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Oral history interview with Martha Hankin

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1999.A.0122.694 | RG Number: RG-50.477.0694

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    Oral history interview with Martha Hankin
    Transcript
    OK, no problem.
    Go ahead.
    Go ahead, Judith.
    Today's Wednesday, October 30, 1991.
    I'm Judith Backover with a Holocaust Oral History
    Project interviewing Martha Hankin at Congregation Beth
    Shalom in San Francisco.
    Also with us this evening are Gail Kurtz, Lisa Barnett,
    and Martha Hankins' husband Harry.
    Good evening, Martha.
    Good evening.
    I'd like to ask you to begin by telling us
    where and when you were born and a little bit about your family
    life.
    Thank you.
    Well, I was born in a very small town in Germany
    near the Dutch border.
    We had about-- it was an Orthodox congregation,
    Orthodox surrounding.
    And we had about 200--
    we used to count it by souls, not by members but by souls.
    I have a sister and who lives in Oakland
    and a brother who is in Israel.
    And we went-- my father had five brothers, so it
    was a very close knit family.
    It was a very, very close knit Jewish community.
    We had a parochial school.
    We had to-- actually until--
    in Germany you only had to go to school
    until you were 14 years old.
    And we had this as a--
    like an elementary school.
    But I went there for three years.
    And then from there on I went to a high school
    in Germany, in this little town where first I
    had French for six, seven years, and then English
    after the third year.
    Later on it was changed and English was the first language.
    But after I graduated, I went to a nearby town
    to business college and graduated from there.
    And then I went to Hanover where I started to work.
    However, in the little town where we were,
    I went to high school.
    I went to school with the girls.
    But you know that I was never invited to a birthday
    party in the Gentile's house.
    I don't know if this is important
    but I bring it out anyhow.
    They would come to me because, I don't want to brag,
    but I was a pretty good student and they would
    like to go and study with me.
    But they never, never invited me to their house.
    Maybe it was because we were a very close knit family.
    But there was my sister or anybody,
    we just grew up and grew up our private life.
    I know at one time I went to a dance
    and a Gentile boy brought me home
    and the whole town was talking about it.
    So I mean, it was just not done, even when
    we had dancing lessons, which was very--
    at that time you had to have when you were 13, 14 years old.
    You had dancing lessons.
    And we were mostly Jewish kids.
    But there were some others and they would dance with us,
    but that was it.
    So I went to the business college.
    And there-- this was a town maybe 30 miles
    from us, which was just a little bit more, what shall I say,
    updated where the Jews and Gentiles mixed a little bit
    more.
    And I went to school there, graduated,
    and then I came to Hanover where I worked in an office.
    First as a secretary.
    Unfortunately, my mother got very sick
    and I had to come home and take care of her and the household
    because my brother was seven years younger.
    He was only 10 years old, 11 years old when I came home.
    And I kept house.
    And my mother died in 1933.
    But at that time already there was difficulty.
    Hitler was already slowly on the rise.
    And 1st April, 1933, the laws came out
    that no more kashrut where they could not kill the animals.
    Although there was still a--
    how shall I call it?
    A Black market or kosher market if you want to call it.
    And we used to get the meat because my mother was
    a very, very observant person.
    And although she was very, very sick,
    she would not eat anything else.
    But slowly we weren't always very honest about it
    because we just couldn't get it.
    Unfortunately she died in July 1933.
    And I kept house.
    It was actually two weeks, three weeks before my brother's bar
    mitzvah.
    And well, we had the bah mitzvah as a family.
    I mean, in those days, you didn't have parties
    like you have now.
    But it was just a family affair.
    And I stayed home.
    And I was never a small town person.
    I always like to live in the city.
    But what else could I do?
    But then in 1935, my father married
    my mother's unmarried sister.
    And that gave me a good way to get out.
    And I went back to Hanover.
    However, I could not work in an office
    anymore because I had to go as a domestic.
    I had some jobs which lasted three months and some lasted
    two months.
    And it wasn't very easy to be a domestic in a Jewish household.
    Naturally I wasn't used to having to live downstairs
    in a basement and have my own room
    and not being a part of a family and so on.
    But I made it.
    Then I went to another town only for a very short time.
    And then I went back to Hanover and worked for a doctor.
    And he was a chief surgeon from the Jewish hospital in Hanover.
    Now Hanover, is a big city.
    There's a lot of culture, a lot of opportunities.
    And even under Hitler, there were still
    opportunities occasionally.
    But the Jewish community did a lot.
    We had a lot of-- there was a Jewish restaurant
    and we could go dancing and so on.
    It was all of the problems that we had.
    We still kept on living.
    Now in this household I learned a lot.
    Excuse me.
    The lady was a very meticulous person.
    And I helped the doctor in the office
    because the office was in the house.
    And when he went to the hospital, then
    I was in the kitchen.
    And we could have a cleaning lady.
    She had to be over 60 years old.
    After that, in 1937, the Nuremberg Laws
    were coming and you could not have anybody--
    because it could be a Rassenschande.
    You know what Rassenschande is?
    A Jewish person could go with the Gentile girl and vice
    versa.
    And I had a wonderful experience.
    I learned a lot.
    And I learned in many ways a lot of things
    that were not so pleasant when people were coming
    and wanted to see the doctor who had been patients for years
    and he couldn't treat them because they were Gentiles.
    And I remember once when we only had a little peephole there
    where we could look through and I saw somebody,
    and I knew it wasn't a Jewish person.
    And she screamed, I'm bleeding, I'm bleeding.
    And he could not go and help her because if something would have
    happened-- something did happen, but if somebody else would
    have happened, he would have been in trouble.
    It would have been his fault.
    So I stayed there until 19--
    well, in 1936 a girlfriend of mine was in England
    and she got a job for me in England as a domestic.
    However, the lady didn't want to pay enough
    so I didn't get the permit.
    But then in 1937 she got another job
    and I went to England in 1938 as a domestic.
    I arrived at 3 o'clock in the afternoon in Liverpool.
    And my girlfriend was not there.
    I had to wait for her.
    But I have to say that the English people were
    very understanding.
    And even the porter--
    I had to call her and I had no idea about.
    I had a little bit of English money,
    you know, a coins, and I said to him, I have to call.
    What do I take?
    And I stood like this.
    And he says, never mind and he paid for it.
    I mean, it was only whatever it was.
    A dime or equivalent to a dime and so on.
    But they were very understanding.
    I arrived at these people's house
    about 3:00, 3:30 in the afternoon and at 7 o'clock
    I was washing dishes because I was a domestic.
    And they had a little girl.
    She was 18 months old when I came.
    And first she wasn't sure, you know?
    I mean, I spoke English enough to make
    myself understood because I learned it in Germany at school
    and later on lessons.
    But it was-- she wasn't quite sure.
    But I have to say, the--
    I have to say, the gentleman-- the man was Jewish.
    The woman was not.
    She used to be his secretary.
    He was a very, very intelligent man,
    and I have a lot to thank for him about my English.
    He let me listen to the radio, you know?
    You did not have any--
    did not have any television.
    And then I had to repeat to him what I heard.
    And then he made me read books.
    I wanted to take some lessons.
    Is that OK?
    Do you to hear all this?
    He made me buy magazines, you know, romances.
    And I would read those.
    And I remember once the first thing was divorce.
    I didn't know what divorce was.
    I had to take my dictionary and read--
    and see what divorce was.
    But I learned an awful lot because those
    were everyday stories, you see?
    So these people were, I must say, very good.
    They had very nice friends who really
    treated me extremely well.
    And after about two months after I was there,
    I had a girlfriend in Liverpool and I was in Birkenhead,
    which was--
    I had to go with the bus and subway to Liverpool.
    And every time I said, well, I'm going today to see Katie,
    the little girl said, let Mummy go.
    You stay with me.
    So I had really gotten my ground.
    And the people in this-- this was a suburb of Liverpool,
    of Birkenhead.
    The people-- I was the first refugee there.
    And they were very nice.
    Whenever I got on the bus, I never paid on my day off.
    I mean, hardly ever.
    I mean, sometimes there was nobody on the bus that knew me.
    But anybody in this little village that knew me
    would pay for me.
    I never paid the afternoon, you know?
    They were very understanding.
    And I stayed with them for a year and a half for '38.
    Yeah.
    Then in '39 I tried to get-- my father and mother--
    my stepmother were still in Germany
    and I tried to get them out.
    Well, I could get a job for my mother,
    but my father was a little bit too old.
    And I made applications.
    I had the equivalent to affidavits.
    But nobody ever-- it was always his name was Wolff,
    and there were so many Wolffs-- who
    knew when they were in-- it was the Woburn House in London who
    took care of these things.
    Anyhow, I got a job for my mother.
    And we thought together we could get my father over.
    So my mother came over and I told a lie.
    No, I didn't tell a lie.
    I always thought that my mother was 10 years
    younger than my regular-- my stepmother
    was 10 years younger.
    And when I completed the application
    I told them that she was born in 1894.
    That made her just not quite 45 years old
    when she came to England.
    So when we went to the police to register her, she filled it in
    and she said 1893.
    And I said, Mother, you were born in '94.
    And she said, well, I should know when I was born.
    And so the policeman said, never mind, she is here now.
    And they could have sent her back at that time.
    Unfortunately, my father did not come.
    If I would have lied the same way--
    I didn't lie really, but if I would
    have said the same way for my father, made him a year
    younger, I could have been.
    He was in-- he died in Auschwitz.
    He was, yes, in Auschwitz.
    He moved in to aunt further inland,
    and then together they came to Theresienstadt.
    And he was at the last transport from Theresienstadt.
    But then my mother got a job.
    And a little bit later, we had to--
    we were called enemy aliens and we were very restricted
    that we could only go 5 miles here, and 5 miles there.
    So my mother said, why don't you come?
    And she worked in the house where
    they were very fancy mansion where she was a cook
    and somebody else was the maid.
    And they had a child that was a cripple
    and they needed a nurse.
    And the nurse was leaving for Ireland
    because I don't know if she had a boyfriend or so on.
    And so they asked me to come.
    The worst thing I ever did.
    But I did it because I wanted to be together with my mother.
    And the other lady who was with her was a distant relative.
    Oh, my husband just noticed my button's open.
    So this was-- so I stayed there.
    It wasn't the most pleasant surroundings
    because I was so well-received at the other job.
    I was part of the family.
    I mean, even if I wanted to write a letter
    and would go in the kitchen or in my room,
    they would come and say, it's time for tea.
    And you have to go.
    At 9:30 they have their biscuits and tea, you know?
    And so I wasn't too happy.
    And then they had to go and get into smaller surroundings.
    And I went to--
    got some other jobs for some people that I knew.
    And I stayed there until May 1940
    when, because we were Liverpool, that was near the coast
    and they were afraid of the invasion.
    And they were afraid of the fifth columnists.
    And so we had to go into Manchester.
    So we had to leave everything in Liverpool
    at first, everything we had.
    And we went to Manchester.
    And we got to Manchester the day the Germans invaded Holland.
    No, Holland-- Belgium.
    Invaded Belgium.
    But when I was in Holland--
    I was still in Liverpool when they invaded Holland.
    And so that's when we came to Manchester.
    But I have to tell you one little story from Liverpool.
    On my day off I went to a travel agent who was doing something
    for an uncle of mine.
    And he said, I have no time today.
    I have to go.
    A whole load of people from Holland
    came and a whole bunch of children.
    And I said, well, let me go with you.
    He said, no.
    But there was another-- it was a doctor from Hamburg.
    And he said OK, let her go.
    And I got to this old sailor home.
    Hundreds of people, children, and so on.
    And I went in there and I had two cousins
    who had gone with a charter transfer to Holland.
    And I said, by any chance do you know Ellen and Peter Weinberg?
    And they screamed.
    And I tell you, I wore a hat.
    I was all dressed up for my day off,
    you know, hat and gloves in those days.
    And they screamed, Peter, Ellen, and I found my two cousins
    there in that sailor home.
    And everybody said, are you going to take them?
    Are you going to take them?
    But where could I take them?
    I was a domestic.
    So was my mother.
    But I went there.
    And then the next day my mother-- my mother
    was not with me and they let us go.
    And we went with them.
    And they later on stayed in-- were put on Hakhshara
    and they got an education there.
    The boy was, I think, only about 11 years old.
    And she was about 14 or so.
    But it was quite an experience I think that's worthwhile
    repeating there, you know?
    And anyhow, we came to Manchester.
    And a lady was supposed to have gotten a room for us from this
    other friend, but she didn't.
    She says, I couldn't get a room.
    So we went to the committee.
    And there were about 2,200, 2,500 domestic.
    Girls, women, men who were butlers or the husbands
    of these people.
    And we were sitting there.
    And then there was a young man.
    And I wasn't too old so I said to him--
    I said, how about taking us?
    I said, look at my mother and this lady.
    So he took us in.
    And they offered us a room for people
    to work for these people for nothing
    and they would give us a bed for the three of us.
    We should sleep the three of us in a bed.
    Well, I mean, can you believe it what that was?
    So then they said, well, there is a place,
    and they told us where to go.
    And the three of us went off to Cheetham Hill, which is the--
    now it's even worse but in those days
    it was all the factories was and a lot of Jewish people.
    And we went to this person's house and a man came.
    He was from Vienna.
    And we said, we hear you have room to rent.
    And he says, yes.
    He says, where's your bedding?
    And we said, what do you mean?
    Your bedding?
    Why didn't you bring all your stuff with you?
    Now I want to tell you we just--
    we came with a little suitcase like this.
    Well, when we got out of that house
    I wasn't a strong person anymore and I broke down and I cried.
    And the lady was a little girl who comes
    and she says, what's the matter?
    Again she could see we were--
    they used to know us by our purses
    that we came from Germany.
    We all have purses about the same size and the same colors.
    And so we told her and she said to this little girl,
    you go to Auntie Paula and see if they have room.
    And she said, you come with us.
    And this lady was from Vienna.
    And the little girl came back and she says, yes, there
    is a room available.
    That was-- this aunt--
    by the way I'm still in contact with them.
    The lady of the house had a room to rent.
    And I slept with this other woman
    whose name was Hilda on a couch that you pulled out,
    and my mother slept on a cot in the same room.
    We had a roof of our house.
    We could use the kitchen.
    And that was more than this.
    The first night we were there the alarm--
    the area alarm goes.
    You have to go in the shelter.
    We went in the shelter.
    No roof on the shelter.
    The shelter wasn't ready.
    But we had to go to the shelter.
    We had to get out of the house.
    And in the same house lived this family--
    a husband, a wife, and a little boy Robert,
    and three yeshiva boys.
    And when we talked to them-- you know,
    I was a young girl, and when we talked
    these yeshiva boys were human beings and we talked and so on.
    So one day the lady of the house accused the yeshiva boy
    because they were having an affair with me.
    And this was just one of those things there.
    So the first few days that we were in Manchester,
    we had all saved a little bit of money.
    And the first thing they did was we
    went to see Gone With the Wind.
    We could sit for four hours and you got a little it to eat
    and we didn't-- at least we were relaxed.
    And then we all started working in defense work making--
    and for me that was terrible.
    I can't sew but I had to finish uniforms.
    The buttons, they had to go and put the buttons there
    and finishing this.
    I mean, I didn't know from--
    I was never very good in sewing.
    I could do anything else, but don't ask me sewing.
    So I worked there for a while.
    And then when the contract was finished,
    we were told got to go.
    So here was no job.
    So we went from one factory to the other.
    And I came to a factory where they made garments, raincoats,
    and ground sheets for the army.
    And I was there.
    And I had no idea what it meant.
    And I had to stand there.
    And they gave us some material and some glue
    that you had to go.
    You called it schmear on it.
    And then you had to fold it over.
    And I sit there and suddenly I hear a voice next to me
    in German.
    You have to go and fold that there,
    and there was my husband.
    Now my husband.
    That's how we met.
    And so the man hired me.
    And we worked there.
    Wasn't always very easy.
    I mean, like I say, I can't sew but I can put things together.
    The fore lady who didn't like me,
    she was jealous because there was another young man there
    whom I knew from Liverpool, and she
    thought that I had something going on with this guy
    and she was jealous.
    She tried anything to get rid of me.
    But the boss-- his name was--
    we called him Stefano but I don't even know--
    Mick was his name.
    He came one day when she wasn't in-- her day off
    or she wasn't there.
    And he says-- and he used to call me Rose.
    He had a sister who he always thought looked
    like me or I looked like her.
    He said, Rose, come here.
    I show you something.
    So he showed me some tricks of the trade.
    Well, the next day when I used the tricks of the trade,
    the fore lady was fuming.
    She had what they call a stool pigeon, a young man,
    who told her everything what the boss had said.
    Now these two were not Jewish, but the boss was Jewish
    and the foreman was Jewish.
    And they knew that I was probably [? live here.
    ?] He would always come.
    He says, go like this.
    Come on.
    He would do very quick.
    He was a marvelous man.
    But anyhow, we got along as well as we could.
    And then I started going out with Harry.
    And Christmas came.
    Two days or three days before Christmas.
    I'm not saying that I didn't have any other boyfriends
    but, I mean, I went there.
    And we were all sitting- no, I have one boyfriend
    came from London I must say.
    A soldier.
    And I spent an evening with him.
    And to make up my mind who I wanted to marry.
    And Harry went with my mother.
    It was on a Saturday.
    And we had the worst--
    the next night the worst air raid on Manchester.
    The whole city of Manchester inside was bombed.
    It was on fire.
    And the next day was a Sunday.
    And we were at the place to the boarding house where we lived,
    my mother and I. And we had some-- people always
    came over because we were more like the home for these people.
    And suddenly the alarm--
    air raid came.
    And we were on the first floor.
    And suddenly the house went like this but it came back.
    And thank god.
    And there was a direct hit about a block away on an air raid
    shelter.
    We didn't even have time to go out.
    And the owner of the house, she had lived in Germany
    but she was British.
    But she had one room where we couldn't
    go because there was a radio and she wasn't in there.
    So we all went into a room just in the corner huddled together.
    I have [INAUDIBLE] stomach.
    Could I go to the bathroom?
    Sure.
    OK.
    Where was I?
    You were at the bombing of Manchester.
    Oh, Manchester.
    You were in one little room.
    One little room, yeah.
    So the next day we got engaged.
    And on Monday morning we went to the factory.
    We both worked in the same factory.
    And everything was-- the roofs and everything--
    they had glass roofs and and so on.
    And all the material was underwater.
    It wasn't completely on fire and so on.
    So I went to my boss Mr. Mick and I said, what can we do?
    Can we help here?
    And he said, yeah, you can [NON-ENGLISH]..
    You know, sighing with me and so on.
    So that way we had to look for another job.
    So I went back to--
    I went over to another company that made the same things.
    But my husband got a job in his field, which was engineering.
    And so we got married in January.
    And I kept on working a little bit
    but I got pregnant right away.
    And our oldest son was born in 1942 and another one in '43.
    So we were in England with the children,
    but we lived in Manchester.
    And I just took care of them and I had--
    well, we had a job.
    First I had a job when he was born for a doctor.
    In England you had the doctor, and they
    had to have somebody living in the place.
    So I took care of the office and got the people in
    and cleaned his office and cleaned the instruments
    and made certain medication.
    And my mother did the cleaning in the house and so on.
    And when people had to have violet [INAUDIBLE] treatments
    and so on, I helped them.
    So that way I was always with the children, with the boy.
    And the second one, then I got a job in the factory
    where he worked also at the office.
    They had an office and they had an apartment there.
    So we moved in there.
    That was a little bit bigger than the one from the doctor.
    And the other one was born there.
    And so we had two there.
    And we lived there until 1940--
    1943, and then we moved--
    he got another job in Southern England
    in Aylesbury, which is just 30 miles outside London.
    But I have to tell you here that the people--
    the Jewish people in Manchester really
    did not welcome us too well because I
    couldn't speak Yiddish.
    And they didn't think that I was Jewish because in Germany--
    and I have to say this--
    my background is completely German.
    I mean, there's no Eastern European blood in it,
    at least as long as we know.
    And so Yiddish was not spoken.
    I never heard it until I came to England.
    And some people would try to speak German,
    but they spoke Yiddish.
    But in Manchester, it was really bad.
    And also in Manchester I had never
    seen so many men that were drunk from Jewish people.
    And the poverty of the Jewish people in Manchester
    was unbelievable.
    And where we worked and where we lived,
    you had to go through a street and there were all the pubs.
    I never believed that Jewish men would go to the pub.
    But on Friday afternoon we got paid
    and we always got paid in money--
    loose money in a little bag.
    And the women would stand down outside
    and take the little envelopes away
    or they would wait outside the pubs to get the money away
    because they had--
    otherwise they would have never gotten.
    And while we were working in the factory, they had a--
    we all used to be what they called piecework, you know?
    We used to get a bundle of things to put together.
    And Wednesday was the cutoff date.
    So some of these people on Wednesday,
    even if they had another bundle lying there,
    they would go and get three bundles
    so that they would get a good paycheck on Friday.
    But some of them were three, four, or five weeks behind.
    And they always used to say-- this other man who
    worked with me, this friend who worked with me,
    we would never do that.
    We worked together but we would never do that because we said,
    what's the use of it?
    Then I have so much money this week
    and the next two weeks I got nothing.
    And they didn't like that either because we
    were too German in their brain.
    They used to call us--
    I don't know if you have heard that expression.
    They used to call us Yekkes.
    You know the expression Yekkes?
    Although the other fellow, Henry, was not a Yekke really,
    but he had a lot of, shall I say,
    Yekke customs because he lived there.
    But they were not very nice to us really.
    They never, never accepted us.
    I mean, I'm talking about me because being
    a German Jew and any of those of us
    who came from Germany who didn't speak Yiddish.
    There were a lot of-- my husband didn't speak Yiddish.
    And so although-- you know, his background was different but we
    didn't We had some Jewish expressions but we never--
    it just wasn't spoken, you know?
    Anyhow, I just wanted to put that in.
    You can take out whatever you want
    to if you don't think that is pertinent to that.
    So then we moved from Manchester to Aylesbury.
    And in Aylesbury, it was a small town.
    It didn't have a temple or anything, a synagogue or so.
    But for the holidays there was every Monday--
    no, every Saturday and Wednesday there was a market.
    It was a very small town.
    And the Jewish people from London came.
    And then they were evacuated during the war.
    And so for the holidays-- for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur--
    we had-- one of the churches gave us a room,
    and a traveling rabbi would come.
    And we would have services there.
    But otherwise there was no Jewish life.
    It was just on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
    And we stayed in England until 1947
    when we came here to America.
    I forgot something to tell you.
    When I was in Liverpool when I first got there,
    before I was married and I was still a domestic,
    there was a refugee committee.
    And they contacted us if we could help them.
    And when we knew of somebody who wanted to come out--
    this was 1938--
    we would go there.
    And being a club woman, club or organization person,
    I don't know if they smelled it, but anyhow,
    I got there right away.
    And so every Wednesday afternoon before I went on my dates
    or on my meeting with the girls and so on,
    I went there and translated letters for them to get jobs.
    And I took care a little bit of some of the people
    that came over to England.
    When they came in the household, a lot of them
    were not used to it, especially those people from Austria
    and so on.
    I mean, we from Germany.
    A lot of us had already worked in the households in Germany.
    But they were not.
    And they couldn't believe all these things.
    And they did a lot of things which were contradictory,
    let me say this.
    They would go on Friday night when the Shabbos candles were
    burning and do their nails.
    And you know, on all these complaints
    actually only the bad things would come to the committee.
    And then they would come to us--
    we were about two or three women and girls there--
    and they would ask, can you talk to them?
    So then I would talk to them.
    And I was always the bad girl because I
    was ganging up with the other people like this.
    But I mean, those things we wouldn't do.
    But I don't know what background these people have.
    But coming from a religious background like we have
    or like I had, I mean, it would never
    have occurred to us to do anything on Friday night, never
    mind doing the nails when the Shabbos candles were burning.
    So then when we came here we went first to New York
    and stayed with my in-laws for three months.
    If you think with two small boys, four and five years
    old in a one bedroom apartment on the fifth floor
    after having living in a country where
    the boys could go back and forth and so on, it wasn't easy.
    And I wanted to work.
    I did get a job at Gimbels in New York.
    And believe it or not, at that time I was jealous of people.
    I'm not a jealous person.
    I work for Gimbels.
    And I was used to cleaning up everything that everything
    looks nice and so on.
    And I made-- even if I was not on commission,
    I made good money.
    And some of these older ladies that
    were sales girls there, she said, look at her,
    look at the greenhorn, how much money she took in today.
    And I thought, why should I give you all the commission?
    I'm going to go over to those two men.
    There were two men in the apartment next door.
    And believe it or not, one of them
    was my first boss in Germany.
    Wow.
    And somebody said this is [? this and that.
    ?] And I looked at him and I said, you know,
    remember my uncle in Hanover?
    And he says Martha?
    And it was my first boss.
    So that was really something, you know, like this.
    So you have really experiences that you
    may miss all these things.
    So then we came here to America-- to Oakland
    where my sister was here.
    And she had been here since 1939.
    And they were in business.
    And they got a--
    they were supposed to have an apartment for us.
    My mother had come earlier here.
    And the apartment was--
    then they put us up in a converted garage
    where the toilet and the bathroom was in the room
    where the boys were.
    And we slept on a couch which had been in the backyard of one
    of the neighbors.
    And if we wanted to take a bath, we
    had to go next door to my uncle who had a little cottage there
    where there was a bathtub.
    And I had to take our boys to there to have a bath.
    Winter and summer.
    Until-- well, even when we moved into the other apartment
    we still didn't have a bathroom.
    That was a converted dental office
    and the toilet was out of the room.
    And there were about three or four other people working.
    Because in 1947 nobody would rent you
    an apartment or a house with two small children.
    And boys on top of it.
    Nobody would do it.
    So my mother's business didn't go too well.
    And I looked for a job.
    And I went to the local employment agency.
    And they let me take a typing test.
    And I didn't want to type because I've
    typed but I'm not a typist.
    Anyhow, they put me in a little cubicle
    with a typewriter and some legal paper
    and with a light on top of it.
    And they gave me this paper.
    And then this lady comes with a stopwatch and she said, start.
    In the excitement I put my hands on one over,
    and you should have seen what came out of that typing test.
    So when I came out--
    when I came out, the interviewer said, well,
    I don't think, Mrs. Hankin, that we can get you a typing job.
    I said, I don't want a typing job.
    I'm an accountant.
    You know, I'm an accountant.
    I don't want to type.
    Well, you'll hear from us.
    So then the girl who heard it she
    said, you will never hear from them.
    So I came home and there was an ad
    in the paper of selling floor polish from house to house.
    Well, I want to take everything so I went there.
    It was Columbus Day 1947.
    We met in Oakland.
    We brought over with the bus to San Francisco
    here in the fancy district.
    And we said, which side do you want to take?
    One took this side, the other one took this side.
    I took this side.
    Nobody was home.
    What did I know about Columbus Day?
    I sold one can of floor polish.
    Somebody sold 8 and 10.
    I probably-- everybody says, no I didn't sell another thing.
    So then I had it-- and then I got a job.
    There was a department store.
    And that was just after Columbus Day and that thing.
    And I went there.
    And on the Thursday--
    I went on Wednesday for training on a Thursday,
    and it was a good day.
    And at 5 o'clock they said, thank you very much.
    You did a very nice job.
    And if we need you again, we'll call you.
    And you know, I thought I had a job.
    Nobody ever said-- and I wasn't the only one.
    When we walked out, about half a dozen of us said, what a nerve.
    I got on the street car, cried my heart out
    because I couldn't believe it that somebody would hire us
    and then say you did a wonderful job, we'll call you back.
    They did call me back at least half a dozen times.
    My sister had a store.
    I came to the store and she said,
    you have to go to the employment agency tomorrow.
    They have a job for you.
    So I went.
    And they had a job with insurance agency addressing
    envelopes.
    I could have cared less what I got.
    So I went there, interviewed, filled out my application.
    Where were you born?
    Germany.
    Where?
    What religion?
    Jewish.
    How old are you?
    I wasn't quite 35.
    I could say still 34.
    Just a minute.
    The girl who interviewed me was a Jewish girl.
    I could tell she was [INAUDIBLE]..
    Then I had the interview with a gentleman.
    Gray hair, nice man.
    He looks at my application and he says,
    was it very bad in England?
    And I said, well, pretty bad, you know?
    How are your children?
    Are the healthy?
    I said, yes.
    He said, when would you like to start?
    Would you like to start addressing envelopes
    or would you like to start in the filing-- no,
    in the mail department or in the filing department?
    And I said, well, filing.
    I knew you had a better chance to go from filing out there.
    He said, OK, you can start on Monday.
    I went on Monday.
    I didn't even know who I was working for.
    I came back and I said, I have a job.
    I went on Monday.
    It rained.
    I took the street car on a Monday.
    And I had to go and do some filing.
    And so at lunchtime I thought I'd go around.
    And then when I came back I said,
    gee, this is Blue Cross isn't it?
    And they said, yes.
    And I came home and I came to my sister and I said,
    you know I'm working for Blue-- well she said,
    who are you working for?
    I said, for Blue Cross.
    And she screamed.
    She screamed to her husband, Bert,
    can you imagine we are here 10 years nearly
    and have been trying to get into Blue Cross
    and Martha didn't even know where she was working?
    So I worked there.
    And I went up quite a bit.
    I finished off as an administrative assistant
    and worked there for 32 years.
    Wow.
    So I had my ups and downs too.
    I was a supervisor for 20 years, which
    at times wasn't that easy.
    But the last 10 years was much better when
    I was not a supervisor anymore.
    I think sometimes it was a little bit
    the age difference and my upbringing
    because I expected people to work.
    And it was OK until 1966 when the Social Security came in
    and we had--
    the man who interviewed, let me say this, was a Mormon.
    Very nice man.
    He never made any difference.
    He hired anybody.
    Age, it was nothing.
    And if something was wrong, we could go to him and so on.
    But he would have never married--
    he would have never hired a Black person.
    You know, the Mormon thing.
    But then when that was all--
    integration came.
    He was gone.
    He was retired by then.
    Things were not that easy.
    I was the first one in the organization
    that hired a Black person.
    And any of the Black person that I hired but one gave me
    the best recommendations you want to know because I used
    to say, I don't care what color you are-- red, green, blue,
    purple--
    as long as you work.
    But then the younger people came and they would sit like this.
    And I would say, hey, if you haven't got anything
    to do-- we had no union, I must say.
    If you're through with that, you better do this.
    And they didn't like that.
    So thank god after that I had strong support
    from the management and somebody else got my job
    and I became an administrative assistant, which
    was much better and worked with all the computer programmers
    and so on.
    So that's my story, let me say.
    It's not a horror story like some you have heard,
    but it's from a completely different point of view.
    But if you like, I like to go back and say
    a little bit about my background about where I actually come
    from so you can understand too.
    My attitude.
    Now, the congregation-- and we went back
    to-- this is all in German but I want to show you
    some of the pictures there too.
    I mean, you can [? insert it. ?] But on the cemetery that I was
    in our town, there is a stone from a great, great,
    great grandfather from 1615 when he died.
    And the stone is still there.
    I want you to know that the cemetery in this little town
    is in better shape than some of ours here in America.
    The people there are taking care of it.
    I mean, they're really interested.
    This group of people is interested in doing it.
    Now, the congregation was, I would say,
    quite a wealthy congregation.
    We had one family that was poor.
    But you see, in Germany, you didn't pay membership
    in a congregation.
    1% of your income tax was automatically
    given to all religious institutions.
    So everybody pays their dues.
    If you made $100 a year or if you
    made a million dollars a year, you paid 1% of that money.
    So the congregations were not poor.
    Now, our congregation, we had a building.
    We had a very nice synagogue.
    I showed you the inside-- no, this is not the inside.
    This is the inside of the synagogue.
    I don't know if you can later on--
    Hold it up for me so I can see.
    That was the inside of a synagogue.
    And the photographer in our town had a plate from 1926.
    He still had that and he gave it to us.
    Can you see it?
    Mm-hmm.
    Thank you.
    I thought that was very interesting.
    So we had the synagogue.
    Then we had to--
    I brought it all with me so you can see what it is.
    And then you had--
    this was the house of the shammash.
    And this was the place where the hearse was.
    We had our own hearse.
    We would not take the hearse from the Gentiles.
    You see, we never had like we have here the homes where
    the body would stay in the house and would go from there.
    The taharah was done in the house
    and it would be getting from there.
    But we had our own things there.
    Now, this is part of--
    this was a house from one of the teachers.
    Now, when my mother went to school,
    there were two teachers because in those days
    it wasn't that fashionable to send the girls to high school.
    The boys went to the high school gymnasium but the girls didn't.
    So they had two teachers.
    And this was a house of one of the teachers.
    And I especially brought this because it was really
    well done in this book.
    And this was a house of the other teacher.
    There was a store on the first floor
    and the teacher lived up there.
    Can you see it?
    And then we had two school rooms.
    They had two school rooms.
    And we went to school there.
    And so you see, in Germany, you had
    to have religious instructions.
    There was no separation of church and state.
    In our report cards from the high schools,
    the first subject was religion.
    We used to go every Wednesday from 2:00 to 4:00
    and every Sunday from 8:00 to 1:00 for religious school
    where we learned Hebrew and history and so on.
    I personally went even in the afternoon.
    Although we had a Orthodox and we were sitting separately,
    but I used to go on Saturday afternoons with the boys
    and learned--
    I mean, the haftorah and the Torah reading and so on.
    I think the teacher liked us.
    We were two girls and about a 1/2 a dozen
    boys that grew up together.
    And so we came and we learned.
    Now, I can read any haftorah.
    And since we are now--
    when the conservative allowed women to say the haftorah,
    I started saying the haftorah.
    Now we are reformed and we can do it.
    But we really had a terrific background.
    But the congregation itself was a very wealthy congregation.
    And unfortunately, you know, some of these houses
    have been--
    other people living there now after the synagogue
    was burned down.
    But the synagogue itself has--
    now here's a picture-- maybe you want to go and see it--
    from the cemetery.
    At the entrance of the cemetery, there are gravestones flat,
    and they are from [INAUDIBLE] that came there.
    And they are trying to--
    they have had so many scholars there to translate it,
    but it's been very difficult.
    But here's a picture from 1926 from the member of the board.
    And that too, this plate this photographer still
    had, why he ever kept it we do not know.
    But he did and this camera We all
    when we came to Norden for this meeting,
    we all got a big picture of this.
    And then this is the book that all the
    pictures that they gave.
    But this is-- let me say this.
    This is the monument that they erected there.
    The city paid for the--
    the city paid for getting it all straightened out,
    and the private business paid for our stay for five days.
    Now, I have translated what it says on there.
    And do you want me to read this?
    It says, in memory of the synagogue
    of the Jewish community in Norden
    which was intentionally destroyed on November the 9th,
    1938 and our Jewish fellow citizens
    who had to die a violent death or were expelled.
    In remembrance and a warning.
    And then it says, from Psalm 74 they
    have set thy sanctuary on fire.
    They have profaned the dwelling of thy name even to the ground.
    And that is on here.
    And this is where they unveil it.
    There was a rabbi from Hanover who was like a district rabbi
    and goes to all the cities like this.
    And the mayor of the city.
    And it was an amazing thing that in this town, which
    was really antisemitic all their lives came to the [INAUDIBLE],,
