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Oral history interview with Nina Menrath

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1999.A.0122.776 | RG Number: RG-50.477.0776

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    Oral history interview with Nina Menrath
    Transcript
    --10 seconds you can go for it.
    My name is Maria Jensen.
    I'm interviewing Nina Menrath May 17, 1990
    at the Northern California Holocaust Center.
    Professor Menrath, when were you born?
    1928 in Austria, in Graz, which is
    close to the Yugoslav border.
    What did your parents do?
    My father, who we're talking about--
    his name was Frank Pestle, and he was a consulting engineer.
    He had an office in Vienna, one in Hamburg, one in Paris,
    and one in Barcelona.
    So I was sort of raised like an army brat
    because wherever my father had two or three factories
    to build.
    that's where we would move to.
    In his work as a consulting engineer
    you moved around a lot.
    What do you remember?
    What are your memories of your childhood moving around a lot?
    What kind of a life was it for you over there?
    People in and out--
    Well, I was thinking the other day
    that I had a fairly blissful childhood until I was eight,
    and then from then on it became incredibly difficult
    because we were in Spain during the Civil War,
    and we fled from there.
    And we were in Austria during the Anschluss,
    and we fled from there.
    By this time I'm 10.
    It's 1938.
    From Austria we went to France.
    By the time we got to France.
    My father's office was requisitioned by the Germans.
    He couldn't even go back into his office.
    So we got into the car, and we left for Spain.
    And by this time they're mobilizing,
    and all hell is breaking loose.
    So my memories are of meadows in Austria
    and vacations at my grandfather's house,
    wherever we lived during the year.
    We would in summer go to Graz, which
    was my father's and my hometown, and I
    think of squirrels, and rowboats, and meadows,
    and Grandpa, who was a lawyer and a delightful, fun man.
    I think of picking flowers, and blueberries, and mushrooms
    in the woods, and it's so much in contrast
    with the rest of my childhood.
    It's almost like I have a light childhood and a dark childhood.
    And the dark childhood actually started probably
    when I was five or six because that's
    when my father started to work as an activist against Hitler.
    Hitler came in '33, so I was five.
    By '34, '35, my father was pretty clear
    that we were in the forces of evil,
    and he started to talk to his Jewish friends and say,
    aren't you listening to what that guy is saying?
    He wants to purify the German race.
    He's going to do you in.
    And a lot of his friends wouldn't believe him.
    What was your father specifically-- how
    was your father active?
    You think starting in '33 he was active?
    '33 is early.
    I think '35 probably was when he started.
    He had a connection through his business world
    with Schacht, who was Hitler's finance minister,
    and of course I don't know how he got to do this.
    But what I do know is that my father, once a month,
    had Schacht's car and chauffeur with a diplomatic number
    and diplomatic immunity.
    And the Schacht said to my father,
    I'll give you the car once a month with my chauffeur.
    I never want to know what you did,
    and my chauffeur won't tell.
    And go do what you need to do.
    And so my father would go back to Germany, to Hamburg,
    to Berlin, to different places in Germany where
    he had Jewish friends who had actually
    worked with him in his offices, and he would get them--
    when he could get them to believe him,
    he'd get them into the car, and he'd bring them out of the--
    through the border.
    If it was north it was to Belgium, or if it was south
    it was to France or it was to Italy.
    A lot of the people he helped to come out to America.
    Some of them he took to Spain.
    Some of them went to Israel.
    And what I remember about that as a child is my father
    had always traveled a lot, and I wasn't scared when he traveled.
    But I began to notice that there were times when he'd
    travel that were terrifying.
    The whole family was terrified because we never knew
    whether he would come back.
    Now, nobody ever said that to me because I
    was the youngest in the family.
    My older brothers certainly understood.
    But little children feel things, and I
    started to feel-- whenever I heard
    my father was going to Germany, I was like, oh my God.
    Don't go.
    Don't go.
    And he'd say, it's all right, honey.
    I have an office there.
    And it was like I didn't believe him.
    I knew he wasn't going to the office.
    Besides, his trips were very short.
    He would go like for two or three days.
    You were about six or seven years old
    when you start being aware of changes going on in Europe.
    Do you remember any specific incidents as a child
    where you knew what was being said,
    and what was being talked about and was important
    and what they were saying?
    The clearest memory I have of that is after the Anschluss
    when I was 10.
    Our doctor, our family doctor, was Jewish,
    and he lived three houses down from us.
    And one morning I got up to go to school,
    and it was just after the Anschluss.
    And there was an SS guard standing over the doctor,
    and he was on the sidewalk with a brush.
    And he was supposed to--
    people had done the Kruckenkreuz in tar, made it out
    of the swastika.
    There's the Austrian cross.
    So what they would do is when there
    was a swastika they would complete it and make
    a Kruckenkreuz, which was our symbol.
    Well they got him out of his house,
    and they had him on hands and knees to brush that down.
    I just ran over to him, and I put my arms around him.
    And I said, don't let him do that to you.
    And the guard took the rifle, turned it around,
    and hit me over the head.
    And my mother was standing on the balcony,
    and she came running down.
    And she got me in the house.
    Now, what--
    What did she-- do you remember what she said to the soldier
    or--
    Yeah, well, what she said is what we talk about in the house
    and what we believe-- and you must never
    say in the outside world.
    And if you see something like that, you've got to walk by it.
    And I was saying, but you can't do that.
    You can't walk by and let that man be treated like that.
    And she said, you have to for your father's sake
    or they'll kill him, or they'll kill me, or they'll kill us,
    or they'll kill you.
    But something terrible is going to happen.
    The other side of that that's really amazing
    is I was learning English at the time,
    and my English teacher was Jewish.
    And my mother's hairdresser was Jewish.
    And then people started to call us up and said,
    we can't come to your house anymore, and we'd say, why?
    Are we Jewish?
    And they'd say, no, we are.
    A lot of the time you didn't know because all of a sudden
    you had to research up to your great-grandparents.
    So anyway, I'm still in school, and the Anschluss
    has only been a month.
    And my father's figuring out how are
    we going to get out of there.
    And I'm still in school, and the schoolteacher says, now,
    in the morning and when we come in, instead of saying
    good morning we say Heil Hitler.
    And when you go home to your parents,
    you are to say highly Hitler to your parents, too.
    And I noticed that I wasn't allowed
    to go to my English lessons and that the Jewish children
    in class weren't in class anymore.
    So anyway, I started to ponder this, and my mother
    and I had a difficult relationship.
    So one day I go home and I say, I think I'll try it.
    And I ring the doorbell.
    My mother opens the door, and I say Heil Hitler.
    And she slaps me across the face, and slams the door,
    and says, you're not getting into this house
    until you greet me properly.
    And we used to say kusst du Hand, which means,
    I kiss your hand.
