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Oral history interview with William Hess

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1997.A.0427 | RG Number: RG-50.106.0076

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    Oral history interview with William Hess
    Transcript
    This is an interview for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
    We are interviewing William Hess.
    My name is Esther Finder.
    Today is August 15, 1997.
    This is tape 1, side A. May I ask you to please
    state your name for me.
    My name is William Werner Hess.
    Was this your name at birth?
    Werner was my name at birth, yes.
    When were you born?
    I was born on August 8, 1921.
    And where were you born?
    I was born in Stuttgart in Germany.
    Is that where you grew up?
    I grew up in Stuttgart, and I lived there until the time
    that I moved into the United States in 1937.
    I'd like to ask you a little bit about Stuttgart
    and your childhood.
    Was there a large Jewish population in Stuttgart?
    The Jewish population of stood guard
    was approximately 4,000 people, which pretty much corresponded
    to the proportion of Jews within Germany-- roughly 1%
    of the population.
    Stuttgart had a population at the time of about 430,000.
    What were relationships like between Jews and non-Jews?
    In general, relationships were very good.
    And a lot of the Jews had many non-Jewish as well as
    Jewish friends.
    Did you live in a Jewish area?
    There really wasn't such a thing as a Jewish area.
    That is Jews, of course, tended to live
    in the better areas of the city, but they were pretty well
    spread around.
    The street that we lived on, there
    were no other Jews in our particular apartment house.
    But on the block where we lived, there
    were a number of Jewish families.
    Did your family have a long history in Germany?
    Yes, they did.
    I'm very lucky I have genealogical information
    on both sides of my family--
    none of it done by myself.
    On my father's side, I have a family history that goes back
    to about the year 1700.
    And my ancestors lived in a village,
    really, not in Stuttgart--
    the political unit of Wurttemberg.
    The Jews were driven out by 1492 by the then-ruler
    for all times.
    And subsequently, there were very few Jews
    that ever lived there.
    If a ruler needed certain things like money and so,
    he would have a Jewish counselor.
    And of course, the most famous and the most important of those
    was a man who became known as Jud Suss.
    His name was Joseph Suss Oppenheimer.
    And he was hired by the duke at the time
    to raise money for his excessive style of living, which
    was pretty typical for most rulers who all thought
    they wanted to imitate Louis XIV of France
    by building palaces and otherwise living it up.
    After the ruler died, Jud Suss was hanged publicly
    for taking advantage of the population.
    That happened about 1740 or thereabouts.
    It wasn't until the early 19th century
    that Jews were legally living in the state.
    And where my grandparents and my ancestors lived
    was one of the many little principalities
    that were scattered throughout Germany.
    And since they allowed Jews to live there,
    there was a rather large proportion
    of Jews in that village.
    At the end of the 19th century, most of them
    moved away and into the city where the opportunities were.
    So my ancestors on my father's side go back that far.
    And the same is true on my mother's side.
    My mother comes from a small town in Treuen,
    which is in central Germany.
    And we also can go back to about 1700 on my mother's side.
    What was your father's name?
    And what did he do for a living?
    My father's name was Wilhelm Hess.
    And he was in the wholesale textile business.
    He had a wholesale business that was founded by my grandfather
    and was then taken over by my father and my uncle.
    And it was in existence until 1930
    when it was dissolved during the Depression.
    About a year or so later, my father
    started up again on his own and started, again,
    a small textile business.
    What was your mother's name?
    And what work did she do?
    My mother's maiden name was Elsa Simpson.
    She did not have any job.
    And this was very rare for Jewish women
    to work outside the house unless there was an absolutely
    dire economic necessity.
    In fact, until World War I, it was greatly
    looked down for a Jewish girl to be working.
    Do you have any siblings?
    No, I'm an only child.
    What religious traditions did your family observe?
    Actually, very few.
    On the high holidays, Yom Kippur, and Rosh Hashana,
    and Yom Kippur, I didn't go to school.
    We never had a seder in our house.
    In fact, I only went to a seder once that an aunt of mine held,
    and I was very impressed by it.
    Hanukkah-- well, once in a while,
    we might have a Hanukkah celebration.
    Well Saturday, of course, chametz--
    my father, there was still some of the tradition.
    My father, who occasionally, or rather frequently,
    traveled on behalf of his own business from Monday to Friday,
    he would come home Friday night.
    And my mother would have a chametz dinner ready for us.
    Jewish cookery, of course, was very important.
    And we did have religious training, religious education.
    And I was bar mitzvahed.
    That just about sums it up.
    Tell me about your religious education.
    Well, religious education in Germany
    was at the time part of the school curriculum.
    In fact, twice a week in the elementary school,
    the teacher would talk about a Bible story--
    either Old or New Testament--
    and when I entered the second grade,
    we were informed that, henceforth, we
    would be excused from going through
    the religious instruction in school--
    we could take that hour off.
    But every Wednesday afternoon, which was traditionally
    a school-free afternoon, we would
    have to go to religious education
    in the Jewish community-building, which was
    adjacent to the main synagogue.
    And there, we would have an hour of Bible or Jewish history
    and an hour of Hebrew.
    And unless you opted out of that,
    you were expected to attend.
    And the report cards that were given to you
    there were incorporated into your public school report
    cards.
    Now, if you flunked religion, that
    wasn't grounds for keeping you back.
    It didn't count, but it was shown.
    And you got grades, and they were
    reflected in your report card.
    Can you tell me a little bit about your bar mitzvah?
    Well, I was interviewed by--
    we had two rabbis.
    Where I lived, we had one big, main synagogue.
    There was a small synagogue which
    was used by the orthodox-- mainly people who
    had moved into Stuttgart after World War I
    and had come from Eastern Europe.
    But the main synagogue had two rabbis and a number of canters.
    And they were the people who gave religious instructions
    to Jewish children.
    And one of them then would also be
    responsible for guiding you through the bar mitzvah,
    giving you instructions.
    For that, we had to come in on Saturday afternoon for a bar
    mitzvah instruction.
    And then there was a youth service
    at the synagogue about an hour in length particularly geared
    toward young people--
    I wouldn't say small children, but maybe
    sixth or seventh grade--
    fifth, sixth, seventh grade and up.
    And I was given the choice--
    did I want to just say the berakha over the Torah
    or say a parsha.
    And of course, being lazy, I chose the berakha.
    The rabbi later told me he's sorry he ever gave me
    that option.
    I should have taken the time to chant
    the parsha for the bar mitzvah.
    And it was a fairly big deal.
    You invited all your family, and sometimes even
    non-Jewish friends too.
    And we had big family dinners.
    And of course, you expected and received many gifts.
    Did you have a favorite holiday, either religious or secular?
    I really don't know.
    Undoubtedly, if we had kept seder,
    that would have been my favorite holiday, because it is now.
    I think it's a wonderful family and religious institution.
    Tell me about your non-religious education.
    well it was a traditional middle class education--
    four years of elementary school.
    At the end of four years, you had
    to take a test, which was no harder than what
    you would normally receive in the course of education.
    And if you passed it, then you could
    go to a higher school, which is now pretty uniformly known
    as gymnasium.
    In my day, the gymnasium was a humanistic education
    that you received if you would become a doctor,
    or a philosopher, or something like that.
    So from the fifth year, which was
    the first year of high school, I went to equivalent
    to a gymnasium.
    And after four years, I was sent to a higher school of commerce,
    because the idea was, my father said,
    that, undoubtedly, like most of other members of my family,
    I would enter business.
    And this would be a specialized training where you would be
    taught specifically things that you would need in business--
    that included languages, of course, English and French--
    and in French specifically, writing a business letter
    in French, accounting, chemistry, and history,
    and all the other academic subjects as well.
    After one year in that school, I was 16.
    And of course, that was the time when it was decided for me
    it was time to leave Germany.
    When you were growing up, what were some of the things
    that you did for fun?
    Well, I had friends.
    Usually I had one or two friends.
    I didn't usually have hordes of friends.
    And we got together.
    And where I was living there were a lot of children--
    most of them not Jewish.
    And we would play when I was small-- the usual games--
    catch and hide and go seek.
    We also had scooters which we used.
    And we go around the block or even downtown,
    downhill, and then push the scooter back up again.
    My bar mitzvah present was a bicycle which I dearly wanted,
    and which my parents didn't want me
    to have because Stuttgart is a little like Washington--
    it's full of hills.
    And my mother thought it was bad for my heart
    to have to pump up these steep streets.
    In actuality, it helped me a lot even now,
    because I developed a tremendous amount of lung power and also
    leg muscles.
    I would go with friends on bike excursions for the day
    or for the afternoon.
    And we had a lake there-- an artificial man-made lake
    on the river.
    And I'd go with a friend, and we'd
    take out a canoe or a kayak with what you'd call it here.
    And we'd paddle around in the kayak for an afternoon.
    Also after the Nazis came into power,
    the Jewish Veterans Organization organized a sports group.
    And I belonged to that, where I had the opportunity
    to swim, play ball games, and just do field sports.
    Did that sports group have a name?
    It was called after the organization.
    They let the initials are [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] RJF,
    which is the German Federation of Veterans.
    Did you ever experience or witness any anti-Semitism
    as a child?
    Yeah.
    Well, as I remember, there wasn't anything more
    than being called Dirty Jew, or why don't you
    go to Palestine, or something like that.
    There actually wasn't a whole lot of this
    that I personally experienced.
    But that was about the extent of it.
    When you think back on your childhood in Stuttgart,
    do you primarily remember Germany with Hitler in power,
    or do you have much recollection of Germany before Hitler came?
    Well, I was 12 when Hitler came into power.
    And I remember, of course, life as it was then.
    Actually, for me, it didn't change an awful lot at all.
    I continued to go to school, and I had non-Jewish friends.
    In fact, one of them came to a little dinner
    my mother gave the week before I emigrated.
    So actually, I had a very pleasant life on the whole.
    Can you tell me what you remember about Hitler's rise
    to power?
    Yes.
    The very first thing I remember in school--
    that must have been about when I was in second or third grade--
    so that would be about 1930--
    and the teacher was giving some instructions
    on how to draw a face.
    And he showed a simple face on the blackboard--
    the hair, the nose, and the eyes, and so on.
    And I remember one of the kids commented on it,
    he says, this what you drew there looks like Hitler.
    And the teacher said, well, Hitler-- well,
    I don't really think so--
    never heard of Hitler.
    So I think I asked at home-- who is this Hitler?
    Well, he's a politician now, and he's doing a lot of activity--
    anti-Semitic and all that.
    And that's the first I ever heard of him.
    This was, of course, a time when the worldwide depression hit--
    1929.
    And you heard a lot about the problems
    that the government in Germany had--
    the emergency decrees.
    A lot of fund was made--
    the emergency decree was something
    that the constitution that was in effect then,
    the Weimer Constitution that was put in effect after World War
    I, and it gave the president the power
    to rule by decree, which he would bestow
    on his chancellor who was the chief of government
    at the time.
    And so very frequently, the parliament, the Reichstag,
    would vote no confidence, and then new elections
    would have to be held.
    And so in a little bit like here,
    there would be flags flying, and rallies, and so on.
    And you hear about parties.
    And Germany had, I think, something
    like 35 parties, of which only about a half a dozen counted
    for anything.
    And you voted not by individual, but by list.
    And the lists were determined on the basis
    of the strength of a party how many delegates they had.
    And so you could watch.
    And the first thing I remember about parties,
    there were these national socialists,
    and they were number two.
    I learned much later that they had
    come up very rapidly from a very much lower position.
    And so in 1930, I think there were two or three elections--
    the parliament would be turned out.
    And so you'd hear a lot of election propaganda.
    And of course, at that time, you heard the speeches
    and you read the articles in the newspaper.
    And it was at that time that I really became aware
    that there was a Nazi movement and that there was a danger.
    Now, one of the things happened that the parties, the Nazis--
    but the communists, who were number three,
    and the social democrats who were number one in position
    in 1930--
    they had militias-- uniformed militias.
    And they would march through the streets.
    And I remember one time my father took us
    for a ride in the evening on a weekday,
    and we passed through one street.
    And we saw the social democrats marching.
    We turned the corner, and we saw the Nazis marching.
    And my father said, let's get out of here.
    Because when those two met up, there'd
    be some sort of a battle.
    They would draw knives, and there might
    be people injured and so on.
    And of course, the election campaigns,
    there would be disorders to with people
    trying to break in and so on.
    So at that time, of course, I became aware
    of the political struggle.
    And then the following year, either '31 or '32,
    the Nazis moved into the number one position--
    reversed positions with the social democrats who
    became number two.
    And so at that point, of course, I paid attention
    to the elections and who the candidates were.
    When the election, the results would come in the evening.
    And they would come in, since you
    ran on the list not as an individual candidates,
    the election would be determined by strength throughout.
    And then they would give you the figures at 8 o'clock
    in the evening.
    The Nazis would have so many votes and so
    many delegates in the Reichstag.
    And my father would get very upset
    when he saw that it was shifting and that the Nazis were
    taking over as the major party.
    It was worrisome.
    And of course, in addition to it,
    you had the economic situation.
    The unemployment was proportional
    to that in the United States.
    Germany had half the population of the US
    and half the number of unemployed people, which
    was something like 6 million out of a population of 66
    million people at the time.
    And people were nasty.
    They wanted jobs.
    And of course, the Nazis were very adept at promising.
    They were going to close the Jewish department
    stores so that people would go again to the specialist stores.
    They would do away with the socialist unions
    and honor German workers again.
    And of course, people who were out of work and who
    had gone, most of them at the time through World War I,
    and felt that Germany was badly treated--
    which it was, that they had suffered
    through the war and the subsequent inflation.
    And now when it started it looked like things were
    going to go better comes this depression,
    and you're out of work.
    And is there no end to this thing?
    And Hitler, of course, took advantage of this
    with his message.
    Were you or your parents alarmed by these events?
    Were you all alarmed, or intimidated, or frightened?
    Of course, you were somewhat alarmed.
    But there was no precedent to look to say, well,
    this has all happened before, because it has hadn't.
    And you figure it's going to be too bad--
    if he comes into power, there'll be
    increased anti-Semitism and god knows what else.
    But nobody dreamt that he would go to the extent
    that he initially and, of course, eventually did.
    I'd like to go through some of the changes step
    by step, one at a time.
    You mentioned some of the propaganda.
    Can you give me some specific examples of the propaganda
    that you remember?
    At that particular time, I don't think
    I remember anything specific.
    I know that it was being made.
    Later on, of course, I became more aware of it.
    I'm sure that the anti-Semitic paper
    that Hitler's party leader, Gauleiter Streicher
    in Nuremberg, put out in his really filth paper,
    The Sturmer, which was devoted to insulting and denigrating
    Jews.
    And every issue had on its main masthead the caption,
    [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] The Jews are our misfortune.
    This was spiced up with caricatures of Jewish faces
    with big noses--
    fat, very hairy, very unpleasant, unsavory looking.
    But I don't know whether I was aware of that particular aspect
    at the time.
    What about the speeches?
    What can you recall about the speeches?
    I really didn't listen to speeches at the time.
    I know they took place.
    They were pretty raucous affairs.
    They were in big meeting halls-- beer halls and so on.
    They were filled with Nazis.
    And when Hitler spoke, there was always
    either spontaneous or stoked applause.
    There were people seated throughout who
    would jump up in applause.
    And we knew that these people were not gentle politicians,
    but they were mass-oriented and geared
    to the lower class of the population,
    particularly the unemployed and, of course, many others too.
    Were you aware of things like book burnings?
    Yes.
    Of course, we heard that announced, because that
    was always presented.
    At the time, of course, there was no television,
    and a lot of people didn't even have radios.
    We didn't get our radio until 1932.
    That is the year before Hitler came to power.
    And one of the things he installed
    was a very efficient propaganda apparatus.
    And so when there was book burnings,
    that would be on the news.
    And of course, it would be in the newspapers too.
    Because once he came in, while the press was
    still locally or independently owned,
    they had to carry certain news items.
    And they were checked for their attitude.
    And some of the less Nazi-oriented papers
    would try to go as far as they could.
    But they would have to carry certain articles.
    And of course, when the speeches were printed,
    you would see that the book burning took place.
    And of course, the speech that went with it
    is that the people demanded it.
    This was filthy literature which poisoned the German spirit,
    and we wanted to purge Germany from this.
    And that's why it was being done.
    So yes, you knew about that.
    How about the Nuremberg laws?
    Well, that was in 1935, of course.
    At that time, I was 13.
    And we were immediately affected by it,
    because one of the clauses was that no Jewish female
    under the age of, I believe, 42 or 45
    was allowed to work in a Jewish household in which there
    was a male present.
    So we had a maid at the time who my father had hired--
    after times got a little better.
    We had a maid before the Depression,
    but we let her go because of the times.
    And my father thought it would be nice for my mother
    to have a maid.
    And usually maids came from small towns
    and served in the city, because that was how they
    learned how to run a household.
    They were frequently peasant girls
    or from other blue collar occupations in small towns.
    And to learn how to run a household,
    they would go into the city.
    And they liked working for Jewish households.
    They were well-run, and they had a chance to learn something.
    And one maid told my mother once that she came into the city
    to be a maid because she was told
    she couldn't get a husband if she hadn't worked in the city
    even if it was for only two weeks.
    And that's exactly what she did.
    But to get back on track, my father hired this young woman--
    I guess she was orphaned, and a customer of his
    asked if my father didn't know of a place
    where she could work.
    My father says, well, maybe we can employ her.
    And she came to work.
    She was very happy.
    She worked hard.
    Of course, she had it pretty good.
    It wasn't unpleasant work.
    She got plenty of time off, and she was pretty well-paid.
    And when the Nuremberg laws were passed,
    we had to tell her that she couldn't work anymore,
    and she cried.
    But there was no choice.
    It also, of course, reduced our status as German citizens.
    Full citizens rights were now officially
    abrogated considerably.
    For you personally, were there any changes
    in your situation at school?
    No.
    The Nazis wanted to throw the Jews out of public schools
    initially.
    And I understand that a Jew who was a soldier in World War I
    went to the then-President Hindenburg who died in 1934
    and complained.
    He served his fatherland, and now his children
    can't go to school.
    And reportedly, Hindenburg said that no child of a veteran
    will lose his rights to education.
    And that was being honored until the Nuremberg laws, I guess.
    Anyway, since my father was a veteran,
    I was in the public school until I emigrated in 1937.
    I believe in 1938, if not even earlier, that was terminated.
    What kind of military service had your father seen?
    Well, all Germans, including Jews, of course,
    were required to serve for one or two
    years in the army for training.
    Now, if you had a certain educational level,
    you could then volunteer for what
    was called a one-year service.
    And my father did.
    He was militarily trained in the cavalry in the nearby garrison
    of Ludwigsburg.
    And he served his here.
    And then, of course, he was available in case of war.
    In 1914 when World War I broke out,
    my father immediately received his mobilization order
    on August the 2nd, which was mobilization day.
    And he was called in and he served until November 1918,
    the end of World War I.
    Was his service recognized in any way?
    Yes, he did get a medal for bravery and loyalty
    by the king.
    The various German States had their own military decorations
    from the days when the sovereign was completely sovereign.
    He has this medal.
    I have it upstairs here.
    And I don't know whether he earned an Iron Cross.
    I don't believe he did.
    I have his military passport in my possession,
    and I have just recently reviewed it,
    and the only thing is this medal that I
    mentioned that he received.
    He did serve in what you would call
    the logistic service on the Eastern Front
    in Russia, Lithuania, Poland.
    And after the collapse of that front at the end of the war,
    he served in France.
    What about the boycotts of Jewish businesses?
    Did that impact your family?
    It didn't.
    It was a strange situation.
    The boycott was on April 1, 1933.
    And I'm not sure, but it seems to me it was a Saturday.
    My father's business was on the fourth floor
    of an office building.
    He had a small store room in his office.
    And in the morning, he went to work on the elevator,
    and he got out.
    There was nobody standing at his door.
    He went to work, and he came home in the evening.
    And of course, he told us he saw stores
    that he passed being boycotted.
    But he wasn't, by some strange perk, however,
    two floors below there was a lawyer
    by the name of Kaufman, which could be Jewish or not Jewish.
    They thought he was Jewish.
    So they put a couple of SS or SR men in front of his store
    and told people not to go in.
    The man was a reserve officer in the German army.
    He was furious.
    He went home, and put on his uniform,
    and read those guys the riot act.
    And of course, they apologized.
    He wasn't boycotted at the time.
    Can you remember a change in the atmosphere
    during the 1936 Olympics?
    No.
    Again, of course, we listened on the radio to the Olympics.
    And we knew what was going on.
    In Stuttgart, we were particularly interested
    because there was a young athlete who lived nearby who
    recently has been in the news.
    Her name's now Margaret Lambert.
    She was known as Gretel Bergmann--
    who was a champion high jumper.
    And she was of Olympic quality, and she
    had trained for the Olympics.
    And at the last minute, they disqualified her
    from participating.
    At the Holocaust Museum, we did have
    an exhibit on the Olympics.
    And the letter she received was exhibited at the museum.
    The letter stated that she wasn't Olympic quality anyway,
    so she wouldn't be acceptable to them.
    Here, again, ironically, the person who won a gold
    medal at the Olympics--
    I believe she was Hungarian.
    She was half-Jewish, but since she was from a foreign country,
    they couldn't keep her out.
    And I think she jumped exactly the same height
    as this woman would have jumped and got
    the gold medal, which went to Hungary
    or whatever country she represented.
    Whereas if Gretel Bergmann had competed,
    she would have won it for Germany.
    Of course, we were very much aware of that,
    because she lived not far from where we did.
    And we were all hoping that she would qualify and show
    the Nazis that the Jews are not a bunch of wimps.
    We're going to pause so I can flip the tape.
    This is tape 1, side B. We are interviewing William Hess,
    and we were talking about the 1930s in Germany
    and your experiences as a child and into your teenage years.
    And you were telling me about the Olympics in '36,
    and I had asked if you'd noticed a change in the atmosphere.
    Was there any change in the propaganda
    that was coming out at that time or social policies that
    were enacted?
    Anything like that?
    Well, I wasn't aware of it.
    Of course, the Nuremberg laws were the great change,
    because it officially abrogated the citizen rights of Jews.
    And we were also, of course, aware of the fact
    that right from the beginning, from 1933,
    the Jews were being displaced wherever they could be--
    first of all, from official positions.
    If you were a judge or any public employee,
    you were immediately fired.
    If you were an artist employed by the city
    in the municipal opera or something, you were fired.
    Jewish music, that is music by Mendelssohn who
    was baptized, Meyer, Behr, Gustav Mahler, and so on
    was not played anymore.
    And there were a lot of Jewish playwrights
    and operatic composers--
    Romberg and others.
    All these were removed from the public domain.
    And large businesses were synchronized,
    as it's translated.
    [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] meaning that if you had a large
    enterprise that were less important or maybe not even
    important, a Aryan business manager would be put in.
    The Jews would or would not be allowed to remain.
    But the say-so would entirely devolve on the Aryan business
    operative.
    So, yes, that we were aware of right along.
    I had an uncle who worked in a municipal savings bank,
    he was immediately furloughed and eventually fired, and never
    found employment again.
    Because in that field, it was impossible.
    So that was pervasive from the beginning.
    And at first, Jewish personnel was retained.
    Eventually, it was, especially the managerial positions,
    removed.
    And eventually, they were completely eliminated.
    I had an uncle who was a doctor, and one
    of the things that doctors very much depended on
    was the health insurance, which was state-operated
    for employees who had to pay a certain amount,
    like here in social security for which they
    had medical insurance.
    And doctors made a good bit of their living handling
    these patients.
    Fairly early on in '33 or '34, they
    would not allow Jewish doctors to participate in that except,
    again, if you were a veteran.
    Now, my uncle was in World War I--
    was a military physician, served on the front,
    and he wasn't injured but his health suffered greatly
    under stress because with a lack of doctors
    and many, many injured people, he was
    kept on duty for days on end.
    And he was allowed to keep that--
    I don't know how long.
    But these things came in right at the beginning.
    And then, of course, there were individual policies
    where customers of my dad would say to him, well, I'm sorry,
    we can't buy from you anymore because the Nazis now we're
    doing business with a Jew, and they've threatened me,
    or they've threatened my business.
    It actually didn't happen too much to my father.
    He did lose customers.
    I guess everybody did.
    But he was able to maintain his business until he sold it
    in May of 1938.
    Other things that happened-- well,
    municipalities or local governments acted on their own.
    They would deny use of a swimming pool to Jews.
    As I remember it, I could go to one swimming pool
    in Stuttgart-- one that was a little out of the way--
    just until before I left in '37.
    But I think at that time, I could not
    go to the municipal main swimming pools anymore.
    We could also go to the movies.
    But again, in some towns, they would not admit Jews.
    And many restaurants would put signs in their window--
    Jews will not be served.
    Or sometimes they were a little more subtle.
    They didn't put any sign in the window, but you went in,
    and when you sat down, and you ordered coffee,
    they would serve you a cup in a can.
    And the cup with have a note inside--
    we cannot serve you here.
    So that depended on where you lived.
    And as I've stated, Stuttgart, you had it too.
    You had it everywhere-- but a little bit less
    so in Stuttgart.
    So that, I would say, accounted for the fact
    that I was not myself immediately affected so much
    by what went on.
    I didn't go to the opera, a lot of things I didn't
    do so I wasn't turned away.
    I had one or more Jewish friends at the time.
    And that's why I'm saying that I personally
    did not suffer greatly.
    If you lived in other towns, especially small towns,
    it was a different story.
    As early as 1934, my father talked once
    to a neighbor who had moved into the house
    across the street who lived in a small town in Hesse who
    told us terrible stories of what happened.
    The man was in business, and he had sold some goods to someone,
    and the man refused to pay.
    And the neighbor then tried to pressure him to pay.
    And the man finally said, well, OK, I'll pay you.
    Just sign my release, and I'll give you the money.
    So the man signed, and the guy took it, and took his money,
    and said, so, you dirty Jew, now I don't owe you a cent anymore.
    And when the man protested, they beat him up--
    beat him up quite severely.
    And they finally had to call a doctor.
    And the doctor came into the room
    and says, where's the man who fell down the steps?
    This man said, well, I didn't fall down the steps.
    And the Nazi in the room said, if you
    know what's good for you, you fell down the steps.
    So this is the sort of thing that did happen.
    My aunt lived in a small town in Hesse,
    and these small towns in Hesse were particularly bad,
    as were towns in Franconia, and even
    my own state of Wurttemberg.
    This would happen, but my aunt, she had to go to the grocer.
    She had to take a detour because there
    were kids in the street who were on after her
    and yelled, dirty Jew, dirty Jew--
    and maybe even tried to trip her or something.
    So I'm not trying to gloss over and say everything was rosy
    and it wasn't so bad.
    It depended a lot on where you lived.
    And I consider myself fortunate, because there were incidents
    that people were severely beaten up.
    I understand that in Berlin as early
    as 1933, the new chief of police there on Rosh Hashana had
    his rowdies stand in front of the synagogue
    and when Jews came out dressed for the holidays,
    had them beat up.
    So it happened.
    It happened early on.
    And it happened many places.
    I'm aware of one incident in my high school,
    the year after I left--
    I wasn't in this school anymore, but there were still
    three or four Jewish kids in the school.
    It was customary that every year in the summer, in June or so,
    there'd be a class excursion.
    You either hire a bus or take the train someplace and then
    hike.
    And you took a picnic lunch along,
    and maybe there were some sightseeing point you would
    visit, and then you came back.
    That year at the excursion, some of the Hitler Youth
    leading personalities, who I had in my class,
    ganged up on these Jewish kids.
    They found some abandoned shack, pushed the Jewish kids
    in there, and piled straw, grass, or paper
    around the openings, and set it on fire
    so these kids were inside choking.
    I don't think they tried to burn them at the time,
    but I think they try to make them sweat and hurt them.
    And that was told to me by a friend of mine who
    was still going to class there.
    So it did happen in my own surroundings too.
    That was about the most serious thing that I came close to
    at the time--
    at least that I can remember.
    Did you speak with your parents about some of these things that
    were happening around you and try and make
    some kind of sense or some kind of--
    No, I don't believe--
    not that I can recall.
    Of course, my father was very much politically alert.
    Oh, you asked me how we know about a lot of these things--
    we did have a radio.
    And we did listen to foreign broadcasts in German.
    There were radio stations in France,
    in Strasbourg, in Luxembourg, and Moscow
    had a very strong transmitter that we could pick up.
    Now, you weren't supposed to listen to it, but we did.
    That's how we found out what was going on
    that they wouldn't tell you.
    I was a little incautious at the time.
    One evening, my parents weren't home,
    and I tuned in the Moscow transmitter.
    And at the beginning, they always play the music.
    And it was on, and I had it on fairly loud.
    I found out later on there was the Internationale,
    the communist anthem, that they played.
    And you could hear it outside.
    I thought, my god, if anybody hears
    we're listening to a communist broadcast,
    we'll be in real trouble.
    But again, we were lucky-- nobody apparently
    did or knew what it was.
    But this is one way in which people
    are kept informed as to what was going on at the time.
    And my father was usually pretty pessimistic.
    And he would say, I don't know what's
    going on-- what's going to be.
    Business, as I had said, was very good,
    because people were working--
    mostly defense-related or defense
    triggered the building of the highways, the drafting
    of people in the labor service, which did the kind of work
    that the Civil Conservation Corps, the CCC,
    did in this country.
    This brought money into circulation.
    And so people had a little more money to spend.
    The problem, then, was the shortages,
    because the rearmament cost either foreign currency
    or gold.
    And Germany had very little gold reserve and foreign currency.
    The mark was soft, and Goering made
    that famous pronouncement--
    cannon are more important than butter.
    So there were shortages.
    And since my father had an old established business,
    he did have some very good connections.
    In fact, one of his main vendors,
    a cotton manufacture in the Nuremberg area,
    the local representative during that very period
    turned from being just a business friend
    to a very good and loyal personal friend
    who stuck by my parents until the very day they left.
    They were welcome in his house.
    He even helped them get some of their treasured gold jewelries
    like rings and watches out of the country
    by suggesting that relatives from Switzerland who
    came and visited would come to this friend's house
    where they would pick up my father's watch, and my mother's
    gold rings, and so on.
    My parents did, and so they were able to save some of their most
    precious little jewelry items.
    And after the war, we helped them--
    we, my parents and I too--
    Shirley and I-- by sending them packages
    for already a year or so to tide them over the shortages.
    I'm going to try and go back to what
    I was trying to ask you before that I
    don't think I phrased well.
    What kind of guidance could your parents
    give you, given the times were very trying,
    and there was no precedence, as you mentioned before.
    What kind of guidance to handle these things
    did your parents give you?
    Oh, yeah.
    Well that, of course, that's true.
    Keep your mouth shut, watch what you say,
    and watch what you do--
    everything is being watched.
    The Nazis to have their stool pigeons out.
    They'll try to involve you into a conversation to draw you out,
    and then you get arrested or I get arrested.
    So that, I was very much aware.
    Walls have ears.
    And you were careful.
    You either didn't talk--
    I had a couple of friends, and maybe I was careless,
    but I talked to them.
    And eventually they all had to join the Hitler Youth,
    but the very fact that they continue ed
    to associate with me, and themselves would
    complain about the situation--
    but you had to be careful, of course, what you said
    and to whom you said it.
    You mentioned arrests-- what did you
    know about the fate of those people who were arrested
    for being incautious?
    Well, at the time, usually you would be
    sent to a concentration camp.
    At that time, they were in death camps.
    Dachau was, of course, one of the first ones
    that was organized.
    In addition, there were other smaller camps
    that were established.
    Occasionally, if you were prominent, you might be killed.
    There were times-- not so much early on, but let's say after
    '37 or '38--
    yes, you were beaten up, and you were, of course, very badly
    treated.
    Did you or your family consider leaving Germany?
    And if so, when?
    Well, the classic story--
    my father said, I'm a veteran of World War I.
    They're not going to bother me.
    I don't have a big business.
    I'm getting old, I can stay.
    You have no future, you're going to have to get out.
    So when I was 13 or 14, my mother
    had an uncle in New York who had left Germany
    after the Franco-Prussian war because his older brother
    had died in battle.
    His mother didn't want him to be drafted.
    And he helped a lot of family members.
    My mother wrote to her uncle and her uncle said, don't worry,
    I have a friend who always made something.
    And when he's old enough to work, which is 16,
    he can come to the United States.
    Your parents didn't think about leaving themselves
    at this point?
    My parents didn't think of leaving.
    I don't think my uncle at the time--
    or rather, his wife--
    were inclined to send any more affidavits, which
    you needed in order to get in.
    Fortunately, I guess by 1938, I think
    it became clear-- my father sold his business in May,
    and I think after the Austrian annexation, which ratcheted up
    the anti-Semitism by several degrees,
    it became plain that maybe you can't stay after all.
    So my father applied for a visa number for the United States.
    And of course, you needed a visa.
    And since the United States only gave out
    a certain number, which was actually
    only half the number that legally could be given out,
    at least he had a place in line.
    So by that time, they started to make some preparation.
    It was very lucky they did when they did, because they were
    just about among the last ones to leave Germany
    before World War II broke out.
    They left in July of '39.
    I want to do this with your departure,
    because your departure was before theirs.
    July '37, two years before.
    What arrangements did you have to make for you
    to get out of Germany?
    What problems did you have to overcome?
    And how did you overcome them?
    Well, actually, there were no real problems.
    The only thing is I had to have a lot of different papers.
    And my father thought it'd be a good idea
    for me to do it myself, which I greatly resented--
    to traipse from one office to another, go into the first one,
    they said, you have to go somewhere else first.
    I finally got the hang of it, and I
    was able to make the rounds.
    And what I essentially needed was birth certificates,
    then statements that my father wasn't in any debt that
    could be lost somehow--
    passport, and visa, and all that sort of thing.
    And then, of course I was allowed to take things out with
    me-- clothes--
    I think all of probably $10 or $15 in cash--
    but clothes and other things you could take out--
    so shopping for these things.
    And that's what took up a good bit of time.
    Do you remember the date that you left Germany?
    Yes.
    I left from Hamburg on an American ship, the Manhattan,
    and my parents accompanied me to Hamburg.
    We stopped on the way to visit relatives who lived on the way.
    And I sailed on the 31st of July of 1937,
    and arrived in New York on the 5th of August--
    almost to the day 60 years ago.
    Anything eventful happened on route?
    Other than I got seasick, no.
    Tell me about your thoughts when you left Germany and were out
    of Nazi Germany?
    It's a little bit hard to realistically talk about.
    It seems to me I wasn't really greatly concerned.
    I always thought I was a rather independent person,
    because every vacation I spent with relatives
    who lived about 300 miles away.
    And I went there by train--
    went to the station, got the schedule together,
    traveled by myself, stayed there, and came back.
    And so to me, this was really just another face of it.
    I'd come here, and I had glowing pictures.
    I was told I was going to be taken care of,
    I was going to have employment, and would be paid, and so on.
    So I looked forward to it.
    And I don't think I was greatly worried about this thing,
    at least not that I could recall.
    It didn't really hit me until I arrived in Danville, Illinois
    and was shown to a small room, which
    was my room, among total strangers
    with different customs, habit, language, and all
    that that all of a sudden it hit me like a ton of bricks,
    you know?
    This was for real.
    This wasn't like going to visit relatives
    and having a good time.
    In New York, I had a wonderful time.
    I was there for two weeks until the people were
    ready to accept me in Danville.
    And my relatives took very good care of me--
    wonderful accommodations-- I went to the beach and all that.
    So it wasn't hard at all until the reality set in that I
    was not totally on my own.
    Did you ever have any thoughts that you might not
    be reunited with your parents?
    I was worried about my parents.
    At that point, especially then, of course,
    after the Kristallnacht, I was worried.
    And I felt when I was there that I had
    to prepare the way for them--
    work on my uncle and also possibly on other people
    to give them an affidavit.
    And also I was aware that if they came,
    they would not have any money with them.
    So--
    I'm going to hold you back for just a second.
    We'll get to Kristallnacht and your parents
    coming in just a minute.
    I wanted to try and get a sense from you
    that when you left Germany, did you have any feelings of relief
    or a lessening of anxiety because you
    were no longer subject to all the things
    that were happening in Germany?
    To be honest, I can't recall that I did.
    I probably had some mixed feelings.
    I very probably did because I've had a good life there.
    And I knew things weren't going to get any better.
    And so I probably had some mixed feelings.
    What were your first impressions of America and Americans?
    Well, arriving in New York, I thought it was the greatest.
    New York, especially in the '30s, was a very exciting
    place, and lots of things to see and do, new impressions,
    and so on--
    then visiting relatives, going to the beach, seeing movies,
    and so on.
    It was great.
    It was wonderful.
    How were you received by Americans in general--
    not your relatives, but just the average Americans that you met?
    Reception was friendly and curious.
    In a small town in Illinois, most people had never been that
    far away, let alone in Europe.
    They didn't have any idea at all.
    Yeah, they had heard of Hitler.
    They've heard of some of the things he did.
    But the first question usually was, how do you like it here
    in America?
    And they always expected to hear, it's wonderful,
    it's great.
    And I liked America.
    I liked being there.
    I didn't particularly like the kind of life
    that I now led when I was at my destination.
    But on the whole, I was treated friendly and well.
    Did you experience any anti-Semitism, either New York
    or in Danville?
    No.
    And how exactly were you able to support yourself?
    Let me just go back to your previous question.
    I knew who the Ku Klux Klan was, and I also
    was aware that the Midwest was a stronghold, particularly
    in neighboring Indiana.
    I had heard that they had marched in those areas.
    I personally never saw or heard them.
    Now, I had heard of Father Coughlin, but for some reason
    I never listened to his broadcast.
    I didn't know where he spoke, so I never heard him.
    I would have been greatly angered and alarmed, of course,
    if I had heard him give the kind of Nazi talks that he did.
    I'm sorry to have--
    Let's follow up on what you were saying.
    Did anybody ask you about Hitler and all that stuff
    that was going on in Germany?
    They did, yes.
    And I would tell them what happened.
    They were surprised.
    People without the background of what
    life is in a total dictatorship couldn't understand
    why couldn't you buy a foreign newspaper, or a magazine,
