Advanced Search

Learn About The Holocaust

Special Collections

My Saved Research

Login

Register

Help

Skip to main content

Print

Oral history interview with Janina Prot

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1992.A.0125.104 | RG Number: RG-50.233.0104

Search this record's additional resources, such as finding aids, documents, or transcripts.

No results match this search term.
Check spelling and try again.

results are loading

0 results found for “keyward”

    Oral history interview with Janina Prot
    Transcript
    OK, the date is April 1, 1992, and we're
    speaking with Dr. Janina Prot in Lexington, Massachusetts.
    Dr. Prot, could you please tell me your name,
    and your date of birth, and your place of birth?
    Yes.
    Please, don't call me Dr. Prot.
    My name is Jana.
    It is my nickname.
    And my full name is Janina.
    And my last name is Prot.
    Oh, date of birth.
    Yes.
    February 8, '26.
    I was born in Poland, in small town
    named Nowe Miasto, near Warsaw.
    Could you tell me about your childhood?
    What was it like growing up in your town?
    What was your family like?
    Did you have brothers and sisters?
    What did you like to do?
    Anything you can remember about that time.
    Well, I can remember plenty.
    I grew up mostly in Warsaw.
    But my travels-- during my childhood,
    I changed the place of living, mostly because my parents were
    divorced.
    And part of my childhood, I spent with my father
    and then part with my mother.
    I have a brother, who is two year.
    See I mean?
    That's OK.
    Two year younger.
    And for part time before the war,
    we were separated because he was with my mother,
    I was with my father.
    It was plenty of family problems.
    My father had some kind of high position in Poland.
    What did he do?
    He was a director of a big factory of ammunition
    and explosive materials in Poland.
    So it was kind of high position.
    And living with him, I was living
    near Radom, a small town, Pionki,
    what was mostly the town around big factory.
    It was a big house, big garden.
    I didn't go to school.
    You didn't?
    No, because it was small country-like elementary school.
    And my father didn't want to send me to this country school,
    feeling probably correctly that education was not too good.
    So I was taught at home with two other girls.
    We had a private tutor.
    And we had lessons at home.
    And in the afternoon, I had to do my homework,
    as all children.
    And once a year, I had to take some small exam.
    It was a government requirement that I have enough education
    to start another class.
    This way, I practically never went to school.
    Except last year before the war, when we moved to Warsaw.
    And I started what they call in Poland Gymnasium, what
    is about junior high.
    This level.
    And I went for one year to school.
    Could you tell me a little bit about the religious life
    in your home or respective homes with your parents?
    Well, it is really complicated.
    We start some kind of complicated part of my life.
    My parents converted to Catholicism before I was born.
    Both my family were completely what they
    call assimilated Polish family.
    They never feel that have too much to do with Jewish habits.
    My father, I think, it was biggest Polish patriot
    what I ever met in my life.
    And I think almost everybody on my father's side,
    in some '20s probably, or after the First
    War, converted to Catholicism or to Protestantism.
    Not in my mother family.
    My mother was, I think, only one.
    So I grew up as a Catholic girl.
    Of course, my parents were not very religious in any religion,
    simply.
    But officially, they were Catholic.
    And because I grew up with other children,
    they wanted me, probably, to be the same as the other girls.
    So I was baptized and I went to first communion, having,
    I don't think--
    being eight-year-old.
    And I didn't know that I am Jewish.
    We never talk about it at home.
    I knew that we are a little different.
    And it was hard for me to figure out what is really different.
    I knew that we are different than the other people.
    Of course, my parents never was going to the church.
    But if I wanted to go to the church as other girls,
    or if I wanted to go to the church with our maid,
    it was permitted.
    It was fine.
    I really discovered who am I when the war started and we all
    discovered that we are not Pole anymore,
    that we are Jews and treated as Jews by everybody around.
    But otherwise, people didn't know?
    Or they did know?
    Oh, yes, of course everybody knew.
    But it was some kind of thing what we were--
    educated people don't talk about.
    We were living between some kind of
    educated, intellectual people.
    And many of them, they have what they
    call in Poland mixed marriages.
    One of them was Jewish, one of them was Polish,
    and everybody had some grandmother was Jewish.
    You know, just mixed.
    And until probably late '30s, I don't know if my father really
    feel a big antisemitism.
    I think later, something started because I remember then,
    about '38 or beginning of '39, he
    started to talk that he would like to quit his job, what
    was very well-paid.
    And I think he enjoyed doing what he was doing.
    Could probably move to Warsaw.
    And so on, and so on.
    It was probably some--
    I will never know this because I didn't
    see my father after the war practically started.
    So I never was--
    I never had opportunity to ask him.
    I was a child.
    And personally, I was living in some kind of isolated area.
    I didn't go to school.
    I was living with my father at this time,
    being taught at home with other girls.
    It was practically not possible even
    to be exposed to the Polish antisemitism.
    I knew that it did exist.
    I knew that it is something really bad.
    But I never took it personally.
    Right, well, you had no reason to.
    I grew up in very liberal house, very intellectual liberal
    house.
    And it was bad to be antisemitic.
    It was bad to think that black people are different,
    and all people should be equal.
    And so on, and so on.
    You can imagine how it is.
    I also imagine you didn't have any black people, too.
    No, no, no.
    But also it was this kind of feeling in the house,
    that the people equal, all religions are fine.
    Right.
    Can I ask you about your childhood?
    Do you remember, did you have any particular interests,
    or hobbies, or music, or anything that you
    pursued or enjoyed to do?
    I don't think so.
    I was very unhappy child.
    In all this financial possibility
    till then, I was very unhappy.
    I was very unhappy because my parents were divorced.
    How old were you when they divorced?
    I was about four year old.
    And they were constantly fighting to have children.
    My father wanted to have both of us.
    And my mother, of course, wanted to have both of us.
    And we are constantly from different reasons switched
    from one parent to the other.
    And you know, my mother was very nervous,
    tense, anxious, neurotic person.
    I was much, much more happy to be with my father.
    But my mother, when I went with her for vacation,
    was constantly telling me, how come
    that you are with your father?
    You should be with your mother.
    You are a girl.
    And children should stay with mother.
    And so on, and so on.
    I was really very, very shy, unhappy, frustrated,
    frustrated child.
    I was very good student.
    And I was reading books from age five.
    I had time that I was reading two books per day.
