for nine months; being sent to Skarszysko, where she worked in a munitions factory; being sent to Buchenwald, where she remained for nine months, working at making grenade timers; being marched for three weeks; escaping with eight others and being liberated by the Russian army several days later; returning to Krakow; meeting her husband in 1946; arriving in the United States in 1948; and living in Cleveland, OH, where her husband is a rabbi in Menorah Park.

    Oral history interview with Mimi Ormond

    Oral history interview with Mimi Ormond

    Oral History

    Mimi Ormond describes growing up in Marienbad, Czechoslovakia (Mariánské Lázne, Czech Reublic); the German community in Marienbad; switching from a German school to a Czech school; her family deciding to flee after Kristallnacht; the Jewish population of Marienbad; her brother, who was away at college when her family fled Marienbad; belonging to a Zionist organization; her parents’ lack of interest in Zionism; feeling isolated from other students during the Nazi salute and Catholic prayers; fleeing to an apartment in a small town called Kolín, Czech Republic; the German invasion; her father being a socialist and on a Nazi arrest list; leaving on a children’s transport to Palestine via England; living on a farm in England; being moved with the other children to unoccupied castles in 1940; learning Hebrew and receiving agricultural training; receiving a notice that her parents were going to Palestine; the British authorities declaring Jewish refugees over the age of 17 to be enemy aliens; being left alone in the castle; night bombing near the castle; moving to another castle and joining an Orthodox Mizrahi labor group when she was 15 years old; going to live with an uncle in London; studying early education at a university; meeting her future husband, who was an American soldier; having a temple wedding; visiting her parents in Palestine; living in Ann Arbor, MI then Indianapolis, IN; feeling isolated from other Europeans; moving to Cleveland, OH and meeting survivors from her hometown; having survivors guilt; and her feelings about Israel.

    Oral history interview with Hilda Prooth

    Oral history interview with Hilda Prooth

    Oral History

    Hilda Prooth, born in Carlsbad (Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic) in 1904, describes her father, who was a painter and chose to become a Czech citizen after WWI; having three brothers and two sisters; the fates of her siblings, some of whom died in concentration camps; going to Prague, Czech Republic to earn a living as a governess; teaching German to Czech children; becoming a seamstress after the German occupation; meeting her husband, Mike, in 1939 in the Jewish community and getting married in 1940; coming under the protection of the Swedish government after she was married to Mike, who was Russian; being deported to Theresienstadt in 1943; being considered a Russian internee; being sent to Prague in 1944 then by train through Austria to an internment camp in Vittel, France; being liberated by the French in March 1945; being evacuated with a group of about 100 internees to the French Alps, to a former resort for asthmatic children; returning to Paris, France in August 1946 to get permission to return to Prague to find her husband; being sent to Epernay, France and traveling for three weeks in cattle cars back to Prague; reuniting with husband in Prague; working in an old printing house while her husband taught at the university; crossing into Germany in 1947; her husband working as an interpreter between the Jews and the Americans in Munich, Germany; waiting for passage to the US in displaced person camps in Bremen and Hamburg; going to Cleveland, OH in 1948; life in Cleveland and her husband’s death in 1960; working in the needle trades at Keller-Kohn and being very active in the ILGWU (International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union); and her reasons for volunteering to be interviewed for the Holocaust Archives Project of the Council of Jewish Women.

    Oral history interview with Isidor Reisman

    Oral history interview with Isidor Reisman

    Oral History

    Isidor Reisman, born in 1920 in Bilka, Hungary (Bilky, Zakarpats'ka oblast', Ukraine), describes being the oldest of nine children; his father, who was a monument engraver and a good provider; the active Zionist movement in Bilka; being inducted into the army in 1941; the uniforms having yellow badges to identify the Jews; doing hard labor, building railroads, for two years; receiving word from his parents that they were moved about 37 kilometers from Bilka and visiting them in 1944 in the barracks where they were living; his division being walked in January 1945 toward Germany and told to go to a synagogue which was controlled by the Germans; living in a ghetto and working as an emergency volunteer for several weeks; being freed by the Russian Army; deciding to go to the United States; going to New York, NY, where he worked as a monument engraver for about two years; going to Cleveland, OH in 1952; living in Mayfield Heights, OH; teaching Hebrew at the Bureau of Jewish Education and consulting on religious education; getting married to Ann (née Zaremsky) and having two children; and rebuilding his life after the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Sally Rettman

