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Oral history interview with Philip Goldstein

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1992.A.0125.37 | RG Number: RG-50.233.0037

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    Oral history interview with Philip Goldstein
    Transcript

    There is no transcript available for this track

    OK, we're on again.
    Yeah?
    Yeah.
    I was not given any help in the sick bay.
    I was merely assigned to a sort of rest barrack,
    where I met also the people that I hadn't seen several years.
    They were all prisoners from Birkenau.
    And within a day or two, the orders
    came for evacuation of that [? Mildorf ?],, of that camp.
    And that was the last transport that we were on.
    We traveled several days.
    No food, of course.
    It was the first time in all my travails
    that I have decided that I'm going
    to risk and eat a raw potato.
    I had it cut, or dissembled, or whatever.
    And then I've heard a commotion outside.
    We were sitting in the cattle cars.
    And we opened-- someone opened the door.
    And we were stopped at the station, upper Bavaria,
    called Poing.
    And you hear people going crazy, they're
    dancing on the platform.
    And some of them are so overjoyed that they've
    embraced the guards.
    There were some guards that were,
    in that particular transport, they weren't SS,
    they were remnants of beat-up Wehrmacht divisions
    that they have conscripted and put into work of some sort.
    What's going on?
    I never ate the potato.
    There war is over.
    The war is over.
    It was the leader of the transport, a captain
    or whatever, some German officer, Wehrmacht, obviously.
    He wasn't an SS man.
    Went inside the station master's office on the platform.
    He stopped the train there on the station
    because he realized he doesn't have enough provisions
    for several thousand people.
    Being a military, he was not-- he
    had no idea of the way the SS operates
    camps and the transports.
    Being a military, he detached the locomotive,
    sent the guards with a car back to Munich,
    to Dachau, in order to get provisions for this transport.
    I mean, he couldn't get a loaf of bread in Dachau most likely.
    But he thought that he's going to send
    a locomotive and enough cars to bring provisions.
    He came in.
    He came out of the station.
    He said, he heard the radio announcement the war was over.
    It was a false alarm.
    What happened is, on that day, there
    was an uprising in Munich.
    It really took place.
    Was an uprising by German--
    some military, and some civilians, and some military
    then participated, they've sympathized with them.
    They declared the city open.
    And they didn't want to have Munich destroyed.
    So they wanted to surrender to the Allies.
    But the next day, there was-- it's a whole story.
    In fact, I read the details of the story only a couple
    of weeks ago in a book called 100 Days by John Toland.
    He was an American journalist following the Allied troops
    into Germany in 1945.
    If you ever seen it in a library,
    it's a very interesting book, called 100 Days.
    And he describes this particular uprising.
    And I remember it because that was the 27th--
    it took place on 27th.
    We were stopped there on 28th of April.
    And he says, you're free, the guard, the German commander
    of the transport.
    What happened is the Ukrainian guards ran away, of course.
    They were afraid.
    Some SS men ran away.
    Only the few Wehrmacht guards were still with us.
    And hundreds and hundreds of people took off.
    They just ran, helter-skelter.
    They ran to the nearest village or town.
    And I said to my friend, Isaac, who was with me--
    we were together the whole time--
    I says, if the war is over, it's over here as well as there.
    So we don't have to run.
    First thing, let's go and find where
    the cupboard with the provisions are.
    And we got up.
    It was difficult to climb up for us.
    And I took a loaf of bread.
    There was still enough.
    But it wasn't enough for thousands of people.
    It was enough for a few souls like me,
    who didn't rush to freedom.
    Because I realized there's no point.
    If it's over, what difference does it make where you are?
    Why risk?
    Then it turns out, we got a loaf of bread and some--
    whatever it was, margarine, or some salami, or whatever.
    And I ate myself full after three months of starvation.
    And I sat leaning against the wheels of the rail car.
    And soon enough, you hear rounds of ammunition.
    And whole groups of prisoners coming back to the train,
    running for their life.
    The Volkssturm in the village or town, whatever--
    I never inquired where it was--
    saw prisoners, they rounded them up and began shooting.
    And many, many paid with their lives.
    So we came back.
    And obviously, the fiasco of the news from Munich
    was no more than that.
    And the transports saw that, they knew for another day.
    And on the way, we already began to see that--
    yeah, I remember.
    A train passed us by.
    And there were French people looking out at the cars.
    And I understood a few words of French.
    I didn't speak it, but I asked them in French
    whether the war is finished.
    Like yes, [FRENCH].
    They said, [FRENCH].
    They didn't know anything about it.
    I said, they are civilians, they should know.
    Well, the next day, we stopped in many places.
    And German women came out, and brought food and drink, coffee,
    and so on.
    We knew with the end is near.
    And at night, we stopped at some sighting.
    It was in a German village in the Alps, Tutzing,
    and I went to sleep on the floor.
    In the middle of the night, you hear a commotion.
    And the doors of the cars opened up.
    All freight cars.
    And there were some people, civilian, military,
    I didn't know.
    I was so tired.
    And they told us, you're free.
    We are from the International Red Cross.
    Pretty soon, there will be someone here
    who will take care of you.
    And I fell asleep.
    I didn't even penetrate my consciousness.
    I just couldn't believe it anymore.
    And I got up in the morning, was about 8:00,
    and it was April 30th.
    And we looked out.
    And all the remaining SS have gone.
    No one except the Wehrmacht soldiers, the few,
    remained there with us.
    And nothing happened to them.
    In fact, the prisoners talked to them,
    they gave them cigarettes.
    And we looked down the embankment.
    And we saw troops and vehicles moving.
    I didn't know it, I saw stars.
    I thought, there's a Russian, so how
    did I know whether they're Americans.
    I didn't realize the American military
    have all stars as the emblem.
    It was the units of the 100th Division
    of the Third Army coming there.
    They didn't come to liberate us.
    They just passed by the road.
    And they saw emaciated people coming down
    the embankment close to them.
    And they threw various things-- cigarettes and chocolate.
    And pretty soon, someone began to organize.
    Lieutenant Smith, I remember his name, from the 100th Division,
    came.
    He got the function of organizing the first DP
    center in Feldafing, which was four kilometers from there.
    We stayed there two nights.
    And in the cars, before they had involve the town's folk,
    the townspeople to come and clean out, and put bedding,
    mattresses, and linen, and whatnot,
    and the former Hitler Youth school,
    which became the DP center, Feldafing.
    And we were put in there.
    Two days later, the train brought us
    in there the four kilometers.
    Before we entered, we had to take off all of our clothes,
    burn it, everything.
    And for the next six weeks or so, I was in a pair of pajamas.
    That's all I had.
    A pair of pajamas.
    And I traveled to Garmisch-Partenkirchen
    in a pair of hospital pajamas.
    That's all we had.
    The Greek fellows that were with us
    broke out the clothing stores of the Hitler Youth school.
    And they got out Hitler Youth uniforms.
    And that's what we wore.
    T-shirts.
    And it looked like a circus.
    And we were on our own how to organize the clothes.
    I finally found a pair of shorts that must have
    come from a very young kid.
    They were very short and very tight on me.
    I found one pair of moccasins, slippers.
    With luck, a couple of days later,
    I found the other one, the matching, in some other room.
    So that was my first for the next two months or so.
    That's all I had-- a pair of pajamas and a pair of shorts.
    And from there on, for one more year, I had.
    Yeah, I expected my brother to be somewhere
    because he was evacuated.
    And one day, I was in the DP center
    in Landsberg playing ping pong.
    And a young fellow comes over to me, says hello.
    And I didn't know him.
    He seemed to have acted as if he knows me.
    And I says, where from?
    Usually at that time, where from meant where have you been?
    In Auschwitz, have you been in here, have you been there?
    Have you?
    Do you know me from Birkenau?
    He says, no.
    Flossenburg.
    I said, I was in Flossenburg, I left in such and such time.
    He says, no.
    He meant my brother.
    I looked very much like him, my oldest brother.
    He was 10 years older, but I look very much like him.
    And he was with him.
    And it was the 23rd of April.
    They arrived from some commander from Buchenwald, some satellite
    camp, to Flossenburg, and they were evacuated.
    And obviously, that was the time,
    when during the evacuation of Flossenburg,
    in the last week of the war, where he perished somewhere.
    Either killed in the death marches or died of starvation.
    Even some of our transports--
    my own transport was bombed by--
    we were in closed cars with SS guarding heavy machine guns
    on top against us.
    But they used-- the bastards used it against the aircraft.
    When an air raid sound became audible,
    they closed our cars from the outside.
    They locked our cars.
    And they themselves ran into the woods.
    And now, the airmen didn't know who was in those cars.
    It could have been them or troops being moved.
    Anything that moved was bombed.
    Though our luck was that they didn't throw a bomb.
    Because many, many people were killed from Allied air raids.
    Prisoners on the move in closed cars, they machine gunned.
    There were people wounded in my car.
    That was the last.
    It could well be that my brother fell victim
    to that sort of thing.
    I don't know.
    But there's no way.
    He was together with my cousin in the same camp, the doctor.
    So he took him into his sick bay in the place
    where he was after evacuating from Birkenau.
    But during the evacuation, my cousin and my brother
    came to Buchenwald together.
    But my cousin was able to submerge
    into the French community, the French prisoners.
    But my brother couldn't do that into the Polish community.
    There was just no way.
    So he had to go on transport.
    And that was his end.
    And here I was, 23 years old.
    The day I realized I was free, I walked along the rail track
    for a couple hundred yards.
    And I couldn't believe it.
    I looked behind me to see whether someone's following me.
    And only then did it dawn on me, what then?
    I mean, what happened?
    I mean, you're alone in the world.
    I mean, the chances of my brother surviving
    in the Arctic, as well as us, as my own survival,
    were almost nil.
    Either one of us could.
    But I didn't know what happened to him.
    But then about a couple of months later, in the fall,
    he moved to Stuttgart, when I--
    we lived in an apartment there.
    And the DP sent the apartment buildings.
    We occupied one room, several of us,
    and our former neighbors from back home
    occupied-- the four sisters occupied the two other rooms.
    One of them was married.
    The youngest of them came, just came back from Poland.
    She has been in Poland and came to West Germany.
    And she said she met my cousin.
    My first cousin, one of those three who survived,
    who came to Radom.
    And she has heard that I am alive somewhere.
    So she asked to give the message that she received a letter
    from my brother in the Soviet Union that
    came to the Jewish community in Radom.
    There was an office there.
    A few survivors established some kind of office.
    The letter.
    And she answered that she knows that I am alive, that my older
    brother most likely is alive.
    So that was the first that I've heard that my brother is alive.
    But I didn't expect that they'll let him out.
    Because I knew it from experience,
    my own father's brother in the First World War came.
    In order to help my father get back to Poland,
    he came there, and got stuck, and could never leave.
    And he perished in the Ukraine.
    So I left for the United States.
    My mother's only brother lived here.
    And shortly after my arrival here--
    I went with my uncle to the country
    for a couple of weeks' vacation--
    I came back.
    There was a letter from one of the girls who lived
    with us in the same apartment.
    And she said someone came from Stettin--
    that's the German city occupied by Poland now--
    and who told her that my brother is there.
    He had just gotten out in 1946 when
    the first transports from the Soviet Union
    were exchanged and allowed to get back.
    And he settled in Stettin.
    And that was the beginning, that's
    how I hooked up with him.
    I sent him a parcel immediately.
    He never got it because by the time the parcel got there,
    the pogrom in Kielce interfered.
    And all those who were in Stettin
    and other areas in Western Poland
    got out to Western Germany.
    And he came to Berlin from there on a truck.
    His wife was pregnant with the first son.
    What compelled him to settle in Germany?
    Nothing compelled him.
    He was there, he got a place, he opened pretty soon
    a little business, and his children were born there.
    It was difficult first to come, and eventually it was--
    he made his life there.
    And that's it.
    He had no regrets.
    I have been there many times, almost every second year, I
    used to go there, about 20 times now.
    Yeah.
    His son went to the University of Jerusalem,
    and graduated there, and then studied
    in Amsterdam and Belgium.
    And he works for the Common Market Commission.
    He has a very good job and leads a very good life
    in Belgium and Brussels.
    I was just there.
    His daughter finished law school in Berlin.
    And she lives in Luxembourg.
    Her husband works for the European Parliament, also
    a lawyer.
    And there were 6,000 Jews in Berlin.
    And they had a viable community.
    It's a nice place to live.
    It's an interesting city.
    He is now shocked.
    His wife died three years ago.
    They were married in the Soviet Union.
    And when I got there, I went to work
    for my uncle who was working in the garment industry.
    And his boss gave him a chance to train me,
    a machine across from him.
    So he trained me as a dressmaker.
    And it's a skill that I acquired.
    I worked.
    But I've never cared for to remain there for life,
    for a lifetime.
    I had different plans.
    And I started to go, too.
    I didn't speak English when I arrived here.
    But I went to school for one year
    just to learn English at night.
    And then I graduated.
    They gave me a diploma from elementary school.
    I came down to a high school.
    New York City had high schools at night.
    There were two high schools.
    One was downtown.
    It was a very good one, excellent teachers.
    I started just to take English and history.
    But after a year or so, I realized
    that if I want to get a high school diploma,
    I better buckle down.
    And I began to go five nights a week, four hours a night.
    And it was hard, every night traveling home for an hour
    and then doing some homework, reading a newspaper,
    and then getting up in the morning, going to work.
    Weekends doing homework.
    When I graduated after a couple of years from high school,
    I took the test at City College.
    I was accepted.
    And I entered as a full-time student.
    I didn't want any more work and study.
    That was not possible at the time.
    And I graduated in 3 and 1/2 years in City College
    and applied to graduate school at Columbia and London
    School of Economics.
    I was accepted to both and I decided to go to Columbia.
    And after I finished at Columbia,
    I took an entrance test for the federal service.
    They had just done.
    I don't know why I did it.
    But I did it.
    And I was called.
    A few weeks later, I was called by the Department
    of Labor office whether I'll be interested in a job
    in the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
    And that was my beginning with the Department of Labor.
    I had an interesting job for the first few years.
    I traveled a lot throughout the country.
    And then I married two years after I worked.
    And I met my wife through some friends of mine.
    And she was a brilliant young girl.
    Born here.
    Father was Russian-born, her mother was Czechoslovakian,
    I believe.
    She graduated from Hunter College at 20
    and got a PhD at 23 and died at 25.
    Aw, goodness.
    So after 3 and 1/2 years of marriage, she was dead.
    Kidney failure.
    At that time, there was not much you
    could do with kidney dialysis and that sort of thing.
    A very accomplished, brilliant girl.
    She had a PhD in economics, too.
    So you married her, though, after you started
    working for the government?
    Yeah.
    And she died at the end of 1961.
    And in '62, I took a leave of absence for six months.
    And I traveled in Europe, and went to Israel.
    And they were very good to me.
    I could do what I wanted there.
    And they realized that I need time away.
    So they didn't mind giving me half a year off.
    And I got back, I got assigned to Cleveland
    to help a friend of mine setting up an office in Cleveland
    from the Department.
    And it was about a three months' assignment or so.
    And I went overnight to stay with friends of mine.
    We went to school together in college.
    She introduced me to Jeanne, who is my current wife,
    in the school.
    And we knew each other for many years.
    But I married someone else, and she eventually
    went down the University of Michigan
    to get a PhD in psychology.
    At the time, she was finishing her dissertation.
    So she lived in Chicago and worked in a hospital
    as a psychologist.
    So I got in touch with her when I was in Cleveland.
    And for a holiday weekend, my buddy, who came to Cleveland,
    really was stationed in Chicago.
    So we went to Chicago and we met with Jeanne.
    And that was the beginning of our involvement
    and 1 and 1/2 years later, we married.
    And we married in '64.
    But I had known her for 10 years before that.
    And then we had two sons.
    After 1967, I had enough of travel,
    and said I wanted to go to Washington to settle instead
    of--
    in the region, you travel a lot.
    And that's how we came here.
    And we've been here since 19--
    it's now.
    In May was 25 years, we arrived here.
    That's the story.
    That's a very involved story.
    Would you like to talk a little bit about your parents now?
    Or would you like to stop?
    That would be up to you.
    Well, my father was, as I said before,
    was one of six in his family.
    Can you tell me his name, and do you know his birth name?
    Yeah.
    Mendel.
    I said before, Mendel Goldstein, born September 15, 1884.
    He married about age of 25, as far
    as I can reconstitute the marriage.
    My mother was 21.
    She was one of eight, one of eight children in their house.
    I didn't know my father's parents.
    They were dead long before I was born.
    My mother's father was dead long before.
    I only knew my maternal grandmother.
    She died in 1934.
    Were they are from Radom?
    All were from Radom there.
    I don't know how far back they go,
    but they were all from Radom.
    My father had two sisters and a brother in Radom.
    One brother lived in the Ukraine and he
    perished in Dnipropetrovsk in the Holocaust.
    And one youngest brother, a single man, lived in Paris.
    And he came to Birkenau in 1942.
    I met him.
    He lived about two weeks.
    The same name as my brother, Yechiel.
    He was about-- at that time, he was about 40.
    41, perhaps.
    My mother had two sisters and five brothers.
    Only one of them lived abroad.
    One of her younger brothers lived in New York.
    And he is the uncle to whom I came in 1946.
    He sent me the affidavit.
    And he was exceedingly helpful to me.
    He treated me like a father, helped me.
    Without him, I would not have been able to get an education,
    or support myself, and so on.
    So he was exceedingly well-disposed towards me.
    I was the only one of his entire family
    that was alive except for my brother.
    And so he was--
    he had an affinity, a very close relationship with me.
    Do you know about your parents' education.
    No, this much I can not go back, except that in those days,
    there was no Polish education.
    You studied Russian, or you studied Hebrew, or Yiddish.
    I don't know how far to the parochial school, my father--
    how far he went in a parochial school.
    But he was literate in Yiddish, and Russian, and some Polish.
    The Russian-- his ability to speak or have
    a command of Russian was helped by the fact
    that he, in 1913, at the beginning of 1913, he
    and the family left Radom and went
    to settle in Yekaterinoslav, this was in the Ukraine.
    He was sitting on his suitcases, waiting for a passage card
    from my mother's aunt who lived in New York.
    But this never arrived, and the times were difficult in Poland.
    There was an economic boycott against Jews at the time.
    Jewish was tradesmen, and crafts, and so on.
    And his brother had just finished
    serving the Tsar's Army.
    And he settled in Yekaterinoslav, he
    wrote him, come here, it's a much better life
    than in Poland.
    So he went there.
    And I believe it was the best years of their life
    that they have spent there.
    Unfortunately, the war intervened, and later,
    the revolution, and the Civil War, and pogroms.
    And by 1921, they were able to exchange, come back
    with the Nansen exchange.
    Which was Nansen was a Norwegian humanitarian diplomat, who
    arranged the Nansen passports for stateless people.
    And so they came back as war refugees,
    who were driven out to Russia and came back after the war.
    And the end of 1921, they came back with no place to--
    it was very difficult to get apartments.
    And moved in with my grandmother,
    a family of four children.
    And my grandmother has several of her own
    still living there, all living in one room.
    That was unbelievable.
    And then I was born.
    A couple of months later, I was born.
    And we moved into--
    finally got a place in which I grew up.
    And we lived there for--
    This is an apartment?
    Yeah, yeah, most people lived in apartments there.
    Was it large?
    No, it was a two-room apartment.
    Large apartments were very few and far in between.
    Only wealthy people or upper-middle class people.
    You couldn't.
    There was a very strict rent control in the country,
    hence there was very little construction,
    housing construction.
    And those who lived in a house will never move.
    Generations would pass on the apartment.
    People lived there 20, 30, 40 years in one apartment.
    It was much, much--
    there wasn't much to go around.
    And just a little bit before the war, some construction started.
    But it was expensive and people usually
    lived in less than desirable housing conditions
    by our standards.
    By existing standards there, it wasn't bad at all.
    Right.
    We weren't-- by existing standards,
    I would consider ourselves middle class.
    By our standards, we should have been considered deprived.
    But I never thought of myself deprived.
    And that's it all.
    You said you and your siblings were involved
    in the Zionist movement.
    Were your parents also inclined Zionistically?
    Or did they have any other?
    No, no, both.
    But they were inclined to.
    I can't recall, really.
    But the Zionist movement was usually
    a movement for the young.
    And the elderly, I mean, middle-aged people, some
    were, who started there young.
    But my father was very young.
    There was hardly anything going on,
    certainly not in a provincial city, like Radom.
    Right.
    So would he have been just sent off
    to apprentice with a tailor at a young age?
    I'm sure he must have started very young.
    12, maybe even younger.
    I know that's the age of that time.
    People started to get apprentice at an early age.
    You had a few years of schooling.
    But still, my father was very literate
    in Jewish and cognate learning.
    He was able to take the role of the one leading
    the congregation in prayer, for instance,
    during the Shabbat morning, for Shacharit or sometimes Mussaf.
    But he was not a Hasid, he wasn't dressed like a Hasid.
    There were very few Hasidim in our town.
    Our life was utterly secular.
    Your mother, then, was she educated as well?
    She had to be because she was able to read and write.
    And so she had.
    I don't know whether she went to school
    or she had private education.
    I don't know.
    Her grandfather, after whom I'm named, was a Hebrew teacher.
    Another Melamed, meaning a--
    Instructor of Hebrew, [BOTH TALKING]..
    [? Cheder ?], yeah.
    I'm named after him because my mother dreamed that--
    when she was pregnant with me, still in Russia--
    that she saw him in her dreams.
    She didn't.
    Of course, he was alive in Radom,
    but she always used it as a story to tell.
    That was a time when he really died.
    He died in Radom.
    Oh, my.
    Just before we came back.
    That's why I was named after him.
    He was called Fischel Melamed.
    That was his sobriquet.
    Because all the other grandfathers had already
    namesakes.
    And they had to fill in the gaps.
    But you said, then, your mother married by about age 21 or so?
    Yeah.
    From other people that I've talked to,
    I understand that if a girl--
    she must have done something in that time.
    Would you know?
    Yeah, in fact, that may be the reason
    why she didn't marry at 18.
    That's a good point.