    So I'm standing outside the door, and I'm thinking, well,
    I don't like that woman very well.
    I could now go to the police and denounce her,
    and they take her away.
    And the danger of implanting these possibilities
    into a child's hands are just obvious and enormous.
    So anyway, thank God I didn't do it.
    I rang the bell again, and I went back in.
    But there were-- for me, as a child,
    it was incredibly difficult to sort out
    what my father was doing, and what
    we were talking about at home.
    And my mother actually was accidentally
    born in Gualeguaychú, in a little town in South America.
    Her father lived like my father.
    He worked for Liebig, and he traveled all over the world.
    So my mother had an Argentine passport
    besides having an Austrian one, so she
    went to the Jewish hairdresser.
    And there was a guard in front of the door.
    And my mother was so obviously blond and blue-eyed,
    and the guard said, you can't go in there.
    And she said, yes, I can, and she took out
    her Argentine passport.
    The guard let her in.
    But he quickly read her name.
    He called my father in the office.
    She says, if you don't get your wife out of the hairdresser's
    you're going to be arrested.
    It went that quick.
    How soon was that incident, for example, after the Anschluss?
    Two months.
    Within two months?
    Two months.
    We left about three months after the Anschluss illegally,
    and my father had to make sure that we
    would be received along the way so that we could get out from--
    Vienna to Paris is a long way, and I can't tell you
    how we got there.
    I don't know that.
    I know we rode in cars at night, and I know we came to borders.
    And I know we were told to be quiet
    and we climbed over things.
    But I don't know the facts, or the route,
    or whatever that was.
    Then I remember we arrived in Paris.
    And in Vienna we had a very big, beautiful house,
    and we had to leave everything there.
    And then the next thing I know is
    we're in Paris in a dinky little apartment.
    I'm saying, what happened?
    Well, that's the way it is now, and it'll be different again.
    We went through that also when we left Spain
    during the Civil War.
    How many were there traveling?
    Your brothers-- you mentioned them.
    How many older brothers--
    I have two brothers.
    How old were they?
    One was four years older than I and the other seven years
    older than I. And the one was four years older
    than I lived in Argentina, and he died of cancer
    about three years ago.
    The one who was seven years older than I is still
    alive in Brazil in Curitiba.
    So their memories of-- do they-- their memories of-- did
    they ever share-- did they ever share their memories with you
    about that time, about leaving?
    Did you ever talk about it?
    I became a psychologist probably because I
    was so traumatized in my childhood,
    and they did the reverse.
    They shut down.
    My brothers had a great deal of difficulty
    talking about feelings, talking about childhood.
    If I tried to talk childhood with them,
    they want to talk about the meadows in Austria,
    and Grandpa, and the happy times.
    They don't want to talk about the other stuff.
    Let's go back to something you mentioned before.
    Your father's relationship with the finance minister,
    Schacht, who I believe was later deposed by Hitler--
    how long do you-- do you know how long his relationship
    with him lasted?
    It lasted for as long as we were in Europe.
    We landed in South America in 1940.
    And it's interesting that people who on the one hand
    were loyal to Hitler and were doing things which I believe
    were pretty horrible on the other hand
    had allegiances, underground allegiances.
    I've heard that from other people,
    too, where they've named names, and I thought, oh my.
    You knew him?
    I'm not talking Goebbels or Goering.
    I don't know anybody who knew them.
    But I did know people who knew lower down in the hierarchy
    and who said things like, yeah, he saved my life.
    When do you think this relationship
    with Schacht started?
    Many, many years before 1933?
    Probably, probably in my father's business world
    and totally unrelated to anything political originally.
    When do you think he started making these monthly trips
    into Germany with the diplomatic--
    Schacht's car?
    I'm quite sure it was '36, '36 to '40.
    So was he going in once a month to--
    about once a month?
    That's what Schacht had said to him originally,
    that he could have the car once a month.
    Now, I'm not sure that went on for all
    that time because two of those years we were in Spain.
    '36 to '38 we lived in Spain, and then the Civil War came.
    And then my father took people out of Spain
    who were being persecuted by Franco,
    and so he couldn't have gone back to Germany at that time.
    You were very young then, eight years old, in 1936.
    Do you remember any discussion about the German aid that
    was going towards Franco's forces, the destruction
    of Guernica, for example and--
    No, no.
    You don't remember anything about--
    No, that's--
    So you went back to Vienna, and you were there until 1938?
    Right.
    And then three months after the Anschluss you fled to Paris.
    Do you remember how long it might
    have taken you to get to Paris?
    No.
    No, it's like lost time.
    I remember the feelings.
    I remember sitting in places like this
    where that was the signal, and then you'd hear people walk.
    I have no idea how long that was.
    It seemed an eternity.
    It may have been six days or seven days.
    I'm not sure at all.
    You were told that-- you do remember distinctly being
    told that you had to be quiet?
    You knew it was dangerous.
    The utmost gravity was--
    And I was told so many times never
    to speak about what we spoke about at home,
    and that it was always like my father's life
    depended on our being able to keep secrets,
    including when we were in France,
    and when we went back to Spain, and when we got on the ship
    and went to South America.
    They didn't-- my parents didn't feel safe until we had landed
    in Buenos Aires and had a place to live.
    So there were many years of not being
    able to speak like other kids do when other kids would
    say, where do you live, or what does your father do.
    Well, we move a lot.
    Well, what does your father do?
    Well, he's an engineer, and that's why we move a lot.
    And we weren't even allowed to say
    that we were fleeing because you never
    knew who you were talking to.
    Do you think-- do you remember-- about that flight back-- just
    go back for a second.
    Was it-- do you think you might have been
    going through Germany?
    Do you remember any languages being spoken around here?
    Or did you travel just as a family by yourselves at night
    or during the day?
    We traveled just as a family, and when
    we went to South America we were on that ship
    that was full of Jews.
    We were the only non-Jews on the ship.
    But when we left Austria we traveled as a family
    and we got to France.
    Wherever-- we stopped at night.
    We drove.
    We took trains, whatever.
    When we-- I want to--
    I'll tell you one story which I just--
    that I remember really clearly.
    When we got to--
    when we left France and we got to-- we
    were going to go back to Spain.
    We got to the border.
    The chain just closed in front of us, and the Frenchman said,
    mobilization has taken place.
    Everybody has to go back to their own country
    and has to go into the army, and so just turn back and go.
    And my father had a gray Packard,
    and everybody just stopped dead.
    And the borders closed, and we don't know what to do
    and what's happening.
    And all of a sudden we see the-- the Spanish guard
    comes over to the French guard, and he's
    pointing at my father's car.
    And he's saying something, and my father says,
    this is probably it.
    That's the end.
    Somebody recognized me.
