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Oral history interview with Liane Reif-Lehrer

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1992.A.0125.108 | RG Number: RG-50.233.0108

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    Oral history interview with Liane Reif-Lehrer
    Transcript
    This is a test.
    Do you want me to do more?
    No.
    The date is Sunday, March 29, 1992.
    We're speaking with Dr. Liane Reif-Lehrer about her parents.
    What can you tell us--
    let's start with your mother.
    Is that all right?
    OK.
    Can you tell us her name, her date of birth,
    her place of birth, anything you know about her childhood,
    anything at all?
    OK.
    My mother's name was Clara Gottfried-Reif,
    G-O-T-T-F-R-I-E-D, and she was born in a small town in Poland
    not far from Lemberg, which is now called Lviv.
    And she was apparently somewhat of a rambunctious young lady,
    and she often said that she--
    I guess she didn't get along with her father
    as well as with her mother.
    And she liked to run around, and travel, and do a lot of things.
    And she spoke several languages because when
    she was a child the borders kept changing, and so at one point,
    where she was born was part of Austria.
    And I think both she and my father
    were actually Austrian citizens because when they were born
    Poland was part of Austria.
    And then the Russians came in.
    So she spoke Polish, Russian, German.
    I think she spoke some Czechoslovakia,
    and she might have been conversant
    with a couple of other languages.
    She always said she spoke five or seven languages,
    and I never remember whether it's five or seven.
    Do you know what they spoke at home?
    I think at home they probably spoke a combination
    of Polish and Yiddish.
    Yeah, I think that was correct.
    So my mother did a lot of traveling around.
    She used to go to Lemberg to have clothes made and so on,
    and I think she went off to school at some point also.
    Do you know what kind of a school?
    Was it a Jewish school, or a private school,
    or a technical school?
    I don't know.
    No, it was definitely not a technical school,
    and I don't really know.
    I have a feeling it might have been
    more like a finishing school or just
    some kind of general school.
    She definitely finished gymnasium but did not
    go to college, but she was pretty clever.
    She was very, very good with numbers,
    and she did a lot of reading.
    Anyway, at some-- and I think she was very interested
    when she was young in fashion and that kind of thing.
    And so at some point, she went off to Vienna
    either for a vacation or to have clothes made.
    I don't know.
    And somehow-- and I don't know how-- but she met my father.
    And, well, ultimately, they got engaged,
    and then they got married, I think, in 1925.
    And so then my--
    They got married in Vienna?
    They got married in Vienna.
    Well, I'm not sure about that.
    I'm not sure about that.
    They might have gone back to Poland to get married,
    but anyway, they lived in Vienna after they got married.
    And then in 1927, my brother was born.
    Now, my mother tells me about her life in Vienna.
    She said, in the beginning, it was kind of hard.
    My father had been trained as a physician,
    and then he went back and retrained as a dentist.
    And he opened his practice.
    Now, one of the things my mother always
    told me is that we lived in [PLACE NAME]..
    That's the first district in Vienna.
    And I guess that was not such a nice or the nicest part
    of Vienna.
    And it's [PLACE NAME].
    Excuse me.
    The [PLACE NAME] is where she would have liked to live.
    And she said that the reason they
    lived there was because my father's office
    was in our house, and that's where he saw patients.
    And it was for reasons of the business that we lived there,
    and we lived, actually, I guess, right overlooking the Danube.
    And so in the early years, she said, things were difficult,
    and she helped my father.
    She would do things like answer the phone
    and maybe help prep patients and various other things.
    But I guess my father did pretty well fairly quickly,
    and so things kind of perked up.
    And I think things were quite comfortable.
    And we had--
    I know there were about six people who used to come and go
    in terms of, quote, "servants."
    There was a cook who did our meals.
    My brother and I each had a governess when we were kids.
    Each?
    Yeah, well, we were very far apart, so it wasn't concurrent.
    Oh, I see.
    There were one or two women who came in to do laundry.
    In those days, everything was a big deal.
    Coming in to do the laundry was taking the sheets,
    and boiling them up with soap and Clorox,
    and so on and so forth.
    It was kind of a big thing.
    And then even we did actually have a vacuum cleaner,
    but I personally remember that these two cleaning
    women used to come.
    And they would toll up the rugs and take them up
    to the roof with these bamboo oddly-shaped paddles
    and beat the hell out of the rugs.
    So there were these servants around.
    And at that point, I think my mother sort of became
    a lady of leisure.
    And again, I don't know which of these stories
    are true or apocryphal, but her role
    was to put on a white glove after the servants
    and go around to make sure they had cleaned well.
    And I think she went--
    I think they did a fair amount of socializing.
    I think they went to the opera, and they would go dancing
    and go to the theater.
    And I know they went--
    apparently, once a week they went
    to play cards with this relative who actually-- the daughter
    lives in New York now.
    So they must have done a lot of things like that.
    I think my father was a fairly serious person,
    and my mother was probably a--
    I don't know-- more frivolous person.
    And actually, my brother apparently
    didn't do very well with my mother
    because he was a very serious kid,
    and he really liked my father.
    But he thought my mother wasted her time, even when
    he was very little.
    Yeah, go ahead.
    Can we back up?
    Yeah, go ahead.
    Do you know about her life in Poland,
    before she moved to Vienna?
    Do you know about, for example, the Jewish aspect
    of their life?
    Were they religious?
    Were they orthodox?
    I think her parents were Orthodox.
    I don't know that my mother really--
    my mother always did all the very traditional kinds
    of things, but I'm not sure she really believed in any of that.
    I don't know.
    I think she might have--
    she certainly had some sorts of superstitions involved
    in Jewish religion, but I have a funny feeling that she probably
    went along with the things.
    I don't think she and my father had-- we didn't have a kosher
    home, and I think they did go to services on the high holidays
    and things like that.
    I'd be curious to know whether we--
    I'm sure we ate matzah on Passover,
    but the real question is, did we also eat bread?
    And I don't know what the answer was.
    Or like ham and matzah.
    Yeah, right.
    Right, well, I'm sure we ate ham.
    I'm absolutely sure we ate ham.
    Well, no, we probably didn't eat bread at Passover,
    but I don't think it was terribly compulsive.
    I think it was fairly casual.
    But I have a feeling that her father was probably
    not very casual, and I don't know about her mother.
    I have a feeling that the mother was a more worldly woman,
    and the father may have been a more retiring
    religious kind of person.
    I think that my mother always felt that she was the black--
    or that she was considered the black sheep, that
    not by her mother but by her father,
    that her father didn't like her as well as he
    liked the other two kids.
    And I think she thought that was because she
    was sort of rebellious and didn't do the things
    that the other kids did.
    Definitely my mother's brother and sister sound
    like more traditional kids.
    They got married, and they had kids.
    And they stayed, I think, in the same town or nearby,
    and here was this young chick going off to Vienna
    and marrying strange people.
    Did she ever find out the exact fate of her family?
    Yeah.
    Well, in 1946, when I would have been 12--
    and I remember this very dramatically--
    there was a blue letter that came from somebody,
    one of her relatives.
    And I think it might have been this guy called [? Moche ?]
    [? Weinreb, ?] who went to live in Israel and whose son is
    in Israel and is a physician, I think.
    And of course, I lost contact after my mother died.
    But I think the letter was from this guy,
    [? Moche ?] [? Weinhaub, ?] and it told in very great detail
    what happened to all the relatives.
    And, well, they all perished in one form or another.
    Now, my mother's sister--
    that was the most dramatic thing.
    Apparently, they forced her to watch
    while they threw her kids into an oven,
    and then they shot her.
    That was really a horror story.
    I think my mother's brother and maybe the parents--
    I remember him describing that a lot of people in the camp
    had typhoid, and they purposely tried to contract typhoid.
    And they did, and so they died of the typhoid because they--
    they purposely did that because they
    didn't want to die in what they knew was awaiting them.
    And they were just descriptions of what happened to everybody
    that he knew about, and I don't know whatever
    happened to that letter.
    As a matter of fact--
    it's really weird-- this is my mother's.
    Those two pieces of furniture are my mother's.
    And since my mother died, I have not
    been able to find the key to this,
    and every once in a while I try to get it open--
    How intriguing.
    --because I keep thinking that maybe
    there are some letters and things in there.
    And I know I could probably get a locksmith--
    I'm sure you could.
    --to open it, but I probably have mixed feelings.
    Part of me wants to know what's behind those little doors,
    and part of me probably doesn't.
    Anyway, but my mother--
