Oral history interviews with former Polish inmates of Ravensbrück concentration camp

Oral history interview with Jeanne Dupont

Oral History

Jeanne Dupont, born in Liège, Belgium and married to a Belgian military officer, describes their resistance activities directed by London intelligence; her husband's transport of guns and ammunition in Belgium; their arrest by the Gestapo at their home; her 41 months of incarceration, including nine months in a Gestapo prison in Belgium; her transport to Germany with eight other members of the intelligence service; her arrival in Ravensbruk in 1943; her designation as NN by the Gestapo (Nacht und Nebel); the harsh conditions for an NN prisoner; her work on small arms at a Siemens factory outside the camp; her transfer by train on March 3, 1945 to Mauthausen with 2,000 other NN-designated women; her work filling bomb craters on the railroad; the cruelty of women guards; her liberation by the Swiss Red Cross on April 23, 1945; her transfer by caravan of 24 trucks driven by Canadian war prisoners to the Swiss frontier; learning that her husband had been decapitated in Ravensbrück; reuniting with her father; and her marriage to a Dachau resistance survivor.

Oral history interview with Simon Wiesenthal

Oral History

Simon Wiesenthal describes his views on the hesitation of survivors to tell their experiences to their children; encountering the same anxieties in WWII German officers years after the war; explaining to his own daughter, who was the only Jewish child in her school, about why they had no extended family; his liberation from Mauthausen and realizing that their justice could be sought after the war; beginning his organization (Jewish Documentation Centre); their war criminal investigations becoming more organized after Eichmann's capture; how many war criminals fled to Argentina and other countries; the Israeli view of Holocaust survivors in the early 1960s; the psychological reasoning for resistance and the difficulty of leaving family to join the resistance; his feeling as a Nazi hunter that he prevented the same propaganda from spreading; the left and right Fascism today; how at the time of the interview 1100 Nazi criminals have been brought to justice and they’re working on 300 more cases; believing he located Mengele and missed him by 80 minutes; his wife, who lives in Italy, and his son, who lives in Vienna, Austria; and a female camp commandant, Braunsteiner, who was arrested in Queens after a 9 year search.

Oral history interview with Stefan Grajek

Oral History

Oral history interview with Eva Feldenkreis

Oral History

Oral history interview with Chaim Bargl

Oral History

Oral history interview with Ella Lingens

Oral History

Auschwitz Chronik documentary film sound track

Oral History

Oral history interview with Tadeusz Szymanski

Oral History

Oral history interview with Shlomo Strauss-Marko

Oral History

Oral history interview with Maurice Schellekes

Oral History

David Schiff performs Yiddish songs

Oral History

Oral history interview with three former Hungarian inmates of Ravensbrück concentration camp

Oral History

The three interviewees describe being in various concentration camps, including Dachau, Ravensbrück, Spandau, and Oranienburg; arriving in the camps and the physical condition of the inmates; the harsh conditions in the winter; enduring starvation; only sleeping 3 or 4 hours per night; the guards beating prisoners; the roll calls early in the morning; the forced labor; the selection process and going through medical exams; being sent to a factory to work; and being returned to Ravensbrück.

Oral history interview with Morris Schulstein

Oral History

Oral history interview with Israel Gutmann

Oral History

30th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz

Oral History

Performance by Aleksander Kulisiewicz

Oral History

Aleksander Kulisiewicz performs "Za lagrem szumi gaj".

Performance by Peter Wortsman at the Steinberg Center

Oral History

Performance by Aleksander Kulisiewicz

Oral History

Aleksander Kulisiewicz performs "Chorał z piekla dna".