    came to the unveiling.
    And there was probably about 300 people they said.
    The schoolchildren were wonderful.
    They came and people were there who never was expected.
    They had a lot of protection.
    There was a Red Cross.
    There were nurses.
    There was policemen.
    But there was no disturbances whatsoever.
    They were almost-- really very good.
    I mean, I'm not a, what shall I say, very pro-German person.
    And when I was there, only two of my prior schoolmates
    came forward.
    But about six months later, I got a letter
    that they invited me to a 60th reunion.
    And the girl who wrote to me, I was very close
    when I went to business college.
    She married a young man who was an SS man way back.
    But she did not come from that kind of background.
    And she wrote the letter and told me
    about herself and some of the people.
    And she wrote in the letter, if you feel you cannot write,
    I can understand.
    Well, I did write her a letter.
    And then they had that reunion.
    And a lot of the girls or women [INAUDIBLE]
    And after I got that letter I'm sorry to say
    I did not write back.
    There were people who I knew.
    One of the girls, her father and brother
    were the first SS and SA men there.
    And he says, I'm so sorry you couldn't come.
    We would have loved to see you.
    And we hope everything is OK with you.
    And all these things.
    I mean, it just absolutely--
    I just saw the picture the other day
    and I thought it wasn't really fair to the other girl.
    But I couldn't.
    I just couldn't write.
    My heart wasn't in it.
    And I didn't want to go and write something
    that I didn't mean.
    So that is, let me say, in a nutshell my story.
    If you want to see a few of the other pieces and pictures
    that we took when we were there on the cemetery.
    I don't know if it's any bearing on it.
    See we went to the cemetery.
    But I want to tell you that the lady who did all this,
    she's a very, very concerned person.
    She came to the cemetery with a basket and with a towel
    over it.
    And we though, what on earth is she bringing to the cemetery?
    She had picked up stones so that we could
    put the stones on the graves.
    She's a Gentile woman.
    Now, her husband said that when he was nine years old,
    that's when the synagogues were burned down.
    And he said to his father, why doesn't the fire brigade
    go and do it?
    And the father said, be quiet.
    Don't say anything.
    We can't say anything.
    And he said he was nine years old in '38.
    And then when he went--
    in all this time and he went in the war and later
    and growing up he always said he wanted to go and look,
    you know, find out what happened and so on.
    But he never had--
    he could never forget.
    And so this-- and his wife was one of those girls in the--
    not Girl Scouts.
    In the girls troops and so on.
    But they both felt very strongly about that.
    And so they're trying hard.
    But I must say, they were very nice to us.
    But there was a young man who was a doctor.
    And he was telling us he was 12 years old in 1956 when he found
    his mother's pin-- she was a nurse--
    which says the National Socialistic Nurses I think.
    And he asked her what is it?
    And they said, oh, I don't know what.
    Why do you want to know?
    And he says, what is it?
    And then he asked, what is a Jew?
    I mean, this small town there was nobody.
    None was left.
    There was one who was half Jewish, but I mean,
    he was never Jewish, let me say this.
    And they wouldn't tell him.
    And then finally they got afterwards and he said,
    and you were part of these people that did all that?
    He said he could never forgive his parents.
    He was a doctor.
    His father was a doctor.
    He said he could never forgive his parents.
    But they didn't know, these youngsters.
    But one consolation is my brother came from Israel.
    And he's very close to these people that do all this.
    And he went to the high schools while we
    were there and spoke to them.
    And they have it now in their history books.
    Now the whole generation from--
    I would say from '40 to '60 probably never learned
    about it in Germany.
    But now it is in all the history books.
    It's the same as here.
    I have to say that maybe we are forced to.
    We did not always tell our sons everything.
    I mean, we would say Grandpa, you know,
    was killed in Auschwitz or we came from Germany and so on.
    But it was our grandsons now.
    I mean, they are now in their 20s too.
    They came and wanted to know more.
    When my younger grandson, he was--
    he's 21 now.
    For his bar mitzvah I made a tape for him,
    and he used it as his--
    for one of his projects.
    So I think it's good that we do these things.
    And we can't forget.
    We never forget.
    But we have to go on living.
    We have to live for now.
    You can't live in the past.
    You've got to make the best of it.
    We've been very fortunate.
    We're here in America.
    We're very active in all Jewish organizations.
    I'm three times past president of Hadassah,
    past president of Sisterhood.
    I'm on the regional board of Hadassah.
    My husband was the president of the temple.
    So I mean, we're very active and feel very strongly connected
    with this congregation, with the Jewish community.
    We know a lot of people and a lot of people know us.
    Anything else?
    I have a lot of questions I'd like to ask you.
    I'll start with the ones that are basically for the record.
    Can you give us your birth date?
    Oh yeah.
    July the 28th, 1913.
    And let's see.
    What was your family name before you got married?
    Well my name is Wolff.
    I have a sister Hilda de Lowe who lives in Oakland now
    who unfortunately lost her house in the fire.
    She's a widow and she lost her house.
    And I have a brother in Israel who has three children.
    And he went to Israel with the Youth Aliyah in 1935.
    He came here to the States in '56
    and stayed until '70 and then went back.
    And I've been to Israel three times.
    What was your family business when you were a child?
    My father was a cattle dealer.
    And you know, mother stayed home.
    In those days, unless you have a business, they stay at home.
    We had a very, very close family life.
    And my mother-- let me say this.
    My mother-- there were seven children.
    five boys-- no, eight.
    Five boys and three girls.
    And my mother-- the parents died very young.
    And my mother was the first one to get married,
    so I had the attention of all the uncles and the aunts.
    I lost two uncles in the First World War.
    My father was wounded in the First World War,
    but he was wounded in his leg and walked
    on a cane for quite a while.
    And we had a very close family life.
    But our house was the house of parents
    when my uncles got married and my aunts got married.
    And whenever they came, they came to us.
    We were always the center for the Seder and for Rosh Hashanah
    when the people came to visit.
    It was always in our house.
    You talk about a close family life
    and a close Jewish community in Norden.
    You said that you knew several Gentile children
    but that they didn't closely associate with you.
    How else did the distance between the Jews
    and the Christians show itself?
    I don't think in any other way.
    I mean, business wise, people--
    I mean, my father always dealt with the farmers and ranchers
    and things like this.
    And it wasn't that we only bought in Jewish stores
    or we only did buy in Gentile stores and things like this.
    There were a lot of Gentiles that had connections
    with the Jewish people.
    We had a few mixed marriages, but very few.
    And there really wasn't very much connection with them.
    Now, they had a bowling group but they were all Jews.
    Now, the only one I think that was really mixed
    was the soccer team.
    The boys that were in the soccer team,
    they were all Gentile and Jewish people.
    But otherwise, what I used to be--
    they had a shorthand organization where I went to
    and that was mixed, but it was just
    because when we were in the classrooms.
    They came to the house-- well, when I went to the business
    college, I had a little bit more contact with Gentiles
    because I was the only Jewish girl.
    And there was one young man.
    We were just talking about it the other day.
    Two of them, they always came and we studied together.
    We cheated too a little bit, you know?
    Because this one guy, he was really nice
    but he didn't like to study.
    And he used to come and I went out to see him
    and went to dances and things like this.
    And then when I went to Hanover, he visited me a few times
    in Hanover.
    And in 1935-- '34, after my mother died,
    I got a phone call from him.
    He was in town.
    This photographer, by the way, was his uncle.
    And could I meet him?
    And I said, you know, I don't think so.
    He says, why not?
    I said, well you know, I'm Jewish.
    He says, I know.
    I've known that all along.
    So finally we decided we meet at the railway station, which
    was a little bit out of town.
    And we met there and I said to him--
    I said, don't you realize that both of us are in danger?
    And he says, no.
    He takes the card out he says, I'm an SS man.
    I've been an SS man since we went to school together.
    I could have gone through the ground.
    I had no-- well, who thought this?
    Was 1929, 1930.
    I mean, when I went out with him.
    And when he visited me in Hanover it was already '30--
    yeah, it was in '31, '32, '33, you know, like this.
    And here he visits me in '34 and we go--
    I was like this all the time.
    But he didn't care.
    He wrote to me afterwards.
    And then when I was in Norden now to our thing
    and I went to the photographer and asked about him
    he said he was killed in the war.
    But some of the people, I don't think they realized it.
    Another case like this when I worked
    for the doctor in Hanover they had a huge apartment.
    This was six apartments.
    But I mean eight rooms and things like this.
    And there used to be the cellar or the basement that
    used to be for the maids.
    These people used to have two maids usually.
    But still we had the icebox and things
    because we don't have icebox.
    We have this refrigerator--
    in the cellar you could keep everything.
    So one night the doctors, they went out
    and I had to go down and get something out
    of one of the cabinets or something like this.
    And there was a mailman was living down there
    and he says, Miss Martha, Miss Martha.
    And I said, what's the matter?
    And I go in there.
    I used to talk to them.
    I always felt kind of safe because they were there when
    I was alone in the apartment.
    And I walked in there and there sat three SS man or SA man
    like this.
    And I said, oh my god.
    So I said, can you help us?
    I said, help you with what?
    Can you complete these forms for us?
    They were applications for jobs.
    And I said to the mailman--
    I forgot the name.
    I mean, this is some 50 off years ago.
    I said, me?
    He said yes, why not?
    And I said, you know.
    And he says, well, we don't care.
    Here I sat with these three men around me completing the forms
    for them.
    They made applications for some kind of a job.
    I didn't dare tell the doctor.
    They would-- when the phone rang and I answered the phone,
    you could tell if I answered the phone downstairs or upstairs.
    And he said, what are you doing in the basement?
    And I said, well, I was taking some of the food up or down
    or whatever it is.
    I lied because if I would have told the doctor,
    he would have flipped the switch, you know?
    Because it was just--
    they talked as little as possible to them.
    And later after they left and later when I saw him he said,
    you never have to worry about anything.
    We take care of you.
    I mean, he didn't have to take care of me
    because I left early enough.
    And the doctor came here to America afterwards.
    He worked at Mount Zion as a nurse's aide
    because he was too old to learn again, you know?
    He was a GYN.
    And so he just died just before we came.
    But those were things that we--
    I mean, I never--
    I was scared stiff.
    But the funny thing is that so many
    of the things that happened-- one other thing, if I'm
    talking too much, tell me.
    My sister got engaged in 1937 when I was in Hanover.
    And I lived about--
    oh, it was five hours with the train.
    Now it's about two hours or three hours with a car.
    And in Hanover you have asparagus.
    In Germany you don't have green asparagus.
    You have white asparagus.
    And Hanover was a place where you got it and cherries.
    This was the thing.
    And she got married in June.
    And I brought two cases--
    I mean, 20 pounds of asparagus, 20 pounds
    of cherries for the party.
    I had to change a train in a little town at night
    where I had to go from one side up the stairs,
    across there, and down the stairs and carry all that.
    I had that like this.
    And in the compartment with me was a young man.
    And I was sitting like this, you know, not in uniform.
    And when he came he says, can I help you?
    Now I cannot say-- my hair was jet black and I would have said
    that he knew I was Jewish.
    I'm sure he knew.
    I don't know.
    But this was 1937.
    He carried my stuff over, waited till I got into the train,
    and where we lived in Norden, that was the end station.
    Maybe we were very conscious about these things
    that everybody knew we were Jewish.
    I don't know.
    But I'm sure he knew I was Jewish.
    I don't know.
    I mean, I talked a little bit.
    He said what I had.
    I said, well, my sister's engaged
    and we're having a party.
    But those were the only really incidents
    where I can say, you know, I was kept away from them.
    Did you always feel that people would
    know that you were Jewish?
    Just know somehow?
    Do you remember?
    Yes, I think we all knew that.
    We thought we knew.
    How was it that you thought you could tell
    or that you thought--
    [INTERPOSING VOICES]
    Well you see, where we lived was a very,
    you would call it here [INAUDIBLE]
    Everything was Protestant.
    We had very little Catholics.
    We were all Protestants, you see?
    And most of them were Protestant.
    You know, I mean, I can't--
    the only place I think that I ever went was we
    had rented a place in the back of our house for seeing
    a Christmas tree, to go to a place
    where there was a Christmas tree.
    We never went anywhere where there was a Christmas tree.
    I mean, sometimes you couldn't help it
    when you go into a restaurant but not into a private home.
    And I was telling you about the report cards too.
    The Jewish teacher had to send in our reports to the gymnasium
    and to the high school because we
    had to have a grade in Hebrew-- in religion.
    That was the main thing.
    Now, the director of our high school--
    I go from one thing to the other.
    But our director from the high school, he
    was teaching religion.
    You see, when we went to high school,
    we did not have every day the same classes.
    We had usually-- there usually was religion twice a week.
    Talk about a religious thing.
    We were a few Jewish girls.
    I'm talking about the high school now.
    And we were a few Catholics.
    I mean, I think they were not as many Catholics
    as they were Jews there.
    Every morning they had assembly.
    And the Jewish girls and the Catholic girls
    were not allowed to go there.
    The only time we went was at the end of the school year
    or the end of the semester.
    Then we used to have a monitor, you know, walking.
    But we were not allowed to do any homework
    while they were at the things.
    We weren't even allowed to open a book.
    We just had to sit like this.
    And I mean, we were teenagers and 7, 8, 9, 10,
    11, 12 graders.
    And so the only time we went was, like I said,
    the end of the school year or the end
    like Christmas vacation and so on.
    And so the Catholic priest and they
    had to send in the religious things.
    But our director, he was an antisemite.
    I mean, definitely.
    What he did to us Jewish girls.
    And then he was a German teacher.
    If he could give us a bad grade, he would do it.
    Now, I was never very good in making compositions.
    I was very much, you know, very down to earth
    and couldn't tell stories.
    But I had an uncle who was a brilliant man.
    And one day he helped me to write
    a composition which wasn't on the up and up but still.
    And I mean, he was brilliant.
    And when I used to say, but that's not true, he would say,
    but you're telling a story, aren't you?
    But anyhow, I wrote.
    And you know that I got a poor grade on that from that teacher
    because he did not like us.
    Where he could--
    I mean if he--
    usually they had the religion the first thing in the morning.
    Then we didn't have to go in until 8:30 or 8:45.
    But if he could have done it with a plan
    and so on, he would have done it in the middle of the day
    and we would be sitting there, you know?
    But it was pretty good that he did it, especially
    in the higher grades.
    But the teachers in general-- you
    see, we went to school six days.
    We didn't go five days.
    Six days to high school, and then until we
    were 14 we went to religious school on Sunday.
    But not after 14.
    And we went to school on Saturday.
    We never wrote.
    We did not write on Shabbat.
    And some of the teachers tried to give tests but they knew.
    I mean, most of them were old people, old teachers.
    But when some of the younger teachers--
    new teachers came in, one was there.
    He tried to give tests when we were.
    And he knew we were two Jewish girls in the class.
    And he knew that we didn't write.
    And we told him.
    And he says, well, it's too bad.
    But then we complained when we had the homeroom teacher--
    I guess that's equivalent here.
    We told her and then he stopped.
    And he never liked us either.
    But then we had another one, a young teacher,
    who would go out of the way to help us.
    He was very friendly to us Jewish girls.
    But the other one didn't.
    So those were little incidences where you can see what is.
    But actually when it all came about my brother,
    he was 13, 14.
    He went to the gymnasium, and one day he came home
    and he says, I got to sit by myself because I'm Jewish.
    When he left he was 14, 15.
    And the next day he comes and says,
    yes, somebody else is sitting with me.
    And we ask who?
    So he gives us the name of a boy.
    And he says, he's not Jewish.
    The father was a judge in our town who lived in our town
    for--
    well, anybody remembered.
    They found out that this boy's great, great grandmother
    was Jewish.
    Nobody in our town knew it.
    And I mean, everybody knew everybody's business.
    I mean, whoever went to bed with whom, I mean, that was--
    everybody knew what was going on.
    So that poor boy, you know, like this.
    It was much later that my brother
    couldn't go to school anymore.
    And then he went with Youth Aliyah to Israel.
    But those were the things that happened as it went along.
    I'm sure you had heard these stories before,
    but the actual confrontation with Gentiles wasn't like this.
    Do you remember when you first had a sense
    that things were going from not so good to pretty bad?
    When you first felt like--
    Well, actually when--
    I got to think about it.
    1931.
    '31 when Hindenburg came in?
    I think I was in Wiesbaden.
    And they said, well, that's the end of it.
    Hitler will come.
    And then in '33 when he came you could tell by that time
    they were not afraid to work-- first
    they were afraid to work in SS uniforms as their uniforms
    because the youth group from the democratic side
    would fight them.
    But in '31, '32, they were already
    not afraid to walk around.
    And then in '33, the 1st of April,
    that's when it really started.
    And I remember then that they had taken in--
    arrested Jewish men who were having
    affairs with Gentile girls.
    And they marched them through our town
    and were walked around.
    And I remember that two of the Jewish fellows came.
    It was 1st or 2nd of April.
    And they came in and said we want to say goodbye.
    I said, why are you leaving?
    He said, well, we're not going to stay.
    And they went at night to Holland and then afterwards
    to Buenos Aires.
    As a matter of fact, the son of one of them we met.
    They were older.
    We met when we came back there.
    And that's when it really started.
    That's when they came and they had people
    in front of the Jewish stores.
    Don't buy from Jews.
    And their restaurants and said, Jews not allowed.
    You know, you couldn't get into certain stores.
    You couldn't get into certain restaurants, hotels, and things
    like this.
    And there were some that gladly would have taken us,
    but they were afraid.
    The people were afraid.
    But we had a bakery.
    We didn't get in the front.
    We got in the back.
    Listen, when I was there, it wasn't quite that bad
    because I left in 1938.
    But I do know that they used to come until the last minute
    and gave things to them.
    But this is when it started, you know,
    taking the Jews through the street.
    And we are in Rassenschande, you know?
    We are disgracing the other race.
    And there was a concentration camp about an hour
    away from where I lived already then.
    Not with gas chambers and so on, but they
    weren't very well treated there.
    What do you remember thinking about the exclusion policies
    and not being able to work in the business for which you
    were trained?
    This sort of thing.
    What do you remember thinking about?
    It was very discouraging because I had a degree.
    I had worked.
    And whenever you went to one of these stores or to the bank--
    now, we had-- my father did a lot with one bank.
    And this man was very friendly towards us.
    And I applied and he said--
    I went to school with his daughter so, I mean, we knew.
    He said can't do it.
    We cannot employ Jewish people.
    And there were that many Jewish stores.
    I mean, when I came to Hanover, which
    had larger Jewish population.
    But the few jobs that were available were taken.
    I mean, I had a girlfriend who worked at the hospital
    as a secretarial thing.
    And there was one big Jewish company in Hanover.
    But they hired everybody.
    I mean, this man did a lot of good.
    He hired as many as he had desks or chairs.
    But I couldn't.
    I mean, I was--
    I did not live in Hanover so he did not know me that well.
    But he couldn't have done it anyhow.
    So there was nothing else left but going into the household.
    So I went in different households.
    And when they started doing all these things, when they started
    it was a school.
    And I tried to get out.
    Unfortunately, I had nobody really until 1936
    when my girlfriend went from Germany to England.
    She got it because she had a friend who
    was a doctor in Liverpool and he got her a job.
    I had a cousin who went to Buenos Aires.
    And he wanted to go.
    And then he wrote to me, you want to come?
    But he had said that he only had one--
    he was an only child, although her last name was Wolff,
    and you know, Argentina was usually corrupt enough.
    But when he said, you know, renting a place,
    he couldn't do it.
    And I had another cousin of my mother's
    who was my age who went to South Africa--
    who wanted to go to South Africa.
    And he said, well even if we don't, let's get married.
    And we both didn't have any money.
    But his mother was loaded.
    And she said, no, I'm alone.
    You're not going.
    You don't give her the money.
    So he didn't go.
    And he's gone.
    He went to Auschwitz or wherever.
    I found out from somebody--
    we were in San Diego from somebody
    who came from the same town, and they told me
    that he vanished with his mother.
    And who knows who has the money because they were loaded.
    But none of us could prove that we were family because we
    don't know where they are.
    And how can we prove?
    His father was my grandfather's brother.
    So I mean, who can prove anymore?
    There's nobody left.
    So we couldn't even claim anything.
    So it was the feeling.
    You could tell people were looking
    like this were kind of afraid to say hello to you
    even if they knew you.
    But like I say, I didn't have any opportunity.
    We did not have anybody here in America.
    And my-- in 1938 when the synagogues were burning,
    my father was put in a concentration camp.
    My sister was married.
    Her husband was in Dachau.
    No, they weren't in Dachau.
    They were in Buchenwald.
    Buchenwald?
    You were in Dachau.
    My husband was in Dachau.
    And my sister--
    I mean, the stories that they tell, you know,
    all the women were taken to the slaughterhouse in the morning.
    But they were released then, you know?
    And then after seven weeks or eight weeks, they came--
    they were released.
    And my sister and brother-in-law,
    they went to Holland.
    He had family in Holland.
    And he had family in America.
    And so they came here in '39.
    More or less were of the last person to go to America.
    But I had nobody.
    So that why I went to England and thank god for that.
    So they have--
    I can only say good things about England.
    I know that Palestinian politics wasn't very favorable.
    But to us, they were very good.
    They took in percentage wise more than any country.
    And they were very good.
    When I lived in the small town and everybody knew everybody,
    but I was the first refugee in this town.
    And so I was the wonder person.
    Everybody was nice.
    Even the mailman knew me.
    They had a long--
    to get into the house there's a big front yard
    and, you know, to pass there.
    And when there was a letter from Germany or usually
    from my father, he drove on his bicycle
    and he would go like this when he saw that I was--
    because I knew approximately when he came.
    And when this happened in '38 he came, stopped his bicycle,
    knocked at the door and he says, did you
    hear anything from your father, you know, from your family?
    No.
    Every day.
    He would drive on the driveway and he would go like this.
    And then one day he came and he did like this.
    He knew by the handwriting.
    It was in a small town.
    Everybody knew everybody.
    In England, you know, like this and everybody
    knew Martha Wolff, you know, like this.
    And he said the letter, open it up, he says.
    And I had to open it up and read to him what was in there.
    He wanted to see if he was OK.
    So those are some highlights, you know,
    that makes you feel good that people recognize you and helped
    you along in the very difficult times.
    And here I was in England.
    I couldn't do anything.
    Nothing but wait for--
    you know, there was no television.
    You only heard above it over the radio.
    And it's one of those things.
    So it's a different story, I think,
    than you have heard most of the people
    that you're interviewing.
    Talk a little bit more about hearing--
    learning the fate of your father and some of your other family
    members who didn't get out in time.
    My father went-- after my mother left
    went to an aunt, sister of my aunt, whose husband was
    arrested too on the 9th of November.
    And he was a diabetic.
    And they marched him, and he died on the way.
    He just collapsed.
    I mean, he was [INAUDIBLE] like this.
    And this is kind of a sad story too.
    There was a man with the same name in the next town.
    And they told the woman in the next town
    that her husband had died and sent her the coffin.
    And later on, when the people were
    released from the concentration camp, it wasn't this man.
    He came home and they had buried my uncle
    in the other person's name.
    So then my father and my aunt went to--
    no, I don't know where my aunt went.
    But my father went to Theresienstadt.
    And I still have his last letter that he
    wrote through the Red Cross.
    They would send us letters.
    And he was in Theresienstadt.
    And he was always--
    he was a cattle dealer but he was always, what shall I say,
    very humanitarian.
    And he was always-- when somebody was sick.
    And he was the president of the [NON-ENGLISH] and all these
    things.
    When somebody died, he saw to it that the taharah
    was done properly and so on.
    And he worked in the hospital.
    And the last-- and there were a couple--
    one of the doctors from Hanover was there too.
    And the last transport to Auschwitz
    were all the people in the hospital-- the doctors, nurses,
    aides and so on.
    And he was one of those.
    And I have a cousin in Israel who went there
    with the Youth Aliyah.
    And he married a girl from Czechoslovakia.
    And she came one day to us and we have
    a picture of my father there.
    And she looked at it and she said, who is that?
    And we said, that's our father.
    He says, you mean Karl Wolff was your father?
    She was with him in Theresienstadt.
    You know, these are stories--
    they are unreal.
    You don't wish like this.
    And we do know that he was sent away
    because there was another couple from our hometown.
    It was a husband and wife and two children.
    And they were in--
    they were sent from Theresienstadt-- from one
    to the other.
    And the mother was always sick.
    She had meningitis.
    She had everything.
    But the two girls always [INAUDIBLE]..
    They were separated.
    And they always said when the husband was taken away
    from them, if we ever see you again--
    if we ever get together again, let's meet
    either in Paris or in Holland.
    They had emigrated to Holland.
    And the girls, I mean, what they did for the mother
    is just amazing.
    Anyhow, the mother and the daughters came to Paris.
    And they met some people there and they said,
    I think that your husband is in Switzerland.
    So they got things together and, lo and behold, they met again,
    all four of them in Paris.
    Then went back to Holland.
    I mean, the father, mother gone.
    They were in their 90s in the mean time.
    But they met there.
    And now the one daughter-- the oldest daughter is suffering.
    I mean, she has bad back and so on.
    But mentally she has-- all she can talk about it and things
    like this.
    Whereas the younger one, maybe she was--
    well, she was not that young--
    has a different outlook on life.
    And she's very positive.
    Beautiful girl.
    But the other one is a beautiful girl too,
    but she's very positive and so on.
    But the older one has a lot of problems.
    But they did come back.
    And they had their parents for--
    oh my god, the mother died, what, last year, two years ago?
    And he died about maybe four years ago.
    No, he was gone and we were there in '87.
    We went to see them.
    They lived in Hengelo in Holland.
    We went to see her.
    And he was gone.
    Maybe he was gone since '85 or so.
    But the man was 90 or so.
    And so I mean, it was not--
    he died a natural death after surviving all that.
    About my father-- and from them we
    know that my father was sent to Auschwitz.
    Now, I had an uncle in Turkey, in Istanbul.
    And he could write to him.
    He would always hear from him.
    My father was there, and he got the word too
    that he was sent to Auschwitz.
    But he kept the correspondence up for a long time.
    Do you remember some of the things
    your father talked about in the last letter you got?
    No.
    We were saying goodbye.
    We say goodbye.
    That was really probably the letter when
    he was sent to Theresienstadt.
    We did not hear from Theresienstadt.
    This is a letter where I want to say goodbye to you.
    That's all he said.
    They couldn't say anything.
    Everything was censored, you know?
    But he did get our picture when we got married.
    I mean, it wasn't a fancy picture of this veil
    and things like this.
    But he did get a picture.
    And he wrote to my uncle, Martha does not look so well.
    I think I was already pregnant by the time we
    had our picture taken, you know, because there
    wasn't these formalities.
    I mean, it was even with I wore a hat and suit.
    We didn't have pictures taken there.
    By the time these pictures were taken, you know, I guess--
    our boy was born exactly a year after we were married.
    And everybody was doing like this, you know?
    But they were not lucky enough to do that.
    They're fine now.
    But that's all we know from him but that he
    was very well respected.
    I mean, my father was--
    and maybe I brag a little bit.
    Maybe I'm prejudiced.
    But whenever we meet anybody and say
    who my father was, you know, he was a very, very well respected
    man.
    And he was a good man.
    And he was respected.
    Now, he had a lot to do with Gentile people.
    We had cattle that were more used for breeding than
    for [INAUDIBLE].
    And he would supply the counts and things
    like that, especially in Upper Silesia and so on.
    And they would come to us and visit us, you know, and so on.
    And so he had a very good relationship.
    He had a good relationship with the farmers.
    And he was very well respected.
    And we know from when he was there everybody liked him.
    There was nothing not to like him.
    He was too good a person anyhow.
    But it was-- you know?
    And my own mother was--
    she was a deeply religious person but very modern.
    Much more modern than a lot of other people.
    She let us go-- when I went to school, I mean, she let me go.
    And from a small town they would say, why are you doing that?
    Why are you doing that?
    Why'd you let her go?
    Why don't you insist she's staying here and so on?
    But she said, no.
    They have to go out.
    They have to learn and so on.
    She was very modern.
    Very understanding.
    My friends would come to her and talk to her
    before they could talk to their own parents or mothers
    and so on.
    So like I said, we had a good--
    let me say, my youth itself, until Hitler came,
    was a good one.
    To be quite honest, I was spoiled.
    I probably was more spoiled than a lot of others
    because, I guess, was the oldest one.
    Things were easier when I grew up,
    you know, until my mother died on my 20th birthday.
    And things were easier than they were later on in the '30,
    you know?
    We still had our house.
    We didn't have to share it with anybody.
    In I think now '35, '36, another family moved in.
    We had to share the house with somebody else.
    That was one of the things too.
    It was after I left in '35.
    So we have to share it with another family
    because they couldn't keep the store open
    and they couldn't keep the house.
    So the Jews were put together.
    Later on I heard that they even moved with somebody else again.
    But that was way after I was gone.
    When I left, we were in our own home with another family.
    And we had to sell the house.
    Or he had to sell the house.
    And when we were there, I went in but it
    wasn't anything like it.
    There wasn't anything like it.
    There's a-- matter of fact I think--
    I don't know.
    No, I think it's in the other book.
    No, it isn't in the picture.
    No, I don't think it's in here.
    I thought I had the picture of the house,
    but that was in somewhere else.
    I have the house of--
    see, I was talking about the stones.
    Here somebody is putting one of the stones on one
    of the graves.
    I come from one thing to the other, huh?
    OK?
    I was just wondering if I--
    I just want you to see if there is from the house.
    No, this is all other people there.
    You see, this is where the synagogue was
    and what they did to it.
    And you see all of us sitting up there.
    And they do say that every time they have flowers there.
    But it has happened too that some people took the flowers
    away.
    But every year for the 9th of November,
    the rabbi from Hanover comes and they have services there.
    But you know, the Kristallnacht--
    they Kristallnacht itself.
    But they have a Chinese restaurant in our little town.
    I think that was-- when we saw that we
    had to take a picture of that because nobody
    would believe it.
    I don't think we even knew what a Chinaman was.
    So we had to go take the picture there.
    But I just want to see if there is a--
    no, we were just walking through some of the streets.
    Now, some of the streets they have taken from the town.
    They have completely taken away some of the old towns
    where a lot of Jewish people lived in the poor section.
    They've torn all the houses down and build condominiums.
    We didn't know we were standing at one spot.
    We said, we think that's where the store was, you know,
    one of the stores.
    But who knows?
    And I mean, you can't judge too much because the streets don't
    exist anymore.
    But like I say, I went there.
    I'm not sorry I went.
    But I wouldn't go again.
    I saw in everybody my enemy.
    Maybe I'm wrong.
    I don't know.
    You started to say something about Kristallnacht.
    Yeah.
    I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more?
    I was not there at the Kristallnacht.
    I was already in England.
    But I do know that suddenly they saw the synagogue in flames.
    And they said at the time that the teacher
    that we had put the fire on.
    And like I say, I could only tell you what I heard.
    But can you imagine in every town of Germany
    all the teachers or the rabbis turned to fires,
    I mean, spontaneously at the same time.
    And I think he rescued one Torah or so.
    But the wife of the shammash who actually-- here
    was the synagogue and there was the shammash house.
    She went crazy.
    Absolutely crazy.
    I don't know why.
    Later on they sent them away, but she absolutely
    went berserk because they had two children and so on.
    But altogether, I don't know because I wasn't there.
    I can only tell, you know, about the stories that they were.
    They just came and took the men away.
    And they went on the train and they
    were sent to Buchenwald, which is near Berlin I think.
    But they had kind of a, shall I say, true story in a way.
    We did not have a rabbi in our little town.
    We had a district rabbi.
    And the district rabbi was there.
    And what out of all things did he take?
    His tefillin.
    And in the morning he lay tefillin on the train.
    And the Nazis came like this.
    And everybody says, he's crazy, he's crazy, leave him alone,
    he's crazy, so that he could finish laying his tefillin.
    And they left him alone because they thought he was nuts.
    But he survived.
    When he came out too he went to Israel afterwards.
    But those are things--
    like I say, they're just stories that I
    can say because I wasn't there.
    I heard it in England.
    And I must say, the people were most supportive.
    They would stop me in the street.
    I mean, like I say, this was a one street village.
    Very residential person, you know?
    Everybody knew everybody there too.
    And they were very good.
    They had a mansion there too which was used first
    for the Spanish refugees.
    And then they had refugees from Czechoslovakia there.
    And the Labour Party from England had saved these people.
    And then I was contacted because I was the one who spoke German
    and could go in there, you know?
    And we are bored.
    They used to dance.
    They had music and things like this.
    So we must say one thing about the English people.
    Even in the worst time of trouble, their sense of humor
    and their sense of we'll win the war, we will do it,
    don't worry about it, and they survived only because of that.
    And I think both of us have learned a lot from it.
    When things are happening I think
    we can face a lot of things better because of the influence
    of the English people I think.
    And they're so positive.
    And they just a sense of humor, sense of security.
    And my god, we were not secure.
    I tell you we were not secure in England, you know,
    when all that bombing came.
    Like I say, air raid without a roof on it.
    But in Liverpool we used to go to a international club
    from the University of Liverpool.
    And one Saturday we were there.
    This was before I was married.
    And we were always discussion groups.
    And you know, the English people at that time
    they had a lot of South African, let's say, Black people.
    Can I use that expression?
    They used to call them something else
    but I don't want to say that.
    And they were sons of doctors.
    They were going to the university.
    Wonderful people.
    Beautiful people.
    And smart.
    And so we used to have discussion groups there.
    The air raid sirens go off.
    Got to go in the basement, in the air raid shelter.
    So the whole-- we all went.
    And some of us, the German girls, we were sitting
    huddled together scared to death.
    This was in the middle of Manchester--
    of Liverpool.
    They started the jukebox.
    They had a jukebox in the shelter
    and they wanted to dance.
    And my god, we were scared.
    But they said then the all clear came in and said, all right,
    let's stand in a line.
    We all stand in line and sang Auld Lang Syne.
    Went upstairs, kept on discussing.
    I mean, it's wonderful to have that attitude
    because life goes on.
    You can't just-- what could you do?
    What could we do really?
    What else could we do?
    But those are little things.
    Can you talk a little bit more about being a Jew in England
    at that time?
    You mentioned that in Manchester the Yiddish speaking
    Jewish community didn't like the newer Jews who came
    in and didn't speak Yiddish.
    Well, I tell you, I always knew I was Jewish.
    And I admit I was not a Zionist in Germany
    because all our people have lived in Germany.
    What, in 1600.
    I mean, just like ask any American young Jewish person
    now.
    They wouldn't say I'm a Jewish American.
    I'm an American Jew.
    And so we were German Jews.
    And we felt very secure.
    But when I came to England, to Liverpool
    first in the job, and my girlfriend was got sick,
    and I had to take care of the old lady.
    And my girlfriend got-- when I was there six months--
    I don't know if I told you this--
    got scarlet fever.
    So I had to go over.
    And so the people sent me over to the old people's house.
    And one day I was--
    I didn't know anybody.
    I only knew this one girl.
    And so I was at the hairdresser.
    And the hairdresser said, oh, don't you know Dolly?
    And I said, who's Dolly?
    Well, she's about your age.
    I'm sure the hairdresser said, wait a minute
    her mother's the next cubicle.
    So he said, this is mother and she works there and there.
    And she asked me to come and meet her daughter.
    Well, I wasn't quite sure that I wanted to do it.
    But the daughter came and asked me.
