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Oral history interview with Michael "Micha" Gazit

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 2020.207.1 | RG Number: RG-50.030.1089

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    Oral history interview with Michael "Micha" Gazit
    Transcript
    OK.
    This is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    interview with Mr. Michael, Misha Gazit,
    on September 2, 2020.
    And Mr. Gazit I understand you are
    in San Francisco, California.
    I am in Falls Church, Virginia.
    So clear across the United States.
    Our interview is being recorded by Zoom.
    And it is conducted in a remote fashion because of the pandemic
    that we are currently experiencing.
    First of all, Mr. Gazit do you agree to this interview,
    and do you agree to it being recorded?
    I agree to the recording and I agree to the interview.
    Thank you.
    Thank you.
    So I'm going to begin our interview with the most
    basic questions.
    And then we'll take everything from there.
    So my very first question is this.
    Can you tell me the date of your birth?
    September 28, 1935.
    1935.
    Yes.
    September 28, 1935.
    Yes.
    In my documents, I have 1934.
    Yeah.
    Again, I don't have the birth certificate.
    And it was in dispute, since I remember myself,
    because my mother kept the dates in the Hebrew calendar.
    And it will never jived together.
    I see.
    So we came to the conclusion it's actually 1935.
    And the reason I derived it as 1935--
    I had an uncle that served at the time in the Polish army.
    And he always told me that Piłsudski at the time died.
    And after he died, he came to visit my mother because she
    just gave birth to me.
    [INTERPOSING VOICES]
    And I checked that Piłsudski actually died in 1935.
    This is true.
    So I think that's probably the correct date.
    OK.
    And Piłsudski was one of the interwar leaders of Poland.
    Probably the strongest interwar leader that Poland had.
    Yes.
    Yes.
    OK.
    What was your name at birth?
    It was-- in Hebrew, it's like Micha
    which is like Misha in Jewish Bornstein.
    Bornstein.
    Yeah.
    This was the name of my father.
    Yes.
    And how would I spell it?
    Bornstein-- B-O-R-N-S-T-E-I-N. Bornstein.
    Where were you born?
    Radom, Poland.
    Radom in Poland.
    And can you tell me--
    I'm not that familiar with Polish geography.
    What part of Poland is Radom in?
    Is it central, is it western?
    It's exactly at the center.
    If you take a straight line between Warsaw and Krakow,
    Radom is in the middle, between the two cities.
    And so when your first name at birth was what?
    In, let's say-- in Hebrew, it would have been what?
    Micha
    Misha
    Yeah.
    And Polish, it would have been?
    Probably Mikhail.
    OK.
    OK.
    And your father's first name?
    Eliezer.
    Eliezer.
    Yes.
    And do you know approximately when he was born?
    I think I have the document.
    It was 1905.
    So he was a young man when you were born.
    Yes.
    30 years old or so.
    Yes.
    And your mother, what was her first name?
    Rivka.
    Rivka.
    And her maiden name?
    It's Zviebel.
    And how would I spell that?
    There's a few version.
    Z-V-I-E-B-E-L. Zviebel.
    OK.
    In German, it means onion.
    Yeah, right.
    Right.
    We always joked about it, yes.
    Oh, really?
    Yeah.
    What was your first language at home?
    Yiddish.
    OK.
    Did you have brothers and sisters?
    No.
    You were the only child?
    Yes.
    Were your parents originally from Radom?
    My father, yes.
    My mother, no.
    Where did she come from?
    She came from eastern Poland, from a little village called
    Griva, or in Ukraine, it is Hrywa But it was Griva.
    Griva.
    Yes.
    All the way in eastern Poland.
    How is it that your parents met?
    How did they marry?
    Oh, OK.
    Since it was such a small Jewish community there,
    her parents sent her to Radom because in Radom, she
    had an uncle.
    And she originally went there.
    They had, I think, a big summer retreat place, they owned.
    Like a little hotel or something of this sort.
    So she, in the summer, came to help them with the intention
    that they will let her meet some Jewish boys in Radom.
    Because Radom was a city.
    They had about 30,000 Jewish inhabitants.
    They were about, I would say, 30% of the total population.
    So it's a lot.
    Yeah.
    So there was probably a bigger selection
    than in eastern Poland.
    So that's where she met him, Eliezer Bornstein.
    And they got married there in Radom.
    Did your mother have brothers and sisters?
    Oh, yes.
    How many?
    She had two brothers and four sisters.
    A lot.
    A total of seven.
    Seven siblings.
    Did you know any of these aunts and uncles?
    Yes.
    After the war, I met them.
    But the uncle-- actually, the two uncles,
    that's part of my survival.
    We can talk about it later on.
    We'll come to that.
    Yeah.
    We'll come to that.
    But right at this point, I wonder
    if you remember the names of your aunts and uncles
    on your mother's side.
    I think I know all of them.
    I will start with the oldest one.
    His name was Isaiah.
    Isaiah.
    Or in Hebrew, Yesha'yahu Isaiah.
    Yes.
    Yesha'yahu, OK.
    Yeah.
    Then it was Sarah, Sarah.
    My mother, Rivka, of course.
    Rivka.
    Yes.
    There was another one.
    Ina like Yentl.
    How do I spell that?
    I-N-A?
    I-N-N-A?
    Yes.
    Yes.
    And then there's the second uncle, Joseph.
    Joseph.
    OK.
    Then was another sister.
    Her name was Pesia I don't how you can translate it in--
    I know the name.
    I know the name.
    Pesia
    [INAUDIBLE]
    Yes.
    I think that's all what I remember.
    There's one more.
    But that's OK.
    That's OK.
    You remembered six of them.
    Yeah.
    OK.
    And your father, did he have brothers and sisters?
    Yes.
    He had a brother and a sister.
    Did you know your aunt and uncle from your father's side?
    No.
    I don't remember them.
    Of course, I left very early and never saw them again.
    OK.
    Do you know their names?
    The brother was Israel.
    Israel.
    Israel.
    OK.
    Yes.
    And the name of his sister, I'm not sure.
    OK.
    I think her name was Havva, Eva.
    Havva.
    Havva, yes.
    Did your parents come from about the same equal social class,
    or was it different?
    It's a little hard to compare.
    Because my mother comes from a family which are mainly
    merchants, and from my father's side,
    they were actually manufacturing.
    They had a leather manufacturing company, kind of.
    My father and his brother were partners in leather kind of,
    I don't know what's the right term in English.
    Like leather-- preparing the leather
    for production of shoes or coats, [INAUDIBLE]
    for this kind of stuff.
    It sounds like a tannery.
    Yeah.
    Exactly.
    Exactly.
    OK.
    So they were both partners in this production.
    And was this a company that they founded themselves,
    or had they inherited it from their father?
    I think they founded it.
    OK.
    Because their father, which means my grandfather,
    was basically a teacher in the gymnasium there.
    OK.
    Had the --
    Had your father's family lived in Radom for generations?
    Or had they moved there from somewhere else, do you think?
    I think they lived for quite a long time.
    I would say for generations, yes.
    Did you know your grandparents on your father's side?
    I don't remember them.
    They probably saw me.
    But I left Radom when I was three years old.
    OK.
    We'll talk about this.
    We will talk about this.
    Yeah.
    Did the two families ever meet?
    That is, your mother's side of the family,
    with your father's side of the family?
    Yes, they did, I think, during the wedding.
    But it was too far away to have constant meetings or--
    Visits.
    [INAUDIBLE] yes.
    OK.
    And would you say that the company that your father had
    with his brother--
    his brother was Isaiah, yes?
    Yesha'yahu.
    No.
    His brother was Israel.
    His name was Israel.
    Israel.
    Excuse me.
    Excuse me.
    Israel.
    Was it something that was very large,
    or was it a small company?
    I have no idea.
    OK.
    That's no-- it's only what I was told.
    Yes.
    OK.
    All right.
    Did you know your father?
    I don't remember him.
    OK.
    All right.
    Do you know anything else about his side of the family?
    Do you know anything more about who they were, where
    they came from, and so on?
    Very little.
    No.
    No.
    Only that his father was a teacher in the gymnasium,
    the high school?
    Yes.
    OK.
    And was Radom part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
    before World War 1?
    Or was it part of Prussia, or part of Russia?
    Do you know?
    Good question.
    I'm not sure.
    I'm not sure.
    Never investigated this aspect of Poland.
    Well, the reason why I ask is because many times, if somebody
    was in, let's say, the Austro-Hungarian side, they
    would have fought.
    The fathers would be of such an age
    that they either experienced, or would
    have fought during World War 1, with the Austro-Hungarian
    Empire.
    But your father is born 1905.
    So he would have been too young.
    Yeah, to fight in the First World War, yes.
    Yeah.
    OK.
    So you are an only child.
    Yes.
    Do you know anything about your home in Radom?
    Where you lived.
    Only what my mother told me.
    It was like a two-story building.
    It was already electricity and running water.
    At the time, it was not common in Poland.
    No.
    But it was quite modern.
    We lived on the second floor, she told me.
    Because many times, she had problems with the stairs.
    And I would be trying to run and had a few accidents.
    Yeah, so.
    But in the lower floor, I think, the grandfather
    lived with his wife.
    OK.
    So your father's parents.
    Yeah.
    OK.
    So it was their home.
    Either the grandparents home, or the--
    Yeah.
    The whole building, I would say.
    The whole building belonged to the Bornstein family,
    I would say.
    OK.
    And do you have any memories of this place at all?
    Not at all, no.
    Not at all.
    All right.
    So how is it that you don't know your father,
    or your grandparents, or that you have no memory of Radom?
    What happened that created this situation?
    Yeah.
    OK.
    Every summer, my mother would take me back
    to where she was raised and born, to eastern Poland
    to see my grandfather, in this place that I told you, Griva.
    Griva.
    Yeah.
    And it's a wonderful place during the summer.
    Because it's a place--
    like I told you, it's near Polesia,
    which is known to be at the Amazon of Poland.
    I mean, forests and rivers.
    So this was a wonderful place to spend the summer.
    So every summer she would take--
    Was it large?
    Was it a large village, or was it a town, Griva?
    The village was smaller.
    They had maybe like 200 families there.
    But around it you have bigger towns.
    OK.
    And the village itself was named Griva?
    Or was it--
    Griva.
    Griva.
    Griva.
    And did it have a large Jewish population?
    No.
    They were the only family in this village.
    Yes.
    But around it, about five kilometers away,
    there were other small towns that
    had a bigger Jewish population.
    So they always communicated.
    And it was almost an hour walk by foot, or with a horse, 20
    minutes or something like this.
    Did anybody have a car?
    No, no.
    This part of Poland was very, very backward.
    No electricity and no running water.
    What kind of a place did your mother take you to then?
    Her father's home, was that it?
    Yes.
    And what did that look like?
    Her father's home.
    Well, this was a big ranch that they
    bought from a Polish nobleman.
    Oh, wow.
    OK.
    And it was a very big--
    as far as I remember very well.
    It has maybe like 10 rooms.
    I don't remember.
    And adjacent to the house they had a shop.
    Like a big-- almost like a little supermarket there.
    And behind that, the fields that belonged
    to this Polish nobleman.
    The land, we could not buy.
    Because at the time, Jews not allowed to own land in Poland.
    But you were allowed to own the house.
    Yes.
    Yes.
    How strange.
    And the house, they purchased many, many years ago.
    It was in 1830 according to the stories I was told.
    So it belongs to the family since 1830.
    That's unusual.
    Yeah.
    Yeah, it is.
    Well, it sounds like it was an estate of some kind.
    Like an estate.
    With the exception of the land around it.
    It has many hundreds of acres.
    But it still belonged to the nobleman, and his family,
    of course.
    And the crops from this land was always collected and paid for.
    bit by bit paid whatever it was worth back to the nobleman.
    Every year?
    Every year, yes.
    Well, it sounds, also then-- it gives me the assumption
    that whichever ancestor bought it in 1830
    must have been well-off in order to buy
    the estate from a nobleman.
    It's possible.
    Must have had some kind of-- yeah.
    It's possible.
    I always thought that the grand-grandfather, back
    like three or four generations, he was a very big traveler
    and had business all over.
    And he was also a big art collector.
    But of course, I never saw it.
    I never experienced it.
    But I guess that there was some [INAUDIBLE]
    that he was quite capable, at least financially, was
    capable of purchasing such a thing.
    And your own grandfather--
    your mother's father?
    You say he was a merchant?
    Yeah.
    He was a merchant there.
    Did he use that little store to sell things,
    or did he have a store somewhere else?
    No.
    He sold-- actually, he was the only store in all the region.
    So all the farmers and everybody would come and buy
    all the necessities from him.
    He was the only one there.
    And in return, he also bought from the farmers
    and from all the-- there were a lot of hunters
    there that would hunt foxes and all kinds
    of stuff, that would bring the fur.
    And they would take them and ship them to some other places.
    So it was like a,
    a very involved business here.
    Yeah.
    It sounds very lucrative.
    Yeah, they were very--
    If you're the only one there.
    Yeah.
    They were very well-to-do, yeah.
    Very well-to-do.
    So he was more well-to-do than your father's side
    of the family?
    It's hard to compare.
    It's hard to compare.
    I know.
    You said that in the beginning.
    But you know--
    Maybe even more.
    It's possible.
    Because they were able to marry six daughters.
    And at that time--
    five daughters, yeah.
    At the time, some money had to come with it, you know.
    Yeah.
    That's a complication.
    To be able to do that, yes.
    And each one has a dowry.
    Exactly.
    Exactly.
    Did your father ever visit with your mother in the summertime?
    I don't recall.
    Maybe.
    Maybe when I was younger, because the last time
    we visited was 1939.
    And we can go later on what happened in '39.
    Oh.
    So when you were three years old--
    Three or four years old.
    You were four years old in the summer of 1939.
    Yes.
    We left Radom for the summer like in June or something
    like this.
    And this was the last time we left Radom.
    And so your mother and your father
    never saw each other again either.
    No.
    No.
    OK.
    OK.
    We can go later what happened at that time.
    Well, of course, September 1, 1939.
    Germany attacks Poland.
    Yes.
    And how did that--
    It was a couple of weeks later, the Russians,
    take over eastern Poland.
    That, I think, was September 17.
    That they take over.
    OK.
    You have the exact date.
    I see.
    Yeah.
    This is what I remember from other interviews
    that I've done is that people would talk about that.
    Yeah, I see.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    Do you have any memories of this time?
    I mean, you're four years old.
    And if someone would ask me what do
    I remember from four years old, I don't know if I could answer.
    But do you?
    Vaguely, I can remember.
    I remember the blackout.
    We had to cover all the windows during the night,
    because planes were flying over.
    This I remember very well.
    Some kind of mystery.
    And the next thing, I remember my mother was crying that she
    cannot go back home, and what's going to happen to my father.
    I remember.
    She was very, very upset.
    I mean, it's the most dramatic stuff I still remember.
    OK.
    Did the estate have a telephone?
    There was a telephone.
    But it did not operate.
    It was a connection to the main--
    like, the capital of the area, or the region.
    It was called Commune kushirsk This
    was the main municipal area.
    So there was a telephone right there.
    I guess where the graf lived there.
    The count, yeah.
    Yeah.
    But it was never in operation.
    As far as I remember.
    And you said--
    [INAUDIBLE] I tried-- these are some of the memories.
    I tried to play with it.
    And nobody even bothered to tell me don't do it,
    because it was dead.
    Yeah.
    You say the estate didn't have electricity?
    No.
    OK.
    Did it have running water, indoor plumbing?
    No.
    They had a well in the back of the house.
    What did the house look like?
    It was a one-story house.
    Like I said, about 10 rooms.
    Very long.
    From wood.
    Made of wood.
    Except the kitchen.
    I remember the kitchen had some bricks inside.
    But the rest of it was--
    The picture I get in my mind when
    I think of estates that belonged to Polish nobility--
    I always think of stone buildings two stories high,
    that looked like almost little castles.
    But this is different.
    This is different.
    And there are certain--
    yeah.
    OK.
    Yeah.
    Do you know--
    I guess down there, the main building material
    was wood, of course.
    Yeah.
    And it's around such forests.
    So this was probably the main building material.
    Yeah.
    But I remember a lot of glass.
    I remember one of the back rooms, the last room,
    was like a solarium.
    There was a lot of glass.
    I remember.
    And inside, they had all kinds of plants in the house.
    This I vaguely remember.
    OK.
    And-- oh.
    I just had a question and it--
    do you remember the name of the Polish family--
    the nobility, the nobleman who sold--
    whose land was still belonged to?
    No.
    Not at all, no.
    OK.
    Maybe I can research it, but no, I don't.
    I don't recall even hearing the name or whatever.
    No.
    OK.
    And did your grandfather live alone in this big house?
    Or when you would visit him with your mother, who
    else lived there?
    His youngest son, which is my uncle.
    Uncle Joseph.
    He lived there and helped him with the business.
    Actually, he took over the business.
    OK.
    Uncle Joseph.
    Uncle Joseph.
    Yes.
    And the other children, did they live nearby?
    No.
    Some of them immigrated to Brazil, to Argentina.
    Oh?
    And to nearby cities like Manyevich.
    That's the city about--
    How far is Manyevich?
    It's about 30 kilometers west of Griva.
    OK.
    It was also like a summer retreat place.
    People would come from the big cities and stay there.
    Because it was surrounded by forests and lakes.
    It sounds like it was a beautiful part of the country.
    Oh, yes.
    It was--
    If you talk-- the people go at the summertime.
    Yeah.
    I would say it's the most undeveloped.
    I mean, anyone who looked for nature, this was a nice place.
    The most undeveloped spot of Poland was in this area,
    I would say so.
    In the eastern part.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    Do you remember much from Griva itself?
    You say there were about 200 people living there,
    or 200 families?
    200 families.
    200 families.
    So that might even get us up to close to 1,000 people
    if it's 200 families?
    Probably even more.
    It's maybe more, because at the time,
    each family had my, something in average 7 or 8 children.
    That's right.
    So it could be quite a lot.
    And do you know how it came to be
    that your mother's family was the only Jewish family there?
    How they came to settle in Griva?
    I always wondered about it.
    And they did not have really a convincing story to tell me.
    I guess this was just the business that was available.
    Because I guess the Polish nobleman
    had developed his business.
    And they just took over and continued with it.
    OK.
    OK.
    And-- oh.
    I just had another question that was on the tip of my tongue.
