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Oral history interview with Beatrice Muchman

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 2016.298.1 | RG Number: RG-50.030.0900

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    Oral history interview with Beatrice Muchman
    Transcript
    This is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    interview with Mrs. Beatrice Muchman,
    now married to Larry Abrams, on September 27th,
    2016 in Chicago, Illinois.
    Thank you very, very much for agreeing to meet with us,
    to share your story, to share your experiences
    and your thoughts.
    You're very welcome.
    We're going to start the interview
    at the very beginning, like we do with everybody.
    And I'm going to ask you a few basic questions
    and then we go from there.
    OK.
    Can you tell me your date of birth?
    June 5th.
    I'm sorry, I'm croaking.
    June 5th, 1933 in Berlin, Germany.
    What was your name at birth?
    Westheimer.
    Your first name?
    Beatrix Westheimer.
    It wasn't the best year.
    It was the year Hitler came to power.
    But my family was very integrated, young, German,
    and reasonably unaware of circumstances.
    Do you know what part of Berlin your family lived in?
    Yes.
    It was the Bavarian area, which is
    where young people would move.
    I just revisited Berlin recently.
    Oh, really?
    Yes.
    Survivors were invited.
    And I saw the area, which is now full of posters
    and indicating what Jewish families were living through.
    Jews cannot visit parks.
    They cannot sit on benches.
    It's historical now, but at the time, it was real.
    And it made me realize that as a little child, being wheeled
    in a buggy, I knew nothing, but my parents
    must have been aware.
    I want to ask, you say it was the Bavarian part of Berlin.
    Would this have been in the former Eastern
    section or the Western section?
    No, it was actually the Western section.
    Do you know the name of the region?
    Was it Lankwitz, Lichterfelde, Zehlendorf, Dahlem,
    Charlottenburg?
    It was not Charlottenburg, but I don't know the rest.
    OK.
    I don't know.
    OK.
    Because I couldn't recognize what
    the Bavarian section would have been.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    Do if it was the center of town or whether it
    was a residential area?
    It was very much a residential area.
    Had your family been there for generations?
    For generations.
    OK, so they were old Berliners.
    They were old Berliners.
    And my great grandfather fought in the First World War,
    like many Jewish Germans, with medals.
    My grandmother had a large family,
    and everyone would meet on Sundays.
    These are hazy memories that I have.
    But yes, they were Berliners.
    OK.
    Do you have any memories of your home?
    I have memories of visiting an uncle on Sundays
    and getting very wet kisses.
    Now, that's about as far as I go.
    I mean, when I went back, I saw my nursery school,
    but only because I've researched that.
    Could I really tell you memories?
    Not until Kristallnacht.
    OK.
    What I'm trying to find out now is what kind of a place
    you lived in.
    Was it an apartment or a single family home?
    Would you know that?
    It was an apartment.
    OK.
    Actually, people didn't live in single family homes.
    It was an apartment.
    And it had to be somewhat spacious,
    from what I have now seen.
    But actually, I don't have pictures of that.
    Do you know what your father--
    how he supported your family?
    My father did something with the meat business,
    as many of the Westheimers did.
    And my mother worked for her father.
    My grandfather had a printing business for artists.
    Oh.
    So my mother was one of four sisters,
    and all four sisters were educated
    in some kind of a career.
    So they were somewhat ahead of their day.
    Do you know the names of all four sisters?
    OK.
    The oldest sister was Frieda Hurwitz.
    Well, they were Boas, B-O-A-S.
    Their maiden names were Boas.
    Were Boas.
    So it was Frieda Boas, the oldest.
    And then came Margot Louis, but at the time Boas.
    After Margot came my mother, Meta.
    Meta.
    Boas, then Westheimer.
    And then the younger sister was Hella Boas, later also
    a Hurwitz.
    OK.
    So that's your mother's side of the family?
    Correct.
    What were you your grandmother and grandfather's
    names on your mother's side of the family?
    Baruch, B-A-R-U-C-H.
    Boas?
    Well, my grandfather was Boas.
    My grandmother was Baruch.
    Oh, I see.
    I see.
    Her first name?
    Her first name--
    Mimi is what I think of-- was Johanna.
    OK, Johanna Baruch.
    And she married?
    His first name?
    Bernhardt.
    Bernhardt Boas.
    Correct.
    OK.
    And they had four girls?
    That's correct.
    Did you know your grandfather and your grandmother?
    I knew my grandmother very intimately.
    My grandfather died the day my parents got--
    the day before my parents got married.
    So he died long before the Holocaust.
    It was 1932.
    Do you know how the story of how your parents met and became
    engaged and how they found each other?
    I don't.
    I don't know the story, but I picture
    it had to be a wonderful love story.
    And let's turn to your father's side of the family.
    What was his name, first and last?
    His name was Julius Westheimer.
    And my father, as far as I knew, was an orphan.
    So there wasn't very much history.
    I knew that my father was a very sports-like person.
    He liked a crew.
    And of course, all of this came to an end with the Holocaust.
    Sure.
    But he took to my mother's family.
    And that's the only family that I ever heard of,
    and therefore my entire life has been the maternal part
    of the family.
    I see.
    I see.
    And you say he worked in the meat business somehow,
    and your mother worked in her father's printing business?
    And got married and stopped working.
    And got married and stopped working.
    And how would you describe your family's financial footing?
    Was it well-to-do?
    Was it middle class?
    It was middle class.
    It was definitely middle.
    Did your mother have any help at home, anyone coming in?
    I don't know.
    I don't know.
    I mean, at the age of five, Kristallnacht had already
    happened, so a lot of these things I don't know.
    My grandmother did, that I know.
    I'm going to ask a few questions.
    The reason for them is to get a sense
    of the level of development.
    I'm talking about economic, mostly development,
    within a place.
    And I'm assuming in Berlin, it would be quite high,
    but not always.
    Did you have indoor plumbing?
    Yes.
    OK.
    Did you have electricity?
    Yes.
    Do you know how the place was heated?
    Did you have coal ovens or coal heating?
    No.
    No.
    OK.
    I would consider the apartment about as modern
    as an apartment would be today, except there
    was a depression in Germany, and so things became very tough.
    And when my grandfather died, of course, there
    were other hardships, but the apartments were normal.
    [NON-ENGLISH]
    OK, [NON-ENGLISH].
    Did your family have a radio?
    Yes.
    Did they have a telephone?
    It was confiscated.
    OK.
    Did they have a telephone?
    I don't know that.
    I'm assuming they might have, but I
    don't know the answer to that.
    OK.
    And there was a bathroom and toilet facilities
    within the apartment?
    Yes.
    Yes.
    Did your father have a car?
    Yes, my father had a car, because I distinctly remember,
    when I was about probably four years old,
    we had a car accident going on a trip.
    It was very traumatic, but that's how I know.
    Of course he had a car, yes.
    OK.
    And did you have your own room?
    Yes, I had my own room.
    OK.
    Can you remember how many rooms there were in the apartment?
    Not.
    I know.
    If someone asked me, at five years old,
    whether I would remember--
    I don't remember that.
    OK.
    Do you have memories before Kristallnacht about your life
    in Berlin?
    The memories I have are about one uncle who was partially
    owner, or had some relationship to Tietz,
    which was a German Marshall Field's.
    A department store.
    Kind of a department store.
    One uncle was a pharmacist.
    My grandmother had about eight brothers and sisters.
    And I remember some days, we would visit and just people
    floating around.
    But that's about the extent of my memory.
    The Baruch family.
    In the Baruch family, right, and lots of cookies.
    Do you remember walking in parks?
    Yes.
    I remember walking in parks, and I also
    remember when you had to stop walking in parks.
    But I must have been so sheltered that none of this
    rang as a terrible thing.
    We walked in parks and then we didn't walk in parks.
    And we walked on the street and then
    we didn't walk on the street.
    This was Berlin.
    Things changed drastically.
    OK.
    So let's come to Kristallnacht.
    What can you tell me from your memory of Kristallnacht.
    From my memory, I had woken up and I
    thought my drapes were on fire.
    Of course, it wasn't drapes at all.
    It was a reflection, but I had no idea.
    And my father came and just scooped me out of bed
    and we ran out on the street.
    And our synagogue was burning.
    It was down the street.
    And having revisited, I know it was really down the street.
    And I just knew it was a disaster.
    Did I understand that it was the end of something
    and the beginning of something else?
    Really not, but it was frightening.
    Do you remember now the street name
    that your apartment was on?
    At this moment, I can't tell you, but I do know it.
    That's OK.
    That's OK, Trixie.
    Kaiserallee.
    Kaiserallee.
    OK.
    It's fairly central, if I remember.
    Yes.
    OK, it is.
    It is.
    Yeah.
    I have absolutely no sense of direction.
    Sorry.
    That's OK.
    And I just called you Trixie without letting
    people know how.
    Oh.
    OK.
    So tell me about how people called you.
    I had two nicknames.
    One was Puppe.
    Puppe.
    Which meant that my cousins would look in the buggy
    and decide it was a doll.
    Because in German, puppe means a doll.
    And the other one was probably taken from Beatrix.
    And Trixie.
    So did your parents call your Trixie or Beatrix?
    I think Puppe.
    Puppe.
    Puppe.
    Puppe, Trixie, Trixie Line, a number of names.
    So you're out on the street and you get a sense
    that something had ended and something new was beginning,
    and there was all of this chaos.
    Did you see other people, do you think, on the street?
    I just remember fire and scary destruction,
    as it would scare a child.
    Sure.
    Sure.
    Then what happened?
    You know, I jump from that point to the family falling apart.
    I'm from a very sheltered background.
    I remember meetings and whispering, and wanting
    to lie down on the floor and listen
    to what people were saying that I couldn't understand.
    And then of course, the next thing
    I knew we were emigrating.
    By that, I mean we were literally
    fleeing, because you could really not emigrate anywhere.
    So how we got to the border between Berlin and Brussels
    I don't know.
    So you were going westwards?
    We were going to meet my aunt and uncle, Frieda, the oldest
    sister, her husband who was a lawyer
    but had been blackballed, and their youngest child,
    their only child, Henry.
    And it seemed like the logical place to go.
    And they lived where?
    They lived in Brussels, outside of Brussels.
    OK, well, the trek from Berlin to the border is quite long.
    Is quite long.
    And I can't tell you if it took a day, if there was
    a train, if there was a bus.
    Or the car.
    I don't know.
    I don't know.
    Do you remember anything else from that trip to Brussels?
    Oh, from crossing the border?
    Tell me.
    Yes.
    What I remember about crossing the border is being--
    we went with Margot, who was the second sister down the line.
    The second oldest.
    Her husband was very tall, and my cousin Bernt.
    All we could do is take whatever we
    could put on ourselves, because really by this time,
    you could not leave.
    This was after Kristallnacht.
    I believe it was March.
    And I remember, for the first time in my life,
    that I was told, one sound and you're decked.
    So as a five-year-old child and now a grandmother
    and great grandmother, I know how scared I must have been.
    I never talked.
    I was on my father's shoulders, and there were dogs all around.
    And this was a stretch of forest with army.
    It's a very familiar story, because so many thousands
    and thousands of people did the same thing.
    We had guides, and of course, guides
    were not particularly trustworthy,
    but these people obviously got us to where we were going.
    Did I really understand any of this?
    I only understood to be afraid and to have
    to leave things behind.
    So how many people were in your group of people?
    So altogether, there was my grandmother, who had barely,
    I think, told anybody that we were leaving.
    So your mother's mother?
    My mother's mother, my mother, my father, myself,
    and my uncle and aunt, and my cousin, their son.
    So this was another uncle and aunt who had a son?
    So you had one that was waiting for you in Brussels--
    Correct.
    --and one that was coming with you.
    Correct.
    This was the oldest cousin, and the one in Brussels
    was the youngest cousin, Henry.
    OK.
    OK.
    Who takes a life of his own in the next part of this.
    So you were rather a large group, actually.
    We were a large group to be kept quiet, yes.
    I mean, did people just leave everything behind?
    People left everything behind.
    And you left everything behind?
    And I had to leave everything behind,
    except what you could wear, and whatever
    you could take that wasn't too cumbersome because it
    was a long journey in March.
    Now, at the time, you wouldn't have known this,
    but later, did you know how soon after Kristallnacht you all
    fled?
    It was March.
    So several months later.
    Several months later, because obviously,
    this had to be arranged.
    So it was March 1939?
    Correct.
    And Kristallnacht had happened November 9th, 1938.
    Correct.
    So there you are, March, which is still winter,
    and you're in the forest.
    Do you remember leaving it?
    Do you remember of being on the Belgian side of the border
    at some point?
    I remember getting in and the relief of the entire family
    that these guides had taken the money
    and actually delivered us to the other side of the border.
    OK.
    And then I remember a reunion and I
    thought everything was fine, because now we
    were again together with my youngest cousin, who I adored.
    And I thought it was over.
    That was it.
    Let me step back a little bit here.
    Go ahead.
    I want to ask a little bit about the people who
    were in your world at that time when you were a little girl
    and about who they were and their personalities.
    So let's start with your mother.
    Tell me, what do you remember of her?
    What was she like?
    What were some of the things that she liked to do?
    What were her interests?
    My mother was very art--
    she was a very soft woman.
    She was beautiful.
    She was a wonderful seamstress, an industrial artist,
    because that's actually what she studied to be.
    And my father was a very tough guy.
    He kind of ran the show, but having been raised an orphan,
    that was quite understandable.
    So basically, my father set the rules.
    Was he scary?
    No, not to meet.
    And I doubt that he was scary to my mother,
    but it's just sort of the way I remember
    the flow in the family.
    OK.
    And did they play with you?
    Yes.
    Yes.
    They played with me to a point.
    But if I got in the way, well then, you know, bye.
    But my Uncle Werner was the star.
    He eventually became my adoptive father,
    and he was definitely the star.
    Everybody loved my Uncle Werner.
    So he became my children's grandfather later.
    Always beloved, so I have just very long-term memories of him.
    So was he part of the group that was coming with you?
    He was part of the group.
    He was part of the group.
    So it was your Aunt Margo.
    Right.
    And your Uncle Werner, who were married together.
    Correct.
    And their last name was?
    Well, at that time it was Loevy, L-O-E-V-Y.
    Oh, Loevy in German.
    Right.
    So it would have been lion.
    That's what it means.
    Right, exactly.
    OK.
    And they had a son named?
    Bernt.
    Bernt, OK.
    And your grandmother, Johanna.
    Yes.
    Boas.
    She was the matriarch.
    She also set the tone, and I think
    my mother would never have left Berlin if my grandmother would
    not have gone.
    And my grandmother hesitated to leave because of her family.
    It was her life.
    OK.
    That's huge.
    It's huge.
    It just becomes more understandable the older I get.
    Yeah.
    And I have questioned it.
    Well, that's part of the process, isn't it?
    It is, indeed.
    When you have the skeleton of a life story,
    the skeleton of what happened, but you
    have many places where there is no meat on the bones
    and you want to find out.
    Yes.
    Yes, absolutely.
    So your grandmother was a strong personality.
    Your father was a strong personality.
    And your uncle Werner--
    My uncle Werner was very funny.
    I don't know that he was necessarily as strong--
    not in the sense that a child would remember.
    He was just the one who would make everybody laugh
    and who had tons of patience, and he was very tall
    so he would stand out in any crowd.
    And so you as a group now make it to the Belgian side.
    Correct.
    And do you remember that moment when you've
    made it to the Belgian side?
    Not exactly.
    I remember being met by family, and from that point on,
    I felt, oh, it's over.
    This is now wonderful.
    Mistake.
    And then what?
    And then what's the next place?
    OK, so then the next several months,
    actually, were a joyful reunion, as I remember it.
    So it's the mid of March 1939.
    The war hasn't started yet.
    March, April.
    No.
    But then my father was arrested.
    By whom?
    Actually, by the Belgian authorities
    because he was German.
    So there goes this double-edged sword,
    not realizing the Jews are really escaping.
    It was just bureaucracy.
    And my father, as well as my uncle,
    the uncle that we went to meet--
    Not uncle Werner.
    Not uncle Werner.
    This was Uncle Walter.
    These two men were sent to France, Gurs,
    which was a common place to--
    at the time it was a holding camp.
    Run by the French?
    By the Belgians.
    In France?
    In France.
    This is where, frequently, people would be sent.
    And their crime was that they were in Belgium
    with German passports?
    Well--
    Because you all--
    What we now would call green cards.
    I mean, they were not citizens.
    Of Belgium?
    No.
    They were allowed into the country--
    I didn't realize all this exactly--
    but they were allowed into the country as passersby.
    Transit.
    Exactly.
    Refugees.
    And the country took them in, which
    is more than other countries did, of course.
    But if they were German, they were enemies.
    So there you go.
    No one understood they were Jews.
    But here were these women, my mother, without a husband.
    My mother was sewing.
    I'm assuming she was sewing for other people, and for me,
    for sure.
    And life went on.
    I don't exactly know how.
    I went to first grade, whatever first grade was then.
    And my father did come home.
    He escaped.
    Do you now know how many months incarceration there was?
    It was months.
    Months.
    It was a lot of months.
    OK.
    And the Jewish star had already happened.
    So that was the German occupation
    had already happened?
    So the German occupation had already happened.
    But my father had managed to escape.
    If you're asking me my memories as a child, I don't know how.
    I just remember seeing my father looking like a skeleton,
    and just being thrilled that he was home.
    But I was scared, too, because I already recognized him.
    So by this point, the war has started.
    By the time he escapes, the war has started.
    Germany has occupied Belgium.
    And not only occupied, but now you, personally,
    have to wear the star that distinguishes you
    from anybody else.
    And between that, between the star and the occupation,
    there was the outpouring of Brussels going
    toward the French borders.
    This was like reliving the First World War.
    I didn't understand that, either.
    You saw people leave?
    Oh, en masse.
    People were leaving en masse.
    And there were dead horses on the road
    and bodies on the road.
    And my mother and my aunt--
    my cousin and I got the measles.
    I remember we were sick.
    But you know, everything to us was half a game.
    So you were trying to leave Belgium as well?
    We were trying to leave Brussels because the Germans were
    going to invade, and these women were scared.
    They were reliving the First World War.
    Actually, we were going into the fire,
    so it didn't do much good.
    But we turned around.
    You went into the fire, you say?
    Well, the fighting was actually taking place
    on the border of France, where all these people were escaping.
    So we were going toward more war.
    And by the time we got back, Brussels had been overtaken.
    And your father was still in prison?
    Yes.
    OK, so you remember that flight?
    I remember the flight.
    And I remember eating strawberries in farmhouses
    and drinking milk in farmhouses.
    Where was your grandmother?
    And my grandmother was with us.
    My grandmother was very strong.
    Anyway, she wasn't that old, even though I thought she was.
    [CHUCKLES]
    And so you go partially, and you see
    that it's going into more chaos and more fighting.
    And so you turned around.
    Everybody turned around.
    Everybody turned around.
    Right.
    OK.
    And you make your way back to the same place?
    To the same place.
    And the landlady had taken care of our apartment,
    as well as, I imagine, my aunt's.
    In general, what was the attitude
    of local Belgians to you, to other refugees?
    What was the atmosphere like there?
    We had a wonderful Christian landlady.
    Belgium was a--
    I know this now as an adult--
    Belgium was basically a Catholic country,
    and heroic in the way--
    this is Belgium, only Belgium.
    It's not Poland and it's not Russia.
    There was an atmosphere of helping Jewish, especially
    children.
    And I was never afraid.
    I was extremely uncomfortable with the star,
    and my mother pulled me out of school,
    because I didn't know why I had to wear the star.
    And of course, children must have
    made fun or stared or wondered, and at that point
    my mother took me out of school.
    And that is about the time that my father came back
    into our lives.
    Oh my gosh, all that chaos.
    It was nothing but chaos.
    Yeah.
    It was nothing but chaos.
    It was nothing but chaos, but my mother continued not school,
    but dancing lessons.
    And the imagination kept going.
    She turned everything into a game,
    and it stood me in such good stead in my life.
    So was that your way of coping?
    Totally.
    Totally.
    So things became games.
    Everything was a game.
    I'm reminded of that film Life is Beautiful.
    Yes.
    There was something quite realistic
    about that film, that parents--
    I don't know about all parents, but my mother especially.
    And my father was an optimist.
    My father never believed any of this
    would really come to an end.
    So there was not only being loved so much,
    but being given the opportunity to remain
    as just possible a child and looking at life as a child.
    That's amazing.
    That's amazing.
    Is it?
    Yeah.
    Or parents pretty much shelter children, or try.
    Sometimes.
    We are talking sometimes, of course.
    Sometimes.
    It's a huge generalization.
    Yeah.
    But that ability to have had it succeed.
    It succeeded.
    I think that I probably was born thinking I
    was going to be Shirley Temple.
    I remember wooden curlers in my hair.
    And I remember there's a war going
    on all around us, in horror, and my mother managed this.
    And no work.
    There were committees, of course,
    the Belgian Jewish Committee helping.
    But she must have been quite a wonder.
    So your father returns.
    You've seen all of this chaos.
    You've seen the occupation.
    You see you have to wear the yellow star.
    By this point, I assume you must have already spoken
    some French?
    A lot of French.
    Did your parents also?
    Not.
    Barely.
    Barely, which was obviously some part of the downfall.
    And my grandmother never.
    But children-- I became a foreign language teacher
    for good reason--
    children just assimilate language so quickly.
    Sponges.
    Oh, yeah.
    It was no problem.
    OK.
    Did you often have to be the interlocutor then between?
    Yes.
    Yes.
    How did that happen?
    You're six years old maybe, seven years old?
    Six.
    Did I love it?
    I think so.
    I think I was very impatient.
    I think I felt my mother should definitely have learned
    French better than she did.
    Did you have to translate for her?
    Oh, sure, at times.
    At times.
    And my grandmother was--
    well, my grandmother was my mother.
    Tell me about her personality.
    Oh, my grandmother, she was a very tiny person,
    but you didn't cross my grandmother.
    She just knew what she wanted to do.
    She would navigate between her two daughters.
    She had my mother, who was her favorite child,
    and my oldest aunt, Frieda.
    And my grandmother would take turns,
    navigating between the two sisters.
    So what happened to Margot?
    Margot had already left for the United States.
    Oh, how did that happen?
    They were able to leave and the others weren't.
    It was quite a sad parting, because we all
    loved each other.
    And of course, as I later found out,
    Werner and my father, Julius, went for visas.
    I didn't know this as a child.
    But my father's name was misspelled.
    A letter was missing from Westheimer,
    so he didn't get a visa and my uncle did.
    Did your uncle, who was married into your mother's
    side of the family, did he get an affidavit
    from his own relatives?
    He received an affidavit from two brothers, who
    were lawyers in Chicago, and that's
    how he received an affidavit.
    They would have done the same for my father,
    had bureaucracy not intervened.
    So your father didn't get it because his name
    was misspelled.
    By a letter.
    By one letter in the alphabet on the letter, on the affidavit
    itself.
    On the affidavit.
    Oh, that must have been such a--
    Well, it cost them their lives.
    Did I understand all of it?
    No, I just understood the parting was awful.
    And of course, everybody wanted to come to America.
    And I don't think anybody realized that America's borders
    were closed.
    I think we just thought Roosevelt was God
    and was going to make everything happen.
    And none of this was quite understood as a child.
    I do remember watching as the war evolved
    and hearing so much about Roosevelt.
    Everybody's hope.
    Everybody's hope.
    Roosevelt was everybody's hope.
    So of the four sisters, one had already been in Brussels.
    Two-- one had already been in Brussels.
    The youngest sister had left in 1937 for the United States.
    Hella.
    Hella, and her husband Walter, and a little girl, Florie.
    And then Werner and Margot and Bernt.
    Just everybody left on the last boat.
    They supposedly left on the last boat.
    And so who was left was Frieda and her husband,
    who was also in prison?
    Yes.
    And Henry, your youngest cousin.
    Yes.
    Your mother, your father, and yourself.
    Exactly.
    And your grandmother.
    And my grandmother.
    And so that's when you said, when she goes between the two
    daughters--
    It's the oldest sister and my mother.
    The third?
    Right.
    And so she sometimes lived with us
    and sometimes lived with Frieda.
    And she babysat for me.
    Well, it was not called babysitting at the time,
    but she stayed with me a lot.
    And why was your mother her favorite child?
    I can't exactly answer that, but it isn't
    because she lost my mother.
    My mother would never have left her mother behind.
    I think the other daughters were quite
    willing to make their own way, maybe rightfully so.
    I don't know.
    But my mother would never have left her mother.
    So she was very attached to her own mother,
    and maybe it went both ways.
    OK.
    OK.
    That's not an easy question to answer, I know.
    I don't exactly know, either.
    I do know from later stories that she was definitely
    the favorite daughter.
    And your father reappears.
    Is he able to--
    I mean, if he looks so different from when you had last
    seen him, and I think you said he looked like a skeleton?
    Yeah.
    Was he unhealthy?
    Was he sick?
    He had typhoid.
    And he had actually hidden beneath cadavers to escape,
    and escaped with typhoid.
    And was held up in between, but eventually made his way,
    because my father, he was just like that.
    You could have great confidence in what he set out to do.
    OK.
    Was he able then to help put food on the table
    once he came back?
    Once he came back, yes.
    And within, I can't remember a span of time,
    but there were then good times again.
    There was a lull, and we moved to a bigger apartment.
    My grandmother came to live with us,
    and we even had a little yard.
    And for immigrants in Brussels, that seemed to be wonderful.
    Well, tell me, at the same time this was happening
    and in your family, the minute that German soldiers would
    march into a Polish village, Polish Jews
    would be rounded up and taken to a ghetto.
    Do you know why that wasn't going on in Belgium?
    There was a committee, and I found this out.
    We moved a lot.
    The minute you had to register, my father moved.
    So he didn't register?
    He never registered, and didn't do him any good anyway.
    But he never registered, figuring
    that these committees that were set up to register Jews
    were a trap.
    And in fact, that was the case later.
    Who set up these committees?
    These were Jewish committees set up by Jewish--
    Organizations.
    --organizations, that were told by the Nazis,
    if you can round up Jews--
    not round up.
    No, no, no, no.
    Wrong term.
    If you can get us names and phone numbers,
    these Jewish families will be saved.
    Well, it was quite contrary.
    And history tells all kinds of other stories
    about these committees.
    OK.
    But my father didn't trust anybody,
    and he had decided that he wasn't registering.
    So the minute we had to register an apartment, we would move.
    So we moved a lot, and sometimes in little places
    and sometimes in bigger places.
    And the place I remember best was the last apartment,
    which, of course, was probably the worst apartment
    because that was 1942.
    So you were able to live in Belgium for almost three years
    after the war starts?
    Correct.
    Correct.
    Now, did you, as an adult or later on in life,
    learn what the Nazi policies in Belgium themselves
    were against native Belgian Jews, not only the refugees?
    OK, against Belgian native Jews, they were better than against--
    the first Jews that Nazis were after were non-Belgian Jews.
    OK.
    Belgian Jews were more protected,
    both by their own government probably,
    as well as the Nazis' disinterest.
    But we would have been first.
    And in 1942, of course, as we all know now,
    my parents noticed people disappearing all around,
    which was the "final solution."
    And that's when they made the decision,
    along with an underground committee that was set up,
    made up of Christians and Jews, to find homes for children.
    I mean, did I know this at the time?
    No, I did not.
    I thought I was going to summer camp, as a matter of fact.
    But Christians and Jews and people--
    nuns, priests-- people would gather and decide
    how many Jewish children they could save.
    And my parents found a family.
    You were how old?
    At that time I was nine.
    Was I nine?
    Between eight and nine.
    And they found two sisters to each other who
    were able to take two children.
    That was my young cousin Henry, younger by a year, and myself.
    And my father said we were going to summer camp.
    How did you get there?
    He took a train.
    With the star on him?
    No.
    He hid the star, and we did, too.
    But we were on a train with Germans.
    And I remember being told, now you don't understand a word,
    so just hush.
    Pretend you don't know German?
    Exactly.
    But we were so excited.
    We thought we were going to a regular summer camp.
    So we were on this train, all three of us.
    My father must have been panicked,
    but never acted it, not in my memory.
    So where did you end up?
    We ended up in a little town called Ottignies, which
    is maybe 25 kilometers outside of Brussels,
    but I thought it was the other end of the world at the time,
    of course.
    And the train station was at the very low end of the town,
    and the houses were way high up.
    Now, we were city children.
    We had been raised in Berlin and Brussels,
    under surveillance of the tightest kind,
    as you can imagine.
    And here we were suddenly in a village.
    And we loved it.
    We just loved it.
    Now, arriving at this little-- to us it was a fire.
    It was not really a farm, but it was a house with a big backyard
    and they were growing vegetables,
    and we saw all this.
    Tell me, why would there be surveillance of the toughest
    kind?
    My parents.
    Oh my God.
    I mean, we couldn't go anywhere alone is what I meant.
    I'm sorry.
    Wrong-- well, wrong word.
    No, no.
    The right, but needs explanation.
    Yes, of course.
    I mean parental surveillance, because wherever we went,
    our parents were with us, or somebody had to be.
    They were scared for us.
    Got it.
    So now we seem to be in a place that, number one,
    we thought was a summer camp.
    Number two, was just wide open countryside.
    And nobody had to be with you.
    And we thought, after my father left,
    that nobody would have to be with us.
    But when my father left, we knew it wasn't a summer camp.
    It was just only the two of us, so what kind of a summer camp
    could this be?
    But it didn't really take long.
    What was that goodbye like?
    Pardon me?
    What was the goodbye like to your father?
    He just said, "mon petit bébé," "my little baby."
    And I knew something was just terribly wrong.
    But I think either we were very well taught
    or we knew just to do what children do
    best, which is really survive.
    I know, watching him go, it was not a summer camp
    kind of parting, although children going to summer camp
    can be very sad, too.
    Yeah, yeah.
    It was just heavier?
    You felt it was heavier?
    It was heavier than some kind of a summer separation.
    I think I'm more than, perhaps, my younger cousin.
    What were these two sisters like?
    Well, one of them was absolutely wonderful,
    and she eventually became my godmother.
    She was tall, always a cigarette dangling from her mouth,
    wearing an apron, and a little angular.
    Wonderfully natural.
    No fuss.
    We just knew this was going to work out.
    And her sister was more in the background.
    What were their names?
    The sister's name was Adele [? Ponsiss ?]
    and Jeanne Duchet.
    Jeanne Duchet.
    Who became Marraine, my godmother.
    Does Marraine mean godmother?
    Marraine means godmother, correct.
    OK.
    So basically, within a few days, we were home.
    What was that new home like?
    It was a wonderful, little house, another thing
    we had never lived it, with a basement where vegetables were
    kept, one kitchen that was like an everybody
    room with a little oven, and the oven was both there
    to heat the room and cook.
    There was a salon, which was the front room, the living room.
    Upstairs, there were two bedrooms.
    One belonged to the sisters and one was for us,
    but we all slept together.
    It was just decided that this felt better, and warmer.
    [LAUGHS]
    And warmer.
    And warmer.
    In the winter, it was pretty cold.
    Why was it that your mother didn't go to see you off there?
    I don't know.
    I think, from what I heard, that my father looked very Gentile.
    He had blue eyes, blondish, and he could pass.
    I don't know that my mother felt she could.
    I don't even remember saying goodbye to my mother.
    I think my mother couldn't handle this,
    and I have since seen letters.
    And I'm sure she couldn't handle this.
    When you left that time, did you see her again?
    I never saw my mother again.
    I never saw my mother again.
    And my greatest regret was not even remembering
    saying goodbye, or perhaps even as a child,
    not thinking that it was important.
    I don't know.
    I don't know.
    But you did enter a world that was good for you.
    That's what I'm sensing.
    It was amazing.
    What a gift.
    What a gift.
    It was a world so separate from the reality in the world.
    And we really didn't know.
    Did we choose not to know?
    I don't know.
    It's perfectly understandable, even if you had,
    but you wouldn't have known you had.
    We didn't know.
    We couldn't go to school, but we learned how to pick berries.
    We were roaming.
    I've gone back many times.
    And when my cousin, who lives still in Brussels,
    shows me where we walked, we would walk in the woods
    and the German Army was stationed right above us.
    I mean, if anybody had asked us questions,
    I don't know what would have happened.
    And we were totally unafraid.
    You both spoke French, however.
    Oh yes, fluently.
    It had been decided we would be the niece and nephew of Jeanne
    Duchet, our eventual godmother.
    So we had an identity.
    And of course, we found out later
    that nobody really believed this.
    Everybody knew we were Jewish children, which
    was very interesting in itself.
    Tell me a little bit about the village itself.
    How large was it?
    About how many people lived there?
    You know, I can't tell you how many people-- to me
    it was very small.
    People knew each other.
    OK.
    You knew the place you would walk
    to to get milk, unpasteurized, and you knew the neighbors.
    You felt perfectly free.
    There was no one you ever had to--
    I mean, we would walk in front of the city hall,
    and the Germans occupied city hall.
    Hiding in plain sight.
    We were totally visibly hidden children.
    Wow.
    And there were other Jewish children in the village.
    Could you recognize them?
    Well, recently, there was a monument erected
    in this town for the rescuers, and our godmother
    was, of course, memorialized on this monument.
    And I could not recognize, but they recognized,
    my cousin Henry and myself.
    Oh, you were the little Shirley that danced or sang.
    Or whatever it is that we did, they remembered.
    Did I ever recognize anyone?
    Yes.
    Shortly after the war, when we went back,
    with my late husband and our children,
    we did recognize some of the villagers.
    We were now grown.
    But did you recognize other hidden children
    as being hidden?
    No.
    You weren't allowed to do that.
    Everybody had a story.
    So the way you would unite would be, more or less, as oh, we
    belong to a scout team.
    And all those children were Jewish.
    But you didn't know it.
    No, we didn't know it.
    We didn't know it.
    And they arranged all ages.
    I mean, some were 18.
    Some were 16.
    Somewhere were five.
    And they were hidden in what was considered to be an orphanage,
    but was once, upon a time, a school for disabled.
    And these children were together under the auspices of someone
    else, who took care of them.
    And since I did write a book and the story is out there,
    I have received phone calls from people who were hidden right
    in that institution--
    Oh my.
    --and didn't have such a wonderful experience.
    So we were quite fortunate.
    We did.
    OK.
    And this doesn't mean everybody, it's
    just some, two people that got in touch with me that
    did not have a good experience.
    So what made Marraine special?
    I think the fact that she was so not fussy, and caring
    in the way that we weren't accustomed to being cared for.
    We didn't have to be home for dinner.
    We didn't have to be home for lunch.
    She trusted us completely.
    She didn't have any children of her own, ever.
    And I think that this non-fussy caring was just the best thing
    that could have happened to us.
    Because you had, for understandable reasons, up
    until then, parents who are nervous for you.
    Always.
    Always.
    And we were so loved.
    We were so loved.
    She genuinely loved us.
    And my cousin remained with her.
    His mother went back to Germany because she married someone
    who was on business there.
    After the war?
    After the war, he remained with her and went to university.
    He would commute every day.
