Advanced Search

Learn About The Holocaust

Special Collections

My Saved Research

Login

Register

Help

Skip to main content

Print

Oral history interview with Madeleine Sigel

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 2015.170.1 | RG Number: RG-50.106.0241

Search this record's additional resources, such as finding aids, documents, or transcripts.

No results match this search term.
Check spelling and try again.

results are loading

0 results found for “keyward”

    Oral history interview with Madeleine Sigel
    Transcript
    This is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    Volunteer Collection interview of Madeleine Sigel.
    It is being conducted by Gail Schwartz
    and is taking place on May 22, 2015 in Bethesda, Maryland.
    This is track number one.
    What is your full name?
    Madeleine Sigel.
    And what name were you born with?
    Madeline Bartfeld, B-A-R-T-F-E-L-D.
    And where were you born?
    I was born in Vienna, Austria.
    When?
    On February 16, 1924.
    Let's talk a little bit about your family,
    your parents, their names.
    My parents were [? Milita ?] and Albert Bartfeld.
    And your mother's maiden name?
    Was Bonyhady.
    B-O-N-Y-H-A-D-Y.
    Interesting name.
    And were there--
    I am an only child.
    No siblings.
    OK.
    And were they also born in Vienna?
    Yes.
    How far back does your--
    that you know of that your family goes?
    My parents were born in 1895 in Vienna.
    So I don't know when my grandparents on either side
    came.
    I don't know actually when my grandmother--
    How many generations were in Vienna?
    When they came to Vienna?
    I know that my grandfather on my father's side was in the army,
    and he was with the emperor's guard.
    Guard?
    Guard in Vienna.
    And actually when I was there, it
    was pointed out to me by my cousin
    where he was stationed at the Vienna Burg, at the Hofburg.
    So anyway--
    Did you have a large extended family
    of aunts and uncles and cousins?
    Not really, no.
    I'm an only child on my mother's side.
    And on my father's side, I had four cousins.
    That's about it.
    And one of the cousins lived in the States all her life.
    And the other three lived in Vienna.
    And my cousin's Charles Bartfeld was
    interviewed by the Holocaust Museum,
    so they have their record.
    What kind of work did your father do?
    Well, that's a long story.
    My grand-- my grandfather and his sons had a dairy business,
    wholesale dairy business is in Vienna.
    And my father then decided at some point
    to go out on his own, and he opened a delicatessen store,
    like Balducci's in Washington.
    It was very fancy and imported all kinds of goods
    from the States and things.
    And then after a while, he branched out.
    He was always interested in theater and stuff.
    And he branched out.
    And of course, I have no idea how this all
    developed because I was a kid.
    But anyway, he took over the largest or the best known,
    I should say, vaudeville theater called the Ronacher,
    R-O-N-A-C-H-E-R, which was a very well known place.
    And so I grew up being able to go there all the time
    and see the acts and all that.
    And then after a while, he also got a cabaret cafe
    called the Cafe de Paris.
    And by then he had left the Ronacher.
    And by the time the Anschluss came,
    he had the Cafe de Paris, which was a very well-known cabaret
    where a lot of people, comedians and dancers appeared.
    And many of them were--
    I don't know actually if there are many of them--
    former citizens of so-called Germany.
    And so anyway, I'm mentioning that because this
    was the cause for his being informed
    by one of his loyal employees that he was going
    to be picked up in a couple of days
    to go to a concentration camp.
    And so he left before they came.
    But then I'm jumping ahead.
    Yeah, we'll get to that time.
    We'll get to that time.
    So I don't want to--
    But that's important, what you just said.
    Did your mother work?
    My mother-- when he opened the store,
    she helped out in the store.
    And then when he--
    in the business, I should say.
    When he then took over the--
    went off to the theater side, she sort of
    ran the store on a part time basis, I would say.
    So they kept the store when he went into the theater world.
    Oh, they kept the store the whole time.
    Because they supplied the food for the buffet in the theater
    and for the cabaret afterwards.
    So the store was there until it was taken over by the Nazis.
    What language did you speak at home?
    German.
    Spoke German.
    Yes.
    How religious was your family?
    Not very.
    Did you celebrate any holidays?
    We celebrated holidays.
    Which ones?
    Huh?
    Which holidays?
    You know, the big holidays, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Passover.
    You know.
    That's about it, probably.
    Would you get together with extended family?
    Passover.
    Yeah.
    I was with-- my grandfather was still alive.
    Do you have any special memories of those holidays?
    Oh, Yeah.
    Well, we were the youngest, so my mother
    drilled me in the Ma Nishtana when I was four years old,
    and I always had to recite the Ma Nishtana.
    Even after my cousin was born, but see,
    he was four years younger.
    So I don't recall him ever reciting it.
    So that was sort of my job on the seder.
    Did they belong to a synagogue?
    They belonged to a synagogue.
    Not my parents.
    Maybe one year they did, but the my grandfather and uncle,
    they belonged to a synagogue.
    Were they quite observant?
    They were more observant than we were.
    I don't know whether they kept a kosher house or not.
    I don't think so, but I don't know.
    Did your family observe Shabbat, Friday night Shabbat?
    No.
    No, you did not.
    Did you have a Christmas tree?
    Only once.
    How did that happen?
    I don't know.
    I guess I carried I wanted a tree, so they put a tree up.
    I don't know.
    What kind of neighborhood did you live in?
    Was it a mixed neighborhood of Jews and non-Jews?
    Well, yeah.
    I would say that was it.
    Yes.
    Were you in a house or an apartment?
    Apartment.
    Apartment.
    Nobody lived in a house in Vienna.
    Vienna is apartments.
    It's a big city with apartments.
    And I'm sorry, did you say Jews and non-Jews in your build--
    Huh?
    Jews and non-Jews in the building?
    Yeah, I guess so.
    Listen, remember I was a kid.
    OK?
    Yeah, yeah.
    All right?
    I left-- when we left, I was 14.
    Yeah.
    But when you were younger, you played with non-Jewish children
    and Jewish children?
    No, not really.
    I don't think so.
    I don't know.
    I mean, we didn't--
    certainly when I was in elementary school,
    there were a lot of non-Jewish children.
    OK, so you went to a public school.
    Public school.
    Public elementary school, private school thereafter.
    My elementary school was four grades.
    Oh, and what kind of private school?
    Was it a Jewish school?
    No, no.
    It was a very advanced what then was called--
    because it was called--
    it was for women.
    And it was-- the only difference between that school
    and the Gymnasium was that we did not
    have to learn Latin and Greek.
    But we had to learn-- have chemistry, and physics,
    and history, and all the same bit.
    And then of course, which I always stress
    is religion was a subject.
    I don't know if anybody ever told that.
    Religion was a subject in school.
    And at the end of the--
    one day a week, at the last hour,
    the kids used to divide and go to their different classrooms,
    the Jews and the Catholics and Protestants, different places.
    And it was, you were graded with your report card in religion.
    And--
    What percentage were Jewish?
    In the upper school where I went,
    there were, I would say, 80%.
    Were Jewish?
    I would say so.
    I don't know.
    I mean, I never thought--
    So it was predominantly Jewish.
    I guess so.
    But that didn't matter.
    I mean, it was Jewish, but it was was--
    that didn't come up, except when you had your religion.
    Yeah, yeah.
    I mean, it was not something that was discussed or anything.
    Were your parents Zionists?
    No.
    No.
    No.
    OK.
    Nobody that I knew was Zionist.
    Not Zionist, then.
    OK.
    But again, you have to take into consideration that I was a kid.
    Yes, yes, yes.
    OK?
    Yeah.
    Would you describe yourself as an independent child?
    Yes, very much so.
    You did things on your own?
    Yeah.
    Went out on your own?
    Yeah, of course.
    We didn't have anybody walking with us.
    I walked to school and home, and I went afterwards to things
    and went home.
    Nobody had company that I can remember.
    You know, we met our friends and we went out.
    Yeah.
    And back and forth.
    It was different times.
    Yeah, yeah, yeah.
    What about sports?
    Were you interested in sports when you were a young teenager?
    Yeah, soccer, football.
    My father was into soccer, or football as we called it.
    And he would take me.
    He would go to matches on Sunday,
    and I would go with him.
    Did you play?
    Did you play soccer?
    Only what we did in school a little.
    Not too much.
    Girls didn't really play soccer, God forbid.
    What about swimming or anything like that?
    Oh, yeah, sure.
    I was taught to swim when I was four.
    Everything when I was four.
    And then we were ice skating when I was four.
    And they-- they flooded tennis courts
    so you could go and skate.
    And so there were a lot of skating rinks around.
    That's interesting.
    Yeah.
    Did you play tennis as a young teenager?
    Well, yeah.
    My mother felt that I should learn to play tennis
    on one of our many vacations.
    And she went to a store and bought a racket, which
    was entirely too heavy for me.
    And then we had a tutor or whatever you call it.
    Coach.
    At a hotel.
    And he was very impatient, because I
    couldn't hold the racket.
    And so this was more or less a disaster
    but it ruined my arm for life.
    Where did your family vacation?
    Well, they had a home in a suburb out of Vienna
    in a little town called Baden, a spa town.
    And actually it was more like a family compound.
    It had two or three buildings.
    And my uncle and family went there also in the summer.
    And I think they rented out one building.
    I don't really quite remember.
    But anyway, and there was a--
    well, it was called a beach bath,
    but it was a big building, and it had large, very large pools.
    And they have imported sand the whole length of the pool.
    OK.
    Anyway, my first-- the first six years of my life,
    we went every summer to Baden to be
    with the family in the house.
    And then my mother had enough.
    And so we traveled every summer, my mother and I.
    And my father rarely took vacation with us
    because he was busy with the businesses.
    He would come out weekends or something.
    So anyway, I had a very interesting life,
    I must say, being an only child.
    While we had help very often since they were busy all week,
    I spent weekends, Sundays with them,
    and most frequently wherever they went.
    So I went, you know, wherever they went.
    Did your family have a car?
    No, they had a--
    well, that's later on they had a car,
    but that was used only for business, more or less.
    Did you-- when you were old enough to remember,
    did you experience any anti-Semitism before '38.
    We're talking about pre-'38.
    No, no.
    No Anti-Semitic--
    I had not felt nothing.
    How adults felt I cannot tell you.
    As a child, I had--
    Up to '38, there were no restrictions.
    No, no, of course not.
    A normal childhood till the age of 14.
    Yes, yes.
    And there were no--
    of course not.
    Remember, we lived in Vienna like everybody else.
    So did you feel very Austrian?
    Yes, very much so.
    And very Viennese.
    Very Viennese.
    And what about, did you feel very Jewish?
    Yeah, to a certain extent.
    But I never felt that it was any different from anybody else
    as a kid.
    And so it was a happy childhood?
    A very happy childhood with a lot of things going on.
    My main interest in my years, I would say starting maybe at 12
    or maybe at 10, I don't remember when,
    was really getting autographs from people, from actors
    and through my father and all that.
    And that was really--
    Any famous autographs that you--
    Oh, yes.
    They're all at the University of Maryland Library.
    Such as?
    I have a huge collection.
    Such as?
    And I'll give you the write-up on it.
    And I had-- there were a lot like this poster you have
    behind you, Comedian Harmonists, they were very well known,
    appeared in the theater, and I have their autographs
    to my father.
    Many of them were autographs to my father, not to me.
    But many of them are to me.
    And then we spend a lot of time, a few friends and I,
    at the stage door of the largest theater,
    the Burg Theater, which was the classical theater we
    [? visit often ?] and to get autographs from the actors.
    And there was a particular one that we all adored,
    a young man who was very good-looking.
    And all his photographs and autographs
    are at the University of Maryland.
    Wonderful.
    And so, well, the school was a private school.
    So we had classes all morning.
    And then in the afternoon, I went to another school,
    I think one year.
    Just I guess now you would call it day care in the afternoon.
    I had a governess for one year, I remember in the afternoon.
    But we didn't get along.
    I was a very tomboy type child.
    I really didn't like people to tell me
    what to do all the time.
    That got me into trouble in school at times.
    Such as?
    Oh, no, just talking.
    Yeah, I was talking.
    And so anyway, we went--
    the school, the schools in Austria and other places
    had a break, and we went skiing for a week.
    I mean, so when we was in, I guess,
    7th grade was when we started to go on the ski trip.
    Which was very exciting.
    And then--
    Where would you go to go skiing?
    Oh, well, when we went with school,
    we went into parts of Austria.
    And then there was an area close to Vienna,
    about an hour or two hours away, two hours.
    It was a big mountain.
    That was a big ski resort, and a resort, really,
    and it still is, called the Semmering.
    And we went skiing there, and it was wonderful.
    Well, that's good to hear.
    Now, when did you first start hearing
    about a man named Hitler?
    Oh, my.
    Heard very early.
    I remember being in--
    When you were 9 years old?
    No, I was 10.
    I meant when he came into power in '33.
    Huh?
    He came in when you were nine.
    '33?
    Yeah.
    I don't think I heard about that.
    Yeah.
    But in '34, we were in Yugoslavia, my mother and I.
    And that was when the chancellor,
    Austrian chancellor, was assassinated
    in 1934 in the summer.
    And that's sort of the first time
    that I remember that I may have heard
    of things that were in Germany that weren't good for the Jews.
    But I really don't recall.
    I mean, this is something--
    You were young.
    --that sinks in.
    And then of course, I was 10.
    Then so then as you get older, you become more aware
    and you hear more of what's going on.
    Did you listen to his speeches on the radio?
    No, but that's another story.
    And so the-- while you are asking me,
    the last time we were skiing with a group was about two,
    three weeks, maybe, before Hitler--
    before the Anschluss.
    And so we were skiing on the Semmering.
    And then when we came down, we had to--
    in the room.
    So by then we were 13.
    Yes.
    And in the dining room, and Hitler was giving a speech.
    And we were supposed to be very quiet
    while he was-- and listen.
    And so the table I was at, we were fooling around.
    We didn't really want--
    whatever kids do.
    And they told us to be quiet, so OK.
    So the next day was the last day skiing.
    And they were giving us tests.
    And the woman who was the ski instructor was a real Hitler
    type, Hitler-Madchen--
    blonde, blue-eyed, rather good-looking as I recall.
    Anyway, as I came down the hill to be tested
    and I came close to her, she stuck her ski pole out
    and I fell.
    That was the result of fooling around.
    And as it turned out when we went on the train
    and went home, on the train I had a very bad pain in my leg.
    And it turned out then when I came home, I went to bed
    but they took--
    then they took me to the emergency room,
    and I had torn my meniscus in the knee.
    So they put a cast on, and that's
    what you did at that time, I guess.
    And that was-- by that time it was the week
    before Hitler came.
    And on the-- he entered on the 13th, the troops.
    Or he entered on the 13th, which was a Sunday.
    And in between, they called for elections.
    So they put slogans, slogans on the streets.
    Elections for the Austrian chancellor and all that.
    So before-- this I always remember
    how kids do the crazy things.
    So the Sunday before there was a custom
    that people were sort of parading Sunday morning
    on the Ring, which was a fancy area.
    And it was called the Corso.
    So my friend Madeleine, I had a friend called Madeleine,
    had broken her leg on the same trip.
    And so her left leg was in a cast,
    and my right leg was in a cast, and we both had canes.
    So we decided we would parade on the Corso.
    The two Madeleines in the casts on the Corso.
    People looked.
    You know, we thought was it all a big joke.
    So that was the Sunday before Hitler came in.
    So he came on the 13th.
    On the 16th--
    When he came, where were you and what did you see?
    I didn't see a damn thing.
    They didn't have news reels or television.
    You did not go out to see him?
    Are you crazy?
    Why would I go to see?
    What did you--
    The only people went out claimed they were taking over,
    who were screaming like crazy welcome and all this and stuff.
    And--
    Did you feel particularly frightened
    when he came, knowing that he was there?
    No.
    I mean, you almost have to view this
    from a kid's point of view.
    Right.
    Yeah, obviously this was disturbing and stuff,
    but you really didn't have any idea on the 13th.
    Now, let me go on to the 16th.
    I spent a lot of time at my grandmother's,
    because my parents were occupied.
    And then my father would be sleeping during the day
    because he was up at night with his business.
    And so I was at my grandmother's when all this happened,
    and my parents were wherever, I guess, in the apartment.
    And on the 16th, I think we had no school that week.
    Yeah, I think we had no school that week.
    I was going to go to the business where my parents--
    not the nightclub, the business.
    And as I reached the bridge across the canal, the Donau--
    the Danube canal, one of the employees
    met me from my father, from the business.
    And he says, your parents want you not to come.
    They want you to go home, go back to your grandmother
    and just stay there.
    Well, what was happening in the business was
    that they had come, Nazis had come in already.
    This was the 16th.
    And I guess they took over the business.
    Honestly, I can't really give you
    details, because obviously I didn't know a damn thing.
    Right.
    And I think that same evening, that same day--
    yeah, or maybe the next day.
    I don't know.
    They came to the apartment and had them
    search through the apartment.
    But you weren't--
    I was not there.
    You were still at your gran--
    I was at my grandmother's.
    Is this your maternal or paternal grandparent?
    Maternal.
    I had a paternal grandfather and a maternal grandmother.
    The other ones were deceased.
    Were gone.
    So I was not there.
    So I only hear--
    You heard about it.
    I heard about it time and again when my parents
    would relate what went on.
    And apparently they marched off with some stuff, and--
    Were your parents there at the time?
    Oh, yeah.
    They had to be there.
    I don't know.
    Yeah, I guess they were there.
    I don't know if they took them there or what.
    I have no idea how this was.
    But it was very upsetting, obviously.
    Of course.
    And I think what stopped the whole thing was
    when they learned that my father was a lieutenant in the First
    World War.
    And so that seemed to stop whatever they were doing.
    So anyway, this is--
    and then I think school started again, but we only had--
    we had some new teachers.
    Some of them had-- apparently were Jewish.
    Not that we knew it ahead of time.
    But they weren't there when we came back to school.
    The new teachers were Jewish teachers?
    No.
    No, the Jewish teachers had left.
    Had left.
    Some of them.
    Some of them?
    All of them?
    I don't remember.
    OK, Yeah.
    And--
    Did that upset you?
    I don't remember, really.
    OK.
    Yeah, I guess.
    Now the person who left--
    I know who left-- was the English teacher.
    We had an English teacher, Frau Professor, who was a dragon.
    She was really something.
    But I've been very grateful to her
    ever since, because when we left I spoke English.
    Fabulous, yeah.
    Yeah.
    We had to learn things by rote.
    First we had to learn things phonetically for the first six
    months with a handkerchief and a mirror,
    and we had to turn our tongue the right way and all this.
    I mean, it was unbelievable.
    And then after-- so we had her for four years.
    Yeah, four years.
    And we had to learn--
    as the years progressed, not right away--
    books by heart.
    Like The Jungle Book, every day two pages that
    you had to recite.
    Well, that was the way you practiced speaking.
    Because who would you speak to?
    And it certainly turned out to be a mis--
    it was a miserable way to learn, but when
    I left I spoke English.
    I was fluent.
    Yes, good.
    I mean, I didn't have many adult words.
    I don't know.
    I had never had any problem communicating.
    So anyway, that's an aside.
    So you said you went back to school
    and there was new teachers.
    We went back to school, and we had to quit school
    when school was over.
    Because it was summer.
    That was the eighth grade, and that was it.
    They closed the school.
    They closed the school?
    Oh, you mean for the summer?
    No, no.
    I think the school was closed because I
    think the owner was Jewish, but she was not in the country.
    She was a well-known educator, and I have books for her.
    People still use her method.
    What is her name?
    Schwarzwald.
    Eugenie Schwarzwald.
    That's "Black Forest" translated.
    Yes.
    So then what did you do?
    It was summertime now?
    It was summertime, so what did we do?
    Did you still vacation at all?
    When Hitler was there?
    Who went on vacation?
    So you stayed in--
    We were in Vienna for the first time in my life.
    I was in Vienna in the summer, and I
    found it very uncomfortable.
    It was very hot.
    What about if you saw the soldiers?
    No, you didn't see many.
    Again, we didn't get together.
    We, again, a couple of us went to the stage door,
    and they gave us autographs, and we
    gathered in a park or something, a group of kids.
    But was it frightening to see soldiers?
    Yeah, it was frightening.
    Or flags with the swastika?
    Oh, yeah.
    Of course.
    What did that mean to you as a teenager?
    What do you mean?
    It was taken over.
    There was no Austria.
    It was Germany.
    Did you feel frightened?
    Huh?
    Do you remember feeling frightened?
    At times, yes.
    Probably.
    But your folks still gave you freedom
    to travel in the neighborhood?
    Oh, yeah.
    We were walking around as usual.
    Even so.
    Of course they told us not to do this and not to do that.
    Not my parents.
    Parents told us, don't go there or don't go here.
    I don't know that we paid attention.
    Were there any anti-Jewish signs?
    Of course.
    There were stuff painted on stores and things.
    And I did go--
    I think my father was in the store sometimes.
    They put what they called a Kommissar into the store,
    but he was unpleasant but not too unpleasant, apparently.
    I mean, I really cannot go into that.
    I really don't know.
    I mean, it was--
    you discussed where would you end up
    and where did your friends go and some had left.
    And there was a big thing about always exchanging addresses
    among our group of kids.
    We then had turned--
    we had turned 14 a month--
    And some of your friends had already
    left by the time you were 14?
    Some had left.
    They just disappeared.
    But the closer ones, we didn't leave
    without exchanging addresses.
    And the idea was that wherever you went
    you didn't know where you would be,
    but you would write to general delivery,
    so that you could pick up your mail.
    Yes, yes.
    And there was a close-knit group of about eight or nine
    that we had all gone to school together all these years.
    So we were all in touch.
    What countries did they go to?
    All over the world.
    And--
    So now it's the fall?
    No, it's not.
    Well, then there was the summer.
    And you learned where and what countries gave you visas.
    I mean, we weren't oblivious.
    I mean, we were discussing all these things all the time.
    And then some apartments were taken over.
    It was a very--
    it was somewhat of a difficult time as I recall.
    I mean, you didn't feel easy or anything.
    So let me go back, if you want to hear the whole story.
    In 1937, my mother and I were in Venice at the Lido and spending
    the summer.
    This was, I think, the second time already we were there.
    And we were in a very nice hotel, a small hotel.
    Now they would call them boutique hotels.
    I don't know what they call them now.
    And there was a young man there who was very nice,
    and he sort of became friendly with my mother
    and me and we would talk.
    And I guess he must've spoken German.
    I often wonder, now how did I communicate with somebody?
    Anyway, I guess he did.
    And he was there because he worked for the police
    in Venice.
    But in the summer, it was too hot in Venice,
    so he would take a room in the hotel at the Lido,
    where the air was fresher, and be out there.
    And so at dinner we would talk and all That and we exchanged
    addresses, and we were very--
    became friendly.
    So after Hitler came at some point--
    I don't recall when this was occurring,
    oh, when we went to Vienna and he went,
    we would occasionally write to each other.
    And so I think what happened--
    now, again, you have to remember that I was a kid, and not
    privileged to all this whatever.
    Anyway, I think what happened was,
    he wrote my parents that if we ever
    had to leave at some point, there
    would be a compartment in a certain sleeping car that
    leaves every night at 10:00 for Venice,
    and we could go to that compartment
    and we would be taken care of.
    So when my father was told that he
    was going to be picked up the next day or whenever, two day--
    next day.
    Two days.
    We went to--
    [INAUDIBLE]
    No, it's fine.
    What?
    Just leave it.
    We went to the station, and he went to that compartment
    and he went--
    showed his ticket.
    He had a ticket and his passport and stuff,
    and he boarded the train and he left--
    this was in September--
    and arrived in Venice.
    This is September '38.
    Yeah.
    And my mother and I were still there.
    And the Kommissar was still in the Store and at some point,
    there was talk about how you had to get a quota number for the--
    to get-- even if you get an affidavit,
    you have to have a quota number from the US to be able to Enter
    and somebody told me that.
    And my father was not there.
    And my mother was, to put it mildly, under the weather.
    I mean, her nerves were shot.
    Among other things, I didn't mention this earlier,
    when they put slogans on the sidewalks during the election,
    then when the Nazis entered, they got the women
    to scrub the sidewalks.
    And my mother was one of them.
    And she was, I mean, very devastated.
    And only somebody came by and said, "What, you
    took Frau Bartfeld?
    That's not right."
    They took her out from the line and she went back.
    So she didn't do very well.
    Anyway--
    Did you see her scrubbing?
    No.
    I mean, I was told that, or heard it
    when they told other people.
    I mean, nobody told me things directly.
    And anyway, to go back to that now,
    so she was not in great shape.
    She is managing whatever she had to but not much.
    So anyway, I went to the embassy, to the US embassy,
    and got the forms that you had to fill out
    to get a quota number, which I did very well.
    You did this on your own?
    You went on your own?
    On my own, yes.
    And since I had forged my father's signature
    when I was in the school a great deal, for excuse slips
    or something, I had no problem signing his name and stuff.
    I filled all this out in his name.
    You're 14-years-old.
    14-years-old.
    And we got a quota number.
    And that was-- however, the quota number
    didn't help us much, because my uncle who
    lived in the States, my father's brother,
    didn't send any affidavits.
    The family had a--
    there was a rift in the family, and he
    didn't send any affidavits, and he didn't send any affidavits
    for his father, even.
    So that was a lot of it, but we did have a quota number.
    So anyway, my father was in Venice.
    And we were here.
    And then we-- there were things left
    in the apartment, which we had.
    We packed big things in crates.
    And my uncle had a visa for Palestine.
    Which was always called a capitalist visa.
    I don't know what it meant, but what
    it did mean is that they could take a lift or container, what
    now is called a container.
    And they were able to take all their stuff.
    And the crates that we packed of the stuff that
    was left, my mother that, we sent over to his house.
    And those things went when they left for Israel or Palestine.
    These crates went with them, our crates.
    So we-- I don't know somebody that took the apartment,
    it was very fancy furniture and stuff.
    My parents both liked antiques and stuff,
    so I don't know what happened to that.
    Anyway, my mother and I left.
    And in December--
    December '38.
    My father left in September.
    We left in December '38, the same way he did,
    in the compartment that [? Santi ?] had arranged,
    which was ready every night, and we got to Venice.
    We handed our stuff to the conductor,
    and we never saw anybody again until we arrived in Venice.
    In Venice.
    What about Kristallnacht?
    Huh?
    What about Crystal Night, Kristallnacht?
    Ah, Kristallnacht, we were at my grandmother's.
    I was at my grandmother's and so.
    And my mother was there, too.
    We still had the apartment somewhere else.
    I don't know.
    I don't remember.
    And so where we lived they didn't really--
    it was part of the 1st District, and there weren't
    any Jewish stores as such.
    So there wasn't anything happening.
    My father's store was in the 2nd district,
    which you crossed on--
    I mean, it just so happened the way,
    you crossed on the Danube canal on the bridge, and that's--
    oh, yeah.
    What happened was, we were going to go for some reason
    to the second--
    to the store, or to my grandfather.
    I don't know.
    We were on the bridge the night--
    starting on the bridge the night--
    the evening before Crystal Night.
    And we saw these guys in boots running with--
    they had stuff on their--
    they had like brooms, I think, running towards there.
    And my mother said, let's turn around and go back.
    Which is about what we did.
    And then it turned out these were the hooligans
    and everything who were running into the district,
    breaking everything up in the temple and stuff.
    And--
    What was it like to see the damage the next day?
    I didn't see the damage.
    I didn't go near the place.
    Who knew what was going to happen?
    We stayed where we were for--
    I don't know-- a couple of days or something.
    OK.
    I mean, I didn't see anything.
    I mean, I am trying to think what I--
    I guess after a week or two I may
    have gone over there or not.
    I really stayed away as much as possible.
    What was your--
    My uncle, as I now recall, they had
    to move out of their apartment, and they
    moved into another place.
    This was earlier, not then.
    But I'm mentioning it because they always--
    the new place, I think, was backing onto a temple,
    and that was on fire.
    Cause they were talking about it.
    I mean, I have no experience of this, only hearsay.
    What was your home address?
    What was your--
    I lived on their 1st District.
    Do you remember the name of the street or?
    In the Gonzagagasse.
    Anyway, and-- so anyway, we ended up in--
    Venice.
    Venice.
    By that time, my father was already in Switzerland.
    Because you only had a certain permission
    to stay in a place was only--
    A number of days.
    Yeah, and the Italians at first didn't do Much
    but then they said people had to get out after a certain time.
    So [? Santi ?] was able to get him a visa into Switzerland.
    And he met us when we were in Venice.
    And we were in Venice two weeks.
    It was miserable.
    It was cold and rainy.
    And we had always been there in the summer
    and it was gorgeous, blue sky.
    But because the summer was long and the winter
    was short at that time, at least the place we were in,
    they only had stone floors, because they didn't need--
    So it was cold and miserable I remember.
    And anyway, I was very upset of course,
    because I was away from my friends.
    When you're a teenager, you've got to have your friends,
    never mind anybody else.
    And so--
    So you were upset about leaving Vienna.
    Yeah, I was-- yes and no.
    Yes, I was upset about leaving my environment, but not--
    Right, but you knew what was happening.
    But here I was with my mother.
    Right.
    So what was I saying?
    I did find letters right away.
    This is what we did.
    So I think I confided in one person that I was leaving.
    Because you really didn't tell people.
    And so there was a letter at the general delivery.
    All right, so that already made it that much better.
    And so anyway, we were there about two weeks,
    and then we joined my father in Switzerland.
    What city?
    Where in Switzerland?
    Zürich.
    In Zürich.
    And he by then was living at some woman
    who was renting rooms.
    There were Jewish organizations, and they gave you addresses.
    I think that's how he found the place.
    So we moved in there, and we were in a one room.
    And except I was--
    they had two beds in the room, and I
    was sleeping on the couch in the living
    room of this woman's home.
    It was OK.
    I mean, you know.
    Yeah.
    The best part of it was, as far as I was concerned,
    This other Madeleine, her mother was Swiss.
    So she had left Vienna much earlier, and she was in Zürich.
    And so this was wonderful, of course, I had a friend.
    But also she had an aunt and uncle.
    Her mother was in St. Moritz.
    She was a bridge lady.
    She ran bridge in a hotel.
    Bridge was a big thing at this time.
    So she was living with her aunt and uncle,
    and they were very nice.
    And we had dinner there, I think, once a week and stuff.
    And my father, the ever-outgoing man,
    he had connections with the theater people in Zürich,
    because they had exchanged employees.
    They were called artists.
    They had exchanged.
    So anyway, so it wasn't too bad.
    So he went to the coffee house.
    They went to a coffee house every afternoon,
    where they met other refugees.
    But they also met Swiss Jews, people.
    And so we were there a couple, two, three months.
    I don't know how long it took.
    But it was--
    The rumor was always what country can you go to?
    This was the big thing that everybody always discussed.
    So one of the things came up that you
    could buy a visa to Cuba.
    And you could get the visa in Geneva at the consulate.
    And you had to have a certain amount of money.
    You had to show that you had that kind of money--
    I forgot what it was--
    in the bank, so that you're not charged with the government.
    So one of the Swiss people that my father met,
    one of the businessmen, said to him,
    "you know, I will put this amount
    in the bank in your name, and open up
    and give you a bank book.
    And you show them that you have this kind of money
    and buy the visa.
    And then when you come back, I'll close the account
    and you will have the visa."
    So this was done.
    My father went to Geneva and got the three visas for Cuba.
    We were going off to Cuba.
    So then came the question, how are you going to go there?
    Well, I really don't know how this worked,
    but I think he was able to talk one of the Jewish organizations
    to pay for tickets on a boat to go to Cuba.
    And the boat was leaving from France.
    So we got on the train and went to Paris.
    Now, I think we were in Paris for a week or two weeks.
    I don't remember.
    But again, my parents felt--
    particularly my father again--
    that the child, that was me, may never be in Paris again,
    and she has to see everything there is to see.
    So he schlepped me to the museums
    and to all the sightseeing, all the sights
    that you have to see.
    Which at the time I didn't really appreciate,
    but you know.
    Oh, and then I had to go to the Galeries Lafayette,
    because you have to have a dress from Paris.
    Because you can't go aboard ship without a dress from Paris.
    So I got me a cotton dress or something.
    I was it, as far as they were concerned.
    And so anyway, so we went to La Rochelle and boarded the boat.
    It was an English boat.
    It was a cargo ship that took passengers.
    So there were 70 people aboard.
    They were German and French and Polish.
    And that's about it.
    A mixture.
    I don't know how they got to it, but they got to it.
    So we were 70 aboard.
    And the other group aboard was returning fighters
    from the Franco--
    Spanish Civil War, Cubans who were going back to Cuba.
    Except they had been in war such a long time,
    there were no manners left.
    It was steerage, and it was disgusting.
    Thoroughly disgusting where we were.
    Of course obviously we had the cheapest possible thing.
    But there were also some passengers
    who had taken passage to go to Cuba,
    who were first class, second class, whatever they had.
    Upstairs.
    So I managed to go through the door
    upstairs, which was very good.
    Because I was what, 14 and an innocent teenager.
    But there were a couple of young men who were very pleased.
    What month was this?
    May.
    May.
    May.
    May '39.
    May '39.
    You were already 15.
    I was already 15.
    Yes.
    And so we set out for Cuba.
    And we came to Bermuda, and I heard some officers
    talking to each other.
    And I heard them say that we won't be
    able to land in Cuba and stuff.
    And I said, oh, that's weird.
    So I told this to my father and his buddies.
    They were standing there.
    And the reaction was, what does your child know?
    Who knows what she heard?
    OK.
    All right.
    The only good part of--
    makes a big impression.
    There was a young man by the name of Paul Jones.
    And we used to dance together.
    They had dancing.
    And so he was going to Cuba.
    He was an Englishman.
    He going not to Cuba, to Bermuda.
    This was we stopped in Bermuda.
    And so he left, and we said goodbye.
    It was all very innocent.
    Nothing.
    And then he came back in the late afternoon
    with a big bunch of oleander, which was blooming in Cuba,
    to give it to me.
    Now, can you imagine?
    I mean, what do I-- a 15-year-old?
    I was absolutely--
    Smitten.
    Yes, smitten and overcome.
    And I've got tears in my eyes now.
    And so anyway, we set out for Cuba.
    We arrive.
    We arrived in the--
    yeah, I think in the evening.
    Because in the morning--
    my father had a cousin who was in Cuba already.
    She was from Germany.
    And so we had exchanged letters or whatever.
    Obviously we haven't called.
    And there was this big ship.
    Not parked.
    What do you call it?
    Tied up next to us, this big ship.
    And so we learned that it was the--
    what's it called?
    The St. Louis?
    St. Louis, and it's here from Germany
    with all these refugees.
    There were about 500 or something on there.
    I remember my cousin standing on the pier and waving
    and my father waving to her in the distance, very far
    distance.
    But he recognized her and stuff.
    So anyway I don't remember how long we were there, whether it
    was a day or two or what.
    But the captain-- we were very fortunate because this was
    a British ship, and the captain said, "you know,
    I will take you down the coast, the West Coast of South
    America, because that's where I have--
    my cargo goes, and I have to land at various places.
    And we'll see if they let you go, if somebody will give you
    a visa."
    So OK, we went.
    I think we, too, sent telegrams to Roosevelt or something.
    You know, people trying to--
    Were there are a lot of Jewish passengers on your boat?
    Yeah.
    Were most of them Jews?
    The 70 of us were Jews.
    Were Jewish.
    Were Jewish refugees.
    Oh, OK.
    The others were--
    I think I'm not even sure that there were any more left.
    I think the other passengers, the paying passengers were all
    got off in Bermuda, I think.
    So the rest--
    It was just us left to go to Cuba, as far as I-- maybe
    there was some other rich ones, but I don't know,
    who were in the upper class.
    I don't remember.
    Anyway, we set out.
    And we got to the--
    to Cristobal, which is the Atlantic side of the canal.
    And that ship docked.
    And a rabbi came aboard.
    He was the chaplain in the American army,
    a Jewish chaplain.
    And he came aboard.
    He had heard about us.
    And everybody said, ah, what are we going to do?
    And all that.
    And my Yiddish wasn't very good.
    It was nonexistent, really.
    Whatever I picked up, I picked up in the States.
    But he said something like "Zorg zikh nisht."
    which means, "don't worry."
    And it's the German word "sorgen."
    It's the same.
    So I remember his saying "Zorg zikh nisht."
    I'll see what I can do.
    So we went through the canal, which of course, was
    very interesting.
    And then we went down the coast to South America.
    We stopped in Colombia and then at Peru
    it was really in my mind because all these Indians came
    aboard wanting to sell things, and my father of course
    bought a bracelet and all that.
    Whatever money he had, he was going to still make
    like he had a lot.
    And then we went further down on the coast of Peru.
    Callao was the port that is really right near Lima.
    And I still have this vision of the church,
    of the cathedral in Lima.
    You could see that from the boat.
    It was very impressive, this big--
    and I've since seen pictures and realized that's what it was.
    So then when we hit the northern part of Chile, Pisco,
    I don't know if Pisco is still the southern part of Peru
    or it was Chile.
    Anyway, the captain said, this is the end.
    I cannot take you any longer, because I have to go around
    the Cape and leave my cargo, but there there's a sister ship
    coming up from the same company, and we are going to transfer
    you from the sister ship to the sister ship and take you back,
    and you'll go through the canal, and you will have to go back
    to Europe if nobody picks you up.
    So anyway, they transferred us on the bosun chair across.
    Where you get on the wires, you get transferred because you
    couldn't touch land.
    Our luggage could touch land.
    They put that on the boat, but we were on the chairs.
    So anyway, so we got on the [? Orbita. ?]
    The original shape was the Orduna,
    And then we went on the [? Orbita. ?] And we came back,
    and we hit Balboa, which is the Pacific side of the canal.
    And the rabbi came aboard, and he
    said, "I was able to arrange for you
    to get off in the quarantine station here in Balboa.
    You do not have to go back to Europe.
    OK."
    So we got off.
    All 70 of you?
    All 70.
    We got off at the quarantine station,
    and apparently HIAS paid--
    he arranged-- it was $250 a day for a family or something.
    And the quarantine stations, at the time I understand,
    they had quarantine stations in various ports
    in the world for the drunken sailors.
    And so there are buildings in there.
    And it was a compound, a big compound with a fence around it
    and different buildings.
    And we were all in, I think, in the same building.
    The families or the couples in the one building.
    There were a lot of young--
    not a lot.
    There were a few young men among the 70.
    Single men.
    Single men, and they were in another building.
    What about children?
    Where there a lot?
    There were very few children.
    There were a couple of little children.
    Nobody your age or anything?
    Nobody my age.
    But there were a couple of little children.
    One was-- as it turned out, it was really very weird.
    The person-- the couple with a very young child,
    like a two-year-old, turned out to be a distant cousin
    of my father's, who was--
    and the woman who was in Cuba was
    his aunt, this cousin's aunt.
    So he was going to Cuba to her.
    And then it turns out that another man, single man,
    my mother and he exchanged--
    it also turned out that he was a distant member of the family.
    I mean, really weird.
    The father's side of the family, the guy,
    they had lived in Germany.
    They were German.
    Because the cousin that was in Cuba lived in Germany also,
    and had gone to Cuba.
    The one in my mother's side, I think, was from Vienna,
    but they never met.
    I don't know.
    Anyway, so we were in the quarantine station,
    not permitted to leave, to go outside.
    And this went on for--
    we were there for almost a year and 1/2, 15 months.
    In the quarantine station?
    In the quarantine station.
    After two or three months, we were permitted to go outside,
    and we went to Panama, the city of Panama.
    There was no-- the Canal Zone, this