    well, I think my mother was a very, very different person
    after the war from what she was before, although I can't really
    judge that.
    It's kind of a guess.
    So I made you jump.
    Now why don't we come back to close to the time
    that she had given birth to your brother, I guess.
    In what year?
    Right, 1927, right, April 24, 1927.
    And my brother was apparently a very serious little boy,
    even at age two, and my mother always told stories about
    how, when she would go for a walk
    with him, instead of wanting to play and so on,
    he would want to have her read the street signs.
    What does that say, how do you spell that, what
    are the letters, and so on.
    That's her perception.
    I have a picture of my brother sitting all dressed up
    with little Lord Fauntleroy tie in a sandbox with his rear end
    up off the sand so he wouldn't get himself dirty.
    And my brother tells with some resentment
    that he wasn't allowed to be a little boy because they dressed
    him up, and he always felt he couldn't get dirty.
    So I think there were a lot of interesting dynamics there.
    And then at age three they started him on violin lessons,
    and somehow it didn't work out.
    So they stopped, at the advice of the teacher,
    I guess, and then he started again at age five.
    And then it really took hold very well,
    and he really did play the violin.
    If you ask him, he'll say, well, I can't really play very well,
    but he really plays.
    For an amateur, he plays extremely well.
    Well then, when my father died--
    well, first, my father got very depressed, well,
    because things were obviously looking really bad in Europe.
    Well, I really should back up.
    Starting in 1933, I think things started being politically very
    hairy, and people had just come out of the Depression.
    And as an aside, all my life I was always really bothered
    that I might have been an accident because I'm
    seven and a half years younger than my brother,
    and subliminally that always bothered me.
    And I never had the guts to ask anybody, which,
    in retrospect, seems silly.
    But actually, I was over 40 once when I asked my brother,
    was I an accident, and my brother
    said, no, absolutely not.
    Why did they wait so long?
    Because of the depression.
    So I was born in 1934, in November, and so things were--
    now, as I think back on it, it was a really dumb time
    to have a kid because things were not looking good.
    And did I send you the article that I
    wrote for Boston Magazine?
    You sent me one about your cousin.
    I didn't send you mine from Boston Magazine?
    I should give that to you because that's
    sort of about this subject.
    Anyway, so then I was born, and then things
    started getting bad.
    And they got worse and worse.
    And my father and mother started talking
    about the possibility of going to America,
    and apparently, my father just felt-- well, no, in 1934,
    my father was already 40 years old, so his feeling was,
    how can I go to America?
    I don't know the language.
    I would have to retrain.
    We would get there, and we would have nothing.
    And so it just didn't seem like a reasonable thing to do.
    But then in August of 1938, I think it was,
    my father, like everybody else, had
    to close his practice because Jews were not
    allowed to work anymore, and my father got really,
    really very, very depressed.
    And my brother--
    I think my brother really still has and had all that time
    a really tremendous resentment about my mother not handling
    that right.
    And I've asked him about that, and he says,
    well, she used to say, well, you got to come out of this.
    You can't walk around like this.
    And she would kind of go off, then, and do
    whatever needed to be done.
    And I said to my brother, well, what'd you do?
    And he said, well, I remember standing in a dark room holding
    his hand just quietly.
    Now that I'm at my present age and our kids are 22 and 24,
    I realize that it was just a very difficult situation
    for my mother.
    If somebody else is just very depressed all the time
    and you really don't know how to get the person out of it,
    I think, after a while, maybe it's a kind of survival thing
    that you've got to just keep doing
    your daily things because otherwise you're
    going to go insane also.
    And so I don't know.
    I don't know what was going on there,
    but it was a really bad scenario.
    And really very unpleasant things were happening to Jews,
    and I'm sure that my father must have been extremely frightened.
    And there's a woman who actually went to medical and then
    dental school with my father, and we were always
    friendly with that family.
    And for example, that woman was forced
    to go out and scrub the streets and things like-- so there were
    all sorts of demeaning things happening,
    and I think it must have been just a terrible, terrible time
    psychologically.
    Until the time that he was forced to stop working,
    he worked regularly?
    Yes, I think he did work regularly, yes.
    Even if maybe he was beginning to be depressed or whatever,
    he didn't [INAUDIBLE].
    No, I don't think so.
    I think he really got very depressed after he
    had to close his practice.
    Now, I don't know that for sure.
    I just know that from things that I've gathered.
    So anyway, my mother, I think, tried
    to keep going about her business,
    and somewhere in this time span they
    did decide that they would have to leave.
    And so they went and applied for visas, and passports,
    and so on, and on the morning of September 30, 1938,
    my father and mother actually left the house together
    to go pick up those passports.
    And they picked up the passports,
    and at about noontime, they parted to do separate chores.
    And they were supposed to meet, I
    think, at the home of this cousin
    where they used to play cards, and apparently
    my father never got there.
    And I guess at about 2:30 in the afternoon--
    I seem to remember somebody telling me--
    there was a phone call, and my father
    had been found at the bottom of a staircase.
    And I'm not sure whether he was already dead
    or whether he died either on the way to the hospital or right
    after he got to hospital, but the death certificate
    says that he died of multiple fractures,
    including a fractured skull and lots of fractured ribs.
    So all my life, I grew up thinking
    that he had thrown himself off the top floor, the fourth floor
    of this, down the stairwell.
    And there was a lot of trauma around that.
    My mother did not want--
    well, so the general consensus was
    that he had committed suicide.
    My mother didn't want anybody to know that.
    And I don't understand--
    it's funny.
    Children don't ask the right questions all the time,
    but I just took that on gospel.
    And I never ever said anything until quite recently
    about that.
    I never told it.
    Practically no one did I tell this to.
    And when I was discussing it with my brother recently,
    he said, well, I've never kept this a secret.
    And then a few years ago, when I started really thinking
    about this, I started thinking, well, now,
    how do we know he committed suicide?
    And people say, oh, well, you're just
    trying to protect yourself from this sort of thing.
    Well, first of all, I don't have anything against suicide.
    I just don't-- in general, it wouldn't bother me.
    Now, I keep asking myself, does it bother me
    if he did commit suicide?
    Well, I don't know.
    I suppose in one way it doesn't bother me, and in another way,
    I think, well, this was a shirking
    of your responsibility.
    You had two kids, and this was not the appropriate thing
    to do, to leave your wife alone with these two kids.
    My brother's idea is that my father probably
    did commit suicide and that one of the reasons that he did it,
    aside from being depressed--
    people were committing suicide right and left--
    was that he probably figured that a woman with two children
    would have a much better chance of escaping if there was
    no husband around because, at that time, mostly
    it was the men who were being really harassed initially.
    So I don't know.
    But now, as a scientist, I stop, and I think,
    well, there was nobody there to see this,
    and all sorts of horrible things were happening to Jews.
    How do we know what really happened?
    Could he have been pushed?
    And I think the chances are 90% that he probably
    did commit suicide.
    Now, the other thing is that I keep
    thinking, why would somebody with a medical profession who
    has access to much neater, cleaner
    ways of committing suicide throw himself off a stairwell?
    So that's another reason why I think that maybe he
    didn't do it himself.
    On the other hand, I suppose that when people commit suicide
    they're not necessarily being totally rational.
    Well, some people plan it out.
    This sounds like it perhaps hadn't
    been contemplated for too long or this specific act,
    if it was.
    I don't know.
    I don't know, but somebody recently pointed out to me
    that Primo Levi, who was also a scientist and also
    had more sophisticated means of committing suicide,
    apparently also jumped off something or else.
    Yes, he did.
    And I think he did it in his basement or something, yeah.
    Anyway, so the answer is, I don't know what happened.
    But anyway, when this happened, my mother
    was just totally devastated, just--
    Before we-- I hate to--
    No, go ahead.
    No, I don't mind.
    --break the train of thought.
    But do you remember anything about her personality
    before this time, when you were very, very young?
    No, I don't remember very much about her, except--
    I remember a few silly things.
    Like I used to like to go into the kitchen
    and dry the dishes for the cook, and the cook
    would stand me up on a little stool
    and hand me one dish at a time.
    And I would dry it.
    And I also liked to iron.
    In those days, there was no electric iron,
    and so they had those irons that you kind of had