    Her father died a few years before she married.
    And she, her father, my grandfather
    was dealing in produce and game, nuts and eggs.
    And she would-- I remember stories as a child,
    she would always tell about her going to various fairs
    and marketplaces to buy.
    And she had contacts with recipients, or the wholesalers,
    or whatever in bigger cities.
    So she was involved in maintaining.
    She was the oldest in the house.
    There was a brood of seven to feed.
    And so she and my grandmother were
    involved in that sort of business until she married.
    But once she got married, I don't
    believe she was involved in any occupation.
    What about your father's parents?
    Do you know what--
    No, my father's father was a furrier.
    In fact, if you spoke about fur in Radom, it was a Goldstein.
    There was so many from different branches
    of the family were furriers.
    My two grand uncles and my grandfather's
    one, two, three brothers.
    They were all furriers.
    And they had children who were furriers.
    Oh, wow.
    And one of the three had no sons, he had daughters.
    And they all three of them lived in Toronto.
    They all came here before the First World War.
    And I used to see them all very often.
    These were my father's first cousins.
    My father's older brother was initially a furrier,
    but he, of course, as long as I remember,
    he was a fur merchant, a very wealthy man.
    The one whose son became the doctor and I met in Auschwitz.
    He had eight children.
    But he didn't do fur work but he had the big store of furs,
    the biggest in the city.
    All gone.
    Can I assume that your family life, like for example,
    the Sabbath was a family time, and you had meals together,
    and things like that?
    Oh, meals together was--
    in the West, if your family has meals together, it's--
    Rare.
    --somewhat of a phenomenon.
    But all our meals, no matter how meager, no matter how festive,
    they were all together.
    Namely the dinner, which was usually during the--
    At midday, right.
    --afternoon, now, at midday.
    And the evening stuff, there was usually
    some cold cuts or whatever, depending on the season.
    But the main meal was always together.
    And the Sabbath, the Friday night, and Sabbath noon
    was usually big meals.
    And they were always together with all the trimmings.
    My mother was an exceptionally gifted cook and baker.
    I mean, she could concoct things that were out of this world.
    She learned a lot in Russia when she was there.
    So her baked-- she was always in--
    You had a separate kitchen in these two rooms?
    Yeah, no, one of the rooms was a kitchen.
    Yeah.
    As well as my father's shop.
    Oh, my gosh.
    Workshop, yeah.
    So where did the kids sleep?
    In that room also?
    At night, that was the room, was several kids slept
    and the other kids slept.
    It was crowded.
    But it's amazing that we didn't know about it.
    And now, it would be a formidable task
    just to assign places to sleep.
    But at the time, relatively, we were well-off.
    Right, right.
    Others had larger families and less space.
    And we managed.
    We managed to be well-dressed.
    Particularly, my father was a tailor.
    So we were all custom then.
    We managed to be clean.
    And educated, that's--
    And you were less rowdy than American boys are brought up
    to be.
    And I finished school.
    My brothers finished school and we all had a great inclination
    to read.
    My brother, the one who was in Shema Yisrael,
    was fluent in Hebrew, which was rare for us.
    We were not.
    He left, he led the correspondence
    for the organization with the central office in Warsaw,
    all in Hebrew.
    And he also knew the Russian alphabet.
    He was a very gifted fellow.
    He was an unusually gifted guy.
    He was there a short period in the army
    and he got the private first class, one bar.
    Very few Jews had made even a private first class.
    It was usually a GI.
    He became the company writer, I mean, the company clerk,
    I should say.
    He was able to fix electricity if it went bad.
    If they needed invitations for various balls and parties,
    they sent him to Radom.
    He came to Radom almost every month on leave for a day
    to do the printing.
    Since he could set type, he was a printing apprentice.
    So he took time off.
    And he did the printing and went back.
    And he did anything.
    He didn't go on maneuvers.
    He was always excused.
    So he had 16 months of easy service
    because he was very capable of doing things.
    What about-- is there anything else
    that you can tell me about your parents before the war started?
    What about their personalities?
    What were they like?
    That you could remember.
    My father was a man who had a exceedingly high sense of honor
    about him.
    His word was his--
    what do you say?
    His word was his--
    there's an English term.
    I forgot.
    Just escaped me.
    He had a renown that if he--
    for instance, people would come to him to cosign.
    If he had a signature on someone's loan,
    the people would get a loan.
    And sometimes he would be stuck with it.
    But I could go to any store in town to buy there supplies.
    And all I had to put it down.
    And then wouldn't have to pay anything.
    After months, they'll come up, and the accounts
    will be settled.
    And he would give a--
    not a check, we had a system then of [? texel. ?]
    When you put an IOU which is due in three months or two months.
    And at that time, it would be submitted to the bank,
    and you get a bank order to pay.
    And you had to come in and pay.
    And if you didn't, it would go to bankruptcy proceedings
    or something like that.
    His signature was like the Bank of England.
    The exceedingly honest person and subdued, not
    very aggressive.
    My mother had a very strong personality.
    She was very daring in the things she
    did while she was in Russia.
    My father was conscripted in the Tsarist army
    during the war in 1916.
    And he served in the regiment in town, in Yekaterinoslav.
    And he would come home at night with his corporal, a sergeant,
    for food and they ate there.
    The time came they will be shipped out
    to the front, the Romanian front.
    My mother insisted that he desert
    because the whole echelon, as they
    called it, the whole transport that went there,
    came back frozen.
    They were all-- the entire transport, regiment,
    was killed and frozen to death.
    He did skip town the last day.
    The sergeant-- on the way, when the regiment was marching
    to the rail, to the rail station, dropped by,
    and he left his pack and his carbine.
    He says, if he has submitted, if he surrender right now,
    he still has time.
    He wanted him to join so he doesn't get to trouble.
    But my father was already in Kiev at the time.
    My mother claimed that the regiment lost him.
    I mean, my mother had enough guts
    to go up to the Ministry of War office, whatever was,
    in Yekaterinoslav, and claim that she is a--
    if not a widow, she is a woman with children whose husband
    disappeared in the service.
    And she got a pension.
    While for the couple of months until the revolution broke out.
    It was only about three or four months.
    He was in Kiev.
    And then of course, there was an amnesty,
    and he came back to Yekaterinoslav.
    He had to report to the regiment.
    And after a few weeks, they let him go because he
    was already not the youngest.
    But she was that type.
    She could.
    She was very daring.
    It was in contrast to my father, who would never even dream.
    He wouldn't have the chutzpah to do that sort of thing.
    What about in terms of their relationship with the kids?
    My mother was closer to the children.
    My father was a bit not detached, really,
    but not forthcoming.
    That's all I can remember.
    It's amazing how little kids observe about their parents
    until they grow up.
    But I never had a chance.
    I never had a chance to observe them as a grown up.
    When I was a kid, the parents were they.
    My life was with my peers.
    And since my brothers were not my peers, the next in line
    was 5 and 1/2 years older.
    It was a break between this brother and myself.
    The others were very close to each other.
    But the revolution, the civil war and the fiat,
    when I was born, it was a long distance from 1960.
    I'd like to hear about, then, what
    happened, what you know about what happened to your family
    during the war, if that's OK.
    Which war?
    World War II, sorry.
    Oh, World War II.
    I'm going to flip the tape again though.
    OK.
    We we're able to manage during the war for several reasons.
    My sister had first--
    my sister had a dressmaking establishment.
    It was very good.
    She designed, and cut, and did the whole work herself.
    It started with one or two German civilian employees
    who were assigned to the occupation government came up.
    And I suppose that they didn't have a chance
    to get custom tailoring, custom dressmaking back home,
    wherever they came from, industrial cities.
    It was to them a great achievement.
    And pretty soon, whole flocks of German young women
    who were in the occupation government from the offices
    came to do their work dresses, whatever, skirts, blouses.
    And the money wasn't of much value.
    Food was.
    And food to them was--
    they obtained in the PX, or whatever German equivalents.
    And they brought a pack of sugar, or flour, or butter,
    or something else, or ersatz coffee, or whatnot.
    It meant a great deal to us.
    It meant very little to them.
    They obtained a dress.
    They had made a custom dress for the equivalent of about $0.50
    or something like that.
    But it was to our mutual advantage.
    And so we were able until the ghetto formed.
    When the ghetto closed in March of 1941,
    that stopped to some extent.
    Although it didn't-- some of them had permission to come in.
    My father couldn't deal with the German customers,
    those civilian workers.
    One only came, and he was very upset about it.
    He was almost frightened.
    He was a decent sort of guy.
    There were many there who weren't involved
    in the persecution process.
    But he was shaking when they came in.
    And he didn't.
    And this guy, when he had the work finished,
    my brother took the garment to his place where he lived,
    and he was able to come back with a sled and a whole sack
    of potatoes, which was a lot to us.
    But to him it wasn't anything.
    And my brother worked in the stores.
    He got permission.
    There was a Jewish welfare committee,
    which was a part of the overall Polish welfare committee.
    It operated in the ghetto.
    And they supplied the kitchen for the home of the elderly,
    and for the orphanage, and homeless, and whatnot.
    And he was able to go out.
    He got an official permission to be out of the ghetto
    and go to smaller towns to bring provisions.
    And as such, he was able to help himself, and buy up something,
    and smuggle in, and bring in.
    So we usually got enough.
    He brought coal, which was unobtainable, plain coal
    in the ghetto.
    We kept it like diamonds.
    We kept it under the bed.
    There's no place to keep it because the basement
    that we had as part of the apartment setup was out front.
    The entrance was out front.
    And the ghetto happened to be divided right
    in the middle of our courtyard.
    There was a fence set up.
    The front was outside the ghetto,
    the inside within the courtyard was within the ghetto,
    and the basement entrance was there.
    So we had no place to put coal or wood.
    We used to use it in the winter to put away potatoes
    and all kinds of vegetable that kept, like onions,
    and carrots, and beets, and whatnot.
    And keep cold in the summer.
    There was no refrigeration.
    You kept your butter there, your milk, and what.
    That was out so we kept--
    I remember we kept the coal under the beds.
    Because without the coal, you'll freeze.
    And it was a very rare thing to have coal.
    We would have managed to survive the war unless they would
    have tightened the screws.
    At the end, shortly before I was taken
    in the early spring of '42, they cut off the electricity
    from the ghetto.
    So we were left without electricity.
    We had to use carbide lamps.
    It was a stinking outfit.
    That equipment that created an enormous unpleasant smell
    in the house.
    But that was the only thing that--
    luckily, it was the spring and the summer,
    and in northern Europe, the days are very long.
    You had daylight up to 10 o'clock almost.
    9:30, 10 o'clock.
    And we couldn't use the electric hot plate, a quiet one,
    during the war.
    Before the war, electricity was so expensive,
    you can't even believe.
    Just having a couple of bulbs in the house,
    you had to pay almost as much as 50% of your rent.
    Just for a couple of bulbs.
    It was a monopoly, electricity.
    And it was one of the largest expenses was
    to be able to pay the utility.
    During the war, the same price prevailed.
    So you were able to use.
    And we got the chance to get a hot plate, I remember.
    And we were able to use to boil water, which was quick, instead
    of having coal to stoke a fire.
    But it stopped in the spring of '42,
    just shortly before I was taken.
    And what happened from there on, I really
    have no way of knowing.
    You don't know where they were deported,
    when they were deported, or where?
    Yeah, together with the Jews of the town.
    And to [? too serious ?] there.
    My mother and sister when first, during the first.
    That was in the middle of, end of July.
    I don't know how my father got separated.
    But he lived-- my cousin told me he lived with her family,
    with his older brother, until the next
    and the final deportation took place two weeks
    later, in early August of 1942.
    I don't know.
    Do you know where they were taken?
    Treblinka.
    They were taken to, OK.
    Most of the Polish general government provinces
    were, also Radom and all the big cities around,
    went to Treblinka.
    People from the eastern provinces
    of the general government went to Majdanek, Sobibor, Belzec.
    People from Krakow, Lemberg, and Lwow went to these places.
    But the rest-- not many Polish transports came to Auschwitz.
    And the 42 people came from various provinces that were
    incorporated into the Reich.
    But Auschwitz, most of Polish Jewry
    was annihilated in Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Majdanek.
    Radom and all the environment went to Treblinka.
    Would you like to talk about your brothers as well?
    The ones that you have pictures of here?
    Anything about-- you mentioned the one
    that was in the military.
    Was that Moshe?
    Yeah.
    Did you have a similar education?
    I had a similar education to the two, these two.
    They were close to each other.
    They graduated grade school.
    That was seven years of compulsory education.
    That was it.
    This is Yechiel.
    And this is Moshe.
    They were about close to two years apart,
    a year and 10 months or so.
    They were both born in Russia, Yekaterinoslav.
    This man here was a friend of my father
    who served in the Tsarist army in the Caucasus.
    Shulman, his name.
    And this lady is his wife.
    She is from Tbilisi, Georgia.
    Oh, really?
    Yeah.
    Interesting.
    She was some woman.
    When she came to Poland, she didn't know Polish
    because she was Russian.
    She learned.
    She had to learn Polish.
    She spoke Yiddish, she picked it up,
    but her Russian was perfect.
    But he served in the Caucasus, and he met her,
    and they married.
    They lived together with my parents in Yekaterinoslav.
    And they came back about the same period, in 1921.
    Which one are your parents?
    Your parents.
    This is my father, my mother, my sister, my brother,
    my oldest brother.
    And these are the younger brothers.
    I mean, older than me.
    I'm the youngest.
    Right.
    And I have heard that she wasn't deported.
    She was assigned to work in an ammunition factory in Pionki
    and escaped.
    And she was shot while escaping.
    Rebecca was her name.
    She must have-- this must have been in '42, '43.
    She must have been a lady in her 50s, well into the 50s.
    She had the courage to escape.
    She was a beautiful woman and she was quite a lady.
    This lady was-- my uncle who lived
    in America, who lived here in New York, came for a visit
    to Radom in 1935.
    He stayed six months.
    And he got engaged to this lady.
    But something-- somehow, something happened,
    and she never came here, and she perished.
    She married someone else in the war.
    Is there anything about Moshe or Yechiel
    in terms of their-- well, we've heard a lot about Moshe,
    I guess, already.
    But about Yechiel.
    Were you all different in temperament very much?
    Very much, very much different.
    The two of us don't look alike and we
    are completely different.
    He is very excitable, temperamental.
    I am more reflective.
    He is very outgoing.
    He, no matter where he comes, he will immediately make contacts.
    And very energetic.
    And you wouldn't believe it.
    I mean, look at him.
    And he is 75 years old.
    And the way he keeps his house and he runs a business.
    And he worked in the gulag.
    He couldn't swim.
    Very few people in our town swam.
    We didn't have any rivers, and there were no swimming pools.
    He was assigned to be a logger in the forest, in the north,
    in Archangel.
    And you know what a logger does.
    You have to jam, you know the logs get jammed up.
    You would have to manipulate.
    Walk from one log to another in order to unjam the--
    and he couldn't swim.
    And they even gave him special rations
    because he was a Stakhanovite.
    He was a good worker.
    If he is assigned to do something, he'll work.
    I mean, no matter what it is, he can't stand still.
    That's him.
    And you can tell in his house.
    It's like a gym.
    And he does everything.
    He's able to.
    He washes, he irons, he cooks, he cleans, and he decorates.
    He can do anything.
    Send him over to my house.
    Yeah.
    And he was a good business manager.
    He was able to run a store.
    And how about Azriel?
    Did you want to talk a little bit about him?
    This was as little I remember.
    He was a very sociable guy.
    He was an excellent dancer and very graceful.
    What type of dancing?
    Ballroom dancing?
    Yeah, sure.
    Yeah.
    Waltz, tangos, foxtrot, all these things.
    Was that popular?
    Oh, yes.
    You would go dancing?
    Not our crowd, no.
    These crowds were popular.
    The hora, the kind you dance.
    The Zionist.
    Yeah.
    But he was-- he had a different crowd,
    a different group of people.
    I have the pictures of him with his friends.
    Six of them.
    They were very devoted to each other.
    And they were always going dancing, and parties,
    and whatnot.
    So all of your brothers, you all received a cheder education
    and basically then a public school?
    Yeah, yeah.
    So not a Gymnasium.
    Because public school, you begin when you're seven.
    Even now, it's still at seven.
    Cheder, you begin at any time, three, four.
    Right.
    That's why you were you were literate in Yiddish or Hebrew
    long before you become literate.
    When I started to study Polish when
    I was in the private, Jewish private school.
    I didn't go to public school until I was 10.
    Just told me, tomorrow, you bring a pencil and paper.
    We're beginning to study Polish.
    Now, I don't know how old I was.
    Six, maybe seven, I don't remember.
    I came home, I cried, I'll never learn it.
    I won't be able.
    How can I learn it?
    It's a complete-- Polish was something
    that was outside our life.
    The Jewish community, Jewish life in Poland
    was almost like a nation within a nation.
    We had our own culture, our own civilization.
    There was no mingling, there was no mixing.
    Socially, very little.
    We had our own daily press, our periodicals,
    a very rich literature, theater, films, libraries, concerts.
    We had more Yiddish-language newspapers in the country
    than Polish.
    Did your parents go in any of the directions of the--
    I know they all had an ideological bent.
    No, no.
    My father was middle of the road.
    Middle class.
    He wasn't politically-oriented at all.
    Nor was my older brother.
    Just the youngest, the younger three had definite ideas.
    So your older brother wasn't involved
    in the Hashomer Hatzair?
    No, no, no.
    Do you know what he did?
    He went to work early because there was a problem.
    When he came back from Russia, he
    was already nine going on 10, and it
    was a conversion from one language
    to another in schooling.
    And there was no schooling in Russia
    during the revolution, and civil war, and all that.
    So there was a problem.
    I have to take a break.
    I have to go to the men's room.
    At a very early age--
    you on?
    Yeah.
    She became skilled as a dressmaker.
    And very early on, started out herself
    with a group of girlfriends as partners.
    And then by herself.
    And she had a good clientele and was
    able to help herself, as well as to, in some way,
    also help the family.
    But she lived in there?
    She was like what--
    Yeah.
    --10 years older than you or 12?
    12 years older than you?
    She is 11 years older than I am.
    Yeah.
    So how is your relationship with her?
    She was in some way--
    I don't remember that, but I was of course informed,
    I was told, anecdotally as well as properly,
    that she took care of me when I was
    very young since my mother had her hands
    full with the other three boys.
    But she was the oldest.
    And she liked me.
    And I suppose she carried me around.
    I also liked it when we sometimes
    went out in the summer to--
    we had a cottage in a nearby resort place.
    You would normally share that.
    Go for a couple of weeks and then go home,
    and the others would come out.
    Excuse me.
    I always liked to be with her because she would spoil me.
    She would.
    She cooked well and she wouldn't be stingy with ingredients.
    She was really nice to be with.
    Did she have a lot of friends?
    Did she a group of friends that she would hang around with?
    Yeah, sure.
    Yeah, yeah.
    One of her friends is in one of those pictures.
    They're all gone.
    We had a houseful.
    There was a small house, but there was all--
    we were always with her friends and my brother's friends,
    and the house was always--
    and my father's and mother's relatives and friends there.
    We lived in the very center of town.
    And it was always full of people dropping in.
    I mean, there was no telephone.
    You didn't make appointments, you just walked in.
    The door was always open.
    There were always people in the house.
    Your sister, I assume, I assume, had also a public school
    education?
    The same as the older brother.
    I don't know exactly when she finished because she came back
    from this from Russia.
    She was 11 years old and that was a problem
    that interrupted education.
    Compulsory education ended at 14.
    Very few people could afford to go to Gymnasium
    because Jewish children were not accepted to the state
    Gymnasiums, except for very few.
    You had to be the best.
    You had to be someone with the highest grades available to be
    admitted and to get a place.
    And the academic or even academic gymnasium,
    or the technical gymnasium, or the commercial gym.
    There were three in our town, with a separate middle school.
    Not middle school, but what is it called?
    Secondary schooling for technical--
    people who from there on would go to the polytechnical
    and become engineers.
    The academic one with very high standards.
    And the commercial one, where you become accountants,
    auditors, and so on.
    Very few Jews there.
    It was inexpensive.
    But very few Jews.
    There was one Jewish Gymnasium in town.
    The pay was 75 zloty a month.
    To give you an idea what I meant is
    that there were millions of families
    who didn't earn that much to support themselves.
    To pay 75 a month for a child or for more than one,
    is something that only the very wealthy could afford.
    And besides, the idea of secondary higher education
    wasn't as prevailing concept of life and expectations
    of life as here.
    How many Americans went to, let's say,
    just about to expect how many--
    they go to college.
    Even when I went to college, you were always
    told by our betters, you are you are one only of about 4% or 5%
    of the population that goes to college.
    That was in 1951.
    How many did go to college before the war?
    Very few.
    Even I wouldn't be surprised that not more than half
    ever finished high school before the war.
    They had to go to work before.
    And as far as that country was, and at that time, at 14
    was the time to start an apprenticeship
    or to do something or other.
    You couldn't well hang around the house.
    Life wasn't that easy.
    Oh, hi.
    That's it.
    As young people in pre-war Poland, we never associated,
    at least within our environment, we never associated our future
    with Poland.
    Either you had enough gumption to get up, and smuggle your way
    across, and go to France, which had a very heavy population
    of young Polish Jews who came through to France
    and worked there.
    Or you hedged your future to the Zionist wagon,
    as my brother would have, and gone to Palestine
    as a kibbutznik.
    OK.
    The fate, then, of your older brother and your sister--
    were they deported with your parents, to your knowledge?
    My sister was.
    Yes.
    My older brother, I told you, was
    killed in the last week of the war somewhere,
    I don't know where.
    I saw him for a couple, for about two months in Birkenau.
    I was communicating with him but I only saw him twice.
    And then when he left.
    That is my greatest disappointment,
    that he didn't survive.
    He made it so far to the end and didn't survive.
    Goodness.
    Now, if these are the pictures that-- this represents
    my family, my entire family.
    Just you would like to become a part of it.
    I don't know whether you would like to go with the rest of it.
    And would you like to have that as the way I--