    Your uncle lived there.
    He took over the business.
    It was the play --
    Ah.
    I know what I was going to ask.
    Were most of the other people in Griva Polish?
    Or were there also Ukrainians there?
    I would say most of them were Ukrainian.
    Yeah.
    Belonging to the pravoslavac part of Christianity.
    The Orthodox.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    Orthodox.
    There were quite a few Baptists.
    Interesting.
    Yeah.
    And a few Polish Catholics.
    But they didn't have a church there.
    But we knew them.
    So the Poles were in a minority.
    Yes.
    Definitely.
    OK.
    And did the Ukrainian Orthodox, did they have a church?
    Yes.
    Quite a nice church, yeah.
    And was it the--
    With the famous onion on the top here.
    Were you ever inside?
    Not inside, but from outside, I could see it.
    Was there a synagogue anywhere close by?
    Yeah.
    About five kilometers away, in a little town called [PLACE NAME]
    [PLACE NAME]
    Yeah.
    Down there was quite a big Jewish community.
    So let's say, the holy days--
    the High Holy Days, and some other occasions,
    they would go there and stay there.
    They had also family there.
    So this was--
    You mean, your family had family there?
    Yes.
    OK.
    Would have that been one of your mother's brothers or sisters?
    No.
    Most of them were cousins, I think.
    Most of them were cousins.
    Was your family religious?
    Yes, very much so.
    So your grandfather and your mother,
    they observed all of the rituals?
    Oh, yes.
    All the holy days, and all the rituals.
    Yes.
    OK.
    Yeah.
    At the time, most of the Jews were religious, probably, yeah,
    at that time.
    But you see, here's an interesting distinction.
    Some people became more secular, particularly if they
    lived in the larger cities.
    Exactly.
    They were more often secular.
    And like, your father's family, as far as much as you know,
    were they as religious as your mother's?
    No.
    Much less.
    Much less.
    And how do you know that?
    Did your mother tell you?
    Yes.
    They were not as observant as they were.
    OK.
    And-- forgive me, but this is one of those questions where--
    the dress, that how your grandfather dressed
    and your mother--
    was that in a secular way, or was that something
    that was in keeping with some of the older traditions?
    No, this was more secular, I would say.
    OK.
    It just was just the same like the Ukrainian housewives
    around there-- the same.
    OK.
    OK.
    Do you have any other memories, early memories,
    of being on the estate, of living there
    before the war happens, or even immediately afterwards?
    Afterwards I remember more before that.
    Tell me about that.
    Well, we stayed there since 1939 the minute we
    were separated from Poland.
    So we could not go back.
    So we stayed there at my grandfather's house.
    So we were two years under the Soviet regime at the time.
    Do you have any memory of that?
    Did that affect your grandfather at all?
    Oh, yes.
    Oh, yes.
    They kind of tried to confiscate the business
    and make it a cooperative.
    But that's another story I can tell how they avoided it.
    Please.
    Please.
    OK.
    Living so close to their gentile neighbors,
    they developed quite a good friendship and good relations.
    Very good.
    Of course, there were many of them
    at the time that did not like Jews.
    They were anti-Semites, especially the Ukrainians.
    But there were many of them very, very friendly,
    especially the Baptists.
    They would always call my grandfather
    the Abraham from the Bible.
    Because they believed in the Bible.
    So and he had the long beard.
    So they called him Abraham.
    Even his name was Shlomo.
    OK.
    Yeah.
    [INAUDIBLE; BOTH TALKING]].
    And were these Baptists Ukrainians or were they Poles?
    The Baptists were Ukrainians.
    They were Ukrainians.
    OK.
    And from all their friends, there was one family.
    He was quite poor.
    And they supported him.
    My grandfather and my uncle Joseph from time to time
    gave him food and some other stuff.
    They were very poor.
    And he was so close to my uncle Joseph that--
    who could tell him all kinds of stuff
    that he even did not want to hear about it.
    One of the things that he belonged
    to a communist underground in Griva.
    This poor man.
    From the poor family.
    This poor man.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    And his name is very important.
    He was named Nikolai Konishtook.
    Konishtook
    Konishtook.
    And later one, during the war, he was called Crook.
    Not crook like we understand.
    No, no.
    No.
    Not at all.
    No.
    Just the short of Konishtook was Crook.
    OK.
    And this poor little guy became kind of dependent
    on Uncle Joseph, to give him from time
    to time some handouts.
    And one of the days, he came to Uncle Joseph.
    And he said--
    Uncle Joseph also was dealing with scrap metal.
    He would-- the farmers around would [till their fields.
    And from time to time they would find an old cannon, or rifles,
    or whatever.
    So they would bring it to him.
    And he would collect them and sell it as scrap metal
    by the pound.
    And so he came one day, this Crook, or Nikolai.
    And he saw a big pile of old rifles, rotten, corroded.
    And he wanted a rifle.
    Just the corroded.
    So Joseph asked him, what for?
    Why do you need it?
    And anyway, he was not allowed to give it away.
    But anyway, he was pleading.
    So I gave him, and he told him, you never know.
    One day you may need it.
    So again--
    Crook said that, or uncle Joseph said that?
    No, Crook said it.
    You never know.
    One day you may need it.
    And he was looking through the pile, also found,
    that, in addition to the rifle, the lock inside
    so you can't combine the two of them
    and you can make it a shooting instrument.
    OK.
    So he gave it to him and forgot about it.
    But this would be important later on.
    OK.
    So we also had, at the home, they had a maid.
    A very nice, almost like a family member.
    She cooked and then helped them.
    And also in the bed, they had chickens and cow and horses.
    So she took care of everything.
    And Also her husband of this maid
    helped with all the chores of the house.
    Do you know her name?
    Do you remember--
    Yes.
    Darka
    Darka.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    Well, also an important name in my history.
    OK.
    Her name was Darka.
    And she was like a family member.
    So when the Russians arrived, when the Soviets arrived,
    was that good news for Mr. Crook?
    That's it.
    So since he was such a good buddy to my Uncle Joseph,
    the communists wanted to confiscate the shop
    and make it a cooperative.
    So he arranged it that it was called a cooperative,
    but nothing happened.
    Actually, nothing happened.
    Except by name.
    So he arranged it that my uncle Joseph continued
    with the business as usual.
    And did your uncle, do you know--
    did anything happen with supplies?
    I mean, did the amount of goods that he was selling--
    did that change?
    Very much so.
    Very much so.
    Everything now, he had to go to the big city
    and get like a special quota.
    He had to bring so many names that depend on him.
    And abide by this number of names.
    He could get like 100 kilos of sugar, or 200 kilos of flour,
    or whatever.
    It was already not what it used to be.
    He had to go through a certain procedure to get supplies.
    And many things were not available anymore.
    So it was quite a big change.
    But at least his business, still stayed intact.
    And did anybody-- did any of the-- excuse me, please.
    Did any of the new Soviet authorities
    visit the estate, as far as you know?
    Did any soldiers show up?
    Any commissar?
    No, That's when everything ran through this Crook
    because he was already in the underground-- the communist
    underground.
    So the minute the communists came, he was immediately
    the manager of the village.
    He already established there--
    And did the villagers--
    OK.
    Yeah.
    And they established, like before,
    a governing board of the village.
    And he took Joseph to be part of the board.
    One of the members.
    I see.
    And he was the head of the board.
    OK.
    Now do you know--
    I mean, again, I realize that you're only
    four years old at this point.
    Yes.
    And some of the questions that I have are
    questions that are normal for an adult.
    But did you ever learn later--
    did anyone ever tell you how the other people in the village
    perceived this takeover by the Soviets?
    Was it something they were in favor of,
    or was this something they didn't like?
    They did not like.
    And they developed quite an animosity to this Crook.
    They started to hate him very much.
    They did not know that he was an underground hiding communists,
    and suddenly came open.
    And many of the farmers, they lost their land.
    It became like a kolkhoz So they hated the Russians.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    There was a collective farm?
    Yes.
    At least in name.
    They started to change it.
    Of course, it didn't happen in one day,
    because there was a lot of resistance to this policy.
    But as far as I know, they started
    to hate him very much so.
    Did their attitude change to your family?
    Probably not.
    Because there was anti-Semitic feelings before and even after.
    But we felt a little better when the Soviets came.
    Because they came like, there's no religion.
    There's no discrimination on the religious base.
    So in this respect, maybe it was a little less obvious
    than before.
    OK.
    Had the anti-Semitism been strong before in the village?
    Oh, yeah.
    There were quite a few elements which were very hostile.
    Especially the Ukrainian nationalists.
    Some of them were called by the name of past fighters,
    like Bulbovtists on the name of Bulba.
    Bulba.
    [INAUDIBLE] yeah.
    So their name was Bulbovtists.
    And a another one were the [INAUDIBLE]
    Like the Green Party.
    The [INAUDIBLE].
    [INAUDIBLE] OK.
    Yeah.
    They were very Ukrainian nationalists, and also
    extremely anti-Semitic.
    And I can tell you one unpleasant accident we had.
    The minute the war broke out, there
    were like a few weeks there was no--
    nobody knew what's going to happen in this area of Poland.
    So one night, we were attacked in our home
    by these Ukrainian bandits.
    It was [INAUDIBLE] at night.
    I remember it like today.
    My Uncle Joseph was resting from the day
    work in another bedroom.
    And it was maybe like 8 o'clock in the evening.
    Suddenly, we heard a window glass breaking.
    And then a shot from a pistol, a gunshot.
    And then three masked people came in
    from the bedroom with my uncle Joseph.
    He was a little injured.
    I mean, when they were shooting, the bullet just
    scraped his forehead.
    So he was bleeding a little here.
    And he came-- I remember, we were still
    sitting in the dining room.
    And this was a terrible experience.
    So they came in, masked, all of them.
    Three of them took all of us, put us
    on the floor in the kitchen, and covered us
    with all kinds of blankets or whatever.
    And they were roaming around the house, taking everything.
    And then they came to my mother.
    She had a diamond ring.
    By force, the removed it from her finger.
    And again told her lie down, and covered everybody.
    It took probably the whole night, they were taking stuff.
    And then they disappeared.
    At least we were happy they did not kill us.
    So this was one of the most, I would say,
    signs of the love we got there from certain elements.
    And was this during--
    is this after the war begins, or is this before the war begins?
    The between when the --
    Germany declared war and the war started.
    And until the Russians came.
    They were --
    During those two weeks?
    Yeah.
    Two or whatever.
    But for us it was forever.
    It was like no authority.
    There was complete chaos.
    So they used it to do all kinds of things.
    OK.
    So this is one example of the extreme hatred that existed
    between certain elements.
    So when the Soviet troops came in,
    at least it was the re-establishment
    of some kind of authority?
    Oh, yes.
    OK.
    In this respect, it was kind of more assuring.
    And at least for us, as a Jewish family, it was OK.
    Did you know, or did anyone tell you later,
    of any kind of NKVD presence and activity in Griva?
    Yeah.
    I think my uncle always mentioned to be quiet,
    not to talk too much.
    Because NKVD-- NKVD, yeah, it's exactly the name.
    You never know who is going to be one of them.
    And not to talk too much.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    Well, tell me-- there will be people
    who will be listening to this interview in the future.
    And they won't know what NKVD is.
    Can you explain?
    NKVD, this is like the secret police
    of the communist regime, yes.
    Of the Soviet Union.
    So the equivalent of the Gestapo.
    Yeah.
    You may say so, yes.
    Yes.
    OK.
    And they were very feared.
    If somebody at night would knock on the door, it was NKVD,
    it was quite a bad experience.
    Unpleasant.
    Was your uncle Joseph married?
    He married.
    But I guess after a year or so, it was annulled.
    OK.
    So did he have children at all or no?
    At that time, no.
    At that time, no.
    Later on, yes.
    He was still young.
    And in our description up until now,
    I don't hear much about any of your mother's other brothers
    or sisters.
    OK.
    So, like, one of them went to Brazil.
    The other one went to Argentina.
    Pesia lived, I think, in Manyevich.
    OK.
    Not so far.
    Not so far.
    And his brother, or my uncle Isaiah,
    Yesha'yahu, lived also in Manyevich.
    OK.
    And he had a family there.
    He was married and he had two daughters.
    And he also was part of the business from the village.
    Because my uncle or my grandfather,
    they would collect all these furs
    from foxes and other stuff.
    And they would send it to him.
    And he would send it farther away.
    So it was kind of an exchange business there.
    Well, actually, there's a connection,
    when you think of some of these things,
    that it probably didn't happen.
    But they could have sent it to your father in Radom,
    when he had a tannery.
    If they needed to make cowhide, they could make leather from.
    Exactly.
    Things like that.
    Exactly.
    Yeah.
    But it's not developing; there was no time.
    There was no time.
    Yeah.
    So his brother Isaiah, Yesha'yahu.
    He had a very nice home in this Manyevich.
    There was quite a big Jewish community there.
    And what is interesting--
    he married also a very well-to-do--
    his wife was Sarah.
    Her name was Sarah.
    And when they built their house, when they were still young,
    a Belgian agricultural expert came there and settled down
    to live there and teach the Ukrainian farmers how to grow
    flowers and other stuff.
    So they rented their house.
    And for a few years, they lived somewhere else,
    with their parents, I guess.
    When they were still young.
    So this Belgian guy developed such a beautiful garden
    in the backyard.
    So everybody, from all the neighborhoods,
    from all the cities, would come to see it.
    It was so beautiful.
    All kinds of flowers.
    They'd never saw them in the Ukraine.
    And when he left and they moved to the house,
    it was unbelievable how beautiful it was.
    So they have now the cities with the most beautiful house
    in eastern Ukraine.
    It was so nice.
    No kidding.
    Yeah.
    It was so nice.
    It was in Manyevich.
    Yeah, in Manyevich, yeah.
    But a beautiful and special array of flowers, I guess.
    And he had some solarium he developed all kinds of stuff.
    He brought civilization to this place, I guess.
    Yeah.
    And the house itself was so big.
    They had two kitchens-- the kitchen for the summer,
    and the kitchen for the winter.
    And many, many rooms.
    So it sounds like he was well-to-do as well.
    Very, very well-to-do, yes.
    And all from the same business?
    Yeah.
    I would say the same.
    Like a branch of what they were doing in Griva,
    he was doing in Manyevich here.
    And also a lot of wood products.
    Because near the forest, there were many places
    where they were cutting wood and were
    doing all kinds of furniture and other stuff.
    So there was a lot of raw materials
    that they could handle.
    In this time, was there any news from your father
    and what was going on in Radom?
    Only one time came a little letter.
    This was, I guess, a few months after the war started.
    There were still some smugglers that went between the borders.
    So he told my mother to stay, not to try to come back.
    Stay where she is.
    And they are managing fine.
    And let's hope for the best.
    And that's the last time we heard from him.
    Oh yeah.
    And also he sent with this farmer or whatever it was,
    a pair of boots for me, because the winter was coming.
    So he sent special boots, what's called, at that time,
    it's called valenkis.
    Valenkis.
    Are these felt?
    Made out of felt?
    Yeah.
    Right, right.
    So they are very warm for the winter.
    So that's the last time we heard from him.
    Do you ever know what happened to him?
    Later on, yeah.
    All of them, at least the men, were used
    in some factories around Radom.
    And I think in 1944, all of them were executed.
    Before the Russians came.
    So did you ever find any documentation about your father
    during those years?
    We have only a registration card from the German authorities.
    And that's all that we have.
    Wow.
    OK.
    So he disappeared from your lives?
    Yeah.
    Completely.
    Completely.
    No photograph of him?
    Just a photograph that my mother sent to her sisters
    in Brazil and Argentina.
    They kept it.
    But with us, we had nothing.
    Everything was lost, was destroyed.
    That happened with many people.
    That they lost all of such things.
    And only from relatives abroad who
    might have gotten such a photograph,
    they were able to find it.
    Yes.
    When was the first time that you looked
    upon a picture of your father?
    Do you know how old you were?
    Oh, probably I was like maybe seven
    when they came here, maybe 15 or something like this.
    Did you have any reaction to it?
    He looked like a stranger to me I mean.
    There was no reaction at all.
    Like, it could have been any other picture.
    I mean, because in my mind, I didn't have anything
    to relate or to connect to.
    At least, not mentally.
    Did you miss having a father?
    Definitely.
    Growing up without a father, of course.
    It's always missing in your life.
    Did anybody step in sometimes, and at some point--
    doesn't take on the role of the father,
    but is there for you in that way?
    Was there anybody like that?
    I was in this respect very lucky.
    My grandfather, as long as he was alive,
    was very, very supportive and very, very loving.
    And also Joseph.
    Uncle Joseph, he was almost in the action of a father, almost.
    He took care of me, yeah.
    As you were speaking of him, I had that impression
    that he was someone who was important in these early years
    of your life.
    And later, I will tell you.
    He actually saved us with his connection and his situation
    at that time.
    He was able to save us.
    Tell me a little bit about the personalities
    of your grandfather, uncle Joseph, and your mother.
    What kind of personalities did they have as individuals?
    My mother was very gentle.
    Very, very quiet.
    I would say very easily insulted.
    If you tell something, she would feel
    [INAUDIBLE] very sensitive.
    Very sensitive.
    And very quiet, but very loving.
    And also loving towards the family.
    Very dedicated to the family.
    Was a great, great mother, of course.
    A great cook.
    She liked to cook for the family.
    My grandfather, as far as I remember him,
    he was very, very quiet, maybe, because of the--
    first of all, he was not a young man anymore.
    And everything that was happening,
    he was kind of under shock, I would say.
    He was shocked what happened all around him.
    So I remember, he did not speak much.
    Was your grandmother alive?
    No.
    She died at a younger age.
    After she gave birth to one of the sisters of my mother,
    she died a year later.
    I guess.
    Did your grandfather ever remarry?