    to keep putting on the stove until they get hot.
    And I used to like to iron.
    And my mother really didn't like me to do those things,
    and I loved to do those things.
    So maybe she was already overly-protective
    before the war.
    I'm not sure.
    You still like to iron?
    No, I don't like to--
    And we have to iron.
    I don't mind, but I don't like to-- no, I don't like to iron,
    and I hate to dry dishes, as a matter of fact.
    As a matter of fact, I think my mother used
    to kid me about that because then, when we came to New York
    and she wanted help with those things, she would tease me
    and say, you used to love to do it when I didn't want you to,
    and now when I want you to you don't want to do it.
    Well, it seems to me that's fairly self-evident
    that it would be that way.
    But do I remember anything else about her?
    No, I actually remember more about my interactions
    with the governess and the servants.
    For example, the things that I remember about the servants
    is that they were fun for me, and the reasons they were fun
    was that they would come in and do all these routine things.
    Like we had a very long hallway because the apartment
    was two seven-room apartments with the wall broken down
    between them, so there were 14 rooms.
    And they all went off this one long hallway,
    and we had this runner rug.
    And so they would roll that up every time they came,
    and I don't know whether it was every day, or every other day,
    or whatever.
    And so they would let me sit on the end of the runner,
    and then they would start rolling it, pull, roll, pull.
    And so I'd get a ride.
    Or if they were sweeping the floor,
    they'd let me put my two feet on the broom and sweep with me.
    Or if they were folding the sheets,
    they'd put me inside the sheet and swing me back and forth
    and things like that.
    So those were kind of exciting things for me.
    And also, I think my governess had a cot in my room,
    so I remember her being there.
    I think it was probably kind of a consoling feeling that--
    I don't know whether she was there all the time or what,
    but I don't ever remember the thing of being left alone.
    But then early on, I think I did get left alone
    at night to sleep because my brother tells me
    I was an absolute royal pain, that I
    used to scream through the nights,
    and the governess would not let my mother come to me.
    But I don't really remember a lot
    about my mother in those days, and I certainly
    do not remember my father.
    The funny thing is, I remember remembering my father,
    but then I remember one day, when I must have been about 10
    or something, looking at this picture of my father
    that my mother always had on her night table
    and suddenly realizing that the real memory of my father
    had been taken over by the memory of the picture
    and that I no longer had that real memory that I
    had originally.
    So I remember my room in Vienna, and I think
    I remember the dining room.
    And I certainly remember the kitchen.
    Do you want to describe them at all?
    Well, the dining room--
    I seem to remember it was very formal and dark.
    It seemed dark in there.
    I don't know whether it was because there were
    curtains drawn or something.
    And we did have, in New York, the table that
    was in that dining room, and it was dark, probably
    mahogany or something, massive.
    The furniture we had in Vienna was this sort of massive thing
    that was popular in the 1930s.
    I just remember the big table in the middle
    and looking in there, and it was, I just remember,
    a sort of formal feeling.
    The kitchen was sort of light and airy,
    and there was this white--
    in Vienna, there were no built-in closets,
    and so people had--
    I don't know if they were called wardrobes
    or-- and in the kitchen, there was
    a white, lacquered, big wardrobe with two doors that
    opened with keys, these kinds of old-fashioned keys,
    and I think the cook had like dish towels in there.
    And one memory that becomes very important for Kristallnacht--
    she had-- and actually, I have one upstairs.
    There were these little things you could buy.
    Pastilles, they were called.
    They were awful-tasting things, minty or something,
    and they came in either single boxes or triple boxes.
    And I don't know if there were double-sized ones,
    but they were green and gold cans.
    And the cook had a triple size one
    of those in that white closet, and whenever
    she had extra Groschen, which are the equivalent of pennies,
    she would put them into that can.
    So must there must have been some connection to me
    about that can.
    I don't know what it could have been.
    Maybe she bought me things with those occasionally
    or something.
    But anyway, and then there was this long hallway,
    and I remember my room quite well.
    My room had a nice window which I think overlooked the river,
    and then there was a dresser over here
    with a stuffed animal on it and then my crib, which was not
    like an American crib but had--
    the part that goes up and down had a mesh
    of ropes going both ways.
    That was the way cribs were made in that time, I think.
    And then there was this cot that the governess used to--
    I don't know-- maybe nap on or whatever.
    I don't think it was a very big room.
    I sort of liked that room.
    And then I remember my father's office,
    my father's examining room, and I remember
    the linoleum on the floor.
    And that becomes important for later
    when we went back to Vienna in 1963 and I recognized that.
    But anyway, so then the next--
    my big memory is the night of Kristallnacht,
    and my mother was holding me up in her arms.
    And my brother was--
    of course, my father was dead by now.
    My brother was holding onto my mother's skirt,
    and there was this loud knock on the door.
    And my mother said, who's there?
    And the superintendent was there.
    See, now, I only remember the superintendent
    and one other man, but my brother
    says there were actually five or six men who came.
    And my mother went to open the little metal thing on the glass
    peephole, and this guy smashed the glass
    with the back of a revolver.
    And the superintendent said, let us in, Mrs. Reif.
    We won't hurt you.
    And they came in, and I remember being in the kitchen.
    And the only really strong memory I have
    is of them taking that can full of coins.
    And now, they took--
    they helped themselves to everything, all the radios we--
    anything that was of any value they took,
    although before that, interestingly,
    apparently either my mother or some relative--
    my father, as a dentist, had hunks of gold
    because in those days a lot of fillings were made with gold.
    Somebody went and dumped those in the bottom of the Danube.
    And I don't know.
    But anyway, whatever else was valuable in the house
    these people helped themselves to.
    And I do think I remember one of the guys having some radio
    or something in his hand, but the thing
    that I, as a little girl, felt most resentful
    about was that they took away this box of coins.
    So anyway, so they left.
    And I don't remember anything else about Vienna,
    I don't think.
    I think I may remember the little suit that I wore when
    we got onto the ship, the St. Louis,
    but I'm not sure whether I remember that
    or I remember a picture that we have.
    I don't-- and I actually have that outfit still.
    Oh, I know.
    I remember one other thing.
    OK, so then after Kristallnacht, somehow--
    I don't know how it happened, but my mother
    managed to get these tickets to get on the St. Louis.
    And the reason we got first-class passage was
    because you were only allowed to take--
    I think it was like $4 a person out of the country.
    And so my mother figured, what the hell, we
    might as well go first class.
    And so we had to pack up stuff, and you were
    allowed to send things away.
    Abroad?
    Yes, but there were regulations, and I
    have a feeling that some things got
    smuggled in because, for example,
    a bunch of sterling silver flatware was in that van.
    And I think that was strictly forbidden if I
    have read my history correctly.
    But anyway, my mother was not very--
    well, I don't know.
    I shouldn't say that.
    My mother was really devastated.
    I was going to say she wasn't very functional,
    but she obviously managed all right.
    But I think other people came and kind of
    had to help her do things.
    And there was a--
    my brother had met another boy called Erwin Kleinfeld, who's
    now a mathematician at the University of Iowa in Iowa
    City, and through that friendship,
    our parents kind of got to know his parents.
    And that guy-- the father was a lawyer,
    and somehow he came and helped my mother out
    with various things.
    And the day this enormous van pulled up
    in front of our building, he was there
    helping my mother get stuff packed into this van.
    And I think my mother was really not doing very well,
    and he kind of said, take this, take that.
    And I don't know--
    I don't know who made the final decisions.
    I have a feeling that he made a lot of them.
    And there were some really weird things in this van,
    just really weird.
    For example, we had one room in Vienna
    that was totally covered, apparently, in mirrors,
    and it was made out of these tiles that
    were about 8 inches wide by maybe about 14 inches high.
    And one of the things that came out of this van
    when we got it in New York three years later
    was all these mirrors.
    Now, what did anybody think we were
    going to do with these mirrors?
    But anyway, so that was in there.
    And then weird things--
    on my second birthday, I had been
    bought a very special doll, and that doll arrived in New York.
    And speaking of traumatizing kids,
    it was hung by the neck from the bar inside one of the wardrobes
    with all the clothes and so on.
    So anyway, so this guy--
    I remember that day.
    I remember this guy coming.
    And I remember these things going out into this van,