    And I know and understand now why everybody was looking, oh,
    what a wonderful child, reading, and reading, and reading.
    No, it was my escape, simply.
    Not to be exposed on this family problem,
    not to play with children, what they can ask me,
    where is your mother?
    I had very strong feeling that I am different,
    and I should keep away.
    I was very happy.
    Even now-- this is up through your teenagerhood?
    No, teenager I was during the war.
    I was also unhappy, but different way.
    OK.
    The war started when I was 13.
    And just before the war, I moved to Warsaw.
    My father stayed, and I moved with my brother
    to my mother's apartment.
    And we stayed with her.
    Can you tell me when you found out you were Jewish?
    I remember.
    It was very funny.
    I remember one talk with our maid.
    I was probably 17 year old.
    And I wanted to go with her to the church.
    And my grandmother, paternal grandmother,
    she was living with us when I was with my father.
    And I really didn't like her.
    She was very Victorian, very rigid, and stiff.
    And constantly trying to correct my behavior.
    And I remember telling my maid, I
    know why she does not want me to go to the church,
    because she is Jewish.
    And I remember my maid was looking around,
    you know, and didn't probably know what to say on this.
    So I knew that something was around.
    I cannot clearly tell you what I find out.
    Probably, I was about 12.
    But was still, I think, what the people don't talk about it.
    It was full denial.
    It was full denial.
    And of course, immediately after war, we find out.
    We all find out that you are nothing more, nothing more,
    nothing less.
    But you're Jews.
    Oh, after the war, you found out.
    When the war started.
    Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, OK.
    OK.
    Of course, when the war started.
    Right.
    So would you like to talk about that a little?
    Where were you, and what was going on,
    and what did you end up doing?
    OK, war started, as you know, September 1, '39.
    I came from vacation.
    It was last vacation was I spent with my father.
    To Warsaw.
    And the war started.
    And we moved from our apartment, which
    was on the north part in Warsaw, in Bielany,
    to the huge apartment of my aunt.
    It was a sister of my father.
    Because for a reason what I was never able to understand,
    everybody had the feeling that it
    is more safe to be in downtown Warsaw than all around.
    Of course, life showed that it was completely different.
    And then it was--
    how is siege in English?
    Siege.
    Siege.
    Thank you.
    Same word.
    Yeah.
    Of the Warsaw.
    And we stay all time until in the apartment of my aunt,
    with her husband and her daughter, which was
    10 years older at this time.
    It was also her daughter-in-law because the son, my cousin,
    was in the army.
    Was an officer in the army.
    But his wife was in this big apartment.
    And three months old child.
    It was seven, or eight room, enormous apartment
    in downtown Warsaw.
    And September 25, it was the worst bombardment of Warsaw.
    And it was one of the first bomb dropped on this house.
    My cousin was killed on the place.
    A wife of my cousin and three-month-old baby
    was killed.
    And her mother was killed.
    Four people was killed, being about,
    I don't know, five yards from me.
    Simply, this house collapsed.
    And I was on the verge of the collapsed house.
    And we survived.
    My aunt survived, her husband, my mother, my brother,
    and myself.
    And then the first phase of war finished.
    Warsaw give up, as you know.
    It was September 29 or 30.
    And we moved back to our apartment
    on the north part of Warsaw, what
    was not too badly destroyed.
    It was no glass, no windows.
    But otherwise, it was the same as before.
    And then we discovered that first of all,
    we don't have any money.
    My father disappeared.
    We knew that he's in the army.
    We didn't know was he killed or what's happened.
    And also, I don't know how it was,
    but I think my mother had the feeling that it is pressure
    against Jews, and we cannot stay too long.
    I think in October, probably, or November '39, it was the order
    that the Jews had put the bands with Zion star--
    David Star.
    Star of David, yeah.
    With Star of David, star of the David.
    Of course, we didn't because we lived in complete denial,
    that we are not.
    We are not, we are not.
    But we knew about it.
    And I think that the landlord, the owner of the house what we
    are living, he probably knew.
    Well, people know these kind of things.
    So we're hanging around, not having too much
    money, able to buy bread and not too
    much until in November, my father show up from the army.
    But he knew very well that he cannot stay for all possible
    reason.
    And he started, immediately tried
    to go through the green border, what they call--
    illegally to Hungary.
    And jumping a little farther, he went to Hungary
    in end of December '39.
    And from Hungary to France, and from France to England,
    and I never saw him again.
    So last time when I saw him, it was a brief time
    in December or November '39.
    And we decided to move near Warsaw to the big
    some kind of convent what was near Warsaw.
    And my mother had good friends in this area.
    Could you tell me a little bit about this convent?
    It was some interesting place the convent was sister
    of Franciszkanki, Franciscan?
    Franciscan.
    Franciscan sister.
    It was organized by mother Czacka.
    She was one from the Polish very well-known aristocratic name.
    And they were quite liberal from the beginning.
    And plenty of people from Polish aristocracy, from intellect.
    They some kind of stick to this convent.
    And it was what they call French Catholicism.
    They were running school from blind children,
    they were mostly interested in blind children.
    And mother Czacka, she was blind herself,
    the mother superior, she was blind.
    Some way, Jewish intellectual was also
    interested in this convent.
    It was planned to be very friendly with them.
    And two of the nuns on higher position were of Jewish origin.
    They converted and they became nuns.
    My mother knew some of them before the war,
    was very friendly with them.
    And with all the situation, they invited
    us to stay over there, telling that they
    can give us some-- not so much apartment, some room, simply.
    And my mother can help in the garden,
    what she loved to do it.
    And I can go to the school or whatever.
    I don't think that we had very clear plan
    what we will be doing.
    Everybody hoped at this time that the war
    would finish in one year.
    So what, survive one year and that's all.
    Nobody expected what really happened.
    So in the very end of 1939, we pack our belongings,
    we take very few of our furniture,
    some basic things only, and we moved
    to Laski, which was 10 kilometers north from Warsaw.
    And we stayed in small apartment.
    My mother was working helping in the garden,
    or sometimes in the kitchen, whatever was needed.
    My brother stayed mostly home.
    And for the first year, I was simply helping.
    I remember working also in the kitchen,
    and working in washroom.
    And doing everything what it should be done.
    I remember clearly.
    I was, at this time, 13, 14.
    I was bored to death.
    It was nothing to read, it was nothing to do,
    it was no people in my age.
    I was not allowed to go, of course,
    to Warsaw or any other place.