Oral history interview with Selma Steinmetz

Oral History

Selma Steinmetz describes her family background; her father, who was a Jewish grocer and a member of the Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei; attending university and writing her dissertation about German philology; the rejection of her dissertation because she was a Jew; teaching high school German history; immigrating to France in 1938 and working in a Parisian home for immigrant children; losing her job when the home closed in 1939; the arrest of her boyfriend in Germany; escaping to southern France with Austrian refugees; making wallets and working as a secretary for the Quakers in Clermont-Ferrand for a living; returning to Austria in 1946 after the war; receiving an assignment as a librarian in the Städtische Bibliothek in Vienna; losing her job and becoming a journalist; her work with Amnesty International; the Jewish community in Vienna after the war; and not perceiving the existence of antisemitism in Austria today.

Oral history interview with Kurt Schubert

Oral History

Oral history interview with Herbert Steiner

Oral History

Herbert Steiner describes his childhood in Vienna, Austria; his family’s participation in the Social Democratic movement; his arrest in 1938 and escaping to Holland; his father’s arrest during Kristallnacht; his arrest in Holland and going to an internment camp for Austrian and German refugees; immigrating to England; working for a printer as a typesetter/compositor in the surroundings of Cambridge; helping to print and edit German-language newsletters which were dropped by planes; being the secretary of a foreign Austrian organization; being arrested in 1940 and released after six months; working again as a typesetter for the resistance; returning to Vienna after the war and founding the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance; his memories of Kristallnacht; and his impressions of antisemitism in the world today.

Oral history interview with Josef Cepi Meisel

Oral History

Oral history interview with Dr. Eisenschimmel

Oral History

Dr. Eisenschimmel describes his capture and imprisonment in the Gestapo prison in the hotel Metropol Vienna, Austria in 1943; his deportation to Auschwitz as a political prisoner; his opposition to the National Socialist Party that began in 1938; his transport to Birkenau, where he lost his clothes and had to shave his head; receiving a tattoo on his arm; remaining in Birkenau until 1945, when he was taken to Mauthausen by train and then forced on a death march; his transfer by train to Ebensee; his health suffering and his weight declining; his liberation in May 1945 by American forces; and returning to Austria after the war.

Oral history interview with Kurt Hacker

Oral History

Kurt Hacker describes his childhood in Austria; his interest in leftist ideals; fleeing to Belgium in 1938 and joining the underground; his arrest in 1941 and being sent to a German prison; his deportation to Auschwitz as a political prisoner and remaining there until 1945; working as a printer in the camps; becoming ill in 1944 and having to stay in the sick barracks; his experiences with particular SS men who were kind to him; working for an SS painter from Munich; and his views on the work of Doctor Mengele.

Oral history interview with Herr Sussman and Frau Sussman

Oral History

Herr and Frau Sussman describe their deportations to Auschwitz; the living conditions in Auschwitz; the psychological sufferings of the camp prisoners; fears of going to the showers because no one knew whether gas or water would come out; Frau Sussman’s transfer to Camp Kraków and working with steel saw machinery there; figuring out how to sabotage machinery at the camp; Frau Sussman’s escape with a French girl and joining the underground movement; Frau Sussman’s escape to Switzerland and going to a refugee camp in Basel; Frau Sussman’s discovery that Herr Sussman was alive and living in Marseilles, France; their return to Austria; and the existence of antisemitism today.

Oral history interview with Gisela Obendorfer

Oral History

Oral history interview with Maurice Schellekes

Oral History

Oral history interview with Dr. Kodjinski

Oral History

Doctor Kodjinski, born in 1918 in Kraków, Poland, describes his childhood; attending medical school and starting his third year at the beginning of the war; being sent to a quarantine unit of the Polish Red Cross; joining an underground organization; being sent to Montelope to administer prisoners; his underground activites; his capture in 1941 and being sent to Auschwitz; becoming an official nurse in Auschwitz; being transferred to Mauthausen, where American forces liberated him; the prevalence of typhus in the camps; receiving medications through the underground to help camp inmates; and his memories of witnessing prisoner escapes from the camps.