    Oral history interview with Sally Rettman

    Oral History

    Sally Rettman, born in 1923, describes growing up in Bedzin, Poland; being 16 years old when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939; her father, who was in the textile business and died suddenly in 1942; being sent to the ghetto in 1939; her mother being taken to Auschwitz and killed in 1943; being forced into another ghetto on the outskirts of Bedzin; getting married to Yakov (Jack) Rettman in the ghetto; her aunt being sent to Auschwitz; being moved to the Greenberg labor camp and being assigned to textile factory; her husband being sent to the camp also but not being allowed to see or talk to one another; being evacuated and marched to the Czech border at the end of 1944; their numbers dwindling from 1,500 female prisoners to 120; escaping from the transport with her sisters and two friends; being housed and taken care of by a Mrs. Schmidt living in Langesdorf; being liberated by American soldiers; finding her husband back in Bedzin; living in Hungary for five years then Germany; and going to New York, NY in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Ursula Rosow

    Oral history interview with Ursula Rosow

    Oral History

    Ursula Rosow (née Braatz), born in Berlin, Germany in 1919, describes growing up in a middle-class, gentile family; her parents being active socialists; her father, who was part Hungarian and was a laboratory technician; her mother, who was part Polish; the Nazis coming to power and street fights beginning all over Berlin; the SS shooting at her father in 1934 for making anti-Nazi comments in a local pub; her father’s imprisonment that same year for distributing anti-Nazi propaganda; her family belonging to an organization that helped Jews escape Germany with false identity papers; helping to obtain ration cards for Jews in hiding; hiding a Jewish dancer; leaving the city with her mother when the Allies beginning to bomb Berlin; going to Wurzburg while her mother went to Bad Kissingen; marrying a Jewish American soldier after the war; going to the US in 1948 with her husband; settling in Cleveland Heights, OH; being divorced; and her two children.

    Oral history interview with Leo Rzepka

    Oral history interview with Leo Rzepka

    Oral History

    Leo Rzepka, born in 1913 in Ruckzyn, Poland, describes the Jewish community in his hometown; being one of nine children (five girls and four boys); his father, who was a wagon-wheel maker; working with his father after finishing school at age 13; the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and his family fleeing to Russia, where they lived for several years; attending chauffeur's school, from which he graduated two days before the Germans invaded Russia; life becoming difficult for Jews in Russia; trying with one of his brothers and one sister to return to the home of one of his sisters in Poland; living for many months in the woods and staying with farmers in exchange for work; going to a small concentration camp in Zembrov in late 1942 with his sister, brother, and brother-in-law; remaining there for three weeks until January 1943 when they were deported to Auschwitz; working as a carpenter; spending time in Birkenau; being evacuated in January 1945 to Mauthausen and then to Ebensee, Austria, where he worked in the stone quarries; being liberated by the Americans on May 5, 1945; going to Israel illegally; being intercepted by the British and spending 21 months in Cyprus; being able to go to Israel, where he spent five months in the army; getting married; going to the United State in 1956; living in Cleveland, OH; having a wife, a son, a daughter, and one grandchild; and being retired.