    and that van went to New York.
    And it sat in a warehouse, which I think
    was paid for by my aunt, Lena.
    Or maybe we sent--
    I don't know.
    I don't know what happened.
    But anyway, so then I don't remember anything else
    until we went on the St. Louis.
    I don't remember that trip except for being seasick,
    and then we were sent back to Europe.
    And we went to France, and that's
    where my memories start again.
    So the first thing that happened was-- am I on track?
    Is this the kind of stuff you want to hear?
    Maybe we can-- since I already have a lot of the facts,
    maybe-- do you know any of your mother's responses to these
    things or her feelings about how--
    how did she respond being in France when you were in Limoges
    and all of--
    OK, well, the thing that I remember is that my mother--
    my remembrance of my mother was that she
    was, to a large extent, for years and years in--
    I don't know what to call it-- a state of somebody who's
    just been through a catastrophe, which she had been.
    It's just that most people seem to recover more rapidly,
    and she just did not recover.
    She recovered effectively in that she always
    seemed to do the right thing to get to the next step,
    but emotionally, she never recovered.
    And so my recollection of my mother
    through most of those years is that she was often
    a very sad person.
    It was like a lot of sighing and just this unhappy
    demeanor on her face for years.
    Now, in later years, some of that
    lifted, and she could be a real fun person sometimes.
    I don't know.
    It was almost-- it was almost weird,
    and I couldn't even begin to go through this
    until very recently.
    But now I have a feeling that if somebody had somehow
    just let her or encouraged her, she
    could have been just a really vibrant, dazzling lady.
    Occasionally, she would dance with me, not very often,
    but occasionally.
    She was very good in later years,
    like after I met Sam and we got married and everything.
    She was always game for anything.
    Fly on a jet?
    Yeah, fly on a jet.
    She didn't have any of these hang-ups.
    Like other parents of my contemporaries--
    they wouldn't ride an escalator.
    Even when she was 60, she climbed with us in Yosemite.
    But there was always this real sadness.
    And I remember once, when she was already
    starting to get Alzheimer's disease,
    she-- well, she said this to me very often,
    but this particular time I remember it very dramatically.
    She said, you know, I've only had 13 good years
    in my whole life, and those were the first 13
    years with my father is what she was referring to.
    And we were not very nice children to her.
    We were extremely hard on her for many reasons.
    First of all, my brother thought she was frivolous.
    I probably thought she was a little frivolous, also,
    although she was very sad and serious.
    But she always seemed to be concerned about things that--
    I don't know how we got to be so lofty-thinking,
    but she always seemed to be concerned
    with things that we felt were not terribly important.
    And so one would say there was friction,
    but it wasn't really friction because we just totally
    lorded over her.
    As I think back on it now, it was a very strange situation.
    Do you want to switch it?
    Let me flip it over.
    It's getting--
    I'm not technical enough to [INAUDIBLE]..
    I'm sorry.
    Would you like to continue?
    So is it going now?
    Yeah, now we're on.
    She was very, very encouraging of our studying and doing well
    for ourselves, but she didn't demand enough for herself.
    I can say this in retrospect.
    For example, my brother had a room to himself in New York--
    I'm skipping ahead now--
    and I didn't.
    I shared a bedroom with her.
    And so I did my homework in the kitchen.
    She'd come home tired from work.
    She would make dinner.
    She would clean up.
    And then I had the audacity to tell her
    that she couldn't run the water to wash the dishes while I
    was doing my homework, and she went along with that.
    That was really-- in retrospect, that was not short of amazing.
    She should have told me where to get off.
    And she did get after me to help often,
    and I sometimes tried to help a little.
    It's funny.
    Now you-- do you have children?
    No, not yet.
    Well, you see this thing reflected in your children.
    She would say, would you dry the dishes,
    and I would say, yes, I'll dry the dishes as
    soon as I finish my homework.
    And then she would say--
    well, she couldn't wait until I finished
    because she was very methodical about all the household things,
    so she would dry the dishes.
    So most of the time, I never got to do it because--
    I would have done it if she had waited, but she couldn't wait.
    And so now, as a parent, I can sense that irritation
    of "I want it done now" and the kid wants to do it later.
    It's just that I know enough to know
    that if I really don't want to do it
    and I want the kids to do it, you just leave it
    and let the kid do it later.
    Did she have any interests--
    you said she enjoyed dancing and things like that.
    Did she have--
    Well, she certainly--
    You mentioned that they went to the opera.
    Did she follow anything closely or have hobbies or anything
    like that?
    No, I don't think so.
    Actually, she was she was fantastic with her hands,
    and in Europe, when she was a lady of leisure,
    she did embroidery.
    That's what ladies did.
    She did that whole thing.
    That's all silk petit point, and it took her two years
    to do that.
    And we were such terrible kids.
    We both used to tease her about, why
    did you spend all this time doing this really
    disgusting-looking scene?
    Why didn't you at least pick some--
    Well, first of all, now, it still looks--
    I still think, why did she spend all this time doing this scene,
    but it doesn't look as bad as it used to look.
    And now I really appreciate the time--
    [?
    To look at the work and-- ?]
    --and the energy, and the devotion, and the workmanship.
    And there are lots of things around the house that she did.
    And later on, it became things that we
    tried to get her to do to keep her busy.
    So needle point. [? OK, that's good. ?]
    But she didn't know--
    she did not--
    I don't know how she did this in Vienna.
    I think in Vienna she probably picked
    this up whenever she had time and then put it down and so on.
    In the time that I really knew her, she didn't know how to--
    she didn't know how to relax, except to read.
    She did a lot of reading.
    I'm not always sure that--
    she read in a funny way.
    She did not read like an educated person.
    She read in a way that was non-analytical,
    and so we, the children, who both turned out
    to be PhD scientists, found this really weird.
    But how do you mean non-analytical?
    Reading fiction in a non-analytical way?
    Well, the best way--
    You have to defend the humanity?
    Yeah.
    Well, and this is probably-- this
    may even be an unfair thing to say,
    but one of the things that I remember-- an this
    had nothing to do with reading but rather with a movie.
    She was up here babysitting for us,
    and she had seen a movie called I Never Sang For My Father.
    And my husband and I were going out to see it that night.
    And when we came home, almost simultaneously,
    my husband and I said, boy, what a miserable father,
    and at the same moment she said, wasn't that a miserable son?
    And I'm sure it could be interpreted both ways,
    but I think any--
    if you looked at the critics, which I don't think I ever did,
    of that movie, I think the whole point of the movie
    is that here's a parent who is manipulating
    the son in such a way that the son's life becomes ruined.
    My mother totally missed that.
    All she could see was the bad son
    not being nice to the daddy.
    I see.
    Well, for example, after our kids were born,
    I would keep giving her books to read about child rearing,
    and every time she finished one, she'd say,
    oh, this is really interesting.
    This is great.
    I wish I had known about this when you were small.
    But then 10 minutes later, she would go and totally
    interact by her gut reaction rather than by what
    she had just read about.
    And so we would--
    we would get into some really ridiculous arguments,
    she and I. So later on, after I got my PhD and got a job--
    because she worked like a mad dog in the factories,
    and she had incredible pride in her work.
    So she not only did what she had to do,
    but she worked harder because she wanted everything
    to be just right.
    And so we pretty much had to insist that she retire,
    and my brother and I each gave her money.
    Well, she never could feel comfortable with getting money
    from us.
    And we would say, look, you struggled like mad
    to support us.
    Did we ever complain about that?
    No, we just took the money, and we lived happily ever after.
    And so now it's your turn to have a good time and retire.
    We are doing quite well we are in no way being
    hurt by giving you this money.
    Why don't you just take the money and enjoy it?
    You've had a really hard life.
    Now's the time to have a good time.
    She could never cope with that.
    Every month when the checks came,
    there was a struggle about whether she
    was going to keep these checks.
    But then also when she did retire, she was lonesome.
    What was she going to do with her time?
    So Sam and I used to devise these projects for her to do.
    So one time, she said she really needed a bookcase,
    so we bought her an unfinished bookcase, and some varnish,
    and shellac, and the rest of it.
    And we said, well, this ought to keep
    her busy for a week or two, and so we told her
    how to do this and so on.
    Two days later or three days later, she calls up,
    I finished the bookcase.
    I said, what do you mean you finished the bookcase?
    You have to wait at least so many hours in between.
    To dry, yeah.
    She said, oh, I did.
    She said, it said wait five hours,