    She was a genuinely loving human being.
    Anyway, you couldn't do what she did.
    You just would have to be--
    I don't think she thought of herself as anybody heroic.
    I think she just was a little piece of the history that
    made good things happen.
    You couldn't go to school, you said.
    No, not formal.
    Not formal.
    So was there informal school?
    Informal was the words, and learning
    what mushrooms that you could eat,
    the ones that weren't poisoned.
    That's also important.
    That was very important.
    And learning, really, how to navigate the countryside--
    Did you have chores?
    --and how to be on your own.
    Pardon me?
    Did you have chores.
    Oh, we had enormous amounts of chores, which
    was another wonderful thing.
    I think basically, we were never given chores.
    I took dancing lessons.
    I'm not sure what my cousin--
    he wasn't given chores, either.
    You mean at home with your parents?
    At home with our parents.
    But we loved the chores.
    We were competing with each other who was stronger,
    who could peel more green beans, who could be more potatoes.
    We loved it.
    We would gather what was leftover from corn,
    on our knees and kill ourselves, but we never minded it.
    That's a help.
    That's a real help.
    It's a real help.
    My cousin now says it really made a strong.
    Well, maybe in a way, it really did.
    It was that part of education.
    Then I became a teacher.
    I always tell my kids that there is
    no way you can learn as much behind a desk
    as I learned in this part of my life.
    No, I didn't go back to school until seventh grade.
    Wow.
    Wow.
    Where I had a year in Brussels, and then
    I came to the United States.
    So you have a gap of a good three years or so, if not more.
    Yes, four years.
    Yeah.
    Religion, did it come up?
    Yes, that was the best part.
    We had to go to catechism.
    Was she religious, by the way?
    Not at all.
    [LAUGHS]
    Not at all, but I became so religious.
    I wanted to be a Carmelite nun of the non-speaking order.
    Because we had visited the Carmelite nuns,
    who were just lovely and floating around
    in these incredible outfits.
    And I thought, continuing the Shirley Temple routine,
    that this outfit, this habit, would be wonderful on me.
    And if I didn't have to talk--
    oh, it would have been a disaster.
    Those poor sisters.
    [LAUGHS]
    But religion became, I think, surrogate parents.
    I think Catholicism became enormously important to us.
    So what would be the routine?
    Would you go to catechism classes?
    At 6 o'clock in the morning.
    So there goes schooling.
    There goes reading in Latin, and language,
    and a wonderful parish priest.
    What was his name?
    Father Vaes.
    Father Vaes?
    V-A-E-S. Right.
    Father Vaes.
    What did he look like?
    I have pictures.
    He was probably a very ordinary, middle-aged man.
    I think to us, everybody looked old.
    But he wasn't.
    He wasn't old.
    And just a very protective person,
    who also was aware of all the Jewish children.
    And I don't think there were any expectations laid upon us.
    We just did.
    So did Marraine arrange for you to go to catechism every day?
    Was this on her initiative?
    Well, she had to.
    I mean, the idea was that we were in a Catholic village.
    If we had been anything but Catholic,
    it wouldn't have appeared--
    It wouldn't have supported the story?
    Not at all.
    I see.
    OK, so that's the tradition.
    So all the children of the village go.
    All the children of the village go to catechism.
    And then, of course, comes with this
    a preparation for a first communion.
    Yes.
    Which was the highlight of my life.
    And I borrowed a dress and shoes,
    and my cousin was a choir boy.
    It was a huge part of that life.
    We loved the church.
    To me, the church looked huge.
    As we went back to visit, later as an adult with our children,
    the church was very small.
    It was not huge.
    It shrunk in the meantime.
    It shrunk.
    But it gave us something.
    It gave us hope.
    There was the after life.
    I never understood death anyway.
    But if you're afraid to lose someone
    and you can believe that there is a life hereafter,
    how wonderful.
    And we believed.
    So there was nothing about the Catholic religion lost on us.
    Plus the kindness that was extended to us.
    That is the key.
    That was the key.
    It was all so much love, and so much love on the other side
    that we didn't understand.
    The other side meaning?
    Meaning my parents.
    But you didn't know it at the time?
    Well, you did.
    No, I didn't.
    Why would you say that you didn't?
    When you say you were such a loved child at home,
    and had dancing lessons and your mother sewed for you
    and your parents played with you, and so on.
    I knew I was loved, but I didn't understand
    how much love it would take for a parent to give up a child.
    Did you feel like your parents had given you up?
    No.
    I felt like they had sort of just abandoned me.
    Where were they?
    They were really not coming back.
    And I found that out the second time
    my father came to visit with clothes.
    And the clothes were indicative of the fact
    that we were going to stay.
    Otherwise, why would he bring clothes after summer was over,
    and supposedly, camp was finished?
    So then I knew.
    So in other words, you end up in a good place.
    You're happy there.
    But you're not being told the full truth
    as to what this is all about.
    Right.
    And you fill in the gaps with your own interpretation.
    Yes.
    They're abandoning me.
    I could have helped, or maybe not help, but they left me.
    In those days, or in those times--
    let me put it that way--
    you just didn't tell children why they were going away.
    The truth was beyond explanation.
    Too scary, too frightening.
    So I found out that my father had been killed
    through the parish priest.
    This was in 1944, and my grandmother
    had gotten those news through the underground
    to my parish priest.
    What happened?
    How did he tell you?
    I was on his lap and he told me my father had been killed.
    And I didn't even quite understand what it meant.
    I just knew I would see him again,
    so it couldn't be that bad a thing.
    I had not lost a dog.
    I didn't understand death.
    You hadn't seen a corpse.
    I probably saw a corpse, but it didn't fall into place for me.
    So it was a very sad thing.
    But I had my mother.
    So tell me, what did you learn at the time
    about the circumstance?
    Not much.
    OK.
    Not much.
    I just knew that he had been wounded and hurt
    and he was dead.
    But I knew my mother would come back.
    Let me pause for just a second.
    And I'm going to take my jacket off.
    OK.
    And I will apologize in advance because the question--
    OK, so I wanted to ask a question,
    and I'm apologizing in advance for it
    because it is borne out of the world we live in today, rather
    than the times then.
    But in the past several years, there
    have been many scandals within the Catholic church of priests
    being inappropriate priests, exploiting the trust
    that children have in them.
    And when you mentioned Father Vaes told you
    about your father's death while you were sitting on his lap,
    in olden times, no one would think twice about it.
    Today people's ears would perk up
    and they'd say there's a red flag there.
    OK.
    Is there any reason to have that red flag?
    There is no reason.
    I have no explanation for this, but in that village,
    Father Vaes had a housekeeper, and Father Vaes
    and the housekeeper had a child.
    So this little boy would walk around the village.
    Everybody knew he was Father Vaes' son and the housekeeper.
    So it was a different time altogether.
    But inappropriate with me, never.
    Or my cousin, never.
    So I don't think anything like that ever even entered
    our minds.
    So he was just an affectionate person that,
    when he wanted to tell you this--
    He didn't know how to tell it.
    And you would automatically--
    what would you do?
    You wouldn't put a child 10 feet away from you.
    You would, of course, hold the child on your lap
    and tell the child the story.
    I just spoke to the Catholic dioceses in northwest Indiana,
    and it is so amazing to me where we were and what we've come to.
    Maybe it's just one story.
    I doubt it, but this is really just this story
    and this little village, and the life of this particular priest
    and his housekeeper and this son that they had.
    And everybody knew it.
    I mean, there was nothing peculiar about it.
    Can we cut for a second?
    So you felt you like you were in safe hands
    when you were with him, when you were with Marraine, when
    you were in the village, even though the Germans were
    right there.
    In total safe hands.
    We were stopped once by a German soldier, who told us
    we reminded him of his children, and it
    was sort of a sad encounter.
    Were we were a little intimidated?
    Yes.
    But genuinely frightened?
    No.
    We became frightened when the Allies began bombing.
    Now that was horrific.
    So it was something we had never really expected,
    but that particular train station was
    a very important train station and the Allies were
    trying to get to it.
    So we had to dig a shelter at the end of the yard.
    And of course, even building it was fun.
    Going into it wasn't so much fun.
    But the lights, the glares that the Germans would send up
    to find the Allied planes were frightening,
    because we didn't understand what they were.
    And parachutes.
    We would find parachutes.
    And I always thought somebody must be after us.
    But that was frightening because every night,
    the sirens would go off.
    And every night you would have to get out of bed
    and go into the shelter.
    Well, that's war coming to you.
    It was real war.
    And at that point, it was as frightening to the two sisters
    as it was to us, as it was to the whole village.
    But then the next day, we would go play in the craters,
    so go figure children.
    Yeah.
    And I've seen enough documentaries
    to know children still do these things now, even mines.
    Sure.
    They'll pick up a grenade that doesn't explode.
    That doesn't explode.
    And mines all around them, and they're still playing.
    And so about how long did that last, that period of time.
    The bombs?
    That period of time seems like forever,
    and probably not as long as I think.
    Probably a few months.
    And then we were liberated by--
    I didn't know this, but it was General Patton's army.
    I just knew they were soldiers on tanks,
    and I expected to see these glamorous American soldiers.
    Looking like Shirley Temple.
    Oh, I don't know what they were, just totally.
    But it was a Black army.
    I had never seen a Black person, except chieftains
    from the Congo.
    So I thought, oh, then America must look like this.
    So the fact that I never understood racism,
    I come by it honestly, because this was really
    my first encounter.
    What was interesting, that I didn't even understand,
    is the sergeant, or whoever led the battalions, were all white.
    And when I did research for my book,
    I found out that African Americans were not
    allowed to carry arms, except when armed in wartime.
    But as they were filing through in tanks,
    they weren't allowed to carry guns.
    So they only had chewing gum and candy,
    but we weren't even allowed to take that.
    Why not?
    I think the villagers were scared.
    They didn't know what was being--
    they had never seen chewing gum.
    Were they apprehensive about the liberators?
    Oh, sure.
    Oh, sure.
    Oh, really?
    And there were still various sniping going on.
    Snipers were around.
    So they didn't greet them with flags and wave and everything
    like that?
    Not really.
    We knew we were being liberated.
    And why was this apprehensiveness
    there, do you think?
    Well, I think this was a village,
    and the street is very narrow.
    And when huge tanks and dust comes through,
    with helmets and soldiers, so close to your front door,
    I think it was very intimidating.
    I don't think it had a thing to do with the color of anybody's
    skin.
    No one told me, this one way or another, but I doubt it.
    The children had to go inside.
    OK.
    And we had to give back all the chewing gum.
    [CHUCKLES] We didn't know what it was.
    We would have swallowed in anyways.
    OK.
    Well, I could see a logic for this,
    in that if you were occupied and if it's wartime,
    you don't know what's real until it's lasted for a while.
    Exactly.
    OK.
    Exactly.
    And then how did life progress further?
    Well, then it was not good because,
    and this is really strange, we knew we had to go back,
    Henry to his mother, which survived.
    His father had not.
    And of course, my parents, I knew, had been murdered.
    And I didn't know where my mother was,
    so I had to go back to my grandmother.
    We did not want to go.
    We did not want to go.
    His father was the one who was also imprisoned along
    with your father.
    In Gurs.
    So what happened to him in Gurs?
    Did he ever leave Gurs?
    He never left.
    He didn't understand that my father would want to escape.
    He was a lawyer.
    And he'd felt that if he obeyed the law--
    even wanted his wife to come with his child.
    He figured if he obeyed the law, he was doing the right thing
    and everything would work out, not understanding.
    And eventually, he was on transport to Auschwitz
    and never heard from again.
    And my father escaped and it happened anyway.
    As I found out later, they were reported by a Jew
    by the name of Jacques, who was a notorious person in Brussels,
    and who was told that if he saved all these Jewish whatever
    for the Nazis, his own family would be saved.
    There was a lady in Berlin who had similar infamy.
    I'm sure.
    Yeah.
    I'm sure.
    The same person?
    Because he was famous?
    No, no, no.
    She had a different one.
    I don't know.
    I think her name was Helga, but I'm not exactly sure.
    I don't want to go beyond that because I would be guessing.
    Right.
    But she was a very famous what they called [NON-ENGLISH]..
    Oh, sure.
    Yeah, known amongst the Jews.
    Yes, yes.
    And my parents had broken the curfew
    and were on their way to a card game,
    and this man knew all the comings and goings.
    So this is how they--
    They were picked up.
    They were picked up.
    And this I found out later when I did
    go back to my grandmother, unwillingly.
    My poor grandmother.
    And Marraine brought us back to Brussels.
    That was a terrible goodbye.
    We didn't want to go.
    Was the war still on or had it ended?
    The war ended.
    And my cousin and I would spend hours navigating
    the lakes of Brussels, making escape routes, how we
    would go back to the village.
    It was a wonderful 2 and 1/2 years.
    But I stayed with my grandma.
    My poor grandma, oh my God.
    And then, of course, came the search
    for coming to the United States.
    Oh, and prior to that, I had told the parish priest, when
    I didn't want to leave, that I was going to be a Carmelite
    nun, and I just wasn't leaving.
    And this incredible, incredible parish priest
    said, oh, you know, your roots are Jewish.
    And when you grow up, you can do whatever you want to,
    but right now you belong with your grandmother.
    Now, if we transpose this to today's times,
    we know what it would mean for a Catholic priest
    to make this decision for a child, who I would not
    have left.
    I would have stayed.
    I would have missed out on this interview.
    [LAUGHS]
    Yeah.
    It's quite a story.
    Yeah.
    There were such people.
    There were such little pieces.
    Each person could do something good.
    They didn't know they were part of a bigger history,
    but they were just good people and they
    did what they considered to be the right thing.
    But you when you left, your heart, in some ways,
    was still there.
    Oh, yes.
    Did it ever return back to Brussels, back to your family?
    It took a long time.
    It took a long time.
    I did want to come to America.
    What happened was that every day,
    we would look for my mother.
    I mean, this is what people did.
    They would go to railroad stations.
    They would look at lists.
    My mother never showed up.
    So after she is arrested with your father
    for not having made it to the card game,
    did you know what had happened to her after that?
    I knew that she had been taken back.
    She had been caught.
    She didn't leave my father.
    So they stayed together?
    She did not leave my father.
    They stayed together.
    My father died in a Christian doctor's home.
    My mother was transported to a hospital,
    and could have been saved if somehow the story hadn't
    gotten out.
    The Nazis were all over.
    And so they recaptured the people that had been saved.
    In the hospital?
    Right.
    And so the 20th transport, which is a very famous transport
    at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
    tour, that transport where people tried to escape and were
    helped.
    No one really escaped.
    And my father was killed, and my mother
    was then re-transferred out next day in another transport, 21.
    But no news.
    No one ever knew what happened to her.
    But she was such a small person, she probably
    didn't stand a chance, and I believe she was hurt.
    But even the Museum can't get the details.
    Our Holocaust Museum in Washington.
    Right, even Washington.
    So that's as much as you know.
    That's all I know.
    I have never known more.
    Oh my.
    And the waiting.
    You know, the thinking that, oh, on the street,
    I would see that face.
    And as other people have told me, had the same experience.
    And as a child, you keep thinking,
    my mother's going to certainly show up now.
    And of course, she didn't.
    And leaving Marraine was very difficult,
    and leaving the Catholic religion,
    because of course, my grandmother was
    totally unaccepting of this.
    She neither understood it nor wanted to understand it.
    Well, my aunt was very smart.
    My aunt would organize-- well, we went to church.
    So Henry's mother.
    Henry's mother.
    Frieda.
    Frieda was a very smart lady.
    We would go to church, the two of us.
    In Brussels?
    In Brussels.
    And she never said much.
    My grandmother was horrified.
    But my aunt would organize, with her food stamps, picnics.
    And she would have food, things that we
    hadn't seen in years, whatever she could get her hands on.
    And my cousin was a traitor.
    Within a week, he was gone out of church.
    [LAUGHS]
    Not me.
    I continued.
    How long did you last?
    Oh, maybe three weeks.
    And she pulled it off.
    I mean, she got these two children not to go to church,
    although I have her letters.
    And she never cared what Henry would be,
    as long as he was the best at whatever he could be.
    And in effect, he became a scientist,
    and he's a total non-believer.
    That was his choice.
    It was his choice, and she was a wonderful person.
    My grandmother wasn't a bit as tolerant.
    She was a grandmother.
    Yeah.
    But she wasn't that old.
    She was only 65.
    I mean, I just thought she was ancient.
    But she lost her favorite child.
    And son-in-law and every member of her family.
    Back in Berlin?
    Brothers.
    Yes.
    Sisters.
    Oh my.
    [PHONE RINGING]
    Let's cut here.
    Is this your phone?
    You're doing fine.
    This is actually improving.
    Yeah.
    Speak whenever you're ready.
    OK.
    So your grandmother had losses upon losses.
    How old were you when you went back to her, even though you
    wanted to stay with Marraine?
    How was your relationship with one another?
    Well, she took me to a lot of movies,
    and that worked out very well.
    We would sit through the same movie.
    It was Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald.
    And now I wanted to be like Jeanette McDowell.
    It was always a choice between a movie
    star and the Carmelite nun.
    So now the movie star thing was winning out.
    And she was smart.
    She would take something to eat and she
    would sit with me through the same movie for hours and hours.
    And I would help to get a visa, because at this time,
    through the Red Cross, through Quakers, through HIAS,
    we had been found in the United States,
    because we had been looked for through the whole war.
    By your--
    By Uncle Werner.
    And all these letters that I later found went to him.
    And when they found us, because I was going to be adopted,
    I was going to go to the United States without any camps.
    As you know, people had terrible experiences.
    But we were allowed to live with them.
    Becoming adopted was difficult because I thought--
    it took a couple of years--
    if I have another mother and father,
    what happens if I see my mother and how would she
    understand this?
    You didn't know at the time that your mother had wanted you
    to be adopted by her sister?
    Yes, I did.
    Oh, you did.
    I didn't know she wanted me to be adopted.
    Thank you for asking that question.
    I didn't know that at the time, but later, in 1991,
    when my adoptive father died, one of the letters
    that my mother wrote had told her sister in the United
    States--
    Margot, Uncle Werner's wife--
    that if anything happened to them,
    everything was for their child.
    And please, you are the one to take care of the child.
    But I didn't know that until then.
    Did that change your feeling of having been abandoned?
    Oh, yeah.
    And long before that, when I lost my son.
    I knew the hardest thing to do is to give up a child.
    Because in 1984, right after graduating from law school
    and getting married in two months,
    my kids were driving to see us and were hit by a drunk driver.
    And my son, Robbie, was killed instantly.
    And speak about darkness and Holocausts,
    I knew I hadn't been abandoned.
    I knew my parents had to love me more
    than life itself to give me up.
    So slowly, but surely, I worked my way out of the abandonment.
    It's natural that you would have felt that.
    You were a child.
    As a child.
    You were a child.
    Yes.
    And I think children somewhat feel responsible, in a way.
    If I had been there, I could have saved them.
    If I were good, it wouldn't have happened.
    It was, certainly in my case, if I was good.
    Certainly.
    So your grandmother had you to also look after.
    Did she come with you to the United States?
    I think she lived to bring me to the United States.
    I was not that easy, on retrospect,
    having grandchildren.
    I think that I made her life very difficult.
    And the letters later showed that, oh, she
    spoiled me and Trixie can be difficult. I'm sure I was.
    First of all, I did not understand
    not managing a language.
    I felt that if you just had managed the language,
    you would be fine, but you didn't
    know how to speak French.
    And yet, my grandmother was never caught.
    Yeah.
    How was it so that she and your Aunt Frieda survive?
    Oh, my Aunt Frieda spoke French.
    My grandmother used to call that mazel, which means luck.
    And I believe it is.
    So she loses her daughter when the daughter
    goes to a card game for an evening's entertainment,
    something innocent.
    And yet she herself, throughout the war, is never caught.
    And survives running everywhere and doing everything,
    although she was sheltered by a Christian landlady to a point.
    No one ever gave away her apartment or her residence.
    But yes, and my grandmother had to live with that.
    She had to live with that knowledge, that not only was
    she older and her daughter had so much to live for,
    but she had to live with the fact
    that she was so careless about her comings and goings.
    So she comes with you to the United States.
    Do you remember the journey over?
    Yes.
    I still get sick to my stomach on a rowboat.
    Oh, really?
    [CHUCKLES]
    Yes, but it was fun.
    I mean, I don't remember it as anything drastic.
    That was going to be a real new beginning for me.
    It wasn't as easy as I thought it was going to be.
    In what way?
    Well, it was being adopted into a family that now had never
    had a daughter, number one, that had been given
    the responsibility of raising this child that, supposedly,
    came out of the wilderness, practically.
    Now there was breakfast and lunch and dinner and homework
    and hours, and never mind that you come home or go anywhere
    or without being--
    Where was Bernt?
    He was also there.
    He was a year older.
    It wasn't that they were out of that and they were free
    and then you come into their lives.
    They still were raising a child.
    Oh, they were raising a child, but not a daughter.
    OK.
    And I think that that generation felt
    you raise a daughter differently than you raise a son.
    So he had a lot of freedom.
    First of all, he had been their son forever,
    and I came out of nowhere, and I was a girl.
    So he was allowed to come home at midnight.
    I had to be home at 9:30.
    I mean, there were different rules.
    I wasn't used to rules, and I wasn't used to them
    and they weren't used to me.
    And practically, the day I came, I met a neighbor.
    She happened to be my age, going to the same school,
    and she was also German-Jewish, but they
    had escaped prior to the war.
    And I used to tell her, if I had my mother,
    my mother wouldn't do this.
    This is just because I'm adopted.
    She would say to me, I assure you
    that my mother does the same thing and I'm not adopted.
    And for years, these conversations would go on.
    And I hate her.
    She's doing this and she's doing that,
    and it's because I'm adopted.
    But at base, it was difficult.
    And it sounds like a teenage voice, too.
    Sort of, yes, on retrospect.
    Yeah.
    On retrospect.
    But I missed the security of the Catholic Church.
    I missed confession.
    I did all these awful things and I had no one
    to say to that I did this.
    [CHUCKLES]
    And I missed Marraine, and I was not
    allowed to correspond with her.
    Oh, really?
    No.
    I think the greatest fear was that I would be pulled back.
    I did it anyway, and I would put money into the letter.
    But really, for Henry and me, it was a huge separation
    and the connection kind of got lost for a long time.
    That was difficult.
    I loved high school and I loved everything American,
    and I wanted to be more American.
    I was going to learn English in a minute, and I sort of did.
    And I wanted to be more American than any American child could
    possibly be.
    So I took to everything that was American,
    and my parents were complete immigrants
    and totally didn't understand it.
    Did Bernt understand it?
    Was he called something else by now?
    Bernie.
    Bernie.
    Bernie, Bernie [? Lanbernchen ?]..
    Did he understand it?
    We get along to a point.
    Looking at it from his point of view,
    he must have been terribly jealous.
    He was always an only child, and I was an only child.
    I don't know.
    I mean, his friends sort of took to me,
    and that upset my mother.
    There were all kinds of issues that are probably natural,
    but didn't seem natural to me.
    So you didn't have the same connection to him
    as you did to Henry?
    Not at all.
    Not at all.
    So in some ways, you're putting all of this out of your mind.
    Everything that you left in Europe, you leave in Europe.
    Is that the case?
    I did so much that when this book was published in 1997,
    and I remain friends with the same people I knew then
    and still now, people had no clue.
    People did not know that was me.
    Or acquaintances would say, what?
    You were really an immigrant?
    Wait, you're kidding.
    So I knew that I really did leave everything.
    I just blocked it.
    What unblocked it?
    Robbie, losing Robbie.
    And maybe a while before that, because we went back
    with our children.
    We went back to visit my cousins, as young children.
    But as visitors, and Wendy, my daughter, would tell you this,
    it was fun memories.
    I would tell all the wonderful things that happened
    and the village.
    But really getting in back in touch took losing my son.
    And I think that's when all this became therapy,
    to touch base with the things that I was
    able to do when I was a child.
    I knew I could do the rest then.
    Because I felt, well, you did this and you managed.
    And you did this and you managed.
    And you did this and you managed.
    And always, there were wonderful people
    around to help, always, continuing.
    And so lucky in my life today.
    Earlier today, we had a separate interview with Renate.
    Tell me about that, in the sense of now
    we know more about your father.
    We know who your father was.
    And in some ways, this is almost like part of your father's
    world being brought to you.
    It is unbelievable, really.
    I think that-- well, let's put it this way.
    In 1999, I lost my late husband, Irwin Muchman,
    and within a year I met Larry Abrams.
    And we became very good friends and got married.
    And Larry has a huge clan of kids.
    And I never felt that I had a big--
    I never felt I had family.
    It was always either my late husband,
    who had a big family, too, and other people's families.
    But I had, for years--
    I knew about my maternal family, but I never
    knew anything about my father.
    The orphan.
    The orphan, that's all.
    And I had searched, because in 1990, Wendy, my daughter,
    found a cache of letters.
    And these letters contained over 100 letters
    and documents and artifacts that are now all in Washington.
    Many, many are in Washington.
    My rosary is still with me and my Bible is with me,
    but other things are mainly donated, and given back
    to me gloriously in huge, beautiful books.
    Somehow, the mystery remained, because there
    was a letter written.
    I had the letter, which was in this box, Marshall Field box,
    and it was addressed to a Max Westheimer in Houston.
    And his answer was somewhat abrupt.
    I don't know that he would have ever sent for my father.
    He was going to tell his nephew about he wasn't feeling good.
    So your father had gotten in touch, or your--
    No.
    Werner's wife, my adoptive mother,
    or together, they had written a letter to Houston.
    Because I'm sure they scrolled all the Westheimers.
    We're the Westheimers in phone books.
    And since they were in Chicago, they
    found a Westheimer in Houston.
    And there were so many Westheimers in Houston.
    Westheimer Avenue is in Houston.
    So they wrote to Max Westheimer, who would have been an uncle
    of my father's.
    And they received this letter in return, which I have.
    There were two.
    And I thought, what a terribly unkind answer.
    Such a wealthy person, and he was.
    He owned a big insurance company,
    and went to Houston to look for it.
    No Westheimer was willing to admit anything.
    Now I know why, because no one really was related.
    But after that I kind of dropped it because it was useless.
    And then Muchman cousins of my late husband's.
    This young woman would have been my late husband's first cousin.
    She decided to do ancestry.com, she found the whole Muchman
    clan, going all the way back to Russia
    and then when they came over.
    And it's a wonderful story of a very big family,
    all Trotskyites.
    [LAUGHS]
    Wonderful, wonderful gang.
    It's really when I learned to be Jewish.
    OK.
    And then we got to know them, and they read my book
    and we got friendly.
    And she decided they were going to look
    for Westheimers, because the letter was sort of weird.
    And within, I'd say, almost not more than six months,
    she discovered Westheimers in New York on the East Coast.
    And up came Renata and a tree, an unbelievable tree,
    going back to Germany, all the Westheimers
    in my line of Westheimers.
    Your father's line.
    My father's line, going back to before 1800.
    And it's all proven because Ancestry,
    in order to belong to Ancestry, you
    have to really go in search.
    The Museum is connected to Ancestry,
    so I know they can have all this material.
    And when she found all this, I realized
    but nobody recognized my father, another tragedy
    of the Holocaust, because he perished
    and they were all able to come here.
    So fine.
    Now I found all the Westheimers.
    And then Renata decided--
    she was a six degrees of separation.
    We lived together within a half a block of each other.
    We went to the same high school.
    We went to the same university.
    We didn't know each other and our families
    didn't know each other, which is amazing.
    She decided to come visit with her children.
    And so I had planned a dinner and CBS was coming in,
    and it was very chaotic, because Sherri Goodman is an organizer
    and she organized you and she organized everybody.
    Her daughter.
    So her daughter, Sherri Goodman.
    There's Lauren McCloud, and there is David,
    who's her son from New York.
    And they all came.
    So we just figured, OK, nobody knows.
    I had talked to other Westheimers.
    Nobody quite placed Julius Westheimer,
    until today, moments before you were all set up,
    she looked at the letter.
    Coincidentally, I had shown her what
    the Museum does, because she felt maybe she
    wanted to give her pictures.
    The Museum would be thrilled to hear this.
    But she saw the letter that the museum had copied,
    and of course, everything is cataloged.
    She looked at the letter.
    And she said, this is when my grandfather died.
    This man in Houston also died, coincidentally,
    around the same time.
    And she said, I suspect, and I'm pretty sure,
    the letter was written to the wrong Max Westheimer.
    Had it been written to her grandfather, who would
    have been my father's uncle--
    In New York.
    In New York.
    Not in Texas.
    No, no, no.
    There's nobody in Texas.
    They were all in New York.
    Then the rest of the Westheimers,
    we would have been here.
    Because the man Herman, I think--
    Humberger.
    Humberger was in the diamond business.
    He sent all these people visas.
    But my adoptive mother and father
    made the error of looking for a Max Westheimer, logical,
    and found one in Houston.
    And there you are.
    And Renata and I were together alone, just moments ago really.
    And I can't even believe this.
    So not only did they come here and you're here
    and we're finding each other, but here she is,
    solved the mystery for me.
    Why was this Max Westheimer so standoffish.
    Now it's logical.
    I talk a lot to a lot of groups and I'm always
    talking about this complete indifference, which
    made me think of the Holocaust and Jewish life in America.
    Because I figured, Oh my God the indifference.
    These people could have helped and they were so indifferent,
    but they weren't even related.
    And there was a hint of I'd like to do something, but--
    But some reserve as well.
    Well, sure.
    He probably, who are these people?
    Who are writing to him.
    And do they have a ticket?
    Do they have-- those questions, those things
    were important, if you didn't have any money.
    So we're sitting here in 2016 and you've still
    learned something new that you never expected.
    But you know where this takes me?
    Because it's 2016, this takes me to what
    I hear every day on the news.
    It takes me to the repeated tragedies,
    the orphans, the refugees who are going to repeat--
    and never mind now.
    This has been going on.
    There was Bosnia, Rwanda there.
    I mean, we can just go way back.
    It has never stopped.
    And where are the little pieces of good people,
    who are doing something?
    It is really not just about this Holocaust.
    It isn't just about my life anymore.
    I mean, I'm sure it was for years.
    And that's OK.
    But at this point in my life, if I
    can't do something or try to do something,
    I've wasted all this.
    And of course, that's the wonderful thing about the US
    Holocaust Memorial Museum, is all the things
    that they do with little pieces of people
    who are willing to help.
    Thank you for that.
    I think we've kind of come to the end of our conversation.
    I believe so, and you've been so kind,
    and it's been a pleasure knowing you anyway.
    Likewise.
    Thank you.
    Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up?
    No.
    I used to think that there has to be a time when
    we can say no, it's enough.
    I hope we find the time.
    I hope that time comes.
    I hope it's here.
    It doesn't look it.
    I'd like to leave it on a positive note.
    There's a lot that's positive in what
    you've shared with us today.
    Thank you.
    So I'll say, with that, this concludes the United States
    Holocaust Memorial Museum interview with Beatrice Trixie
    Muchman on September 27th, 2016 in Chicago, Illinois.
    Thank you.
    Thank you again.
    [APPLAUSE]
    Oh, you guys.
    I'm rolling.
    This is the rosary.
    And what is that rosary from?
    Who gave it to you?
    Well, it was a gift of my first communion,
    and given to me by my godmother, as well as the Bible.
    Let's take a look at this.
    And the little Bible.
    Looks like a prayer book.
    It's a little Bible.
    It's a prayer book, and it was given to everybody.
    Let's hold it up like this in the picture.
    So here.
    So it says, [FRENCH].
    So it's a souvenir of a solemn occasion,
    given to Beatrix Duchet, because my name was changed, of course.
    And the church is the Church of Saint Joseph,
    St. Joseph of Ottignies, 30th of May, 1943.
    Why don't we show both sides of this?
    Let's hold it like that so that you can get all of these words.
    That's what's on the flip side, and now we'll turn it this way.
    And that's on the occasion of your first communion.
    Of my first communion.
    And this was given to me by Father Vaes, the parish priest.
    And that's the little card or the Bible and prayer
    book itself?
    No.
    This is the card that was within the--
    it's a little Bible.
    It's a little Bible.
    Yes.
    OK.
    And let's open the Bible so we can
    see at least a few pages of it.
    And you have kept that all these years?
    Yes.
    And I think this came recently.
    That's why you donate things to the museum.
    Let's just see this.
    It's very well kept for so many decades.
    It's amazing, isn't it?
    And this is just a random page?
    It's just a random page.
    I'm not sure where we opened it.
    And so you told me earlier, or did you say no on camera,
    you know all the prayers?
    In French, I think I could still go through them.
    I was punished a lot after confession
    because I would steal candy purposely
    so I could go to confession.
    [LAUGHS]
    And then what you have to do is you
    have to just recite your beads several times,
    and it was my pleasure to remain in the church
    and recite the beads.
    More candy, more beads.
    Right.
    More prayers.
    More prayers.
    So in a way, that's an education.
    Thank you so much for sharing that.
    Oh, you're so welcome.
    We got it.
    Thank you.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Beatrice (Trixie) Muchman (née Westheimer) was born June 5, 1933 in Berlin, Germany to Meta and Julius Westheimer. She had two nicknames: Trixie and Poopa (doll). She discusses her mother’s large family who lived in Berlin for generations, and her father being an orphan; her mother working for her family’s printing business for artists, and her father working in the meat business; being middle class, living in an apartment, and owning a car; the neighborhood synagogue burning during Kristallnacht; her family, including grandmother Johanna Baruch Boas, aunt Margaret Lewy and her husband Werner Lewy, their son Bernt fleeing Berlin in March 1939 to Brussels, Belgium; staying with her aunt Frieda Hurwitz and her husband Walter and their son Henri; Beatrice’s father and Uncle Walter getting arrested and imprisoned at Gurs; her father escaping in February 1941 and returning to his family; Margaret and Werner receiving visas and immigrating to the United States; her family not being able to obtain visas, partly due to a misspelling of their last name; Beatrice and her cousin Henri going to Ottignies to be hidden by two Catholic sisters; her parents getting arrested, her father getting killed trying to escape, and her mother perishing at Auschwitz; hiding in a shelter in the garden during air raids; getting liberated by the Americans and joining her grandmother in Brussels; immigrating with her grandmother to the United States in May 1946; getting adopted by her Aunt Margaret and her husband; marrying Irwin Muchman (d. 1999), and later marrying Larry Abrams; and finding letters many years later concerning her father’s relatives. She married Irwin who died in 1999 and then she married Larry Abrams. After the interview, Beatrice shows the Rosary given to her by her Godmother and a little bible given to her by her priest at her First Communion and her prayer beads.
    Interviewee
    Ms. Beatrice Muchman
    Interviewer
    Ina Navazelskis
    Date
    interview:  2016 September 27
    Geography
    creation: Chicago (Ill.)