    was still the American part.
    I mean, recently, comparatively recently
    it was returned to Panama.
    But at that time, there was this Canal Zone,
    and we were in the American part.
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum Volunteer Collection
    interview with Madeleine Sigel.
    This is track number two.
    And you were talking about being in the quarantine.
    Coming into Panama.
    And so then when we were permitted to go out.
    We went to Panama and saw a lot of interesting things.
    Panama then was a small city, and the only thing
    that was air conditioned was the Kodak store.
    And the bus went through what would be called what?
    The red light district, at this point.
    And my mother always engaged me in conversation,
    because she never wanted me to see the women sitting out
    there, and I would ask questions,
    which I saw anyway, and did ask questions.
    I never got an answer.
    And anyway it was interesting.
    And the city itself was interesting.
    And they had ruins from the pirate Morgan,
    who had apparently destroyed part of the city.
    When I now see pictures with the skyscrapers,
    I can't believe that this is the same place.
    But anyway, to go back to being able to go out,
    across the quarantine station there was a building,
    and it was called the Sailfish [? Forum. ?]
    And it was a building where the people in the quarantine--
    in the Canal Zone had a club.
    And if they wanted to go fishing,
    then they would rent boats there.
    And the man and woman who ran the club came over to say hello
    and to talk to us.
    And since I spoke English, I was the translator
    for a lot of people, and they were very nice.
    And so when we could go out, we would go over there,
    and they would give us--
    invite us for dinner, take us out for a ride in the boat.
    And then he would also take us on the other side of the canal,
    where there was a beach.
    And he was very nice.
    They were very nice people.
    And the kids-- and they had a daughter who
    was in school, who was my age.
    And then they had an adult, who was I think she was married
    and had a son.
    Anyway, the Barlow family was very nice.
    And we became very good friends and saw them
    afterwards in the States.
    They came-- they moved back to the States, to New Jersey.
    And so we saw them when we--
    Did you go to school?
    No, no school.
    No school.
    And I did babysitting for a colonel, a lieutenant
    colonel in the army.
    See, the quarantine station, it was attached to a fort,
    Fort Amador, where the army was stationed.
    And I have no idea how this occurred.
    There was a Jewish community in Panama, Panama City.
    And they came and we talked with them, and they came.
    And maybe they had something up.
    Anyway, I got a job to babysit for a lieutenant
    colonel in Fort Amador.
    And the only thing I remem--
    I got the job, but in order to get the job,
    I had to have a blood test.
    And so they took me into a room, into a lab,
    to take a blood, which I had never seen.
    So I watched them do it and promptly passed out.
    And so I remember that the guys, very young guy,
    they were all shocked.
    What do we-- I can still hear them saying, "what do we
    do with her?"
    But obviously I woke up, and I got a job
    with the little girl, who was very cute.
    And at $0.50 a night.
    And so I knew nothing.
    What do I know about taking care of her?
    But it worked out.
    I was there.
    One night I was there and a bat flew around,
    and I was scared silly.
    It didn't sit in my hair.
    All I could remember is people saying
    that bats go into your hair.
    I was really very upset, but that worked.
    And then there was a little episode which I really
    have to mention, because it was a highlight of one
    of my things.
    Jascha Heifetz, the violinist, came to--
    it was announced that he would give a concert in Panama City.
    And so I told--
    so there was a young man who came to visit always.
    He was a young man.
    I think he was 30, and I was 15.
    But he came.
    He was Jewish, I think.
    He worked in the Canal Zone, and he would come in
    and he would take me to the movies and show me around.
    And so he took tickets to Jascha Heifetz concert.
    And I told the lady--
    so she said to me on such and such a date
    I need you at such and such a time.
    And I said, oh, I was just going to tell you, I can't come.
    I'm busy that time.
    She wanted to know what I was doing,
    and I don't know what I told her,
    but anyway I didn't tell her that I
    was going to the concert.
    Or maybe I didn't even know.
    Whatever.
    Anyway, so she apparently got somebody else.
    So when we went to the concert, they
    were sitting in sort of the back,
    and he had taken tickets in the second row.
    And so I passed by and sat down in the second row.
    And I thought-- I could tell, I was just
    looking out of the corner of my eyes
    that she had a conniption fit.
    And afterwards she was never as nice as she was before.
    Anyway, but I thought this was just terrific.
    And I even cashed in on this triumph a few years later
    when I was in New York, and among a crowd, older crowd,
    and a guy said that Jascha Heifetz is coming.
    And I said, I heard him play in Panama,
    and he played L'apres Midi d'un Faune.
    And the guy said, Jascha Heifetz wouldn't play that.
    So I said, well, I'll show you.
    So the next time I saw him, I brought the program.
    I can prove it.
    I said, see here.
    He played.
    Oh, OK.
    But that was my second trifle of Jascha Heifetz.
    Never forget it.
    Anyway--
    So anyway, then when he came close, when the war broke
    out and then it came--
    things became sort of a bit more difficult--
    oh, and then they had the [INAUDIBLE] it was a destroyer,
    I think, or a ba--
    it was sunk near in the Caribbean or somewhere.
    So anyway, we couldn't get out.
    They closed the quarantine station.
    We couldn't go out anymore.
    And so--
    By that time, the war had broken out in the fall of '39,
    and we were still there the whole winter.
    After that.
    After that.
    What was it like for you when you
    heard that the war broke out?
    Did your parents talk about it?
    Oh, yeah.
    We gathered around the one radio every night.
    And everybody wanted to hear what was going on.
    What was your parents' reaction?
    Do you remember?
    Listening.
    Oh, good.
    You know, everybody thought they were going to win right there.
    Yeah, right.
    So then I think when Dunkirk came, and I said, I don't know,
    it was pretty bad.
    Yeah.
    But the following happened.
    They all of a sudden, the powers-that-be
    became very upset.
    Not upset, but concerned that they had all these enemy
    aliens sitting on the canal.
    So what to do with them?
    So what they did was, they gave everybody a visa to the US.
    Now, at the very same time, my uncle, after all these years,
    sent an affidavit, because a friend of my father's
    went to see him and said look, I'll
    guarantee that I will take over for them if they need any help.
    All you have to do is send the affidavit.
    And I will do everything else that needs--
    So he sent the affidavit, and we got our visa at the same time,
    they were giving visas to the other people.
    So then the question was how do we get to the States?
    You had to pay.
    Well, they had arranged for a troop transport
    to transport everybody to Ellis Island.
    And again, my father persuaded the powers-that-be,
    the Colonel [? Odom, ?] that could we go on the troop
    transfer, even though we have the visa not through them
    but from--
    So they permitted us to do that.
    So we all got on the troop transport.
    This is all 70?
    All 70.
    Well, by then it had dwindled a little, because some of them
    had gotten affidavits over the months and were able to go.
    And went to Ellis Island.
    Got off in Ellis Island.
    And that was pretty unpleasant, I must tell you.
    Ellis Island, it was--
    Arriving in the United States?
    Yeah.
    Yes, it was.
    You saw that-- did we even see the-- yeah, we did.
    We saw the Statue of Liberty, and everybody read.
    It was fine arriving.
    But then being in Ellis Island was pretty fairly unpleasant.
    They closed-- they separated the men of the women,
    and you had to--
    and by 9:00, you had to be in that room
    where they had four or five women, double bed bunks.
    You had to take all your luggage along.
    Well, there was a lot of luggage that you
    had to take into the room.
    And all the men were separate, so my father took it.
    And then the next day you went out into the hall again,
    and you sat around with your luggage.
    And I don't-- oh, I think the hall had the food tables there.
    I don't remember how that went.
    What month?
    That was September.
    It was September 1940 we had been there a year,
    from May '39 until September 1940.
    But you know, the choice--
    Right.
    Right.
    I mean, nobody complained, really.
    I mean, and by then we really didn't
    know what was going to happen.
    Right.
    Did you know anything up to that time about what
    was happening to the Jews?
    No, that's what I'm saying.
    I mean, you knew that this was this terrible persecution,
    but you didn't know about Auschwitz.
    Or you know about concentration camps.
    You know where they are, but not what was happening.
    No, we had no idea.
    But even the other stuff would have been terrible.
    I mean, even thinking about going back and being--
    obviously we didn't let these people in,
    they were going to go to a camp or something.
    So anyway, so my uncle--
    I just must add to this story, my uncle came to pick us up.
    Two days before he had bought a Packard, a black Packard.
    To show, I guess, that how well he is doing.
    Which apparently he wasn't doing all that well.
    But he drove us, took us from Ellis Island.
    So you passed the test or whatever at Ellis Island,
    when you said you were waiting.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    Well, Ellis Island--
    Did they examine you at all?
    Yeah.
    Yeah, sure.
    They examined you, and they--
    So you passed all the questions?
    All the questions and the past--
    you know.
    And then if you got picked up by somebody--
    I think they were the early-- we left early because he
    came and picked us up.
    So we went down the West Side Highway.
    I don't know if you know New York.
    I do.
    Yeah, West Side Highway.
    And--
    What did the United States mean to a young teenager?
    Oh, well, I had read some books.
    It must be OK.
    It was fine.
    But then I was--
    16.
    No, I wasn't 16 yet.
    I turned 16 in the United States.
    No, I turned 16 down there.
    Yes, of course, we had--
    everybody said sweet 16.
    I didn't know what they were talking about.
    So I was 16.
    Yeah, of course I was 16.
    But did it mean anything special, the United States,
    to you?
    Oh, yeah.
    It was the golden country, I mean, even before.
    It was OK.
    Anyway, we came down the West Side Highway.
    And he was pointing things out, and then he
    says, oh, there is the Empire State Building on Thoidy-thoid
    Street.
    And me, big shot, said Thoidy-thoid?
    You mean 33rd Street?
    Well, that was the end of this relationship
    as you can imagine.
    Anyway, we continued riding down the highway
    and ended up in Mount Vernon, where he had his store.
    He had a store with children's clothes.
    And he said very sweetly, "Well, I
    rented a room for you in a hotel for one week,
    and then you're on your own."
    OK.
    And then misery began.
    We found a room in somebody's private house
    that actually had a kitchen in the room.
    It was a large room.
    And I guess my--
    Did your parents speak English?
    No, a little bit.
    Hardly any.
    And--
    Was he able to get a job?
    [LAUGHTER]
    I'll tell you in a minute.
    So anyway, we went to--
    we had friends in New York.
    And we had-- in New York.
    In New York City.
    And so my mother got a job.
    There was an agency, Jewish organization.
    I think it was ORT.
    And so she got a job in a household
    with a young couple who just had a baby,
    and she was going to take care of that.
    And they treated her terribly.
    And she absolutely could not deal with that.
    So that took care of a week, and by then she
    was through with it.
    And my father and I went to New York.
    And do you know this--
    do you know New York?
    I mean, you're from New York?
    You know Barton Chocolates?
    OK, there was another one, Gregor chocolates.
    And he was a Viennese who delivered chocolates and stuff
    to my father in the store.
    And don't ask me how they found each other.
    Maybe through the Aufbau.
    Do you remember that paper, where
    you're always searching for--
    Anyway-- anyway, he offered me a job.
    I was the only one who spoke English.
    I've got to have a job.
    So I was working--
    so he offered me a job at his store.
    He had two or three stores by then.
    And he had a store on 42nd Street and Times Square,
    and I was--
    and he offered me a job there.
    So I went to work at 42nd and Times Square.
    The ride from Mount Vernon was first with a bus and then
    from 240--
    241st Street on the Lexington, over two hours
    till I got there.
    And then the hours were from 1:00 to 10:00 at night.
    And so I worked there for a year in that store.
    Maybe a year.
    Yeah, something like that.
    So you had no more schooling.
    No more school.
    That's another story.
    And so I was miserable.
    I mean, really miserable.
    The whole time when all this started,
    I was never as miserable as I was the first six
    months in New York.
    Because I had no friends, nobody to talk to,
    and only going back and forth to this miserable job.
    Anyway, so I did that.
    Then my father got a job.
    Somebody told him be a Fuller Brush man.
    So he did.
    He got all the stuff, the brushes.
    And they gave him the territory in New Rochelle,
    because he was out of Vernon.
    How he sold anything I don't know,
    because his English was really not--
    practically nonexistent.
    But he managed somehow, but not very much.
    I was the one who got some money.
    Like some money, $10 a week.
    And then he raised me to $12 a week.
    And then somehow or other, we still lived in Mount Vernon.
    And then I made contact with some people through the Aufbau
    and discovered who was here, and I
    discovered there was a club actually
    of Austrian young people my age.
    So then life began to look up.
    I still had to go in two hours, but I had people to talk to.
    In fact, one was a close--
    a friend of mine from school, from Vienna.
    So it was already better as long as I had--
    and then I don't remember how the next thing occurred,
    but we moved to New York.
    I don't know how he finagled that.
    And we got an apartment on 96th Street and near river--
    it's the last house on the Riverside Drive.
    Not on the Riverside, to Riverside, which was a walk up.
    And we had a walk up onto the fifth floor, which
    was a beautiful view.
    He got it because you could see the Riverside
    Drive and the river and New Jersey across.
    And it had air.
    There was no air.
    Some air.
    It was under the roof, so the air didn't help very much.
    But anyway, it was a little apartment.
    It was fine.
    And so we moved to New York.
    And then he had--
    Gregor had a store on 93rd and Broadway.
    So he nicely transferred me to that store.
    So already life started looking up.
    But I still had to work nights, evenings, four or five times
    a week.
    And then, let's see, what else did happen?
    Oh, and then one evening--
    I don't know when this happened, whether this
    was while he was still in Mount Vernon,
    but my father went, discovered the movie theaters
    on 42nd street where he went every day
    and sat from whenever it started till the evening.
    And that's how he picked up his English.
    Because he heard the same film over and over again
    and the words and he picked up his English.
    And he got a job in the packing department--
    what you call it?
    Whatever you call it.
    I can't think now.--
    at Gimbel's.
    And he--
    Shipping?
    Shipping department.
    Thank you.
    Couldn't think of-- in the shipping department
    at Gimbel's.
    And so I got a job at the candy department
    in Gimbel's, because I had such experience with candy.
    That, of course, was great because I
    didn't have to work nights.
    So maybe one night they were open and we took turns.
    And so then I started--
    I went to business school.
    I was not very good.
    I learned typing and shorthand.
    That's what you learned then.
    And I went to business school.
    And then as you lived there, you made contacts
    with all the people.
    And the cafeteria was there.
    Again, they gathered the men there and talked.
    So anyway, a very good old friend of ours,
    who had a daughter whom I knew well, lived on 86th Street.
    And we-- and so the whole thing became much more livable.
    And he worked for a shipping--
    for a ship building office downtown in--
    On Moore Street, near the Bowery.
    And I was-- in business school.
    So anyway, he needed an assistant.
    So he said, why don't you come down
    and you can have the job, maybe?
    And so I had an interview, and I got the job.
    And fortunately, I didn't have to take dictation and typing.
    It was only--
    So anyway, but then I worked with him in cost accounting,
    so I learned some other stuff and really became
    his assistant, and didn't have to do any typing.
    But it also gave me time to go to take some classes.
    So I ended up at the New School and New York University,
    but I only audited classes, because I didn't want
    to take any tests and stuff.
    And it was very interesting.
    I was able to get some different things.
    And I only took classes that interested me.
    I didn't have to take physics and chemistry, which
    I hated when I did that.
    Anyway, so life became-- and the group, the Austrian group,
    we did a lot of things together, and I had a boyfriend,
    and the whole thing became livable.
    Did you know what was happening in Europe
    during the early '40s.
    Of course, of course.
    I was a-- so this is--
    there were all these service men, and you went to canteens,
    and then they tell you to write to servicemen, write letters,
    and they gave you addresses.
    And I would sit in my lunch hour writing letters.
    And so this girl I got very friendly with in the office,
    she was not--
    she was already married.
    And we got very close.
    She was very nice and very helpful when I first came.
    There was a bitch there, a woman,
    and she would always give me stuff.
    And Rhoda would say, don't worry.
    I'll do it.
    So anyway, she saw me writing letters during the lunch hour.
    So she says, you know, my brother is in England.
    Why don't you write to him?
    I said, fine, I'll write to him.
    So we started a correspondence, which developed into marriage.
    He was a lieutenant in the Navy.
    And he was stationed then in England before D-Day.
    And he had already been in the invasions
    in Africa, and in Italy, and in Sicily.
    And then he was a small boats officer on an LST.
    And he was in England.
    The only problem was, he was seasick a lot.
    But that was taken care of.
    He survived all that.
    And in May of '45, the ship came back to the States.
    And he came to his sister's, and we met.
    And by then I had met most of his parents and some cousins,
    because Rhoda and I were very close,
    and she had a baby that spring, just after he came back.
    Yeah.
    And his name?
    Stanley Sigel.
    And her name was Rhoda Sigel.
    And they lived-- he grew up in Boston.
    And he grew-- he was born in Boston,
    and grew up in Maine, in Portland, Maine.
    And she had met her husband at a wedding of a cousin in Boston,
    and married and moved to New York.
    But the parents were still in Portland.
    Portland.
    And so anyway, so we started to go out,
    because he was stationed in Lido Beach for a while.
    And then he was down in Norfolk when he left,
    and then he went back.
    Oh, and he's a Harvard--
    he was a Harvard graduate.
    OK.
    And when I first heard about him,
    I said to myself, a Harvard graduate and a lieutenant
    in the Navy?
    Couldn't be so bad.
    To myself.
    Turned out it was bad.
    Anyway, so--
    When did you get married?
    We got married two years later, in '47.
    Yeah, he had gotten--
    he went back to Harvard and got his master's.
    And I always say the PhD was my second child.
    And Joan is my third child.
    But she's my second child.
    And so--
    What is his field?
    Economics.
    Economics.
    He was with the Federal Reserve for 40 years.
    Oh, my.
    So yeah.
    So before the war was over, were your parents
    hearing things and you hearing things about what was--
    Oh, oh.
    My parents were living and they heard--
    they got-- there was correspondence
    that took forever.
    Both there was the correspondence from Panama
    to Israel.
    And my grandfather-- my grandfather never got out.
    But he had a housekeeper for many years
    who was not Jewish, before Hitler came.
    She was like a member of the family.
    And somehow he ended up in the Jewish old age home in Vienna.
    We have no idea how she arranged that.
    And he died in the home, in 1942,
    and is buried in the family grave, where his wife is.
    How this all came about under these circumstances
    I have no idea, but I presume Frau Else, as we called her,
    somehow managed that.
    So did you lose any--
    Yes, my grandmother was in Vienna.
    And there was always this thing, it's we'll go first,
    and you go first, and then we'll get you, yeah?
    So she and her sister, her sister
    lived with her at the time, unmarried.
    She was a widow for many--
    she was widowed when I knew her.
    All my life she was single.
    But she lived there with her after.
    After Hitler, I think she moved in.
    And they then had to move out of this fancy apartment into--
    the 2nd District was a ghetto sort of--
    into some apartment.
    And then there were cousins, Bonyhady cousins
    who lived in Graz, who had to move into Vienna.
    So they moved into their apartment.
    So I don't know how this--
    And so we had still correspondence.
    And my aunt, that was my mother and a brother and a SISTER
    neither one of whom had offspring.
    My uncle left, also came to the States.
    And my aunt went to England.
    And so I have the correspondence from my grandmother
    to my aunt in England, which I have never really read.
    I can't deal with this.
    And so they, of course, were carted off to Auschwitz in 1942
    somewhere we checked it out.
    Yeah.
    What were their names?
    Bonyhady.
    Yeah.
    And the first name?
    [? Kaete. ?] [? Kaete ?].
    Katherina.
    Kaete Bonyhady.
    And my aunt, my great-aunt, her sister was Petronella Cohn.
    Oh, my.
    So my older daughter is named Karen Patricia.
    Oh, yeah.
    So anyway--
    Yeah.
    How did your family find out about this?
    Only afterwards.
    My father found out about his father from the Red Cross.
    I still have a letter somewhere.
    They said he deceased.
    They wrote that he deceased in 1942.
    He could never get out.
    I don't remember what it was with the visa got filed that he
    was supposed to go to Israel.
    My aunt-- my uncle left.
    My uncle left with--
    left with the wife, with the son.
    And the other son had gone earlier.
    And the daughter had gone to England.
    She was in England during the--
    my cousin.
    She was the oldest, and she was in England all during the war.
    She was a nurse.
    And then she went to Israel and had a family.
    So you got married, and where did you live after that?
    We lived-- well, we lived in Cambridge for six months,
    and then we moved down here.
    I've been here since 1947.
    Oh, wonderful.
    You have how many children?
    Two daughters.
    Two daughters.
    Yes.
    OK.
    And we lived in--
    first we lived right close by here,
    because a friend of Stan's at the board
    got another woman who was going on vacation to lend us
    her house for four weeks.
    They were leaving for four weeks, the people.
    So we lived here on the River Road without a car.
    It was a little difficult.
    He walked to the bus on Western--
    on Western and got a ride.
    And I was stuck in without anything.
    And the neighbor took me to the store.
    And then we would take a bus and carry groceries around.
    Oh, and then my brother-in-law and sister, Rhoda,
    came to visit.
    They had a car and stuff.
    So anyway, we lived here, we spent most of our time
    in town looking for a place to live.
    And we found a place.
    We had to move out, of course, when they came.
    And we found a place near DuPont Circle, on P Street,
    with a woman, very convenient.
    She was a telephone operator at the Fairfax Hotel.
    And the night operator, which was very good.
    Because the apartment was like a railroad apartment,
    like you used to have.
    And you opened the door and there
    was a bathroom in front of you.
    There's a big corridor.
    The bathroom in front.
    To the right were two rooms.
    And to the left were two rooms.
    And she had the rooms to the right,
    and we had the two rooms to the left with the kitchen.
    And she had breakfast at the hotel before she came home.
    And we left.
    And by the time we came home, she went back to have dinner
    and spent the night there as night operator.
    So this worked out very well.
    And I got a job with FAO, the Food
    and Agriculture Organization.
    And so I only walked down the street.
    They had-- their offices were next to the Mayflower.
    And I got a job as a translator of--
    well, that's not the job I got it for,
    but that's what it ended up in.
    I was translating stuff, Scandinavian languages,
    because, well, I'm good in languages.
    So when you know German and you know English and you know what
    the subject matter is, which is just agricultural food,
    I mean generally, I was able to put together
    some kind of translation of what the thing meant.
    And we did that.
    And then friends of ours who lived out in Mount Rainier,
    in Kaywood Gardens, which was then a very-- it probably still
    is garden apartments, but probably
    not as nice as it was then.
    They managed to get us an apartment.
    We moved there, and they had cars,
    so we were able to go to work.
    If we wanted to stay in the city, we took the bus.
    Then at one point, we got a car.
    Can we talk now a little bit about your thoughts
    and your feelings?
    Do you feel very Viennese, very Austrian?
    I wouldn't say that, no.
    But I still have somewhat of a connection of feelings
    to Vienna, the city.
    I--
    Have you been back?
    Oh, I've been back quite a few times.
    Mainly because I had a childhood friend there.
    And I don't know.
    I can tell you very quickly the story.
    She was Jewish, but her husband, who was--
    we would all grow up together, her husband, and she,
    and some other friends of ours.
    And his mother had, as I would now say, as I mentioned before,
    like a daycare.
    You'd go afterwards to her house, and we would make--
    do homework.
    But we had to take piano lessons and exercise at home.
    A woman would come to do--
    you had to do exercise, gymnastics and stuff.
    So we were all there.
    And so her husband, Hans, and his brother, they
    were this woman's sons.
    And so she was Jewish, and her ex-husband was not.
    They got divorced before Hitler came.
    And the father was a very nice guy.
    I mean, I met him and stuff.
    When Hitler came and he made every effort
    not only for his ex-wife to go to England
    but to take the boys.
    He did not want to have the sons in Vienna.
    Hans was 18 by then, and the other one was 15.
    He didn't want that.
    So they went to England.
    And Susie and her mother went to England.
    And then Susie and Hans connected again, of course,
    and they got married.
    And they had a child in England.
    Now.
    During the war, the refugees, many joined the army.
    But the other thing they wanted them for
    was to work on the farm.
    And Hans went to work on a farm with wife and child.
    And when the war was over and he'd
    been in touch with his father, of course, all along somehow.
    Anyway, the father wrote--
    said or called, and said to him, "look,
    you're going to be a farmhand all your life.
    I have a growing business, and it is yours.
    So why don't you come back and see what you can--
    whether you would like to?"
    So they came back, and he took over the business,
    and they had a wonderful life in Vienna.
    They had another son.
    And so they lived there for all their life,
    the rest of their life.
    She died a couple of weeks ago.
    And the big joke always was that I was a week older than she.
    Our mothers pushed us in the baby carriage.
    What was her maiden name?
    Her name was Wardak.
    Susie Wardak.
    Her father had a mental illness, and I never knew her father.
    He was in an institution.
    So I was asking if you feel Austrian, if you feel Viennese.
    I don't feel Austrian at all.
    No.
    I still have a sort of a feeling when there is something
    Viennese and something.
    And going back to Vienna was easy for me,
    because I stayed with her all the time.
    I didn't have to deal with any of these miserable people.
    Why do you say "miserable people"?
    Well, didn't they all get them happy that they had him in?
    I mean, things have changed now, but I went back to Vienna--
    well, the first time we went is in 1967.
    Had a visit to I don't know how many countries
    to see the heads of the banks and stuff.
    And I went with him, and one of them was Vienna.
    And so we stayed with Susie then, which was about 20 years.
    What are your thoughts about Germany?
    They don't exist, as far as I am concerned.
    They are-- the Viennese never liked the Germans.
    I mean, generally, sort of.
    Particularly the-- particularly the Viennese Jews,
    but I don't know if it was only the Jews.
    There was always jokes about Germans.
    Except when they came in, they loved them.
    Right.
    So you know it's--
    Have you been to Germany?
    No, I wouldn't set foot in Germany.
    Absolutely not.
    So you've never been?
    No, the only thing, I've been on the Autobahn,
    because we lived in Paris, and we
    had to get from Paris to Salzburg,
    and Stan insists that the only way to go is on the Autobahn,
    and you don't have to stop.
    And I said, what if I have to pee?
    Well, then we have to stop.
    But when you were growing up, you had never gone?
    No, never.
    How do you feel speaking German?
    Oh, I speak Viennese.
    I don't speak German.
    No.
    It's German with a Viennese accent?
    No, it's a softer German.
    Softer German?
    I speak-- well, my parents lived here, we only spoke German.
    And I with Susie I spoke German.
    She spoke English fluently, but when we talked on the phone
    all the time, when I went--
    I speak German very well.
    OK.
    What about reparations?
    Did your parents ever get reparations?
    Yeah, we got reparations.
    Yes, my cousin here, who is here, we worked together,
    and we did not very well, but we did fine.
    I mean, they gave us stuff.
    Well, they had the compound.
    The villa in Baden was a big deal.
    And then my uncle had a couple of houses, I think, in Vienna.
    I have a cousin who lives here, in Washington.
    So we got some reparations, yes.
    Have you been to Israel?
    We've been to Israel about 50--
    more than that.
    Yeah, 50 years.
    When we lived in Paris, we went to--
    you could then go to Israel by boat.
    And we went by ship, and we spent a month in Israel,
    in August.
    My aunt and uncle were still alive,
    and my cousin had the two little girls.
    And so we were there.
    But we have not gone back.
    We like to travel the world, and our feeling always
    was, we've been in Israel.
    And it's now to see the rest.
    Obviously, we didn't see the rest.
    I mean, we were in Europe a lot, and in Australia.
    I have cousins in Australia on my mother's side.
    Oh, my.
    So it was very nice.
    But you know.
    Do you feel that your childhood experiences
    made you more Jewish?
    My what?
    Your childhood, what are your thoughts about being Jewish?
    And considering what you went through and
    your father losing his--
    Yeah, I obviously feel Jewish and stuff.
    My childhood, I mean, being Jewish,
    the festivals were part of it.
    But I--
    How did you raise your children?
    Were they Jewishly affiliated?
    Well, they were in Beth-El for--
    Sunday school?
    No, my daughter Karen was in Beth-El until we went to Paris.
    We lived in Paris for two years.
    And when we came back, I did not rejoin Beth-El
    because they started a building fund.
    And they started with bat mitzvahs for girls.
    And I didn't grow up with bat mitzvahs.
    No girls had bat mitzvahs.
    I was not going to take my children to Sunday school
    and all that Hebrew school.
    It was enough I had to take Karen before we left,
    but that was just Hebrew school.
    Fine.
    But I did enroll Joan into the--
    what was it called?
    The Bethesda Chevy Chase Jewish Community Group,
    which is the oldest Jewish group in Montgomery County.
    And they had--
    I don't know what they have now, but they had Sunday school.
    You didn't have--
    She was the younger of the two?
    The younger.
    And they had Sunday school.
    And I took Joan to Sunday school,
    to that, because I wanted her to have some Jewish background
    and education.
    But I was not about to--
    money wasn't plentiful at that time.
    And I was not going to spend it on something
    that really annoyed the hell out of me, quite frankly.
    So.
    Do you think you would have been a different person
    today if you hadn't gone through having to leave?
    Yeah, probably.
    In what way?
    I don't know.
    Did it strengthen you?
    Huh?
    What did they experience, do you think, did to you?
    Make you a stronger, more independent person?
    You said you were an independent child.
    Yeah.
    I don't know that I would have been more independent than I
    already was.
    Yeah, yeah.
    I mean, I would have not worked in a candy store or anything.
    I was in a society where, I guess,
    I would have gotten married.
    I don't know that I would have gone to university, because I
    really did not like taking exams and stuff.
    So I don't know what I would have thought.
    The only thing that--
    Susie and I felt that the only thing that Hitler did for us,
    we didn't have to take the Matura.
    Which is the final exams.
    At age 18, the baccalaureate.
    Right, right.
    I mean, neither one of us were that type of pupil.
    We were bad pupils.
    I was pretty good in stuff that interested me.
    Were you active in the Civil Rights movement at all,
    since your civil rights were taken away from you?
    No, I was not.
    I mean, you were raising children.
    I was very active, and still am, in the Democratic Party.
    And if you were--
    well, you could come up there, but you don't want to.
    You see him lying in bed in the dining hall.
    You see my pictures from Clinton and Hillary.
    And here's a picture from Kennedy.
    So you were active in politics?
    Politics, yes.
    Behind the scenes?
    Behind the scenes.
    I didn't run for anything.
    I managed.
    Did you?
    I managed campaigns.
    This picture from Kennedy is my pride and joy.
    Unfortunately, the tub-- no, the toilet got stuck,
    and the water ran down.
    And while you can see his writing, which
    says "to Madeleine, with thanks and best wishes,"
    you can see the imprint of the writing.
    The ink is washed out.
    Yeah, yeah, yeah.
    Much to my chagrin.
    So do you think you were active in politics because you--
    No, I think--
    --it was a country where you were deprived of your--
    No, I was active in politics because I
    liked what the Democrats were--
    I was interested in what they were doing, stuff from day one.
    I mean--
    I'm just saying, you would have more awareness
    than someone who was born here and wasn't subject to what
    you were subject to as a--
    Maybe.
    I don't know.
    I mean, I never thought of it in that connection at all.
    Have you been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington?
    No.
    Because you don't have the time?
    I don't want to see it.
    Because?
    I don't want to.
    Too painful?
    Too painful.
    I don't want to deal with it.
    I don't have to see it.
    It's for people to see who--
    Who don't know.
    Who don't know.
    It's not for me.
    Right.
    I mean, even though I was lucky, I never
    considered myself a Holocaust survivor.
    I would say a Holocaust refugee maybe, but not a survivor.
    Survivor are the ones who survived the camps,
    as far as I'm concerned.
    Anybody whose life was changed or life
    was in danger, like yours.
    Yeah, but you know, it's no comparison.
    Do you read about the Holocaust or see movies?
    Not much.
    No, this is just too much for me.
    Too much.
    I can't, really.
    Yeah.
    Do you do you have any grandchildren?
    I have one grandson, who is absolutely adorable.
    And he has taped all of this that I have told.
    I was going to say.
    And you've told him your story.
    Yes, he knows my story.
    Are you more comfortable with people
    who came from Europe than you are with native Americans?
    Not particularly.
    Not particularly.
    I'm comfortable with all Americans.
    With anybody.
    Not with anybody.
    I mean, that's-- you know just living.
    Well, is there anything else you wanted
    to add that we haven't covered?
    I can't think of anything.
    I could tell you how my father proceeded in the United States.
    Well, we have a few minutes, if you--
    If you want to.
    Sure.
    It's quite a story, too.
    Yeah.
    It's still going, the tape?
    It's still going.
    Well, how are you going to erase all this other stuff
    about Netanyahu.
    Can't erase it.
    So what your father--
    OK, so my father, he--
    Yeah, keep going.
    Yeah.
    I got married, and I left, moved away.
    And I guess it finally hit him that he really
    has to do something.
    So far I was there, and money was coming in.
    I mean, he was, too.
    He worked in the shipping department in Gimbel's,
    and then in a shipping department
    at Hattie Carnegie and stuff.
    And then they were still gathering at the cafeteria
    of the Viennese.
    On 96th Street, there was a cafeteria on Broadway.
    And there was a man there who said that he had pictures.
    And he goes into the Catskills to the hotels,
    and he sells these pictures, and he has
    some artists who paint them.
    And then the next--
    at some other point, he mentioned
    that he needed an assistant.
    So my father decided, said, "oh, I can help you."
    So he started to go with him to do the pictures.
    Now, what I hadn't mentioned before was that if you put--
    never mind.
    I'll tell you later.
    So I hadn't mentioned that my father was extremely talented.
    He painted.
    One picture here is his.
    And he played piano by ear.
    And his painting and drawings were wonderful.
    So he went with him, and he saw what the man was doing.
    And then he says, I can do this.
    So he went and he bought a car.
    And this was in 1950, because my daughter was born.
    And he appeared in Washington with this new station wagon
    and with pictures.
    And he was going down to Miami, because he had heard
    that they have a hotel boom.
    And he figured that maybe he could
    sell some pics to interior decorators or something,
    so he would do that.
    So he painted some samples.
    And I guess had them framed.
    Anyway, he went down there and he made contacts.
    Well, to make a long story short, he sold--
    he plastered, I think, most of the motels with his pictures.
    He hired artists in New York, and he
    would tell us he had a studio.
    They would send up 10 or 15 easels
    and go red, red, red, blue, blue, blue.
    He designed the pictures, and the orders
    he got to match the pictures to the decor.
    So they were painted yellow and gray and blue and whatever.
    And he sold-- he must have sold thousands of pictures.
    He didn't just sell in Florida, but he went up
    the Southern coast to Houston, where this friend lived,
    who got my uncle to get the affidavit, who had
    a cafe by that time, I think.
    And then he went up through the country, up through Arkansas
    and all there, wherever.
    And he sold pictures here in Washington, too,
    where the [INAUDIBLE] furniture and stuff.
    And he was absolutely--
    Wonderful.
    My mother traveled with him.
    Oh, and they had moved.
    After I left, they moved from 96th Street,
    which became a Puerto Rican district there, to Riverdale.
    And they had an apartment in Riverdale.
    Also, everything had to overlook something.
    Do you think your mother was emotionally?
    Oh, yeah, definitely.
    Definitely.
    I mean, there's no doubt about it.
    How did it manifest itself?
    Well, when retiring, she wasn't affected emotionally
    once things picked up.
    I mean, the first few couple years,
    especially after she had to be a maid.
    But I meant having to leave Vienna.
    Oh, no.
    She had it by that time.
    I mean-- and my parents did go back to Badgastein,
    which is a resort near--
    in the mountains near Salzburg every summer.
    Oh, they moved.
    After they lived in New York, they moved to Miami.
    And then he retired.
    And every summer, they went to Badgastein.
    Oh, interesting.
    The first year they went to Israel,
    and they went all through Europe to see.
    And they went to Vienna, and they stayed at a hotel.
    I mean, he did very well.
    And then he invested.
    And he really did well in a very short time.
    Yes.
    Because he retired when he was 65.
    Oh, my.
    And so-- Oh, so I'll just tell you one other little story.
    He is sitting at a cafe in Badgastein.
    There was a man sitting next to him,
    and they started to talk, this and that and the other.
    And it turned out the man was the President of Austria.
    You see, things are different.
    And he was having his coffee.
    My dad was having his coffee.
    And so they became quite friendly.
    And every time he went to Vienna,
    he went to see the president.
    Which President was this?
    Kirchschlager.
    He's since deceased, of course.
    And very nice guy.
    So next time we went to Vienna, I wrote to him
    and said that I would like to meet him.
    And so when we were in Vienna, there
    was an invitation waiting at Susie's house for me
    to come at a particular time.
    And his office is in a palace, the president's palace.
    In fact, Maria Theresia's bedroom was the anteroom.
    So is it still going?
    Yeah.
    Yeah, so it was the anteroom.
    So on the way to walk into the palace,
    we're on a street, Stan and I. And a man walked up to me,
    and he said, can you tell me where the Fischerstiege is?
    And I said, oh, yeah, no problem.
    And I showed him how to go.
    And Stan was very surprised.
    Anyway, we went on to have our audience with the president.
    And he, the president, Kirchschlager,
    he spoke English very well.
    So we talked English, of course, and all kinds of things.
    And then he said to me, "by the way,
    do you still remember Vienna?"
    And I said, "Oh, yes.
    I remember it very well.
    And I told him the episode that just happened on the street."
    And he says, "Oh, that is really very interesting.
    Tell me, where is the Fischerstiege?"
    So I had to explain to him where it was.
    That's wonderful.
    That's a wonderful story.
    So anyway, that's the story.
    Well, thank you very much for doing this interview.
    Well, thank you very much.
    And--
    I appreciate it.
    Yes.
    Are we--
    OK, this concludes the United States Holocaust Memorial
    Museum interview with Madeleine Sigel.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Madeleine Bartfeld Sigel (born February 16, 1924 in Vienna, Austria) discusses her childhood; her father’s delicatessen and his management of a theater and a cabaret; attending a public elementary school then a private girls’ school; taking a religion class with the other Jewish students; her parents not being religious or Zionists, though they celebrated holidays; having a second home in Baden, Austria; feeling independent and not experiencing antisemitism initially; not going to see Hitler in March 1938; Nazis taking over her father’s business; furniture being taken away from their apartment; Jewish teachers leaving her school and the school permanently being closed to Jews; her father hiding to avoid being arrested and her mother having to scrub sidewalks, which affected her emotionally; going to the United States embassy to get forms and forging her father’s signature; getting a quota number and leaving in December 1938 for Venice, Italy; going to Zurich, Switzerland, where her father had moved; getting three visas for Cuba; traveling through France and in May 1939 boarding an English cargo ship with tickets paid for by a Jewish organization; being among 70 Jewish passengers and Cubans, who had fought in the Spanish civil war; getting near Cuba and seeing the St. Louis; being told they could not land and continuing on through the Panama Canal to the west coast of South America, passing Colombia, Peru, and northern Chile; transferring to another ship (the Orduna Orbita); going to Panama and being quarantined for two months; living in the Fort Amador station in the American Zone from May 1939 to September 1940, where the Jewish community came to visit the refugees; gathering around one radio when the war started; her uncle sending affidavits and getting visas to US; sailing to Ellis Island and settling in New York, NY; attending business school and learning cost accounting; getting a secretarial job; getting married in 1947 to Stanley Sigel, a Navy lieutenant and Harvard graduate; moving to Washington, D.C.; still feeling connected to Vienna but not feeling Austrian; and her feelings about Germans.
    Interviewee
    Madeleine Sigel
    Interviewer
    Gail Schwartz
    Date
    interview:  2015 May 22
    Geography
    creation: Bethesda (Md.)