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Philip Goldstein, born in 1922, discusses his childhood in Radom, Poland; his secular and religious education in Poland; joining the youth Zionist movement; participating in Hashomer Hatzair in Radom; the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and his family’s house arrest; forced labor; being marched to many towns in Poland including Belzec, Lublin, Annapol, and Krasnik; seeing his family for the last time in 1942; his deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau with his brother; life in the camp; contracting typhus; walking from Auschwitz to Birkenau; living conditions in Birkenau; mass killings in Birkenau; building the gas chambers and crematoriums; the uprising in Birkenau in October 1944; returning to Auschwitz; evacuating Auschwitz-Birkenau; being forced to march to Gross-Rosen; rumors about war’s end; being liberated by U.S. troops; his relatives who survived; living in a displaced persons camp; immigrating to New York in 1945; and his family and life in the United States.
    Interviewee
    Philip Goldstein
    Interviewer
    Sharon Tash
    Date
    interview:  1992 June 02

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    2 sound cassettes (90 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
    Goldstein, Philip, 1922-

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Sharon Tash, of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ID Card Project, conducted the interview with Philip Goldstein in Chevy Chase, MD on June 2, 1992.
    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 08:23:40
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    Oral history interview with Miru Alcana

    Oral History

    Miru Alcana, born on the Island of Rhodes, Greece in 1915, describes her life in Rhodes before the war; the implementation of anti-Jewish laws; her deportation from Rhodes to Haidari (Chaidari), near Athens and then to Auschwitz; her experiences first in Auschwitz, then working in a munitions factory near Buchenwald and then her arrival in Theresienstadt (Terezin) immediately after its liberation; her attempts to save lives in the hospital at Terezin; her move to Bologna, Italy to seek assistance from the Jewish community there; and problems with reparations and the effect the losses she suffered during the Holocaust had on her physically and emotionally.