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Genre/Form
    Oral histories.
    Extent
    1 digital file : MPEG-4.

    Rights & Restrictions

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

    Keywords & Subjects

    Personal Name
    Muchman, Beatrice, 1933-

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Ina Navazelskis, on behalf of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History Branch, conducted the oral history interview with Beatrice Muchman on September 27, 2016 in Chicago, IL.
    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 08:05:28
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn550881

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    Oral History

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    Oral History

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    Oral History

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    Oral History

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    Oral history interview with Fred R. Wohl

    Oral History

    Fred R. Wohl, born in 1914 in Baden-Baden, Germany, describes growing up in Germany after World War I; leaving to work on a farm in Switzerland in 1932 for four months; working in Athens, Greece in 1935 and trying to get a Greek passport for fear of what the Germans were planning; moving to Nicosia, Cyprus in March 1939 with the help of the British Ambassador to Athens; the German invasion of Greece and being interned with refugees in a camp next to the Nicosia prison; being sent to a hotel-camp in the mountains with his father but soon being released; the Nazi invasion of Crete in 1941 and preparing for evacuation; traveling to Tel Aviv, Israel and then to Mwanza, Tanzania; working in a gold mine and contracting black water fever in Tanganyika, Tanzania; and immigrating to the United States in 1946.

    Oral history interview with Norbert Yasharoff

    Oral history interview with Norbert Yasharoff

    Oral History

    Norbert Yasharoff, born in 1930 in Sofia, Bulgaria, describes the anti-Jewish measures enforced by the Nazis when World War II began; Bulgaria joining the Axis Alliance in March 1941, allowing German troops to pass through Sofia; the expulsion of some Jewish families to Poland in March 1943 and a bloody protest soon after; leaving with his family to Pleven, Bulgaria in May 1943 and staying with family members; attending a Gentile school while in Pleven, where his teacher did not force him to perform the Nazi salute; his liberation on September 9, 1944 and returning to Sofia with his family; immigrating to Israel in December 1948; joining the volunteer air force, where he trained as a radar technician; graduating with a degree from Tel Aviv University in Political Science and residing in Israel for twenty years; and working in an American Embassy for nine years until he immigrated to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Frank Meissner

    Oral history interview with Frank Meissner

    Oral History

    Frank Meissner, born in Třešt̕, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic) in 1923, describes his family; joining a Zionist youth group and traveling to Prague, Czech Republic to live with other members of the group in 1937; the group’s fear of anti-Jewish Nazi policies and subsequently leaving Czechoslovakia to settle in Denmark; attending agricultural school at the University of Copenhagen; receiving a call in 1943 from his landlady, who warned him to not return home because the Gestapo had been looking for him; being smuggled onto a fishing boat to Sweden, where he finished his education; traveling to England in September 1944 and starting to contact his family but learning that they had all been taken to Theresienstadt (Terezin) and eventually to Auschwitz, where they perished; returning briefly to Prague and then going to Denmark in 1946; and immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Mina Perlberger

    Oral history interview with Mina Perlberger

    Oral History

    Mina Perlberger, born on December 25, 1918 in Tyczyn, Poland, describes growing up in a strict Hasidic Jewish family; the German invasion of Poland while her family was in the process of moving to Kraków in 1939; her family’s assignment to do forced labor outside of Tyczyn; working as a black market trader until 1942, when her family's home was seized by the Gestapo; being forced into the ghetto in Rzeszów, Poland; the deportation of her parents to Auschwitz in late 1942; escaping the ghetto with her younger sister and hiding with a Polish farmer in exchange for a payment; hiding with the farmer for 21 months until the Soviet Army liberated them in 1944; meeting her future husband, a Soviet Jew, in Blażowa, Poland; marrying her husband and moving to Austria after the war with the help of a Jewish organization; and immigrating to the United States soon after arriving in Austria.

    Oral history interview with David Klebanow

    Oral history interview with David Klebanow

    Oral History

    David Klebanow, born in 1907 in Barysaŭ, Russia (now Belarus), describes his family and childhood; fleeing to Kiev, Ukraine in 1917 after the Russian Revolution and then to Białystok, Poland; becoming a doctor in 1937 and then being drafted into the Polish Army in 1939; returning to Białystok when he was released from the army and then marrying his wife; being taken to Kaunas, Lithuania and then to Riga, Latvia with his wife; performing abortions to save the lives of pregnant women and staying in Riga for two years; his deportation to Stutthof and then to Danzig, from where they were liberated on March 10, 1945; his wife dying of tuberculosis; working at the Munich University Hospital as an obstetrician after the war; noticing genital abnormalities, sterility problems, and a higher rate of miscarriages among women who had survived concentration camps; and immigrating in 1951 to the United States, where he joined the obstetrics department at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.

    Oral history interview with Franz Wohlfahrt

    Oral history interview with Franz Wohlfahrt

    Oral History

    Franz Wohlfahrt, born in 1920 in Velden am Wörthersee, Austria, describes growing up in a family of Jehovah's Witnesses; the arrest of his father in 1936 for peddling in the street as part of his activities as a Jehovah’s Witness; the German annexation of Austria in 1938; refusing to go to a Hitler Youth meetings and say the “Heil Hitler” greeting, which resulted in German troops monitoring his activities; the execution of his father on December 7, 1939 and his brother soon after because they refused to participate in the war and fight for the German state; the general persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses during World War II since they would not worship Hitler; agreeing to do work for the German state but not participate in military exercises, which resulted in his imprisonment in a dungeon for thirty-three days in 1940; being transferred to the Gestapo office in Graz for further questioning; his deportation to a work camp at Allweiter Rodgau, in the Hessen-Nassau province, because he would not fight for the German state; being saved by a camp commandant’s wife because he painted wall paper for her; his liberation by Allied troops while he was still in the camp; and returning home to find that few people he knew had survived.

    Oral history interview with Tove Schöbaum Bamberger

    Oral history interview with Tove Schöbaum Bamberger

    Oral History

    Tove Schöbaum Bamberger, born on October 8, 1934 in Copenhagen, Denmark, describes growing up in a wealthy family; her father’s ownership of a men’s clothing business; attending first and second grade at a Jewish school before her family fled from Denmark on October 2, 1940; taking a train to the seaport in Snekkersten, Denmark and then traveling on a fishing boat until a Swedish ship intercepted them at sea and took them to Sweden, where they settled in Malmö; her father working in a chocolate factory and selling artificial teeth; her mother selling lingerie; attending school with her sister; returning to Copenhagen on May 28, 1945 to find her family home and store undisturbed; and immigrating to the United States with her husband in 1956.

    Oral history interview with Morris Gordon

    Oral history interview with Morris Gordon

    Oral History

    Morris Gordon, born in Latvia, describes immigrating with his father to the United States; growing up in New York, NY; attending City College and Columbia University; being ordained as a rabbi in 1940; volunteering for the military in 1942; his participation in The Flying Tigers; going to India briefly then Burma; traveling through the jungles of Burma to get to different camps and getting lost three times; taking his Torah with him everywhere he went; arriving in Shanghai as a Jewish chaplain and being greeted by a large Jewish community; conducting a Bar Mitzvah with a boy; his memories of the Shanghai Jewish ghetto and its schools; and receiving a chalice from a Catholic chaplain during the war to help him perform his services.

    Oral history interview with Raya Markon

    Oral History

    Raya Markon, born in 1911 in Vilnius, Lithuania, discusses her childhood; going to college for one year in Toulouse, France; getting married in Paris, France in 1936; her husband's mobilization into the French Army in 1938; her escape from Paris two days before the German invasion in 1940; returning to Toulouse to take refuge with friends and the birth of her son; getting a visa to the United States and difficulties in obtaining an exit visa from France; and her and her family's immigration to the United States in November 1942.

    Oral history interview with Ernest G. Heppner

    Oral history interview with Ernest G. Heppner

    Oral History

    Ernest G. Heppner, born in 1921 in Germany, describes his experiences with antisemitism in his youth; participating in a Jewish youth organization; his father’s positive experiences running a factory in the mid-1930s; being kicked out of school and learning how to weld; losing any sense of hope for German Jews after his experiences on Kristallnacht; his family being forced to sell their house and considering immigration; he and his mother getting a place on a steamship to Shanghai, China by giving the captain of the ship some of their Impressionist paintings; arriving in Shanghai in March 1939; his mother finding a job with a youth committee; communicating through letters with his father and sister back home a few times before never hearing from them again; participating in the British Boy Scout Association in Shanghai; seeing the Imperial Japanese Naval Landing Party come into Shanghai after Pearl Harbor and acting as a British spy; the Jews of Shanghai being forced into a ghetto-like area of the city in February 1943; finding a job in a bakery and meeting his future wife in the ghetto; getting married shortly before the end of the war and going to work for the American occupying forces; his memories of life in the ghetto; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Emanuel Mandel

    Oral history interview with Emanuel Mandel

    Oral History

    Emanuel Mandel, born in 1936 in Riga, Latvia, describes his family moving to Budapest, Hungary when he was three months old; his family; his father’s work as a cantor that led him to travel around and work in several synagogues in Europe; not understanding that he could not have or do certain things because he was Jewish; the German invasion of Budapest in early 1944; his deportation by cattle car in June 1944 to Bergen-Belsen with his mother; developing pneumonia and not having access to much food while in the camp; developing a sense of comic relief, like by calling a German troop “Popeye,” to survive; participating in a Red Cross inspection of Bergen-Belsen; in January 1945 being taken by German soldiers on a train towards the German-Swiss border and being released in Switzerland, where they were cleaned and fed; traveling to Saint Gallen and then to Caux, Switzerland to stay in a displaced persons center; reuniting with his father after the war; his mother’s decision to go to Heiden after the war to run a one-room school house for six- to fourteen-years olds to learn Hungarian; immigrating to Palestine by a British troop carrier in September 1945 and living in a kibbutz, where his mother took charge of the day shift cooking; and immigrating to the United States in March 1949.

    Oral history interview with Leo Bretholz

    Oral history interview with Leo Bretholz

    Oral History

    Leo Bretholz, born on March 6, 1921 in Vienna, Austria, describes his childhood; his father passing away in 1930 and becoming a father figure for his two younger sisters; long-standing antisemitic attitudes transforming into excessive violence after the Anschluss in 1938; the arrest of his friends and his mother encouraging him to flee to Luxembourg, where he had an aunt; being arrested three days after he arrived in Luxembourg, questioned for several hours, and released to a train station; returning to Luxembourg and staying with relatives until he had the opportunity to cross the border into Belgium on November 9, 1938 and go to Antwerp, where he found distant relatives and stayed until May of 1940; receiving an affidavit and visa from an aunt in Baltimore, MD to immigrate to the United States but being unable to leave because Pearl Harbor was bombed the day he was scheduled to go; obtaining the necessary documents to cross into Switzerland in October 1942, but getting arrested and taken to Rivesaltes; his deportation to Drancy, another French detention camp, where he stayed for a short time before he and other prisoners were loaded onto cattle cars for transport; escaping deportation by bending the bars covering one of the train’s windows and squeezing through and jumping out of the train; making his way to Paris, where he obtained a false identification card; his arrest in December and then being sent to prison for nine months until he went to a forced labor camp in Septfonds, France; escaping from the camp and contacting a friend who got him in touch with an underground resistance group in Saint-Vallier, France, which he joined in November 1943; helping children cross the border into Switzerland, making false ID cards, and relaying messages between various resistance organizations; working with the resistance after D-Day and helping the Allied forces; and receiving an affidavit from his aunt in Baltimore that allowed him to immigrate to the United States in 1946.

    Oral history interview with Paul Matasovski

    Oral history interview with Paul Matasovski

    Oral History

    Paul Matasovski, born in Bacău, Moldavia (now Romania) in December 1933, describes his family and early childhood; his family getting a radio in 1933 to find out what Hitler was doing in Europe; the political situation with the Iron Guard and General Antonescu; the Jews having their radios taken from their homes but receiving news by passing around sheets of paper; attending a Jewish high school until the end of 1942, when he was sent to work in a textile factory; participating in sabotage activities until he was arrested in the spring of 1944; remaining in a prison near the Carpathian Mountains until Russian forces liberated him; his knowledge of transports and concentration camps during the war; the composition of the people in his underground group and their activities; and returning to his hometown to help clean up the mess after the war.