    so I set the alarm clock when I went to sleep.
    And I at five hours, I got up, and I
    put on the next coat and so on.
    So everything was like something she had to do.
    All right, I'll give her something better to do.
    So I gave her this enormous piece of rug mesh
    to hook a rug, which is now hanging on our wall.
    I thought, well, this has got to keep her busy for a while.
    After a few weeks, she came back.
    It was all finished, and she said,
    this was really very hard.
    My hands were bleeding along the sides from working on this.
    So everything we tried to do to occupy her time in a nice way--
    but on the other hand, she also did very well.
    Like she must have gone to every free concert in New York,
    and free plays, and so on.
    She would start talking to younger people.
    Other people found her very delightful
    because they didn't have to grow up with her,
    and so none of those irritations were there.
    But it was very hard for her to make friends.
    The only people that she made friends with
    were other ladies like her from Vienna,
    and it was hard to find those as the years went on.
    And even with those people, she was very critical,
    and so if they did something wrong
    she would get very annoyed or insulted.
    You were going to ask something?
    Did she speak German with you and your brother,
    or with these other people did she prefer to speak German?
    She did speak German with them, yeah,
    and she did speak German with us for a long time.
    I think in the later years, after our kids were born,
    she probably spoke more English.
    And she was very--
    when we first came here, she had all these books,
    and every night she'd come home from work, she'd be exhausted.
    She would make dinner.
    She would clean up.
    She would get into bed.
    She would study her English.
    And she was very thorough.
    She had these little notebooks about this size
    that she would keep, and every night she
    would write down everything she spent
    that day in that notebook.
    And she would add it up, and then she
    would count what was in her change purse and her wallet.
    And if it was off by even $0.01, even if it was late at night,
    she would go through the whole thing as many times
    as it took to balance that--
    it could not be off by one penny.
    And then funny things happened.
    Like one time I remember we were--
    I don't know.
    You know how you get into silly discussions about--
    she had bought me this dress, and I said it cost so much.
    And she said, no, it was so much.
    And she just went and got her little thing of little books
    and looked it up, and there it was with the date
    and how much it was, gray dress with white stripes.
    So she was really--
    she was almost compulsive about keeping the records,
    and every Saturday was cleaning day.
    And come heaven, hell, or high water,
    the house got cleaned on Saturday from top to bottom,
    and I got involved in that.
    And sometimes I probably felt resentful about that.
    It was a gorgeous Saturday, and from 9:00 in the morning
    until 3:00 in the afternoon we cleaned house,
    washed the floors, everything.
    So I want to go back to France because--
    in France, my mother was not doing very well,
    and with all the languages, she could
    speak she never learned to speak French because she was just
    so emotionally devastated.
    And in France, when we first got to Loudun,
    we lived in this hotel.
    There were a whole bunch of about 20 refugees
    who were put up at this hotel.
    And she was really--
    in addition to things being bad, she
    was upset about all sorts of minor things.
    Like in the kitchen of the hotel, there were cats,
    and the cats were allowed to walk on the food table.
    Well, yeah, I'd get bothered about that also,
    but under those circumstances--
    She went to ask the woman who ran the hotel where
    is there a public bathroom.
    There was no bathroom.
    There were toilets but no bathroom in this hotel.
    The woman didn't know.
    This blew my mother's mind.
    How could she not know?
    And this woman, like a lot of other French women,
    would put on a lot of perfume, and my mother was always, God,
    she must be filthy.
    I'm sure she sponge-bathed and so on.
    But anyway, so my mother was really
    bothered by things like that.
    So I remember that hotel very well.
    And then after we had been there--
    I had a little boy friend whose name was Jean-Paul Berg,
    and I just--
    He was in the picture that you sent me.
    Right.
    And he apparently perished.
    I don't know what that meant, having a little boyfriend,
    but I think he was just my friend.
    We played together.
    And then the other thing I remember from that time--
    this was really weird stuff.
    I remember there were these two girls who
    forced me to go to the-- who forced me to watch the hotel
    cooks kill a chicken in the back of the hotel,
    and I just cried and cried.
    And I was really upset.
    And just around the time of the St. Louis reunion in 1989,
    I coincidentally met these two women who were the two girls.
    And they said, well, there weren't any other children,
    so it must have been us, and yeah, it
    sounds like the kind of thing we would have done.
    And they're actually-- those people,
    if you could get to interview them,
    would be very interesting because those two sisters have
    diametrically opposite stories about what happened in France.
    Not the facts but the attitudes are just
    diametrically opposite.
    Do you remember their names?
    Yes.
    Well, first of all, their unmarried last name was Isner,
    I-S-N-E-R, and the younger one is Ruth Isner Kissinger.
    And her husband is actually a first cousin
    of Henry Kissinger.
    And the other one is Bella, and she remarried--
    I don't remember what happened to her husband.
    I think maybe he died.
    And she remarried, so she's now Bella Isner Uhlfelder,
    U-H-L-F-E-L-D-E-R.
    Ruth Isner is--
    I found her very easy to talk to.
    Well, actually, Bella was originally easier to talk to.
    Ruth is a more reticent person, but Ruth
    has been much more cooperative with me about collecting stuff
    for my book.
    And Bella got mad at me for some really dodo thing
    at the reunion because I got up and announced
    that I was doing this book, and she accused me
    of making this very emotional thing into a commercial affair.
    So I don't know.
    But anyway, so I have not gotten a story from Bella,
    but I have one from Ruth Isner.
    And I think it would be very interesting to interview
    both of those sisters.
    Do they live in New York?
    Yeah, they both live in-- no, she lives in New Jersey.
    Bella lives in, I think, The Bronx or uptown Manhattan,
    but somewhere in the hundreds.
    Anyway, so we spent almost a year there,
    just short of a year, and then one morning the Germans
    came in and took the town.
    And I remember that because we woke up,
    and they were parading around, and shooting into the air,
    and just being generally very noisy.
    And the thing that I remember was
    I was a very goody-goody little girl,
    and I'd always been taught, you don't lie, you don't this,
    you don't that.
    And I was told that no way was I allowed
    to let on that I could speak German because the generals, I
    guess, actually came and lived in the hotel,
    so for about two weeks we were together.
    And I remember being totally--
    I thought this was really weird that you're not
    supposed to lie, but here I am.
    And I can understand everything all these guys say,
    and every time they talk to me, I'm standing there saying,
    [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].
    And my brother now tells me that, one day, my brother just
    had his heart in his mouth because one of these guys
    came up to me, started to talk to me,
    and my brother saw me start to answer in German.
    And he became petrified, and he said, at the last minute,
    I suddenly must have remembered.
    And I said, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]..
    But that was a very important time in my life
    because there was a young German soldier there.
    I don't really remember his face except it was a very nice face,
    and he had sandy-colored hair.
    I don't know if I could judge, but as I think back,
    he must have been 18 or 19.
    There was something very pleasing about this kid.
    And every morning they did these stupid maneuvers
    around this hotel, and we would watch from our window, which
    looked out over the side.
    And this guy would throw me candies and things,
    and my mother was always sure they were poisoned and didn't
    want me to eat them.
    But I didn't get stuff like that, and so I ate it.
    And here I am.
    And then he ultimately gave me a little doll, which
    I treasured for a long time.
    Now, I don't know whether this is true or not, but in my mind,
    that soldier was unbelievably important because when
    I came to the United States, the kids--
    well, first of all, kids are brutal,
    and the kids were really brutal.
    And first of all, everybody was making fun of me
    because I couldn't speak English,
    and even some of the parents in the neighborhood in Brooklyn
    were not really very kindly, which I find kind of shocking.
    But the kids would come over to me and even the adults and say,
    do you hate the Germans?
    And even as a kid--
    I was seven--
    I would say, no, I don't hate the Germans.
    There are good Germans, and there are bad Germans.
    And the reason I was able to say that must have had to do--
    it probably also had to do with discussions with my brother,
    but I think it had a lot to do with this soldier.
    And it really wasn't until very recently
    that I started thinking, well, was this soldier--
    I always somehow in my life assumed
    that that soldier knew I was Jewish,
    but recently I thought, well, did he know?
    Maybe he didn't know.
    Maybe he was just being nice to me
    because he thought I was a cute, little Catholic kid.
    But the point is, it's irrelevant.