    I probably-- here is a good place
    to mention that I didn't look as a Polish girl.
    I had very black hair, black eyes, rather dark skin.
    And from obvious reason, it was difficult for me
    to walk on Warsaw street not being asked by people,
    are you Jewish?
    Or hey, stop, you're Jew, and so on.
    My brother didn't look as a Polish child,
    too, with curly black hair.
    But he was not circumcised.
    And this way, some way, my mother
    knew that it was easier to save him than to save me.
    My mother, if we are talking about how they look,
    looked wonderful.
    She absolutely didn't look Jewish.
    Nobody never suspect that she can
    be Jewish, a very kind of small, very pretty face, with gray.
    At the time, completely gray hair.
    We have gray hair early in the family.
    And she did not have any problem when she was walking around,
    and never had any difficulties.
    Of course, we had always also difficulty with our documents.
    We keep our name Prot because does not
    have any Polish, Jewish, or any other meaning.
    But my mother's maiden name is Dajches.
    She was Zosia Dajches.
    Dajches, it is not the name what you can have
    in documents during the war.
    So all our documents were changed.
    And my mother's maiden name was given Kossuth, what
    is a typical Hungarian name.
    And it was given in this goal that if somebody was asking me
    during the war, oh, you look some fine strange,
    well, probably you look Jewish, you
    have so hard, so black hair.
    I was telling immediately, oh, yes, oh, well, I
    have a black hair because my grandmother were Hungarian,
    you know.
    My mother is Kossuth, my mother's name is Kossuth.
    And the documents were changed with the help of these nuns
    and this when we stayed.
    And I think it was very good documents.
    My baptism document, baptisal document?
    It was fill out in some kind of church in the books.
    So it was possible to check that it is not
    a false, that is true, and you know, some church was--
    some priests were able to do this
    if they wanted to false the book.
    Make them before the war, and so on.
    So we had not too bad documents for the war.
    And we are walking around.
    So you would like to know what's happened to me later, yeah?
    Yeah, if you just want to give the straight narrative
    of you're in the convent and then?
    Then I am in the convent and it was about 1940, we moved.
    All of this year, we stayed together.
    It was very hard, it was very poor, it was not enough food.
    We did not have enough clothes.
    But we are quite, we feel quite safe.
    In 1940, it was start feeling that the war will not finish so
    quickly and it is not so easy.
    And I started to press my mother very badly that I would
    like to go back to school.
    And I begged her that I want to go back to Warsaw.
    And I want to go to school and to my Gymnasium.
    And that is not possible for me to lose so much time.
    So first at all, my mother had friends in Warsaw.
    And they agreed to take me and to stay with their children.
    And I would be able to live with them
    and simply to go to school.
    And I move with them.
    I don't know.
    I am sure they knew who am I. I am quite sure.
    But we, of course, never talk about it.
    It was some kind of agreement that it is complete denial.
    They don't know that I am Jewish.
    I have all my documents.
    I am a Polish girl, with Polish name, I am Catholic.
    It was very helpful that I knew Catholic religion very well.
    And of course, to tell all prayers?
    Prayers.
    It was no problem for me.
    And I knew all the habits, that I can go to the church,
    and knew how to behave during a mass,
    and so on, and so on, and so on.
    It was big help, of course.
    So I started to go to school.
    I went to school.
    And it was very difficult for first year.
    And then the next year, how it was?
    Then it was about '41.
    I stayed with these friends for about half a year.
    And then I was quite unhappy with them.
    The children were impossible, it was very cold, it was dirty,
    and I was hungry all the time.
    And my mother decided that I am big enough--
    I was about 14, 15--
    that I can live alone.
    So they rent me, not a room, because nobody did
    have money for a room.
    But also through some friends, they
    find an older woman which wanted to have some kind of company.
    And she rent me a bed in her room.
    It was in Zoliborz.
    It was much more close to my school.
    And I stay with her.
    I'm sure it was her.
    She was some kind of nice woman.
    And I was going to school.
    Only I remembered that I had to cook for myself.
    I had to feed myself.
    And it was absolutely nothing to eat.
    I was awful, terribly hungry all day long.
    I had only this bread, what was [POLISH],, what
    was permitted to buy.
    And of course, you can buy many thing in Warsaw
    during a war on the black market.
    But I didn't have any money.
    So for dinner, I cook some kind of kasza.
    And I eat every day the same, piece of bread for breakfast,
    and this kasza what I cook with water for myself.
    And I did this in the afternoon.
    And I remember being very, very, very hungry.
    At this time, I have to move back a little bit.
    Because ghetto was organized, of course, much earlier.
    But I was going to ask you, yeah.
    Yeah, ghetto was organized much earlier.
    But the ghetto was more south from the part of town
    what I was living.
    And I avoid very much going to the downtown.
    Doesn't mean I was living in north part of the Warsaw,
    Bielany, and later in Zoriborz.
    School was in Zoriborz.
    And I practically never go downtown
    because it was very, very unsafe.
    But few times when I went, I saw the wall of the ghetto.
    And the streetcar was going-- for some times
    was going through ghetto.
    Because it was a big ghetto and a small ghetto.
    Probably the people told you.
    I don't.
    Yeah, I know about it.
    Yeah.
    And the car, streetcar was going for sometimes
    through ghetto, not stopping, of course.
    And I remember, one my trip through the ghetto,
    it was probably in '42, I took streetcar, I don't know why.
    And then it was possible to see street on the ghetto
    through windows.
    And then I saw dead people lying on the street, this I remember,
    and dead probably children bodies, covered with newspaper.
    I didn't know what to do.
    I didn't want to look, or not to look, or what to do.
    This I remember very, very clearly.
    Did people talk about-- when the streetcar went
    through the thing, did anyone make any?
    No one said a word?
    No, nobody said any words.
    People, I think, try not to look.
    Yeah.
    Now, were the windows.
    I mean, I've heard things that the windows were like blocked.
    The windows were locked in some towns.
    And if you see a movie Europa, Europa, I'm sure you did,
    he's looking for some kind of scratch.
    If I remember correctly, the windows
    were not blocked in this streetcar what I took.
    And shortly after this, it was some change
    in the relationship between big ghetto and small ghetto.
    I think small ghetto was liquidated.
    And the streetcar was not going anymore through ghetto.
    Only along the walls what we see the big opening,
    [POLISH],, port, port, [POLISH],, entrance.
    Entrance to the ghetto with Polish and German police.
    And the people.
    At this time, sometimes, you were
    able to see Jews on the street going
    to do some work on the street.
    Pavement of the street or something.
    Going men.
    And with, of course, German soldiers and police with guns,