    Oral history interview with Zelda Piekarska Brodecki

    Oral history interview with Zelda Piekarska Brodecki

    Oral History

    Zelda Piekarska Brodecki (Americanized name, Sonia Brodecki), born on July 27, 1928 in Sosnowiec, Poland, describes her family; the German occupation of her town and her family having to close their business; entering the Sosnowiec ghetto and being forced to work in a factory; her deportation from the ghetto to a forced labor camp near Wrocław, Poland; her transfer in 1943 to another labor camp in Klettendorf, Germany (Klecina, Wrocław, Poland); Russian troops liberating her at an ammunition factory in Ludwigsdorf, a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen in Germany; returning to Sosnowiec after the war and meeting her cousin there; moving to the Landsberg am Lech displaced persons camp, where she met her husband, Boleslaw Brodecki; and living in Germany until 1949 when she and her husband immigrated to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Stefania Podgórska Burzminski

    Oral history interview with Stefania Podgórska Burzminski

    Oral History

    Stefania Podgórska Burzminski, born in Lipa, Poland, describes her family and childhood; helping her parents run a farm until she decided to move with her sister to Przemyśl and work in a bakery; the Russian invasion and not noticing much of a change in life until the Germans ousted the Russians; living in an apartment near the ghetto and witnessing people being deported from it; developing a relationship with a young man named Josef, who was Jewish and lived in the ghetto; having to explain what a Jew was to her little sister; helping to smuggle food into the ghetto for Josef and his family; moving into a large apartment and taking Josef and twelve other Jews in with her; having an SS man insist upon taking a room in her apartment and always living in fear that he would kill the Jews living there; and her liberation by Russian forces.

    Oral history interview with Rose Galek Brunswic

    Oral history interview with Rose Galek Brunswic

    Oral History

    Rose Galek Brunswic, born in Sochocin, Poland in 1920, describes her family; learning Hebrew and participating in a Zionist organization in her youth; moving to Warsaw in the mid-1930s; being forced into the Warsaw ghetto and living with twelve other people; her parents being shot during a roundup; going into hiding with the underground in March 1941; leaving her hiding place and finding another one in the city with an old work friend of her father; being caught by the Germans during a raid and sent by cattle car to Berlin; using her false papers to get a job on a farm; pretending to be a Seventh Day Adventist and playing the organ for the church; getting in trouble for not having the proper identification and having to do translations for a judge as penance; her liberation by American soldiers in 1945 when she was still working on the farm; meeting a Jewish soldier and marrying him; staying in a displaced persons camp after the war until she immigrated to the United States to live with her uncle; and settling in Buffalo, New York, where she attended school.

    Oral history interview with Renée Schwalb Fritz

    Oral history interview with Renée Schwalb Fritz

    Oral History

    Renée Schwalb Fritz, born in 1937 in Vienna, Austria, describes her family; her father leaving for the United States in 1939 and fleeing with her mother to Belgium; the German occupation of Belgium in 1940 and going into hiding in a convent, where she remained for two years until the Germans became suspicious; the underground taking Renee to a Protestant family's farm and then to an orphanage; reuniting with her mother after the war and discovering that she had survived Auschwitz; joining her father in the United States five years later; going through high school in the US with much difficulty; attending Boston University; and marrying an American man soon after she graduated from college.

    Oral history interview with Martin Spett

    Oral history interview with Martin Spett

    Oral History

    Martin Spett, born on December 2, 1928 in Tarnów, Poland, describes his childhood; the German occupation of Tarnów in 1939; his family losing their apartment in 1940; hiding in an attic when the first massacre of Jews occurred; having to finally register as a Jew in May 1943 and go to Bergen-Belsen, where he was allegedly to be part of an exchange for German prisoners of war; being liberated on April 13, 1945 by Allied troops during his transport to Theresienstadt; spending some time in Belgium after the war; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Ion Cioaba

    Oral history interview with Ion Cioaba

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Niels Bamberger

    Oral history interview with Niels Bamberger

    Oral History

    Niels Bamberger, born on October 21, 1928 in Würzburg, Germany, describes growing up in a religious family; fleeing from Germany to his mother's hometown of Copenhagen, Denmark in 1932; his family being warned of imminent danger on Rosh Hashanah of 1943; their local grocer helping them to escape to the port town of Snekkersten, Denmark (the closest point between Denmark and Sweden); receiving help from the local resistance forces and hiding in houses until their group of over two hundred could be transported in row boats; a Swedish military boat intercepting his family at sea and taking them to Sweden; attending school in Lund, Sweden while his parents opened a small restaurant; his family’s return to Denmark on May 28, 1945 to find their old home undisturbed; and getting back on his feet after the war.

    Oral history interview with Ray Buch

    Oral history interview with Ray Buch

    Oral History

    Ray Buch, born on September 18, 1920 in New York City, NY, describes his parents and their emigration from Ukraine; joining the US Army in November 1942 and going into training in Louisiana and Texas for a year; being shipped to England in September 1944; fighting in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and encountering fighting and violence; finding out about the concentration camps and death camps; his unit’s attempts to bury people who had died alongside the roads; arriving in Mauthausen on May 10, 1945 and the scenes of people and depravation he witnessed; forcing the German citizens to bury the dead; spending about thirty days in Mauthausen and then moving around to other camps, like Dachau and Ebensee; and the sacrifices his unit made for the sake of the freedom of Europe and the United States.

    Oral history interview with Nina Kaleska

    Oral history interview with Nina Kaleska

    Oral History

    Nina Kaleska, born on April 11, 1929 in Grodno, Poland (now Hrodna, Belarus), describes having a pleasant childhood; her family not being perceived of as Jewish because of their Aryan looks; experiencing antisemitism among her childhood friends in 1938; joining the Young Pioneers after the Russians invaded in 1939; her father’s imprisonment for three to four months for political reasons; the German invasion in 1941 and the formation of two ghettos in Grodno; the Germans selecting one of her cousins, who was considered an electronics genius, for forced labor but then killing him; peasant families offering to hide her and her sister but rejecting because she did not want to be separated from her family; being deported with her sister to Auschwitz in 1941; the death of her sister three months after they arrived; becoming sick in the camp several times and only being saved because of the help she received from a woman named Martha who worked there; being asked by Dr. Mengele if she was Jewish because she did not look Jewish; having to stand guard while the head of her lager had sex with some of the most beautiful women in the lager; going on a death march and being liberated by Allied forces on May 5, 1945; and her immigration to England and then to the United States with the help of the American Joint Distribution Committee.

    Oral history interview with Judith Meisel

    Oral history interview with Judith Meisel

    Oral History

    Judith Meisel, born on February 7, 1929 in Josvainiai, Lithuania, discusses her childhood; moving to Kaunas, Lithuania shortly after her father’s death; being forced into the Kaunas ghetto in 1941; her family’s deportation in 1944 to Stutthof, where her mother was killed; escaping with her sister from a death march out of Stutthof by hiding in a coal bin; receiving shelter in a Catholic nunnery; developing typhus and posing as a Christian in a hospital in Danzig, Poland to receive treatment; finding work on a farm with her sister; moving to Copenhagen, Denmark, where she was sent to school; her liberation on May 5, 1945; living with a Jewish family in Denmark for some time after the war; immigrating to Canada in 1948; and immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Thomas Buergenthal

    Oral history interview with Thomas Buergenthal

    Oral History

    Thomas Buergenthal, born in 1934 in Czechoslovakia, describes his family; moving with his family to Žilina, Czechoslovakia in 1938 and facing persecution from the Hlinka Guard; moving to Katowice, Poland and registering with the British Consul; leaving for England on September 1, 1939 but being stopped near the Russian border when their train was bombed by Germans; having to march with a group of refugees to Kielce, Poland and go into its ghetto; the deportation of his grandparents and twenty thousand other ghetto inhabitants in August 1942 to Treblinka while he and his parents were sent to a forced labor camp in Kielce; surviving a massacre of Jewish children and then being transported with his parents to a factory where they made wooden carts for the Eastern Front; his deportation in August 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he worked in the laundry as an errand boy; getting separated from his father and never seeing him again; being forced on a death march to Gliwice, Poland and then to Heinkel concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany in January 1945; his transfer to a sub-camp of Sachsenhausen; his liberation on April 27, 1945 by Russian soldiers; marching with the First Polish Division into Berlin, Germany and Siedlce, Poland and then being placed in a Jewish orphanage in Otwock, Poland; his mother finding him in 1946 and smuggling him into the British zone of Germany; living in Göttingen, Germany and attending high school there; immigrating by himself to the United States in 1951 to live with his uncle; his mother remarrying and staying in Europe; attending Harvard Law School and becoming a professor of International Law at the George Washington University Law School; and serving on the United Nations Human Rights Committee and the United States Holocaust Memorial Council’s Committee on Conscience.

    Oral history interview with Leif Donde

    Oral history interview with Leif Donde

    Oral History

    Leif Donde, born in 1937 in Copenhagen, Denmark, describes his upbringing in a religious but not Orthodox Jewish family; the German occupation of Denmark in April 1940; seeing the German police begin to arrest Jews in early October 1943 and fleeing with his family by train to the Danish city of Nykøbing Falster, south of Sjælland island; being smuggled by a fishing boat to safety in Sweden; arriving in Trelleborg, Sweden after an eleven-hour nighttime boat ride in October 1943, during which they passed through a German mine field; attending school in Sweden while his parents worked in a garment factory in Uddevalla, Sweden; his family returning to Denmark after the end of the war; and settling in Denmark, where he serves as the Consul General.

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Kaufmann Koenig

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Kaufmann Koenig

    Oral History

    Elizabeth Kaufmann Koenig, born in Vienna, Austria on March 7, 1924, describes her family and childhood; enjoying the rich cultural life Vienna had to offer before the war; her father’s placement on the Nazi blacklist for being a liberal writer and journalist; attempting to leave Austria and go to France but getting arrested and sent to prison; escaping to Cologne, where her mother managed to attain three visas by giving up some of her jewelry; moving to Paris, where her father found a job as a reporter; attending art school in Paris and meeting her future husband; the deportation of her father and brother to concentration camps when Germany declared war on France; her father’s return home for a short period until he had to join the French Army; running away from Paris and going through several cities until she arrived in Blois, France and began to search for her father; getting separated from her family and asking about their whereabouts wherever she went; reuniting with her mother in Barcus, France; finding a teaching job in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France through a family friend who lived there; her family receiving special visas to move to the United States on December 7, 1941 because her father was an intellectual; attending college in the United States; and marrying Ernest, the man she had earlier met in Paris.

    Oral history interview with Max Amichai Heppner

    Oral history interview with Max Amichai Heppner

    Oral History

    Max Amichai Heppner, born on October 15, 1933 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, describes growing up as an only child; his parents’ escape from Berlin, Germany in 1933; the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands and missing a boat to escape to Sweden; losing several of his family’s possessions to the Nazis; his mother getting captured during a street raid but then being released by a Nazi commander in August 1942; escaping into the countryside with his parents and finding various hiding places with another family; going into hiding with underground forces and then with a farming family; dealing with frequent Nazi raids; meeting several downed Allied pilots while in hiding; his liberation by Scottish soldiers on September 24, 1944; his mother’s attempts to shield him from much of the devastation of the war; and immigrating to the United States to live with his mother’s family.

    Oral history interview with Charles Bruml

    Oral history interview with Charles Bruml

    Oral History

    Charles Bruml, born in Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), describes his family and the Prague Jewish community; being about 28 years old and working in an import-export firm in 1938 when German troops marched into Prague; his family’s deportation to Theresienstadt and finding a job in the camp’s Technical Department; making paintings during his internment that are displayed at the camps today; his deportation to Auschwitz on January 11, 1942 and getting tattooed; being transferred to Buna (Monowitz), where he worked as a painter for the SS men until January 18, 1945; being forced to walk to Gleiwitz, because the Russians neared, and then to Bergen-Belsen, where the Red Cross liberated him; and meeting his wife in Prague as they both tried to sort out the fates of their families.

    Oral history interview with David Pollack

    Oral history interview with David Pollack

    Oral History

    David Pollack, born in Prince Albert, Saskatechewan, Canada in 1922, describes growing up in a mildly Jewish family; enlisting in the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1942 but not being accepted as a pilot because of his poor eyesight; being trained as a radar technician and stationed first in the Queen Charlotte Islands and then in England in 1943; joining a mobile radar unit outside of Weimar, Germany in 1945 and visiting Buchenwald, where he was shocked by the horrors of the camp; speaking, with the aid of a translator, to many prisoners, taking the names and the addresses of their relatives who were in other countries, and contacting these relatives to inform them that the prisoners would soon be arriving in displaced persons camps and contacting them for help; returning to Canada after the war; and keeping up correspondence with some of the survivors he had helped to reunite with their families.

    Oral history interview with Eugene Lipman

    Oral history interview with Eugene Lipman

    Oral History

    Rabbi Eugene Lipman, born in Pittsburgh, PA on October 13, 1919, describes his family; graduating from Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio; being sent overseas as an army chaplain in April 1945; after the war helping Jewish survivors at Buchenwald and Dachau before being sent to Plzen, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic); joining the Haganah, a group that cared for Jewish survivors and refugees as well as secretly transporting Jews to Palestine; continuing his work with the Haganah in Regensburg, Germany; going home to the United States for a short time in April 1946 but returning in late 1946 with his wife to continue to aid Jews by providing many with false identity papers for them to leave Europe; and returning to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Hetty d'Ancona de Leeuwe

    Oral history interview with Hetty d'Ancona de Leeuwe

    Oral History

    Hetty d’Ancona de Leeuwe, born on May 1, 1930 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, describes her family and early childhood; her father losing his business after the German invasion; the deportation of several of her friends and family in 1942; her father’s participation in the Dutch underground newspaper; leaving Amsterdam in October 1943 and separating from her parents to live with a Dutch Gentile family for two years; her liberation by American and British forces and staying with her foster family for a few months until she reunited with her father; and marrying a Jewish man and immigrating to the United States with him after the war.

    Oral history interview with Marty Glickman

    Oral history interview with Marty Glickman

    Oral History

    Marty Glickman, born in 1917 in the Bronx, NY, describes growing up with parents who were immigrants from Romania; attending Syracuse University, where he was a track athlete chosen to compete in the 1936 Berlin Olympics in Germany; being one of two Jews on the United States Olympic track team; arriving in the Olympic Village and being told that he and Sam Stoller, the other Jewish runner, were to be replaced in the 400 meter relay by Ralph Metcalf and Jessie Owens; hearing from the head coach of the Olympic track team that the substitutions were made because the Germans were said to be hiding their best sprinters but believing that he was really replaced because Avery Brundage, president of the American Olympic Committee, did not want to further embarrass the Nazis by having Jews run and win a race; serving in the United States Marine Corps in the Pacific during World War II; going to the Marshall Islands; and his friendship with Jesse Owens.

    Oral history interview with Susie Gruenbaum Schwarz

    Oral history interview with Susie Gruenbaum Schwarz

    Oral History

    Susie Gruenbaum Schwarz, born in 1931 in Schlüchtern, Germany, describes her family; moving to Dinxperlo, a village located close to the German border in the Netherlands in 1933; the German invasion of the Netherlands on May 10, 1940; Jews no longer being allowed to own businesses or to attend schools; going into hiding when they heard that the Jews would be rounded up for deportation in 1943; living with her mother in a barn attic that was barely big enough for them to both lie flat; beginning to write a cookbook-diary in 1944 to pass her time; becoming extremely ill because of a lack of ventilation in her living quarters; recovering from her illness but remaining weak; having to leave her hiding place toward the end of the war because of increased Nazi raids; her liberation on April 1, 1945 by Canadian troops; returning to their former village with food and money supplied to them by the farmers who had hidden them; returning to school as her family tried to re-build their lives; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Hessy Levinsons Taft

    Oral history interview with Hessy Levinsons Taft

    Oral History

    Hessy Levinsons Taft, born on May 17, 1934 in Berlin, Germany, describes her family and childhood; her parents having her photo taken in 1934 and the photo ending up in a Nazi magazine labeled as a beautiful Berliner baby; her family’s decision to run away to Paris, France, where they were when it fell to the Germans; moving to the French coast near Bordeaux with her mother and sister while her father remained in Paris trying to find a way for the family to leave; her father securing visas for the family to travel to Cuba, where she and her sister began to attend a British school; immigrating to the United States in 1948 and settling in New York, NY; and eventually getting married and starting a family.

    Oral history interview with Bella Jakubowicz Tovey

    Oral history interview with Bella Jakubowicz Tovey

    Oral History

    Bella Jakubowicz Tovey, born on September 18, 1926, in Sosnowiec, Poland, describes growing up in a Jewish family; the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and losing her father’s factory and their family furniture; being forced to move into the Sosnowiec ghetto and to work in a factory there in 1941; her family’s deportation to the Bedzin ghetto in 1942; her deportation to the Graeben sub-camp of Gross-Rosen in Germany in 1943 and then to Bergen-Belsen in 1944; her liberation in April 1945; and immigrating to the United States in 1946.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Krautwirth Meyerowitz

    Oral history interview with Ruth Krautwirth Meyerowitz

    Oral History

    Ruth Krautwirth Meyerowitz, born June 23, 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany, describes her childhood; facing intensifying antisemitic measures that resulted in the loss of her father's business and the closing of her school in the late 1930s; her family’s deportation in 1943 to Auschwitz, where her father was killed; her selection for forced labor and being assigned to work on road repairs; working in the "Kanada" unit sorting possessions brought into the camp; her transfer to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany in November 1944; being sent to Malchow, where she worked in a munitions factory making bullets; her liberation by American soldiers in May 1945 during a death march from the Malchow camp in Germany; traveling to Frankfurt with her mother in August 1945 with hopes of finding the rest of their family; and immigrating with her mother to the United States in early 1947.

    Oral history interview with Peretz Milbauer

    Oral history interview with Peretz Milbauer

    Oral History

    Peretz Milbauer, born in Brooklyn, New York in October 1915, discusses his life up to World War II; teaching history before he was drafted into the United States Army; being sent overseas in July 1944 and arriving to his station in Remse, Germany on December 5, 1944; liberating prisoners from a death march in Wałbrzych, Poland in December 1944; gathering a list of names of survivors from the death march and sending the list to American newspapers and magazines in an effort to help survivors contact their relatives; and also liberating prisoners at Ebensee, a sub-camp of Mauthausen in Austria, in May 1945.

    Oral history interview with Judah Nadich

    Oral history interview with Judah Nadich

    Oral History

    Judah Nadich, born in 1912 in Baltimore, Maryland, describes his life until World War II and training to be a rabbi; enlisting in the army as a chaplain after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor; serving as the senior Jewish chaplain with the United States Army in the United Kingdom and then in France during the war; having his first contact with survivors of Nazi oppression in France; helping Parisian Jews re-build their community; being ordered to Frankfurt, Germany as the Jewish affairs adviser to General Dwight D. Eisenhower and reporting on conditions in displaced persons camps; and returning to the United States in late 1945.

    Oral history interview with Hana Bruml

    Oral history interview with Hana Bruml

    Oral History

    Hana Bruml, born on May 30, 1922 in Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), describes her family and childhood; attending a Zionist elementary school; meeting Rudolph Schiff and marrying him on November 14, 1939; the German invasion of Prague and her father losing his business, receiving ration tickets marked with a “J,” and only being allowed to do certain things at specific times; the deportation of her parents in July 1942 to Theresienstadt followed three weeks later by her and her husband’s deportation to the camp; working in the camp hospital as a nurse; the death of her husband and the development of a romance with Bruno, who worked as an internist in the camp; the special treatment of Danish Jews and a few prominent Austrian and German Jews in Theresienstadt; seeing doctors perform several abortions in the camp to save women; her transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau in October 1944 and seeing Dr. Mengele; and remaining in Auschwitz until May 5, 1945, when she was liberated.

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Meed

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Meed

    Oral History

    Benjamin Meed, born on February 19, 1922 in Warsaw, Poland, describes his family; traveling with a friend in 1939 to Russian territory to escape Nazi persecution; returning to Warsaw because they could not support themselves; joining an underground movement that provided a library and schooling for children; smuggling people to the Aryan side of Warsaw when the ghetto was established; helping his family escape to Praga Południe, Poland, where they hid in a cemetery; beginning to work with a woman named Vladka who was also involved in underground activities; posing as a Christian with Vladka during the war in order to facilitate their work in the underground; moving his hiding place to a bunker which he had built after the Warsaw uprising; jumping onto a Red Cross truck after his liberation to escape persecution by Germans and Poles after the war; reuniting with his parents after the war; and marrying Vladka in Warsaw ten days after liberation.

    Oral history interview with Johanna Neumann

    Oral history interview with Johanna Neumann

    Oral History

    Johanna Neumann, born on December 12, 1930 in Hamburg, Germany, describes her early childhood; her memories of Kristallnacht on November 10, 1938; her family’s decision to leave Germany as anti-Jewish measures intensified; obtaining visas for Albania and leaving Germany without many of her possessions; crossing into Italy and setting sail for Albania on March 1, 1939; remaining in Albania during the Italian and German occupations for a total of six and a half years; finally being liberated after a battle between the Germans and the Albanian partisans in December 1944; spending some time in an Italian displaced persons camp at the port of Tricase in the Lecce province of Apulia in southern Italy; immigrating to the United States in September 1946; and living briefly in Israel for three years from 1969 until 1971.

    Oral history interview with Alice Lang Rosen

    Oral history interview with Alice Lang Rosen

    Oral History

    Alice Lang Rosen, born in 1934 in Lambsheim, Germany, describes her early childhood; the deportation of her family to the Gurs camp in France and then to Rivesaltes when she was six years old; the French Red Cross taking her out of the camp and hiding her from the Germans by placing her in a children's home, then in a convent, and then with various Catholic families; being sent to a children's home near Paris after her liberation; having her name put on a list of Jewish children from all over France, which was being compiled by a Polish rabbi; her father tracing her from this list and reuniting with her in Germany in 1946; and immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Jay Ipson

    Oral history interview with Jay Ipson

    Oral History

    Jay Ipson, born June 5, 1935, in Slobodka (Vilijampolė), Lithuania, describes growing up in religious, well-off family; his father's attempts to move his family to Russia but being turned back at the border; losing their home in the move and moving in with his grandmother, whose house was in the Kaunas ghetto; witnessing the deportations from the ghetto; escaping the ghetto with his mother and father in November 1943; hiding in a farmer's hay wagon and then in one room under the care of a poor, religious Polish Catholic family; his father's construction of a hiding place under the Polish family's potato patch; hiding with all of his extended family in the underground bunker; being liberated by the Russian army; moving back to Kaunas with his parents; attending Jewish school; being forced to run away from Kaunas after his father was declared an enemy of the Soviet Republic; changing his last name to Butremovitch and getting false papers; hiding with a Jewish family in White Russia; leaving Warsaw, Poland and traveling to Germany; receiving help from a German man to cross the border to the American occupied-zone of Germany; living with a German family in Prinz Regenten Strasse in Munich for nine months; immigrating to the United States to live with his aunt in Richmond, VA in June 1947; and joining the US military during the Korean War and becoming a colonel in command of an aviation unit.

    Oral history interview with Margaret Jastrow Klug

    Oral history interview with Margaret Jastrow Klug

    Oral History

    Margaret Jastrow Klug, born on June 8, 1923 in Rogoźno, Poland, describes her family and childhood; her brother’s immigration to Scotland before the war; the beginning of the war and being arrested because someone had given them her name; jumping from a window of the jail to avoid deportation to Auschwitz but instead being injured and staying in a hospital for two months; being deported to Auschwitz, where she worked in a factory; getting married and having a daughter after the war; immigrating to Israel in 1949; returning to Germany soon after because the climate in Israel was too uncomfortable for her; and immigrating to the United States in the mid-1950s and settling in Atlanta, Georgia.

    Oral history interview with Solomon Klug

    Oral history interview with Solomon Klug

    Oral History

    Solomon Klug, born on July 9, 1923 in Krzepice, Poland, describes growing up in a religious family with one sister and three brothers; seeing his mother and brother shot in his backyard; his deportation in 1940 to Annaberg, Germany, where he worked building the Autobahn; being transferred in 1943 to Markstadt, Germany, where he built bridges, and then to Fuenfteichen, a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen, in March 23, 1944 to work in an ammunitions factory; his transport to Wolfsberg, another sub-camp of Gross-Rosen; being sent to Politz, Czechoslovakia, Bergen-Belsen, and finally to Barth-an-der-Ostee, a sub-camp of Ravensbrück; going on a three-day death march after his evacuation from Barth-an-der-Ostee; his liberation on April 30, 1945; going to Berlin, Germany after liberation and meeting his wife Margaret; immigrating to Israel, where they lived for four years, and then returning to Nuremberg to spend a year in a displaced persons camp; and immigrating to the United States in 1955 and settling in Atlanta, Georgia.

    Oral history interview with Helene Baraf

    Oral history interview with Helene Baraf

    Oral History

    Helene Baraf, born July 24, 1927 in Antwerp, Belgium, discusses her family and her childhood in Antwerp before World War II; her family's move to the United States in 1937; her return to Belgium with her mother and brother in 1940; traveling to France with her family by train and on foot after the Germans entered Belgium; her family's life in Lille, France; her brother's arrest by the Gestapo and eventual deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau for failing to properly display his Star of David on his coat; her and her mother's arrest by the Gestapo and their escape during a round up; their rescue from a small hiding place by the members of the underground resistance; her time spent hiding in a convent with other Jewish children in Lille; her attempts to conceal her identity with an assumed name and falsified identification documents; her move from the convent to a "Protestant community" in Roubaix, France, where she attended high school and remained with her mother until after World War II; her friendship with a girl from Roubaix whose family sheltered her and her mother for period of time during the war; the divorce of her parents shortly after the war; and her life in the United States after 1969.

    Oral history interview with Morris Kornberg

    Oral history interview with Morris Kornberg

    Oral History

    Morris Kornberg, born in Przedbórz, Poland on January 6, 1918, describes growing up as the youngest of seven children in a strict Orthodox family; the 1939 German invasion and being forced to work in a factory in the ghetto; his imprisonment in Końskie, a prison in Poland, and then in Radom, Poland and Jawischowitz, a sub-camp of Auschwitz; working in a coal mine and receiving special treatment by SS men because of his memory for numbers; his transfer to Troeglitz, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, in January 1945; the evacuation of Troeglitz on April 9, 1945 and escaping on a train with two others; getting caught and forced on a death march to Leitmeritz, a sub-camp of Flossenbürg, and then to Theresienstadt, where he was liberated; staying in a sanitarium outside of Stuttgart, where he met his wife; and immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Michael Diamond

    Oral history interview with Michael Diamond

    Oral History

    Michael Diamond, born on July 10, 1919 in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia), describes his family; his draft into the Czech Army in 1939 but being forced to work in army camps clearing snow off roads and highways when the Slovak State was created; his transfer to Liptovský Mikuláš, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia), where he repaired weapons and became a Slovak-German language interpreter; being moved to Vrútky, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia), where he had to clean old uniforms; working as an electrician in eastern Slovakia; escaping into hiding in the forest but soon getting captured by the Gestapo; his transport to Sered, a "Sommerlager" in Slovakia; attempting to escape from a transport train and then being sent to Sachsenhausen, Heinkelwerke, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Neuengamme, and Mauthausen; working as an engineer and repairing railroad engines; ending up in Wurttemberg, Germany, where he was marched deeper into Germany as the Allied forces approached; and hiding in a peasant's empty house in Germany until he was liberated by Soviet soldiers.