    Oral history interview with Eva Sands

    Oral history interview with Eva Sands

    Oral History

    Eva Sands, born in 1940 in a Jewish ghetto, describes her parents, who came from Piotrkov, Poland; her father, Zev Wolfe, who was in the wood veneer business and was also a Talmudic scholar; her mother, Hannah, who died when Eva was seven months old; her father remarrying shortly after her mother’s death; her aunt Esther obtaining false papers and escaping the ghetto with two-year-old Eva and Eva's cousin, Naomi; Esther finding refuge for Naomi in a convent and leaving Eva on the doorstep of a woman named Maria Zaider; her parents remaining in the ghetto, having another child against ghetto rules, and being shot when this was discovered; living with the Zaiders throughout the war in Pustelnik, Poland (possibly the Pustelnik in Łódź Voivodeship) and not being aware of her Jewish identity; her Aunt Esther passing as a Polish Aryan until the war ended, and then reclaiming Eva from the Zaiders; being hysterical for several days after the separation from Maria Zaider and not wanting to be in the same room with her aunt; living first in a displaced persons camp in Germany, where her aunt was married; settling in Frankfurt, Germany; antisemitism in Frankfurt; attending a Hebrew school in Salzheim, Germany; growing up in Germany; moving to the United States in 1952 and spending a year in New York, NY; attending an Orthodox Jewish boarding school in England at age 14 and attending a finishing school in Switzerland; attending college at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH, and meeting her husband, Barry Sands; going to Poland to find Maria Zaider in 1976 and her painful visit with her; living in University Heights, OH; and her two children.

    Oral history interview with George Sapin

    Oral history interview with George Sapin

    Oral History

    George Sapin, born in 1924, describes entering into the army in 1943; being a member of the 67th Signal Battalion, the 82nd Airborne, and the 1286th Engineer Combat Battalion; going to England and arriving before the Battle of the Bulge; antisemitism in the army; his life after the war, becoming an electrical engineer then a technical writer; being originally from New York, NY; moving south with his unit along the Rhine as the war drew to a close; his emotions during the war and not having developed a Jewish identity; being Jewish in the army; not being present at the actual liberation of any camps; having many experiences with German citizens and seeing physical evidence of Nazi atrocities, including pictures of torture and rapes; his experiences having a strong influence on his political and social philosophy; and his attempts to live according to his belief that one should be committed and active.

    Oral history interview with Werner Sauer

    Oral history interview with Werner Sauer

    Oral History

    Werner Sauer, born in 1918 in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, describes the Jewish population of Gelsenkirchen; his family considering themselves German and being financially well-to-do; his father’s meat-packing plant; attending a Jewish Volkschule (an elementary school) for four years and then a gymnasium until he was forced to leave in 1933 at age 15; having to relinquish his license in 1938; becoming a bricklayer with the help of his father's friend; the ruin of his father’s business; the gradual changes under the Nazis; Kristallnacht and being arrested; deportations in 1940; being deported with his parents to the ghetto in Riga, Latvia in the winter of 1941 along with 500 Jews from Gelsenkirchen and 500 from Dortmund; conditions in the ghetto; his family being taken to Stutthof concentration camp; going to a section called Lent a where the Nazis had gathered all the artisans and skilled laborers; living and working in the factory, which he was ordered to rebuild with virtually no materials; being transferred with his father to Buchgarten, a section of Stutthof where people were exterminated; escaping with a friend and being caught briefly and passing as marine deserters; escaping the deserters’ camp and hiding on farms; being caught by Russians and having to prove they were German Jews; obtaining identity papers; his parents’ deaths; walking toward Germany; working in a Russian-occupied hospital after the liberation; living in Berlin, Germany until he received his emigration papers in May 1949; flying out of Berlin in an empty cargo plane and then taking a boat to New York, NY; getting a job in Cleveland, OH, where he had an aunt and uncle who sponsored him; working for Carling Brewing Co. for three years; his work installing boilers for the Ira E. Baker Co. until the company liquidated and he retired at age 60; and living with his wife in Middlefield, OH.

    Oral history interview with Freda Schmelzer

    Oral history interview with Freda Schmelzer

    Oral History

    Freda Schmelzer, born in a small Romanian town in the region of Transylvania, describes her parents, who ran a small general store; being one of seven children; the beautiful Jewish traditions and the peaceful life among the gentiles during her childhood; her home life and learning homemaking by assisting her mother; the arrival of the Hungarians; the restrictions placed on Jews; her family’s last time together at their Passover meal in 1944; the great psychological distress of not knowing what was happening elsewhere or of what was going to become of her family; the Jews of her town being taken to a ghetto in Soluge (possibly Vynohradiv, Ukraine), where they remained for four weeks; being transported to Auschwitz and being separated from her family; the conditions in the camp; being selected to work in a grenade factory, where conditions were slightly better; being marched to an unknown location and detained for four weeks in a horse barn; being liberated by the Russians; and returning home.