Oral history interview with Erna Musik

Oral History

Oral history interview with Dina Strassberg

Oral History

Dina Strassberg, born in Chechov, Galicia (Čechová, Slovakia), describes her childhood; the large Jewish community of Chechov; the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 and going into a ghetto; having to do forced labor outside of the ghetto; doing forced labor in Sepinka (possibly in Romania); being deported to Auschwitz; the cruel treatment she received in the ghetto and camps; working in a munitions factory near Auschwitz until she was accused of sabotage and tortured; the evacuation of and death march from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück; being taken to Mecklenburg/Neustadt and digging trenches; the Germans abandoning the camp and the surviving inmates raiding the food supplies; her liberation by American forces; pogroms against Jews in Chechov after the war; living in Italy for six months after the war; and immigrating to Palestine in May 1946.

Oral history interview with Esther Schkurman

Oral History

Esther Schkurman, born in Hrodna, Belarus in 1923, describes her childhood; living in Warsaw, Poland and returning to Hrodna after the German invasion; being forced into a ghetto in Hrodna after the Nazi invasion and losing her family’s assets; the death of her father in the ghetto and having to lie to bury him in a Jewish cemetery; work in the ghetto; being beaten in the ghetto; the smuggling of food into the ghetto and the suicides in the ghetto; being forced to sing Jewish songs by the Germans; being transported in cattle cars to Majdanek and then Auschwitz-Birkenau; witnessing murder and torture in Auschwitz; her contacts with the men’s camp; working in the Kanada barracks; exchanging food with resistance fighters through the toilets; and the fates of her camp friends.

Oral history interview with Jeshayahu Kalfuss

Oral History

Jeshayahu Kalfuss, born in Ciechanów, Poland in 1919, describes his youth; the German invasion of Poland; the Aryanization of their apartment, housing conditions; being forced into the ghetto; his deportation to Auschwitz in 1942 and being separated from his family; working as a textile expert in the Kanada unit; being beaten by Franz Wunsch for not going to a roll call; his death march from Auschwitz and arriving in Mauthausen; being sent to Gusen and working for the Messerschmitt company; his liberation from Mauthausen and heading to St. Orthen to find help; traveling to Switzerland and then Paris, France after the war; his reflections on the privilege of his job in the textile operation; an uprising organized by textile workers, electricians, and tilers; the conversation he had with Wunsch at a trial; the difficulties Jews faced after the war; and his experiences as a survivor.

Oral history interview with Stefan Zweig

Oral History

Stefan Zweig, born in 1941 in Kraków, Poland, describes his childhood and family in Warsaw and Kraków; life in Kraków after the German invasion in 1939; being sent to the ghetto; his belief in the importance of Holocaust-related literature; his deportation to Buchenwald with his father; and his feelings about former Nazi sympathizers.

Oral history interview with Menachem Bargil

Oral History

Menachem Bargil (né Manfred Berglass), born in 1922 in Vienna, Austria, describes his family and childhood; growing up with an appreciation for Zionism; the historical and political incidents in Austria before the Anschluss; resistance against Dollfuss, the July putsch of the Nazis, and stronger antisemitism; the emergence and acceptance of fascism in Austria; his experiences with antisemitism; the Anschluss in March 1938 and always living under the threat of violence; Jewish life in Austria after the Anschluss; his memories of Kristallnacht; life becoming nearly unbearable for Jews in Austria; and the pro-Hitler enthusiasm shared between Austria and Germany after 1938.

Kurt Schubert lecture at the institut fur Judaistik

Oral History

Kurt Schubert describes his wartime experiences in Austria; his knowledge of antisemitism in Germany and Austria in the 19th century and the beginning of the National Socialist movement in Germany; several laws related to the equality of Jewish people; and the theories that exist about the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

Oral history interview with Tadeusz Holuj

Oral History

Oral history interview with Stefan Boratinski

Oral History

Oral history interview with Felix Rausch

Oral History

Oral history interview with Hermann Langbein and others

Oral History

On the 30th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Hermann Langbein, et al. discuss their experiences during the Holocaust.

Oral history interview with Ernst Toch

Oral History

Discussion with Auschwitz survivors upon visiting the former concentration camp

Oral History