    No.
    And Joseph, he was the big hero in my life.
    He was connected to all the villagers.
    He had all the dealing and wheeling.
    And he knew how all the types are.
    He was a good reader of their character, I would say.
    He had a high mental intelligence, I would say.
    So these days, we call it emotional intelligence.
    Exactly.
    Emotional intelligence.
    He could read many types of these only in the village,
    whom he can trust, and whom he can be careful and not
    come too close to him.
    He was very, very successful, I guess, in this respect.
    During this time, when there is that Soviet occupation
    of eastern Poland, was there any Polish presence
    that you sensed?
    I mean, you say that most of the Ukrainians did not like them.
    But was there any Polish kind of attitude, or feeling,
    or response?
    I don't recall anything that remains in my memory
    that I can distinguish.
    And today, is Griva part of Poland, or is it
    part of western Ukraine?
    Western Ukraine.
    OK.
    I mean, from what my understanding is,
    that these territories in eastern Poland
    were a great deal of contention between the Ukrainians
    and the Poles.
    Yes.
    That there was a great deal of animosity between the two.
    Oh, yes.
    And quite a bit of violence, each, actually.
    Oh, yes.
    Yes.
    Did you know of any of this at the time in Griva?
    Did you experience any of it?
    Did it come out?
    At that time, when the Russians took over, during the war, I,
    from stories that my uncle told me,
    it was a big animosity towards the Russians and, of course,
    the communists again, because they tried to convert it
    to a cooperative or kolkhoz.
    And they didn't like it.
    So there was quite an animosity between the Ukrainians
    and the Russians.
    But at that time, they could not express it.
    Because they were afraid to do anything.
    But between the Poles and the Ukrainians, you don't remember?
    Or it did not play a role?
    Not really.
    But what I can remember--
    and then the Germans came and took over.
    Some of the Polish farmers or people
    there were more kind of exertive and they kind of
    came closer to the Germans and became managers of the village.
    I don't know how it happened.
    But some of them became trusted by the Germans
    more than the Ukrainians.
    I don't know why.
    Interesting.
    Because usually, at least the stereotype is the opposite.
    Yeah.
    Because most Poles were not treated very well
    by the Germans.
    Exactly.
    But in this village, maybe because of their personality,
    I know at least one of them that became-- one
    was the head of the village.
    He was a Polish.
    And he also was very mean to our family.
    So this is what I remember.
    His name was Krakoviak.
    Kakovia?
    Krakoviak.
    Krakoviak.
    Did most people know one another in Griva?
    Did you know each other by first name?
    Yeah.
    Oh, yeah.
    Well, most of them, yes.
    OK.
    And since you come from Radom, and you
    come when you're so small that you have no memories of Radom,
    did you end up knowing everybody in Griva?
    And they know you?
    No.
    Some of the neighbors knew me.
    You know with this kind of loving attitude
    to a small child.
    And I remember later on, like in '41, '42,
    and already the Germans were there.
    I played with the neighbor's children.
    And during the winter, we would build ourselves little sleds.
    And we played.
    So we were quite normal relations between children.
    Even after the Germans arrived?
    Yes.
    Yes.
    Wow.
    Because what happened in the beginning,
    the village is so remote from the main roads.
    So the Germans did not even bother to come there
    for the first year or so.
    Really?
    Yes.
    So for one year, it is more or less left alone?
    Almost alone.
    But of course, they nominated one of the [INAUDIBLE]
    like I told you, the Krakoviak to be the head of the village.
    Now, while the Soviets were still there,
    did you start school?
    I was supposed to start next year.
    Because at that time, I think, you start school at seven
    or something that is of course, not at six.
    I'm not sure what year.
    But I remember even getting books.
    I had to go to a special place that they distributed books.
    I remember to this day, I got some Russian books,
    but never had a chance to study.
    Yeah.
    So was there talk amongst the grown ups of what is
    going on in the rest of Poland?
    Was their talk about what Germany is doing?
    Was there surprise that the Russians had come?
    Was there any kind of discussion either in the family
    or in the village of 1939 and how the war started,
    and what's happening now?
    Excuse me.
    Was there any kind of discussion like this?
    I don't remember anything more specific,
    with the exception to this guy Crook that
    suddenly became a big shot.
    Because the Russians came.
    And by chance that he was such a good friend, or actually
    a dependent on Joseph.
    Yeah.
    So in this respect, it was OK.
    It was a good development for them.
    At least from the security point of view.
    But that's talking about what happens within the village.
    I'm saying, was there any news, or I'm asking,
    was there any news about what's going on in greater Poland?
    Was there any kind of information?
    Was there any interest?
    Or was it really an isolated village
    where the outside world didn't matter much?
    Most of it, I would say, are just
    rumors and nothing official, or nothing more logical.
    It's all kinds of rumors who came from nowhere.
    So I don't really remember the details.
    But every time was some kind of a panic.
    This happened, or this happened.
    But I cannot make up any cohesive or coherent story,
    how they felt. At least not what I observed.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    Well, of course, I know I'm asking you.
    You were a child, yeah.
    Yeah.
    Do you remember the German attack on the Soviet Union?
    Do you remember Operation Barbarossa?
    Yes.
    Oh, yes.
    First of all, up until that day, there
    had been in the center of the village,
    they had a radio with a big speaker.
    So we heard almost every day the communist propaganda.
    And sometimes Stalin would speak.
    And you heard it all the time.
    Suddenly, the whole thing changed.
    And from the same speaker, you could hear Hitler,
    with his terrible voice.
    So up until this day, I can still hear his terrible--
    you know, screams in the radio.
    So this is at least in my head, it's what I remember,
    the big change in the atmosphere, in the air.
    Well, that's interesting.
    Because most of the time what happens
    is, people see soldiers, people see boots, people see armor.
    And what you is, it's what you hear through the same speaker.
    Yeah, right.
    Because this was the only, I would
    say, thing that connected this village to the outside.
    They didn't have any newspapers there.
    There were no trains coming there-- nothing.
    So this was the only way of kind of feeling
    what happens outside the village.
    And so there was no German soldier in the village.
    No.
    Not in the beginning.
    OK.
    And what happened to Mr. Crook?
    He must have disappeared very fast.
    Oh, what happened to him.
    The minute the Germans attacked, of course,
    he was shocked like the whole Soviet army was.
    So he saw-- so first of all, he ran towards the main town,
    which was the municipal center of the area, which
    is [PLACE NAME].
    So he came there to ask what happens, what to do.
    He saw the Russian army in retreat, in disarray, panic.
    So he joined one of the columns and the Russian army
    and went deep into Russia.
    We even did not know what happened to him.
    And he disappeared with the Russian army.
    And back in the village, he had brought your uncle Joseph
    onto that council, as well as some other people.
    Did your uncle Joseph suffer any repercussions
    because he had been on this council?
    Not immediately.
    But later on, of course--
    he was immediately-- not immediately--
    after the Germans established a certain structure,
    he was ordered by this Krakoviak he
    became the head of the village.
    He told him that as a Jew, he has to go to [PLACE NAME]
    and register and see what to do next.
    So my uncle was suspicious, but he didn't have a choice.
    Because from other rumors, many Jews that were sent there never
    came back.
    They were executed somewhere during their stay there.
    So he came there.
    And the Germans asked him what he's doing.
    He told them-- he already prepared a certain story,
    that he's working for the forestry authority.
    And he can manage--
    for managing the cutting of trees
    and providing trees for the civil use.
    So that's something that they needed very, very badly.
    The German army needed wood for the war effort.
    So they gave him a special permit
    that he can stay, go back to his place,
    and continue to work and provide wood to the German army.
    And they gave him a special document
    that for the time being, he can stay there.
    So this was kind of a temporary relief.
    Now did Mr. Krakoviak send him there
    because he was implementing an anti-Jewish policy?
    Or did he send him there because uncle Joseph
    had been part of this council?
    I would say because of the anti-Jewish policy.
    Yes.
    This was an order to all the municipalities
    to identify the Jewish people and send them there, especially
    the male people.
    The men.
    Yeah, the men.
    Your grandfather-- do you know how old he was about this time?
    I think he was around 70.
    At that time, I guess it was old age.
    Yeah.
    He had a long beard and a white beard.
    So he looked old.
    But you know, when you said earlier
    that he looked shocked by all of these changes,
    you know, I tried to put yourself
    in the place of a person who spent
    his entire life in this place.
    Is someone who establishes a business.
    And there had been--
    I mean, this was never a very stable part of the world.
    And yet he was able to thrive in this stable part of the world.
    And all of a sudden, things happen
    that are beyond his experience.
    Yes.
    Beyond anything that he had ever seen or experienced before.
    Yeah.
    Did his manner change?
    Did he all of a sudden become even older in his way of being?
    I would say so.
    He became much more internalized.
    Everything, he did not open up.
    Everything was in him.
    He could not express himself the way he did before.
    It was always kind of enclosed in his own shed.
    And your mother, how did she react
    to these types of changes?
    Well, she was very, very, of course, worried.
    And every little thing would scare her.
    Every little noise.
    So somebody would knock on the door,
    she would get immediately startled or something.
    She was always on the edge, like,
    who knows what's going to happen not only tomorrow,
    or five minutes from now.
    And you know, when you're such a young child,
    these types of ways the grown ups behave
    has an enormous effect on a child.
    We pick these things up very quickly.
    Oh, yes.
    You know?
    Yeah.
    I would say so, yes.
    But--
    Were you frightened?
    Yeah.
    I was.
    Of course.
    Especially after this experience during the robbery
    during the night.
    Every time somebody would knock, the minute
    it was a little dark, I was always afraid.
    So your uncle Joseph comes back.
    And he has this permit for a while
    to keep on cutting down the forest, providing wood.
    Yes.
    And how does life progress?
    Trying to remember.
    Well, again, living in fear.
    From time to time, we heard that all kinds of bandits,
    most of them Ukrainian nationalists,
    are going to Jewish homes, robbing and also killing.
    And this happened in the bigger places.
    So there were a few times that our good neighbors,
    they were telling us that a big gang is coming.
    This happened a few times.
    They saw them coming with horses and with big--
    even with musical instruments, playing
    Ukrainian nationalist songs.
    And a few times, they told us, you'd better disappear.
    So many times we left our house and spent all the day
    in the fields, hiding.
    At the time it was like harvest time, I remember.
    So they still had big wheat--
    Wheat stalks.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    Yeah.
    So we could go inside and hide there for the day.
    So many times, we just didn't want to stay at home at all.
    And when you would return home, would you see a change?
    Was there a difference?
    Had they ransacked the place?
    No.
    They were just looking for us.
    There was already nothing there to rob.
    It was already empty.
    So they would knock and look around and scream,
    and do all kinds of stuff and continue.
    And what was happening--
    And this happened quite a few times.
    Yeah.
    What was happening in Manyevich with your relatives
    there, and with the other people?
    While you're in this more isolated place,
    what's happening in a place where there are more Jews?
    Yeah.
    So what happened there, after a few months
    after the Germans arrived, they ordered all the males, all
    the men, again to report to the train station there,
    all of them.
    And from then, there were marched to a certain place.
    And all of them were executed.
    They were shot.
    But nobody knew.
    The news was that they were taken to some urgent work.
    And some fake kind of like fake people that came back and told,
    they are doing fine.
    They are working hard.
    They will come soon.
    So anyone that escaped this, some of them
    were suspicious of it.
    They were hiding, and they survived.
    But the majority of them were executed.
    So this was the beginning of it.
    And this was, I guess, maybe like the beginning of '42
    or something like this.
    Yeah.
    So half a year after the Germans have marched in, they march in
    and in June 1941, these sorts of things start to happen.
    Yes.
    I would say maybe a half a year later, or something like this.
    OK.
    What about your own relatives?
    OK.
    So luckily, [INAUDIBLE] and that day
    he was in another village, another town to be correct.
    So he survived it.
    When he came back, he was told immediately,
    hey, you have to hide because they were looking for men.
    And so he was hiding for a few days.
    But then [INAUDIBLE] there more motion so he started to go out
    and they managed to move around.
    But in the beginning, he was hiding for a few weeks.
    And another thing there, since his house
    was such a beautiful house, [INAUDIBLE] the Germans
    wanted to confiscate it.
    But somehow they let them stay in the back of the house.
    But two German officers took over the most beautiful rooms
    in the front.
    And they were living there, two Germans.
    Together with your--
    Together with Shia and his family.
    They were living in the back.
    But later on it became, this was a blessing,
    because these two Germans had still had
    some human instinct in them.
    And they started to know the people.
    Before Jews were like creatures from nowhere.
    Who knows what they are?
    But since they lived so close, and Shia's wife
    would bring them some food sometimes, a cake or something,
    so that they conversed a little.
    And slowly, they saw they are just human like they are.
    So it became kind of-- they had some feelings towards them,
    I guess.
    Well, how did that affect what happened
    with Shia and his family?
    Well, they were the two that were actually
    instrumental of their survival.
    Can you tell me a little bit about that?
    Well, it's again connected with what happened in Griva.
    In Griva, in 1942, in August or something like this, 1942,
    this Krakoviak came and he had an order.
    He ordered all the family, all the Jewish families
    have to go to [PLACE NAME].
    And it was clear, if you go there,
    it will be a ghetto and probably execution.
    So what to do?
    What to do?
    And my uncle Joseph still could move around
    with his special permit.
    So he decided no, he's not letting
    us go to [PLACE NAME],, because this is a death sentence.
    So what he said, you go back now to Shia,
    and maybe we will find some solution.
    So [INAUDIBLE] because Jews are not allowed at the time
    to move freely from town to town.
    And you had these yellow stars
    You were wearing a yellow star?
    Yeah.
    Oh, yeah.
    OK.
    So what they decided that during the night,
    my mother and my grandfather will go to,
    by foot, walk to Manyevich, and they remove the yellow stars.
    So in case some farmer sees them on the way,
    he doesn't make a big deal of it.
    We were walking, and my Uncle Joseph took me.
    He decided that for me it's too far to walk,
    to walk 30 kilometers non-stop.
    And he was still with the wood business.
    So every day he would have a convoy of little trains.
    The trains were driven by horses.
    It's like rabonyetka it's called.
    It's a small railroad train.
    That every time they would bring wood
    to Manyevich for the bigger train station there.
    So he decided at that time, he will take me with the train.
    And nobody would probably pay attention.
    So when the train was about to leave,
    he took me, put me around him, and we came to Manyevich.
    And slowly, he smuggled me to Shia's home
    without anybody noticing.
    And we stayed there.
    And the --
    Did the two Germans know this?
    No, no.
    Because it all was in the back.
    It was a very big house.
    And in the back was so much vegetation,
    you could enter the house without being noticed.
    So we came there.
    But again, it's during the night.
    We could not sleep there.
    So his wife, [Shia's uncle's wife, Sarah,
    slowly took us to a relative that lived a few blocks away.
    And that's where we spent the night and also the coming days.
    We stayed there, waiting for who knows what.
    I don't know.
    I was not fully aware what's going to happen.
    But we stayed there.
    What about grandpa?
    He was hiding in the same house.
    But it was like a barn in the back.
    So he was staying in the barn.
    So they couldn't notice him.
    And Joseph was still in Griva doing his wood business.
    Suddenly, he got a notice from Crook's wife
    that he's back from Russia.
    And he's organizing a partisan unit,
    and he would like to talk to him.
    Wow.
    So yeah.
    So during the night, they had a meeting.
    And he said, look, you Jews are going to get killed.
    You'd better join me.
    My orders from Moscow is to establish a partisan unit.
    And I need bodies.
    I need soldiers.
    It was like a present from heaven.
    Yeah.
    Yeah, absolutely.
    Yeah.
    He said, sure.
    I know a lot of Jewish young that served in the Polish army.
    I can bring them.
    And it's great.
    We can establish a partisan unit.
    And this was the beginning.
    So who did he--
    did he leave you and your mother and your grandfather,
    and only take young men there?
    Or did you go with him?
    What happened?
    OK.
    So he talked to this Crook.
    He said, OK.
    I will bring you fighters.
    But I also want to save my family.
    So Crook said, OK.
    If you want to save them, you will be responsible for them.
    I cannot take care of them.
    And Joseph said, OK.
    I will take care of them.
    Don't worry.
    So in the few months that he was meeting with him,
    he already, this Crook, had already
    established a place in the forest.
    As I told you, this was like the Amazon forest.
    It's deep.
    Around it is a lot of swamps.
    And there's only one little way that you
    can walk without really being drowned in the swamps.
    And this Crook knew this way.
    And Joseph also learned where it is, where's the site.
    It was like a little island between swamps.
    And that's the place the Crook was hiding.
    And Joseph said, OK.
    Let's begin here.
    Bring guys, fighters.
    And I also want to bring my family to this place.
    And so, from Manyevich, did he bring you through the forest?
    To the forest?
    So what happened, how does he contact us,
    and how does he bring us to this place.
    So he tried to send all kinds of people.
    And it didn't work, as far as the messages.
    Unless these woman, Darka as I told you, that was working,
    she could move around.
    She was gentile.
    She could move around.
    With her, somebody sent a note that he's waiting for them
    in a certain place.
    This was a note to Shia, who was waiting for a certain place.
    And you have to bring all of them.
    The grandfather, Rivka and Misha, everybody.