    And the French guard comes up to our car, and he says,
    are you Mr. Pestle?
    Yeah.
    Is this is your family?
    Yeah?
    Get through.
    And my father's totally puzzled, and he was white as a sheet.
    I could just see him.
    And we still don't know whether, if we get on the other side,
    we're going to be shot or what's going to happen.
    We get on the other side, and the Spanish guard says,
    well, you saved my life during the Civil War,
    and this is my turn to save your life.
    And my father looks at him and says, I don't even know you.
    And he says, yep, I am the brother
    of the guy who worked in your factory,
    and you came to get me at night, and you drove me
    over this very same border, and your risked your life.
    My father had done that hundreds of times.
    He'd never even looked at the people
    he was taking over the border.
    This was during the Civil War, so he
    was going almost every night.
    And I remember that.
    And he'd get-- one guy would say to him,
    go over there, go to this house.
    It's my brother, and his wife, and their three children.
    And my father had an Argentine flag and an Austrian flag
    over his old Packard, and he would drive people
    over the border.
    Well, this guy is one who he'd driven over the border,
    and he let us in, and that's how we got to Spain.
    And if it wasn't for that guy we'd all be dead.
    You could [INAUDIBLE] all be dead because--
    I'm curious about that because shortly after the Anschluss
    close to 80,000 people, within a few months,
    were rounded up in Austria, undesirables,
    political enemies, of which there were many.
    And your father managed to escape that.
    Why are you certain that you would have been dead?
    Because--
    Because if we had gone back to France--
    by this time the Anschluss had taken place.
    We were Germans.
    Everything would have been taken away from us
    or, if we were recognized as activists,
    we would have been sent back to Austria or Germany to a camp.
    So one way or the other we would have been dead.
    And the reason we got out of Paris
    is because somebody from the German embassy called my father
    and said, get out of here.
    They're going to mobilize in two days.
    And that was supposedly from the enemy's side.
    How did your father know this person at the embassy?
    Do you know?
    I don't know, but it must have been somebody
    he helped one way or the other.
    He helped so many people.
    And besides, he had to have a guardian angel for us
    to get through all the things we got through.
    We get on this ship to go to South America.
    We're the only non-Jews on the ship.
    Just before we get to Brazil--
    by this time it's the war--
    a British U-boat surfaces and stops us and asks the captain
    to come on board.
    And by this time my father is a German
    who would be captured by the British, right?
    Wherever he was he was the enemy.
    So the British guy comes on board,
    and he says to the captain, give me all your passports.
    The captain gives him all the passports.
    By this time all the Jews have a J in their passport,
    and almost everybody on the boat was--
    on the ship was Jews, German Jews, Austrian Jews.
    So this is-- what do you call it-- a little transport ship.
    There was room like for 40 people, and we were 360.
    So we're sleeping everywhere, and he has 360 passports.
    So the Spanish captain gives the British guy the passports.
    By this time my older brother is 17.
    He would have been taken, too.
    So the British guy starts going through the passports
    and says, well, these are all Jews.
    Don't you have any others?
    And the captain says, I don't make any difference.
    I don't know what you mean by others or by Jews.
    So he looks through another--
    I don't know-- 120 passports, and then he says,
    that's all you got?
    He says, that's all I got, gets off the ship.
    In the meantime, we're in our cabin
    saying, OK, two minutes before freedom
    they're going to get him.
    And they didn't.
    After they didn't get your father--
    it sounds like Franco's forces didn't get your father,
    and then the Nazis marching into Vienna didn't get your father,
    and then in France you managed to escape the new onslaught.
    But after the war did your father ever go back to Vienna
    and find out what happened to some of his colleagues
    or anything?
    Yeah, my father went back to Germany and to Austria
    on business and to visit family.
    And what was so--
    and he visited his Jewish friends who had either returned
    or his Jewish friends in America.
    He had some in New York, and he went
    to visit them a number of times in Chicago, and in Pittsburgh,
    Pennsylvania, and--
    they just adored him--
    in Los Angeles.
    What was so amazing about him-- he
    was so much more forgiving than I am.
    Yeah, he would just go back, and he
    would visit his Jewish friends, and his friends who
    had been Nazis, and he would listen to their stories.
    And eventually he would say, it doesn't matter very much
    on what side you were.
    It was horrible.
    It was painful.
    It was devastating.
    We all suffered.
    We all were hurt.
    We all were wounded.
    Yeah, more people were killed on one side
    than on the other, but then look at Leningrad
    and the millions of people who died in Leningrad
    who-- the Russians.
    What was your father's background
    that made him take such extraordinary risks,
    you think, going into Germany--
    What the psychology of the rescuer is is fascinating.
    He was raised a Catholic.
    We were raised Catholics.
    He was a deeply honorable, loving kind of man.
    We always had servants.
    He treated the servants with the greatest respect.
    He would go to the kitchen, and compliment them after dinner,
    and thank them for the beautiful meal that they had made.
    I never, ever in my life saw my father
    put somebody down or even criticize
    somebody, which is why it was so incredibly shocking to me
    when Hitler came into Austria.
    We were in the street watching the parade,
    and my father said, why doesn't somebody shoot him?
    And it was the only comment I ever
    heard my father make that was so devastating that it took me
    months, and months, and months to integrate how
    this father who was so loving to us, to his family,
    to his friends, and to everybody could say something like that.
    And then as I began to understand more and more, even
    from accidental conversations when my father would come home
    and say to my mother, you know who they just deported,
    or something like that--
    and then I'd say, was that Hitler?
    And he'd say, yeah.
    Little by little I got it.
    Within in a few months-- within--
    this is still in Vienna?
    Yeah.
    So you heard about deportations.
    You heard about people being taken away.
    Did you did you recognize the names as friends of the family?
    Oh, yeah.
    Oh, yeah.
    Were you afraid for your friends,
    for your own childhood friends as well?
    Yeah, yeah.
    And actually some of my cousins were taken into the German army
    by force.
    Like the SS would come into a high school classroom,
    and take all the boys, put them in SS uniforms,
    and send them to Russia.
    So I've had people on both sides who were fighting on that side
    and fighting on this side, which eventually also taught me
    that no matter where you were it was horrible.
    And it was cruel, and it was senseless.
    And yeah, Hitler initiated the whole debacle, but nobody won.
    The winners didn't win.
    Do you remember-- do you remember
    if there was any kind of a discussion with your brothers
    about being part of Hitler Youth or anything like that?
    Do you remember any kind of-- you
    were only there a short time, but do you
    remember any kind of a conversion?
    We were made to join the Hitler Youth.
    So you were a member of Hitler Youth?
    Oh, yeah, oh, yeah.
    I remember three meetings of being in the Hitler Youth.
