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Oral history interview with Elisabeth Weinberger

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 2018.301.1 | RG Number: RG-50.030.0975

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    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Weinberger
    Transcript
    Rolling.
    This is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    interview with Mrs. Elisabeth Weinberger on June 28,
    2018 in Lawrence, New York.
    Thank you very much, Mrs. Weinberger,
    for agreeing to speak with us today.
    Thank you for being here.
    Well, I know that sometimes it's not
    easy to go back to the memories one has from a very
    traumatic, bad time.
    And we appreciate that you're willing to do so.
    And I'd like to start our interview with the times
    before they got bad, that is, the early years
    of your childhood.
    I'd like to learn as much as I could
    about what your life was like and what
    your family's life was like.
    So I'll start with basic questions.
    OK.
    And we go from there.
    OK.
    OK.
    Tell me, what was your name when you were born?
    Elizabeth Heller.
    Heller?
    Yes.
    H-E-L-L-E-R.
    OK.
    And what was the date of your birth?
    March 30, 1931.
    OK.
    And where were you born?
    I was born in Antwerp, Belgium.
    Aha.
    Did you have any brothers and sisters?
    Yes.
    I had a sister, a younger sister.
    And what was her name?
    Her name was Rosa.
    And when was she born?
    She was born in February 9, 1933.
    OK.
    Can we cut the camera?
    Rolling.
    OK.
    And what was your mother's name?
    My mother's name was Helena.
    What was her maiden name?
    Her maiden name was Friedman.
    Friedman?
    Yes.
    Do you know about when she was born?
    She was born in 1909, on April 15, 1909.
    In Antwerp as well?
    No, no.
    She was born in Czechoslovakia.
    Do you know where in Czechoslovakia?
    It was called-- a small, small town also,
    it was called Ohrobec.
    But it's next to a bigger town, which was [? Serles. ?]
    [? Serles? ?]
    [? Serles, ?] yeah.
    That sounds Hungarian almost.
    Yeah.
    Also because it was also Czechoslovakia.
    But they were also close to the borders over there.
    So it's a little bit further than
    where my husband comes from.
    OK.
    And did you ever visit that place as a little girl?
    I went there in 1936, when I was five years old
    and my sister Rosa was three.
    Because my mother-- it was 1936, because my mother
    wanted to go back home to see her father, her older father.
    And then we should go back to where my father was born also.
    So at first we went to my mother's house
    where she was born.
    And we visited the grandfather, my grandfather.
    What about your grandmother?
    My grandmother, unfortunately, died in childbirth
    when my mother was two years old.
    So she was a little girl.
    And then the father, they got married.
    So she had a stepmother, a very, very much of a stepmother
    like they have in the stories.
    Oh, one of "those" stepmothers.
    Yes.
    Oh, gosh.
    Real, really bad.
    So she used to take it out on my mother, who was the youngest,
    and pinch her and make her life a little miserable.
    Did your mother have brothers and sisters?
    Yes, she did.
    She had a sister who was in the United States that
    came before the war.
    And her name was Bertha, Aunt Bertha.
    And then she had another sister which I never met, then,
    I think.
    And a brother-- two brothers, but I
    don't remember them very clearly,
    because I was five years old.
    But I remember seeing them.
    Was the stepmother alive when you visited them?
    No.
    I didn't meet her.
    No.
    OK.
    But your grandfather was alive when you met--
    Yes.
    Yes.
    And what was his name?
    Well, I only know the Jewish name was Shia.
    Shia?
    Yeah.
    OK.
    And was this the one and only time
    that you met him, when you were there at age five?
    Yes.
    How is it that your mother came from this small place
    in Czechoslovakia to Antwerp?
    You know what, because of her childhood.
    She didn't have such a great childhood when she was little.
    Like I told you, her stepmother was a mean lady.
    I hate to say it.
    So she went from aunt to aunt somehow
    because she didn't want to stay there.
    So she was not always happy where she was.
    And because the aunts were not the direct women--
    it was their husbands who were the relatives,
    so they were not that nice to her, either.
    So because she was a little girl and, like, a half orphan.
    So anyway, it was not easy for her.
    But she was the type of person who was very smart and very--
    how do you put it-- not only smart, but street smart, too.
    She was resourceful.
    Pardon me?
    Very resourceful and very bright.
    As a matter of fact, they gave her
    a nickname when was very little, the little lawyer.
    Really?
    Good for her.
    She needed it.
    Yes.
    She did.
    She needed all the help she could get.
    Because they took advantage of her.
    So she wanted to go more to school.
    And the stepmother announced-- they said, no, you
    have to take care of the geese.
    But she was very smart.
    So it didn't harm her not to have this too much schooling.
    And I guess her stepmother was in charge of the children,
    so she was the one that was with her most of the time.
    But when we went back, it was a bittersweet trip.
    Because my mother wanted to see her father and her siblings
    that were still there.
    But we were very happy to be there,
    because it was a completely different life there.
    Tell me.
    Yeah.
    Well, what did it look like.
    We come from a big city.
    I was born in a big city.
    And there, they had outside.
    They did barbecue corn and all kinds of different things.
    You know what I mean?
    It's a rural life.
    And they had fun.
    But we liked it.
    And everybody spoiled us.
    [LAUGHING]
    And because they don't see us.
    They never see us.
    They never saw us before that.
    Did her father have a farm or did her father live in a town?
    That was not my father's family. it was my mother's.
    No, no, her father.
    Oh, her father?
    No, it was a town.
    It's a small town.
    A small town?
    Yes, a small town.
    How did he make his living?
    You know what?
    I'm not too sure.
    OK.
    So I can't tell you, really.
    Because at that time, I didn't even talk too much about it.
    The problem is that I can't even ask my sister,
    but she wouldn't know, either.
    She was younger than I was.
    So I don't know what really he did.
    He was a very bright man, but I'm not sure.
    So I don't want to tell you something that I'm not sure of.
    Do you know how she got from there to Antwerp?
    Yes.
    How did she get--
    She got there because she wanted to get away.
    So somehow, I don't know how she did it,
    but she got some people that she knew.
    And she tried and she went with someone.
    And she arrived-- because she had heard that Belgium is
    a very good country for--
    she liked to sew.
    So she said she'll go there and she'll be on her own
    and make her new life there.
    Because she wasn't happy with her home life at that time.
    And so I don't know.
    Some people helped her on the way and she somehow made it.
    I told you she was very smart, very streetwise,
    and very, very lovable.
    She was very good.
    Everybody liked her, except the stepmother.
    And so she made it to Belgium and Antwerp.
    Would this have been after World War I?
    Well, she was 16 when she left.
    And she was born, again, tell me-- you told me.
    1909.
    OK.
    So it was 1925.
    She left in 1925.
    Probably, yes.
    So she got there.
    And there, she somehow had some connections.
    I don't know how she did it.
    In French, they said débrouillard That means, like,
    resourceful.
    OK.
    So she knew people and people liked her.
    She was good.
    So she found a family that she went and lived in their room
    by them, a Jewish family.
    And that's where she stayed.
    And that's how she got there to Belgium.
    But my father also was not from there.
    He was from Slovakia.
    And that was a different region.
    And he was born in a small town called Nizny Svidník,
    which is next to what my husband said, Presov--
    OK.
    --in Slovokia.
    Nizny Svidník.
    Nizny Svidník.
    It's not easy to--
    Let me see if I can say it again.
    Nizny--
    Nizny Svidník.
    Svidník.
    Yeah.
    Nizny Svidník.
    Svidník, yeah.
    OK.
    We got it.
    Yes.
    So he was there.
    And I don't know how many siblings he had.
    He had brothers.
    Was he the youngest, the oldest?
    My father was one of the youngest also.
    OK.
    So he was one of the youngest.
    And he had three brothers in the United States
    that came before the war.
    OK.
    Yeah.
    And what was your father's first name?
    His first name was really Pinkas.
    Pinkas?
    "Peen-kaz, they'd call him.
    But they called him Paul--
    "Pauly" in the Czech and the Hungarian way.
    So, Heller.
    OK.
    And when was he born?
    He was born in 1907.
    So he was a few years older than your mother?
    Just two years older.
    OK.
    Yeah.
    And so was Pinkas--
    His birthday was September 10, 1907.
    September 10, 1907.
    And your mother's birthday was in 1909?
    Yes.
    April 15.
    April 15.
    Yes.
    And she was born Friedman?
    Yes.
    And her first name, again, was Helena.
    Helena, of course.
    Helena.
    Helena Friedman and Pinkas Heller.
    Yeah.
    And how did they meet?
    Did they ever tell you?
    They met in Antwerp.
    Because he came out also at 18.
    He went to Antwerp, too.
    He wanted to be there and to have a trade there and have
    more opportunities.
    So he came to Antwerp.
    And because Antwerp was the big diamond center
    of those days, the biggest one.
    So he got a job in the diamond center as a diamond cutter.
    Oh, you have to be quite skilled to do that.
    Yes.
    He was very skilled.
    I guess he learned a lot on the job, too.
    But that's what he did.
    OK.
    So your mother and father met how?
    I don't know exactly.
    Because I don't know exactly.
    But they were very much in love.
    And she was 16 and he was 18.
    But I think they met maybe a little later than that.
    And I don't know the details of their meeting.
    But they had a lot in common.
    They're both from the same part of the world.
    Yes.
    Even if their towns aren't that close,
    they're still within Czechoslovakia.
    Yes, yes, yes, yes.
    So they did.
    And I guess through people, their friends and all that.
    I have a wedding picture of them.
    Do you?
    Yeah.
    In the other room.
    But because we wouldn't have had any pictures--
    because we didn't have it.
    We didn't bring any pictures.
    We didn't have any pictures.
    But we had sent-- they always sent pictures
    to the United States to their family, everybody did.
    So my Aunt Bertha, my mother's sister
    that was in the United States, she always
    had pictures from when they sent her.
    So that's when we had most of the pictures
    from after the war.
    OK.
    So that's how you were able--
    'Cause during the war we didn't have anything.
    --get them again.
    Pardon me?
    That's how you were able to get them again.
    You know?
    Because people lost everything.
    Yes.
    And that's what we have some of the memories and pictures.
    So let's talk a little bit about your first memories in Antwerp?
    Do you have any as a small toddler
    or as a child that come to your mind?
    Yeah.
    One of them is not a good memory I remember.
    But I had wonderful memories after.
    But that one memory, when I must have been very young--
    maybe two.
    It was preschool or something.
    And I remember going with a group of the children.
    I was very little.
    And all of a sudden, I see that nobody else in line--
    they left me out in the hall.
    So that was by accident, I'm sure.
    But I didn't go into the class with the other children.
    And all of a sudden, I see that I'm all alone
    and nobody's coming for me.
    So I started to cry.
    I remember this.
    I remember crying and crying and crying.
    Because I was very fearful and afraid.
    And finally, somebody came to get-- but it's a weird memory.
    I must have been very young.
    But it must have been very frightening and unexpected?
    Yes.
    Because left alone someplace in the hall somewhere.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    But that's the first memory I remember, really.
    So that's within a school?
    Yeah.
    That's not at home?
    No.
    Do you have any memories from your home life?
    Well, my home life was wonderful.
    Tell me about it.
    Home life was wonderful.
    We had wonderful parents, wonderful father,
    wonderful mother--
    very caring, especially my mother, because she had
    didn't have her own mother.
    So she was extremely, extremely loving
    and dedicated to the children.
    And she was a wonderful person, I told you,
    in general, everything.
    Everybody loved my mother.
    Hm.
    Was she more outgoing than your father was?
    More?
    Outgoing.
    Yes.
    She was very outgoing, very outgoing.
    And my father was also, but not as much as my mother.
    No, she was very friendly, very sociable.
    And she sang all the time and she laughed.
    And she has a very good personality.
    Your father, did he have any brothers and sisters who
    lived with him or lived in Antwerp as well?
    Yes.
    There was one brother that lived in Antwerp, and maybe
    another one for a little while.
    But three of them, I told you, were in the United States
    of America.
    They came here, three brothers.
    And one brother, two maybe--
    was in Antwerp also.
    But I don't remember him well at all.
    So you don't remember visiting him much?
    No.
    OK.
    Did your parents have a wide social circle in Antwerp?
    Yes.
    They were going everywhere.
    They were very popular.
    And we had a very nice-- they had a very nice life.
    My father went to a synagogue, you know.
    And they were modern Orthodox.
    Modern Orthodox?
    Modern.
    Yeah, modern.
    Because they my mother didn't have a wig.
    And my father didn't have a beard.
    But it was orthodox, but not with the beard
    and the wig that they were wearing in those days.
    So in other words, they had apparel
    that looked like everybody else's clothes?
    Oh, yeah.
    Oh, yeah.
    They wore clothes like everyone else did?
    Yeah.
    Sure, sure.
    Yes.
    And there was nothing from their appearance outward
    that would signify that they belonged to an orthodox sect?
    Except my father liked to wear a hat.
    He was a dapper dresser.
    Was he?
    And my mother liked to dress, too.
    So he wore a hat.
    I'll show you a picture of him.
    There may be some in the album.
    I don't know if it's that one.
    So they were both very modern dressing and modern
    in their ways--
    except that they were kosher, of course,
    and they belonged to the synagogue.
    And all the holidays were kept strictly and all that.
    Did you live in a Jewish neighborhood?
    Yeah.
    It was a Jewish neighborhood, except we
    had a Christian neighbor, too.
    I remember them, too.
    Not too well, but I remember them.
    Now did you live in an apartment or a house?
    A house, it was a house.
    It was a two story or three story.
    But the upper part of the story, I think they rented out.
    But the rest was ours.
    OK.
    And was it a stone house or a wooden house?
    No.
    It was a city, so it was a stone house.
    It was a very nice street.
    You know, paved, nice, modern street.
    And it was a nice house and beautiful.
    The entrance had beautiful, wide steps, wide steps going out.
    I remember that very well.
    And beautiful furniture, we had nice furniture.
    They liked nice things.
    My mother liked nice things, my father.
    And they lived not very--
    I mean, my father made a nice living.
    But they didn't live like very wealthy people,
    but very, very nice and comfortable.
    OK.
    So it was sort of like a solid middle class family?
    Yes.
    Very nice, very nice.
    Well, tell me, in that kind of frame,
    or that kind of category, let's talk in the same way
    or ask the same questions that I had
    asked your husband in his interview, your husband Nathan
    Weinberger.
    Did you have indoor plumbing in your home?
    Indoor plumbing, running water.
    Yes, we did.
    OK.
    Running water, bath?
    We had to call it--
    at that time, called weight-save.
    They had that thing with the pull, the chain.
    OK.
    You had a water closet, I guess--
    Yes.
    --a WC.
    Yes, a water closet.
    OK.
    I'm not sure about a bathtub.
    I don't remember, not a bathtub.
    But we probably had some kind of shower, something.
    But we had the toilet with a chain on it.
    Did you have electricity?
    Yes.
    How was the place heated?
    I don't know if I paid attention.
    I don't know if it was heated.
    I don't remember a wood stove or anything.
    Do you remember a coal oven?
    We had a stove.
    I remember that.
    But I don't-- maybe they put coal in it, but not wood.