    and so on.
    Sometimes we saw the small group of Jews out of the ghetto.
    I think it was about at this time.
    Also, oh, this is probably in '41.
    I was in ghetto, inside of the ghetto once during the war.
    Should I tell you the story what's happened?
    Yes, please, yes.
    I went with some other children of my friends.
    Well, they're half Jewish.
    And they didn't look too Polish, too.
    We are very stupid.
    And we tried to change streetcar near the ghetto wall, what
    was the most always dangerous place.
    Because plenty of the people what we call in Poland
    during the war, [POLISH].
    You know the word [POLISH]?
    Informers.
    The people where they pick up the people
    on the street, and they, oh, you are a Jew, give us money.
    If not, we are going to the police.
    And we stop over there on the street,
    what was very bad place.
    And of course, immediately, they pick us.
    They went with us.
    We are all teenagers.
    Two of them.
    I was with the other girl.
    She was a little older.
    I was about 14, and she was, I think, 16.
    And they took us to the police station on the entrance
    to the ghetto.
    And inside to some ghetto, some kind of, I remember, big room.
    And they started to ask us for documents,
    and what we are doing, we are Jews,
    and how come that we are out of the ghetto?
    And we are sitting and both or I was telling constantly,
    we are not.
    We are absolutely not.
    It is a mistake.
    Please let us go, it is a mistake.
    I don't know how I have, and the other girl,
    too, how we have nerve to tell.
    Because in some moment, it was some--
    this I remember very clearly--
    some older man, a Jew, with band on the arm, and he came to me,
    and he told me, [POLISH],, mademoiselle,
    why you don't have a band?
    So I said, I'm not Jewish.
    There's no reason for me to have a band.
    Oh, how come?
    You are Jewish.
    It's enough to look at you.
    It's enough to look at you.
    You are Jewish.
    And I don't understand.
    But if you will give me some money, I can help you.
    I can help you.
    Do you have parents?
    I can call them.
    I can help you if you will give me some money.
    It was clearly that he was working with the police.
    And I looked at him, and I told very firmly, I am not Jewish,
    and please go away and leave me alone.
    And then the police.
    And he went alone, he went away.
    And then the police, the Polish policeman
    came and asked me again about documents.
    What I did not have enough.
    Because I don't have yet Kennkarte.
    Kennkarte was given when you were 16.
    But for some kind of--
    I had to have something.
    I have a small document, Legitymacja,
    small piece of paper, from school what I was
    attend one year before the war.
    And it was Catholic school because I
    was going to Catholic school one year before the war.
    And I show him this.
    And I told him, do you think if I
    will be Jewish before the war, I will
    be going to Catholic school?
    And he look at us, and he lets us go.
    So it is only once that I was inside the ghetto.
    And he pushed us through the entrance.
    And we took the streetcar.
    And since then, I knew very well that I
    have to keep far away from this place.
    So going back, I was going, it was '42, yes.
    I was going to school and living with this woman.
    And I started to have problem at this time.
    I think the woman didn't know what I am.
    But I remember that few times, they picked me on the street.
    And these Polish informers, they told me, oh, you are Jewish,
    go with us.
    And mostly, I tried to tell very firmly, no, I am not,
    go away, and so on.
    Because I knew if once if I will tell that yes,
    or I will give them some money, or I don't know what,
    that will be the end.
    And some people, they are calling me Jewish.
    And some people, even in school, they
    ask me, some girl, they ask me, oh, look, you look so Jewish.
    And I always tell this story, oh, well, I have black hair
    because I am Hungarian.
    But it was--
    I don't know how to tell you.
    It started to be as I am totally, completely,
    day and night, 24 hours on this scene.
    That I am playing somebody who I am not.
    Even, you know, in this situation,
    somebody pick you up on the street,
    mostly the Jewish people became very confused,
    you can see on their face that, oh, my god.
    I learned not to have on my face.
    I learned when they pick me up to smile and say, hey,
    you know, no, how funny.
    But I remember, psychologically, I was somewhat exhausted.
    It was this deny and deny, and it was nobody
    with whom I can talk about it.
    Absolutely nobody.
    Because even it was some friends what I see sometimes.
    And I knew that they know.
    It was some taboo.
    Never, never talk about it.
    Never admit that they know.
    Never talk about this problem.
    To make things even more funny, time to time,
    my mother visited to me.
    We never talk about it.
    It was denial between my mother and myself.
    It was something what we never, never talk about it.
    My mother always, always told me,
    you remember, you are Hungarian.
    And I knew why she was telling.
    But it was never to this extent that I
    was able to say, well, talk about it.
    Talk what's happened to the rest of the family, you know.
    Never, never.
    To make things more complicated, at this time,
    my mother had to move from this convent
    when she stayed with my brother.
    I think it was '42.
    And one day, they told her that there
    are some informers telling the police that she's Jewish
    and my brother is a Jew.
    And they told them that if they will not go away in few hours,
    they will be taken.
    And that will be the end.
    So my mother took my brother, leaving absolutely everything
    behind.
    I think took some clothes with her and as much money
    as they had.
    Not too much, of course.
    And went by [FRENCH]?
    Foot.
    By foot.
    And went by foot to Warsaw.
    And then I know from her story that she
    didn't have any place to go.
    She was walking on the street in Warsaw
    keeping by hand this small, very Jewish-looking boy.
    And she didn't have any place to go.
    And at 7:00, it was curfew hours.
    And it was became evening.
    It was in summer, '42, I think.
    It was became the evening.
    And you cannot stay on the street.
    So in Warsaw, it was some small hospital also run by nun.
    It was some private hospital in downtown Boston.
    And my mother knocked to the door to the small hospital.
    The nun opened.
    And she told the nun, this boy is very sick.
    He has to be in the hospital right now.
    So the nun, of course, didn't want to take him.
    My mother almost forced herself into.
    And as I told you, my mother looked always very elegant.
    And told, well, I'm terribly sorry, dear nun,
    but he has appendicitis.
    He has to be operated.
    Oh, god.
    Yeah.
    And he has to go to bed right now.
    So the nun did know what to do, opened the door,
    and put my brother to the hospital to the bed.
    And the next day, I don't remember.
    Of course, I don't if the doctor was seeing him or not.
    But my mother left him with the nuns
    as a very sick child in bed.
    And ran through Warsaw to find the place what
    they can took him.
    And after some effort, I think some friends took him
    for a few days.
    And then he was placed for the children
    of Polish officers, what they perished during the war
    or something.
    It was special organization helping these kind of children,
    named RGO, RGO, Rada Glowna Opiekuncza.