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    2 digital files : WAV.

    Rights & Restrictions

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

    Keywords & Subjects

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Gail Schwartz, on behalf of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History Branch, conducted the interview with Madeleine Sigel on May 22, 2015 in Bethesda, MD.
    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 08:13:15
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn601152

    Additional Resources

    Transcripts (3)
    Time Coded Notes (2)

    Download & Licensing

    In-Person Research

    Contact Us

    Also in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum oral history volunteer collection

    Consists of interviews with Holocaust survivors and concentration camp liberators conducted by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History Department volunteer staff. The interviewees, among them survivors from Hungary, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, and Poland, discuss their experiences of life before World War II, life in the ghettos, life in concentration camps, and life after the Holocaust.

    Date: 1993

    Oral history interview with Marie Schwartzman

    Oral History

    Marie Schwartzman discusses her early life in Paris, France; her large Polish family; her father’s arrest and imprisonment in Drancy; becoming the head of the family due to her mother’s illness; hiding house for three months; being arrested and sent to Drancy in October 1942; being deported to Auschwitz; living conditions in the camp; working in the crematorium sorting clothes; being marched to Ravensbrück in January 1945; living conditions in Prchin-Malkov camp; liberation by the Americans; turning in a German officer who was arrested; returning to Paris and Grenoble; immigrating to the United States in 1949; and marrying an American soldier.

    Oral history interview with Nathan Kalman

    Oral History

    Nathan Kalman (b. Natan Kalmonowitz) discusses his early life in Łódź, Poland; joining a Zionist organization in 1930; living on a kibbutz in Krakow for a year; marrying in 1939; the beginning of the German occupation; his mother’s work smuggling food; moving into the ghetto; the deaths of his mother, father, and son; being deported to Auschwitz in cattle cars; keeping a photo of his family in his shoe; conditions in Auschwitz; being moved to Gurlitz; working in an ammunition factory; liberation; remarrying; immigrating to the United States; and living in Israel from 1969-1989.

    Oral history interview with Esthy Adler

    Oral History

    Esthy Adler discusses not knowing her real name or when and where she was born, noting that many of her childhood memories are vague; her papers that say she was born in Kaliningrad, Russia, where she thinks her parents had a summer home; staying with her mother’s sister in a compound where there were frequent bombings; her mother’s death during their stay; her father’s remarriage, despite the family’s disapproval; how the Germans found her, her father, and stepmother; the last time she saw her father; how she, her aunt, cousins, and stepmother were relocated to another compound where they slept on cots in places similar to bunkers; seeing a man digging a ditch and holding a machine gun; being lined up and fired upon, but surviving; finding her way back to the barrack where she found her stepmother and another woman; being loaded onto a cattle car and taken to another location (possibly Treblinka); escaping into the forest with her stepmother via a hole and tunnel dug by another woman; living with a partisan group that consisted of Polish-Ukrainian prisoners of war and Russian deserters; the death of her stepmother by machine gun fire in the winter of 1942; being shot; becoming ill from drinking poisoned water and being nursed back to health by a peasant; living with a woman named Margot who got her a job in a factory sewing pants; leaving her job after a man paid for her to go to a private school; living with the Katz family; becoming legally independent after she turned 18; attending graduate school and being accepted into a program where she was trained as a paralegal; meeting her future husband Jim Adler at the University of Heidelberg in 1954; and immigrating to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Tana Gelfer

    Oral History

    Tana Gelfer, born October 7, 1939 in Berlin, Germany, discusses her parents Herman George Reichman and Johanna Kahn and her family background in Gelsenkirchen, Germany; how her father lost his banking job after the Nazi party came to power; her father’s arrest on December 27, 1942; never finding out what happened to her father; her deportation with her mother to Theresienstadt; living conditions in Theresienstadt; sharing a bunk with her mother; how her mother worked in the fields harvesting crops and sorted through prisoners’ belongings; being hospitalized frequently; how a woman in the camp, Minnie Simon, gave birth to a son in secret; how Minnie Simon, her husband Fritz, and their child all survived; being made to watch, along with other small children, the cruel treatment of men who were brought into the camp from trains; her and her mother’s liberation by Russian forces; living with her grandmother in Berlin; immigrating to the United States; marrying and raising a family; and how her mother helped sponsor several people emigrate from Germany to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Maria Devinki

    Oral History

    Maria Devinki, born June 1, 1920 in Hannover, Germany, discusses her family’s move to central Poland; her parents’ successful business there; the Nazi invasion of Poland; how Jews were forced to live in a ghetto; having to give up her large house; her father’s deportation to Treblinka where he perished; marrying her fiancé and being hidden with family members by a Polish farmer in small underground space; traveling with her husband to Regensburg, Germany to wait for U.S. visas; and settling in Kansas City, MO.

    Oral history interview with Jerome Stasson

    Oral History

    Jerome Stasson (b. Jerome Stashevsky) discusses his early life in Detroit, Michigan; coming from a family of Polish immigrants; being drafted into the U.S. army in 1943; following General Patton to Germany from England; liberating Buchenwald; his first impressions of the camp; speaking Yiddish to the survivors; destroying the letters he sent home to his family due to their distress; and his memories of the smell of the camp.

    Oral history interview with Adriana Pacifici

    Oral History

    Adriana Funaro, born in Rome, Italy on July 28, 1923, describes her early life in Rome, Italy; being expelled from public school in 1938 and afterward attending a Jewish school and a Catholic school; her father’s decision not to emigrate; a doctor’s efforts to help her father avoid a roundup in 1943; hiding with her sister in a Dominican convent; living under a false name; learning prayers while hiding; working in a partisan group while in hiding; the arrival of American soldiers; marrying a childhood friend; immigrating to the United States; and her nightmares about the war years.

    Oral history interview with Ernest Kolben

    Oral History

    Ernest Kolben describes his early life in Vienna, Austria; feeling like an outcast at school; his brother’s arrest and imprisonment in Dachau on Kristallnacht; changing conditions for the Jewish community; being sent to Theresienstadt; living and work conditions in the camp; being moved to Auschwitz in September 1944; volunteering to move to Buchenwald; arriving instead at Kaufering, near Dachau; being force marched to Camp Allach; liberation by American soldiers; his 30 day hospitalization; working for the Counterintelligence Corps to find SS members; returning to Vienna; marrying; immigrating to Montreal; moving to Chicago; and splitting his time between Vienna and the US.

    Oral history interview with Henry Kolber

    Oral History

    Henry Kolber (b. Hirsch Kolber), born June 6, 1923 in Przysietnica, Poland, discusses his early life in Barcice, Poland; moving with his family to Nowy Sacz, Poland after the German invasion; how the Germans shot and killed 15 Jews and selected 100 other Jews, including his father, to be locked up overnight; working as a grave digger with his father after the Aktions; how he was selected by the Judenrat to go to Rabka, Poland; upon arrival he discovered it was a school to train Ukrainian volunteers to become SS; being assigned work to dig a shooting gallery in the mountains where the new recruits would learn to shoot; covering graves and filling them with dirt and antiseptic; the commander, Rosenbaum, whom he testified against in Hamburg, Germany in 1968; his parents’ deaths in Treblinka; being sent to Krakow to build Płaszów concentration camp; being transferred to Auschwitz; marching in December 1944 in the snow for two days then being taken to Buchenwald by train; living in the barracks with Elie Wiesel; being liberated by American troops; moving to Switzerland with the help of the Red Cross; immigrating to the United States in 1947; and his marriage and children.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Greifer

    Oral History

    Ruth Greifer (b. Ruth Dahl) discusses her childhood in Geilenkirchen, Germany, and Mastricht, Netherlands; her experiences during the German invasion of the Netherlands; her life in hiding during World War II; her reunion with her parents after World War II; and her life in the United States after 1948

    Oral history interview with Anna Wollner

    Oral History

    Anna Wollner (b. Jakab) discusses her early life in Nagy-Varad, Transylvania (Oradea, Romania); her fiance’s conscription into forced labor; his return and their marriage; being forced into a ghetto; her feelings about wearing the Jewish star; being sent to Auschwitz; being transferred to Stutthof; her friend Suzy, who taught her to sabotage the materials they were working on; being moved to Riga, Latvia by boat; building roads out of Jewish headstones; acts of violence by guards; being marched back to Germany (near Gdansk, Poland); liberation by Russian soldiers; witnessing rapes; returning to Budapest, Hungary; reuniting with her husband; leaving for Munich, Germany after the communists arrived; immigrating to the United States in 1949; divorcing and moving to Israel; returning to the United States; and her feelings about German reparations.

    Oral history interview with Kate Wacz

    Oral History

    Kate Wacz (née Katalin Kadelburger), born in 1932, discusses her childhood in Budapest, Hungary; her father’s death performing forced labor; going to the Jewish gymnasium; the Germans arriving in March 1944; the school closures; moving to the ghetto; anti-Jewish violence from members of the Arrow Cross Party; the Allied bombings in January 1945; living conditions in the ghetto; liberation; readjusting to life after the war; her mother becoming a Swedish citizen; getting passage to Sweden in 1951; and her life after the war.

    Oral history interview with Erwin Forley

    Oral History

    Erwin Forley (b. Feuerstein) discusses his childhood in Košice, Czechoslovakia, (now Slovakia) and Munkacs, Hungary (now Mukacheve, Ukraine); his life in the Munkacs ghetto; his family's deportation to Auschwitz at the hands of Hungarian gendarmes; his work in Budy, a sub camp for farming near Auschwitz; his experiences with Kapos in Auschwitz, some of whom he describes as homosexuals; the evacuation of Auschwitz and liberation by Russian troops; his return to Mukacheve; his reunion with his mother and sister; and the family's life in the United States after 1946.

    Oral history interview with Ernie Marx

    Oral History

    Ernie Marx (né Ernest Ludwig), born in Gelnhausen, Germany on November 8, 1925, discusses his childhood in Gelnhausen and Speyer am Rhein, Germany; his experiences during Kristallnacht; his arrest by the Gestapo and imprisonment in Dachau along with his father in November 1938; his father's work to organize Kindertransports of Jewish children from the Rhein area to France; his travel to France on a Kindertransport; his imprisonment in Gurs concentration camp; his involvement in the Maquis resistance group in France; his reunion with his mother and brother after World War II; and his life in the United States after 1947.

    Oral history interview with Doris Rauch

    Oral History

    Doris Rauch, born August 26, 1920 in Brno, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), discusses her childhood in Brno; the death of her father in 1936; the German invasion of Czechoslovakia; being unable to attend a German-speaking university because she was a Jew; attending a textile school; working in a factory; buying goods on the black market; her deportation to Theresienstadt on a passenger train; volunteering to work planting trees in Bohemia with her mother; returning to Theresienstadt after six weeks; avoiding transports to the East; being put on a transport in September 1942 along with her mother and boyfriend; being taken to Raasiku, Estonia and separated from her mother; being taken to Tallinn, Estonia in December 1942 to clear rubble for the Holzmann construction firm; being taken to a camp in Ereda at the end of 1943; how she and other women stopped menstruating; working in the forest; a romantic relationship between a prisoner and an SS commander; being given a ring by male inmate; contracting hepatitis in Ereda; being taken to Stutthof; how she had written in a diary every day in Estonia; being very sick; arriving at Bergen-Belsen in April 1945; taking another prisoner’s place to work in a factory; finding fliers saying that the Allies were approaching; being taken to the Danish border at the end of April 1945 and turned over to the Danish Red Cross who provided food, care, and new clothing; living in Sweden for two years working as a secretary for the World Jewish Congress; living with two women she met in the camps; moving to the United States in May 1947 and experiencing culture shock; marrying and moving to Chicago, then Pittsburg, and then to Washington D.C.; the effect of her experiences on her religious beliefs; and reparations from Germany.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Elman

    Oral History

    Joseph Elman, born February 5, 1922 in Pruzhany, Poland (present day Belarus), discusses the German and Russian occupations of Pruzhany; his memories of the murder of 11 Jews in Pruzhany by Nazis; being forced into slave labor; the relocation of his family into the ghetto; daily living conditions in the ghetto, which included starvation and crowding; his work in the ghetto’s food department; the liquidation of the ghetto starting in January 1943; his father’s membership in the Judenrat; his father’s suicide; how he and others built a bunker in the ghetto; his contact with a resistance group which was smuggling weapons into the ghetto; his escape from the ghetto with a large group of people during the liquidation; his experience living in the woods as part of a partisan group; forming family bonds with members of the group; liberation by the Russian Army; returning to his home in Pruzhany to find a family living there; living with this family for a period of time; moving to Bialystok, Poland to join his brother; settling in Łódź, Poland; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Gerald Rosenstein

    Oral History

    Gerald Rosenstein (b. Gerhard Rosenstein) describes his early life in Darmstadt, Germany; being attacked and beaten by a schoolmate’s father as a child; immigrating to Amsterdam with his family in May 1940; trying to leave for England after the German occupation; the persecutions Amsterdam’s Jewish community faced; being separated from his family in Westerbork; being sent to Theresienstadt; reuniting with his parents there; living conditions in Theresienstadt; partaking in propaganda for the Red Cross; being deported to Auschwitz with his father; being transferred to Gleiwitz; working conditions in camp; being marched to Blechhammer in January 1945; how he felt at liberation; traveling through Poland, Romania, and Odessa before boarding a Red Cross ship to Paris;

    Oral history interview with Ivan Becker

    Oral History

    Ivan Becker, born in 1929, discusses his childhood in Budapest, Hungary; his memories of the "hanging priest of Budapest" who killed Jews for refusing conversion to Christianity; the Nazi invasion of Hungary; harsh restrictions on Jews; his father who was sent to Buchenwald; being sent on a death march with his mother from Budapest towards Austria; being separated from his mother and never seeing her again; his life in hiding; his experiences in an unnamed ghetto; his return to Budapest after liberation; his time in a displaced persons camp in Bad Gastein, Austria; his immigration to the United States as a "war orphan" in 1946; and his adjustment to life after the Holocaust and success in business.

    Oral history interview with Romana Koplewicz

    Oral History

    Romana Koplewicz (née Margitte), born April 26, 1919 in Warsaw, Poland, describes her pre-war life in Poland; her parents and sister; her father’s dye factory; her education at a private Jewish school; her law school education at the University of Joseph Pilsudski in Warsaw; the antisemitism she experienced in law school; meeting her husband in 1936; her inability to complete law school due to anti-Jewish legislation; the beginning of the war and ghettoization in Warsaw; working in her father’s factory; her father’s arrest and return in the spring of 1940; the liquidation of the ghetto; her work sewing German uniforms; her escape with her family from numerous selections; the false papers she and her sister acquired in 1943; her work in the ghetto in a manufacturing factory; working as a housekeeper to survive; her time in Otwock Poland working as a chambermaid in summer 1944 at a convent; her escape to Grodzisko Mazovieckie, Poland because the Gestapo were looking for her; her time working for a German in Warsaw; the Warsaw ghetto uprising; the ghetto’s evacuation and her transfer to Piastów, Poland; her survival and return to Warsaw; her reunion with her husband and their marriage; leaving Warsaw for Germany with her husband; her time in Germany with her husband waiting for their visa to the United States; her immigration to the United States in May 1949; her master’s degree in social work; and her two children and her life in the U.S.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Koplewicz

    Oral History

    Joseph Koplewicz, born December 7, 1915 in Kielce, Poland, describes his pre-war life in Kielce; his parents and siblings; his father’s occupation as a businessman; his education in Kielce and law school education in Warsaw; his family’s religious attitudes; his experiences with antisemitism while attending law school; the beginning of the war; his arrest in Kielce for not wearing a Star of David badge; the ghettoization of Warsaw; performing forced labor in Warsaw; his father’s death due to health complications; his stay with his sister and her husband in a comfortable apartment; his marriage in 1942; being wounded in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; his transfer to Majdanek concentration camp; his transfer to Budzyn labor camp near Krasnik, Poland until February 1944; his transfer to Mielec, Poland where he worked as a draftsman until July 1944; his short time in Wieliczka, Flossenbürg, Litomerice, and Dachau; his transfer to Augsburg, Germany where he worked in airport construction; his time in Kaufering and Nuremburg; a forced march to Landshut, Germany where the SS guards in charge fled; the marchers subsequent scattering; his survival and return to Poland; his reunion with his wife; their decision to leave Poland and immigrate to the United States in 1949; and his post-war life in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Irving Schaffer

    Oral History

    Irving Schaffer, born May 26, 1928 in Chust, Czechoslovakia (present day Khust, Ukraine), discusses growing up in an Orthodox family; his early education; a teacher beating him in front of the class in 1943; experiencing antisemitism before the war; his father’s arrest for receiving milk from a neighbor; the deportation of his father and brother to labor camps; his family’s eviction from their home and deportation to the Chust Ghetto; conditions of the ghetto, such as the Jewish leadership; his assignment as a messenger and pass to leave the ghetto; smuggling in bread from outside the ghetto; people being punished for being Hungarian; being transported by train from the ghetto after three weeks; how partisans blew up the train and told prisoners to jump off and escape; arriving at Auschwitz in the spring of 1944; his memories of Dr. Mengele; being separated from the rest of his family at Auschwitz; being sent to Warsaw, Poland after only three days at Auschwitz; working to clean out the Warsaw Ghetto; prisoners escaping from the Warsaw ghetto; being marched out of the ghetto in August 1944; arriving at Kutno on the German and Polish border; being transported by train to Dachau; living in Camp Seven and working in Mühldorf in an ammunition factory; stealing potatoes and bartering with other prisoners; being transported from Dachau; finding a train transporting sugar that had been bombed and eating the hot sugar; being transported to the Landshut camp; working in Landsberg, Germany; a bombing by American planes; being released by the Germans and then chased down and beaten into a coma; waking up in a German hospital; organizations that assisted in reconnecting families, such as UNRRA and the Joint Distribution Committee; being liberated in Feldmoching, Germany; finding his brother in Chust; how the Russians did not let him leave Chust; escaping across borders into Germany; attending school in Munich, Germany; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with William Klein

    Oral History

    William Klein, born in 1924, discusses growing up in Užhorod, Czechoslovakia (present day Uzhhorod, Ukraine), in a large family; attending Jewish school until the sixth grade, then entering a public high school; the friendliness between Jews and non-Jews in Užhorod; his two older brothers leaving in 1940 for Yugoslavia and Russia with the army; Jews being made to wear the yellow Star of David badge and comply with a curfew beginning in 1942; hearing rumors about Jews being killed in Poland; being forced into the ghetto in January or February 1944; being taken by train to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944; last seeing his parents and sister as they went through the selection process at Auschwitz; being advised by a kapo to volunteer for work outside the camp when he had the opportunity; being taken to what had been the Warsaw Ghetto along with his brother and brother-in-law to demolish buildings and clear debris; finding gold pieces in an abandoned house where he was working and hiding them in a belt; prisoners making up songs and singing as they worked; being forced to march to Dachau as the Russians advanced towards Warsaw; witnessing the death of a rabbi he and his brother had helped on the march; staying in Dachau for a few days; volunteering to work at a construction site; being seriously injured on the construction site and being helped by fellow prisoners, including one who was a doctor; escaping with his brother and brother-in-law from a train and hiding in a farmhouse as the Americans liberated the area; reuniting with his surviving family members in Bratislava and Užhorod; living in Sudetenland and then in a series of displaced persons camps in Germany (Wasserburg, Föhrenwald, and Bremerhaven) and applying to move to the United States; having his application delayed after being accused of being a communist; moving to Chicago in 1951; his pride in his Jewish identity; health problems caused by beatings he received during his time as a prisoner; telling his children about his experiences; and his response to the question of why he does not hate.