    No one is left behind.
    And I will meet you in this place.
    When you come, you tell Crook's wife that you are there
    and I will come to pick you up.
    OK.
    So they were waiting there, Shia and the family.
    They got this note.
    But they did not feel this is the time to escape.
    It was still OK.
    Until one day, these two Germans told Sarah, his wife,
    you'd better run tonight.
    Because tomorrow, it will be an Aktion You may not survive it.
    You'd better run.
    OK?
    So since my mother and me were living a few blocks away,
    with a relative, she had a problem.
    How does she contact us?
    Because walking during the night is very dangerous.
    But anyway, she did it almost crawling on the floor she came.
    This I even remember today.
    She knocked on the window.
    And the other relatives that were staying with them got
    panicked and started to scream.
    They were afraid that the Germans would hear the screams.
    But she told them, nothing, nothing.
    It's me.
    It's Sarah.
    And then she said, Rivka, come, come with me.
    And that was the beginning of the salvation.
    Yeah.
    And grandpa?
    He already stayed in the barn.
    He stayed in the barn all the time with Shia.
    OK.
    Ah.
    So he knew already.
    He knew already.
    He knew already.
    Yes.
    OK.
    So we came.
    We joined them.
    And I think about midnight, in the middle of the night,
    slowly, we crawled out between the fences
    and started to walk fast.
    Very fast.
    And 30 kilometers, it was too much for us.
    So we rested.
    The next day we made like maybe 10 kilometers or something
    we did.
    And continued.
    And then we arrived near Griva.
    And told Crook's wife that we are waiting in a certain place.
    So for some reason, Joseph could not make it, or he was--
    I don't know what happened.
    He didn't show up.
    So we stayed there for two days.
    We didn't know what happened.
    We didn't have anything to eat or anything to drink.
    Were you in the forest at that point?
    Or were you [INAUDIBLE]?
    It was not taken not deep in the forest.
    Near the village, kind of near the fields.
    I think we were hiding in a big stack of hay.
    This was the end of the summer.
    If you remember, at that time, the hay
    was collected in such cones like pyramids.
    So we crawled inside.
    And we stayed there during the day.
    And this was near Griva?
    Yes, near Griva.
    Yes.
    One of the things is also interesting,
    that Crook's wife was not arrested.
    Yeah.
    Because if he is a known communist, then when
    the Germans arrive, she would have been the first one
    to be under suspicion.
    Right.
    But for some reason, nothing happened.
    Yeah.
    This was our luck.
    So there you are in the haystack.
    What happens?
    So again, we already got panicked for two days.
    He did not show up.
    Joseph did not show up.
    Then he showed up.
    And Shia made the contact.
    And he took us all, the whole group,
    and brought us to the forest, to this island.
    Amazing.
    Yeah.
    It's amazing.
    Yeah.
    And so you learned that path through the swamp,
    to the island that was there.
    Oh, yeah.
    Was it a large island?
    Not really.
    I would say--
    I don't know exactly the dimensions.
    I would say, maybe, it was like a kilometer by a kilometer
    or something like this.
    OK.
    But it's surrounded by swamp.
    Swamp and forest.
    Heavy, heavy dense forest.
    And was that whole --?
    Because this was just the beginning to me.
    Later on, they moved from there, and the partisans grew.
    I mean, we mobilized even more people.
    So the whole partisans moved deeper into the forest.
    Maybe like 50 kilometers inside, to stay away
    from any chance that the Germans suddenly will show up
    or something.
    So the --
    So when you arrived there, what did you see?
    Can you describe for me what kind of an image it was?
    Well, what I remember, walking to the island, some of it
    you had to go on a little narrow piece of road.
    You know, like in gymnastics.
    You have to walk on a little panel.
    So for me, it was easy.
    I was jumping back and forth.
    But I remember, I helped my grandfather.
    Because for him, he was shaky.
    He couldn't keep walking.
    We were afraid the minute he slides,
    he can sink down to the swamp.
    Sure.
    It would be almost impossible to take him out.
    So this is what I remember, is that I was like in my own game,
    no problem.
    We're moving around and helping the grandfather
    and immediately trying to see any interesting stuff
    of nature.
    So a kid looks on these things completely differently.
    Were you the only kid there?
    At the time, yes.
    OK.
    And where were people living?
    When you finally get there and you come to where the group is,
    do they have tents?
    Do they have shacks?
    How did they sleep?
    How did they live?
    In the beginning here, there were just all kinds of blankets
    that they collected through the farmers.
    So sleeping under the trees.
    But then when we moved to a more deeper place,
    they built what they call the zemlyanka.
    It's like a little bunker that you dig within the ground.
    And put over it like a little pyramid of wood.
    And also cover it with mud.
    So it also keeps us warm during the winter.
    And also a good hiding place.
    Nobody can see it.
    How many people would be in one zemlyanka?
    Oh, I'd say probably around 10 10 people.
    That's a lot.
    Oh, yeah.
    That's a lot.
    Yeah.
    So these were not small--
    We were sleeping in two rows, with the head
    outside, with the feet together, yes.
    How did you eat?
    [INAUDIBLE]
    How did you get food?
    Yeah.
    So in the beginning, Joseph managed
    to get from some farmers some loaves of bread and this stuff.
    But they did not ask much.
    So the first thing before the summer was over,
    they decided to accumulate potatoes.
    So every night, everybody except me and my grandfather, they
    would go out during the night to the fields of the farmers,
    and they got with their hands.
    They got potatoes.
    But they did it in such a way that they wouldn't
    notice that people did it.
    Because there were a lot of wild pigs there, boars.
    And they liked potatoes.
    And they had a certain way how to dig them out.
    So what they'd do, they would dig out just a few potatoes
    from each plant.
    So not to make a too big impression
    that they will notice that people did it.
    So every night they would go out, collect potatoes
    and bring them to the place until they had
    enough for the whole winter.
    And they dug deep trenches, put some hay around it,
    and put the potatoes inside and covered it.
    So the potatoes can stay fresh.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    And not freeze.
    And not freeze.
    And not freeze.
    Yes.
    And not freeze.
    Yes.
    And about how many people were in this camp
    when you first arrived?
    Oh, very few.
    And like I said, maybe maximum 20 people.
    But they were growing very fast.
    Growing very fast.
    And were you the only family that was there?
    Or did others bring their families there too.
    Later, some other families joined.
    And I would say, after a few months,
    it really grew to a civilian camp.
    That Crook decided to separate the fighters
    from the civilians.
    And the civilians at that time, slowly--
    I think they were maybe around 100 people.
    That's a lot.
    It's a lot to stay secret in the forest.
    You know?
    Yes.
    And Shia was the manager, actually, of the civilian camp.
    He organized the food.
    And actually they served the fighting units this food
    and clothes and some other stuff.
    The women that were preparing from wool sweaters and hats,
    and all kinds of stuff that they needed for the winter.
    So it was almost a service unit.
    They became a service unit for the fighters,
    the civilian camp.
    And were the two camps or locations close to each other?
    They were about two kilometers away.
    OK.
    And what kind of activities would the fighters do?
    What kind of things would they do?
    Was it sabotage of some kind?
    Oh, yes.
    They got their orders from the Soviet army, from the Kremlin,
    of course.
    And they had special missions.
    Almost every night, they had to send certain units of partisans
    to blow up trains, to attack the police stations,
    and to disrupt food supply from the farmers.
    Because the farmers had quotas.
    They had to give to the Germans.
    So one day, they would collect maybe
    like 50 cows and whatever, ready to march them
    to the German camp.
    So they would come, knock out the German people
    that kept them and would take the whole thing away from them.
    Or as far as the trains, they somehow
    knew the schedules of the army trains,
    which are very important.
    So they would tell them, in this place, at this date,
    you have to blow up this train.
    So they would go there and do it.
    And was your uncle Joseph part of this?
    Oh, yeah.
    They established a full regiment under Crook.
    Crook was the commander.
    And he had three sub-commanders under him.
    So Joseph was one of them.
    And there were two other ones.
    How interesting that the roles reversed.
    Yeah.
    Yeah, right.
    Right.
    And were there ever any--
    did you ever see anybody else besides Crook--
    let's say, any other Soviet partisans or officials
    sent by the Soviets?
    Oh, yes.
    Oh, yes.
    We saw -- one of them was Dyadya Petya he was called.
    He was a big general that was, I think,
    in charge of the whole partisans in the whole forest.
    And we saw many, many Russian army commanders
    coming from time to time to visit and to teach them
    how to make mines, to produce mines to blow up the trains.
    And did any of them ever comment on the civilians
    that were in the forest?
    Was there ever any kind of resistance or unhappiness
    that there were these families there?
    Not so much from the Russian army, or Russians
    that were sent to supervise.
    But there were some from the partisans itself,
    some other units, that they were not Jewish partisans.
    There were other units--
    Ukrainians and Polish.
    From there, there were many, many times some resistance.
    And even said, why?
    Why do we need it?
    And a few times, they even came and tried to do some trouble.
    But Crook always tried to keep us safe.
    So they all of the people who were civilian were Jewish?
    Yes.
    All of them.
    Yes.
    OK.
    And in those two--
    Maybe with the exception of one or two
    that were considered collaborators
    with the Russians, later on.
    They were later taken in.
    I mean, they were in danger that the Germans would kill them.
    I think there were a few of them with us.
    I'm not sure.
    I think there were a few of them.
    So can you give me a sense of how long you
    were in the forests, when you entered,
    and how long you were there?
    What year you entered?
    So we entered around September '42.
    And we left spring of '44.
    All right.
    About a year and a half.
    Yeah.
    A year and a half.
    A year and a half.
    The main thing was the two winters.
    This was the most difficult time.
    Explain it to me.
    Explain it to those of us who have never
    had to live in the forest what that was like.
    Yeah.
    Just imagine.
    You are coming from a 20th century home in Radom.
    And suddenly you have to live a Stone Age, or even
    before the Stone Age.
    Naked in the forest, almost.
    So like I said the most difficult time was the winter.
    And temperatures would drop sometimes to minus 30,
    minus 40.
    It's unbelievable.
    So we tried to keep warm.
    We were burning wood all the time.
    But there's a limit on how much you can stay warm there.
    We can get all kinds of shmatas, like we say.
    All kinds of stuff to keep warm.
    But it was difficult, very difficult.
    Was it a danger to burn things so that the smoke was seen?
    Or were you far away into the forest
    that that was not a danger?
    It was far away.
    But there were a few times that the Germans
    would send the [INAUDIBLE] to photograph
    and probably look for us.
    So what we would do, we immediately
    tried to extinguish it, cover it.
    But this happened rarely.
    Most of the time, it was so far away that the smoke was not
    a problem.
    But again, the Germans, in the winter,
    tried what they call a [INAUDIBLE]..
    They tried to create--
    to sweep the forest, and try to clean the forests
    from the partisans.
    And they did it during the winter.
    So they would bring thousands of German soldiers
    and just spread them all over and really
    walk through the woods, and try to find us.
    Luckily, we knew about it in advance from the farmers
    and from other informants.
    So we would evacuate our areas in advance.
    But the problem there again it was the footsteps.
    I mean, in snow, it's very difficult.
    So we had to go so much.
    And normally, we would go over a river or something.
    Then the footsteps suddenly disappeared.
    They did not know where we went.
    So they did it twice in the two winters.
    In the middle of January, they'll
    do the most heavy sweeps trying to find the partisans.
    Were there any--
    I can remember one of the accidents, when
    we escaped the civilian camp, moved together with Shia.
    He's my uncle.
    And the combating units were moving to another place.
    They didn't want us to be together.
    So when the thing was over, when the German sweep was over
    and we could return back to our original camp, remember.
    So we were walking back.
    But the combat units did not know that we were coming back.
    And they put an ambush for the Germans.
    And they thought they are [INAUDIBLE] German.
    Somebody saw some people moving.
    And they opened fire on us.
    No matter how many signals we did, they did not stop.
    I remember-- so we had to lie down and almost crawl out back
    into the forest until we were far away from the--
    you could almost hear the bullets.
    The noise above our heads.
    This was one of the accidents.
    We almost got killed by our own partisans.
    Did you have any deaths in the camps?
    In the combat units, yes.
    A lot.
    In the civilians, not so much, no.
    It's --
    How did your grandfather survive it?
    I mean, he was an old man.
    In the winter, this woman Darja that was helping there,
    I told you about Darka.
    She was the maid.
    And she had a family there.
    She insisted that the grandfather be brought
    for the winter to her house.
    So Joseph did a special trip during the night
    and brought him there.
    And he stayed there during the winter.
    And again, she paid with her life.
    This woman, Darjka paid with her life.
    She perished terribly.
    What happened to her?
    Finally somebody probably gave her name to the Germans.
    And from the Germans, I think it came
    to the Ukrainian nationalists.
    So almost before the end of the partisan movement, maybe
    it was the beginning of '44 or something, they grabbed her,
    tied her to the tail of a horse.
    And the moved the horse all over the places with a sign,
    this is what will be done to collaborators.
    And of course, she died a terrible death.
    So this is a sad story.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    And Mrs. Crook-- what was the real name?
    Now I keep calling him Mr. Crook.
    What is his real name again?
    Nikolai Konishtook.
    Konishtook So Mrs. Konishtook did anything
    like that happen to her?
    She survived the war OK.
    But she also came to the camp.
    She was in the camp.
    But again, if I'm already talking
    about Crook, [Ior Kohishtook After the war,
    the communists took over in there, of course.
    Griva became part of the Soviet Union.
    And he became the head of the village.
    And after [INAUDIBLE] returned from the partisans,
    and tried to organize Griva, he was murdered.
    And he was murdered.
    And as a punishment, Stalin gave an order
    that Griva has to be erased from the Earth.
    So a few days later, they came.
    They burned the whole village.
    And today there is--
    my son looked it up.
    There's a stone, a black stone that says,
    this village was destroyed by the order of Stalin.
    Wow.
    And the people?
    Most of them were sent to Siberia, I guess.
    That's the 20th century.
    Yeah.
    That's being in a bad geographical location.
    Yeah.
    Like I always say, I was born in the wrong time,
    and in the wrong place.
    That's true.
    That's true.
    Were there other children in the camp?
    But when it grew to its largest size?
    Or were you always the youngest?
    I was always the youngest.
    Later on came another one.
    I think towards the end.
    And he stayed there.
    I think I even have a little picture with him.
    The picture as it came when we left the forest.
    And the Russian army was already there.
    They saw us.
    They said, oh, malchik partisanski.
    It meets children partisans.
    They must take a picture of us.
    So they took a picture and published it
    in the local newspaper here.
    Like, oh.
    Look who fought the Germans.
    The big fighters here.
    This was nice.
    Are there any other memories that you
    have of living in the forest?
    Any incidents that happened that stay in your mind today?
    Any events of--
    Oh, yeah.
    There are a few I can mention.
    Of course, there are quite a few during the two years.
    One of them is two boys, they were probably around 14,
    15 years old.
    Their function was, normally they would collect--
    the partisans would collect old artillery shells
    that did not explode.
    And from the shells, they would take out the TNT inside
    and build mines to blow up the trains.
    So they needed somebody with small hands like these two boys
    because you open up--
    I don't know if you are familiar with an artillery shell.
    There is in the cap something that you screw out.
    And then you put inside, you can dig out the TNT inside.
    Some times you have to open it and scoop it out.
    And put it in special forms to make a usable mine.
    So these two boys were doing it for a long time,
    preparing hundreds of mines.
    One day, they made probably some kind of a mistake
    by removing the TNT from one of the shells.
    They triggered something.
    And it exploded.
    So I remember to this day, to see their bodies--
    part of their bodies, thrown all over.
    So this is one terrible thing that I remember.
    Another thing is, again, the cruelty of the times.
    And also the extreme power that the commanders, the partisans
    had in their hand.
    He was like a god, the commander.
    He could do anything.
    So one of the occasions, Crook was walking with his unit,
    with his fighting unit to a certain mission
    during the night.
    And a Jewish boy saw them.
    Probably he ran away from the ghetto,
    maybe from a killing pit.
    Who knows?
    Survived it.
    So he came and begged for food and maybe they can take him.
    So Crook said, no.
    You cannot.
    We are going to a mission.
    We cannot.
    We cannot take it.
    You'd better go away.
    We don't want you here.
    This boy did not listen and was always running behind them,
    after the unit.
    And they told him a few times, you cannot do it.
    And the boy still was--
    they found him again and again, following them.
    He took out his revolver and shot him, without any mercy.
    So this is the power that the commanders had at that time.
    What did people think of him, of Crook?
    Well, they knew him close; they were not afraid of him.
    They knew who he is, a little boy from Griva.
    But people that joined him later, they were afraid of him.
    He was a very little--
    I mean, he was not tall.
    Very short.
    And did not make any impression of a big, you know, fighter.
    But he was, inside, very strong, I guess.
    Did your uncle Joseph survive?
    Yes, he did.
    And your mother?
    Yes, she did.
    We all survived the forest.
    Wow.
    And your grandfather?
    He survived, but got immediately sick.
    And again, because he was such a religious man, such a--
    he did not want to eat anything except potatoes.
    This was-- all the partisans were eating anything.
    You know, pigs-- whatever was available.
    Even there were traditionalists who didn't pay attention.
    He didn't want to touch anything of it.
    And I think by eating these potatoes that were in fire,
    you know, they were charcoaled.
    He probably got cancer of the stomach.
    I'm almost sure it's from that.
    For two years, eating this kind of stuff.