    It's what that guy represented to me throughout my life,
    whether it was real or not real, that I
    think was just incredibly important about that particular
    stage.
    So then there was a lot of talk between my mother
    and my brother about what's to be done.
    You can't stay here because--
    I don't know how my mother managed to--
    my mother couldn't even talk one word of French.
    How could she carry this ruse on for two weeks
    of us making believe that we couldn't speak German?
    I don't know how we managed to get through that.
    But apparently, according to my mother--
    my mother says that my brother said to her one day,
    I'm leaving here whether you leave or not.
    Now, my brother doesn't quite remember
    saying anything quite so dramatic, but in the meantime,
    apparently, my brother tells me that there were meetings
    amongst these 20 refugees.
    And as a group, they decided to get out.
    Now, there was only one family--
    and I heard about this for years--
    there was one family who decided not to leave,
    and I never knew who that was until 1989.
    It was this family, these sisters,
    and that was obviously the wrong move because they didn't
    get out until '46 or '47.
    So we left all our stuff in this hotel
    except for a couple of, I think, pairs of underwear
    and my brother's violin, and we went very late at night.
    I remember walking to the train station.
    It was dark, and I think it was midnight.
    And we went to the train station,
    and I didn't remember that there were 20 of us, or 18 of us,
    or whatever it was.
    I only remember my mother, and my brother,
    and me walking to the train station.
    And we took the train, and my brother
    has filled me in on the funny things
    that happened along the way and how we actually
    got across the border.
    It was just luck a ruse.
    But the next thing I remember is being
    in Limoges, which is the town in southern France
    that's famous for its China, and I
    think that first night we actually must have
    slept in the railroad station.
    And I slept on a scale.
    There was a scale in the railroad station.
    And then we got put up.
    And I thought it was just for one night,
    but my brother says we were there for six weeks.
    So you can see that my memory is distorted compared to his.
    But we got put up in the concrete bleachers
    of a stadium for the circus.
    Right.
    Yeah, you told me this, right.
    And then ultimately, some people got together and rented
    these two rooms, and the rooms were
    each maybe about two or three times as big as this room.
    And there were 30 women in the room downstairs,
    and I think I was the only child.
    And so we lived in there for several months,
    and all the guys lived upstairs.
    And I think my brother was the only child
    upstairs, the only one of the men who was a boy.
    What did your mother do there when you were there?
    Well, nobody could do anything.
    So you just hung around?
    Well, I seem to remember them being pretty busy cleaning up.
    They were always cleaning up.
    In the nighttime, we had these straw sacks
    that we put down on the floor and we slept on.
    In the morning, we pulled them up against the wall,
    and there were these crates, like orange crates.
    And we put those down as tables and chairs.
    And people were always sweeping, and cleaning up,
    and walking down.
    Every morning, we walked down--
    I was allowed to get about 3 inches' worth of milk
    in a Coke-sized bottle, and my mother made me share that with
    my brother.
    So you had to walk to the store--
    and they measured this out-- walk back.
    And then there were always walks begging
    for bread in the bakery.
    That was my job.
    I think I told you about that.
    And just last year, when I was interviewing my brother,
    I said to him, did anybody think how-- did I
    tell you about this?
    I said--
    Oh, yeah, how you felt.
    Did anyone think how demeaning this was to me?
    And my brother looked at me, and he said, it wasn't demeaning.
    It was bread.
    And I have a sign in my office that
    says that because it reminds me of something.
    So anyway, that's where I went to school for the first year,
    and I think it was a very lonesome time for me.
    There weren't-- somehow I don't think I played with the other
    kids after school.
    They lived someplace else.
    We were refugees, which was probably not a nice thing
    to be.
    Do you know about your mother?
    Did she interact with the other people?
    Well, she interacted with the other women.
    You said how she basically began to changed or whatever.
    Do you think that she was [? in this-- ?]
    She definitely interacted with the other women,
    but I have a feeling that she may not
    have been terribly popular because she was emotionally
    a downer a lot of the time.
    She was always sad.
    And a lot of other people--
    and I think that's true of my brother also.
    When we got on the St. Louis, apparently,
    most people, when the ship sailed away
    and the captain said, all right, these people
    are going to be treated like all other people who are on a tour,
    people were rejoicing, and dancing,
    and doing all these other things which my mother was not
    participating in.
    And my brother, even though he was about 11 or 12 at the time,
    said he was really bothered that these people were being
    so insensitive, that they had left people behind
    in dire straits, that they had just
    come from being in dire straits and it was not
    a time to dance or sing.
    Well, adult me can see it both ways.
    Yeah, it's not a time to dance and sing.
    On the other hand, I can see where
    if you've been really hurting for so long
    and there's an opportunity to do something different,
    then maybe it makes good mental health sense
    to try to take advantage of this.
    So I think we spent our time on the ship rather quietly.
    I must have played with the other kids,
    and there's a picture that I sent you a copy of.
    And there seemed to be quite a lot of kids,
    though most of them, I think were older,
    and there were a few babies.
    So in Limoges, I went to school, and I have a feeling
    I was kind of lonesome.
    But there was some--
    I remembered some really nice things.
    Like there was a carpenter who couldn't work most of the time,
    and he made me this wonderful little set
    of red and blue furniture, tables and chairs,
    and he made upholstery things with little pieces of wallpaper
    and so on.
    So that was a really nice thought.
    And then after a few months, two rooms next door to the two
    rooms we had became available.
    And I don't know why, but somehow my mother
    was chosen or somehow got to have the smaller of the two
    rooms with us, and so we didn't have to sleep on the floor.
    We could put our--
    they would like orange crate beds
    that somebody had put together, and we could put our straw bags
    on those.
    That's where I had real measles, in that room,
    and I remember that very dramatically.
    I remember for two weeks lying on my back in this room
    with the dark curtains drawn because I was so photophobic
    and watching the mold grow on the ceiling and the drips come
    and drip down.
    And two weeks I was lying there like that.
    But the two couples who got the outer room
    were two sisters married to two brothers.
    One of those brothers was almost blind, and he somehow--
    even though I think this was illegal,
    he managed to find some leather, and he would punch out
    those pieces of leather that you make, the belts
    that hook into each other.
    And my brother and I would sometimes help him,
    and I liked doing that, especially
    because I think he used to tell us stories
    while we sat and worked.
    So we would sit at this little window,
    and we would make these belts.
    And that was kind of a pleasant thing for me.
    Is there anything else you can think of about your mother?
    Because basically when we write this [INAUDIBLE] we'll stop
    when you get to America because that's your--
    the Holocaust.
    So do you think-- is there anything else that you
    can think of to fill in?
    I think my mother was extremely somber in those days.
    We went for-- I remember going for some long
    walks to try to get food, and I remember those
    as being somber occasions.
    I may be totally wrong, but I don't
    remember any laughter or--
    I think she was just-- but I have to--
    The only way I can present her personality,
    really, is to tell you about after we
    came to America because I think it must have been worse
    in France.
    My mother imagined herself a really aristocratic lady.
    That's the way she thought of herself.
    And when my aunt, Lena--
    actually, it was her kids who came with her--
    brought us from the boat to her house--
    and she lived in the Lower East Side--
    I was sitting next to my mother in the back seat,
    and my brother was sitting next to me.
    And as we drove into the Lower East Side
    with the pushcarts and this sort of mass of humanity,
    my mother whispered, for this I've struggled all these years?
    And I thought, oh my God.
    What a terrible thing to say.
    Even though maybe I was--
    maybe I was also feeling part of that,
    but maybe I was worried that somebody was going to hear
    or what.
    But she just-- and then when my aunt--
    we lived with my aunt for three months,
    and my aunt got sick at one point.
    And in retrospect, we should have been really
    grateful for being put up.
    And I think my mother really was very grateful,
    but at the same time, when my aunt got
    sick and needed somebody to make her a cup of tea,
    my mother had no idea how to make a cup of tea
    because she'd been so--
    Now, part of that had to be a put-up job
    because in France in those two years,
    everybody was struggling making meals and so on.
    I think it was more maybe when she was asked
    to make cereal or something.
    She had never done it.
    She hadn't a clue and so on.
    But she was a very giving person, and so
    when we finally got an apartment after three months and we had--