    Oral history interview with George Pisik

    Oral History

    George Pisik, born May 25, 1925, describes his experience as a soldier in the U.S. Army’s 15th armored division, 10th infantry battalion; entering Dachau in May 1945 without any prior knowledge of concentration camps; his battalion’s doctor trying to help the prisoners; searching a guard who was subsequently taken by prisoners and killed in the barracks; meeting a 19 year-old female prisoner in Dachau and giving her the mezuzah his grandmother had given him to wear; receiving almost 100 mezuzahs from his family and friends after writing them; giving these mezuzahs to chaplains to distribute and to his fellow soldiers, telling them they were good luck charms; entering Munich and seeing the giant swastika on Munich Stadium, which his commander ordered to be destroyed by tank fire; seeing Germans surrender; conflicts with German civilians; suffering from trench foot and impetigo; returning to the United States expecting to be sent to Japan but staying after the bombing of Hiroshima; after his homecoming, using a swastika flag as a doormat, which drew the attention of the neighborhood and the police when his mother washed it and hung it out to dry; bringing home pistols which his mother took to the army depot to be deactivated; returning to college; his frustration with Holocaust deniers, including a Catholic priest he met in 1950 in Louisiana; the failings of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust; his feelings towards the Germans; his belief that a holocaust could happen again; his level of religious involvement; and the importance of education in preventing another holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Rosicka

    Oral History

    Ruth Rosicka, born August 13, 1919 in Nowice, Czechoslovakia (present day Poland), describes her Polish father who was actively pro-Zion; escaping bombing in Bielsko, Poland; escaping through Krakow, Poland and being found by the Russian army; being deported to a camp in Siberia from which she was amnestied in 1941; being drafted by the Czechoslovakian army and working in the medical brigade, where in 1944 she met her husband; being taken to the Carpathian Mountains, to the war front, where they stayed until February 1945; being released from the Army in May 1945 because of her pregnancy; and living in Prague, Czech Republic after the war.

    Oral history interview with Salomon Cohen

    Oral History

    Salomon Cohen, born July 28, 1937 in Athens, Greece, discusses how his family escaped to the south of Greece in February 1943 with the help of partisans; hiding with his family in the mountains for six months; how the partisans obtained food from monasteries in the mountains for his family; using false names while in hiding; traveling to Izmir, Turkey then Syria; being captured by English troops; how the family was taken to British camps in the Gaza Strip; their escape with the help of a Jewish agency; traveling to Ted Aviv, Israel, where they lived from 1944 to 1952; going into the army as a tank fighter; going to Haifa, Israel after leaving the army; getting married and having children; and his visits to Greece.

    Oral history interview with Suzanne Foldes

    Oral History

    Suzanne Foldes (b. Zsuzsi Morvai) discusses her childhood in Miskolc, Hungary; her Jewish and Christian schooling; pre-war antisemitism; training as a gymnast but being denied entry into the Olympics because she was Jewish; her father’s conscription into Hungarian forced labor; getting married in 1942 to Paul Berkowitz; terminating a pregnancy; the German occupation of Hungary; being confined to a ghetto; being transported to Auschwitz by cattle car; learning of her mother’s death by gassing; moving to Buchenwald; how she was good at stealing coal; liberation; returning to Budapest after the war; reuniting with her father; learning of her husband’s death; marrying a friend from before the war; immigrating to the United States in 1956; and speaking about her wartime experiences beginning in the 1990s.

    Oral history interview with Tibor Vince

    Oral History

    Tibor Vince, born in 1910, describes his childhood near Budapest, Hungary; his medical studies in Italy; his escape to Cuba at the outbreak of World War II; his immigration to the United States; his work as a physician in the United States Army; his experiences at Dachau shortly after liberation; his medical treatment of Allied prisoners of war; and his life in New York, NY after 1945.

    Oral history interview with Elias Piorko

    Oral History

    Elias Piorko, born on May 15, 1919, discusses his childhood in Zambrów, Poland; his life in a kibbutz near Slonim, Poland (now Belarus); his experiences with forced labor in Russia; being in four different camps; his travels through Europe on the way to Italy after World War II; and his life in the United States after 1950.

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Hildesheim

    Oral History

    Benjamin (Beniek) Hildesheim discusses his childhood in Sieradz, Poland; his experiences with antisemitism and Jewish persecution in Sieradz before the Holocaust; his time in the ghettos of Sieradz and Łódź, Poland; his adoption by Chaim Rumkowski; his imprisonment at Auschwitz, Babice/Babitz (a small agricultural camp west of Auschwitz), and Buchenwald concentration camps; his participation in a death march to Theresienstadt, where he remained until liberation; his time in Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), immediately after liberation; his immigration to Palestine in the first Aliyah after World War II in 1945; his participation in the Israel-Arab War of 1948 to 1949; and his life in Brazil and the United States after 1962.

    Oral history interview with Peter Masters

    Oral History

    Peter Masters (né Peter Arany), born February 5, 1922, in Vienna, Austria, describes his prewar life in Vienna; his Viennese mother and Hungarian father; his escape to Britain after the Anschluss in 1938; his family’s internment as “friendly aliens;” his family’s reclassification as enemy aliens in Britain; his experiences volunteering for special hazardous duty in Britain and being assigned the 3rd Group, 10th Commando, an elite paratroop unit mostly consisting of Jewish or political refugees; his identity being anglicized for his protection; his work to petition for the recognition of Austrians who perished fighting the Nazis; his many family members who perished during the war; and his 1997 book, Striking back: A Jewish commando’s war against the Nazis, which he wrote as a counterpoint to the idea the Jews did not fight back during the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Wolke

    Oral History

    Joseph Wolke (Wolkeovich), born July 14, 1919 in Tomashov (Tomaszów Mazowiecki), Poland, discusses his family background and religious upbringing; his father’s successful farm outside the city; the rise of Hitler and antisemitism; racial laws against Jews; being deported during Rosh Hashanah; arriving in Krakow, Poland on a cattle train; his disbelief that the war would last so long; escaping from the Germans and returning to Tomashov by bus; how the farm provided for the family; increases in the deportation of Jews; living in the Tomashov ghetto; smuggling food into the ghetto; the liquidation of the ghetto on November 1, 1942; the mass burial of Jews in the ghetto for which he was forced to dig graves; being deported to Bergen-Belsen; being transferred on a cattle train to Auschwitz; forced labor digging ditches outside the camp; being relocated to Gross-Rosen camp; the death march from Rosen, which lasted over a week; starvation during the march; liberation by Russian forces; returning home to Poland; meeting his wife and having a child; immigrating to the United States in August 1950; living in Baltimore, MD with his wife’s family; adjusting to American life; creating a business; and learning the fate of his family members in the years following the war.

    Oral history interview with Ionel Ghelman

    Oral History

    Ionel Ghelman, born on March 27, 1929 in Bucharest, Romania, discusses his mother’s death in 1938 and being raised by his maternal aunt; experiencing antisemitism; seeing boys in 1936 practicing to be in the Iron Guard in the future; the German occupation in 1940; the events in January 1941, including pogroms, stores being burned, and Jews being killed; ration cards and how Jews’ ration cards were half of Rumanians’ cards; the Allied bombardments of Bucharest from late 1943 to early 1944; seeing Russian tanks and troops in August 1944; leaving school in 1946 to work in a locomotive factory; rejecting the Communist Youth Party and feeling a connection to Zionist Hashomer Hatzair; going to Bukovina to prepare for kibbutz in Israel; the banning of Zionist organizations in 1949; being a draftsman for oil pipeline company from 1948 to 1950; marrying a Romanian woman in 1956; his children; being expelled from the Communist Party because parents went to Israel; getting visas for Hungary, France, and Germany in 1976; going to New York in April 21, 1977 with the help of HIAS; and settling in Washington and working for Bechtel.

    Oral history interview with Irimia Solomon

    Oral History

    Irimia Solomon, born on November 3, 1924 in Dorohoi, Romania, describes his parents, who were divorced; how he and his mother lived with his grandparents in Falticeni, Romania; his granfather’s farm; the Jewish community in the town and his family not being particularly religious; Jews in Moldovan cities; his education; playing soccer with non-Jewish children; hearing about antisemitism; wanting to go to Palestine; going to school in Bucharest, Romania to learn a trade; his relationship with his father; an uprising in Romania in September 1940; the Iron Guard (Garda de Fier); returning to Falticeni in December 1941; going to Dorohoi; his father being taken away in June 1942; being taken to forced work, unloading rail cards and sweeping; being deported with his mother to Transnistria and conditions during the journey there; having to trade in their Romanian money for Russian rubles; arriving in Sharhorod, Ukraine; being housed in a synagogue for several weeks; staying in a room in a house of a Christian family with other Jews; being in a ghetto, where there was religious life but no cultural life; building roads and sleeping overnight in rail cars outfitted with bunk bed; typhus in Sharhorod and helping to bury the dead; his mother not working and staying indoors; being helped by a cousin’s Christian husband; being taken back to Dorohoi in December 1943; moving from house to house until they could contact relatives; not feeling relief or happiness; his mother being treated as a war widow and being allowed to sell certain items, such as stamps, alcohol, and tobacco; returning to school and going to the polytechnic in 1945; waiting from 1958 to 1972 to get a passport; going to Israel, where his wife did not like the heat; going to Canada, where they settled in Toronto; working as an engineer; and moving to Montreal.

    Oral history interview with Lotte Salus

    Oral History

    Lotte Salus (b. Charlotte Helena Cohen) discusses her childhood living near the Dutch border in Germany; working for a Jewish family; being arrested and pressed into labor after Kristallnacht; being sent to Amsterdam, Netherlands by her father; living with other Jewish teenagers in The Hague, Netherlands; learning her family had been deported to Westerbork; moving to Amsterdam in May 1940; receiving orders to register with the police; being deported to Westerbork; reuniting with her family; daily life in Westerbork; volunteering to go to Theresienstadt with her parents in 1944; her experiences in the camps Auschwitz, Stutthof, and Praust; being taken on a death march in March 1945; liberation by the Russians; sexual violence perpetrated by the Russians; returning to Germany; immigrating to the United States in 1949; and marrying and starting a family.

    Oral history interview with Irena Kirkland

    Oral History

    Irena Neumann discusses her childhood in Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic); not having a Jewish identity or religious education; evacuating Prague before the Munich Agreement; returning to the city and learning she was Jewish; adapting to restrictions placed on Jews; her feelings about wearing the yellow star; being deported to Theresienstadt with her family; daily life in the camp; contracting encephalitis; being deported to Auschwitz; conditions in camps Auschwitz and Sachsen Chemnitz; returning to Theresienstadt in May 1945; reuniting with her parents; liberation by Russian soldiers; returning to Prague; beginning university; being arrested and released by communists; and immigrating to the United States in 1956.

    Oral history interview with Hans Hirsch

    Oral History

    Hans George Hirsch discusses his early life in Stuttgart, Germany; his father’s role as executive director of the German Jewish Community; graduating gymnasium in 1934; prewar antisemitism; the difficulties he experienced attending university and holding a job in Nazi Germany; visiting Palestine in 1937; receiving a visa to leave for the United States in 1937; working on farms in the U.S.; trying to get his parents out of Europe; teaching German prisoners of war farm management from 1943 to 1946; his career trajectory in food administration and policy; and his retirement from foreign agricultural service.

    Oral history interview with Milton Shurr

    Oral History

    Milton Shurr, born January 28, 1911 in the United States, describes his work with the Jewish Welfare Fund in Oklahoma City, OK in the early 1940s; his draft into the military and entering Officer’s Candidate School; being shipped overseas to England, where he worked in preparation for D-Day in June 1944; his recruitment by the Civil Affairs Unit of the Military Government to gather and identify medical supplies left behind on Omaha Beach, France; helping to provide food for the 15,000 survivors of Buchenwald and working with the Red Cross and Joint Distribution Committee; traveling to Bavaria, Germany to work has a health welfare officer; working to reopen schools, hospitals, banks, and other institutions in Germany; maintaining correspondence with his wife in America during the war; returning to the United States after the war and moving to Chicago as an assistant in health planning; and sharing what he had witnessed in Buchenwald after years of being unable to speak about it.

    Oral history interview with Ludwig Jacob

    Oral History

    Ludwig Jacob discusses his early life in Schmalkalden, Germany; being arrested with his parents on Kristallnacht; being imprisoned in Buchenwald for a month; leaving on a Kindertransport to Holland; living in a children’s home; the German invasion; moving to his brother’s home in Amsterdam; the arrest of his brother, who subsequently was imprisoned and died in Mauthausen; receiving a deportation notice; choosing to live under a false identity; moving to Paris, France and working with the underground; sabotaging the German defense organization where he worked; being denounced and arrested; spending time in Fresnes prison before being deported to Drancy; jumping off the train on the way to Buchenwald; rejoining the resistance; working for Americans in Paris; immigrating to the United States in 1947; and his marriage and life in the US.

    Oral history interview with Barbara Artman

    Oral History

    Barbara Feuerstein Artman, born September 12, 1923 in Kosice, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia), discusses her parents Elizabeth and Henry Feuerstein and two younger brothers; her 14 aunts and uncles and 27 first cousins, who all perished in the Holocaust; her family’s move to Mukacheve, Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine), which in March 1939 was occupied by Hungry; the Nazi invasion of Hungary in 1944; being forced to live in a ghetto; conditions in the ghetto; her deportation with her family to Auschwitz; conditions in Auschwitz; the treatment of camp guards; being sent to a labor camp near Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) with her mother; their liberation by the Russians while on a march; walking, at the end of the war, to Krakow; reuniting with one brother; attending medical school but changing her major to chemistry; contacting uncles in United States who arranged for visas and transportation to the US for her, her mother, and her brother; and settling in Forest Hills, NY, where she married another refugee and had one son.

    Oral history interview with Fritz Schonbach

    Oral History

    Fritz (né Frederic) Schonbach, born in 1920, discusses his middle-class childhood in Vienna, Austria; attending private school until Jewish restrictions began in 1938; how life changed with the Nazi annexation of Austria; antisemitism in Austria and the terror campaigns; fleeing to Italy then to England in 1939; his family fleeing to Argentina while he remained in England; his internment in England because of his Austrian background; volunteering for the Australian army; daily life in the army; being discharged in 1946; enrolling in art school after the war; meeting his wife; reuniting with family in Argentina; immigrating to the United States in 1959; and discovering what happened to various family members in the war.

    Oral history interview with Charles Barber

    Oral History

    Charles Barber, born in 1932 in Budapest, Hungary, describes his father, who owned a liquor store; attending a public grade school, where some of the non-Jews wouldn't speak with him; his memories of the first bomb being dropped in Budapest in 1939; his father being drafted into the labor corps of the Hungarian army; his mother’s work as a tailor; being an only child; his father dying after two months in the labor corps; his mother being taken to a camp for eight months in 1943; living with several different people; his mother returning home; his memories of feeling guilty for telling his mother that he was hungry; the Jews being summoned to the courthouse in town and being separated from his mother by the officials; going to live in an orphanage with a Swedish flag out front; the Russian army and their activities in Budapest; his aunt sending him to the Red Cross then a Zionist orphanage in Sagat; returning to Budapest to work in a factory; attending law school but leaving when the revolution began; going to Austria and then the United States with the help of the Red Cross; living with an uncle in the US; becoming an accountant, attending Queensborough Community College and then Bernard Baruch College; working for ABC Transnational Transport; getting married to an Austrian Holocaust survivor; the effects of his Holocaust experience; losing his faith when he lost his parents; visiting Europe; antisemitism in Hungary; wanting to go to Israel; possessing a letter from his mother, which she wrote while she was in Bergen-Belsen, and a picture of his parents (which is in the USHMM Photo Archive); and his other family pictures.

    Oral history interview with Tibor Borsos

    Oral History

    Tibor Borsos, born on March 12, 1927 in Budapest, Hungary, describes his highly intellectual Catholic family; his family moving to Debrecen in 1936; having many Jewish friends; how he “looked Jewish” and was sometimes made fun of; his family’s possession of an American flag, National Geographic magazines, and a censored version of Time magazine; his family burning the American flag March 21, 1944 to be safe; his family storing carpets, silver, and jewelry for Jewish friends and hiding them in the university library; his mother being denounced, arrested, and released; his family leaving Debrecen in May 1944; witnessing Jews being rounded up; going to Budapest and living next door to a Swedish protected house; the closing of schools in the fall of 1944; his family going in December 1944 to Halle an der Saale, Germany, where his father taught in a medical school; being drafted into the Hungarian Army in March 1945 and riding on a train for two months to avoid finding his unit; finding his brother on May 8, 1945 in Mitterald; being rounded up by Patton’s troops and sent to Ludwigshafen, Germany; being sent to a POW camp in Heilbronn; going to Gottingen in the British Occupation Zone; sailing to the United States in December 1949 on the USS Harry Taylor; earning a Ph.D. in chemistry at Johns Hopkins; researching cancer at NIH; marrying a survivor of Bergen-Belsen; and his feelings about not being officially Jewish.

    Oral history interview with Robert Kertesz

    Oral History

    Robert Kertesz, born in 1933, discusses his childhood in Budapest, Hungary; antisemitism in Budapest; his family; his religious upbringing; being stuck in Hungary due to travel restrictions; his father being conscripted into the Hungarian Army; the Hungarian Nazis and Arrow Cross Party members in his neighborhood; the increasing antisemitism and abuse; how the ghetto grew in 1943; finding safe houses for children; escaping from the ghetto after his parent’s deportation; hiding in his Christian aunt’s home; returning to Budapest to escape violence; returning to the ghetto; living conditions in the ghetto; liberation by the Soviets; looting by the Soviet Army in the city; working as a guide and interpreter for Russians; his parents’ return; living in a displaced persons camp; immigrating to the United States in 1948; and his life in the U.S.

    Oral history interview with Fred Kahn

    Oral History

    Fred Kahn, born December 19, 1932 in Wiesbaden, Germany, describes being raised until he was six years old by an aunt (Rosa Nassauer) in Wehen, Germany; his older brother, Walter; his Christian friend, Walter Kaltwasser, who protected him from young Nazis; being raised religious by his aunt and uncle; his grandfather dying in 1938; being sent after the Munich Agreement to Aachen, Germany, where he crossed the border and joined his parents and brother in Verviers, Belgium; his father’s successful career as playing bridge; his aunt and uncle being sent to Łódź, Poland; starting school in Belgium; his parents and life in Verviers; going to Liege and Brussels in May 1940 with his family; returning to Verviers; Jews having to register; the small right-wing party, Rexiste, which collaborated with the Nazis; his father being interrogated; getting false identities with the last name Jejeune; being taught Catholic prayers; getting scarlet fever in the spring of 1942; leaving his school after getting in a fight; his principal helping him; going into hiding and the various ways he entertained himself; moving from village to village in 1943; getting a job in 1944, carrying milk; being liberated in September 1944 by the American Army; life when he was in hiding; his mother’s accused of being a German spy and arrested; the Battle of the Bulge; events he heard about involving the underground; factors that helped him survive; developing a sense of humor; and considering Verviers his hometown.

    Oral history interview with Susan Warsinger

    Oral History

    Susan Warsinger (née Hilsinrath), born in 1929, discusses her family and childhood in Bad Kreuznach, Germany; her memories of Kristallnacht; escaping to Paris, France; being homeless; fleeing to Versailles when the Germans invaded; going to Château des Morelles, a home for homeless children; her schooling; getting tickets to the United States from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society; immigrating to the U.S. in 1941; her life in the U.S.; her feelings about returning home to Europe; and her life since the war.

    Oral history interview with Arnold Weiss

    Oral History

    Hans Arnold Wangesheim, born in Nuremberg, Germany on July 25, 1924, describes his parents divorcing in 1930; his mother placing him in a very strict Jewish orphanage in Furth; his encounters with Hitler youth; getting passage on a Kindertransport with help of Quakers in 1938; going to Chicago, IL then Milwaukee, WI; running away from a Jewish orphanage and being placed with a family in Janesville, WI; attending a watchmaker’s college; enlisting in 1942 in the Army Air Corps and being a B-17 tail gunner; his training plane crashing in Utah in 1943 and being severely injured; going to OSS (Office of Strategic Services) in Washington in 1944; going in late 1944 to Paris, France then Germany; crossing the Rhine with the 4th Division behind German lines picking up mail from agents; seeing Nuremberg bombed; going back to Furth; going in April 1945 to Dachau to get important political prisoners, including the former French Prime Minister Leon Blum; locating the prisoners in Innsbruck, Austria; his counterintelligence work for de-Nazification and working with Hugh Trevor-Roper to hunt down Wilhelm Zander; being assigned to trace enemy assets including Nazi treasures and Reichsbank gold; his work interrogating Germans, doing anti-Soviet intelligence, and being sent to Czechoslovakia as a contact for Hungarian agents; returning to the US, attending school, and working for the US Treasury; and working for a law firm.

    Oral history interview with Sia Hertsberg

    Oral History

    Sia Hertsberg (née Izrailewitsch), born June 8, 1927 in Riga, Latvia, describes her early family life and schooling; the Jewish community and the state of antisemitism in pre-war Riga; the 1940 Russian invasion; her family’s persecution at the hands of the Russian communists; the 1941 Nazi occupation and implementation of Nazi race laws; the burning of Riga’s synagogues; the help her family received from non-Jewish friends; the establishment and the later liquidation of the Riga ghetto; how a Latvian soldier attempted to rape her; avoiding the Rumbula massacre; working as a seamstress in a Reichskommissariat workshop; her family’s transport to the Kaiserwald concentration camp; how her father saved her sister several times by hiding her amidst the trash or in a pot of soup when the Nazis were looking for young children; the Nazis’ theft of her childhood; the normalcy of discussing death; her family’s transport via ship and cattle car to Stutthof; the typhus epidemic and her work carrying the dead to the crematorium; her mother’s death; her and her sister’s escape from a death march; seeking shelter and being turned away by Polish peasants; liberation by Russian soldiers on March 23, 1945; hospitalization and her sister’s death; her deep depression at losing her family; her hospitalization in Kolomna, Russia; her return to Riga and reunion with her father; falling in love with her future husband; their attempts to illegally immigrate to the United States and her father’s subsequent imprisonment by the Russians; the birth of her two sons; finishing her schooling; her husband’s death; her move to Chicago, Illinois and her post-war life in the United States; and her father’s death on the same day as her sister, thirty years later.

    Oral history interview with Chava Frajhof

    Oral History

    Chava Frajhof (née Geister), born September 20, 1923 in Belzyce, Poland, discusses her family; the German invasion of Poland in 1939; hiding from the Germans; paying the Judenrat to be assigned work in Będzin, Poland; working as a seamstress; being sent to Kraśnik, Poland in 1943; being liberated by the Soviets; fleeing to Lublin, Poland; having a family; going to Frankfurt, Germany then Berlin, Germany; and immigrating to Brazil in 1953 to join her family.

    Oral history interview with Israel Frajhof

    Oral History

    Israel Frajhof, born March 3, 1920 in Krasnik (near Lublin), Poland, describes experiencing violent antisemitism in 1933; the establishment of a ghetto in the fall of 1942; the typhus epidemic and conditions in the ghetto; working outside the ghetto; the deportation of old men, women and children deported to Majdanek and Treblinka in December 1942; trying to become a policeman but being declined permission; doing carpentry work for Germans making furniture; appels, beatings, and sleeping in the synagogue; meeting his future wife Chava Geister, who was in Krasnik camp; the Russians’ arrival in Lublin on July 22,1944; the death march to Germany and escaping into the forest for 10 days; meeting up with Chava and going to Krasnik; going to Lublin; getting married in January 1946; going to Berlin , Germany and being helped by the UNRRA; going to Frankfurt, Germany; going to Brazil in 1953; visiting Majdanek in 1986; and living for his wife and children.

    Oral history interview with Edward Novakoff

    Oral History

    Edward Novakoff, born in 1926 in Boston, Massachusetts, discusses his Ukrainian and Lithuanian immigrant parents; enlisting in the U.S. Army in December 1943; being shipped to Marseilles, France with the 90th Infantry Division; seeing his company wiped out in November 1944; fighting in southern Germany in January 1945; arriving at Flossenbürg in May 1945 and seeing the conditions and the survivors; his transfer to the 26th Regiment, 1st Infantry in August 1945; guarding prisoners for the Nuremburg Trials; having contact with Nuremburg prisoners; returning to the U.S. in December 1945; his life after the war; and helping to create the largest Jewish cemetery in the Boston area.

    Oral history interview with Celia Feldschuh

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Nicole Yancey

    Oral History

    Nicole Yancey (née Guggenheim), born July 26, 1941 in Saint-Amand-Mont-Rond, France, describes having one sister, Nanette, born November 1938; being separated from her family when she was two years old and sent to a farm to live in a safe and secure environment; still today calling the farmer and his wife her real grandparents; members of the French Resistance coming in for meals because the farm was close to the demarcation line and there was lots of Resistance activity; her daily routine of working, hiding, and eating; how her relationships were all very harmonious; being moved back to Orléans, France when she was five years old and starting school; the severe personality changes of her parents because of their experiences during the Holocaust; the torment her father experienced because he was not able to save his brothers from being murdered; being sponsored by a French/American agency to attend William and Mary College, where she met her husband; remaining in the Tidewater, VA area; converting to Catholicism because her husband is Catholic as are her children; her position now as Consul for the French Embassy in Norfolk, VA; and her assertion that tragedies like the Holocaust will continue as long as people do not learn to accept each other and their differences.

    Oral history interview with Jaffa Munk

    Oral History

    Jaffa Munk (née Noemi Donath), born April 10, 1931 IN Ónod, Hungary, describes her father Philippe, who was a Rabbi, and her mother Olga Shick Donath; having one brother, Joseph, and one sister, Esther Judith; living a very normal life with a family that was religious yet open-minded and encouraged academics; the many changes that began in 1942 and 1943; being moved in May 1944 to the ghetto, where her father was put in charge; being sent to Auschwitz; the brutal arrival and her father’s last words to her: “Wherever you go, continue to believe in God;” being marched to Birkenau, which was the very last time she saw her mother; being selected by Mengele in September 1944 to go to Bergen-Belsen and the grim living situation there; the forced evacuation in January 1945 and a subsequent six week death march; escaping to a forest and being liberated May 8, 1945 by Russian soldiers; eventually returning to Budapest, Hungary, where she lived at an Orthodox refugee orphanage facility, which was started by Esther Eckstein with education as the primary goal; going with a Zionist group with 1800 refugees to Palestine on a boat leaving from Bucharest, Romania and the refusal of the British to allow them entry, but finally being allowed to land at Haifa, Palestine; the break-out of war in 1947 and the desperate living conditions during the war; being taken to Tel Aviv, Israel, where there was less danger and where she attended teacher’s seminary; meeting her husband, who was in the Army; the birth of her first son, Gabriel, which was the highlight of her life because it meant continuation of her family; her teaching positions, starting with 1st grade, where students came from 30 different countries; and how her personal strengths are her sense of hope and having a positive outlook.

    Oral history interview with Frances Hirshfeld

    Oral History

    Frances Hirshfeld (née Frieda Miriam Rosenbloom), born in 1918, discusses her family and childhood in Opatów, Poland; moving to Zawiercie, Poland and its local Jewish population; the beginning of the war; her religious life; antisemitism; Kristallnacht; going into hiding in Ukraine and returning to Poland; the Judenrat; adjusting to anti-Jewish laws; moving into the ghetto; living conditions in the ghetto; being deported to Auschwitz in 1943; living conditions in Auschwitz; being moved to Birkenau; contracting typhoid fever and scabies; lack of medical care; bombings near the camp; returning to Auschwitz; hearing about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; working in a munitions factory; being on a death march to Ravensbrück; escaping into a forest; liberation by the Soviets; immigrating to the United States in October 1946; her husband immigrating to the U.S. in 1949; visiting Poland; her feelings about Holocaust deniers; and her life after the war.

    Oral history interview with Moris Gluckman

    Oral History

    Moris Glukman, born in Suceava, Romania in 1924, discusses his childhood; the rise in antisemitism; deportation announcements; his arrival in Bessarabia (in Moldova and Ukraine) with his family and how the peasants took the belongings of the Romanian Jews; travel to Moravia, Czech Republic; living at the mercy of the Romanian Gendarmerie; the spread of typhus and diphtheria during the winter of 1941-1942; how the Ukranian police guarded the village in Moravia; the German entrance into Moravia; building bridges and excavating coal from open mines; his knowledge about events in Bessarabia and Russian positions and the approaching front; working in a Kolkhoz; being liberated by the Russians; his schooling in Bucharest, Romania; and immigration to the United States in 1983.

    Oral history interview with Margie Rosenthal

    Oral History

    Margie Rosenthal (née Margit Mary Miedzwinski), born July 19, 1927 in Gleiwitz, Germany (Gliwice, Poland), describes her prewar childhood; her family’s immigration to the Philippines after the Nazi invasion so that her father could continue in the lumber business; her pleasant life in the Philippines until the Japanese bombing in December 1941 and subsequent invasion; severe changes in their lives in Pasay City as Americans began bombing nearby Manila; the delay in her family’s move to the United States in 1948 as a result of immigration quotas; her life in San Francisco; and her marriage to her husband, Ernie.

    Oral history interview with Emma Mogilensky

    Oral History

    Emma Mogilensky (née Hubert), born May 22, 1923 in Kronheim, Bavaria, describes living in the house that had been built by her great-grandfather; having one brother and one sister; living in a friendly and peaceful community until Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938 when antisemitism became so violent that she was sent to Nuremberg, Germany; enrolling in a very strict, all Jewish high school; moving to Augsberg, Germany after her father was released from Dachau; the children’s transport, going to Munich, Germany and being transferred to a boat; finally arriving in London, England, where she and the other children were chosen for English homes such that not one of them would become a public charge; being sent to live with a couple, both physicians, who were extremely helpful; attending school again where English Literature became her best subject; being a Fire Watcher at St. Paul’s Cathedral and joining the British Army when she was 17; antisemitism in the Army; being a cook for 2,000 men; receiving her GED; subsequently attending college on the GI Bill; a trip to Israel with her children after her husband’s death; finding that the cemetery where her grandparents were buried was not desecrated and finding their graves; visiting her foster parents in England every year; and her serious commitment to speaking about the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Isaiah Henig

    Oral History

    Isaiah Henig (né Yeshiah Henig), born in 1915, discusses his childhood in Szydlowiec, Poland; his family and the Jewish community; his religious upbringing; the absence of antisemitism before the war; changing anti-Jewish attitudes after the German occupation; the outbreak of the war and changes in daily life; being conscripted for forced labor; the creation of the ghetto; living conditions in the ghetto; working as a laborer in Starachowice, Poland; diseases in the camp; working to build replacement parts for machines; not believing reports about Jewish deaths; being deported to Birkenau in the summer of 1944; working in a factory; being moved to other concentration camps, including Mauthausen and Hannover; Allied bombing of the area; being deported to Bergen-Belsen; living conditions in the camp; his job building cannons; liberation by the British; moving to a displaced persons camp; immigrating to the United States in 1951; his life after the war; and his feelings about what happened.