    or listen to the radio, or that-- well, yes, to the radio.
    You could listen.
    A lot of people didn't have radios, unlike here.
    So it was hard for them to understand
    why did you put up with it?
    Why didn't you shoot one of them people in Germany
    didn't have guns and you didn't shoot people.
    And if you did, with the Nazis, you
    couldn't go and hire a lawyer who would get you out.
    The Gestapo didn't respond to that.
    To them, it was just incomprehensible.
    The question I had asked you was,
    how were you able to support yourself when you came here?
    With very great difficulty.
    I was hired at the minimum wage of $12.50 a week--
    $0.13 social security, which just then had gone into effect.
    The man who hired me, he was an older man
    who was himself an immigrant who had been helped
    by mother's uncle in New York.
    His son was a rich kid who had gone to college
    and who didn't have quite the sensitivity and understanding.
    When I came there, I had had two years of English in school.
    And in anticipation of emigrating,
    I had additional English lessons.
    But of course, I spoke with a thick accent, something
    like Kissinger.
    And Danville was so hard hit by the Depression.
    There was a lot of unemployment, and here comes
    this foreigner who gets a job and he
    speaks with a foreign accent.
    That doesn't look good.
    So he said, we've got to work on your English.
    You've got to get rid of your accent.
    He says, I've hired a woman for you
    who is a teacher, who because she is married, under the law,
    couldn't teach anymore since she had a husband who
    was earning a living.
    And you go out to her, and she will work with you
    on your accent.
    Now, this was a very good thing, because my education
    had been disrupted.
    And this woman was great.
    She used the English lessons to teach me American literature,
    and history, and so on.
    But I had to pay her.
    The people where I lived were employees of this friend,
    and I had complete room and board.
    I was a member of the family in a lot of respects.
    And it cost me $9 a week, which was, again, not a lot of money.
    The lessons were $1 apiece.
    That makes $12.
    And I had to take the bus to go there.
    That makes $12.30.
    That left knee $0.07 out of my pay.
    Now, fortunately, it was possible for my parents
    to send me a maximum of something like $8 a month.
    But, you see, I felt that my parents
    might have to come here, so that wasn't really my money.
    So I had to conserve that.
    But of course, you can't live on $0.07
    a week, even if you have room and board all that paid for.
    So I had to go into that money, and I managed to do it.
    But I don't know if I was able to save anything at all
    out of what they sent.
    But I would walk to save a nickel.
    I would go to the movies early to save a nickel and so on.
    So it was very difficult to live on what I had.
    Apparently you were able to have communication
    with your parents, if they were able to send you money.
    Were you able to have free and open correspondence with them?
    Open?
    No, because any correspondence was subject to--
    what do you call it--
    Censorship?
    Censorship, yes.
    So you always had to expect that somebody
    would read what you wrote.
    I wrote weekly.
    My parents bought me a little portable typewriter
    that fit into a briefcase.
    And I think I still have it.
    It used to be a marvel at the time.
    And so I was able to type the letter to them.
    They were also able to send me stamps.
    And every week, I wrote to them--
    and of course, what I wrote is what I did, what I saw,
    and so on, and health, and all that.
    But of course, you stayed away from the political aspects.
    What were they able to communicate to you?
    Well, of course, I heard about the Kristallnacht.
    And my mother and my father both always wrote to me.
    And then suddenly, only my mother wrote.
    My father was away on a trip.
    So I guessed something went on--
    I didn't know or didn't want to know.
    And my father is still not home yet, we
    hope he'll be home soon again and so on.
    And then after a while, he did write again.
    And so I surmised that he had been in a concentration camp.
    Do you know how long your father was interned.
    Yes, he was picked up the day after the Kristallnacht, which
    is November the 10th, and he came home just shortly
    before Christmas in 1938.
    That is about five weeks.
    He was in Dachau.
    Do you know the conditions of his internment?
    Well, it was pretty much standard
    of what they did at the time.
    They picked up people, hauled them
    away on trucks to the local police station,
    kept them overnight, and then put them on a bus
    and took them to Dachau, where they
    were issued prison uniforms.
    First, you weren't fed for quite a while.
    You were poorly fed.
    And of course, most of the time was
    spent in roll calls where you stood in your prison uniform
    without winter clothes for hours three or more times a day.
    My father caught serious bronchitis,
    which was with him as long as he lived.
    People in the barrack where he was, some of them
    were mistreated.
    They told me one case where a father and son--
    a young son who was 16--
    were in the same barrack, and the Nazis
    made sport of having the son beat up his father
    so that they had something they could amuse themselves by.
    My father, he never mentioned of being beaten or anything.
    But one of the sports that the Nazis did
    was when they had to take a shower,
    they would shut off the hot water so that suddenly
    in the middle of November, you'd stand in the ice cold water,
    then they shot the cold water off
    so you'd have practically boiling water come down--
    that sort of thing is what he was subjected to.
    And then they were also made to run double time around a parade
    ground there.
    And these were people who were middle aged,
    and some people died as a result of the treatment.
    Under what conditions was he released?
    Standard condition.
    You sign that you're going to leave the country,
    you bring proof that you leave the country
    in a certain length of time, and you would immediately
    be released.
    So my mother wrote to her uncle again and told him
    that my father had been arrested and would be freed only
    if he could leave the country.
    So he immediately sent the affidavit.
    And of course, that's what saved their life.
    Yeah.
    They had some other little nice things.
    For example, for the privilege of being transported from
    and to the concentration camp, you
    were also made to pay the cost of transportation.
    And those who were too poor, the others had to make up for it.
    This was sort of standard Nazi chicanery
    to make people just suffer a little bit extra.
    What mode of transportation did your parents
    use to come to the United States?
    They emigrated legally after they had the papers.
    They left Germany and went to Belgium
    to be with relatives for a week and to Paris,
    where we had relatives at that time.
    And my father, my parents, and my father's brother
    and sister-in-law, and sister and brother-in-law,
    then came by a Dutch ship from Boulon in France to New York.
    And from New York, they came to Danville.
    They arrived one week before World War II broke out.
    We're going to pause so I can change tape.
    This is tape 2, side A. We are interviewing William Hess.
    And I wanted to ask you to describe
    your reunion with your parents.
    When my parents arrived, we're going to go to Danville--
    the man whom I was living with.
    And as I said before, they really
    treated me like their own child.
    I was taken along on day trips and so on.
    I ate with them at their table.
    They were really very, very kind.
    What was her name?
    Their name was Biteg.
    It's a rather strange German name.
    And he was, of course, of German descent.
    And his wife was Scotch-Irish.
    He was Catholic but non-practicing,
    and she was a Protestant.
    And the children went to, I think, Protestant church when
    they did go.
    They were very kind.
    The man owned a car.
    He told me if I wanted to meet my parents at the New York
    train in Indianapolis, which is 90 miles from Danville,
    I could take the car, which I was happy to do.
    And I met my parents at the station in Indianapolis
    and took them back to Danville.
    And they stayed at the same place where I was living.
    They made a room available to them
    until they found an apartment and until their furniture
    arrived.
    Now, that was another thing.
    It always comes through in this that we were lucky.
    And I think we really were extremely lucky.
    Somebody must have looked out for us, because
    with all the pitfalls, we made it, our little family.
    My parents were able to ship their household goods.
    They weren't allowed to buy anything new,
    but they were allowed to take what they had.
    That was boxed in huge crates.
    And that arrived about two weeks after they
    did in September of 1939.
    We were lucky to find an inexpensive apartment.
    And so we moved into the apartment.
    Again, a lucky break--
    the crates arrived on a German ship,
    which was the last German ships to make the port of New York
    before World War I broke out.
    If it had been on the next ship or if the ship
    had left a day or two later, it would
    have turned around in the middle of the ocean
    and taken all of their belongings back.
    So by the skin of their teeth, they
    were able to salvage at least their belongings.
    I think my father at the time owned something
    like $200 or so.
    That was this total substance for 30, 40 years of work.
    And of course, we were very happy to see each other.
    And I didn't go into a lot of details about what happened,
    especially to how I thought he might be sensitive to it.
    But we moved into our own place.
    And eventually, we did talk about it.
    And my father did tell me what happened
    to him in Dachau in detail.
    That's how I found out about it.
    What other things that your parents tell you
    about with respect to the changes in Germany
    since your departure?
    Well, of course, as I was able to see for myself,
    it got a lot worse.
    My mother told me about a woman who
    lived up on the third floor of the apartment house
    where we had lived who were very friendly people-- very friendly
    with us.
    She was a good bit younger than my parents.
    And she felt comfortable coming to our apartment.
    I remember one time when she was pregnant at a thunderstorm,
    she was afraid-- she asked if she
    could come in, and of course, we said, yes.
    And my mother told me it was just terrible.
    One day her husband who was employed at the bank
    was called in by his boss and told
    that they understand that they still traffic with Jews,
    and if the man valued his job, then they better cut that out.
    And so she came to my mother and said, I feel terrible,
    but I can't afford to be seen talking to you anymore.
    So when I pass you, I'll wave and say, hello, but that's
    about all I can do.
    So my parents were very upset, of course, that this happened.
    Now, in contrast, this business friend
    that my parents were talking about,
    they were welcome right up to the end
    even though they had relatives who made snide remarks.
    When your Jewish friends come, you
    serve them better than you would do us when we come for dinner.
    And this man, he said he couldn't care less
    how they felt about this thing.
    So my father also told me of another incident--
    the place where he had his business.
    There was a chocolate and coffee store on the first level.
    And my father would go in, and this man
    would talk to him about the shortages
    and how the Nazis were ruining everything.
    And while they were there, a woman enters the store
    and says, Heil Hitler, and he answers, Heil Hitler.
    And she says, I'd like to have a pound of coffee.
    And he says, I'm sorry, but with the shortages,
    we don't have any coffee.
    Heil Hitler, and she walked out.
    And then he says to my father-- by the way,
    would you like some coffee?
    My father said, I don't think my wife buys it.
    And he says, well, for you, I have coffee.
    For her, I don't have coffee.
    So I'm not saying that this was very prevalent,
    but it wasn't total.
    And these things, of course, were
    isolated with a lot of other experiences.
    You did run into hard times and unfriendly responses.
    But I don't recall specifically that they were
    in any way mistreated anywhere.
    When your parents came to this country,
    did they have any problems adjusting to life in America?
    Very greatly.
    It's a strange thing, and history repeats itself.
    I always had to remember the story of the Israelites
    in the desert when they complained
    to Moses, why didn't you leave us
    with the flesh pots of Egypt?
    I had an experience with my father one time--
    maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.
    Eventually, he opened a little dry goods store with money
    he borrowed in a small town not in Danville,
    about five miles away.
    He had to take two buses--
    we had no car.
    And it was very difficult to get started.
    And the competition, of course, was fierce.
    People would come on Saturday to come to Danville and shop,
    and he would see them go past, and he
    would take very little money.
    Well, one time I came home from work in the evening--
    and usually Saturday night it was--
    that was the busy day.
    And I'd come home dead tired at 9 o'clock in the evening,
    and I would have a bite to eat and talk to my parents.
    My father wasn't there.
    I said, what happened?
    Where's father?
    He's upstairs in bed.
    Go up and see him.
    I went up, I said, what's wrong?
    He was in bed staring stonily at the ceiling.
    I said, what happened?
    He says, I was there all day long from 9:00 in the morning
    till 6:00 in the afternoon.
    How much money do you think I took in?
    I said, I don't have the slightest idea.
    Takes a $0.50 piece from the table, says, $0.50.
    That's all I take in.
    Monday, I'm going to go back to the guy who lent me the money,
    and I'll throw the key at his feet and say,
    I don't want to do business.
    You can't do business anymore.
    This is a terrible place.
    I should have stayed in Germany.
    I said, what?
    I said, you didn't have enough from Dachau,
    you want to be back there?
    Well, he was in no mood to argue at the time.
    Of course, he didn't really believe it,
    but it was difficult. My parents tended to speak German,
    and I told them, here we speak English.
    My mother always made comparisons-- it
    became laughable after a while.
    My mother would buy blueberries--
    and the blueberries here are big and they're white inside--
    in Germany, they were blue inside.
    So I made up a little song about how much
    better everything in Germany was--
    that even the blueberries are blue
    all the way through and so on.
    It was very difficult, but they did make an effort.
    They did make an effort.
    And eventually, I think they felt at home.
    But it was difficult for them, because for my mother,
    time stood still.
    And I used to tell her, look, if you went back today,
    you wouldn't recognize it, because it's not
    only the place, it's the time.
    First time I went back to Germany on business in 1952
    and I told my parents what had changed in this city,
    I said, you wouldn't recognize it anymore.
    It's not the place that you left.
    So she always used to say, everything's so different here.
    I said, it's different over there too now.
    It's changed.
    Let's go back to 1939.
    Are you running ahead of me a bit.
    Tell me about September 1939--
    where you were and what you heard about the Nazi invasion
    of Poland.
    Oh, well, of course at that time,
    I listened to the radio and I read the paper.
    The Danville paper was a pretty lousy paper,
    but we had the Chicago Tribune and so on.
    And of course, you went to the movies, you saw the newsreel,
    and so you saw what was going on at the time.
    And at that time, we were pretty sure
    that there wasn't going to be another Munich--
    that this time it was going to break out.
    And in a way, we felt relieved because finally, finally,
    somebody who had arms and not just a voice
    was going to do something.
    What was the American reaction to this news story?
    Well, the Middle West was isolationist in outlook.
    So the outlook at the time was, well, that's not our business.
    Let's just make sure that we stay out of that war.
    Was that reaction surprising to you in any way?
    Well, in a way, yes, except I had encountered it.
    I knew that the people here were concerned with America.
    And there were still economic problems at the time.
    There was still a lot of unemployment, and low wages,
    and so on.
    So I knew at that time what the peoples feeling were.
    Tell me about your life in Danville at the end of 1939
    and the beginning of the 1940s.
    The fact that at 16 I had to work
    didn't put me in touch with young people.
    I worked six days a week, and I still
    had to take lessons for quite a while--
    two or three nights a week.
    And I was supposed to do homework too.
    And Saturday, the day when most young people have free,
    that was the day in which I worked the longest,
    and I was dead tired in the evening.
    So I had very little contact with people of my own age
    at that particular time.
    There were Jewish people living there,
    and they had children my age.
    But I was at that time rather shy.
    I would never go out and call up a girl
    or ask somebody to go out.
    If they asked me, that was fine.
    But the fact that I had no money, and the Jews in Danville
    very relatively better off, I always
    felt like I was the poor relative.
    And the people I met at the store, well,
    they were nice people, but they didn't have my interests.
    Usually I had one or two friends, but what can
    you do in Danville?
    I went to the movies, listened to the radio, not an awful lot.
    Now, in 1940, I was contacted by some of the young people.
    I found out there was a Jewish youth group, which I joined.
    And so I had a little more contact
    then with the local people, which helped me a great deal.
    But I always felt that I came from a big city,
    an interesting area.
    And here it's all flat land and cornfields.
    And so I never really particularly liked
    living there.
    You followed the war news.
    Oh, yes, assiduously, always.
    Tell me about your reaction to the Nazi invasion
    of Soviet Russia.
    Well, I had mixed reactions at the time,
    because after all, the year before, the arch enemy
    of Hitler, Stalin, had signed a non-aggression pact
    with the Russians.
    And incidentally, I remember one guy in Danville,
    a Jewish tailor who was a communist--
    and I couldn't wait when they signed that Hitler-Stalin pact
    when he came into the store to look for goods,
    I said, well, what do you say now about your friends making
    friends with the Nazis?
    He was somewhat embarrassed about it.
    But still, I figured, well, if he attacked the Soviet Union,
    then here's a powerful enemy.
    And up to that point to 1941, the Nazis had had it their way.
    They overran everything they invaded,
    and it looked like there was no stopping.
    And here's this vaunted huge Red Army, of which
    they were so deadly afraid.
    Maybe now he's bitten off too much.
    But of course, the first few weeks were very disconcerting
    when the Nazis advanced, took hundreds of thousands
    of prisoners, and it looked like Russia
    was going the way of Belgium, and France, and all
    the other countries that were invaded.
    Pearl Harbor-- your recollection.
    Yes.
    Well, of course, everybody who lived at a given time
    will remember.
    And it was a Sunday.
    We were having dinner.
    I was waiting to listen to the concert
    by the New York Philharmonic when the broadcast was
    interrupted with a very stark announcement
    that unidentified planes had attacked Pearl Harbor,
    and there was nothing further at the time.
    So this, of course, brought it home--
    now we're in it for sure, and for god knows how long.
    Did you see service in the military?
    Yes.
    Yes, I received a draft notice in August of 1942
    and was making arrangements to leave when I suddenly
    got a recall of the draft notice and to come to the draft board.
    Why?
    Well, we just discovered you're an enemy alien.
    You have to sign a certain form, and this is a small town,
    we don't have it, so we'll let when you will be called up.
    Now, one of the things that really griped me--
    here I was an enemy alien, and I couldn't leave town
    without permission of the state's attorney
    and let him know where I go and when I go.
    And so I really bridled at that.
    And so I was pretty much locked in--
    I could do some traveling, but I always had to get permission.
    And they never contacted me again.
    So I wrote to them and I said, what's the matter now?
    Don't you want me or what?
    So very promptly then, the form had arrived,
    and I got another draft notice.
    And one year after Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1942,
    I left for the reception center at that time of Scott Field,
    Illinois, near St. Louis.
    In what capacity did you serve?
    Well, of course, I was drafted into the army.
    At that time, you couldn't even volunteer anymore
    if you wanted to, because everyone
    was subject to the draft.
    I was drafted into the army.
    And in the beginning, they were very anxious to have linguists.
    So anyone who had foreign language knowledge-- not
    everybody, but a great many of the people
    were pulled out from whatever they had been assigned to
    and sent to the Military Intelligence Training Center
    at Camp Ritchie, Maryland for training
    to be a German interrogator.
    Interrogator in the language of German with a mission of being
    formed into a team to be attached to an American combat
    division to interrogate newly-captured prisoners
    for tactical information on the battlefield--
    that was my training.
    Did you actually serve in the European theater?
    No, I never went overseas.
    Very few of us were pulled out and sent
    to a strategic interrogation center
    at Fort Hunt, which was a classified installation, South
    of Alexandria.
    It was what you would call the day a combined services
    interrogation center.
    Was used by Army, and Navy, and by the British
    as well to interrogate prisoners who had strategic information.
    And that included all captured submarine personnel--
    and there were many of them who were brought there
    for interrogation about technological developments,
    naval order of battle.
    And then, of course, there also was interrogation primarily
    for main strategic targets--
    ball-bearing, petroleum, and rubber
    were the most strategic material.
    But anyone who had knowledge about the workings
    of the government, or the propaganda machinery,
    or anything, they were brought to that center
    and interrogated by Army or Navy interrogators.
    Including you?
    Yes.
    Actually, I didn't do much interrogation.
    There was something else that was going on there,
    and that is they had bugged all the rooms.
    And so we sat with earphones on our ears
    to listen to prisoners.
    There were always two, sometimes three in the room.
    And some of the prisoners were turned around
    and became stool pigeons who were made to entice information
    from these people.
    Then important information was transcribed and used.
    I don't know how good the stuff was.
    We found out from a book that was written after the war, when
    information became available under the Freedom
    of Information Act-- because this data was classified,
    and we were made to sign we would never
    talk about what went on there because the British found
    after World War I that people talked
    and that helped the Germans in World War II.
    But anyway, there's a book, The [GERMAN] Escape is the name
    of it, which was written by an American--
    that the Navy personnel did spot the microphones
    under the ceiling by the third round there
    and got coded letters back to Germany
    so that people who arrived there knew what
    was going on at that center.
    And so I don't know.
    I guess the interrogation yielded
    important material, but not the listening, I don't believe.
    Did you experience any anti-Semitism
    or any anti-foreign sentiment?
    Well, the only thing I remember that once during the war,
    I was going somewhere, and I was on a railway train,
    and I stood on the platform while the train
    was halted at a station.
    And I heard a couple of people talking to each other,
    making anti-Semitic remarks.
    And I was boiling, and I was considering,
    should I punch them in the nose for doing that?
    But of course, I would have been court martialed for it.
    And these people were, at that time,
    I guess, just making use of their First Amendment rights.
    Strangely, at work at Fort Hunt, the only anti-Semitic remarks
    I heard was made by two American officers who
    were called in because they had been attaches in Berlin,
    and one of our prisoners was a German officer
    who was being interrogated at that center.
    And I guess they thought maybe that these two colonels could
    get some information from him.
    But they held conversations in which these officers lambasted
    Roosevelt and I guess also made some anti-Semitic remarks.
    I remember their names, but I'm not going to mention them now.
    Did you have citizenship during the war?
    I applied.
    I was eligible before I was drafted.
    But actually, by being in the Army,
    you qualify a little earlier than you would.
    You don't have to wait five years.
    But since I was drafted at such a time,
    my citizenship was actually delayed a little bit.
    And I did become a citizen in May of 1943
    at Hagerstown, Maryland while I was stationed in Camp Ritchie--
    Fort Ritchie now.
    What did you know about the way Jews
    were being treated in Nazi-occupied Europe
    during the war years?
    Well, during the war years, of course, news came back.
    Now, my parents subscribed to a German refugee newspaper,
    Aufbau which is still published in New York.
    It's really a fine publication.
    They had renowned writers.
    They were not noisy, antI-Nazi propagandists--
    they were very factual.
    And they carried a tremendous amount of information.
    And of course reading that, you read whenever
    something became available.
    So you knew what was going on--
    not the total scope of it, but you knew enough
    that people were being killed wholesale, that they
    were being deported.
    In fact, I have a postcard upstairs
    that my mother received in 1940 or '41
    from a woman she didn't know in Frankfurt
    who wrote to my mother that she has been asked
    by her neighbor, Mr. Sternberg, to let my mother
    know that they are going to go on a trip now for a while,
    so they won't be able to communicate.
    But when they arrive to where they're going,
    she will get in touch again.
    And that was, of course, when my uncle and aunt were
    being deported from Frankfurt.
    They were being deported to Lodz in Poland.
    And my mother wrote to them.
    I don't know whether they ever received any answer.
    And my mother sent food packages,
    which were signed for not by them
    but, by someone in the camp as receipt of the package.
    And then, of course, after we got in the war,
    we didn't have any news anymore.
    And they were undoubtedly gassed,
    because the Germans themselves said that they were disappeared
    in the East, which means they weren't put in a labor camp
    where they worked and died there,
    but they were immediately gassed.
    Is there anything else that comes to your mind
    that you want to talk about regarding
    the war years and your service in this country?
    Being in the army, we received a lot of information
    through intelligence.
    We knew that what the Nazis were building,
    that they were building in Peenemunde, that they
    were doing rocket research.
    And so they were also active in nuclear research.
    And that, of course, were subjects
    which we watched very closely.
    If anybody came in who knew what the status of production
    and in Peenemunde was.
    And then also, we were very interested
    in any kinds of developments in submarines and aircraft
    production.
    And so from these sources, I was informed
    as to what was going on.
    Tell me about May 8, 1945--
    V-E Day.
    That was a great holiday, because now it
    was over in Europe.
    And especially after the Battle of the Bulge,
    when we all thought that the war was just about over,
    and here comes this terrible and very successful
    German counter-offensive, which would add weeks to the war.
    But now in Europe, it's finally over, but it's still just half
    a victory.
    Because although for the Jews there
    is no further suffering, for the American soldier,
    there is still Japan and the Pacific.
    After the war was over in May in Europe,
    did you make any efforts to find friends, or cousins,
    or other people that were left behind in Germany?
    No, I didn't.
    There was no way of doing this thing,
    because in the first few months, there was no fraternization.
    And I was still in the Army, so there
    wasn't very much we found out.
    I had relatives in Europe-- in Italy,
    in Belgium, and in France.
    My one sister of my mother's and her husband had gone to France,
    and we were in touch with her until the war broke out
    in 1941.
    I don't know whether my mother heard anything from them.
    They were in Paris.
    So that was the occupied area.
    I don't remember at this point when my mother learned
    that that sister and her husband as well were
    deported to Auschwitz.
    My cousin in Italy we had--
    well, that was enemy territory too,
    so we didn't hear anything from her.
    And another cousin who had been in Belgium,
    we learned then that he had somehow
    been able to get to Switzerland where he was
    interned and survived the war.
    On my father's side, my immediate family members
    all were able to emigrate.
    How was the news of the genocide covered in American press?
    It became known fairly early on.
    I really don't recall too much in detail about it.
    Once the war was over, of course, you heard it.
    And in the beginning, there were so many other things
    that you were preoccupied with--
    the end of the war.
    And organizations weren't set up where you could readily
    make inquiries.
    I'm sure my parents who at that time
    lived in Danville, where as I was here in Washington,
    I'm sure whatever possibilities there were to find out,
    my parents did.
    Oh, I forgot one thing--
    one sister and brother-in-law of my mother's lived in Brussels.
    And they were the closest to my parents.
    And I'm sure that my parents immediately
    tried to find out what happened to them.
    As it happened, they did survive the war in Belgium.
    Did you follow the events of the Nuremberg Trials?
    Well, somehow or other, I didn't follow them that closely.
    I tried to get a job in the Washington office of the war
    crimes commission.
    I didn't get the job.
    And then just two weeks--
    this was only a temporary job anyway-- two weeks later,
    then I found a permanent job that I held for a long time.
    I did follow it.
    As a matter of fact, after the war, I worked at Ford Hunt
    for a while.
    They kept the operation going.
    And a lot of the work that was being done there
    was to go through documents that they had generated
    that were being transmitted to Justice Jackson, who
    was the American representative on the war crimes trial.
    So we did have some information as to certain things
    that were being dealt with at the time.
    How long did you stay in the military?
    I was discharged in February of '46.
    So I was in for a little over three years.
    Tell me a little bit about your post-war professional career.
    I liked what I was doing.
    I wasn't a good businessman at all.
    I really didn't enjoy it, and I wasn't good at it.
    But what to do-- now, by that time, I was married.
    We got married and in October '45.
    The war was over.
    My wife had come to Washington as a government worker.
    And so when the war was over, we got married.
    And I went back to work at the last military installation
    where I was, and I really didn't have too much of an idea.
    My education had been greatly curtailed.
    It was incomplete.
    Business didn't appeal to me.
    And my wife says, well, go to school
    under the GI Bill of Rights.
    Well, I'd taken care of myself ever since I was 16,
    and I couldn't see to earn my own living.
    So I figured, well, I'll go to school at night.
    The camp closed or was transferred a short time later,
    and I found employment as a technical translator
    for the Signal Corps.
    And that was moved too.
    So somebody suggested I go to the Army map service.
    They used linguists.
    Well, I'm not a cartographer.
    I went out anyway, out in the sticks in Maryland
    in Glen Echo.
    And to my surprise, I was hired, because they didn't only
    do maps, they were also doing intelligence work
    for the Corps of Engineers.
    And since I spoke German and since they had captured a great
    deal of German documents, and since intelligence was really
    a neglected field, especially in the Army--
    the Navy did a little more, the army did very little--
    and there was a decision at the time.
    We've got to know more about our potential enemies, which was
    at that time the Soviet Union.
    And since most of the documents were in German, I was hired.
    But I didn't realize that this was an up and coming career
    field that under the National Security Act of 1947
    they had established the CIA as a permanent institution,
    and also an intelligence program--
    a coordinated intelligence program in a career field.
    So I took an exam, which was an elaboration
    of your experiences.
    And this is how I got into the Civil Service.
    And I have worked on intelligence ever since.
    I went to school at night.
    I went to GW University.
    I never finished.
    GW is George Washington.
    George Washington University here
    in Washington for several years taking courses,
    which I greatly enjoyed, but which
    were also somewhat of a drag-- working
    full-time taking courses.
    And then I also did translations to make some extra money.
    But I found the intelligence field something
    I was good, at something which I enjoyed doing.
    And it also later formed sort of the basis for my work
    in the Holocaust museum.
    What work do you do for the Holocaust museum?
    My basic employment is learning center specialist.
    The learning center is a bank of 20 interactive computers which
    have as their database the four volumes of the MacMillan
    Encyclopedia of the Holocaust plus additional data
    from the MacMillan Encyclopedia of the Third Reich,
    eyewitness interviews of survivors,
    music from and about the period, and documentary films.
    And what I do is I answer any questions
    that come up, other than explaining
    how the system works.
    Very frequently, people ask me substantive questions,
    or a question about what we have in the system,
    and how to go about getting it.
    That's my basic occupation, and then I'm
    also busy on the floor doing whatever duties come up
    for the volunteers--
    working with the public.
    What have you with your background brought to this work
    that you do at the museum?
    Well, of course, a great deal--
    I have not mentioned one thing that I also
    did in my variegated life.
    Again, with a very little basic knowledge,
    when we joined the congregation, they
    were looking for religious school teachers.
    And since I had gone to religious school
    myself and I was willing to learn, they hired me.
    I kept one jump ahead of the students
    by doing a lot of reading.
    And I eventually became my own best student.
    And I taught religious school for 14 years
    talking to young people, addressing subjects
    and teaching them.
    In the field of intelligence, I had
    to deliver briefings frequently of military attaches,
    for example, going on station or coming back,
    foreign visitors, and things like that.
    And having had to keep up with the political situation,
    the history, and the geography on a fairly wide basis,
    I felt that in the museum I could use all these skills.
    And I have found that it comes in very handy.
    Some consider me a walking encyclopedia.
    We have to pause to flip the tape.
    One moment.
    This is tape 2, side B. We are interviewing William Hess.
    And you were just telling me about being a walking
    encyclopedia.
    No, I never used that expression,
    but that's what my fellow workers tell me.
    And of course, speaking German is helpful
    because we do get German visitors who greatly appreciate
    to find someone when they don't speak German so well
    themselves--
    to find someone who is knowledgeable and who
    can talk to them in their language.
    And I'm sure that that has made friends for us.
    And I always felt at the museum that especially Germans who
    come should have every opportunity to see and hear
    as much as possible, because it's vitally
    important for Germans to know as much as they can
    about that period.
    What have you gotten from your volunteer experience?
    I get a great deal of satisfaction from it.
    One of the duties I occasionally draw
    is giving introductory talks to young people who come-- well,
    actually, groups, any groups.
    But it's very frequently high school students.
    I find that being a survivor-- although I
    don't like to use that term, because survivor
    conjures up thoughts of someone who escaped or was in the camp.
    I never was in any real peril.
    But under the terms of the museum, I'm a survivor.
    I can talk of some of my personal experience,
    having lived in the period, having kept up with it.
    There are not many people left who can do it.
    So if I can teach especially young people something
    firsthand--
    not out of a book, but firsthand--
    or at least having been alive at the time,
    that the lessons of the Holocaust have truly not been
    learned.
    Every year, there are new examples--
    but one that just ended last year in a lot of areas
    like parts of East Timor, which is
    hidden in the jungle where people are
    being murdered all the time--
    all the generations up until now,
    having failed to do something about it.
    I always tell them someday if you
    get into a leading position--
    and this can happen.
    We have Madeleine Albright, and we have
    Henry Kissinger, and so on--
    maybe if you remember your visit here at the museum
    and that which you have seen, that you can make a difference
    and see to it that measures can be taken on a global basis
    that this sort of thing does not happen again.
    Do you speak publicly outside the museum
    about your experiences?
    No.
    When I was in Danville, as a matter of fact,
    I was occasionally asked by the lions
    or some other organization--
    would I come in and talk about my experiences in Germany?
    Now, that was, of course, still the pre-war period.
    My father also was asked, and he did.
    And so at that time, yes, we tried
    to spread what word we could.
    Again there, we had to be careful
    because my boss thought that maybe
    that the customers would like to have somebody here
    who is trying to maybe voice any opinion that maybe we
    should get into the war and help fight these Nazis.
    That wasn't very popular in the late-'30s, and early-'40s--
    at least until Pearl Harbor.
    I'd like you to think about your volunteer experiences
    at the museum, and see if there's anything you
    can share any special moments--
    meaningful experiences-- that you can share?
    Well, occasionally, I meet people
    who come from Germany, from my own area.
    A man came in one time--
    he was sent to see me, and I talked in German to him.
    And I told him where I had lived and where I
    had spent a vacation one time.
    And he just couldn't get over it.
    Here's a man he meets in Washington
    who knows their home, and who has lived in Germany,
    and who speaks German and can talk to him
    now about the Holocaust.
    This is always very gratifying-- or if you can help somebody
    to get into the museum.
    One time there was a man who came in and asked where
    he could get a pass to go in.
    I said, well, they're all given out today.
    He was German, I said, where do you come?
    He was from Germany.
    He says, well, don't bother.
    If I can't get in, I come here occasionally.
    I said, well, what do you do?
    I'm a member of parliament.
    I said, well, you're a member of parliament,
    I've got to get you in here somehow.
    So there's a way of scrounging tickets,
    and so I scrounged a ticket, and I gave it to him.
    And he was very, very appreciative.
    I saw him again when he came out,
    and he told me that this is something
    that he'll never forget.
    And I thought, well, if a member of the parliament
    comes back with these views--
    and one other thing, of course, was
    we occasionally get survivors who sign books or talk.
    And one of my eyewitness interviews
    that I always like to use as an example is that of Gerda Klein.
    And hers-- it's like a fairy tale almost.
    In a way, I can't compare it to myself,
    because I wasn't in peril, and she was.
    But she got through to it too where
    there were so many instances where
    she could have been wiped out.
    She goes to a camp that's run by a woman who
    looks like evil incarnate, and yet this woman
    saved all the inmates.
    And finally, she's liberated by a man she marries.
    And she lives in this country now.
    That, I always think, is one of the high points when
    you have experiences like that.
    Is your wife also a survivor?
    No, my wife was born in this country.
    Is there anything you'd like to add?
    Anything that has come to your mind before we conclude?
    Any final thoughts that you might have?
    Well, one of the things--
    I don't know if this is going too far afield
    again-- it comes up very frequently,
    you know, how Jews in Germany felt.
    The German Jews, most of whom had lived there
    for hundreds of years, had always yearned
    to be full-fledged citizens.
    Finally, we reached that status and became super patriots.
    They considered themselves Germans who were Jewish,
    but primarily they were Germans.
    In World War I, they fought to a slightly greater proportion
    in the situation in the army and also died to a slightly greater
    proportion.
    So when the Nazis came, this was totally
    incomprehensible to them.
    They tried to reason with them.
    We are Germans like you are.
    We fought in the war.
    What do you want from us?
    They never understood that they were dealing with a man who
    wasn't ignorant about all that.
    They were dealing with a fanatic, ultra-nationalist,
    racist who had an idea of purging Germany of everything
    that was not Germanic.
    And he had no use for those people he couldn't re-educate.
    And of course, you can't re-educate someone
    from out of their race.
    So this was the viewpoint that they
    brought to this whole thing.
    And prior to the Hitler period, most Jews--
    not all of them, but a great many of them--
    lived a very good life there.
    And in many cases, like my parents--
    my father was 55 when he came here--
    out of those 55 years, 50 years or more were very gratifying.
    He earned a good living.
    He had his roots there, his family was there,
    and so he didn't want to let go.
    And I have since found that even my generation,
    there is still an attachment to your old home.
    In 1993, we were invited to be guests
    of the city in the program that had been going on
    and still goes on where former citizens are invited.
    We were received by the mayor at the time
    who was then Manfred Rommel, the son of the famous field
    marshal.
    And they really tried to make us feel, well, you
    belong to us-- in the way even the rabbis
    spoke that while you're gone, there is still
    part of your old home in you.
    And I find this is true-- there is still
    a certain sentimental attachment to it.
    It was part of your life.
    I'm not angry at Germans today.
    Those who committed crimes, of course, there is in my mind
    no forgiving them.
    You can't forgive something that's done to other people,
    especially.
    But I feel that the current country--
    I feel that a democracy, which didn't
    exist before during the Hitler period-- they
    weren't accustomed to it.
    They've had two generations of it now.
    And of course, there's no guarantee for anything,
    but I think there's a good chance that Germany will remain
    not a hostile environment, will be
    part of the family of nations.
    And when we visit over there, which
    we have done since we have a daughter over there,
    I have an open mind.
    Of course, when I talk to somebody my own age
    and they ask me, how long have you been in America?
    I can see the wheels turn and I think, what were you
    doing at that particular time?
    And I know I've talked to people who if this were 1933 or '34
    would kick me out of their presence.
    And I don't want to know so much either of what they
    did at that particular time.
    If they talk to me, I'll address what I think about it.
    But most of the people now, the overwhelming majority,
    were either children or weren't even born at that time.
    So when I was in the army, I felt
    that I was an American soldier.
    I had been kicked out of there-- vilified, kicked out, deprived
    of my citizenship.
    Here, I was allowed to come in, I was invited to participate,
    I was allowed to participate in everything.
    And so I fought for this country.
    And this is my home.
    I have no desire to go back and live there.
    It's fine to visit, but that's it.
    Thank you.
    And that concludes our conversation today.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    William Hess was born William Verna on August 8, 1921 in Stuttgart, Germany. He was an only child and lived a pleasant life there. Despite the Nuremberg laws, he was permitted to continue his schooling as his father served during World War I. Nevertheless, they lost the service of their maid. William experienced little anti-Semitism in Germany but knew that Hitler made anti-Semitic speeches and had newspaper articles written against the Jews. His father's business suffered little from the boycotting but he sold it in 1938. Anti-Semitism was more severe in the outlying towns than in Stuttgart. William studied English for two years before immigrating to Danville, Illinois with his uncle's assistance in 1937. He had difficulty adjusting to the US so had an English tutor. Additionally, he had difficulty living on his wages of $12.50 as $9 went toward room and board and he also had to cover tutoring and transportation expenses. Kristallnacht and his father's internment in Dachau influenced his parents to leave Germany in 1939 for Danville.
    Interviewee
    Mr. William Hess
    Interviewer
    Esther Finder
    Date
    interview:  1997 August 15
    Geography
    creation: Rockville (Md.)

