Overview
- Interview Summary
- Sasha Semenoff, born in 1924 in Riga, Latvia, describes his sister, who also survived the Holocaust; the Nazis arriving in Riga in 1941; the formation of a ghetto for the Jews; fleeing the ghetto and going to work in a factory in an apartment building, where he stayed until he was sent to concentration camp; surviving four camps, including Stutthoff and Gutendorf; doing a variety of work, from the kitchen to clean up on U-boat construction; being liberated by the Soviets in March of 1945; being put in jail by the Soviet troops; a Soviet doctor putting him into a hospital, which saved his life; and ending up in three hospitals after his liberation.
- Interviewee
- Sasha Semenoff
- Interviewer
- Esther Finder
- Credit Line
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Esther Toporek Finder
Physical Details
- Language
- English
- Extent
-
1 digital file : MOV.
Rights & Restrictions
- Conditions on Access
- There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
- Conditions on Use
- Restrictions on use. Restrictions may exist. Contact the Museum for further information: reference@ushmm.org
Keywords & Subjects
- Topical Term
- Concentration camp inmates. Forced labor. Holocaust survivors. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Personal narratives. Jews--Latvia--Riga. Soldiers--Soviet Union. World War, 1939-1945--Concentration camps--Liberation. World War, 1939-1945--Conscript labor. World War, 1939-1945--Deportations from Latvia. World War, 1939-1945--Medical care. Men--Personal narratives.
- Geographic Name
- Germany. Latvia--History--German occupation, 1941-1944. Riga (Latvia) Sztutowo (Poland)
- Personal Name
- Semenoff, Sasha.
- Corporate Name
- Stutthof (Concentration camp)
Administrative Notes
- Legal Status
- Permanent Collection
- Provenance
- Esther Toporek Finder, President of Generations of the Shoah - Nevada, produced the oral history interview with Sasha Semenoff in partnership with Raymode Fiol, President of the Holocaust Survivors Group of Southern Nevada, Brett Levner, film professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV), and Sun City Anthem TV in Henderson, NV.
- Special Collection
-
The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive
- Record last modified:
- 2023-11-16 09:34:54
- This page:
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn608183
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Also in Oral history interviews of the Esther Toporek Finder collection
Oral history interviews with survivors from the Las Vegas, NV area about their post-Holocaust experiences.
Date: 2013-2014
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Oral history interview with Ann Jenner
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Oral history interview with Ben Lesser
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Oral history interview with Evelyn Goldstein
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Oral history interview with Henry Kronberg
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Oral history interview with Henry Schuster
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Oral history interview with Janos Strauss
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Oral history interview with Lily Tokarski
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Oral history interview with Lydia Lebovic and Willie Lebovic
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Oral history interview with Judd Nissanov and Magda Nissanov
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Oral history interview with Martin Kohn
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Oral history interview with Meta Doran
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Meta Doran (née Kempinski), born in Hamburg, Germany on February 1, 1926, describe her father, who ran a successful import/export business; being an only child; her family being deported to Poland in 1938 because her father had Polish citizenship; living in the Pabianice ghetto and then the Łódź ghetto, where her father died of starvation; spending four years in in the Łódź ghetto; being deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in the summer of 1944; her mother’s death; being in the camp for 5 or 6 months; being deported to Bergen-Belsen, where she slept on the ground; being forced to collect information from incoming prisoners for the Nazis because she spoke German and Polish well; being sent to Salzwedel, where there were munitions factories; being lucky enough to be assigned to work in the kitchen; and being liberated by the Americans on April 14, 1945.
Oral history interviews with Raymonde Fiol
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Raymonde (Ray) Fiol (née Nathansohn), born in Paris, France in 1936, describes her mother, who was a dressmaker, and her father, who was in the handbag business; being foreign-born Jews in France and how this made their lives especially dangerous under the Nazis; being three years old when the Germans invaded; having one memory from that time: her mother wearing a yellow Star of David on her clothing and a Nazi stopping her in the street and asking why Ray was not wearing a star (children her age were not required to wear the star); learning as an adult about her parents’ fates; her parents being forced into a labor camp and being made to work the land; her parents being in the Drancy transit camp in 1942 and then deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were killed in January 1944; her parents arranging to have her smuggled out of the labor camp by a member of the French Resistance; staying with a couple her for the rest of the war, posing as their niece who left Paris for safety; how the whole village knew the truth and kept her secret; registering with the German authorities when she first arrived in the village; the German in charge of the village and her suspicion that he knew she was Jewish; speaking Yiddish fluently and translating German for her adopted parents; and the liberation of her area by the Americans in August 1944.
Oral history interview with Sabina Callwood
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Sabina Callwood (née Wagschal), born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1936, describes her father, who was taken away in 1942 by the Gestapo; her mother staying with the children but becoming ill and having to be hospitalized; being registered with the Gestapo and going to an orphanage with her siblings; the director of the orphanage, Madam Rosi Rothschild; being fed and guarded; how Madam Rothschild could not save all her charges, but was able to save Sabina and her brothers; how Madam Rothschild wanted to help the Callwood children because she knew their mother was still alive; the need for the children to leave Antwerp to escape the Gestapo; being separated from her two brothers, who were taken to different shelters outside the city while she stayed in the orphanage; being very ill and almost dying of dysentery; how when the Nazis decided to make Antwerp Judenrein (free of Jews) in 1943, Madam Rothschild got permission to take her charges to Lasne, Belgium; being sheltered with the other children in a hospital for the handicapped; being sent to another orphanage in a hamlet at the end of 1944 and staying there until the end of the war; her mother surviving Auschwitz and looking like a skeleton when she came to collect Sabina; reuniting with her brothers; and ultimately reuniting with her father, who had survived by escaping a French labor camp pretending to be a Christian Deaf mute.