    Anybody who wasn't Jewish was forced from their school
    to go into the Hitler Youth, and I
    remember that the first time that they were there--
    that we were there the teacher said
    with this friendly, phony smile, what do
    you children know about Hitler?
    And I said I knew that he was a painter--
    I mean he painted walls--
    and that his father was a guard at a train station
    or something like that.
    Well, I obviously wasn't supposed to say those things.
    Those were not the heroic things,
    but interestingly to me that I had those facts.
    I must have been told at home that he
    was a kind of a nobody who came out
    of no education, no culture, no background that
    had any thinking, or value, or whatever,
    and amongst those things I heard those things.
    Did you hear he was Austrian?
    Did your father ever tell you he was a--
    Oh, yeah.
    Oh, yeah.
    I also remember once--
    the Russian Georgians were friendly toward the Germans
    because Hitler tried to help them stay independent from
    Russia, and when they couldn't-- from the Soviet Union,
    I should say.
    When they couldn't, the Germans helped Georgians to get out
    of the Soviet Union, and at some dinner with some bigwigs
    that I attended a Georgian said to me,
    you must be very proud that Hitler was Austrian.
    And I said, oh, exactly as proud as you
    are that Stalin was Georgian, and oh boy did he shut up.
    He never talked to me again the whole evening.
    When did you have to join the Hitler Youth?
    From school.
    Immediately after the-- how soon after the Anschluss in March--
    Immediately, immediately.
    So it was in March?
    Maybe April.
    Maybe it was April, until things got--
    You remember seeing the parade.
    --organized.
    I remember seeing the parade.
    I remember the Jewish children leaving class.
    One morning they were in class, and the next morning they
    weren't there.
    And of course--
    Did anybody say anything?
    Well, being who I was, I went right up to the teacher,
    and I said, good morning.
    Where are my friends?
    And she said, you didn't say Heil Hitler.
    And I said, OK, Heil Hitler.
    Were are my friends?
    And she said, well they are now going
    to special separate schools from you
    because they're not the same as you.
    And then I went home, and I said,
    is this about the Jews again?
    Yeah.
    But of course they didn't say it.
    They didn't say they're Jewish.
    They said they're different.
    I want to share one experience that was very important to me.
    I work in Europe in spring.
    Normally I'm not here.
    I'm in Europe.
    And I teach there all over the place,
    in different communities.
    And a friend of mine started a community in Northern Germany,
    and she asked me if I would come and do some teaching there.
    And I said, sure, I'll do anything for a friend.
    And then I'm in Holland working, and all of a sudden I
    realized that I have made really sure, since the war,
    never to go to Northern Germany because that's
    where my father was persecuted.
    And so I went to Southern Germany.
    I went to Frankfurt, and I went to Munich,
    and I went to places in the south, close to Austria
    kind of, but not Northern Germany.
    Austrians have a prejudice against Northern Germans
    anyway.
    But that's where my father went, Berlin and Hamburg.
    That's where he went he went when he was getting Jews out,
    so I never went there.
    So then I'm on the train going to Hamburg,
    and I think, oh my God, I wonder what's going to happen to me.
    I could get back into five-year-old and be terrified,
    and I'm supposed to lead a group of Northern Germans.
    So I arrived there, and I said to my friend,
    this is where my terror comes from as a child.
    And I'm not sure I can do it, or I may do it and fall apart
    in the middle of it.
    And she said, well, I'm a pretty good group leader.
    If you have to fall apart, fall apart.
    So one night-- this was a week workshop--
    I worked with a woman my age a dream that she had,
    which was about the war, and I've
    had thousands of those dreams.
    As a matter of fact, I did a lot of therapy
    to get over my war dreams.
    And some things I dream that I never
    experienced but I heard, and I read, and I lived with.
    So anyway, I worked with this woman's dream,
    and it was absolutely devastating.
    So then I go to bed, and all hell breaks loose.
    I start dreaming war dreams again.
    And I wake up, and I'm in tears.
    And my friend comes in, and she says,
    well, you don't have to lead the group today.
    I'll lead it.
    And I said, oh, no.
    This is my opportunity.
    I'm going to lead the group, and I'm going to tell them.
    I share with them who I am, which I never do in Germany,
    and she said, OK.
    So I went in, and I said, I'm just
    going to talk about my childhood for about 10 minutes.
    And it comes from the dream that you shared last night.
    And my childhood was as difficult as yours,
    and yours was no more and no less difficult than mine.
    And I have finally understood that we're all the same.
    But I need to talk about the terror.
    So I did just a little bit.
    And then there was a Dutch woman there, and she--
    this is the month of May, which is
    when the Dutch were liberated, and so she
    talks about her experience as a child, and she's my age.
    And then somebody else talked, and then
    all of a sudden this one German woman
    with a voice like a general says, get up, everybody.
    It sounded like an air raid is happening.
    We all got up.
    And she says, put your arms around each.
    We put our arms around each other.
    She starts to sing "We Shall Overcome."
    And we're just all saying, "We Shall Overcome."
    It still makes me tearful.
    And that was my real healing to be
    able to realize that we're all one
    and we've all gone through these atrocities.
    But we have to stop blaming, and we
    have to stop pointing fingers.
    And we have to learn to forgive, and we
    have to remember so that it never happens again.
    I didn't know that's where I was going, but that's fine.
    If you want to take a break, it's all right.
    No, I'm OK.
    I always think tears are just fine.
    There's some people who feel that strong people come out
    of difficult childhoods and that--
    and many people who are strong and very successful in life
    will say, well, it's because I had a difficult childhood.
    That's true.
    But do you-- you've obviously reflected on what the war cost
    you and your family.
    What do you think it cost you in terms of your childhood?
    What would your childhood have been like,
    do you think-- do you think about or did you ever
    think about what your childhood would have been like
    if the war had not interceded?
    No, I'm so much of a realist that wouldn't
    occur to me, but I see--
    I have a very complicated and interesting family,
    and I think we've all suffered a great deal.
    And some of us are more able to look within and work
    with the suffering than others.
    My mother is 85, and she's a very bitter, sad old lady
    who is still pointing fingers.
    Who's she pointing fingers at?
    At the Germans, and at life, and at my father, and at--
    the risks he took and how traumatized we were.
    And my father's dead.
    Everybody is at fault except her.
    That's how my mother deals with it, which
    is a total non-dealing with it.
    She didn't approve of your father's actions?
    She did, but it cost her.
    Did you ever--
    And it cost her much.
    How did it cost her, him deciding to risk his safety
    and other families' by using--
    Tremendous fear.
    My mother lived in terror a lot of the time.
    And sometimes she talks about it like he was a hero,
    and sometimes she talks about it like he was crazy
    and that he also endangered a lot of people
    who knew what he was doing.
    And she's confused about it, and she's on all sides of it.