    And they had some small houses, what they're taking abandoned
    or children what they didn't have father.
    And my brother went to this kind of orphanage.
    OK.
    Yeah, it's fine.
    So at this time, my mother--
    what was going with our family?
    My brother was in this orphanage.
    My mother took a job as a helper of some sick woman
    with children, something as a tutor for children,
    or a little bit maid, or something,
    and living with these people.
    And I was going to school and living
    with this old woman, who would quickly,
    after this started, also to be impossible.
    I think somebody informed.
    She told me that I cannot stay with her any longer.
    Not giving me a clear reason for this.
    Or if you want to have some small story before I will
    tell what I was doing before.
    Sure.
    During this time, I think it was '42, some children from ghetto
    was going through streets of Warsaw and begging for bread.
    You can see them on the street running
    and completely in schmattas, very hungry, mostly
    was completely without hair.
    How do you call?
    Bald.
    Yeah, but they cut the hair.
    Oh, right, shaven.
    Oh, my.
    Yeah.
    And they had some kind of cans.
    And they bang on these cans, metal cans, making noise.
    And some people, not all the people,
    are throwing food to these cans.
    They are mostly sitting on the people.
    They are half-naked, even in winter.
    Completely, you know, what they call, dying from hunger.
    Looking as a people, you know, dying from hunger.
    Children from Kenya, you see how.
    You know how does it look.
    And some people there are putting some piece of bread
    or a piece of potato.
    And the Germans when they see them,
    they shoot them, simply, on the street.
    So in this apartment building what I was living
    was this woman, she was going to work,
    and I was back from school, about 3:00 in the afternoon.
    It was a child, probably, sleeping
    on the stairs or someplace with this big, noisy can.
    And he was banging this can, asking the people
    to throw him some food.
    And I throw some food, some dry bread, to this can.
    And he remember what I did.
    And next day, he showed again.
    And what it was worse, it was on the first floor.
    He showed on my door.
    And banging on this can.
    And you know, it was very dangerous.
    I don't know if you can understand, in my situation,
    how terribly dangerous it was to have
    a Jewish child on the door.
    So I opened the door and I throw again some bread
    because I really didn't know what to do.
    And I was dying that the neighbors will look.
    And then it will be all situation completely, you know.
    I was going on the edge of the--
    and then he came again.
    And then I think he came again.
    But what I wanted to say--
    the fear of the poor child, I never had this kind of fear.
    I was sitting, and how, at home and almost praying God, please,
    don't send this child anymore because I
    don't know what to do.
    Open the door or not open the door.
    So this was the situation.
    Yes or not?
    Yeah, I'm gonna flip it over now.
    OK.
    OK.
    It's on.
    It's on.
    So I at this time, really, I think
    they didn't know what to do with me.
    Summer started and my mother and her friends,
    they find some friends near Lowicz.
    It was a school for agriculture from the peasant girls.
    And they sent me over there for vacation,
    that I can help but work in fields,
    and work between these girls.
    And they agreed to take me.
    This means I will have a bed and food.
    And then I can work.
    And I went there, knowing that I don't have any place to go.
    And nobody does not want to take me.
    And I started to work.
    And I was terribly unhappy.
    But I was very unhappy all times,
    that it nothing, nothing that was new.
    And I was only one girl with dark hair
    between these Polish peasants, very simple girls.
    Sleeping in the big room for more than 20 beds.
    I had one bed between them and working in the field,
    and taking care about cows, and garden, and weeds,
    taking out weeds.
    And oh, I learned a lot.
    I have to tell.
    And the girls never crossed their mind
    that I can be Jewish.
    It was so, they were so simple.
    And it was so far about their imagination,
    even, that I was going with them to the church.
    And they were surprised.
    They were surprised that I have different hobbies
    and different clothes.
    And they asked me thousands of naive question.
    And of course, I was reading books constantly.
    And they asked me what for I am reading books?
    Where did you get books at this time?
    They have some small library.
    It was very boring, and I knew almost everything.
    But you know, I still was reading in the evenings.
    I think the director of the school,
    he probably knew very well who am I.
    But they place everybody around.
    They played that they don't know.
    It was some kind of general agreement.
    And I had my documents.
    And at this time, I had Kennkarte, what you can see,
    and it was general agreement that I am not Jewish.
    And I stayed there quite a long time.
    I didn't go back to Warsaw.
    I didn't go back to school.
    It was not possible.
    And I was working.
    I was very exhausted, very lonely.
    It was absolutely nobody to talk.
    I was still only 16.
    And I got hepatitis.
    Oh, god.
    I was very sick.
    Of course, I was not seen by any physician.
    I was lying in bed, I remember, with was high fever.
    And I was as yellow as lemon.
    And after hepatitis, what I understand now,
    but at this time, I had very deep depression.
    I was unable to do anything physically and mentally.
    I was sitting in the corner in the room.
    And even I was unable to read.
    I was staring by window.
    And I didn't want anybody to talk to me.
    And I didn't want to answer.
    And it was for about three or four weeks.
    And everybody was surprised, what is going on?
    They think that I am going crazy, simply.
    So after this time, I went back to work.
    I was very weak.
    And everybody was laughing that I cannot work too much.
    They told me that I am lazy.
    Believe me, I was not lazy.
    I was sick.
    I was sick.
    But I was dragging my foot.
    One of the girl in school got typhoid fever.
    And they decided that I was the best
    person to take care of her.
    So they put us together in the small room.
    And I was taking care of her.
    I had always some kind of nurse's possibility.
    I was interested in medicine.
    And I was taking care of her until she was so sick that they
    took her in the hospital.
    And she died, as I know.
    At this time, it was December '42.
    Yeah, it was December.
    You didn't get typhoid?
    You didn't catch?
    Typhoid?
    No, no.
    I was very-- hepatitis was enough for me.
    And I remember, in December, I was still not very healthy.
    And I went to bring water from the well.
    And it was very windy day.
    I had long hair, what mostly I combed very nicely back,
    and put them together.
    But it was early in the morning.
    I went for water.
    And my hair, I think, were down, and it was windy.
    And my hair was, I don't know, waving or whatever.
    You tell.
    And I was taking water.
    And the Germans came to the school for something.
    They were coming frequently.
    I avoid.
    You know, I was always hiding in some place
    when I saw that the car was coming.
    And just when I was taking this water, the car with German
    came.
    And they look at me.
    And they immediately went to the director of the school.