    Oral history interview with Inge Auerbacher

    Oral History

    Inge Auerbacher discusses her prewar life in Kippenheim, Germany, where her orthodox Jewish family lived peacefully with Christians; her memories of Kristallnacht; the transports of Jews beginning in 1941, the 1942 deportation of her entire family to Theresienstadt; the “clean-up” of Theresienstadt done for the benefit of the Red Cross Commission and for a propaganda film; her liberation on May 8, 1945; arriving in the United States in 1946 aboard the Marine Perch; her work as a chemist with renowned scientist, Meyer Friedman; and her life’s work lecturing about the Holocaust and being a voice against bigotry.

    Oral history interview with Helen Balsam

    Oral History

    Helen Balsam, born December 16, 1927 in Bedzin, Poland, discusses her childhood in Poland during World War II; witnessing the destruction and burning of homes and synagogues early in the war; her father’s registration for the Polish Army; early resistance against Germany; her father’s capture in Russia and internment in various labor camps; her family’s placement in a ghetto; her family’s internment in Auschwitz; the hardships she experienced during her internment in a labor camp in Hirschberg (Jelenia Gora), Poland; working in a textile factory; her reunion with her father in Hirschberg; her experiences being transported to multiple camps near the end of the war; her experiences walking through “the roads of death” in Austria; her traumatic experiences in the labor camp, Gunskirchen; her liberation from the labor camp by the American Army; her stay at the German soldiers’ camp, Hirschegg; her long-term hospitalization after the war; and marrying a Christian man from the Hirschegg camp.

    Oral history interview with Irving Balsam

    Oral History

    Irving Balsam, born October 17, 1924 in Praszka, Poland, describes experiencing antisemitism as a schoolboy; his family’s religious observances; the German invasion; his membership in the Hitler Youth as a means of surviving, until he was discovered as a Jew; his deportation as one of the first 80 schoolboys deported from his home town; his time in several concentration and slave labor camps, including one near Poznan; being sent to Auschwitz in 1943; being transferred to Lagisza concentration camp; his liberation by the American Army on May 5, 1945; immigrating to the United States in December 1948; giving testimony at war crimes trials; and his personal convictions on why he survived.

    Oral history interview with Harry Bass

    Oral History

    Harry Bass, born July 7, 1919 in Bialystok, Poland, discusses his childhood in Bialystok; his mother and father and five siblings; speaking Yiddish at home; graduating from high school; the Russian occupation of Bialystok; antisemitism and the boycott of Jewish properties; working in the kitchen of a Russian textile factory; the German occupation of Poland in 1941; his memories of the Germans killing Jews by throwing them into burning synagogues; living with his family in the Bialystok ghetto until its liquidation in January 1943; being taken to Pruzany with his mother, sister, and two brothers; the trek to the Linowo (Linova, Belarus) train station eight kilometers away; the cattle car journey to Auschwitz; delousing and washing after his arrival in the camp; receiving an identification number; the death of his mother and two youngest brothers in Auschwitz; the Sonderkommando revolt in Auschwitz; working in the camps; his liberation in Germany in May 1945 following a death march; sailing on a ship, named the Capricorn, on the Elbe to Noishta-Limbeck; and working for the Board of Education in Germany after the end of the war.

    Oral history interview with Abraham Bergman

    Oral History

    Abraham Bergman, born June 15, 1924, in Krasnik, Poland, describes his prewar life in Lublin; his experiences with violent antisemitism; the German occupation of his town; his work at menial jobs assigned by the Judenrat; the first deportations in 1941; how, by September 1942, the town was “Jedenrein,” cleansed of Jews; the “Judenkarde,” the legal document which allowed Jews to remain; his transport to Budzyn labor camp; the Ukrainian and SS guards in the camp; doing forced labor for the German company Henklewerk; and being transported to Majdenek in 1944 where he became the foreman of a group of shoemakers.

    Oral history interview with Hans Bergman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Alice Bogart

    Oral History

    Alice Bogart (née Winternitz), born May 7, 1926, discusses her childhood in Prague, Czech Republic; her parents and her brother, Peter Winternitz; restrictions placed on Jews after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia; her and her brother’s involvement with the Zionist youth group, “Helping Hands;” going to the countryside to help farmers as unpaid laborers; how her brother was sent on one of the first two small transports, Arbeit Kolona 1 and 2, to build Terezin; how she and her parents joined her brother at Terezin in July 1942; the death of her parents and brother in Terezin in March 1943; doing forced labor at Terezin during the rest of the war; being sick with typhoid when Russian troops liberated the camp 1945; returning to Prague, where she continued to recuperate; and how after eventually managing to contact her uncle in New York; and going to the United States in July 1946.

    Oral history interview with George Brieger

    Oral History

    George Brieger describes his familly’s experience during the Holocaust; his father Anno Brieger, who was born in Nyathalas, Hungary in 1925; his mother and grandmother who came from Munkatch; his grandfather Adolph Brieger; his family’s prewar life in Nyiregyhaza; changes as Hungary took control of Nyireghaza in 1938; the ghettoization of their town; his father and grandfather’s deportation to Auschwitz; his grandfather’s liberation by the Russians and subsequent deportation to Siberia, where he perished; his father and uncle’s forced march to Bergen-Belsen from which they were eventually liberated by the British and then relocated to Sweden; his father’s arrival in the United States in 1977; and how his father remained the only survivor of his five siblings, his parents, and grandparents.

    Oral history interview with Maria Brieger

    Oral History

    Maria Brieger (née Deutsch), born December 19, 1931, discusses her childhood in Budapest, Hungary; her extended family; speaking German at home; studying Hebrew and English at school; attending an orthodox Jewish school and then gymnasium; antisemitism in Hungary; the start of the German occupation of Hungary on March 19, 1944; her father’s store getting taken over by Prime Minister Miklos Kallay’s brother; Raoul Wallenberg organizing fake Red Cross homes in Budapest; caring for children in a home; recovering from an illness brought on by dirt and lice; the death of her mother and father; the liberation of Budapest by Russian forces on January 18, 1945; living with her maternal grandmother after the war; her husband, who was liberated from Bergen-Belsen; living in Nyiregyhaza, Hungary for 25 years; and the Communist government takeover of her family’s store in 1952.

    Oral history interview with Claude Brunswic

    Oral History

    Claude Brunswic (born Kurt Braunschweig), born ca. 1921 in Heidelberg, Germany, describes his life in Germany before the war; his father’s medical practice; the lack of antisemitism in Heidelberg before the war; the German army arriving in Heidelberg in January 1933 and the subsequent persecution of the Jews; his family’s decision to leave Germany and move to The Hague, Holland; his membership in the Hachshara in The Hague; his father’s acquisition of French nationality due to his French grandfather; the family’s move to France in 1936; working as a cabinetmaker at the piano factory, Pleyel; enlisting in the French Army in the fall of 1939; being transferred to the Maginot Line, where he was captured by Germans in 1940; being sent from Bacharach and to Trier as a prisoner of war; doing forced labor in Laufeld; experiencing forced marches until liberation in January of 1945; his demobilization and reunion with his parents after the war; being employed for the United States Relief and Rehabilitation Administration as a messing officer; and his immigration with his wife to the United States in January 1946.

    Oral history interview with Rose Brunswic

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Renee Carasso

    Oral History

    Renee Carasso, born August 15, 1919 in Preveza, Greece, describes her happy childhood; her father’s textile store; attending school in Iōannina, Greece; the Jewish community in her town; her siblings; playing mandolin; the German invasion of Greece; the restrictions placed on Jews; Germans billeting in their home and bringing prostitutes with them; being deported with her family on March 25, 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau; her three brothers being selected to work in the crematorium; the uprising in Birkenau; her various jobs in the camp; being transferred to Ravensbrück and Malchow; having to work at night on parts for pistols; her friendships in the camps; religion in the camps; her physical condition in the camps; liberation; going with other Greek Jews to a displaced persons camp run by UNRRA; finding her sister; living in a city near Berlin, Germany; returning to Greece with her sister in 1945; getting married; going to the United States; and settling in Baltimore, MD.

    Oral history interview with Magda Cox

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Jacek Dabrowski

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Paula Dash

    Oral History

    Paula Dash (née Garfinkel), born in 1920 in Łódź, Poland, describes life in Łódź; the beginning of the war and the German invasion; the roundup of Jews and deportations; having to turn in their valuables and wear the star of David; being moved into the ghetto and living in one room with her family; rations in the ghetto; the death of her father from starvation in 1942; the deportation of her sister and brother; the atrocities in the ghetto; learning of the mass killings; a Kinder Aktion in the camp when the Nazis rounded up and killed all the children they could find; being sent with her mother and youngest brother in August 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau; being shaved upon entering the camp but not receiving a tattoo; the emotional torture the guards subjected the inmates to; the heavy bombardment to the camp and being crammed into a barrack with hundreds of other people; life in Bergen-Belsen; seeing piles of corpses and the mass graves; being sent briefly to work cleaning bombed out houses in Bremen, Germany, where she found a towel that she managed to keep in the camp; witnessing cannibalism; contracting typhus; receiving help from her friends in the camp; being liberated by the British in April 1945; and her immigration to the United States in 1951.

    Oral history interview with Ani Davidovics

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Juliusz Deczkowski

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Aron Derman

    Oral History

    Aron Derman (né Dereczynski), born on May 5, 1922 in Slonim, Poland (Belarus), describes his life before the war; his parents who were shopkeepers; his experiences with antisemitism before the war; his involvement in the Zionist movement and membership in the Hashomer Hatzair; the boycott of local Jewish businesses towards the end of the 1930s; being on a date in Oftryn when the war began; the arrival of Russian soldiers; his journey to Vilna (Vilnius, Lithuania) in hopes of immigrating to Palestine that came to no avail; the ghettoization of Slonim; the liquidation of half the ghetto and his escape from the round-up; his escape from a German “Aktion”; his decision to leave the ghetto and travel to Grodno; being sent to Auschwitz, escaping the train, getting caught, and being sent back to the ghetto; hiding in the Grodno ghetto and hopping a train headed to Vilna with several friends (including his future wife Lisa Nussbaum); joining the FPO; leaving the ghetto and going to the Narocz forest; joining the Nakamah partisan group, which was disbanded; being in the Kalininski partisans and his activities; being liberated by the Russians; getting married in Rome, Italy in 1947; immigrating to the United States in 1947; and his life after the war in Chicago, IL.

    Oral history interview with Henry Drobiarz

    Oral History

    Henry Drobiarz, born in Sosnowiec, Poland, describes growing up in Kozlow, Poland; attending public school and cheder; his siblings; his family’s religious practices as Orthodox Jews; apprenticing as a tinsmith with his uncle in Sosnowiec; the German invasion and continuing to work as a tinsmith; being sent to Krakow, Poland in 1940; staying in town to work as a tinsmith as other Jews were sent to Slomniki in 1942; hiding with his parents in Kozlow during roundups; the separation of his family to various places; working in Krakow-Jerozolimska (Płaszów) concentration camp; being sent to Mielec concentration camp; his work making airplane parts in the camp; working in Sandomierz concentration camp; being taken to Wieliczka concentration camp in June 22, 1944; being sent to Flossenbürg concentration camp and the terror experienced by the inmates when they thought they were going to be gassed; working in a quarry; being transferred to Leitwezil, Czechoslovakia (possibly Litomerice, Czech Republic) to a carbide mine for six weeks; being sent to Dachau concentration camp for three days then Augsburg to work in a Messerschmitt factory; daily life in Augsburg; being transferred in December 1944 to Leonberg concentration camp; being taken to Kaufering concentration camp for three weeks; being taken to Allach concentration camp; being liberated on May 1, 1945; going to the nearby town; going to Munich, Germany; working for the US Army for a few months; meeting his future wife; going to the United States in December 1949; living in New York, NY; and his life after the war.

    Oral history interview with Maria Efes

    Oral History

    Maria Efes, born on July 15, 1909 in Kopys', Belarus, describes living in Orsha, Belarus; going to Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) in 1924; graduating from the Gertson institute in 1933; working as a speech therapist in a Russian-occupied area of Finland; her parents’ backgrounds; her siblings; being a child psychologist in the 1930s; her studies on school children in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), Russia; going to Crimea, Ukraine in 1936; being a graduate student, studying foreign languages; the German invasion in 1941; her sister’s experience during the German invasion; the bombings; the experiences of her siblings during the war; taking a group of children to Siberia in September 1942; working at a children’s house in Siberia for two years; returning to Leningrad when the war ended; and her husband. [Note that the interviewee describes her early life approximately half-way through the interview.]

    Oral history interview concerning Abraham Ellenbogen and Hanna Ellenbogen

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Selma Engel

    Oral History

    Selma Engel discusses her early childhood and family life in Zwolle, Holland; her three older brothers; attending Dutch public school and Hebrew afternoon school; how her parents ran a kosher hotel; the death of her father in 1941; how in 1942, the Germans threw the family out of their hotel and placed them in a small house with no electricity or bathroom; saying goodbye to her mother and brothers and going into hiding in July 1942; being sent to Sobibor the following year when her mother was sent to Poland; two of her brothers being sent to a work camp, while the third remained in hiding; how at the beginning of the war and in 1945 their hotel was used as a place to hide German Jews who were smuggled to Belgium; her observation that all small towns in Holland have memorials to the Jews who were killed during the war.

    Oral history interview with Lonia Fishman

    Oral History

    Lonia Fishman (née Goldman, born on May 3, 1920 in Wegrow, Poland) and her husband, Sevek Fishman, discuss Lonia’s childhood and her family; attending public school and a Hebrew school; making and selling quilts in Warsaw, Poland with her sister; her family’s move to Warsaw; getting married; the German invasion; how some Jews committed suicide; Sevek’s experience getting shot in the ghetto; stocking up on supplies with the family; the resolve of the family to remain together and not separate; Sevek’s mother; the Jewish police in the ghetto; Sevek witnessing his father being shot to death; and her sister Edith Goldman.