    So the minute the war was over, and they
    escaped from the Soviet Union, they went to a camp in Germany,
    at that time.
    On the American side.
    And he got sick and died in Germany.
    In the DP camp?
    Yes.
    In a displaced-- OK.
    So let's come now to--
    let's come now to the war ending.
    And you say that it was in '44?
    Was it spring '44 that you were able to leave the forest?
    Yes.
    Because the Russian army was advancing and reached
    our area, our forest.
    And they got an order to get out of the forest,
    because what happened the minute the Germans retreated,
    all the Ukrainian nationalists escaped to the forest.
    And they were our biggest enemies.
    This [INAUDIBLE].. and Bulbovists and all
    this Ukrainian nationalist movements.
    They were very dangerous.
    So they came to the forest.
    And we had to get out of the forest.
    It was almost an exchange.
    OK.
    And so where did you go?
    Well, to the cities that the Soviet army liberated.
    Finally, we settled for a few months in Rovno.
    This was a big city there.
    That's in Ukraine, isn't it?
    Today, it's in Ukraine.
    At that time, it was still Poland, yes.
    OK.
    And we stayed there for a few months.
    I remember we settled in a Jewish home.
    Of course, all the Jews there were liquidated, killed.
    And I remember terrible sights that we saw there.
    We saw burning of the big synagogue,
    all kinds of writings in Hebrew with blood.
    They probably didn't have anything to write.
    Revenge.
    We are getting killed.
    We saw it on the walls of the synagogue.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    How do you say it in Hebrew?
    What was written--
    In Hebrew, [HEBREW].
    [SPEAKING HEBREW]
    [SPEAKING HEBREW], yes.
    And that means revenge.
    Yes.
    And from the locals, we learned that all the Jews were
    collected in the synagogue, and from there, they
    were taken to a nearby forest.
    They were ordered to dig trenches.
    And all of them were killed.
    And I remember that when the partisans came,
    the first mission was to see what happened to the graves
    that they were killed.
    Because there were many rains, and we could see bodies almost
    exposed, because they were not fully buried as necessary.
    So I remember this day that the partisans had to do it again,
    and buried them in a more respectful way.
    And --
    And this is as you're leaving the forest?
    Yeah.
    Just discovering what happened to the Jewish communities
    in the cities.
    And there were some, maybe like 20,000 Jews there in the city.
    So all of them were slaughtered in this forest.
    It's hard to remember that at this point,
    you're not even 10 years old.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    Enough to remember all my life.
    How did it change you?
    How did it shape you?
    It's hard for me to be so objective, in a way for myself.
    I cannot be so objective.
    Somebody maybe from --
    I mean, from the inside.
    From the inside.
    How did-- were there certain feelings
    that you got that have stayed with you as a result?
    The main thing was that as a Jew, we need a state.
    We need a strong army.
    And these things should never happen again to us.
    I lost my belief in God.
    And again, this [INAUDIBLE] would say the major conclusions
    I was thinking to myself, that this thing should never
    happen again.
    And to prevent it from happening again,
    again, we need your own state.
    You need a strong army.
    And don't rely on God.
    God doesn't exist.
    I guess that's enough, no?
    That's quite a lot.
    That's quite a lot.
    What about your mother and your grandfather,
    who were so religious?
    Did they stay that way?
    He remained religious.
    My mother also.
    Why?
    How did she explain it?
    God helped her to survive.
    That's another way.
    It's another way.
    Yeah.
    Because of God, she survived.
    And I let it go.
    I didn't want to argue with her.
    But it didn't make sense to me.
    What about uncle Joseph?
    He also stayed religious.
    To my surprise.
    Yeah.
    Did he?
    Did he ever see a contradiction that he
    had his own internal beliefs, and they were religious,
    and yet he was fighting for an atheistic regime?
    Or was it not a question?
    It was clear, because otherwise it was death?
    Yes.
    It was clear.
    Otherwise it was death.
    He did not think even of the regime on the other side.
    It was his own physical survival.
    So you stayed in Rovno, yeah, for a while?
    Yes.
    How long did you stay there?
    Oh, I would say maybe, four, five months.
    And Uncle Shia and Sarah and their children,
    did they survive too?
    Yes.
    Shia -- what happened to Shia.
    The minute they left the forest, he
    tried to provide some living means, food and other stuff.
    So he had an idea to go back to the forest
    and remove-- we had these big bunkers, a lot of wood.
    He went with another guy and horses,
    tried to then load all of the wood
    and bring it back and sell it in the local market.
    While he was trying to dismember this bunker,
    the whole thing collapsed and killed him.
    So this is another end of the war--
    another nice surprise.
    So that's his story here.
    My mother, myself, convinced that we
    must leave this place, Europe, especially
    eastern Europe, no matter what.
    So from Israel, they started to send all kinds of emissaries.
    We still have time?
    Oh, yeah.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    They sent emissaries all over that
    said Europe was liberated from the Germans.
    And one of them came to Rovno.
    And he said, well, we will help you to come to Israel
    or to immigrate to Israel.
    And he organized a group in Rovno,
    a full group of partisans, and gave them instructions and also
    some money so they can survive.
    And they told them to start moving to Romania.
    And down there, they have a boat or a ship
    that one day will come and pick them up.
    So from Rovno, it took us a few weeks to travel during this--
    still the war was still going on.
    But --
    Was there a difficulty in leaving Soviet territory?
    At that time, there was so much chaos--
    It didn't matter.
    It didn't matter.
    But we did rejoin the Russian army trains.
    They didn't even know.
    We entered the train.
    And the train was going towards the Hungarian-Romanian border.
    Nobody checked.
    Nobody saw anything.
    Yeah.
    It was complete chaos.
    Until we arrived in Romania.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    I want to come back and talk.
    But I need to pause a little bit.
    Something is going on in my house.
    I need to check it.
    Would you wait for me for five minutes?
    OK.
    Go ahead.
    I will drink some water.
    OK.
    I will shut down and come back.
    Thank you
    OK.
    OK, thank you for that.
    There were some distracting noises.
    And I didn't know what was going on.
    So my apologies for the interruption.
    And you are safe?
    I'm fine.
    I'm fine.
    So chaos is all around.
    The Soviet army is moving westwards.
    And you catch a train, a military train,
    that goes in the direction of Romania and Hungary.
    Yes.
    And so what happens then?
    And how many people are with you of your family?
    With my family, only me and my mother, and then the partisans.
    I would say maybe a group of 20 partisans
    with the aim of reaching, at that time, it was Palestine.
    So we finally arrived in Bucharest.
    For me, it was like a new world, like Paris,
    discovered the first time coming from this backward place.
    It was beautiful.
    So we stayed in a special home that the Israeli emissaries
    arranged for us.
    And we were waiting for certificates
    from the British authorities so we can come to, at that time,
    Palestine, because they did not allow just free movement.
    They had only a limited number of certificates that they gave.
    But since we were partisans, we got the first priority.
    And the summer of '45 the ship arrived on the way
    to the Palestine.
    I remember arriving in Haifa, which is a main port city.
    When my mother went down through the [inaudible]
    from the ship and she kissed the soil.
    This was quite a sight.
    And why didn't your grandfather come with you?
    Well, he was already very frail.
    And all our movements to Rome and other places,
    you really have to be physically OK.
    He could not move like that.
    So [? Yousef ?] took care of him.
    And he took him to a camp in Germany,
    which is more [? worrisome. ?] He needed doctor's help.
    He did not feel well.
    So that's--
    And [? Yousef, ?] what did he do, your Uncle [? Yousef? ?]
    So he stayed in Germany for about a couple of years
    in the camp, tried to establish himself.
    And then he also emigrated to Israel.
    He.
    Married, for the time being, he married.
    Here's another story about how he married
    and what happened to him.
    He came out of the forest.
    Again, stayed in all these liberated cities.
    And there was a friend of the partisans
    that got injured during the fighting with the partisans.
    And he had a big wound in the legs that did not
    heal for many, many months.
    So the minute they arrived, in the city
    I think it was in Lublin.
    They arrived there, immediately checked into the hospital.
    And the doctors started to treat him.
    During the night, some Ukrainian nationalist
    came in and killed him in his bed.
    You can imagine what kind of hatred there was in this place.
    And they killed him.
    And a sister of this guy, who has
    during the war in Russia in Siberia,
    the communists moved her to there.
    And as a Polish citizen kind of, they
    released her to go back to Poland.
    So she came here.
    And this was her brother that was killed.
    And she asked me what happened.
    And [? Yousef ?] was by his bed told her
    what happened and asked if his stuff, his belongings.
    And he's giving it to the sister.
    It turned out that the sister became later his wife.
    Interesting.
    Yeah.
    And she had-- yeah--
    So they all move together to Germany to this camp.
    So [? Yousef, ?] his new wife, and grandfather--
    And grandpa--
    And the grandfather passed away while staying there.
    Do you know what the name of the camp was?
    Or do you know where it was?
    It was, I think, Frankfurt am Main or something.
    I don't know.
    OK, OK, yeah, there were DP camps around there.
    Yeah.
    Quite a few.
    And in the meantime, you, your mother--
    what about Shia's children and wife, what did they do?
    They first went to Manevychi Because they
    were such an established family, they
    thought maybe they can start something, make a living there.
    It didn't go well.
    At the same time, one of their relatives
    also was in the Russian army and came back.
    And this guy was married to Sara's sister,
    I mean the sister of Shia's wife.
    But she perished in the Holocaust.
    She was killed in Manevychi While he
    was in the Russian army, his wife and children got killed.
    So it was natural for him to marry Sara So they married.
    And they first moved to Austria.
    They stayed there.
    And from there, they established themselves a little.
    And then they came also to Israel.
    So your mother and yourself were the first ones there?
    Oh, we were the firsts one to arrive in Israel.
    In '45, Israel did not exist yet.
    It was Palestine at the time, in '45.
    And what were your first experiences in Israel?
    Where did you live?
    What did you do?
    How did you feed yourselves?
    Exactly.
    So we arrived-- they had-- it was
    a little camp for immigrants.
    We stayed there for a couple of weeks.
    And then they started to see what they can do with us.
    So they suggested we go to a kibbutz.
    Well, it was a good solution for us.
    I mean, what else--
    my mother didn't have any vocation or anything she
    could do and here a small boy.
    What can she do?
    So we went to a kibbutz.
    And in kibbutz, my mother was not so happy about it.
    But I, for me, it was like paradise.
    This was the first time I could experience my childhood.
    It was wonderful.
    Were you able to still have a childhood?
    Yeah, sure, sure.
    This was the first time I experienced the childhood,
    yes, yes, at the age of 10.
    At the age of 10.
    What was the name of the kibbutz?
    [? Haramat ?] [? Hakodesh ?]
    And what did your mother do on the kibbutz?
    And what did you do?
    Did you work at all?
    Did you go to school?
    Did you do all of it?
    Oh, they gave me immediately a private teacher.
    Because you can say up till 10, I did not
    have any schooling, nothing.
    I knew to read Russian because I learned it for myself.
    I could read their newspapers and picked up Russian
    from hearing from the partisans.
    It's actually my best language was Russian at the time when I
    came, just hearing the radio--
    Better than Yiddish?
    And Yiddish, yes, talking to my grandmother,
    grandfather, and mother was Yiddish, yeah.
    But with other side, I talked Russia.
    Of course, natural.
    Yeah, this is what I picked up from all my surroundings.
    So they gave me a private teacher in the kibbutz.
    And I was studying there probably 10 hours
    a day non-stop, until they were able to bring me up
    to the level of the third grade.
    And then they send me to join the school.
    And from there I slowly was catching up what I lost.
    And your mother, what was she doing on the kibbutz?
    What was her job?
    The kibbutz, it was changing.
    First, she worked in preparing clothes for the workers,
    like a sewing machine.
    She worked on a sewing machine.
    And then I think she worked in the flower garden.
    They changed.
    In the kibbutz, they changed.
    Every few months, they would change positions,
    giving people to work on all kinds of fields.
    Did she eventually get used to it?
    Not really.
    Eventually, she left it.
    A few years, she left the kibbutz.
    OK.
    And you?
    Well, I continued.
    And I liked it.
    And I continued studying.
    And then when [? Yousef, ?] my uncle, arrived, he said,
    you have to get out, because in the kibbutz
    you're not going to get a matriculation where you
    can continue higher studies.
    So I lived with my uncle for a few years
    finishing high school.
    And then after high school, I had
    to go to the army, Israeli army.
    Where did you your uncle live?
    It's near Tel Aviv, near Tel Aviv.
    It's a city called Holon.
    Holon?
    Holon, yes.
    Holon.
    And your mother, where did she live after the kibbutz?
    Well, first, she lived, by herself
    she worked in a school, a boarding school, as a helper.
    And later on in 1954, she married, remarried.
    I was going to ask that, whether or not she ever remarried.
    Yeah, she remarried in 1954.
    OK.
    Did she ever have any more children?
    No.
    OK.
    And when she left the kibbutz after a few years,
    is that when you no longer lived with her?
    You stayed while she left?
    Yeah, right.
    OK.
    And how old were you at that time?
    Well, I would say, 14 I would say, in '50.
    And then you went to live with your uncle?
    Yes.
    And after high school, then it was the army?
    Yes, three years of the army.
    And then I went to the Technion, which
    is university for engineering.
    And so by this time, I take it, you
    must have been fluent in Hebrew.
    Oh, yeah, definitely.
    And when you went to the school for engineering,
    the university for engineering, how old were you?
    This was after the army.
    I'd say maybe 22 or something like this, 22, 23.
    So this is the mid 1950s.
    Right, right.
    OK.
    And when did you come to the United States?
    I came in 1963.
    And why did you leave Israel to come to the US?
    Well, I think I look for more opportunities,
    because at that time, Israel was very poor.
    So it was really hardly anything there.
    And I was like almost, I would say, naked.
    I had nothing there except my degree.
    I didn't even have a place where to sleep, except be
    a guest at my uncle's house.
    So I said probably here have more a chance to establish
    myself and be a more independent.
    So this what happen.
    So slowly I worked up here.
    And at that time, it's the '60s, '70s, '80s.
    This was the golden age of the United States engineering.
    The big thing in engineering happened here
    in the United States.
    So at the time, it was easy to find a good job
    and really to grow with the industry.
    Did you marry here, or did you marry
    before you came to the US?
    I came back for a vacation to Israel
    and married there and brought my wife to the United States.
    And have you ever been back to any of the places
    that we spoke about today?
    No.
    No.
    I'm kind of afraid to go back.
    I don't want to deeper--
    to feel it again, at least not physically.
    It's not an easy subject.
    Yeah.
    How many children do you have?
    Two children, two boys.
    Two boys.
    And it was one of your sons who originally
    got in touch with us.
    Yeah, yeah--
    Who arranged this--
    He's the historian of our family.
    He tries to take care of it.
    Well, this leads me to probably one of my final questions,
    which is, did you tell your children the details
    of your experiences?
    Did they know, as they were growing up, what this all was?
    They know, I would say, the headlines, they know.
    And they are pressing me to sit down and write it.
    But I cannot really.
    So that's why you are some help.
    It's impossible to start writing about these things.
    If you had to tell grandchildren and other children who
    have no idea what this was all about,
    what would you want them to understand?
    What would you want them to know?
    I mean, there's a certain amount that I think
    you would want to spare them.
    Most people do.
    But what would you want them to understand about these things?
    Well, I would say people can become very dangerous at times
    when they are led by certain ideologies,
    and have to be very careful not to be
    allow, to happen anything try to active it as early as possible.
    Because--
    Try to be-- try to be--
    To detect it.
    And there are certain signs to give a warning that things
    are not going right.
    Because people can be marvelous, great,
    and they can also be dangerous, murderers, and all kinds
    of bad things can happen to a human, to the human kind.
    And if it can happen to such a educated country like Germany,
    it can happen to every country.
    And have to be always be on the lookout,
    watch it, and see any signs that a certain society is
    drifting to a bad place.
    And it can happen very fast.
    And people are not predictable.
    Have to be very, very careful.
    Would you say that you still have a belief in humanity?
    Or is that one of the things you lost?
    I wouldn't be so clear about it.
    I would say, you have to be careful.
    Humanity can be great if it is being taken care
    of, nature like, being fed with the proper stuff.
    And can be very, very dangerous and very destructive.
    So you have to watch it all the time.
    A human being is not the perfect being.
    It needs all the time somebody to watch it.
    Well, I think it is in many ways quite amazing
    that you didn't lose this faith in humanity entirely.
    If you lost your faith in God, if there
    are things that changed you when I asked you earlier, to still
    give human beings a chance, that they can still
    have good functions, as you say, that's quite a bit for someone
    who by the age of 10 had seen what you had seen,
    and what it experienced what you had experienced.
    So this is what I'm saying.
    It can go either way.
    People can be marvelous, great.
    But watch out.
    They can go to the other side very fast.
    It has to be watched all the time.
    Thank you.
    Thank you very much.
    Thank you for your patience and your contribution.
    Well, it's been an honor.
    It's been a privilege.
    And I know that there is a cost involved.
    And so on behalf of the museum, we really
    thank you for that, for going through it with us
    and for sharing this.
    That's a minimum that I can do.
    What are the next things that are going to happen?
    OK.
    The next step is immediate.
    I'm going to close the interview by saying a sentence.
    Then I'll turn the recording off.
    And then we can talk a little bit more.
    OK?
    OK.
    At this point I'll say this concludes the United States
    Holocaust Memorial Museum interview with Mr. Micha
    Gazit on September 2, 2020.
    And thank you again.
    And now I will--
    let's see-- conclude the recording.