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    2 sound cassettes (74 min.).

    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
    Hess, William.

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Esther Finder, a volunteer for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History branch conducted this interview on August 15, 1997 in Rockville, MD.
    Funding Note
    The cataloging of this oral history interview has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:12:18
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn507573

    Additional Resources

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    Time Coded Notes (3)

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    Also in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum oral history volunteer collection

    Consists of interviews with Holocaust survivors and concentration camp liberators conducted by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History Department volunteer staff. The interviewees, among them survivors from Hungary, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, and Poland, discuss their experiences of life before World War II, life in the ghettos, life in concentration camps, and life after the Holocaust.

    Date: 1993

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    Oral history interview with Jerome Stasson

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    Oral history interview with Adriana Pacifici

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    Oral history interview with Ernest Kolben

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    Oral history interview with Henry Kolber

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    Oral history interview with Ruth Greifer

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    Oral history interview with Erwin Forley

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    Oral history interview with Joseph Elman

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    Oral history interview with Gerald Rosenstein

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    Oral history interview with Romana Koplewicz

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    Oral history interview with Joseph Koplewicz

    Oral History

    Joseph Koplewicz, born December 7, 1915 in Kielce, Poland, describes his pre-war life in Kielce; his parents and siblings; his father’s occupation as a businessman; his education in Kielce and law school education in Warsaw; his family’s religious attitudes; his experiences with antisemitism while attending law school; the beginning of the war; his arrest in Kielce for not wearing a Star of David badge; the ghettoization of Warsaw; performing forced labor in Warsaw; his father’s death due to health complications; his stay with his sister and her husband in a comfortable apartment; his marriage in 1942; being wounded in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; his transfer to Majdanek concentration camp; his transfer to Budzyn labor camp near Krasnik, Poland until February 1944; his transfer to Mielec, Poland where he worked as a draftsman until July 1944; his short time in Wieliczka, Flossenbürg, Litomerice, and Dachau; his transfer to Augsburg, Germany where he worked in airport construction; his time in Kaufering and Nuremburg; a forced march to Landshut, Germany where the SS guards in charge fled; the marchers subsequent scattering; his survival and return to Poland; his reunion with his wife; their decision to leave Poland and immigrate to the United States in 1949; and his post-war life in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Irving Schaffer

    Oral History

    Irving Schaffer, born May 26, 1928 in Chust, Czechoslovakia (present day Khust, Ukraine), discusses growing up in an Orthodox family; his early education; a teacher beating him in front of the class in 1943; experiencing antisemitism before the war; his father’s arrest for receiving milk from a neighbor; the deportation of his father and brother to labor camps; his family’s eviction from their home and deportation to the Chust Ghetto; conditions of the ghetto, such as the Jewish leadership; his assignment as a messenger and pass to leave the ghetto; smuggling in bread from outside the ghetto; people being punished for being Hungarian; being transported by train from the ghetto after three weeks; how partisans blew up the train and told prisoners to jump off and escape; arriving at Auschwitz in the spring of 1944; his memories of Dr. Mengele; being separated from the rest of his family at Auschwitz; being sent to Warsaw, Poland after only three days at Auschwitz; working to clean out the Warsaw Ghetto; prisoners escaping from the Warsaw ghetto; being marched out of the ghetto in August 1944; arriving at Kutno on the German and Polish border; being transported by train to Dachau; living in Camp Seven and working in Mühldorf in an ammunition factory; stealing potatoes and bartering with other prisoners; being transported from Dachau; finding a train transporting sugar that had been bombed and eating the hot sugar; being transported to the Landshut camp; working in Landsberg, Germany; a bombing by American planes; being released by the Germans and then chased down and beaten into a coma; waking up in a German hospital; organizations that assisted in reconnecting families, such as UNRRA and the Joint Distribution Committee; being liberated in Feldmoching, Germany; finding his brother in Chust; how the Russians did not let him leave Chust; escaping across borders into Germany; attending school in Munich, Germany; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with William Klein

    Oral History

    William Klein, born in 1924, discusses growing up in Užhorod, Czechoslovakia (present day Uzhhorod, Ukraine), in a large family; attending Jewish school until the sixth grade, then entering a public high school; the friendliness between Jews and non-Jews in Užhorod; his two older brothers leaving in 1940 for Yugoslavia and Russia with the army; Jews being made to wear the yellow Star of David badge and comply with a curfew beginning in 1942; hearing rumors about Jews being killed in Poland; being forced into the ghetto in January or February 1944; being taken by train to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944; last seeing his parents and sister as they went through the selection process at Auschwitz; being advised by a kapo to volunteer for work outside the camp when he had the opportunity; being taken to what had been the Warsaw Ghetto along with his brother and brother-in-law to demolish buildings and clear debris; finding gold pieces in an abandoned house where he was working and hiding them in a belt; prisoners making up songs and singing as they worked; being forced to march to Dachau as the Russians advanced towards Warsaw; witnessing the death of a rabbi he and his brother had helped on the march; staying in Dachau for a few days; volunteering to work at a construction site; being seriously injured on the construction site and being helped by fellow prisoners, including one who was a doctor; escaping with his brother and brother-in-law from a train and hiding in a farmhouse as the Americans liberated the area; reuniting with his surviving family members in Bratislava and Užhorod; living in Sudetenland and then in a series of displaced persons camps in Germany (Wasserburg, Föhrenwald, and Bremerhaven) and applying to move to the United States; having his application delayed after being accused of being a communist; moving to Chicago in 1951; his pride in his Jewish identity; health problems caused by beatings he received during his time as a prisoner; telling his children about his experiences; and his response to the question of why he does not hate.

    Oral history interview with George Pisik

    Oral History

    George Pisik, born May 25, 1925, describes his experience as a soldier in the U.S. Army’s 15th armored division, 10th infantry battalion; entering Dachau in May 1945 without any prior knowledge of concentration camps; his battalion’s doctor trying to help the prisoners; searching a guard who was subsequently taken by prisoners and killed in the barracks; meeting a 19 year-old female prisoner in Dachau and giving her the mezuzah his grandmother had given him to wear; receiving almost 100 mezuzahs from his family and friends after writing them; giving these mezuzahs to chaplains to distribute and to his fellow soldiers, telling them they were good luck charms; entering Munich and seeing the giant swastika on Munich Stadium, which his commander ordered to be destroyed by tank fire; seeing Germans surrender; conflicts with German civilians; suffering from trench foot and impetigo; returning to the United States expecting to be sent to Japan but staying after the bombing of Hiroshima; after his homecoming, using a swastika flag as a doormat, which drew the attention of the neighborhood and the police when his mother washed it and hung it out to dry; bringing home pistols which his mother took to the army depot to be deactivated; returning to college; his frustration with Holocaust deniers, including a Catholic priest he met in 1950 in Louisiana; the failings of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust; his feelings towards the Germans; his belief that a holocaust could happen again; his level of religious involvement; and the importance of education in preventing another holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Rosicka

    Oral History

    Ruth Rosicka, born August 13, 1919 in Nowice, Czechoslovakia (present day Poland), describes her Polish father who was actively pro-Zion; escaping bombing in Bielsko, Poland; escaping through Krakow, Poland and being found by the Russian army; being deported to a camp in Siberia from which she was amnestied in 1941; being drafted by the Czechoslovakian army and working in the medical brigade, where in 1944 she met her husband; being taken to the Carpathian Mountains, to the war front, where they stayed until February 1945; being released from the Army in May 1945 because of her pregnancy; and living in Prague, Czech Republic after the war.

    Oral history interview with Salomon Cohen

    Oral History

    Salomon Cohen, born July 28, 1937 in Athens, Greece, discusses how his family escaped to the south of Greece in February 1943 with the help of partisans; hiding with his family in the mountains for six months; how the partisans obtained food from monasteries in the mountains for his family; using false names while in hiding; traveling to Izmir, Turkey then Syria; being captured by English troops; how the family was taken to British camps in the Gaza Strip; their escape with the help of a Jewish agency; traveling to Ted Aviv, Israel, where they lived from 1944 to 1952; going into the army as a tank fighter; going to Haifa, Israel after leaving the army; getting married and having children; and his visits to Greece.

    Oral history interview with Suzanne Foldes

    Oral History

    Suzanne Foldes (b. Zsuzsi Morvai) discusses her childhood in Miskolc, Hungary; her Jewish and Christian schooling; pre-war antisemitism; training as a gymnast but being denied entry into the Olympics because she was Jewish; her father’s conscription into Hungarian forced labor; getting married in 1942 to Paul Berkowitz; terminating a pregnancy; the German occupation of Hungary; being confined to a ghetto; being transported to Auschwitz by cattle car; learning of her mother’s death by gassing; moving to Buchenwald; how she was good at stealing coal; liberation; returning to Budapest after the war; reuniting with her father; learning of her husband’s death; marrying a friend from before the war; immigrating to the United States in 1956; and speaking about her wartime experiences beginning in the 1990s.

    Oral history interview with Tibor Vince

    Oral History

    Tibor Vince, born in 1910, describes his childhood near Budapest, Hungary; his medical studies in Italy; his escape to Cuba at the outbreak of World War II; his immigration to the United States; his work as a physician in the United States Army; his experiences at Dachau shortly after liberation; his medical treatment of Allied prisoners of war; and his life in New York, NY after 1945.

    Oral history interview with Elias Piorko

    Oral History

    Elias Piorko, born on May 15, 1919, discusses his childhood in Zambrów, Poland; his life in a kibbutz near Slonim, Poland (now Belarus); his experiences with forced labor in Russia; being in four different camps; his travels through Europe on the way to Italy after World War II; and his life in the United States after 1950.

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Hildesheim

    Oral History

    Benjamin (Beniek) Hildesheim discusses his childhood in Sieradz, Poland; his experiences with antisemitism and Jewish persecution in Sieradz before the Holocaust; his time in the ghettos of Sieradz and Łódź, Poland; his adoption by Chaim Rumkowski; his imprisonment at Auschwitz, Babice/Babitz (a small agricultural camp west of Auschwitz), and Buchenwald concentration camps; his participation in a death march to Theresienstadt, where he remained until liberation; his time in Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), immediately after liberation; his immigration to Palestine in the first Aliyah after World War II in 1945; his participation in the Israel-Arab War of 1948 to 1949; and his life in Brazil and the United States after 1962.

    Oral history interview with Peter Masters

    Oral History

    Peter Masters (né Peter Arany), born February 5, 1922, in Vienna, Austria, describes his prewar life in Vienna; his Viennese mother and Hungarian father; his escape to Britain after the Anschluss in 1938; his family’s internment as “friendly aliens;” his family’s reclassification as enemy aliens in Britain; his experiences volunteering for special hazardous duty in Britain and being assigned the 3rd Group, 10th Commando, an elite paratroop unit mostly consisting of Jewish or political refugees; his identity being anglicized for his protection; his work to petition for the recognition of Austrians who perished fighting the Nazis; his many family members who perished during the war; and his 1997 book, Striking back: A Jewish commando’s war against the Nazis, which he wrote as a counterpoint to the idea the Jews did not fight back during the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Wolke

    Oral History

    Joseph Wolke (Wolkeovich), born July 14, 1919 in Tomashov (Tomaszów Mazowiecki), Poland, discusses his family background and religious upbringing; his father’s successful farm outside the city; the rise of Hitler and antisemitism; racial laws against Jews; being deported during Rosh Hashanah; arriving in Krakow, Poland on a cattle train; his disbelief that the war would last so long; escaping from the Germans and returning to Tomashov by bus; how the farm provided for the family; increases in the deportation of Jews; living in the Tomashov ghetto; smuggling food into the ghetto; the liquidation of the ghetto on November 1, 1942; the mass burial of Jews in the ghetto for which he was forced to dig graves; being deported to Bergen-Belsen; being transferred on a cattle train to Auschwitz; forced labor digging ditches outside the camp; being relocated to Gross-Rosen camp; the death march from Rosen, which lasted over a week; starvation during the march; liberation by Russian forces; returning home to Poland; meeting his wife and having a child; immigrating to the United States in August 1950; living in Baltimore, MD with his wife’s family; adjusting to American life; creating a business; and learning the fate of his family members in the years following the war.

    Oral history interview with Ionel Ghelman

    Oral History

    Ionel Ghelman, born on March 27, 1929 in Bucharest, Romania, discusses his mother’s death in 1938 and being raised by his maternal aunt; experiencing antisemitism; seeing boys in 1936 practicing to be in the Iron Guard in the future; the German occupation in 1940; the events in January 1941, including pogroms, stores being burned, and Jews being killed; ration cards and how Jews’ ration cards were half of Rumanians’ cards; the Allied bombardments of Bucharest from late 1943 to early 1944; seeing Russian tanks and troops in August 1944; leaving school in 1946 to work in a locomotive factory; rejecting the Communist Youth Party and feeling a connection to Zionist Hashomer Hatzair; going to Bukovina to prepare for kibbutz in Israel; the banning of Zionist organizations in 1949; being a draftsman for oil pipeline company from 1948 to 1950; marrying a Romanian woman in 1956; his children; being expelled from the Communist Party because parents went to Israel; getting visas for Hungary, France, and Germany in 1976; going to New York in April 21, 1977 with the help of HIAS; and settling in Washington and working for Bechtel.

    Oral history interview with Irimia Solomon

    Oral History

    Irimia Solomon, born on November 3, 1924 in Dorohoi, Romania, describes his parents, who were divorced; how he and his mother lived with his grandparents in Falticeni, Romania; his granfather’s farm; the Jewish community in the town and his family not being particularly religious; Jews in Moldovan cities; his education; playing soccer with non-Jewish children; hearing about antisemitism; wanting to go to Palestine; going to school in Bucharest, Romania to learn a trade; his relationship with his father; an uprising in Romania in September 1940; the Iron Guard (Garda de Fier); returning to Falticeni in December 1941; going to Dorohoi; his father being taken away in June 1942; being taken to forced work, unloading rail cards and sweeping; being deported with his mother to Transnistria and conditions during the journey there; having to trade in their Romanian money for Russian rubles; arriving in Sharhorod, Ukraine; being housed in a synagogue for several weeks; staying in a room in a house of a Christian family with other Jews; being in a ghetto, where there was religious life but no cultural life; building roads and sleeping overnight in rail cars outfitted with bunk bed; typhus in Sharhorod and helping to bury the dead; his mother not working and staying indoors; being helped by a cousin’s Christian husband; being taken back to Dorohoi in December 1943; moving from house to house until they could contact relatives; not feeling relief or happiness; his mother being treated as a war widow and being allowed to sell certain items, such as stamps, alcohol, and tobacco; returning to school and going to the polytechnic in 1945; waiting from 1958 to 1972 to get a passport; going to Israel, where his wife did not like the heat; going to Canada, where they settled in Toronto; working as an engineer; and moving to Montreal.