Oral history interview with Stan Rubens
Oral History
Stan Rubens, born in Holland in 1932, describes his parents, who ran a retail store; his older sister; the Nazis invading on May 5, 1940; his father taking the family into hiding in Amsterdam in 1941; being aided and then betrayed by a woman named Mrs. Eusman; the Nazis coming to arrest them in 1942 and his father convincing one of the Germans to help them escape from deportation; being in a holding area with his sister and other children; his sister finding an opening and escaping by just walking away; trying to break away from a captor but being caught and returned to the holding area; being nine years old when he was separated from his family; his father helping him to escape; his parents bribing someone to help them escape from a transport truck; memorizing the address of a member of the underground who would shelter them and reuniting with his family; being in this shelter for about a week after which they stayed in a variety of hiding places and the members of his family were sometimes dispersed; hiding on a farm in the countryside by the end of the war; and his family’s survival.
Oral history interview with Stephen Nasser
Oral History
Stephen Nasser, born in Budapest, Hungary in 1931, describes his family’s jewelry store; his pleasant childhood and their friendly neighbors; experiencing some antisemitism before the Nazis came in March 1943; conditions changing dramatically when the Nazis arrived; the laws changing and the Jews losing their citizenship so they were no longer protected by the Hungarian government; he and his brother getting into fights with boys who tried to bully and intimidate them; being forced with his family into a ghetto towards the end of 1943 or early 1944; only being in the ghetto a few days with his brother before a Christian friend took them to work in his factory, where they separated from the family; being deported in the spring of 1944 to an internment camp in a brick factory; being transported with his mother and some other relatives being transported from the brick factory in a cattle car to Auschwitz-Birkenau; witnessing the murder of some of his relatives in Birkenau; staying with his brother in Birkenau for less than a week until they were sent to Muhldorf, a subcamp of Dachau in Bavaria, Germany; building a bomb-proof munitions factory; remaining there until liberation on April 30, 1945; and being liberated from a death train by General Patton’s 3rd Army.
Oral history interview with Tamas Foldes
Oral History
Tamas Foldes, born on March 20, 1938 in Budapest, Hungary, describes the invasion of the Nazis when he was celebrating his 6th birthday in 1944; his family having Shutzpasses (protective passports) issued from Spain; how these passes were not as secure as Swedish passes and sometimes Jews with such passes were still taken out, shot, and their bodies were dumped in the Danube River; his family being kicked out of their home and having to find shelter in dangerous circumstances; living in the international ghetto, also known as the little ghetto; the Hungarian fascists rounding them up one night and the people in his building bribing someone to help them get to the big ghetto, where they might be slightly safer than where they were living; his mother, who was an actress and was saved from deportation by a guard who was one of her fans; and the takeover of Budapest by the Soviet troops in January 18, 1945.
Oral history interview with Tom Figueras
Oral History
Tom Figueras (né Nadelstecher), born in Uzhorod, Czechoslovakia (Ukraine) in October 1927, describes changing his last name after the war; his father, who was a dentist; his one brother, who was a musical prodigy and played the violin in the orchestra in the Buchenwald concentration camp until he was sent to Bergen-Belsen; his other brother, who was a heavy smoker and traded his bread for cigarettes in the concentration camp; no one in his immediate family surviving the war; the Nazis arriving in his town in March 1944 and being sent within two months to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he stayed three days; being transported to the Gross-Rosen cluster of camps in Germany; his leather shoes wearing out and being forced to wear ill-fitting wooden clogs, which damaged his feet; staying in a hospital for three months; being force-marched to Bergen-Belsen and how most of the other prisoners with him did not survive; getting himself on a transport to Hildesheim, Germany; the housing of the Jewish laborers in a synagogue in Hildesheim; his job pulling dead bodies out of bomb shelters; often finding food in those shelters; American bombers destroying the town; marching back to Bergen-Belsen; how conditions there had deteriorated in the weeks he had been away; and being liberated by the British on April 15, 1945.
Oral history interview with Joseph Frank
Oral History
Joseph Frank, born in Bavaria, Germany in March 1937, discusses his father's prewar cattle business; dramatic changes for Jews in Germany following Kristallnacht; his father's arrest and deportation to Dachau concentration camp for three months; his father's release under the condition that he and his family would leave quickly from Germany; finding temporary refuge in England; the suspicion of German spies in Britain; his family being separated; being placed in an orphanage at two years old; and his family's immigration to the United States in March 1940.
Oral history interview with Gary Rosenthal
Oral History
Gary Rosenthal, born in Vienna, Austria in 1933, describes his father, who was a publisher of a pharmaceutical magazine; the Anschluss in 1938; life changing dramatically for the Jews after the Nazis took over; his parents having different opinions about what to do before the Anschluss: his father wanting to stay and his mother wanting to leave; how after the Anschluss all the Jews wanted to leave, but nobody at that time had any idea what was about to happen to the Jews in Europe; his parents writing to strangers and relatives with the name Rosenthal and Blaustein (his mother’s maiden name) in order to find someone to help them leave Austria; getting help to go to the United States; his family leaving in September 1938 and boarding the SS Washington; crossing the Atlantic; and arriving in the US on October 8, 1938.