    Overview

    Interviewee
    Michael Gazit
    Interviewer
    Navazelskis, Ina
    Date
    interview:  2020 September 02
    Geography
    creation: Moraga (Calif.)
    Credit Line
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    2 digital files : MP4.

    Rights & Restrictions

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

    Copyright Holder
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

    Keywords & Subjects

    Personal Name
    Gazit, Michael.

    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 Michael Gazit on September 2, 2020. The interview was conducted remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:06:32
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn722665

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    Oral history interview with Eddie Willner

    Oral History

    Eddie Willner, born on August 15, 1926 in Germany, describes how his father had felt that his family would be safe because he had fought in the German Army in World War I; being separated from his parents and sent on a train to Brussels, Belgium, where a Jewish refugee organization placed him with a Dutch family; his parents’ move to Belgium in 1939 and seeing them on weekends until the war broke out in May 1940; the arrest of his father and his deportation to an internment camp in France; remaining with his mother and tracking down his father in the Pyrenees Mountains; living in the house of a French priest; getting caught with false identification cards with his family and being sent to Drancy; his deportation out of France and toward the east on September 12, 1942; arriving in Auschwitz, where his mother was immediately gassed while he stayed with his father; his transfer to a work camp in Lazy, Poland, where he worked on reconstructing bombed-out railroads; enduring harsh conditions, especially in the winter months; losing his religious faith after the war; returning from his work detail one day to discover that his father had been selected for the gas chamber during the day; the bombing of the train on which he was being transported to Buchenwald, escaping, and being liberated by American troops; staying in the Frankfurt displaced persons camp and then searching for his family in Brussels after the war; and immigrating to the United States in December 1947.