    Oral history interview with Ida Henig

    Oral History

    Ida Henig (née Markowicz), born in 1924, discusses her family and childhood in Lódź, Poland; Łódź’s Jewish community and economy; not experiencing antisemitism before the war; changing anti-Jewish attitudes when the Germans invaded; fleeing to Częstochowa, Poland; working in the ghetto; not believing stories of mass murder; the Jewish police; liberation by the Soviets in January 1945; going to Germany; coming to the United States in the 1950s; the fates of her family members; and her feelings about the Holocaust and war.

    Oral history interview with Marcel Drimer

    Oral History

    Marcel Drimer (b. Marceli Drimmer), born in 1934, discusses his childhood in Drohobych, Poland (present day Ukraine); his family; his religious upbringing; life before the war; the Russian occupation; the German invasion in 1941; the looting of Jewish property; the deportations in 1942; moving into the ghetto; the fates of his family members; Ukrainian and German police; the Judenrat; hiding in an attic for a week; escape plans being postponed due to the death of his father; how his female relatives were saved by a woman who was recognized as a righteous gentile; their living conditions while in hiding; liberation by the Soviets; adjusting to life after the war; his education; difficult living conditions in Poland; post-war anti-Semitism; immigrating to the United States in 1961; his family going to Israel; and his feelings about the war, Poland, and anti-Semitism.

    Oral history interview with Michael Silberstein

    Oral History

    Michael Silberstein (né Mieczyslaw Silberstein), born in 1930 in Grudziadz, Poland, discusses his family; life before the war; the arrival of the German Army when he was nine years old; moving to Łódź, Poland; the establishment of the Łódź ghetto; being an errand boy and getting arrested in 1942; escaping arrest; living conditions in the ghetto; being deported to Birkenau in the summer of 1944; being sent on a death march in January 1945; arriving in Mauthausen; conditions and life in Mauthausen; liberation by the Americans; reuniting with his family; meeting family in England; immigrating to the United States in1952; being drafted into the U.S. Army; and his life after the war.

    Oral history interview with Joan Schwab

    Oral History

    Joan Schwab (née Nussbaum), born on March 24, 1926, describes living in the Tiergarten area of Berlin, Germany; her memories of Kristallnacht and how two men came for her father; being placed on a Children’s Transport to England on May 21, 1939; staying with Norman and Elsie Denham and going to secondary school and Hebrew school; her brother joining her in August 1939; evacuating in September to Chichester; conditions in the home, where she shared a bed with four girls and showered every two weeks; graduating from high school in 1944 and going back to Denhams in London; sleeping in an air raid shelter when V2 rockets attacked; going after the war to the Joint Distribution Committee in Munich, Germany and finding out that her parents perished in Auschwitz and her grandfather died in Theresienstadt; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Erwin Deutscher

    Oral History

    Erwin Deutscher, born on January 28, 1923 in Vienna, Austria, describes being raised with thorough religious training; being in the Zionist Youth group, HaShomer HaDati; how his maternal grandfather had gone to the United States in 1898 to Oklahoma City, OK; his Bar Mitzvah in 1936; hearing about Hitler’s arrival on March 11, 1938; his father’s dairy business closing; his mother being arrested; getting notice that his youth group was going to go to Palestine and meeting Eichmann at the emigration office with his father; conditions getting worse in Vienna; traveling with 25 others by train to Trieste and by boat to Haifa and arriving October 24, 1938; going to Mikveh Israel agricultural school for two years then to Bnai Akiva yeshiva for another two years; working for Haganah and meeting his wife; fighting in the Israeli War of Independence; his father being taken to Dachau after Kristallnacht and then to Buchenwald from June 1939 to January 1940; his parents immigrating to the United States; his life after the war working for a life insurance company; and getting a Ph. D. in Hebrew letters at Hebrew Union College.

    Oral history interview with George Pick

    Oral History

    George Pick, born in Budapest, Hungary on March 28, 1934, describes his very large extended family; his father losing his job in May 1939 and being sent on labor brigade in September 1940 for three months; seeing German tanks in the streets on March 9, 1944 and the subsequent anti-Jewish laws after including wearing the yellow star and not being allowed to attend school after April; his father having to leave again; being ordered to move to special Jewish houses in the summer of 1944; the air raids in Budapest and the massive bombings on July 2, 1944; his father’s return; he and his mother joining his father in hiding in a uniform factory building in November 1944; the factory being raided December 2, 1944 and bribing their way out; being taken to a Red Cross building and running away; going to the ghetto on December 14, 1944 and his father being in the ghetto police; the siege of Budapest; Wallenberg saving Jews from a massacre in January 1945; liberation; starting school; his Bar Mitzvah in 1947; attending university; going to Austria and then the United States, where his uncle lived; working for the Navy as mechanical engineer and retiring in 1996; his three marriages and not having children; and his commitment to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Oral history interview with Hedi Pope

    Oral History

    Hedi Pope (née Politzer), born March 18, 1920 in Vienna, Austria, describes her prosperous family, which was neither religious nor political; wanting to be a dancer as a child; the increase in anti-Semitism in Vienna; her memories, day-by-day, of Hitler’s invasion of Austria in March 1938; rising fears to speak out about Hitler’s actions; her memories of Kristallnacht; her father being sent to Dachau; the difficulty of getting all the documents to go to the United States; immigrating to the U.S. in January 1939; living in Newark, NJ; joining the Refugee Artist’s Group as a dancer; going to Miami University in Ohio and graduating in 1942; having two children; maintaining a dance studio in Alexandria, VA until 1980; and working with the volunteer corps at USHMM.

    Oral history interview with Bella Simon Pasternak

    Oral History

    Bella Simon Pasternak, born in 1928, discusses her liberation from Auschwitz by Russians; walking home to Hungary during the winter; being hospitalized with frostbite and starvation; living in a displaced persons camp in Innsbruck, Austria; immigrating to the United States in 1946; her first impressions of the U.S.; Americans’ disbelief at her experiences; meeting her husband, who was also a survivor; her religious views becoming more orthodox; desiring to immigrate to Israel; coping with the Holocaust many years after it occurred and still experiencing nightmares; and how important her grandchildren are to her.

    Oral history interview with Marion Friedman

    Oral History

    Marion Friedman (b. Traute Marion Julia Georgia Sulimas), born in 1922, discusses her childhood in Hamburg, Germany; being raised with her Christian mother and Jewish father; her parents’ upbringings; celebrating both Christian and Jewish holidays; her brothers’ immigrations to China and the United States; the Aryanization of her father’s bank; her mother’s resourcefulness; receiving a visa along with her mother to go to the U.S.; being sent to the U.S. on her own because her mother decided to stay with her father; learning of her parents’ arrest and deaths; adjusting to life in the U.S.; meeting her husband; returning to Germany long after the war; meeting her German family; and dealing with her losses on a daily basis.

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Strassburger

    Oral History

    Elizabeth Strassburger, born in 1938, discusses her childhood in a small town near Zakopane, Poland; her father’s arrest and imprisonment in Siberia; being forced into the Tarnow ghetto with her mother and grandmother; watching her grandmother being taken by the Germans; hiding under an assumed Christian identity; being drugged and hidden in a basement during dangerous times; the family who hid her and her mother; believing she was a Catholic; her Catholic schooling; liberation by the Russians; learning she was Jewish after the war; being smuggled out of Poland with her mother; living at a Jewish orphanage with her mother in Germany; learning her father was alive; moving to Italy to be with her father; immigrating to England with her family; immigrating to the United States; adjusting to life as a teenager in the U.S.; her marriage; studying social work in college; her volunteer work; and her family.

    Oral history interview with Jadwiga Dziekonski

    Oral History

    Jadwiga Dziekonski, born in 1919, discusses her family’s emigration from Kiev, Ukraine to Warsaw, Poland in 1921 because of the revolution; her Catholic upbringing; attending public school; following the political situation in Germany; meeting her husband; the German invasion and occupation; her father’s exile in London, England as a member of the Bank of Poland; moving to Warsaw with her husband; her husband’s role in the Home Army; her daughter’s birth in 1943; sheltering two Jewish women in her mother’s apartment; the Polish underground’s participation in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; the Warsaw Uprising; her husband’s arrest and imprisonment in Bergen-Belsen and Gross-Rosen; liberation; readjusting to life after the war; escaping to London through Sweden in 1947; leaving her mother behind; reuniting with her father; immigrating to Detroit in 1951; visiting Poland in 1988 to see her husband’s family; her feelings about being Polish; how she feels about Jewish people and German people; and her two visits to Israel.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Harvey

    Oral History

    Ruth Harvey, born in 1928, describes growing up with mixed Jewish and Christian heritage; her childhood in Berlin, Germany; being expelled from public school in 1938; attending a private Jewish school; witnessing the burning of Berlin’s temple during Kristallnacht; hearing Hitler’s speeches over loudspeakers; leaving Germany in 1939 with her mother to meet her father in Cuba; immigrating to New York in 1940 with her parents; growing up in New York City; moving to Washington, DC for a job with the State Department; getting married and having children; having a sense of confusion about her religious identity; why she chose not to visit any concentration camps; and volunteering at the USHMM.

    Oral history interview with Thomas B. Gardiner

    Oral History

    Thomas Brown Gardiner, born on March 26, 1920 in St. Louis County, Missouri, describes being raised by his widowed mother; life during the Depression; working for a house painter as a teen in St. Louis; getting married in 1940; working for a manufacturer that made small parts for the M1 rifle; being drafted in 1944; training at Camp Robinson in Arkansas; being sent to England in the fall of 1944; going to France; being assigned to the 45th Infantry Division; seeing action in the Vosges Mountains and Alsace-Lorraine; participating in the capture of Schaffenburg; going through Nuremberg and Munich; liberating Dachau as a member of L Company in the 157th Infantry Regiment; guarding the camp while waiting for the military police to arrive; billeting in apartment buildings outside of the camp, where the Nazi officers had lived; typhus in the camp and the high death rate of the survivors; speaking with the survivors and being shown the camp by them; going to Munich then Augsburg for a month; being sent to Le Havre, France; returning to the US; working in military camps in Texas until his release; the effect seeing Dachau had on him; and how he feels stronger in his Christian faith.

    Oral history interview with Roberta Jones

    Oral History

    Roberta Jones, born October 15, 1921 in St. Louis, Missouri, discusses growing up during the Great Depression; enlisting as a nurse in the United States Army; being commissioned as a second lieutenant with the 3rd Army and assigned to the 121st Semi-Mobile Evacuation Hospital; traveling by ship to England and helping in a hospital there; traveling to Luxembourg and then into Germany under dangerous conditions; going to Buchenwald; seeing a crematorium, stacked bodies, and starved prisoners still in uniforms; being offered bread by the prisoners; seeing a lampshade made of human skin in the office of a Nazi official; visiting a smaller liberated concentration camp and watching as American soldiers distributed clothing to naked prisoners; traveling with her hospital to a concentration camp near Linz, Austria (possibly Mauthausen); female nurses being kept outside of the camp fence as men worked inside the camp; meeting newly-liberated English prisoners of war who had been captured at the Battle of Dunkirk; returning to the United States and working at McCormack General Hospital in Pasadena, California; the difficulties of severely disfigured patients integrating into the community in Pasadena; marrying her husband; working at Camp Swift in Texas and Camp Polk in Louisiana, and, during the Korean War, in a military hospital in Michigan; encountering Holocaust deniers; and her insistence that her children know everything about her experience so that they can continue to spread the truth about the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Christine Cohen

    Oral History

    Christine Cohen, born April 27, 1940 in the Warsaw ghetto, describes living in the ghetto until 1942 when they escaped; using forged papers showing that they were Christian; having one brother, born in 1948; being sent alone to live with a farm family; being helped and protected by an aristocratic woman, who had befriended an old German officer while she worked for the underground resistance; living with a series of families and caretakers; living in Walbrzych, Poland; not knowing she was Jewish until she was 10 years old and not admitting to it until she moved to Israel (seven years later) in 1957; visiting Germany and Poland after the war and going to Auschwitz, all of which was very difficult; wanting to stay in Israel but because of her parents, moving to the United States; the bitterness she still feels about having her entire extended family taken from her; the recurring nightmares and physical ailments that are all tension-related; and her current life in San Antonio, TX, where there are only a few survivors of her mother’s generation.

    Oral history interview with Hugh Jenkins

    Oral History

    Hugh Jenkins, born December 29, 1914 in Lester, England, describes being the youngest of eight siblings, whose father was a Welsh minister; working before World War II with Quakers and being a conscientious objector even before the war; moving to London, England in 1944 to take part in training at a Quaker institute; being sent to Antwerp, Belgium after the training to do relief work; going to Belsen, Germany on April 22, 1944, soon after the camp had been discovered and the horrific scene; the various response processes at the camp; setting up a hospital, known as the “new camp,” maintaining a first aid station, and finding food; eventually being sent to Poland to be in charge of another camp; how even now he has a sense of desolation in how war is used to settle problems; working as the overseas secretary for the British Friends Relief Service until 1948, when he went to Philadelphia, PA to work with the American Friends Service Committee; and being sent to Washington, DC to be the director of the Foreign Student Service Center.

    Oral history interview with Rene Edgar Tressler

    Oral History

    Rene Edgar Tressler, born April 16, 1927 in Strakonice, Czech Republic, describes his childhood in Strakonice; his parents and brother; escaping to Prague, Czech Republic to live with his grandparents; his brother’s selection to be on the Board of Elders at Theresienstadt; how Theresienstadt was used as a showcase for the Red Cross; his deportation to Auschwitz; his camp number; being moved to Birkenau; his movement to Blechhammer camp; his experiences on a death march in February 1945; his arrival at Buchenwald; reuniting with his parents and brother after the liberation; escaping Czechoslovakia in 1956; immigrating to the United States; and authoring several books.

    Oral history interview with Stefan Wohl

    Oral History

    Stefan Wohl, born February 4, 1934 in Vienna, Austria, discusses the Anschluss in 1938; leaving Vienna through Switzerland to Kraków, Poland; traveling with 14 family members in September 1939 to Jaroslav, Zloczow, and Kolomyja; being captured with his father in November 1939 while trying to cross the border; being released and going to Zloczow; being on a transport for six weeks with his mother, sister, and other relatives in July 1940; arriving in the Yakutsk, Siberia labor camp settlement; leaving in May 1941 by train through Moscow to Lvov where they were reunited with their father; the German invasion on June 22, 1941; going with his sister to a farm in Jaroslav; going to Budapest, Hungary via Monkacs, Hungary (Mukacheve, Ukraine) in the fall 1942; changing their name to Wolinski and pretending to be Catholic; going to Leanyfalu in 1943 and staying for a year; the family going to Seged (Szeged), Hungary; being captured and jailed; being released and staying with an uncle in Budapest; his father’s illness; being liberated by Russians in January 1945; going back to Poland in the spring 1945; going to Sweden in the summer 1946; sailing to Brazil in October 1946; attending school and a university in the United States; and being a film producer in Brazil.

    Oral history interview with Yehuda Adam

    Oral History

    Yehuda Adam (né George Strn), born on July 3, 1929 in Budapest, Hungary, discusses being raised in a reform Jewish household; being put into forced labor in Budapest; receiving a Schutzpasse and his family working for Raoul Wallenberg; being liberated by the Soviets in January 15, 1945; going to Palestine in 1949; going to the United States in 1962; and living in both Israel and the US.

    Oral history interview with Arlette de Long

    Oral History

    Arlette de Long, born June 15, 1937 in Brocourt, Somme, France; describes her parents’ medical practice; her early love of the church and uncertainly whether her family was Jewish; villagers’ willingness to maintain friendship with the family because her father was the only physician in the village; having no memory of life before the war; the liberation of France; moving to a suburb of Paris, where she attended Protestant churches rather than synagogue; father’s unwillingness to discuss the Holocaust; her own reluctance to discuss the Holocaust until her sixteen year old daughter insisted that she talk about it; moving to the United States; her work as a psychotherapist for underprivileged children; and her feeling that her story is one of hope, compassion, and gratitude.

    Oral history interview with Eva Adam

    Oral History

    Eva Adam, born September 3, 1932 in Budapest, Hungary, describes her Orthodox Jewish family; her family’s awareness of what was happening to European Jews; their reluctance to leave Hungary; her father and brother’s membership in the Jewish Legion; serving as adjunct personnel to the Hungarian Army; changes in their lives in the late 1930s and early 1940s; her family’s unawareness of concentration camps before 1944; the Arrow Cross Party taking over the Hungarian police; deteriorating conditions for Jews; the murder of Jews at the Danube River; conditions in the ghetto; her post-liberation search for family members; finding that only three of her thirty-six family members survived Auschwitz; leaving Budapest in 1949; living in Israel and then the United States in 1961; her plans to return to Israel in the future; her pride in being a Jew and a Hungarian; the value in caring about others; and her strong work ethic as an explanation of why she was able to survive.

    Oral history interview with Herbert Bitter

    Oral History

    Herbert Jerome Bitter, born August 4, 1919 in New York City, discusses his parents who were Romanian immigrants; growing up in a Jewish neighborhood in Manhattan; becoming more religious during his service in the United Sates Army from 1943 to 1945; his experiences at Ohrdruf in 1945 soon after the Germans evacuated the camp; seeing three U.S. generals, Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton, at the camp on April 5, 1945; the generals’ return visit on April 12, 1945 with photographers; how the freed inmates at Ohrdruf were eager to tell their stories to the American liberators; the effect of witnessing the horrors of the Holocaust had on his Jewish identity; and his reluctance to talk about his experiences during the war, especially to children.

    Oral history interview with Rachel Goldfarb

    Oral History

    Rachel Goldfarb, born December 2, 1930 in Poland (now Dokshytsy, Belarus), discusses her life following her liberation by the Russians and her time living in the forests near Bialystok, Poland with her mother; working and living on Russian trains; traveling to Prussia to find shelter provided by various Jewish organizations and the Red Cross; traveling to Italy’s southern coast; attempting to board a ship to Palestine but being blockaded by British authorities; eventually getting to New York City in November 1947 after two and a half years in Italy; visiting Washington, DC after graduation from high school; taking a job with the District Court; attending George Washington University at night; meeting her husband, also a Holocaust survivor, and marrying in 1952; raising two children, both of whom are architects; finally visiting Israel; her good life in the United States; and her advice about valuing what you have in life.

    Oral history interview with Tania Rozmaryn

    Oral History

    Tania Rozmaryn, born on June 16, 1928 in Vilnius, Poland (present day Lithuania), discusses her family as strong Zionists; the changes that took place after the German occupation; family’s escape towards the eastern Russian border; working in the house of an SS officer and being offered guidance on survival; frightening years in the Kovno ghetto; going into hiding until 1944 when the ghetto was liquidated; her deportation with her mother to Stutthof; her mother’s struggles and strategies, trying to make her look less like a child so that she would be chosen for work; being sent to various work camps until March 1945 when they were liberated by the Russians and taken to Central Poland to a displaced persons camp; being sent to Germany with false documents to a kibbutz in Munich; going to the American Zone and teaching at a school in Bergen-Belsen in 1947; getting married in 1949; immigrating to the United States in 1950; graduating summa cum laude from the Teacher’s Institute and receiving an M.A. from Queens College in 1960; moving to Maryland in 1990 where she received an M.S. in Marriage and Family Counseling; nightmares about her Holocaust experiences; and her feelings about her Jewish faith.

    Oral history interview with Frank Ephraim

    Oral History

    Franz Gunter Ephraim, born February 19, 1931 in the Schöneberg district of Berlin, Germany, describes his family and being raised Jewish but not Orthodox; living an integrated life in the community until 1937 and his participation in the 1936 Olympics events; how Kristallnacht was the impetus for his family immigrating to the Philippines; attending a Hebrew school in Manila before the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Japanese invasion of the Philippines; the politics in Manila; experiencing an open Jewish life; their favorite playing areas, holidays, their several living spaces, and the daily routine in Manila; the attack on Pearl Harbor and his memories of the alarms, airplanes, gas masks, and lack of school for about a year; how after the US declared war there were more air raids and an exodus from the Philippines began; how the US was closed to Jews who still had family in Germany and Europe and his family could not go to the US; the Japanese invasion of the Philippines; the many wartime restrictions, including food shortages, looting, changes in currency, and a new governmental organization; how 1944 was the year when things were really deteriorated and the people were starving; the daily air raids from B24 bombers; the Japanese systematically burning down the city of Manila; how February 1945 brought total chaos and there was no food for several weeks; the liberation of Manila by US forces; leaving the Philippines on November 19, 1946; arriving in San Francisco, CA where relatives were waiting for them, along with HIAF; the closeness of the Manila Jewish community in San Francisco; attending UC Berkeley until the Korean War when he was drafted into the Army and sent to Europe as an interpreter; becoming a US citizen in 1952; his philosophy that the importance of Jews as a nation is far more important than Jews as a religion and that self-reliance is the most important quality to have; graduating from UC Berkeley in 1957; and working for a naval architect specializing in submarines, United Airlines, and the Maritime Administration in Washington, DC.

    Oral history interview with Peter Phillips

    Oral History

    Ernst Pieter Philipps, born December 5, 1931 in Essen, Germany, describes his twin brothers, who were three years younger; moving to Prague, Czech Republic in 1936 because of his father’s position with his company; life in Prague, which was normal until the Germans occupied Prague beginning April 1939; moving to Genoa, Italy and spending six months there; relocating by an Italian steamer to Quito, Ecuador, where living conditions were rather primitive and where at their second address they experienced antisemitism for the first time; spending two years in Ecuador; relocating to New York City, NY, where the instances of antisemitism directed at him were violent and ugly; his parents moving back to Rotterdam by 1950 while he remained behind in the house his parents had bought in Queens; attending City College of New York for five years and in 1955 joining the US Army and being sent to Germany where, among other duties, he worked as a teacher and Boy Scout leader for American and German boys; after leaving the Army, working first for the New York Times, a newspaper in Danbury, CT, and Business Week magazine; going to Washington, DC to work for McGraw Hill for 20 years; his experiences as a volunteer at the USHMM; and how he believes his experiences as a Jew have affected his outlook.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Ichiuji

    Oral History

    Joseph Ichiuji describes his parents as having immigrated to the US in the early 1900s; his father being a truck farmer and then owning a shoe repair business; working in a fish cannery and living in Fresno, CA until Executive Order 9066, which required that all Japanese Americans be evacuated to internment camps; being sent by train and truck to Flagstaff, Arizona, where they were assigned to barracks number three of the internment camp at Poston, AZ; conditions at the camp, which was run like an army installation with strict regimentation; volunteering for the 442 Combat Team, formed in 1943 and consisting solely of Japanese American soldiers who had families living in internment camps; fighting in Italy at the front lines north of Rome; liberating Livorno, Italy; helping liberate a subcamp of Dachau; conditions of prisoners still alive at the camp; helping two Lithuanian prisoners reconnect with important people in their lives; going home in December 1945 to find his parents released from the internment camp; helping his father with his business until May 1946 when he went to Washington, DC, where he worked in government service for 37 years; and the reunion of Japanese American soldiers in Los Angeles, CA, which a few of the survivors of Dachau attended.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Horowitz

    Oral History

    Ruth Horowitz (née Salzburg), born March 23, 1930 in Hamburg, Germany, describes her Polish parents Isaac Salzberg and Rose R. Kleinert and her sister; life in Hamburg, where they lived until November 1938; leaving Hamburg two days before Kristallnacht; how Hamburg was very open to Jews until Hitler’s regime, though she experienced many instances of antisemitism; being fascinated with the 1936 Olympics; how her father’s efforts to leave Germany began in 1936 and finally succeeded when he dramatically threatened to commit suicide at the US Consul if the visas were not granted; how crossing the Atlantic was very difficult, with cold and seasickness, but they arrived and went to Detroit, MI for a short while, then to New York City, NY, and finally to Washington, DC; learning to speak English by going to lots of movies; her father’s death at age 54; her mother’s transformation from being a housewife to running her husband’s jewelry business after he died; the wartime antisemitism, the problem of quotas, the Nuremburg trials, and the State of Israel; getting married in 1950; traveling to Germany in 1995; and her views on present day Germany.

    Oral history interview with Hermann Kosak

    Oral History

    Hermann Kosak, born May 2, 1924 in Vienna, Austria, describes his younger sister, Margaret; how antisemitism was pervasive and being involved in instances of physical violence as early as kindergarten; the growth of the Nazi movement in Austria; the Anschluss in March 1938; seeing Hitler arriving in Vienna in his car; how quickly the Jews were affected by the Nazi’s changes; Kristallnacht and being arrested the next morning; trying to get out of Vienna at age 14 and finally getting to Brussels, Belgium with his mother; the Germans attack on Belgium; how enrolling in art school after the invasion was the most important thing he did; learning survival, watchfulness, and self-reliance at age 16; beginning a diary on May 9, 1940, describing daily life, and keeping the diary until three weeks before liberation; how out of 50 family members, 43 were killed in camps; finally getting visas for him and his sister in November 1947 by forcing his way into the US Embassy and leaving for the United States; arriving in New York City, NY; being a painting instructor; being drafted, released to Reserves, working for a while, and being called back for the Korean War; being married and eventually getting a job with Boeing as an illustrator; and his views on the effects of the Holocaust on humanity.

    Oral history interview with Dolly Bestandig

    Oral History

    Dolly Bestandig (née Hirsch), born July 24, 1939 in Vilna (Vilnius), Lithuania, discusses her family, which had been in Lithuania for 11 generations; her father, who was a mathematical engineer, and her mother, who was a concert pianist; how her parents were both very religious and wealthy; being sent to the Vilna ghetto, the hardship of which marked the beginning of her mother’s psychological changes; the presence of 90 members of her mother’s family in the ghetto; how at age five, after living in the Minsk ghetto, she and her mother were sent to Auschwitz, where her mother managed to save her life by hiding her in a garbage can during the day while her mother worked; being moved to Bergen-Belsen with her mother and father after four months, where she was again hidden in a garbage can every day until liberation on April 15, 1945 by English soldiers; being sent to Sweden for medical care; being hospitalized in Gothenburg and then in Stockholm, where surgery on her palate was performed; leaving Sweden in 1947 and going to New York, where an uncle met her family; going to Mexico City, where two uncles were waiting; how her mother’s psychological state was deteriorating and she died in 1958; having flashbacks to her life in the camps; going to the Margaret Sanger Institute in New York City in 1967, where she received counseling help and tuberculosis was found throughout her body; recovering and adopting two children; being the Sub-Director of Hebrew instruction at the Yeshiva in Mexico City; and her feelings about her survival.

    Oral history interview with Goldie Gendelman

    Oral History

    Goldie Gendelman, born November 17, 1933 in Lechowichi (possibly Lyakhavichy, Belarus), Poland near Baranowichi (possibly Baranovichi, Belarus), discusses her parents, Chaim and Chana Wolochiwianski; growing up in an extremely Orthodox family; being raised to speak Polish and Yiddish; her family’s attempt to immigrate to the United States; how she and her family made it to Cuba and stayed there for 11 years; living in Regla, Cuba; her struggles to communicate in Spanish; being run over by a bus in Cuba; how she and her family finally were able to immigrate to the United States in 1948; her paternal uncle in the United States who assisted with the immigration process; her experience with antisemitism in Poland and Cuba; graduating from high school in the United States; volunteering at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; and her feelings about leaving Poland, living in Cuba, and starting a new life in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Rhoda Kuflik

    Oral History

    Rhoda Kuflik (née Ruzenka Husen), born in October 1937 in Kitev, Poland (now Kuty, Ukraine), describes living in the Kuty ghetto; escaping to Romania and hiding there; being liberated by the Soviets; and immigrating to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with William Hess

    Oral History

    William Hess was born William Verna on August 8, 1921 in Stuttgart, Germany. He was an only child and lived a pleasant life there. Despite the Nuremberg laws, he was permitted to continue his schooling as his father served during World War I. Nevertheless, they lost the service of their maid. William experienced little anti-Semitism in Germany but knew that Hitler made anti-Semitic speeches and had newspaper articles written against the Jews. His father's business suffered little from the boycotting but he sold it in 1938. Anti-Semitism was more severe in the outlying towns than in Stuttgart. William studied English for two years before immigrating to Danville, Illinois with his uncle's assistance in 1937. He had difficulty adjusting to the US so had an English tutor. Additionally, he had difficulty living on his wages of $12.50 as $9 went toward room and board and he also had to cover tutoring and transportation expenses. Kristallnacht and his father's internment in Dachau influenced his parents to leave Germany in 1939 for Danville.

    Oral history interview with Jutta Levy

    Oral History

    Jutta Levy, born in 1926 in Hamburg, Germany, describes growing up in a pleasant upper middle class family in a large Jewish community; listening to Hitler’s speeches on the radio and seeing him on a school field trip; witnessing Nazi book burning; learning of the death of Hindenburg; drastic changes in Germany after 1933; living in fear as children were taken from school and acquaintances disappeared; father’s dramatic pleading for visas to leave Germany; obtaining passage on the last train from Hamburg on November 6, 1938; traveling to Paris, France and then to Cherbourg, France, from which her family sailed to New York on the Queen Mary; arriving on November 11, 1938; learning about life in concentration camps from family members who survived the Holocaust; and her return to Hamburg and visit to Bergen-Belsen as an adult.

    Oral history interview with Wolfgang Mueller

    Oral History

    Wolfgang Mueller, born in Hanover, Germany on March 10, 1919, discusses his father’s role as a leader in the Jewish community and being head of B’nai B’rith; being aware of the Nazis at an early stage and seeing posters on kiosks denouncing Jews; refusing to say “Heil Hitler” in school and being advised by the principal to leave the country; going to London, England the summer after his Bar Mitzvah (1932); attending Ewell School and going back to Germany on vacations, pretending he was English; attending Cranbrook School with funding from a relative, Max Nordhaus, in the United States; receiving an affidavit from Nordhaus and getting a visa to the US; arriving in the US July 26, 1936 and moving to New Mexico; his mother and sister emigrating; hearing about Kristallnacht; being drafted in September 1941 and being sent to Florida; being in the Signal Corps; applying to officer’s candidate school and being in a group that called themselves the fighting 614s; being made into an MP after his superiors found out he was from Germany; being stationed in Tampa, FL and Jacksonville, FL; getting his American citizenship; volunteering to go overseas; being stationed in England as a technical supply sergeant and a liaison with the RAF; working after V-E Day in the Air Technical Intelligence Office; interrogating prisoners in Czechoslovakia and Austria and engineers at Zeiss works; being in Nordhausen for an hour; translating V-2 documents; being discharged on January 11, 1947; getting married; working in the meat business, real estate, and as a wholesale fish company; being proud to be Jewish; and his dedication to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Oral history interview with Klari Rudnai

    Oral History

    Klari Rudnai (née Takacs), born May 19, 1930 in Budapest, Hungary, describes her well-to-do family that was not at all religious; her older sister; her father, who was her hero, and her strict mother; how their cook was instrumental in saving their lives by getting counterfeit papers with non-Jewish names for them and by bringing them food as they hid in a one-room apartment in 1944; moving to a nice hotel and having to go to the hotel’s underground bunkers during all the bombing for almost nine months; her father’s seven siblings, who were all sent to Auschwitz; going back to the hotel, the Vadasqur, until it too was bombed; moving to a new villa in 1946; how when she was 19 years she was picked up by Russian soldiers in a jeep and had to fight her way out of an attack by them and was saved by American soldiers who took her to the hospital for a few days; marrying an American soldier and wanting to go to the United States; finishing high school; how the solitary military life and moving a lot to odd places didn’t suit her; divorcing her husband and moving back to Washington, DC; getting married in 1960 to a Jewish doctor, who had been in many concentration camps and was instrumental in getting her interested in her Jewish religion; volunteering at the USHMM in the Archives and Volunteer Services; enjoying all parts of talking to people and the volunteers in her job; and reading a lot of books and newspapers about the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Jill Pauly

    Oral History

    Jill Pauly, born May 1, 1933 in Cologne, Germany, describes her large, very well-to-do country family; the efforts of her grandmother and uncle to get money to Holland and make arrangements for the family to get to Kenya, where they bought two cattle farms that eventually were very successful; wanting a more orthodox Jewish life after the war; moving to New York City then moving to Vineland, NJ; her family buying a chicken farm, which was destroyed by a hurricane in 1952; the death of her father when he was 66 years old; her mother being her guiding light in terms of religious practice; attending the Pierce School of Business in Philadelphia, PA; working for the Quakers and then for a synagogue; getting her real estate license at the University of Maryland; her two adopted children; retiring in December 1993 from real estate; volunteering at the USHMM in Visitors’ Services and in the Office of Survivor Relations; having very strong feelings about people having access to the Museum; and some of the artifacts that she’s donated to the Museum.