    Oral history interview with Lotte Salus

    Oral History

    Lotte Salus (b. Charlotte Helena Cohen) discusses her childhood living near the Dutch border in Germany; working for a Jewish family; being arrested and pressed into labor after Kristallnacht; being sent to Amsterdam, Netherlands by her father; living with other Jewish teenagers in The Hague, Netherlands; learning her family had been deported to Westerbork; moving to Amsterdam in May 1940; receiving orders to register with the police; being deported to Westerbork; reuniting with her family; daily life in Westerbork; volunteering to go to Theresienstadt with her parents in 1944; her experiences in the camps Auschwitz, Stutthof, and Praust; being taken on a death march in March 1945; liberation by the Russians; sexual violence perpetrated by the Russians; returning to Germany; immigrating to the United States in 1949; and marrying and starting a family.

    Oral history interview with Irena Kirkland

    Oral History

    Irena Neumann discusses her childhood in Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic); not having a Jewish identity or religious education; evacuating Prague before the Munich Agreement; returning to the city and learning she was Jewish; adapting to restrictions placed on Jews; her feelings about wearing the yellow star; being deported to Theresienstadt with her family; daily life in the camp; contracting encephalitis; being deported to Auschwitz; conditions in camps Auschwitz and Sachsen Chemnitz; returning to Theresienstadt in May 1945; reuniting with her parents; liberation by Russian soldiers; returning to Prague; beginning university; being arrested and released by communists; and immigrating to the United States in 1956.

    Oral history interview with Hans Hirsch

    Oral History

    Hans George Hirsch discusses his early life in Stuttgart, Germany; his father’s role as executive director of the German Jewish Community; graduating gymnasium in 1934; prewar antisemitism; the difficulties he experienced attending university and holding a job in Nazi Germany; visiting Palestine in 1937; receiving a visa to leave for the United States in 1937; working on farms in the U.S.; trying to get his parents out of Europe; teaching German prisoners of war farm management from 1943 to 1946; his career trajectory in food administration and policy; and his retirement from foreign agricultural service.

    Oral history interview with Milton Shurr

    Oral History

    Milton Shurr, born January 28, 1911 in the United States, describes his work with the Jewish Welfare Fund in Oklahoma City, OK in the early 1940s; his draft into the military and entering Officer’s Candidate School; being shipped overseas to England, where he worked in preparation for D-Day in June 1944; his recruitment by the Civil Affairs Unit of the Military Government to gather and identify medical supplies left behind on Omaha Beach, France; helping to provide food for the 15,000 survivors of Buchenwald and working with the Red Cross and Joint Distribution Committee; traveling to Bavaria, Germany to work has a health welfare officer; working to reopen schools, hospitals, banks, and other institutions in Germany; maintaining correspondence with his wife in America during the war; returning to the United States after the war and moving to Chicago as an assistant in health planning; and sharing what he had witnessed in Buchenwald after years of being unable to speak about it.

    Oral history interview with Ludwig Jacob

    Oral History

    Ludwig Jacob discusses his early life in Schmalkalden, Germany; being arrested with his parents on Kristallnacht; being imprisoned in Buchenwald for a month; leaving on a Kindertransport to Holland; living in a children’s home; the German invasion; moving to his brother’s home in Amsterdam; the arrest of his brother, who subsequently was imprisoned and died in Mauthausen; receiving a deportation notice; choosing to live under a false identity; moving to Paris, France and working with the underground; sabotaging the German defense organization where he worked; being denounced and arrested; spending time in Fresnes prison before being deported to Drancy; jumping off the train on the way to Buchenwald; rejoining the resistance; working for Americans in Paris; immigrating to the United States in 1947; and his marriage and life in the US.

    Oral history interview with Barbara Artman

    Oral History

    Barbara Feuerstein Artman, born September 12, 1923 in Kosice, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia), discusses her parents Elizabeth and Henry Feuerstein and two younger brothers; her 14 aunts and uncles and 27 first cousins, who all perished in the Holocaust; her family’s move to Mukacheve, Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine), which in March 1939 was occupied by Hungry; the Nazi invasion of Hungary in 1944; being forced to live in a ghetto; conditions in the ghetto; her deportation with her family to Auschwitz; conditions in Auschwitz; the treatment of camp guards; being sent to a labor camp near Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) with her mother; their liberation by the Russians while on a march; walking, at the end of the war, to Krakow; reuniting with one brother; attending medical school but changing her major to chemistry; contacting uncles in United States who arranged for visas and transportation to the US for her, her mother, and her brother; and settling in Forest Hills, NY, where she married another refugee and had one son.

    Oral history interview with Fritz Schonbach

    Oral History

    Fritz (né Frederic) Schonbach, born in 1920, discusses his middle-class childhood in Vienna, Austria; attending private school until Jewish restrictions began in 1938; how life changed with the Nazi annexation of Austria; antisemitism in Austria and the terror campaigns; fleeing to Italy then to England in 1939; his family fleeing to Argentina while he remained in England; his internment in England because of his Austrian background; volunteering for the Australian army; daily life in the army; being discharged in 1946; enrolling in art school after the war; meeting his wife; reuniting with family in Argentina; immigrating to the United States in 1959; and discovering what happened to various family members in the war.

    Oral history interview with Charles Barber

    Oral History

    Charles Barber, born in 1932 in Budapest, Hungary, describes his father, who owned a liquor store; attending a public grade school, where some of the non-Jews wouldn't speak with him; his memories of the first bomb being dropped in Budapest in 1939; his father being drafted into the labor corps of the Hungarian army; his mother’s work as a tailor; being an only child; his father dying after two months in the labor corps; his mother being taken to a camp for eight months in 1943; living with several different people; his mother returning home; his memories of feeling guilty for telling his mother that he was hungry; the Jews being summoned to the courthouse in town and being separated from his mother by the officials; going to live in an orphanage with a Swedish flag out front; the Russian army and their activities in Budapest; his aunt sending him to the Red Cross then a Zionist orphanage in Sagat; returning to Budapest to work in a factory; attending law school but leaving when the revolution began; going to Austria and then the United States with the help of the Red Cross; living with an uncle in the US; becoming an accountant, attending Queensborough Community College and then Bernard Baruch College; working for ABC Transnational Transport; getting married to an Austrian Holocaust survivor; the effects of his Holocaust experience; losing his faith when he lost his parents; visiting Europe; antisemitism in Hungary; wanting to go to Israel; possessing a letter from his mother, which she wrote while she was in Bergen-Belsen, and a picture of his parents (which is in the USHMM Photo Archive); and his other family pictures.

    Oral history interview with Tibor Borsos

    Oral History

    Tibor Borsos, born on March 12, 1927 in Budapest, Hungary, describes his highly intellectual Catholic family; his family moving to Debrecen in 1936; having many Jewish friends; how he “looked Jewish” and was sometimes made fun of; his family’s possession of an American flag, National Geographic magazines, and a censored version of Time magazine; his family burning the American flag March 21, 1944 to be safe; his family storing carpets, silver, and jewelry for Jewish friends and hiding them in the university library; his mother being denounced, arrested, and released; his family leaving Debrecen in May 1944; witnessing Jews being rounded up; going to Budapest and living next door to a Swedish protected house; the closing of schools in the fall of 1944; his family going in December 1944 to Halle an der Saale, Germany, where his father taught in a medical school; being drafted into the Hungarian Army in March 1945 and riding on a train for two months to avoid finding his unit; finding his brother on May 8, 1945 in Mitterald; being rounded up by Patton’s troops and sent to Ludwigshafen, Germany; being sent to a POW camp in Heilbronn; going to Gottingen in the British Occupation Zone; sailing to the United States in December 1949 on the USS Harry Taylor; earning a Ph.D. in chemistry at Johns Hopkins; researching cancer at NIH; marrying a survivor of Bergen-Belsen; and his feelings about not being officially Jewish.

    Oral history interview with Robert Kertesz

    Oral History

    Robert Kertesz, born in 1933, discusses his childhood in Budapest, Hungary; antisemitism in Budapest; his family; his religious upbringing; being stuck in Hungary due to travel restrictions; his father being conscripted into the Hungarian Army; the Hungarian Nazis and Arrow Cross Party members in his neighborhood; the increasing antisemitism and abuse; how the ghetto grew in 1943; finding safe houses for children; escaping from the ghetto after his parent’s deportation; hiding in his Christian aunt’s home; returning to Budapest to escape violence; returning to the ghetto; living conditions in the ghetto; liberation by the Soviets; looting by the Soviet Army in the city; working as a guide and interpreter for Russians; his parents’ return; living in a displaced persons camp; immigrating to the United States in 1948; and his life in the U.S.

    Oral history interview with Fred Kahn

    Oral History

    Fred Kahn, born December 19, 1932 in Wiesbaden, Germany, describes being raised until he was six years old by an aunt (Rosa Nassauer) in Wehen, Germany; his older brother, Walter; his Christian friend, Walter Kaltwasser, who protected him from young Nazis; being raised religious by his aunt and uncle; his grandfather dying in 1938; being sent after the Munich Agreement to Aachen, Germany, where he crossed the border and joined his parents and brother in Verviers, Belgium; his father’s successful career as playing bridge; his aunt and uncle being sent to Łódź, Poland; starting school in Belgium; his parents and life in Verviers; going to Liege and Brussels in May 1940 with his family; returning to Verviers; Jews having to register; the small right-wing party, Rexiste, which collaborated with the Nazis; his father being interrogated; getting false identities with the last name Jejeune; being taught Catholic prayers; getting scarlet fever in the spring of 1942; leaving his school after getting in a fight; his principal helping him; going into hiding and the various ways he entertained himself; moving from village to village in 1943; getting a job in 1944, carrying milk; being liberated in September 1944 by the American Army; life when he was in hiding; his mother’s accused of being a German spy and arrested; the Battle of the Bulge; events he heard about involving the underground; factors that helped him survive; developing a sense of humor; and considering Verviers his hometown.

    Oral history interview with Susan Warsinger

    Oral History

    Susan Warsinger (née Hilsinrath), born in 1929, discusses her family and childhood in Bad Kreuznach, Germany; her memories of Kristallnacht; escaping to Paris, France; being homeless; fleeing to Versailles when the Germans invaded; going to Château des Morelles, a home for homeless children; her schooling; getting tickets to the United States from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society; immigrating to the U.S. in 1941; her life in the U.S.; her feelings about returning home to Europe; and her life since the war.

    Oral history interview with Arnold Weiss

    Oral History

    Hans Arnold Wangesheim, born in Nuremberg, Germany on July 25, 1924, describes his parents divorcing in 1930; his mother placing him in a very strict Jewish orphanage in Furth; his encounters with Hitler youth; getting passage on a Kindertransport with help of Quakers in 1938; going to Chicago, IL then Milwaukee, WI; running away from a Jewish orphanage and being placed with a family in Janesville, WI; attending a watchmaker’s college; enlisting in 1942 in the Army Air Corps and being a B-17 tail gunner; his training plane crashing in Utah in 1943 and being severely injured; going to OSS (Office of Strategic Services) in Washington in 1944; going in late 1944 to Paris, France then Germany; crossing the Rhine with the 4th Division behind German lines picking up mail from agents; seeing Nuremberg bombed; going back to Furth; going in April 1945 to Dachau to get important political prisoners, including the former French Prime Minister Leon Blum; locating the prisoners in Innsbruck, Austria; his counterintelligence work for de-Nazification and working with Hugh Trevor-Roper to hunt down Wilhelm Zander; being assigned to trace enemy assets including Nazi treasures and Reichsbank gold; his work interrogating Germans, doing anti-Soviet intelligence, and being sent to Czechoslovakia as a contact for Hungarian agents; returning to the US, attending school, and working for the US Treasury; and working for a law firm.

    Oral history interview with Sia Hertsberg

    Oral History

    Sia Hertsberg (née Izrailewitsch), born June 8, 1927 in Riga, Latvia, describes her early family life and schooling; the Jewish community and the state of antisemitism in pre-war Riga; the 1940 Russian invasion; her family’s persecution at the hands of the Russian communists; the 1941 Nazi occupation and implementation of Nazi race laws; the burning of Riga’s synagogues; the help her family received from non-Jewish friends; the establishment and the later liquidation of the Riga ghetto; how a Latvian soldier attempted to rape her; avoiding the Rumbula massacre; working as a seamstress in a Reichskommissariat workshop; her family’s transport to the Kaiserwald concentration camp; how her father saved her sister several times by hiding her amidst the trash or in a pot of soup when the Nazis were looking for young children; the Nazis’ theft of her childhood; the normalcy of discussing death; her family’s transport via ship and cattle car to Stutthof; the typhus epidemic and her work carrying the dead to the crematorium; her mother’s death; her and her sister’s escape from a death march; seeking shelter and being turned away by Polish peasants; liberation by Russian soldiers on March 23, 1945; hospitalization and her sister’s death; her deep depression at losing her family; her hospitalization in Kolomna, Russia; her return to Riga and reunion with her father; falling in love with her future husband; their attempts to illegally immigrate to the United States and her father’s subsequent imprisonment by the Russians; the birth of her two sons; finishing her schooling; her husband’s death; her move to Chicago, Illinois and her post-war life in the United States; and her father’s death on the same day as her sister, thirty years later.

    Oral history interview with Chava Frajhof

    Oral History

    Chava Frajhof (née Geister), born September 20, 1923 in Belzyce, Poland, discusses her family; the German invasion of Poland in 1939; hiding from the Germans; paying the Judenrat to be assigned work in Będzin, Poland; working as a seamstress; being sent to Kraśnik, Poland in 1943; being liberated by the Soviets; fleeing to Lublin, Poland; having a family; going to Frankfurt, Germany then Berlin, Germany; and immigrating to Brazil in 1953 to join her family.

    Oral history interview with Israel Frajhof

    Oral History

    Israel Frajhof, born March 3, 1920 in Krasnik (near Lublin), Poland, describes experiencing violent antisemitism in 1933; the establishment of a ghetto in the fall of 1942; the typhus epidemic and conditions in the ghetto; working outside the ghetto; the deportation of old men, women and children deported to Majdanek and Treblinka in December 1942; trying to become a policeman but being declined permission; doing carpentry work for Germans making furniture; appels, beatings, and sleeping in the synagogue; meeting his future wife Chava Geister, who was in Krasnik camp; the Russians’ arrival in Lublin on July 22,1944; the death march to Germany and escaping into the forest for 10 days; meeting up with Chava and going to Krasnik; going to Lublin; getting married in January 1946; going to Berlin , Germany and being helped by the UNRRA; going to Frankfurt, Germany; going to Brazil in 1953; visiting Majdanek in 1986; and living for his wife and children.

    Oral history interview with Edward Novakoff

    Oral History

    Edward Novakoff, born in 1926 in Boston, Massachusetts, discusses his Ukrainian and Lithuanian immigrant parents; enlisting in the U.S. Army in December 1943; being shipped to Marseilles, France with the 90th Infantry Division; seeing his company wiped out in November 1944; fighting in southern Germany in January 1945; arriving at Flossenbürg in May 1945 and seeing the conditions and the survivors; his transfer to the 26th Regiment, 1st Infantry in August 1945; guarding prisoners for the Nuremburg Trials; having contact with Nuremburg prisoners; returning to the U.S. in December 1945; his life after the war; and helping to create the largest Jewish cemetery in the Boston area.

    Oral history interview with Celia Feldschuh

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Nicole Yancey

    Oral History

    Nicole Yancey (née Guggenheim), born July 26, 1941 in Saint-Amand-Mont-Rond, France, describes having one sister, Nanette, born November 1938; being separated from her family when she was two years old and sent to a farm to live in a safe and secure environment; still today calling the farmer and his wife her real grandparents; members of the French Resistance coming in for meals because the farm was close to the demarcation line and there was lots of Resistance activity; her daily routine of working, hiding, and eating; how her relationships were all very harmonious; being moved back to Orléans, France when she was five years old and starting school; the severe personality changes of her parents because of their experiences during the Holocaust; the torment her father experienced because he was not able to save his brothers from being murdered; being sponsored by a French/American agency to attend William and Mary College, where she met her husband; remaining in the Tidewater, VA area; converting to Catholicism because her husband is Catholic as are her children; her position now as Consul for the French Embassy in Norfolk, VA; and her assertion that tragedies like the Holocaust will continue as long as people do not learn to accept each other and their differences.

    Oral history interview with Jaffa Munk

    Oral History

    Jaffa Munk (née Noemi Donath), born April 10, 1931 IN Ónod, Hungary, describes her father Philippe, who was a Rabbi, and her mother Olga Shick Donath; having one brother, Joseph, and one sister, Esther Judith; living a very normal life with a family that was religious yet open-minded and encouraged academics; the many changes that began in 1942 and 1943; being moved in May 1944 to the ghetto, where her father was put in charge; being sent to Auschwitz; the brutal arrival and her father’s last words to her: “Wherever you go, continue to believe in God;” being marched to Birkenau, which was the very last time she saw her mother; being selected by Mengele in September 1944 to go to Bergen-Belsen and the grim living situation there; the forced evacuation in January 1945 and a subsequent six week death march; escaping to a forest and being liberated May 8, 1945 by Russian soldiers; eventually returning to Budapest, Hungary, where she lived at an Orthodox refugee orphanage facility, which was started by Esther Eckstein with education as the primary goal; going with a Zionist group with 1800 refugees to Palestine on a boat leaving from Bucharest, Romania and the refusal of the British to allow them entry, but finally being allowed to land at Haifa, Palestine; the break-out of war in 1947 and the desperate living conditions during the war; being taken to Tel Aviv, Israel, where there was less danger and where she attended teacher’s seminary; meeting her husband, who was in the Army; the birth of her first son, Gabriel, which was the highlight of her life because it meant continuation of her family; her teaching positions, starting with 1st grade, where students came from 30 different countries; and how her personal strengths are her sense of hope and having a positive outlook.

    Oral history interview with Frances Hirshfeld

    Oral History

    Frances Hirshfeld (née Frieda Miriam Rosenbloom), born in 1918, discusses her family and childhood in Opatów, Poland; moving to Zawiercie, Poland and its local Jewish population; the beginning of the war; her religious life; antisemitism; Kristallnacht; going into hiding in Ukraine and returning to Poland; the Judenrat; adjusting to anti-Jewish laws; moving into the ghetto; living conditions in the ghetto; being deported to Auschwitz in 1943; living conditions in Auschwitz; being moved to Birkenau; contracting typhoid fever and scabies; lack of medical care; bombings near the camp; returning to Auschwitz; hearing about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; working in a munitions factory; being on a death march to Ravensbrück; escaping into a forest; liberation by the Soviets; immigrating to the United States in October 1946; her husband immigrating to the U.S. in 1949; visiting Poland; her feelings about Holocaust deniers; and her life after the war.

    Oral history interview with Moris Gluckman

    Oral History

    Moris Glukman, born in Suceava, Romania in 1924, discusses his childhood; the rise in antisemitism; deportation announcements; his arrival in Bessarabia (in Moldova and Ukraine) with his family and how the peasants took the belongings of the Romanian Jews; travel to Moravia, Czech Republic; living at the mercy of the Romanian Gendarmerie; the spread of typhus and diphtheria during the winter of 1941-1942; how the Ukranian police guarded the village in Moravia; the German entrance into Moravia; building bridges and excavating coal from open mines; his knowledge about events in Bessarabia and Russian positions and the approaching front; working in a Kolkhoz; being liberated by the Russians; his schooling in Bucharest, Romania; and immigration to the United States in 1983.

    Oral history interview with Margie Rosenthal

    Oral History

    Margie Rosenthal (née Margit Mary Miedzwinski), born July 19, 1927 in Gleiwitz, Germany (Gliwice, Poland), describes her prewar childhood; her family’s immigration to the Philippines after the Nazi invasion so that her father could continue in the lumber business; her pleasant life in the Philippines until the Japanese bombing in December 1941 and subsequent invasion; severe changes in their lives in Pasay City as Americans began bombing nearby Manila; the delay in her family’s move to the United States in 1948 as a result of immigration quotas; her life in San Francisco; and her marriage to her husband, Ernie.

    Oral history interview with Emma Mogilensky

    Oral History

    Emma Mogilensky (née Hubert), born May 22, 1923 in Kronheim, Bavaria, describes living in the house that had been built by her great-grandfather; having one brother and one sister; living in a friendly and peaceful community until Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938 when antisemitism became so violent that she was sent to Nuremberg, Germany; enrolling in a very strict, all Jewish high school; moving to Augsberg, Germany after her father was released from Dachau; the children’s transport, going to Munich, Germany and being transferred to a boat; finally arriving in London, England, where she and the other children were chosen for English homes such that not one of them would become a public charge; being sent to live with a couple, both physicians, who were extremely helpful; attending school again where English Literature became her best subject; being a Fire Watcher at St. Paul’s Cathedral and joining the British Army when she was 17; antisemitism in the Army; being a cook for 2,000 men; receiving her GED; subsequently attending college on the GI Bill; a trip to Israel with her children after her husband’s death; finding that the cemetery where her grandparents were buried was not desecrated and finding their graves; visiting her foster parents in England every year; and her serious commitment to speaking about the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Isaiah Henig

    Oral History

    Isaiah Henig (né Yeshiah Henig), born in 1915, discusses his childhood in Szydlowiec, Poland; his family and the Jewish community; his religious upbringing; the absence of antisemitism before the war; changing anti-Jewish attitudes after the German occupation; the outbreak of the war and changes in daily life; being conscripted for forced labor; the creation of the ghetto; living conditions in the ghetto; working as a laborer in Starachowice, Poland; diseases in the camp; working to build replacement parts for machines; not believing reports about Jewish deaths; being deported to Birkenau in the summer of 1944; working in a factory; being moved to other concentration camps, including Mauthausen and Hannover; Allied bombing of the area; being deported to Bergen-Belsen; living conditions in the camp; his job building cannons; liberation by the British; moving to a displaced persons camp; immigrating to the United States in 1951; his life after the war; and his feelings about what happened.

    Oral history interview with Ida Henig

    Oral History

    Ida Henig (née Markowicz), born in 1924, discusses her family and childhood in Lódź, Poland; Łódź’s Jewish community and economy; not experiencing antisemitism before the war; changing anti-Jewish attitudes when the Germans invaded; fleeing to Częstochowa, Poland; working in the ghetto; not believing stories of mass murder; the Jewish police; liberation by the Soviets in January 1945; going to Germany; coming to the United States in the 1950s; the fates of her family members; and her feelings about the Holocaust and war.

    Oral history interview with Marcel Drimer

    Oral History

    Marcel Drimer (b. Marceli Drimmer), born in 1934, discusses his childhood in Drohobych, Poland (present day Ukraine); his family; his religious upbringing; life before the war; the Russian occupation; the German invasion in 1941; the looting of Jewish property; the deportations in 1942; moving into the ghetto; the fates of his family members; Ukrainian and German police; the Judenrat; hiding in an attic for a week; escape plans being postponed due to the death of his father; how his female relatives were saved by a woman who was recognized as a righteous gentile; their living conditions while in hiding; liberation by the Soviets; adjusting to life after the war; his education; difficult living conditions in Poland; post-war anti-Semitism; immigrating to the United States in 1961; his family going to Israel; and his feelings about the war, Poland, and anti-Semitism.

    Oral history interview with Michael Silberstein

    Oral History

    Michael Silberstein (né Mieczyslaw Silberstein), born in 1930 in Grudziadz, Poland, discusses his family; life before the war; the arrival of the German Army when he was nine years old; moving to Łódź, Poland; the establishment of the Łódź ghetto; being an errand boy and getting arrested in 1942; escaping arrest; living conditions in the ghetto; being deported to Birkenau in the summer of 1944; being sent on a death march in January 1945; arriving in Mauthausen; conditions and life in Mauthausen; liberation by the Americans; reuniting with his family; meeting family in England; immigrating to the United States in1952; being drafted into the U.S. Army; and his life after the war.

    Oral history interview with Joan Schwab

    Oral History

    Joan Schwab (née Nussbaum), born on March 24, 1926, describes living in the Tiergarten area of Berlin, Germany; her memories of Kristallnacht and how two men came for her father; being placed on a Children’s Transport to England on May 21, 1939; staying with Norman and Elsie Denham and going to secondary school and Hebrew school; her brother joining her in August 1939; evacuating in September to Chichester; conditions in the home, where she shared a bed with four girls and showered every two weeks; graduating from high school in 1944 and going back to Denhams in London; sleeping in an air raid shelter when V2 rockets attacked; going after the war to the Joint Distribution Committee in Munich, Germany and finding out that her parents perished in Auschwitz and her grandfather died in Theresienstadt; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Erwin Deutscher

    Oral History

    Erwin Deutscher, born on January 28, 1923 in Vienna, Austria, describes being raised with thorough religious training; being in the Zionist Youth group, HaShomer HaDati; how his maternal grandfather had gone to the United States in 1898 to Oklahoma City, OK; his Bar Mitzvah in 1936; hearing about Hitler’s arrival on March 11, 1938; his father’s dairy business closing; his mother being arrested; getting notice that his youth group was going to go to Palestine and meeting Eichmann at the emigration office with his father; conditions getting worse in Vienna; traveling with 25 others by train to Trieste and by boat to Haifa and arriving October 24, 1938; going to Mikveh Israel agricultural school for two years then to Bnai Akiva yeshiva for another two years; working for Haganah and meeting his wife; fighting in the Israeli War of Independence; his father being taken to Dachau after Kristallnacht and then to Buchenwald from June 1939 to January 1940; his parents immigrating to the United States; his life after the war working for a life insurance company; and getting a Ph. D. in Hebrew letters at Hebrew Union College.

    Oral history interview with George Pick

    Oral History

    George Pick, born in Budapest, Hungary on March 28, 1934, describes his very large extended family; his father losing his job in May 1939 and being sent on labor brigade in September 1940 for three months; seeing German tanks in the streets on March 9, 1944 and the subsequent anti-Jewish laws after including wearing the yellow star and not being allowed to attend school after April; his father having to leave again; being ordered to move to special Jewish houses in the summer of 1944; the air raids in Budapest and the massive bombings on July 2, 1944; his father’s return; he and his mother joining his father in hiding in a uniform factory building in November 1944; the factory being raided December 2, 1944 and bribing their way out; being taken to a Red Cross building and running away; going to the ghetto on December 14, 1944 and his father being in the ghetto police; the siege of Budapest; Wallenberg saving Jews from a massacre in January 1945; liberation; starting school; his Bar Mitzvah in 1947; attending university; going to Austria and then the United States, where his uncle lived; working for the Navy as mechanical engineer and retiring in 1996; his three marriages and not having children; and his commitment to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Oral history interview with Hedi Pope

    Oral History

    Hedi Pope (née Politzer), born March 18, 1920 in Vienna, Austria, describes her prosperous family, which was neither religious nor political; wanting to be a dancer as a child; the increase in anti-Semitism in Vienna; her memories, day-by-day, of Hitler’s invasion of Austria in March 1938; rising fears to speak out about Hitler’s actions; her memories of Kristallnacht; her father being sent to Dachau; the difficulty of getting all the documents to go to the United States; immigrating to the U.S. in January 1939; living in Newark, NJ; joining the Refugee Artist’s Group as a dancer; going to Miami University in Ohio and graduating in 1942; having two children; maintaining a dance studio in Alexandria, VA until 1980; and working with the volunteer corps at USHMM.

    Oral history interview with Bella Simon Pasternak

    Oral History

    Bella Simon Pasternak, born in 1928, discusses her liberation from Auschwitz by Russians; walking home to Hungary during the winter; being hospitalized with frostbite and starvation; living in a displaced persons camp in Innsbruck, Austria; immigrating to the United States in 1946; her first impressions of the U.S.; Americans’ disbelief at her experiences; meeting her husband, who was also a survivor; her religious views becoming more orthodox; desiring to immigrate to Israel; coping with the Holocaust many years after it occurred and still experiencing nightmares; and how important her grandchildren are to her.

    Oral history interview with Marion Friedman

    Oral History

    Marion Friedman (b. Traute Marion Julia Georgia Sulimas), born in 1922, discusses her childhood in Hamburg, Germany; being raised with her Christian mother and Jewish father; her parents’ upbringings; celebrating both Christian and Jewish holidays; her brothers’ immigrations to China and the United States; the Aryanization of her father’s bank; her mother’s resourcefulness; receiving a visa along with her mother to go to the U.S.; being sent to the U.S. on her own because her mother decided to stay with her father; learning of her parents’ arrest and deaths; adjusting to life in the U.S.; meeting her husband; returning to Germany long after the war; meeting her German family; and dealing with her losses on a daily basis.

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Strassburger

    Oral History

    Elizabeth Strassburger, born in 1938, discusses her childhood in a small town near Zakopane, Poland; her father’s arrest and imprisonment in Siberia; being forced into the Tarnow ghetto with her mother and grandmother; watching her grandmother being taken by the Germans; hiding under an assumed Christian identity; being drugged and hidden in a basement during dangerous times; the family who hid her and her mother; believing she was a Catholic; her Catholic schooling; liberation by the Russians; learning she was Jewish after the war; being smuggled out of Poland with her mother; living at a Jewish orphanage with her mother in Germany; learning her father was alive; moving to Italy to be with her father; immigrating to England with her family; immigrating to the United States; adjusting to life as a teenager in the U.S.; her marriage; studying social work in college; her volunteer work; and her family.

    Oral history interview with Jadwiga Dziekonski

    Oral History

    Jadwiga Dziekonski, born in 1919, discusses her family’s emigration from Kiev, Ukraine to Warsaw, Poland in 1921 because of the revolution; her Catholic upbringing; attending public school; following the political situation in Germany; meeting her husband; the German invasion and occupation; her father’s exile in London, England as a member of the Bank of Poland; moving to Warsaw with her husband; her husband’s role in the Home Army; her daughter’s birth in 1943; sheltering two Jewish women in her mother’s apartment; the Polish underground’s participation in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; the Warsaw Uprising; her husband’s arrest and imprisonment in Bergen-Belsen and Gross-Rosen; liberation; readjusting to life after the war; escaping to London through Sweden in 1947; leaving her mother behind; reuniting with her father; immigrating to Detroit in 1951; visiting Poland in 1988 to see her husband’s family; her feelings about being Polish; how she feels about Jewish people and German people; and her two visits to Israel.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Harvey

    Oral History

    Ruth Harvey, born in 1928, describes growing up with mixed Jewish and Christian heritage; her childhood in Berlin, Germany; being expelled from public school in 1938; attending a private Jewish school; witnessing the burning of Berlin’s temple during Kristallnacht; hearing Hitler’s speeches over loudspeakers; leaving Germany in 1939 with her mother to meet her father in Cuba; immigrating to New York in 1940 with her parents; growing up in New York City; moving to Washington, DC for a job with the State Department; getting married and having children; having a sense of confusion about her religious identity; why she chose not to visit any concentration camps; and volunteering at the USHMM.