    Oral history interview with Sevek Fishman

    Oral History

    Sevek Fishman, born on July 14, 1918 in Kaluszyn, Poland, describes his childhood and attending a Jewish school; religious observations in his family; apprenticing as a tailor; the Jewish community; the German invasion; antisemitic propaganda; the roundups; going to the Warsaw ghetto with his whole family; smuggling in food for his family; his work removing corpses from the ghetto streets; his work for Organisation Todt; being sent briefly to a small camp; hiding with his wife during another roundup in the neighboring suburb Wegrów, Poland; escaping from the ghetto; people hiding out in the woods outside Warsaw; hiding in a hole in the floor of a house with his wife for 18 months; being liberated by Jewish soldiers and sent to a field hospital; and his reflections on the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Jack Frenkel and Henry Frenkel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Irene Freund

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with John Friedmann

    Oral History

    John Friedmann, born on born October 19, 1913 in Vrbove, Czechoslovakia (now in Slovakia), describes growing up in Vienna, Austria; his apprenticeship as a salesman in a linoleum business; the German annexation of Austria; being arrested and sent to a jail in Linz, Austria in August 1938; being taken by cattle car to Dachau concentration camp; the work and various prisoners in the camp; being sent to Weimar before being transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp; his work in the camp; hangings in the camp; his mother’s attempts to write to the camp officials and get John out; being released and returning to Vienna; Kristallnacht in November 1938; going to Shanghai, China in December 1938; his mother joining him in Shanghai; working as a supervisor for the trash dumps; working for the Shanghai Bus Company; having to live in the ghetto; working for Citroën Motors; getting a job in the Toyota Company, which allowed him a pass to leave the ghetto; the arrival of American troops and being hired as a foreman in the ATC (Air Transport Command); flying to Alaska with a Jewish organization in 1949; going to Vancouver then Toronto; working for Austin Motor Company; getting married in 1950; and moving to California in December 1950.

    Oral history interview with Irene Frisch

    Oral History

    Irene Frisch (b. Bienstock), born in 1931 in Dohobyz, Poland (Drohobych, Ukraine), describes her life in pre-war Poland; her parents; her father’s occupation as a businessman; her family’s housekeeper, Frania Osobokowa, who helped save her life; the beginning of the war and ghettoization of Dohobyz; the harsh conditions her family endured while in the ghetto; Frania’s willingness to house and feed her, her mother, and her sister during the war; the murder and persecution of Jews after the liquidation of the ghetto; her survival in hiding and liberation by the Russian Army; antisemitism in Poland after the war; her miraculous reunion with her father on a train; her experience with antisemitism in high school and her struggles with her principal; her family’s decision to immigrate to Israel and the painful goodbye with Frania; her emigration from Israel to the United States in 1961; her life in the United States; and her lasting relationship with Frania.

    Oral history interview with Andrzej Garczynski

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Bozenna Gilbride

    Oral History

    Bozenna Gilbride, née Urbonowicz, discusses her childhood in Wolyn, Poland (present day Volhynia, Ukraine); her Christian farming parents; how her father hid Jews in a shed on his farm early in World War II; escaping after Ukrainians burned her family’s farm and their village; immigrating to Germany, unaware of what was happening there; working in a factory making leather goods for German soldiers; working in a slave labor camp in Chemnitz; contracting TB; how her mother was suspected of being in the Polish underground and was sent to Ravensbrück, where she was sterilized; how her mother was sent to Gross-Rosen; her feelings about being separated from her mother; the arrival of American troops; the behavior of German citizens; living in a displaced persons camp in Leipzig from 1945 until the beginning of 1947; immigrating to the United States; and her mother’s difficulty in obtaining a visa to join the family in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Marian Gnyp

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Alma Goldberg

    Oral History

    Alma Goldberg (née Bressler), born on March 22, 1930 in Czernowitz, Bukovina (Chernivtsi, Ukraine), describes her younger sister (Lydia Bressler Goldring); her father’s import business; her religiously traditional family; attending soccer games with her father; attending a Romanian school and learning Hebrew from a private teacher at home; experiencing antisemitism from other children; living in an integrated neighborhood; hiding during the pogroms committed by Romanians, Ukrainians, and Cossacks; going with her family to Bucharest, Romania; the bombardments in Bucharest; having to leave a cinema once because of the bombing; attending school in Bucharest; sending family heirlooms to relatives in Israel and hiding other possessions; going to Switzerland with her family then Milan, Italy; going with her family to Cuba in 1948; attending business school and being a secretary, using six languages; living in Havana; moving to the United States; and her life in the US.

    Oral history interview with Charles Goldberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Helen Goldkind

    Oral History

    Helen Goldkind discusses her grandmother, who was 80 years old when she was taken to Auschwitz; her childhood in Volosyanka (Ukraine); her extended family, most of whom were deported to Auschwitz; growing up as one of seven children; the Hungarian occupation of her town in 1939; her limited access to education; speaking Czech and Yiddish; restrictions under Hungarian rule; how her parents were forced to close their store; her brothers’ deportation to a Hungarian labor camp; the arrival of German forces in her town between 1942 and 1943; the establishment of a ghetto in a brick factory in Uhzgorod; being forced to move into the ghetto in 1943, where she lived for a few months; her deportation to Auschwitz; the commotion and confusion she experienced during her arrival at Auschwitz; the deaths of family members; staying together with her sister in the camps; being sent to Bergen-Belsen with her sister; and how her sister aided in her survival.

    Oral history interview with Sally Goldstein

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Monique Goodrich

    Oral History

    Monique Goodrich (née Jackson), born on October 29, 1937 in Paris, France, describes her Russian father and Polish mother, who were both orphans of World War I; spending most of the war years in Saint-Laurent-de-Neste, France; her family’s escape to the Pyrenees at the beginning of the war; receiving help from people in the town; speaking Basque; her brother’s birth in 1941; Germans coming into the town and rounding up people; sensing the danger but not understanding it fully as a child; instinctively knowing as a hidden child that she shouldn’t call attention to herself; living for a while in an orphanage in a convent when she was four; the regimented life in the orphanage; the severe rationing; living on a farm apart from her family; her mother getting false identity papers from the policeman who was helping her; her father’s garden; her father going to Spain and living in Miranda de Ebro concentration camp; smugglers in the area; the resistance in Saint-Laurent-de-Neste; her mother’s despair when she learned of her sister’s deportation; being in Paris during the liberation; her father coming back from Spain; being sent to the countryside; living in Paris for six years before going to the United States; attending school in the US; feeling that she knew more about the Catholic religion than Judaism; making more time for Judaism in her life; and her appreciation for all the things the people in Saint-Laurent-de-Neste did for Jews during the war.

    Radio broadcast about Karl Gorath

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Edit Gredinger

    Oral History

    Edit Gredinger (née Grinsphun), born on March 2, 1922 in Kishinev (Chisinau, Moldova), describes her parents and little brother; living well on their own land; her father farming and working for the railroad; being sent at the age of 11 to Tigina (Bender, Moldova) for gymnasium; graduating in 1940; not being allowed to discuss the war nor read newspapers while she was at school; the rise of fascism in 1938 and the subsequent pogroms; not being affected by the pogroms; studying at the Teacher Institute in Kishinev; the Russian occupation; going to Bulboka to get her parents so they could evacuate together; traveling east with her parents and brother; going to Pervomaysk, Ukraine; being caught by the Germans and assembled in a church in Bogopol (Bohopil); being separated from her family and taken with other people to work; the murder of her mother, father, and brother; escaping with a friend across the frozen river; hiding in pigpens; passing as a Romanian Christian; being sent to a ghetto camp in Otmechatka; the hard labor she performed in the camp; getting married in 1942 to Matvey Gredinger (RG-50.233*0042); working on a farm with her husband; her husband being sent to other places for two years; her husband’s return in 1944; having her daughter in the camp; returning to Moldova; and the communal grave at Pervomaysk.

    Oral history interview with Matvey Gredinger

    Oral History

    Matvey Gredinger, born June 2, 1921 in Moldavia, discusses his prewar family life; his home town in which 500 Jewish families lived; studying Hebrew and the Jewish religion; antisemitic groups at school; visiting in parents in Versoka, Romania in 1940; the murder of his parents in Versoka by the Germans; being shot in the neck in his home along with his father; marching through Moldova until reaching Soroka a week later; being marched to a concentration camp in Vertajan (Vertiujeni, Moldova)at the end of September 1941 with over 20,000 prisoners; how mostly Romanians guarded the prison with some Germans; being forced to carry rocks to build a road; his fellow prisoners who were Romanian, Moravian, and Ukrainian Jews and political prisoners; his liberation by the Russians in April 1944; his arrest by the Russians in 1947 and his time in Siberia; and his arrival in the United States in March 1990.

    Oral history interview with Bernard Green

    Oral History

    Bernard Green, born March 6, 1911 in Rozwadow, Poland, discusses his family members, several of whom survived the Holocaust with false papers; attending a private Jewish school and completing three years of college for engineering; his awareness of antisemitism when he was unable to finish his education; working for Germans in a factory; being recruited into the Polish Army from 1934 to 1937; being stationed in Lvov (L'viv, Ukraine); attending school in the army; running the canteen in the army for two years; the head of his outfit who was a Jewish mayor; events following the German occupation of Rozwadow; the camp in Pisznica, Poland; and his return to Rozwadow after the war.

    Oral history interview with Sabina Green

    Oral History

    Sabina Green (née Low), born on March 23, 1922 in Ulanow, Poland, describes her childhood; her parents; her two brothers and sister; her parents taking in a young Jewish boy from Frankfurt, Germany; attending public school and Jewish school; the Jewish organizations in Ulanow; the German invasion in 1939; doing forced labor; the looting committed by local non-Jews; the Judenrat (Jewish council) choosing people for work details; her brother’s deportation to a work camp in 1941; visiting her brother at the camp and bringing him food; her brother’s release from the camp; the murder of her uncle and his family; being ordered to go to Saklikov; getting false papers with the name Zofya Jamowa; going with her future husband to Stryj, Poland (now Stryĭ, Ukraine); the death of her sister and younger brother; passing as a non-Jew and attending mass; witnessing the destruction of the whole Jewish community in Stryj in 1943; the massacre of the Jews in Stryj; how the Polish people in Stryj helped the Jews; visiting Ulanow after the war and finding no survivors in her family; leaving Poland in 1957 and going to Israel; going to the United States in 1960; and living in Brooklyn, NY.

    Oral history interview with Henry Greenbaum

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Blanka Gross

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Elias Grossman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Gerald Grossman

    Oral History

    Gerald Grossman, born on December 20, 1923 in Rovno, Poland (Rivne, Ukraine), describes his Jewish parents; his three brothers and one sister; his father’s work as a tailor; attending public school and cheder; attending a specialized ORT school in 1936; speaking Yiddish at home and Ukrainian and Polish elsewhere; the relations between Jews and non-Jews in Rovno; belonging to a religious Zionist organization; discussions in the 1930s about Hitler and the Nazis in Germany; the beginning of the war and the Russian occupation in 1939; living with his family in the nearby town of Abarro; continuing his education in a Russian-controlled school; going to a railroad school in Zdolbunów (Zdolbuniv, Ukraine); graduating in 1941 and working as a locomotive engineer in Kamionka Strumilowa (Kam'ianka Buz'ka, Ukraine); the German invasion in June 1941; traveling by train east during the bombardment; returning to Rovno; being sent to Russia as part of a special reserve transport group for the military; going to Harkov (Kharkiv, Ukraine) in 1941; living in Zagorsk (Sergiev Posad), Russia circa 1942, working on the railroad near Moscow; deserting his railroad job with four Ukrainian men and going to east; the harsh winter and his experiences in Gorki (Nizhniĭ Novgorod), Russia; going through Kuibyshev (Samara), Russia to Tashkent, Uzbekistan; being afflicted with lice and typhoid; living in Tashkent for about nine months working as a machinist; throwing away all his documents and pictures that would identify his real name for fear of being discovered as a deserter; going to Cuzar with his uncle to sign up with the Polish Army to fight the Germans from the English side; being rejected because he was Jewish; going by the name Grisorus; returning to Poland and going to Krakow; not knowing what happened to any of his family; and his efforts to help other survivors find family members.

    Oral history interview with Robert Gruber

    Oral History

    Robert Gruber, born on December 6, 1933 in Kosice, Czechoslovakia (now in Slovakia), describes having few memories before 1938; the Hungarian occupation and watching the Hungarian victory parade; his parents and their backgrounds; going to his mother’s hometown, Michalovce, Slovakia; the anti-Jewish laws; attending a Jewish school; the views of his relatives on Zionism; the deportations beginning in 1942; the Jewish council; how luck and chance influenced one’s survival; his parents hiring a smuggler to get them to Uzhhorod, Ukraine; being detained in a prison in Uzhhorod for a week with his family; being returned to Slovakia; going into hiding; the prevalence of false conversion papers; passing as Christians; living in a boarding school in Miskolc, Hungary for a year; going to Budapest, Hungary with his sister when she needed a tonsillectomy; his mother removing he and his sister from the boarding school soon before all the students were deported; hiding in a pigsty with his family for a few days; moving west to Nitra, Slovakia; the hiding place close to their apartment; avoiding a roundup; getting sick and having a severe fever; liberation of the town; the family members who perished and those who survived; attending gymnasium after the war; the communists' coup d’état in 1948; and going to the United States with his family in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Eugenia Grudzinska

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Laura Gruenbaum

    Oral History

    Laura Gruenbaum (née Ellenbogen), born in 1911 in Rozwadów, Poland, discusses her brother Abraham Ellenbogen and her sister Hanna Ellenbogen; the family’s six-room house built outside of Rozwadów about two years before World War I; Abraham’s education in Czechowice and Krakow; his move to Prague to attend medical school; his return to Poland to attend law school in Krakow; his thriving general law practice at the family home outside of Rozwadów for two years before the Germans invaded Poland; Hanna and Abraham’s travel to Russian-controlled Lvov (L'viv, Ukraine) after the German invasion of Poland; her family’s eviction from their house by the Germans; finding her siblings in Lvov where they lived together until she and her parents were sent to Russia; being separated from Abraham and Hanna; and her attempt after the war to find out what happened to Abraham.

    Oral history interview with Lutz Haase

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Irving Hass

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Margot Heuman

    Oral History

    Margot Heuman, born on February 17, 1928 in Hellenthal, Germany, describes her pleasant childhood in Lippstadt, Germany, where her family moved in 1932; her family’s large home; attending public school and Hebrew school; her family’s religious observations; living briefly with her grandparents in Euskirchen, Germany; moving with her family to Bielefeld, Germany around 1937; her memories of the day Jews were no longer allowed to attend school in 1938; having to wear a Jewish star; the restrictions placed on Jews; the deportations of other Jews, including many of her friends; her grandfather’s death from starvation; being deported with her family to Theresienstadt on June 29, 1942; life in the ghetto/camp; the theatrical and musical performances; the Zionists in Theresienstadt; meeting her very good friend Dita in Theresienstadt; her father’s work for the post office in Theresienstadt; being deported with her family to Auschwitz in May 1944 after her father was caught stealing; the journey to Auschwitz; witnessing the murder of an infant when they arrived at the camp; being placed with her family in Birkenau; being tattooed with a number; her friend Dita arriving after a month; the death of her grandmother; the pain of hunger in the camp; roll calls, during which the prisoners stood naked outside; being sent to a labor camp in Hamburg, Germany with Dita; living in a warehouse on the harbor (probably Hamburg-Geilenberg); digging ditches; her friendship with Dita in the camp and sharing everything with her; the bombings at the camp; being sent to Neugraben concentration camp and the conditions there; a German soldier who gave her his lunch every day because she reminded him of his daughter; being physically abused a few times in the camps; being transferred in February 1945 to Tiefstack and the terrible conditions there; their mixed feelings about the bombings; being sent to Bergen-Belsen in March 1945; being liberated by the British on April 15, 1945; being very ill upon liberation and her will to live; going to Sweden, while Dita went to England; living with Marta Dandenell in Stockholm for over a year; attending private schools; corresponding with Dita; the loss of most of her family; going to the United States, where she had uncles; her dislike for New York when she arrived; working in an advertising agency as a systems analyst; getting married; and feeling obligated to have many children to replace her lost family.