    Oral history interview with Jack Reuben

    Oral History

    Jack Ruben was born Yaakov Ruben on December 8, 1921 in Cincinnati, Ohio and after six months the family moved to LA. He was the only child to Joseph and Sarah Basha Ruben who came from Russia and were not religious. His mother was a garment worker and his father sold fruits and vegetables in a horse and cart in the local area. Due to an eye condition, Jack went to a health camp for a year. Jack's father left the family in 1927 and since lost track of him. Jack was placed in foster homes until the 11th grade and would visit his mother on the weekends. He graduated from high school and worked his way through UCLA by working part-time. In summer of '43 Jack volunteered for the Air Corps and was sent to Pomona College for nine months to study meteorology. He was not picked to be a meteorology officer so joined the infantry and was selected to be a coding clerk. He went to several camps and was shipped to Le Havre. His division had little information of the overall war and no details of concentration camps. From there he was part of the effort to form a bridge over the Moselle and next in a major assault at the Rhine River. Jack was in the Division furthest east in Germany which took many German prisoners as they quickly drove east. His company going east and meeting a surrendering German battalion who were permitted to march on their own. His company formed perimeters around villages and often stayed overnight in a civilian's home. They went through a rural area and saw dead prisoners and dead horses along the road without understanding the situation. They reached Ohrdruf Concentration Camp and saw a few emaciated prisoners leaving and many dead bodies piled up or laying on the ground. Jack did not realize it was a concentration camp at the time or that others existed until later when he returned to the US. The Army newspaper did not publish such information. From there, they went to the Czech border for 3 months which they guarded until VE Day. Then Jack was relocated to a relocation camp near Paris until Christmas '45 when he was shipped home and arrived in NY on New Year's Day '46. He was discharged and married a second time as his first wife was killed in an auto accident. Subsequently, he received a BA in economics, MA in family counseling and PhD in psychology and has practiced 10 years in the field. He has four children. Jack still does not understand how the crimes in the concentration camps could have been performed by fellow human beings.

    Oral history interview with David Bayer

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Tilda Finzi Cohen

    Oral History

    Tilda Finzi Cohen (née Mazel Tov “Tilda” Finzi) born in Split, Yugoslavia on July 11, 1933, discusses Germans passing through their city in early 1941; her father getting called into the army and returning after one month; the Italians occupying Split, closing businesses and setting a curfew; not being permitted to go to school and the formation of community Jewish schools in different locations around city; her uncle being imprisoned and bringing him food; the Italian capitulation in September 1943; her family joining other people fleeing to partisans in the mountains; going with her mother to Brac Island, to Vis Island; sailing to Bari two days before Yom Kippur; living in a camp then a private house; the Germans dropping gas bombs on ships on December 2, 1943; her family moving to a village near Bari and attending school; attending a Seder arranged by the Jewish Brigade in Bitonto, Italy in the spring of 1944; how after the war their relatives told them of the camps and atrocities and advised them not to return to Split; her family moving to Milan, Italy in 1948; her family immigrating to the United States in 1950; finishing high school and attending college; getting married; and feeling that she is not a part of any country and that she lost her childhood.

    Oral history interview with Zwi Golombek

    Oral History

    Zwi Golombek, born in Warsaw, Poland on September 15, 1934, describes his father’s large construction business; the formation of the Warsaw ghetto and his family moving into one room on Nowolipki Street; his father’s ability to exit and enter the ghetto because he possessed building permits; being aware of danger and seeing beatings; his father striking a German guard in early 1942 and being taken to a ghetto prison then Treblinka; his Uncle Mietek placing him with the Abramzuc family in Jozefow, Poland and his mother and sister disappearing from the ghetto two weeks later; staying hidden for three years and his uncle visiting often and playing the family to hide him; being called Henyek; his uncle placing him in a kibbutzim in Poland and Germany after the war; going to Israel on October 6, 1948; working in Tel Aviv and joining the Israeli army in 1952; fighting war in 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982; getting married; and his two sons.

    Oral history interview with Samuel B. Hagner

    Oral History

    Samuel Hagner, born November 1, 1925 in Philadelphia, PA, discusses his Quaker parents; becoming a Quaker member at age 14; going to a Quaker work camp; being told about antisemitic events in Europe by a Jewish friend named Doris Weil and not believing her; his brother being a conscientious objector and working in a forestry camp during war; attending Oberlin College; being inducted into the army in January 1944 as a 1-A-O; training as a medical corpsman; sailing to Europe in December 1944; joining 7th Army in Germany and moving as the front moved; being made an armed guard at a billet even though he refused to carry a gun; going by truck to help liberate Dachau; the overwhelming experiences of seeing Dachau and feeling anger towards the SS guards; staying in the camp for one week; wavering about being a conscientious objector and writing to Doris to tell her she was right; going to a German hospital with nuns; going to France and the war ending before he was deployed to the Philippines; becoming a scrub nurse during plastic surgery on war victims in Indiana; being discharged and returning to college in the fall of 1946; practicing psychiatry for adults; living with his Dachau experience but not being at peace with it; and his continued abhorrence of war.

    Oral history interview with Werner E. Michel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Guta Jacobson

    Oral History

    Guta Jacobson (née Rogowitz), born on April 23, 1925 in Łódź, Poland, discusses her early life in Łódź; relations between Jews and Christians; her activity in a Zionist organization; various holiday celebrations; the German invasion of Poland and the implementation of Nazi race laws; food shortages; the establishment of the Łódź ghetto; her family’s indecision on whether or not to flee; life in the ghetto; losing her faith in God after seeing her parents give up their children; her father’s disappearance; the typhus epidemic; hearing rumors of Chelmno and Auschwitz; hiding from the liquidation of the ghetto and their eventual deportation to Auschwitz in August of 1944; her immediate understanding of what was happening in the camp; Dr. Josef Mengele taking her mother away; being transported to a camp in Birnbäumel, Germany (now Gruszeczka, Poland), to work digging anti-tank trenches; the differing conditions of various camps; hiding in the woods during a death march; her return to a liberated Łódź; marrying her husband; her reunion with her sister who had been recuperating in Sweden after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen; immigrating to the United States; the birth of her children; the death of her husband; her avoidance of discussing her experiences with her children when they were young; her motivations for sharing her story now; and her hopes that the world will never forget.

    Oral history interview with Helen Luksenburg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with William Luksenburg

    Oral History

    William Luksenburg describes going on a death march from Regensburg, Germany to Lebenau, Germany; a German farmer picking him up from the road, where he fell; being brought by the farmer to American troops stationed in the nearby town of Laufen, where he was treated for malnutrition; his cousin coming to the same camp a few months later; returning with his cousin to Bayreuth, Germany, where there were other family members; reuniting in Prague with his future wife, Helen, whom he met in the Blechhammer work camp; getting married in 1947; receiving money and support from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency; attending a technical school organized by the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training; immigrating to the United States in September 1949 with Helen; and becoming a mechanic and starting his own business. [Note: This interview focuses on the interviewee’s post-Holocaust experiences. There is an earlier interview focusing on the interviewee’s Holocaust experience. This interview can be accessed by requesting RG-50.030*140.]

    Oral history interview with Rose Weisfeld

    Oral History

    Rose Weisfeld (née Friedman), born on March 28, 1914 in Radom, Poland, discusses her early life and schooling; social integration between Jews and Christians at home and at school; keeping Jewish customs and traditions at home; her religious education; her brothers’ conscription in the Polish army; being badly injured and hospitalized for a year; her family’s forced relocation to the Radom ghetto; her father’s death; the liquidation of the ghetto; doing factory work; being transported to Auschwitz via cattle car; the process of selections; being transported to Ravensbrück in 1944; being liberated by Swedish soldiers and their compassion; weighing 32 pounds at liberation; her hospitalization in Denmark and Sweden; finding work in a factory and regaining her humanity; her marriage in Sweden to another survivor; the birth of her children; finding her brother through the Red Cross after four years; immigrating to the United States to be with her brother; the difficulties of adjusting to life in the US; and the importance of raising her children with Jewish traditions.

    Oral history interview with Ruth E. Greifer

    Oral History

    Ruth Greifer (née Dahl), born May 30, 1922 in Geilenkirchen (near Aachen), Germany, discusses her father, who was a cattle dealer, and her Dutch mother; attending a private Catholic school and experiencing antisemitism but being treated well by the nuns; how the plaque on father’s business was shattered in 1938; moving to Valkenburg, Holland in the spring of 1938; Germans occupying the city on May 10, 1940 and her family hiding in catacombs during the bombing; having to wear the yellow star and obey curfew; her father’s business being taken away; the Germans ordering them to leave in June 1942, but she was allowed to stay because she was sick; her brother and two aunts being taken to Auschwitz; how a Mr. Jansen from the underground arranged for she and her parents to go into hiding; going to a coal miner’s house, while her parents went to another; being thought of as a risk and being relocated to a doctor’s house to be a maid; going into hiding at the Robertson’s house near Treebeek and Hoensbroek with another Jewish woman; getting money from the underground organization; hearing about the June 1944 invasion; going to a house in Treebeek; the heavy bombing in the city and hiding in a potato bin for three days; being liberated September 17, 1944; returning to her parents in Valkenburg; the loss of all of her mother’s Dutch family; sailing to the United states in the spring of 1948; settling with her sister in Pittsburgh, PA; getting married April 8, 1951 and having three daughters; moving to Washington, DC in 1957; and her feelings about Germany.

    Oral history interview with Nesse Godin

    Oral History

    Nesse Godin (née Galperin), born on March 28, 1928 in Siaulai, Lithuania, discusses her life after the war; being liberated by the Russians in Chynowie (known as Chinow in German) near Wejherowo, Poland on March 10, 1945; suffering from typhoid and dysentery and weighing 65 pounds; joining her mother and brother in Feldafing DP camp; going to ORT and UNRRA sponsored classes; getting married to Jack Godin, who had escaped from the Vilna Ghetto and whose family was killed in Ponary; having her first child in Munich, Germany; immigrating to United States in 1950 and settling in Washington, DC; becoming a citizen in 1955 and working as a dressmaker for 26 years; raising her children; sharing her Holocaust experience; working with the UJA, Jewish Community Council and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and the US Holocaust Memorial Council; working on projects at USHMM, including the “Remember the Children” exhibit, the ID project, and within the education and development departments; and her thoughts on the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Maryla Korn

    Oral History

    Maryla Korn (née Orgel), born on June 10, 1938 in Kraków, Poland, discusses going with her mother first to Wieliczka and then to Bochnia between late 1940 and early 1941; hiding with a peasant family but crying so much that she was returned to her mother; going to a ghetto in Bochnia at the end of 1941; her mother working outside the ghetto in a factory; taking messages outside the ghetto and bringing back food; leaving the ghetto in June 1943 and separating from her mother; carrying diamonds and money, but no luggage and bribing Germans and the Judenrat; traveling by truck to the border then by foot at night; being guided by paid partisans; her grandfather being shot at Bochnia cemetery, her grandmother being taken to Auschwitz, and her uncle being taken to Belzec in the summer of 1942; being by Czech collaborators in Kosice, Slovakia; being released and proceeding to Hungary with help from the Joint; being caught and sent to a prison in Budapest and the Joint getting her out; going to Usod, Hungary in the fall of 1943 and staying there until April 1944 under name of Orglowska; living as a Christian; being treated for gangrene in her leg; the roundup of Hungarian Jews in April 1944; her mother stealing passes and going to Budapest; staying with a Jewish Polish friend and then going to Bucharest, Romania with help from the Joint; almost boarding two different ships in Constanta, Romania going to Palestine, one of which (the Merkur) sank and the other ended up in Cyprus; being liberated by the Russians in the spring of 1945; going to Budapest and staying in a children’s home while her mother went back to Poland to check on family; her mother setting up a business in Vienna, Austria with an uncle; her father returning traumatized from the war; going to Brussels, Belgium in the winter of 1946-1947; going to Israel in 1951; living in both Israel and Brussels until immigrating to the United states in May 1961; getting married in June 1961 to David Korn, who is also a survivor; visiting her parents in Germany; and her work translating for USHMM.

    Oral history interview with Michel Margosis

    Oral History

    Michel Margosis, born in Brussels, Belgium on September 2, 1928, discusses immigrating to the United States in 1943; being taken in by father’s cousin in Brooklyn, then to foster home; his parents coming to the US in 1946; graduating from high school in 1947; graduating with honors from Brooklyn College in 1951; enlisting in the army and being sent to Germany as an interpreter but requesting to be transferred; becoming a medic near Verdun; feeling very American, but did not speak about his childhood with other soldiers; his feeling about Germany; working at USHMM with the Speakers Bureau and translating materials; speaking about his past; and being featured in the book “The Triumphant Spirit” by Nicholas del Calzo.

    Oral history interview with Lena Jurand

    Oral History

    Lena Jurand (Salzberg), born in Przemysl, Poland on September 13, 1917, discusses being an only child, educated in a Catholic school then at a music conservatory; meeting her husband Julian Jurand in 1931 and getting married in May 1940; living in the Russian part of town; her father being chosen for the Judenrat when the Germans took over; Jews having to give up jewelry and wear a star; the ghetto being formed in July 1942; moving with parents and in-laws from Lvov; working in a factory disinfecting uniforms; her father being taken away and how she went to the Gestapo headquarters and saved him from deportation to Auschwitz; meeting a Polish woman in the factory who offered to hide her and Julian; hiding for 22 months in room off of kitchen in a woman’s apartment; being liberated by Russians in August 1944; living in an apartment with her husband and cousins; living in Munich, Germany with UNRRA staff of the Neu Freimann DP Camp; teaching music to child survivors in camp for one year; moving to Genoa, Italy, where Julian practiced medicine; visiting her uncle for six months in New York, NY; going to the United States in 1951; living in New Jersey, where Julian worked in state hospital as a psychiatrist; and Julian becoming the clinical director at St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, D.C.

    Oral history interview with Wallace Witkowski

    Oral History

    Wallace A. Witkowski, born January 12, 1928 in Kielce, Poland, discusses his escape from Poland on a ship to Goteborg, Sweden in 1948; going to the United States; how his sister was caught by the communists and imprisoned; his struggle to find his father who had immigrated to the United States earlier; settling in Detroit, Michigan and adjusting to American life; how his mother and sister arrived in the U.S. later; attending high school and then Wayne State University; getting married in 1951; working as a radio disc jockey using the on-air name Jan Alexander; earning a law degree; working in Washington, DC and traveling between the United States and Poland; working for the Federal Trade Commission; living and working in Micronesia; his thoughts on religion and how the Holocaust affected him; his identity as a Catholic; his work as a translator; and his work with the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission.

    Oral history interview with Peter Masters

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Lena Gitter

    Oral History

    Lena Gitter (née Lieba Rosenblatt), born in 1905 in Vienna, Austria, discusses her life after the Holocaust; immigrating to the US in July 1938 with her husband and small daughter; her husband who worked as a physician; feeling guilty for many years about having escaped Vienna before the Holocaust; her long involvement with the Montessori schools both in Vienna and the United States; the Montessori method; working with people in Mississippi under Johnson’s War on Poverty program; the death of her husband in 1974; her plan to donate her collection of early childhood education materials to a library in Vienna; working under several Presidents of the United States.

    Oral history interview with Jacob Wiener

    Oral History

    Jacob Wiener (né Koppel G. Zwienicki), born March 25, 1917 in Bremen, Germany, discusses his experiences in the United States after World War II; the reaction to the war by the American media; his wife’s experience on the Kindertransport; his memories of watching Nazi war crime trials on television; his thoughts on Israel and Palestine; the Eichmann trial; how he was involved with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum from its founding; Holocaust education in American schools; antisemitism in the United States; and how he founded a school for mentally disabled children in the 1950s.

    Oral history interview with Noah Roitman

    Oral History

    Noah Roitman, born in Baranowicze, Poland (Baranavichy, Belarus) on January 10, 1923, discusses his religious upbringing and schooling; being very athletic; receiving warnings from his Christian friends in November 1938; his town being under Soviet rule in 1939; people being deported and his house being burned down; the German invasion on June 27, 1941; the formation of a ghetto on December 12, 1941; wearing the yellow star and working in arms factory; joining the resistance group of Mome Kopelovitz; the first action in the ghetto in March 1942; joining the partisans led by Pougatchov in the forest in August 1942; his activities sabotaging trains and bringing others out of ghetto (saving approximately 80 people); being sent to Pinsk, Belarus in late 1943; joining a group led by Major Igor, attacking trains; being ordered into Russian Army in Slutsk, Belarus in December 1943; fighting Germans and seeing Warsaw destroyed; being wounded by a sniper outside of Berlin, Germany; running a canteen for the Russian Army at the end of the war; returning to Poland; helping Jews get to Czechoslovakia; being captured and jailed, but escaping to Łódź, Poland; meeting his wife; traveling through Germany and France to get to Israel; being detained in Cyprus for 3 to 4 months; having a construction business in Israel; and immigrating to the United States in October 1963.

    Oral history interview with Richard W. Peterson

    Oral History

    Richard W. Peterson, born September 29, 1925 in Iowa, discusses his family’s Danish background; growing up in a Baptist family; first learning about the war in Europe and his family’s concern for Denmark; antisemitism in Iowa; hearing about the attack on Pearl Harbor; his involvement with ROTC and Boy Scouts; attending Drake University; joining the Army Specialized Training Reserve Program (ASTRP); reporting to Fort Crook for the reserve program and then to Camp Dodge in Iowa; being sworn into the U.S. Army; training at Camp Livingston in Louisiana with the 86th Blackhawk division; being assigned to A Company, 342nd Infantry; being sent to Le Havre, France; traveling through France, the Netherlands, and Germany; fighting in a battle in Attendorn, Germany; entering what appeared to be a factory in Attendorn and seeing starving people there; the reaction of his comrades to seeing the prisoners; the liberation of Auschwitz; being sent to the Philippines from September 1945 to March 1946; finishing his degree at the University of Iowa; graduating from law school in 1951; getting married; his father’s appointment to the Iowa Supreme Court; how he was a United States Magistrate Judge; his three children; and how he feels about American current events, politics, and world news.

    Oral history interview with Riane Gruss

    Oral History

    Riane Gruss (née Wohl), born on August 18, 1932 in Vienna, Austria, describes her father, who was a banker in Kraków, Poland and an industrialist in Vienna, and how her parents lived half a year in each place; she and her siblings being raised by a governess in Vienna; being in Kraków on September 1, 1939; going to Jaroslav, where there was bombing, then to Zloczow and to Kolomyja; her father and brother being captured at the border and her brother’s release; returning to Zloczow; being sent to Siberia by the Russians in July 1940; her younger brother getting scarlet fever; arriving in August 1940 near Yakutsk and Aldan and going to a labor camp; conditions in the camp; the hard physical labor for adults; how in April 1941 the NKVD said mothers and children could leave; their New York relatives getting them Bolivian passports; leaving in May and meeting her father in Lvov (L'viv, Ukraine); going to a farm in country for four months after the German invasion on June 22, 1941; her family following her uncle Joseph Stieglitz to Munkacs, Hungary (Mukacheve, Ukraine); getting Polish Christian papers; going to Budapest, Hungary; going to Szeged, Hungary, where her father had to be hospitalized; the children being hidden in the fall of 1944 in a caretaker’s house in Buda, Hungary; escaping when the Russians arrived and reuniting with her parents; going with her family to Mako, Hungary for four weeks then to Vienna; her parents returning to Kraków; going with a smuggler to Brno, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic) and then joining her parents in Kraków; going with her family to Stockholm, Sweden; going to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in October 1946; going to New York, in February 1951; and getting married in December 195 and having two children.

    Oral history interview with Regina Spiegel

    Oral History

    Regina Spiegel, (née Gutman) born May 12, 1926 in Radom, Poland, discusses her post-war experiences starting with her liberation; traveling with 3,000 other female prisoners by train from Elsnig, Germany to Dachau, Germany; how the train stopped on the way to Dachau because the railway line had been bombed; how the train itself was bombed by the Allies while stopped on the tracks; being able to escape during the bombing; traveling with 15 other women by horse and buggy to Poland; sleeping in German homes while traveling to Poland; avoiding large groups of Russian soldiers; promising her mother and her boyfriend that if they were separated during the war, they would meet in Radom, Poland; how she and her friends boarded a train in Poznań, Poland without any money; meeting a man on the train with whom she had been imprisoned in Pionki, Poland; returning to Radom where she was told that returning Jews were being killed; returning to the Radom Ghetto, where many displaced persons were gathering; writing her name on a list of displaced persons in the Radom Ghetto; traveling from Radom to Kozienice to reunite with her boyfriend, Sam; leaving Poland with Sam and traveling by train to Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic); traveling with the Joint Distribution Committee from Prague to Pilsen, Czech Republic and then to Germany; staying with Sam in the displaced persons camp Föhrenwald; her marriage to Sam in 1946; moving to Stuttgart, Germany, where she learned to be a seamstress through ORT classes; her involvement with the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York; her religious beliefs and how they changed throughout the war; moving to Washington, DC; how she and Sam learned to speak English; working as a seamstress before giving birth to a daughter in August 1951; her thoughts on the Yugoslavian conflict; her work with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum during its early development; her activity with the Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Friends of Greater Washington; returning with Sam to Auschwitz in 1975; speaking publically about the Holocaust; receiving an award from the United Jewish Appeal; and how she and Sam take groups of 16 to 18 year olds to Poland and Israel through the B'nai B'rith Youth Organization.

    Oral history interview with Charles Stein

    Oral History

    Charles Stein (né Karl Robert Stein), born in Vienna, Austria, on November 28, 1919, describes his childhood; attending medical school at the University of Vienna; immigrating to the United States and arriving on December 18, 1939; his draft into the army on October 7, 1941; discovering that his parents had gone into the Łódź ghetto; training at Camp Ritchie in Maryland; going to Normandy, France with the 9th Infantry Division as the commander of a prisoner-of-war interrogation team; helping to liberate Nordhausen and interrogating its Ukrainian guards; becoming an Army captain and then the chief of the translation section in the Office of Military History at the Pentagon; serving in Korea and Tokyo for five years; marrying an Air Force lieutenant in Tokyo; returning to the US and settling in Washington, DC; working for the Air Force Intelligence and for the State Department until his retirement in 1978; serving as a foreign service officer and being responsible for the resettlement of refugees in Europe; and writing about his experiences during the war.

    Oral history interview with Hannah Kalman

    Oral History

    Hannah Kalman (née Hannah Finer Kalmanowicz), born in 1912 in Opoczno, Poland and describes her family; moving to Łódź, Poland when she was 12 and joining a Zionist organization; meeting her husband in the Zionist organization and getting married in 1937; moving into the Łódź ghetto in 1939; living with her son, sister, and nephew in a small room with bad conditions; being deported with her family on one of the last transports out of the Łódź ghetto; never seeing her son and nephew again after their arrival at Auschwitz; her transport to Waldeslust, Germany, where she did hard labor; going on a death march to Bergen-Belsen; conditions in the camp; being liberated with her sister on April 15, 1945; the death of her sister two months after liberation; traveling around Poland looking for relatives; reuniting with her husband later in Poland; moving to Germany and having a son; immigrating to the United States; settling in Scranton, Pennsylvania; having a daughter; and living in Israel for a short time but ultimately settling in the United States for medical treatment.

    Oral history interview with Morris Rosen

    Oral History

    Morris Rosen, born on November 10, 1922 in Częstochowa, Poland, describes his family; being forced to paint rooms for German troops during the war; his deportation to Theresienstadt; being forced on a death march to Buchenwald; receiving help from the Red Cross after the war; traveling around Poland and Germany trying to find his sister; his time spent in displaced persons camps; his memories of the Nuremberg Trials; immigrating to the United States and settling in New York; the mental stress with which he dealt after the war; attending the international law program at Columbia; moving to Baltimore, Maryland in November, 1949; getting married in 1953; collecting items from the World War Two era; and his reflections on the state of antisemitism in today’s world.

    Oral history interview with Sam Spiegel

    Oral History

    Sam Spiegel, born in Kozienice, Poland on August 23, 1922, describes his family and childhood; being forced into a ghetto; his father’s involvement in the underground movement; working for the Judenrat and getting papers to leave the ghetto and get extra food; his deportation to Auschwitz in 1942; meeting his future wife in the camp; the Ukrainian camp guards; conditions in the camp and how inmates helped each other; going on a death march as the Allies neared Auschwitz; returning home and experiencing antisemitism; spending time in displaced persons camps; working for the United Nations Relief Organization and the Joint Distribution Committee after the war; getting married; immigrating to the United States; and returning to Europe to visit the concentration camps.

    Oral history interview with Fred Gutter

    Oral History

    Fred Gutter, born on December 25, 1926 in Sanok, Poland, describes his family and childhood; his memories of celebrating the Jewish holidays and Sabbath services; attending a high school and experiencing antisemitism; increasing persecution against Jews in the 1930s; moving to Lwów because of the difficulties his family faced; his family’s capture by Russian troops and living under Russian control; being released by the Russians at the end of the war and briefly returning to Sanok; staying in several displaced persons camps; reuniting with his father after the war; receiving aid from the Joint Distribution Committee; spending some time in Palestine and fighting in the 1948 war; immigrating to the United States in 1959; and his feelings about American politics.

    Oral history interview with Henry Greenbaum

    Oral History

    Henry Greenbaum, born on April 1, 1928 in Starachowice, Poland, describes his family and childhood; his memories of his family celebrating the Jewish holidays; being too young to understand the persecution that was happening around him; his family deciding that one of his sisters should immigrate to the United States in 1937; the establishment of a ghetto in Starachowice; his deportation to a labor camp in October 1942; attempting to escape but getting severely wounded and having to stay in the camp; his transfers to Auschwitz and then Flossenbürg; going on a death march from Flossenbürg; his liberation by the U.S. Army on April 25, 1945; spending time in a displaced persons camp after the war until his sister in America could send papers for him and his brother; immigrating to the United States in June 1946; adjusting to life in America and finding a job at a department store; settling in the Washington metro area; and interacting with other Holocaust survivors who live in his community.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Alper

    Oral History

    Ruth Alper, born on February 18, 1932 in Germany, describes her family and childhood; experiencing little antisemitism as a child; her memories of Kristallnacht; receiving an affidavit from family in Detroit, MI in 1939 to immigrate to the United States; arriving in Cuba and staying there until 1941, when she and her family moved to Miami, FL; the small Jewish community in Havana, Cuba; listening to the progress of the war on the radio; experiencing antisemitism in Miami; her recollections of the response of the American Jewish community experiencing the war from abroad; and creating a new life for herself in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Michael Lin

    Oral History

    Michael Lin, born in Riga, Latvia on September 14, 1936, describes his family and childhood; the Jewish community of Riga; the beginning of the war in 1941 and his family being forced to leave their home to settle in Yaroslavl (IAroslavl' ), Russia; catching malaria and developing pneumonia in 1941 but not being able to get medication; moving to another small village in Russia, where he remained until 1944 when his family moved farther east; having to shave his head to avoid getting lice; his father’s draft into the Russian Army; the end of the war and preparing to return to Riga; his experiences with antisemitism in Russia; beginning school after the war in Latvia; his draft into the Russian Army in September 1955; attending school in Moscow after he left the army; immigrating to Israel in 1969 with his wife and children; immigrating to the United States a few years later; and his reflections on sharing his memories of the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Hannah Kalman

    Oral History

    Chana Kalman, born on January 20, 1912 in Opoczno, Poland, describes her family and childhood; her experiences with antisemitism; moving to Łódź, Poland when she was eighteen years old; participating in a Zionist organization with several other young people; working during the day and attending a Hebrew school at night; getting married shortly before the death of her father in 1937; giving birth to a child on January 25, 1939; moving into the Łódź ghetto in 1940 and struggling to find food for herself and her son; the liquidation of the ghetto in August 1944; her deportation to Auschwitz with her sister and being forced around by SS men; her transfer to Bergen-Belsen shortly before her liberation; finding out about the death of her husband and child; getting remarried in 1946 and having a son and a daughter; remaining in Germany as a displaced person until 1950, when she immigrated to the United States; settling in Scranton, Pennsylvania; spending some time in Israel once her children had grown up; and her reflections on life in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Dorrit L. Ostberg

    Oral History

    Dorrit Liane Ostberg, born in Vienna, Austria on September 29, 1929, describes her family; her father fleeing to Paris, France after the Germans entered Austria; escaping to Paris with her mother and sister but discovering that her father had fled to Yugoslavia; arriving in Yugoslavia several months later; obtaining Yugoslavian citizenship and living in Slavonski-Brod and Zagreb (both in present day Croatia); fleeing to Crikvenica, Croatia after Croatian guards arrested her father; her family’s deportation to an Italian internment camp on Rab; attending school until she contracted hepatitis and had to stay in a hospital for four months; her liberation in September 1943; her family fleeing on a fishing boat to Italy and living openly as Jews in Bari, Italy with two Italian women; immigrating to Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York in July 1944; attending junior high school; moving to New York City after the war ended; attending university and becoming a math teacher; getting married three times and having one son; and her religious feelings.

    Oral history interview with Alice Eberstarkova Masters

    Oral History

    Alice Eberstarkova Masters, born in Trstená, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia) in 1925, describes her youth; her experiences with antisemitism before the war; immigrating to England in 1939 on a Kindertransport; working as a secretary for the Czech government-in-exile in London during the war; following the BBC broadcasts of the war’s progress; the end of the war and discovering that her parents had died in Auschwitz; her reflections on the Nuremberg Trials; participating in Zionist and Jewish organizations while in England; immigrating to the United States in March 1948; working for the International Monetary Fund; losing her religious faith; getting married and starting a family after the war; and telling her children and grandchildren about her experiences during the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Martin Weiss

    Oral History

    Martin Weiss, born in Polana, Czechoslovakia (possibly present day Veľká Poľana, Slovakia) on January 28, 1929, describes his post-war experiences living in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic with his sister; receiving papers to immigrate to the United States in 1946 and living with a distant cousin; working at a butcher’s shop, so he could support himself; opening his own meat store later in life; eventually deciding to volunteer at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; and not participating much in his faith anymore.

    Oral history interview with Leonard Gordon

    Oral History

    Leonard Gordon, born on June 8, 1925 in Tilsit, Germany (Sovetsk, Russia), describes growing up in Siauliai, Lithuania; his family; attending Jewish grade school and high school; the German invasion of Lithuania in 1941; trying to escape to Russia but instead having to return home and go into the Siauliai ghetto; his family’s transport to Stutthof in 1944; being transported with his father and brother to Dachau, where they worked at Mühldorf; building the German underground airport, Messerschmitt; his father’s proposal that the three of them commit suicide; hearing about the invasion of Normandy; the liberation of Dachau in May 1945; staying in a displaced persons camp in Feldafing and planning to move to Israel; traveling to Italy and studying to be a radio technician; immigrating to the United States; becoming an electrical engineer and serving in the United States Navy; and rediscovering religion after the death of his wife.

    Oral history interview with Fritz Gluckstein

    Oral History

    Fritz Gluckstein, born January 24, 1927 in Berlin, Germany, describes the end of the war in Berlin; the food and housing shortages; cleaning up rubble from bombings with his father; the difficulties of re-starting his education after the war; immigrating to the United States in January 1948 and settling in the Minneapolis and St. Paul area; becoming a veterinarian; and volunteering for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Oral history interview with Brigitte Freidin

    Oral History

    Brigitte Freidin, born in Augsburg, Germany on June 3, 1930, describes her family and childhood; her memories of Kristallnacht; her father being arrested and sent to Dachau after Kristallnacht; her father’s release and her parents’ decision to try to immigrate to the United States; traveling to England while waiting for permission to go to the U.S.; immigrating to the U.S. in 1941; staying with relatives who were taking in refugees in Washington, DC; losing touch with much of her family left in Europe and then discovering that many had died; participating in American student clubs during the war; working as a salesgirl when she was fourteen years old to help support her family; getting married and starting a family; and speaking about her personal experiences during the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Eva Kristine Belfoure

    Oral History

    Eva Kristine Belfoure, born on October 1, 1924 in Kraków, Poland, describes growing up in a Roman Catholic home; having many Orthodox Jewish friends in her childhood; teaching Catholic prayers to an elderly Jewish lady who was hidden in her home during the war; exchanging goods and delivering messages in the ghetto; being arrested in January 1942 and being taken to the Nordhausen concentration camp, where she worked in various labor camps; her deportation to the Rathsfeld firm, where she worked as a kitchen aide and remained until liberation; doing translation work in a field hospital in Nordhausen after the war; going to the displaced persons camps in Dora, Heilbronn, and Darmstadt; attending the university in Frankfurt after receiving aid from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency; immigrating to the United States in June 1950 and marrying a sailor in 1953; teaching languages in Baltimore County for twenty-five years; and translating for the Red Cross and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Oral history interview with George Hill Leonard

    Oral History

    George Leonard, a concentration camp liberator born on December 24, 1921 in Malden, Massachusetts, describes his childhood; his training in Alabama and California before he and his unit went to England; becoming the company runner, staying close to the captain and lieutenants; translating codes and delivering messages while at war; his memories of the fights at the Siegfried Line; receiving the Bronze Star after being wounded; traveling through parts of Germany along the Czech border and getting ordered to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria; helping to give the victims a proper burial; staying in the Mauthausen area for about six weeks until he went to Spital am Pyhrn, Austria in late July; leaving for America on December 15, 1945; getting married; and teaching at Harvard University after the war.