    And they had a girls school.
    I still think it's like Junior Hadassah was here.
    This was they called Ziona.
    And there were only just girls.
    We got together and we were just in our 20s and discussing
    and things like this and had parties.
    And that's how I really got into the Jewish community
    in England.
    And I went there to the synagogue.
    And it was quite an experience because I
    thought Jews all over the world had the same melodies.
    I had brought my machzor with me from Germany.
    We always went-- after we left, when
    we graduated so-called from religious school
    we got a set of machzor.
    And that's one thing I brought with me.
    And I took that when the first Rosh Hashanah--
    the first Rosh Hashanah was there.
    These girls asked me-- one of the girls asked me to come.
    And I went to services.
    And I took my book out and couldn't follow.
    I mean, it was OK.
    The translation was in German, but I thought
    the Hebrew would be the same.
    So they gave me another Hebrew--
    of the machzor.
    And I knew enough Hebrew that I could follow.
    And you know, these girls never had any Hebrew lessons.
    We had to.
    We had no choice if we wanted or not.
    And they couldn't get over it.
    Martha can follow?
    I could follow the service without hesitation.
    And actually then they started to believe that I was Jewish.
    I think it took all this time to prove to them that I was Jewish
    because I did not know Yiddish.
    And that's how I got into the Jewish group and all
    that, the women school--
    girls school or whatever it is.
    And I went to services.
    Nobody went out of their way to welcome me besides these girls
    when I came to services.
    Nobody.
    Nobody contacted any of us who went.
    Especially there were a lot of us in mixed Jewish--
    in mixed marriage homes.
    Never did anybody ever come and say,
    would you like to come to services?
    Most of them knew there were Jewish girls.
    Maybe not many wanted to.
    I went by myself.
    I did not need anybody because my Jewish upbringing,
    my Jewish feeling was enough that I could do it myself.
    But they did not go out of their way to help us.
    I mean, I'm not saying the refugee committee
    helped to find jobs and things like this.
    But once you had a job, well, that was it.
    Unless there was like me who was interested to help.
    And for me, there's nothing else.
    I am Jewish and that's it.
    I've never held back.
    I've never in any way, shape or form denied it.
    You know, when I worked and I wanted
    to take off for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur,
    I went there and said, I take off.
    But at first we were very fortunate with my mum and boss
    we were paid.
    We took usually one day of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
    And then came a time where some people had
    to make a sacrifice in coming--
    they usually went because I was the oldest of them
    and the other girl had left.
    And I said, well, if we take off that day for Rosh Hashanah,
    how about coming the day before?
    Which was admission day in those days.
    We were closed.
    And when I came the next day to work she said,
    how come these girls came to work?
    They didn't want to make up for it.
    So the following year they said, well,
    you can either have Rosh Hashanah paid or Yom
    Kippur paid.
    And I said, I don't care.
    I take off.
    And that's it.
    So then one year they always had--
    after you've been there five years they
    had a service club dinner.
    We get the invitation for Friday night.
    It was always Friday night.
    It was Rosh Hashanah.
    I called the secretary and I said, I'm not coming.
    And most of the other Jewish girls.
    I said, I don't think they're coming.
    It's Rosh Hashanah.
    So a few days later, the boss--
    the president comes and walks around me and around me.
    And he says, Martha, can I talk to you?
    I said, yes.
    I had worked there probably about 10, 12 years.
    He says, I feel very bad.
    I said, what happened?
    He says, well, because you can't come to the dinner.
    He said, can't you just manage?
    And so I said, no, Rosh Hashanah is first.
    And after the services everybody comes to my house.
    It must have been the boys were already married I think.
    And so no, I can't do it.
    And he said, how about the others?
    And we said, no.
    We were very good in that respect.
    Most of us.
    And they said, no, they weren't coming.
    Martha, how can you do that?
    I said, well--
    Now, he says, there's one thing I want you to tell.
    In April-- every April you call my secretary and you tell us
    when your holidays are--
    Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur--
    so that we don't do this again.
    The following day the vice president comes.
    He says, Martha, you sure embarrassed me.
    I said, what did I do?
    He says on the calendar it says Rosh Hashanah on Saturday.
    Why can't you come on Friday?
    Now, this is an educated man.
    He did not know that our holiday started this.
    But I felt very good that we Jewish people--
    Jewish girls, women were that respected
    that they really felt like-- they never did it again.
    Well, I would call in April and say, look, Lillian,
    our holidays is then and then, but they would never
    do it again.
    She said-- and the boss said--
    the president said, I really couldn't change it.
    That is the only Friday night.
    I said, look, I hope I can come next year and next year
    and next year, you know, like this.
    But we won't come.
    And they have been, in that respect very, very good.
    And they have hired a lot of Jewish people.
    We have never had any problems.
    I did have a problem with a Jewish woman
    because on Good Friday they used to go to church
    or went shopping, but they were supposed to go to church.
    And I used to take my early lunch so
    that I could man the phones--
    telephones.
    There was a Jewish girl.
    And I said to her, I said, why don't you
    take an early-- a woman- an early lunch
    and then come back so that we can
    take care of the telephones.
    But you see, the others had three hours off.
    And we only have 45 minutes.
    After everybody came back, I got called in the office.
    Why I asked-- and her name happened to be Martha too--
    why I had asked her to come back to work.
    I felt they give us Rosh Hashanah off and pay for it.
    I felt it was our obligation.
    I had to let that woman go home so that she just three hours
    like the other people.
    Now you see, I would never have done it.
    And none of our other Jewish girls.
    We always made it a point to be there.
    We took instead of going from 12:00 to 12:45,
    we used to go from 11:00 to 11:45
    so that the people that wanted to go to church or they
    went to the show- I mean, I don't care where they went,
    but they supposedly went to church.
    I would never have said no.
    You see, that's how I showed my Jewishness there.
    And I was respected for it.
    And we all were.
    When there was anything, they would call, Martha,
    what about it?
    So I think I proved my Jewishness.
    And so did my children.
    I mean, my children went--
    at that time, there was no Jewish Community Center
    in Oakland that had everything.
    So they used to go to the YMCA in Christmas
    vacation, Easter vacation because I was working.
    They took matzah to the YMCA camp.
    They used to say, give us more.
    Everybody wants to have the matzah.
    And they gave the--
    every Christmas came, they came.
    But they went there.
    And that's how we brought them up too.
    When we first came here, they went to child care
    and they came home and says, Mother, we
    have to have a blue crepe rope with a white collar
    and the little bow tie for a Christmas carol.
    It was the first year we were here.
    And I went in the morning and I said
    to the ladies, Mrs. Solomon, the boys came home
    that they were having a Christmas party,
    but you know we are Jewish.
    And she says, you know, Mrs. Hankin,
    here in America this is not the holiday like we have.
    This is a holiday of love.
    What could I say?
    I was a greenhorn.
    So they went there.
    They sang the songs whatever they had learned.
    And Friday night there was a Hanukkah party at the temple
    and we took them to the temple.
    When they went to grammar school,
    my oldest one supposedly had a little bit better voice
    and was supposed to sing with three other boys O Holy Night.
    And he says, don't worry, Mother.
    Every time it says "When Christ is born," I take a deep breath.
    So they were brought up enough never to do it.
    My youngest boy was pretty tall.
    One day he was a father and had to put
    the star on the Christmas tree.
    It didn't help hurt them because they were strong enough.
    They went the next night for Hanukkah
    and we had a Hanukkah play, you know?
    And I think we transferred all our Jewishness
    like this to our children too.
    And I had it in England.
    And I showed it here.
    I never-- and they never did.
    As a matter of fact, when our oldest boy graduated
    from Fremont High, he had Rabbi Gates,
    God rest his soul, as what they call the baccalaureate,
    as a speaker because they felt that he deserved it.
    And he they stood up for it, their Jewishness
    and so on because I think we proved it to them.
    I mean, I do not have a kosher household,
    but I am a very traditional person.
    Go ahead.
    OK.
    I have one thing.
    When they started digging at the temple,
    they found something, some ceramic, a ceramic thing,
    and the prayer book pretty charred but some prayer book.
    And some people that had some of the things gave it to them,
    and they have a museum there now.
    And these are some pictures of the museum, some of the things
    that help there.
    OK.
    I want to be sure that she gets it on and then.
    OK, thank you.
    OK.
    And this is a safe place from which
    we send them to them from Israel to put in the showcases.
    Somebody who was really taking care of this museum too.
    And I mean, I bring this up--
    not that I'm so terribly impressed by everything--
    but I think it's important that we see all this.
    That this is really being done.
    And the people, I must say, we live very, very interested.
    And it brought back a lot of memories
    but they can have them too.
    I think positive now of our life in States and Israel actually.
    You know, [INAUDIBLE]
    While you are on the subject of the commemorative book,
    also for the record, can you tell us what the day
    and year or so forth of the commemoration
    and what you were commemorating?
    Well, it's actually called the Week of the Meeting.
    And it was from August the 21st in 1987.
    We came on the Sunday and left on the Saturday, right?
    Yeah.
    We got this book and we got a picture of--
    no, not of the synagogue, but if we get a picture of the people.
    Again, I showed you the picture of--
    I wanted to show you if this is--
    no-- the picture of the board of directors.
    We got a big one of that.
    Now, here's-- this picture we got.
    This is all the people that they by the board of directors
    in 1926.
    I don't know if you have it or not.
    It might be duplicate.
    Is it a duplicate?
    I'm not sure, so get a good shot of it anyway.
    OK.
    That's good, thank you.
    And this is-- they used to call it
    the Judenlohne of the Synagogenweg.
    But it used to be the Judenlohne.
    But you know, nobody paid--
    was offended by it.
    Now, I think I would be offended.
    But it was Judenlohne.
    And the Jew-- what would we say-- the way of Jewish way,
    you know like this, our Jewish lane or something like this.
    And I don't think anybody was offended at the time
    until all this happened with Hitler.
    So I still looking out for some of the things that--
    I mean, I must say they showed a lot--
    and this is a little bit more in detail what it was it's.
    The since the 16th century.
    And in 1638 is the first time that they have Jews,
    where they mentioned Jews in 11 households
    in this kind of thing.
    And that's where my family came in from my mother's side.
    And they were-- he was a cantor And my grandfather
    had a good voice.
    And I had one or two uncles but it didn't go into any of our.
    Neither my age either myself or my Cousins
    or our children, any of those children inherited that.
    And they all have gorgeous voices.
    They always used to say that my grandfather from my mother's
    side, if he would have lived in modern times,
    he would have been probably an opera singer.
    He was just, what we call now, cantorial soloist.
    I mean he wasn't a cantor--
    playing cantor or anything.
    The cantors as well that what you call
    trained like this in those days.
    But it was more audience participation.
    So that's it.
    What was it like going back after 50 years?
    What do you remember thinking about hoping
    the time [INAUDIBLE]?
    What were your expectations?
    To be quite honest, I had no expectation.
    Let me say, I not a very good letter writer.
    And like I say, I had none.
    My sister and brother-in-law, when he was alive,
    they used to go to Germany every year.
    My brother from Israel, nearly every year they went to Germany
    into this little town.
    Now, I was never this very enthused about the little town.
    As soon as I could get out, I ran out
    because I was more a city person.
    So I really didn't have quite the ties
    to this little town as my sister.
    My sister lived there longer, and my brother
    was a little boy.
    What did he know more about that?
    So they had connections with these people.
    I really went-- well, we went first to England.
    Of course, we lived there for one.
    Then we went to Frankfurt.
    And from there, we took a tour through Frankfurt,
    which was very interesting.
    And I must say, the guide always brought out
    of how many Jewish professors were
    at the University in Frankfurt and that they
    had the greatest loss on professors in 1933
    when they all had to go.
    And we took a tour from Frankfurt and they showed.
    I called the Frankfurt--
    I called the congregation there, the Federation or whatever
    you wanted to call it, but they weren't very cooperative.
    I don't know.
    I've heard that from somebody too.
    I think they thought, oh, she wants something from us.
    All I wanted to know is how many families
    do you have here and so on.
    And we were not very there very long.
    And then we rented a car and went to his hometown.
    We just drove through where he used to live
    and had some lunch in a very nice boulevard.
    And then we went to a small town where
    he used to spend his childhood and after bringing him
    in at this time because it's interesting.
    And we drove and when we thought we were the town
    and we asked somebody where that street is, he said,
    you're already out of the town.
    That's how small the town was.
    So we drove back and he says, I think
    this is where the house was.
    There was a store.
    So we knocked at the door and this woman comes out,
    and we said, we are looking for so-and-so.
    Yes, they used to live here in this house.
    Can you believe it after all these years and it had changed?
    But it says, no, they are not anymore and somebody died.
    But their sister-in-law-- sister-in-law I think--
    lives there and there.
    She has a shoe store.
    But it was Wednesday afternoon and the stores are closed.
    But why don't you go there?
    So we drove there and the young lady opened up
    and she says, no, my mother isn't home.
    And so Harry said who he was.
    And she said, come upstairs.
    And they were very nice.
    I never seen so many shoes in my life in this small store.
    And she offered something to drink and some cookies
    and so on.
    And then the old lady came.
    And she remembered Harry very--
    but her sister-in-law used to be the Maid from when
    Harry was a small girl.
    And here we were in the house where he spent his youth--
    and I mean, his childhood [INAUDIBLE] days.
    In the first house, the woman wasn't quite sure, and he says,
    it's still the outhouse in the back and still the creek there
    and that and that.
    So she knew that we were just intruding, you know.
    And we talked to these people.
    And they were very nice.
    I must say, I had quite a job to understand them because they
    have a very heavy dialect, which I don't.
    Coming from the North, I'm like Boston and he's like Alabama.
    But he, right away, fell back into the dialect.
    And that was quite an experience.
    They were very nice.
    And we were there.
    And then we went to Heidelberg.
    You see, this is a part of Germany that I had never been.
    And we didn't encounter anybody there.
    We just watched.
    And then we went to Hanover, where I spent my adult life,
    and I wanted him to see.
    And that's where we met my sister.
    She came then.
    And so I showed them around.
    And on Shabbat morning, we went to services.
    They have a new synagogue but built the same
    as the old one was.
    You see, I knew the old part from when I lived there
    and still, the women upstairs and the man downstairs.
    And the bima is in the middle, like you see in this book
    from I showed you early.
    And there were a lot of Jews, very few
    not really that used to live in Hanover.
    There were more people from the displaced person camp
    that had moved into Hanover.
    Very few of the old-time time Hanover people have come back.
    The only ones that really have come back next to it
    is an old age home.
    Very nice.
    It's very, very Orthodox.
    But at that time, there was a group of Israelis there.
    There's a woman, a Gentile woman, in Hanover
    that every year either takes a group of Gentile people
    from Hanover to Israel or she brings a group of Israelis,
    mainly former Hanover people, which, again, I must say,
    those were people, Hanover people,
    that had moved to Hanover just before the war,
    probably just from the little towns around Hanover.
    I mean, there was nobody and I knew quite a few people
    of Hanover in there.
    But they had services, real Orthodox.
    And then we had a luncheon, which was very nice.
    And we could talk to the people and--
    very Orthodox.
    We wanted to make a donation.
    Yes, we did make a donation.
    We gave the shammas--
    no, the caretaker.
    We kind of slid something in because we
    didn't know how to send them there and so on because he
    got an aliyah.
    So you know, when they see a new person, grab him right away.
    But the synagogue, for me, I mean, actually was--
    the old synagogue-- was beautiful in Hanover and all
    in dark wood and here was more lighter wood and a little bit
    more modern.
    But the plan itself was the same as in Hanover.
    And from Hanover, then--
    I showed them some parts of Hanover then.
    And then we went to outside Bremen
    to visit a distant cousin, distant relative,
    who was married--
    who lived there.
    And she was one of the few who was married to a Gentile man
    in our hometown in Norden
    And this man, what they did to him is unbelievable.
    They wanted him to divorce her.
    And she says, no.
    Finally, they had one daughter.
    They got the daughter was sent to Leipzig.
    He went into the work in the labor camp, labor work,
    and she went to Theresienstadt.
    When he saw that it was getting to the end,
    he more or less run away from the labor colony
    and went and got his daughter and went to Bremen,
    and she came back too and they met in Bremen again.
    And this man was wonderful.
    I mean, what he did for our Jewish people in Norden
    before they were all sent away was just unbelievable.
    Unfortunately, he's a very sick man with Alzheimer's.
    I mean, he doesn't deserve it but who are we to say.
    And then from there, we went to Norden.
    And there, my brother was already there.
    My sister came with us.
    And my brother and sister-in-law were already there.
    And there were some people that I didn't know.
    I mean, one man was there and I knew him
    as a little boy of eight or nine years old.
    So to see him after 50 years, I mean, who were they?
    And then one person came.
    My brother says, hey, I have a surprise for you.
    And this woman comes in and she says, Martha, how are you?
    And I did not recognize her at first.
    But the minute she--
    she didn't say anything-- the minute she opened her mouth,
    I knew who she was.
    She lives in New York.
    And she was there with her daughter.
    And then some of the other people I had known when--
    these were 50 years you haven't seen people.
    And that didn't mean that-- for example, this particular girl
    that I met this person, she had already
    left Norden before I left.
    She lived in Stuttgart at the time.
    So we had a real good time together.
    Talked and talked and talked and talking all the time.
    And they had a lot of parties for us.
    I mean, they paid for everything.
    I mean, we really didn't need anything.
    And never saw anybody drinking as much
    as they drank because the group itself
    that did that, everything was free in the hotel.
    And they took advantage of it.
    But, well, I had one other experience maybe
    if you want to hear.
    After the unveiling of this, we walked back
    from the synagogue bay to the hotel, and I was quite upset.
    Well, I did find a bus.
    Oh, that was it.
    First, I found--
    I asked somebody is so-and-so still alive,
    and he says, yeah, he is here.
    There was the only so-called Gentile boyfriend
    I had because we went to school together.
    We had to walk the same way.
    And he would say he was a Senator.
    He was then.
    He says, I don't remember you.
    I remember your name, but I don't think
    I would have recognized you.
    I wouldn't have recognized him either.
    But I was quite upset.
    And while I was walking towards the hotel, a couple stopped me.
    And she says, we see you're upset.
    Can we do something for you?
    And I said, no.
    It was one of those things.
    You break down and you can't help it.
    And they walked with me.
    And they came from somewhere South of Germany,
    but they had a summer home in the US
    because this Norden is near the North Sea
    and there is an Island where we used to go on vacation.
    And they walked with me.
    And they said, can we do anything?
    And they patted me and you know like this.
    And they left me at the hotel.
    On Saturday morning, we were supposed--
    we were going to leave, and they came and brought me
    a little jar.
    And in our hometown, the tea was mixed.
    There was a-- what do you call it-- a factory where
    they mixed tea and so on.
    Brought me a little China thing with tea
    in it to show their concern about us.
    And this was quite touching from somebody, I mean,
    complete stranger.
    But there are few of those, I guess, still around.
    And they were younger people, probably
    were never exposed to Jewish people.
    If they are in their 30s and 40s,
    they've never been exposed, even 50s.
    They were never-- [COUGHS] can you give me some water, please.
    Give me some water.
    There's my cup.
    They were never exposed to Jewish people.
    Anybody who comes from a small town,
    they didn't know what Jews were.
    Unless they were told by some people and either
    said something nasty or they said whispered it to them.
    What did I expect?
    I don't know.
    I really don't know what to expect because I really
    went there not very willingly.
    But I felt I had to.
    I had to because these people had done a tremendous job.
    And I had never visited my mother's grave again
    because she was buried-- she died in very unfortunate,
    natural death in-- thank you--
    in Germany in 1933.
    And I'd never be back since I left Germany.
    So I felt that was an opportunity,
    and I felt obligated.
    I can't say that I was overwhelmed with it.
    I was overwhelmed when we had this, and I was overwhelmed
    and we went to the cemetery.
    And the concern of these people, yes, they really
    made me feel comfortable.
    They tried to.
    But maybe my feeling towards the Germans
    was so bad that I wasn't comfortable.
    You see, I did not go out of my way to visit.
    I did visit--
    One girl invited us because they had a bakery.
    And her sister-in-law had a beautiful home and they invited
    us there because she wasn't well and had us over for tea
    and my brother--
    and my brother and sister, no, didn't go.
    She didn't feel well about my sister.
    And you and I were already there.
    And she had invited a few people that knew us.
    But there were two girls, two women, that my sister knew.
    And one of them said to my sister, oh,
    the terrible things that we went through.
    They said to her, and she says, what
    do you mean what you went through?
    What do you think we went through?
    You are still here Norden.
    Thank God we are well taken care of.
    But what you went through?
    Because but there no one was never bombed.
    And they probably didn't have enough to eat
    or another thing like this.
    But she was furious.
    But the ones that talked to me was just
    the opposite they were.
    We just came and talked together.
    But there was one man who came up to me and says,
    don't you remember me?
    And I said, no.
    He says, we used to play together, remember,
    when we were small.
    I used to-- and his mother was a war widow from the First World
    War and my uncle who never had any children,
    he was uncle to everybody in the town.
    And he says, Uncle Adi always took care of us,
    took care of my mother.
    And he wasn't Jewish.
    And he said, don't you remember me?
    Can you believe it.
    I probably hadn't seen him since we were seven or eight years
    old you know.
    But he came forward too and then two other women
    came forward the other later on, we heard that you were there.
    But I guess, that was enough for me.
    So.
    One thing that you didn't talk on your [INAUDIBLE]
    was your coming to the United States, your trip to the United
    States from [INAUDIBLE].
    Well, I tell you, we came in 47.
    And my mother--
    I'm talking about now my stepmother
    but we always considered her mother.
    She always lived with us in England.
    So we had a little bit of a built in babysitter like this.
    And for our boys, granny was part of the family.
    And we couldn't get any reservations
    because the five of us wanted to go.
    They always used to say, well, we have reservations for four.
    I said, well, what I'm going to do is my mother?
    Throw overboard?
    So finally, we got a boat from Sweden.
    So we went from England to Denmark on a boat
    and then on a ferry with a train to Sweden.
    And our boys-- how old were they?
    Four and five, four and five.
    I don't want to brag, but they were cute.
    And they were everybody's you know people like this.
    And so on the boat when we went across on the ferry,
    it was at night.
    And they got tired.
    So he had one there and one of the officers
    hit the other one on the arm.
    And they said, we are going to Sweden.
    And everybody was awful then.
    At that time, we were the only ones there.
    In Sweden, we got on the grips on.
    It was a very large ship there.
    And on that boat, there are a lot of displaced people.
    And there was some man who had lost their families,
    and we never had to take care of our boys.
    They always took care of them because a lot of them
    had lost little boys like that.
    They were always surrounded.
    Because I guess, I was with the only children.
    I mean, there were others on the boat but Jewish children,
    let me say this and--
    on the Swedish boat.
    We had enough to eat in England but not all the things there.
    We used to take apples and oranges in the cabin
    and didn't even eat them.
    Remember when we came to the States,
    we had to throw them overboard because you can't bring it in.
    But we had always told our children, now,
    if you don't empty your plate, the poor children in Europe
    and so on.
    And you know, American people now and in those days,
    they didn't get any food or anything.
    Everything you got of a smorgasbord and so on.
    And the oldest boy, five years old,
    suddenly says, mommy, look at this.
    The poor children, starving children, in Europe
    and look all the food on the plates that was left.
    I was ready to go under the table.
    So I can't believe it.
    So anyhow, this one person from the American came over to me
    and he says, you know, you're bringing up your children
    all right.
    They have taught us a lesson.
    They never fill their plates up so much.
    And I was so embarrassed.
    But it wasn't naughty.
    It was something that we have been telling them.
    So when we came over here-- let me tell you
    one good story from England.
    In England, Santa Claus is Father Christmas.
    And Hanukkah and Christmas was about the same time.
    And we had a friend who had no children.
    And he says, I'm going to be the Hanukkah man.
    And so he came and had presents in there like this.
    Christmas Day, the milkman came.
    The milkman always comes to the door-- came to the door--
    it's all different now, but I'm talking about the '40s--
    to bring the milk in England.
    And so my boy would say, hi, Mikles, and says,
    well, it's the Father Christmas Cameron.
    He says, uh-huh, another man came.
    [CHUCKLING]
    So that was the little things in there.
    But anyhow, when we came on the boat--
    oh, but we were so seasick--
    the whole boat was nearly dying.
    It was a roughest trip they had from Sweden here in June.
    Even the stewards were sick.
    The only one who wasn't sick was my mother
    because she never got out of bed.
    But those of us who went out of bed because the ship was
    like this, we got seasick.
    But she never went out of bed.
    How she ever managed the whole day, I don't know.
    But she didn't.
    So after the boys were sick, so then we came over here.
    And my in-laws were under--
    were going in there and my brother-in-law.
    And so then they gave the boys--
    and it was hot in the meantime.
    He had cold over there throughout the year.
    They gave them Eskimo pies.
    And the minute-- and our kids didn't know Eskimo pies.
    They didn't know ice cream.
    And the minute they started eating, it was so hot.
    Before you knew, they fell on the floor off the stick.
    Never mind, we buy another one.
    And you know I thought, uh-uh, forget it.
    You can't just go do it, so two or three
    and then I said forget it.
    It must not think.
    I said, watch what you eat, and that's enough.
    So then we came here and moved into with my in-laws.
    The boys slept in the same room as the grandparents.
    And we slept in the living room.
    It was in one bedroom, bathroom.
    It was the most ideal situation.
    But what could we do?
    We were looking at 1947.
    Even apartments in New York were not that easily available.
    My oldest boy went right away to a camp around the corner
    from the school.
    And the younger one, my sister-in-law
    had a boy a little bit younger so then she took care of it.
    And we both went to work.
    But after about 2 and 1/2 months,
    we had disagreements with his parents.
    I didn't hit it.
    [LAUGHTER]
    We came to here--
    we came from different backgrounds.
    His mother was so meticulous and so clean.
    And my sister-in-law lived one floor up.
    So when we came here and my sister-in-law
    comes with the basket, I said, where are you going?
    She says, I'm going in the basement to do my washing.
    And I said, oh, wait a minute, I'm coming with you.
    I needed her to die and they had to Bendix machine.
    I don't know.
    You're all too young for those things.
    I went into the basement and my mother-in-law was appalled.
    And he said to her, is she clean?
    Is your wife clean?
    She couldn't believe it that I would do the washing there.
    But I washed there.
    And then we had to hang up things but--
    This apartment is probably under 10 to 25
    and I would say, 70% even more of a Jewish.
    And my oldest friend, my uncle right away
    got into with the Jewish kids to play.
    Because in this camp, there was like a daycare.
    And he was very independent, five years old.
    They always wanted to bring him and he says, never mind.
    I could go by myself.
    And he went by himself.
    And like I said, we stayed there.
    And on weekends, my brother-in-law picked us up
    when they went to Belle harbor with his wife and daughter was
    evacuated--
    not evacuated, for the summer.
    And then in September, we came here to the States
    and to Oakland.
    Of course, my sister was here and brother-in-law.
    And two anchors who had come from Shanghai, they were here.
    And in the meantime, my mother had come here too.
    And so we came here and we arrived at Mission day
    on the 9th of September.
    And he looked at it in a--
    maybe within a few days.
    And he looked in the paper.
    My brother-in-law took him to a place for a job
    because he was a machinist, inspector, and so on.
    The man said, no, you are too overqualified for me.
    I'm going to send you to another place.
    So they hired him and he says, no, I
    can't come on whatever day it was because it's Rosh Hashanah.
    I have to have a day off.
    So he came the second day.
    So in the meantime, I was having all those other little jobs.
    And so my uncle had come from Shanghai.
    And the rabbi in Alameda used to be in Shanghai.
    And it was Rabbi day.
    And Rosh Hashanah-- he came just before Rosh Hashanah
    and we went to go to services.
    But we were just here.
    We didn't have much money.
    I mean, after coming over here with these two kids
    and so on and then coming from New York and nobody
    would give us anything because we
    had to guarantors, his father and his brother,
    who wouldn't pay for us.
    I mean, we had to use all our money that came here.
    And when we came to Beth Jacob, which was the Orthodox
    shul in Oakland.
    Because my brother-in-law and sister went there,
    they wouldn't let us in.
    They wanted us to pay.
    And what could we do?
    So they sneaked us in.
    And I said, never again will anybody sneak me into.
    I only went there for yeshiva.
    That was the only time I went there.
    We stayed outside.
    He went in a little bit and so on.
    And then my uncle said, well, why don't we go to Alameda?
    There is a rabbi.
    His name is [PERSONAL NAME],, but he was in Shanghai.
    For a sukkahs, we went to Alameda.
    And when Rabbi Gates saw us, and saw my uncle, and my cousin,
    he was so happy to see somebody that he right away took us
    under his wings.
    And he says-- and I-- we said-- told him--
    I said, we don't have much.
    He says, never mind.
    Just come.
    And that's when our children started Sunday school
    in Alameda.
    My sister, brother-in-law-- because we didn't have a car,
    so my brother-in-law always took the boys to--
    well, my sister had two boys at the time too--
    to Alameda.
    And then his brother left near where we were
    and he would brought to bring them home.
    And we have been members of Alameda since.
    So in July in 1948, we went to Los Angeles to a girlfriend
    by train, still didn't have a car.
    And when we came back, we had a bill for $35 membership
    in for Alameda.
    And underneath, they had written,
    if you cannot afford it, by all means, whatever do.
    And I said at that time, look, if we can afford-- it
    cost $48 to go to Los Angeles.
    If we can afford $48 to go for one week's vacation,
    we can afford that.
    We paid it off by $2, and $3 dollars.
    But we have been paying ever since.
    And we have always been paying ever
    since what the highest was.
    But so we have members in Alameda for that.
    Our boys went to Sunday school.
    They were bar mitzvah.
    They were confirmed.
    And the rabbi married them.
    They insisted by both marriages that they
    had that Rabbi Gates was supposed to do the marriage.
    Unfortunately, he died over there 10 years ago.
    But we've been very close.
    But we have been very active there.
    And the boys are married.
    And their children are ready bar mitzvah, confirmed.
    One is going to be married.
    One belongs to this temple, his children Friedman
    to the reformed, and the other one
    belongs to a shul in Walnut Creek to the conservatives.
    But there's all the children out of Sunday school.
    They still pay their dues, reluctantly.
    They feel they have to.
    They know what they would hear from us.
    But they do.
    And so we've been very active here.
    And I think we have to be well received.
    I mean, a lot of-- we didn't have a car for five years.
    Everybody was taking us and picking us up.
    We never had any problems.
    We always had enough.
    We have reciprocated in it.
    Not to the people that gave us a ride
    but we've been give them rides ever since.
    So I think I would like if we have led a very Jewish life.
    I mean, we have a few Gentile friends,
    but not socially too much.
    Because I don't know why.
    But we are--
    I don't-- we're just Jewish people, Jewish surrounding.
    And we have a lot of friends.
    And there are quite a few mixed marriages
    where we are very closed with and most supportive.
    We are most supportive because that's what the life they
    have to live.
    But we are, what we would say, close Gentile friends, no, we
    don't have, even here.
    But that's probably our fault too
    because we have a circle of friends
    and we don't go out too much.
    So.
    What would you have the world know from your experience?
    What would you want people to know
    about what you went through?
    I want you to-- well, I want them to know what was going on,
    and I want to warn them that they should not
    take anything lying down.
    We cannot afford that it ever happened again.
    And whatever we can do, we advise the ADL,
    or is APAC, or is any of the things.
    We have to support them.
    We have to show the world that we are here to stay
    and not taking anything lying down.
    I know there are some Jewish people that would still say,
    well, it's not that bad and so on.
    We know it's bad.
    And the smallest thing we let those through, I think, then,
    we are on the losing side.
    We have to understand-- they have
    to understand that we are one people, and that we are strong,
    and that we are determined to keep what we have.
    And here, the least--
    the smallest thing when something happens,
    make a big thing out of it.
    Don't just say, oh, it's not that important.
    Be it a swastika on a temple, or be
    it a swastika on a call from somebody like this,
    or be it anything like this.
    I mean, we have instilled that--
    I know one day when our boys were small,
    we used to have a lot of dances in our street.
    We don't have them anymore now.
    I don't know what that is.
    They were gang but like this.
    And there was a bunch of Catholic kids--
    they went to a Catholic school-- and our kids and others two.
    And suddenly, one of the little Catholic boys
    said to my younger boy, oh, you're Jew, a dirty Jew.
    He flipped him one.
    I mean, he beat him up.
    And everybody says, oh, the parents.
    The parents never came and complained.
    They knew.
    And this is what we have to teach the children.
    Don't take anything lying down.
    Tell them what we are, help wherever you can,
    but be sure that we are helping our Jewish people too.
    I mean, we have a lot of talk a lot about outreach.
    You have to do this for them and this for them.
    Who's doing things for us?
    I think the in-reach in our Jewish community
    is maybe more important than the outreach.
    I'm not saying that we shouldn't support.
    I know from the temple, they go to St. Vincent
    or whatever it is for Christmas and Easter
    to serve the people because to let the others do.
    By all means, do that.
    By all means, help when it comes to food,
    give them food like this.
    But don't break your neck because nobody
    breaks the neck for us.
    And the more we can show that we are together,
    that we are together in it, in everything it is,
    I think they will follow.
    I think that's how I feel about it.
    I feel very strongly that have to include or be
    part of some of the things.
    I mean, there's a homeless, God forbid,
    that should happen that helpful.
    But don't forget that you have obligations towards your people
    too.
    And that's one of the things that I'm
    very strong at the temple.
    We always out for the new people and then have outside.
    What happens to the old ones?
    Do we ever give them a call?
    Do we include them in festivities and so on?
    And I see others too, but let's sure--
    be sure of what we are thinking, and what our feeling is.
    I'm not saying that I'm not trusting anybody.
    But we have to be strong.
    And we have to be together.
    And we have to support all the organizations that
    represent us.
    I'm not an APAC.
    I'm not here to make propaganda for APAC and ADL, and so on.
    But we cannot live without them.
    I know everybody comes in another bill, another letter,
    or another donation to make and so on.
    But we know because if we would have been strong--
    I'm not saying that we could have done anything in Germany.
    Somebody said, well, why didn't you do anything?
    You couldn't in Germany.
    You just couldn't.
    My brother-in-law had an old gun.
    I mean, rusted.
    It was up in the attic.
    He didn't even know that he had it.
    Somehow, they found it and they wanted to arrest him for that.
    So how could we have helped?
    How could we have done it?
    But we can do it here now.
    We do not have to take anything lying down.
    That's all right for you.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    Thank you.
    Actually I wanted to say something.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    The interview describes Ms. Hankin's childhood in Norden, a small town in Germany near the Dutch border, the antisemitic measures that were introduced in Germany in 1933, her memories of early implementation of these laws and general antisemitic sentiment. She discusses moving to Hannover in 1935 and working as a domestic, and emigrating to England in 1938. Ms. Hankin describes her experiences there, her attempts to rescue her stepmother and father, her father's death in Auschwitz, her move to Manchester, England, working in a factory, and marrying in January 1941. She discusses emigrating to the United States with her family in 1947, first to New York and then to Oakland, California, where they settled.
    Interviewee
    Martha Hankin
    Interviewer
    Mel Feld
    Norman Feld
    Date
    interview:  1991 September 30
    Credit Line
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Jewish Family and Children's Services of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    2 videocassettes (SVHS) : sound, color ; 1/2 in..