    What often happened in city dwellings
    at that time is that there'd be these beautifully
    decorated ovens called--
    that were coal ovens.
    Yeah, probably it was coal oven.
    And they would be in one room or there'd be one per room.
    And they had nice tiles.
    Do you remember anything like that?
    Not by the tiles--
    I remember the top.
    It was very nice and white.
    And it was a nice stove.
    OK.
    And it was only in the kitchen.
    We had it in the kitchen.
    OK.
    OK.
    Did you have a radio?
    I think they had a radio later on.
    Yeah.
    Because they were listening at one time to the news
    when the war was going on.
    I was going to--
    So they listened to a radio.
    Yeah.
    Did your father-- how did he get to work?
    He didn't have a car.
    That was my question.
    So I don't really--
    probably transportation, public transportation.
    But I really don't know.
    I don't remember, I have to tell you.
    I'm ashamed.
    That's OK.
    But I don't remember.
    Yeah.
    Did you ever visit him at work?
    I think once we went there.
    Yes.
    We did go.
    Because my sister went too close to their cutting machine,
    to the thing.
    And her hair got caught in the thing.
    That I remember clearly, in the back.
    She went too close to the--
    She was curious?
    Yeah.
    She was.
    So her hair got caught, the hair on the back.
    So it was like a little traumatic experience.
    But it was OK.
    She didn't get hurt.
    But this I remember.
    OK.
    But it was very hard to cut the diamond.
    It had to be very, very, very precise.
    And he had the loop, you know, and all these things.
    He must have had magnifying looks.
    I don't know what they had-- loops.
    And it's very tedious.
    Because they had--
    I don't know how many facets are to a diamond.
    But there were so many.
    And each one had to be cut separately and perfectly.
    That takes--
    A lot of skill.
    Yeah.
    So we did go to visit him.
    And maybe more than that one time.
    But I don't know how he got to work.
    I really don't know.
    But they used to have tramways, too,
    that could have been there.
    You know, on the--
    Sure.
    --streetcar.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    Did your mother, after you and your sister were born,
    did she still work?
    Or did she stay at home to take care of you?
    She stayed at home.
    Take care, but she did some sewing.
    OK.
    Was she a good sewer?
    Yes.
    A very good sewer.
    Did she make your clothes?
    Yes.
    And your sister's?
    Yes.
    But sometimes we went to the stores, too.
    Because they had beautiful stores.
    And one beautiful street in Antwerp
    was called De Keyserlei.
    Why I remember that, I don't know.
    That's, like, Main Street.
    You know, like Fifth Avenue or something.
    So she used to go in there and copy from the window, you know,
    things, and then make it for us.
    Oh, wow.
    Yeah.
    Oh, wow.
    She was talented.
    And so you remember accompanying her
    to see some of these stores?
    Yes.
    Sure, we walked in the stores on that street.
    Yes.
    So we have only really good memories
    from our home life all the time.
    And did she have any help at home,
    like someone helping her with the cleaning?
    No.
    She did everything herself.
    She did everything herself?
    Everything she did herself.
    OK.
    She baked.
    And she cooked.
    And she was a terrific cook.
    And baked, I remember her making the strudel.
    Do you know what that is?
    Oh, yeah.
    On the table-- isn't that funny, memories like that?
    She was stretching the dough, you know,
    to thin, thin, thin dough.
    You know?
    And then fill it with the fillings
    with the nuts and the--
    Apples?
    --apples, yeah.
    And then rolling the thing and the cutting it.
    She was a very wonderful cook, really, and a good baker.
    And she was-- in every way, she was.
    Did you help her in the kitchen?
    Or were you too little too help?
    We were too little.
    And then I think she wouldn't want us to help.
    [LAUGHING]
    Yeah.
    But it's interesting the things that you
    remember in your mind's eye.
    Yeah.
    You know?
    I remember the kitchen.
    I remember that we were--
    and Belgium's-- it's the home for chocolate, you know?
    Yes.
    Good chocolate.
    Oh, yes.
    --best chocolate.
    So we like chocolate, of course.
    So my sister was the curious one.
    I remember this so clear--
    I don't know why-- in the kitchen,
    stepping on some chair or something to go
    reach the chocolate and find it.
    And she found it.
    She did?
    This is a picture that I have of her.
    She was little, yeah.
    And she got the chocolate.
    But in Belgium, they ate chocolate, sometimes even,
    like, a snack, they put it on the bread, you know, like the--
    Oh, really?
    --and butter and chocolate.
    You know, chocolate pieces, you know, like--
    That's some snack.
    It's a good snack.
    [LAUGHING]
    I remember this snack.
    And we loved it.
    My sister was the one that was more--
    get more into mischief.
    Oh, I see.
    Were you, in your personality, were you more
    the reserved one or the one who was obedient?
    I was obedient.
    I was, yes, I was obedient, more obedient than my sister.
    But were you a pair, then?
    Were you one another's best friend?
    Yeah.
    We did everything together.
    OK.
    We were friends.
    We were growing-- we had a nice garden
    in the back of the house.
    Did you have any pets?
    No pets, I don't remember any pets.
    No.
    No pets.
    What did your street look like?
    Was it residential?
    My street was a street-- to me, it
    seemed like it's a big street.
    When my sister went back to Belgium, after the war,
    with her son, to show her where we had lived.
    And she says, oh, my God.
    I thought it was such a big street.
    And it's a small, not too big--
    narrow, with its two sidewalks on each side.
    And to her, it looked like a little, little street.
    Well, it shrunk.
    Yeah.
    It shrunk.
    [LAUGHING]
    When you get older, it shrinks.
    But we had a wonderful, wonderful area.
    Because on our street, going across it
    from the end of the street was the school where we went to.
    And that was called--
    the public school, the elementary school--
    so that's what's called Bais Yaakov.
    But this was also modern.
    It was a girls school, for girls, a Jewish school.
    Bais Yaakov?
    Yes.
    But it was a public school?
    No, that was a private school.
    It was a private school.
    It was a private school.
    Did you go there?
    Yes.
    We both went there.
    OK.
    OK.
    And what was your neighborhood called?
    Did you have a name for what part of Antwerp you lived in?
    No.
    I just know the name of the street.
    What was the name of the street?
    [NON-ENGLISH] Rosebrook Straat.
    [NON-ENGLISH] Rosebrook Straat.
    That was Flemish.
    Aha.
    Because in Belgium, there are two languages, bilingual.
    The one language was Flemish and the other was French.
    Which did you speak at home?
    We spoke mainly Flemish, Yiddish,
    and tried to understand what my parents were
    talking in Hungarian.
    So I should know what it is.
    And I did pick up, because I liked languages.
    So after a while, I knew what they were talking about.
    But most of the time we spoke--
    the language of Antwerp was more Flemish.
    [NON-ENGLISH].
    It was called in French.
    OK.
    French I learned later when-- well, I'll tell you the story.
    We fled from Belgium to France.
    It's a complicated--
    So at home, it was Flemish?
    Well, that makes sense, because that
    would be closer to Yiddish than French would be.
    Right.
    Right.
    Right.
    And your parents spoke Hungarian to each other?
    Hungarian to each other and Yiddish.
    OK.
    And in Flemish, because they were in the country, you know.
    Was the house in a residential area or downtown?
    Where we lived was residential.
    It was residential.
    So was it a suburban area type of thing, far from the city
    center, or close to it?
    I don't know.
    I don't remember too well.
    I was never good in directions, still
    not, no sense of direction too much.
    That's OK.
    But to us, it seemed wonderful.
    Everything was wonderful.
    Did you have only your mother take care of you,
    or was there anybody else who helped her out?
    No.
    She took care of us all the time.
    OK.
    And my father came home at night after work.
    And he spoiled us when he came.
    He brought us all kinds of goodies, you know.
    But we also went, in the summertime,
    there was a beach area.
    And it was called--
    I forgot the name but two of them.
    It was-- I can't remember right now.
    So we went there, too.
    So we had a nice time there because we were by the beach.
    And--
    It was by the ocean?
    Antwerp is a port.
    But I don't know which ocean it was at that time.
    It probably must have been the north--
    what do you call it?
    North Sea?
    I don't know for sure.
    No.
    It was on the Belgian coast?
    Was it within the country?
    Yes, yes, yes, yes, the Belgian coast.
    And like I said, my sense of direction, at that time,
    I didn't pay that much attention.
    I just knew that when we were going out
    in the street in front of the house,
    we used to have a scooter, not a bicycle.
    A scooter that we did scoot it with the feet, you know?
    That's what we used to call it, [NON-ENGLISH]..
    [NON-ENGLISH].
    [NON-ENGLISH].
    It's funny that you remember some things like that.
    Yeah.
    But that comes back to you.
    You know?
    Did you play with neighborhood kids?
    Yeah.
    We played with neighborhood kids.
    And most of them were Jewish?
    No.
    It was very mixed.
    It was mixed.
    Our next door neighbor was not Jewish.
    That I know.
    OK.
    And did you have non-Jewish friends then?
    Not out of the school.
    Because when we went to school, those
    were our friends, whoever went to the same school,
    even if they didn't live right there.
    But those were our friends, yeah.
    Yeah.
    That's what I remember.
    What kind of memories do you have of school?
    Good memories.
    I have good memories, yeah.
    It was very nice.
    I remember-- I don't remember the teachers' names.
    But I remember what was on the walls, all the pictures,
    you know?
    They had animals and all sorts of nice--
    I remember the wall picture.
    I remember especially one was for A, was off--
    you know, monkey?
    But they were very nice.
    The teachers were very, very lovely.
    Did you have a favorite teacher?
    I wouldn't remember her from that time.
    Because I was there only till I was 9 years old, just 9.
    OK.
    And so that would have made third grade or fourth grade,
    or third class or fourth class?
    I have no idea.
    I know that we went there as children, too, like preschool,
    too.
    And then, I don't know.
    Do you know what age you started school?
    I don't know, probably five--
    OK.
    --six.
    OK.
    So that would have been 1935, 1936, something like that?
    Yeah.
    1936, we already went to--
    I told you-- to Czechoslovakia.
    So that I remember.
    We went to Czechoslovakia.
    With my mother.
    Yeah.
    You mentioned that you stopped to see your grandfather.
    Now did he look more traditional orthodox,
    or was he also modern dressed?
    No.
    He was more traditional.
    OK.
    And did you then say you went to visit your father's family?
    Yes.
    And he also had a beard.
    OK.
    And my grandmother had a sheitel, a wig.
    So they were very wonderful people,
    too, my father's parents.
    Yeah?
    Yeah.
    And had any of their children stayed
    in the same place with them in--
    what was it, "Novy Svedík" or something?
    You said that he--
    Nizny Svidník.
    "Nizny Svid--"
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    [LAUGHING]
    Did any of their kids stay, their father's
    brothers or sisters?
    Or are all of them--
    Most of them went away.
    They went to Antwerp.
    And they went to America, too, later on.
    But I don't remember clearly there.
    But I know that everybody spoiled us.
    That I remember.
    Because they didn't see kids like us.
    Because we were different than they were somehow.
    And our grandparents were wonderful to us.
    They spoiled us rotten.
    Didn't know what to do with--
    That's what grandparents are for.
    Yeah.
    But we didn't stay long.
    Because we had to go back.
    My mother and-- my father came later.
    We went with my mother, alone, you know, at first.
    And then my father met us there.
    And then we came back.
    That was one of my questions, whether it had been a family
    trip, or he had stayed in Belgium for a while
    and you went on ahead of him.
    And it sounds like first you went and visited
    your mother's place.
    Yes.
    And then we went there.
    And then my father was there, too, and joined us there.
    Was that the only trip you took to Czechoslovakia?
    Only one, the only time that I ever saw my grandparents ever.
    I see.
    Did anybody ever come to visit you in Antwerp?
    No.
    Not from the Czechoslovakia, no.
    OK.
    OK.
    And you said that your parents did have a radio?
    Is that right?
    No.
    My parents had a radio.
    Yes.
    They had one.
    Yeah.
    Did they also read newspapers?
    Did they order--
    Yeah, my father and my mother, they read newspapers.
    So he subscribed to some and got them every day,
    or brought them home with him?
    Do you remember?
    The papers?
    Yeah.
    I know he had papers.
    But I wasn't that interested, to tell you
    the truth at that time in the papers.
    But they were both interested in what's going on in the world.
    Now do you remember--
    this is an unfair question to ask, but I'll ask it.
    Do you remember the first time you heard the name Hitler?
    It was already when I was probably nine years old.
    I heard something.
    Had the war started or not yet?
    Yeah.
    The war started in 1940 in Belgium.
    They bombed Belgium in 1940.
    And that's exactly when I was nine years old,
    just about my birthday.
    And then I don't remember the date, but it was in 1940.
    OK.
    And then they were bombing.
    And there were a lot of bombs.
    And I remember the sirens and the bombs.
    And then, at that time, that's where they were all
    listening to the radio.
    Everybody was listening to the radio,
    even the one's that didn't have, so went to a neighbor
    and listened to radio.
    And all the Jewish friends decided,
    I think I'm running away from the question that you asked?
    No, you're not, actually.
    We're going straight into them.
    Unless there's something I haven't asked,
    I think we've gotten a picture of what your childhood--
    It was beautiful, our childhood, very beautiful and wonderful,
    comfortable, and loving, and very good
    memories from my childhood, and with my sister,
    my little sister.
    And we had, like I said, a nice garden in the back.
    And I remember going down the steps.
    I think my sister fell down the steps one day, because she
    was always in trouble.
    And on that was a terrace going down to the garden.
    And I remember that we had grapes growing on the terrace.
    And we had an apple tree and a pear tree.
    Oh, how lovely.
    Yeah.
    And it was very nice.
    And it was a nice place to live.
    And to us, it was heaven.
    That's what we knew.
    That's how we grew up.
    And then it all changed.
    In a couple of days.
    Really?
    We started to hear news about Hitler before.
    And then it reached us.
    So the people, I don't know how they got together,
    my parents and friends and all that everybody
    knew from each other.
    And the whole bunch of Jewish people
    decided that they would be better off to go--
    I don't know who was in charge of this.
    But to go and flee to France, South of France.
    Because they wouldn't come there, the Germans, they said.
    You know?
    That was really a Vichy time, you know?
    That was free.
    So do you remember leaving your home?
    Yes.
    I remember very well.
    My mother made roast chicken--
    no, fried chicken--
    Southern fried chicken and French fries.
    Because French fries come from Belgium, too.
    Pommes frites?
    [LAUGHING]
    The frites.
    Yeah.
    The pomme-- de terre frites.
    That's why I remember the meal.
    After we ate it, then they took just whatever they could,
    very little.
    Because we were going just, like, running away, you know.
    It was from one minute to the other that this was decided.
    So I remember--
    Did you take a toy with you?
    I don't know.
    I really don't remember.
    OK.
    Maybe I did.
    But it wasn't a time for toys, exactly, then.
    But some things I don't remember well,
    I've told you, some things.
    But I remember the trip.
    Tell me about it.
    The trip going there, because they
    went in trains that were not, how do you call it, real
    trains for passengers.
    It was, like, they would have the trains later on
    to go to the camps, you know?
    There's no place to sit.
    Like cattle cars?
    Yeah.
    Cattle cars.
    That's probably what they were, cattle cars.