    Oral history interview with Max Solomon

    Oral history interview with Max Solomon

    Oral History

    Max Solomon (ne Slomovitz), born in Drahova, Czechoslovakia (Drahovo, Ukraine), a small town in the Carpathian mountains; being the oldest of four boys and having six sisters; his father’s saloon and restaurant; being raised religious and being part of a relatively small Jewish community; being affected by the war in June 1941 when the Germans invaded; Jews being deported from his town and the remaining Jews being forced to work; being taken with his family to Kolomyja, Poland (Ukraine) and then to Horodenka, Ukraine; his family’s attempted escape and the women being successful while the men were captured and killed; escaping the massacre; passing as a Christian and going to Russia, where he lived as an adopted son on a communist co-op; a flood causing a famine in the area; meeting people who were looking for food and reported that many Jews were still living in Drahova; returning home and finding his mother and sisters; being sent to a Hungarian forced labor camp while his mother and sisters were sent to Auschwitz; escaping and joining the Yugoslavian underground; fighting until the war ended; returning home and finding two of his sisters; going to a displaced persons camp in Egenfelder, Germany where he married in 1945; going to the US in 1949 with his wife; living in Beachwood, OH; and being an active member of Green Road Synagogue.

    Oral history interview with Helen Stone

    Oral history interview with Helen Stone

    Oral History

    Helen Stone (née Kahan), born in Napszolok, Czechoslovakia, describes her life in Cleveland, OH with her husband and her son, daughter, and grandchild; growing up in Nagydobryn, near the large city of Ungvar (Uzhhorod, Ukraine); the Jewish population in Nagydobryn; being very close to her mother, but having a bad relationship with her stepfather; her five brothers and sisters; her stepfather sending her to an orphanage, but returning home at her mother’s request; antisemitism increasing in 1939; getting typhoid; being deported with all the Jews in her town shortly after Passover in 1944; being sent to Auschwitz and separated from her mother; conditions in the camp; witnessing medical experimentation on the inmates; being sent to work in a factory in either Altenburg or Waldenburg (Mrs. Stone is not certain); being forced to march with her fellow prisoners for many days; being liberated by American soldiers, but having to go to a Russian refugee camp since she was a resident of the Russian-occupied zone; returning to Nagydobryn; escaping with a friend over the border and getting married to him shortly after; going to the United States in 1948; her husband working in a meat market in Cleveland, OH; and feeling proud to be Jewish.

    Oral history interview with Inge Weiss

    Oral history interview with Inge Weiss

    Oral History

    Inge Weiss, born in 1923 in Hannover, Germany, describes her father, who was born in Warta, Poland and became a men's clothing manufacturer in Germany; her mother, who was born in Germany but lost her citizenship when she married; her younger sister; her family being active in the Jewish community and keeping kosher; attending public school and having a Jewish education; attending business school for a short time; her family’s plan to immigrate to the United States; antisemitism increasing as the Nazis rose to power; being ostracized in school; the vandalism of her father’s store; her family being deported to Poland in October 1938; staying in crowded stables in Spoczynek; living with relatives in Kalisz, Poland; not being able to speak Polish nor Yiddish; the war starting and her family being deported to Krakow where they lived under very poor conditions until 1941; escaping to Warta; the atrocities in Warta; the gathering of the Jews in the town square and being separated from her family; being sent with her father to the ghetto in Łódź, Poland, where they stayed from 1942 to 1944; being deported to Auschwitz and sent to Bergen-Belsen in September 1944; her job distributing bread, which she got because she spoke German; getting typhoid; being liberated by the British and living in the German officers' quarters until she recovered; returning to Hannover in 1946 and working for the Jewish community; getting married in 1947; getting half of her father’s business and running a notions business there; going to the US in September 1949; her son’s birth in 1948; going to Cleveland, OH; and receiving help from the Ratner family.