    Rights & Restrictions

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

    Keywords & Subjects

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    The Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project conducted the interview with Martha Hankin on September 30, 1991. The interview was received by the Archives Branch in July 2003.
    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 08:46:26
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn515238

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    Klara Birman discuses her childhood in Novo Uman, Ukraine; her move with her family to Moskovoya, where her father was sent to organize a collective farm; her family's Jewish identity and observances; the invasion of Ukraine by Nazi Germany in June 1941; the family's flight to the Dnieper River, where they were halted by German troops; returning to their village; their eventual forced move to a Jewish ghetto/concentration camp in Bogdanovka, Transnistria; her experiences in the ghetto; her work building a highway; the workers' supervision under Ukrainian police, who were under Romanian command; the increase in the hostilities to the Jews in the ghetto; improvements after the retreat of German troops; liberation in March 1944; returning to Moskovoya; learning of her father's death; attending medical school in Odessa, Ukraine; her marriage; the death of her husband in 1979; and her immigration to the United States in 1985 with her daughter, son-in-law, and grandson.

    Oral history interview with Leonid Birman

    Oral history interview with Leonid Birman

    Oral History

    Leonid Birman, born on January 1, 1938 in Moskovoya, Ukraine, describes living with his mother and three sisters in a ghetto near Moskovoya, while his father was a soldier fighting in the army; Ukrainian and Romanian policemen governing the ghetto; the restriction on Jews; being liberated by the Soviet Army in March of 1944; returned to Moskovoya with his family after the war and finding their house destroyed; moving into a neighboring house that was originally owned by a soldier; attending school again in 1946; graduating and moving to Odessa, Ukraine, where his sisters worked; enrolling in a technical school where he became a specialist with metals; working for three years; joining the army and serving from 1960 to 1963; returning to his factory; getting married in 1968; his daughter’s birth; and moving with his family to the United States on May 26, 1997 to escape discrimination.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Brunn

    Oral history interview with Ruth Brunn

    Oral History

    Ruth Brunn (née Oppenheimer), born on September 26, 1932 in Mannheim, Germany, her childhood in Mannheim, Germany; her father's early death; her flight with her mother and sister from Germany to Strasbourg, France and then Brussels, Belgium; their life in Brussels until the Nazi invasion; how her paralyzed sister was sent to an institution in the Netherlands; staying with her mother in Brussels until May 10, 1940, the day the Germans invaded Belgium; their journey to southern France; staying in a small town in the Pyrenees Mountains and enrolling in a catholic elementary school; going to Marseille, France, where she was traumatized by the bombings; going through Spain and Portugal trying to find a ship that would take them to the United States; reaching Ellis Island with a temporary visa; going to Mexico, where they had family; receiving permanent visas for the US and going to New Jersey, where the rest of her father’s side of the family lived; being re-introduced to her sister; attending school in South Orange, NJ; attending New York State College; her mother’s death; getting a job at a local hospital; visiting Europe during the summers; moving to California; getting married and having two children; and working at the Anno Nuevo State reserve.

    Oral history interview with Robert W. Koehorst

    Oral history interview with Robert W. Koehorst

    Oral History

    Robert Koehorst describes his experiences in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation; his father's activities in the underground and hiding the valuables of Jewish neighbors; his father's arrest after being informed on by a neighbor; his mother and sister's continued participation in underground activities; his father's release from jail; his experiences in hiding with his father and brother from 1941 to 1945; his decision to immigrate to the United States; his service in the Unite States Army and his family life and marriages.

    Oral history interview with Dora Tarshish

    Oral history interview with Dora Tarshish

    Oral History

    Dora Tarshish, born March 4, 1927, discusses her childhood in Petrova, Romania; her family life; her education; her experiences after the Hungarian occupation of her town began in 1942; the large-scale changes beginning in 1944 when Germany took over; the period when she and her family were forced to leave their home and the two weeks they spent in hiding with neighbors; the deportation of her family to a ghetto; being deported to Auschwitz two months later and being separated from her family during the initial selection; her experiences in Auschwitz, including the aid she received from a fellow inmate during an inspection in November 1944; her transfer to another (unnamed) labor camp; the work she performed; being liberated by the Soviet Army; returning to Petrova; her attempts to reunite with one of her brothers in Budapest, Hungary; her attempt to immigrate to Palestine and being detained in Cyprus; moving to Israel in 1948; her marriage and children; her family's immigration to the United States; and her ongoing feeling of connection to Israel.

    Oral history interview with Leon Benson

    Oral history interview with Leon Benson

    Oral History

    Leon Benson (né Leon Samuel Szmelcan), born in Łódź, Poland in 1931, describes his family’s immigration to Paris, France when Leon was three years old; his father’s work as a furrier; the German occupation of Paris; being deported with his mother (Yana Benson), older brother, and younger sister to Auschwitz; being separated from his mother and sister, but remaining with his brother for a brief time; working in a grenade factory; being sent on a forced march to Buchenwald towards the end of the war; being liberated by the US Army in April of 1945; returning to Paris and living in a home for child survivors; being the only survivor from his immediate family; joining the Zionist movement and planning to immigrate to Israel; being contacted by relatives of his mother who had settled in the US and deciding to go to the US; living briefly on the east coast before moving to San Francisco, CA; his wife Lillian and their two sons and daughter; and ushering for the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Giants during his retirement.

    Oral history interview with Leon Benson

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Gerda Cohn

    Oral history interview with Gerda Cohn

    Oral History

    Gerda Cohn, born on September 29, 1914 in Breslau, Germany (Wroclaw, Poland), describes her parents, Alfred Fischer and Margarete Riesenfeld; her two siblings, Klaus Peter and Lori; growing up in a well-off family; attending school; having blonde hair and light complexion and was often mistaken for an Aryan woman; her first experience of Nazi violence around 1934 when a Nazi officer confused her for an Aryan woman and shoved her and spit in her face because she was walking around with her Jewish fiancée; pleading unsuccessfully with her father to flee to America; getting married in June of 1935 at the age of 20; convincing her new husband to flee to the US; obtaining visas in November of 1936; receiving a telegram from her mother in 1938 notifying her that her father and brother had been arrested and sent to a concentration camp; the release of her father and brother when she obtained visas for them; her parents fleeing to England, while her younger siblings going to the US and living with her; and her life in the US.