    Oral history interview with Kurt Roberg

    Oral History

    Kurt Roberg, born May 16, 1924 in Celle, Germany, discusses his childhood; attending a German school where he was the only Jewish student; his father Victor Roberg’s profession as a merchant for the firm Gebrüder Freidberg; his family’s religious practices; Kristallnacht; antisemitism in his hometown; details of German politics of the time; the boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933; how a retired teacher, Hal Lotheim, taught local Jewish students; the Hitler Youth in his community; his Bar Mitzvah; how his brother, Harry, immigrated in 1936 to Holland, the Netherlands to live with their maternal uncle, Wilhelm Marx; how his father had to close his business in 1937; his mother’s 1938 trip to Hamburg, Germany to visit the American consulate; how his father was sent to Oranienburg after Kristallnacht; his father’s release and experiences in Oranienburg; his journey to Holland to join his brother and uncle; how his mother and father used American visa applications to travel to Holland; how his mother, father, and brother immigrated to the United States from Holland in 1940; German attacks on Rotterdam, the Netherlands; being interned in Holland for his status as a German citizen; being sent out of Rotterdam to Gouda, the Netherlands; how a woman organized transports of children from Holland and Belgium to reunite with their parents; receiving his American visa in January 1941; leaving Holland in March 1941; traveling from Germany to Spain and then to Lisbon, Portugal by train with other children; traveling by American ship from Lisbon, Portugal to the United States; being held on Ellis Island for a month because of visa complications; living in New Rochelle, New York with his family; learning about Pearl Harbor; how he and his brother joined the army in 1943; experiencing antisemitism in the army; his experience in the Pacific during World War II; and his life with his family after the war.

    Oral history interview with Alfred Schnog

    Oral History

    Alfred Schnog, born January 25, 1931, discusses his childhood in Cologne, Germany; growing up in a relatively secular Jewish family on Universität Straße; his relationship with his grandparents who lived in Deutz, a suburb of Cologne; seeing Nazi parades and looking on with interest but feeling unwelcome; being harassed by Nazi Youth on his way home from school with his twin brother, Norbert; seeing signs in businesses barring Jews and learning that few business owners enforced this policy; spending Passover in a Catholic hospital after being injured in a car wreck and being provided with kosher food by the nuns; watching his father throw pieces of a gun into the Rhine when guns were banned for Jews; his father’s metal trade business being taken over by non-Jews; hearing about concentration camps but believing they would primarily affect immigrants (particularly Poles) and seeing Polish children taken out of his classes by the Gestapo; his parents’ search for a way out of Germany and eventual escape to the Netherlands in the summer of 1938; his family’s return to Germany in November 1938 to retrieve belongings; witnessing Kristallnacht from an upper-floor window of the Dome Hotel; his family being taken to jail as they tried to return to the Netherlands after the German borders were sealed, but eventually being allowed to go; attending Jewish school in Amsterdam and learning Dutch; applying to move to the United States and first going by plane to England in Jan 1940, then by ship (the Britannic) from Liverpool to New York City in April 1940; attending school in the United States; speaking Dutch with his brother because they did not want to be associated with Germans; experiencing discrimination in school when his third grade teacher admonished him and his brother for wearing an American flag pin on a holiday when they were not born in America; having his Bar Mitzvah and attending Hebrew school at the synagogue in Regal Park; experiencing antisemitism as his family vacationed in the Adirondacks, finding many signs restricting Jews from staying at hotels; learning that his grandparents had been killed in a concentration camp; graduating from Forest Hill High School and then receiving a degree in engineering from Cornell; going to Korea in 1954 to serve two years in the U.S. Army; starting and running a company; learning that a pair of his father’s cufflinks were given to his father in recognition of his Bar Mitzvah by Claus von Stauffenberg, a German officer who later led an assassination attempt against Hitler; his reflections on the way those who did not experience the Holocaust and WWII view it; his children’s knowledge of his and his parents’ experiences and how it has affected them; and his thoughts on Israel.

    Oral history interview with Fred Taucher

    Oral History

    Fred Taucher, born on January 29, 1933 in Berlin, Germany, describes his half-brother’s suicide to avoid Nazi concentration camps; the destruction of his father’s store during Kristallnacht; moving to a ghetto in 1938; his father’s inability to leave Germany despite his United State’s citizenship; his family’s relationship with a high ranking Nazi member; his father going into slave labor and then being sent to Auschwitz in 1943; his family’s escape from arrest; living in subway stations to avoid Allied bombings; getting arrested, tortured, and sent to Dachau in April 1945; escaping from the Nazis with some Russian soldiers; his mother’s death during a crossfire between the Germans and the Russians; his 1946 Bar Mitzvah in Berlin; life in Berlin after the Holocaust; his 1946 arrival in America; his decision to join the U.S. Army; his experiences trying to obtain United States citizenship; his life in America as a citizen and his activism in Holocaust survivor networks.

    Oral history interview with Helen Goldkind

    Oral History

    Helen Goldkind, born in Czechoslovakia (near Volosyanka, Ukraine) on July 9, 1928, describes her early childhood; experiencing antisemitism as a child; her recollections of the Nazi occupation of her town in 1944; her deportation to Auschwitz; how her grandfather was beaten to death for not relinquishing a Torah scroll; being sent to work at a munitions factory in Germany; being with her sister when they were liberated by British troops in 1945; spending time in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp to recover; receiving help from the Swedish Red Cross and traveling to Sweden to recover; immigrating to the United States in 1946 with her sister; finding a job as a secretary in New York City; getting married and moving to Baltimore; the death of her sister and raising her children; and her reflections on the current state of the world.

    Oral history interview with Inge Katzenstein

    Oral History

    Inge Katzenstein (née Berg), born March 27, 1929 in Cologne, Germany, describes her family; having to move in with some of her extended family in Cologne after Kristallnacht; attempting to illegally cross into Holland; getting into Holland but immediately being captured and imprisoned; immigrating to Kenya but not being able to leave their home their without permission; attending stenography school to become a secretary; immigrating to the United States in 1951 and settling in Vineland, New Jersey; getting married and raising her children as Orthodox Jews; and returning to Germany twice and getting treated well.

    Oral history interview with Werner Katzenstein

    Oral History

    Werner Katzenstein, born in Wallensen, Germany on April 29, 1922, describes his childhood; having to leave school in 1933 after Hitler came to power in 1933; his father going to prison because he was Jewish but getting released after about a week; his father being forced to close down his business; buying property in Holland and immigrating there in 1937; immigrating to the United States in 1939 and settling in Somerville, New Jersey; being considered an enemy alien; registering for the draft and being called to service in March 1944; being sent for basic training to Camp Blanding in Florida; being classified for intelligence and reconnaissance work; joining the 100th Infantry Division in Fort Bragg, North Carolina; his deployment to Europe; going through southern France and the Vosges Mountains; and getting wounded in combat; returning to his platoon in January 1945 and going through Germany; being in combat in Heidelberg; working for the military government; visiting family who had been in Theresienstadt; returning for New Jersey on April 30,1946; and getting married and settling in Washington, D.C.

    Oral history interview with Fred Goldman

    Oral History

    Fred Goldman, born in Fürth, Germany on September 6, 1915, describes his childhood; his memories of Hitler coming to power; finishing high school and moving to Berlin to train to be a cantor and teacher at a Jewish Teacher’s College; returning to Fürth after three years and moving back in with his mother and sister; immigrating to the United States in January 1939 because a distant cousin vouched for him; arriving in the U.S. with twelve dollars and taking a job as a busboy at a department store in New York; marrying Ruth Schuster, a Jewish women also from Fürth; working in a uniform factory until he was drafted into the army in March 1943; becoming a member of the medical corps but then being transferred into the military intelligence unit when the army learned he was fluent in German; going to Camp Ritchie in Maryland; interrogating prisoners in Europe; staying with the army until March 1946, when he returned to the United States and became a diamond setter; and settling in Silver Spring, Maryland after the war.

    Oral history interview with Paulette Stessin

    Oral History

    Paulette Stessin, born in Metz, France, discusses her family and childhood in France; her parents, who sold clothing in the market; keeping kosher; her understanding of events in Germany in 1938 when she was 17 or 18; her family’s move to Angouleme, France where they thought they would be safe; daily life in Angouleme; her work as a hairdresser in Brive la Gaillarde, France, where there was one Jewish family; being arrested near Brive in April 1944; being transferred to Drancy and then to Auschwitz-Birkenau; her memories of Auschwitz; working on a road hauling stones; “Pitchipoi,” a term referring to the imaginary place they would be sent to and used by the prisoners in Drancy; the addition of a chemical to the women’s soup to suppress their menstrual cycles, which did not work on her; deciding to join her “camp sister”, a Dutch woman in another barrack, who was being deported; arriving at Bergen-Belsen; her memories of the camp; being liberated in April 1945; traveling to Paris; her reintegration at the Hotel Lutetia; and her decision to return to Angouleme.

    Oral history interview with Margitta Cooper

    Oral History

    Margitta Cooper, born on June 10, 1929 in Speyer, Germany, describes her family and childhood; her relationships with her non-Jewish friends; her memories of Kristallnacht; her father being arrested and sent to Dachau after Kristallnacht; her family’s arrest in 1940 and being taken to the Gurs concentration camp; gathering with about 20 other children and being told they were to be sent to the United States; separating from her parents and seeing them for the last time; spending time in a small French town before her immigration; finally travelling to the United States by boat in 1941; taking a train to Baltimore, MD to recover with the other immigrant children; meeting an uncle in New York City; finding out about the fate of her family; settling into life in Baltimore and receiving a job at the Johns Hopkins hospital; and her reflections on what the world knew about the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Erika Eckstut

    Oral History

    Erica Eckstut, born June 12, 1928 in Znojmo, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), describes her family; staying with her sister and brother-in-law at the end of the war; marrying a member of the Czech Army, Robert Kauder, on August 28, 1945; living in Freiwaldau (Jeseník), Czech Republic; how her husband was the big boss (Velitel) in the city, removing Germans from the Sudetenland area; moving to Prague, Czech Republic; having two children over the next few years; how her husband testified at the Nuremberg Trials; the death of her husband in 1957; immigrating to the United States; finally arriving in the United States with her children on April 11, 1960 and being greeted by a swarm of reporters because she was among the first to be allowed to leave Communist Czechoslovakia; attending technology school; living with her sister, her sister’s husband, and their children for a year before getting her own apartment; meeting her current husband in 1962; her diagnosis of lung cancer in 1989; participating in a cancer research study and being one of two survivors of the seventy-five person study; and volunteering at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Oral history interview with Tole Johannes Madna

    Oral History

    Tolé Johannes Hendricus Madna, born June 8, 1931 in The Hague, the Netherlands, describes his Indonesian father and his Dutch Protestant mother; living in Holland during the war; the divorce of his parents in 1936; living with his father and a nanny; hiding the infant son, Alfred Munzer, of family friends; the child staying with his family for three and a half years and calling him Bobby; moving to Belgium after the war; and immigrating to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Henri Dupuy

    Oral History

    Henri Dupuy, born June 5, 1920 in Thiviers, France and designated Righteous Among Nations, discusses his anger at the French government and Germany; his decision to join the Resistance; Constantin, nom de guerre Jambard, leader of the Armée Secrète (AS) who formed the Maquis in 1942 in Perigueux, France; how his mother, Helene, hid Maquis members in her home and procured ration cards; joining the police to avoid the draft; guarding the Perigueux Gestapo headquarters and stealing letters stamped “Dordogne,” denouncing French citizens; the November 10, 1943 Maquis attack in Perigueux and roundup and deportation of 350 Jews to Auschwitz; the arrest of the Gruska family and escape of their children; how his mother placed two Gruska sons with rural families and the daughter in a convent; how his mother secured forged identity papers with the complicity of Secretary-General Lafont, joining the Messignac Maquis; Maquis attacks from the woods; the supply of small arms by the Riberac police and by parachute drops; how the Maquis were denounced and attacked by Germans; hiding in Coursac, Dordogne, France and joining the Roland Maquis; a Maquis attack on the Neuvic-Bordeaux train carrying French francs to Germany in July or August 1944; and how the Maquis offloaded the francs in a truck to Saint-Alvere, a resistance center in the Dordogne, to support Maquis families and resistance activities.

    Oral history interview with Halina Peabody

    Oral History

    Halina Peabody (née Halina Janna Litman), born in Kraków, Poland on December 12, 1932, describes her childhood; taking on a false identity (Halina Litinska) during the war and pretending to be Catholic; hiding in Jaroslaw with her mother and younger sister; being injured on the day of liberation by a hand grenade; being liberated by the Russian Army; living in group homes with her sister after the war; traveling to Italy with her family and staying at a displaced persons camp; traveling to England and then going to Israel in 1957; taking a job at the American embassy in Tel Aviv; marrying a Bulgarian Jew who worked for the U.S. Information Agency; leaving Israel in 1968 with her husband and five year old son; immigrating to Palo Alto, California, where her husband could get a job at the Hoover Institute; moving to Washington, D.C., where Halina’s husband got a job working for “The Voice of America”; getting a divorce from her husband in 1972 and then marrying Richard Peabody; volunteering at the Holocaust Museum; and getting involved with survivor groups such as the Association of Child Survivors.

    Oral history interview with Marcel Bercau

    Oral History

    Marcel Bercau, born October 17, 1920 in Paris, France, describes his Romanian family; restrictions placed on Jews during German occupation; his deportation to Drancy in 1941; working in a locksmith's workshop and remaining in Drancy with his father and brother for a year before they were deported; going to Auschwitz, where he worked as an earth-worker and then as a bricklayer; working in the schlosser-electriker division, which allowed him to find a little bit of extra food; the evacuation of Auschwitz on January 17, 1945; going on a death march with 60,000 other prisoners and traveling through the snow and the cold with no food; arriving in Gleiwitz, Germany (Gliwice, Poland), where they were put in open cattle cars and transported to Oranienburg; how while they passed through Prague, Czech Republic people threw them bread and water containers; how four out of five people died during the transport; the German abandonment of Landsberg, where he was being held; being rescued and taken to Augsburg, where there was a repatriation camp; and returning to Paris to start a family.

    Oral history interview with Rolph Hammel

    Oral History

    Rolph Hammel, born on September 11, 1912, in Karlsruhe, Germany, describes his family; his involvement with a Zionist youth movement; being forced to do military service in 1933 in Dijon; getting scarlet fever; moving to Strasbourg, France and working in a hardware store before starting his own faucet and fixtures business in 1937; being allowed to remain in France because he had inherited citizenship from his mother who was French; working in the DCA during the war; helping to save 70 Jews in Périgueux, France; going to the ORT school; and his reflections on the treatment of Jews during the war.

    Oral history interview with Norbert V. Hilsberg

    Oral History

    Norbert Hilsberg, born on September 3, 1914 in Vienna, Austria, describes his family; graduating college and serving in the Austrian military for three months; starting the forms to immigrate to the United States after the Anschluss; his parents’ immigration to Cuba, where they stayed until April 1941, when they attained visas for the United States; receiving his visa in June 1938 and traveling to the United States; living with his uncle in Philadelphia, PA when he arrived; learning about the invasion of Poland; working in the advertising department of the Litz department store in Philadelphia; volunteering for the US Army in February 1941; getting sent to an engineering camp, where he made maps; the attachment of his outfit to the general headquarters in DC; being forced to remain in the US when his unit went abroad because he was not yet eligible for his American citizenship; receiving his citizenship in April 1943 and working on plans for the invasion of southern France and Austria; living in North Africa for nearly a year; being sent to Hawaii; leaving the army in 1945; accepting a job with the war department; and settling in Washington, DC with his family.

    Oral history interview with Alfred Munzer

    Oral History

    Alfred Munzer, born in The Hague, Netherlands on November 23, 1941, describes his family; how his parents debated over having him circumcised; his family going into hiding in May 1942; his father being admitted into a psychiatric hospital and his mother working at the psychiatric hospital as a nurse’s aide; his two older sisters being taken in by a Catholic family; going into hiding with a family friend and neighbor, Tolé Madna; how he played in the backyard and was called Bobby; his parents being sent to a concentration camp on December 26, 1942; his mother surviving the war, working first as a seamstress and later as an electrician; how his father died soon after liberation; the death of his sisters in Auschwitz; immigrating to Brussels, Belgium in 1952 and to the United States in 1958 with his mother; settling in New York where he attended Brooklyn College; going on to attend medical school at the State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn; becoming a lung specialist and interning at several well known-hospitals before doing military service at Andrews Air Force base in Washington, D.C.; and settling in D.C. with his partner Joel Wind.

    Oral history interview with Maria Mandel

    Oral History

    Maria Myriam Mandel, born 1938 in Czerwinsk, Poland, discusses the assembly of the town's citizens in a square and their deportation; her family's escape through a bakery door; hiding from the Gestapo in granaries, cemeteries, and the woods; her parents’ execution by the Gestapo in 1942; her placement by her parents in a neighbor's home from 1942 to 1947; her new name, Katia Gortak; the kindness of her foster mother and brother; her Catholic education; her antisemitic feelings; the painful loss of her brother and sister who were placed in other families and abandoned; the arrival of the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) at the end of the war; reuniting with her uncles in America and France; her shock at learning she was Jewish; her transfer to a Jewish orphanage in Czerwinsk, where she received a Jewish education; her recollections of antisemitism at the war's end; her life in the orphanage from 1947 to 1949; visits by her foster mother; her bitterness when visits ceased; how the JDC changed her birth date from 1938 to 1937 to allow her to travel alone from Poland to France; her arrival in Paris, France; her refusal to join her uncle in America; and her life in Perigueux, France with her paternal uncle and his family.

    Oral history interview with Yvonne Mignot de Royere

    Oral History

    Yvonne Mignot de Royere (née Roux), born in Clermont d’Excideuil, France on February, 22, 1925, describes how she and her father, Joseph Roux, saved 21 Jews during World War II; the evacuation of Jews in Strasbourg in 1939; working with her father, who was the mayor; taking in French Jewish refugees; how her work as a municipal clerk gave her access to forms and papers, which she used to provide the Jews with forged identity papers and ration cards; hiding Jews in the village rectory; one of the Jewish women giving birth to her daughter, Arlette Veil, in 1943; she and her father saving several families (last names: Robertso, Schwab, Wertz, and Veil); how three of the families were hidden in the caretaker’s house at the Chateau du Noyer and she helped them secure food; how she occasionally left the mayor’s office unlocked so that the families could secure additional ration cards; living in Excideuil from 1942 to 1944, after which the Jews returned to Alsace to rebuild their lives; staying in touch with the people she helped; and being honored with her father by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among Nations in 1982.

    Oral history interview with Susan Berlin

    Oral History

    Susan Berlin (née Suzanna Reichman), born on June 22, 1926 in Rožňava, Czechoslovakia (present day Slovakia), describes her family; her childhood in Rožňava; her memories of the rise of Nazi power; immigrating to the United States on August 3, 1939; settling in New York City, where she went to Julia Richmond High School; graduating in 1942 and attending Brooklyn College for her undergraduate degree and the University of Pennsylvania for her master’s degree; graduating in 1947 and moving to Washington D.C., where she got a job in the Army Intelligence Map Service as an Army Intelligence Research Analyst; marrying in 1950 and having three daughters; retiring from the Army Intelligence Map Service to raise her daughters; becoming an art teacher when her children got older; and volunteering at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in the Education Department.

    Oral history interview with John Bucur

    Oral History

    John Bucur, born in Youngstown, Ohio on March 5, 1925, describes his childhood; his Romanian-American parents; the multiracial community he grew up in; graduating high school in 1943 as the valedictorian of his class and receiving a scholarship to Ohio University; enlisting in the Army and being sent to Fort Sill, where he received training to be in Battery B of the 17th Observation Battalion; his first assignment watching a ship off the shore of Omaha Beach in France on D-Day; his unit’s move through England, France, and Germany and then going on a tour of Buchenwald at the end of the war; taking college courses at an American School in Biarritz, France after the war; returning home on December 7, 1945 and being discharged from the army; finishing his degree at Ohio University and graduating in 1948; going on to medical school and becoming a neurosurgeon; having five children with two wives; and moving to Arlington, Virginia to found Fairfax Hospital, Northern Virginia Doctor’s Hospital, and the National Orthopedic Hospital.

    Oral history interview with Lore Schneider

    Oral History

    Lore Schneider (née Heti Lore Koppel), born on October 10, 1924 in Bochum, Germany, describes her family; seeing the Nazi youth in her neighborhood; observing the Nazi parades from her home on the main street; immigrating to the United States in June 1934; settling in Washington, D.C. and attending public school; obtaining U.S. citizenship in 1939, five years after her family’s arrival; attending college at night and working as a stenographer at the Interior Department during the war; and marrying in 1946 and having three children.

    Oral history interview with Frank Liebermann

    Oral History

    Frank Nathan Liebermann (né Franz Natan Liebermann), born in Gleiwitz (Gliwice), Poland on January 19, 1929, describes his family; celebrating Jewish holidays; immigrating to the United States in October 1938 and moving to Dayton, Ohio, where his father set up his medical practice; his family’s involvement in the Jewish community and helping many European Jews to immigrate to the United States; attending Western Reserve University; meeting his wife during his sophomore year and marrying her soon after he graduated; working for a textile converting firm for many years before retiring and moving to Washington, D.C., where his two daughters had already settled; finding a job at a travel firm; and beginning to volunteer at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum after September 11th, 2001.

    Oral history interview with Marianne Liebermann

    Oral History

    Marianne Liebermann, born in Vienna, Austria on October 29, 1929, describes her family and childhood; her education; her father searching for ways to leave Vienna and immigrating to the United States after the Anschluss; her father’s efforts to convince a gentile American family, with whom he had previously done business, to vouch for his family; boarding a train to Cherbourg, France in September 1938 and transferring to the Europa ship, which took them to the U.S.; arriving in New York on October 3, 1938 and living there when the war broke out in 1939; graduating from Barnard University and later going on to get her master’s degree at Adelphi University; marrying Frank Liebermann on November 23, 1950; settling down in Great Neck, New York and having three children; becoming a teacher and spending many years teaching English as a second language; and settling in Maryland.

    Oral history interview with Thea S. Rips

    Oral History

    Thea S. Rips, born in Trieste, Italy on February 24, 1922, describes her childhood; her family moving to Rijeka, Croatia when she was five years old; growing up in a Catholic family but having many Jewish friends; witnessing the persecution of nearby Jewish families; aiding several families in their attempts to escape Italy; wanting to become a doctor and working in a shipyard infirmary in Rijeka; getting a job working on the Marshall Plan after the war in Rome, Italy; being offered a chance to move to the United States and work as an interpreter in 1955; meeting her husband, who she was engaged to for eighteen years before they married in February 1976; going to the United States and living in New York; moving to Washington, D.C.; and the death of her husband in September of 1994.

    Oral history interview with Andrew Glass

    Oral History

    Andrew (né Andrej) James Glass, born November 30, 1935 in Warsaw, Poland, discusses his early childhood; spending time in his wealthy grandfather's house because of his mother's illness; his grandfather, Jacob, repatriating millions of dollars which had been deposited in Switzerland, New York, and London, back into zlotys in Poland because of a 1939 government decree; hearing planes and bombs exploding in September 1939; his father being forced to clear rubble and fill sandbags; supplying gas to a gentile taxi driver and two families driving east on September 13; going by horse and cart and then by train and on foot to Vilnius, Lithuania; his father getting picked up by a Lithuanian patrol but being released when he agreed with them that President Roosevelt was Jewish; his family receiving three Japanese visas from Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese Consul; paying 600 dollars to get Soviet transit visas; traveling on the Trans-Siberian Railway and arriving in Japan in December 1940; getting three residence visas to the Dominican Republic and a one week transit visa from the American Consul in Tokyo, Japan; sailing on the Kama Kumakara in April 1941 to San Francisco, CA; taking the train to New York, NY and staying there until 1943; immigrating to Canada; re-entering the U.S. under the Polish quota; his father working in a defense plant and his mother working as a seamstress in New York; how he determined to not feel different; working for the New York Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, Senators Javits and Percy, and Cox newspapers from 1974 to 2001; becoming a Fellow at Harvard and the managing editor of The Hill newspaper; and feeling that he is living on borrowed time, that life is precious, and that there is a randomness to who survives.

    Oral history interview with Renate Fischer Chernoff

    Oral History

    Renate Fischer Chernoff, born on June 25, 1929 in Breslau, Germany (Wrocław, Poland), describes her early childhood; moving to Racibórz, Poland with her family in 1934; being sent to Berlin, Germany to stay with her grandmother in 1937; her family choosing to immigrate to Canada since her father was a physician; arriving in 1938 and settling in Montreal; moving to New Brunswick; her parents adopting Saul Silvershein, a sixteen year old Polish boy from a displaced persons camp; attending college at Dalhousie University; meeting her husband while in graduate school at the University of Chicago; marrying in New Brunswick in 1953 and moving to Saint Louis, MO where her husband finished his residency and their first child was born; moving to Durham, NC, where they had two more children; and settling in the Washington, DC area in 1980.

    Oral history interview with Eli Dortort

    Oral History

    Eli Dortort (né Klemfner), born on August 30, 1920 in Zdachov, Galicia, Poland, describes his family and childhood; escaping his hometown a few hours before the Germans invaded; traveling with some Russian soldiers to Kiev, Ukraine and then to Starobielsk (Starobil's'k), Ukraine, where he volunteered for the Polish Army; his unit being sent to Israel, where he deserted and worked in a kibbutz; staying in the kibbutz for a year before he joined the British Army and was sent to Italy; later being stationed in Teheran, Iran and Egypt; returning to Israel after the war and fighting in the War of Independence; staying in Israel until the late 1950s, when he immigrated to the United States; and settling in New York City, where he met his wife and had a daughter.

    Oral history interview with Hilda Seftor

    Oral History

    Hilda Seftor (née Cohen), born in Edinburgh, Scotland on August 21, 1923, describes her family and childhood; finding out about the Nazi invasion of Poland; helping her local Jewish community and finding homes for thirty-five Jewish refugee children; her parents founding the Whittingehame Farm School; teaching the school’s Jewish children how to farm and giving them a traditional education; attending the Edinburgh College of Domestic Science and graduating with a degree in household and institutional management in 1943; working in the Edinburgh school system and later at a wartime nursery preparing meals for children; marrying after the war and immigrating to the United States; having four sons; moving to Washington, DC in 1994; and volunteering at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Oral history interview with Felix Nicinski

    Oral History

    Felix Nicinski (né Fievish Nicinski), born December 7, 1925 in Lochów, Poland near Lódź, Poland, discusses his early childhood; moving in to the fenced-in ghetto in early 1940; how the Germans bombed their city before entering it; being taken to a work camp in Lienzingen (Mühlacker, Germany) in late 1940 with the other 14 to 18 year old boys to dig ditches; slipping away on a march in the summer of 1941 to work and escape to the fenced-in ghetto in Kalisz, Poland; receiving the false identity of an escaped 27 year old; Kalisz Jews being sent to the Lódź ghetto in 1941; being forced to wear the yellow star and beaten by the German guards; working at an ammunitions plants in Skarżysko-Kamienna for 10 months in 1942; being sent to Dora in 1943 and then to Buchenwald in 1944 for six months; his transfer to Bergen-Belsen in 1944; being liberated by the British on April 15, 1945; living in Bamberg, Germany between 1945 to 1948 and learning how to be a barber; immigrating to Australia in 1948 and living there for ten years; immigrating to the United States in 1958; and marrying another survivor of Bergen-Belsen.

    Oral history interview with David Brombart

    Oral History

    David Brombart, born on August 3, 1933 in Brussels, Belgium, discusses his childhood; the German invasion in May 1940 and being able to attend school until mid-1941; the deportation of his sister, Sarah, and his mother in August 1942; running away from a boarding school in Ikla (possibly Uccle in Brussels) and his father placing him in the home of business clients; going into hiding in Hornu, Belgium but visiting his father, who was in hiding in another city; his liberation in September 1944 and returning to Brussels with his father; finding out that his grandfather was a member of the Jewish Committee which made up lists for the Germans; returning to school at age 11 and learning how to write; serving in the Belgian Army from 1952 to 1954 and becoming the head of the Socialist Democratic Youth until 1958; having a full time job with the Young Socialist Guard and attending international conferences as the Labor Secretary from 1958 to 1964; living in Paris, France from 1958 to 1959; getting married in 1961; being offered a job to direct the African Labor Institute of the American organization AFL-CIO; moving to New York and advising labor movements in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia; becoming Deputy Director of the International Department of the AFL-CIO under Lane Kirkland; and being honored for his international labor work by the governments of Dahomey, Togo, and Senegal.

    Oral history interview with Gunter Haimann

    Oral History

    Gunter Haimann, born on January 26, 1922 in Koblenz, Germany, describes his childhood and family; his parents deciding that it was time to leave Germany in the beginning of 1937, when Jewish children were banned from public schools; immigrating to the United States and living with his aunt in Queens, New York; attending high school and night school to learn English; graduating in June 1941 and finding a job at an auto shop; his draft into the army at the beginning of the war and being trained as an interrogator; teaching interrogating techniques at Camp Ritchie in Maryland; his transfer into the 101st Airborne; going to England and jumping on D-Day and landing in Carentan, France; serving with the 101st for the remainder of the war; receiving a Purple Heart after being wounded in Bastogne, Belgium; not taking religion in to account while he was fighting; jumping onto Holland on Rosh Hashonah in 1944; going into Düsseldorf, Germany; finding Hitler’s stationary and using it to write letters; going to Austria and finding Mr. and Mrs. Goering and speaking with Mrs. Goering; seeing Holocaust survivors walking home; returning to the United States and starting a luncheonette business; and meeting his wife and having three children.

    Oral history interview with Alfred Lakritz

    Oral History

    Alfred Julian Lakritz, born on June 1, 1934 in Kiel, Germany, describes his family; narrowly escaping deportation to Poland in 1939 and moving to Antwerp, Belgium and then Marmande, France with his family; experiencing antisemitism from his peers in Marmande; how his father was arrested; speaking with the men who arrested his father many years later, and their regret; being sent with his brother to a Jewish summer camp in Creuse, France in July 1942; going into hiding in various safe houses for two and a half years after leaving the camp; ending up at a convent in Lourdes, France, where they met a Jewish French woman who took them in for the remainder of the war; being placed in a Catholic home in Tarbes with his brother after the war; reuniting with their mother in Marmande and applying for visas to the United States; immigrating to the United States in 1950 and settling in Oakland, CA; attending the University of California at Berkeley; completing his law degree; moving to Los Angeles, CA with his wife, whom he had met in law school; and raising a family.

    Oral history interview with Rita Rubinstein

    Oral History

    Rita Rubinstein (née Frieda Rifka Lifschitz), born on December 12, 1936 in Romania, describes her family and early childhood; her father’s draft into the Russian Army; going into hiding in Transnistria, Ukraine in September 1941; her liberation by Russian troops in April 1944; returning to their home in Romania and discovering that her father had died during the war; attending school for the first time and learning Russian and Ukrainian; traveling to Munich, Germany and posing as a Greek refugee; living in the Feldafing displaced persons camp for some time; developing tuberculosis in 1947 and having to go to a sanitarium in Augsburg, Germany; immigrating to the United States with her mother in September 1949 and settling in New York, NY; and getting married in 1959 and starting a family.