    And everybody bunched in together.
    OK.
    And I remember going there.
    And we were scared.
    It was the middle of the night.
    We went at night.
    And then we were afraid because there was bombing noise.
    And we were there and there's a bunch of people,
    some other strangers.
    I remember two sisters, they were two spinsters,
    they never got married.
    And my mother was, I told you, a good person, took in everybody
    and take care of everybody and helped everybody.
    So these two ladies, they were not so young anymore.
    But she always took care of somebody.
    So they were in the same train with us.
    And they were so frightened that I remember them crying.
    And they didn't want to live.
    They wanted to just--
    Give up.
    --give up, completely give up.
    So I know why I remember this.
    Because they were crying, you see.
    And my father, I remember he was very nervous
    about this whole thing.
    So I remember him sitting--
    at one time, when the train stopped somewhere,
    sitting on the steps from the train, sitting there.
    My mother was worried.
    She didn't know what he was thinking.
    You know?
    It was a very, very, very--
    Anxious.
    --anxious time for us.
    Don't know where we were going really.
    We're just going.
    Did they give you any explanation
    why you had left, why you had to leave?
    You know, that I don't remember.
    But they told us we have to go because no good here.
    Because we knew the bombing, because we heard it.
    OK.
    Did you own your own home?
    Yes.
    OK.
    So they left their furniture?
    Everything.
    Everything.
    Everything.
    OK.
    It was a very nice house, like I told you.
    We had beautiful front going up steps.
    I think they were marble, as a matter of fact,
    wide, wide steps.
    You know, about five steps, six steps,
    I don't know why I remember this.
    And we had a very nicely furnished home.
    My mother was very fussy about certain things.
    She wanted to have everything nice.
    Did your father ever give her jewelry as presents?
    Yes.
    She had her engagement ring, a diamond
    ring really very expensive at that time
    when they got engaged.
    And who has the ring?
    I don't know if we ever got it.
    Maybe Renee has the ring, maybe my daughter.
    I'm not even sure.
    But she had it.
    She hid it all the time, wherever we went after that.
    And yeah, so he gave her jewelry.
    OK.
    The upstairs neighbors--
    Pardon me?
    The upstairs neighbors who rented from you, did they stay
    or did they also leave?
    That was just people that we didn't even know.
    No, I don't even know they were Jewish.
    OK.
    OK.
    You don't know if they were, they weren't.
    No.
    OK.
    So you're on a cattle car?
    Yeah.
    You're going South.
    You have two spinsters who are crying.
    Yes, yes.
    You have you--
    Nobody else was very happy, either.
    Yeah.
    No.
    Yeah.
    Were there other children on the cattle car?
    You know, now I don't remember.
    I remember-- mainly, I remember these two spinsters.
    Because they were crying the whole time.
    And they were very, very sad.
    And your father is nervous himself?
    Yes.
    And when he's sitting on those steps,
    are those, like, you open the cattle car doors?
    Yeah.
    Right, steps.
    And right there.
    Yes.
    All right.
    My mother, I know, was nervous about it.
    And this is as the train is moving?
    No, I think when it stopped or something.
    You can't, because the doors wouldn't open then
    if it's going.
    OK.
    So when it was going, it was dark?
    Yes.
    Pitch dark.
    OK.
    No lights.
    They didn't want us to have lights because didn't want to--
    Attract bombs?
    --attract attention, you know.
    And so how long did you travel like this?
    I don't know exactly how much mileage, but awhile.
    Because we went to south of France,
    not that it's so far from Belgium.
    But we went to the south of France.
    Well, it's far enough.
    Yeah.
    It's far enough.
    And when you got off, where did you land?
    We landed in some kind of small town, village.
    And I don't know why they stopped there.
    That's where we landed, in a French village,
    where they never had seen a Jew.
    They didn't know what we were.
    But we stayed in the village.
    And then somehow we got an apartment--
    not an apartment, like a room.
    And we stayed in that village.
    And my mother used to sew for the peasant ladies.
    And they gave her food, you know, and things.
    It was a barter system, somehow.
    And that's what I remember, somehow.
    Do you remember the name of the village?
    I think of Autoliv, but I'm not sure.
    OK.
    I don't remember.
    We were there.
    But we stayed there a little while.
    And then what did they do?
    What did we do?
    We stayed a while.
    And then they started to take the Jewish people into camps,
    like transient camps--
    waiting to go somewhere else.
    You know?
    OK.
    Here's a question.
    I don't-- I'm not remembering.
    Yeah.
    When you were in that cattle car,
    do you know about how many people were in there with you?
    In the car?
    In our car, in our area?
    To me, it seems like a lot, because I was little.
    We were little.
    I don't know.
    Maybe it was 20, 25.
    I don't know.
    I can't tell you.
    OK.
    Because I don't know.
    I'm not sure.
    And were there more cattle cars with more people in them?
    Yeah, yeah, yeah, attached to the train,
    you know, the whole train.
    OK.
    So it was a train full of cattle cars.
    And in each cattle car, there were
    Jews who were trying to escape?
    Yes, to runaway from Belgium.
    And when you stop at this village,
    do they all get out there?
    Or do only some of them get out there?
    Some of them, I think, because I don't know.
    Didn't pay attention, really.
    OK.
    Just was very drama--
    very how do you call it?
    That time was very anxious for us.
    Because we didn't know where we were going.
    We didn't know what was going on.
    And we stopped at--
    that's what I'm saying.
    I don't remember dates.
    And I don't remember some of the names, especially more way
    back.
    Because the computer is not as good as it was-- my computer.
    [LAUGHING]
    Well, none of our computers are like the computers
    that are not human.
    You know, the ones that are not human
    are way smarter than any of us.
    So I try to remember.
    But it's very hard.
    But we stayed there for a while.
    Do you know what time of year the Germans
    started to bomb Belgium?
    Yeah.
    Well, I think it was, that I remember,
    I was just turned nine.
    My birthday is March 30.
    So it was spring time?
    Spring time, yeah.
    That's what I remember.
    Maybe I'm 100% wrong.
    But that's what I remember.
    OK.
    Because of my birthday.
    So at least when you were traveling,
    it was not through the coldest months of the year.
    OK.
    When you get to this French place, it's still springtime?
    Yeah.
    All right.
    And how long did you stay there, do you think?
    I don't remember exactly how long we stayed there.
    Because we had to move somewhere else.
    Because later on, they started to take the Jewish people
    and tried to put them in not concentration
    camp, but some kind of a camps.
    Holding camp?
    Yeah.
    So that's where we ended up.
    Yeah.
    Do you remember what that place looked like?
    Yeah.
    It was called Rivesaltes.
    You were in Rivesaltes.
    Yeah.
    What did it look like?
    What did Rivesaltes look like, from your memory?
    It looked like there were barracks--
    barracks and different kinds of areas--
    barracks and then another part of different barracks.
    And the men and the women were not together.
    So your father was separated from you at this time?
    Yeah.
    OK.
    Were you able to see him while you were in the camp?
    I saw him.
    This is a time that's not a good time.
    I saw him once we were in the camp.
    And we were there when all of a sudden, a miracle happened.
    Because we were there a while and with my mother.
    And she wasn't happy that we were there in the camp.
    They had nothing too. it was bad food-- bad food.
    We didn't want to eat it because we were spoiled rotten
    from the food at home.
    And we used to say, we don't want to eat this soup.
    It has flies in it.
    Or it was-- I don't know what it was, something.
    So my mother said, you have to eat it.
    You have to eat it.
    So we ate whatever she could.
    And she used to go and work in the kitchen, too.
    Because she was a good cook, too.
    And then Nate, my husband, said she
    used to smuggle in sometimes some different foods, you know?
    But I don't know exactly how long we were there.
    But sometime in 1941 or '42, I don't know,
    we went to that camp--
    OK.
    --all of us.
    And then, from there, I told you we're
    separated from husband and wife, the men and the women.
    And then I don't know the time that you asked me exactly when,
    what.
    But by a miracle, somebody from the Czech--
    no, the French marquis.
    Do you know this marquis?
    That's the underground the French had--
    or from the Czech consulate or something
    that's connected with something with Czechoslovakia--
    came one day in the camp and wanted to save some children,
    to grab them out of there to save them.
    And so they came in.
    I don't know how, what was it about.
    Because I was only young.
    I didn't know all the details.
    All I know is that they came in and they
    took my sister and me and some other kids that
    were with us, Jewish kids.
    And they said that we should go out.
    Somebody is waiting and they took us out--
    Of the camp?
    From the camp, yeah.
    And my mother and father were there.
    That's the time I saw my father, the last time.
    And somehow he managed that he was there.
    I don't know how.
    And we had a cousin, my father's brother's son.
    He was 13.
    And she knew that he's in a different area of the barracks.
    So my mother ran.
    I told you, my mother was something special.
    She ran there and told him, "You come, come."
    And he made it.
    We made it.
    He came with us.
    And he was saved too.
    So then we went on the thing.
    It was a big open truck, like--
    what do you call that?
    An open truck, yeah.
    An open truck, you know?
    Where sometimes you'll have a tarp over it.
    No.
    That was an open truck, an open truck.
    Open truck, OK.
    An open truck.
    And they said, we have to go there.
    Did you go willingly?
    I didn't know what was going on really.
    We said goodbye to my--
    they were there, both of them standing.
    This I remember very well.
    They're both standing there and saying-- because this was all
    done right there and then.
    And so we have to go.
    And they said we have to go there.
    We're going somewhere nice, my mother said, so proud.
    My mother was crying.
    But my father was hysterical crying.
    Was he?
    And he was saying, I will never see my children again.
    (EMOTIONALLY) I remember this so--
    and he didn't.
    He said, I will never see my children again.
    It's horrible.
    And he didn't.
    But my mother didn't say it, because she was-- somehow
    she was stronger.
    You know?
    So this is the picture I have.
    We said goodbye.
    And we went on that truck, the kids.
    And they took us down to the south of France, further.
    Further south?
    Yeah.
    Like, to the area of almost--
    how do you call this?
    I can't think--
    Cote d'Azur, almost, you know?
    You know where that--
    the French Riviera-type, around there.
    OK.
    So then we took-- there was a long trip
    in the middle of the night.
    But always in the middle of the night then, we think.
    We didn't know where we're going.
    We don't know anything, we're going.
    So we had no choice.
    So that's when kissed our parents goodbye.
    And we're crying and crying.
    And then we went.
    And they stopped in the middle of the night, too.
    And I remember walking from some area to somewhere
    in the middle of the night.
    And we came to a place.
    And that was going to be our place for a while.
    This was called-- it was next to Vance.
    You know where Vance is?
    No, no.
    But tell me.
    Vance is one of the places where a lot of the artists lived.
    OK.
    Excuse us, please.
    You could google it.
    Hang on a minute.
    OK.
    So you're in this city in the South of France in Vance.
    Next to Vance.
    Next to Vance.
    It's a few kilometers.
    But I remember walking and walking.
    We were walking and we went to--
    where we ended up was in the middle of the night
    in a place--
    I want to say it must have been a wealthy person's home
    first, before.
    But these people that we went to, maybe didn't know it then,
    they were the people that were going to be our saviors.
    That's how we were saved from being killed.
    But almost we had another time when
    we were almost killed again.
    So anyway, that was called, in French, [NON-ENGLISH]..
    What is that?
    Which means like a welcoming home for Christian children.
    Ah.
    OK.
    So was it like an orphanage?
    It was supposed to be like an orphanage, yeah.
    But most of the people did not have their parents.
    But some of them had.
    Because some of them were Christian there, too.
    And there was a mixture.
    There was some of the Jewish kids and some Christian people,
    probably a political reason why they were hiding or something.
    They were Czech.
    They were from Czechoslovakia.
    I want to pause here at that moment
    and go back a little bit.
    And let's find out what happened with your father.
    You say you never saw him again.
    I never saw him again.
    What happened to him?
    They sent him away, my mother found out later,
    to a place in Jura Mountains that's
    next to France-- between France and Switzerland.
    That's where we heard that they sent him there.
    Because he was in the diamond thing,
    they needed somebody for some kind of--
    not the diamond cutting, but some kind of skills.
    So that's what we heard, that he went there.
    So we didn't see him anymore--
    And you never knew--
    --till after the war.
    --what happened to him?
    Yeah.
    After the war, my mother went back to Belgium.
    And she wanted to find out what happened.
    They said that he lived through the war, you know.
    And he went to concentration camp.
    But he was killed while some say that--
    they were doing, walking-- you know, the march or whatever.
    In a death march?
    Yeah.
    He was killed?
    Yeah.
    That's right.
    That's what some people said, that they saw him.
    But you know, that's all we know.
    So you never were able to find out?
    No.
    Not for sure.
    Did you know what camps he was in?
    Which camps?
    Which concentration camps?
    Don't know.
    Because after that, we never had contact with him.
    He was sent away first to another area in France,
    you know?
    So we were never in touch with him.
    Now during this time that you were at this orphanage--
    Pardon me?
    Excuse me?
    That's my husband.
    Oh.
    While you were at the orphanage, this place,
    the home for Christian children, did you ever
    get letters from your mother?
    No.
    So you didn't know what happened to her, either?
    No.
    But at one time, somebody came that she--
    it was a Christian lady.
    That was much later, though.
    Because she came and told us that my mother's still--
    Alive?
    --alive.
    Yeah.
    But I don't mean remember when it was.
    But that's the only time that we ever
    heard that she was still alive.
    That was someone that went for her and did her a favor.
    And anyway--
    So you are taken probably when you
    were around 10 or 11 years old?
    Yeah.
    Even younger, it was right after, almost, we went there.
    But 10, 10-years-old.
    You're 10.
    Yeah.
    About 10.
    And Rosa's eight?
    Eight.
    All right.
    And you, then, at that point, you just don't-- your parents
    are out of the picture.
    Altogether.
    Tell me what happened then.
    You come to this home.
    You stay there.
    How do things progress?
    It progressed that these people were wonderful.
    Oh, that's good.
    They were so wonderful to us.
    They just wanted to save our lives.
    Because the main person in that--
    because a mixture of Gentiles and Jews working there, too.
    And the leader, the head of this place
    was a Czech lady, a Jewish lady.
    And her name was Ida.
    But we called her Tante Ida--
    Aunt Ida-- Tante Ida.
    She was an angel from heaven.
    And she ran the whole place.
    OK.
    I have pictures of her.
    Excuse me?
    What?
    Excuse me.
    Can you cut?
    I do not--
    It's going to beep some.
    OK.
    I'm sorry for interrupting.
    You were talking about Tante Ida--
    Tante Ida, yeah.
    --and how she ran the whole place.
    She did.
    She was in charge of everything.
    About how many people helped her?
    Was it a large staff?
    I don't remember how many.
    But she has a staff there.
    They had a staff, only there were people also
    that were there for reasons, probably political reasons,
    trying to get away from-- so I don't know.