    Oral history interview with Ileana Farkas

    Oral history interview with Ileana Farkas

    Oral History

    Ileana Farkas (née Marmustein), born in 1929, discusses her childhood in Satu Mare, Transylvania, Romania; her memories of antisemitic incidents after the Hungarian invasion in 1940; her brother's flight to Budapest, Hungary, where he lived using false identity papers; the increase in harassment of Jews in 1943; her brother's return from Budapest to encourage his family to flee; fleeing with her sister to Budapest in 1944; her brother's capture, arrest, and deportation to Auschwitz; the deportation of her other sister and parents from Satu Mare to Auschwitz; her life with her sister in Budapest using false papers; hiding in basements during the bombing of Budapest; the liberation of Budapest by Soviet troops in January 1945; returning with her sister to Satu Mare to find their brother and sister; learning about their parents' deaths in Auschwitz; meeting and marrying her husband in 1946; her life in Romania; immigrating with her husband and family in 1962 to the United States; and her adjustment to life in the San Francisco Bay Area.

    Oral history interview with Sol Farkas

    Oral history interview with Sol Farkas

    Oral History

    Sol Farkas describes his childhood in Satu Mare, Romania; joining the Hungarian Army in December 1940 and working on a labor brigade with his brother Morris; returning to his town in January 1944, where it was turned into a ghetto in April 1944; being transported to Auschwitz with his family, where his parents were selected and perished in the gas chambers; the terrible conditions he endured, working in grain fields and being moved to Austria to work in an underground laboratory; being liberated by the American Army; the family's attempts to emigrate from Romania; his brother’s illegal escape to Hungary, Austria, and finally to the United States; remaining in Romania for 14 more years; and immigrating to the US.

    Oral history interview with Adda Gerstel

    Oral history interview with Adda Gerstel

    Oral History

    Adda Gerstel discusses her childhood in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland); her education in a private school and her graduation from business school in 1929; the death of her mother in 1932 and her father in 1934; her brother losing his work as an attorney because of anti-Jewish laws and taking over the family brewery; her marriage in 1937; her memories of the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938, when both her husband and her brother were arrested and imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp; the release of her husband and brother; her brother's immigration to the United States; fleeing Germany for Shanghai, China with her husband and young daughter in June 1939; her experiences in a refugee camp in Shanghai, and in the Hong-Kew (Hongkou Qu) ghetto; immigrating to the United States after the war; her family life in San Francisco, CA; and her brother's return to Germany.

    Oral history interview with Clara Markovits

    Oral history interview with Clara Markovits

    Oral History

    Clara Markovits describes her childhood in Budapest, Hungary and Satu Mare, Romania; the increase in antisemitism after the Hungarians seized parts of Romania; her family's deportation to a ghetto in Satu Mare after the Nazi German invasion of Romania in 1944; her family’s deportation to Auschwitz, where she remained from June until October 1944; her subsequent work in a bomb factory near Dresden, Germany from October 1944 until her liberation by the Russians in May 1945; her father's and sister's deaths at Auschwitz and her thoughts of suicide; the aftermath of the bombing of Dresden; her postwar experience in a hospital at Terezin, Czech Republic; her life in Romania and Hungary until her immigration to the United States in 1962; and the emotional and psychological effects of her wartime experiences on her postwar life.

    Oral history interview with Laurence Moitozo

    Oral history interview with Laurence Moitozo

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Leo Samuel

    Oral history interview with Leo Samuel

    Oral History

    Leo Samuel, born in 1924, discusses his childhood in Cherna, Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine); the effect of the economic depression of the 1930s on his family; his deportation to Khust, Ukraine in September 1939; the Hungarian annexation of the region; his work as a tailor in Budapest, Hungary and Cherna; his experiences in the ghetto at Khust; the conditions in the ghetto; the things he had heard about the camps; being deported to Auschwitz in early 1944; being separated from his family; his transfer to Płaszów and the conditions there; working as a tailor; his encounters with Göth's assistant Wilek Chilowicz; being transferred to Melk (subcamp of Mauthausen) several months later; the conditions in Melk; the people he encountered; the help he received from a friend; the work he performed building tunnels and crematoria; his transfer to Ebensee; working in the kitchen; his liberation by the United States Army; his postwar life; his immigration to the United States; and his life in the US.

    Oral history interview with Lily Spitz

    Oral history interview with Lily Spitz

    Oral History

    Lily Spitz discusses her childhood in Satu Mare, Romania; her family life; her religious upbringing; the changes she observed after 1939, the increased antisemitism, and the difficulty in attending school; the changes she experienced when her region became part of Hungary in 1944; her family's deportation to a ghetto and the conditions there; her experiences during her family's deportation to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944; the selection process, and her entry into the camp; her experiences in Auschwitz, the work she performed, and the many selections she endured; her transfer by train to Mauthausen in early 1945; being liberated; the medical care she received from the United States Army; her reunion with her surviving siblings and their return to Romania in July 1945; her marriage and family; their immigration to the United States in 1964; and their life in the US.

    Oral history interview with Melvin Suhd

    Oral history interview with Melvin Suhd

    Oral History

    Melvin Suhd discusses his childhood in Detroit, Michigan; the antisemitism he experienced in school; his education as an electrical engineer; his decision to join the military in 1943; his training in weaponry; his arrival in France in December 1944; the military actions he was involved in; his experiences while helping to liberate Dachau and his emotions at the time; his life after he returned from the front; and the psychological aftermath of his wartime experiences.

    Oral history interview with Bernard Benjamin Broclawski

    Oral history interview with Bernard Benjamin Broclawski

    Oral History

    Bernard Broclawski, born January 27, 1917, describes his childhood in Pabianice, Poland; how he began to work at 13 to support his family; his socialist political leanings; his involvement in Jewish socialist organizations from 1936-1939; his awareness of political events in Germany; being drafted into the Polish Army; his time in Soviet-occupied Poland; reuniting with his father and brothers in Grodno, Poland (Hrodna, Belarus); his work as a machinist in Siberian coal mines in January 1940; his work as a German-language teacher in 1941; his arrest for giving a counter-revolutionary speech in 1943; his experiences in prison from 1944 to 1948; his release from prison and return to Poland in 1948; his marriage and the birth of his daughter; his involvement in workers' organizations; his studies at the University of Łódź; the increase of antisemitism in 1968; how and why he immigrated to the United States with his family; their immigration with the assistance of the HIAS (Hebrew Immigration Aid Society); and his life in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Julius Drabkin

    Oral history interview with Julius Drabkin

    Oral History

    Julius Drabkin, born in 1918 in Maritopa, Latvia, describes his parents, Mikhail and Sarah Daviolovna; life before the war when he lived in Riga, Latvia; being a soldier in the Latvian Army until the German invasion in July 1941; living in the ghetto for most of the war; getting married to his first wife, Amalia, in 1941; the liquidation of the ghetto in 1943; being sent to Kaiserwald camp; being liberated on March 10, 1945 at Stutthof; returning to Riga after the war because he was distressed, even though he had the opportunity to emigrate; the perishing of all of his family during the Holocaust, except for one of his aunts; getting remarried shortly after the war (his wife also lost all her family); having two sons and living in Riga until he immigrated to the United States in the late 1970s; emigrating because his older son found it impossible to pursue his career because he was Jewish; and visiting Riga for the World Conference of Holocaust Survivors.

    Oral history interview with Renee L. Duering

    Oral history interview with Renee L. Duering

    Oral History

    Renee Duering, born January 7, 1921 in Cologne, Germany, describes her childhood in Cologne; moving to Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1933; her experiences in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation; getting married in 1941; the time she and her husband spent in hiding; her family's deportation to Westerbork in July 1943; her experiences in Westerbork; her parents’ deportation to Bergen-Belsen; her and her husband's deportation to Auschwitz; how her husband perished in Auschwitz; being a subject of medical experiments, including those involving sterilization; her deportation to three other camps; her experiences on a death march to Ravensbrück in January 1945; her escape during the march; hiding near Dresden, Germany until liberation by the Soviets; living with her sister after the war; moving to Israel; immigrating to the United States; her second marriage; and her joy at becoming pregnant despite the experiments she endured.

    Oral history interview with Werner Epstein

    Oral history interview with Werner Epstein

    Oral History

    Werner Epstein discusses his childhood in Berlin, Germany; the anti-Jewish regulations he and his family encountered when the Nazis rose to power; his decision to leave Germany after the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938; fleeing by bicycle to Belgium, where he prospered until the war began in September 1939; being arrested as an enemy alien; his experiences in a series of detention camps in southern France; his arrest, imprisonment, and deportation to Auschwitz; arriving at Auschwitz; volunteering to work in a coal mine in Silesia, where he remained until December 1944; being ill with malaria, which he contracted while in French detention camps; the death march he endured after the camp’s evacuation in advance of the Soviet Army’s approach; being liberated by Russian Mongol soldiers; journeying to a transit camp in Magdeburg, Germany; reuniting with his fiancee; returning with her to Paris, France, where they settled and he became a chef; and immigrating to California in 1962.

    Oral history interview with Lya Galperin

    Oral history interview with Lya Galperin

    Oral History

    Lya Galperin discusses her childhood in a small town near Kishinev, Romania (Chisinau, Moldova); her family's flight after the invasion of Nazi Germany; a traumatic incident in which Romanian soldiers sexually assaulted the women in their group, after which the family returned to their home town; her family’s imprisonment in the local synagogue; her experiences in the ghetto of Beshard, Ukraine from 1943 until her liberation in 1945; her postwar life in the Soviet Union; her marriage; her life in Riga, Latvia; her mother's attempts at helping the family immigrate to the west; and her eventual immigration to San Francisco, California in 1981.

    Oral history interview with Lore Gilbert

    Oral history interview with Lore Gilbert

    Oral History

    Lore Gilbert, born in Worms, Germany in 1929, describes her childhood in Worms; the antisemitism she experienced as a child; the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938 and its impact on her family when her father's assets were confiscated; the family's move to Heidelberg, Germany and their deportation to France; their experiences in Gurs concentration camp; the family's selection by the Dominican Republic Settlement Association (DORSA) to be sent to the Dominican Republic; the Jewish refugee community in Sosua, Dominican Republic; the dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina; the security and safety Jewish refugees enjoyed in the Dominican Republic during the war years; her family's immigration to the United States; her father's difficulties in adjusting to their new life; the experiences of her grandparents, who remained in France during the war years and were sheltered by the French Catholic Church; and the trauma and fear she has felt over the years as a result of her Holocaust-related experiences.

    Oral history interview with Rita Goldman

    Oral history interview with Rita Goldman

    Oral History

    Rita Goldman discusses her childhood in Berlin, Germany; her parents' painful decision to send her on a Kindertransport; leaving Germany for England in 1939; the kindness of the family with whom she stayed; the events of the war years; corresponding with her parents, who had fled to Shanghai, China; her reunion with her parents after the war; and the difficulties she experienced in adjusting to life with them.

    Oral history interview with Mala Holcberg

    Oral history interview with Mala Holcberg

    Oral History

    Mala Holcberg describes her childhood in Poland; her early memories of the Nazi occupation of Poland and crimes committed against Jews and her family's desire to flee Poland; the confiscation of her family's possessions and the family's deportation to an unidentified ghetto; her experiences in the ghetto; the murder of her father; being deported to an unidentified concentration camp, where the inmates were forced to make bombs and grenades; the terrible conditions in the camp and her illnesses; the camp's liberation by Soviet troops; her return to Poland; her marriage and family; her present ill health and the lasting emotional effects of her experiences during the Holocaust; and the loss of many family members.

    Oral history interview with Kate Kaiser

    Oral history interview with Kate Kaiser

    Oral History

    Kate Kaiser describes her childhood in Mistek, Austria (now Czech Republic); her marriage and move to Hamburg, Germany; the rise of antisemitism after the Nazi's rise to power; how she and her husband were affected by the Nuremberg Laws; their decision to leave Germany after their daughter was born; the wait to obtain papers; her husband's move to the United States in advance of them; waiting with her daughter in Mistek until August 1938 when their visas arrived; her adjustment to life as an immigrant in the United States; her attempts to find her family after the war; learning of the death of her family, all of whom perished except for one brother and a cousin; and her trip to Prague, Czech Republic in 1998 to discover the details of her mother's fate.

    Oral history interview with Tatjana Khepoyan-Viner

    Oral history interview with Tatjana Khepoyan-Viner

    Oral History

    Tatjana Khepoyan-Viner describes her childhood in Odessa, Ukraine; her family life and her marriage at age 19; the outbreak of World War II being ejected from her home by her neighbors and being imprisoned with her family in Odessa; the ensuing chaotic events; being separated from two of her brothers; being placed on trains to a small village, where she endured terrible conditions with her younger brother, daughter, and mother; the threat of mass murder; escaping with her mother and daughter; being transported to a series of villages; attempted sexual assault at the hands of a Rumanian officer; being separated from her mother; successfully passing as a non-Jew and working as a cook at a police station until the end of the war; reuniting with her mother and husband; and immigrating to the United States with her family in 1978.

    Oral history interview with Vera J. Lieban-Kalmar

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Nadine Lieberman

    Oral history interview with Nadine Lieberman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Bernard Offen

    Oral history interview with Bernard Offen

    Oral History

    Bernard Offen discusses his childhood in Krakow, Poland; his early experiences with antisemitism; the events he witnessed during the German invasion of Poland in 1939; his experiences in the Krakow Ghetto starting in 1941, including the deportations of many family members and hiding from raids; being deported to Płaszów in 1943; his narrow escape from Płaszów; hiding in a nearby camp with a family member; his deportation to Mauthausen; his subsequent deportation to Auschwitz in August 1944; his experiences in Auschwitz; his transfer in October 1944 to a subcamp of Dachau near Landsberg; his experiences in the subcamp; being on a death march in May 1945; being liberated by the United States Army; his search for other surviving family members; the fates of the rest of his family; immigrating to the United Kingdom after the war; his subsequent immigration to the United States; enlisting in the United States Army to serve in the Korean War; his life after the war; returning to Poland to conduct tours of Holocaust-related sites; the time he spends speaking about his personal experiences.

    Oral history interview with William Pels

    Oral history interview with William Pels

    Oral History

    William Pels, born on May 11, 1924 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, discusses his prewar experiences in Amsterdam; his memories of the German invasion of Holland in 1940; the changes that he witnessed during the occupation; witnessing the arrest and deportation of Jews; the German raids on homes to find hidden Jews; his own close call with deportation; moving to Vienna, Austria in 1942 to work in a hotel; his experiences with wartime Vienna; the bombing campaign by the Soviets in March 1945; travelling into Hungary, where he remained until May 1945; his postwar activities; working for the United States Army; working in a former concentration camp; returning to Holland; marrying his wife in Great Britain; immigrating to the United States in 1957; and his life in America.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Plainfield

    Oral history interview with Ruth Plainfield

    Oral History

    Ruth Plainfield (née Oppenheimer), born on January 27, 1925 in Gau Bickelheim, Germany, discusses her childhood in Mainz, Germany; the rise of the Nazi party to power; her father's arrest in 1935 and the effect that had on her; her childhood encounters with antisemitism; her family's immigration to the United States; living first in New York and then San Francisco, CA; her family's experiences in California; her education; and learning of the fate of family members, including a grandfather who died in Theresienstadt.

    Oral history interview with Thomas Schneider

    Oral history interview with Thomas Schneider

    Oral History

    Thomas Schneider discusses his childhood in Vienna, Austria; being raised as a Catholic child of a Jewish father and a Jewish mother who had converted to Catholicism; being forced to leave school and study at a Jewish school in 1938 after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany; his family's immigration in March 1939 to the United States; settling in New York, NY; his experiences in school, college, and law school; his legal career; and the conflicts he has felt throughout his life about his Jewish identity.

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Shlyapochnik

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Sieradzki

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Sieradzki

    Oral History

    Benjamin Sieradzki, born on February 4, 1927 in Zgierz, Poland, discusses his childhood in Zgierz; his awareness in 1938 about Hitler and the discrimination experienced by German Jews; his memories of the mobilization of the Polish Army, and the invasion of Poland by Nazi forces in September 1939; hiding from the bombing; his brothers' escape to the Soviet section of Poland; his family's move to the Łódź ghetto; the harsh conditions in the ghetto; the first deportations in 1941; Chaim Rumkowski's leadership in the ghetto; a visit by Heinrich Himmler in 1942; the deportation in September 1942 of the ill, elderly, and children, during which his parents were sent to Chelmno and killed in gas vans; the liquidation of the ghetto in 1944; his transport, with one sister, to Auschwitz; watching the selections and seeing his sister being taken to the gas chambers; his experiences in Birkenau, then in a concentration camp in Hannover where he worked for the Continental Rubber factory; being forced to work in a quarry, where he became emaciated, sick with dysentery, and indifferent to his fate; the abandonment of the camp by German troops; being liberated; the state of his health and his experiences in military hospitals and then in convalescent homes in Sweden; experiencing anti-Jewish sentiment in Sweden; being smuggled to Denmark to stay with his uncle; his reunion with his older brothers, who had survived the war; the difficulties of his living situation; his immigration to the United States in 1953; and his marriage and family life in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Gisela Spigel

    Oral history interview with Gisela Spigel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Erika Weingarten

    Oral history interview with Erika Weingarten

    Oral History

    Erika Weingarten (née Mosler), born on October 9, 1918 in Berlin, Germany, discusses her childhood in Berlin; her assimilated family life; her education; the few instances of antisemitism she experienced; her family's decision to send her out of Germany to attend school in Switzerland and her experiences there; her journey in August 1939 to Great Britain, where she reunited with her parents; their immigration to the United States in March 1940; the work she performed; her continued education; passing as Swiss when she tried to get work; her trips to Europe in later years and the closure she experienced; and her thoughts about the German people.

    Oral history interview with Max Weingarten

    Oral history interview with Max Weingarten

    Oral History

    Max Weingarten, born in April 1913 in Lechnau, Poland, discusses his childhood in Vienna, Austria; his education and religious upbringing; studying the law; his work in the film industry with his uncle in London beginning in 1936; his immigration to the United States in 1938 and the work he performed in the film industry; his experiences in the United States Army and his work in intelligence and international law; his life after the war; his marriage and children; his work as a lawyer; his feelings about the United States; and the fates of his other family members.

    Oral history interview with Herman D. Wiener

    Oral history interview with Herman D. Wiener

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Liza Avrutin

    Oral history interview with Liza Avrutin

    Oral History

    Liza Avrutin, born in 1930 in Odessa, Ukraine, describes her big family, which consisted of nine brothers and sisters; how even though her family was not very religious, Liza remembers various religious traditions such as all of the kids saying a Shabbat wish in front of the candles; her mother’s reluctance to leave before the Nazi occupation; her uncle’s evacuation to Tashkent where he and his family survived the Holocaust; the Nazi occupation in October 1941 and the summoning of Jewish residents on December 22; being taken with other Jewish residents to Slobodka (a section of Odessa) where they spent three months; a pogrom in Odessa on October 23-24, 1941 in which much of the remaining Jewish population was murdered; being sent with her family on cattle trains to Vaselinivska; the train journey, during which many passengers died including her father and her four-year-old brother, Boris; her mother’s psychological reaction to their deaths and her eventual death; being taken to Vasnisenska (Voznesensk, Ukraine), where they were sorted and sent to different places; being sent to Babini Balki in Krivoruchka, Ukraine; the lack of food and the death of many of the imprisoned people from starvation; the arrival of the Russians, who murdered all the civilians; being one of two survivors (Rosa Lifchitza also survived) who were rescued by the nearby villagers; waking up in Nadia Zhigalovna’s house with a bullet wound on the top of her head; hiding her Jewish identity by saying her name was “Lida” not “Liza”; changing her name to Valentina Ivanovna Panchivka; her life in the village and the sacrifices her new mother made for her; living with Nadia and her family until 1947; staying in close contact with the family that rescued her; getting married and immigrated to the United States; and changing her name back to Liza when she became a US citizen.

    Oral history interview with Aleksandr Belfor

    Oral history interview with Aleksandr Belfor

    Oral History

    Aleksandr Belfor, born September 18, 1923, describes his childhood in Kishinev, Ukraine (now Chisinău Moldova); the onset of the war and his family's escape from the approaching Nazi forces to Alma-Ata, Khazakstan, where Mr.Belfor lived and studied medicine until he was inducted into the Soviet Army; the stories he heard about the tragic fate of many family members during the Holocaust, including the sexual assault of one aunt; being arrested and imprisoned after the end of the war; his life in the Soviet Union and the antisemitism he encountered there; and his immigration to the United States in 1983.

    Oral history interview with Semyon Berenshteyn

    Oral history interview with Semyon Berenshteyn

    Oral History

    Semyon Berenshteyn discusses his childhood in Moldova; the family's move from Balta to Odesa after the beginning of the war in 1941; the occupation of the area by Nazi troops; the establishment of a ghetto in Balta; working for a Christian friend; passing as a non-Jew by wearing a crucifix; learning of war news from Christian neighbors; the forced labor imposed on Jews; the murders of Jewish men, women and children by German soldiers, including the death of his father; liberation by Soviet troops in March 1944; his service in the Soviet armed forces; his marriage and the birth of his son; and his immigration with his family to the United States in 1988.

    Oral history interview with George Denes

    Oral history interview with George Denes

    Oral History

    George Denes, born on September 9, 1936 in Budapest, Hungary, describes his family and early life; the fates of different family members; growing up Jewish but not Orthodox; the beginning of the war at which point his father was sent to the front to perform forced military labor and his return before the German occupation began; antisemitism before and during the war; Polish refugees arriving in 1939 and 1940; the belief amongst Hungarian Jews that the Nazi policies would not affect them; the German occupation and his father relocating the immediate family to another part of the city; his mother working as a nurse for a wealthy family while he and his brother stayed in a "private day care" for Jewish children; being discovered and escaping; his father acquiring false papers for the family (new surname was Faketta); staying with an older Christian woman until her son, a Nazi sympathizer, had the boys and their father arrested and taken to a local Nazi headquarters; being imprisoned in the basement of the building with other Jews and some other people arrested by the Nazis; being taken on December 29, 1944 with his family to the river to be shot by the Nazis and being saved when the German army prevented the Hungarian Nazis from shooting in this area; escaping the prison a few days later; reuniting with his mother and going with his family to the eastern side of the river; hiding for several weeks in the basement of a villa; having difficulties acquiring food and being near starvation by the time the Red Army liberated the city; being given food, baths, and clean clothes by the Russians; attending a Jewish high school after the war; being refused by the university because he attended a religious high school; befriending the head of the university's engineering department and being accepted the following year (1956) [note that the first interview includes family photographs]; the revolutionary period following 1956 as well as his life as a university student in mechanical engineering; everyday life in post-war Communist Hungary, including some analysis of the political and social climate of that period; his life after the revolution, including his marriage, the birth of his son, and his military career; his family's two attempts to defect, once without help, and once with help (the second one was successful); the time they spent in Vienna, Austria while their refugee status was established; the help given to them by HIAS; the medical care given to Robert, who had contracted typhus during their escape; his life in the United States, including his career as an electrical engineer working in semiconductors and his divorce; and his state of mind at various points in his life.

    Oral history interview with Lev Dumer

    Oral history interview with Lev Dumer

    Oral History

    Lev Dumer, born in 1919 in Odessa, Ukraine, describes the Jewish community in Odessa before the war; experiencing antisemitism before the war; the deaths of his maternal grandparents in pogroms; receiving a degree in radio engineering; working in Kirovograd (Kropyvnyts'kyi, Ukraine) when the war began; the German occupation of Kiev; the Jewish response to the invasion; his family’s evacuation to Chelyabinsk in August 1941; his grandmother, Pena Gershova Dumer, dying while evacuating later in 1943; the Romanians entering Odessa; Jews having to register; the denouncement of Jewish families by antisemitic neighbors living in the same building as his family; the hanging of his college mathematics and physics professor, Foodim, for failing to register; the roundups and mass murders in Odessa; Alexander Sepino, who was able to escape imprisonment; observing a minute of silence every day for five years as a prayer for those who perished; the deportation of the remaining Jews to a ghetto in Slobodka; various righteous people who risked their lives to save Jews, including Oleg Krist and Jora Temoshenko; the experience of his aunt, uncle, and two cousins in Pervopol; the difficulty of living during the Stalin regime; the growing antisemitic trend in Russia during the years following WWII; the Russian government hiding the evidence of the Holocaust from the people; and spending many years gathering information from survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust in Ukraine in order to preserve the memory for future generations.

    Oral history interview with Anisim Dworkin

    Oral history interview with Anisim Dworkin

    Oral History

    Anisim Dworkin, born in 1923 in Smirenskiy, Soviet Union (possibly one of the many Russian places named Smirnovskiy), describes how at the time Jews were required to live in a few designated towns in the Soviet Union; his great-grandfather, who served in the Tsar’s army as a cannon operator for 12 years and was thus given the right to live in a Russian town even though he was Jewish; the regret he feels for having spent his childhood in a Russian town because it stripped him of the rich Jewish culture he saw in his parents, including celebration of Jewish holidays and speaking Yiddish; not experiencing antisemitism as a child but being teased as a child for being part of the lower middle-class; moving with his family to a kolkhoz in Smolensk in 1928; having a good life on the farm until the famine in 1933; several of his aunts and uncles who moved to Brest, Belarus with their families; the arrest of his older brother for writing a letter expressing anti-Hitler sympathies in 1939; the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941; being sent to the east since he was not able to serve in the army because of an injury to the eye; being accepted to serve in the Allied army for four months; studying after the war at a university in Ural (possibly Ural Federal University); working in the oil industry in Ural after the war and being discriminated against because of his religion; being fired from a job as head of the research department at a university because of rumors that he was involved in the Zionist movement; his life now in Perim, North Ural (probably Perm’, Russia); his daughter who is married to a non-Jew; and reuniting with his older brother in 1987.

    Oral history interview with Ernest Feld

    Oral history interview with Ernest Feld

    Oral History

    Ernest Feld discusses his childhood in Lucenec, Slovakia, close to the Hungarian border; the occupation of his town by Hungary in 1938; the onset of anti-Jewish restrictions and curfews; his removal to a ghetto; being conscripted for forced labor in 1944; being able to continue his apprenticeship in a bakery; the advance of the Soviet Army and the ensuing confusion; his return to Lucenec in November 1945; his reunion with his mother; their move to Prague, and then Karlsbad; their decision to immigrate to Israel; the boat trip to Israel; the detention of the group in Cyprus by the British; his life in Cyprus until 1949; emigrating from Cyprus to Israel with his wife, whom he met in Cyprus; his successful bakeries in Israel; his later move to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Lya Galperin

    Oral History

    Lya Galperin discusses her childhood in a small town near Kishinev, Romania; her family's flight after the German invasion; the gang rape of women by Romanian soldiers; her family’s imprisonment in the local synagogue; her experiences in the ghetto of Beshard, in the Ukraine, from 1943 until her liberation in 1945; her postwar life in the Soviet Union; her marriage and life in Riga; her mother's attempts at helping the family immigrate to the west; and her eventual immigration to San Francisco in 1981.

    Oral history interview with Mae Lopatin Herman

    Oral history interview with Mae Lopatin Herman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Inna Kagan

    Oral history interview with Inna Kagan

    Oral History

    Inna Kagan, born in 1937 in Kharkov (Kharkiv), Ukraine, discusses her childhood in Kharkov; being a descendant from Khazars; the evacuation of her family in September 1941 to Khazakstan; her father's later evacuation to Perm, Russia; her family's move to Bukhoro, Uzbekistan; and the family's reunion in Kharkov in December 1944. She dicsusses the destruction of the city and learning of the death of her paternal grandparents at the hands of the Nazis. Ms. Kagan describes the increase in antisemitism that she experienced after the war, and emigrating with her family to the United States in 1989.