    Oral history interview with Thomas B. Gardiner

    Oral History

    Thomas Brown Gardiner, born on March 26, 1920 in St. Louis County, Missouri, describes being raised by his widowed mother; life during the Depression; working for a house painter as a teen in St. Louis; getting married in 1940; working for a manufacturer that made small parts for the M1 rifle; being drafted in 1944; training at Camp Robinson in Arkansas; being sent to England in the fall of 1944; going to France; being assigned to the 45th Infantry Division; seeing action in the Vosges Mountains and Alsace-Lorraine; participating in the capture of Schaffenburg; going through Nuremberg and Munich; liberating Dachau as a member of L Company in the 157th Infantry Regiment; guarding the camp while waiting for the military police to arrive; billeting in apartment buildings outside of the camp, where the Nazi officers had lived; typhus in the camp and the high death rate of the survivors; speaking with the survivors and being shown the camp by them; going to Munich then Augsburg for a month; being sent to Le Havre, France; returning to the US; working in military camps in Texas until his release; the effect seeing Dachau had on him; and how he feels stronger in his Christian faith.

    Oral history interview with Roberta Jones

    Oral History

    Roberta Jones, born October 15, 1921 in St. Louis, Missouri, discusses growing up during the Great Depression; enlisting as a nurse in the United States Army; being commissioned as a second lieutenant with the 3rd Army and assigned to the 121st Semi-Mobile Evacuation Hospital; traveling by ship to England and helping in a hospital there; traveling to Luxembourg and then into Germany under dangerous conditions; going to Buchenwald; seeing a crematorium, stacked bodies, and starved prisoners still in uniforms; being offered bread by the prisoners; seeing a lampshade made of human skin in the office of a Nazi official; visiting a smaller liberated concentration camp and watching as American soldiers distributed clothing to naked prisoners; traveling with her hospital to a concentration camp near Linz, Austria (possibly Mauthausen); female nurses being kept outside of the camp fence as men worked inside the camp; meeting newly-liberated English prisoners of war who had been captured at the Battle of Dunkirk; returning to the United States and working at McCormack General Hospital in Pasadena, California; the difficulties of severely disfigured patients integrating into the community in Pasadena; marrying her husband; working at Camp Swift in Texas and Camp Polk in Louisiana, and, during the Korean War, in a military hospital in Michigan; encountering Holocaust deniers; and her insistence that her children know everything about her experience so that they can continue to spread the truth about the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Christine Cohen

    Oral History

    Christine Cohen, born April 27, 1940 in the Warsaw ghetto, describes living in the ghetto until 1942 when they escaped; using forged papers showing that they were Christian; having one brother, born in 1948; being sent alone to live with a farm family; being helped and protected by an aristocratic woman, who had befriended an old German officer while she worked for the underground resistance; living with a series of families and caretakers; living in Walbrzych, Poland; not knowing she was Jewish until she was 10 years old and not admitting to it until she moved to Israel (seven years later) in 1957; visiting Germany and Poland after the war and going to Auschwitz, all of which was very difficult; wanting to stay in Israel but because of her parents, moving to the United States; the bitterness she still feels about having her entire extended family taken from her; the recurring nightmares and physical ailments that are all tension-related; and her current life in San Antonio, TX, where there are only a few survivors of her mother’s generation.

    Oral history interview with Hugh Jenkins

    Oral History

    Hugh Jenkins, born December 29, 1914 in Lester, England, describes being the youngest of eight siblings, whose father was a Welsh minister; working before World War II with Quakers and being a conscientious objector even before the war; moving to London, England in 1944 to take part in training at a Quaker institute; being sent to Antwerp, Belgium after the training to do relief work; going to Belsen, Germany on April 22, 1944, soon after the camp had been discovered and the horrific scene; the various response processes at the camp; setting up a hospital, known as the “new camp,” maintaining a first aid station, and finding food; eventually being sent to Poland to be in charge of another camp; how even now he has a sense of desolation in how war is used to settle problems; working as the overseas secretary for the British Friends Relief Service until 1948, when he went to Philadelphia, PA to work with the American Friends Service Committee; and being sent to Washington, DC to be the director of the Foreign Student Service Center.

    Oral history interview with Rene Edgar Tressler

    Oral History

    Rene Edgar Tressler, born April 16, 1927 in Strakonice, Czech Republic, describes his childhood in Strakonice; his parents and brother; escaping to Prague, Czech Republic to live with his grandparents; his brother’s selection to be on the Board of Elders at Theresienstadt; how Theresienstadt was used as a showcase for the Red Cross; his deportation to Auschwitz; his camp number; being moved to Birkenau; his movement to Blechhammer camp; his experiences on a death march in February 1945; his arrival at Buchenwald; reuniting with his parents and brother after the liberation; escaping Czechoslovakia in 1956; immigrating to the United States; and authoring several books.

    Oral history interview with Stefan Wohl

    Oral History

    Stefan Wohl, born February 4, 1934 in Vienna, Austria, discusses the Anschluss in 1938; leaving Vienna through Switzerland to Kraków, Poland; traveling with 14 family members in September 1939 to Jaroslav, Zloczow, and Kolomyja; being captured with his father in November 1939 while trying to cross the border; being released and going to Zloczow; being on a transport for six weeks with his mother, sister, and other relatives in July 1940; arriving in the Yakutsk, Siberia labor camp settlement; leaving in May 1941 by train through Moscow to Lvov where they were reunited with their father; the German invasion on June 22, 1941; going with his sister to a farm in Jaroslav; going to Budapest, Hungary via Monkacs, Hungary (Mukacheve, Ukraine) in the fall 1942; changing their name to Wolinski and pretending to be Catholic; going to Leanyfalu in 1943 and staying for a year; the family going to Seged (Szeged), Hungary; being captured and jailed; being released and staying with an uncle in Budapest; his father’s illness; being liberated by Russians in January 1945; going back to Poland in the spring 1945; going to Sweden in the summer 1946; sailing to Brazil in October 1946; attending school and a university in the United States; and being a film producer in Brazil.

    Oral history interview with Yehuda Adam

    Oral History

    Yehuda Adam (né George Strn), born on July 3, 1929 in Budapest, Hungary, discusses being raised in a reform Jewish household; being put into forced labor in Budapest; receiving a Schutzpasse and his family working for Raoul Wallenberg; being liberated by the Soviets in January 15, 1945; going to Palestine in 1949; going to the United States in 1962; and living in both Israel and the US.

    Oral history interview with Arlette de Long

    Oral History

    Arlette de Long, born June 15, 1937 in Brocourt, Somme, France; describes her parents’ medical practice; her early love of the church and uncertainly whether her family was Jewish; villagers’ willingness to maintain friendship with the family because her father was the only physician in the village; having no memory of life before the war; the liberation of France; moving to a suburb of Paris, where she attended Protestant churches rather than synagogue; father’s unwillingness to discuss the Holocaust; her own reluctance to discuss the Holocaust until her sixteen year old daughter insisted that she talk about it; moving to the United States; her work as a psychotherapist for underprivileged children; and her feeling that her story is one of hope, compassion, and gratitude.

    Oral history interview with Eva Adam

    Oral History

    Eva Adam, born September 3, 1932 in Budapest, Hungary, describes her Orthodox Jewish family; her family’s awareness of what was happening to European Jews; their reluctance to leave Hungary; her father and brother’s membership in the Jewish Legion; serving as adjunct personnel to the Hungarian Army; changes in their lives in the late 1930s and early 1940s; her family’s unawareness of concentration camps before 1944; the Arrow Cross Party taking over the Hungarian police; deteriorating conditions for Jews; the murder of Jews at the Danube River; conditions in the ghetto; her post-liberation search for family members; finding that only three of her thirty-six family members survived Auschwitz; leaving Budapest in 1949; living in Israel and then the United States in 1961; her plans to return to Israel in the future; her pride in being a Jew and a Hungarian; the value in caring about others; and her strong work ethic as an explanation of why she was able to survive.

    Oral history interview with Herbert Bitter

    Oral History

    Herbert Jerome Bitter, born August 4, 1919 in New York City, discusses his parents who were Romanian immigrants; growing up in a Jewish neighborhood in Manhattan; becoming more religious during his service in the United Sates Army from 1943 to 1945; his experiences at Ohrdruf in 1945 soon after the Germans evacuated the camp; seeing three U.S. generals, Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton, at the camp on April 5, 1945; the generals’ return visit on April 12, 1945 with photographers; how the freed inmates at Ohrdruf were eager to tell their stories to the American liberators; the effect of witnessing the horrors of the Holocaust had on his Jewish identity; and his reluctance to talk about his experiences during the war, especially to children.

    Oral history interview with Rachel Goldfarb

    Oral History

    Rachel Goldfarb, born December 2, 1930 in Poland (now Dokshytsy, Belarus), discusses her life following her liberation by the Russians and her time living in the forests near Bialystok, Poland with her mother; working and living on Russian trains; traveling to Prussia to find shelter provided by various Jewish organizations and the Red Cross; traveling to Italy’s southern coast; attempting to board a ship to Palestine but being blockaded by British authorities; eventually getting to New York City in November 1947 after two and a half years in Italy; visiting Washington, DC after graduation from high school; taking a job with the District Court; attending George Washington University at night; meeting her husband, also a Holocaust survivor, and marrying in 1952; raising two children, both of whom are architects; finally visiting Israel; her good life in the United States; and her advice about valuing what you have in life.

    Oral history interview with Tania Rozmaryn

    Oral History

    Tania Rozmaryn, born on June 16, 1928 in Vilnius, Poland (present day Lithuania), discusses her family as strong Zionists; the changes that took place after the German occupation; family’s escape towards the eastern Russian border; working in the house of an SS officer and being offered guidance on survival; frightening years in the Kovno ghetto; going into hiding until 1944 when the ghetto was liquidated; her deportation with her mother to Stutthof; her mother’s struggles and strategies, trying to make her look less like a child so that she would be chosen for work; being sent to various work camps until March 1945 when they were liberated by the Russians and taken to Central Poland to a displaced persons camp; being sent to Germany with false documents to a kibbutz in Munich; going to the American Zone and teaching at a school in Bergen-Belsen in 1947; getting married in 1949; immigrating to the United States in 1950; graduating summa cum laude from the Teacher’s Institute and receiving an M.A. from Queens College in 1960; moving to Maryland in 1990 where she received an M.S. in Marriage and Family Counseling; nightmares about her Holocaust experiences; and her feelings about her Jewish faith.

    Oral history interview with Frank Ephraim

    Oral History

    Franz Gunter Ephraim, born February 19, 1931 in the Schöneberg district of Berlin, Germany, describes his family and being raised Jewish but not Orthodox; living an integrated life in the community until 1937 and his participation in the 1936 Olympics events; how Kristallnacht was the impetus for his family immigrating to the Philippines; attending a Hebrew school in Manila before the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Japanese invasion of the Philippines; the politics in Manila; experiencing an open Jewish life; their favorite playing areas, holidays, their several living spaces, and the daily routine in Manila; the attack on Pearl Harbor and his memories of the alarms, airplanes, gas masks, and lack of school for about a year; how after the US declared war there were more air raids and an exodus from the Philippines began; how the US was closed to Jews who still had family in Germany and Europe and his family could not go to the US; the Japanese invasion of the Philippines; the many wartime restrictions, including food shortages, looting, changes in currency, and a new governmental organization; how 1944 was the year when things were really deteriorated and the people were starving; the daily air raids from B24 bombers; the Japanese systematically burning down the city of Manila; how February 1945 brought total chaos and there was no food for several weeks; the liberation of Manila by US forces; leaving the Philippines on November 19, 1946; arriving in San Francisco, CA where relatives were waiting for them, along with HIAF; the closeness of the Manila Jewish community in San Francisco; attending UC Berkeley until the Korean War when he was drafted into the Army and sent to Europe as an interpreter; becoming a US citizen in 1952; his philosophy that the importance of Jews as a nation is far more important than Jews as a religion and that self-reliance is the most important quality to have; graduating from UC Berkeley in 1957; and working for a naval architect specializing in submarines, United Airlines, and the Maritime Administration in Washington, DC.

    Oral history interview with Peter Phillips

    Oral History

    Ernst Pieter Philipps, born December 5, 1931 in Essen, Germany, describes his twin brothers, who were three years younger; moving to Prague, Czech Republic in 1936 because of his father’s position with his company; life in Prague, which was normal until the Germans occupied Prague beginning April 1939; moving to Genoa, Italy and spending six months there; relocating by an Italian steamer to Quito, Ecuador, where living conditions were rather primitive and where at their second address they experienced antisemitism for the first time; spending two years in Ecuador; relocating to New York City, NY, where the instances of antisemitism directed at him were violent and ugly; his parents moving back to Rotterdam by 1950 while he remained behind in the house his parents had bought in Queens; attending City College of New York for five years and in 1955 joining the US Army and being sent to Germany where, among other duties, he worked as a teacher and Boy Scout leader for American and German boys; after leaving the Army, working first for the New York Times, a newspaper in Danbury, CT, and Business Week magazine; going to Washington, DC to work for McGraw Hill for 20 years; his experiences as a volunteer at the USHMM; and how he believes his experiences as a Jew have affected his outlook.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Ichiuji

    Oral History

    Joseph Ichiuji describes his parents as having immigrated to the US in the early 1900s; his father being a truck farmer and then owning a shoe repair business; working in a fish cannery and living in Fresno, CA until Executive Order 9066, which required that all Japanese Americans be evacuated to internment camps; being sent by train and truck to Flagstaff, Arizona, where they were assigned to barracks number three of the internment camp at Poston, AZ; conditions at the camp, which was run like an army installation with strict regimentation; volunteering for the 442 Combat Team, formed in 1943 and consisting solely of Japanese American soldiers who had families living in internment camps; fighting in Italy at the front lines north of Rome; liberating Livorno, Italy; helping liberate a subcamp of Dachau; conditions of prisoners still alive at the camp; helping two Lithuanian prisoners reconnect with important people in their lives; going home in December 1945 to find his parents released from the internment camp; helping his father with his business until May 1946 when he went to Washington, DC, where he worked in government service for 37 years; and the reunion of Japanese American soldiers in Los Angeles, CA, which a few of the survivors of Dachau attended.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Horowitz

    Oral History

    Ruth Horowitz (née Salzburg), born March 23, 1930 in Hamburg, Germany, describes her Polish parents Isaac Salzberg and Rose R. Kleinert and her sister; life in Hamburg, where they lived until November 1938; leaving Hamburg two days before Kristallnacht; how Hamburg was very open to Jews until Hitler’s regime, though she experienced many instances of antisemitism; being fascinated with the 1936 Olympics; how her father’s efforts to leave Germany began in 1936 and finally succeeded when he dramatically threatened to commit suicide at the US Consul if the visas were not granted; how crossing the Atlantic was very difficult, with cold and seasickness, but they arrived and went to Detroit, MI for a short while, then to New York City, NY, and finally to Washington, DC; learning to speak English by going to lots of movies; her father’s death at age 54; her mother’s transformation from being a housewife to running her husband’s jewelry business after he died; the wartime antisemitism, the problem of quotas, the Nuremburg trials, and the State of Israel; getting married in 1950; traveling to Germany in 1995; and her views on present day Germany.

    Oral history interview with Hermann Kosak

    Oral History

    Hermann Kosak, born May 2, 1924 in Vienna, Austria, describes his younger sister, Margaret; how antisemitism was pervasive and being involved in instances of physical violence as early as kindergarten; the growth of the Nazi movement in Austria; the Anschluss in March 1938; seeing Hitler arriving in Vienna in his car; how quickly the Jews were affected by the Nazi’s changes; Kristallnacht and being arrested the next morning; trying to get out of Vienna at age 14 and finally getting to Brussels, Belgium with his mother; the Germans attack on Belgium; how enrolling in art school after the invasion was the most important thing he did; learning survival, watchfulness, and self-reliance at age 16; beginning a diary on May 9, 1940, describing daily life, and keeping the diary until three weeks before liberation; how out of 50 family members, 43 were killed in camps; finally getting visas for him and his sister in November 1947 by forcing his way into the US Embassy and leaving for the United States; arriving in New York City, NY; being a painting instructor; being drafted, released to Reserves, working for a while, and being called back for the Korean War; being married and eventually getting a job with Boeing as an illustrator; and his views on the effects of the Holocaust on humanity.

    Oral history interview with Dolly Bestandig

    Oral History

    Dolly Bestandig (née Hirsch), born July 24, 1939 in Vilna (Vilnius), Lithuania, discusses her family, which had been in Lithuania for 11 generations; her father, who was a mathematical engineer, and her mother, who was a concert pianist; how her parents were both very religious and wealthy; being sent to the Vilna ghetto, the hardship of which marked the beginning of her mother’s psychological changes; the presence of 90 members of her mother’s family in the ghetto; how at age five, after living in the Minsk ghetto, she and her mother were sent to Auschwitz, where her mother managed to save her life by hiding her in a garbage can during the day while her mother worked; being moved to Bergen-Belsen with her mother and father after four months, where she was again hidden in a garbage can every day until liberation on April 15, 1945 by English soldiers; being sent to Sweden for medical care; being hospitalized in Gothenburg and then in Stockholm, where surgery on her palate was performed; leaving Sweden in 1947 and going to New York, where an uncle met her family; going to Mexico City, where two uncles were waiting; how her mother’s psychological state was deteriorating and she died in 1958; having flashbacks to her life in the camps; going to the Margaret Sanger Institute in New York City in 1967, where she received counseling help and tuberculosis was found throughout her body; recovering and adopting two children; being the Sub-Director of Hebrew instruction at the Yeshiva in Mexico City; and her feelings about her survival.

    Oral history interview with Goldie Gendelman

    Oral History

    Goldie Gendelman, born November 17, 1933 in Lechowichi (possibly Lyakhavichy, Belarus), Poland near Baranowichi (possibly Baranovichi, Belarus), discusses her parents, Chaim and Chana Wolochiwianski; growing up in an extremely Orthodox family; being raised to speak Polish and Yiddish; her family’s attempt to immigrate to the United States; how she and her family made it to Cuba and stayed there for 11 years; living in Regla, Cuba; her struggles to communicate in Spanish; being run over by a bus in Cuba; how she and her family finally were able to immigrate to the United States in 1948; her paternal uncle in the United States who assisted with the immigration process; her experience with antisemitism in Poland and Cuba; graduating from high school in the United States; volunteering at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; and her feelings about leaving Poland, living in Cuba, and starting a new life in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Rhoda Kuflik

    Oral History

    Rhoda Kuflik (née Ruzenka Husen), born in October 1937 in Kitev, Poland (now Kuty, Ukraine), describes living in the Kuty ghetto; escaping to Romania and hiding there; being liberated by the Soviets; and immigrating to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Jutta Levy

    Oral History

    Jutta Levy, born in 1926 in Hamburg, Germany, describes growing up in a pleasant upper middle class family in a large Jewish community; listening to Hitler’s speeches on the radio and seeing him on a school field trip; witnessing Nazi book burning; learning of the death of Hindenburg; drastic changes in Germany after 1933; living in fear as children were taken from school and acquaintances disappeared; father’s dramatic pleading for visas to leave Germany; obtaining passage on the last train from Hamburg on November 6, 1938; traveling to Paris, France and then to Cherbourg, France, from which her family sailed to New York on the Queen Mary; arriving on November 11, 1938; learning about life in concentration camps from family members who survived the Holocaust; and her return to Hamburg and visit to Bergen-Belsen as an adult.

    Oral history interview with Wolfgang Mueller

    Oral History

    Wolfgang Mueller, born in Hanover, Germany on March 10, 1919, discusses his father’s role as a leader in the Jewish community and being head of B’nai B’rith; being aware of the Nazis at an early stage and seeing posters on kiosks denouncing Jews; refusing to say “Heil Hitler” in school and being advised by the principal to leave the country; going to London, England the summer after his Bar Mitzvah (1932); attending Ewell School and going back to Germany on vacations, pretending he was English; attending Cranbrook School with funding from a relative, Max Nordhaus, in the United States; receiving an affidavit from Nordhaus and getting a visa to the US; arriving in the US July 26, 1936 and moving to New Mexico; his mother and sister emigrating; hearing about Kristallnacht; being drafted in September 1941 and being sent to Florida; being in the Signal Corps; applying to officer’s candidate school and being in a group that called themselves the fighting 614s; being made into an MP after his superiors found out he was from Germany; being stationed in Tampa, FL and Jacksonville, FL; getting his American citizenship; volunteering to go overseas; being stationed in England as a technical supply sergeant and a liaison with the RAF; working after V-E Day in the Air Technical Intelligence Office; interrogating prisoners in Czechoslovakia and Austria and engineers at Zeiss works; being in Nordhausen for an hour; translating V-2 documents; being discharged on January 11, 1947; getting married; working in the meat business, real estate, and as a wholesale fish company; being proud to be Jewish; and his dedication to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Oral history interview with Klari Rudnai

    Oral History

    Klari Rudnai (née Takacs), born May 19, 1930 in Budapest, Hungary, describes her well-to-do family that was not at all religious; her older sister; her father, who was her hero, and her strict mother; how their cook was instrumental in saving their lives by getting counterfeit papers with non-Jewish names for them and by bringing them food as they hid in a one-room apartment in 1944; moving to a nice hotel and having to go to the hotel’s underground bunkers during all the bombing for almost nine months; her father’s seven siblings, who were all sent to Auschwitz; going back to the hotel, the Vadasqur, until it too was bombed; moving to a new villa in 1946; how when she was 19 years she was picked up by Russian soldiers in a jeep and had to fight her way out of an attack by them and was saved by American soldiers who took her to the hospital for a few days; marrying an American soldier and wanting to go to the United States; finishing high school; how the solitary military life and moving a lot to odd places didn’t suit her; divorcing her husband and moving back to Washington, DC; getting married in 1960 to a Jewish doctor, who had been in many concentration camps and was instrumental in getting her interested in her Jewish religion; volunteering at the USHMM in the Archives and Volunteer Services; enjoying all parts of talking to people and the volunteers in her job; and reading a lot of books and newspapers about the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Jill Pauly

    Oral History

    Jill Pauly, born May 1, 1933 in Cologne, Germany, describes her large, very well-to-do country family; the efforts of her grandmother and uncle to get money to Holland and make arrangements for the family to get to Kenya, where they bought two cattle farms that eventually were very successful; wanting a more orthodox Jewish life after the war; moving to New York City then moving to Vineland, NJ; her family buying a chicken farm, which was destroyed by a hurricane in 1952; the death of her father when he was 66 years old; her mother being her guiding light in terms of religious practice; attending the Pierce School of Business in Philadelphia, PA; working for the Quakers and then for a synagogue; getting her real estate license at the University of Maryland; her two adopted children; retiring in December 1993 from real estate; volunteering at the USHMM in Visitors’ Services and in the Office of Survivor Relations; having very strong feelings about people having access to the Museum; and some of the artifacts that she’s donated to the Museum.

    Oral history interview with Jack Reuben

    Oral History

    Jack Ruben was born Yaakov Ruben on December 8, 1921 in Cincinnati, Ohio and after six months the family moved to LA. He was the only child to Joseph and Sarah Basha Ruben who came from Russia and were not religious. His mother was a garment worker and his father sold fruits and vegetables in a horse and cart in the local area. Due to an eye condition, Jack went to a health camp for a year. Jack's father left the family in 1927 and since lost track of him. Jack was placed in foster homes until the 11th grade and would visit his mother on the weekends. He graduated from high school and worked his way through UCLA by working part-time. In summer of '43 Jack volunteered for the Air Corps and was sent to Pomona College for nine months to study meteorology. He was not picked to be a meteorology officer so joined the infantry and was selected to be a coding clerk. He went to several camps and was shipped to Le Havre. His division had little information of the overall war and no details of concentration camps. From there he was part of the effort to form a bridge over the Moselle and next in a major assault at the Rhine River. Jack was in the Division furthest east in Germany which took many German prisoners as they quickly drove east. His company going east and meeting a surrendering German battalion who were permitted to march on their own. His company formed perimeters around villages and often stayed overnight in a civilian's home. They went through a rural area and saw dead prisoners and dead horses along the road without understanding the situation. They reached Ohrdruf Concentration Camp and saw a few emaciated prisoners leaving and many dead bodies piled up or laying on the ground. Jack did not realize it was a concentration camp at the time or that others existed until later when he returned to the US. The Army newspaper did not publish such information. From there, they went to the Czech border for 3 months which they guarded until VE Day. Then Jack was relocated to a relocation camp near Paris until Christmas '45 when he was shipped home and arrived in NY on New Year's Day '46. He was discharged and married a second time as his first wife was killed in an auto accident. Subsequently, he received a BA in economics, MA in family counseling and PhD in psychology and has practiced 10 years in the field. He has four children. Jack still does not understand how the crimes in the concentration camps could have been performed by fellow human beings.

    Oral history interview with David Bayer

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Tilda Finzi Cohen

    Oral History

    Tilda Finzi Cohen (née Mazel Tov “Tilda” Finzi) born in Split, Yugoslavia on July 11, 1933, discusses Germans passing through their city in early 1941; her father getting called into the army and returning after one month; the Italians occupying Split, closing businesses and setting a curfew; not being permitted to go to school and the formation of community Jewish schools in different locations around city; her uncle being imprisoned and bringing him food; the Italian capitulation in September 1943; her family joining other people fleeing to partisans in the mountains; going with her mother to Brac Island, to Vis Island; sailing to Bari two days before Yom Kippur; living in a camp then a private house; the Germans dropping gas bombs on ships on December 2, 1943; her family moving to a village near Bari and attending school; attending a Seder arranged by the Jewish Brigade in Bitonto, Italy in the spring of 1944; how after the war their relatives told them of the camps and atrocities and advised them not to return to Split; her family moving to Milan, Italy in 1948; her family immigrating to the United States in 1950; finishing high school and attending college; getting married; and feeling that she is not a part of any country and that she lost her childhood.

    Oral history interview with Zwi Golombek

    Oral History

    Zwi Golombek, born in Warsaw, Poland on September 15, 1934, describes his father’s large construction business; the formation of the Warsaw ghetto and his family moving into one room on Nowolipki Street; his father’s ability to exit and enter the ghetto because he possessed building permits; being aware of danger and seeing beatings; his father striking a German guard in early 1942 and being taken to a ghetto prison then Treblinka; his Uncle Mietek placing him with the Abramzuc family in Jozefow, Poland and his mother and sister disappearing from the ghetto two weeks later; staying hidden for three years and his uncle visiting often and playing the family to hide him; being called Henyek; his uncle placing him in a kibbutzim in Poland and Germany after the war; going to Israel on October 6, 1948; working in Tel Aviv and joining the Israeli army in 1952; fighting war in 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982; getting married; and his two sons.

    Oral history interview with Samuel B. Hagner

    Oral History

    Samuel Hagner, born November 1, 1925 in Philadelphia, PA, discusses his Quaker parents; becoming a Quaker member at age 14; going to a Quaker work camp; being told about antisemitic events in Europe by a Jewish friend named Doris Weil and not believing her; his brother being a conscientious objector and working in a forestry camp during war; attending Oberlin College; being inducted into the army in January 1944 as a 1-A-O; training as a medical corpsman; sailing to Europe in December 1944; joining 7th Army in Germany and moving as the front moved; being made an armed guard at a billet even though he refused to carry a gun; going by truck to help liberate Dachau; the overwhelming experiences of seeing Dachau and feeling anger towards the SS guards; staying in the camp for one week; wavering about being a conscientious objector and writing to Doris to tell her she was right; going to a German hospital with nuns; going to France and the war ending before he was deployed to the Philippines; becoming a scrub nurse during plastic surgery on war victims in Indiana; being discharged and returning to college in the fall of 1946; practicing psychiatry for adults; living with his Dachau experience but not being at peace with it; and his continued abhorrence of war.

    Oral history interview with Werner E. Michel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Guta Jacobson

    Oral History

    Guta Jacobson (née Rogowitz), born on April 23, 1925 in Łódź, Poland, discusses her early life in Łódź; relations between Jews and Christians; her activity in a Zionist organization; various holiday celebrations; the German invasion of Poland and the implementation of Nazi race laws; food shortages; the establishment of the Łódź ghetto; her family’s indecision on whether or not to flee; life in the ghetto; losing her faith in God after seeing her parents give up their children; her father’s disappearance; the typhus epidemic; hearing rumors of Chelmno and Auschwitz; hiding from the liquidation of the ghetto and their eventual deportation to Auschwitz in August of 1944; her immediate understanding of what was happening in the camp; Dr. Josef Mengele taking her mother away; being transported to a camp in Birnbäumel, Germany (now Gruszeczka, Poland), to work digging anti-tank trenches; the differing conditions of various camps; hiding in the woods during a death march; her return to a liberated Łódź; marrying her husband; her reunion with her sister who had been recuperating in Sweden after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen; immigrating to the United States; the birth of her children; the death of her husband; her avoidance of discussing her experiences with her children when they were young; her motivations for sharing her story now; and her hopes that the world will never forget.

    Oral history interview with Helen Luksenburg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with William Luksenburg

    Oral History

    William Luksenburg describes going on a death march from Regensburg, Germany to Lebenau, Germany; a German farmer picking him up from the road, where he fell; being brought by the farmer to American troops stationed in the nearby town of Laufen, where he was treated for malnutrition; his cousin coming to the same camp a few months later; returning with his cousin to Bayreuth, Germany, where there were other family members; reuniting in Prague with his future wife, Helen, whom he met in the Blechhammer work camp; getting married in 1947; receiving money and support from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency; attending a technical school organized by the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training; immigrating to the United States in September 1949 with Helen; and becoming a mechanic and starting his own business. [Note: This interview focuses on the interviewee’s post-Holocaust experiences. There is an earlier interview focusing on the interviewee’s Holocaust experience. This interview can be accessed by requesting RG-50.030*140.]