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malach

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malach

    Oral History

    Abraham Malach, born on May 12, 1935 in Zwoleń, Poland, describes his family; entering the ghetto in Radom, Poland in 1940 and remaining there until 1942; spending 1942 through 1943 at work camps in Poland, where he worked as a messenger boy; his deportation to Auschwitz in 1944; being removed from the group headed to the gas chambers at his first selection by a female Kapo, who molested him and bribed him to keep silent by giving him food for his family; running away to a monastery when Auschwitz was liberated; eventually being taken by nuns to a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency camp; reuniting with his parents in 1946 in Krakow, Poland; his parents sending him to Israel to finish his high school education; and immigrating to New York, NY after high school when he was admitted to Columbia University.

    Oral history interview with Michael Bernath

    Oral history interview with Michael Bernath

    Oral History

    Michael Bernath, born on February 14, 1923 in Szikszó, Hungary, describes growing up in a family with eleven older siblings; working in Budapest, Hungary as a furrier in 1943 and always getting harassed; joining the underground movement in Budapest and working for American and British intelligence services; the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944 and Hungarian gendarmes rounding up five thousand Jewish people from his town and transporting them to Kassa, Czechoslovakia; being forced into a slave labor camp with about 35,000 other men; his deportation to the Schachendorf concentration camp in Austria in the winter of 1944 and being forced to dig trenches and train tracks in the Austrian Alps; Russian forces liberating him and returning to Budapest to live with his aunt and uncle; and his immigration to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Kate Bernath

    Oral history interview with Kate Bernath

    Oral History

    Kate Bernath, born in August 27, 1927 in Szikszó, Hungary, describes her family and childhood; living a decent life until March 1944 when the Germans occupied Hungary; dating a man to keep herself amused before the occupation; being rounded up and sent to a ghetto in Kassa (Košice, Slovakia); her deportation to Auschwitz in May 1944; her transfer to a factory in Augsburg, Germany to work in a Messerschmitt factory; hearing Allied bombings every night toward the end of the war; her transfer to Mühldorf, where she had to clean up debris from bombings; the guards disappearing one day and escaping to a farmhouse, where they were caught by an SS soldier; her liberation on May 1, 1946 and going to the Feldafing displaced persons camp; returning to Amsterdam and reuniting with her pre-war boyfriend; and getting married in Leipheim, Germany and then immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Paul Kovak

    Oral history interview with Paul Kovak

    Oral History

    Paul Kovak, born on December 6, 1938 in Trenčín, Slovakia, describes being born a Jew but converting to Roman Catholicism with his parents; his father’s work as a professor at a small agricultural college; not having to wear the yellow star because of his father’s indispensable position at the school; going into hiding in the second home of a farming family in the mountains in late August 1944 at the time of the Slovak National Uprising; staying in hiding until April 1945, when they were liberated by Russian and Romanian troops; living in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia until 1981; and immigrating to the United States in 1981.

    Oral history interview with Abraham Kolski

    Oral history interview with Abraham Kolski

    Oral History

    Abraham Kolski, born in 1917 in Izbica Lubelska, Poland, describes his family; the German occupation of Poland and going into the Czestochowa ghetto, where he did forced labor at a metal factory; his deportation on October 2, 1942 to Treblinka, Poland, where he performed forced labor searching for valuables in the clothing of gas chamber victims; participating in the Treblinka uprising on August 2, 1943 and escaping the concentration camp with nine other friends; hiding in a cellar of a home near Treblinka for the remainder of the war; eventually being liberated by the Russian Army; remaining in Poland until 1948, when he married and left for France; immigrating to the United States in 1954; and testifying as a witness to the events at Treblinka in the war crimes trials at Düsseldorf.

    Oral history interview with Sylvia Kolski

    Oral history interview with Sylvia Kolski

    Oral History

    Sylvia Kolski, born on September 15, 1925 in Tarczyn, Poland, describes her family and childhood; moving with her aunt, uncle, cousins, and parents into the Warsaw ghetto; working for a tailor in the ghetto; hearing rumors that the Jews would be killed on July 22, 1942; hiding money in her clothing, so she could bribe people to save herself; seeing several major deportations from the ghetto; escaping from the ghetto and staying with a family in the countryside; her liberation on January 16, 1945 and returning to Tarczyn; moving to Łódź, Poland, where she met her husband, and then to Paris, France in 1947; and immigrating to the United States when the Vietnam War began.

    Oral history interview with Steven Springfield

    Oral history interview with Steven Springfield

    Oral History

    Steven Springfield, born in 1923 in Riga, Latvia, describes his experiences as a child; the German occupation of Riga in 1941 and having to go into the ghetto; the massacre of about 28,000 Jews from the ghetto in late 1941 at the Rumbula forest; being transferred with his brother to a small ghetto for able-bodied men; his deportation to a labor camp near Kaiserwald in 1943; being moved to Stutthof in 1944 and forced to work in a shipbuilding firm; surviving a death march in 1945 with his brother and being liberated by Soviet forces; accepting a position as an interpreter for the Russian Army; his incarceration by the Russians for allegedly supporting the Nazis but being released when the charges were disproven; locating his pre-war girlfriend and marrying her; moving to Berlin, Germany with his wife and brother; and applying for a visa and immigrating to the United States on March 10, 1947.

    Oral history interview with Liny Pajgin Yollick

    Oral history interview with Liny Pajgin Yollick

    Oral History

    Liny Pajgin Yollick, born in 1924 in Hague, Netherlands, describes growing up in a wealthy family; the German occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940; her mother’s plans to escape after her father died; spending six months with her mother and sister trying to escape through southern France by pretending to be Protestant, obtaining visas to travel through Spain and Portugal, and going on one of the last trains to cross into Spain after the Germans took over southern France; boarding a Portuguese ship bound for Dutch Guiana and being placed into a refugee camp; the exiled Dutch government’s arrangement for her to finish her education; and immigrating to the United States, where she worked for some time in the Dutch embassy in Washington, DC before settling in Texas.

    Oral history interview with Fred Bachner

    Oral history interview with Fred Bachner

    Oral History

    Fred Bachner was born on September 28, 1925 in Berlin, Germany and describes his family; his brother’s and father’s deportation to the Polish border after Kristallnacht; moving to Poland in 1939 to join the rest of his family; his brother being taken to a work camp in Poland in 1940; his deportation to Markstädt, a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen, and then to Groeditz and Faulbrueck before he was sent to Auschwitz; loading and unloading coal and cement for I.G. Farben, a German industrial company; going on a death march out of Auschwitz to a camp near Dachau, where he found his brother; being placed on another train that was ambushed by British fighter planes; jumping off the train with his brother and hiding in the surrounding area until they located the American soldiers; staying at the Feldafing displaced persons camp after the war; reuniting with his father and immigrating to the United States with his father and brother on January 3, 1947; and being drafted into the United States Army during the Korean War.

    Oral history interview with Murray Pantirer

    Oral history interview with Murray Pantirer

    Oral History

    Murray Pantirer was born on June 15, 1925 in Kraków, Poland and discusses his childhood; the German occupation of Kraków in 1939; separating from his family on several occasions in an attempt to find food and other necessities; finally being confined to the Kraków ghetto; his and his brother’s deportation to Płaszów, Poland to do forced labor; his transport to Auschwitz in May 1944, then to Gross-Rosen, and finally to Brünnlitz, a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen, to work for German industrialist Oskar Schindler; his liberation on May 10, 1945 and discovering that he was only one of nine family members to survive; returning to Poland after liberation but deciding to leave because of the lingering presence of antisemitism; moving to a displaced persons camp in Linz, Austria, where he met and married his wife; arranging to immigrate to America through the American consul in Salzburg, Austria; and immigrating to the United States on the S.S. Marine Fletcher in January 1949.

    Oral history interview with Barbara Marton Farkas

    Oral history interview with Barbara Marton Farkas

    Oral History

    Barbara Marton Farkas, born on May 4, 1920 in Beliu, Romania, describes her family and childhood; living in Beliu until 1937, when her family sold their house and store and moved to Oradea, Romania; being refused entrance into the university in 1940 because of the anti-Jewish laws implemented by the Hungarian government, which then controlled the northern Transylvania area; training in a hospital laboratory and working there until the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944; leaving the hospital, which was occupied by the SS, and starting work at a photo company; first wearing the Star of David on April 1, 1944 and going into the Oradea ghetto in May 1944; her family’s deportation to Auschwitz, where she lost her parents; her transfer to Weisswasser, a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen in Germany, where she worked in a chemistry lab and then in the Cathode Workshop; staying there from October 1944 through February 1945; her transport through several camps after March 1945 to avoid the approaching Soviet army; ending up on the German-Danish border at Padberg, Germany; the Red Cross assisting the survivors with food and shelter; being taken to Malmö, Sweden the next day and then spending some time in a hospital in Landskrona, Sweden; returning to Romania to study in Cluj from 1946 to 1951; graduating as an industrial pharmacist; immigrating to Israel in 1961; and immigrating to the United States in 1968.

    Oral history interview with William Farkas

    Oral history interview with William Farkas

    Oral History

    William Farkas, born in 1916 in Arad, Romania, describes growing up as an only child in a middle class family; attending the Arad Jewish school and studying business administration after high school; joining the Romanian Army after school; not experiencing antisemitism until 1940 when he was expelled from the army because he was Jewish; the Iron Guard coming to power in September 1940; being ordered to report for deportation to labor camps in July 1941 and going to a work camp in Sighişoara, Romania, where he worked as a miner demolishing mountains for a new railway line; being sent home until 1942, when he was transported to Valea Homorod, Romania and then to Kinapist, Romania to do railway work; claiming he was an electrician in 1943 and going to a camp with three friends in Timişoara, Romania, where they worked as auto mechanics in a military garage for one year; his transport in 1944 to Doaga, a labor camp in Romania, where inmates built cement fortresses; hearing that Soviet soldiers were approaching Doaga and being liberated on August 25, 1944; returning home via Bucharest and reuniting with his parents in Arad; finding a wife and immigrating to Israel with her in 1954; and immigrating to the United States in 1961.

    Oral history interview with Sheila Perec Etons Bernard

    Oral history interview with Sheila Perec Etons Bernard

    Oral History

    Sheila Etons Bernard (née Sala Perec), born on February 18, 1936 in Chełm, Poland, describes her family and early childhood; her father’s deportation to a labor camp after the war began and never seeing him again; hiding in the shack of a Polish policeman for almost two years with her mother; her mother dying because of a blood clot in her leg; going to a children’s home in Germany for two years; immigrating to Palestine to live with one of her uncles; joining the military, where she met her husband; immigrating to the United States in 1963 because her husband had family in the US; and her thoughts on how the war has affected her life.

    Oral history interview with Frima L.

    Oral history interview with Frima L.

    Oral History

    Frima, born in 1936 in Volochys'k, Russia (now Ukraine), describes her family; trying to escape to White Russia with her family after the Nazi invasion but being forced back to live with some distant cousins; her father’s capture by the Germans to serve as an interpreter for them; her sister and mother being forced to work at labor camps during the days; entering the Volochys'k ghetto; getting caught by Germans and claiming that they were not Jewish, which resulted in them going to jail; escaping with her mother and sister to hide in the attic of a barn, where they were almost discovered but managed to escape; the intensifying pogroms against the Jews by Russian and Ukrainian collaborators; pretending to be Christian and going into hiding with an old family friend; eventually reuniting with her mother with the help of several generous Gentiles and staying with her until the end of the war; going into displaced persons camps in Bavaria; going to school in Germany for two and a half years and then moving to France; immigrating to the United States in the 1950s and meeting her husband there; and her considerations on how the war has affected her life.

    Oral history interview with Esther Terner Raab

    Oral history interview with Esther Terner Raab

    Oral History

    Esther Terner Raab, born on June 11, 1922 in Chelm, Poland, describes growing up as one of two children; the Soviet occupation of her town in 1939; the German invasion of Chelm in 1941 and her family being forced into a ghetto; moving to Siedliszcze, Poland and eventually moving into the ghetto in Siedliszcze; her transport to the labor camp at Staw Noakowski, Poland for a short time before she and her brother were sent to Sobibór in December 1942; arriving at Sobibór three days before Christmas in 1942 and being forced to work in a knitting factory in the camp, knitting woolen socks; witnessing the gassing of Jews at Camp III of the Sobibór compound; participating in the camp uprising of October 14, 1943 but getting wounded during the escape; fleeing to the countryside and getting sheltered by a former customer of her father; reuniting with her brother, who had escaped during a previous transfer; remaining hidden until 1944, when the region in which she hid was freed by the Soviet Red Army; following the Red Army to Berlin, Germany and settling there for a short time after the war; marrying a man in Berlin and then immigrating to the United States shortly after the end of the war; and serving as a witness at the trials of Nazi criminals in the 1965-66 trials in Hagen, Germany.

    Oral history interview with Guy Stern

    Oral history interview with Guy Stern

    Oral History

    Guy Stern, born on January 14, 1922 in Hildesheim, Germany, describes growing up in a Jewish family; attending a German school, where he had many non-Jewish friends; losing several of his friends after 1933 when they joined the Hitler Youth; his family’s decision to move to the United States after they began to experience increased levels of antisemitism; leaving Germany with a group of children in November 1937 and arriving in New York, NY; moving to St. Louis, Missouri to live with distant relatives; graduating high school in June 1939 and trying to help his family immigrate to the United States; discovering that his parents had perished in the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland; attempting to enlist in the US Army in 1941 but being turned away because of his German heritage; receiving a draft notice in 1942 and being trained in military intelligence because of his familiarity with the German language; training at Camp Ritchie in Maryland; working as an interrogator and uncovering the deeds of several war criminals; going to Buchenwald the day after it was liberated and seeing the horrible conditions there; returning to the United States after the war, attending Hofstra College, and then earning his Ph.D. from Columbia University in German Literature and Culture; and helping other survivors write about their Holocaust experiences.

    Oral history interview with Toby Stern

    Oral history interview with Toby Stern

    Oral History

    Toby Stern, born on July 15, 1920 in Vișeu de Mijloc, Romania, describes growing up as the youngest of six children; marrying when she was seventeen or eighteen; going into hiding with her family shortly after the war began; having one child and miscarrying another while in hiding; her deportation to Auschwitz with her mother and her three-year-old son; giving her child to her mother to carry, since both were guaranteed to be killed, which allowed her to survive; having to do forced labor making uniforms in the camp's tailor shop; going on a death march in early 1945 from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück and then to Malchow, where Russian forces liberated her; going to the New Bromberg displaced persons camp and then returning to Vișeu de Mijloc in search of her husband and family; finding all of her brothers but not her husband, who was rumored to have died in Russia; immigrating to Germany after the war and remarrying while there; and immigrating to the United States in 1950.

    Oral history interview with Ion Butnaru

    Oral history interview with Ion Butnaru

    Oral History

    Ion Butnaru, born in 1918 in Huși, Moldavia (Romania), describes his family; working for a small newspaper before the war until he was drafted into the Romanian Army in November, 1939; being transferred to the military zone in northern Moldavia in the spring of 1940; his expulsion from the army in August 1940 because he was Jewish; being ordered to return to his regiment to work with the battalions in the Carpathian Mountains on September 1, 1940; being sent back to Huși to clean streets in the summer of 1941; his deportation to a concentration camp in Tîrgu Jiu, Romania, where he remained for four months; returning to Huși, where he was placed in a local camp in the courtyard of the Jewish community and had to wear yellow badges; witnessing the Iron Guard Rebellion in January 1941, during which many Jews were killed; his father being falsely accused of being a communist and getting badly beaten; being forced to clear the streets of snow until the summer of 1942, when he was sent to Bolgrad, Ukraine and then to several other villages in Bessarabia in a forced labor battalion; getting moved to another camp near Bîrlad, Romania in 1943; the Romanian Army surrendering to Soviet forces in August 1944; and immigrating to the United States in 1976.

    Oral history interview with Jeanine Gutman Butnaru

    Oral history interview with Jeanine Gutman Butnaru

    Oral History

    Jeanine Gutman Butnaru, born on June 25, 1925 in Bacău, Romania, describes her childhood and family; moving to Bucharest, Romania in 1938; her involvement in the underground resistance movement in Bucharest; working as a volunteer in Jewish hospitals; witnessing the Iron Guard Rebellion of January 21-23, 1941, when Legionaries killed Jews and burned downed their houses and stores; the 1944 American bombing of the railroads that cut the Germans off from Ploiești, Romania, which was rich with oil; hiding in her family’s cellar during the heavy bombardments because Ploiești was near Bucharest; Soviet troops entering Romania at the end of the war; meeting her husband in the Writer's Union; and immigrating to the United States in 1976.

    Oral history interview with Cecilie Klein-Pollack

    Oral history interview with Cecilie Klein-Pollack

    Oral History

    Cecilie Klein-Pollack, born on April 13, 1925 in Yasinya, Ukraine, describes growing up as the youngest of six children in a Jewish family; the death of her father when she was nine years old; her expulsion from high school after the Hungarians annexed Ruthenia; being threatened with deportation and subsequently going into hiding in Budapest, Hungary after her mother and sister were briefly imprisoned there; fleeing to Horinc, Ukraine, where they stayed for a year until her brother was taken for forced labor; moving with her mother to Nyíregyháza, Hungary, where arrangements had been made for her to apprentice in a dental laboratory; traveling to Budapest when she heard that her oldest sister had been arrested and finding out that she had been sent to a labor camp in Bačka Topola, Yugoslavia; traveling to Bačka Topola to arrange for her sister’s release and then returning to Budapest, where she became engaged to her future husband Joe Klein; the German invasion of Budapest in March 1944 and joining up with her and Joe’s families in Chust, Ukraine; being forced into a ghetto and then transported to Auschwitz; arriving in Auschwitz and being sent to Birkenau with her sister; being sheltered by the Blockältester who liked her because she was a talented poet; her and her sister’s transport to Nuremberg and Holleischen; their liberation from Holleischen by Russian troops and returning to Czechoslovakia, where she reunited with her fiancé and married him in Budapest on August 21, 1945; and immigrating to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Fred Schwartz

    Oral history interview with Fred Schwartz

    Oral History

    Fred Schwartz, born on October 30, 1928 in Kotaj, Hungary, describes his childhood; his father’s deportation to a labor camp in 1940; taking over his father’s job delivering seltzer water with his brother; knowing very little of what was happening in Europe from 1940 to 1944; the German invasion of Hungary; the organization of Jews into their town synagogues as the Germans prepared them for deportation; his deportation to Birkenau with his father, mother, and brother; discovering later after the war that his mother had died in Bergen-Belsen; his transfer to a work camp in Wolfsberg where he had to dig tunnels through mountains; being forced on a death march as the Russian forces neared; arriving in Mauthausen where he was liberated by American forces; staying a displaced persons camp for two years until he relocated to Paris, France; waiting to receive an American visa; going to the United States without legal papers and almost being sent back; and reconciling with his past.

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malnik

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malnik

    Oral History

    Abraham Malnik, born on January 31, 1927 in Kaunas, Lithuania, describes his childhood and family; the Russian invasion of Lithuania in 1940 and losing most of his family’s belongings; the brutal treatment of Jews by Lithuanians; the establishment of a ghetto in Kaunas that held about thirty thousand people; the Lithuanians beheading the local rabbis; being saved during a selection because his father knew the chief of police; his father’s work in the ghetto fire department; being forced to do several jobs like make toys for German children and clean dirty clothes from the front; the Germans and Lithuanians intensifying their battle against the Jews after the loss of the battle at Stalingrad; being on the last transport from the ghetto to Dachau, where he had to help build a factory for Messerschmitt and pick up dead bodies; his transfers with his father to Flossenbürg and then another camp; getting a German officer in trouble because he attempted to sexually abuse him; his transfer to Theresienstadt, where he was liberated by Russian troops on May 8, 1945; immigrating to the United States without knowing anyone or speaking English; and settling in Washington, DC with his wife, who was a Belgian Holocaust survivor.

    Oral history interview with Lilly Appelbaum Malnik

    Oral history interview with Lilly Appelbaum Malnik

    Oral History

    Lilly Appelbaum Malnik, born in Belgium in 1928, describes her family and childhood; her father's move to the United States; waking up one morning in 1940 and discovering that the Germans had invaded; her sister who was taken into hiding by a farmer who later turned her in to the Germans because she would not have sexual relations with him; living with her aunt in the countryside after having her tonsils out; returning to find that her mother and brother had been deported; hiding her Jewish identity and doing odd jobs for the Germans; going into hiding with a Belgian girl with whom she had worked; being caught and deported on the second-to-last transport before the liberation of Belgium; arriving in Birkenau and receiving her identification number and work assignment to the kitchens in Auschwitz; a death march to Bergen-Belsen; the arrival of Allied soldiers at Bergen-Belsen; being taken away by the Red Cross to recover from typhus and physical injuries; returning to Belgium and reuniting with her aunt; and immigrating to United States to be with her father.

    Oral history interview with Masha Loen

    Oral history interview with Masha Loen

    Oral History

    Masha Loen, born in July 1930 in Kaunas, Lithuania, describes growing up in a religious family with three sisters; her father hiding her family and other Kaunas Jews under the wooden floor planks in his home; being separated from her family in 1941 and taken to the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland; performing forced labor in Stutthof until 1945, when she was taken on a death march as Russian troops approached the camp; making it to a Russian hospital after the German soldiers abandoned the death march; traveling to Łódź, where she found her father who had been liberated from Dachau; taking a transport to Austria; and immigrating to New Orleans, LA in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Madeline Deutsch

    Oral history interview with Madeline Deutsch

    Oral History

    Madeline Deutsch, born on April 29, 1930 in Berehove, Czechoslovakia (now in Ukraine), describes her childhood; Hungary taking over her town on November 9, 1938; living under the Hungarians until March 1944 when the Germans invaded; living in a ghetto for two weeks until her transport to Auschwitz, where she and her mother stayed in for one week; being moved near Wrocław, Poland to work at an ammunition factory; her and her mother’s liberation by Russian soldiers on May 8, 1945; discovering that both her father and brother had died; staying with her mother in a displaced persons camp for four years until March 9, 1949 when the two immigrated to the United States; and marrying and having two sons in America.

    Oral history interview with Amalie Petranker Salsitz

    Oral history interview with Amalie Petranker Salsitz

    Oral History

    Amalie Petranker Salsitz, born in 1922 in Munich, Germany, describes growing up in a Zionist family; moving to Stanislav, Poland (now Ivano-Frankivs'k, Ukraine) when she was a young child; the Russian occupation of Poland in 1939 and the loss of her father’s business; seeing her sister move to Palestine with her new husband; her family’s arrest by the Gestapo in October 1941; moving into the ghetto until her father was deported in 1942; escaping to Kraków, Poland, where she passed as Aryan; working as a chambermaid and finally obtaining employment at a construction firm in Kraków, where she remained until January 1945; traveling to Munich and Palestine after the war; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Norman Salsitz

    Oral history interview with Norman Salsitz

    Oral History

    Norman Salsitz, born in 1920 in Kolbuszowa, Poland, describes growing up in a Zionist Hasidic family; making a failed attempt to immigrate to Palestine in 1938; unsuccessfully trying to join the Polish Army in September 1939; the occupation and destruction of his town; escaping to Russian-occupied Poland for a short period until he returned to Kolbuszowa; going into the Lipie labor camp in 1940; running away from the camp; working for the Germans, building garages for the Wehrmacht; his deportation to the Pustków concentration camp in late 1940; being beaten; escaping from Pustków and moving to the Czechowice ghetto; escaping from the ghetto in November 1942 and helping to establish a partisan unit in the forest near Kolbuszowa; obtaining false documentation with which he joined the Armia Krajowa; fleeing to Germany after the war; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Frederic Bernard

    Oral history interview with Frederic Bernard

    Oral History

    Frederic Bernard, born on August 7, 1912 in Chernivtsi, Romania (Chernivtsi, Ukraine), describes his family; studying medicine at Karls University in Prague, Czechoslovakia; attempting to enter Hungary in 1941 but being turned away by the Hungarian gendarmerie and placed in a ghetto in Oleyëvo-Korolëvka, Ukraine with over 1,500 Jewish people; hiding during an Aktion in 1942 that exterminated most of the ghetto and then later escaping with his wife Gusti; finding a hiding place with a Polish man in a barn in the woods; the Polish man encouraging him to join a Polish resistance group; finding a new hiding place with Gusti in 1943 and joining a Russian resistance group; becoming a courier for the resistance because of his Romanian language ability; joining the Polish Army, where he practiced as a doctor; and immigrating to the United States in 1950.

    Oral history interview with Isaac Bitton

    Oral history interview with Isaac Bitton

    Oral History

    Isaac Bitton, born on March 31, 1926 in Lisbon, Portugal, describes his family and childhood; the small Lisbon Jewish community in which he grew up that hosted thousands of Jewish refugees before and during the war; his family’s work running a soup kitchen to help the Jewish refugees; immigrating to Palestine with his brother aboard the ship Nisassa; being forced into an internment camp when he arrived in Haifa; joining the Palestine Police Railroad Division and then the Jewish Brigade; spending some time in Antwerp, Belgium for the Jewish Brigade but soon returning to Palestine to work for the British military; participating in a movement to encourage the illegal entry of European refugees into Palestine; working with the underground forces of the Haganah, a movement dedicated to preparing for Israeli independence; and his immigration to the United States in 1959.

    Oral history interview with Max Haber

    Oral history interview with Max Haber

    Oral History

    Max Haber, born on December 31, 1904 in Essen, Germany, describes his family; attending an Orthodox Jewish school in Germany; moving to Hamburg, Germany and working as a businessman there until 1933, when he moved to Kolomyia, Poland to live with his brother and sister; moving to Katowice, Poland, where he was able to find work; joining the Revisionist party in 1939 and trying to immigrate to Palestine on an illegal transport through Romania; the British Ambassador to Romania telling the Romanians to withdraw his visa since the British were restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine; returning to Kolomyia and staying there until the Soviets invaded in 1939; trying to escape to Romania with his brother-in-law but getting caught and imprisoned; being moved to Kiev, Ukraine in March 1940; receiving a five-year prison sentence and getting transported to Yartsevo, Russia; his transfer to the Mostowits labor camp in Russia, where he was forced to cut trees; his liberation in March 1944 and taking a train to Kotel’nich, Russia with other prisoners; staying with several Russian Jewish families until he found a Ukrainian family who housed him for a short time in exchange for German lessons; traveling to the English zone in Germany; and reuniting with his brother in 1951 in Israel.

    Oral history interview with William P. Levine

    Oral history interview with William P. Levine

    Oral History

    Major General William P. Levine, born in Duluth, Minnesota on July 1, 1915, describes growing up as the oldest of four brothers; his draft into the United States Army in 1942 and completing Officer Training School in 1943; entering the Intelligence Unit as an Artillery Officer in 1944; being sent to England and later traveling with a unit that began in the Netherlands and worked its way south towards Dachau; moving into Dachau on April 29, 1945 and helping to give out food and medical care to the former prisoners at Dachau; and returning to the United States in 1946.