    Oral history interview with J. Daniel Khazzoom

    Oral history interview with J. Daniel Khazzoom

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Vilem Kriz

    Oral history interview with Vilem Kriz

    Oral History

    Vilem Kriz discusses his experiences in the Czech Republic (then Czechoslovakia) in the late 1930s and under Nazi occupation; his observations, as a journalist, of the unfolding events of Nazi aggression; an encounter with Reinhard Heydrich in 1936; the mobilization of a small national army in 1937; the betrayal of Czechoslovakia by its allies in 1938; the grief of the Czech people after Nazi troops occupied Prague in March 1939; demonstrations against the Nazis by university students and reprisals that came after; his experiences as part of the Czech underground; and conditions in Czechoslovakia during its occupation and after the war ended.

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Lapan

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Lapan

    Oral History

    Mikhail Lapan, born on March 9, 1920 in Bobruisk, Belarus, discusses his childhood in Bobruisk; his enlistment in 1941 at the age of 16 in the Soviet Army; the German attack on Bobruisk; his hospitalization in 1942 in Stalingrad (Volgograd); the invasion of Stalingrad by the Germans; an incident in which the German troops removed the hospital patients and selected Jews and Communists for execution, and that by using the name of a fellow patient who had died earlier that day, he was able to escape that fate; being forced to work in a salt mine in Peine, Germany; having his Jewish identity betrayed; his escape, recapture, and removal to Braunschweig concentration camp; being liberated by US troops; being returned to the Soviet Union; his work in a coal mine in Harlov; his marriage; his return to Bobruisk, where he discovered that he parents had died during the war; and his eventual immigration to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Sofiya Manoylo

    Oral history interview with Sofiya Manoylo

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Shaya Neys

    Oral history interview with Shaya Neys

    Oral History

    Shaya Neys, born on June 28, 1927 in Liepaja, Latvia, discusses his childhood in Liepaja; the arrest of his family in June 1941 by the Russian security agency NKVD, and the family's transport to a military port, where the men were separated from the women and children; traveling by train with his mother to Krasnoyarsk, Russia; their experiences of forced labor and misery in various locations in Siberia until the end of the war; difficulties in returning to Latvia after the war ended and his return in 1956; his reunion with his son and their lives in Riga, Latvia; learning that his father died in a labor camp, and that many of his relatives from Liepaja perished; and his reflections that their deportation to Siberia probably saved his and his mother's lives.

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Sieradzki

    Oral History

    The interview describes Mr. Sieradzki's childhood in Zgierz, Poland; his awareness in 1938 about Hitler and the discrimination experienced by German Jews; his memories of the mobilization of the Polish Army, and the invasion of Poland by Nazi forces in September 1938. Mr. Sieradzki describes hiding from the bombing; his brothers' escape to the Soviet sector of Poland; and his family's move to the Łódź ghetto. Mr. Sieradzki recalls the harsh conditions there; the first transports in 1941; Chaim Rumkowski's leadership in the ghetto; a visit by Heinrich Himmler in 1942; and the deportation in September 1942 of the ill, elderly and children, during which his parents were sent to Chelmno and killed in gas vans. He describes the liquidation of the ghetto in 1944; his transport, with one sister, to Auschwitz; watching Dr. Mengele make selections and seeing his sister being taken to the gas chambers. Mr. Sieradzki describes his experiences in Birkenau, then in a concentration camp in Hannover where he worked for the Continental Rubber factory, and then in a quarry, where he became emaciated, sick with dysentary, and indifferent to his fate. He recalls the abandonment of the camp by German troops, his liberation, the dreadful state of his health and his experiences in military hospitals and then in convalescent homes in Sweden. Mr. Sieradzki describes anti-Jewish sentiment in Sweden, being smuggled to Denmark to stay with his uncle, and his reunion with his older brothers, who had survived the war. He discusses the difficulties of his living situation, and describes his immigration to the United States in 1953, and his marriage and family life in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Rahilia Sirota

    Oral history interview with Rahilia Sirota

    Oral History

    Rahilia Sirota (née Aizenman), born in 1913, discusses her childhood in Chemirovits (now Chemerivtsi), Ukraine; the Nazi occupation of her town in the summer of 1941; her move to a nearby village; learning that the Jewish community of Chemirovits had been taken to the Kamentsk Podolsky ghetto, where 80 of her relatives were killed days after their arrival (this included her parents and younger brother); living in fear in the village she had moved to, and being rescued by two brothers, Nikolay and Pavlo Kuchman [PH], who hid her and then her boyfriend throughout the remaining years of the war; living in holes in the corn fields and caves; moving from village to village; living in barns and hiding from the Ukrainian SS; the assistance she received from the Kuchman brothers and other Ukrainians; learning of the liberation of the Chemirovits in March 1945; her reunion with her boyfriend; finding that everything they had was gone; getting married; the birth of her son; her life in post-war Ukraine until her immigration to the United States; and her enduring gratitude to those who hid and save her during the war years.

    Oral history interview with Tom Szelenyi

    Oral history interview with Tom Szelenyi

    Oral History

    Tom Szelenyi discusses his childhood in Budapest, Hungary; his assimilated family life; his education; his religious upbringing; the antisemitism he experienced while growing up and the increase of antisemitism after the war began in 1939; his family's deportation to the ghetto in Budapest; the anti-Jewish laws; being deported to a Hungarian military labor camp in 1944 and the changes he experienced after the Germans occupied Hungary; his experiences on a forced march in October 1944 from Budapest to Wiener Neustadt, Austria; his journey to Buchenwald by train; the conditions there; the cruelty of the guards; his transfer to Colditz a month later; the work he performed; his experiences on a death march in April 1945 to Terezin (Theresienstadt); his liberation there by the Soviet Army and the conditions after; his return to Budapest; his reunion with his mother; his work with the American Joint Distribution Committee; his experiences in the DP (displaced persons) camp in Ulm, Germany; his immigration to the United States in 1948; his life in the US; his family; and his work.

    Oral history interview with Irving Zale

    Oral history interview with Irving Zale

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Tamara Albukh

    Oral history interview with Tamara Albukh

    Oral History

    Tamara Iosifovna Albukh, born on December 21, 1918 in Minsk, Belarus, describes her childhood; having to leave school after six years to work and contribute to her family financially; getting married and having two daughters (Sara born on May 5, 1940 and Gena born on August 31, 1942); not being able to evacuate once the war started; the German occupation of Minsk; her husband being taken into the army; moving into one of the Jewish ghettos in Minsk; pogroms in the ghettos; doing forced labor in the ghetto and the murder of her daughters one day while she was working; being moved to Trostinetskiy (Maly Trostinec) concentration camp and having to work for the Germans; the murder of inmates every day in the camp and ghetto; escaping the camp on July 29, 1944; the intensification of antisemitism during the war; hearing Russians scream the slogan “Kill Jews, save Russia” which continued even after the war; and having two daughters after the war in 1946 and 1949.

    Oral history interview with Bernard Broclawski

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with George Denes

    Oral History

    George Denes, born on September 9, 1936 in Budapest, Hungary, describes his family and early life; the fates of different family members; growing up Jewish but not Orthodox; the beginning of the war at which point his father was sent to the front to perform forced military labor and his return before the German occupation began; antisemitism before and during the war; Polish refugees arriving in 1939 and 1940; the belief amongst Hungarian Jews that the Nazi policies would not affect them; the German occupation and his father relocating the immediate family to another part of the city; his mother working as a nurse for a wealthy family while he and his brother stayed in a "private day care" for Jewish children; being discovered and escaping; his father acquiring false papers for the family (new surname was Faketta); staying with an older Christian woman until her son, a Nazi sympathizer, had the boys and their father arrested and taken to a local Nazi headquarters; being imprisoned in the basement of the building with other Jews and some other people arrested by the Nazis; being taken on December 29, 1944 with his family to the river to be shot by the Nazis and being saved when the German army prevented the Hungarian Nazis from shooting in this area; escaping the prison a few days later; reuniting with his mother and going with his family to the eastern side of the river; hiding for several weeks in the basement of a villa; having difficulties acquiring food and being near starvation by the time the Red Army liberated the city; being given food, baths, and clean clothes by the Russians; attending a Jewish high school after the war; being refused by the university because he attended a religious high school; befriending the head of the university's engineering department and being accepted the following year (1956) [note that the first interview includes family photographs]; the revolutionary period following 1956 as well as his life as a university student in mechanical engineering; everyday life in post-war Communist Hungary, including some analysis of the political and social climate of that period; his life after the revolution, including his marriage, the birth of his son, and his military career; his family's two attempts to defect, once without help, and once with help (the second one was successful); the time they spent in Vienna, Austria while their refugee status was established; the help given to them by HIAS; the medical care given to Robert, who had contracted typhus during their escape; his life in the United States, including his career as an electrical engineer working in semiconductors and his divorce; and his state of mind at various points in his life.

    Oral history interview with Audrey Doughty

    Oral history interview with Audrey Doughty

    Oral History

    Audrey Doughty, born in San Diego, California in 1921, describes her mother, who died when Audrey was three years old; her father, who was a naval officer and a member of the diplomatic core; going with her father to Berlin when he was stationed there in 1938; transferring from Stanford University to the University of Berlin; being in Berlin during Kristallnacht and taking photos afterward; writing a journal entry describing that night; having little notion of what was really happening in Germany apart from Kristallnacht as well as the antisemitic and anti-American sentiment from the Germans; how soon after arriving in Berlin, she and her father were invited to review the troops with Nazi officials; sitting in the stands three feet from Adolf Hitler, watching endless waves of troops pass underneath; going with her grandmother on a tour of Germany and neighboring countries in 1939; working at the American consulate after she turned 18; her duties, which consisted of convincing refugees applying for visas to leave the country; being evacuated to Copenhagen in 1940; returning to the US after the war ended; graduating from Stanford University; working as a war correspondent in Honolulu and then went to work for the San Francisco Chronicle; working in the Office of War Information and then working as an Associated Press correspondent in China; leaving journalism and pursuing a career as a social worker; becoming the director of the International Institute in San Francisco from 1975 to 1983; spending two and a half years as the director of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation; founding and directing the AIDS Benefits Counselors; directing AIDS Indigent Direct Services; her plans to write a book about her family's history; writing many editorials on possible fascist trends in American society; and her thoughts on Germans [note that artifacts relating to her experiences are shown at the close of the interview].

    Oral history interview with Sara Gelender

    Oral history interview with Sara Gelender

    Oral History

    Sara Gelender (née Buzyn), born circa 1927 in Warsaw, Poland, discusses her childhood in Warsaw; her memories of the bombing and burning of Warsaw in September 1939; her family's escape to a farm near the Russian border; hiding there for several months; being part of a group of Jewish refugees sent to Siberia in June 1940; the primitive conditions in the labor camp; the work she performed in the camp; getting married in the camp; leaving the camp with her husband for a small town; her continual state of hunger during those years; moving with her husband to Ukraine in 1944; returning to Poland in 1946; the antisemitism they encountered in Poland; escaping to Czechoslovakia, Vienna, and then to a displaced persons camp in Germany; moving to Paris, France, where they lived until 1951; their immigration first to Canada, and then to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Sofia Ginzbursky

    Oral history interview with Sofia Ginzbursky

    Oral History

    Sofia Ginzbursky (born on December 27, 1915 in Asipavichy, Belarus) describes her mother, who died at the age of 27, soon after she gave birth; going with her siblings to live with their grandfather, who observed Jewish traditions; studying at a technical school in Gomel (Homel), Belarus; living in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), working as a nanny and secretary; getting married and moving to Gomel; moving later to Belostock (Białystok), Poland; being left alone with their two children when her husband was called up for military duty at the beginning of WWII; evacuating from Belostock by train to Zlobin (ZHlobin, Belarus) and then to Baranovichi, Ukraine; destroying all her documents to hide her Jewish identity; witnessing the persecution of Jews in Ukraine when locals helped the Nazis find Jews; how speaking German helped her find a job at a food exchange center where she received food to feed her children; obtaining false papers with a new last name that showed she was Russian and not Jewish; returning to Gomel to look for remaining family members and being captured by the Nazis and was humiliated by Politsai for several days; being released and living with a woman named Nadia Lisitskaya; passing as a gentile refugee from Poland; washing clothes for the German army in exchange for soap and kerosene; seeing the deportation of hundreds of Jews from the Gomel ghetto; traveling with her friend, Sonia, as well as all their children to Oryol (Orel), Russia; finding a new place of stay every night so no one would suspect them of being Jewish; living with Sonia and the children at the house of a Latvian lady for two years; choosing to not wear the Star of David as was requried for the Jews by the Nazis; passing as Russian Orthodox; having a Russian lady teach her son how to pray to an icon when bombings occured; working small jobs while in Oryol; being liberated and moving to Leningrad; getting a new passport and stating her nationality as “Jewish” again; reuniting with her husband in Chkalov (possibly Orenburg, Russia) with the help of her sister; experiencing even more antisemitism after the war; and becoming more observant after the war.

    Oral history interview with Genia Likwornik

    Oral history interview with Genia Likwornik

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Mark Malamud

    Oral history interview with Mark Malamud

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Annemarie Roeper

    Oral history interview with Annemarie Roeper

    Oral History

    Annemarie Roeper (née Bondy), born August 27, 1918 in Vienna, Austria, describes her childhood in Vienna; her parents' progressive boarding school; her memories of the Nazi ascension to power; her mother's move to Switzerland in 1936 with Annemarie’s siblings; remaining behind to graduate; her father selling their school; the family's reunion in Switzerland; her psychoanalysis studies in Vienna with Anna Freund; her husband-to-be's warning to flee; immigrating with her family to the United States in 1939; moving to Vermont, where they opened a school; her marriage and move to Michigan with her husband; and opening a progressive school for gifted children there called Roeper School.

    Oral history interview with Irina Rozhanskaya

    Oral history interview with Irina Rozhanskaya

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ilse Sternberger

    Oral history interview with Ilse Sternberger

    Oral History

    Ilse Sternberger (née Naumann), born in 1914, discusses her childhood in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland); her assimilated family life; her education; her marriage and her decision to move to Belgium with her husband in 1933; her life in Belgium; her husband's success as a photographer; their decision to move to London, England in 1936; returning to Germany in 1939 in an attempt to help Jewish children leave the country, and being stymied by the bureaucracy; immigrating to the United States with her husband and children in July 1940; her life in the US; her work as a teacher and writer; and her curation of books and exhibits of her husband's work.

    Oral history interview with Clara Tsukerman

    Oral history interview with Clara Tsukerman

    Oral History

    Clara Tsukerman discusses her childhood in Chisneau, Romania (now Chișinău, Moldova) and her experiences after the war began in her region in 1941; her experiences during her family's journey on foot to Vasylivka, Ukraine; their efforts to evade the advancing German front; and their life in hiding in an unnamed village after the Germans caught up with them; the help and protection they received from the villagers, as well as her experiences during and after the war.

    Oral history interview with Sam Weiss

    Oral history interview with Sam Weiss

    Oral History

    Sam Weiss, born in 1928 in Ricka, Czechoslovakia (now in Ukraine), discusses his childhood in Ricka, Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine); the occupation of the town by Hungarian soldiers; the conscription of Jewish men for forced labor; his father being sent to Germany for forced labor; the institution of anti-Jewish restrictions such as yellow stars and in March 1944, the deportation of the Jews of Ricka; his arrival at Auschwitz; being separated from his family and sent first a children's barracks; being sent to Camp Four in Munich, Germany; being sent to Landsberg, a sub-camp of Dachau, where he was liberated by American troops in 1945; his return to Ricka, where he was reunited with his sister; his attempts to escape Czechoslovakia; his imprisonment by Russian soldiers; his escape to Munich; his immigration to the United States; his service in the United States military; and his family life and career in California.

    Oral history interview with Edith Wertheimer

    Oral history interview with Edith Wertheimer

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Laszlo Vass

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Jakob Atlas

    Oral history interview with Jakob Atlas

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Isaac Silber

    Oral history interview with Isaac Silber

    Oral History

    Isaac Silber, born in 1913 in Złoczów Poland (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), discusses his childhood in Złoczów; the occupation of Złoczów by German troops; the violent and terrifying conditions of the Nazi occupation; his escape from murder by German troops; being conscripted for forced labor in a brick factory; returning to Złoczów to learn of the murder of family members; his experiences in the Złoczów ghetto and in work camps; giving up his baby daughter to be cared for by a non-Jewish family; escaping with his wife and finding refuge in the farmhouse of a Polish man who hid them; and the gratitude he feels to his rescuer.

    Oral history interview with Lotte Grunwald

    Oral history interview with Lotte Grunwald

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Anne Marie Roeper

    Oral History

    Anne Marie Roeper describes her childhood in Vienna, Austria; her parents' progressive boarding school; her memories of the Nazi acsencion to power; her mother's move to Switzerland in 1936 with her siblings; remaining behind to graduate; her father's selling of their school; the family's reunion in Switzerland; her psychoanalysis studies in Vienna with Anna Freund; her husband-to-be's warning to flee; immigrating with her family to the United States in 1939; moving to Vermont, where they opened a school; her marriage and move to Michigan with her husband; and opening a progressive school for gifted children there called Roeper School.

    Oral history interview with Janina Swift

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Polya Liza Pekker

    Oral history interview with Polya Liza Pekker

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Paul Nebenzahl

    Oral history interview with Paul Nebenzahl

    Oral History

    Paul Nebenzahl, born August 9, 1921, discusses his childhood in Long Island, New York; his career in advertising; enlisting in the United States Army in 1942; his experiences as a sergeant in the Signal Corps; being part of a secret OSS operational group; working with the French underground movement in southwestern France to hinder the German retreat in 1944; his military service in India and China for the remainder of the war; his life after the war; marrying; having children; and his leisure activities.

    Oral history interview with Meier Lichtenstein

    Oral history interview with Meier Lichtenstein

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Janice Auerbach

    Oral history interview with Janice Auerbach

    Oral History

    Janice Auerbach, born August 7, 1934 in South London, England, describes her childhood in London; the bombings and fear she felt during World War II; her evacuation to a farm in Cornwall; the discomfort she experienced while there; her reunion with her family after the war; her various employments around the world; and her marriage to a Jewish man in 1962.

    Oral history interview with Helmut Kobler

    Oral history interview with Helmut Kobler

    Oral History

    Helmut Kobler, born on January 18, 1928 in Vienna, Austria, discusses his childhood in Vienna and Pohorelice, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic); his experiences growing up with his Jewish father and Catholic mother; his experiences after the annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938; his mother's decision to move herself and her son to Brno, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic); the conditions they lived under; the Nazis' search for his father; being deported to a camp near Ivancice, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) in 1939; the camp’s transformation from a concentration camp to a forced labor camp; working as a coal miner at the camp; the camp’s liquidation in June 1942; being transferred to another labor camp near Oslavany, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic); the work he continued as a coal miner; the conditions at the camp; the brutality of the Czech and German guards; being transferred in the summer of 1944 to a labor camp near Postoloprty, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic); working to construct an underground fuel pipeline; an accusation against him of sabotage; his subsequent imprisonment in Saaz, Czechoslovakia and Karlsbad, Germany (now Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic); the brutality of the guards; the poor conditions there; his escape from Karlsbad while out on a labor detail; being recaptured in Brno; the executions he witnessed while imprisoned there; being transferred by cattle car to a prison in Mirosov; escaping from Mirosov in May 1945, a few days before liberation by the United States Army; the aid he received from refugee organizations after the war; reuniting with his mother; being educated as a mining engineer; defecting to the west with a sample of uranium ore; moving to Canada; and immigrating to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Ellen Leeser

    Oral history interview with Ellen Leeser

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Anne Marie Yellin

    Oral history interview with Anne Marie Yellin

    Oral History

    Anne Marie Yellin (née Feller), born on December 6, 1928 in Chemnitz, Germany, discusses her childhood in Chemnitz; her family life; the changes she experienced after Kristallnacht in November 1938; her father's arrest and release; her parents' decision to leave Germany; her journey with her parents to Belgium in September 1939; her experiences after the German invasion of Belgium in May 1940 and her father's decision to hide her in a convent; her experiences in the convent; moving between institutions to avoid capture by the Nazis; her conversion to Catholicism; her reunion with her parents after liberation in September 1944; their immigration to the United States at a later point; her life in the US; and the emotional aftermath of her wartime experiences.

    Oral history interview with Adele Silber

    Oral history interview with Adele Silber

    Oral History

    Adele Silber discusses her childhood in Warsaw, Poland; her education in a Catholic school; her family's religious practices; her experiences during the German invasion in 1939; hiding her young daughter with a Catholic family; living in hiding on a farm with a group of partisans; her experiences while in hiding, including the lack of food and the necessity of living in the woods near the end of the war; her reunion with her daughter; her decision to immigrate to the United States with her husband and daughter in 1946; and their life in the US.

    Oral history interview with Sylvie Marshall

    Oral history interview with Sylvie Marshall

    Oral History

    Sylvie Marshall (née Bedel), born on July 1, 1923 in Paris, France, discusses her childhood; her older brother Michel Bedel (born 1918) and her younger brother Alain Bedel (born 1926); her father, who was the president of the largest moving and storage company in France before the war; her adolescence in Paris; being raised Catholic; the participation of her father and brother Michel in the French Resistance; her life with her mother in south central France; the liberation of Paris; the story of her father and brother's arrests by the Gestapo and her father's subsequent death in Buchenwald.

    Oral history interview with Elena H. Javor

    Oral history interview with Elena H. Javor

    Oral History

    Elena H. Javor (née Gross), born December 15, 1914 in Martin, Czechoslovakia (now in Slovakia), describes her childhood in Martin; her siblings; her medical education and practice; the birth of her three children; the threat of deportation in 1942; her escape from deportation due to her husband's exemption; Allied bombing in spring 1944; the Slovak national uprising in August 1944; her husband's enlistment to fight; fleeing with her children to a monastery, where they were sheltered; joining her husband in Banska Bystrica; her arrest in October 1944; her husband's disappearance; her liberation in April 1945; her reunion with her three children; learning of her husband's, sister's, and parents' deaths in Auschwitz; her return to Martin with her children; her life after the war; how she studied dermatology; her remarriage; and her family's immigration to the United States in 1968.

    Oral history interview with George Denes

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Joseph Welgreen

    Oral history interview with Joseph Welgreen

    Oral History

    Joseph Welgreen, born in 1918 in Sosnowiec, Poland, discusses his childhood in Sosnowiec; his family life and education; the work he performed; the antisemitism he experienced; the changes he experienced after the German invasion of Poland in 1939; being deported to Annaburg in late 1940, and his subsequent transfers to several other labor camps, including Breslau and Klettendorf (both subcamps of Gross-Rosen); the conditions in these camps, his experiences there, the work he performed in highway construction, and his experiences with the guards and Kapos; being transferred to Bunzlau in 1943; the work he performed as a machinist and the conditions there; his experiences on a death march to Dora in February 1945; the work he performed there and the conditions; his liberation at Bergen-Belsen; his journey to Hannover, Germany; the business he established there; and his immigration to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Frank Weinman

    Oral history interview with Frank Weinman

    Oral History

    Frank Weinman, born on July 9, 1914 in Vienna, Austria, discusses his childhood in Vienna and Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia); the introduction of restrictive anti-Jewish laws in Vienna after the Anschluss in March 1938; the family's definitive move to Bratislava soon after; his marriage; his and his wife's forced move to a ghetto camp after Nazis took control of Czechoslovakia; their experiences there doing manual labor; their fortunate escape through a German baggage firm, HAPAG, to Budapest, Cuba, and finally the United States; his parents' escape to Cuba where his father died; his reunion with his mother in October 1942; the assistance he received from his brother who had immigrated to Chicago, IL in 1938; and the success and prosperity he experienced in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Morris Rosnow

    Oral history interview with Morris Rosnow

    Oral History

    Morris Rosnow (né Moishe Raznov), born on January 7, 1927 in Zdzieciol, Poland (now Dzyatlava, Belarus) discusses his experiences during World War II while hiding in the woods as a member of a Jewish partisan group operating under the organization of the Russian partisans; liberation in 1944 by the Soviet Army; his return to his hometown in Poland, where he remained with his sister until the death of their father; moving to Munich, Germany; earning a degree in engineering; immigrating with his sister to join their other sister in the United States; and earning a degree in pharmacy and raising a family.

    Oral history interview with Gary Schoofs

    Oral history interview with Gary Schoofs

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Gerta Wingerd

    Oral history interview with Gerta Wingerd

    Oral History

    Gerta Wingerd (née Alper), born on September 23, 1923 in Bеrhomet, Romania (now Berehomet, Ukraine), discusses her childhood in Czernowicz, Romania (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine); the increase in antisemitism in 1938 after fascist rule was established; the occupation of her town by Soviet forces in 1939; the retreat of the Soviet forces; her two brothers' escape toward Russia; the occupation of the area by Nazi troops; the establishment of a ghetto; her family's release; their eventual internment in a ghetto camp in Transnistria until 1944; the conditions, difficulties, and disease that were prevalent there; the family's liberation by Soviet troops; her return to Czernowicz; her escape from Romania to Vienna, Austria, where she worked for the United States Army; being sponsored by the Joint Distribution Committee to immigrate to the United States in 1949; and her experiences in New York, Minneapolis, and Great Falls, Montana before marrying and settling in Mill Valley, California.

    Oral history interview with Ilse Eden

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sam Genirberg

    Oral history interview with Sam Genirberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Eva K. Breyer

    Oral History

    Eva Breyer, born on August 18, 1936 in Budapest, Hungary, describes her parents, who converted from Judaism to Catholicism after the death of her grandfather; being christened Catholic; her brother, who was born Jewish and converted when he was about a year old; attending Catholic religious classes; antisemitism in Hungary before the Germans invaded; the laws passed against Jews in the 1930s; the bombings after the war started; the drafting of non-Jewish men for the military and Jewish men for labor service; her father being called up for labor service near Budapest; how her mother was able to keep her father from being sent to the front in 1943; the German occupation, at which time the Jewish laws grew worse; having to move to Jewish houses with other families; the round ups led by the Arrow Cross and police in the summer of 1944; her aunt saving her mother from deportation; moving into an apartment building that was under the protection of the Vatican; her brother, who was sent to a monastery for extra protection; being sent to the hospital where a doctor diagnosed her as sick so she could hide with terminally sick children; going to a convent outside Buda; seeing people being shot into the Danube; going to a Swedish house and finding it empty; the arrival of the Russians; her family, who went to the ghetto while she was in hiding; her father’s death from pneumonia in March after the liberation; the mistreatment of the Hungarians by the Russian soldiers; life under the communists; escaping to Austria and then the United States in 1956; and how she identifies as Catholic.

    Oral history interview with Kurt Levi

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Paul Nebenzahl

    Oral History

    Paul Nebenzahl discusses his childhood in Long Island, NY; his career in advertising; enlisting in the United States Army in 1942; his experiences as a sergeant in the Signal Corps; being part of a secret OSS “operational group” working with the French underground movement in southwestern France to hinder the German retreat in 1944; his military service in India and China for the remainder of the war; his life after the war; marrying; having children; and his leisure activities.

    Oral history interview with Frank Weinman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Olga Nepomyashy

    Oral history interview with Olga Nepomyashy

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Floyd Dade

    Oral history interview with Floyd Dade

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Peter Oppenheim

    Oral history interview with Peter Oppenheim

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ellen Van Creveld

    Oral history interview with Ellen Van Creveld

    Oral History

    Ellen Van Creveld, born in 1933 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, discusses her childhood in Amsterdam; her assimilated family life; her lack of awareness of her Jewish heritage; the changes she experienced after the German invasion of Holland in May 1940, including the new restrictions and her transfer to a Jewish school; her relationships with her non-Jewish friends during this period; the fear of arrest and deportation; her family's decision to go into hiding in November 1943; her experiences while living in hiding; her family's move to Brussels, Belgium with the help of the underground; the false identities they acquired; her experiences in Brussels under false papers, her education; the betrayal of the family and their arrest; her reprieve from deportation due to illness; her experiences in the Jewish hospital and orphanage; her subsequent time spent living in hiding on a farm and in an abandoned castle during the winter of 1944-1945; her reunion with one of her brothers after the end of the war and the fates of her other family members; her postwar life in the United States and Holland; the challenges she faced; her marriage and family; her permanent immigration to the United States in 1956; and her life in the US.