    Oral history interview with William Himmelfarb

    Oral History

    William Himmelfarb, born on July 19, 1927 in Koprzywnica, Poland, describes his siblings; his parents; speaking Yiddish at home; attending school; the German invasion in 1939; living with three other families in their house; doing forced labor; the Judenrat (Jewish council); the restrictions placed on Jews; the formation of ghettos; being taken with others to Skarzysko-Kamienna; his work in the camp; hearing that the Jews in Koprzywnica were annihilated; suffering from typhoid; his kind supervisor; the dangers of working with ammunition; being taken by cattle train to Czestochowa; being placed on trains soon after and sent through Leipzeig, Germany to Buchenwald; arriving in the camp on July 18, 1944; the processing of prisoners; the Kapos; working in a quarry; being sent to Schlieben; working in a factory for anti-tank grenades; an explosion in the factory and how he still doesn’t know if it was due to sabotage or an accident; rebuilding the factory that had been destroyed; the difficult conditions in the camp; being sent out of the camp by cattle cars in April 1945 towards Theresienstadt; being abandoned by the guards during an air raid of their train; getting to Theresienstadt, where he received medical care in the hospital; being liberated by the Russians; going to Prague, Czech Republic then Windermere, England; being sent by the British government with other Jewish youths from city to city; staying in a boys’ home with 15 other boys in Winchester; living in England for five years; going to the United States in 1950; serving during the Korean War; getting married in 1951; and never returning to Poland.

    Oral history interview with Irene Hizme and Rene Slotkin

    Oral History

    Twins, Rene Slotkin (born Rene Guttman [Gutman]) and Irene Hizme (born Renatta [Renate] Guttman), describe their stories and memories, starting from their birth on December 21, 1937 in Teplice-Sanov, Czechoslovakia (Teplice, Czech Republic), and continuing through their early lives in Prague; their father, Herbert Guttman, who was arrested as a political prisoner in December 1941 and eventually sent to Auschwitz, where he died; being deported with their mother, Ita, to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and then later to Auschwitz, where the family was separated and where their mother perished; their experiences in Auschwitz, where they were kept separate and subjected to Mengele’s medical experiments on twins; their reunion several years after liberation, thanks in part to an article in Life Magazine that contained a profile of Irene; Operation Rescue Children which brought Irene to the United States; her adoption by the Slotkins; the Slotkins’ search for Rene, eventually finding him living in Czechoslovakia; and Rene’s adoption by the Slotkin family who brought him to the United States in 1950.

    Oral history interview with Irving Horn

    Oral History

    Irving Horn (né Isachar Herszenhorn), born in February 1927 in Radom, Poland, describes experiencing significant antisemitism as a child; the integration of schools when he was seven years old; how he and the only other Jewish boy at his new school were severely beaten by some of their schoolmates; the war breaking out and his father losing his job; his brother being accused of spying and temporarily jailed; attending a secret Jewish school for two years until Radom became a ghetto; the ghetto in Glinice; how upon the liquidation of the Radom ghetto, he and his father volunteered to work on the Waschnik estate; surviving encounters with the SS; working in a weapons factory, where he encountered Jacob Holz, a ruthless security guard against whom Irving later testified; how around July 25, 1944 he marched to Tomaszów because the Russians were approaching Radom; being deported by train to Auschwitz; being chosen with his father and two brothers to do work in Vaihingen an der Enz near Stuttgart; being sent by a guard to work on the Nazi Secretary of State’s sister-in-law’s estate for two weeks, where he received food and regained his strength; being sent to Camp Unterriexingen, Kochendorf, and finally to Dachau; being in Tyrol, Austria at the end of the war but being taken back to Germany and almost shot into a ravine; how before the killing was to take place, the SS men changed into civilian clothes and left; ending up in a military hospital in Mittenwald, Germany due to severe hunger; spending several years in a displaced persons camp in Stuttgart; immigrating to the United States in 1948; and being in the US Army between 1950 and 1952.

    Oral history interview with Molly Ingster

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Katalin Karpati

    Oral History

    Katalin Karpati, born in 1912 in Újpest, Hungary, discusses growing up in a large, modern house in a gentile neighborhood; her father Izidor Dicker, who was the director of a lumber factory in Újpest, and her mother, who was well-educated and helped her husband with his business; how her family was not religious; marrying her first husband Lajos Nagy, a wealthy businessman who owned a store and mines; how Lajos received a degree in diplomacy from the University of the East in the late 1920s but was unable to find work due to anti-Jewish laws; how in 1940, all Jewish men in the village were sent to a labor camp, but Lajos received a medical exemption and was permitted to relocate to a family villa in Újpest; the birth of their first child Shandor Michael in January 1944; how on April 23, 1944, Lajos was taken to forced labor in Felsőgalla, where he died in an air raid; being sent with her son to live in the ghetto; their deportation to Auschwitz; how six-month old Shandor Michael was killed immediately upon arrival; her second husband, Joseph Karpati; how in May 1944, 25 members of the Karpati family were taken from Buj to Auschwitz, where they were killed; how her current husband Joseph and his brother spent four years in forced labor, but survived the war; and how two of her nieces survived and settled in Israel.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Kirzhner

    Oral History

    Joseph Kirzhner, born January 7, 1916 in Odessa, Ukraine, discusses his four brothers; his father who was killed fighting in war; his mother who also perished; his experience driving tanks in the Russian Army; being captured after fighting in Nikolaiev (Mykolayiv), Ukraine and becoming a prisoner of war in 1942; being sent to a concentration camp; his transfer to three or four concentration camps, partly because he tried to escape several times (twice from Auschwitz); how, after being caught, Kapos used sticks to beat his bare feet, and then made him walk until his feet bled; undergoing surgical experiments in Auschwitz; his memory of constant beatings, wire all around, and German soldiers trying to shoot inmates as the liberating Russian Army approached; his liberation in April 1945; his hospitalization and surgery following liberation; his return to service in the Russian Army; his immigration with his wife to the United States in 1978; and persistent health problems in the years following the war.

    Oral history interview with Michael Kishel

    Oral History

    Michael Kishel (né Majlech Kisielnicki), born in Kaluszyn, Poland, describes his family; his childhood; growing up Orthodox; his great-grandparents who had a bakery; completing grade school at age 14 and attending trade school in Warsaw, Poland for six months; working in the family business and saw his friends in the evening; attending camp in the summers with other teenagers; going to the Russian border for a short time and the German occupation of Poland shortly after his return; the formation of a Judenrat (Jewish council), which his father was part of; living in an open ghetto; being on the sanitary committee to prevent typhus; getting papers, along with his brother, to live on the Aryan side of Warsaw; moving in with their cousins in the ghetto; being deported on a cattle car to Treblinka; jumping out of the train and returning to their cousins; hiding in a basemenrt when the Germans came; being deported to Majdanek; going to a hospital and recuperating after being sick; being deported to Auschwitz, where he remained for two years; being beaten numerous times; being transferred to various subcamps, including the coal mines (Waldenburg subcamp); being evacuated on January 18, 1945; being on the road until they were liberated in May 1945; returning to Kaluszyn; immigrating to the United States in 1948; getting married in 1949; settling in Queens, NY; working in the export business with his brother until they retired in 1988; and his belief that his father helped him survive.

    Oral history interview with Ingrid Kisliuk

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Gertrude Kupfer

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Walter Lachman

    Oral History

    Walter Lachman (b. Wolfgang Louis Lachman), born May 26, 1928, discusses his family background and comfortable childhood in Berlin, Germany; his grandfather’s service in WWI as a master sergeant; his father’s service in the German army and participation in the Spartacus movement; his early school days during which he would sing the German anthem and National Socialist anthem; changes in Germany in 1935 and 1936; the banning of Jewish children from public schools; attending Jewish school in the backyard of an old synagogue; Jewish doctors and attorneys who were no longer allowed to practice their professions; broader restrictions placed on Jews in Germany; his father’s gentile customers who stopped shopping at the family’s business; his experiences with antisemitism and daily harassment from non-Jewish children; his memory of Kristallnacht, during which his father’s business was vandalized; his small Bar Mitzvah in an orthodox synagogue in 1941; his mother’s death from Leukemia; his father’s death from tuberculosis; his last memories of Berlin; being taken by open truck to a railroad yard; his journey east by freight car which took seven to eight days; the conditions in the freight car; his arrival in Riga, Latvia in several feet of snow; his relocation to the Riga ghetto with his grandmother; daily conditions in the ghetto; the murder of his grandmother who was gassed along with other older people inside a truck; the formation of the Council of Elders; the ghetto’s hospital where abortions were performed; the ghetto’s small synagogue; becoming a messenger for the Council of Elders; being sent to Pleskau (Pskov), Russia to cut down trees; the liquidation of the ghetto and his relocation to Kaiserwald concentration camp; working in a factory in Riga where he repaired uniforms for the German Army; harassment from the factory’s guards; conditions in the factory from which there were several failed escape attempts and subsequent hangings; being punished after he was caught attempting to steal shoes; pro-German and anti-Russian sentiment among Latvians; being forced to work 12 hour shifts while unloading ammunition at Riga harbor without protection from the elements or Russian air raids; being taken to Libau (now called Liepaja), a port on the Baltic Sea, to load and unload ships and dismantle tin roofs to send back to Germany; bombings from the Russians; evacuating Liepaja and being taken back to Germany in a freight boat; his confinement in a crowded jail in Hamburg, Germany for three to four weeks with little food; being forced to collect shell fragments from A.A. guns; his relocation to Bergen-Belsen; contracting typhus; the abandonment of Bergen-Belsen by German guards as British forces approached; his liberation by the British on April 15, 1945; how the British used German guards to bury the dead and then burned down the camp; medical care from the British Red Cross; working for the British Red Cross as an interpreter until late 1945; working for the United Nations in Munich, Germany; sailing to the United States on the S.S. Marlin; living in New York and Massachusetts; working as a stock boy; advancing in sales and becoming the president of several successful department stores before his retirement; and returning to Bergen-Belsen in the 1990s and seeing young German citizens who were interested in what happened there.

    Oral history interview with Aaron Laro

    Oral History

    Aaron Laro, born March 23, 1919 in Zdzieciol, Poland (now Dziatlava, Belarus), describes the prevalence of antisemitism in Poland; the signs posted in 1937 demanding a boycott of Jewish-owned shops; the beginning of the war; the confiscation of Jewish property, including the Laro’s six-room house; working with others to hid weapons in the woods; the creation of a ghetto in January 1942 in Novogrudek (Navahrudak, Belarus), and Jews being forced to move there and wear the yellow Star of David; two massacres in Navahrudak, including one in April 1942 when 800 people were killed; escaping from the ghetto and joining partisans in the woods; being a machinist and repairing tanks and other vehicles they found; finding Jewish families hiding in the woods; the attitude of the Russian Army towards Jews; making a detonator that derailed a train going to Vilna (Vilnius, Lithuania) and helping to derail three more trains; being incorporated into the Russian Army; fighting in numerous battles; being wounded and still having a bullet near his heart, a piece of shrapnel in his head, and a leg injury; spending a month in a hospital recuperating from a bullet wound; being made a sergeant; deserting from the Russian Army in the autumn of 1944; immigrating to the United States in June 1947 with the woman who had been with him throughout their time in the woods; getting married; and his thoughts on the actions he took during the war.

    Oral history interview with Anthony Lazar

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Lillian Lazar

    Oral History

    Lillian Lazar (née Guzenfiter), born in Warsaw, Poland on June 16, 1924, discusses her family life in Poland prior to World War II; rebelling against wearing the yellow star and being beaten by Polish children; being sent with her parents to a small ghetto in Prosta; her father’s acquisition of papers listing him as Aryan; working in the ghetto’s factory that made German military uniforms; working 12 hour days for one bowl of soup, which she shared with her mother; her mother’s weak health from starvation and subsequent death from German gunfire; how most of her family died in the ghetto from starvation; memories of her grandfather when the Germans surrounded the ghetto; witnessing a German soldier shoot a mother with a baby in her arms; her attempt to defend herself when the Germans surrounded the factory; being sent with the remaining few hundred factory workers in cattle cars to Majdanek; being beaten at Majdanek; escaping by hiding in a large sewage pipe; boarding a train going to Skarzysko (Skarzysko Kamienna), where she worked making bullets for rifles; performing sabotage by approving several bushels of bad bullets; her liberation by Russian forces in January 1945; Russian soldiers’ harsh treatment of women, including sexual assault; marrying a man she had known in the ghetto, traveling to Italy; and immigrating to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Fanny Lebovits

    Oral History

    Fanny Lebovits (born circa 1923) describes the backgrounds of her father (Herman Judelowitz born in Aizpute, Latvia) and her mother (Sarah Gamper Elterman born circa 1899); her father’s efforts as a liberation fighter for Latvia and his capture by the Germans during WWI; growing up in Liepāja, Latvia; speaking German, Yiddish, and Latvian at home; antisemitism in Latvia; attending a Jewish school; being raised by her parents as a Zionist; attending school in Riga, Latvia when the Russians came in 1940; the deportations of wealthy Latvians to Siberia before the Germans arrived in 1941; working in a hospital; the death of her father in the forest with other Jews; the Latvians who collaborated with the Germans; the creation of the ghetto in 1942; conditions in the ghetto; being send with her family to Riga-Kaiserwald camp in October 1943; and being separated from her younger sister and mother [note that the remainder of the interview concerns the interviewee’s family’s background].