    Oral history interview with Jack Wieder

    Oral history interview with Jack Wieder

    Oral History

    Jack Wieder, born in Bozkov, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), describes being the fourth of 11 children in a happy, religious family; his father, who was a wood processor; the existence of some antisemitism but his family being treated well because of his father’s good reputation; the Ukrainians taking over in 1939; the situation improving temporarily when the Hungarians came to power in 1941; the deportation of some Jews; the Nazis arriving in Bozkov in 1943; his sisters fleeing to Budapest, Hungary and Belgium; his father and older brother being sent to a work brigade; his father returning in 1944; being deported with his remaining family to a ghetto in Matejovice (possibly Matejovce nad Hornádom, Slovakia), where they stayed from five weeks; being taken to Auschwitz and the death of his mother and six younger siblings; being sent with his father to Warsaw, Poland to work at clearing the remains of the Warsaw ghetto; being sent to Dachau to work the camps in Kaufering and Landshut; being sent back to Dachau; his father dying at Dachau four days before liberation; being evacuated from Dachau to Garmisch-Partenkirchen; being liberated by American soldiers; returning to Bozkov and discovering that his brother, Hermann, and sisters, Julia and Toni, had also survived the war; being inducted into the Russian army; serving in the army for one year and escaping to Hungary; working for a refugee assistance organization and meeting his future wife, Eva; going to Vienna, Austria; immigrating to the United States; and living in Cleveland, OH, as do Toni, Julia and Hermann.

    Oral history interview with Abraham Akst

    Oral history interview with Abraham Akst

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Roni Berenson

    Oral history interview with Roni Berenson

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Beatrice Berger

    Oral history interview with Beatrice Berger

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Leon Bergrin

    Oral history interview with Leon Bergrin

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Betty Berliner

    Oral history interview with Betty Berliner

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Henry Billys, Sophie Billys, and Millie Korman

    Oral history interview with Henry Billys, Sophie Billys, and Millie Korman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Mayer Bitterman

    Oral history interview with Mayer Bitterman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Helen Cik

    Oral history interview with Helen Cik

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ann Cyncynatus

    Oral history interview with Ann Cyncynatus

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Paul Cyncynatus

    Oral history interview with Paul Cyncynatus

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Madeline Dautartus

    Oral history interview with Madeline Dautartus

    Oral History

    Madeline Dautartus, born in Strasbourg, France, discusses her parents, two sisters, and one brother; being raised Catholic; attending a Catholic high school; the evacuation of the entire town to Perigueux in Dordogne 1939; her father and brother being drafted into the army; the German occupation; her family’s return to Strasbourg; the Aryanization of Alsace-Lorraine; the burning of books; participating in the resistance; refusing a job in Germany; working at the social security office and being given a pass to enter the POW camp; bring food, clothes, and information to the prisoners; her desire to join the French army in Africa; being caught in 1942 while attempting to escape from Strasbourg with two young men; swallowing the message she was carrying; being detained in prisons for a month; being interrogated; being taken by train to Schirmeck camp (near Struthof extermination camp); her work in the laundry and cutting trees; a rosary that was shared amongst inmates; contracting diphtheria and pneumonia; the doctor who visited the isolation unit regularly to see who should be sent for extermination; being released after a year; being required to sign a statement saying she would never reveal anything about the camp; returning to Strasbourg and her job; being warned that she was being watched; being arrested twice more and questioned about her resistance activities; being prepared to commit suicide when she arrested two months before liberation; the Gestapo building being burned by US bombers; her family hiding two wounded US soldiers and two Arab soldiers from the French army in their basement until liberation; her brother’s experiences during the war; the liberation of Strasbourg in November 1944; serving as civilian in the Bureau Militaire; enlisting in the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps in France; being posted in Stuttgart, Germany and then Freiburg, Germany for five years; her encounter with a former SS guard; preparing the papers for a Lithuanian scout, who later became her husband; serving as a secretary to General Jean de Lattre; and working as a civilian in the military until 1950 when she immigrated to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Eugene Davidovits