    I think she was earning $35 or $45 a month,
    something like that.
    No, wait a minute.
    What was she earning?
    She was earning $15 a week-- that's what it was--
    and the rent was $45 a month.
    And she would buy things for us.
    Sometimes she'd even come home with a little treat for us,
    and she was living on toast and tomatoes.
    It was all for us.
    But she wore black for years and years and years.
    It wasn't until--
    I don't know.
    She must have been--
    I don't know.
    I don't know when it happened, but she would occasionally
    put on something red.
    But for years-- and then there was that whole struggle
    of when I tried to put on something black
    and she would say, there'll be time enough for that.
    Don't wear-- if you have to wear black,
    put on a flower or something like that.
    She often complained about her state in life,
    and I don't blame her.
    But she also-- she didn't have any guidance.
    She could have had a fantastically better life.
    She could have been a fantastic bookkeeper,
    but nobody guided her.
    So she ended up leading her life in the factories, which
    she hated because she--
    it wasn't so much the work as it was the demeaning atmosphere.
    She felt that she was with these uneducated, boorish people
    who--
    I think, occasionally, maybe even people made passes at her,
    which she found--
    She was so Victorian that even when
    she was in the nursing home in her--
    no, it wasn't a nursing home.
    It was when she was living in a senior citizen thing
    when we moved her up to Brooklyn,
    and she belonged to some golden age club.
    And I think she was 80 by then.
    And one day, she called me up, and it was raining.
    And she said some 80-year-old man offered her
    a ride back to her apartment.
    I said, good, did you take it?
    Who do you think I am?
    Would I take a ride with a strange man?
    So she had this image of herself.
    She never would have thought of getting remarried.
    She wouldn't-- she was so Victorian.
    The idea of-- no man was allowed to touch her except my father.
    And she had a terrible time getting used to America
    because one time she came in for a job interview or something,
    and the boss was sitting on his chair with his feet
    up on the desk.
    While, she thought that that was treating her in a terrible way.
    Or for example, when people would call her
    by her first name without being invited because in Vienna
    she was Frau Dr. Reif.
    And the least she expected was to be Mrs. Reif.
    So she had a lot of those--
    she was just very European, but she also--
    she adapted very well in other ways.
    She got to be really good at shopping and knowing
    where to get bargains.
    And she was very--
    she was always very energetic.
    It's just that she didn't always channel her energy.
    Like when she went to work in New York in the morning,
    she would get up, I think, at 6:00
    in the morning to be able to leave
    the house at a quarter to 8:00.
    And during that time, she must have expended--
    you could have built a house with the amount of energy
    she expended during that, just in the process of getting
    herself dressed, and makeup, and a hat,
    and hatpins, and stockings, and shoes, and all this thing.
    And then she'd get to Manhattan and take it all off
    and put on some work clothes that she had at the factory.
    But then she'd put it all back on
    to take the subway back home.
    What else do you want to know?
    I think that's painting a very nice picture.
    I think we can definitely--
    because we have the storyline.
    Right.
    Well, let me add one more thing because I
    don't want to leave you with the wrong impression.
    She was very good-natured.
    Like she'd play cards with me.
    If I was bored, she'd play cards with me.
    Or if I needed to memorize a poem for school,
    even though she was exhausted, she
    would sit up in bed at night and have
    me recite over and over again "If" by Rudyard Kipling.
    I just remember that one in particular, but many things
    like that.
    She was really very good about always
    trying to do things to try to make me happy.
    So I think there was a really fun-loving person there
    that never got to come out because of the way life went.
    Well, thank you very much.
    The date is Sunday March 29, 1992.
    We're speaking with Dr. Liane Reif-Lehrer about her father,
    Dr. Gerson Reif.
    What can you tell us about your father?
    What do you know?
    Do you know anything about his childhood, about his family?
    I don't really know anything about his family.
    The only things that I can say about my father
    is that, first of all, apparently he
    was a pretty good daddy.
    Apparently, he really wanted very much to have a daughter.
    And so he was apparently very happy
    when I was born as a girl.
    And I think he was probably a fairly serious person.
    But I think he was probably less way
    out than either of his children in the sense
    that I think he was serious about his professional pursuits
    but he also apparently enjoyed going to the opera and so on.
    And I guess he and my mother bought
    sort of popular music records of the day,
    and so I have a feeling that he was
    not a sort of ultra-intellectual type,
    but very serious about his work.
    Do you know where went to school or anything?
    He went to school in Vienna.
    That's all I really know.
    And then he actually was in the war
    during World War I and he was wounded.
    He was in the Austrian Army and He was
    wounded at the Russian front.
    And actually I'll take you on a 3-minute tour
    to show you a certificate that he got for that.
    And that happened during his medical training, apparently,
    and then he went back and--
    You said he was born in Poland.
    Yes.
    Grew up in Poland.
    Yes, and apparently he was the only one
    of the children who did anything professional.
    Do you know anything about any of the other children?
    Well, I know about the two who were in New York.
    And my Aunt Lena came here I think in the 1920s
    and got married.
    And she and her husband owned a hardware store.
    And the other, the Uncle Max brother
    owned what was called a luncheonette in New York, which
    was a place with a fountain and you
    could get sandwiches or a sundae or something like that.
    So I think he probably was different
    within his own family, different from all the others.
    My brother felt that he had--
    My brother liked him because he was serious
    and he would bring him books to read and things like that.
    But I think he also took my brother ice
    skating, for example, which my brother apparently hated.
    So I think he had a variety of things that he liked to do.
    And he did go dancing with my mother.
    As a matter of fact, I grew up with this funny thing.
    I thought that all people in Vienna
    ever did was to go ballroom dancing in white gowns
    and tails for the men.
    And actually I love to do that.
    My husband and I do a lot of ballroom dancing
    in evening gowns and tails.
    I don't know whether there's a connection there.
    But I think he was quite a serious person.
    I think he really liked his work.
    I think he was a good dentist.
    I think he was serious and interested in his patients.
    Did he always run the practice out of his home,
    or did he ever work for someone else?
    As far as I know, he always ran the practice out of our house.
    And there was something else I was going
    to say but it just eluded me.
    I'm sorry.
    No, it wasn't because you interrupted,
    it was just because I'm so forgetful.
    Well, I don't remember what I was going to say,
    but I don't really know very much else about my father.
    You know I think he was probably a gentle, kindly sort
    of person.
    I think he was rather good looking.
    I mean he looks good looking when he was young.
    I have a picture of him around the cadaver
    on a dissecting table and he was rather good looking then.
    But then later on he got kind of stocky
    and I don't know, to my mind that didn't really
    look too great on him.
    Do you have any memory of any outings or anything
    that you ever took with him?
    No.
    I don't have any particular memories of my own.
    I know that in the summers we used to go to the country
    and he would come on weekends.
    And I know my brother to this day
    still talks about those things in a sort of somewhat
    mocking way about how many suitcases and porters my mother
    needed to go on those trips.
    I guess that's really about all I can say.
    I know it always seems weird to me
    how circumstances shape people's lives.
    And about the fact that my father was
    in the Austrian Army, and if he had been sensible enough
    to come to the United States earlier,
    he would have been probably in the American Army
    because he would have been in that age group
    where he still would have gotten drafted.
    And you're sort of a pawn of the country that you're born in,
    in a funny kind of way.
    On the other hand, if they had remained in Austria
    they probably would have been deported very early
    because they were Polish born.
    Yes.
    Right, right.
    So I guess that's about all I know.
    I think he was a rather serious person,
    although I don't think he's as serious a person as my brother
    has turned out to be maybe.
    So I guess that's about all I can say unless I
    think of something later.
    Is it all right with you if we're
    able to use what we have about your father
    to represent his story as of being a victim of the Holocaust
    to a large extent?
    Oh, definitely.
    Yeah, I think not to a large extent.
    I think entirely.
    OK, so that we represent the suicide as a direct result.
    Oh, absolutely.
    Yes.
    Definitely.
    OK.
    All right, well thank you very much.
    This has been very useful and I appreciate your time.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    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.
    Interviewee
    Dr. Liane Reif-Lehrer
    Interviewer
    Sharon Tash
    Date
    interview:  1992 March 29