    Oral history interview with Anita Etzyon

    Oral History

    Anita Etzyon, born on October 4, 1941 in Boryslav, Poland (present day Ukraine), describes her family and childhood; being one year old when her mother died from tuberculosis; having few direct memories of the war but being told about her family’s life during that time; being taken away to live with a Christian family and getting baptized to better fit into her surroundings; returning to live with her father, who had remarried, after the war; living in a Jewish neighborhood and attending a Jewish school; moving to various cities around Poland with her father and step-mother; being the only Jew in her school in Swidnica, Poland; adjusting to life as a Jew after she had spent four years as a Christian; immigrating to Israel in 1951; learning Hebrew and adjusting to life in Israel; getting married to avoid serving in the Israeli Army; having a daughter; immigrating to the United States with her husband and daughter 1963; settling in Washington, DC and working for a Jewish Day School; and her reflections on being a Jew in the modern world.

    Oral history interview with Melvin Galun

    Oral History

    Melvin Galun, born on May 10, 1940 in Kowal, Poland, describes his parents’ participation in the Zionist movement; his mother’s stories about Jews being sent away to the camps; going into hiding in the nearby forests; his memory of his family’s liberation by Russian troops; staying in several German displaced persons camps after the war; his early education in the displaced persons camps; participating in Zionist youth movements in the camps; immigrating to the United States in November 1949; his studies in the United States at a Yeshiva school; traveling to Israel after graduating school and working in a kibbutz for a year; and getting married in 1963 and starting a family.

    Oral history interview with Magdalena Farkas Berkovics

    Oral History

    Magdalena Farkas Berkovics, born on July 15, 1919 in Cluj, Romania, discusses her childhood, schooling and musical training in a conservatory; experiencing low level antisemitism; getting married in 1939; living in her house in the Cluj ghetto with other women after the city’s Jewish men had been taken away for forced labor; conditions in the ghetto, including food scarcity and the black market; providing piano lessons to Christian children; being deported in June 1944; terrible conditions in the train car; her arrival at Auschwitz; being separated from her family except for one 25-year-old cousin; how her clothes were taken away and her hair removed; going to Stutthof in August 1944 and then digging ditches in Steinort (Sztynort, Poland), Elbing (Elbląg, Poland), and Groudentz; speaking about freedom with the other women and singing Hungarian songs; being liberated and traveling to Satu Mare, Romania, where Jewish volunteers helped her return to Cluj; how she found Christians living in her house and learned that she was the only survivor in her family; marrying, Zoltan Berkovics, in 1946; the birth of their son, Tiberius, who later changed his name to John Sylvanis because of antisemitism in Romania; how Communists nationalized her house and forced her to pay rent; teaching in the Romanian conservatory for 30 years; immigrating with her husband to the United States in the 1980s; and feeling very grateful for American liberty and democracy.

    Oral history interview with Sol Mackler

    Oral History

    Sol Mackler, born on January 15,1921 in Poland, discusses his childhood in a small village; visiting relatives in nearby Radom; being forced to live in a ghetto in 1939 with sixteen people in one house; wearing a yellow star; in late 1941 walking seven miles to Pionki labor camp, being given a striped uniform and the number 1058; working in a munitions factory, then laying railway tracks in a tunnel; escaping with four other prisoners to the forest and joining Polish Jewish partisans; being captured by Germans and being sent by train to Sachsenhausen; seeing his sister and her baby there; smuggling his one year old nephew into Pionki to the child’s father, a tailor who made Nazi uniforms; waiting for Russians at liberation; going back to his village and being severely beaten; living in Bad Nauheim displaced persons camp in Germany; working on the black market selling diamonds from Belgium; arriving in the United States in December 1949 after being sponsored by two Jewish Californian wine makers; moving to New York to work and getting married in 1956; working for his brother-in-law; and finding out his parents were executed in Treblinka.

    Oral history interview with Theresia Bauer

    Oral History

    Theresia Bauer discusses her involvement with the League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel), which paralleled the boys’ Hitler Youth (Hitler Jugend); the Soviet occupation of Austria, a time period in which she was constantly hiding from soldiers; and her husband's experience as a prisoner of war in Russia.

    Oral history interview with Carolina Taitz

    Oral History

    Carolina Taitz (née Lena Knoch), born on February 24, 1929 in Russia on a train, discusses her childhood in Viesite, Latvia; having friendly relations with schoolmates in her Latvian public school; how her father, a tree doctor, lost his business and the family house and was temporarily imprisoned as a capitalist when the Russian Communists occupied the town; experiencing a lot of antisemitism; seeing Jews being shot on the street when the Germans came in 1941; being forced to live in the ghetto in Riga, Latvia with five people to a room and little food; getting hit in the eye when a German soldier caught her with a cooked potato; being forced to work in a shoe polish factory from 5 AM to 5 PM; going on a forced march with 30,000 people guarded by German soldiers; seeing and hearing people being shot in a ditch in the Rumbula forest; walking with her mother, sister, and 200 other women to Termini prison; staying on the roof in the cold for two weeks in November 1942 and the birth of a baby, named Termina; going back to the ghetto; dressing as a boy going to work and escaping during a second Aktion when she was 14 years old; taking off her yellow star; being sheltered by a Russian Evangelist priest, Vladimir Michko, and his sister for two and a half years; living in their cellar; going back to Riga at liberation; her mother returning from Auschwitz but dying soon after; attending acting school; getting married and having a daughter; trying for 10 years to go to the United States, and finally getting a visa with the help of Eleanor Roosevelt; arriving in New York in March 1966; working at the New York City Opera for 19 years in charge of costumes, wigs, and makeup for the productions; being widowed twice and moving to Washington, DC in 2008; and still seeing her mother and little brother in her dreams and herself running away from German soldiers.

    Oral history interview with Helen Schwartz

    Oral History

    Helen Schwartz (b. Hela Kirschner), born in 1925, discusses living in the Łódź ghetto in Poland from 1939 to August 1944; working in a laundry in the ghetto; being taken with her family to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944; being marched from Auschwitz to Stutthof; her liberation by the Russians near Gdansk, Poland; contracting typhus in an outbreak that hit a group of female survivors following liberation; returning to Łódź and reuniting with her sister; reuniting with her brother at the displaced persons camp in Ainring, Germany; immigrating in 1949 to Portland, Maine, where her husband worked in a clothing factory; opening a tailor’s shop in 1954; raising a family; volunteering at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; and speaking at schools in Silver Spring, Maryland.

    Oral history interview with Irene Silver

    Oral History

    Irene Silver, born Irena Dynkewicz in Łódź, Poland on January 30, 1933, discusses raising her children in the Jewish tradition, being comfortable with friends who understand the Holocaust experience; her anger with people who ask why victims did not fight back during the Holocaust; being tolerant of strangers after having lived with strangers in the Warsaw Ghetto; her work as a social worker and how it was influenced by her wartime experiences; her sympathy with the civil rights movement; her membership in the Hidden Children group in New York where she feels a common ground; receiving Holocaust reparations which she used to help her children; her view that the world has not learned any lessons from the Holocaust; and her emotion at the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, feeling that the rain at the opening ceremony was the heavens crying.

    Oral history interview with Herman Taube

    Oral History

    Herman Taube (né Herschel Taube), born February 2, 1918 in Łódź, Poland, discusses his family; being orphaned by age nine; living with grandparents and later moving to Piyotrkov; attending a yeshiva; being encouraged by a Polish doctor to become a medic; returning to his grandparents in Łódź in 1935 and seeing antisemitic incidents; writing poetry; belonging to a literary society and meeting the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber; working in a military hospital in Alexandrov (possibly Aleksandrów Łódźki, Poland), arranged by Father Jagla, a Catholic priest; joining the Polish Army in August 1939; serving in a medical group that marched to the Bug River where the Soviet Army ordered the group to go to Volodymyr-Volyns'kyĭ, Ukraine to get educated so as to lose their capitalist mentality; accompanying a wounded soldier to Poltawa (Poltava), Ukraine, where an Ukrainian militia man arranged for him to take a new name, Grigori Arionowicz Taube, and live with a Jewish family; going to Samarra (Koibashov or possibly Kuybyshev) and getting more medical training; being sent to Tyumen (Tiumen') in Siberia and working in hospitals and in gulags; in November 1941 going to Tashkent, Uzbekistan and then to Andizhan, Uzbekistan; working in a malaria clinic; leaving the clinic after reporting that people were stealing food from the hospital; going to Seratov, Russia to the Polish Army; being assigned to the Kotsk offensive in June 1944; being badly injured by a mine explosion while riding in a truck; recovering enough by December 1944 and going to Lublin, Poland to the Polish Army headquarters in Majdanek; being assigned to Platte and opening a Red Cross repatriation station where he treated people with typhus; going to Keslin in Bessarabia in June 1945 to acquire more medicine from a CIBA warehouse; meeting a young woman, Susan Strauss, a survivor from Germany and traveling together to Potsdam, Germany; staying in a displaced persons camp in Halle-Merseburg, Germany, where he opened a Red Cross station; meeting a young Auschwitz survivor, Henry Rothfogel; traveling with Susan back to Platte, and getting civilly married and later religiously married; traveling with Susan and Henry in the summer of 1946 to Berlin, Germany with help from the Bricha; adopting a two year old child survivor, Mark; having first child in the Zingenheim displaced persons camp in September 1946; arriving in the United Sates on April 18, 1947 and being interviewed at the pier by the Jewish Daily Forward; going to Baltimore, MD to join Susan's father; writing for the Jewish Daily Forward; traveling to New York, NY to edit a Histadrut yearbook; returning to Baltimore and helping Susan run a grocery store; working for various Jewish organizations; obtaining accreditation as a journalist at the White House and in Congress; and continuing to write poetry, stories, and essays about the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Regine Ginsberg

    Oral History

    Regine Ginsberg, born on November 19, 1925, discusses her childhood in Brussels, Belgium; her father’s work in the leather industry; religious observances in the household; speaking Yiddish at home and French in school; how her father wired money to Chase Bank in New York in the 1930s; her family abandoning their home in Brussels to travel by train to France; staying with a farmer in St. Gaudens, France; the family’s arrest in St. Gaudens; how her brother and father were sent to a prison near Toulouse, France and then released seven weeks later; how her mother returned to Brussels and brought back Sabbath candlesticks, prayer shawls, tefillin, and diamond jewelry which she used to bribe guards; how her father contacted a cousin in Pennsylvania; being on the last boat out of France from Marseilles; arriving in New York in June 1942; staying with cousins in Pittsburgh, PA and then settling in McKeesport, PA; her mother and father’s work in the leather industry; moving to Texas where she met her future husband Reuben Ginsberg in Athens, TX; her brother enlisting in the army and being sent to Belgium where he did intelligence work acting as a French interpreter; studying along with her husband at Columbia University in New York; becoming an art dealer and opening up a gallery in the 1970s; her emotional state after the war; and how her wartime experiences affected her life, her marriage, and the way she raised her children.

    Oral history interview with Ursula Guttstadt McKinney

    Oral History

    Ursula Guttstadt McKinney, born November 17, 1925 in Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany, discusses her family’s professional and religious background; her childhood and the troubles she faced obtaining schooling due to being half-Jewish; the difficulties her Jewish father and cousins faced; worrying about her father getting arrested; being able to say goodbye to her father when he was taken to prison and subsequently transported to Mauthausen in October 1942; receiving news that her father died; the Third Reich taking ownership of her family’s house; getting expelled from school in October 1942; moving to Berlin, Germany with her mother and sister; the psychological effects of the war, especially the bombings; her limited contact with the underground; working at a convent where there were some hidden Jewish children; her difficulties resuming a normal life after the war; her education after the war; feeling like an outcast because of being half-Jewish; immigrating, along with her sister, to the United States; not wanting to identify as German; her feelings on being a “mischling,” or having a mixed background; not identifying with one religion and being wed in an Unitarian church; and her work as a founding member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Rappaport

    Oral History

    Ruth Rappaport, born May 27, 1923 in Leipzig, Germany, discusses her parents, Mendel Rappaport, a Romanian subject, and Helene Rubinstein, who was born in Poland; how her mother’s cousin, also named Helene Rubinstein, was a well-known cosmetics businesswoman, attending an Orthodox Jewish school and an English language school in Leipzig, Germany; her membership in the Zionist youth group, Habonim; her Romanian passport, which did not identify her as a Jew; moving to Switzerland with her family shortly after Kristallnacht; staying in Zurich, Switzerland as a nanny for the Herzog family after her parents returned to Germany; selling nail polish, which her parents sent because they could not send money; being sponsored by her uncle, Carl Rubinstein, who lived in Seattle, Washington to come to the United States; leaving Europe in December 1939 on the Holland American Line boat, the Veendam; her parents’ attempt to leave Germany with Cuban visas; how her father died in Buchenwald and her mother in Ravensbrück, both in 1943; attending high school in Seattle, then the University of Washington, and finishing at Berkeley, majoring in sociology; working after graduation for a Jewish newspaper in Seattle and for the Zionist Emergency Council; working with Bartley Crum for UNSCOP (United Nations Special Committee on Palestine) in San Francisco, CA; working in Israel during the War of Independence in 1948, where she exchanged gunfire with Palestinians; working with Golda Meir; helping establish the Israel Photographic Archives; returning to the United States and working for the Department of Defense as a librarian; living overseas in Okinawa, Japan; Taipei, Taiwan; and Vietnam; and retiring from the government after 19 years.

    Oral history interview with Edith Langer

    Oral History

    Edith Langer, born October 4, 1932 in Hamm, Germany, discusses living on a farm; her devout Lutheran mother; memories of the prewar Jewish community in her town; her early approval of Hitler because his support of public works; meeting Hitler as a member of her scout troop; attending a one-room school with 30 children, 10 of whom were Jewish; her father’s offer to hide the families of two of his Jewish customers in her family’s farm house; her mother’s feeling that hiding Jews was the right thing to do as a Christian; her father's murder by the Nazis for hiding Jews; being sent away from her family to work on a farm, where she stayed from 1941 to 1945 and had no contact with her family; being afraid of German soldiers; seeing murdered Jews in the streets; giving food to the Russian prisoners, who were living on the farm; emigrating from Germany to the United States in 1956; becoming an American citizen in 1961; her hope that more Nazis would be tried, including the one who shot her father; her membership in the Methodist Church; and taking part in protests against the American Nazi Party.

    Oral history interview with Marianne Milkman

    Oral History

    Marianne Friedenthal Milkman, born May 13, 1931 in Berlin, Germany, discusses her childhood in Germany; being baptized and raised as Christian to have more opportunities; changing schools and apartments in 1938 because of anti-Jewish laws; her aunt Lotte Friedenthal, who worked with Pastor Martin Niemӧller; her father’s deportation to Sachsenhausen in 1938; traveling to Switzerland in January 1939 and then flying with her sister to England on a Kindertransport in May 1939; living with relatives in Cambridge, England; the arrival of her parents in England and her father’s internment on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien; joining her father on the Isle of Man in May 1940; returning to Cambridge in May 1941, where she remained throughout the war; graduating from high school and Cambridge University; coming to the United States in 1957 to study biology; getting married and living in Iowa for 30 years; settling in Washington, DC; her Jewish identity; and her feeling that her experience during the war made her a stronger person.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Cohen

    Oral History

    Ruth Friedman Cohen, born April 26, 1930 in Mukachevo, Czechoslovakia (present day Mukacheve, Ukraine), describes her life after the Holocaust; her prewar life in Czechoslovakia; her family’s religious beliefs; her family’s deportation to Auschwitz in 1944; her mother and brother’s death immediately after their arrival at Auschwitz; her transfer to Nuremberg, Germany and then Holachov; the painful effects of tuberculosis that she contracted in Holachov; her survival and liberation by the Russian Army; her and her sister’s return to Mukachevo, where they reunited with their father; her time in Budapest, Hungary and Prague, Czech Republic, where she recuperated from tuberculosis; her immigration to the United States in 1948; the various jobs she had to support herself; her marriage in 1952; her education at the New School for Social Research; and her struggle to recover from the damaging emotional and mental effects of the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Phillip Abraham

    Oral History

    Phillip Abraham, born August 10, 1931 in Podului-Turkului (Podu Turcului), Romania, describes his prewar life in Romania; his family’s religious beliefs; his childhood in a close-knit Jewish community; his family’s move to Tecuci, Romania in 1940; his father being taken away and then released in 1942; the lack of food available to the population; his education in a Jewish school; his town’s liberation by the Russian Army; his post-war Romanian education; his membership in Hashomer Hatzair, a Zionist youth organization; his time in Israel; his education at Hebrew University and Weizmann Institute, where he studied physics; his immigration to the United States in 1959; his careers at Raytheon and the Office of Naval Research; his marriage in 1964; and his two children.

    Oral history interview with George Arnstein

    Oral History

    George Ernest Arnstein, born September 20, 1924 in Stuttgart, Germany, describes his prewar life in Germany; the repercussions of the Nuremberg laws; his experiences with antisemitism; his father’s arrest on Kristallnacht; his father’s time in Dachau; his family’s decision to leave Germany and go to Geneva, Switzerland; his family’s immigration to the United States in 1938; the anti-German sentiment in America during World War II and its effects on him; his service for the United States Army beginning in 1943 and his duties as a crypto-analyst; his work in Germany helping to perform interrogations, monitoring anti-American efforts, and denazification; his return to Wisconsin after the war; his education at Berkeley and Geneva; and his life post-war.

    Oral history interview with Gertrude Scarlett Epstein

    Oral History

    Gertrude Scarlett Epstein, born July 13, 1922 in Vienna, Austria, describes her early life growing up in Vienna; her Czech father’s belief in free thinking; how her family was not religious; her parents’ and older brothers’ experiences during World War I; her Uncle Willie, who became wealthy as a textile factory owner; how she began to notice antisemitism in Vienna when her family moved to a non-Jewish part of town in the 1930s; her father’s and oldest brother’s activities in the socialist movement; her memories of a strike in Vienna in 1934; her memories of the Anschluss; her brothers’ immigration to England; her experience securing visas for Czechoslovakia on the day Hitler entered Vienna; her feelings that her moral code shifted as it became necessary to lie; her father’s arrest and later release from jail in Czechoslovakia; the family’s move to Albania by train; help provided to the family by her Uncle Willie; how she smuggled money out of Austria and Czechoslovakia; her family’s life in Albania from November 1938 to April 1939; the reaction of native Albanians towards Austrian refugees; how the Joint Distribution Committee helped refugees in Albania; her experiences teaching German to Albanians and the Italian consulate; problems she and her mother had in securing passage from Albania to England; brutal treatment she and her mother received from German police at a fuel stop in Germany; her memories of learning about concentration camps in 1943 or 1944; and how she tracked down an Albanian family to whom she taught German.

    Oral history interview with Matilde Neuwirt

    Oral History

    Matilde Neuwirt, born December 26, 1930 in Belgrade, Serbia, describes her early life in Belgrade; how her parents spoke Serbo-Croatian and Ladino at home; her family’s upper-middle class lifestyle; her schooling at both a public and a Jewish school; the lack of apprehension she felt in the pre-war years; her mother’s decision that the family leave Yugoslavia in the summer of 1940; her family’s escape westward through Dubrovnik, Croatia and then to Italy; how her parents smuggled money out of Yugoslavia; her family’s arrival in Italy without visas; living in Vicenza, Italy; how her family was moved to a detention camp in Sandrigo by the Italian authorities; the unofficial schooling that families set up for the children in Sandrigo; how the Italian authorities encouraged families to leave Sandrigo when Italy capitulated to the Germans; the help Jewish families received from a government official to get false documents; her family’s experience traveling to Rome, Italy; her memories of German brutality on the streets; how she did not know what was happening to Jews elsewhere in the country nor the rest of Europe; her brother’s return to Yugoslavia to fight with Tito’s partisans; the anti-Jewish sentiment of the partisans; her brother’s disappearance and the lack of information about him from the Yugoslav government; her family’s decision to emigrate from Italy to the United States in 1949; her family’s arrival in New York, NY; her feelings about Americanization and leaving memories of Europe behind; her memories of the Eichmann trial; her experiences returning to Yugoslavia and Italy after the war; and her belief that her family was lucky in the way they lived through the war.

    Oral history interview with Susanne K. Bennet

    Oral History

    Susanne Klejman Bennet, born August 11, 1938 in Warsaw, Poland, discusses her memories of entering the Warsaw ghetto; seeing the brick walls being built in the ghetto; living with her grandparents, aunts, and uncles all together in one apartment; beggars asking for food in her building; how her father, a successful art and antiquities dealer, arranged with a non-Jewish friend to have a Polish policeman take her out of the ghetto to a farm in the countryside; how, just before the destruction of the ghetto, her mother escaped from her work group and hid with nuns who gave her a habit and a new name; how the nuns were later rounded up, but were saved on the train platform by a Catholic commandant; how her father escaped from the ghetto through the sewers right before the uprising and went into hiding throughout Warsaw; how as a young child, she knew not to talk about her parents; seeing the red sky in the distance when Warsaw was burning in 1944; her reunion with her parents; the death of most of her relatives during the Holocaust; moving with her parents to Stockholm, Sweden in 1947; receiving visas in 1949 from the Swedish ambassador to Mexico where she and her family stayed for nine months; immigrating to the United States in 1950; living in New York where her father opened up a store off of Fifth Avenue and became a major art dealer with John and Robert Kennedy, the Rockefellers, the Fords, and Greta Garbo as his clients; attending Wellesley College, where she received a masters in library science; meeting her husband Douglas Bennet, who later worked for Hubert Humphrey, Senator Abe Ribicoff, and was an Assistant Secretary of State, head of US AID and NPR, and president of Wesleyan College; their eldest son, Michael, a United States senator from Colorado; their second son, James, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Monthly; their daughter, Holly, a financial adviser; her feelings when visiting Germany with her husband; how her father never spoke about his wartime experience; and how she has only recently started talking about her childhood during the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Marianne Roberts

    Oral History

    Marianne Roberts (née Marianne Cohn), born June 20, 1920 in Ludwigshafen, Germany, discusses her childhood in Ludwigshafen; experiencing antisemitism; her father's death from tuberculosis in 1933; her expulsion from school with her sister, Lottie, because they were Jewish; her mother's death in 1936; being photographed at the City Hall to show her "Jewish left ear" and being given the name ‘Sarah’; living with her sister until Kristallnacht; hiding in a basement for three days with no food while their apartment was being destroyed; moving into her sister's fiancé’s family's house for a few months and never going outside; going to the American Consulate to get visas their mother had applied for three years previously; leaving Germany in early 1939 with 4 dollars, pots and pans, and a family ring; sailing on the Cunard White Star to New York, NY; working in a doctor's office in Brooklyn; getting married and having two children; and speaking for past 20 years in schools and colleges about her wartime experiences.

    Oral history interview with Harry Markowicz

    Oral History

    Harry Markowicz, born August 9, 1937 in Berlin, Germany, discusses his childhood in Antwerp, Belgium; being hidden during the war with the Coons family in Brussels, Belgium, then in a children's home, and then in the Von der Linden's house under the name Henry Von der Linden; his parents who lived in hiding with another couple; how his father did not go outside for two years while in hiding; his brother, Mani, who was saved by Father Joseph Andre; how his mother found him after liberation; the removal of Allied flags at the time of the Battle of the Bulge because of fear that German forces would make their way to Brussels; arriving in the United States with his parents in March 1951; settling in Seattle, WA and going to high school and the University of Washington; traveling to Paris, France for a year for training as a French teacher; traveling to Israel to learn Hebrew; teaching French in Tacoma, WA; learning sign language and working at Gallaudet University for 29 years; feeling more comfortable among Holocaust survivors; and volunteering at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he feels a bond with the other volunteers.

    Oral history interview with Julie A. Keefer

    Oral History

    Julie Keefer (née Jula Weinstock Eisen), born on April 19, 1941 in Lvov, Poland (present day L'viv, Ukraine), discusses her family’s forced relocation into the Lvov ghetto; the escape of her grandfather, Aiski Eisen, from a camp in Janov; her grandfather finding help from Mr. Borecki, who told him in late 1943 that the ghetto was to be burned, and her grandfather’s rescue of her family from the ghetto; her memories of a tunnel or bunker in the forest, to which a few dozen people were smuggled out of the ghetto; her memories of her grandfather donning a Nazi uniform to smuggle people out of the ghetto; being taken out of the bunker because she and her baby sister, Tola, were endangering others by crying; being placed with Mrs. Szwarczynski, a Catholic woman; the arrival of the Russians in Lvov in June 1944; staying in three displaced persons camps in 1945; living in Camp Taylor in Linz, Austria; traveling alone at seven years old to the United States, where she lived in a series of Catholic orphanages, seeing relatives on weekends; being called a Nazi because she spoke German; being sent by the Joint Distribution Committee to the Bellefaire Jewish Children's Orphanage in Cleveland, OH; her adoption by Fred and Tea Klejstadt; attending Oberlin College; getting married and earning a graduate degree in education; feeling grateful to United States; and her desire to find out what happened to her hidden sister whose name became Antonina Noviska.

    Oral history interview with Erica Laufer

    Oral History

    Erica Laufer, born May 11, 1930 in Klagenfurt, Austria, discusses being the only Jewish child in her school, where she was taught by nuns; her mother denying her Jewish identity but her father being observant; an appearance by Hitler after the Anschluss; being forced to wear the yellow Star of David; being barred from attending school; moving into her grandfather's apartment in Vienna, Austria and living there in secret; SA attacks on Jewish homes; witnessing the events of Kristallnacht while hiding in a doorway; how her father obtained tickets to Trinidad; sailing on the Dutch ship Cotica with other refugees; establishing a life in Port of Spain, Trinidad; being forced, as refuges, to live in a detention center after England entered the war; going to a boarding school to be the companion to the daughter of the director; sailing to New York, NY with her parents in December 1940; moving to Washington, DC where she was discriminated against by other children because of her accent; her academic success; her work for the federal government; getting married and starting a family; not raising her children as Jews following an oath to her mother; the number of relatives she lost in Europe; and her attempts to suppress her feelings about the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Barbara Goldberg

    Oral History

    Barbara Goldberg, born in 1943 in Wilmington, DE, discusses her parents, Emma and Erich, who received visas from the Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes to emigrate from France to Portugal; their journey over the Pyrenees to Spain and then to Portugal; their arrival in the United States; her uncle Paul Brennan (born Pavel Briess) who had been in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz; how other relatives made it to Palestine, Australia, and South Africa; speaking only German in the house; how her parents’ personalities were shaped by the war; never discussing the past or other relatives' stories; feeling a connection to refugees; living with the memory of the Holocaust; and her discovery later in life that Aristides de Sousa Mendes had helped her family.

    Oral history interview with Liselotte Epstein Ivry

    Oral History

    Liselotte Epstein Ivry, born July 21, 1925 in Lichtenstein, Czechoslovakia (possibly present day Lichtenstein, Saxony, Germany), describes her family, including her father Victor Ivry, mother Elsa Sicher, and younger brother Hans; the large families on both her father’s and mother’s sides; having heard of Hitler at age 12; being taken by truck with soldiers to live with relatives in a nearby village and then by train to live in Prague, Czech Republic; the many changes after the Germans marched in on March 15, 1939; having been set to go to Great Britain in 1939 on the Kindertransport but instead being sent first to a children’s facility in Prague and then to a private home; being sent to Terezin September 9, 1942 to work as a nurse in the hospital; the transport and death of her mother and brother on March 8, 1944; being sent on December 15, 1943 in a cattle car to Auschwitz, to Block 11; being given number 70663; how the will to live was what kept you alive; being sent to Hamburg, Germany to work first in a sand pit, then as a train switcher, and finally as a brick-maker; how their camp was bombed and they were moved to Bergen-Belsen; the ensuing chaos and then the emotion and celebration after being liberated by the British; eventually going to Canada in 1949 to stay with her uncle; marrying in 1950 to a Lithuanian, Sydney; her children; her attitude about Germany now and forgiving but not forgetting; her book, I Am Their Voice, which is a collection of poems, letters, and anecdotes by children from her 25 years as a speaker; and how now she is doing research for a work about Madeleine Albright.

    Oral history interview with Hans Ziegler

    Oral History

    Hans Ziegler, born June 12, 1925 in Brno, Czechoslovakia, discusses being raised as a Christian with a Jewish father; his parents divorcing in 1934; his father’s factory going out of business in 1937; attending a German elementary school; his father’s deportation to Terezin (Theresienstadt concentration camp) in 1942; being transported to Berlin, Germany in 1943 for forced labor; being sent in September 1944 to Postelberg (Postoloprty), Czech Republic; escaping in April 1945 with two others to the woods; hiding in Brno until the Russians arrived; getting repatriated and going to university for three years; being expelled by the Soviets in 1949 because his father was a capitalist and a diplomat; being in the military for two years; being employed as a chemist in an armaments factory; working in Egypt and Afghanistan; escaping to Germany in 1970 and staying until 1983; going to the United States and working in Warren, Ohio until 1990; going back to Germany; feeling more Jewish than Christian; and how he thinks more about his father and his war-time experiences.

    Oral history interview with Vera Levine

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Guenter Lewy

    Oral History

    Guenter Lewy, born August 22, 1923 in Breslau, Germany (Wrocław, Poland), discusses his childhood in a large extended assimilated family; his memory of seeing Hitler at the 1936 Olympics; belonging to a Jewish Zionist youth group; being attacked on a hiking trip by German storm troopers; his father’s three month imprisonment in Buchenwald after Kristallnacht; going with Youth Aliyah via Trieste to Palestine in March 1939; being met in Haifa by his uncle; living on Kibbutz Tzarad where he worked as a shepherd; his parents’ escape to the United States in late 1941; volunteering in early 1942 for the Palestine Regiment of the British Army; joining the Jewish Brigade and being stationed in Egypt; traveling to Italy with Montgomery's 8th Army in late 1944; traveling to Holland at the war’s end; his role in organizing illegal immigration to Palestine; interrogating German civilians in Berlin; returning to Palestine; traveling to the United States to see his parents in late 1946; graduating from college in 1951 and earning a Master's and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1957; teaching at Columbia, Smith College, and University of Massachusetts; teaching in Germany from 1961 to 1962; his feelings about German people today; the strong influence of his youth group on his resilience; his writings on the moral dimensions of history and the Nazi persecution of the Romani peoples; his current interest in writing about Holocaust perpetrators; reoccurring dreams about Nazis brutality; and feeling that some of the best Holocaust scholarship has being written by contemporary young German scholars.

    Oral history interview with Malvy Solomon

    Oral History

    Malvy Solomon (née Aizic), born in 1938 in Bacau, Romania, discusses pre-war violence against Jews; her father’s conscription into forced labor for the Romanian military in 1941; living with her mother and grandmother in the ghetto with little food; her father’s return in 1944; attending a Jewish primary school and learning Hebrew; surviving bombings; the Soviet arrival in Romania at war’s end; Soviet looting after the war; her school’s closure by Soviet authorities; post-war antisemitism and anti-Capitalist feelings; her father’s job working for the communist government after he was forced to close his store; finishing high school at 16; her medical schooling and career; her marriage; immigrating to Israel in 1961; attending medical school in Tel Aviv; getting divorced, treating soldiers and bombing victims; remarrying in 1971; immigrating to the United States; her education in the U.S.; working for the Department of Veterans Affairs; and her feelings about the war, communism, and her life.

    Oral history interview with Elia Miranski and Genia Miranski

    Oral History

    Elia Miranski, born on August 3, 1922 in Mir, Poland (present day Belarus), describes growing up in a poor, moderately religious family but experiencing no antisemitism until the German invasion in 1939; his parents’ deaths in the first few days of the occupation; escaping with his brother, Israel, from the ghetto which had been set up in a castle; joining Russian partisans in the forest; blowing up railroad tracks for two years; trains near Valozhyn, Belarus; planes dropping supplies; others taking the wounded away from the front lines; Russians mobilizing all partisans into the army; being wounded by the Germans; traveling back to Mir after the war; working on a dairy farm for seven years as a supervisor; moving to Minsk, Belarus and working as a house painter; getting married and having a daughter; going to Israel in 1972 and then to the United States in 1995; thinking day and night about his wartime experiences; and going back to Mir from Israel for a memorial ceremony in the cemetery. Genia Miranski, daughter of Elia Miranski, adds to her father’s interview by translating it into English and by describing Elia’s membership in the Zionist youth group Hashomer Hatzair; Elia’s parents and two younger siblings being shot by Germans; Elia building bridges and roads; witnessing his friend being mauled to death by a dog; living in the castle ghetto; Elia’s experience escaping and hiding in a swamp for three days and at times breathing through a straw when German dogs were nearby; joining Russian partisans; his return to Minsk at the end of the war and experiencing a significant amount of antisemitism; the Six Day War in Israel; going to an underground bakery at night to get Passover matzo; arriving in Israel in 1972; living in underground bunkers in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War; and her own arrival in the U.S. in 1985 and her parents’ arrival in 1995.

    View All 264 Items in the Collection