    And they asked him what this Jewish girl is doing here.
    I didn't look too well, probably.
    And so he asked me.
    And still, not telling me directly, he told me,
    you cannot stay any longer.
    You have to go.
    You have to go now.
    Some way, I don't remember how I informed my mother.
    I had my mother address.
    I don't remember.
    It was possible to call probably, I don't know.
    My mother came next week and she picked me up.
    And it was the end of my stay in this school.
    I went with her to Warsaw.
    And I stayed with my very good friends.
    They were parents of my friend from school, Zofia Kielan,
    with whom I am still very friendly.
    And I was a good friend from school
    from both sister Zofia and Krystyna.
    And the parents agreed to take me to their home.
    It was just the beginning of 1943.
    And I started again to go to school.
    I cut through all this what I lost during the last six
    months.
    And it was-- as for my all war time,
    it was probably the best time.
    I was treated as a third daughter.
    I think they liked me very much.
    And I treat them as my parents.
    Of course, they knew.
    And I knew that they know.
    And so on.
    We never, never talk about it.
    It was, again.
    We never talk about it.
    I had all my papers.
    I had documents.
    I had my Kennkarte.
    I have big, beautiful picture from my first communion.
    What of course disappear, I can not show this.
    It was very important to have it.
    And I stay with them until May, 1943.
    Does it mean after ghetto uprising?
    No.
    The time at this time with the Jews was very difficult.
    It was plenty of informer on the street.
    It was very difficult to walk.
    Many times, they stopped me.
    And many times, I had the feeling
    that being in the streetcar.
    And sometimes, I had to go to Warsaw.
    I had to pretend that I am a normal person, that I
    am moving as everybody else.
    Also what I didn't mention before,
    but I cannot talk about everything at the same time.
    I was in Polish underground movements.
    Oh.
    From age 14, 15, I was involved by my friend Zofia and Krystyna
    Kielan.
    And I was what they call in Polish Underground Army, AKA,
    a youth organization, what was Szare Szeregi.
    A gray rose.
    And we had our meetings.
    And we had some kind of underground activities.
    What was some way it was a danger.
    But for me, it was some kind of protection.
    I don't know if you understand why.
    Because the fear for me, unfortunately, I
    didn't fear the German.
    I feared Poles.
    The German was not dangerous for me directly.
    Of course, indirectly, yes.
    But directly, it was the Poles.
    It was somebody on the street, or ex-friends,
    or somebody who knew who was my father.
    What also happened to me during the war,
    they stopped me because they recognized me.
    And some neighbors, some concierge, or whatever.
    And being in the Polish underground movement,
    it was some kind of protection.
    That I belong to a different group,
    I belong to Polish youth, I am with them,
    I am in the underground movement.
    So we had the meetings what we are going.
    And we had a small different task.
    And I remember they gave me, Polish underground gazette,
    a small newspaper.
    Small newspaper, it was called Biuletyn Informacyjny
    in this time.
    And all bunch of them, I don't know, 20 or whatever.
    And they asked me to bring to different houses,
    to different homes.
    It was what the young people were doing.
    I didn't want to take it.
    I didn't want to take it.
    Not because-- my danger was my face.
    Right.
    I didn't want because who knows-- when they picked me up
    with these underground materials,
    who knows what I will tell it who will start to beat me up?
    I had the feeling that I am not dangerous myself
    but I didn't want to tell them that I don't want to take it.
    Why everybody's taking, why not?
    Of course, it was out of question to tell them
    what was the most simple, look at me.
    Do you really want this together with this kind of look
    to walk on the street with some underground material?
    So you know, it was constant struggle
    how to avoid this kind of involvement.
    So we're still in '43 and it was Warsaw ghetto uprising.
    Oh, one more thing, what I think,
    unfortunately, we have to tell.
    I was going to school with my friend Zofia,
    and her mother gave her some small lunch with us,
    piece of bread we had in the pocket.
    And we walked.
    It was one streetcar, it was not very far away from the home.
    And again, it was this Jewish child
    sitting with a can, completely emaciated child with this can,
    and banging, and half-dead-looking, simply.
    And we both immediately, without talking,
    we took this lunch from our pockets
    and throw away to his can.
    And at this moment, some Polish woman noticed from the street
    and started to run after us, screaming, [POLISH]..
    Jewish ants, Jewish helper, Jewish, you know.
    What was very dangerous.
    Because she was very angry that we gave this piece of bread
    to this Jewish child.
    Isn't it difficult to imagine?
    Now, OK, let's talk about uprising.
    Jewish uprising started just before Easter.
    I think it started first day.
    And from the place what we are living, it was fifth floor.
    The window faced to the south.
    So we can start it to see the flame.
    And even it was quiet at night.
    It was no street movement.
    You can hear sometimes people screaming.
    And then of course, smoke.
    And constant them guns shot.
    We all try not to go near the ghetto walls.
    It was very dangerous at this time, what was many time--
    what was many time described.
    And then I remember, a few days after ghetto uprising
    started, it was Easter dinner in the house of our friends.
    What they say, I think they started
    to have a hard time with me, too.
    Because all the relative started to tell them, why do you feed--
    why do you keep this strange-looking girl?
    And we are sure that she's Jewish.
    And so on, and so on.
    But it was a big dinner.
    The relatives of friends were invited.
    And we are sitting on the table and eating.
    And the windows are open.
    And you can see the smoke and the guns.
    It was something for me what--
    it was hard for me to take it.
    It was some feeling that I am not in the right place.
    That probably, I should be over there, not here.
    And again, some of these people.
    They basically was not bad people.
    I remember looking by the window and telling, well--
    what I heard many times during the war.
    Well, good the Germans are doing for us the dirty work.
    What I hear many, many times during the war.
    It is a poem of Milosz, what you know for Campo dei Fiori?
    Do you know Campo dei Fiori?
    It's a poem about Milosz.
    Oh, no I don't know it.
    I know Campo dei Fiori in Rome.
    Want me to tell from the beginning?
    Yeah, if you don't mind.
    Oh, no.
    Of course not.
    So we all as I told avoid to go near the ghetto at this time.
    But I went once or twice.
    And I remember on the Plac Krasinski,
    it was a small, some kind of carnival.
    It was a carousel and music.
    And the people are going on the carousel.
    And it was beautiful weather.
    And just pure, I don't know, yard.
    It was a wall of ghetto.
    And shooting people, and smoke, and screaming, and so on.
    And the people are playing.
    What was described this Milosz poem.
    And it is not a [POLISH],, it was this way what he described.
    Then what's happened-- you want to know
    what's happened to me later?