    Oral history interview with Rose Weisfeld

    Oral History

    Rose Weisfeld (née Friedman), born on March 28, 1914 in Radom, Poland, discusses her early life and schooling; social integration between Jews and Christians at home and at school; keeping Jewish customs and traditions at home; her religious education; her brothers’ conscription in the Polish army; being badly injured and hospitalized for a year; her family’s forced relocation to the Radom ghetto; her father’s death; the liquidation of the ghetto; doing factory work; being transported to Auschwitz via cattle car; the process of selections; being transported to Ravensbrück in 1944; being liberated by Swedish soldiers and their compassion; weighing 32 pounds at liberation; her hospitalization in Denmark and Sweden; finding work in a factory and regaining her humanity; her marriage in Sweden to another survivor; the birth of her children; finding her brother through the Red Cross after four years; immigrating to the United States to be with her brother; the difficulties of adjusting to life in the US; and the importance of raising her children with Jewish traditions.

    Oral history interview with Ruth E. Greifer

    Oral History

    Ruth Greifer (née Dahl), born May 30, 1922 in Geilenkirchen (near Aachen), Germany, discusses her father, who was a cattle dealer, and her Dutch mother; attending a private Catholic school and experiencing antisemitism but being treated well by the nuns; how the plaque on father’s business was shattered in 1938; moving to Valkenburg, Holland in the spring of 1938; Germans occupying the city on May 10, 1940 and her family hiding in catacombs during the bombing; having to wear the yellow star and obey curfew; her father’s business being taken away; the Germans ordering them to leave in June 1942, but she was allowed to stay because she was sick; her brother and two aunts being taken to Auschwitz; how a Mr. Jansen from the underground arranged for she and her parents to go into hiding; going to a coal miner’s house, while her parents went to another; being thought of as a risk and being relocated to a doctor’s house to be a maid; going into hiding at the Robertson’s house near Treebeek and Hoensbroek with another Jewish woman; getting money from the underground organization; hearing about the June 1944 invasion; going to a house in Treebeek; the heavy bombing in the city and hiding in a potato bin for three days; being liberated September 17, 1944; returning to her parents in Valkenburg; the loss of all of her mother’s Dutch family; sailing to the United states in the spring of 1948; settling with her sister in Pittsburgh, PA; getting married April 8, 1951 and having three daughters; moving to Washington, DC in 1957; and her feelings about Germany.

    Oral history interview with Nesse Godin

    Oral History

    Nesse Godin (née Galperin), born on March 28, 1928 in Siaulai, Lithuania, discusses her life after the war; being liberated by the Russians in Chynowie (known as Chinow in German) near Wejherowo, Poland on March 10, 1945; suffering from typhoid and dysentery and weighing 65 pounds; joining her mother and brother in Feldafing DP camp; going to ORT and UNRRA sponsored classes; getting married to Jack Godin, who had escaped from the Vilna Ghetto and whose family was killed in Ponary; having her first child in Munich, Germany; immigrating to United States in 1950 and settling in Washington, DC; becoming a citizen in 1955 and working as a dressmaker for 26 years; raising her children; sharing her Holocaust experience; working with the UJA, Jewish Community Council and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and the US Holocaust Memorial Council; working on projects at USHMM, including the “Remember the Children” exhibit, the ID project, and within the education and development departments; and her thoughts on the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Maryla Korn

    Oral History

    Maryla Korn (née Orgel), born on June 10, 1938 in Kraków, Poland, discusses going with her mother first to Wieliczka and then to Bochnia between late 1940 and early 1941; hiding with a peasant family but crying so much that she was returned to her mother; going to a ghetto in Bochnia at the end of 1941; her mother working outside the ghetto in a factory; taking messages outside the ghetto and bringing back food; leaving the ghetto in June 1943 and separating from her mother; carrying diamonds and money, but no luggage and bribing Germans and the Judenrat; traveling by truck to the border then by foot at night; being guided by paid partisans; her grandfather being shot at Bochnia cemetery, her grandmother being taken to Auschwitz, and her uncle being taken to Belzec in the summer of 1942; being by Czech collaborators in Kosice, Slovakia; being released and proceeding to Hungary with help from the Joint; being caught and sent to a prison in Budapest and the Joint getting her out; going to Usod, Hungary in the fall of 1943 and staying there until April 1944 under name of Orglowska; living as a Christian; being treated for gangrene in her leg; the roundup of Hungarian Jews in April 1944; her mother stealing passes and going to Budapest; staying with a Jewish Polish friend and then going to Bucharest, Romania with help from the Joint; almost boarding two different ships in Constanta, Romania going to Palestine, one of which (the Merkur) sank and the other ended up in Cyprus; being liberated by the Russians in the spring of 1945; going to Budapest and staying in a children’s home while her mother went back to Poland to check on family; her mother setting up a business in Vienna, Austria with an uncle; her father returning traumatized from the war; going to Brussels, Belgium in the winter of 1946-1947; going to Israel in 1951; living in both Israel and Brussels until immigrating to the United states in May 1961; getting married in June 1961 to David Korn, who is also a survivor; visiting her parents in Germany; and her work translating for USHMM.

    Oral history interview with Michel Margosis

    Oral History

    Michel Margosis, born in Brussels, Belgium on September 2, 1928, discusses immigrating to the United States in 1943; being taken in by father’s cousin in Brooklyn, then to foster home; his parents coming to the US in 1946; graduating from high school in 1947; graduating with honors from Brooklyn College in 1951; enlisting in the army and being sent to Germany as an interpreter but requesting to be transferred; becoming a medic near Verdun; feeling very American, but did not speak about his childhood with other soldiers; his feeling about Germany; working at USHMM with the Speakers Bureau and translating materials; speaking about his past; and being featured in the book “The Triumphant Spirit” by Nicholas del Calzo.

    Oral history interview with Lena Jurand

    Oral History

    Lena Jurand (Salzberg), born in Przemysl, Poland on September 13, 1917, discusses being an only child, educated in a Catholic school then at a music conservatory; meeting her husband Julian Jurand in 1931 and getting married in May 1940; living in the Russian part of town; her father being chosen for the Judenrat when the Germans took over; Jews having to give up jewelry and wear a star; the ghetto being formed in July 1942; moving with parents and in-laws from Lvov; working in a factory disinfecting uniforms; her father being taken away and how she went to the Gestapo headquarters and saved him from deportation to Auschwitz; meeting a Polish woman in the factory who offered to hide her and Julian; hiding for 22 months in room off of kitchen in a woman’s apartment; being liberated by Russians in August 1944; living in an apartment with her husband and cousins; living in Munich, Germany with UNRRA staff of the Neu Freimann DP Camp; teaching music to child survivors in camp for one year; moving to Genoa, Italy, where Julian practiced medicine; visiting her uncle for six months in New York, NY; going to the United States in 1951; living in New Jersey, where Julian worked in state hospital as a psychiatrist; and Julian becoming the clinical director at St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, D.C.

    Oral history interview with Wallace Witkowski

    Oral History

    Wallace A. Witkowski, born January 12, 1928 in Kielce, Poland, discusses his escape from Poland on a ship to Goteborg, Sweden in 1948; going to the United States; how his sister was caught by the communists and imprisoned; his struggle to find his father who had immigrated to the United States earlier; settling in Detroit, Michigan and adjusting to American life; how his mother and sister arrived in the U.S. later; attending high school and then Wayne State University; getting married in 1951; working as a radio disc jockey using the on-air name Jan Alexander; earning a law degree; working in Washington, DC and traveling between the United States and Poland; working for the Federal Trade Commission; living and working in Micronesia; his thoughts on religion and how the Holocaust affected him; his identity as a Catholic; his work as a translator; and his work with the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission.

    Oral history interview with Peter Masters

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Lena Gitter

    Oral History

    Lena Gitter (née Lieba Rosenblatt), born in 1905 in Vienna, Austria, discusses her life after the Holocaust; immigrating to the US in July 1938 with her husband and small daughter; her husband who worked as a physician; feeling guilty for many years about having escaped Vienna before the Holocaust; her long involvement with the Montessori schools both in Vienna and the United States; the Montessori method; working with people in Mississippi under Johnson’s War on Poverty program; the death of her husband in 1974; her plan to donate her collection of early childhood education materials to a library in Vienna; working under several Presidents of the United States.

    Oral history interview with Jacob Wiener

    Oral History

    Jacob Wiener (né Koppel G. Zwienicki), born March 25, 1917 in Bremen, Germany, discusses his experiences in the United States after World War II; the reaction to the war by the American media; his wife’s experience on the Kindertransport; his memories of watching Nazi war crime trials on television; his thoughts on Israel and Palestine; the Eichmann trial; how he was involved with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum from its founding; Holocaust education in American schools; antisemitism in the United States; and how he founded a school for mentally disabled children in the 1950s.

    Oral history interview with Noah Roitman

    Oral History

    Noah Roitman, born in Baranowicze, Poland (Baranavichy, Belarus) on January 10, 1923, discusses his religious upbringing and schooling; being very athletic; receiving warnings from his Christian friends in November 1938; his town being under Soviet rule in 1939; people being deported and his house being burned down; the German invasion on June 27, 1941; the formation of a ghetto on December 12, 1941; wearing the yellow star and working in arms factory; joining the resistance group of Mome Kopelovitz; the first action in the ghetto in March 1942; joining the partisans led by Pougatchov in the forest in August 1942; his activities sabotaging trains and bringing others out of ghetto (saving approximately 80 people); being sent to Pinsk, Belarus in late 1943; joining a group led by Major Igor, attacking trains; being ordered into Russian Army in Slutsk, Belarus in December 1943; fighting Germans and seeing Warsaw destroyed; being wounded by a sniper outside of Berlin, Germany; running a canteen for the Russian Army at the end of the war; returning to Poland; helping Jews get to Czechoslovakia; being captured and jailed, but escaping to Łódź, Poland; meeting his wife; traveling through Germany and France to get to Israel; being detained in Cyprus for 3 to 4 months; having a construction business in Israel; and immigrating to the United States in October 1963.

    Oral history interview with Richard W. Peterson

    Oral History

    Richard W. Peterson, born September 29, 1925 in Iowa, discusses his family’s Danish background; growing up in a Baptist family; first learning about the war in Europe and his family’s concern for Denmark; antisemitism in Iowa; hearing about the attack on Pearl Harbor; his involvement with ROTC and Boy Scouts; attending Drake University; joining the Army Specialized Training Reserve Program (ASTRP); reporting to Fort Crook for the reserve program and then to Camp Dodge in Iowa; being sworn into the U.S. Army; training at Camp Livingston in Louisiana with the 86th Blackhawk division; being assigned to A Company, 342nd Infantry; being sent to Le Havre, France; traveling through France, the Netherlands, and Germany; fighting in a battle in Attendorn, Germany; entering what appeared to be a factory in Attendorn and seeing starving people there; the reaction of his comrades to seeing the prisoners; the liberation of Auschwitz; being sent to the Philippines from September 1945 to March 1946; finishing his degree at the University of Iowa; graduating from law school in 1951; getting married; his father’s appointment to the Iowa Supreme Court; how he was a United States Magistrate Judge; his three children; and how he feels about American current events, politics, and world news.

    Oral history interview with Riane Gruss

    Oral History

    Riane Gruss (née Wohl), born on August 18, 1932 in Vienna, Austria, describes her father, who was a banker in Kraków, Poland and an industrialist in Vienna, and how her parents lived half a year in each place; she and her siblings being raised by a governess in Vienna; being in Kraków on September 1, 1939; going to Jaroslav, where there was bombing, then to Zloczow and to Kolomyja; her father and brother being captured at the border and her brother’s release; returning to Zloczow; being sent to Siberia by the Russians in July 1940; her younger brother getting scarlet fever; arriving in August 1940 near Yakutsk and Aldan and going to a labor camp; conditions in the camp; the hard physical labor for adults; how in April 1941 the NKVD said mothers and children could leave; their New York relatives getting them Bolivian passports; leaving in May and meeting her father in Lvov (L'viv, Ukraine); going to a farm in country for four months after the German invasion on June 22, 1941; her family following her uncle Joseph Stieglitz to Munkacs, Hungary (Mukacheve, Ukraine); getting Polish Christian papers; going to Budapest, Hungary; going to Szeged, Hungary, where her father had to be hospitalized; the children being hidden in the fall of 1944 in a caretaker’s house in Buda, Hungary; escaping when the Russians arrived and reuniting with her parents; going with her family to Mako, Hungary for four weeks then to Vienna; her parents returning to Kraków; going with a smuggler to Brno, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic) and then joining her parents in Kraków; going with her family to Stockholm, Sweden; going to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in October 1946; going to New York, in February 1951; and getting married in December 195 and having two children.

    Oral history interview with Regina Spiegel

    Oral History

    Regina Spiegel, (née Gutman) born May 12, 1926 in Radom, Poland, discusses her post-war experiences starting with her liberation; traveling with 3,000 other female prisoners by train from Elsnig, Germany to Dachau, Germany; how the train stopped on the way to Dachau because the railway line had been bombed; how the train itself was bombed by the Allies while stopped on the tracks; being able to escape during the bombing; traveling with 15 other women by horse and buggy to Poland; sleeping in German homes while traveling to Poland; avoiding large groups of Russian soldiers; promising her mother and her boyfriend that if they were separated during the war, they would meet in Radom, Poland; how she and her friends boarded a train in Poznań, Poland without any money; meeting a man on the train with whom she had been imprisoned in Pionki, Poland; returning to Radom where she was told that returning Jews were being killed; returning to the Radom Ghetto, where many displaced persons were gathering; writing her name on a list of displaced persons in the Radom Ghetto; traveling from Radom to Kozienice to reunite with her boyfriend, Sam; leaving Poland with Sam and traveling by train to Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic); traveling with the Joint Distribution Committee from Prague to Pilsen, Czech Republic and then to Germany; staying with Sam in the displaced persons camp Föhrenwald; her marriage to Sam in 1946; moving to Stuttgart, Germany, where she learned to be a seamstress through ORT classes; her involvement with the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York; her religious beliefs and how they changed throughout the war; moving to Washington, DC; how she and Sam learned to speak English; working as a seamstress before giving birth to a daughter in August 1951; her thoughts on the Yugoslavian conflict; her work with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum during its early development; her activity with the Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Friends of Greater Washington; returning with Sam to Auschwitz in 1975; speaking publically about the Holocaust; receiving an award from the United Jewish Appeal; and how she and Sam take groups of 16 to 18 year olds to Poland and Israel through the B'nai B'rith Youth Organization.

    Oral history interview with Charles Stein

    Oral History

    Charles Stein (né Karl Robert Stein), born in Vienna, Austria, on November 28, 1919, describes his childhood; attending medical school at the University of Vienna; immigrating to the United States and arriving on December 18, 1939; his draft into the army on October 7, 1941; discovering that his parents had gone into the Łódź ghetto; training at Camp Ritchie in Maryland; going to Normandy, France with the 9th Infantry Division as the commander of a prisoner-of-war interrogation team; helping to liberate Nordhausen and interrogating its Ukrainian guards; becoming an Army captain and then the chief of the translation section in the Office of Military History at the Pentagon; serving in Korea and Tokyo for five years; marrying an Air Force lieutenant in Tokyo; returning to the US and settling in Washington, DC; working for the Air Force Intelligence and for the State Department until his retirement in 1978; serving as a foreign service officer and being responsible for the resettlement of refugees in Europe; and writing about his experiences during the war.

    Oral history interview with Hannah Kalman

    Oral History

    Hannah Kalman (née Hannah Finer Kalmanowicz), born in 1912 in Opoczno, Poland and describes her family; moving to Łódź, Poland when she was 12 and joining a Zionist organization; meeting her husband in the Zionist organization and getting married in 1937; moving into the Łódź ghetto in 1939; living with her son, sister, and nephew in a small room with bad conditions; being deported with her family on one of the last transports out of the Łódź ghetto; never seeing her son and nephew again after their arrival at Auschwitz; her transport to Waldeslust, Germany, where she did hard labor; going on a death march to Bergen-Belsen; conditions in the camp; being liberated with her sister on April 15, 1945; the death of her sister two months after liberation; traveling around Poland looking for relatives; reuniting with her husband later in Poland; moving to Germany and having a son; immigrating to the United States; settling in Scranton, Pennsylvania; having a daughter; and living in Israel for a short time but ultimately settling in the United States for medical treatment.

    Oral history interview with Morris Rosen

    Oral History

    Morris Rosen, born on November 10, 1922 in Częstochowa, Poland, describes his family; being forced to paint rooms for German troops during the war; his deportation to Theresienstadt; being forced on a death march to Buchenwald; receiving help from the Red Cross after the war; traveling around Poland and Germany trying to find his sister; his time spent in displaced persons camps; his memories of the Nuremberg Trials; immigrating to the United States and settling in New York; the mental stress with which he dealt after the war; attending the international law program at Columbia; moving to Baltimore, Maryland in November, 1949; getting married in 1953; collecting items from the World War Two era; and his reflections on the state of antisemitism in today’s world.

    Oral history interview with Sam Spiegel

    Oral History

    Sam Spiegel, born in Kozienice, Poland on August 23, 1922, describes his family and childhood; being forced into a ghetto; his father’s involvement in the underground movement; working for the Judenrat and getting papers to leave the ghetto and get extra food; his deportation to Auschwitz in 1942; meeting his future wife in the camp; the Ukrainian camp guards; conditions in the camp and how inmates helped each other; going on a death march as the Allies neared Auschwitz; returning home and experiencing antisemitism; spending time in displaced persons camps; working for the United Nations Relief Organization and the Joint Distribution Committee after the war; getting married; immigrating to the United States; and returning to Europe to visit the concentration camps.

    Oral history interview with Fred Gutter

    Oral History

    Fred Gutter, born on December 25, 1926 in Sanok, Poland, describes his family and childhood; his memories of celebrating the Jewish holidays and Sabbath services; attending a high school and experiencing antisemitism; increasing persecution against Jews in the 1930s; moving to Lwów because of the difficulties his family faced; his family’s capture by Russian troops and living under Russian control; being released by the Russians at the end of the war and briefly returning to Sanok; staying in several displaced persons camps; reuniting with his father after the war; receiving aid from the Joint Distribution Committee; spending some time in Palestine and fighting in the 1948 war; immigrating to the United States in 1959; and his feelings about American politics.

    Oral history interview with Henry Greenbaum

    Oral History

    Henry Greenbaum, born on April 1, 1928 in Starachowice, Poland, describes his family and childhood; his memories of his family celebrating the Jewish holidays; being too young to understand the persecution that was happening around him; his family deciding that one of his sisters should immigrate to the United States in 1937; the establishment of a ghetto in Starachowice; his deportation to a labor camp in October 1942; attempting to escape but getting severely wounded and having to stay in the camp; his transfers to Auschwitz and then Flossenbürg; going on a death march from Flossenbürg; his liberation by the U.S. Army on April 25, 1945; spending time in a displaced persons camp after the war until his sister in America could send papers for him and his brother; immigrating to the United States in June 1946; adjusting to life in America and finding a job at a department store; settling in the Washington metro area; and interacting with other Holocaust survivors who live in his community.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Alper

    Oral History

    Ruth Alper, born on February 18, 1932 in Germany, describes her family and childhood; experiencing little antisemitism as a child; her memories of Kristallnacht; receiving an affidavit from family in Detroit, MI in 1939 to immigrate to the United States; arriving in Cuba and staying there until 1941, when she and her family moved to Miami, FL; the small Jewish community in Havana, Cuba; listening to the progress of the war on the radio; experiencing antisemitism in Miami; her recollections of the response of the American Jewish community experiencing the war from abroad; and creating a new life for herself in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Michael Lin

    Oral History

    Michael Lin, born in Riga, Latvia on September 14, 1936, describes his family and childhood; the Jewish community of Riga; the beginning of the war in 1941 and his family being forced to leave their home to settle in Yaroslavl (IAroslavl' ), Russia; catching malaria and developing pneumonia in 1941 but not being able to get medication; moving to another small village in Russia, where he remained until 1944 when his family moved farther east; having to shave his head to avoid getting lice; his father’s draft into the Russian Army; the end of the war and preparing to return to Riga; his experiences with antisemitism in Russia; beginning school after the war in Latvia; his draft into the Russian Army in September 1955; attending school in Moscow after he left the army; immigrating to Israel in 1969 with his wife and children; immigrating to the United States a few years later; and his reflections on sharing his memories of the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Hannah Kalman

    Oral History

    Chana Kalman, born on January 20, 1912 in Opoczno, Poland, describes her family and childhood; her experiences with antisemitism; moving to Łódź, Poland when she was eighteen years old; participating in a Zionist organization with several other young people; working during the day and attending a Hebrew school at night; getting married shortly before the death of her father in 1937; giving birth to a child on January 25, 1939; moving into the Łódź ghetto in 1940 and struggling to find food for herself and her son; the liquidation of the ghetto in August 1944; her deportation to Auschwitz with her sister and being forced around by SS men; her transfer to Bergen-Belsen shortly before her liberation; finding out about the death of her husband and child; getting remarried in 1946 and having a son and a daughter; remaining in Germany as a displaced person until 1950, when she immigrated to the United States; settling in Scranton, Pennsylvania; spending some time in Israel once her children had grown up; and her reflections on life in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Dorrit L. Ostberg

    Oral History

    Dorrit Liane Ostberg, born in Vienna, Austria on September 29, 1929, describes her family; her father fleeing to Paris, France after the Germans entered Austria; escaping to Paris with her mother and sister but discovering that her father had fled to Yugoslavia; arriving in Yugoslavia several months later; obtaining Yugoslavian citizenship and living in Slavonski-Brod and Zagreb (both in present day Croatia); fleeing to Crikvenica, Croatia after Croatian guards arrested her father; her family’s deportation to an Italian internment camp on Rab; attending school until she contracted hepatitis and had to stay in a hospital for four months; her liberation in September 1943; her family fleeing on a fishing boat to Italy and living openly as Jews in Bari, Italy with two Italian women; immigrating to Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York in July 1944; attending junior high school; moving to New York City after the war ended; attending university and becoming a math teacher; getting married three times and having one son; and her religious feelings.

    Oral history interview with Alice Eberstarkova Masters

    Oral History

    Alice Eberstarkova Masters, born in Trstená, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia) in 1925, describes her youth; her experiences with antisemitism before the war; immigrating to England in 1939 on a Kindertransport; working as a secretary for the Czech government-in-exile in London during the war; following the BBC broadcasts of the war’s progress; the end of the war and discovering that her parents had died in Auschwitz; her reflections on the Nuremberg Trials; participating in Zionist and Jewish organizations while in England; immigrating to the United States in March 1948; working for the International Monetary Fund; losing her religious faith; getting married and starting a family after the war; and telling her children and grandchildren about her experiences during the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Martin Weiss

    Oral History

    Martin Weiss, born in Polana, Czechoslovakia (possibly present day Veľká Poľana, Slovakia) on January 28, 1929, describes his post-war experiences living in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic with his sister; receiving papers to immigrate to the United States in 1946 and living with a distant cousin; working at a butcher’s shop, so he could support himself; opening his own meat store later in life; eventually deciding to volunteer at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; and not participating much in his faith anymore.

    Oral history interview with Leonard Gordon

    Oral History

    Leonard Gordon, born on June 8, 1925 in Tilsit, Germany (Sovetsk, Russia), describes growing up in Siauliai, Lithuania; his family; attending Jewish grade school and high school; the German invasion of Lithuania in 1941; trying to escape to Russia but instead having to return home and go into the Siauliai ghetto; his family’s transport to Stutthof in 1944; being transported with his father and brother to Dachau, where they worked at Mühldorf; building the German underground airport, Messerschmitt; his father’s proposal that the three of them commit suicide; hearing about the invasion of Normandy; the liberation of Dachau in May 1945; staying in a displaced persons camp in Feldafing and planning to move to Israel; traveling to Italy and studying to be a radio technician; immigrating to the United States; becoming an electrical engineer and serving in the United States Navy; and rediscovering religion after the death of his wife.

    Oral history interview with Fritz Gluckstein

    Oral History

    Fritz Gluckstein, born January 24, 1927 in Berlin, Germany, describes the end of the war in Berlin; the food and housing shortages; cleaning up rubble from bombings with his father; the difficulties of re-starting his education after the war; immigrating to the United States in January 1948 and settling in the Minneapolis and St. Paul area; becoming a veterinarian; and volunteering for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Oral history interview with Brigitte Freidin

    Oral History

    Brigitte Freidin, born in Augsburg, Germany on June 3, 1930, describes her family and childhood; her memories of Kristallnacht; her father being arrested and sent to Dachau after Kristallnacht; her father’s release and her parents’ decision to try to immigrate to the United States; traveling to England while waiting for permission to go to the U.S.; immigrating to the U.S. in 1941; staying with relatives who were taking in refugees in Washington, DC; losing touch with much of her family left in Europe and then discovering that many had died; participating in American student clubs during the war; working as a salesgirl when she was fourteen years old to help support her family; getting married and starting a family; and speaking about her personal experiences during the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Eva Kristine Belfoure

    Oral History

    Eva Kristine Belfoure, born on October 1, 1924 in Kraków, Poland, describes growing up in a Roman Catholic home; having many Orthodox Jewish friends in her childhood; teaching Catholic prayers to an elderly Jewish lady who was hidden in her home during the war; exchanging goods and delivering messages in the ghetto; being arrested in January 1942 and being taken to the Nordhausen concentration camp, where she worked in various labor camps; her deportation to the Rathsfeld firm, where she worked as a kitchen aide and remained until liberation; doing translation work in a field hospital in Nordhausen after the war; going to the displaced persons camps in Dora, Heilbronn, and Darmstadt; attending the university in Frankfurt after receiving aid from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency; immigrating to the United States in June 1950 and marrying a sailor in 1953; teaching languages in Baltimore County for twenty-five years; and translating for the Red Cross and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Oral history interview with George Hill Leonard

    Oral History

    George Leonard, a concentration camp liberator born on December 24, 1921 in Malden, Massachusetts, describes his childhood; his training in Alabama and California before he and his unit went to England; becoming the company runner, staying close to the captain and lieutenants; translating codes and delivering messages while at war; his memories of the fights at the Siegfried Line; receiving the Bronze Star after being wounded; traveling through parts of Germany along the Czech border and getting ordered to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria; helping to give the victims a proper burial; staying in the Mauthausen area for about six weeks until he went to Spital am Pyhrn, Austria in late July; leaving for America on December 15, 1945; getting married; and teaching at Harvard University after the war.

    Oral history interview with Kurt Roberg

    Oral History

    Kurt Roberg, born May 16, 1924 in Celle, Germany, discusses his childhood; attending a German school where he was the only Jewish student; his father Victor Roberg’s profession as a merchant for the firm Gebrüder Freidberg; his family’s religious practices; Kristallnacht; antisemitism in his hometown; details of German politics of the time; the boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933; how a retired teacher, Hal Lotheim, taught local Jewish students; the Hitler Youth in his community; his Bar Mitzvah; how his brother, Harry, immigrated in 1936 to Holland, the Netherlands to live with their maternal uncle, Wilhelm Marx; how his father had to close his business in 1937; his mother’s 1938 trip to Hamburg, Germany to visit the American consulate; how his father was sent to Oranienburg after Kristallnacht; his father’s release and experiences in Oranienburg; his journey to Holland to join his brother and uncle; how his mother and father used American visa applications to travel to Holland; how his mother, father, and brother immigrated to the United States from Holland in 1940; German attacks on Rotterdam, the Netherlands; being interned in Holland for his status as a German citizen; being sent out of Rotterdam to Gouda, the Netherlands; how a woman organized transports of children from Holland and Belgium to reunite with their parents; receiving his American visa in January 1941; leaving Holland in March 1941; traveling from Germany to Spain and then to Lisbon, Portugal by train with other children; traveling by American ship from Lisbon, Portugal to the United States; being held on Ellis Island for a month because of visa complications; living in New Rochelle, New York with his family; learning about Pearl Harbor; how he and his brother joined the army in 1943; experiencing antisemitism in the army; his experience in the Pacific during World War II; and his life with his family after the war.

    Oral history interview with Alfred Schnog

    Oral History

    Alfred Schnog, born January 25, 1931, discusses his childhood in Cologne, Germany; growing up in a relatively secular Jewish family on Universität Straße; his relationship with his grandparents who lived in Deutz, a suburb of Cologne; seeing Nazi parades and looking on with interest but feeling unwelcome; being harassed by Nazi Youth on his way home from school with his twin brother, Norbert; seeing signs in businesses barring Jews and learning that few business owners enforced this policy; spending Passover in a Catholic hospital after being injured in a car wreck and being provided with kosher food by the nuns; watching his father throw pieces of a gun into the Rhine when guns were banned for Jews; his father’s metal trade business being taken over by non-Jews; hearing about concentration camps but believing they would primarily affect immigrants (particularly Poles) and seeing Polish children taken out of his classes by the Gestapo; his parents’ search for a way out of Germany and eventual escape to the Netherlands in the summer of 1938; his family’s return to Germany in November 1938 to retrieve belongings; witnessing Kristallnacht from an upper-floor window of the Dome Hotel; his family being taken to jail as they tried to return to the Netherlands after the German borders were sealed, but eventually being allowed to go; attending Jewish school in Amsterdam and learning Dutch; applying to move to the United States and first going by plane to England in Jan 1940, then by ship (the Britannic) from Liverpool to New York City in April 1940; attending school in the United States; speaking Dutch with his brother because they did not want to be associated with Germans; experiencing discrimination in school when his third grade teacher admonished him and his brother for wearing an American flag pin on a holiday when they were not born in America; having his Bar Mitzvah and attending Hebrew school at the synagogue in Regal Park; experiencing antisemitism as his family vacationed in the Adirondacks, finding many signs restricting Jews from staying at hotels; learning that his grandparents had been killed in a concentration camp; graduating from Forest Hill High School and then receiving a degree in engineering from Cornell; going to Korea in 1954 to serve two years in the U.S. Army; starting and running a company; learning that a pair of his father’s cufflinks were given to his father in recognition of his Bar Mitzvah by Claus von Stauffenberg, a German officer who later led an assassination attempt against Hitler; his reflections on the way those who did not experience the Holocaust and WWII view it; his children’s knowledge of his and his parents’ experiences and how it has affected them; and his thoughts on Israel.

    Oral history interview with Fred Taucher

    Oral History

    Fred Taucher, born on January 29, 1933 in Berlin, Germany, describes his half-brother’s suicide to avoid Nazi concentration camps; the destruction of his father’s store during Kristallnacht; moving to a ghetto in 1938; his father’s inability to leave Germany despite his United State’s citizenship; his family’s relationship with a high ranking Nazi member; his father going into slave labor and then being sent to Auschwitz in 1943; his family’s escape from arrest; living in subway stations to avoid Allied bombings; getting arrested, tortured, and sent to Dachau in April 1945; escaping from the Nazis with some Russian soldiers; his mother’s death during a crossfire between the Germans and the Russians; his 1946 Bar Mitzvah in Berlin; life in Berlin after the Holocaust; his 1946 arrival in America; his decision to join the U.S. Army; his experiences trying to obtain United States citizenship; his life in America as a citizen and his activism in Holocaust survivor networks.