    And none of it had she digested or--
    she's just not that kind of lady.
    My mother cares more about makeup, and hairdo,
    and about image.
    And when it's convenient, then the image is, he was a hero,
    and when it's not convenient, he was a crazy man.
    It sounds like also that it was important, as a child,
    that you--
    you had to adapt.
    You had to have several different images.
    At school you're a member of Hitler Youth,
    and at home you could be yourself
    and discuss the oppression going on around you.
    Did your parents-- going back to the Hitler Youth,
    did your brothers and you ever discuss what
    you were being taught there?
    And what did you do at a Hitler Youth meeting
    as a little girl--
    six or--
    You sang songs.
    You saluted.
    You were told that you were of a privileged race.
    I was told that if I was very, very good during summer
    vacation I could go to Germany and live
    with a wonderful German family, stuff like that.
    And I wanted to go.
    I went home, and I said, hey, I can go to Germany this summer
    and live with a wonderful German family.
    It's so confusing in a child's mind.
    Then my mother says, no, that's for poor children, children
    who have no means and they can probably go live on German farm
    where they will be well-fed.
    I didn't know what poor children were.
    They were in class with me.
    They looked like me.
    I didn't know the difference.
    It's something really-- my father also
    built a glass factory for the Shah of Persia, the old Shah.
    We had Hindus, and Persians, and Japanese.
    Mitsubishi people were at our house
    when I was a little kid in Vienna.
    We had people from all over the world in our home.
    I didn't know what prejudice was.
    I didn't understand.
    But do you think that-- but did you quickly--
    do you think that you-- did you start to learn perhaps when you
    were--
    Oh, sure.
    You started to learn it.
    And did your parents-- do you feel, looking back,
    that maybe your parents were then making a conscious effort
    to stop this education that you were getting in the schools
    and in Hitler Youth and with your brothers as well?
    Were you aware of any--
    My parents were just waiting to get us out of there,
    so by being truthful and honest when
    we were home they were counteracting everything
    that we were learning.
    And I guess part of my memory is how incredibly strong
    the family bond was and is.
    Still with my brother who lives in Brazil--
    I just found him.
    It was his wife's birthday.
    We're a closer family in many ways than many families
    who live in the same town because we've
    been so torn apart.
    And, yes, having such a difficult childhood
    makes you a strong person, or you go under.
    And I've seen some of my cousins after the war who
    stayed in Austria, who couldn't get out,
    and who experienced a lot of what I experienced and worse,
    and who are absolutely neurotic, who've never gotten over it,
    and with whom I can't talk because if I
    talk to them like I'm talking to you they go--
    they go nuts.
    They can't face it?
    What are you talking about?
    You're crazy.
    How can you-- how can you work this through?
    What is there to work through?
    We were damaged forever and ever and ever.
    We're just damaged people.
    And I say, hey, we were damaged people
    until we were 10, or 12, or 15.
    And what are you now, 62?
    And you're going to tell me you're a damaged person?
    And you've had 50 years to work on it, and what have you done?
    Oh, they go so-- they just go crazy.
    They don't believe there's any possible healing--
    No.
    --for their psyches at all.
    No.
    It sounds like-- it sounds like--
    you started to talk about the activities.
    There was singing these little-- it sounds almost like it was--
    Singing, storytelling.
    Yeah, like Boy Scouts, Boy Scouts of America.
    So was it--
    But it probably--
    Was it a fun activity?
    Do you remember any kind of-- was it fun?
    [CROSS TALK]
    No, it was so conflicting for me that it wasn't fun
    because I was always afraid I'd get caught saying something
    I wasn't supposed to say.
    I was afraid to leave what they said.
    If I did believe it, and went home, and talked to my family,
    I would be--
    a couple of times I was ridiculed,
    which was very hurtful.
    How can you believe that?
    What happened then?
    When were you ridiculed?
    What happened?
    I don't remember what the story was I brought home,
    but it was something I said that my teacher had
    said with big eyes and wanting to know whether it was true
    or not.
    And I was laughed at.
    And I don't know what it is I said, but I
    do remember how hurt I was.
    And they probably-- living in that much crisis,
    they probably expected much more maturity of me
    than a 10-year-old girl could muster, and they would forget.
    That you were 10 years old?
    Then I was 10 years old.
    So when you left--
    Actually, when you fled to France, did you go to school?
    Yeah, I went back to school in France.
    I went to a--
    I went to a Catholic nun school, and I
    was terrified, just terrified.
    It was so austere.
    It was in a castle, and there was a gate.
    And there was an old nun who opened the gate,
    and she had a cane.
    And if she didn't like the looks of you
    she'd just hit you one as you walk by.
    It's funny.
    Then I get terrified by Catholic nuns
    who are supposed to be kind and loving
    and accept this traumatized child.
    I was probably more terrified in that school than
    in some of the times in Vienna or in Spain.
    How long were you in school in France?
    Were you based in Paris?
    One year.
    One year before we went to Spain.
    And how long were you in--
    1939.
    That was the year I was in school there.
    In France.
    And then in Spain?
    No, in Spain I wasn't in school anymore.
    How long were you in Spain?
    And where did you go?
    And you went to-- where did you go?
    We went back to Barcelona where we had lived
    and my father had associates, and we stayed there
    maybe two months before we got on the ship to get out.
    You mention that even until you landed in Buenos Aires
    there was this silence that had to be
    kept about the family's beliefs, what did your father do.
    That pertained in Spain as well.
    Why was there-- were you told specifically why--
    Well, in Spain-- oh, yeah, in Spain Franco was ruling,
    and so if it came out that my father was an anti-fascist--
    and most of his friends at the time with whom
    he had the factory probably, by necessity, had become fascists
    or had bowed to Franco and his politics or whatever.
    So then we couldn't talk about it again.
    And they actually-- I remember conversations
    where they were making pretty positive comments
    about Mussolini, and about Hitler, and Franco,
    and this big alliance that is forming.
    What did your father say?
    My father didn't say anything.
    At that point he kept his mouth shut.
    At that point he kept his mouth shut
    because he wanted us to get out of there,
    and there was no point.
    The purpose of going to Spain was
    to escape, to get out of Europe, and there was no point
    in starting anything at all.
    And that's when my mother went to the Argentine consulate
    and said, I was born in Argentina.
    I want to be repatriated.
    And they said, fine.
    And she said, and I have a husband and three children.
    Oh, yeah, they can go with you.
    And it was an absolute miracle, and it was my mother's idea.
    My father didn't even think of it.
    My father was working with his political connections
    to try to get us out, but my mother naively and innocently
    went to the Argentine embassy and came back and said, hey,
    we can get out legally.
    And my father said, what happened?
    And she told him.
    Well, if your father--
    so your mother still had her Argentine passport which
    enabled your legal passage to--
    how soon after that do you remember boarding the ship to--
    do you remember the name of the ship?