    Oral history interview with Lola Welgreen

    Oral history interview with Lola Welgreen

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Semyon Berenshtein

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sara Gelender

    Oral History

    Sara Gelender discusses her childhood in Warsaw, Poland; her memories of the bombing and burning of Warsaw in September 1939; her family's flight to a farm near the Russian border; hiding there for several months; being part of a group of Jewish refugees sent to Siberia in June 1940; the primitive conditions in the labor camp; the work she performed in the camp; marrying in the camp; leaving the camp with her husband for a small town; her continual state of hunger during those years; moving with her husband to the Ukraine in 1944; returning to Poland in 1946; the antisemitism they encountered in Poland; escaping to Czechoslovakia, Vienna, and then to a displaced persons camp in Germany; moving to Paris, where they lived until 1951; their emigration first to Canada, and finally to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Ilse Sternberger

    Oral history interview with Ilse Sternberger

    Oral History

    Ilse Sternberger (née Naumann), born in 1914, discusses her childhood in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland); her assimilated family life; her education; her marriage and her decision to move to Belgium with her husband in 1933; her life in Belgium; her husband's success as a photographer; their decision to move to London, England in 1936; returning to Germany in 1939 in an attempt to help Jewish children leave the country, and being stymied by the bureaucracy; immigrating to the United States with her husband and children in July 1940; her life in the US; her work as a teacher and writer; and her curation of books and exhibits of her husband's work.

    Oral history interview with Jenny Friedlander

    Oral history interview with Jenny Friedlander

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Leonid Bobrovsky

    Oral history interview with Leonid Bobrovsky

    Oral History

    Leonid Bobrovsky, born on May 4, 1937 in Odessa, Ukraine, describes being only three years old when the war began; his father who fought with the partisans during the war; the Nazi invasion of Odessa, at which time he and his family were in an underground hiding place (“Kotokloomba”) reserved for partisans and their families; hiding with his mother while his older brother and father helped the partisans; getting sick because the hiding place was very wet; the Nazis discovering various entrances to the hiding place and using poisonous gas to force the people out; escaping from the hiding place along with his mother and older brother; getting caught by the Nazis and taken away to the city jail where there were many other Jewish residents; being separated from his mother, who was later murdered by the Nazis; being moved with his brother to a different jail; his brother’s attempted escape and then suicide; being taken to camp Ombarova where he remained until liberation; working even though he was so young; attributing his survival in the ghetto to the women who protected and took care of him; liberation; being taken to an orphanage where he stayed until his father’s return; his father, who remarried after the war; attending school and studying construction at a college; being married twice and having two daughters; and naming his younger daughter, Polina Bobrovskaya, after his mother.

    Oral history interview with Sam Genirberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Joseph Schein

    Oral history interview with Joseph Schein

    Oral History

    Joseph Schein discusses his childhood is Sosnowiec, Poland; his experiences with antisemitism, and how his plans to immigrate to the United States were disrupted by the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany; being sent to his mother’s hometown Brzostowica-Wielka, Poland (now Vialikaia Berastavitsa, Belarus); avoiding forced labor in Russia by returning to Sosnowiec; being conscripted for forced labor by the Germans in October 1940; his experiences in several forced labor and concentration camps throughout the war years, which included Geppersdorf, Gross Sarne, Kleinmangersdorf, Wiesau, Waldau, Casper Bowder, Gintersdorf, Rostitz, Hundsfeld, Hirschberg, Gross-Rosen, Dachau, and Buchenwald; the conditions in these camps and the various labors he was forced to perform; being witness to medical experiments at Hundsfeld; enduring a death march from Buchenwald; being liberated by American troops; being hospitalized; his marriage to his childhood sweetheart and their stay in a displaced persons camp in Ainring, Germany; immigrating to the United States in June 1946; being the only member of his family that survived the Holocaust; immigrating with an accordion, which was his only possession at the time; and his experiences in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Nicholas Nagi-Talavera

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Edith Eva Eger

    Oral history interview with Edith Eva Eger

    Oral History

    Edith Eger (née Elefant), born on September 29, 1927 in Kosice, Hungary (now Slovakia), describes her father (Lajos), who was a tailor, and her mother (Helen Klein), who worked for the Hungarian ministry; her two sisters, Magda and Klara; her favorite memories are of her mother's cooking; her childhood, during which she trained in ballet and gymnastics; preparing to compete for the Olympics for Hungary but being disqualified because she was Jewish; her sisters, who were gifted musicians; the story of how her sister Klara was smuggled out of Hungary when the war began by one of her professors from the music academy in Budapest; the German occupation of Hungary; being taken to a brick factory; being deported with her sister, parents, aunts, and uncles to Auschwitz in May 1944; being separated from her parents, and thus spared the gas chambers; being selected to dance for Dr. Josef Mengele; using her talent for gymnastics and dancing to help survive in Auschwitz; conditions in the barracks; how she helped Magda survive in the camp; being liberated from Gunskirchen on May 4, 1945, at which time she had five types of typhoid fever, pneumonia, and no hair left; going to a displaced persons camp, where she met her husband and became pregnant; immigrating to the United States in 1949, going first to New York, and then to Baltimore, where she worked in a factory; moving to Texas, where she had two more children and attended the University of Texas at Austin; earning her doctorate; moving to San Diego, CA and working as a family therapist; and how her grandchildren are her world and how she lives every day for them. Ms. Eger, her parents, aunts and uncles, and her eldest sister Magda, were deported to Auschwitz in May 1944. Ms. Eger was separated from her parents; she and her sister Magda were spared the gas chambers. Because of her talent for ballet, Ms. Eger was selected to dance for Dr. Josef Mengele. She was able to use her talent for gymnastics and dancing to help survive in Auschwitz. Ms. Eger was liberated from Gunskirchen on May 4, 1945. While in a displaced persons camp, she met her husband and became pregnant. She emigrated to the United States in 1949; first to New York, and then to Baltimore, where she worked in a factory. She, her husband and her daughter Marianne moved to Texas, where Ms. Eger had two more children, and attended the University of Texas at Austin where she ultimately received her doctorate. She settled in San Diego and works as a family therapist and with battered wives and abused teenagers.

    Oral history interview with Otto Springer

    Oral history interview with Otto Springer

    Oral History

    Otto Springer discusses his German upbringing in Prague, Bohemia (now Czech Republic); his education; his family life; the antisemitism he witnessed in Prague in the early 1930s; his marriage to his Jewish wife and the discrimination he experienced as a result; his arrest in 1941; his sentence of forced labor; the help he received from a Gestapo officer; his activities in the Czech underground including the rescue of Jews, aided by two members of the Gestapo; his experiences in another labor camp near Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) beginning in October 1944; the work he performed; a forced march he underwent in January 1945; acts of vengeance by Czechs that he witnessed after the war ended; the suspicion he fell under because of his German heritage; the assistance he received from a Czech military commander; and his immigration with his wife and children in September 1948.

    Oral history interview with Greta Stuehler

    Oral history interview with Greta Stuehler

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Magda Silberman

    Oral history interview with Magda Silberman

    Oral History

    Magda Silberman, born on August 17, 1928, discusses her childhood in Pavlovo, Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine); the occupation of her town by the Hungarians; antisemitism that she and her family experienced; the occupation of her town by Nazi troops; the gathering of the Jewish citizens and their deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau in April 1944; her arrival, the selections, and her experiences while at Auschwitz; the death march she endured in January 1945 to Ravensbrück and Leipzig; her liberation in May 1945; and her immigration to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Eric Willgott

    Oral history interview with Eric Willgott

    Oral History

    Eric Willgott, born on February 12, 1925 in Vienna, Austria, discusses his childhood in Vienna; his family life; his Orthodox religious upbringing; his involvement with a Zionist youth organization; his education; the increased antisemitism he experienced after the German annexation of Austria (Anschluss) in March 1938; his experiences during Kristallnacht in November; his family's decision to send him to Great Britain with the Kindertransport in December 1938; his experiences in London during the Blitz; his work with the United States government in Germany after the war; his immigration to the United States in 1948; his marriage; his life in the US; and his work.

    Oral history interview with Cecilia Kornbluth

    Oral history interview with Cecilia Kornbluth

    Oral History

    Cecilia Kornbluth (née Cilli Mehlman), born on October 11, 1920, discusses her childhood in Vienna, Austria; her early experiences with antisemitism in elementary school and gymnasium; her memories of the assassination of Engelbert Dollfuss, Chancellor of Austria, by Austrian Nazis in 1934; the Anschluss in March 1938; the changes that occurred for Jewish Austrians afterward; her two older brothers fleeing to France and to Switzerland; the arrests of her younger brother, father, and mother; her father's eventual deportation to Auschwitz; her brother's incarceration in Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps for 11 months, and his release and move to England; the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938; being sent for by her brother in Switzerland; her illegal crossing into Switzerland; hiding because she lacked legal papers; being questioned and released; living and working in a refugee camp for single Jewish girls in Basel; living there throughout the war; marrying another refugee who was living in a single man's camp in 1942; having a son; being supported by the Jewish community during this period; her immigration to the United States in 1947; and her family and work life in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Steiner

    Oral history interview with Ruth Steiner

    Oral History

    Ruth Steiner discusses her childhood in Dresden, Germany; her well-integrated family life; her education; the changes she experienced after the Nazis came to power in 1933; the necessity of attending a university outside of Germany due to her Jewish heritage; her studies in Geneva; her family's decision to leave Europe in 1939; their immigration to Brazil; their move to the United States in 1940; her life in the US; the work she performed as a librarian; and her husband and family.

    Oral history interview with Trudy Lyons

    Oral history interview with Trudy Lyons

    Oral History

    Trudy Lyons discusses her childhood in Vienna, Austria; the family's assimilated life; the changes that occurred after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in March 1938; having to leave school, and witnessing abuses against Jews. Ms. Lyons describes the family's flight to Czechoslovakia, and their successful immigration to the United States in November 1938; the family's adjustment to life in the US, eventually settling in Indiana; and her education, marriage, and family life in Detroit, MI and San Francisco, CA.

    Oral history interview with Margrit Schurman

    Oral history interview with Margrit Schurman

    Oral History

    Margrit Schurman, born on April 1, 1925 in Essen, Germany, discusses her childhood in Essen; her memories of antisemitism; the flight of her sister to Switzerland and her brother to England; the events of Kristallnacht; being sent with her sisters to a Catholic school in England; their conversion to Catholicism; her life and experiences in England during the war, including her brother's deportation as an enemy alien to Canada; her separation from her mother, who had married an Italian and spent the war years in Italy; her immigration to the United States; her marriage and life in Berkeley, California; being reunited with her family in California; and her return trip to Germany.

    Oral history interview with Edith Deutsch

    Oral history interview with Edith Deutsch

    Oral History

    Edith Deutsch, born on January 21, 1925 in Arnswalde, Germany (now Choszczno, Poland), discusses her childhood in Arnswalde; her father, Fritz Abrahamowsky, and her mother, Lotte Gradnauer; living in a large home and being raised as a young child by servants, rarely seeing her mother or father; her family's move to Berlin, Germany in 1933; the difficulties experienced by her family when Hitler rose to power; going to the Olympic Stadium with her class and seeing the No Jews Allowed signs; having to leave public school after the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938; fleeing Germany with her family in April 1939 for Thailand; traveling by ship to Singapore; abandoning their plans to travel to Bangkok and instead opting to go to Shanghai, China; staying in a camp in Shanghai for a week; her experiences in Shanghai; working as a sales girl and as a beautician; her marriage in 1946 and the birth of her son in 1948; immigrating to Australia in 1949; living in a boarding house; moving to the United States in 1951; living in Oregon and then San Francisco, CA; and her efforts to socialize with other refugees over the years.

    Oral history interview with Francis E. Cappel

    Oral history interview with Francis E. Cappel

    Oral History

    Francis Cappel (né Franz Erwin Cappel), born on June 2, 1916 in Cologne, Germany, discusses his childhood in Cologne, Germany;his parents, Dr. Paul H. and Meta Cappel (née Braunschweig); growing up in an apartment flat near a synagogue in a mixed (Jewish and non-Jewish) neighborhood; antisemitism in Germany; the beating of his lawyer father by Nazi storm troopers (Sturmabteilung) in April 1933; the boycott of Jewish business; moving in October 1933 to France, where he worked in the textile business; concealing his Jewish origins as best he could, always carrying French or English newspapers with him; befriending a man who brought him to the German Reich secret headquarters where he got to see rare German stamps (Mr. Cappel was an avid stamp collector); moving to Hamburg, Germany in 1935; immigrating to England in 1937; serving as a corporal in the British Army; his success in obtaining transit visas for his father and mother, thus rescuing his father from Dachau concentration camp; getting married to his wife Margo in 1944; leaving the Army in April 1946 and returning to London; immigrating with his wife, children, and parents to the United States; and settling in San Francisco, CA.

    Oral history interview with George Wittenstein

    Oral history interview with George Wittenstein

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Thomas Trier

    Oral history interview with Thomas Trier

    Oral History

    Thomas Trier, born December 27, 1930 in Frankfurt, Germany, discusses his childhood in Frankfurt; his family's roots in the city; his integrated family life; his education in a Jewish school; his experiences in Nazi-era Germany; the economic difficulties his family faced; their decision to immigrate to the United States; the journey to New York, NY and then Chicago, IL; his experiences as a young immigrant in America; his feeling of isolation among his peers as a boy; his education through graduate school; his life after school; the work he performed; his feelings about his German and Jewish identity; and his marriage and family.

    Oral history interview with Rita Grunbaum

    Oral history interview with Rita Grunbaum

    Oral History

    Rita Grunbaum (née Rita van Leeuwen), born on April 9, 1910 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, discusses her childhood in Holland; her career as a social worker in the Hague; her marriage in 1936;the onset of World War II in September 1939; the bombing of Holland; the German occupation beginning in 1940; the birth of her daughter in 1942; the family's arrest in September 1943; their transport to Westerbork concentration camp; her experiences in Westerbork; receiving papers for Palestine from her in-laws who had fled to Mexico; being selected as part of an exchange program with German prisoners-of-war held in Palestine; being sent with her family to Bergen-Belsen in February 1944; being transported from Bergen-Belsen in April 1945 on the Lost Train (also called Lost Transport); her liberation in Troebtiz, Germany; the deaths of her family members during the Holocaust; and her post-war experiences.

    Oral history interview with Lily Robinson

    Oral history interview with Lily Robinson

    Oral History

    Lily Robinson (née Lily Solomon Leibovitch), born on June 29, 1939 in Sofia, Bulgaria, discusses her childhood with her mother and sister who had been deported to Haskovo, Bulgaria from Sofia in 1940; her experiences there as a young child; her family's return to Sofia in 1945; immigrating to the United States in December 1946; her life in California; and the emotional aftermath of the Holocaust that she witnessed in her brother.

    Oral history interview with Herman Apteker

    Oral history interview with Herman Apteker

    Oral History

    Herman Apteker, born on October 9, 1915 in Dresden, Germany, discusses his childhood in Dresden; his Ukrainian parents; his father (Elieser), who was in business and died when Herman was only four years old; his mother, who started a wholesale business selling clothing out of the family's six or seven room flat; his four older siblings (three brothers and one sister); his male "guardian" (this was a German requirement for children whose fathers had died) Dr. Avraham Borg, who took Herman to synagogue and was the primary source of Herman's religious education; his experiences with antisemitism at public school; his strong desire to leave Germany once Hitler rose to power; his trip to Czechoslovakia in 1933 as part of the Young Macabees, in preparation for immigration to Palestine; spending 10 or 11 months in Slovakia, taking part in agricultural training; his arrival in Palestine in April 1933; becoming very ill with dysentery and malaria; his experiences in Palestine; the immigration of his mother and brothers to Palestine; his work in Haifa; riots that occurred in 1936; becoming a temporary policeman before a British officer offered him a job in the immigration office; his marriage in 1938; the beginning of WWII and his work for the British army (in an office) until he was conscripted into the Israeli Army; working as a commission officer at the Lebanese border; his unique relationship with an Arab officer on the Lebanese side; his divorce and remarriage; his immigration with his second wife to the United States in 1953; and settling in San Francisco, CA.

    Oral history interview with Hanna Cassel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Nicholas Nagy-Talavera

    Oral history interview with Nicholas Nagy-Talavera

    Oral History

    Nicholas Nagy-Talavera, born on February 14, 1929 in Budapest, Hungary, discusses his childhood in Budapest; his time in a Transylvanian ghetto in 1944; his subsequent deportation to Auschwitz; the work he performed in Josef Mengele's medical complex; the experiments he witnessed; his impressions of Mengele; and his subsequent experiences at Mauthausen, Gusen II, and Ebensee.

    Oral history interview with Semyon Veyber

    Oral history interview with Semyon Veyber

    Oral History

    Semyon Veyber, born on December 20, 1927 in Tomashpil, Ukraine, discusses his childhood in Tomashpil; his religious upbringing; the changes he experienced after the German Army invaded in June 1941; his family's attempt to evacuate, their capture by the Germans, and the help given to the Germans by the local Ukrainian people; his escape from an Einsatzgruppen action; being deported with his family to a ghetto in July 1941, and his experiences there; the work he performed and the conditions; the fear he felt as the German Army retreated that he and his family would be killed before they were liberated; the arrival of the Soviet Army in March 1944; the charges of collaboration that he faced; his life after the end of the war; and his immigration to the United States in 1989.

    Oral history interview with Chaya Fuhrman

    Oral history interview with Chaya Fuhrman

    Oral History

    Chaya Ash-Furhman (née Averbuch), born March 19,1920 in Kishinev (now Chisinau), Moldova, describes her childhood; her parents’ involvement in Yiddish theater; her own involvement in theater at a young age; the outbreak of war in June 1941; hiding with her family in the basement of a theater in the Russian section of Tiraspol, Moldova; being transported to cooperative farms in Ukraine and Uzbekistan; being underfed; her father, who suffered from mental distress and dysentery and was taken to a courtyard and shot; how the people who were murdered were then covered in lime, so as not to spread disease; the hardships she and her family endured working on these farms; becoming sick with malaria; working as a seamstress in a nearby town where conditions were better; meeting her first husband; antisemitism that was rampant after the end of the war; her leaving for Poland with her mother and husband, who was Polish by birth; their decision to leave Poland in 1947 while she was pregnant; the family's experiences in a displaced persons camp in Linz, Austria; and their immigration to Israel, where she continued her involvement in Yiddish Theater.

    Oral history interview with Peter Mueller

    Oral history interview with Peter Mueller

    Oral History

    Peter Mueller, born on December 30, 1926 in Hannover, Germany, discusses his childhood in Hannover; his family's decision to leave Germany after Kristallnacht in 1938; his life with his father in England; his decision to immigrate to the United States in 1943; his service in the US Army with the medical corps as an instructor in Texas; and his life after military service.

    Oral history interview with Eva Cohn

    Oral history interview with Eva Cohn

    Oral History

    Eva Cohn (née Eva Maria Rhee), born in 1923 in Dortmund, Germany, describes her parents, Max Rhee and Else Heinemann; experiencing a warm family life and peace in her early childhood; not experiencing antisemitism until 1934 when her friend shunned her, teachers began to treat her unfairly, and Aryan students were being separated and taught antisemitism; being prohibited from attending public schools around 1935; moving to Cologne, Germany, where she attended a Jewish school while staying with a Jewish family; her family’s experience during an anti-Jewish “Aktion” in 1938, during which German soldiers threw rocks at their windows and burned their synagogue; returning to live with the family in Cologne, while her parents moved to Baudin and stayed with a friend; leaving Germany with her family circa 1938 and going to England just before the ill treatment of the Jews became worse; a law in England that prohibited immigrants from working, which meant her family could not make any money; spending one year in England, before being allowed to immigrate to the United States; settling in Los Angeles, CA; attending Whittier College and majoring in English; working at a school as an instructional supervisor; her father’s death in 1941 from a heart condition; meeting and marrying Hans in Salinas, CA in 1949; having three children and moving quite frequently; and her life in Palo Alto, teaching German, participating in the German association, and leading the Bridge to Understanding, which takes a group to Germany each summer.

    Oral history interview with Fred Baum

    Oral history interview with Fred Baum

    Oral History

    Fred Baum (né Efriam Dovid Boymelgreen), born in Slupaianowa, Poland (possibly Nowa Słupia, Poland), on October 1, 1921, describes his childhood; his one younger brother; his parents, Majlech and Miriam Nhuna, whom he lived with until 1930 when their mother died; being raised religious, and studying before the war at a yeshiva in Otwock, Poland; returning home from school after the war started, and seeing Jews being rounded up for forced labor; working in various government factories, and how the situation got worse and worse; his memories of shootings, confiscations, and deportations; how Jews were not allowed to go to school or to religious services and there was no electricity; his memories of several events including a memory of the rabbi of his town being tied to a horse and forced to run after it until he died; being put into Starachowice with his father and brother in August 1942; suffering from typhus and his father’s efforts to keep him out of the "hospital" so he wouldn't be shot; their transfer in July 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau; his father’s death in Birkenau around January of 1945; being sent with his brother to Buna (Monowitz), where they were given striped uniforms; being transferred with his brother to Lara Hut; being moved in early 1945 to Mauthausen and then to Gusen in Austria; spending a week there and then four days without food in an open train to Hannora, where they worked on an unfinished concentration camp; being separated from his brother on April 5, 1945 and sent to Bergen-Belsen; being liberated by the British on April 15, 1945; spending six months in a hospital unit recuperating, and then staying in Bergen-Belsen for five years; meeting his wife, Helen Wiesel, there; getting married in 1946; never returning to Poland; reuniting with his brother, who was his only surviving family member; immigrating in 1950 with his wife and young daughter to the United States; having two more children; and his brother, who also immigrated to the United States and started a family.

    Oral history interview with Fred Baum

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Fred Baum

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Cantor Hans Cohn

    Oral history interview with Cantor Hans Cohn

    Oral History

    Cantor Hans Cohn, born in Berlin, Germany on May 31, 1926, discusses his childhood in Berlin; being forced to leave his public school after the passage of the Nuremberg laws in 1935; antisemitic propaganda; his feelings of exclusion from social and athletic activities; the 1936 Olympic games; the events of Kristallnacht; the long wait for a visa to the United States; the family's decision to leave Germany for Shanghai, China; his impressions upon arrival in Shanghai; the life of his family and the Jewish community in Shanghai; his mother's death; the difficulties and illnesses he endured; moving into the Hongkew ghetto when the Japanese took control of Shanghai in 1942; his experiences there; the Allied bombings of Shanghai that took place in the spring of 1945; his life in post-war Shanghai; stowing aboard a ship to Australia in 1946; living as an illegal immigrant in Australia; his immigration to the United States in 1948; being drafted into the military; volunteering as a cantor in a San Francisco synagogue; returning to school and obtaining a cantorial diploma; working as a singing waiter in the Borscht Belt in New York while he was attending Hebrew Union College in New York; being reunited with his father in 1952; and his later experiences.

    Oral history interview with Gilbert L. van Mourik

    Oral history interview with Gilbert L. van Mourik

    Oral History

    Gilbert L. van Mourik, born June 27, 1930 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, discusses his childhood in Rotterdam; his family life; his Protestant upbringing; the changes he experienced after the German invasion of Holland in May 1940; his experiences during the bombing of Rotterdam; his father's efforts to gather and store food; his parents' decision to become part of the resistance; his family's activities, which included hiding a Jewish child in their home for the duration of the war; and the dangers his family experienced and their efforts at self-preservation as well as the moral challenges they faced.

    Oral history interview with Bernard Broclawski

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sam Zelver

    Oral history interview with Sam Zelver

    Oral History

    Sam Zelver, born in 1935 in Kalisz, Poland, discusses his childhood in Kalisz; fleeing with his family to the Soviet Union after the occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany in September 1939; the attempts of his father, who was in the Polish Army, to join them; the family's journey across Russia to Siberia; his mother doing hard labor in return for housing and food; the hardships they endured for a year and a half; the journeys the family took, which ended in Kazakhstan, where they lived with other Jewish refugees; discovering a relative nearby with whom they stayed from 1942 until the end of the war; the family's post-war journey to Germany, where they lived in a DP (displaced persons) camp; his immigration with his sister in 1947 to San Francisco, CA, sponsored by an uncle who died before they arrived; their stay in the Jewish children's home, Homewood Terrace; his reunion with his mother and stepfather, who emigrated in 1952; his education and service in the United States Army; his work as a salesman; his marriage; family; and religious life.

    Oral history interview with Asya Grunkina

    Oral history interview with Asya Grunkina

    Oral History

    Asya Grunkina, born on March 2, 1936 in Odesa, Ukraine, discusses her childhood in Odesa; her memories of the occupation of Odessa by Nazi troops on October 16, 1941; the orders for Jewish families to identify themselves in preparation for deportation; hiding with her family in their home to escape deportation; the family fleeing with the assistance of a local Russian man in January 1942; hiding in the catacombs and caves nearby; the assistance of their rescuer and his family who brought them food at great risk; the terrible conditions and privations they endured; and leaving their hiding place in April 1944.

    Oral history interview with Kurt Mostny

    Oral history interview with Kurt Mostny

    Oral History

    Kurt Mostny, born on March 3, 1919 in Linz, Austria, discusses his childhood in Linz; the antisemitism he experienced growing up; enlisting in the Austrian army and being posted in Vienna; the Anschluss in March 1938; serving as part of the honor guard surrounding Adolf Hitler when he arrived in Vienna to oversee the transfer of power; evading the roundup of Jews in Linz; escaping from Austria; going to Egypt to join his sister, who was pursuing a doctorate in Egyptology; their subsequent move to Belgium; his mother's friendship with a woman from Chile; her success in obtaining visas for Mr. Mostny, his sister, and herself; the entire family's immigration to Chile in 1939; his experiences in Chile; his work and family; his immigration to the United States with his wife and five children in 1964.

    Oral history interview with Hanna Cassel

    Oral history interview with Hanna Cassel

    Oral History

    Hanna Cassel, born on December 6, 1914, in Berlin, Germany, describes her father Arthur, who owned a shoe store and her mother Rebecca, who helped run the store; her one brother, Werner, who was six years younger than her; her mother's parents, who were very religious, and spending during many holidays going to the temple with them; her parents, who were not religious; attending a private elementary school and then a girls' high school, which she was not able to finish because about a year and a half before she would have graduated, she lost her scholarship (because she was Jewish); her father's business ending because he was Jewish; not experiencing much antisemitism when she was younger, and how at first most people thought Hitler was crazy and he would never amount to anything; her very good non-Jewish friends, especially at school; her family home and her childhood and her love for reading; not having many options after she dropped out of school; her desire to go to Palestine with some of her friends, which her parents did not want her to do; moving to Rome, Italy and working as a nanny for several different families; how by 1939, Hitler had influenced Mussolini's policies and foreign Jews were required to leave Italy; the popular sentiment in Italy about Germany; the government-sponsored persecution growing worse; being arrested in December 1940 and put into a women’s concentration camp (she had avoided the first roundups); living with about 65 other Jews, Roma, and Yugoslavian partisans; conditions in the camp, the people there, and the flourishing black market; the German occupation of Italy and how the villagers in the town around the concentration camp helped free the prisoners because they knew the women of the camp would be killed or deported immediately by the Germans; hiding in the fields and then walking back to Rome, which took her about ten days; eating vegetables she took from nearby fields during her journey; being given fake papers by the police in the concentration camp’s town (the papers identified her as Anna Castelli; she told anyone who asked that she was an Italian fleeing the Allies); hiding with various friends in Rome; how most people at this time were surviving on the black market; the destruction of the synagogue in Rome right after she returned and the liquidation of the ghetto; the deportation of thousands of people; how several years earlier her parents and brother had gone to Shanghai, China, where her brother and father both died; having very little correspondence with her family while she was in Rome; getting some information from listening to the radio, which was illegal; living in hiding on the outskirts of the city when Rome was liberated on June 5, 1944; the euphoria at that moment and the difficulty of life after the liberation; how food was hard to come by; getting a job at the American Joint Distribution Committee; getting a visa to the United States and arriving in the US in December of 1948; her mother’s death and Hanna’s depression; working nights while taking classes at San Francisco State College; earning a BA and wanting to become a librarian; becoming a teacher after earning her Master’s degree; returning to Italy almost every summer once she was a teacher and visiting friends; returning to Germany for the first time in 1972 to visit a cousin; her hesitation to return to Germany; having a Bat-Mitzvah in 1983; experiencing antisemitism in the US, especially at the high school where she worked; and never marrying or having children.

