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Oral history staff interview with Janet Hatter, Peter Prayder, Ora Band, Florabel Kinsler, Ion Russ, and Sam Gates

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1989.345.51 | RG Number: RG-50.005.0051

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    Oral history staff interview with Janet Hatter, Peter Prayder, Ora Band, Florabel Kinsler, Ion Russ, and Sam Gates
    Transcript
    My name is Arnold Band.
    I'm a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at UCLA
    and the principal investigator of the UCLA Holocaust Testimony
    Project.
    This evening we have gathered together
    to summarize our emotions, which arose
    during the weeks of taping the testimonies of survivors.
    We have here several of the interviewers
    and one of the staff members involved in this project.
    I'm Janet Hadda, associate professor of Yiddish at UCLA.
    I'm Peter Prager.
    I was a cameraperson during the production.
    I'm Ora Band.
    I teach Hebrew language at the University of Judaism.
    I'm Florabel Kinsler, a social worker with Jewish Family
    Service of Los Angeles.
    I'm Ian Russ.
    I'm a family therapist and staff psychologist
    at the University of Judaism.
    I'm Sam Goetz.
    And as a young man, I have survived the Holocaust.
    And I helped to coordinate this program
    with survivors and UCLA.
    And I have some questions tonight.
    And I would like to direct my first question, Peter, to you.
    You were the cameraman.
    You have watched the intensity, the facial expressions,
    and so on of survivors.
    What is your feeling today versus the feeling
    that you had a year ago before you even encountered or met
    a survivor back then?
    How do you feel about the event?
    Well, the event is a much more personal experience for me
    than it was before.
    It was an historical event before.
    I had some-- an added interest in that my mother is German
    and lived in Germany during the war, and my father, Hungarian,
    and lived in Hungary during the war.
    So I had an added interest in World War II in general.
    But the experience is a much more personal and intense
    experience now for me than it was before.
    Did you have any difficulties coping with the stories
    that you heard at the beginning or later on?
    Did they leave any impression upon you?
    Definitely.
    The very first time that we did it,
    I was a camera person for every person for both days.
    And I found that it was just too much for me to deal with.
    For the next couple of days after the first two interviews
    were done, I found that I was very angry.
    I had some trouble sleeping.
    I just wasn't my usual self, and it took me
    a couple of days to rebound and to gain my good spirits again.
    Consequently, I requested that I didn't--
    that I wouldn't be involved in every interview
    and that I would alternate with someone else so that I
    could cope with it better.
    It was still difficult to cope with even though we did
    do that.
    Peter, I'd just like to add something.
    The first day you were the cameraman.
    And what impressed us was that after you had filmed
    the interview, you came behind the camera
    and you came over to the interviewee.
    And you shook your hand.
    And they were taken back.
    And I was also taken and very touched,
    the fact that you wanted to make this very personal contact,
    physical contact with him.
    Well, I would find it impossible to be sitting
    in a room with someone who poured out
    their guts for an hour and a half
    and related an experience that few people have experienced
    and not step out of my neutral position.
    So I did want to come and make contact with the person.
    I found that I also wanted to do that in the beginning
    from that point on.
    I wanted to go over and introduce myself and make
    the person aware that I was concerned and interested
    in what they had to say before they
    began so that they wouldn't feel a cold presence
    in the background.
    So that's why I decided to do that.
    This was obviously helpful for many of them.
    I noticed that they appreciated this very much.
    This is a situation, entire taping situation
    is a situation of great tension for everybody.
    I know that even as an interviewer,
    you are under a certain tension for this period,
    before that, after that.
    It affects you very, very much in ways
    that sometimes you don't even realize.
    So it's very interesting that you sense this
    in the days right after that.
    I'd like to hear from some of the people
    here about how they felt in the process of the strange emotions
    that are evoked by this.
    Flo?
    I think that I had some temerity in approaching people who
    didn't know me by telephone.
    We should explain our process a little.
    We were assigned by Sam, made a contact by phone.
    Some of us-- Ian I think in particular
    was meeting with his people ahead of time.
    We had a printed document that was
    sent to the interviewee, which they filled out, completed,
    and had returned to us.
    That was the basis of our initial contact with them.
    At first, it was uncomfortable.
    It felt like I was prying or pushing
    on old and painful buttons.
    And I think I was relieved when we
    changed our style to your mode and would
    meet with people either in their homes or in our own home
    beforehand.
    And that warmed things up.