    Oral history interview with Lisa Dawidowicz Murik

    Oral history interview with Lisa Dawidowicz Murik

    Oral History

    Lisa Dawidowicz Murik, born on November 5, 1925 in Ostroh, Poland (Ukraine), describes her family; attending public school until the outbreak of war in 1939; the German occupation of Poland and having to endure forced labor; working on a labor detail to construct a railroad station; by 1942 having built a shelter in her family’s basement to hide from the Nazis who were rounding up Jews in the ghetto; later fleeing into the Polish countryside, where a poor Polish farm woman gave them refuge hiding in the potato bin of her barn for sixteen months; surviving on a daily ration of a quart of water and one potato each; finding out that they were liberated in 1944; returning to Ostroh and then going to Łódź, where she met her future husband, a refugee from the Soviet Union, during her stay; leaving for Germany, where she and her future husband spent time in German displaced persons camps in Berlin and Eschwege; and immigrating in 1949 to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Ernst Weihs

    Oral history interview with Ernst Weihs

    Oral History

    Ernst Weihs, born in 1908 in Vienna, Austria and describes his family; his father’s participation in World War I and returning to ask for a divorce from his mother; moving out to the country with his mother and having a difficult life; getting baptized and attending church at the age of 11; finding a job as a gardener to support himself; returning to Vienna in 1928 and living near his father and stepmother; being declared Jewish, having to wear the star, and quitting his gardening job; working for a summer with a Jewish Agency to train for living in Palestine; living in a Swedish mission house associated with the Lutheran church and managing its gardens; working with a Guildemester organization that brought food to people until 1942 when the Germans closed it; being deported to a ghetto in Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia and then to Auschwitz; his transfer to the Kaufering labor camp, where he worked farming nearby fields; remaining in Kaufering until the spring of 1945, when he had to evacuate toward Dachau; being liberated during the march to Dachau by American troops; getting married and having a baby after the war; and immigrating to the United States and raising his daughter as a Lutheran.

    Oral history interview with Agnes Vogel

    Oral history interview with Agnes Vogel

    Oral History

    Agnes Vogel, born on January 1, 1924 in Debrecen, Hungary, describes her childhood; attending a special school in a Catholic Convent in 1939; being rounded up in June 1944 and put on a transport to Auschwitz; ending up in Strasshof, a transit camp in Austria; starting on a transport toward Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in Germany, but turning back to Strasshof because of an air raid that destroyed part of the railroad; her liberation by Soviet troops in 1945; and immigrating to the United States after the war.

    Oral history interview with Dora Goldstein Roth

    Oral history interview with Dora Goldstein Roth

    Oral History

    Dora Goldstein Roth, born on February 1, 1932 in Warsaw, Poland, discusses her family and early childhood; her father’s participation in the Zionist movement; being forced to live inside the Vilnius ghetto; her deportation to the Kaiserwald-Riga, Dinenwerke, and Stutthof camps with her sister and mother; seeing her mother die from hunger; her sister's death in the camp; difficult memories including mass rape of camp inmates, forced labor, and struggling to survive from day to day; deciding while she was still in the camps that she wanted to immigrate to Palestine after the war because she wanted to be surrounded by Jewish people; her liberation by Russian forces; staying in a Jewish hospital for three years to recover from injuries and disease; immigrating to Israel in 1952; getting married and having children; her identity as a mother and Holocaust survivor; and working for the United Jewish Appeal.

    Oral history interview with Yocheved Arie

    Oral history interview with Yocheved Arie

    Oral History

    Yocheved Arie, born in Vilnius, Lithuania on February 15, 1928, discusses the German occupation of Lithuania; how her father and brother were taken away while she and her mother had to go to the ghetto; poor sanitation in the ghetto; aktions in the ghetto carried out by the Germans; the deportation of her mother to Estonia; reuniting with her mother in Estonia; being transported to Stutthof; going to Gdansk where she was forced to make railroad tracks; being liberated along with her mother and several others on the second day of a death march shortly before the end of the war; her postwar return to Vilnius where she and her mother found no survivors from their family; trying to immigrate to Palestine, but remaining in a displaced persons camp in Germany for three years; immigrating to Jerusalem; living with her mother for 40 years until her mother’s death; and her deep understanding about the heroism of Jewish mothers during the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Leo Hanin

    Oral history interview with Leo Hanin

    Oral History

    Leo Hanin, born in 1913 in Vilnius, Lithuania, describes his family; his parents’ decision to escape increasing persecution in Europe and move to Harbin, China, where they had a relative, in 1916; the lively Jewish community but not having many relations with the native Chinese; attending a Russian school in Harbin until 1929; moving with his brother to Shanghai around 1934 to attend a British school; getting married in 1936 and moving to Kōbe-shi, Japan to do work for a textile firm; assisting the Joint Distribution Committee in New York to arrange for funds to be sent to Japan to support refugees coming over from Europe; his participation in a Zionist organization and moving to Israel in 1948; staying in Israel for two years and then moving back to Japan; his experiences with helping people adjust to life in Kōbe-shi and immigrate to the United States; and dealing with the rumors that the Jewish leadership of Kōbe-shi stole money donated to them to help refugees.

    Oral history interview with Walter Schnell

    Oral history interview with Walter Schnell

    Oral History

    Walter Schnell, born on April 16, 1904 in Strehlen, Germany (Strzelin, Poland), describes his family and childhood; going to study crystal and porcelain in Berlin, Germany in the early 1920s; having to sell his family’s porcelain and glass business in 1937 because anti-Jewish business laws were becoming too strict; moving to Wrocław after the business sold with his sister and parents; working for a family friend in a wholesale business in Wrocław; his arrest during Kristallnacht and being sent by train through Weimar and on to Buchenwald; being forced to watch the hangings of those prisoners who had escaped from the camp and been caught; being called into the camp’s main office on the second day of Hanukkah and told that his parents had booked him a passage for Panama; finally securing a passage on a ship from Wrocław to Genoa, Italy after jumping through much red tape with Gestapo officials in Wrocław; staying in Genoa for a short time until he traveled on a boat to Shanghai because he did not need official papers to get in; settling in Hongkou, the Jewish suburb of Shanghai; Allied planes accidentally bombing the Jewish quarter of Shanghai; the creation of a Jewish community with its own traditions in Shanghai, including establishing nine hundred yeshivas, keeping kosher, and maintaining a synagogue; discovering that his mother and two cousins had made it to New York; and joining his family in New York after the war.

    Oral history interview with Erna Tebel Stern

    Oral history interview with Erna Tebel Stern

    Oral History

    Erna Tebel Stern, born on October 28, 1901 in Krotoszyn, Poland, describes her childhood; her father’s experiences when he served in the German Army against Russia during World War I; moving to Wroclaw, Poland after the war; not experiencing much official discrimination when Hitler first came to power because her father had served in the German Army; her family’s decision to flee from their home in 1938 when they discovered that prison camps existed; her parents’ capture and deportation; managing to escape to Brussels, Belgium, where she, her first husband, and her brother boarded the S.S. St. Louis and fled for Cuba; her brother’s and first husband’s deportation to an internment camp in Gurs, France after the St. Louis had to return to Brussels; going into hiding from 1940 to 1942 in Brussels, where she met her second husband; attempting to flee in 1942 to Switzerland, where they were imprisoned for a short time and then released to the Salvation Army; moving to Bern, Switzerland, where she worked as a housemaid until the end of the War; returning to Belgium in 1945 with her second husband and opening a blouse manufactory; and marrying her second husband in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Gerda Blachmann Wilchfort

    Oral history interview with Gerda Blachmann Wilchfort

    Oral History

    Gerda Blachmann Wilchfort, born on April 24, 1923 in Wrocław, Poland, describes her family and childhood; experiencing antisemitism and losing friends after Hitler came to power; her memories of the destruction of Kristallnacht; a cousin in Cuba attaining visas for her and her parents to immigrate to Havana, Cuba; booking a passage on the St. Louis and being forced to return to Europe after Cuba and the United States would not accept the ship; arriving in Antwerp, Belgium and signing papers that said they would not work and would accept their status as a refugee; living off a small budget from the United Jewish Appeal; crossing the Belgium border into France by foot but not finding a much better living situation; discovering a castle in the French countryside in which to stay for a few nights; returning to Belgium and moving back into their old apartment building, where they stayed for a couple of years; becoming a seamstress to make some money for her family; joining an underground group with her mother and crossing into France and then Switzerland; finding an apartment building in which to live; discovering that Hitler had died and that the war was coming to an end; and immigrating to the United States to create a new life for herself and her family.

    Oral history interview with Gidon Arye

    Oral history interview with Gidon Arye

    Oral History

    Gidon Arye, born in Vilnius, Lithuania in 1928, describes growing up in an upper middle class family; moving into the Vilnius ghetto in 1941 and being separated from his family; living in the Vilnius ghetto throughout the war and sometimes hiding or working illegally; avoiding the early deportations; escaping roundups and going to the Kailis work camp; smuggling his way into the same work camp that his father; reuniting with his father at the Heeres-Kraftfahr-Park work camp, where they worked for an elderly German fixing automobile machinery; surviving in the camp for some time and avoiding Nazi Aktions and a transfer of inmates to Kaunas, Lithuania; Nazi soldiers retreating from the Allies throughout July 1944; going into hiding with a local carpenter who was an acquaintance of his father from before the war; leaving Vilnius through Poland, Germany, and then France in 1945 with his father and fiancée; and immigrating to Israel in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Carl Knuemann

    Oral history interview with Carl Knuemann

    Oral History

    Carl Knuemann, born on November 15, 1922 in Bydgoszcz, Poland, describes his family and childhood; moving to Germany in 1932 because his father had German citizenship and was a businessman; his father not finding a job and contracting tuberculosis, which allowed him to get a pension from the government since he was a veteran of World War I; his father’s work with Doctor Goerdeler and Albert Einstein in plotting against Hitler; working as a courier in the underground movement; his memories of Kristallnacht; escaping to Hungary after the war broke out and then returning to Berlin once the Nazis invaded Hungary; meeting a Dane in a restaurant and joining the Danish resistance movement by running guns between locations; being drafted and sent to Denmark; his father being too ill to participate in the July 20 plot against Hitler; working in the German armament industry in 1943 and sneaking information out to Allied contacts; and his considerations on his participation in the resistance movement during the war.

    Oral history interview with Michael Vogel

    Oral history interview with Michael Vogel

    Oral History

    Michael Vogel, born on November 29, 1923 in Jacovce, Czechoslovakia, describes moving to and growing up in Topol'čany, Czechoslovakia; the takeover of Topol'čany by the Hlinka Guard in 1939; his deportation to the Slovak-run Novaky prison camp in 1942; his deportation to Auschwitz in late 1942; working in forced labor in camps around Auschwitz, first in the Buna works and then in the Birkenau "Kanada" detachment, where he unloaded incoming trains; his transfer by cattle car to Sachsenhausen and then to Dachau as the Allies neared in late 1944; his final transfer to the Landsberg sub-camp of Dachau; escaping during a death march from Landsberg by hiding in the woods; his liberation by United States forces two weeks after escaping; following the 74th Tank Battalion on their tour through Germany and Czechoslovakia; swearing himself into the United States Army at a G.I. Camp Home Run in Le Havre, France in November 1945 and receiving American citizenship; taking a position doing laundry at Camp Home Run; and eventually immigrating to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Nina Schuster Merrick

    Oral history interview with Nina Schuster Merrick

    Oral History

    Nina Schuster Merrick, born in Rokitno, Poland in 1929, describes growing up in a religious family; attending Hebrew school as a child; hiding with her family in the woods during the 1939 bombing raids; her family’s forced move into a ghetto in Berezdiv, Ukraine when the Germans invaded Poland; forced labor, including peeling potatoes for German soldiers; the SS raid of her home in August 1942 and jumping out a window to avoid getting caught; hiding in the woods and eventually being taken in by a sympathetic Ukrainian general, who was involved with a partisan group; learning to be a nurse and working in the partisan group; the General sending her to Moscow, Russia on February 18, 1943, so she could attend technical school; working in a Moscow factory, where she remained until after the war; going to a Jewish collective farm in Germany; an aunt from Washington, DC contacting her in February 1947; and immigrating to the United States to live with her aunt in late 1947.

    Oral history interview with Eva Rozencwajig Stock

    Oral history interview with Eva Rozencwajig Stock

    Oral History

    Eva Rozencwajig Stock, born on January 15, 1919 in Kozienice, Poland, describes her family; the establishment of the Kozienice ghetto in 1939 and moving into it; bribing officials to have her family taken together to Skarżysko-Kamienna, a forced labor camp in Poland, during the liquidation of the ghetto; managing to move her family to Szydlowiec and then to Pionki, Poland, where they worked in an ammunition factory; the deportation of her father and brother to Mauthausen, where they both died; being deported to Auschwitz with her mother and sisters; their transfer to Bergen-Belsen and then to Elsnig, a sub-camp of Buchenwald in Germany; returning to Poland at the end of the war and then leaving in 1949 for Israel; and immigrating to the United States in 1959.

    Oral history interview with Ivo Herzer

    Oral history interview with Ivo Herzer

    Oral History

    Ivo Herzer, born in Zagreb, Yugoslavia (Croatia) on February 5, 1925, describes his early childhood; the introduction of anti-Jewish, Serb, and Romani legislation in 1941 by the Croatian Ustaša government; his arrest at sixteen years of age by a Croatian official and going to a transit camp in the outskirts of Zagreb for a short period until an Ustaša officer told him to return home; escaping with his family in July 1941 to the Italian-Croatian border and ending up in Gospić, Yugoslavia (Croatia); being put onto a military train, returning them to Croatia; escaping the train with the help of smugglers; moving to Susak, Croatia, where they hid for one month; Italian authorities sending his family and about sixty other Jewish refugees to Crikvenica, Croatia, where they lived under Italian protection in the Italian zone in Yugoslavia; the Italian authorities placing the Jewish refugees in a camp in 1942 until 1943, when the Italians brought them and two thousand other Jewish refugees into one camp on the island of Arbe, Dalmatia (Croatia); the Italian surrender to the Germans in 1943 and fleeing to southern Italy to the Allied occupied part of Italy; traveling with his family to the Croatian island of Vis and getting picked up by a British military ship and taken to Bari, Italy; the British directing his family to Taranto, Italy, where they were placed in a camp under British control; leaving the British camp and traveling to Bari; working as a translator and typist for the British Army in Bari after he was liberated; moving to Rome, Italy to work for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee from 1946 to 1948; and immigrating to the United States in 1955.