    Oral history interview with Eugene Davidovits

    Oral History

    Eugene Davidovits, born in 1930 in Satu Mare (Satmar), Romania, discusses being raised in an Orthodox family consisting of his parents, five brothers, and one sister; working at forced labor two days a week after the Hungarians occupied the county; being beaten by a teacher and others as antisemitism rose; Rabbi Teitlebaum influencing Jews against going to Israel; living in the closed ghetto for before being taken by cattle car to Auschwitz; going through selection; being separated from his father and his two older brothers; being taken to Krakow-Płaszów where he worked for four months; the Germans killing the leaders of a resistance attempt; being transferred to Gross-Rosen death camp where he witnessed a rabbi being beaten to death; being taken to a subcamp in Gorlitz where he did chores for the doctor who treated him decently, gave him food, and later arranged for him to work in the kitchen; getting caught giving food to other prisoner; being sent to work in the tank factory that was run by German civilians; being treated relatively well by civilians within the factory until a Gross-Rosen inspector enforced limitations on food; being sent to make bunkers for German soldiers in March 1945 as the Russians approached; witnessing weaker workers being shot and sometimes buried while still alive; returning to Gorlitz in May 1945; leaving camp with a friend when the guards were away; being given food and civilian clothes by a policeman; staying in a well-supplied former Gestapo building; returning to Satmar in hopes of finding his family; realizing that he was the only member of his family who survived; living in a Jewish hospital for one month; living with the son of the Cantor until he was placed in a Joint-supported orphanage where he stayed from 1945-1947; getting married; and moving to Cleveland, OH at age 36.

    Oral history interview with Karola Dorfberger

    Oral history interview with Karola Dorfberger

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Helen Dub

    Oral history interview with Helen Dub

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Louis Dub

    Oral history interview with Louis Dub

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Leon Faigenbaum

    Oral history interview with Leon Faigenbaum

    Oral History

    Leon Faigenbaum, born in Gniewoszow, Poland in 1917 describes his life before the war; being taken to a labor camp near Radom; his father being buried alive when he was too ill to work; running away to rejoin his family in the Gniewoszow ghetto; being forced out of the ghetto in early 1942 and going to Zwoleń; being sent to labor camps in Deblin and Stawisk; getting caught while attempting to run away; being taken to Budzyn labor camp, run by SS Feix and a Jewish leader, Stockman; being saved by Stockman when Feix was about to kill him; being sent to Majdanek; being saved in December 1943 by the person overseeing the shoe makers when other Jews were gunned down at the edge of an open grave; being taken to Płaszów concentration camp, led by Göth; receiving daily beatings by non-Jewish Kapos; being sent towards Auschwitz in August 1944 but the train was sent onward to Mauthausen, a journey of eight days without food; surviving another selection and being put to work mining stones; volunteering to work as a toolmaker in St. Valentin, Austria, where an Austrian manager saved him by teaching him the skills he lacked; being moved to Ebensee in 1945 after US bombers destroyed the factory; being beaten so badly he could no longer work and then placed in a barrack with men waiting to die; witnessing cannibalism; being rescued by US forces in May 1945; spending six months in a nearby hospital; living in a displaced persons camp before returning to his hometown to search for relatives; fleeing to Łódź, Poland after being warned by an old friend that Poles would kill any Jews who remained; returning to Austria where he stayed at a DP camp in Linz, Austria; marrying his wife, a woman he knew from before the war; going to Palestine in 1947 with the help of the Haganah; serving in the Israeli Army and then working as a shoemaker; and immigrating to the US in 1959 so that his wife could be reunited with a brother and sister living in Cleveland, OH.