    There was a mixture of people there.
    Were they all children or some adults?
    No, no, adults, too, adults, too.
    So she had people, you know, that helped run the place.
    And also, while we were there, they
    were trying to keep us a little bit educated.
    I mean, we didn't have real teachers.
    But some of them were very bright people, and some Jewish
    and some Christian.
    And so they made, like, a school for us.
    I mean, not school, of classes, you know.
    They wanted to educate us.
    And so like I said they were extraordinary, good people.
    About how many children were there?
    I don't know.
    I don't know.
    Would you say 50, 100, 200?
    I don't think 200.
    This may be closer to maybe 100, maybe not even.
    OK.
    Because it was adults and children.
    And at that time, I wasn't counting exactly.
    I know.
    I'm sorry.
    No.
    That's OK.
    I'm just trying to get a sense of how large a space.
    And you know, was this house in the middle of a town
    or out in the country?
    It was more out in the country.
    It's really beautiful there.
    It's a beautiful area.
    Was it kind of in an isolated area?
    Yeah, in a way.
    It was, like, a few kilometers from the next city, Vance.
    OK.
    So it was in the country.
    Yeah.
    I guess part of my questioning is
    to get a sense of what was involved for Tante Ida
    to keep this place from gaining attention.
    Because if you're supposed to be kept there--
    Yeah, yeah.
    --and saved--
    Nobody was-- we weren't supposed to be Jewish.
    We knew that we are Christian--
    OK.
    --they told us, I think.
    Christian, yeah, we knew.
    I mean, we were scared.
    We were always afraid that somebody is going to find out.
    So then when some people came around from somewhere, we knew.
    We were always taught, we knew that not to stand out
    in any way or anything.
    You know, so we were afraid.
    Now was this part of free France?
    Pardon me?
    Is this in the territory of free France or Vichy France?
    Where in the French Territories was this?
    This was South of France in the Riviera area.
    OK.
    It's called d'Azure, they called it.
    Was it Vichy?
    Was it controlled by the French or controlled by--
    By that time, I think, it was controlled still by the French.
    It was, at that time, free, Vichy government.
    OK.
    Norman, you know what that is?
    Yes, I think it's the free zone.
    It was in the free zone.
    OK.
    Yeah.
    And so did you have any interaction
    with any officials at all?
    Do you remember any officials coming to the house,
    to the place?
    No.
    I don't.
    I don't think that they wanted us to meet anybody.
    But at one time later on, there were some people.
    And we were frightened.
    But we knew not to call attention to anything.
    But where we were there, we did not stay all the time
    in that one place.
    Because they want to move us around,
    and later on, because they didn't want to get caught,
    you know.
    So we had people that, during the night,
    they went looking for provisions, you know,
    wherever, and other people that were in charge of other things
    to do.
    But the middle of the night, they
    were very, how do you call it, resourceful people, very smart
    people in there.
    And everybody did their job, whatever they were doing.
    Some were workers, the Christian ones
    were, mainly, that were hiding there, too.
    And some were workers.
    But then the Jews, they were trying
    to help with, like I said, the provisions
    and keeping us well and safe.
    So they were very, very good to us.
    Now when you say they move you around,
    does that mean you would move from one house
    to another place?
    Not to a house--
    after a while we moved away from there
    and we went to another area of France.
    Aha.
    I see.
    Because when they thought it was too--
    Dangerous.
    --too dangerous, then we moved.
    But like I told you, I don't know dates or times.
    I just know that we moved.
    Once we went to a-- it was called Chateau du Theil,
    which was a castle someplace-- an old castle away
    in the country.
    And they kept moving us around.
    Did you ever venture out and go into Vance
    or go into any of the surrounding villages?
    Or were you pretty isolated from everybody?
    We were pretty isolated that time.
    They wanted us to be.
    OK.
    OK.
    But we did go, where did we go?
    They took us, like, on a little thing,
    but only in the country thing.
    Like an excursion?
    Yeah.
    But later on we did go.
    Because we went to Nice.
    I remember we were in Nice.
    But that was later, much later.
    Because we were there till the end of the war.
    So when you were taken from Rivesaltes in 1941
    when you're 10 years old, it's about four years
    that you were with this--
    three or four years that you were with this Tante Ida?
    Yeah.
    OK.
    And she--
    And-- you wanted to say something?
    Yeah.
    I'm trying to remember.
    Because, like I said, they moved us around
    because they were afraid.
    But in between, we had another thing happening.
    That in 1942, whatever it was, when they were gathering
    everybody, the Jews from everywhere they're
    trying to get them to put them in camps like we were before,
    in the same camp, you know.
    And so what do you think?
    They don't know how they found us or whatever it was.
    They did some kind of very hard--
    if they wanted to find them, they found them.
    They found the children.
    And they brought us back to the camp.
    To Rivesaltes?
    To Rivesaltes, with two gendarmes, everybody--
    you know, police.
    And they brought us back also in the middle
    of the night-- always everything in the middle of the night.
    And then they brought us where my mother was.
    And when my mother saw us, she started to cry.
    She didn't want us to come back there.
    Because she knew then we're not safe anymore.
    You know?
    So we were there for a little bit.
    I don't know how many days or this or whatever.
    But it was terrible, because she was crying all night
    that we shouldn't be there.
    So anyway, so then they came and--
    I forgot the order of things.
    That's OK.
    That's OK.
    But you didn't stay in Rivesaltes.
    You found there was a way for you to get out again?
    Yeah.
    They came to get us after a while.
    OK.
    The same people?
    Same people.
    But that's not the end, even then.
    Because we were there a while, and then they got us out.
    But then we went back later on.
    That's what I'm saying, the time, I don't know when, what.
    Because we were back again.
    And then we were already going to go to--
    that happened later.
    We were scheduled to go on a transport to Germany.
    That's where every time they used
    to have transport at certain times.
    They had people to go and they said to Germany, to the camp.
    So that when we were there--
    [SHUFFLING OFF CAMERA]
    OK.
    So you're supposed to go on this transport to Germany.
    Yes.
    So they used to have several of these
    whenever they had enough people, I guess.
    So we went.
    And they had, like, everybody had
    to stay and go on a open terrain, an open area,
    big open area.
    And everybody was there, all the people in that area.
    And they were calling names, the names of the people,
    each other, and the families, you know.
    So they called everybody, I think, alphabetically.
    So when it came to H, then we heard Elaine Heller, Elisabeth
    Heller, and Josiah Heller.
    My mother, for a second, I thought
    she was going to pass out.
    She got a hold of herself.
    And you know, I told you, she was
    very resourceful and very smart, street smart and everything.
    So for a minute, she said, oh.
    She almost fainted.
    And then all of a sudden, she got back to herself.
    And she says-- started yelling.
    And she's no, no.
    I don't belong here.
    I don't belong here because I don't
    belong here, made a whole big--
    Fuss.
    --fuss on purpose.
    And she said, she made a whole commotion, a big commotion.
    So they didn't want that.
    So then they came.
    And she said, I don't belong here because I'm Hungarian.
    And the Hungarians are Germans.
    And I don't belong here.
    And no matter what--
    she wanted to make a big thing.
    She didn't want to stay there.
    So what they did is they didn't want
    everybody else to start screaming and yelling
    "I don't belong here."
    So they took Mom.
    They whisked my mother away with us to the side.
    And for the moment to the side, we didn't go on that transport.
    That's a miracle.
    They left without us.
    Because she went into the office with the authority,
    the French-- you know, what was it called?
    Whoever was in charge in the office.
    And she was telling them the story and all that.
    And they wanted to quiet her, that she should not
    go there and make a whole thing for the whole place
    to start being hysterical.
    So it ended up that we didn't go.
    And then she stayed in the camp.
    And then after that, not long after that,
    that's when they came back for us.
    Tante Ida and her people?
    They came and they somehow got us out again.
    Do you remember how you left the second time?
    The second time when we left, I don't remember so well.
    OK.
    But I know we went out.
    We were out.
    With your mother or without your mother?
    Without my mother.
    They wouldn't take her.
    No.
    They just came for the children that were brought back.
    So I don't know exactly when that was.
    I was already older, because that was probably 1942 or so.
    Maybe I was 11 or something.
    And like I said, I don't remember dates and exactly--
    But by that time, your father's out of the picture.
    Altogether.
    So right from the beginning, he's out of the picture.
    Because we never heard from him again.
    OK.
    So this story, I hope I'm in order.
    Because so then, by some miracle, we went back.
    To the same house?
    Yeah.
    OK.
    And then, like I said, they moved us
    around to another place, another area.
    But we went back.
    They were safe again.
    OK.
    And we were hiding.
    They hid us.
    And they did everything that they
    could to make our lives as good as possible.
    Now during this time, your mother is always in Rivesaltes?
    Yes.
    She's still in Rivesaltes till afterwards.
    Does she still continue working as a cook?
    Yeah.
    I don't know, because we weren't there.
    But I found out later on that she somehow got herself--
    the wife of one of the authorities of this--
    how do you call it--
    the bureau.
    She was a fancy French lady.
    And she needed a cook.
    My mother said that she is a French cook.
    She's a gourmet cook.
    She was a very good cook, but she cooked
    Hungarian and Jewish dishes.
    She's a French gourmet cook.
    I know she had a lot of nerve.
    It took a lot of courage.
    So they took her out.
    And she became a cook for these people, for that family.
    She was hidden there because they
    weren't supposed to be there.
    So they told her that she went in the basement.
    And they told her she should not say
    a peep, not a word, nothing.
    Because then they'd send her right back to the camp.
    OK.
    This frightened her.
    You know?
    But then, I don't know if she did it.
    But she says, I was talking to my grandmother all the time.
    Because when she was cooking, they made her cook rabbit.
    Did she know from rabbit?
    Nothing, not supposed to, it's not kosher.
    And anything else that they cooked, you know.
    So she said I was praying to my mother--
    my grandmother, not to her mother, to my grandmother,
    she should help me.
    And somehow, they were satisfied with her cooking
    because she was a good cook.
    But I don't know how she managed it, so also a miracle.
    But she said she was in this basement, crying quietly.
    Because they said if she makes noise
    and she doesn't cook what they want, she goes back.
    So she was, like, at her mercy.
    The man wasn't so bad.
    But the woman threatened her.
    So she stayed there till I don't know when.
    Do you think it was more than two years that she was there?
    She was there a while, yeah.
    Yeah.
    She was there a while.
    Because I don't think she went back to the camp after that.
    So then she was just cooking and doing other--
    I don't know.
    But you know nothing of this--
    Nothing.
    --nothing of this at the time.
    Till at one time, somebody came to tell us that--
    I told you that my mother was still alive.
    OK.
    And did you and your sister, did you find
    that you were crying for her?
    Yeah, my sister especially, she was crying all the time,
    always crying.
    Everybody used to say that if Rosa comes already,
    you have to turn off the faucet.
    No, I mean, it's crying.
    She just cried all the time, poor thing, cried and cried.
    I cried, too.
    But not as bad as her.
    There's a difference in ages.
    Yes, she was two years younger than me.
    And she cried.
    But like I said, we were saved.
    They tried to make our life as good as they could.
    And we were safe.
    Was there anybody that became sort of
    like a substitute for your mother?
    Well, Tante Ida was.
    Tante Ida was.
    Yes.
    She was for all the kids.
    But then there was other people, nice people in there also,
    women that were nice, good.
    So would you say that aside from the incidents
    you told me about, did you feel safe?
    Or were you always nervous?
    No, we were safe.
    We felt safe.
    Except the times when I told you,
    if somebody was going to come around, and we didn't know--
    OK.
    --who it was.
    So then they told us to behave.
    But then, like I said, they moved us around so that--
    When they moved you around, was it always in a general area?
    No, different place.
    Or it was in another place in the castle.
    That we were in a castle, an old, old castle.
    OK.
    Really old, cold, ice cold castle,
    used to belong to someone, rich Americans, I think.
    But it was ice cold.
    There was no heat.
    There was nothing.
    So we stayed there a while.
    And it was not a good place at that time.
    But there, we were also safe in a way,
    because it was also isolated.
    And I remember the name of that Chateau du Theil.
    How do you spell that?
    It's hard.
    Chateau, you know is--
    Yeah.
    Theil?
    It was T-H-E-I-L.
    Chateau du Theil.
    Yeah.
    And that's where we were there, too, for a while.
    And then we went somewhere in the Massif Central, which
    is the in the center of France.
    And then one time, they sent me away alone without my sister.
    No, alone to a school, like a boarding school, out,
    because they wanted to scatter the kids.
    They shouldn't all be in the same place, safe for a while.
    So that's where I went.
    But the bad part was that I was the only Jew there.
    And I was afraid that they're going
    to find out that I'm Jewish, somehow, the way I look,
    or what I do.
    So I was always on the lookout, that I shouldn't be.
    So you were always anxious?
    Oh, anxious, anxious, all the time.
    That's why I'm still anxious, the war,
    too, so anxious and worried that they're
    going to find out who I am.
    Because they're all Christian.
    And I think there was one that, my memory, that I think she
    must have been Jewish, too.
    But she also was cautious.
    But I didn't want to talk to her.
    Because I didn't want to have anything suspicious
    going on there.
    But I was there for a while.
    I don't know how long.
    That there's a school--
    like, a high school sort of thing, not high school yet.
    A boarding school?
    Yeah.
    A boarding school-- sleeping, sleeping, sleeping.
    OK.
    Yeah.
    And did you come back from that boarding school?
    I did come back.
    OK.
    And your sister was still within the group?
    And then at one time, they sent her also away somewhere else.
    OK.
    At one time they sent her where my mother was, in the basement
    with her.
    Would you believe?
    Really?
    I don't know how she ended up there.
    But then she came back, too.
    Miracles happened.
    I'm telling you, miracles.
    The details of exactly how it went, I don't know.
    All I know is that she went there.
    And she was almost also killed.
    But finally, we were all together again,
    my sister and I.
    Tell me, when you were together again,
    where were you at that time?
    What part or what place in France were you?
    We were together, again, that was next to Bayonne.
    I'm trying to figure out which town, which big town there
    is there.
    Biarritz-Bayonne-- that's on the coast also.
    It's also the South of France, but on the other side,
    on the East Coast.
    I don't know how to explain it.
    That's OK.
    Yeah.
    Biarritz-Bayonne, and that's where we ended up.
    I think that was our last place.
    And do you remember how the war ended?
    Yeah, the war ended.
    And then somebody came and with my mother.
    I didn't know how it went exactly.
    The war ended.
    But it was ended.
    And then my mother didn't come right away.
    But she came with someone.
    And she came to where we were then.
    And then, from there, after a while,