    Oral history interview with Emmi Lehner

    Oral History

    Emmi Lehner, an Austrian-born Catholic born March 7, 1913, discusses her childhood in Vienna before the war; her sister Helene who became mentally ill in her late teenage years and spent most of her time in different hospitals until she was most likely killed by the Nazis after the Anschluss; her family’s experiences during World War I; leaving Austria with her Jewish husband for England in April 1940; and settling in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Isabella Leitner

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Lilly Levinson

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Johanna Liebmann

    Oral History

    Hanna Liebmann (née Hirsh), born November 28, 1924, discusses her childhood in Karlsruhe, Germany; attending public school, where Jews were harassed; being forced in 1936 to transfer to the Jewish school which was shared with mentally-challenged students; the damage to her home and burning of her synagogue on Kristallnacht; her arrest in 1940 along with her mother, three aunts, and grandmother at the home they shared; spending three days on a train and arriving at Oloron Sainte-Marie, France; being sent with her family to the Gurs camp; the tremendous cultural life at Gurs despite knee-deep mud and raging dysentery; working in the camp’s office, where she met her future husband; food from the Swiss Red Cross; being sent in September 1941 by a social worker to the village Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, where young people were helped to survive; hiding with villagers when Germans came to Le Chambon; escaping, alone, to Switzerland; living with an aunt’s the family; nearly having a nervous breakdown; traveling to Geneva where she reconnected with her future husband and worked as a maid; having a daughter and remaining in Switzerland until 1948 when the Swiss declined to let them stay; and immigrating to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Max Liebmann

    Oral History

    Max Liebmann, born on September 3, 1921 in Mannheim, Germany, describes growing up in a comfortable household that was not particularly religious; beginning to play the cello when he was eight years old and having hopes of going to a conservatory in Zurich or Jerusalem; attending public school until 1937 when he left due to the harassment he experienced as a Jew; attending a private school from early 1938 until Kristallnacht; his mother, who was trained as a concert pianist, and his father, who was in the textile business; how his father was forced to give up his business in 1938 and moved to Greece to build a business there; moving with his mother to live with his grandmother; his father’s illegal move to Nice, France, where he remained until the end of the war; the outbreak of the war and being called to perform harvesting work in East Germany; returning to Mannheim in late autumn 1939; volunteering for emigration offices in Berlin and working there until his deportation on October 22, 1940 to Gurs internment camp; being separated from his mother at the camp; remaining in Gurs for 20 months, working in the office of the camp block; being given a pass that allowed him to move about the camp more easily because he played the cello; seeing his mother and his new girlfriend daily; the closing of his block and moving into the camp hospital, where he ran the office; being removed from the camp at the end of June 1942 by the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants to a farm outside of Lyon run by the Boy Scouts of France; saying goodbye to his mother before he left; being dispersed from the farm when they learned that a raid was planned; being hidden on another farm for about three and a half weeks with the help of Mireille Philip; being given false papers and trekking with others over the mountains into Switzerland; being arrested by the Swiss patrol and told that they would be escorted back to France; escaping capture with another man and returning to Switzerland; being interned in Switzerland; and remaining in Switzerland for five and a half years until he was able to immigrate to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Margaret Lipton

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Arlette de Long

    Oral History

    Arlette de Long, born in 1937 in Brocourt in Picardy, France, describes living under the German occupation; her mother’s Russian immigrant status; receiving a baptismal certificate from a priest; being raised as Christian but also being vaguely aware of her true Jewish identity; how the house was taken and the family moved in with a widow until the end of the war; her memories of Americans arriving with two tanks and Germans immediately being made prisoners; moving to Paris, France around age 11; becoming a practicing Jew; her memories of driving to Brittany, France before the German invasion and hiding from bombings with her grandmother; living for a year in London, England and working as an interpreter after the war; moving to the United States; her daughter; experiencing survivor guilt and nightmares; her Jewish identity and lack of faith in God; and her thoughts on Israel.

    Oral history interview with Alexandra Lorenz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Lubell

    Oral History

    Elizabeth Lubell, born December 9, 1920 in Budapest, Hungary, discusses her childhood in Budapest, where she was not aware of antisemitism; Hitler’s rise to power; the large Jewish community in Budapest; being forced to wear the Star of David; her deportation to Poland in 1941; her father’s background as a military officer for which he earned the Iron Cross; the murder of 40,000 Jews in Kamieniec Padolski; living in the ghetto of Kolomjya, Poland; escaping from the ghetto and returning to Budapest; hiding in the woods from the Germans; using Catholic documents to pass through the area safely; her capture and transfer to the camp at Sarvar; being saved by Raoul Wallenberg who placed her under Swiss protection; liberation by the Russians; continued attacks by Germans after liberation; traveling to Israel to visit her brother; and immigrating to the United States on the RMS Mauretania.

    Oral history interview with Henry Lubell

    Oral History

    Henry Lubell, born in 1911 in Dombrova, Gornicza (Dabrowa Gornicza), Poland, describes his family of eight; his family’s move in 1916 to Rawicz and later to Katowice; his father, who worked as a hazan (cantor) and shochet (mohel or kosher butcher); how his family kept kosher, but was not religious; not experiencing antisemitism before World War II; how on the first day of the war, the family sent the mother and two sisters to Kielce, farther from the German border; walking with his father eastward with other refugees until a Jewish peasant gave them a ride in his horse-drawn buggy; living with his wife and his parents in a ghetto (unclear which one) with about 25,000 inhabitants; the clearing of the ghetto of all but a few hundred people after inhabitants were marched to a train station for deportation; seeing a Jewish woman hand her baby to a Polish woman as they left the ghetto; his memories of 70 to 100 people being shoved and beaten into cattle cars; how he loosened a wooden bar from the window, and he and several others jumped from the train; hiding with about 20 men and women in the woods with partisans; being sent by the partisans on sabotage missions, including putting bombs under train tracks; “liberating himself”; and going to Budapest, Hungary to look for his wife, whom he found and rejoined.

    Oral history interview with Trude Ludwig

    Oral History

    Trude Ludwig (nee Gertrud Grunbaum), born on March 26, 1917 in Vienna, Austria, describes her Catholic mother and Jewish father; being baptized and reared as a Protestant; the high level of antisemitism in Vienna even before the rise of Hitler; attending a children’s conservator in Vienna along with her younger brother Otto; dancing and acting in the theater by the age of seven; her stage name which was Trude Hermann; how her career took her to Italy in September 1937 and her mother’s warnings immediately after the Anschluss to remain in Italy; her mother, who managed to get to Prague, then to Paris, and eventually to the United States; her father, who was in Switzerland on business, and later went to Paris; helping her brother get a transit visa by writing him a letter saying she was very sick and needed him to visit her; her brother, who eventually to Paris, where he studied under pianist Claudio Arrau; Otto receiving help from the violinist Fritz Kreisler, who got Otto a student visa for the U.S. in 1939; Otto’s studies in New York City with Arthur Schnabel, until he joined the U.S. Army in 1944 and served in Germany; being visited by her brother in post-war 1945, and his death a month later in an accident; her life during the war; the expiration of her Austrian passport and managing to get a German passport without the “J” mark that would have officially identified her as Jewish (she credits a “nice guy” officer in Germany’s consulate in Rome for granting a non-Jewish passport despite her Jewish last name); how she did not see antisemitism in Italy, and did not think she was in danger; going into hiding in 1944, just ten days before American troops arrived on June 4, 1944; returning to theater work, and then becoming an interpreter for the Americans until 1948; immigrating to Argentina with her non-Jewish German husband, who had been a POW of the Americans, and their child; and receiving a visa in 1951 to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Nathan Magier

    Oral History

    Nathan Magier, born in Bedzin, Poland on May 4, 1925, describes living with his mother, father, and two brothers when the Germans invaded; the several days of bombings; his brother being sent to a camp and never seeing him again; being put to work on various labor projects before being sent to the nearby Komyunki ghetto; being separated from his father in the ghetto and never seeing him again; hiding during the deportations in a wall with his mother; being sent in 1943 first to Birkenau and then to Auschwitz; working as a tailor in Birkenau; being put to work outside the camp while he was imprisoned in Auschwitz; escaping from Auschwitz and joining the underground resistance; being wounded; joining the Russian Army, but deserting and being arrested for his desertion; getting married in Italy, and going to Montreal, Canada in 1951; going to the United States in 1955; and living in Lake Hiawatha, New Jersey.

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malnik

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Helena Manaster

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Judith Mandel

    Oral History

    Judith Kalman Mandel describes growing up in Hatvan, Hungary, where her family identified as Hungarians who happened to be Jewish; the German occupation of Hungary beginning in March 1944; Jews having to wear the Jewish star; being spit on by other children; being moved with other Jews into a ghetto; being forced to march with 50 other Jews in the middle of a gutter, kissing the ground filled with horse-dung, while civilians in the town watched and cheered; being beaten by Hungarian police; destroying their valuables before they could be confiscated; her mother’s refusal to be separated from her child; being sent to Auschwitz and arriving on June 15, 1944; being separated from her mother; conditions in the barrack; never stealing from fellow inmates; being sent after three weeks to Płaszów concentration camp in Krakow, Poland, where she worked moving large gravestones; the Gestapo constantly beating and torturing people; the use of dogs to punish people; seeing children burned alive; surviving typhoid fever and being helped by a friend who sneaked her out of the hospital; surviving blood poisoning and pleurisy; being beaten so many times that she often thought about killing herself; one of her friends who grabbed the fence and electrocuted herself; reciting poetry and singing for food; being sent back to Auschwitz on a three day journey with no water; being under 50 pounds when American troops liberated her train on May 1, 1945 at Seeshaupt, Germany; being taken to Munich, then to Dachau; being found by a friend, Dr. Gatheish Gabol, and taken to Partenkirchen, Germany to a hospital for a week; being in an UNRA camp until September 1945; finding out that her mother, grandmother, and cousins perished; returning to Hungary and finding her father, who had been liberated in January; getting married and immigrating to the United States; and her belief that her survival was due to luck.

    Oral history interview with Lily Margules

    Oral History

    Lily Margules discusses her family’s experiences during the Holocaust; the three layers of Jewish society in her village of Vilna (Vilnius, Lithuania); learning Yiddish in the ghetto; her mother's death from cancer in 1939; moving from Vilna to Soły (Salos), Lithuania; the 1943 liquidation of the ghetto in Soły; being sent with her sister to the labor camp Dünawerke; her father’s deportation to the Kaiserwald concentration camp; surviving the labor camp with her sister and staying at a displaced persons camp in Italy after the war; how her uncle secured papers for Lily and her sister that stated they were Protestants; immigrating to Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1948; marrying and raising two sons; and immigrating to the United States in 1956.

    Oral history interview with Manon Marliac

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Margit Meissner

    Oral History

    Margit Meissner, born in Innsbruck, Austria in 1922, discusses her childhood in Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic); her mother’s wish to have her children baptized; her parents’ differing views about being Jewish and the difficulties it caused the family; how, before World War II began, her mother often invited impoverished refugees from Germany and Poland or Russia to their house for lunch; her father’s job as a banker; living in a large house with many servants and a governesses; her father’s death of natural causes before World War II; being sent in 1938 to the outskirts of Paris, France to live with a French family; being baptized in France as a Lutheran, but always identifying as a Jew; attending dress design school; how her mother eventually joined her in France; her mother’s arrest and deportation to Gurs; living in Paris when the Germans advanced; how, as an Austrian citizen, she was declared an enemy alien and was forbidden to leave Paris; defying this order and riding a bicycle to Étampes, north of Lyon; spending the night with fellow refugees at a school, which was bombed two hours after she left; obtaining a train ticket to Brittany to join friends; how her train was diverted to Bordeaux, near Gurs, and she was reunited with her mother; getting arrested as she walked with her mother over a mountain to get to Spain; how friends in Barcelona helped get them out of jail and into Portugal; becoming a dressmaker to refugees in Portugal; immigrating to the United States with her mother in April 1941; how she, her mother, and all three brothers survived the war; working two jobs in the U.S., dressmaking and assisting the U.S. Office of War Information; and being part of the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

    Oral history interview with Ellen Mendel

    Oral History

    Ellen Mendel, born in Essen, Germany in 1935, discusses her comfortable childhood with her parents, Ernst and Jella Hocher Mendel; how her grandfather, great-uncle, and father were all physicians; her father’s preparations for her family’s immigration to the United States; living in Brussels, Belgium from 1939 to 1940 while they waited for visas for the United States; how the boat on which they emigrated, the Van Dank, was torpedoed and sunk on its return trip; how her maternal grandparents, Eva and Ferdinand Holchherr, were killed at Sobibor; how other family members were killed at Auschwitz and Theresianstadt; her aunt Ella Holchherr, who survived the Holocaust; her aunt and uncle, Erica and Franz Josef, who fled Holland by disguising themselves as French peasants; and her occupation as a teacher and then a guidance counselor in the New York City schools for 32 years.

    Oral history interview with Arthur Menke

    Oral History

    Arthur Menke, born on February 23, 1927 in Hamburg, Germany, describes how Jews were starting to suffer from persecution around 1935, and had severe restrictions after 1938; being forced with his family, like other Jews, to move from their nice neighborhood; being forced to wear the Jewish Star of David; being prohibited from sitting on benches, going to movies, or shopping in regular stores; events during Kristallnacht and how his father’s small factory (which made rubber signs) was not destroyed because the Germans did not realize he was Jewish; the arrest of his father, who was a World War I veteran, and his imprisonment in a concentration camp near Berlin for six weeks; the return of his father who was hardly recognizable after his time in the camp; the Nazi takeover of the family’s factory and bank account; working as a laborer, packing shoes in a factory; his mother, who wanted the family to leave Germany and how they waited too late in the 1930s to leave; being deported in 1940 with about 1,000 other Jews to Minsk, Belarus; his memories of the journey; being forced to walk in the snow to a school in the Minsk ghetto; seeing dead bodies inside the building; the murders of his mother, father, and sister; and daily life in the ghetto. [There is a break in the audio for around 15 seconds at 31:30]

    Oral history interview with Semyon Menyuk

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Leon Merrick

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Abe Morgenstern

    Oral History

    Abraham Morgenstern, born in 1923, discusses his Russian Jewish parents and family life in Lublin, Poland; attending Polish public school and a Jewish school; graduating from business school at 16 years old, just before war broke out in 1939; the Russian invasion of Poland and feeling that they were protected under the occupation; the German invasion of Poland; how German forces shot 99 percent of Lublin’s best educated, professional Jews; how two ghettos were established in April 1942 during which he and his family moved into one of them; the lack of food in the ghetto; the death of his father and sister during the first of four actions; how no Jews from his town were taken to concentration camps, but instead, shot in the woods and buried in mass graves; reporting to the Judenrat for work assignments but eventually just staying home; digging a hole with eight other ghetto residents and hiding there until Russian troops liberated the area; immigrating to Italy with his mother after the war; planning to go to Palestine where relatives lived, but ultimately immigrating to the United States; and how only about 200 of Lublin’s estimated 10,000 Jews survived the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Betty Migdol

    Oral History

    Betty Migdol, born December 19, 1927, describes her childhood in Ruscova, Romania; her large family’s Hasidic orthodox life; her memories of the Hungarian invasion; her brother’s conscription into forced labor; how her life changed with the 1943 German invasion; her sister’s experiences passing as non-Jewish in Budapest; her deportation to a nearby town where she was put in a ghetto; Jewish relations with Ukrainian neighbors; wearing the Star of David badge; her deportation and life in Auschwitz; her separation from her family; her memories of fasting in Auschwitz during Yom Kippur; her deportation to the Weisswasser labor camp in Czechoslovakia in October 1944; conditions in the work camp run by the Wermacht; liberation by Russian forces on May 9, 1944; her experiences being smuggled into the American zone in Germany; life in displaced persons camp; and her return to Ruscova in 1984.

    Oral history interview with Israel Milkow

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Emanuel Munzer

    Oral History

    Emanuel Munzer, born February 26, 1920 in Berlin, Germany; discusses living in a neighborhood of mixed population in the district of Schöneberg; his memories of Hitler’s rise to power; living under an assumed name in a sublet in Berlin; being placed with his grandmother in 1934 when his parents fled to France; living in a Jewish orphanage from 1934 until early 1937; never having to wear the yellow Star of David badge; joining his father and stepmother in France in 1937; attending a training institute for mechanics in Paris; working for Hispano-Suiza in Paris in 1938; being classified as an enemy alien in 1939 and taken to harvest sugar beets in the Touraine; conditions of work; joining the French Foreign Legion in 1940; the disbanding of the Legion by the Germans in 1941; forced work on a German railroad project; his father’s payment to free him from labor; living in Nice where there was a large Jewish population; being sent to Auschwitz in cattle cars on Convey 69 from Drancy in March 1944; the death of his parents in the gas chambers in Auschwitz; working for Siemans Works as a mechanic and living on site; his transfer to the Siemans Arbeitslager in Berlin, the location of the main factory; his relocation to Buchenwald after Russians forces were close to Auschwitz; Allied bombing raids; his relocation to Oranienburg when the labor camp was destroyed by bombing; being treated well by Russians who discovered him and other forced laborers in the forest when they were marched from the camp; recovering in a hospital in the British zone; returning to France; and immigrating to the United States in 1947 after his uncle furnished an affidavit.