    Oral history interview with Helen Feig

    Oral history interview with Helen Feig

    Oral History

    Helen Feig, born in 1925 in Craciunesti, Romania, describes being the only child of Orthodox parents; the roundup of 500 Jews in 1941 who were taken to Galicia and killed; Hungarian soldiers chasing Jews out of synagogue on Rosh Hashanah; never seeing her father again after he was taken to the Kasho ghetto while he was out of town on business; being sent to the ghetto in Selo Slatina (Solotvyno, Ukraine) along with her mother and other women and children; being taken by cattle car to Auschwitz in 1944; being separated from her mother; running away from Block C-8 to be with her cousins; being transferred to Lübberstedt labor camp, near Bremenhof, Germany; being required to sew a different color sleeve on the left side of her dress; building bunkers to stay safe from bombing that was occurring at Bremenhof; being transported from place to place by train as the Germans were facing defeat; just missing a boat going to Mare Baltica and then being forced to walk until Ukrainians and Russians told them the war was over; being liberated by English soldiers who housed them in a summer resort near Neustadt; returning to her hometown where she stayed with family in a nearby town; neighbors who refused to return her family’s home or belongings; going to Frankfurt, Germany; getting married in 1948 and immigrating to the United States with her husband in 1949; living in Cleveland, OH until her husband became ill; living in Allentown, PA for two years while her husband was in a sanitarium in Colorado; and returning to build a life in Cleveland.

    Oral history interview with Lilly Feig and Helen Kormis

    Oral history interview with Lilly Feig and Helen Kormis

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Esther Friedman

    Oral history interview with Esther Friedman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Nina Frankel

    Oral history interview with Nina Frankel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Art Gelbart

    Oral history interview with Art Gelbart

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Rose Gelbart

    Oral history interview with Rose Gelbart

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Erika Gold

    Oral history interview with Erika Gold

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Wiera Goldman

    Oral history interview with Wiera Goldman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Elaine Grunwald

    Oral history interview with Elaine Grunwald

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Maurice Grunwald

    Oral history interview with Maurice Grunwald

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Zev Harel

    Oral history interview with Zev Harel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Jacob Hennenberg

    Oral history interview with Jacob Hennenberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Larry Hersh

    Oral history interview with Larry Hersh

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Rose Kaplovitz

    Oral history interview with Rose Kaplovitz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sara Kay

    Oral history interview with Sara Kay

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Phillip Wexberg

    Oral history interview with Phillip Wexberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Jack York

    Oral history interview with Jack York

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sylvia Lavon

    Oral history interview with Sylvia Lavon

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ezra Lazar

    Oral history interview with Ezra Lazar

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Olga Lebovitz

    Oral history interview with Olga Lebovitz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Bella Lebowicz

    Oral history interview with Bella Lebowicz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Abraham Lerer

    Oral history interview with Abraham Lerer

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ruth Lidawer

    Oral history interview with Ruth Lidawer

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Danny Lieberman

    Oral history interview with Danny Lieberman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Eva Luedecke

    Oral history interview with Eva Luedecke

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Rosette Lurie

    Oral history interview with Rosette Lurie

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Harold Mailman

    Oral history interview with Harold Mailman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ita Majzner

    Oral history interview with Ita Majzner

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Isador Malcmacher

    Oral history interview with Isador Malcmacher

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sandra Mandel

    Oral history interview with Sandra Mandel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with William McKee

    Oral history interview with William McKee

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Tibor Messinger

    Oral history interview with Tibor Messinger

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Henry Miller

    Oral history interview with Henry Miller

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Jack Mintz

    Oral history interview with Jack Mintz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Mark Moss

    Oral history interview with Mark Moss

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Louis Muller

    Oral history interview with Louis Muller

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ben Nebel

    Oral history interview with Ben Nebel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Mark Newman

    Oral history interview with Mark Newman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Marvin Newman

    Oral history interview with Marvin Newman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Esther Pinkas