    Cabo San Antonio.
    Cabo San Antonio?
    Uh-huh, out of Barcelona.
    Oh, Barcelona.
    It really wasn't meant-- how many people
    did you think were all there, about 300?
    360 people were on board.
    It was a cargo.
    And this specific-- had this boat been chartered,
    or had it been-- was it just a run that was a scheduled run
    that was--
    It was a run, and I think it was by the grace of the captain
    that all of those people were getting on board because we had
    also gotten out of Spain during the Civil War
    on a similar ship, and we had lots of-- at that time
    the Catholic nun the monks were being thrown into churches
    and lit on fire by the Rojos, whoever they were.
    They were Communists, but they weren't just communists.
    They were pretty-- well, the Spanish Civil War--
    between the Rojos and Franco you didn't know
    which was going to be worse.
    And so those are memories that I have
    of seeing a church go up in flames
    and hearing people scream and yell.
    This was in Barcelona?
    In Barcelona.
    Where were you in Barcelona?
    Do you remember?
    We lived on avenida del Tibidabo 22
    You know Tibidabo, the mountain in Barcelona?
    Near Parque Guell?
    Yeah.
    You lived in there.
    Do you remember the church that went up in--
    No, but we also had a summer house in Castelldefels
    on the Costa Brava.
    North of Barcelona?
    Yeah.
    And we saw a church lit on fire there, and people burned alive.
    Do you remember your parents-- you were really young there.
    You were--
    Six, seven, eight.
    What did your-- there was no way a parent would allow a child
    to see that.
    It was one of those situations, obviously, that you were there,
    there was no way they could have avoided that.
    Do you remember what--
    do you remember their explanation
    of what was going on?
    Did you understand-- could you understand
    at all what was happening?
    No.
    Certainly I couldn't understand what was happening.
    I do remember a childhood friend of mine
    who was Spanish run into a church
    and bring out a statue of the Virgin Mary.
    That was in Castelldefels, close to where we lived,
    where we went to mass on Sundays.
    And when I saw her I was absolutely horrified.
    I said, how can you do that?
    And she said, they're going to burn it.
    They're going to burn the church.
    I couldn't believe it.
    Well, not only did they burn the church.
    We heard the screams from our house of the people
    that they put in the church.
    The Germans did the same thing with the French in Oradour.
    But very seldom does anybody talk
    about the atrocities that happened-- the same atrocities
    happened in Spain, horrendous.
    It was so frightening.
    And when we got on the ship to get out--
    To go back to Austria?
    Well, actually they got us out to Italy.
    And then from Italy they put us on a train,
    and we went back to Austria.
    But when we got on there, the whole ship was full.
    It was just like the ship to South America,
    only this is '36.
    And the ship was full of monks and nuns,
    and they were all in just plain clothes.
    And as we got out to sea they put on their helmets.
    And apparently I walked up to one of them,
    and I said, well, thank God they didn't kill you,
    which was a pretty wild comment for a little kid to make.
    But I didn't know how many of them
    had been killed and burned.
    And yet despite the fact that your father was an anti-fascist
    he was helping--
    and you had seen this?
    You knew about your father's activities.
    Yeah.
    Yeah, but, you see--
    You didn't see that-- you didn't see the--
    how was a young child able to understand
    that what those Rojos were doing was wrong
    but what my father was doing was right and the other side
    of the Rojos--
    --was wrong, too.
    I think what I got from that is that my father was just
    so deeply humanitarian that he was going
    to save anybody who wasn't torturing or hurting
    somebody else.
    If you were in danger because of whatever
    and you asked him to help, he would help.
    But on this ship-- let's go back to Barcelona.
    And now you're going to leave for Argentina,
    and you're on the ship.
    You said primarily it was German Jews and Austrian Jews.
    Did you did your father know any of these people on the ship
    by any chance?
    I don't know that.
    We got to know a lot of the people really well,
    and one of the reasons we got to know them
    well is they wouldn't let us land in Brazil.
    And a lot of these people were going to Brazil,
    and all of a sudden--
    I don't remember for what political reason--
    the Brazilians decided they didn't
    want them, probably some Nazi kind of group in Brazil.
    There were a lot of Germans there.
    So we lay outside of Brazil for a long time,
    and a lot of these people were absolutely desperate.
    And the ship was running out of food,
    and my father consoled, and talked,
    and got the captain to wire people whom he knew,
    political people.
    It didn't work.
    We never got into Brazil.
    Then we got into Argentina, and as soon
    as we got into Argentina he knew people there
    who had political influence.
    And he facilitated with the captain
    and the Brazilian authorities, and that ship
    did land in Brazil in small part due to my father's help.
    But that's just who he was.
    Where there was trouble and he had any idea
    of how he could help he did.
    In Buenos Aires-- so you lived in Buenos Aires
    for the duration of the war.
    Until '47.
    And what were you aware of the war growing up in Buenos Aires?
    News every day.
    My father made a--
    in the paper there was--
    in the Prensa in Buenos Aires there
    was a little square thing on the front page
    of the activity of the war.
    My father cut it out every day and had an album--
    God knows where that might be-- had
    an album of the daily activities during the war.
    He also kept communication.
    He sent two copies of every letter.
    There was always a second copy in case
    the first copy didn't arrive.
    He kept in contact with his parents, who were--
    well, his father died at the beginning of the war,
    but he kept in contact with his mother as best he could.
    I remember that sometimes he would call,
    and the only way you could call is make operator calls.
    And then you had to stay by the phone
    24 hours because within the 24 hours
    any time the call might go through.
    We didn't forget the war one day of our lives,
    although we were in South America, not one day.
    What kind of a community was growing up in Buenos Aires?
    Well, my brothers went to French school,
    and I went to British school because of course we
    wouldn't go to German school.
    I would think 99% of my friends were Jewish.
    Were any of your Jewish friends hearing about any family
    members or were able to get any family members out?
    Yeah, oh, yeah, terrible.
    We had two German friends who had also been part
    of the underground, which--
    very carefully my father and they started to--
    when my father realized they weren't Nazis
    he very carefully started to initiate some conversations.
    Were you afraid of being discovered in Buenos Aires?
    No.
    So to clarify, was that the first place that you were in--
    The first place where we could breathe.
    Speak openly?
    Yeah.
    So from 19--
    But not with Germans.
    Not with Germans.
    And most of the kids who we associated with
    were either British or French.
    Then in the British school that I went to-- of course
    we all spoke foreign languages ever
    since we were born practically.
    In the British school that I went to all of a sudden--
    it was a girls' school--
    some girls got it into their heads that since I was Austrian
    I had to be Nazi.
    And they started to ostracize me.
    And I went home.