    Oral history interview with Leo Schneiderman

    Oral history interview with Leo Schneiderman

    Oral History

    Leo Schneiderman, born on August 18, 1921 in Łódź, Poland, describes his family and childhood; the large Jewish population that had comfortably developed within Łódź before Hitler came to power; Poland preparing for war by drafting young men into the army and by digging trenches; the German invasion and fall of the Polish Army in September 1939; being tricked by the German government to head towards Warsaw with his younger brother and father; returning to Łódź and being forced into the ghetto with his whole family; the closing of the Łódź ghetto in 1940 and the realization that the community needed to organize its own services and methods of self-support; each of his family members taking a job in the ghetto, including his work as a tailor; illegally teaching Yiddish in the ghetto; not understanding why there had to be deportations from the ghetto without realizing the severity of the camps; his deportation to Auschwitz in August 1944; his transport to Kaltwasser, a labor camp in Silesia, to do construction work for a short period until he was transferred to Lärche and then to Wolfsberg, where he worked in a hospital; being forced onto an open cattle car for a deportation and being thrown food while passing through Stará Paka, Czechoslovakia; his liberation by Allied Forces; and speaking for the prosecution against Herr Krison in a 1978 trial in Bochum, West Germany.

    Oral history interview with Adam Starkopf and Pela Starkopf

    Oral history interview with Adam Starkopf and Pela Starkopf

    Oral History

    Adam Starkopf and Pela Starkopf, both born in 1914 in Warsaw, Poland, describe their childhoods and families; Pela’s decision to study at a Warsaw law school before the war; getting married in 1936 and having a daughter in 1941; entering the Warsaw ghetto in 1940; escaping from the ghetto in 1942 by drugging their daughter, so she seemed to be dead; pretending to go to the Jewish cemetery outside of the ghetto to bury their daughter but never returning; their daughter getting tuberculosis and her six week treatment in a hospital; being helped by non-Jews; hiding on the Aryan side as Catholics; their daughter’s discovery that she was Jewish after the war; immigrating to the United States in 1947 on a United States Navy transport; Adam taking various jobs until he opened sporting goods factory; and getting involved in the Penny Project, which began in 1989.

    Oral history interview with Carla Heijmans Lessing

    Oral history interview with Carla Heijmans Lessing

    Oral History

    Carla Heijmans Lessing, born in 1929 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, describes her family and childhood; the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940 and experiencing harsh antisemitic measures; going into hiding with her mother and brother in August 1942 with the assistance of a Catholic priest who helped Jews find hiding places; leaving their first hiding place after three months but, with the priest’s help, finding a new shelter in Delft, in which they hid for thirty months; and her liberation in May 1945.

    Oral history interview with Edward Lessing

    Oral history interview with Edward Lessing

    Oral History

    Edward Lessing, born in the Hague, Netherlands on May 8, 1926, describes moving to the United States in 1929; returning to Delft, Netherlands in 1932 because of the economic depression in the US; entering trade school in 1942 to become a tool maker but having to leave because Jews could no longer attend public school after the German invasion; splitting up from his family after the invasion in October 1942 and finding a place to hide with a farmer, who employed him as a farm hand; relocating to hide in a convent in the Hague with his mother; the German raid of the convent in December 1943, during which he escaped, but his mother was taken to Bergen-Belsen; reuniting with his father and brothers in their hiding place in an abandoned cottage; remaining in this cottage through May 1945 when they returned to Delft; his mother’s liberation from Bergen-Belsen in late 1945; and immigrating with his family to the United States in 1946.

    Oral history interview with Werner Goldsmith

    Oral history interview with Werner Goldsmith

    Oral History

    Werner Goldsmith, born in Erfurt, Germany on November 13, 1928, describes his family; the expulsion of Jewish children from German schools in 1938; the death of his father in 1938 and moving with his mother to Berlin, Germany; his mother placing him in the Auerbach Orphanage while she lived with another Jewish woman in West Berlin; his mother arranging for him to be placed in a transport to France while she traveled to England; living in the home of a French count until the invasion of France in 1940; the count being taken prisoner in Germany in 1940 and going into the care of the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants; unsuccessfully attempting to flee to southern France and getting separated from the other children when he was placed in the Rothschild orphanage, where he remained for nine months; moving to Marseilles, France in the spring of 1941; receiving an emergency visa in September 1941 to immigrate to the United States because he had relatives there; getting on a transport from Marseilles to Portugal and then embarking on a Portuguese freighter and sailing to the United States; and living in Jewish foster homes until he reunited with his mother in 1946.

    Oral history interview with Beatrice Pappenheimer

    Oral history interview with Beatrice Pappenheimer

    Oral History

    Beatrice Pappenheimer, born in October 1932 in Lauterbach, Germany, describes her family and childhood; her parents having to register with the local police; moving to Karlsruhe, Germany after her father had to give up his business in 1936; starting school in Karlsruhe but experiencing much antisemitism; being forced to leave school in November 1938 because of a law forbidding Jews from public schools; the Gestapo forcing her and her family from their house and onto a train in 1939; arriving in the Gurs camp and contracting dysentery; her transfer to the Rivesaltes camp; her mother placing her on a truck run by the Oeuvre de Secours des Enfants and moving into homes in France; reuniting with her sister, who had gone through terrible times in the camps; the bombing of France that picked up in 1943; receiving letters from her grandmother in Palestine, her aunts in New York City, NY, and her uncle and aunt in London, England; arriving in London to be with her uncle and aunt; immigrating to New York City in October 1947 to live with her aunts and attend high school; and her thoughts on her wartime experiences.

    Oral history interview with John Komski

    Oral history interview with John Komski

    Oral History

    John Komski, born in 1915 in Galicia, Poland, describes growing up in a Gentile family; having some Jewish friends at the Academy of Arts in Kraków, where he graduated from in 1939; leaving Kraków when the Germans invaded but returning to join the resistance; escaping to Czechoslovakia, where he was caught by Slovaks who turned him in to the Gestapo; being rounded up in 1940 with 756 other Poles and deported to Auschwitz, where he worked in the architect's office; helping to create the museum in Auschwitz in 1941, collecting items of interest from the incoming inmates; escaping from Auschwitz to a small village, where he received false documents from the underground and boarded a train to Kraków; getting captured in Kraków and sent to prison; his transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau and then to Buchenwald, where he worked as a kitchen chef; his deportation to Gross-Rosen, where he worked in the labor relations office; being transported to Hersbruck towards the end of the war and then forced on a death march to Dachau, where he was liberated; and his immigration to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Curtis Whiteway

    Oral history interview with Curtis Whiteway

    Oral History

    Curtis Whiteway, born in Newburyport, MA on November 3, 1925, discusses his draft into the United States Army in December 1943; his basic training in Fort Knox, KY and intensive training with Rangers; transferring to Camp Maxie, TX, where he joined the 99th Division and immediately went to England; crossing into France with his division and participating in several skirmishes with the Germans; fighting the Third Panzer Division, which helped to push American forces further into Germany through the Siegfried Line; fighting near Cologne, Germany and encountering several concentration camps; helping to liberate the few surviving prisoners at Ohrdruf; going south into combat after the arrival of the Red Cross; reaching Dachau 3-B and then liberating the Moosburg prison camp (Stalag VII A) in Germany, which had about 30,000 prisoners, including some American prisoners of war; going to the Landshut sub-camp of Dachau to meet up with English and Canadian troops; and his assignment after the war to work temporarily in Cherbourg, France.

    Oral history interview with Lore Baer

    Oral history interview with Lore Baer

    Oral History

    Lore Baer, born August 26, 1938 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, discusses her childhood in Amsterdam; how her family moved from Germany to the Netherlands in 1933; developing a close relationship with her maternal grandfather, who was arrested by the Gestapo and taken to Bergen-Belsen, where he perished; her family's relationship with Elsa and Sam Izaaks, members of the underground resistance; her time in hiding with the Schouten family and becoming friends with Cornelia Schouten; her memories of living as a Catholic in order to conceal her identity as a Jew; hiding in various places on the Schouten family farm in order to avoid the Germans; her difficult separation from the Schouten family at the end of the war and her readjustment to life in Amsterdam; immigrating to the United States with her parents and settling in the Bronx, New York; and returning to the Netherlands to visit with members of the Schouten family several years after moving to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Erich Kulka

    Oral history interview with Erich Kulka

    Oral History

    Erich Kulka (né Erich Schön), born on February 18, 1911 in Vsetín, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), describes his childhood and family; being raised as a conservative Jew; attending a trade school, where he studied forestry and then worked in the family lumber business; smuggling people through the woods after the German annexation of Austria; being caught, arrested, and tortured by the Gestapo in June 1939; being released from prison in August 1939 and resuming work with the underground; his second arrest in 1940, when he was taken to Dachau as a political prisoner and then transferred to Auschwitz, where he was assigned to a work detail with a group of five in the Birkenau camp; assisting in resistance activities in Auschwitz; going on a death march as the Soviets approached and then put on a train from which he escaped; fleeing from Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring in 1968; living in Vienna, Austria for three months; and how all his family now lives in Israel.

    Oral history interview with Cornelia Schouten

    Oral history interview with Cornelia Schouten

    Oral History

    Cornelia Schouten, born on January 21, 1920 in Huizen, Netherlands, describes growing up as one of five children of a Christian farming family in Oosterblokker, Netherlands; one of her brothers serve in the Dutch Army and fight against the Nazis in 1940; the arrest of her father and uncle during the German occupation of the Netherlands because they were striking in protest of the occupation; her family’s decision to harbor those who resisted the Nazis, including members of the resistance and men who were drafted for forced labor; sheltering the young Jewish girl, Lore Baer, for over two years; Lore’s parents emerging from hiding after the war and reclaiming their daughter; reuniting with Lore several times after the war; and eventually immigrating to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Drexel Sprecher

    Oral history interview with Drexel Sprecher

    Oral History

    Drexel Sprecher, born on March 25, 1913 in Independence, WI, describes his family; his education at the University of Wisconsin, the London School of Economics, and at the Harvard School of Law; receiving a position on the Labor Board in 1938; his enlistment in the United States Army after the US declared war on Germany; being sent to London, England, where he was assigned to the Inspector General's office; later serving as a prosecutor of Nazi war criminals in the Nuremberg Trials; and prosecuting Baldur von Schirach, the leader of the Hitler Youth.

    Oral history interview with Bela Blau

    Oral history interview with Bela Blau

    Oral History

    Bela Blau, born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia) in 1910, describes his family; getting married in 1930 and moving to Zilina, Slovakia; serving in the army for eighteen months and then working as a salesman representing a photo company; having a son in 1937; being dismissed from his job in 1938 because of his Jewish background; being arrested by two Hlinka Guards one day after Yom Kippur in 1942; his and his family’s deportation to Auschwitz, where he was placed in Block 10 and worked on building a bridge above the River Sota; doing writing jobs for an illiterate German Kapo because he spoke German; being assigned to the Kommando Kanada until May 1943 when he became a scribe and met his future second wife Magda; going on a death march in January 1945 from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Mauthausen, where he spent one month until he was transferred to Gusen, where he worked as an engineer fixing petrol tanks, gas tanks, and the wings of Messerschmitt planes; his transfer to Gunskirchen on May 1; and United States forces liberating him on May 7, 1945 in Gunskirchen.

    Oral history interview with Magda Blau

    Oral history interview with Magda Blau

    Oral History

    Magda Blau, born on August 19, 1916 in Michalovce, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia), describes growing up in a Jewish family; becoming a kindergarten teacher; the German invasion and her deportation to Auschwitz, where she worked scrubbing floors for three months until she became an assistant to the block supervisor; being put in charge of the barrack for medical experiments in the autumn of 1942 and becoming the protégé of Dr. Eduard Wirths, the garrison physician; later working in an office and becoming the concentration camp commander of the camp for Hungarian Jews; getting a job counting potatoes in a kitchen and then a job as a concentration camp supervisor in a fabric production facility; going on a death march on January 18, 1945 to Malchow, where they were liberated by the Soviet Army; settling in Prague, Czech Republic for a short time and then immigrating to Israel; and finally immigrating to Australia in 1965.

    Oral history interview with Barbara Ledermann Rodbell

    Oral history interview with Barbara Ledermann Rodbell

    Oral History

    Barbara Lederman Rodbell, born in 1925 in Berlin, Germany, describes her childhood; moving to Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1933 with her family; becoming friends with Anne Frank and her family; the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940; her boyfriend getting her false papers through his underground contacts; the deportation of her mother, sister, and father to Westerbork and then to Auschwitz; working for the resistance and surviving using her false papers; helping other Jews find hiding places; joining a ballet company for two years after the war; and immigrating to the United States in November 1947.

    Oral history interview with Jerry Slivka

    Oral history interview with Jerry Slivka

    Oral History

    Jerry Slivka, born on July 11, 1915 in Western Ukraine, describes his memories of the Soviet takeover of Russia; moving to the neighboring town of Povorsk, Ukraine with his family; participating with the Zionist movement and joining a kibbutz; moving to Łódź, where he worked as a manager of a village store from 1939 to 1941; entering the Polish Army in 1939 but settling in Soviet-held territory after the takeover of Poland; joining the reserves of the Soviet Army; escaping a German attack and seeking refuge at Soviet military headquarters; being sent to a labor camp in Stalingrad (Volgograd), Russia and then to the railroads east of the Volga because the Soviets were suspicious of him; working in a coal mine near Moscow, Russia for one-and-a-half years before he was freed; his interment in Italy until he could return to Łódź in 1946; and immigrating to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Rochelle Blackman Slivka

    Oral history interview with Rochelle Blackman Slivka

    Oral History

    Rochelle Blackman Slivka, born in 1922 in Vilnius, Lithuania, describes growing up in a Jewish family; the German occupation of Vilnius in June 1941 and moving into the ghetto with her family in October; her mother’s death in the ghetto; the liquidation of the ghetto in 1943 and being transported to the Kaiserwald concentration camp in Latvia and later to Stutthof; her father’s murder in an Estonian prison camp because he had served as a Jewish council member; her experiences in the camps until she had to go on a death march, during which the Soviet Army liberated her; beginning to make her way back to Vilnius with her sister but instead going to West Germany; separating from her sister while they both awaited permission to go to the United States; learning nursing during her stay at a German displaced persons camp; immigrating to the United States and arriving in Massachusetts on May 18, 1949; working as a nurse’s aide in an American hospital; and meeting and marrying a Holocaust survivor in the United States in 1952.

    Oral history interview with Francis Akos

    Oral history interview with Francis Akos

    Oral History

    Francis Akos, born on March 30, 1922 in Budapest, Hungary, describes his childhood; attending a music academy, from which he graduated in 1941; becoming the concertmaster for the Budapest Jewish Community Cultural Center orchestra; being drafted for forced labor into the Hungarian Army in 1943; getting captured with other Jews in Budapest while on leave from the army to get fresh clothes; being sent by train to Neuengamme on November 4, 1944; playing violin in the camp; his evacuation from Neuengamme on May 3, 1945 and being transported by the ship Cap Arcona, a passenger liner that was evacuating refugees from West Prussia; the British mistakenly attacking the Cap Arcona and three other prisoner ships, which resulted in eight thousand deaths; returning to Budapest after the war; and immigrating to the United States in 1954.

    Oral history interview with Beno Helmer

    Oral history interview with Beno Helmer

    Oral History

    Beno Helmer, born in 1923 in Teplice, Czechoslovakia, describes his childhood and family; using his foreign language skills to land small movie roles before the war; attempting to settle in Hungary with his family before the war; his family’s deportation to Łódź in 1939 because they did not have immigration papers; arriving in the Łódź ghetto and staying there until he had to begin doing forced labor outside the ghetto in 1942; securing a job posing as a non-Jewish German and collecting information for the underground and becoming an expert at derailing trains; returning to the ghetto when his father became sick and remaining with his family until they were deported to Auschwitz after the liquidation of the Łódź ghetto; his deportations to Gross-Rosen, Krupp Bertha-Werk at Laskowitz-Meleschwitz, Buchenwald, and Ludwigslust; his liberation by American soldiers while in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp; attempting to get back to Poland and on the way joining a Polish forced labor group that was later incorporated into the Russian Army; spending time hunting for Nazi war criminals after the war; and living in Europe for several years until he immigrated to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Jerry von Halle

    Oral history interview with Jerry von Halle

    Oral History

    Jerry von Halle, born on December 2, 1922 in Hamburg, Germany, describes his family and childhood; learning the Hitler salute in school and having to fly the Nazi flag over his house on holidays; moving to Amsterdam, Netherlands with his family in 1933 to get away from the Nazi party in Germany; the German invasion of the Netherlands; the Gestapo arresting and sending him to prison; being sent to Mauthausen with his brother and other boys but returning because he claimed to have tuberculosis; learning to be a shoemaker to avoid deportation; hiding in a house in the countryside with his family but returning to Amsterdam with his mother; going into hiding with his mother in the small apartment that belonged to one of his former teachers; his hider being caught and arrested four weeks before the end of the war and having to find a new place to hide; his liberation by Canadian troops; being arrested after the war with his mother because of their German passports but shortly being released when the authorities realized through what they had been; and immigrating to the United States in 1945.

    Oral history interview with Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall

    Oral history interview with Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall

    Oral History

    Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall, born in 1929 in Klyucharki, Czechoslovakia (Kliucharky, Ukraine), discusses her childhood; her father immigrating to the United States but being unable to arrange for her entire family to come over before the war began; no longer being able to attend school and experiencing increased tensions with her neighbors after the German annexation of Czechoslovakia; being forced to move into the ghetto with her family; being loaded onto a train after spending several weeks in the ghetto and arriving in Auschwitz two and a half days later; pretending that she was 15, so she would be old enough to work; her assignment to carry rocks between two places; being sent to the gas chambers during a selection but getting rescued just before she entered the gas chamber itself; working in an airplane factory with six hundred women; running into a forest with a friend and walking to a town that had been liberated by the Russian military; being given an apartment, food, clothing, and medical attention by the Russians; returning home to find her house destroyed; living in her grandmother’s house with other survivors and living off of the money her father sent her; learning that she had an uncle who had survived and sneaking across the border into non-communist Czechoslovakia to reunite with him; and immigrating to the United States in 1947 with her father.

    Oral history interview with Ralph Codikow

    Oral history interview with Ralph Codikow

    Oral History

    Ralph Codikow, born in 1930, in Kaunas, Lithuania, describes his family; the German occupation of Lithuania in 1941 and his brother shortly thereafter being shot at the Seventh Fort; his and his mother’s confinement to the Kaunas ghetto, where his mother saved them by pretending to be married to a male friend; his mother using her husband’s Lithuanian military service papers to forgo deportation to the Ninth Fort; being saved by his work in a ceramics factory when the children’s Aktions were decreasing the number of children in the ghetto; his and his mother’s deportation to Stutthof, where they were separated; his transfer to Landsberg, a sub-camp of Dachau in Germany, and then to Dachau and Auschwitz-Birkenau; contracting measles but being considered healthy enough to go on a forced march to Buchenwald, a concentration camp in Germany, in the winter; his liberation at Buchenwald in April 1945; moving to France after the war; and immigrating to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Borsos

    Oral history interview with Ruth Borsos

    Oral History

    Ruth Borsos, born in 1923 in Frankfurt, Germany, describes her family; moving to the Netherlands after Kristallnacht in 1938; her and her father obtaining permits to sail to the United States but not being able to do so when Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940; her deportation to Westerbork in 1943 and then to Bergen-Belsen in 1944; being interned with her father in a camp near the Swiss border when an exchange agreement with the Allies broke down; being chosen to be traded for German prisoners because of their foreign passports; their liberation from the internment camp by French forces on April 23, 1945; spending some time in a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration camp after the war; returning to the Netherlands in 1947 and receiving a visa to immigrate to the United States; and marrying another Holocaust survivor, whom she met in Washington, DC.

    Oral history interview with Simone Marguerite Lipman

    Oral history interview with Simone Marguerite Lipman

    Oral History

    Simone Marguerite Lipman (née Weil), born on April 4, 1920 in Ringendorf, France, describes her family; participating in a Jewish scouting organization, Les Eclaireurs Israélites de France, with her brother; moving to Strasbourg, France, a city with a vibrant Jewish community; graduating from high school in 1938 and moving to southern France to care for her elderly grandmother; relocating to Blâmont, France because of fears of Nazi invasion; training in early childhood education and working at a private school in Paris, France for a few months until she returned to take care of her mother who was extremely ill; the German invasion of France in May 1940; packing up her family’s belongings and driving towards southern France; arriving in Périgeaux, France, where her family had to register as Jews; going to the Rivesaltes camp in France to work for the Organization for Children’s Rescue, for which she distributed food, cared for the children, and tried to find ways to get them out of the camp; helping to rescue hundreds of children with the Catholic Church after the Nazis began to round up children in late 1942; working to reopen many children’s homes after the war ended; receiving a scholarship from America’s National Council of Jewish Women for her work during the war; moving to the United States in 1946 to attend Tulane University, where she received a master’s degree in social work; returning to Europe, where she trained employees of children’s homes to deal with the special needs of young Holocaust survivors; and immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Shony Alex Braun

    Oral history interview with Shony Alex Braun

    Oral History

    Shony Alex Braun, born on July 14, 1930 in Transylvania, Romania (possibly Cristuru Secuiesc, Romania), describes his family and early childhood; learning to play the violin at age five; the occupation of his town by Hungarian forces in 1940 and by the Germans in 1944; being deported to Auschwitz in May 1944; his transfer into the Natzweiler (Struthof) camp system in France and then to Dachau, where American forces liberated him in April 1945; his immigration to the United States in 1950; and becoming a professional composer and violinist.

    Oral history interview with Doriane Kurz

    Oral history interview with Doriane Kurz

    Oral History

    Doriane Kurz, born in Vienna, Austria in March 1936, describes her family and early childhood; moving to Maastricht, Netherlands and then Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1939 for her father’s business; experiencing several Nazi air raids over Amsterdam; Dutch Jews losing their businesses in 1942; her parents being imprisoned for trying to escape from the country and then getting deported to Westerbork; her father’s transfer to Auschwitz on November 10, 1942 and never being heard from again; her mother’s return to Amsterdam to take care of her and her brother; going into hiding with two farmers in the countryside; her capture and deportation to Westerbork with her mother and brother at the end of 1943; their transfer to Bergen-Belsen; contracting typhus in March 1944; being liberated by English troops while on a train ride; going to a displaced persons camp in Maastricht in June 1945; her mother’s death in March 1945 due to cancer; and immigrating to the United States in July 1945 with her brother to live with her uncle.

    Oral history interview with David Lieberman

    Oral history interview with David Lieberman

    Oral History

    David Lieberman, born in Częstochowa, Poland on December 31, 1925, describes his family; living through pogroms as a young child; having to move into the town’s ghetto and perform forced labor after the German occupation; seeing many of his family members deported to camps; his deportation to Treblinka, where he escaped after eleven days by cutting a hole in the fence with wire cutters that he had stolen; running with two friends to the house of a nearby farmer who put the three onto a train headed back to Częstochowa; reuniting with one brother, his sister, and his mother upon his return; being taken to another concentration camp, where he worked in a munitions factory as a bullet maker; the camp’s liberation and traveling by train to Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia, where he entered a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency camp; traveling to Italy with the intention of taking a boat to Palestine but being returned to Karlovy Vary by the Italian government; and soon immigrating to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Laura Margolis

    Oral history interview with Laura Margolis

    Oral History

    Laura Margolis, born in Constantinople, Turkey in 1903, describes her family; immigrating to the United States in 1908 and settling in Ohio; becoming a social worker for the Jewish Welfare Society of Cleveland after graduating from college; joining the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and going to Havana, Cuba, where she was in charge of sheltering and feeding Jewish refugees; her transfer to Shanghai, China in May 1941, where she aided over 8,000 Jewish refugees; her capture by Japanese forces after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and going into an internment camp; faking an illness to be transported to an American hospital, where she knew a doctor; the doctor lying about her health and refusing to release her from the hospital; returning to the United States as part of a prisoner of war exchange in 1944; being sent to Barcelona, Spain in 1945 by the JDC to aid Jewish refugees; helping to organize a parcel-sending program to former prisoners of concentration camps after their liberation; moving to Israel in 1953; and returning to the United States in 1983 to retire.

    Oral history interview with Paul Strassmann

    Oral history interview with Paul Strassmann

    Oral History

    Paul Strassman, born on January 24, 1929 in Trenčín, Czechoslovakia (now in Slovakia), discusses his father’s work as an army officer for Austria-Hungary in World War I; the antisemitism his family experienced in the 1930s, which led them to consider escaping the country; his father divesting his share of his business; getting baptized, so they could avoid deportation; going into hiding in late August 1944; his father’s brief emergence from hiding and getting caught by the Gestapo, who sent him to Sachsenhausen; joining the Jegorov Brigade, a partisan group, in September 1944 and remaining in it until April 1945; joining the Czech Army in April 1945 as a noncommissioned officer and going to his station in Bratislava, Slovakia until the end of the war; remaining in Czechoslovakia but leaving just before the Communists took power in 1948; living briefly in Paris, France and London, England before immigrating to the United States in October 1948; and discovering that he was the sole survivor of his family.

    Oral history interview with Ernest James

    Oral history interview with Ernest James

    Oral History

    Ernest James, born in 1920 in Ord, NE, describes his family; joining the California National Guard in 1940; holding the position of sergeant and being called into active service in 1941; being stationed along the coast of San Francisco, CA and then going on to serve as platoon leader and company commander of the 238th Engineer Combat Battalion in the later years of the war; his unit’s attachment to the 1st Army and the 7th Corps; landing in Europe, where they swept through France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany; reaching Nordhausen in April 1945 and finding workers from a V-2 missile and arms plant; ordering the German civilians to begin burying the large number of people who had already died; and assisting in the guarding of a nearby camp containing approximately 80,000-100,000 military prisoners of war.

    Oral history interview with Chaim Engel

    Oral history interview with Chaim Engel

    Oral History

    Chaim Engel, born in January 1916, describes growing up in Łódź, Poland; his experiences with feeling different as a Jew growing up; fighting in the Polish Army during the war and getting captured as a prisoner of war; being released and traveling to Lublin to work as a farmhand; his father’s and step-mother’s transport to Sobibór in June 1942; going to Izbica Lubelska with a friend to join a partisan unit; being caught and sent on a transport in September 1942 with about eight hundred people to Sobibór, where he worked sorting the clothes of people who had come into the camp; getting beaten for stealing pants on a couple of occasions; meeting his future wife Selma when they were both assigned to sort clothes; participating in the Sobibór uprising and escaping with Selma to a farm where they stayed until June 1944; his liberation by Russian troops and going to Parczew, Poland, where he and Selma had a child and started to re-organize their lives; moving to Holland, where they stayed until 1951 when they immigrated to Israel; and his and Selma’s immigration to the United States in 1957.