    Yes, please.
    Yes, I took my--
    I finished school at this time.
    Gymnasium?
    Yeah, I finish Gymnasium.
    And we had some kind--
    I didn't go into the detail because it does nothing
    to do with my personal story and my Jewish story.
    That of course, Gymnasium was not existent during the war.
    And we had what they call Komplety,
    which was underground school, with small group.
    And we are moving from one house to the other.
    And the tutors, teachers were coming.
    And this way, I finished Gymnasium
    with small groups or other girls.
    And in May, we had to take Matura, diploma, high school
    diploma, what was also underground.
    But it was some kind of celebration.
    We had to be dressed.
    And I remember in somebody's bigger apartment,
    we had to take our exams, completely legally.
    And pass my Matura, what I passed.
    It was in May, '43.
    And then I finished.
    Both my friends went further to underground,
    teaching to the university, what also was acting
    during the war in Warsaw.
    And I decided to go to the school for nurses.
    At this time, I knew that I wanted to be a physician.
    But it was not possible for any point of view,
    also financially.
    You know, we did not have any money all the time.
    And I was living, you know, in houses of friends,
    or trying to help.
    And from one house to the other house.
    So I decided to go to school for nurses.
    And it was a very good school in Warsaw.
    She was run by very elegant woman, Mrs. Romanowska.
    I remember her.
    And she decided to take me.
    Even I was below the age.
    You had to be 17 to be admitted.
    And I was below 17.
    I was 16 and 1/2.
    And she agreed to take me.
    And also, they have, how do you call, internal board?
    Board to stay there?
    Yeah, to stay there.
    Room and board
    Room and board.
    We are working in the hospital in the morning.
    In the afternoon, we had lessons.
    And it was some--
    on the last floor.
    It was some small rooms, every room for four girls.
    And we were able to live there and eat very, very poor food.
    But still, it was something to eat.
    So this way, I was all set, I can tell.
    Because I was able to live there.
    Also it was some kind of safer because I have this nurse
    uniform, what you can see here, with some kind of white hat,
    something.
    And I feel that I didn't look so different in this.
    My hair was fair back, and it was all white,
    and I was always extremely careful to be extremely clean
    and in order, no hair out.
    You see, today, no everything completely flat,
    very clean hands.
    You know, it was very important not to look neglected.
    Right, right.
    Not to look this way.
    What was also very strange, funny-looking right now,
    the directrice of the school, I think
    she knew very well who am I. And I think some probably
    people called her and asked her to take me.
    Because first, she agreed to take me
    even I was below the age.
    And second, every new pupil has some kind of task
    to do in school, for instance, keep the bathroom clean,
    or keep the corridors clean, or clean the table
    after breakfast, or this kind.
    They gave me a chapel.
    I was in charge of chapel.
    What was not so very easy because I
    had to get up very early, at 5:30 in the morning
    and clean the chapel, and put the flowers if we had any.
    And then to help the priest with mass.
    And after a mass-- of course, you don't know this because it
    is completely different now--
    the priest was going to give communion
    to the sick people, what they wanted to have communion.
    And I was the one going before the priest with a candle
    and a small [POLISH] making noise, small--
    Bell.
    --bell, of course, sorry.
    And a small bell.
    To the hospital.
    And stand on there show him and sick people what
    they wanted to have communion.
    And it was my task during my stay in nurse's school.
    I was helping priest in the chapel.
    Where was your mother at this time?
    My mother was living in had different jobs mostly living
    with some people they have in troubles.
    Because I remember, both times, I think,
    the women were very sick.
    One woman has a cancer, and it was small children,
    and she was helping, and it was some similar situation going
    from one house to the other.
    She never had any specific problem as a Jewish woman.
    We had all problem.
    We didn't have money, we didn't know how to live,
    we didn't have any apartment.
    Now, you are losing this job and staying with one people
    and you didn't know what place to go.
    And my brother stayed in this orphanage.
    He had some problem because he looked too dark, and too dark
    hair, and so on.
    But at this time, I think he knew that he's not circumcised,
    and he knew that he can prove that he's not Jew.
    So it was some way.
    I think the most difficult was my situation.
    And then I stay in nursing school
    until 1944, when it started Warsaw uprising.
    And because I still was in the Polish underground movement,
    and I still had some orders from them.
    I also had some--
    we are soldiers.
    So I had to--
    when the Warsaw uprising started,
    I had to go to my unit.
    And I was two months on the first line Warsaw uprising.
    What was also was useful.
    Because I was after one year of nurse's school.
    Right.
    That I knew much more and I was in [POLISH],,
    how to tell in English?
    This small--
    Like a clinic kind of?
    No, no, no, I was with solider group, big soldier group.
    It was a small group.
    Some medical group.
    Paramedics.
    Oh, oh, OK.
    Paramedics group.
    It was four of us.
    And I was a chief of paramedics for this group.
    Great.
    Yeah, great.
    And I stayed two months, being almost killed many, many times.
    But at this time, I was no different
    from the other people, you know, practically my being a Jew,
    it was not so important.
    We are all fighting with German.
    But it was not also so easy.
    I remember, when the soldiers from uprising
    was leaving Stare Miasto and going through canal--
    you know, they are going through?
    Canal?
    Canals to the other part of the town.
    Oh, tunnels.
    Underground?
    No, no, no, no, it was this what [INAUDIBLE] is going.
    So they, the soldiers were going--
    Polish soldiers, uprising, Polish soldiers--
    were going from Stare Miasto to Zoliborz through this tunnel.
    Sewers.
    And they were taking them at night
    from the opening on the street.
    One of these girl told me later that when they came out,
    she had very black hair.
    Said, I haven't-- I don't think that she was Jewish.
    And one of the uprising people helping her told her, oh,
    why we should help you?
    You are a Jew, you are Jewish, and push her some kind away.
    And of course, the other people tell, no, no, no
    she's, you know, with us.
    But it was, my goodness, even at this time.
    But mostly, at this time, it was this part.
    For me, it was not important.
    We are all on the every day can be killed.
    Many times, not once.
    It was really bad.
    And then Warsaw uprising, what is no reason
    to go into details right now, finished
    in end of September, '44.
    And we are taken to the camp to Pruszkow.
    And it was a big, big camp.
    And mostly, the people are going to work, and to the German.
    The younger people were sent.
    Some people, they were sent to the camp for soldiers.
    It was different ways.
    Some people ran away, simply.
    And we went with my friend Zofia and her mother,
    find her on the way from Warsaw to Pruszkow,