    And I said, I don't know what's going on,
    but something is fundamentally wrong.
    And I want to go talk to the principal.
    And my mother said, I'll go with you.
    So we went to the principal, and I
    told her some of the things that I was experiencing.
    By this time I'm 14 or something, 13.
    And so then the principal thanked me and said,
    I'd like to be alone with your mother, and I left.
    And then my mother told her some of our history,
    and then one day I was told not to go to school.
    And she, at assembly, told some about our background and said,
    you are to be especially nice to her,
    and it immediately stopped, the harassment.
    Do you remember what the girls did to you at all,
    what these other girls--
    Yeah, yeah.
    They they'd-- I don't remember what the swear words were
    for Germans, but they'd use swear words for Germans,
    and Austrians, and Nazis.
    And I don't remember the--
    There was a coolness of aloofness.
    Yeah.
    And they would--
    Well, in France they called me Boche,
    which is the put-down for German,
    and they threw stones at me on the way to school.
    At your brothers, too?
    At my brothers, too.
    Did you ever want to-- did you ever want to turn around
    and say, you don't understand, you don't understand what
    my father--
    Mostly when children attack you they
    are so cruel that what you do is you survive, you run.
    And I remember whenever I came to the edge of that park
    that I had to cross to go to the Catholic school
    that I was scared of--
    whenever I got to that park I'd kind of hold my breath,
    and I'd start walking.
    And if I saw any of those kids, I'd just start running.
    How did they know you were Austrian.
    How did the children know you were Austrian?
    We lived in Saint-Germain-en-Laye,
    which is a suburb of Paris, small community.
    Pestle is an incredibly Austrian name.
    I'm sure we sometimes spoke German
    when we were in the street or if I went shopping with my mother.
    My mother never did learn French very well.
    I used to translate for her.
    And it was a marketplace.
    It was probably evident.
    You went to Buenos Aires and you were
    friendly with a large Jewish community,
    growing Jewish community in Buenos Aires.
    Your family felt comfortable.
    And there were these two other German families
    that once your father determined they were not Nazi sympathizers
    you could be friendly with.
    After the war, was there any--
    did your family consider returning to Europe?
    Did your mother and father--
    I did.
    I went back to Europe.
    You did?
    My parents did not and, I think, chose--
    by this time my father must have been--
    well, he was born in '98.
    He was 50, and he had a well-developed business,
    and offices, and home.
    Actually, he moved to Brazil later
    when Peron was in Argentina.
    I always said Richard Nixon got elected here
    because I'm living here.
    Wherever we went the fascists came.
    So he moved to Brazil eventually,
    but I think it was like--
    I wouldn't consider moving back to Europe.
    He wasn't bitter about--
    He was not bitter at all.
    It sounded like you had quite a nice life in Vienna.
    You had servants.
    Oh, we did.
    You had [CROSS TALK]--
    Oh, we had servants in South America.
    And you had a wonderful [CROSS TALK]
    We had them in Spain.
    We had them in France.
    My father lost everything four times
    and he made everything again.
    Wherever he went he was able to give the family a very
    comfortable lifestyle.
    Well, when we arrived in Argentina
    we didn't have a cent, and we lived in Buenos Aires
    in a boarding house that was owned
    by a German Jewish woman who was willing to let us live there
    until my father could make some money.
    And I remember his comment was, well, the first thing we'll buy
    is a bicycle, and I said, why a bicycle?
    And he said, so we can go to the bathroom at night
    without stepping on the cockroaches.
    We were that poor.
    And within a month we had a car, and within two months
    we rented a house, and within two years
    we bought a house with a pool, and we had all the servants
    again.
    And he was never bitter about anything
    when he lost everything.
    What about your mother, though?
    I think my mother had a much harder time with it.
    And your brothers?
    Because they were a little older.
    They probably-- were they more set in their ways?
    Did they have more established friends
    in Vienna, more established friendships,
    or were they like you?
    My brothers became-- and I say that with some sorrow--
    became very materialistic in the sense
    that they had suffered from losing everything
    they had that they were going to make really sure that it never
    happened to them again.
    And I think I'm the one who preserved the spiritual values
    much more deeply than they did.
    My brothers don't go to church.
    My brothers don't talk about religion,
    don't talk about spiritual life.
    My oldest brother's oldest son is like the next generation,
    is a guy who has some spiritual values with whom
    I have deep and wonderful conversations which
    I can't have with my brothers or with my mother.
    My mother thinks that the measure of your love
    is how much money you spend on her when you're with her.
    So she went into that mode.
    I went into the mode that money doesn't matter.
    What's important is that you're happy, and healthy,
    and you love one another.
    But she still-- so she was bitter about--
    My mother is very bitter.
    Still to this day is bitter?
    Oh, very bitter.
    Because she lost a life, she lost a nice life in Vienna,
    being forced to flee so many times.
    I have about six or seven more minutes.
    How about you ask me a final question.
    Well, I'm also curious about after the war, too.
    And after the war there were a lot of German refugees
    to Argentina, some of whom were pretty unsavory characters.
    Do you remember that part of history
    occurring, being cognizant of the fact that now were arriving
    people who still felt that, once again, Germany had been cheated
    of its destiny?
    I was horrified, absolutely horrified to see
    the influx of ex-Nazis coming into Argentina.
    We had a house in Bariloche, which is a place in the Andes
    which is absolutely beautiful, and from one summer to the next
    the whole town was German-speaking.
    And I could tell by the accent and by the way
    they talked those are the guys, and now they're all here.
    And they weren't Austrian?
    And one of the very difficult things for me
    when I went to Hamburg that time when I did that workshop was I
    remember a lot of the places that my father spoke of,
    and one of them was the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten.
    And I went there.
    And there were men my father's age,
    and I found myself in the lobby looking at them and thinking,
    I wonder which of these guys would
    have tried to kill my father or something like that.
    And then all of a sudden this influx
    of influx of Germans into Argentina
    was absolutely horrifying.
    And Peron, later Peron.
    And Peron and Evita and the whole--
    And junta later.
    Yeah.
    Today what are your--
    what are your thoughts today regarding Germany
    in light of its reunification?
    I have no worries about that at all.
    Like I have been to the Soviet Union,
    and I have absolutely no worries that the Soviets would ever
    attack anybody in their lives again.
    The Russians I mean.
    And although the situation right now is very complicated,
    the unrest comes from the sub-nationalities
    that live within the Soviet Union, like the Azerbaijani,
    and the Georgians, and the Latvians, and all of those
    people.
    That's a very complicated story, and I
    wouldn't attempt to try to understand or clarify that.
    But I now have worked in Germany for six,
    seven years in northern Germany, and I have German friends
    come and visit me here.
    I know East Germans.
    I have Russian friends who are coming from Moscow
    on the 1st of July to my house.