    Initially, we would meet with them
    for an hour almost before the interview.
    We also meet with them after the interview
    in a kind of debriefing session in which everyone takes
    a bit of a sigh of relief not being on camera
    and perhaps lets down a little more in a relaxed way,
    fills in some of the gaps.
    But for me it was a strain.
    At times, I noticed I was very confused and blocked
    after the interview.
    I wanted to be by myself for a while
    before the next interview.
    In one session I think I was very
    insensitive in that session to Janet.
    It was a very difficult, trying session.
    And Janet was the co-interviewer with me.
    And I felt as though I kind of ruled you out
    in a rather insensitive way.
    But I was in some way trying to steel myself for that interview
    and yet wanted to be empathic and caring about the person we
    were talking with.
    Anyone else?
    I have a question.
    Did any of you feel--
    was there any guilt feeling where when
    you evoked an emotional response to your questioning
    from a survivor?
    Some of them actually had really a catharsis.
    They broke down.
    Did you any of you feel guilty about it?
    Oh, of course.
    You know when you interview--
    several interviews that I had done,
    I remember one in particular, the person
    broke down several times.
    And it isn't particularly comfortable to see
    that going on.
    You feel certainly guilty about that.
    You feel guilty also about the fact
    that these people have gone through certain things
    and you haven't gone through them.
    This is the same type of guilt I think
    which they feel because they've survived
    where members of their families haven't survived.
    There's a great deal of guilt involved in this.
    And I'm positive that we all have had strange reactions,
    just like Peter talked about being angry
    for some reason about this.
    I know that I felt this on a variety of occasions.
    How about you, Ora?
    Very mixed feelings because in some ways
    I see myself almost a survivor.
    At the age of nine, I left Palestine.
    And we flew to America.
    We flew via Rome.
    And we were in Rome in May of 1940.
    And I remember the tanks going through the city and my mother
    crying because she was there with two young children.
    And I was thinking to myself, there by the grace of God,
    I would have been caught in Europe.
    And I would have--
    I don't know whether I would have survived,
    but something horrible would have happened to me.
    So I had this feeling kept coming
    to me as I was interviewing.
    But something else happened when you're
    talking about feelings of anger and so on.
    This actually came up in an interview
    that I was doing with Ian.
    I told him that my relationship with my own mother
    has not been the greatest, but somehow it has resolved itself.
    And then, since last March when we
    started doing the interviews, I started
    to feel this tremendous anger towards her.
    And all the old feelings that I somehow
    felt that I had already submerged or worked through,
    all surfaced again.
    And I couldn't understand it.
    I asked Arnie.
    I was really puzzled until we did this one interview.
    And then I was walking with Ian.
    It was in the rain, went up to have some lunch.
    And I said you know now I understand.
    I said, I'm angry at my mother because these people
    that I'm interviewing, though they had lost their parents,
    they all had wonderful, wonderful memories
    of childhood.
    They remember something wonderful that happened.
    And I said, my mother is still alive.
    And I don't have any memories that I
    can retell saying she loved me and I feel this closeness.
    And for me this realization and talking to Ian about it
    was extremely--
    How about you?
    I had a very different reaction when,
    Arnie, you said that, of course, we all felt guilty doing that.
    I didn't.
    I went into the project with a great deal of excitement.
    My feeling is that the worst thing about experiences
    and memories is that they get blocked up
    and they begin to take proportions
    even grander than they need to.
    I know that's a risky thing to say about the Holocaust.
    And I think that my experience in talking with people
    after the interviews that it was a great deal of relief,
    sometimes just relief that the interview was over.
    But oftentimes the relief that they could go and talk
    about these things, and the memory didn't kill them.
    It didn't destroy them.
    It didn't destroy their children.
    They saw, people who didn't have memories for many years,
    saw that they could talk about it, and it could be contained.
    It could be sad.
    They could cry about it.
    But it could be contained.
    And that was very exciting for me to be a part of.
    The interview itself was probably
    the easiest part for me, the initial interview in the home
    and trying to get a sense of the person's emotional reaction
    to it, and then the post interview
    where they float over some and they're
    talking about what they were going to do,
    and oftentimes a lot of denial about how much
    it was affecting them.
    That was difficult because I knew they
    were going to have nightmares.
    But I didn't feel guilty about it.
    I tried to be there and told them I was available,
    but not guilty.
    Janet, how about you?
    Yeah, my experiences were more along
    the lines of Ian's, that I didn't feel guilty.