    Oral history interview with Selma Engel

    Oral history interview with Selma Engel

    Oral History

    Selma Engel (née Wynberg), born in Groningen, Netherlands in 1922, describes her family and childhood; moving to Zwolle, Netherlands when she was seven years old; her family’s ownership of a kosher hotel; her father dying of a heart attack in 1941; the German invasion of the Netherlands and the confiscation of her family’s hotel; moving with her mother into the home of another Jewish family; receiving help from a Catholic priest in 1942 to hide in a non-Jewish family’s home; never seeing her mother and brothers again; hiding in a nurse’s home in Utrecht, Netherlands for a few months until she moved into another family’s house, where the police soon discovered her; being sent to an Amsterdam prison for three months; her deportation in 1943 to the transit camp in Vught, Netherlands, from which she went to Westerbork, where she worked in the laundry room; her transfer to Sobibór, where she had to sort clothes and clean the woods and railroads; contracting typhus; meeting Chaim, her future husband, when they had to dance in front of the Germans; escaping with Chaim from Sobibór during the uprising and hiding in the woods for several weeks; staying with a farmer in exchange for money for nine months; the farmer taking her and Chaim to Chełm, Poland in 1944; their liberation in July 1944; immigrating to Israel in 1951; and immigrating to the United States in 1957.

    Oral history interview with Morris Engelson

    Oral history interview with Morris Engelson

    Oral History

    Morris Engelson, born in 1935 in Paberze, Lithuania, describes his family; his father’s work in the grain business; the Soviet invasion in 1939; the German invasion in 1941 and forcing the Jews of Paberze into a ghetto; dressing up as a peasant woman with his mother to escape the ghetto that was soon liquidated by the Einsatzgruppen in September 1941; moving around and hiding in different farms with his mother; being smuggled to the Lithuanian-Polish border and ending up in another ghetto; reuniting with his father in April 1943 and hiding in a barn and then a farmer’s attic; moving westward towards the end of the war and arriving in the American zone in Germany; going to a Berlin displaced persons camp and later to the Gobrasa displaced persons camp in Bavaria after the war; and immigrating to the United States after four years.

    Oral history interview with Lonia Mosak

    Oral history interview with Lonia Mosak

    Oral History

    Lonia Mosak, born on July 20, 1922 in Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki, Poland, describes her family; moving to Ciechanów, Poland when she was young; attending a separate Jewish school in Poland and serving in a Zionist youth group; completing her school education in 1936; becoming seriously ill with typhus after the German invasion of Poland in 1939 but recovering even though Jewish physicians could not use medicine to contain the epidemic; her internment in Neustadt, a labor camp in Germany; being split up from her family in 1942 and transported to Auschwitz, where she remained until January 18, 1945 doing forced labor; being forced on a death march to Gross-Rosen and then to Ravensbrück, where she was liberated by the Soviet Army on April 30, 1945; returning to Ciechanów after her liberation; residing for short periods in Łódź and Bialystok to await the return of her last brother from Russia; marrying in Austria after the war; immigrating to a Polish-Jewish neighborhood of Chicago, IL in 1946; and having two children and eventually bringing her brother to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Agnes Grossman Aranyi

    Oral history interview with Agnes Grossman Aranyi

    Oral History

    Agnes Grossman Aranyi, born on May 2, 1936 in Budapest, Hungary, describes her family and childhood; her father being drafted into forced labor camps from 1939 until 1942 when he was finally deported; attending Jewish school until 1942 when the war began in Hungary; the restrictions on Jewish life in Budapest; being warned by a friend to disappear because he knew that the round-ups were to begin soon; meeting a woman who worked for the underground and who took them to live as Christians in a Swedish house set up by Raoul Wallenberg; the Germans invading their home and forcing them into a ghetto; the Russians arriving to liberate the Budapest ghetto; living under Russian oppression until 1956, when she escaped to Austria with her fiancé during the Hungarian Revolution; and immigrating to North Carolina shortly thereafter.

    Oral history interview with David Bergman

    Oral history interview with David Bergman

    Oral History

    David Bergman, born on May 3, 1931 in Beckov, Czechoslovakia (present day Velykyĭ Bychkiv, Ukraine), describes his family and childhood; the German occupation of his town, previously annexed by Hungary, in 1944; his deportation to Auschwitz in late 1944; being transferred with his father to Płaszow, Gross-Rosen, and then Reichenbach an der Fils; being among three of 150 people in a cattle car who survived a transport to Dachau; being placed on a train to Innsbruck, Austria three days before the Americans arrived in Dachau; his liberation while on a death march from Innsbruck toward the front line of combat between United States and German troops; going into in an American hospital and rehabilitating; traveling to his old family home and finding it occupied by a Russian family; discovering that everyone in his family except him had perished; immigrating to the United States, where he settled in Cleveland, Ohio; and joining the American military to fight in the Korean War.

    Oral history interview with Lila Lam Nowakowska

    Oral history interview with Lila Lam Nowakowska

    Oral History

    Lila Lam Nawakowska, born on November 24, 1924 in Stanislawów, Poland (Stanislav, Ukraine), describes growing up in a large family; the invasion of Poland in 1939 and the Soviet occupation of Stanislav until June 1941, when the Soviets withdrew, and the Germans entered and constructed a ghetto; her father becoming the chairperson of the ghetto’s Judenrat because he was such an influential businessman in their community; remaining in the ghetto with her family until December 1942, when they were able to obtain falsified Aryan papers and escape on the eve of the ghetto's liquidation in January 1943; renting an apartment in Warsaw, Poland and remaining there until the Warsaw uprising, when she was transported to Mauthausen; briefly spending time doing forced labor in Steyr, a sub-camp of Mauthausen and in Znojmo, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic); her liberation by Soviet soldiers in May 1945; and reuniting with her mother and future husband shortly after the end of the war.

    Oral history interview with Yaffa Rosenthal

    Oral history interview with Yaffa Rosenthal

    Oral History

    Yaffa Rosenthal, born in Solotvyno, Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine) on October 7, 1926, describes her family and childhood; her experiences with antisemitism as a child; the Ukrainians taking over her town in 1938 and learning in a different language in school; her father losing his job and having to work in mines and on a cattle farm to support his family; receiving a notice that her family would be taken away in the early summer of 1941; her deportation to Yasinya (IAsinia), Ukraine and then being marched toward Galicia, Poland; escaping from the Germans and going to live with her uncle in Oradea, Romania and then with her sister in Budapest, Hungary; having a somewhat normal life until the German occupation of Hungary in 1944; hiding in the Budapest ghetto until January 1945 when she was liberated by Russian troops; trying to survive after the war and receiving help from the Swedish Red Cross; reuniting with her sister in Debrecen, Hungary and then returning with her to Budapest; participating in the Budapest Zionist organization and immigrating to Israel in 1948; getting married to an American man in 1959; and immigrating to the United States to settle in New York, NY.

    Oral history interview with Eve Wagszul Rich

    Oral history interview with Eve Wagszul Rich

    Oral History

    Eve Wagszul Rich, born in Kovel', Ukraine, describes her family and childhood; the German invasion and having to move into the ghetto; the Germans bursting into her home one night and killing her father in front of her; immediately running away into the forest and going to nearby villages, where she met peasants who gave her some food; going into hiding with a group of Carmelite Nuns; the Germans discovering her and sending her to Majdanek; escaping with a friend during a transport and going to Bavaria to work on a farm; her liberation by American forces; and immigrating to New York to live with her grandmother’s sister.

    Oral history interview with Magda Mezei Lapedus

    Oral history interview with Magda Mezei Lapedus

    Oral History

    Magda Mezei Lapidus, born on July 18, 1923 in Budapest, Hungary, describes her family and childhood; attending the Commercial Academy of Budapest for two years; first realizing the danger posed by the Nazis when they invaded Austria in 1938; seeing several young Hungarian men shipped out to labor camps starting in 1941; her brother being taken away to a labor camp in 1943; the German invasion of Hungary on March 19, 1944; being forced into the Budapest ghetto and living in the Star of David House; her father returning to live with them in June 1944; being forced on a march with her father to the outskirts of Budapest, at which point she was separated from her father and never saw him again; hiding in a bush on her march and ripping her identifying star off and returning to Budapest to reunite with her mother and brother; going to the Spanish Legation near the ghetto and receiving a safety pass to move into a house protected from German invasion; remaining in the house until January 18, 1945, when the Russians liberated Budapest; and discovering the fate of her father.

    Oral history interview with Avraham Ronai

    Oral history interview with Avraham Ronai

    Oral History

    Avraham Ronai, born on September 14, 1932 in Budapest, Hungary, describes growing up in a religious family; attending a secular public school and a Jewish school at night in Budapest; not experiencing many difficulties under the pro-Nazi Hungarian regime; the German invasion of Budapest in March 1944 but not really suffering until the Nazis took full control over Hungary in October 1944; the Nazis rounding up Jews into ghettos and deporting them; seeking help at the Spanish Embassy in Budapest and receiving a space in a Spanish safe-house due to the efforts of Giorgio Perlasca; remaining in the safe-house until the Soviets liberated Budapest in 1945; and immigrating to Israel in 1949 because of the oppressive Hungarian Communist regime.

    Oral history interview with Eva Konigsberg Lang

    Oral history interview with Eva Konigsberg Lang

    Oral History

    Eva Konigsberg Lang, born on April 1925 in Budapest, Hungary, describes her childhood and family; the Jewish community losing several of its rights when the war began; her relatives arriving from Czechoslovakia to live with her; being forbidden to attend school after March 1944; receiving a protective pass to get food; hearing that the wife of any man in forced labor would not be deported and getting married in 1944; hiding in a Spanish protective house on St. Paul Street and getting food supplies provided by the Jewish Council; the German occupation of Budapest; forging a telegram to prove that they were under Spanish protection and to save themselves from the Arrow Cross; and reflecting on how certain Spanish diplomats saved her life during the war.

    Oral history interview with Cornelius Loen

    Oral history interview with Cornelius Loen

    Oral History

    Cornelius Loen, born in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) on May 2, 1922, describes growing up with a Jewish father and Gentile mother; the German invasion of his town on January 23, 1942 and German troops killing two of his uncles; escaping with his family to Budapest, Hungary, where they lived for ten months; his deportation to a forced labor camp in Hungary, where he remained until 1944; escaping to a nearby barn, where he hid for three days, during the liquidation of the camp; Russian troops liberating him while he hid in this barn; walking to a nearby displaced persons camp, where he met his future wife Masha; taking a Russian transport to Budapest and reuniting with his parents; discovering that his father had survived a concentration camp and his mother had helped to hide and save many Jewish people after her family was taken away; and immigrating to Los Angeles, CA in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Thomas Blatt

    Oral history interview with Thomas Blatt

    Oral History

    Thomas Blatt, born in 1927 in Izbica Lubelska, Poland, describes growing up in an Orthodox family; the establishment of a ghetto run by the Germans after the war began in September 1939; working in a garage, which protected him from early ghetto roundups; trying to escape to Hungary with false papers in 1942 but getting caught; his and his family’s deportation to Sobibór, where his family was gassed immediately; the Germans choosing him as a laborer because of his mechanical skills; participating in and escaping during the Sobibór uprising on October 14, 1943 by escaping through the wire fences and avoiding the land mines; going into hiding with a friend on several farms; hiding in a stable and then in an abandoned brick factory; working as a courier for the Polish underground; and immigrating to the United States in 1959.

    Oral history interview with Anita Magnus Frank

    Oral history interview with Anita Magnus Frank

    Oral History

    Anita Magnus Frank, born on January 29, 1936 in Emmen, Netherlands, describes her family; her move to Breda, Netherlands, where her family was living when the war broke out; the German invasion of 1940 and being told to leave because the Germans were going to bomb the town; walking thirty kilometers to a farm, where they stayed for five days; returning to Breda and experiencing increased persecution; obtaining false passports and assuming Dutch names to shield their Jewish identities in 1942 (Verified from other sources, the name of the individual who assisted Anita and her family was Govardus Pinxteren, who was later honored as Righteous Among the Nations); going into hiding first in a non-Jewish neighbor's home and then in a Quaker family’s home in Bilthoven, Netherlands; living as “normal” Dutch schoolchildren except having to hide their Jewish identities and constantly being in fear; leaving their hiding place in August 1944 because the Quaker family was too scared to keep them; returning to Limburg with her parents; the liberation of Limburg in September 1944; returning to Breda in April 1945 and living in an uninhabitable, bombed house for six months until they could move into a bigger and better house in the same town; and immigrating to the United States on December 7, 1952 because antisemitism was still a problem after the war.

    Oral history interview with Guta Blass Weintraub

    Oral history interview with Guta Blass Weintraub

    Oral History

    Guta Blass Weintraub, born on January 22, 1924 in Łódź, Poland, describes her childhood and family; her experiences with antisemitism in her youth; attending a private, Jewish, all-girls high school until the German invasion in September 1939; moving from Łódź to Wierzbnik-Starachowice in December 1939 because of fears about what the Germans had planned; the formation of a ghetto and having to share a home with at least one other family; meeting her future husband when he came to her home in the ghetto asking for her father to make him a suit with special pockets; being rounded up in the ghetto’s marketplace and sent to labor camps; managing to smuggle out some pictures with her as she, her mother, and her father were taken to a woodworking camp; surviving several shootings and experiencing starvation; her deportation to Auschwitz in 1942 and staying there until 1944, when she was transferred to Ravensbrück; her liberation by the Swedish Red Cross; and traveling to Sweden to recover.

    Oral history interview with Henry Schmelzer

    Oral history interview with Henry Schmelzer

    Oral History

    Henry Schmelzer, born in March 1924 in Vienna, Austria, describes growing up as the youngest of four children in a middle-class family; graduating from a Jewish high school in 1938 shortly before it closed; his brothers fleeing, while he and the rest of his family endured Nazi raids on their home until they were evicted; his father losing his business and having severe depression; escaping to England on December 18, 1938 and finding refuge at a children's camp; remaining in England throughout the war and living with a group of young Zionists; enlisting in the British Army in 1943; being sent to a mountain unit, the 52nd Division; receiving his degree at the London School of Economics; spending 18 years in Israel; and immigrating to the United States in 1969.

    Oral history interview with Helen Liebowitz Goldkind

    Oral history interview with Helen Liebowitz Goldkind

    Oral History

    Helen Liebowitz Goldkind, born in Volosyanka, Czechoslovakia (Ukraine) on July 9, 1928, describes her childhood and family; the Hungarian occupation of Czechoslovakia and going into a ghetto in Uzhgorod, Ukraine; maintaining religious traditions in the ghetto; the Germans taking over the ghetto and deporting her and her family to Auschwitz; her transport to another camp and hearing bombs going off during the train ride; arriving in a German camp and working in a munitions factory; going on a truck with two hundred other girls to Bergen-Belsen, where English troops eventually liberated her; the Swedish Red Cross offering to take care of her and others in Sweden; discovering that only one of her sisters survived the war and had immigrated to the United States; and following her sister to the United States, where she settled in New York, NY and got married.

    Oral history interview with Johanne Eva Liebmann

    Oral history interview with Johanne Eva Liebmann

    Oral History

    Johanne Eva Liebmann (née Hirsch), born in 1924 in Karlsruhe, Germany, describes her family and childhood; her family’s deportation to the Gurs camp in southern France in October 1940; being rescued by the Children's Aid Society in September 1941 and hiding in a children’s home in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France until 1943, when she obtained false papers and crossed into Switzerland; discovering that her mother had died in Auschwitz; getting married in Geneva, Switzerland in 1945 and having a daughter in 1946; and immigrating to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Max Liebmann

    Oral history interview with Max Liebmann

    Oral History

    Max Liebmann, born on September 3, 1921 in Mannheim, Germany, describes his family and childhood; attending school until December 1937, when he had to quit because of the antisemitism he was experiencing; his memories of Kristallnacht; his father travelling to Greece and Italy to do business since he could no longer do it in Germany; he and his mother being called into a Wehrmacht office shortly after the war began in September 1939; being made to do forced labor harvesting fields in East Germany; being deported with his mother to the Gurs concentration camp in France; playing the cello as part of several concerts given at Gurs; meeting his future wife in the camp through a connection his mother made; managing inventories for French camp officials; his transfer to the Talluyers camp in July 1942; escaping to Le Chambon, France to reunite with his girlfriend for a short period until they both had to find hiding places; finding a guide to take him through France and into Switzerland; arriving in Ouchy, Switzerland and receiving work papers on December 22, 1942; reuniting with his girlfriend in Switzerland on February 28, 1943 and marrying her in Geneva on April, 14, 1945; having a daughter in 1946; and immigrating to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Giorgio Perlasca

    Oral history interview with Giorgio Perlasca

    Oral History

    Giorgio Perlasca, born on January 31, 1910 in Como, Italy, describes growing up with a father who worked for the Italian government in Padua; fighting in the Spanish Civil War and later taking a position in an Italian trade firm; working around Eastern Europe after Italy entered World War II in 1940; maintaining an official position with the Italian Trade Commission and living in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1941 and 1942; continuing to work for the Italian government until the fall of Admiral Miklos Horthy in 1944; his internment by the Hungarian government from April to October 1944 after the Germans took control of Hungary; escaping his internment with falsified papers provided by a member of the Swiss Diplomatic Corps; adopting a Spanish nationality because of his veteran status from the Spanish Civil War; posing as the Spanish Charge d'Affaires after the flight of the appointed Charge d'Affaires for Spain in December 1944; helping to establish of several safe-houses in Budapest to shelter Jews under Spanish protection; coordinating his efforts with representatives of other neutral nations, including Raoul Wallenberg of Sweden, and the representatives of the Vatican, Portugal, and Switzerland, to shelter and save Jews from deportation; and returning to Italy to start a family in February 1945.

    Oral history interview with David J. Selznick

    Oral history interview with David J. Selznick

    Oral History

    David J. Selznick, born in Anykščiai, Lithuania in 1912, describes growing up as the youngest child in a large family; going to Ukmergė, Lithuania to study at a yeshiva in order to become a rabbi; his father’s death shortly before his twelfth birthday and becoming the legal master of his father's estate; deciding to sell off his family's farm and livestock and move to Kaunas, Lithuania; attending a Yiddish night school in Kaunas and working during the day as a retailer of office supplies; his experiences with antisemitism, which hurt his business; selling his business to two Christians but remaining as a silent partner; receiving a visa to serve as a diplomatic envoy to New York because of his business connections but instead deciding to leave for Portugal; returning to Kaunas in 1936 because he was worried about his mother and sisters; his deportation to the Kaunas ghetto in 1941; performing forced labor until late 1944 because he had worked for the ghetto Kommandant; smuggling food to the Jewish prisoners in the ghetto; escaping during the liquidation of the Kaunas ghetto in July 1944 and fleeing into the countryside, where he hid with some other Jews; his liberation by the Soviet Army; and immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Model

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Model

    Oral History

    Elisabeth Model (née Dittmann), born in Bayreuth, Germany in 1897, describes her family; getting married in 1922 and moving to Amsterdam, where she worked as a sculptor; returning to Germany after Kristallnacht to help her mother emigrate; helping her mother sneak into the Netherlands with the help of a Dutch underground organization; her husband being imprisoned for one month by the Nazis after being falsely accused of smuggling money into the Netherlands; bribing a woman at the Spanish Consulate to give her and her husband exit visas in 1941; traveling to Madrid, Spain; and eventually arriving in to New York, NY in 1942.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Levine

    Oral history interview with Joseph Levine

    Oral History

    Joseph Levine, born in Molodezhnyi, Russia on July 20, 1907, describes the difficulties his family faced in World War I; his family’s immigration to San Francisco, CA on February 12, 1917 and then settling in New Haven, CT; attending Franklin and Marshall College and then the graduate school for Jewish social work; working with the Jewish Board of Guardians for six years until 1941; starting to work as a parole officer in 1941; joining the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in 1945 as a social worker; going to Schwandorf, Germany, where he worked with many Polish Jews; his transfer to Dachau in October of 1945, where he also worked closely with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration; bearing witness to the war crime trials at Nuremberg; and returning to the United States, where he worked as the executive secretary of the Indiana Jewish Historical Society.

    Oral history interview with Eugenia Blau Szamosi

    Oral history interview with Eugenia Blau Szamosi

    Oral History

    Eugenia Blau Szamosi, born in Transylvania in 1914, describes her family, childhood, and growing up in Budapest, Hungary; her experiences with antisemitism in Hungary; marrying in November 1941 and having a son the following year and a girl the next; her husband avoiding forced labor by spending time in a mental hospital; having to move into the Jewish section of the town and wear the yellow star after the German invasion of Hungary; escaping from the Budapest ghetto and looking for a flat in town; pretending to be a Transylvanian refugee because she had Aryan looks; returning to the ghetto to work with her husband in a children’s home and await deportation; getting the supplies to make shutzpasses for people; getting Spanish passports for her and her husband, which helped to save them from deportation; her family’s liberation and her husband’s work for the International Red Cross after the war; and immigrating to Israel in June 1949.

    Oral history interview with Irene Dynkiewicz Silver

    Oral history interview with Irene Dynkiewicz Silver

    Oral History

    Irene Dynkiewicz Silver, born in January 1933 in Łódź, Poland, describes her family and the Jewish community in her town before the war; her family’s move to Warsaw just as the German bombardment of Warsaw began; the establishment of the Warsaw ghetto wall; learning how to read and write from one of her cousins; wearing a kerchief and putting on lipstick to look older and avoid deportation during ghetto-round ups; going into hiding in January 1943 with a woman who had managed to attain a Christian identity for her; not being able to leave the home in which she hid and reading to pass her time; attending school for the first time after the war; traveling to London with several other children to attend a boarding school established by a rabbi; and immigrating to Brooklyn, NY in January 1950 to live with her aunt and uncle.

    Oral history interview with Alice Lok Cahana

    Oral history interview with Alice Lok Cahana

    Oral History

    Alice Lok Cahana, born on February 7, 1929 in Sárvár, Hungary, discusses her childhood; her relationships with her parents, grandfather, and siblings; her experiences in the ghetto in Sárvár, which was situated in a brick factory; her work with children in the ghetto; her deportation by train to Auschwitz; her experiences in "C Lager" of Auschwitz; her memories of selections by Dr. Josef Mengele; her successful rescue of her sister Edith from the infirmary in Auschwitz; her survival of the Auschwitz gas chamber because of a malfunction in the chamber; her memories of camp guard Irma Grese; her transfer from Auschwitz to the Guben concentration camp where she worked in an ammunition factory; her participation in a death march with a group from Guben; her escape and subsequent return to the death march group; her separation from her sister in Bergen-Belsen; her evacuation from Bergen-Belsen and transport to a hospital in Sweden; her reunion with her father in Hungary; her illegal immigration to Israel by boat; her return to Sweden with her husband Moshe Cahana; the Cahana family's move to the United States; and her thoughts on the rescue efforts of Raoul Wallenberg in Hungary.

    Oral history interview with Eva Brust Cooper

    Oral history interview with Eva Brust Cooper

    Oral History

    Eva Brust Cooper, born in 1934 in Budapest, Hungary, discusses her childhood; living on the Pest side of the Danube River; her memories of the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944; the various types of persecution experienced by the Jews in Budapest including the wearing of yellow Stars of David; her father receiving papers from Raoul Wallenberg to avoid deportation; the family's time in hiding in various locations around Budapest; her and her mother's attempts to appear Catholic by going to church, learning the Catechism, and acquiring false identification papers; her family's return to Budapest at the end of World War II; her father's participation in negotiations with Adolf Eichmann in hopes of reducing the number of Hungarian Jews to be deported; her family's immigration to the United States and their new life in New York City; and her activities with various Holocaust survivor groups.

    Oral history interview with Jacob Vogel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Frieda Belinfante

    Oral history interview with Frieda Belinfante

    Oral History

    Frieda Belinfante, born in 1904 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, describes her family; being raised without a religion because her father was Jewish and her mother was Gentile; the death of her sister in 1915 after an appendectomy and the divorce of her parents soon after; the death of her father in 1923 from natural causes; not being surprised by the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands; getting married in 1931 and divorcing in 1936; becoming the first female conductor of a professional orchestra in Amsterdam; participating in the cultural commission of Amsterdam and receiving instructions from the Nazis about what artists should or should not do; making false identification cards to help save people; discovering her homosexuality but trying to keep it a secret during the war; living disguised as a man for three months; taking on a new female identity and fleeing to Switzerland; participating in several activities of sabotage with other gay and lesbian refugees; returning to Amsterdam after the war and discovering the fates of the members of the resistance group in which she participated; immigrating to the United States in 1947 for a change of scenery in her work; participating in a string of concerts in the US; and her life in America.

    Oral history interview with Philip Vock

    Oral History

    Philip Vock, born in 1929 in Paris, France, discusses his family background and childhood; the German invasion of France in 1940; the confiscation of the family business by the Germans; antisemitism that he encountered in the media and in personal contacts; leaving the occupied zone of France in 1941 and finding refuge in a town on the Spanish border; the German occupation of their town in November 1942; fleeing to Nice, France, which was occupied by the Italians; being denounced to and arrested by the Gestapo as they were preparing to move to another town; being transported to Drancy concentration camp in 1943; life in Drancy and the possibility of escape from the camp; his deportation to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944; the intake process at Auschwitz and then his outside work detail; the black market within Auschwitz; a death march in January 1945 as the Allies were approaching the camp; life in Buchenwald and liberation; returning to Paris in April 1945; the return of his mother and uncle; and nightmares that he had after liberation.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Gatenio

    Oral History

    Joseph Gatenio, born in 1929 in Thessalonike, Greece, discusses his childhood; the German occupation of Thessalonike in 1940; his deportation from Greece with his family in 1943; the week-long journey to Birkenau; selections at Birkenau; the deaths of family members; his participation in the camp orchestra; how orchestra members helped him survive; being forced to leave the orchestra; the brutality of the SS and Kapos; being transferred from Birkenau to Henkel, then Sachsenhausen, Ohrdruf, Sachsenhausen again, Neubrandenburg, Ravensbrück, and finally Ludwigslust; the appalling conditions in the camps; staying in Ludwigslust until May 1 when they were transported to another camp; his liberation by American soldiers the next day; joining the Russian liberators and wandering throughout Europe for a few months; returning to Thessalonike in December 1945; and the long-term effects of his experiences during the Holocaust on his well-being.

    Oral history interview with Mariette Moscovici

    Oral History

    Mariette Moscovici, born on January 24, 1916 in Iasi, Romania, discusses her family; her father, Hani Garfiender, who was a merchant and owned a store for travel items; her mother, Cecile Garfiender, who was a housewife; attending Alexandru Labrian elementary school; attending Institute Notre Dame for high school; living in Iasi on Cuza Voda street and later on Ice Bratianu street; Rumania entering the war on June 22, 1941; German soldiers entering on the night of June 29, 1941 and taking away all the Jewish men from the shelter; going to the Jewish community the next morning to ask about the fate of the Jewish men and not receiving an answer; stopping at a friend’s house on the way home to warn the men in the family about the arrest of the Jewish men; being stopped on the way home and directed into a convoy; finding her mother and sister in the convoy; being taken to the police headquarters; more Jews arriving at the headquarters wearing pajamas and night gowns because they were taken without anytime to get dressed; the women and girls being released while the men and boys over the age 13 were detained; the chaos of the scene; her father arriving at the shelter in the afternoon; the numerous false alarms to concentrate the population in shelters; the German soldiers enter the shelter around 5pm and demanding their jewelry and money; giving one of the soldiers her money and being instructed by the soldier to go home and not enter the shelters; leaving her aunt’s house with her family the next morning (June 30, 1941) and going home; seeing posters on wall that state the “Communist Jews” of Iasi have been arrested and killed and the rest of the population can continue their lives; staying home and not knowing what happened to other people; going to a market with her cousin dressed like peasants and seeing dead bodies on the street; Jews not being allowed to travel; and the propaganda in the news.