    Oral history interview with Helen Goldkind

    Oral History

    Helen Goldkind, born in Czechoslovakia (near Volosyanka, Ukraine) on July 9, 1928, describes her early childhood; experiencing antisemitism as a child; her recollections of the Nazi occupation of her town in 1944; her deportation to Auschwitz; how her grandfather was beaten to death for not relinquishing a Torah scroll; being sent to work at a munitions factory in Germany; being with her sister when they were liberated by British troops in 1945; spending time in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp to recover; receiving help from the Swedish Red Cross and traveling to Sweden to recover; immigrating to the United States in 1946 with her sister; finding a job as a secretary in New York City; getting married and moving to Baltimore; the death of her sister and raising her children; and her reflections on the current state of the world.

    Oral history interview with Inge Katzenstein

    Oral History

    Inge Katzenstein (née Berg), born March 27, 1929 in Cologne, Germany, describes her family; having to move in with some of her extended family in Cologne after Kristallnacht; attempting to illegally cross into Holland; getting into Holland but immediately being captured and imprisoned; immigrating to Kenya but not being able to leave their home their without permission; attending stenography school to become a secretary; immigrating to the United States in 1951 and settling in Vineland, New Jersey; getting married and raising her children as Orthodox Jews; and returning to Germany twice and getting treated well.

    Oral history interview with Werner Katzenstein

    Oral History

    Werner Katzenstein, born in Wallensen, Germany on April 29, 1922, describes his childhood; having to leave school in 1933 after Hitler came to power in 1933; his father going to prison because he was Jewish but getting released after about a week; his father being forced to close down his business; buying property in Holland and immigrating there in 1937; immigrating to the United States in 1939 and settling in Somerville, New Jersey; being considered an enemy alien; registering for the draft and being called to service in March 1944; being sent for basic training to Camp Blanding in Florida; being classified for intelligence and reconnaissance work; joining the 100th Infantry Division in Fort Bragg, North Carolina; his deployment to Europe; going through southern France and the Vosges Mountains; and getting wounded in combat; returning to his platoon in January 1945 and going through Germany; being in combat in Heidelberg; working for the military government; visiting family who had been in Theresienstadt; returning for New Jersey on April 30,1946; and getting married and settling in Washington, D.C.

    Oral history interview with Fred Goldman

    Oral History

    Fred Goldman, born in Fürth, Germany on September 6, 1915, describes his childhood; his memories of Hitler coming to power; finishing high school and moving to Berlin to train to be a cantor and teacher at a Jewish Teacher’s College; returning to Fürth after three years and moving back in with his mother and sister; immigrating to the United States in January 1939 because a distant cousin vouched for him; arriving in the U.S. with twelve dollars and taking a job as a busboy at a department store in New York; marrying Ruth Schuster, a Jewish women also from Fürth; working in a uniform factory until he was drafted into the army in March 1943; becoming a member of the medical corps but then being transferred into the military intelligence unit when the army learned he was fluent in German; going to Camp Ritchie in Maryland; interrogating prisoners in Europe; staying with the army until March 1946, when he returned to the United States and became a diamond setter; and settling in Silver Spring, Maryland after the war.

    Oral history interview with Paulette Stessin

    Oral History

    Paulette Stessin, born in Metz, France, discusses her family and childhood in France; her parents, who sold clothing in the market; keeping kosher; her understanding of events in Germany in 1938 when she was 17 or 18; her family’s move to Angouleme, France where they thought they would be safe; daily life in Angouleme; her work as a hairdresser in Brive la Gaillarde, France, where there was one Jewish family; being arrested near Brive in April 1944; being transferred to Drancy and then to Auschwitz-Birkenau; her memories of Auschwitz; working on a road hauling stones; “Pitchipoi,” a term referring to the imaginary place they would be sent to and used by the prisoners in Drancy; the addition of a chemical to the women’s soup to suppress their menstrual cycles, which did not work on her; deciding to join her “camp sister”, a Dutch woman in another barrack, who was being deported; arriving at Bergen-Belsen; her memories of the camp; being liberated in April 1945; traveling to Paris; her reintegration at the Hotel Lutetia; and her decision to return to Angouleme.

    Oral history interview with Margitta Cooper

    Oral History

    Margitta Cooper, born on June 10, 1929 in Speyer, Germany, describes her family and childhood; her relationships with her non-Jewish friends; her memories of Kristallnacht; her father being arrested and sent to Dachau after Kristallnacht; her family’s arrest in 1940 and being taken to the Gurs concentration camp; gathering with about 20 other children and being told they were to be sent to the United States; separating from her parents and seeing them for the last time; spending time in a small French town before her immigration; finally travelling to the United States by boat in 1941; taking a train to Baltimore, MD to recover with the other immigrant children; meeting an uncle in New York City; finding out about the fate of her family; settling into life in Baltimore and receiving a job at the Johns Hopkins hospital; and her reflections on what the world knew about the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Erika Eckstut

    Oral History

    Erica Eckstut, born June 12, 1928 in Znojmo, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), describes her family; staying with her sister and brother-in-law at the end of the war; marrying a member of the Czech Army, Robert Kauder, on August 28, 1945; living in Freiwaldau (Jeseník), Czech Republic; how her husband was the big boss (Velitel) in the city, removing Germans from the Sudetenland area; moving to Prague, Czech Republic; having two children over the next few years; how her husband testified at the Nuremberg Trials; the death of her husband in 1957; immigrating to the United States; finally arriving in the United States with her children on April 11, 1960 and being greeted by a swarm of reporters because she was among the first to be allowed to leave Communist Czechoslovakia; attending technology school; living with her sister, her sister’s husband, and their children for a year before getting her own apartment; meeting her current husband in 1962; her diagnosis of lung cancer in 1989; participating in a cancer research study and being one of two survivors of the seventy-five person study; and volunteering at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Oral history interview with Tole Johannes Madna

    Oral History

    Tolé Johannes Hendricus Madna, born June 8, 1931 in The Hague, the Netherlands, describes his Indonesian father and his Dutch Protestant mother; living in Holland during the war; the divorce of his parents in 1936; living with his father and a nanny; hiding the infant son, Alfred Munzer, of family friends; the child staying with his family for three and a half years and calling him Bobby; moving to Belgium after the war; and immigrating to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Henri Dupuy

    Oral History

    Henri Dupuy, born June 5, 1920 in Thiviers, France and designated Righteous Among Nations, discusses his anger at the French government and Germany; his decision to join the Resistance; Constantin, nom de guerre Jambard, leader of the Armée Secrète (AS) who formed the Maquis in 1942 in Perigueux, France; how his mother, Helene, hid Maquis members in her home and procured ration cards; joining the police to avoid the draft; guarding the Perigueux Gestapo headquarters and stealing letters stamped “Dordogne,” denouncing French citizens; the November 10, 1943 Maquis attack in Perigueux and roundup and deportation of 350 Jews to Auschwitz; the arrest of the Gruska family and escape of their children; how his mother placed two Gruska sons with rural families and the daughter in a convent; how his mother secured forged identity papers with the complicity of Secretary-General Lafont, joining the Messignac Maquis; Maquis attacks from the woods; the supply of small arms by the Riberac police and by parachute drops; how the Maquis were denounced and attacked by Germans; hiding in Coursac, Dordogne, France and joining the Roland Maquis; a Maquis attack on the Neuvic-Bordeaux train carrying French francs to Germany in July or August 1944; and how the Maquis offloaded the francs in a truck to Saint-Alvere, a resistance center in the Dordogne, to support Maquis families and resistance activities.

    Oral history interview with Halina Peabody

    Oral History

    Halina Peabody (née Halina Janna Litman), born in Kraków, Poland on December 12, 1932, describes her childhood; taking on a false identity (Halina Litinska) during the war and pretending to be Catholic; hiding in Jaroslaw with her mother and younger sister; being injured on the day of liberation by a hand grenade; being liberated by the Russian Army; living in group homes with her sister after the war; traveling to Italy with her family and staying at a displaced persons camp; traveling to England and then going to Israel in 1957; taking a job at the American embassy in Tel Aviv; marrying a Bulgarian Jew who worked for the U.S. Information Agency; leaving Israel in 1968 with her husband and five year old son; immigrating to Palo Alto, California, where her husband could get a job at the Hoover Institute; moving to Washington, D.C., where Halina’s husband got a job working for “The Voice of America”; getting a divorce from her husband in 1972 and then marrying Richard Peabody; volunteering at the Holocaust Museum; and getting involved with survivor groups such as the Association of Child Survivors.

    Oral history interview with Marcel Bercau

    Oral History

    Marcel Bercau, born October 17, 1920 in Paris, France, describes his Romanian family; restrictions placed on Jews during German occupation; his deportation to Drancy in 1941; working in a locksmith's workshop and remaining in Drancy with his father and brother for a year before they were deported; going to Auschwitz, where he worked as an earth-worker and then as a bricklayer; working in the schlosser-electriker division, which allowed him to find a little bit of extra food; the evacuation of Auschwitz on January 17, 1945; going on a death march with 60,000 other prisoners and traveling through the snow and the cold with no food; arriving in Gleiwitz, Germany (Gliwice, Poland), where they were put in open cattle cars and transported to Oranienburg; how while they passed through Prague, Czech Republic people threw them bread and water containers; how four out of five people died during the transport; the German abandonment of Landsberg, where he was being held; being rescued and taken to Augsburg, where there was a repatriation camp; and returning to Paris to start a family.

    Oral history interview with Rolph Hammel

    Oral History

    Rolph Hammel, born on September 11, 1912, in Karlsruhe, Germany, describes his family; his involvement with a Zionist youth movement; being forced to do military service in 1933 in Dijon; getting scarlet fever; moving to Strasbourg, France and working in a hardware store before starting his own faucet and fixtures business in 1937; being allowed to remain in France because he had inherited citizenship from his mother who was French; working in the DCA during the war; helping to save 70 Jews in Périgueux, France; going to the ORT school; and his reflections on the treatment of Jews during the war.

    Oral history interview with Norbert V. Hilsberg

    Oral History

    Norbert Hilsberg, born on September 3, 1914 in Vienna, Austria, describes his family; graduating college and serving in the Austrian military for three months; starting the forms to immigrate to the United States after the Anschluss; his parents’ immigration to Cuba, where they stayed until April 1941, when they attained visas for the United States; receiving his visa in June 1938 and traveling to the United States; living with his uncle in Philadelphia, PA when he arrived; learning about the invasion of Poland; working in the advertising department of the Litz department store in Philadelphia; volunteering for the US Army in February 1941; getting sent to an engineering camp, where he made maps; the attachment of his outfit to the general headquarters in DC; being forced to remain in the US when his unit went abroad because he was not yet eligible for his American citizenship; receiving his citizenship in April 1943 and working on plans for the invasion of southern France and Austria; living in North Africa for nearly a year; being sent to Hawaii; leaving the army in 1945; accepting a job with the war department; and settling in Washington, DC with his family.

    Oral history interview with Alfred Munzer

    Oral History

    Alfred Munzer, born in The Hague, Netherlands on November 23, 1941, describes his family; how his parents debated over having him circumcised; his family going into hiding in May 1942; his father being admitted into a psychiatric hospital and his mother working at the psychiatric hospital as a nurse’s aide; his two older sisters being taken in by a Catholic family; going into hiding with a family friend and neighbor, Tolé Madna; how he played in the backyard and was called Bobby; his parents being sent to a concentration camp on December 26, 1942; his mother surviving the war, working first as a seamstress and later as an electrician; how his father died soon after liberation; the death of his sisters in Auschwitz; immigrating to Brussels, Belgium in 1952 and to the United States in 1958 with his mother; settling in New York where he attended Brooklyn College; going on to attend medical school at the State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn; becoming a lung specialist and interning at several well known-hospitals before doing military service at Andrews Air Force base in Washington, D.C.; and settling in D.C. with his partner Joel Wind.

    Oral history interview with Maria Mandel

    Oral History

    Maria Myriam Mandel, born 1938 in Czerwinsk, Poland, discusses the assembly of the town's citizens in a square and their deportation; her family's escape through a bakery door; hiding from the Gestapo in granaries, cemeteries, and the woods; her parents’ execution by the Gestapo in 1942; her placement by her parents in a neighbor's home from 1942 to 1947; her new name, Katia Gortak; the kindness of her foster mother and brother; her Catholic education; her antisemitic feelings; the painful loss of her brother and sister who were placed in other families and abandoned; the arrival of the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) at the end of the war; reuniting with her uncles in America and France; her shock at learning she was Jewish; her transfer to a Jewish orphanage in Czerwinsk, where she received a Jewish education; her recollections of antisemitism at the war's end; her life in the orphanage from 1947 to 1949; visits by her foster mother; her bitterness when visits ceased; how the JDC changed her birth date from 1938 to 1937 to allow her to travel alone from Poland to France; her arrival in Paris, France; her refusal to join her uncle in America; and her life in Perigueux, France with her paternal uncle and his family.

    Oral history interview with Yvonne Mignot de Royere

    Oral History

    Yvonne Mignot de Royere (née Roux), born in Clermont d’Excideuil, France on February, 22, 1925, describes how she and her father, Joseph Roux, saved 21 Jews during World War II; the evacuation of Jews in Strasbourg in 1939; working with her father, who was the mayor; taking in French Jewish refugees; how her work as a municipal clerk gave her access to forms and papers, which she used to provide the Jews with forged identity papers and ration cards; hiding Jews in the village rectory; one of the Jewish women giving birth to her daughter, Arlette Veil, in 1943; she and her father saving several families (last names: Robertso, Schwab, Wertz, and Veil); how three of the families were hidden in the caretaker’s house at the Chateau du Noyer and she helped them secure food; how she occasionally left the mayor’s office unlocked so that the families could secure additional ration cards; living in Excideuil from 1942 to 1944, after which the Jews returned to Alsace to rebuild their lives; staying in touch with the people she helped; and being honored with her father by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among Nations in 1982.

    Oral history interview with Susan Berlin

    Oral History

    Susan Berlin (née Suzanna Reichman), born on June 22, 1926 in Rožňava, Czechoslovakia (present day Slovakia), describes her family; her childhood in Rožňava; her memories of the rise of Nazi power; immigrating to the United States on August 3, 1939; settling in New York City, where she went to Julia Richmond High School; graduating in 1942 and attending Brooklyn College for her undergraduate degree and the University of Pennsylvania for her master’s degree; graduating in 1947 and moving to Washington D.C., where she got a job in the Army Intelligence Map Service as an Army Intelligence Research Analyst; marrying in 1950 and having three daughters; retiring from the Army Intelligence Map Service to raise her daughters; becoming an art teacher when her children got older; and volunteering at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in the Education Department.

    Oral history interview with John Bucur

    Oral History

    John Bucur, born in Youngstown, Ohio on March 5, 1925, describes his childhood; his Romanian-American parents; the multiracial community he grew up in; graduating high school in 1943 as the valedictorian of his class and receiving a scholarship to Ohio University; enlisting in the Army and being sent to Fort Sill, where he received training to be in Battery B of the 17th Observation Battalion; his first assignment watching a ship off the shore of Omaha Beach in France on D-Day; his unit’s move through England, France, and Germany and then going on a tour of Buchenwald at the end of the war; taking college courses at an American School in Biarritz, France after the war; returning home on December 7, 1945 and being discharged from the army; finishing his degree at Ohio University and graduating in 1948; going on to medical school and becoming a neurosurgeon; having five children with two wives; and moving to Arlington, Virginia to found Fairfax Hospital, Northern Virginia Doctor’s Hospital, and the National Orthopedic Hospital.

    Oral history interview with Lore Schneider

    Oral History

    Lore Schneider (née Heti Lore Koppel), born on October 10, 1924 in Bochum, Germany, describes her family; seeing the Nazi youth in her neighborhood; observing the Nazi parades from her home on the main street; immigrating to the United States in June 1934; settling in Washington, D.C. and attending public school; obtaining U.S. citizenship in 1939, five years after her family’s arrival; attending college at night and working as a stenographer at the Interior Department during the war; and marrying in 1946 and having three children.

    Oral history interview with Frank Liebermann

    Oral History

    Frank Nathan Liebermann (né Franz Natan Liebermann), born in Gleiwitz (Gliwice), Poland on January 19, 1929, describes his family; celebrating Jewish holidays; immigrating to the United States in October 1938 and moving to Dayton, Ohio, where his father set up his medical practice; his family’s involvement in the Jewish community and helping many European Jews to immigrate to the United States; attending Western Reserve University; meeting his wife during his sophomore year and marrying her soon after he graduated; working for a textile converting firm for many years before retiring and moving to Washington, D.C., where his two daughters had already settled; finding a job at a travel firm; and beginning to volunteer at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum after September 11th, 2001.

    Oral history interview with Marianne Liebermann

    Oral History

    Marianne Liebermann, born in Vienna, Austria on October 29, 1929, describes her family and childhood; her education; her father searching for ways to leave Vienna and immigrating to the United States after the Anschluss; her father’s efforts to convince a gentile American family, with whom he had previously done business, to vouch for his family; boarding a train to Cherbourg, France in September 1938 and transferring to the Europa ship, which took them to the U.S.; arriving in New York on October 3, 1938 and living there when the war broke out in 1939; graduating from Barnard University and later going on to get her master’s degree at Adelphi University; marrying Frank Liebermann on November 23, 1950; settling down in Great Neck, New York and having three children; becoming a teacher and spending many years teaching English as a second language; and settling in Maryland.

    Oral history interview with Thea S. Rips

    Oral History

    Thea S. Rips, born in Trieste, Italy on February 24, 1922, describes her childhood; her family moving to Rijeka, Croatia when she was five years old; growing up in a Catholic family but having many Jewish friends; witnessing the persecution of nearby Jewish families; aiding several families in their attempts to escape Italy; wanting to become a doctor and working in a shipyard infirmary in Rijeka; getting a job working on the Marshall Plan after the war in Rome, Italy; being offered a chance to move to the United States and work as an interpreter in 1955; meeting her husband, who she was engaged to for eighteen years before they married in February 1976; going to the United States and living in New York; moving to Washington, D.C.; and the death of her husband in September of 1994.

    Oral history interview with Andrew Glass

    Oral History

    Andrew (né Andrej) James Glass, born November 30, 1935 in Warsaw, Poland, discusses his early childhood; spending time in his wealthy grandfather's house because of his mother's illness; his grandfather, Jacob, repatriating millions of dollars which had been deposited in Switzerland, New York, and London, back into zlotys in Poland because of a 1939 government decree; hearing planes and bombs exploding in September 1939; his father being forced to clear rubble and fill sandbags; supplying gas to a gentile taxi driver and two families driving east on September 13; going by horse and cart and then by train and on foot to Vilnius, Lithuania; his father getting picked up by a Lithuanian patrol but being released when he agreed with them that President Roosevelt was Jewish; his family receiving three Japanese visas from Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese Consul; paying 600 dollars to get Soviet transit visas; traveling on the Trans-Siberian Railway and arriving in Japan in December 1940; getting three residence visas to the Dominican Republic and a one week transit visa from the American Consul in Tokyo, Japan; sailing on the Kama Kumakara in April 1941 to San Francisco, CA; taking the train to New York, NY and staying there until 1943; immigrating to Canada; re-entering the U.S. under the Polish quota; his father working in a defense plant and his mother working as a seamstress in New York; how he determined to not feel different; working for the New York Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, Senators Javits and Percy, and Cox newspapers from 1974 to 2001; becoming a Fellow at Harvard and the managing editor of The Hill newspaper; and feeling that he is living on borrowed time, that life is precious, and that there is a randomness to who survives.

    Oral history interview with Renate Fischer Chernoff

    Oral History

    Renate Fischer Chernoff, born on June 25, 1929 in Breslau, Germany (Wrocław, Poland), describes her early childhood; moving to Racibórz, Poland with her family in 1934; being sent to Berlin, Germany to stay with her grandmother in 1937; her family choosing to immigrate to Canada since her father was a physician; arriving in 1938 and settling in Montreal; moving to New Brunswick; her parents adopting Saul Silvershein, a sixteen year old Polish boy from a displaced persons camp; attending college at Dalhousie University; meeting her husband while in graduate school at the University of Chicago; marrying in New Brunswick in 1953 and moving to Saint Louis, MO where her husband finished his residency and their first child was born; moving to Durham, NC, where they had two more children; and settling in the Washington, DC area in 1980.

    Oral history interview with Eli Dortort

    Oral History

    Eli Dortort (né Klemfner), born on August 30, 1920 in Zdachov, Galicia, Poland, describes his family and childhood; escaping his hometown a few hours before the Germans invaded; traveling with some Russian soldiers to Kiev, Ukraine and then to Starobielsk (Starobil's'k), Ukraine, where he volunteered for the Polish Army; his unit being sent to Israel, where he deserted and worked in a kibbutz; staying in the kibbutz for a year before he joined the British Army and was sent to Italy; later being stationed in Teheran, Iran and Egypt; returning to Israel after the war and fighting in the War of Independence; staying in Israel until the late 1950s, when he immigrated to the United States; and settling in New York City, where he met his wife and had a daughter.

    Oral history interview with Hilda Seftor

    Oral History

    Hilda Seftor (née Cohen), born in Edinburgh, Scotland on August 21, 1923, describes her family and childhood; finding out about the Nazi invasion of Poland; helping her local Jewish community and finding homes for thirty-five Jewish refugee children; her parents founding the Whittingehame Farm School; teaching the school’s Jewish children how to farm and giving them a traditional education; attending the Edinburgh College of Domestic Science and graduating with a degree in household and institutional management in 1943; working in the Edinburgh school system and later at a wartime nursery preparing meals for children; marrying after the war and immigrating to the United States; having four sons; moving to Washington, DC in 1994; and volunteering at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Oral history interview with Felix Nicinski

    Oral History

    Felix Nicinski (né Fievish Nicinski), born December 7, 1925 in Lochów, Poland near Lódź, Poland, discusses his early childhood; moving in to the fenced-in ghetto in early 1940; how the Germans bombed their city before entering it; being taken to a work camp in Lienzingen (Mühlacker, Germany) in late 1940 with the other 14 to 18 year old boys to dig ditches; slipping away on a march in the summer of 1941 to work and escape to the fenced-in ghetto in Kalisz, Poland; receiving the false identity of an escaped 27 year old; Kalisz Jews being sent to the Lódź ghetto in 1941; being forced to wear the yellow star and beaten by the German guards; working at an ammunitions plants in Skarżysko-Kamienna for 10 months in 1942; being sent to Dora in 1943 and then to Buchenwald in 1944 for six months; his transfer to Bergen-Belsen in 1944; being liberated by the British on April 15, 1945; living in Bamberg, Germany between 1945 to 1948 and learning how to be a barber; immigrating to Australia in 1948 and living there for ten years; immigrating to the United States in 1958; and marrying another survivor of Bergen-Belsen.

    Oral history interview with David Brombart

    Oral History

    David Brombart, born on August 3, 1933 in Brussels, Belgium, discusses his childhood; the German invasion in May 1940 and being able to attend school until mid-1941; the deportation of his sister, Sarah, and his mother in August 1942; running away from a boarding school in Ikla (possibly Uccle in Brussels) and his father placing him in the home of business clients; going into hiding in Hornu, Belgium but visiting his father, who was in hiding in another city; his liberation in September 1944 and returning to Brussels with his father; finding out that his grandfather was a member of the Jewish Committee which made up lists for the Germans; returning to school at age 11 and learning how to write; serving in the Belgian Army from 1952 to 1954 and becoming the head of the Socialist Democratic Youth until 1958; having a full time job with the Young Socialist Guard and attending international conferences as the Labor Secretary from 1958 to 1964; living in Paris, France from 1958 to 1959; getting married in 1961; being offered a job to direct the African Labor Institute of the American organization AFL-CIO; moving to New York and advising labor movements in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia; becoming Deputy Director of the International Department of the AFL-CIO under Lane Kirkland; and being honored for his international labor work by the governments of Dahomey, Togo, and Senegal.

    Oral history interview with Gunter Haimann

    Oral History

    Gunter Haimann, born on January 26, 1922 in Koblenz, Germany, describes his childhood and family; his parents deciding that it was time to leave Germany in the beginning of 1937, when Jewish children were banned from public schools; immigrating to the United States and living with his aunt in Queens, New York; attending high school and night school to learn English; graduating in June 1941 and finding a job at an auto shop; his draft into the army at the beginning of the war and being trained as an interrogator; teaching interrogating techniques at Camp Ritchie in Maryland; his transfer into the 101st Airborne; going to England and jumping on D-Day and landing in Carentan, France; serving with the 101st for the remainder of the war; receiving a Purple Heart after being wounded in Bastogne, Belgium; not taking religion in to account while he was fighting; jumping onto Holland on Rosh Hashonah in 1944; going into Düsseldorf, Germany; finding Hitler’s stationary and using it to write letters; going to Austria and finding Mr. and Mrs. Goering and speaking with Mrs. Goering; seeing Holocaust survivors walking home; returning to the United States and starting a luncheonette business; and meeting his wife and having three children.

    Oral history interview with Alfred Lakritz

    Oral History

    Alfred Julian Lakritz, born on June 1, 1934 in Kiel, Germany, describes his family; narrowly escaping deportation to Poland in 1939 and moving to Antwerp, Belgium and then Marmande, France with his family; experiencing antisemitism from his peers in Marmande; how his father was arrested; speaking with the men who arrested his father many years later, and their regret; being sent with his brother to a Jewish summer camp in Creuse, France in July 1942; going into hiding in various safe houses for two and a half years after leaving the camp; ending up at a convent in Lourdes, France, where they met a Jewish French woman who took them in for the remainder of the war; being placed in a Catholic home in Tarbes with his brother after the war; reuniting with their mother in Marmande and applying for visas to the United States; immigrating to the United States in 1950 and settling in Oakland, CA; attending the University of California at Berkeley; completing his law degree; moving to Los Angeles, CA with his wife, whom he had met in law school; and raising a family.

    Oral history interview with Rita Rubinstein

    Oral History

    Rita Rubinstein (née Frieda Rifka Lifschitz), born on December 12, 1936 in Romania, describes her family and early childhood; her father’s draft into the Russian Army; going into hiding in Transnistria, Ukraine in September 1941; her liberation by Russian troops in April 1944; returning to their home in Romania and discovering that her father had died during the war; attending school for the first time and learning Russian and Ukrainian; traveling to Munich, Germany and posing as a Greek refugee; living in the Feldafing displaced persons camp for some time; developing tuberculosis in 1947 and having to go to a sanitarium in Augsburg, Germany; immigrating to the United States with her mother in September 1949 and settling in New York, NY; and getting married in 1959 and starting a family.

    Oral history interview with Anita Etzyon

    Oral History

    Anita Etzyon, born on October 4, 1941 in Boryslav, Poland (present day Ukraine), describes her family and childhood; being one year old when her mother died from tuberculosis; having few direct memories of the war but being told about her family’s life during that time; being taken away to live with a Christian family and getting baptized to better fit into her surroundings; returning to live with her father, who had remarried, after the war; living in a Jewish neighborhood and attending a Jewish school; moving to various cities around Poland with her father and step-mother; being the only Jew in her school in Swidnica, Poland; adjusting to life as a Jew after she had spent four years as a Christian; immigrating to Israel in 1951; learning Hebrew and adjusting to life in Israel; getting married to avoid serving in the Israeli Army; having a daughter; immigrating to the United States with her husband and daughter 1963; settling in Washington, DC and working for a Jewish Day School; and her reflections on being a Jew in the modern world.

    Oral history interview with Melvin Galun

    Oral History

    Melvin Galun, born on May 10, 1940 in Kowal, Poland, describes his parents’ participation in the Zionist movement; his mother’s stories about Jews being sent away to the camps; going into hiding in the nearby forests; his memory of his family’s liberation by Russian troops; staying in several German displaced persons camps after the war; his early education in the displaced persons camps; participating in Zionist youth movements in the camps; immigrating to the United States in November 1949; his studies in the United States at a Yeshiva school; traveling to Israel after graduating school and working in a kibbutz for a year; and getting married in 1963 and starting a family.

    Oral history interview with Magdalena Farkas Berkovics

    Oral History

    Magdalena Farkas Berkovics, born on July 15, 1919 in Cluj, Romania, discusses her childhood, schooling and musical training in a conservatory; experiencing low level antisemitism; getting married in 1939; living in her house in the Cluj ghetto with other women after the city’s Jewish men had been taken away for forced labor; conditions in the ghetto, including food scarcity and the black market; providing piano lessons to Christian children; being deported in June 1944; terrible conditions in the train car; her arrival at Auschwitz; being separated from her family except for one 25-year-old cousin; how her clothes were taken away and her hair removed; going to Stutthof in August 1944 and then digging ditches in Steinort (Sztynort, Poland), Elbing (Elbląg, Poland), and Groudentz; speaking about freedom with the other women and singing Hungarian songs; being liberated and traveling to Satu Mare, Romania, where Jewish volunteers helped her return to Cluj; how she found Christians living in her house and learned that she was the only survivor in her family; marrying, Zoltan Berkovics, in 1946; the birth of their son, Tiberius, who later changed his name to John Sylvanis because of antisemitism in Romania; how Communists nationalized her house and forced her to pay rent; teaching in the Romanian conservatory for 30 years; immigrating with her husband to the United States in the 1980s; and feeling very grateful for American liberty and democracy.

    Oral history interview with Sol Mackler

    Oral History

    Sol Mackler, born on January 15,1921 in Poland, discusses his childhood in a small village; visiting relatives in nearby Radom; being forced to live in a ghetto in 1939 with sixteen people in one house; wearing a yellow star; in late 1941 walking seven miles to Pionki labor camp, being given a striped uniform and the number 1058; working in a munitions factory, then laying railway tracks in a tunnel; escaping with four other prisoners to the forest and joining Polish Jewish partisans; being captured by Germans and being sent by train to Sachsenhausen; seeing his sister and her baby there; smuggling his one year old nephew into Pionki to the child’s father, a tailor who made Nazi uniforms; waiting for Russians at liberation; going back to his village and being severely beaten; living in Bad Nauheim displaced persons camp in Germany; working on the black market selling diamonds from Belgium; arriving in the United States in December 1949 after being sponsored by two Jewish Californian wine makers; moving to New York to work and getting married in 1956; working for his brother-in-law; and finding out his parents were executed in Treblinka.