    Oral history interview with Esther Pinkas

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sally Pitluk

    Oral history interview with Sally Pitluk

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Mike Prayzer

    Oral history interview with Mike Prayzer

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Alex Rabiner

    Oral history interview with Alex Rabiner

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Eva Reis

    Oral history interview with Eva Reis

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Leslie Robicsek

    Oral history interview with Leslie Robicsek

    Oral History

    Leslie Robicsek, born in 1924 in Oradea, Romania, describes being the son of a kosher butcher; singing in the synagogue with a famous cantor; the destruction of a synagogue in 1933 during an Iron Guard riot; becoming an apprentice in in a plastics factory owned by Glick in 1937; the repressive measures against Jews being put in place after the Hungarians entered in 1940-1941; his brother and other Jews being removed from the army and sent as forced labor to Nagybánya (now Baia Mare, Romania); being sent to the ghetto in May 1944; being taken daily to a cadet training camp to do maintenance work; his father’s non-Jewish friend sending word to him that he’d help the family get out of the ghetto, but his father refusing; being transported to Birkenau where they went through selection; claiming he was a tool and die maker when volunteers were sought; his father being taken to work in the stone quarries at Melk where he died; being moved to Auschwitz where he was sent each day to work at Union Machine Works, an ammunition plant; watching famous actors and musicians perform at night; witnessing hangings after Sonderkommandos blew up a crematorium; beginning a death march on January 18, 1945; arriving at Gross-Rosen where he was selected to work as a Sonderkommando for three weeks; moving on to Flossenberg at the end of February and then to Pocking where he was put to work constructing an airport; being liberated by American troops on May 6, 1945; his wife who had also survived Auschwitz; his reluctance to dicuss the camps; and his thoughts on his Jewish identity and faith.

    Oral history interview with Celia Rosenfeld

    Oral history interview with Celia Rosenfeld

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Celia Roth

    Oral history interview with Celia Roth

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with David Roth

    Oral history interview with David Roth

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Rena Rubinow

    Oral history interview with Rena Rubinow

    Oral History

    Rena Rubinow, born in Kraków, Poland, describes being the oldest of three sisters; her mother dying when she was a child; one sister moving to Palestine in 1937; being a married mother of a two year old child when the war began in 1939; being forced into an open ghetto; fleeing to a small town 20 miles from Kraków in 1940 when the ghetto was closed; running away from the town and being hidden by a peasant in October 1942 when they were warned that Jews in the area were being killed; walking back to the ghetto in Kraków three weeks later as they believed it offered their best chance for survival; working in Madritch’s uniform factory outside of the ghetto and sewing bras in her spare time which she sold to female guards; arranging for her former maid to hide her young daughter; being taken to Płaszów concentration camp on March 13, 1943, her maid and child also being sent to the camp where her daughter was killed; being transported via cattle care to Birkenau with her sister, Rose, in 1944; her husband being transported to Mauthausen where he was killed; being sent to Lichtenburg at the end of the year; remaining there for five months before being liberated by Russians on May 5, 1945; receiving no assistance and walking to Kraków where they learned that none of their other relatives survived; supporting herself by sewing; remarrying in 1946 to a man who had served in the underground; moving to Sweden, then Montreal and finally to Canton, Ohio, where husband had two brothers; struggling financially and eventually moving in 1958 to Cleveland, where she had a grocery store; supporting herself and three children after her husband killed himself; remarrying and putting her two sons through college; and her daughter dying while she was a student at Boston College.

    Oral history interview with Freda Salick

    Oral history interview with Freda Salick

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with David Schneider

    Oral history interview with David Schneider

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with William Seas

    Oral history interview with William Seas

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Edith Simon

    Oral history interview with Edith Simon

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Julia Simon

    Oral history interview with Julia Simon

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Alfred Spitz

    Oral history interview with Alfred Spitz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Jetse Sprey

    Oral history interview with Jetse Sprey

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Milton Steinbock

    Oral history interview with Milton Steinbock

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Eric Stern

    Oral history interview with Eric Stern

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Andrew Sternberg

    Oral history interview with Andrew Sternberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sam Teitelbaum

    Oral history interview with Sam Teitelbaum

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Hannah Rath Trabitz

    Oral history interview with Hannah Rath Trabitz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Freda Traub

    Oral history interview with Freda Traub

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Harry Unger

    Oral history interview with Harry Unger

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Marcel Weintraub

    Oral history interview with Marcel Weintraub

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Malke Weiss

    Oral history interview with Malke Weiss

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Miriam Wexberg

    Oral history interview with Miriam Wexberg

    Oral History

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