    we jumped from the train in Skierniewice.
    The train was going very slowly through the station.
    And we jumped from train.
    The train was open.
    They didn't have roofs.
    The wagons, they didn't have roofs.
    If somebody help you, you can jump all over.
    And we jump all over.
    And then I stay with them in their friend's house.
    I was very sick.
    I had pneumonia.
    We all had places, lices?
    Lice.
    Lice.
    We all had lice, were very dirty, hungry,
    not eating for many days at this time.
    And I had very bad pneumonia.
    And even I don't remember.
    I think I was not completely conscious lying in this.
    People were very nice, they gave us baths and clean clothes.
    Our clothes was only to be burned, it was so dirty.
    And these animals all over.
    And I have some kind of foggy remembering of this place.
    And I stayed through October, quite sick over there.
    And some strange possibility in November, my mother
    find that I survived.
    And she survived and my brother survived
    on the completely other part of the town, completely different.
    We didn't know about us for three months,
    more than three months.
    And she went.
    And she picked me up from these people,
    what I think is they were quite happy that she took me away.
    And she took me away to some big house for displaced person
    from Warsaw, near Krakow.
    And I stay over there, what was terribly dirty.
    And we were happy.
    We had one small bed for two people.
    I remember a long time that it was very strange
    for me to sleep alone.
    Everybody sleep two people on this small bed.
    Or if it was worse, three people on the bed.
    And we were very hungry.
    And they give us a very small amount of food.
    And the people were very unpleasant for us.
    Not for it.
    And then on the end of November, I went to Krakow myself.
    And I found myself a job in a small,
    some kind of a chronic hospital for old and displaced people.
    And they were very short with any help.
    And they took me immediately when
    I told that I finished one year of nursing school
    and I can be a nurse.
    It was the most dirty and terrible place
    what I ever worked.
    But at least I was able to survive.
    I was living small room with other woman.
    And they gave her some soup twice a day.
    And we knew that the war would finish soon.
    And war would finish, as you know, for us in January '45.
    So it was soon after I was working over there
    for two months.
    Who liberated you?
    Soviets, of course, Soviets.
    That's what I thought.
    Whatever you feel like telling.
    Oh, I'm telling you everything.
    I was not, never--
    that the war finished.
    And immediately, when the university opened in Krakow,
    I wanted to go to medical school in Krakow.
    I was not admitted.
    They told me that I didn't finish high school.
    And it was very difficult for me to prove.
    I had some small proof, they told me that it is not enough.
    Whatever.
    Happened I moved from Krakow with my mother and my brother.
    We moved to Wroclaw, what is Breslau, what is in Silesia.
    And it was easy town at this time for some reason.
    Because it was very easy to have apartments.
    They sent all German.
    The town was destroyed, but still it was some good houses.
    And the Germans were sent back to Germany
    and displaced persons.
    And we got some nice apartment.
    And I was admitted to medical school.
    And my brother went to the Gymnasium.
    And my mother got a job as a librarian
    in the polytechnical school in Breslau.
    So we started some kind in quotation life, normal life.
    We were very poor, of course.
    My mother's salary was very low.
    And it was difficult for us to live.
    And I had some strange jobs during my medical school,
    trying to make a little money.
    My father was helping a little bit.
    My father was in England, sending some parcels.
    Sometimes with food, sometimes with something
    what we can sell.
    And this way, we survived.
    And I finished medical school.
    And I stayed in Poland.
    I was married, I had children.
    And I left Poland in 1971.
    Yes, forever, with children.
    Well, I want to thank you very much for your very candid.
    What I think I should add--
    what I should add, I feel almost obligated to add.
    What's happened to other my family.
    I think it is interesting.
    The family on my father's side, they were more no,
    not accommodated.
    OK, they mostly converted before war.
    And nobody, or almost nobody, as I know, didn't go to ghetto.
    They stay on Polish side.
    And they had very, very difficult time.
    Partially because they were quite wealthy.
    And if you had money, of course, it was easier to survive.
    But also, you were under constant attention
    on the informers that are coming to the house
    and telling, well, give us some money.
    If not, you Jew, give us some money.
    If not, we will go to Gestapo and to police.
    We were so poor, and it was obvious
    that we don't have any money, that the informer, I think,
    didn't pay too much attention to us.
    Because we are not attractive for them.
    So my aunt always was telling us that you survived,
    your family, direct family, you survived the war
    because you were too poor to be interesting for anybody.
    And some of them, they survived.
    Some of them they were given by informer
    to the police and Gestapo, and they were killed.
    My mother's family, practically everybody was killed.
    They were not converted.
    They were Jewish.
    And everybody knew the truth.
    They never changed the name.
    The name was Dajches, my mother's brother.
    And nobody survived.
    They all perished in Auschwitz with my cousin, who was younger
    that I am, with children.
    Practically, practically everybody.
    I gather all this name for Yad Vashem.
    And it was more than 20 people.
    Everybody was killed.
    Sorry to hear that.
    Is there anything else that you would
    like to add to this interview?
    Any episodes that you didn't recount
    to me that you would like to?
    Or anything else that you would like to say at this point?
    I think only that it can be said much better that I did.
    No, I don't think so.
    It was some kind of chaotic.
    This was very eloquent.
    Basically, that's all.
    I tried to keep facts.
    I tried not to give too much of my opinion.
    Oh, that's OK, too, though.
    Well, It's different, I think.
    I think, basically, that's all.
    OK.
    Well, thank you.
    Thank you.

    Overview

    Interviewee
    Dr. Janina Prot
    Interviewer
    Sharon Tash
    Date
    interview:  1992 April 01

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    1 sound cassette (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

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Sharon Tash, of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ID Card Project, conducted the interview with Janina Prot in Lexington, MA on April 1, 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 08:24:04
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn509186

    Additional Resources

    Transcripts (2)
    Time Coded Notes (English)

    Download & Licensing

    In-Person Research

    Contact Us

    Also in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ID Card Project

    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 Philip Goldstein

    Oral History

    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.

    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 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

    View All 146 Items in the Collection