    Oral history interview with Theresia Bauer

    Oral History

    Theresia Bauer discusses her involvement with the League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel), which paralleled the boys’ Hitler Youth (Hitler Jugend); the Soviet occupation of Austria, a time period in which she was constantly hiding from soldiers; and her husband's experience as a prisoner of war in Russia.

    Oral history interview with Carolina Taitz

    Oral History

    Carolina Taitz (née Lena Knoch), born on February 24, 1929 in Russia on a train, discusses her childhood in Viesite, Latvia; having friendly relations with schoolmates in her Latvian public school; how her father, a tree doctor, lost his business and the family house and was temporarily imprisoned as a capitalist when the Russian Communists occupied the town; experiencing a lot of antisemitism; seeing Jews being shot on the street when the Germans came in 1941; being forced to live in the ghetto in Riga, Latvia with five people to a room and little food; getting hit in the eye when a German soldier caught her with a cooked potato; being forced to work in a shoe polish factory from 5 AM to 5 PM; going on a forced march with 30,000 people guarded by German soldiers; seeing and hearing people being shot in a ditch in the Rumbula forest; walking with her mother, sister, and 200 other women to Termini prison; staying on the roof in the cold for two weeks in November 1942 and the birth of a baby, named Termina; going back to the ghetto; dressing as a boy going to work and escaping during a second Aktion when she was 14 years old; taking off her yellow star; being sheltered by a Russian Evangelist priest, Vladimir Michko, and his sister for two and a half years; living in their cellar; going back to Riga at liberation; her mother returning from Auschwitz but dying soon after; attending acting school; getting married and having a daughter; trying for 10 years to go to the United States, and finally getting a visa with the help of Eleanor Roosevelt; arriving in New York in March 1966; working at the New York City Opera for 19 years in charge of costumes, wigs, and makeup for the productions; being widowed twice and moving to Washington, DC in 2008; and still seeing her mother and little brother in her dreams and herself running away from German soldiers.

    Oral history interview with Helen Schwartz

    Oral History

    Helen Schwartz (b. Hela Kirschner), born in 1925, discusses living in the Łódź ghetto in Poland from 1939 to August 1944; working in a laundry in the ghetto; being taken with her family to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944; being marched from Auschwitz to Stutthof; her liberation by the Russians near Gdansk, Poland; contracting typhus in an outbreak that hit a group of female survivors following liberation; returning to Łódź and reuniting with her sister; reuniting with her brother at the displaced persons camp in Ainring, Germany; immigrating in 1949 to Portland, Maine, where her husband worked in a clothing factory; opening a tailor’s shop in 1954; raising a family; volunteering at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; and speaking at schools in Silver Spring, Maryland.

    Oral history interview with Irene Silver

    Oral History

    Irene Silver, born Irena Dynkewicz in Łódź, Poland on January 30, 1933, discusses raising her children in the Jewish tradition, being comfortable with friends who understand the Holocaust experience; her anger with people who ask why victims did not fight back during the Holocaust; being tolerant of strangers after having lived with strangers in the Warsaw Ghetto; her work as a social worker and how it was influenced by her wartime experiences; her sympathy with the civil rights movement; her membership in the Hidden Children group in New York where she feels a common ground; receiving Holocaust reparations which she used to help her children; her view that the world has not learned any lessons from the Holocaust; and her emotion at the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, feeling that the rain at the opening ceremony was the heavens crying.

    Oral history interview with Herman Taube

    Oral History

    Herman Taube (né Herschel Taube), born February 2, 1918 in Łódź, Poland, discusses his family; being orphaned by age nine; living with grandparents and later moving to Piyotrkov; attending a yeshiva; being encouraged by a Polish doctor to become a medic; returning to his grandparents in Łódź in 1935 and seeing antisemitic incidents; writing poetry; belonging to a literary society and meeting the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber; working in a military hospital in Alexandrov (possibly Aleksandrów Łódźki, Poland), arranged by Father Jagla, a Catholic priest; joining the Polish Army in August 1939; serving in a medical group that marched to the Bug River where the Soviet Army ordered the group to go to Volodymyr-Volyns'kyĭ, Ukraine to get educated so as to lose their capitalist mentality; accompanying a wounded soldier to Poltawa (Poltava), Ukraine, where an Ukrainian militia man arranged for him to take a new name, Grigori Arionowicz Taube, and live with a Jewish family; going to Samarra (Koibashov or possibly Kuybyshev) and getting more medical training; being sent to Tyumen (Tiumen') in Siberia and working in hospitals and in gulags; in November 1941 going to Tashkent, Uzbekistan and then to Andizhan, Uzbekistan; working in a malaria clinic; leaving the clinic after reporting that people were stealing food from the hospital; going to Seratov, Russia to the Polish Army; being assigned to the Kotsk offensive in June 1944; being badly injured by a mine explosion while riding in a truck; recovering enough by December 1944 and going to Lublin, Poland to the Polish Army headquarters in Majdanek; being assigned to Platte and opening a Red Cross repatriation station where he treated people with typhus; going to Keslin in Bessarabia in June 1945 to acquire more medicine from a CIBA warehouse; meeting a young woman, Susan Strauss, a survivor from Germany and traveling together to Potsdam, Germany; staying in a displaced persons camp in Halle-Merseburg, Germany, where he opened a Red Cross station; meeting a young Auschwitz survivor, Henry Rothfogel; traveling with Susan back to Platte, and getting civilly married and later religiously married; traveling with Susan and Henry in the summer of 1946 to Berlin, Germany with help from the Bricha; adopting a two year old child survivor, Mark; having first child in the Zingenheim displaced persons camp in September 1946; arriving in the United Sates on April 18, 1947 and being interviewed at the pier by the Jewish Daily Forward; going to Baltimore, MD to join Susan's father; writing for the Jewish Daily Forward; traveling to New York, NY to edit a Histadrut yearbook; returning to Baltimore and helping Susan run a grocery store; working for various Jewish organizations; obtaining accreditation as a journalist at the White House and in Congress; and continuing to write poetry, stories, and essays about the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Regine Ginsberg

    Oral History

    Regine Ginsberg, born on November 19, 1925, discusses her childhood in Brussels, Belgium; her father’s work in the leather industry; religious observances in the household; speaking Yiddish at home and French in school; how her father wired money to Chase Bank in New York in the 1930s; her family abandoning their home in Brussels to travel by train to France; staying with a farmer in St. Gaudens, France; the family’s arrest in St. Gaudens; how her brother and father were sent to a prison near Toulouse, France and then released seven weeks later; how her mother returned to Brussels and brought back Sabbath candlesticks, prayer shawls, tefillin, and diamond jewelry which she used to bribe guards; how her father contacted a cousin in Pennsylvania; being on the last boat out of France from Marseilles; arriving in New York in June 1942; staying with cousins in Pittsburgh, PA and then settling in McKeesport, PA; her mother and father’s work in the leather industry; moving to Texas where she met her future husband Reuben Ginsberg in Athens, TX; her brother enlisting in the army and being sent to Belgium where he did intelligence work acting as a French interpreter; studying along with her husband at Columbia University in New York; becoming an art dealer and opening up a gallery in the 1970s; her emotional state after the war; and how her wartime experiences affected her life, her marriage, and the way she raised her children.

    Oral history interview with Ursula Guttstadt McKinney

    Oral History

    Ursula Guttstadt McKinney, born November 17, 1925 in Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany, discusses her family’s professional and religious background; her childhood and the troubles she faced obtaining schooling due to being half-Jewish; the difficulties her Jewish father and cousins faced; worrying about her father getting arrested; being able to say goodbye to her father when he was taken to prison and subsequently transported to Mauthausen in October 1942; receiving news that her father died; the Third Reich taking ownership of her family’s house; getting expelled from school in October 1942; moving to Berlin, Germany with her mother and sister; the psychological effects of the war, especially the bombings; her limited contact with the underground; working at a convent where there were some hidden Jewish children; her difficulties resuming a normal life after the war; her education after the war; feeling like an outcast because of being half-Jewish; immigrating, along with her sister, to the United States; not wanting to identify as German; her feelings on being a “mischling,” or having a mixed background; not identifying with one religion and being wed in an Unitarian church; and her work as a founding member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Rappaport

    Oral History

    Ruth Rappaport, born May 27, 1923 in Leipzig, Germany, discusses her parents, Mendel Rappaport, a Romanian subject, and Helene Rubinstein, who was born in Poland; how her mother’s cousin, also named Helene Rubinstein, was a well-known cosmetics businesswoman, attending an Orthodox Jewish school and an English language school in Leipzig, Germany; her membership in the Zionist youth group, Habonim; her Romanian passport, which did not identify her as a Jew; moving to Switzerland with her family shortly after Kristallnacht; staying in Zurich, Switzerland as a nanny for the Herzog family after her parents returned to Germany; selling nail polish, which her parents sent because they could not send money; being sponsored by her uncle, Carl Rubinstein, who lived in Seattle, Washington to come to the United States; leaving Europe in December 1939 on the Holland American Line boat, the Veendam; her parents’ attempt to leave Germany with Cuban visas; how her father died in Buchenwald and her mother in Ravensbrück, both in 1943; attending high school in Seattle, then the University of Washington, and finishing at Berkeley, majoring in sociology; working after graduation for a Jewish newspaper in Seattle and for the Zionist Emergency Council; working with Bartley Crum for UNSCOP (United Nations Special Committee on Palestine) in San Francisco, CA; working in Israel during the War of Independence in 1948, where she exchanged gunfire with Palestinians; working with Golda Meir; helping establish the Israel Photographic Archives; returning to the United States and working for the Department of Defense as a librarian; living overseas in Okinawa, Japan; Taipei, Taiwan; and Vietnam; and retiring from the government after 19 years.

    Oral history interview with Edith Langer

    Oral History

    Edith Langer, born October 4, 1932 in Hamm, Germany, discusses living on a farm; her devout Lutheran mother; memories of the prewar Jewish community in her town; her early approval of Hitler because his support of public works; meeting Hitler as a member of her scout troop; attending a one-room school with 30 children, 10 of whom were Jewish; her father’s offer to hide the families of two of his Jewish customers in her family’s farm house; her mother’s feeling that hiding Jews was the right thing to do as a Christian; her father's murder by the Nazis for hiding Jews; being sent away from her family to work on a farm, where she stayed from 1941 to 1945 and had no contact with her family; being afraid of German soldiers; seeing murdered Jews in the streets; giving food to the Russian prisoners, who were living on the farm; emigrating from Germany to the United States in 1956; becoming an American citizen in 1961; her hope that more Nazis would be tried, including the one who shot her father; her membership in the Methodist Church; and taking part in protests against the American Nazi Party.

    Oral history interview with Marianne Milkman

    Oral History

    Marianne Friedenthal Milkman, born May 13, 1931 in Berlin, Germany, discusses her childhood in Germany; being baptized and raised as Christian to have more opportunities; changing schools and apartments in 1938 because of anti-Jewish laws; her aunt Lotte Friedenthal, who worked with Pastor Martin Niemӧller; her father’s deportation to Sachsenhausen in 1938; traveling to Switzerland in January 1939 and then flying with her sister to England on a Kindertransport in May 1939; living with relatives in Cambridge, England; the arrival of her parents in England and her father’s internment on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien; joining her father on the Isle of Man in May 1940; returning to Cambridge in May 1941, where she remained throughout the war; graduating from high school and Cambridge University; coming to the United States in 1957 to study biology; getting married and living in Iowa for 30 years; settling in Washington, DC; her Jewish identity; and her feeling that her experience during the war made her a stronger person.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Cohen

    Oral History

    Ruth Friedman Cohen, born April 26, 1930 in Mukachevo, Czechoslovakia (present day Mukacheve, Ukraine), describes her life after the Holocaust; her prewar life in Czechoslovakia; her family’s religious beliefs; her family’s deportation to Auschwitz in 1944; her mother and brother’s death immediately after their arrival at Auschwitz; her transfer to Nuremberg, Germany and then Holachov; the painful effects of tuberculosis that she contracted in Holachov; her survival and liberation by the Russian Army; her and her sister’s return to Mukachevo, where they reunited with their father; her time in Budapest, Hungary and Prague, Czech Republic, where she recuperated from tuberculosis; her immigration to the United States in 1948; the various jobs she had to support herself; her marriage in 1952; her education at the New School for Social Research; and her struggle to recover from the damaging emotional and mental effects of the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Phillip Abraham

    Oral History

    Phillip Abraham, born August 10, 1931 in Podului-Turkului (Podu Turcului), Romania, describes his prewar life in Romania; his family’s religious beliefs; his childhood in a close-knit Jewish community; his family’s move to Tecuci, Romania in 1940; his father being taken away and then released in 1942; the lack of food available to the population; his education in a Jewish school; his town’s liberation by the Russian Army; his post-war Romanian education; his membership in Hashomer Hatzair, a Zionist youth organization; his time in Israel; his education at Hebrew University and Weizmann Institute, where he studied physics; his immigration to the United States in 1959; his careers at Raytheon and the Office of Naval Research; his marriage in 1964; and his two children.

    Oral history interview with George Arnstein

    Oral History

    George Ernest Arnstein, born September 20, 1924 in Stuttgart, Germany, describes his prewar life in Germany; the repercussions of the Nuremberg laws; his experiences with antisemitism; his father’s arrest on Kristallnacht; his father’s time in Dachau; his family’s decision to leave Germany and go to Geneva, Switzerland; his family’s immigration to the United States in 1938; the anti-German sentiment in America during World War II and its effects on him; his service for the United States Army beginning in 1943 and his duties as a crypto-analyst; his work in Germany helping to perform interrogations, monitoring anti-American efforts, and denazification; his return to Wisconsin after the war; his education at Berkeley and Geneva; and his life post-war.

    Oral history interview with Gertrude Scarlett Epstein

    Oral History

    Gertrude Scarlett Epstein, born July 13, 1922 in Vienna, Austria, describes her early life growing up in Vienna; her Czech father’s belief in free thinking; how her family was not religious; her parents’ and older brothers’ experiences during World War I; her Uncle Willie, who became wealthy as a textile factory owner; how she began to notice antisemitism in Vienna when her family moved to a non-Jewish part of town in the 1930s; her father’s and oldest brother’s activities in the socialist movement; her memories of a strike in Vienna in 1934; her memories of the Anschluss; her brothers’ immigration to England; her experience securing visas for Czechoslovakia on the day Hitler entered Vienna; her feelings that her moral code shifted as it became necessary to lie; her father’s arrest and later release from jail in Czechoslovakia; the family’s move to Albania by train; help provided to the family by her Uncle Willie; how she smuggled money out of Austria and Czechoslovakia; her family’s life in Albania from November 1938 to April 1939; the reaction of native Albanians towards Austrian refugees; how the Joint Distribution Committee helped refugees in Albania; her experiences teaching German to Albanians and the Italian consulate; problems she and her mother had in securing passage from Albania to England; brutal treatment she and her mother received from German police at a fuel stop in Germany; her memories of learning about concentration camps in 1943 or 1944; and how she tracked down an Albanian family to whom she taught German.

    Oral history interview with Matilde Neuwirt

    Oral History

    Matilde Neuwirt, born December 26, 1930 in Belgrade, Serbia, describes her early life in Belgrade; how her parents spoke Serbo-Croatian and Ladino at home; her family’s upper-middle class lifestyle; her schooling at both a public and a Jewish school; the lack of apprehension she felt in the pre-war years; her mother’s decision that the family leave Yugoslavia in the summer of 1940; her family’s escape westward through Dubrovnik, Croatia and then to Italy; how her parents smuggled money out of Yugoslavia; her family’s arrival in Italy without visas; living in Vicenza, Italy; how her family was moved to a detention camp in Sandrigo by the Italian authorities; the unofficial schooling that families set up for the children in Sandrigo; how the Italian authorities encouraged families to leave Sandrigo when Italy capitulated to the Germans; the help Jewish families received from a government official to get false documents; her family’s experience traveling to Rome, Italy; her memories of German brutality on the streets; how she did not know what was happening to Jews elsewhere in the country nor the rest of Europe; her brother’s return to Yugoslavia to fight with Tito’s partisans; the anti-Jewish sentiment of the partisans; her brother’s disappearance and the lack of information about him from the Yugoslav government; her family’s decision to emigrate from Italy to the United States in 1949; her family’s arrival in New York, NY; her feelings about Americanization and leaving memories of Europe behind; her memories of the Eichmann trial; her experiences returning to Yugoslavia and Italy after the war; and her belief that her family was lucky in the way they lived through the war.

    Oral history interview with Susanne K. Bennet

    Oral History

    Susanne Klejman Bennet, born August 11, 1938 in Warsaw, Poland, discusses her memories of entering the Warsaw ghetto; seeing the brick walls being built in the ghetto; living with her grandparents, aunts, and uncles all together in one apartment; beggars asking for food in her building; how her father, a successful art and antiquities dealer, arranged with a non-Jewish friend to have a Polish policeman take her out of the ghetto to a farm in the countryside; how, just before the destruction of the ghetto, her mother escaped from her work group and hid with nuns who gave her a habit and a new name; how the nuns were later rounded up, but were saved on the train platform by a Catholic commandant; how her father escaped from the ghetto through the sewers right before the uprising and went into hiding throughout Warsaw; how as a young child, she knew not to talk about her parents; seeing the red sky in the distance when Warsaw was burning in 1944; her reunion with her parents; the death of most of her relatives during the Holocaust; moving with her parents to Stockholm, Sweden in 1947; receiving visas in 1949 from the Swedish ambassador to Mexico where she and her family stayed for nine months; immigrating to the United States in 1950; living in New York where her father opened up a store off of Fifth Avenue and became a major art dealer with John and Robert Kennedy, the Rockefellers, the Fords, and Greta Garbo as his clients; attending Wellesley College, where she received a masters in library science; meeting her husband Douglas Bennet, who later worked for Hubert Humphrey, Senator Abe Ribicoff, and was an Assistant Secretary of State, head of US AID and NPR, and president of Wesleyan College; their eldest son, Michael, a United States senator from Colorado; their second son, James, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Monthly; their daughter, Holly, a financial adviser; her feelings when visiting Germany with her husband; how her father never spoke about his wartime experience; and how she has only recently started talking about her childhood during the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Marianne Roberts

    Oral History

    Marianne Roberts (née Marianne Cohn), born June 20, 1920 in Ludwigshafen, Germany, discusses her childhood in Ludwigshafen; experiencing antisemitism; her father's death from tuberculosis in 1933; her expulsion from school with her sister, Lottie, because they were Jewish; her mother's death in 1936; being photographed at the City Hall to show her "Jewish left ear" and being given the name ‘Sarah’; living with her sister until Kristallnacht; hiding in a basement for three days with no food while their apartment was being destroyed; moving into her sister's fiancé’s family's house for a few months and never going outside; going to the American Consulate to get visas their mother had applied for three years previously; leaving Germany in early 1939 with 4 dollars, pots and pans, and a family ring; sailing on the Cunard White Star to New York, NY; working in a doctor's office in Brooklyn; getting married and having two children; and speaking for past 20 years in schools and colleges about her wartime experiences.

    Oral history interview with Harry Markowicz

    Oral History

    Harry Markowicz, born August 9, 1937 in Berlin, Germany, discusses his childhood in Antwerp, Belgium; being hidden during the war with the Coons family in Brussels, Belgium, then in a children's home, and then in the Von der Linden's house under the name Henry Von der Linden; his parents who lived in hiding with another couple; how his father did not go outside for two years while in hiding; his brother, Mani, who was saved by Father Joseph Andre; how his mother found him after liberation; the removal of Allied flags at the time of the Battle of the Bulge because of fear that German forces would make their way to Brussels; arriving in the United States with his parents in March 1951; settling in Seattle, WA and going to high school and the University of Washington; traveling to Paris, France for a year for training as a French teacher; traveling to Israel to learn Hebrew; teaching French in Tacoma, WA; learning sign language and working at Gallaudet University for 29 years; feeling more comfortable among Holocaust survivors; and volunteering at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he feels a bond with the other volunteers.

    Oral history interview with Julie A. Keefer

    Oral History

    Julie Keefer (née Jula Weinstock Eisen), born on April 19, 1941 in Lvov, Poland (present day L'viv, Ukraine), discusses her family’s forced relocation into the Lvov ghetto; the escape of her grandfather, Aiski Eisen, from a camp in Janov; her grandfather finding help from Mr. Borecki, who told him in late 1943 that the ghetto was to be burned, and her grandfather’s rescue of her family from the ghetto; her memories of a tunnel or bunker in the forest, to which a few dozen people were smuggled out of the ghetto; her memories of her grandfather donning a Nazi uniform to smuggle people out of the ghetto; being taken out of the bunker because she and her baby sister, Tola, were endangering others by crying; being placed with Mrs. Szwarczynski, a Catholic woman; the arrival of the Russians in Lvov in June 1944; staying in three displaced persons camps in 1945; living in Camp Taylor in Linz, Austria; traveling alone at seven years old to the United States, where she lived in a series of Catholic orphanages, seeing relatives on weekends; being called a Nazi because she spoke German; being sent by the Joint Distribution Committee to the Bellefaire Jewish Children's Orphanage in Cleveland, OH; her adoption by Fred and Tea Klejstadt; attending Oberlin College; getting married and earning a graduate degree in education; feeling grateful to United States; and her desire to find out what happened to her hidden sister whose name became Antonina Noviska.

    Oral history interview with Erica Laufer

    Oral History

    Erica Laufer, born May 11, 1930 in Klagenfurt, Austria, discusses being the only Jewish child in her school, where she was taught by nuns; her mother denying her Jewish identity but her father being observant; an appearance by Hitler after the Anschluss; being forced to wear the yellow Star of David; being barred from attending school; moving into her grandfather's apartment in Vienna, Austria and living there in secret; SA attacks on Jewish homes; witnessing the events of Kristallnacht while hiding in a doorway; how her father obtained tickets to Trinidad; sailing on the Dutch ship Cotica with other refugees; establishing a life in Port of Spain, Trinidad; being forced, as refuges, to live in a detention center after England entered the war; going to a boarding school to be the companion to the daughter of the director; sailing to New York, NY with her parents in December 1940; moving to Washington, DC where she was discriminated against by other children because of her accent; her academic success; her work for the federal government; getting married and starting a family; not raising her children as Jews following an oath to her mother; the number of relatives she lost in Europe; and her attempts to suppress her feelings about the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Barbara Goldberg

    Oral History

    Barbara Goldberg, born in 1943 in Wilmington, DE, discusses her parents, Emma and Erich, who received visas from the Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes to emigrate from France to Portugal; their journey over the Pyrenees to Spain and then to Portugal; their arrival in the United States; her uncle Paul Brennan (born Pavel Briess) who had been in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz; how other relatives made it to Palestine, Australia, and South Africa; speaking only German in the house; how her parents’ personalities were shaped by the war; never discussing the past or other relatives' stories; feeling a connection to refugees; living with the memory of the Holocaust; and her discovery later in life that Aristides de Sousa Mendes had helped her family.

    Oral history interview with Liselotte Epstein Ivry

    Oral History

    Liselotte Epstein Ivry, born July 21, 1925 in Lichtenstein, Czechoslovakia (possibly present day Lichtenstein, Saxony, Germany), describes her family, including her father Victor Ivry, mother Elsa Sicher, and younger brother Hans; the large families on both her father’s and mother’s sides; having heard of Hitler at age 12; being taken by truck with soldiers to live with relatives in a nearby village and then by train to live in Prague, Czech Republic; the many changes after the Germans marched in on March 15, 1939; having been set to go to Great Britain in 1939 on the Kindertransport but instead being sent first to a children’s facility in Prague and then to a private home; being sent to Terezin September 9, 1942 to work as a nurse in the hospital; the transport and death of her mother and brother on March 8, 1944; being sent on December 15, 1943 in a cattle car to Auschwitz, to Block 11; being given number 70663; how the will to live was what kept you alive; being sent to Hamburg, Germany to work first in a sand pit, then as a train switcher, and finally as a brick-maker; how their camp was bombed and they were moved to Bergen-Belsen; the ensuing chaos and then the emotion and celebration after being liberated by the British; eventually going to Canada in 1949 to stay with her uncle; marrying in 1950 to a Lithuanian, Sydney; her children; her attitude about Germany now and forgiving but not forgetting; her book, I Am Their Voice, which is a collection of poems, letters, and anecdotes by children from her 25 years as a speaker; and how now she is doing research for a work about Madeleine Albright.

    Oral history interview with Hans Ziegler

    Oral History

    Hans Ziegler, born June 12, 1925 in Brno, Czechoslovakia, discusses being raised as a Christian with a Jewish father; his parents divorcing in 1934; his father’s factory going out of business in 1937; attending a German elementary school; his father’s deportation to Terezin (Theresienstadt concentration camp) in 1942; being transported to Berlin, Germany in 1943 for forced labor; being sent in September 1944 to Postelberg (Postoloprty), Czech Republic; escaping in April 1945 with two others to the woods; hiding in Brno until the Russians arrived; getting repatriated and going to university for three years; being expelled by the Soviets in 1949 because his father was a capitalist and a diplomat; being in the military for two years; being employed as a chemist in an armaments factory; working in Egypt and Afghanistan; escaping to Germany in 1970 and staying until 1983; going to the United States and working in Warren, Ohio until 1990; going back to Germany; feeling more Jewish than Christian; and how he thinks more about his father and his war-time experiences.

    Oral history interview with Vera Levine

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Guenter Lewy

    Oral History

    Guenter Lewy, born August 22, 1923 in Breslau, Germany (Wrocław, Poland), discusses his childhood in a large extended assimilated family; his memory of seeing Hitler at the 1936 Olympics; belonging to a Jewish Zionist youth group; being attacked on a hiking trip by German storm troopers; his father’s three month imprisonment in Buchenwald after Kristallnacht; going with Youth Aliyah via Trieste to Palestine in March 1939; being met in Haifa by his uncle; living on Kibbutz Tzarad where he worked as a shepherd; his parents’ escape to the United States in late 1941; volunteering in early 1942 for the Palestine Regiment of the British Army; joining the Jewish Brigade and being stationed in Egypt; traveling to Italy with Montgomery's 8th Army in late 1944; traveling to Holland at the war’s end; his role in organizing illegal immigration to Palestine; interrogating German civilians in Berlin; returning to Palestine; traveling to the United States to see his parents in late 1946; graduating from college in 1951 and earning a Master's and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1957; teaching at Columbia, Smith College, and University of Massachusetts; teaching in Germany from 1961 to 1962; his feelings about German people today; the strong influence of his youth group on his resilience; his writings on the moral dimensions of history and the Nazi persecution of the Romani peoples; his current interest in writing about Holocaust perpetrators; reoccurring dreams about Nazis brutality; and feeling that some of the best Holocaust scholarship has being written by contemporary young German scholars.

    Oral history interview with Malvy Solomon

    Oral History

    Malvy Solomon (née Aizic), born in 1938 in Bacau, Romania, discusses pre-war violence against Jews; her father’s conscription into forced labor for the Romanian military in 1941; living with her mother and grandmother in the ghetto with little food; her father’s return in 1944; attending a Jewish primary school and learning Hebrew; surviving bombings; the Soviet arrival in Romania at war’s end; Soviet looting after the war; her school’s closure by Soviet authorities; post-war antisemitism and anti-Capitalist feelings; her father’s job working for the communist government after he was forced to close his store; finishing high school at 16; her medical schooling and career; her marriage; immigrating to Israel in 1961; attending medical school in Tel Aviv; getting divorced, treating soldiers and bombing victims; remarrying in 1971; immigrating to the United States; her education in the U.S.; working for the Department of Veterans Affairs; and her feelings about the war, communism, and her life.

    Oral history interview with Elia Miranski and Genia Miranski

    Oral History

    Elia Miranski, born on August 3, 1922 in Mir, Poland (present day Belarus), describes growing up in a poor, moderately religious family but experiencing no antisemitism until the German invasion in 1939; his parents’ deaths in the first few days of the occupation; escaping with his brother, Israel, from the ghetto which had been set up in a castle; joining Russian partisans in the forest; blowing up railroad tracks for two years; trains near Valozhyn, Belarus; planes dropping supplies; others taking the wounded away from the front lines; Russians mobilizing all partisans into the army; being wounded by the Germans; traveling back to Mir after the war; working on a dairy farm for seven years as a supervisor; moving to Minsk, Belarus and working as a house painter; getting married and having a daughter; going to Israel in 1972 and then to the United States in 1995; thinking day and night about his wartime experiences; and going back to Mir from Israel for a memorial ceremony in the cemetery. Genia Miranski, daughter of Elia Miranski, adds to her father’s interview by translating it into English and by describing Elia’s membership in the Zionist youth group Hashomer Hatzair; Elia’s parents and two younger siblings being shot by Germans; Elia building bridges and roads; witnessing his friend being mauled to death by a dog; living in the castle ghetto; Elia’s experience escaping and hiding in a swamp for three days and at times breathing through a straw when German dogs were nearby; joining Russian partisans; his return to Minsk at the end of the war and experiencing a significant amount of antisemitism; the Six Day War in Israel; going to an underground bakery at night to get Passover matzo; arriving in Israel in 1972; living in underground bunkers in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War; and her own arrival in the U.S. in 1985 and her parents’ arrival in 1995.

    Oral history interview with Maria Kordalewski

    Oral History

    Maria Kordalewski, born April 13, 1924 in Poland, describes her Ukrainian parents and her two siblings, Nicolai and Nadja; going to school and her Jewish friends; the Russians coming in 1939 and the subsequent food shortages; how people were being sent away to Siberia; the absence of antisemitism in their small town until the German occupation in 1941; how her family hid two boys until the boys escaped; how her brother was arrested in 1942, along with other young men, as a means of preventing an uprising; the Russians coming in 1945 when the war was over; being sent with her sister to Lvov (L'viv, Ukraine) to get away from the communists; being sent to a displaced persons camp in Regensburg, Germany and going to school to study pharmaceuticals; arriving in the United States in 1950 by herself; landing in New York City, NY; the various jobs she held at first; moving to Detroit, MI then to California, and finally to Miami, FL; and her feelings that the Holocaust should never be forgotten.

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