    All of those people are so seasoned by their history
    that they would never initiate a war again.
    What if they pass that on to their children?
    Have they taught their children?
    Even more so.
    Even more so.
    Even more so.
    The generation of people that I work with now are between--
    in Germany everywhere are between 30 and 65,
    and the 30, 35-year-olds are so wise and so concerned
    about what their parents might have done during the war.
    And some of their parents won't answer their questions,
    which makes them doubly concerned, and aware, and wary.
    I'm really impressed with the young people
    in the Soviet Union, in Germany, in France, in Belgium,
    in Scotland.
    Wherever I work I am--
    that's my hope, that the work that I do has an effect.
    But the quality of the people who come to me to work
    is extraordinary.
    You mentioned-- I guess a final question I would have would
    be-- you said that you think one of the reasons
    you became a psychologist was to understand
    this trauma that the war inflicted on your childhood.
    Perpetrated on all of us.
    --and specifically in your childhood.
    What have you learned as a psychologist
    and from your perspective as a survivor, somebody who
    did live, was able to survive--
    do you have any notion about why it
    happened in the first place, what gave rise to this madness?
    I think the person who has been the most helpful
    in helping me understand that has been Alice Miller, who's
    a German psychologist who wrote a number of books,
    one of them called For Your Own Good.
    And in that book she describes how children were raised
    in Germany between the First World War and the Second World
    War and the incredible brutality that was perpetrated
    on these children, including--
    she has three case histories in the book, and one of them
    is Hitler's life as a child.
    And the other is about a young man
    who had a very famous trial that was on television who killed
    little boys, and then another one
    is of a woman who became a prostitute because she
    became a heroin addict at 14.
    And the first part of that book sort of a general overview,
    history, of the pedagogy by which children were raised
    and then these three case histories which are so
    horrifying that I could hardly read it.
    I'd find myself not breathing.
    And what it reminded me of was that some
    of the children that I was raised in France, too,
    and in Germany would be beaten mercilessly by their fathers
    if we came home from school 10 minutes late.
    Like we played in the street.
    Nobody ever hit me in my life, not as a child
    and not as an adult, but I remember the terror--
    and this was in Paris--
    of walking in with my friend Jean-Claude 10 minutes late.
    And his father was home, and he opened the closet
    where you hung your coats.
    And he took out a belt, and he started beating this kid
    in front of me.
    And I started to scream, turned around, ran out of the house,
    and ran home.
    But I also witnessed that in Vienna,
    and I witnessed that in--
    I never witnessed it in Spain, but I
    did in France and in Austria, how brutally children were
    treated.
    And this would set up a whole generation
    to be taken advantage of?
    Of people who cowed and who bowed down to authority
    and who were so afraid to raise their voice.
    And that's one of the gifts that we
    got who were on the other side, that we were--
    as soon as it was safe, we could speak the truth
    and live my own values.
    It's almost like an alcoholic household
    where you can't talk about it.
    Yeah, but we weren't a dysfunctional family.
    It wasn't a dysfunctional family.
    It's a situation.
    We were a functional family in a dysfunctional world.
    Quickly, just as a psychologist, how--
    what was the appeal of Hitler to these children who've
    been traumatized, do you think?
    The promises he made.
    Europe was in--
    Germany and Austria was in a severe depression.
    People were poor.
    People were hungry.
    The savior-- I remember his words he used to say,
    [SPEAKING GERMAN],, I, a nameless one,
    like I'm humble of the masses, I am going to save you.
    He built roads, and he built housing.
    And he gave people some physical comfort.
    If you weren't a Jew you were better off.
    If you were poor and you weren't a Jew
    you were better off than you'd been in years.
    It didn't last very long, but the beginning
    was very promising.
    And I remember little friends of mine saying, well,
    my parents say he's doing a lot of good.
    He's building a road from here to Linz and from here
    to Innsbruck, and some of my father's friends
    are getting to work and get money.
    But you still knew that this was all wrong, despite-- that this
    was a big lie?
    Yeah.
    Do you have any children?
    Yeah, I have two sons.
    What did you tell them about the Holocaust?
    I guess that would be my final question.
    What did you tell your own children
    about the Holocaust and your own childhood?
    Did you spare them some of these stories that being--
    Yes, certainly, certainly.
    I think if you asked my children,
    more than what I told them it's the values I lived by which are
    very much my father's.
    And, being a teacher, I've had the opportunity
    to help many, many people, and being a psychologist
    I've had that opportunity.
    And I just got a wonderful Mother's Day card
    from my younger son which said something like, thank
    you for the marvelous childhood I've had
    and for the loving, caring, wonderful person that you are.
    I've often said to my children, I
    don't believe what people say.
    I believe what they do.
    And so I've done what I've learned,
    and so they've learned that.
    But no, I didn't tell a lot of stories.
    About your own life.
    Did you make an effort nonetheless
    to educate them about--
    Politics?
    Oh, you bet.
    Oh, you bet.
    So I can't vote.
    I'm an Austrian citizen.
    And I've done everything to educate
    my students, and my children, and everybody I know,
    whether they want to hear it or not, to what power is.
    And voting is one of the powers we have,
    but we have many, many others.
    And I exert all of them except voting.
    And the reason I'm not an American citizen
    is that I've never trusted an American leader,
    and if America got into trouble, as long
    as I'm Austrian I can take both my boys who were born here,
    take them to Austria as long as they
    haven't served in the army, and they
    can become Austrian citizens.
    Now, mind you, the leader of Austria
    isn't particularly trustworthy at this time,
    but anyway, that's another story.
    I thank you.
    It was interesting for me to go back
    into some of those memories, and I accept them all,
    including the tears.
    Well, thank you for gracing us with your time
    and your memories.
    I know some of them were not easy to recall,
    but it wasn't an easy time.
    They go with it.
    They're part and parcel of the story.
    Thank you very much.
    Thank you.
    All right.
    We didn't even take a break.
    We went right through that.
    Great.
    We did about an hour 15.
    Well, some interviews last four hours.
    Oh, yeah?
    Oh, yeah.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    The interview describes Ms. Menrath's childhood in Graz, Austria, her family's Catholic background, her father's rescue of Jews, and her memories of the Anschluss and the changes afterward, including having to join the Hitler Youth. She describes her family's escape to Buenos Aires, Argentina via France, Spain, and Brazil in 1940, as well as the experiences of family members who remained in Europe. She describes her life in Buenos Aires, her return to Europe after the war, her immigration to the United States, and her thoughts about discussing the Holocaust with younger generations.
    Interviewee
    Nina Menrath
    Date
    interview:  1990 May 17
    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
    1 videocassette (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 Nina Menrath on May 17, 1990. The interview was received by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Branch in June 2004.
    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 08:46:48
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn515724

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    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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