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    2 sound cassettes (90 min.).

    Rights & Restrictions

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

    Keywords & Subjects

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Sharon Tash, of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ID Card Project, conducted the interview with Liane Reif-Lehrer on March 29, 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 08:24:06
    This page:
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    Time Coded Notes (2)

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    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 Janina Prot

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Fred Raymes

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Moses Rechnitz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Zofia Reginiewicz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ruth Reiser

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Berta Rivkina

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Henry Robertson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Coenraad Rood

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Izy Rosenblat

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Pal Rozsa

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Roth

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Marsha Rozenblit

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Rozsa

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sophie Salerno

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Norman Salsitz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Charlene Perlmutter Schiff

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michael Scislowski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ida Segal

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Rubin Segal

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Lewis Shabasson

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Irene Shapiro

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Flora Mendelowitz Singer

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Dr. Laszlo Sokoly

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Peter Somogyi

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Harold Spear

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Vera Sprecher and Robert Sprecher

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Morris Steiman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Matylda Szymaniak

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Florence Tabrys

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Harry Tabrys

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Walter Taranowicz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Topas

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Jack Trompettor

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Edward Unkiewicz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Solomon Urbach

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Moishe Weiner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Paul Wos

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Yegher

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Young

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Frances Zatz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Trude Ludwig

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Magda Rein Cox

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Eva Roth

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Gertrude Zoberman Kupfer

    Oral History

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