    see we went back with her.
    She wanted us to be, but she had no place to be.
    You know?
    So we stayed a while yet there.
    In Biarritz right?
    Yeah.
    In the Bayonne.
    In the Bayonne.
    Next to Bayonne.
    Next to Bayonne.
    So were there American soldiers there?
    Was this in the area there was--
    Yes.
    Then they came.
    The American soldiers came.
    OK.
    Do you remember them coming to your area?
    They came and talked to us.
    And then, yeah.
    OK.
    They came and talked to us, American soldiers.
    So essentially, at that point, you're liberated?
    They're there, really.
    If the Americans were there, that means they're OK.
    Remember, the Americans were very nice to us
    when they came, to the children, you know.
    And then, after that, I don't remember exactly when.
    But my mother did come back to get us,
    because she wanted us to be with her.
    After all these years, we were not with her.
    So she went to Paris with us.
    I mean, she took us there.
    Because she had sent-- the minute that the war was over,
    she sent my Aunt Bertha, in the United States,
    in Bethlehem, a telegram.
    Bethlehem, Pennsylvania?
    Yes.
    A telegram that said, we are alive.
    Send papers.
    So my aunt got together with my uncles
    in New York, my father's brothers--
    Oh, yeah.
    And she, working with them together,
    and they got us papers.
    We were one of the first ones that came in 1946 to the United
    States.
    Yes.
    And did you, by that point, know that your father is not
    coming back?
    Yeah.
    We didn't know anything about it, nothing.
    Then?
    No.
    We didn't know anything about it.
    And you didn't go back to Antwerp?
    No.
    My mother went back to Antwerp once,
    to find out what happened to my father, really what happened.
    You know?
    OK.
    Can you hold on just a second?
    So we had a quick break.
    And we were all reminded that there
    were some episodes that you experienced
    that we should look back to.
    So tell me about learning the catechism.
    Did you go to religious classes, Catholic religious classes?
    No.
    But we just somehow knew.
    They taught us in the place.
    You know, they were Christians there, too.
    And so I knew my catechism.
    And I think we went to church once or twice.
    I'm not sure exactly when.
    But I did know my catechism.
    So you know the basic prayers?
    I used to know.
    OK.
    OK.
    In French.
    [LAUGHING]
    Yeah.
    These things could come in very helpful if you're stopped
    and you say I'm Catholic and someone says, prove it.
    [BOTH TALKING]
    And then they'll ask you to say the prayer.
    You know?
    So in a way--
    They wanted us to know that.
    Yeah.
    They didn't want to convert us.
    But they wanted us to know that we
    had to know that we're not Jewish,
    that we're not Jewish for now.
    OK.
    And we know that we're Jewish.
    But just, that's for protection.
    There's a lot of other details.
    But it's too many.
    Well, what kind of details come to your mind
    when you talk about this?
    Because like I said, they were very good to us,
    and they tried to make our life nice.
    So later on, they would took us on little excursions.
    And that was probably already after--
    probably when the war had already stopped almost.
    And it took us, like, to Nice.
    You know where that is?
    Yeah.
    A big city, and to another place, just
    to show us a little bit something.
    But not for pleasure, just to take us out.
    So they tried to make our life, like I said, pleasant and good,
    which they did.
    But tell me about--
    your relative told me that you also
    ended up in a Protestant area?
    In a what kind of area?
    Protestant area, not a Catholic area?
    Yeah.
    The place, the school that they sent me to--
    The boarding school?
    --boarding school was the wrong religion of what I said I was.
    So you said you were Catholic.
    I think so.
    And they were Protestant.
    I don't know which one I was, but I was the wrong one.
    So I was worried about that, too.
    [LAUGHING]
    Oh, my goodness.
    I wasn't an exclu--
    I mean, what do you call it?
    Excluded.
    Excluded.
    I mean, I didn't belong anywhere, really, looks like.
    Did you ever get any explanation as to why you were
    sent to that boarding school?
    Yes.
    To save me from being gathered somewhere.
    They wanted to disperse as many kids at some different places.
    They were afraid they were going to get taken away.
    That's protection.
    Yeah.
    Somebody at that boarding school probably
    knew your real identity.
    Because why would have they taken you?
    They sent us to get an education.
    Oh, they sent you with Christian children?
    Yeah.
    We're not Jewish.
    Jewish is out, completely out.
    But you know that when you think about it,
    the pressure on a child--
    It's terrible, the fear that you're going to be discovered
    and what's going to happen, you know?
    Yeah.
    Did you ever come close to being discovered?
    I don't know.
    I always thought that some kind of suspicious-- but then,
    I forgot about it, didn't want to think about it even.
    But we made it.
    We're here talking.
    That's true.
    So I had asked you before, well, I
    had asked your husband before, how
    did all of these experiences change him?
    From before the war, before, when
    he was a young man who didn't know about such things,
    until he went through them.
    And I ask you the same thing.
    You were a little girl.
    Yeah.
    Basically a child.
    Yes.
    And how did this change you?
    Did it--
    It didn't change me.
    Because I wasn't really an adult at all,
    so I just go from one phase to another phase.
    I became very anxious, I know.
    That's probably part of my anxiety problems.
    Because you know--
    You got scared.
    Yeah.
    I was scared.
    I was scared.
    We were in tension.
    But by the time we were with the Tante Ida and then
    the whole group, we were not scared most of the time,
    you know.
    Because they made our life very bearable
    and they were very good to us.
    But there was always the danger that we had to be on our guard.
    Yeah.
    But they were very good people.
    Well, you know, it's hard to imagine the effects
    that something like this has on a child.
    The way children experience these things
    is a deeper way than adults do.
    Because there are fewer resources that a child
    will have to call upon.
    I think if I wouldn't have been with these people,
    Tante Ida and the whole thing would have been even worse.
    But they had some time there not to be so all the time.
    But I was.
    Because we were always afraid.
    But they made, like I said, our life--
    Sounds like they did what they could.
    --very, very livable.
    They did.
    Yeah.
    Yeah, they did.
    So tell us, where did you live in Paris
    when your mother finally got you?
    We lived there only temporarily to wait for the papers.
    OK.
    That's where she took us there.
    OK.
    And from there then, we went on the ship.
    And she had some people that she knew.
    So they made it even easier.
    We came on a military ship here.
    Oh, did you?
    On the military-- we were the only--
    about 18 civilians on that ship.
    It's a warship.
    And so was it soldiers coming home?
    Right.
    And so you were the only little kids on there?
    Kids, yeah.
    But there were adults, too.
    There was my mother and then there was some American women.
    And then some others, I don't know.
    But there was 18 civilians.
    The rest was all soldiers.
    And I think they were sailors, really.
    I'm not sure.
    We didn't mingle.
    You didn't?
    No.
    Why?
    I was seasick the whole time.
    Oh.
    We were nine days seasick down in the thing.
    And my sister was worse than me.
    She was throwing up.
    And there wasn't good--
    couldn't eat.
    After all the time, there we could have had food, good food.
    We couldn't eat because--
    So you had motion sickness.
    Yeah.
    --we were seasick.
    And then, yeah, the trip wasn't so good.
    But we made it early.
    We came 1946, at Passover time--
    So in the springtime?
    --which is the springtime.
    Yeah.
    It was Passover.
    Yeah.
    That is early.
    Very early, one of the few earliest ones, because we
    came not on a civilian ship.
    So tell me, how did this affect your sister?
    You say she cried a lot.
    She cried a lot.
    She cried a lot.
    Was there a time she stopped crying?
    She still cried afterwards, too.
    Did she?
    Yeah?
    But she was a wonderful girl, my sister.
    I miss her so much.
    Because we went through everything together.
    She was good.
    She was talented.
    Made this sweater for me and a whole bunch of other things.
    And she was a good person and really--
    Well, she was a lifelong friend.
    Yes.
    Since we were babies together.
    And so I miss her terribly, in every respect.
    I can imagine.
    And so can't get her back.
    So she deserved everything, the best.
    But she didn't have a good life.
    It was tough for her, huh?
    Yeah, her husband, I mean, her marriage was not good.
    And I felt terrible for her.
    Because she was talented and good and smart and beautiful.
    I can see that you miss her.
    Pardon me?
    I can see that you miss her.
    I can see that, from your description.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    She is.
    Yeah.
    Let's go back to when you arrive in the United States.
    Oh, yeah.
    That was another experience.
    Tell me about that.
    What was that like?
    Because we came on the ship, seasick and all that, finally,
    we arrived in New York.
    We think my mother had sent the date when we arriving.
    The day we arrived, we didn't go--
    we came to Staten Island.
    I don't know where, because it was a ship, not a luxury ship.
    That's where they ended up, in Staten Island.
    I don't know where.
    Also nobody was there, nobody.
    We come there.
    We go up there.
    Everybody gets out of the boat, ship.
    And we go in there, and there's nobody there for us.
    We're standing there, like, not knowing the language,
    not knowing anybody, not having anything, anybody to refer to.
    And so we stood around.
    Nobody came for us.
    So my mother, there was a--
    the first time I saw a--
    what do you call it?
    I can't think of the name.
    My god, like, a restaurant, but it's not a restaurant.
    A cafe?
    A diner?
    A diner, exactly.
    Thank you.
    A diner.
    So we went in.
    My mother said, let's see.
    We went into the diner.
    And there was a man there behind the counter.
    And we can't converse with him.
    But with gestures and all that, and then finally,
    we said French, Francaise.
    You know, wait a minute.
    So he went in the back and got a young girl,
    must've been his daughter.
    And he says, [NON-ENGLISH] come here, you know?
    So she said, talk French to them and find out what they are
    and what they want and what's going on.
    The poor kid, she knew French from book French.
    But she didn't know how to do conversation.
    She didn't have conversational French.
    So she didn't really help anything.
    And the father got so angry at her
    because she didn't understand.
    Why can't she speak?
    So that didn't help.
    Finally, he gave us some change to make a phone call.
    And my mother called her sister's number.
    But we were waiting there a long, long time.
    And so in the meantime, he told us to come in the diner.
    And he gave us something to eat, put on the jukebox.
    Never heard a jukebox, first time we heard a jukebox.
    And he treated us, you know, with something.
    I don't remember what.
    But he was very kind to us.
    And finally, we got in touch with somebody.
    I don't know if it was my uncle or my aunt.
    But my mother called and got somebody.
    So they came.
    It was a wrong day.
    They thought we were coming the next day.
    Oh.
    Finally, after all this, we got together with them.
    This is your mother's sister?
    Yeah, my mother's sister and the uncles also came.
    And she alerted them.
    And they didn't come from New York.
    But somebody came--
    I don't remember.
    One of them was, you know, that comes here, my cousin Sheila?
    It's too late already?
    No, no, no, no, no.
    My first cousin, she was my father's brother's daughter.
    She came with a big bouquet of flowers, big, big, tremendous.
    She was-- how old was she, 10 or so?
    She was younger than me.
    And she came that big thing of flowers.
    It was so nice.
    But then, finally, we got situated.
    Who did you stay with?
    We stayed first, I think, one night with one of the uncles.
    I'm not sure where or what.
    I don't remember.
    It's like a--
    A haze.
    --a fog.
    But then we went to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania,
    to my mother's sister.
    OK.
    So I don't know even who took us,
    or they took-- somebody came from there.
    And they took us.
    Do you remember the trip there?
    No.
    OK.
    It was, like, probably at night, too,
    already, by the time we get there.
    But I remember getting there, when we got there.
    So my aunt was an angel to--
    and her sister, Mary, my mother's sisters.
    They both were wonderful people.
    So she took us in right away.
    Their daughters had just gotten a nice new bedroom
    set, the girls.
    They were the same age as us, except the older daughter
    was five years older than I was, 20.
    And my other cousin was 15 like me.
    And the younger son was my sister's age, 13.
    So they gave us their bedroom.
    Put them in some other kind of room, with a brand new bedroom
    set, with a brand new--
    chased them out, poor things, and gave it to us.
    And she treated us like royalty.
    And she didn't know what to give us to eat.
    They wanted us to see us eat--
    my little cousin wanted to see us eat ice cream.
    But we couldn't eat cream because it was Passover.
    So we had to eat Passover stuff.
    So he couldn't wait till it's over.
    I went to see them eat ice cream, he said.
    [LAUGHING]
    Isn't that funny?
    But that's the way it was.
    But they were so good to us.
    It must have been years and years since the two
    sisters had seen each other.
    Pardon me?
    It must have been years and years since your mother had
    seen her sister.
    No, because she came into the United States
    as a young girl, very young girl.
    Because somebody couldn't make it in one family.
    So she took the place of someone and came in their name.
    OK.
    There was also a miracle, that she came here.
    And did she work in Bethlehem?
    Or was she a housewife?
    Of course, a housewife works, too.
    No, and then she had a grocery store
    and worked very, very hard.
    Because my uncle, who was a very handsome, nice man, American.
    And he was in the war, I guess World War I.
    And he got wounded in the head.
    And it was OK.
    But after a while, his vision, he lost his vision.
    So he's blind.
    So she had to be the provider--
    Oh, my.
    --for the family.
    And she worked very, very hard, never complained, nothing.
    He worked, like, in a station store, selling newspapers
    or something.
    But he couldn't see.
    So that was not-- but they were so wonderful to us,
    so wonderful.
    How long did you stay with them?
    We didn't stay long.
    Because my mother didn't want to stay long.
    Because she wanted to go to New York.
    Because there was nothing there for her.
    She said there was a factory there.
    That name, I remember.
    Isn't that crazy?
    Yeah.
    Laros Silk.
    They made-- Laros, L-A-R-O-S, I think--
    silk.
    They made the factory sewing some kind of a underwear
    or something something.
    But she wasn't happy there.
    Well, you know, that's not the rag trade.
    There's one place.
    And she was sewing.
    Yeah.
    And New York is everything.
    So she didn't want to stay.
    She wanted to go to New York and see what's going on.
    She wanted to be already settled with us someplace.
    Anyway, so that's what we did.
    OK.
    So we moved to New York.
    But there was no place for us to be.
    Because the soldiers were coming back at that time.
    And they needed apartments.
    There were no apartments.
    So my mother slept in one of her sister-in-law's couch.
    And we had no place to go.
    So our uncles put us--
    they said we didn't have the Jewish education.
    We didn't know any Jewish.
    They put us in a Jewish school called a Bais Yaakov, but very,
    very, very religious.
    And where was this?
    In Brooklyn.
    Williamsburg.
    In Williamsburg?
    OK.
    So we were not together, still, with my mother.
    And she was trying to get a place to be together,
    but we couldn't have.
    So finally, we went to there.
    And finally, she looked and looked and looked.
    And she found a house in New York, Lower East Side, not far
    from the Williamsburg Bridge.
    And the same house, it was 31 Cannon Street.
    And that was the house where Nate lived.
    Your husband?
    My husband, with his brother and sister-in-law.
    So this is the house where you met your future husband,
    in this walk up?
    Yeah.