    Oral history interview with Sylvia Murawski

    Oral History

    Sylvia Murawski, born July 10, 1928, describes growing up in Warsaw, Poland with her well-known and well-to-do, assimilated parents; the bombardment of Warsaw in September 1939; the beginning of deportations to the ghetto; moving with her family into the ghetto; the term “szmugiel” (smuggling between the Aryan population of Warsaw and the Jews in the ghetto); leaving the ghetto on August 16, 1942; living in hiding with her parents for two years in Milanowek with the Sokolowski family; the emotional effect of living in hiding for so long; and how she eventual finished school, completed a law degree, and got married.

    Oral history interview with Eugene Miller

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Pola Nirenska

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Nathan Offen

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Miki Pear

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Eva Peker

    Oral History

    Eva Peker, born March 18, 1921, discusses her childhood and family life in prewar Vertuzhaniye, Saroka district, Romania (now Vertiujeni, Moldova); her large town in which there were about 500 families, including Jews and Russians; moving with her family in 1936 to Visoka, where there were fewer Jews; learning to become a seamstress; marrying in 1940; the presence of Russians before the war began; witnessing some of the richer townspeople being sent to Siberia; her husband being taken to the front in 1941 when she was pregnant; Romanians coming to her village and taking her family to the Village Council from which they never returned home; walking three days with her family of eight with no food or water to a ghetto in Soroka; leaving there with about 1,000 others who were marched from village to village; how those who could not walk were shot; reaching the forest Kosauts and staying there for six weeks; the living conditions in the tents in the forest; the death of her newborn; being marched to a work camp in Torkanivka, Ukraine, where they worked on a beet farm; being taken out of the camp by friends of her parents; liberation by the Russians in 1945; going back to Soroka after liberation; taking courses in bookkeeping and being employed in government work; never finding out what happened to her husband; working for 30 years in a textile factory in Chernovitz; and immigrating to the United States in 1980.

    Oral history interview with Catherine Polak

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Jack Polak

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Janina Prot

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Fred Raymes

    Oral History

    Fred Raymes, born February 6, 1929 in Hoffenheim, Germany, describes experiencing serious antisemitism in school and in the neighborhood; changes after war broke out; his forced exodus from Germany and eventual arrival in Vichy France, in Gurs; being taken by the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, Children’s Aid Society (OSE) in December 1941 to an orphanage in Aspet, France, run by Swedish Quakers; being sent during the winter of 1943, first to a school in Toulouse and then to a children’s home in Montsec, France; and going to the United States in December 1946.

    Oral history interview with Moses Rechnitz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Zofia Reginiewicz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Liane Reif-Lehrer

    Oral History

    Liane Reif-Lehrer, born in 1934, describes living in Vienna, Austria after her Polish father’s medical training was completed; her father’s home-based dentistry practice and their well-to-do life in a 14-room apartment; her mother, Klara Gottfried, who was born in Poland; political changes that began in 1933, resulting in her father having to close his practice in 1938; her father’s suicide; her memories of Kristallnacht; escaping to France with her mother and brother, and living with other refugees in Limoges, including two girls who were her closest friends: Ruth Isner Kissinger and Bella Isner Uhlfelder; her mother’s deteriorating personality and eventual diagnosis with Alzheimer’s; and the voyage to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Reiser

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Berta Rivkina

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Henry Robertson

    Oral History

    Henry Roberston (né Heinz Rosenberg), born September 15, 1921, in Gottingen, Germany, describes his prewar life in Germany; the devastation that occurred during Kristallnacht; his brother’s transport to Sachsenhausen; his family’s deportation in November 1941 to the Minsk ghetto; the liquidation of the Minsk ghetto and his last time seeing his wife and parents; his transfer to a series of camps, including Treblinka, Płaszów, Wielicza, Flossenbürg, Sachsenhausen, Bergen-Belsen, and Bremen from which he was liberated on April 15, 1945; numerous postwar ailments from which he suffered; his transport to Sweden to recuperate; and his immigration to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Coenraad Rood

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Izy Rosenblat

    Oral History

    Izy Rosenblat, born January 8, 1914 in Warsaw, Poland, discusses his family life before the Holocaust; his two brothers Eli and Herschel; his family’s move to Radom; at nine years old becoming a tailor apprentice to his future father-in-law, Yanka Fishman; courting his wife Hanna Taube, born in Radom in 1917, for 13 years; being forced to pay for protection against antisemitism in school; opening his own shop and becoming registered as a master tailor; being deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where Mengele did the selection; being transferred to another camp where he worked as a tailor; his memories of German disorganization; his liberation by the French on April 5, 1945; living for a short period on a farm; being taken to Dusseldorf and then to Stuttgart to a displaced persons camp; and arriving in the United States in 1950.

    Oral history interview with Pal Rozsa

    Oral History

    Pal Rozsa, January 20, 1925, discusses his memories of early pre-war life in Budapest, Hungary; his family life; his father who was a freemason and language teacher; how his family celebrated high holidays and Sabbath despite being non-religious; his oldest sister’s activities in the Communist movement, which led to her arrest; his sister’s contraction death from TB; his inability to attend university in 1943 because of laws restricting enrollment; his memories of the German invasion on March 19, 1944; his memories of forced labor beginning in June 1944 in Northern Transylvania; his work on a railroad with other Jews, Romanians, and Serbs in the camp; liberation by Romanian and Russian forces on October 19, 1944; his return to Budapest; the Arrow Cross takeover; the death of family members during and after the Holocaust; and his time in university after the war.

    Oral history interview with Eva Roth

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Marsha Rozenblit

    Oral History

    Marsha Rozenblit discusses her father Mendel Rozenblit (born November 3, 1907 in Lukow, Poland): his life in prewar Poland; his father Avraham Rozenblit, mother Masha Markusfeld Rozenblit, and five brothers and one sister; his family’s religious observances; his two children with his first two wives; his time in the Warsaw ghetto from which he escaped during the uprising in April 1943; his arrest and internment in Auschwitz; his experience on a death march from Auschwitz to Dachau from which he was liberated in April 1945 by American forces; his work for the UN Relief and Restitution Agency; his immigration to the United States in December 1947; his marriage and birth of his daughter Marsha Rozenblit; his trauma from losing his first two children and the atrocities he experienced during the Holocaust; and his emotional struggles post-war.

    Oral history interview with Eva Rozsa

    Oral History

    Eva Rozsa (née Muhlrad), born October 13, 1924 in Ujpest, then a suburb of Budapest, Hungary, describes her pleasant family life until anti-Jewish laws and restrictions were in place in 1939; the German occupation of Hungary; drastic changes in living conditions and being deported on the last transport to Auschwitz; the revolt of the Sonderkommando, the crematoria workmen; her mother being sent to Bergen-Belsen then to work in a light bulb factory; being assigned to work in potato fields where she became very ill; remaining at the camp when the forced march began and subsequently being liberated by the Russians on October 27; being ill with tuberculosis and being taken to Cracow, Poland, where she spent ten months recovering; enormous difficulties in getting home to Hungary because she had neither money nor official papers; and finishing university in Hungary in 1955.

    Oral history interview with Sophie Salerno

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Norman Salsitz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Charlene Perlmutter Schiff

    Oral History

    Charlene Schiff (née Sulamit Perlmutter), born December 16, 1929 in Horochow, Poland (now Horokhiv, Ukraine), describes a secure and happy prewar life in a large Jewish community governed by the kehillah (Kehilla); her family members who were town leaders; the Russian occupation of Eastern Poland; the German invasion in June 1941; the ghettoization of her town and the desperate living conditions therein; her mother’s arrangement for her and her sister to escape the ghetto and hide in farm houses across the river; the disappearance of her mother; the rejection of an agreement by the farmer, leaving her abandoned and alone; her attempts to find her mother while hiding in the woods; her eventual discovery by Russian troops; her hospitalization; her time in various displaced persons camps in Germany; her education at the University of Heidelberg; her immigration to the United States in 1948; living with her aunt in Columbus, OH; and her life post-war.

    Oral history interview with Michael Scislowski

    Oral History

    Michael M. Scislowski, born September 30, 1922, in Siedlce, Poland, describes his life in prewar Poland; his school years in Siedlce and in Wilaka (now in Lithuania) until September 1, 1939 when the war began; his attempts to escape the Soviets; learning English; his membership in the ZWZ (Zwiazek Walki Zbrojnej), the underground group that preceded the AK (Armia Krajowa); his arrest on March 19, 1943; his time in the Poliak prison; his transport by cattle car to Auschwitz; his forced march to Dachau after time in Flossenbürg; his liberation on April 24, 1945 by Patton’s Third Army on the third day of the march; witnessing medical experiments that were conducted in Block 10 of Auschwitz; working for the US Army from 1945 to 1950 serving the Labor Service Company; and immigrating to the United States in 1950.

    Oral history interview with Ida Segal

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Rubin Segal

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Lewis Shabasson

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Irene Shapiro

    Oral History

    Irene Shapiro (née Hass), born in 1925 in Berezhany, Ukraine, describes her life in Gludjan until 1938 when her family moved to Bialystok; Russian propaganda; her strong Zionist beliefs; the Russian occupation of Bialystok, which became part of Soviet Byelorussia; the ghettoization of Bialystok during the second German occupation; her involvement with the Jewish underground; her time in Treblinka, Lublin, Majdanek (where her father was killed), Blitzen, and in May 1944, Auschwitz Birkenau; how she survived in the camps; her liberation; her immigration to the United States in 1946; and her work with American and British forces after the war.

    Oral history interview with Flora Mendelowitz Singer

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Dr. Laszlo Sokoly

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Peter Somogyi

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Harold Spear

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Vera Sprecher and Robert Sprecher

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Morris Steiman

    Oral History

    Morris Steiman, born August 5, 1918 in Bodzanow, Poland, describes being the youngest of 14 children in an Orthodox family; fighting with Polish boys on his way to school; antisemitism in Poland; speaking Yiddish and Polish at home; attending Yeshiva in Tutusk for two years; being in Tutusk during the German invasion; being taken out of school to dig ditches; not being allowed in the street; being forced to wear a yellow Star of David badge in the fall of 1939; working in a tailor shop for a German until being relocated to a ghetto with approximately 1,200 people; receiving help from some Poles while in the ghetto; deportations but no killing during the first year in the ghetto; being taken to Dzaldowo, and the brutality of a camp there (Soldau concentration camp); and then to a ghetto in Chestochowa; reuniting with his family in Yaldodov, where there was another ghetto; getting married in 1941; being in the ghetto synagogue when the ghetto was liquidated on Yom Kippur of 1941; his transfer to a smaller ghetto; an unsuccessful escape attempt; the ghetto’s liquidation and being taken to work in an ammunition factory in 1943 with his wife; being taken to waiting trains just before liberation; arriving in the United States on March 3, 1947 with his wife; his post-war life including the birth of his daughter and grandchildren.

    Oral history interview with Matylda Szymaniak

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Florence Tabrys

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Harry Tabrys

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Walter Taranowicz

    Oral History

    Walter Taranowicz, born July 22, 1918 in New York City discusses his parents who were Polish-born Catholics; his father’s American citizenship; how during the Great Depression his father took the family to a ranch they owned in Lublin, Poland; his father’s return to the United States for work and subsequent inability to return to Poland; attending Polish schools in the 1930s; planning to get an European education then returning to the US to become an engineer; the outbreak of war in Poland; the arrival of the Russians and loss of the family farm; the family’s attempt to reach the American Consulate in Warsaw, Poland; staying on the German side of the border; his mother and sister’s deportation to Siberia in 1941; his arrest on January 13, 1940 because the Nazis thought he was an American spy; his brutal treatment by the Nazis; being taken with 5,000 Polish men on trucks to Auschwitz; building Birkenau; working as a cabinet maker, making soldier beds, rifle racks, tables, and benches for German army supplies; volunteering in 1942 to transfer with 4,000 others to Mauthausen, where he worked as a cabinet maker with the camp architect; his liberation on May 5th, 1945 by American forces; being taken to Regensburg, Germany to recover; becoming an interpreter in Italy and being stationed in Verona then Milan for seven months; his transfer to the US in the fall of 1945 on the Marine Falcon; the liberation of his mother and sister from a work camp in Siberia; working as a cabinet maker in New York; marrying his wife Sabina; and details about her life.

    Oral history interview with George Topas

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Jack Trompettor

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Edward Unkiewicz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Solomon Urbach

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Moishe Weiner

    Oral History

    Moise Weiner, born in May 24, 1927 in Vakhnivka, Ukraine, discusses his prewar life in Vakhnivka; attending Ukrainian school instead of the Jewish school; his memories of people’s reaction when Molotov announced war with Germany; escaping on a train with his sister; managing to escape when the Germans attacked the train; making their way to Orsk in the Urals; working different jobs until he was called into the army in 1945; the Russian Civil War and pogroms of that time; how his brothers and sister became Communists during the war; becoming a writer after the war; translating novels by Jewish authors from Yiddish into Russian; and living as a Refusenik for ten years.

    Oral history interview with Paul Wos

    Oral History

    Paul Wos, born December 22, 1920 in Warsaw, Poland, describes his life in prewar Starowka; his Catholic family; his membership in the Polish Army; his experience helping Jewish families hide during the German occupation; his membership in the resistance movement; the Warsaw ghetto uprising; his family’s deportation as political prisoners; the family’s relocation to several concentration camps until they were finally taken to Flossenbürg; conditions at Flossenbürg; his feelings that he owes his survival to his friend Jan Shienitski and to the power of prayer; and his immigration to the United States in 1961 with his wife and two children.

    Oral history interview with David Yegher

    Oral History

    David Yegher (né Jegher), born in December 22, 1920 in Rona de Jos, Romania, describes his life in Romania before World War II; early institutionalized antisemitism throughout Europe; his displacement in a ghetto in Slotyna, Czechoslovakia (now Solotvyno, Ukraine); transporting goods from nearby towns to Jewish families in the ghetto; his experiences in Auschwitz and Gleiwitz and subsequent hardships in the labor camps; being liberated by the British Army; his post-war hospitalization; immigrating to the United States; his encounter with the American Nazi Party; and the importance of trying to overcome contemporary antisemitism.

    Oral history interview with Eva Young

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Frances Zatz

    Oral History

    Frances Zatz, born in May 4, 1932 in Warsaw, Poland, describes her early childhood in Poland before World War II; the siege of Warsaw by German troops; the outbreak of the war; the building of the Warsaw ghetto and subsequent hardships there; her mother smuggling ammunitions into the ghetto; plans for the Jewish uprising; being smuggled out of the ghetto and living with a Christian family; her reunion with her mother and sister after the Warsaw uprising; working in the factories making uniforms for German soldiers; her time in a German detention camp; being liberated by the Russians; moving to Berlin, Germany after the war; and eventually immigrating to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Trude Ludwig

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Magda Rein Cox

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Eva Roth

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Gertrude Zoberman Kupfer

    Oral History

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