    Oral history interview with Henry van den Boogard

    Oral history interview with Henry van den Boogard

    Oral History

    Henry van den Boogard, born in Holland in 1915, discusses his childhood in Tilburg, Netherlands; his early education and seminary days; his ordination to the priesthood and first mass in 1942; his memories of Jews being helped by non-Jews in the Netherlands; his personal activities with the resistance movement in southern Netherlands such as making false identification papers for various persons, smuggling children into the Netherlands for hiding, and finding hiding places in homes for Jews and other persons; his dealings with the black market in the Netherlands in order to clothe and feed people in hiding; his reflections on antisemitism in the Netherlands; the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940; the feelings of native Hollanders toward the "Dutch Nazis"; and his life after World War II in the United States where he worked to integrate Catholic churches in Virginia.

    Oral history interview with Jack Moss

    Oral History

    Jack Moss (né Jakuv Mozelsio), born in 1924 in Łódź, Poland, discusses his family background; his encounters with Polish antisemitism; his family's feelings about the possibility of a German occupation; the restrictions imposed on Jews by the Germans; the lucrative business that the Germans brought to his father's tannery; odd jobs that he did at the request of the Germans, including helping to tear down a statue of Tadeusz Kościuszko in Plac Wolności; a German friend who agreed to be a stand-in owner of the tannery, so it would not be confiscated; his uncle, aunt, and other family members fleeing to Tomaszów Mazowiecki, Poland for safety while he and his parents stayed in Łódź; the return of his sister and cousin from Tomaszów Mazowiecki; and how the rest of his family in Tomaszów Mazowiecki perished while he and the others who remained in Łódź were saved.

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Dytlow

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Dytlow

    Oral History

    Boleslaw Dytlow, born in 1932 in Pruszków, Poland, describes growing up in a Romani family; the German occupation in September 1939; moving to Warsaw, Poland with his family and earning money there as a musician; being captured on the streets in Warsaw in late 1942 and delivered into the Warsaw ghetto; meeting other Romanies in the ghetto and forming a plan to escape; escaping to the Aryan side in the spring of 1943; leaving Warsaw and only traveling by night; being ambushed by German soldiers on the outskirts of Kielce, Poland; successfully overpowering the Germans and escaping back to Warsaw; and remaining hidden outside of Warsaw until the end of the war.

    Oral history interview with Mel London

    Oral History

    Mel London, born in 1923, discusses growing up in the Bronx, NY with immigrant parents; his awareness of the political situation in Europe before World War II; his concern for family in Europe; his identification with being Jewish; enlisting in the United States Army signal corps in May 1943; going to Officer Candidate School; antisemitism he encountered in the army and prejudice because of his friendships with black soldiers; seeing the aftermath of World War II in Europe; his knowledge of the Nuremberg war crime trials; becoming a documentary filmmaker; the request to interview Albert Speer after his book "Inside the Third Reich" was published in 1970; preparing for the interview; different attitudes towards Speer among Germans of different generations; and his perceptions of Speer.

    Oral history interview with Henry Cohen

    Oral history interview with Henry Cohen

    Oral History

    Henry Cohen, born in 1922 in New York City, NY, describes growing up in a family of Jewish immigrants; receiving a master’s degree in city planning from Massachusetts Institute of Technology; enlisting in the United States Army in 1944 and fighting with the infantry during the German campaign; his appointment as the director of the Föhrenwald displaced persons camp in Germany in January of 1946; leading the camp until July 1946; and returning to the United States to teach at the City College of New York.

    Oral history interview with Gisela Feldman

    Oral History

    Gisela Feldman, born in 1923, discusses her first encounters with antisemitism in Berlin, Germany after Hitler came to power in 1933 and her political awareness at that time; her father's deportation to Poland in 1938 because he was a Polish citizen; the confiscation of her family's apartment; being barred from going to school; her mother obtaining visas to Cuba and booking passage on the SS St. Louis; her father not being able to leave Poland in time to join them on the SS St. Louis; departing with her mother and sister from Germany in 1939; the atmosphere on board the ship; their arrival in Cuba and the announcement that their visas were no longer valid; the desperation of some passengers on board; sailing near the coast of the United States during the return journey to Europe; her family being selected to disembark in England; her job as a domestic in a convalescent home for Jewish refugees in Broadstairs and then as a nanny for a family with two children in London; her involvement in war work, making uniforms and gunpowder bags; meeting and marrying her husband in London in 1943; her mother's attempts to get permission for her father to emigrate from Poland; and her life in England after the war.

    Oral history interview with Bert Fleming and Irene Fleming

    Oral History

    Bert Fleming and Irene Fleming describe how Bert grew up in Warsaw and Łódź; Bert’s family’s deportation to Hannover, Germany before Kristallnacht; Bert’s deportation from Hannover in 1938, receiving aid from the Joint Distribution Committee, and going through the camps; Irene witnessing people being smuggled from her ghetto and fleeing to Siberia; Irene holding on to her violin through her time in the camps; their experiences with Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski and his relationship with the Nazis in the Łódź ghetto; Bert having to shave his head and watch people steal food while in the camps; Bert’s work in several different factories and the transport of all of the goods he produced to Germany; and their immigration to New York and life after the war.

    Oral history interview with Norman Belfer

    Oral history interview with Norman Belfer

    Oral History

    Norman Belfer, born on September 27, 1922 in Wodzislaw, Poland, describes growing up in an Orthodox Jewish family; the German invasion of Wodzislaw in 1939 and hiding in his family’s factory warehouse until they were discovered; the confiscation of his father’s feather and down business; being forced to clean roads around the town with other youth; going to work for a nearby German company while the rest of his family went into hiding in an underground shelter outside of Wodzislaw; his family’s capture and transfer into the Kraków ghetto; returning home, where he retrieved some of the money his family had buried before they had left; hiding for several weeks in his father’s former factory; joining his family in the Kraków ghetto; the liquidation of the ghetto on March 13, 1943; his family’s transfer to Płaszów, where an SS guard shot his father, and his mother and sisters were sent elsewhere; being transferred with his brother to Mauthausen, where they volunteered as carpenters until they were sent to Melk; digging tunnels and moving machinery for several months at Melk with his brother; going on a barge to Linz and then going on a death march to Ebensee; his liberation by American forces on May 5, 1945; walking to Salzburg with his brother but deciding to go to Palestine through Italy; and remaining and working in Italy until he immigrated to the United States in 1950.

    Oral history interview with Carol Stern Steinhardt

    Oral history interview with Carol Stern Steinhardt

    Oral History

    Carola Stern Steinhardt, born on March 8, 1925 in Nieder Ohmen, Germany, describes losing her non-Jewish friends after 1933; her experiences during Kristallnacht; attending a boarding school in Bad Nauheim until the Gestapo stormed it and harassed students; her father’s deportation to Buchenwald; her mother’s and sister’s arrival in Bad Nauheim; going to Berlin to do hard labor at an airplane factory until her deportation to Auschwitz in March 1943; her selection to be a camp “beautician,” which involved cutting the hair off of incoming prisoners; reuniting with her sister in August 1944 and learning that her parents had died; going on a march to Ravensbrück in January 1945; staying in Ravensbrück for four weeks until having to march to Malchow, where she worked in the camp kitchen; her liberation by American forces in May 1945; her internment in the Kammer displaced persons camp in Austria; and immigrating to the United States in July 1946 on an army transport.

    Oral history interview with Haim Shmueli

    Oral History

    Haim Shmueli (né Heinz Ruman Shmoll), born in 1935 in was born in 1935 in Usti nad Labem, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), describes his family and childhood; his mother’s conversion to Judaism, which she renounced when Hitler came to power; moving to Germany in 1938; his father’s involvement in the underground movement; his deportation to Theresienstadt and his memories of the children’s part of the camp; participating in the propaganda movie filmed in Theresienstadt; his liberation from Theresienstadt in 1945; reuniting with his father after the war; and immigrating to Israel with his father in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Itka Zygmuntowicz

    Oral History

    Itka Zygmuntowicz, born April 15, 1926 in Poland (possibly Ciechanów), discusses her family and childhood in Poland before World War II; her experiences with antisemitism before the war; relations between her family and Gentiles in her hometown; her knowledge of politics as a child and involvement in the Zionist movement; the German occupation of her hometown and the restrictions that the Germans imposed on the Jewish population; the confiscation of her family's valuables; a beating that she and her mother suffered at the hands of the Gestapo for not revealing information; her family's deportation to the ghetto in Nové Město in 1941; the liquidation of the ghetto in 1942 and the mass deportation to Auschwitz; her arrival at Auschwitz and her separation from her parents and younger siblings who perished in the camp; finding a friend named Binna in the camp; her forms of spiritual, mental, and physical resistance as a prisoner; her contact with the guards in the camp; her experience sorting the belongings of dead prisoners in the "Kanada" warehouse; a death march in January 1945 to Ravensbrück concentration camp and then a transport to Malchow concentration camp; her liberation during Passover in 1945; recuperating at a hospital in Sweden after the war through the help of the Swedish Red Cross; living in a displaced persons camp in Sweden; leaving the camp with two friends and getting a job; meeting and marrying her husband and the birth of her son in 1948; and her immigration to the United States in 1953.

    Oral history interview with Gertrude Granirer Flor

    Oral History

    Gertrude Granirer Flor, born in 1921 in Chernivtsi, Ukraine, discusses her childhood; the lack of antisemitism she encountered growing up; the Soviet occupation in 1940 and the confiscation of Jewish property; Soviet propaganda and the pressure to inform on others; the arrest and execution of her step-father; involuntary deportations by the Soviets to Siberia, including the deportation of her mother; escaping from a deportation and finding refuge at the conservatory of the Universitatea din Cernauți; meeting and marrying her husband, Sam; the German occupation of Chernivtsi; German restrictions and the establishment of the ghetto in Chernivtsi; the help that the mayor of Chernivtsi extended to the Jewish population; deportation by train to a stone quarry where she and her husband stayed for several weeks; her husband telling the Romanian authorities that he was a dentist, so that they would be transferred to a work detail in a hospital; being liberated by Russian partisans after being in hiding for several days; returning to Chernivtsi and joining the Czech Army; being part of the liberation of Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic); immigrating to South America with a stopover in the United States on the way; living in Columbia with an uncle on his coffee plantation for six months and then immigrating to the United States; her feelings about her new country and the difficulties she experienced as an immigrant; and how her experiences during the Holocaust have affected her life.

    Oral history interview with Renee Scheuer

    Oral History

    Renee Scheuer, born in 1909 in Vienna, Austria, discusses her childhood; antisemitism in Vienna before World War II; her and her husband’s arrest in November 1938 and the order to leave Austria in three days; traveling to Cologne, Germany and then to Belgium on foot; living in a refugee camp in Antwerp, Belgium; the occupation of Belgium by Germany in 1939 and their attempt to escape to France; returning to Belgium and living in Brussels where they had to wear Star of David badges; receiving a notice to report to a concentration camp; she and her husband going into hiding in Brussels in 1942 and staying in different hiding places until liberation in 1945; the feelings that she had during the events of the Holocaust; the resistance of the Belgian population against the Germans; the fates of her mother and sister; returning to visit Vienna in the 1970s; her immigration to the United States in 1950; and settling in New York City.

    Oral history interview with Bent Melchior

    Oral history interview with Bent Melchior

    Oral History

    Bent Melchoir, born in Denmark, describes growing up with a father who was a rabbi; the ease of relations between Jews and Christians in Denmark; the help that the Danish Christian community gave to the Jewish community to help them escape to Sweden; raising money with his brother to get Jews out of Denmark; the Danish resistance movement; leaving Copenhagen and arriving in Sweden by small boat; returning to Denmark three weeks after liberation; his surprise at the jubilant welcome given by the Danes when the Jews returned; the re-opening of the local synagogue for the fall holidays in 1945; and working on behalf of Soviet Jewry after the war.

    Oral history interview with Reuven Paikowski

    Oral history interview with Reuven Paikowski

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Renata Laqueur

    Oral history interview with Renata Laqueur

    Oral History

    Renata Laqueur, born on November 3, 1919 in Brzeg, Poland, describes growing up in Amsterdam; never considering herself Jewish and attending a Christian school as a child; the German invasion in 1940 and registering as a Jew; her father’s decision to volunteer for the German Army as a medical research officer; her marriage to Paul Goldschmidt on December 24, 1941; becoming involved in the underground movement with Paul; her arrest on February 18, 1943, when the Gestapo took her to a prison for ten days until her transfer to the Vught transit camp in the Netherlands; her transport to the Westerbork transit camp, from where she was soon released because of her father’s connections; being arrested again in November 1943; her and Paul’s transport to Bergen-Belsen on March 15, 1944; writing a daily diary about her experiences in the camp; her liberation by the Soviet Army on April 23, 1945; recovering from illness in a field hospital outside of Dresden; spending a week in a displaced persons camp near Kassel; returning to Amsterdam on July 26, 1945; and immigrating to the United States through Canada in 1952.

    Oral history interview with Carl Hirsch

    Oral History

    Carl Hirsch, born in 1912, discusses his childhood in Vienna, Austria and Chernivtsi, Ukraine; his schooling in mathematics and engineering in his university studies; his work as a civil engineer and service in the Romanian Army before World War II; his first experiences with antisemitism when Romania occupied Chernivtsi and when he lived in Bucharest; Soviet occupation of Chernivtsi from 1940 to 1941; the deportation of business owners in Chernivtsi to Siberia; the Soviet withdrawal in June 1941 and Jews fleeing with them; the takeover of the town by Germans and Romanians and the persecution of Jews; finding a job with the railway, so he would not be taken for forced labor; the establishment of the ghetto in Chernivtsi; his marriage to Lotte; witnessing deportations from Chernivtsi; the influx of Romanians into Chernivtsi; the return of many Jews who had fled with the Russians; the integration of Chernivtsi into the Soviet Union in 1945; leaving Chernivtsi and living in Romania from 1945 until 1961; and immigrating to the United States in 1962.

    Oral history interview with Lotte Hirsch

    Oral History

    Lotte Hirsch, born in 1918 in Chernivtsi, Ukraine, describes her childhood; her encounters with antisemitism while she attended university; the Soviet occupation of Chernivtsi from 1940 to 1941 and having to stop her university studies and work in a factory; witnessing deportations to Siberia carried out by the Russians; Romanian and German troops taking over Chernivtsi and establishing a ghetto and several restrictions on the Jewish population; hearing about executions carried out by the German and Romanian soldiers; how her fiancé Carl was able to obtain an exemption from deportation because of his profession as an engineer; her marriage to Carl in a civil ceremony in the mayor's office; life under the occupation; witnessing more deportations in 1942; receiving better treatment after a new governor of Bukovina was instated; the return of Carl's cousin from deportation to Transnistria; her liberation by the Russians in 1944; and her immigration to the United States in 1962.

    Oral history interview with Walter Meyer

    Oral history interview with Walter Meyer

    Oral History

    Walter Meyer, born on May 31, 1926 in Kassel, Germany, describes growing up as a Catholic in a diverse religious community in Düsseldorf; his experiences during Kristallnacht; joining the Hitler Youth in 1940 but then deciding to organize another group to oppose the Hitler Youth; his recruitment into a military academy, to which his father did not allow him to go; assisting French prisoners of war in 1943 until the Gestapo caught him and placed him in a Düsseldorf prison; his transfer to a prison near Frankfurt, where he remained until the spring of 1944 when the prison director recommended him for the army; his deportation to Sachsenhausen and then Ravensbrück; escaping from Ravensbrück and hiding with a farmer who lived nearby; returning to Berlin and then Düsseldorf; recovering from tuberculosis after returning home; and immigrating to the United States in 1958.

    Oral history interview with Dora Kramen Dimitro

    Oral history interview with Dora Kramen Dimitro

    Oral History

    Dora Kramen Dimitro, born on January 22, 1922 in Eišiškės, Poland (now Lithuania), describes growing up in an Orthodox Jewish home with her parents and three siblings; attending Hebrew and Polish schools and experiencing antisemitism; the Russian arrival in Eišiškės in 1939; losing their rights as Jewish citizens when the Germans invaded in 1941; the Germans ordering them to assemble at the synagogue, where they were kept for two days and nights before many were taken away and shot; escaping with her boyfriend with the help of a Lithuanian police officer; the murder of most of her family on September 25 and 26, 1941; going to the Radun ghetto, where she met up with her father, sister, and boyfriend and stayed for ten months until they decided to escape because of ghetto liquidation warnings; running into the woods and trading valuables for food and clothing; living in the woods until late 1942 or early 1943 when they moved into the Hrodna ghetto in Belarus because they had heard of its better conditions; the transports from the ghetto two to three months after her arrival; fleeing to the Nacha Forest in Belarus; joining Jewish and Soviet partisans and staying in their underground bunker through the winter; hiding in homes or in the forest until the Russians liberated her in July 1944; returning to Eišiškės but fleeing when a group of Poles attacked the few remaining Jews there; marrying her boyfriend and living in Vilnius and Warsaw before moving to Israel in 1957; immigrating to the United States in March 1959 with her sister's help; and giving birth to a son soon after her arrival in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Herma Barber

    Oral History

    Herma Barber, born in 1921 in Vienna, Austria, discusses her childhood; experiencing antisemitism after the Anschluss in 1938; her and her parents' unsuccessful attempts to immigrate to the United States and their decision to go to Yugoslavia instead; their journey into Yugoslavia by foot; their arrest in Zagreb, Croatia and spending a week in jail; being confined to the town of Samobor after their release from jail; deportation by the Ustaša in 1941 to Mostar, which the Italian military occupied; being moved to Čapljina by the Italians; traveling to Split, Croatia without permission and being arrested and put in jail by the Italians for a week; being moved to Dubrovnik, Croatia, where she worked in a restaurant and also did knitting for a store; not having enough to eat; going to an Italian-run concentration camp in 1943; their escape from the camp to a partisan-controlled area of Yugoslavia; being in the same town as Randolph Churchill during a British diplomatic mission to the partisans in Drvar in 1944; moving constantly with help from partisans; she and her parents escaping separately to Bari, Italy in 1944 and 1945; her life in the refugee camp at Bari and her marriage in 1946; and her parents' immigration to the United States in 1946 and her immigration to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with William Zeck and Belle Mayer Zeck

    Oral history interview with William Zeck and Belle Mayer Zeck

    Oral History

    William Zeck (born on March 3, 1915 in New York City, NY) and Belle Mayer Zeck (born on February 22, 1919 in Port Henry, NY) describe their families and childhoods; Belle's work as a New York lawyer and getting a job working for the General Counsel of the Treasury and working on the Foreign Funds Control Bureau; helping the bureau to enforce the Trading With the Enemy Act, which forbade communication with and transmissions to German occupied countries; working on a book analyzing Yugoslavia’s financial laws and investigating Germany’s external assets in the United States; Belle becoming an unofficial expert on German financial affairs at the Department of the Treasury and attending the commission for the Allied nations to outline the principles of law for prosecution and trial of Europe’s major war criminals; Belle meeting William when they were both preparing for the Nuremberg Trials; the deterioration of Belle's health as she prepared for the trials and having to go home; Belle returning to Nuremberg in 1947 for the start of the trial; going back to work for the Department of the Treasury to organize the reconstruction loans for the United Kingdom, France, and Germany; their friendship with Telford Taylor; and William’s return to the United States after six years.

    Oral history interview with Michel Reynders

    Oral history interview with Michel Reynders

    Oral History

    Michel Reynders, born on June 29, 1930, in Uccle, Belgium, describes his experiences as the nephew of Father Bruno Reynders, who ran a rescue network that saved about 350 Jews; growing up in a tight-knit Catholic family; helping Father Bruno in his efforts to hide Jewish children by coercing local families to take them into their homes; being unaware of antisemitism until the war; helping a young girl who had fled from Fascist Italy; the German occupation and the following food shortages, imposed curfews, censored textbooks, and Jewish transports out of Belgium; beginning to observe the restrictions placed on Jewish neighbors in 1942 and realizing that it was primarily Jews who were being taken for forced labor in Germany; his introduction to the resistance movement around the end of 1942 and serving as an escort and messenger for his uncle's rescue service; initially having no idea that the children his uncle asked him to escort were Jewish or that Father Bruno was secretly hiding them throughout Belgium; eventually understanding what his family was doing and that his uncle's actions were secret and extremely risky; his family's decision to hide several Jews; graduating from medical school in 1959 and immigrating to the United States in 1961; and being named as the Honorary Vice-Consul of Belgium.

    Oral history interview with Marthe Hoffnung Cohn

    Oral history interview with Marthe Hoffnung Cohn

    Oral History

    Marthe Hoffnung Cohn, born on April 13, 1920 in Metz, France, describes her childhood; being forced by the French government to move out of Metz along with all of its other rich families; moving to Poitiers, France, where, in June 1940, Jewish refugees started coming; attending a Red Cross nursing school in Poitiers; escaping with her family to the unoccupied side of France in the summer of 1942; the arrest of her sister Stephanie, who later died in Auschwitz; becoming involved in resistance and rescue operations, which enabled her to get her parents, grandmother, two sisters, and a cousin to the unoccupied zone of France; finishing nursing school in Marseilles; leaving Marseilles for Paris, where she lived with one of her sisters and found a job with a family that did not know she was Jewish; joining the French Army after the liberation of Paris; doing intelligence work for the Army because she could speak German; going undercover as a German nurse and receiving two Croix de Guerre medals, signed by Generals De Lattre and De Gaulle, for her work; going to Vietnam with the French Army after the war; and immigrating to the United States in 1956.

    Oral history interview with Miriam Kabacznik Shulman

    Oral history interview with Miriam Kabacznik Shulman

    Oral History

    Miriam Kabacznik Shulman, born on June 26, 1918, in Eišiškės, Poland (Lithuania), describes her childhood; her father’s death of typhus during World War I and living with her mother and two brothers; the Russian arrival in Eišiškės in September 1939 and the nationalization of her family’s tannery business; the Lithuanian takeover in 1940 followed by the German invasion on June 23, 1941; the German implementation of edicts that restricted and isolated Jews; the murder of most of the town’s Jews by an einsatzgruppen squad between September 25 and 26, 1941; the help their family’s friends and co-workers gave them throughout the war by hiding money and providing information and hiding places; hiding from the Germans from 1941 through 1944, when they were liberated by Russian soldiers; returning to their home in June 1944 to find an elderly couple living there; deciding to allow the couple to stay and inviting about twenty other Jews to live in their home; living through a Polish pogrom in 1944; fleeing to Vilnius the day after the pogrom and never returning to her home; spending the next years of her life in several displaced persons camps; meeting her future husband Norman in an Italian prison; and immigrating with Norman to the United States, where they had two children.

    Oral history interview with Anna Szyller Palarczyk

    Oral history interview with Anna Szyller Palarczyk

    Oral History

    Anna Szyller Palarczyk, born on July 21, 1918 in Kraków, Poland, describes her family; studying law in Kraków before World War II; working for the underground organization Armed Struggle Alliance; the arrest of everyone in her underground group in June 1942 and their deportation to Montelupich, where they faced harsh interrogations; her transport on August 17, 1942 to Auschwitz, where she was selected as a cleaning woman for Lauder Kommandant Otto Schmidt; walking to the Birkenau camp and being admitted to the sick-room in Birkenau for flu-like symptoms; her experiences in camp with having little food and seeing dead bodies lying around her; the women guards, including Margot Drexler (Dreschel); Katya Singer, who was from Mariková, Slovakia and was appointed as a Raportschreiberin (assistant to the guards) and her activities in the camp; making friends in the camp, which helped her to survive emotionally; the roll calls and selections she went through; the black market in Auschwitz; the Red Cross sending packages to Jewish women in the camps; concerts that were played sometimes in the camps; discovering the fates of her family and friends after the war; and seeing the Russian Army unite with the American Army during liberation.

    Oral history interview with Steven Galezewski

    Oral history interview with Steven Galezewski

    Oral History

    Steven Galezewski, born on May 11, 1923 in Inowroclaw, Poland, describes his childhood; joining the Polish underground in Mińsk Mazowiecki, Poland; recalling that, in 1940, the Nazis ordered all the Jews to wear an armband with the Star of David; the relocation of his community into the Mińsk ghetto at the end of 1940; the liquidation of the ghetto on August 21, 1942 and the survival of only 282 tradesmen who were still useful to the Nazi war effort; participating in underground activities, which included blowing up buildings or means of transportation; his resistance unit being sent under Soviet command; being stationed in Lublin, Poland; providing security for the public hanging of five SS officers in Majdanek in 1944; remaining in Soviet hands from March to July 1945; being perceived by the Soviet Union as a potentially subversive element supporting the Polish government-in-exile and then receiving a prison sentence from the Soviets; his transport to Siberia, where Polish guerrillas freed him; escaping into the American zone; joining the Polish Army in Italy but returning from Italy in 1947 and joining the British Army; immigrating to the United States in February 1951; and joining the US Army in 1956.

    Oral history interview with George Havas

    Oral history interview with George Havas

    Oral History

    George Havas, born in 1929 in Mukacheve, Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine), describes the Hungarian takeover of his town after the Germans took the Sudetenland; his father no longer being allowed to practice medicine; the German takeover of Mukacheve in March 1944; his transport to Auschwitz on May 15, 1944; learning after the war that his father had died in the Sonderkommando uprising in Auschwitz; being transferred to Mauthausen and then to Ebensee, where he stayed for one year until liberation; working in the tunnels at Ebensee, where he was able to make contacts and bring back news; the death of his brother and several of his friends in Ebensee; his liberation on May 6, 1945 and leaving for Prague on June 7; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Maria Rosenbloom

    Oral history interview with Maria Rosenbloom

    Oral History

    Maria Rosenbloom, born on December 26, 1918 in Kolomyia, Poland (Ukraine), describes her Orthodox Jewish family; learning the violin and playing it every weekend in the Hatikva before the war; feeling increased antisemitic sentiments and fleeing with her family into the Carpathian Mountains; attending a special gymnasium for girls in Poland; starting university in 1936 in Lvov, Poland (L'viv, Ukraine) and never being allowed to sit down because she was Jewish; vacationing with a boyfriend in the Carpathian Mountains until the Soviet invasion on September 1, 1939; getting married in 1940; the Soviets taking away her father’s store because of nationalization policies; opening a pharmacy with her husband in 1940 in a small town called Glen-na-novaria [phonetic] and being pestered by the Russians for condoms; the Nazi invasion on June 21, 1941 and registering with the troops; contracting pneumonia and being treated with leeches; moving into the ghetto after Passover in 1942; working in the ghetto soup kitchen; escaping from the ghetto on Christmas in 1942 and going to live with her friend Blancka; discovering the fates of her family during the war and finding a job in a German hospital; taking a train to Warsaw, Poland in April 1943 and hearing rumors about what was happening to the Jews; living in fear that she would be caught because of her prominent Jewish features; joining the resistance movement; the chaos of the Warsaw uprising in 1944; having to join a Hitler parade in 1944 in an attempt to fit in; taking a train to Heidelberg, Germany hoping to reunite with Blancka; the German surrender of Heidelberg to the Americans and deciding to learn English; working for the US Army and then the Joint Distribution Committee; immigrating to the United States in September 1947; and becoming a social worker.

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