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Brodecki

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Brodecki

    Oral History

    Boleslaw Brodecki, born in March 1921 in Warsaw, Poland, describes his family; the German invasion in September 1939; boarding a train with his sister and escaping to Rostov, Russia while she went to Prużana, Poland; rejoining his sister in Prużana after the German invasion of Soviet territories in June 1941; entering the Prużana ghetto and staying there until he was deported to Birkenau in the winter of 1941 or 1942; being marched to Auschwitz I and then to Swietochlowice, Poland, where he worked in a machine factory making parts for airplanes; being sent on a forced march as the Russian army approached; arriving in Mauthausen and working in a nearby factory; being marched to various camps including Gräditz-Bareza, Flossenbürg, and Theresienstadt; his liberation in Theresienstadt by Soviet forces in 1945; going to a displaced persons camp in Landsberg am Lech, Germany in 1945 and getting a job as a policeman; meeting and marrying his wife, Sonia Brodecki, in the camp in December 1945; having a son and then immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Irene Weber

    Oral history interview with Irene Weber

    Oral History

    Irene Weber, born in Sosnowiec, Poland, describes her family; attending a Polish school until she was about 10 years old, when the war began; the immediate effects of the war on her family, including the closing of her father’s business and the German raids on her home; her father and brother secretly educating her at home; receiving a work card and having to cut thread at a factory; being taken from the factory and sent to the Gliwice labor camp; discovering that her father had died of a heart attack shortly before her deportation; staying in Gliwice from March 1943 to May 1945, when she and others were evacuated from the camp because the Russians neared; being taken care of by some of the older female prisoners; her liberation by the International Red Cross in May 1945; being taken to a hospital to recuperate; having no desire to return to her hometown and see the destruction there; staying on a farm instead of going into a displaced persons camp; going to school in Munich, Germany with the help of the UNRRA; and meeting her husband and deciding to immigrate to the United States with him.

    Oral history interview with Josef

    Oral history interview with Josef

    Oral History

    Josef, born on June 25, 1915 in Vienna, Austria, describes his family; moving to Przemyśl, Poland when he was a child; fleeing to Lwów, Poland after the war broke out in 1939; returning to Przemyśl, which came under Russian occupation when Poland was divided between the Russians and the Germans; the German invasion on June 22, 1941; German troops issuing decrees restricting the rights and opportunities of the town’s Jewish population; moving into a designated Jewish ghetto in Przemyśl; meeting his future wife Stefania Podgófrska, who helped his family by smuggling food and other supplies to them in the ghetto; losing both of his parents during a ghetto Aktion; his deportation from the ghetto on November 18, 1942; using pliers he had in his pocket to cut through the wires covering the small window in the train car and jumping out of the train; getting slightly injured but being able to walk to Lipowice, Poland, where a friend provided him with shelter for a night and smuggled him back into Przemyśl the next morning; immediately going to Stefania, who hid him in her apartment for several days until he could smuggle himself back into the ghetto to be with one of his brothers; Stefania obtaining false papers for him and a few of his friends in the ghetto and finding a small cottage where they could hide; leaving the ghetto to meet with Stefania and her younger sister and to construct hiding places; hiding in the cottage with thirteen people for almost two years; his liberation by Russian troops and marrying Stefania; moving to Kraków and then to Wrocław, Poland, where he graduated from dental school; and immigrating to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Stanislaw Soszynski

    Oral history interview with Stanislaw Soszynski

    Oral History

    Stanislaw Soszynski, born on February 24, 1931 in Warsaw, Poland, describes his neighborhood in Warsaw on Swietojerska Street; the destruction of Warsaw and the Germans opening the Warsaw Ghetto; living in an apartment where the front part was on the Aryan side, and the back part was on the ghetto side, which helped smuggling operations later in the war; going out of the ghetto area to get milk and sell it to support his family; his memories of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising; the massive destruction of the ghetto after the uprising; and the uprising in 1944.

    Oral history interview with Abraham Lewent

    Oral history interview with Abraham Lewent

    Oral History

    Abraham Lewent, born in July 1924 in Warsaw, Poland, describes his family; entering the Warsaw ghetto after the German occupation; hiding in a crawl space during a 1942 German raid and witnessing the capture of his mother and sisters; being deployed for forced labor nearby but escaping to return to his father in the ghetto; remaining in the ghetto until the uprising; his and his father’s deportation in 1943 to Majdanek, where his father died; his transfers to Skarzysko-Kamienna, Buchenwald, Schlieben, Bisingen, and finally to Dachau; and his liberation by American troops.

    Oral history interview with Miriam Storch Lewent

    Oral history interview with Miriam Storch Lewent

    Oral History

    Miriam Storch Lewent, born on June 26, 1926 in Zamość, Poland, describes her family and childhood; fleeing her home when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939; her family’s internment by Soviet forces and being deported to Siberia; cutting down trees to earn food rations near Tomsk, Russia; the Soviets releasing her and her family when the Soviet Union went to war with Germany in June 1941; her two brothers registering with the Russian Army and the rest of her family settling in Kazakhstan, where they lived for the rest of the war; her father teaching Hebrew to Jewish children in their new home; attempting to return to Poland after the war but encountering too much antisemitism; and immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    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.

    Oral history interview with Fred R. Wohl

    Oral history interview with Fred R. Wohl

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Norbert Yasharoff

    Oral history interview with Norbert Yasharoff

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frank Meissner

    Oral history interview with Frank Meissner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mina Perlberger

    Oral history interview with Mina Perlberger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Klebanow

    Oral history interview with David Klebanow

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Franz Wohlfahrt

    Oral history interview with Franz Wohlfahrt

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tove Schöbaum Bamberger

    Oral history interview with Tove Schöbaum Bamberger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Morris Gordon

    Oral history interview with Morris Gordon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Raya Markon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ernest G. Heppner

    Oral history interview with Ernest G. Heppner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Emanuel Mandel

    Oral history interview with Emanuel Mandel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Leo Bretholz

    Oral history interview with Leo Bretholz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Paul Matasovski

    Oral history interview with Paul Matasovski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Zelda Piekarska Brodecki

    Oral history interview with Zelda Piekarska Brodecki

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Stefania Podgórska Burzminski

    Oral history interview with Stefania Podgórska Burzminski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rose Galek Brunswic

    Oral history interview with Rose Galek Brunswic

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Renée Schwalb Fritz

    Oral history interview with Renée Schwalb Fritz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Martin Spett

    Oral history interview with Martin Spett

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ion Cioaba

    Oral history interview with Ion Cioaba

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Niels Bamberger

    Oral history interview with Niels Bamberger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ray Buch

    Oral history interview with Ray Buch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Nina Kaleska

    Oral history interview with Nina Kaleska

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Judith Meisel

    Oral history interview with Judith Meisel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thomas Buergenthal

    Oral history interview with Thomas Buergenthal

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Leif Donde

    Oral history interview with Leif Donde

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Kaufmann Koenig

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Kaufmann Koenig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Max Amichai Heppner

    Oral history interview with Max Amichai Heppner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Charles Bruml

    Oral history interview with Charles Bruml

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Pollack

    Oral history interview with David Pollack

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eugene Lipman

    Oral history interview with Eugene Lipman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hetty d'Ancona de Leeuwe

    Oral history interview with Hetty d'Ancona de Leeuwe

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marty Glickman

    Oral history interview with Marty Glickman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Susie Gruenbaum Schwarz

    Oral history interview with Susie Gruenbaum Schwarz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hessy Levinsons Taft

    Oral history interview with Hessy Levinsons Taft

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bella Jakubowicz Tovey

    Oral history interview with Bella Jakubowicz Tovey

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Krautwirth Meyerowitz

    Oral history interview with Ruth Krautwirth Meyerowitz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Peretz Milbauer

    Oral history interview with Peretz Milbauer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Judah Nadich

    Oral history interview with Judah Nadich

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hana Bruml

    Oral history interview with Hana Bruml

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Meed

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Meed

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Johanna Neumann

    Oral history interview with Johanna Neumann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alice Lang Rosen

    Oral history interview with Alice Lang Rosen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jay Ipson

    Oral history interview with Jay Ipson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Margaret Jastrow Klug

    Oral history interview with Margaret Jastrow Klug

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Solomon Klug

    Oral history interview with Solomon Klug

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helene Baraf

    Oral history interview with Helene Baraf

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Morris Kornberg

    Oral history interview with Morris Kornberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michael Diamond

    Oral history interview with Michael Diamond

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malach

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malach

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michael Bernath

    Oral history interview with Michael Bernath

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Kate Bernath

    Oral history interview with Kate Bernath

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Paul Kovak

    Oral history interview with Paul Kovak

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Abraham Kolski

    Oral history interview with Abraham Kolski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sylvia Kolski

    Oral history interview with Sylvia Kolski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Steven Springfield

    Oral history interview with Steven Springfield

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Liny Pajgin Yollick

    Oral history interview with Liny Pajgin Yollick

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Bachner

    Oral history interview with Fred Bachner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Murray Pantirer

    Oral history interview with Murray Pantirer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Barbara Marton Farkas

    Oral history interview with Barbara Marton Farkas

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Farkas

    Oral history interview with William Farkas

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sheila Perec Etons Bernard

    Oral history interview with Sheila Perec Etons Bernard

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frima L.

    Oral history interview with Frima L.

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Esther Terner Raab

    Oral history interview with Esther Terner Raab

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Guy Stern

    Oral history interview with Guy Stern

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Toby Stern

    Oral history interview with Toby Stern

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ion Butnaru

    Oral history interview with Ion Butnaru

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jeanine Gutman Butnaru

    Oral history interview with Jeanine Gutman Butnaru

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Cecilie Klein-Pollack

    Oral history interview with Cecilie Klein-Pollack

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Schwartz

    Oral history interview with Fred Schwartz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malnik

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malnik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lilly Appelbaum Malnik

    Oral history interview with Lilly Appelbaum Malnik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Masha Loen

    Oral history interview with Masha Loen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Madeline Deutsch

    Oral history interview with Madeline Deutsch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Amalie Petranker Salsitz

    Oral history interview with Amalie Petranker Salsitz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Norman Salsitz

    Oral history interview with Norman Salsitz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frederic Bernard

    Oral history interview with Frederic Bernard

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Isaac Bitton

    Oral history interview with Isaac Bitton

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Max Haber

    Oral history interview with Max Haber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William P. Levine

    Oral history interview with William P. Levine

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Leo Schneiderman

    Oral history interview with Leo Schneiderman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Adam Starkopf and Pela Starkopf

    Oral history interview with Adam Starkopf and Pela Starkopf

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Carla Heijmans Lessing

    Oral history interview with Carla Heijmans Lessing

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Edward Lessing

    Oral history interview with Edward Lessing

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Werner Goldsmith

    Oral history interview with Werner Goldsmith

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Beatrice Pappenheimer

    Oral history interview with Beatrice Pappenheimer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with John Komski

    Oral history interview with John Komski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Curtis Whiteway

    Oral history interview with Curtis Whiteway

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lore Baer

    Oral history interview with Lore Baer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erich Kulka

    Oral history interview with Erich Kulka

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Cornelia Schouten

    Oral history interview with Cornelia Schouten

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Drexel Sprecher

    Oral history interview with Drexel Sprecher

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bela Blau

    Oral history interview with Bela Blau

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Magda Blau

    Oral history interview with Magda Blau

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Barbara Ledermann Rodbell

    Oral history interview with Barbara Ledermann Rodbell

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jerry Slivka

    Oral history interview with Jerry Slivka

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rochelle Blackman Slivka

    Oral history interview with Rochelle Blackman Slivka

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Francis Akos

    Oral history interview with Francis Akos

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Beno Helmer

    Oral history interview with Beno Helmer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jerry von Halle

    Oral history interview with Jerry von Halle

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall

    Oral history interview with Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ralph Codikow

    Oral history interview with Ralph Codikow

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Borsos

    Oral history interview with Ruth Borsos

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Simone Marguerite Lipman

    Oral history interview with Simone Marguerite Lipman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Shony Alex Braun

    Oral history interview with Shony Alex Braun

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Doriane Kurz

    Oral history interview with Doriane Kurz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Lieberman

    Oral history interview with David Lieberman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Laura Margolis

    Oral history interview with Laura Margolis

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Paul Strassmann

    Oral history interview with Paul Strassmann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ernest James

    Oral history interview with Ernest James

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Chaim Engel

    Oral history interview with Chaim Engel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Selma Engel

    Oral history interview with Selma Engel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Morris Engelson

    Oral history interview with Morris Engelson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lonia Mosak

    Oral history interview with Lonia Mosak

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Agnes Grossman Aranyi

    Oral history interview with Agnes Grossman Aranyi

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Bergman

    Oral history interview with David Bergman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lila Lam Nowakowska

    Oral history interview with Lila Lam Nowakowska

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Yaffa Rosenthal

    Oral history interview with Yaffa Rosenthal

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eve Wagszul Rich

    Oral history interview with Eve Wagszul Rich

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Magda Mezei Lapedus

    Oral history interview with Magda Mezei Lapedus

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Avraham Ronai

    Oral history interview with Avraham Ronai

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Konigsberg Lang

    Oral history interview with Eva Konigsberg Lang

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Cornelius Loen

    Oral history interview with Cornelius Loen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thomas Blatt

    Oral history interview with Thomas Blatt

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anita Magnus Frank

    Oral history interview with Anita Magnus Frank

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Guta Blass Weintraub

    Oral history interview with Guta Blass Weintraub

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henry Schmelzer

    Oral history interview with Henry Schmelzer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helen Liebowitz Goldkind

    Oral history interview with Helen Liebowitz Goldkind

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Johanne Eva Liebmann

    Oral history interview with Johanne Eva Liebmann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Max Liebmann

    Oral history interview with Max Liebmann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Giorgio Perlasca

    Oral history interview with Giorgio Perlasca

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David J. Selznick

    Oral history interview with David J. Selznick

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Model

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Model

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Levine

    Oral history interview with Joseph Levine

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eugenia Blau Szamosi

    Oral history interview with Eugenia Blau Szamosi

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irene Dynkiewicz Silver

    Oral history interview with Irene Dynkiewicz Silver

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alice Lok Cahana

    Oral history interview with Alice Lok Cahana

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Brust Cooper

    Oral history interview with Eva Brust Cooper

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jacob Vogel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Frieda Belinfante

    Oral history interview with Frieda Belinfante

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Philip Vock

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Gatenio

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mariette Moscovici

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henry van den Boogard

    Oral history interview with Henry van den Boogard

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jack Moss

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Dytlow

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Dytlow

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mel London

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henry Cohen

    Oral history interview with Henry Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gisela Feldman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bert Fleming and Irene Fleming

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Norman Belfer

    Oral history interview with Norman Belfer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Carol Stern Steinhardt

    Oral history interview with Carol Stern Steinhardt

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Haim Shmueli

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Itka Zygmuntowicz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gertrude Granirer Flor

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Renee Scheuer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bent Melchior

    Oral history interview with Bent Melchior

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Reuven Paikowski

    Oral history interview with Reuven Paikowski

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Renata Laqueur

    Oral history interview with Renata Laqueur

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Carl Hirsch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lotte Hirsch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Walter Meyer

    Oral history interview with Walter Meyer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Dora Kramen Dimitro

    Oral history interview with Dora Kramen Dimitro

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Herma Barber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Zeck and Belle Mayer Zeck

    Oral history interview with William Zeck and Belle Mayer Zeck

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michel Reynders

    Oral history interview with Michel Reynders

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marthe Hoffnung Cohn

    Oral history interview with Marthe Hoffnung Cohn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Miriam Kabacznik Shulman

    Oral history interview with Miriam Kabacznik Shulman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anna Szyller Palarczyk

    Oral history interview with Anna Szyller Palarczyk

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Steven Galezewski

    Oral history interview with Steven Galezewski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Havas

    Oral history interview with George Havas

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Maria Rosenbloom

    Oral history interview with Maria Rosenbloom

    Oral History

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

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