    Oral history interview with Vera Korkus

    Oral history interview with Vera Korkus

    Oral History

    Vera Korkus, born in 1928 in Vienna, Austria, discusses her childhood in Vienna; the onset of World War II, and the opportunity that she and her sister had to go a Kindertransport, which they both refused; the forced move she and her family made in 1940 to Jewish ghetto in Vienna; their transport in October 1942 to an unnamed camp, where her father died of lung cancer; being sent with her mother to Auschwitz two years later; being separated from her mother; her reunion with her sister; the terrible conditions at Auschwitz; her encounter with Dr. Josef Mengele; being transported to Kurzbach, a subcamp of Gross-Rosen, where she endured forced labor and a 3-day march to Bergen Belsen; her escape from the march; finding protection from the Germans with Russian soldiers; the sexual assaults that occurred; her life after the war; moving to Bohemia (Czech Republic) then Vienna; and her immigration in 1949 to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Steffi Black

    Oral history interview with Steffi Black

    Oral History

    Steffi Black, born on October 17, 1920 in Berlin, Germany, describes her childhood; her Polish parents Charlotte Pink and Felix Israel; her father’s factory in Berlin and his work with his brother, Leo, installing electricity in the city; her complex family dynamic; her lack of a Jewish identity; her parents' divorce; her mother's remarriage to Otto Goetz in Switzerland; her separation from her father; her father's involvement in the Spanish Civil War; spending the summers of 1932 and 1933 in Poland with her grandparents; attending a Jewish school for about nine months, but feeling left out since she was not Jewish; her reunion with her father and their immigration first to Cuba and then to the United States; her father's death in 1946 in Nevada; her marriage and life in the US; visiting Germany in 1980; and her three children.

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Parket

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Parket

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ann Burger

    Oral history interview with Ann Burger

    Oral History

    Ann Burger (née Anni Rosalie Rautenberg), born in 1920 in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland), discusses her childhood; her father Arthur Rautenberg, who was the manager of department stores; being raised religious but not Orthodox; attending private school and then public schools; her experiences with antisemitism in school after Hitler's rise to power in 1933; her Jewish friends at school; the loss of her father's business; the family's move to Berlin, while she remained in school; her move to Berlin after her graduation in 1936; her cousin's immigration to Palestine; the family's decision to flee Germany; the efforts of their American family members to obtain visas for them; the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938; training as a nurse; a job opportunity for work in Sweden, where she remained during the war years; her parents’ journey to Spain, Cuba, and then to the United States; her reunion with them in the US in 1946; and settling in San Francisco, CA, where she married and had a family.

    Oral history interview with Volf Gershaft

    Oral history interview with Volf Gershaft

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Klara Garmel

    Oral history interview with Klara Garmel

    Oral History

    Klara Garmel (née Pleshivaya), born on February 17, 1926, discusses her childhood in Yarun’, Ukraine; her parents' work on a collective farm; her memories of Jewish school as well as participating in a pioneer Ukrainian youth organization; the onset of war with Nazi Germany in 1941; the confusion that ensued; the enforcement of anti-Jewish laws; hiding from a roundup; witnessing brutal acts perpetrated against her grandfather; escaping, with the assistance of non-Jewish friends, to Poland; encountering her mother and sister, who returned to Ukraine; her experiences moving, hiding, and passing for a non-Jew; her conversion to the Russian Orthodox faith; marrying a widower far older than she; the advance of Soviet liberating forces; reclaiming her Jewish identity; leaving her marriage; working until she had sufficient funds to return to her home; learning that all but a sister and brother had perished; remarrying and having a daughter; and immigrating to the United States in 1992 due to the antisemitism she experienced in Ukraine.

    Oral history interview with Polina Sorkin

    Oral history interview with Polina Sorkin

    Oral History

    Polina Sorkin (née Britavskaya), born on November 25, 1931 in Krutye, Ukraine, discusses her childhood in Ukraine; her brother and father's service in Soviet Army; the German invasion and seeing troops in her town; her family's unsuccessful attempt to flee; an incident in which all the Jews were rounded up and marched to a barracks where they were imprisoned; escaping the barracks; traveling from village to village; being sheltered by relatives and strangers; her reunion with family members in a ghetto; traveling to an orphanage in Balta, Ukraine, where she remained until the end of the war; reuniting with her family; her life after the war; and her immigration to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Blank

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Blank

    Oral History

    Mikhail Blank, born on April 22, 1930 in Bershad, Ukraine, discusses his childhood in Bershad; the family's experiences on a collective farm; his memories of antisemitism; the family's move from Bershad to a nearby camp after the occupation of the area by Nazi troops; an incident in which his father and brother with other men were locked in a stable from which they escaped and returned to Bershad; the occupation of the area by Romanian troops and the establishment of a ghetto in September 1941 in Bershad, where he and his family lived until the end of the war; his escape attempts; illnesses he endured; the forced labor his father and brother performed; his father's death; the liberation of Bershad in March 1944 by Soviet troops; his brother joining the fight against the Nazis and his death in battle in July 1944; his life in Bershad after the war; his military service; and his immigration to the United States in 1991.

    Oral history interview with Kurt Gronowski

    Oral history interview with Kurt Gronowski

    Oral History

    Kurt Gronowski, born on July 16, 1923 in Berlin, Germany, discusses his childhood in Berlin; the antisemitism he experienced; the destruction of his family's business during Kristallnacht, November 1938; the family's escape to Shanghai, China; his experiences while on board the ship from Italy; the family's arrival in Shanghai and the assistance they received from the Jewish community; life in the Jewish ghetto in Shanghai; conditions during the Japanese occupation; the improvement of conditions after the war ended; immigrating to the United States; the difficulties he encountered while living in Indiana; and settling in San Francisco, where he became a successful businessman.

    Oral history interview with Rosa Wigmore

    Oral history interview with Rosa Wigmore

    Oral History

    Rosa Wigmore (née Adler), born September 8, 1923 in Ulic, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia), discusses her childhood in Ulic; her family life; the changes she experienced in 1939 following the Hungarian annexation of the region; her experiences during her deportation with her family in 1944 to a ghetto in Ungvar, Hungary (now Uzhhorod, Ukraine); their deportation to Auschwitz; the selection she survived with her sister; her illness; her experiences in the infirmary and the help she received from a doctor who arranged to transfer her to another camp; the work she performed; the assistance she received; her lingering health issues; being liberated in May 1945 by Czechoslovakian partisans; her postwar experiences in Prague; her reunion with her sister; their immigration to the United States; and the fates of her other family members.

    Oral history interview with Gerta Wingerd

    Oral history interview with Gerta Wingerd

    Oral History

    Gerta Wingerd (née Alper), born on September 23, 1923 in Bеrhomet, Romania (now Berehomet, Ukraine), discusses her childhood in Czernowicz, Romania (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine); the increase in antisemitism in 1938 after fascist rule was established; the occupation of her town by Soviet forces in 1939; the retreat of the Soviet forces; her two brothers' escape toward Russia; the occupation of the area by Nazi troops; the establishment of a ghetto; her family's release; their eventual internment in a ghetto camp in Transnistria until 1944; the conditions, difficulties, and disease that were prevalent there; the family's liberation by Soviet troops; her return to Czernowicz; her escape from Romania to Vienna, Austria, where she worked for the United States Army; being sponsored by the Joint Distribution Committee to immigrate to the United States in 1949; and her experiences in New York, Minneapolis, and Great Falls, Montana before marrying and settling in Mill Valley, California.

    Oral history interview with Evelyn Lowen Apte

    Oral history interview with Evelyn Lowen Apte

    Oral History

    Evelyn Lowen Apte (née Eveline Loewenberg), born in 1929 in Goerlitz, Germany, describes her brother Gerald; her father Herman Alexander Lowen, who was a cavalry officer during the First World War; her mother Else (Gradnauer) Lowen, who had a great interest in art and attended an art school in Berlin; how her family did not consider themselves religious but when the war began the Jewish holidays became more culturally significant to the family; having a happy childhood; her father’s desire to emigrate as soon as Hitler came to power; getting around the quota system by becoming property owners in the United States; traveling through Paris, France in 1937 and taking a ship to New York, NY, arriving on February 22, 1937; the fate of her extended family; settling in Portland, Oregon; learning English; the difficult transition to American life, especially for her mother; feeling like an outsider in high school, but beginning to feel American in college; visiting Germany in 1966; how she does not enjoy speaking German with people her age, but is willing to speak German with the younger generation; attending Reed College in Oregon for two years, and then transferring to the University of California at Berkeley, where she did her undergraduate and some graduate work, finishing her education in London; becoming a social worker; considering herself an atheist, but still feeling close to the Jewish culture and traditions; the large community of Jewish refugees in Portland; and her reflections on her experiences as a refugee.

    Oral history interview with Annette Herskovits

    Oral history interview with Annette Herskovits

    Oral History

    Annette Herskovits discusses her experiences as a young child during the Holocaust, including her infancy in Paris, France; the occupation of Paris by Nazi troops; her father's decision that the family should go into hiding; hiding with her older siblings with occasional visits from their parents; the arrest and deportation of her parents in June 1943; her brother's efforts to find a safe place for her outside of Paris; being fostered with a couple in an unidentified location; being visited by her siblings during this period; and understanding that she would never see her parents again.

    Oral history interview with Guta Zlotlow

    Oral history interview with Guta Zlotlow

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Alfred Cotton

    Oral history interview with Alfred Cotton

    Oral History

    Alfred Cotton (né Baumwollspinner), born on December 29, 1925 in Hamburg, Germany, discusses his childhood in Hamburg; his Polish parents; his father’s wholesale wine distribution business; his memories of the antisemitism after the Nazis rose to power; his parents' selling their business because of the anti-Jewish boycotts; the expulsion of his father to Poland in 1938; the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938; the arrests of the teachers at the Jewish school he attended; his parents' decision to place him on a Kindertransport; leaving Germany for a boy's camp in Suffolk, England; the arrest and internment of all boys over age 16; being moved to Sheffield, England and living in a camp run by refugee women; attending a public school; learning that his parents and grandparents were deported in 1942 from Poland where they were living; his immigration to the United States in the early 1950s; and his involvement in Kindertransport reunions.

    Oral history interview with Marion Mostny

    Oral history interview with Marion Mostny

    Oral History

    Marion Mostny, born on May 22, 1927 in Berlin, Germany, discusses her childhood in Berlin; the changes she experienced during the 1930s; her parents' decision to leave Germany; her family's immigration to Santiago, Chile in April 1939; the community of Jewish refugees there; the fates of family members left behind in Germany; her life in Chile; her and her husband's decision to immigrate to the United States in 1963; their life in San Francisco, CA; her decision to write her memoirs; and the importance of Holocaust remembrance. [See her memoir titles, Conversations with my grandchildren : a journey through three continents.]

    Oral history interview with Roy Calder

    Oral history interview with Roy Calder

    Oral History

    Roy Calder describes his early life in an assimilated family in Berlin and Dresden; his invovlement in Jewish youth groups; his awareness of increased antisemitism after the Nazi rise to power; his parents' decision to send him to school in Switzerland in 1935; his attempts to convince his family to leave Germany; his regret that they did not; his decision to immigrate to Great Britain; the jobs he held in Birmingham, England; the beginning of World War II in 1939; his internment as an enemy alien in Sherbrooke, Canada; his return to England in late 1940; why he volunteered for the British army; his six year service in Scotland, Nigeria, India, and Burma; his marriage to another Holocaust survivor; his decision to immigrate to the United States in 1953; his Jewish identity; and the effects the events of the Holocaust had on him and his wife.

    Oral history interview with Alfred Batzdorff

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Felberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sandor Hollander

    Oral history interview with Sandor Hollander

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Abraham Jaeger

    Oral history interview with Abraham Jaeger

    Oral History

    Abraham Jaeger, born on March 13, 1916 in Vel'ký Bočkov, Czechoslovakia (now Velykyi Bychkiv, Ukraine), discusses his childhood; his career as a salesman; his escape in October 1939 to Palestine, where he was imprisoned for six months; his experiences serving in the British Army in Egypt, Syria, and Cyprus; joining the Israeli Army in 1948; his career and life in Israel, where he lived until 1958; his immigration to the United States; and the death of his parents and three of sisters in the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Judy Kirkham

    Oral history interview with Judy Kirkham

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Rita Kuhn

    Oral History

    The interviews describe Ms. Kuhn's childhood in Berlin, Germany, her life as the daughter of a Jewish father and non-Jewish German mother as the Nazi regime rose to power, and her growing awareness of antisemitism and change. Ms. Kuhn describes the dismay she felt after the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938, and the privations her family suffered as a consequence of the Nuremberg Laws and her father's unemployment, living with meager ration allotments, detainments, and forced labor. She discusses life trapped in Berlin during the war years, bombings, and forced labor in a small factory. Ms. Kuhn remembers the round-up of Jews in Berlin in February 1943 and her release, because her mother was German. Of particular note, Ms. Kuhn discusses the Rosenstrasse Protest of 1943, when a group of Aryan women protested the imprisonment of their Jewish husbands and children, in which her mother participated. Ms. Kuhn describes the occupation of Berlin by Russian troops, and her family being asked to identify Nazis to them. She recalls her first exposure to information about the concentration camps and the Holocaust, the time she spent in a displaced persons camp, her desire to leave Germany and her immigration to the United States in 1948. Ms. Kuhn describes her return to Berlin for the 50th year memorial of Kristallnacht, when she participated in a silent march from the a synagogue to Rosenstrasse in commemoration of the protest there.

    Oral history interview with Greta Reisman

    Oral history interview with Greta Reisman

    Oral History

    Greta Reisman, born on January 6, 1927 in Mattersdorf (Mattersburg), Austria, discusses her childhood in Nuremberg, Germany; her religious upbringing and assimilated education; the changes she experienced after the Nazis came to power; the increasing antisemitism as well as her family's decision to relocate to Yugoslavia and Hungary; her experiences in Yugoslavia; the actions her grandmother took to allow them to remain there; her decision to join the rest of the family in Hungary; and immigrating to the United States in 1940.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Schein

    Oral History

    The interviews describe Mr. Schein's childhood is Sosnowiec, his experiences with antisemitism, and how his plans to immigrate to the United States were disrupted by the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany. Mr. Schein describes being sent to his mother’s hometown, Brzostowica-Wielka, near Volkovisk, in Russian Poland, and eluding forced labor in Russia by returning to Sosnowiec. He discusses being conscripted for forced labor by the Germans in October 1940, and his experiences in several forced labor and concentration camps throughout the war years, which included Geppersdorf, Gross Sarne, Kleinmangersdorf, Wiessau, Waldau, Casper Bowder, Gintersdorf, Rostitz, Hundsfeld, Hirschberg, Gross-Rosen, Dachau, Buchenwald, and possibly others. Mr. Schein describes the conditions in these camps and the various labors he was forced to perform, being witness to medical experiments at Hundsfeld, and enduring a death march from Buchenwald. He discusses his liberation by American troops, his hospitalization, his marriage to his childhood sweetheart, their stay in a displaced persons camp in Ainring, Germany, and their immigration to the United States in June 1946. Mr. Schein relates that he was the member of his family that survived the Holocaust and his only possession when he emigrated was an accordion. He also describes his experiences in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Dan Dougherty

    Oral history interview with Dan Dougherty

    Oral History

    Dan Dougherty, born May 30, 1925 in Austin, Minnesota, describes being drafted into the United States Army 17 days after his high school graduation; transferring from the 44th Division to the 45th Division; seeing combat on the Sigfried Line and experiencing a slight injury; returning after his recovery and fighting at Aschaffenburg, Germany; the surrender of Germany seven days later; taking part in the liberation of Bavarian US prisoner of war camps and concentration camps; going towards Nuremberg, which had already fallen to the Allies; arriving in Dachau, where they found thousands of emaciated corpselike inmates; coming upon Allach concentration camp; and going to Munich, which they occupied on May 1, 1945.

    Oral history interview with Max Erlichman

    Oral history interview with Max Erlichman

    Oral History

    Max Erlichman, born in November 1931 in Caracas, Venezuela, describes his parents Tobias Erlichman and Bella Galinskaja; spending his childhood years in Amsterdam, Holland until he was taken to Westerbork with his brother and father in mid-November 1942; the deportation of his mother to Auschwitz in September of 1942; the deportation of his older brother Zacharias to Auschwitz in October of 1942; never seeing either Zacharias nor his mother again, and finding out after the war that they were both killed in the camps; being sent with his brother and father to Bergen-Belsen, where they stayed for nine weeks; being sent to a camp in Wülzburg, Germany and remaining there until they were liberated in March or April of 1945 by the American Army; recuperating along with his father and brother in a house provided to them by civilians in the town of Weissenburg in Bayern, Germany; being sent to a displaced persons camp in Würzburg for a week before being sent back to Holland; his father’s travels between Holland and the United States for a few years after the war; and immigrating to the US with his brother.

    Oral history interview with Marianne Gerhart

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Rose Herskovic

    Oral history interview with Rose Herskovic

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Eugene Katz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Tillie Molho

    Oral history interview with Tillie Molho

    Oral History

    Tillie Molho, born on December 25, 1926 in Salonika, Greece, discusses her childhood in Salonika and Athens, Greece; her experience of the Italian and German invasions of Athens; living in hiding for two years with a Christian family; the scarcity of food and the fear of discovery; her reunion with her family after the liberation of Athens; her family's attempt to reclaim their home from German collaborators; her life after the war; and her immigration to the United States in 1951.

    Oral history interview with Edith Newman

    Oral history interview with Edith Newman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Agnes Allison

    Oral history interview with Agnes Allison

    Oral History

    Agnes Allison (née Agnes Suzannah Halàsz), born on October 28, 1926 in Budapest, Hungary, discusses her childhood; her younger sister, Judy; her mother, Ilona Gero and her father, Robert Halász; attending a private German school established for the children of diplomats; the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, and the arrival of Polish refugees; the Hitler Youth movement at her school; her family’s conversion to Catholicism in 1939 and her awareness of the anti-Jewish laws in Hungary; the German occupation of Hungary beginning in March 1944 and the increased restrictions imposed on the Jewish community; her family being forced out of their home; working for the Germans for a short time in exchange for protection; becoming friendly with a German officer's chauffeur, Fritz, who told her that the German soldiers kept watch at night to protect everyone in the apartment from the Hungarian Nazis, the Arrow Cross; going into hiding in December 1944 with the help of a priest, Father Reile; remaining in hiding until the liberation of Budapest in April 1945; learning the fates of family members; and her belief that the Arrow Cross was responsible for the deaths of Budapest Jews.

    Oral history interview with Ann Gabor Arancio

    Oral history interview with Ann Gabor Arancio

    Oral History

    Ann Gabor Arancio, born on September 2, 1926 in Gyula, Hungary, discusses her childhood in Gyula; her childhood experiences with antisemitism; her experiences passing as a Christian with false identity papers; being captured in November 1944 by Nazi troops; doing forced labor in a brick factory; her escape with her mother and sister; going into hiding in several locations; the liberation of Hungary; studying in Holland; immigrating to the United States with her husband in 1950; and her divorce, remarriage, and family life in the United States. [Ms. Arancio was featured in the book, A Time to Flee: Unseen Women of Courage.]

    Oral history interview with Valerie Balint

    Oral history interview with Valerie Balint

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Yanina Cywinska

    Oral history interview with Yanina Cywinska

    Oral History

    Yanina Cywinska, born on October 28, 1929, describes growing up with her Ukrainian family, including her parents, Wladyslaw and Ludwika, and her older brother, Theodor; traveling a lot as a child; living mostly in and around Warsaw, Poland; attending ballet classes; being raised Catholic; her father’s Jewish friends; being taught by her parents to not look down on Jews or ever make an antisemitic comment; her father, who was a doctor and was asked by the Nazis, once they had invaded Poland, to perform some medical experiments on Jewish twins; his refusal to conduct the experiments and his subsequent imprisonment in jail for a short period; the Warsaw Ghetto, which was constructed in 1939; her father’s realization that he had a moral obligation to help the Jews and his failed attempts to get the local priest to help; her family’s participation in the underground movement; making several trips a day through tunnels and sewer lines into and out of the ghetto; carrying ammunition, jewelry, furs, medicine, and poison for the black market; witnessing executions and other violence; the various tunnels that they used to get in and out of the ghetto; being arrested and sent to a detention center; being taken out in the middle of the night with other people into the forest, where they dug ditches and then were lined up and shot; surviving the massacre because she was behind another woman, and she fell into the pit and pretended to be dead; climbing out of the pit and hiding in a haystack, where a farmer found her; reuniting with her parents at the detention center; her aunt, Stasha, paying the Gestapo to get Yanina and her brother out of the detention center; returning to her aunt’s house; being beaten and abused by her aunt for being a “Jew-lover”; her brother, who ran away; working as a servant for her aunt; ending up homeless and wandering around the streets of Warsaw for a while; staying for a few weeks with a couple she met at the detention center; reuniting with her parents at the detention center; being sent with the other prisoners to Auschwitz in cattle cars; the journey; arriving at Auschwitz; surviving a gas chamber after being revived by another inmate; being given a uniform; the shaving of her hair; being tattooed with a number; working in various places, including a factory, a kitchen, in the labs, and at the crematorium (note that it is generally thought that only men worked in the Sonderkommando doing the jobs that Yanina said she did); her methods for survival; being forced on a death march to Dachau; being liberated by American soldiers; staying in a displaced persons camp for a while, where she was sexually assaulted and impregnated by a soldier; her two abusive marriages after the war; meeting her third husband; the effects of the war on her emotionally; giving up on God; and her long recovery from her traumatic experiences.

    Oral history interview with Yanina Cywinska

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ilse Lewy

    Oral history interview with Ilse Lewy

    Oral History

    Ilse Lewy, born on February 26, 1920 in Wuppertal, Germany, discusses her childhood in Wuppertal (now part of Elberfeld); her memories of the increase in antisemitism after Hitler rose to power 1933; being forced to leave school and move with her family; working at a factory until 1936; her move to a children's school in Sweden that prepared students for immigration to Palestine; her travels there by train and her experiences in the school for the next two years; being summoned back to Germany to immigrate with her parents and sister to the United States; the voyage on a ship through the Panama Canal; arriving in San Francisco, CA; returning to school; her attempts at and final success in being admitted to nurse training; her experiences with antisemitism in the United States; volunteering for the United States Army; being stationed in the Philippines where she met her future husband; and their marriage and family life.

    Oral history interview with Esther Kemeny

    Oral history interview with Esther Kemeny

    Oral History

    Esther Kemeny, born on August 19, 1912 in Michalovce, Slovakia, discusses her childhood in Michalovce; attending law school and graduating 1936; incidents of antisemitism; her disbarment in 1939 because she was Jewish; meeting her husband and their marriage; the escape of her brothers and father to the United States in 1940; being deported with her husband to Auschwitz in 1944; the deplorable conditions at Auschwitz; the birth and tragic loss of her son in Auschwitz; her work in the hospital at Auschwitz; the death march she endured; her experiences at Ravensbrück concentration camp; being liberated by Russian soldiers; the assistance she received from the Red Cross; her return to Slovakia and her reunion with her husband who was in the hospital in Bratislava; their immigration to the United States in 1949; their move to New York and then Ohio; her husband's medical practices; and the birth of her daughter in 1952.

    Oral history interview with Ray Redel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Roma Barnes

    Oral history interview with Roma Barnes

    Oral History

    Roma Barnes (née Rosenmann), born on March 15, 1930 in Demblin (Deblin), Poland, describes being subjected to a lot of antisemitism in school when she was growing up; the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany in September 1939; the roundup of Jews; fleeing the roundups several times; her parents, who were caught in the first roundup and sent to Sobibor, where they were killed immediately upon arrival; returning to her town, where she met up with her uncle and stayed with him; her uncle’s preparation of fake passports for all of them to go to Switzerland; watching as her uncle was captured by the Nazis and shot; being caught and sent to a work camp, where she witnessed such atrocities as watching the hanging of her friend; being sent to Chesokova, where she was liberated; and staying in Egland after the war before going to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Margot Braun

    Oral history interview with Margot Braun

    Oral History

    Margot Braun (née Feibush), born January 28, 1923 in Berlin, Germany, describes growing up in a suburb of Berlin, where there were very few Jews; being forced to go to a Jewish school in Berlin when Hitler came to power in 1933; her family’s experience of a "pre-Kristallnacht" in June of 1938, at which time she and her family were awakened and forced to leave their businesses and move in with their relatives; her father’s many siblings, including his brother who was an extremely wealthy businessman in San Francisco, CA; leaving with her family for England in March 1939; the arrest of her parents at the beginning of the war; living with her cousin in a foster home in England; her parents’ eventual release; and her family’s immigration in October 1948 to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Ted Ellington

    Oral history interview with Ted Ellington

    Oral History

    Theodore “Ted” Ellington, born in February 1928 in Vienna, Austria, describes being an only child; growing up around antisemitism and being defensive of his Jewish identity; the religious nature of Vienna schools and having to attend Christian educational activities; being also required to go to Jewish education sessions; how there were about eight Jewish students in his elementary school class of 35 children; his father, who made a living selling foodstuffs for livestock; the economic inequality in Vienna and his family’s practice to provide lunch for an unemployed family once a week; the violence that erupted in Vienna in 1934; the Anschluss in 1938; seeing tanks in the streets and army planes flying overhead daily; the Nazi flags and swastikas all over Vienna and the pro-Nazi sentiment of many Austrians; the Nuremberg laws; being forced to attend an all-Jewish school, where Nazi children would gather outside and taunt the Jewish students; the burning of synagogues and the destruction of his grandfather's store; his memories of Nazis entering their family home and beating his father after he asked the officers for paperwork stating that they were allowed to conduct the search; how the officers took virtually everything the family owned, including his cherished stamp collection; his parents’ desire to relocate to the United States; his parents’ decision to enroll Ted in a program that was run by the Quakers that took children from Austria and placed them temporarily with a family in England; going to Belgium in April 1939 to live with his uncle; going to England in May 1939 and staying with a family there until 1946; being treated well by the English family; attending school in London; his parents’ migration to San Francisco, CA in 1940; traveling to New York, NY in 1946 and a train to San Francisco, where he reunited with his parents in May 1946; attending San Francisco City College for one year and then UC Berkeley; earning his degree in accounting in 1950; joining the US Army for two years and then becoming a CPA; getting married in 1965; and his two daughters.

    Oral history interview with Anna Hollander

    Oral history interview with Anna Hollander

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Theo Joseph

    Oral history interview with Theo Joseph

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Katz

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Katz

    Oral History

    Elisabeth Katz (née Rosenthal), born on April 23, 1920 in Fürth, Germany, discusses her childhood in an assimilated Jewish family; her mother's conversion to Judaism and reversion to Lutheranism; the ambivalent position that she felt placed in because of this difference; having to change schools once Hitler rose to power in 1933; attending a Jewish boarding school; entering nursing school in Frankfurt in 1938; her memories of the events surrounding Kristallnacht in November 1938, including the arrest of her father; immigrating to London in late 1938 to work in a hospital; being interned as an enemy alien; returning to London and working as a nurse during the Blitz; visiting her parents in 1947 in Germany, where they had remained throughout the war; her father being one of the three Jews in Furth who survived the Holocaust; immigrating to the United States in 1949; moving to San Francisco, CA; and marrying a fellow refugee.

    Oral history interview with Jim Sanders

    Oral history interview with Jim Sanders

    Oral History

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