    This horrible walk up, terrible, ugly.
    We were on the fourth floor.
    They were on the third floor.
    And it's a long story.
    I don't think we have time for this, right?
    Well, how did you meet?
    Tell us how.
    How did we meet?
    Well, we didn't meet him right away.
    Because my mother, I told you, she
    found this horrible, ugly apartment.
    The bathrooms were in the hall with a lot
    of people sharing it.
    And not the finest people, like, we
    want to know, their jobs were not so reputable, the women.
    Oh, where there were some of those ladies of the night?
    Yes.
    [LAUGHING]
    There was some like that.
    And others, not fine class.
    And then the bathtub, we had a bathtub, though,
    in the kitchen.
    A terrible place, infested with roaches.
    Welcome to New York.
    Yes.
    Their first time-- full of roaches.
    And when it rained, it rained in.
    Because you were on the top floor.
    That's right.
    And so we kept pots all over the place.
    And my poor mother, she tried to make it livable and nice
    before we came.
    Because where we were in the dormitory, in the school.
    So finally, she got it together, sort of.
    And then she met my sister-in-law, Nate's brother's
    wife, and heard her talk Hungarian.
    So she made friends with her.
    She started a conversation.
    And she said, my mother said, I have
    two little girls in the school.
    And I'm moved in.
    And so, Nate, she says, could you
    come please and help me put up some curtains?
    She bought paper curtains, printed.
    I remember those curtains, cheap, printed curtains.
    That's all she could have.
    And could you please help me put them up?
    Because she was little, like me.
    And he did.
    And he went.
    And that was, then, love at first sight.
    Because she was wonderful to him.
    He loved her.
    He said how much he loved my mother, his own mother.
    Because his mother was lost.
    And she was like a mother to him.
    She was, because my mother was very warm, very warm,
    good person, you know, and kind and nice and everything.
    So but he didn't meet us yet.
    We were still in school.
    And one day, we came home.
    And there we are.
    And she said, I have two little girls.
    So he figured, I don't know, how old we are.
    But it wasn't so old.
    I was 15-- and no, at that time, I was 16.
    Not so little.
    And my sister was 14.
    Yeah.
    No.
    Not so little.
    And that's the first time I met him.
    Wiping away some cockroach thing, oh, not very romantic.
    But that's how we met.
    And then there's a long story after that, too.
    And so at what age did you get married?
    I got married just before my 19th birthday.
    Technically, I was 18, but not really.
    Because my birthday is March 30 and our wedding anniversary
    is March 19, just a couple days before.
    But that's how old I was.
    That we worked together from before that, also.
    Your mother, how did she make a living
    in those early years in New York?
    She was working in New York in a factory of coats and suits.
    So she was a sewer?
    Expensive coats and suits.
    Yes.
    She was, like, the sample maker, you
    know, making the finishing work by hand, and very expensive
    coats and suits.
    Was she able to support herself from that money?
    She did.
    But it wasn't easy.
    Yeah.
    I can imagine.
    She tried to be very frugal.
    And you know.
    She was a single woman with two girls.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    Did she ever remarry?
    Yes.
    She married my stepfather after we were married.
    We were married in 1950.
    And they got married in 1952.
    Did they stay on the Lower East Side?
    No, no.
    By that time, when she met him already,
    that was already in Brooklyn or someplace.
    Where was it?
    No, somewhere else.
    Yeah, I'm thinking Brooklyn already.
    We moved around, too.
    We moved to the Bronx.
    And we moved to Rockaway.
    We moved all over.
    But my sister-in-law and brother-in-law
    moved away to the Bronx and left us where we were, still there.
    So I didn't see him.
    And they were all talking him out of marrying me or going
    with me.
    She's too young.
    She doesn't know how to cook.
    [LAUGHING]
    She's not for you.
    And so how many years later is are you still not for him?
    Well, he didn't listen too well.
    Because he came, and he came on the Williamsburg Bridge.
    And I used to go to school.
    Afterwards, I went to Hunter, on the campus one,
    not in the city, in the Bronx or whatever, where it was.
    I went, and I used to go to school.
    So when he used to walk, he used to go on the Williamsburg
    Bridge and watch me walk wherever
    I was going, whether I was taking a train, or whether--
    I don't remember.
    But he told me later that he knew.
    And he never gave up.
    So then afterwards, he didn't listen to them anymore,
    cook or no cook.
    And you've been married how many years?
    68 years.
    Not bad.
    Truly not bad.
    Not bad, for that amount-- for such a long time.
    And it was a good marriage, very good marriage.
    Now he's sick and not feeling so good.
    But he was a wonderful husband, wonderful father,
    wonderful everything, wonderful husband.
    Yeah.
    I'm so happy to hear that.
    Yes.
    He was.
    Did you tell one another about what kind of childhoods
    you had?
    Well, he used to talk about it to me, but not to the kids.
    When we had the children, he didn't
    want to give them this sad background.
    You know, where this shouldn't happen.
    It was wrong.
    You know?
    And they should have known.
    But they didn't.
    We wanted to spare them.
    A lot of people did.
    And make their lives just as easy and pleasant
    as they could.
    Did the kids ever ask questions?
    Afterwards, when they were older.
    But we never went into detail too much, because like I said,
    we didn't.
    Finally, after a while, they did know.
    But we tried not to.
    Can you tell me-- excuse me.
    Can we cut the camera?
    Yep.
    And how many children did you have?
    I had two daughters.
    What are their names?
    I have two daughters, Renee--
    Renee.
    --and Paulette.
    --and Paulette?
    Yes, Paulette.
    They're French names.
    Lovely names.
    Yes.
    Did you ever return to Belgium?
    No.
    You've never gone back?
    Never have we been back and my husband never went back
    to Czechoslovakia.
    My sister went back.
    To see that it was a very small street?
    Yeah, right.
    [LAUGHING]
    And we thought it was a big street.
    She said, my God, everything was so small.
    Yeah.
    No, she went back with her son.
    She wanted to show him where we had lived in Belgium
    and the school we went to.
    She wanted to show him.
    Yeah.
    And that's it.
    I never went back.
    Are there things that you would like to say at this point?
    Because we've come close to the end of our interview.
    Is there anything you'd like to add?
    Well, I was lucky.
    We were lucky.
    Then we had, like I said, a wonderful marriage.
    He was a wonderful husband.
    So we were living-- and we had two daughters.
    Then we had four grandchildren.
    And their names?
    Their names, the grandchildren, the oldest one is Jordan.
    And that's Renee's son and Rachel.
    She's the one that's in some papers, too, Rachel.
    And then I have--
    Paulette has Summer Joy was born June 21.
    And then she has Tony.
    And then I have great-grandchildren.
    You have great-grandchildren?
    Yeah.
    I've got a great-grandchildren.
    We're 68 years married.
    So anyway, so I have two great-grandchildren by Rachel,
    that's Renee's daughter.
    And three from the other daughter.
    Well, that's quite a clan.
    Three?
    No, only two.
    Come on, I'll remember this.
    Hudson and-- no.
    There are only two there, Joshua, Hudson.
    And that's it?
    Two by her, too.
    Why did I give an extra child there?
    Why not?
    [LAUGHING]
    No.
    And that's it.
    Well, you founded quite a family here
    from the families that you--
    We came alone, the two of us with my mother.
    And then I was lucky to find Nate.
    And there's a lot of other stories,
    but it's too late already for this.
    But let me tell you, in one interview, like I said, one
    can't fit it all in.
    But it's important to get the most important parts.
    Right.
    Is there something you would like your grandchildren
    and great-grandchildren to know about your experience,
    about what you went through, how you endured it,
    how you came out of it?
    Is there some message--
    I came out of it a lot because of my mother,
    she helped with everything, and my husband.
    I have to be thankful for them.
    And we're happy that we had a beautiful family.
    And I'm very grateful.
    And I am very thankful and grateful to God
    that after all that we went through--
    and we hope nobody has to go through this again
    from our family or any family.
    And hope they have a wonderful life.
    And I'm happy that I had a chance
    to have this interview with a really lovely interviewer
    and young man--
    Thank you.
    Thank you for the compliments.
    --photographer.
    [LAUGHING]
    So I'm trying to think of something more wise to say.
    You did fine.
    You know, that is about as--
    those are the things that are meaningful.
    That is what's meaningful for people,
    the family that they know, the life that they had.
    My children are very happy that we're
    doing this, both my daughters.
    They're so grateful.
    They said, I'm very happy that you're doing this.
    They want to have for the children,
    for the future grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren,
    that they'll have some kind of a memory of their parents.
    Well, the gratitude goes both ways.
    Because through your story, we get a little bit more
    of the historical record of what happened at that time
    and what people endured, how they survived.
    And how they stayed human.
    And that's sometimes the hardest thing
    to do in such circumstances.
    It's hard.
    But like I said, I had good, good, wonderful support
    from a very wonderful mother and my husband.
    And I had wonderful good children, far away.
    Well, they'll see this.
    They'll see this.
    They could see this on the internet, they said.
    Eventually, it will be there.
    Eventually, it will be there.
    So what we'll do right now is I will conclude the formal part
    of our interview.
    And then we'll start again and show a few photographs
    and ask you to explain what they are.
    The pictures?
    Yeah.
    But before we do that, I will formally
    conclude the interview.
    OK.
    OK.
    And that is this concludes the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum interview with Mrs. Elizabeth
    Weinberger on June 28, 2018 in Lawrence, New York.
    Thank you.
    And thank you.
    Thank you for everything that you did.
    [LIGHT APPLAUSE]
    So tell me, who is the lovely lady in this photograph?
    This is my mother.
    Helene?
    My wonderful mother, Helene Heller [? Friedland. ?]
    OK.
    And about when was this photograph taken?
    This was taken after she came to the United States.
    And about how old would she have been?
    She was-- we came here in 1946.
    She might have been in her 40s, maybe, 30s even.
    OK.
    Very, very lovely.
    Early 40s.
    OK.
    OK.
    Thank you very much.
    And tell me, who is the lovely lady in this picture?
    That's me.
    That's yourself.
    Myself before I was married and before I
    was engaged, just before.
    But still taken in the United States?
    Pardon me?
    Taken in the United States, a photograph
    taken in the United States?
    Oh, yes, yes, yes.
    I came here when I was 15.
    OK.
    This was, I was about, probably around 17 1/2.
    OK.
    And that's Elizabeth Heller.
    That's right.
    Elizabeth Heller.
    To become Weinberger.
    Right.
    OK.
    Thank you.
    And tell me, who is this a photograph of?
    This photograph is of my husband, Nathan Weinberger--
    but we weren't married yet--
    and of myself, at that time, Elizabeth Heller.
    So you're about 17 and 1/2, 18 years old, something
    like that at that point, two young people
    here in New York City.
    In New York City.
    OK.
    Thank you.
    You're
    Welcome.
    Ready?
    Yeah.
    All right.
    Tell me, who is this a photograph of?
    This photograph is of my husband, Nathan Weinberger,
    and his younger brother, Alexander Weinberger, who never
    came back from the Holocaust.
    He was killed.
    OK.
    So your husband's story was is that he
    was killed on the death march--
    Yes.
    --out of Auschwitz.
    And Alexander is the darker haired brother on the left.
    And Nathan is the lighter haired brother on the right.
    Correct.
    OK.
    Thank you.
    So tell me, what is this a photograph of?
    This is a photograph of the children next to Vance,
    where we were hidden during the war, is Christian children.
    And it's in 1941 and by the pool.
    In Vance?
    On the outskirts of Vance, yes.
    OK.
    So this is one of those excursions
    that they took you on?
    No, no.
    This is where we lived.
    Oh, this is where you lived?
    Yes.
    OK.
    What a beautiful place.
    It was beautiful.
    Yeah.
    OK.
    Thank you.
    OK.
    Tell me who is this a photograph of?
    This is a photograph, a very important photograph to me.
    This is a lady called Tante Ida.
    We used to call her Aunt Ida.
    Because she was the one, the main person
    in the home where we were hidden as Christian children
    during the war.
    And she saved us a lot of aggravation and misery.
    She was a wonderful, wonderful human being.
    Those are two children that were hidden, too, during the war.
    But not you?
    Not us, not me, no, different children.
    Do you remember Ida's last name?
    Tante Ida Wexler.
    Wexler?
    So Tante Ida Wexler.
    Yes.
    OK.
    Thank you.
    OK.
    And tell me what is this a photograph of?
    This is a photograph of myself.
    And this was taken at Christmas time, I think.
    Because I was an angel because I was hidden as a Christian girl
    by the home where I stayed during the war, the ones
    that saved us.
    Yeah.
    Do you remember putting on the angel wings?
    Do you remember the costume and the event?
    Somebody put it on for me in Vance.
    And this was right next, I think,
    was close to the pool someplace in the forest,
    where they took this picture.
    OK.
    Thank you.
    You're welcome.
    OK.
    And tell me what is this photograph of?
    This photograph is of my mother and myself and my sister.
    And this strange child in the middle
    that, when she went to Czechoslovakia
    for a visit in 1936 to visit our grandparents.
    OK.
    So this is that visit you told me about during your interview,
    where you first visit your mother's parents and then you
    visit your father's?
    This is, I think, my father's parents.
    OK.
    And it is your mother standing there with a huge smile.
    And you're the larger child in white to the left.
    Then the middle child is the one that we don't know.
    And the littler one in white is right next to your mother.
    And that's Rosa.
    My sister Rosa.
    OK.
    Yes.
    OK.
    Thank you very much.
    You're welcome.
    And tell me who is this lovely person in this photo?
    This lovely person is my wonderful sister Rosa
    when she was a young girl, a young person.
    And she was with me during the whole Holocaust.
    We were together when we were hidden as Christian children
    in the home.
    And this is when she's already in the United States with you?
    Yes.
    She's now in the United States.
    And I miss her terribly.
    She was a wonderful human being.
    And she passed away two years ago.
    And a big loss for me, I miss her very, very much.
    And I loved her very much.
    Well, this is a lovely tribute to her.
    Thank you.
    She was-- we were all together during the whole time
    of the bad times of the Holocaust.
    I'm sure that that was the reason why
    you were able to survive, is that you had her there.
    That's true.
    And she had you.
    OK.
    Thanks.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Elisabeth Weinberger (née Heller), born on March 30, 1931 in Antwerp, Belgium, discusses being the elder of two girls in a middle-class family; her father who was a diamond cutter; her parents who were originally from Czechoslovakia; the German bombing of Belgium in the spring of 1940; her family fleeing to a small town in southern France under the control of the Vichy government; being gathered together with other Jews and sent to the detention center of Rivesaltes; being taken with her sister from Rivesaltes by Czech Council representatives and spending the next several years in hiding, passing as Christians; her mother’s escape and experiences in hiding; her father who was taken as a laborer to work at the French border and was never seen again by her family; reuniting with her mother; and immigrating to the United States.
    Interviewee
    Elisabeth Weinberger
    Interviewer
    Ina Navazelskis
    Date
    interview:  2018 June 28
    Geography
    creation: Lawrence (N.Y.)
    Credit Line
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    1 digital file : MP4.

    Rights & Restrictions

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

    Keywords & Subjects

    Personal Name
    Weinberger, Elisabeth.

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Ina Navazelskis, on behalf of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History Branch, conducted the oral history interview with Elisabeth Weinberger on June 28, 2018 in Lawrence, NY.
    Funding Note
    The cataloging of this oral history interview has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:05:53
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn619017

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    Contains interviews with Holocaust survivors, concentration camp liberators, rescuers, relief workers, former POWs, and people of different social and ethnic backgrounds who were targeted by the Nazis and their collaborators or witnessed the events of the Holocaust

    Date: 1989-2023

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    Oral history interview with Miriam Storch Lewent

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    Oral History

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    Oral history interview with Liane Reif-Lehrer

    Oral history interview with Liane Reif-Lehrer

    Oral History

    Liane Reif-Lehrer, born in Vienna, Austria in November 1934, describes growing up in a middle-class family; obtaining a passport in 1938 to immigrate to the United States but not being able to go when her father, a dentist, killed himself because he had to close his practice; traveling with her brother and mother to Hamburg, Germany in 1939 to board the St. Louis, which was bound for Cuba; arriving in Cuba and having to return to Europe, where they ended up in France; getting a visa to immigrate to the United States after staying in France for two-and-a-half years; traveling through Spain and leaving Europe from Lisbon, Portugal on the S.S. Exeter and arriving in the United States on November 10, 1941; living with the sister of Liane's father and her children in New York; earning her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley and working for many years as an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School; and now working as a consultant and a writer.

    Oral history interview with Preben Munch-Nielsen

    Oral history interview with Preben Munch-Nielsen

    Oral History

    Preben Munch-Nielsen, born in 1926 in Snekkersten, Denmark, describes growing up in a Protestant family; attending school in Copenhagen; the German invasion of Denmark in 1940; becoming a courier in the resistance and being one of the youngest resistance fighters; helping to hide refugees in houses near the shore and to get them on boats to Sweden once the Gestapo began hunting down Jews in Denmark in October 1943; taking refuge in Sweden in November 1943 and joining the Danish Brigade, in which he fought as a soldier for eighteen months; helping to smuggle arms into Denmark for resistance fighters; and settling in Denmark in May 1945 after the war.

    Oral history interview with Anny Rubinstein Kast

    Oral history interview with Anny Rubinstein Kast

    Oral History

    Anny Rubinstein Kast, born in Poland in 1926, describes moving to Belgium when she was two months old; her family and her childhood in Belgium; attending school in Antwerp before the war; the German invasion of Belgium on May 10, 1940; someone reporting to the Germans that her family was the only Jewish one left in their neighborhood and then being picked up a few days later; living with the aunt of a friend during her family’s deportation and taking on a false identity; studying German, English, and mathematics lessons during the war; her liberation in 1944 when the English troops entered her town; her uncle finding her and opening up a fur store in Antwerp to support her and other surviving family members; immigrating to Israel after the war; and getting married in 1967.

    Oral history interview with Helen Waterford

    Oral history interview with Helen Waterford

    Oral History

    Helen Waterford, born in Germany in April 14, 1909, discusses her 1933 marriage; her move to Amsterdam in 1934; working for many years to help Jews from Germany relocate to the Netherlands; going into hiding in October 1942 with her husband but without her daughter; the Germans discovering them on August 26, 1944 and interrogating them for two days about the network of people who assisted them in hiding; her deportation to Westerbork and then to Auschwitz-Birkenau; her husband’s death in Auschwitz; remaining in Birkenau until October 1944, when she was forced to work in the Kratzau factory in Czechoslovakia; going into a prisoner of war camp, where she remained until her liberation; traveling to a displaced persons camp at Plzen, Czechoslovakia; returning to the Netherlands, where she reunited with her daughter; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Thomas Ward

    Oral history interview with Thomas Ward

    Oral History

    Thomas Ward, born on August 10, 1921 in St. Louis, MO, describes joining the army when he was twenty years old; serving in General Patton's Third Army; working as a part of a three-person reconnaissance team in the Third Cavalry division; liberating 18,000 prisoners from the Ebensee concentration camp on May 5th, 1945; liberating a neighboring camp for women several days later; taking photographs in the camps (which he sent to the Supreme Allied Command); and his views on Holocaust denial.

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    Oral history interview with Fred R. Wohl

    Oral History

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

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    Oral history interview with Norbert Yasharoff

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frank Meissner

    Oral history interview with Frank Meissner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mina Perlberger

    Oral history interview with Mina Perlberger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Klebanow

    Oral history interview with David Klebanow

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Franz Wohlfahrt

    Oral history interview with Franz Wohlfahrt

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tove Schöbaum Bamberger

    Oral history interview with Tove Schöbaum Bamberger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Morris Gordon

    Oral history interview with Morris Gordon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Raya Markon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ernest G. Heppner

    Oral history interview with Ernest G. Heppner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Emanuel Mandel

    Oral history interview with Emanuel Mandel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Leo Bretholz

    Oral history interview with Leo Bretholz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Paul Matasovski

    Oral history interview with Paul Matasovski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Zelda Piekarska Brodecki

    Oral history interview with Zelda Piekarska Brodecki

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Stefania Podgórska Burzminski

    Oral history interview with Stefania Podgórska Burzminski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rose Galek Brunswic

    Oral history interview with Rose Galek Brunswic

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Renée Schwalb Fritz

    Oral history interview with Renée Schwalb Fritz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Martin Spett

    Oral history interview with Martin Spett

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ion Cioaba

    Oral history interview with Ion Cioaba

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Niels Bamberger

    Oral history interview with Niels Bamberger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ray Buch

    Oral history interview with Ray Buch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Nina Kaleska

    Oral history interview with Nina Kaleska

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Judith Meisel

    Oral history interview with Judith Meisel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thomas Buergenthal

    Oral history interview with Thomas Buergenthal

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Leif Donde

    Oral history interview with Leif Donde

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Kaufmann Koenig

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Kaufmann Koenig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Max Amichai Heppner

    Oral history interview with Max Amichai Heppner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Charles Bruml

    Oral history interview with Charles Bruml

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Pollack

    Oral history interview with David Pollack

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eugene Lipman

    Oral history interview with Eugene Lipman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hetty d'Ancona de Leeuwe

    Oral history interview with Hetty d'Ancona de Leeuwe

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marty Glickman

    Oral history interview with Marty Glickman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Susie Gruenbaum Schwarz

    Oral history interview with Susie Gruenbaum Schwarz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hessy Levinsons Taft

    Oral history interview with Hessy Levinsons Taft

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bella Jakubowicz Tovey

    Oral history interview with Bella Jakubowicz Tovey

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Krautwirth Meyerowitz

    Oral history interview with Ruth Krautwirth Meyerowitz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Peretz Milbauer

    Oral history interview with Peretz Milbauer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Judah Nadich

    Oral history interview with Judah Nadich

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hana Bruml

    Oral history interview with Hana Bruml

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Meed

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Meed

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Johanna Neumann

    Oral history interview with Johanna Neumann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alice Lang Rosen

    Oral history interview with Alice Lang Rosen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jay Ipson

    Oral history interview with Jay Ipson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Margaret Jastrow Klug

    Oral history interview with Margaret Jastrow Klug

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Solomon Klug

    Oral history interview with Solomon Klug

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helene Baraf

    Oral history interview with Helene Baraf

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Morris Kornberg

    Oral history interview with Morris Kornberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michael Diamond

    Oral history interview with Michael Diamond

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malach

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malach

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michael Bernath

    Oral history interview with Michael Bernath

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Kate Bernath

    Oral history interview with Kate Bernath

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Paul Kovak

    Oral history interview with Paul Kovak

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Abraham Kolski

    Oral history interview with Abraham Kolski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sylvia Kolski

    Oral history interview with Sylvia Kolski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Steven Springfield

    Oral history interview with Steven Springfield

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Liny Pajgin Yollick

    Oral history interview with Liny Pajgin Yollick

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Bachner

    Oral history interview with Fred Bachner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Murray Pantirer

    Oral history interview with Murray Pantirer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Barbara Marton Farkas

    Oral history interview with Barbara Marton Farkas

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Farkas

    Oral history interview with William Farkas

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sheila Perec Etons Bernard

    Oral history interview with Sheila Perec Etons Bernard

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frima L.

    Oral history interview with Frima L.

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Esther Terner Raab

    Oral history interview with Esther Terner Raab

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Guy Stern

    Oral history interview with Guy Stern

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Toby Stern

    Oral history interview with Toby Stern

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ion Butnaru

    Oral history interview with Ion Butnaru

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jeanine Gutman Butnaru

    Oral history interview with Jeanine Gutman Butnaru

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Cecilie Klein-Pollack

    Oral history interview with Cecilie Klein-Pollack

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Schwartz

    Oral history interview with Fred Schwartz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malnik

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malnik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lilly Appelbaum Malnik

    Oral history interview with Lilly Appelbaum Malnik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Masha Loen

    Oral history interview with Masha Loen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Madeline Deutsch

    Oral history interview with Madeline Deutsch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Amalie Petranker Salsitz

    Oral history interview with Amalie Petranker Salsitz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Norman Salsitz

    Oral history interview with Norman Salsitz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frederic Bernard

    Oral history interview with Frederic Bernard

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Isaac Bitton

    Oral history interview with Isaac Bitton

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Max Haber

    Oral history interview with Max Haber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William P. Levine

    Oral history interview with William P. Levine

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Leo Schneiderman

    Oral history interview with Leo Schneiderman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Adam Starkopf and Pela Starkopf

    Oral history interview with Adam Starkopf and Pela Starkopf

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Carla Heijmans Lessing

    Oral history interview with Carla Heijmans Lessing

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Edward Lessing

    Oral history interview with Edward Lessing

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Werner Goldsmith

    Oral history interview with Werner Goldsmith

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Beatrice Pappenheimer

    Oral history interview with Beatrice Pappenheimer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with John Komski

    Oral history interview with John Komski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Curtis Whiteway

    Oral history interview with Curtis Whiteway

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lore Baer

    Oral history interview with Lore Baer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erich Kulka

    Oral history interview with Erich Kulka

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Cornelia Schouten

    Oral history interview with Cornelia Schouten

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Drexel Sprecher

    Oral history interview with Drexel Sprecher

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bela Blau

    Oral history interview with Bela Blau

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Magda Blau

    Oral history interview with Magda Blau

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Barbara Ledermann Rodbell

    Oral history interview with Barbara Ledermann Rodbell

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jerry Slivka

    Oral history interview with Jerry Slivka

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rochelle Blackman Slivka

    Oral history interview with Rochelle Blackman Slivka

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Francis Akos

    Oral history interview with Francis Akos

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Beno Helmer

    Oral history interview with Beno Helmer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jerry von Halle

    Oral history interview with Jerry von Halle

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall

    Oral history interview with Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ralph Codikow

    Oral history interview with Ralph Codikow

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Borsos

    Oral history interview with Ruth Borsos

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Simone Marguerite Lipman

    Oral history interview with Simone Marguerite Lipman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Shony Alex Braun

    Oral history interview with Shony Alex Braun

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Doriane Kurz

    Oral history interview with Doriane Kurz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Lieberman

    Oral history interview with David Lieberman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Laura Margolis

    Oral history interview with Laura Margolis

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Paul Strassmann

    Oral history interview with Paul Strassmann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ernest James

    Oral history interview with Ernest James

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Chaim Engel

    Oral history interview with Chaim Engel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Selma Engel

    Oral history interview with Selma Engel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Morris Engelson

    Oral history interview with Morris Engelson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lonia Mosak

    Oral history interview with Lonia Mosak

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Agnes Grossman Aranyi

    Oral history interview with Agnes Grossman Aranyi

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Bergman

    Oral history interview with David Bergman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lila Lam Nowakowska

    Oral history interview with Lila Lam Nowakowska

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Yaffa Rosenthal

    Oral history interview with Yaffa Rosenthal

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eve Wagszul Rich

    Oral history interview with Eve Wagszul Rich

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Magda Mezei Lapedus

    Oral history interview with Magda Mezei Lapedus

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Avraham Ronai

    Oral history interview with Avraham Ronai

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Konigsberg Lang

    Oral history interview with Eva Konigsberg Lang

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Cornelius Loen

    Oral history interview with Cornelius Loen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thomas Blatt

    Oral history interview with Thomas Blatt

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anita Magnus Frank

    Oral history interview with Anita Magnus Frank

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Guta Blass Weintraub

    Oral history interview with Guta Blass Weintraub

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henry Schmelzer

    Oral history interview with Henry Schmelzer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helen Liebowitz Goldkind

    Oral history interview with Helen Liebowitz Goldkind

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Johanne Eva Liebmann

    Oral history interview with Johanne Eva Liebmann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Max Liebmann

    Oral history interview with Max Liebmann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Giorgio Perlasca

    Oral history interview with Giorgio Perlasca

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David J. Selznick

    Oral history interview with David J. Selznick

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Model

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Model

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Levine

    Oral history interview with Joseph Levine

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eugenia Blau Szamosi

    Oral history interview with Eugenia Blau Szamosi

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irene Dynkiewicz Silver

    Oral history interview with Irene Dynkiewicz Silver

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alice Lok Cahana

    Oral history interview with Alice Lok Cahana

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Brust Cooper

    Oral history interview with Eva Brust Cooper

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jacob Vogel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Frieda Belinfante

    Oral history interview with Frieda Belinfante

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Philip Vock

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Gatenio

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mariette Moscovici

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henry van den Boogard

    Oral history interview with Henry van den Boogard

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jack Moss

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Dytlow

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Dytlow

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mel London

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henry Cohen

    Oral history interview with Henry Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gisela Feldman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bert Fleming and Irene Fleming

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Norman Belfer

    Oral history interview with Norman Belfer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Carol Stern Steinhardt

    Oral history interview with Carol Stern Steinhardt

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Haim Shmueli

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Itka Zygmuntowicz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gertrude Granirer Flor

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Renee Scheuer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bent Melchior

    Oral history interview with Bent Melchior

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Reuven Paikowski

    Oral history interview with Reuven Paikowski

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Renata Laqueur

    Oral history interview with Renata Laqueur

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Carl Hirsch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lotte Hirsch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Walter Meyer

    Oral history interview with Walter Meyer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Dora Kramen Dimitro

    Oral history interview with Dora Kramen Dimitro

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Herma Barber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Zeck and Belle Mayer Zeck

    Oral history interview with William Zeck and Belle Mayer Zeck

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michel Reynders

    Oral history interview with Michel Reynders

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marthe Hoffnung Cohn

    Oral history interview with Marthe Hoffnung Cohn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Miriam Kabacznik Shulman

    Oral history interview with Miriam Kabacznik Shulman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anna Szyller Palarczyk

    Oral history interview with Anna Szyller Palarczyk

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Steven Galezewski

    Oral history interview with Steven Galezewski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Havas

    Oral history interview with George Havas

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Maria Rosenbloom

    Oral history interview with Maria Rosenbloom

    Oral History

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

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