    And even more than that, I had anticipated
    being very depressed because when I was a child,
    I lived with my grandparents, who were survivors.
    And it was always a Holocaust mentioned.
    It was in the air.
    And when I grew up, I knew--
    I finally pieced it together that every time there
    was a movie or a book or some reference to the Holocaust,
    I became depressed.
    So I was waiting for that pattern with these interviews.
    And it didn't happen.
    And I've been asking myself, why didn't it happen?
    And one of the things that occurs to me
    is that we were working together.
    And I felt that I was not only listening,
    although that was the most important thing,
    but I was there too and I could be there.
    And I felt from the people being interviewed
    a tremendous, in addition to the sadness and the trauma that
    emerged, a sense of pride at being
    able to tell their story and a sense of relief really.
    And to be a part of that relief and that good feeling,
    mixed as it was with all the rest, I think
    contributed to my own lack of depression about it.
    Let me ask you one question.
    To me, watching some of the interviews,
    the most difficult time was when there
    was a moment of separation.
    It was difficult for me.
    I would like to get some feelings about,
    for example, what were the most difficult parts
    in any interview that affected you most?
    I think you've hit on one of the most important ones for me,
    Sam.
    When Elsa, for instance, talked about having left home
    as an 11-year-old after the schools had closed down
    and she had to be by herself for the next series of events
    in her life, that wrenched a great deal out of me.
    To see the war from the perspective of an 11-year-old
    is a little different perhaps than seeing it
    from an 18-year-old.
    And when her emotions needed to be continued
    because we were taping and the camera was on her,
    that was pretty hard.
    And finally, I needed to stop because I
    felt that it was enough at that point,
    but knew that she would be able to continue in a second or two,
    as she did.
    But it was emotionally draining for me,
    as it was for her I think.
    Other things come through my mind.
    I think I have guilt that I was relieved
    that I wasn't Anne Frank.
    I mean there was somebody the same age that I was.
    That's a source of some discomfort.
    The fact that I do a great deal of work
    with Holocaust survivors as a specialist in a project
    that Jewish Family Service has outreaching to the survivor
    community and with children of survivors
    perhaps has sensitized me in such a way
    that I wasn't in the position of Arnie or Ian in terms of I've
    been hearing stories like these for many years.
    Nevertheless, each story, each individual's feeling
    is a fresh wave that you experience with them.
    I've never done therapy with a survivor.
    But I spent a lot of time in Jewish education and taking
    survivors to groups and speaking and taught the Holocaust
    literature.
    But this was different.
    This was just very different.
    And there were-- well, we did one interview together,
    where you saw the first time tears were beginning to form.
    And it was not one of the grotesque experiences.
    It was a poignant experience of a man
    who is out from one of the concentration
    camps on a work team outside the walls of the ghetto.
    And he saw his mother in the distance.
    And the German who was supervising him
    allowed him to spend a few moments with his mother.
    And they knew that it was the last time they
    were going to see each other.
    And she turned to him and she said goodbye.
    And she said, always wear a clean shirt.
    And it was so poignant.
    The emotion just welled up because it was something
    that a mother could just say.
    It was one of the more real experiences for me
    because the other things at times get to be so grotesque.
    As much as I hear it, I feel it, it's
    still not quite real for me.
    That was real for me.
    It's very hard.
    How about you, as the cameraman, what
    did you find the most difficult, the most difficult moments
    that you could face as a cameraman watching those faces?
    Well, because I saw so many people
    and listened to so many stories, I
    would find that if someone was relating
    the story in a disjointed manner or had stepped back
    from the story they were relating, then because I had
    heard so many, I would block everything out
    because I needed to.
    But once the person got involved in the story they were telling,
    it would just draw me back no matter
    what I would try to do to leave the room because I'd
    heard so many stories and that I was trying to give myself
    some space not to be so affected.
    They would always bring me back into the story
    that they were relating.
    And I think some of the atrocities
    that I heard I was able to block out.
    But once in a while, if they would
    talk about a child being slammed to the ground or the separation
    of a very close family, you could
    tell that the person was really involved
    in the family as a child and really missed everyone.
    And those types of things really did affect me,
    no matter what I tried to do to not listen to everything.
    I think these two points have evoked a certain resonance also
    in what I felt. It wasn't the grotesque description,
    descriptions of grotesque things,
    that really were enormously moving.
    But it was really the family things.
    And separation scenes, we were talking about.
    That's a whole category of them.
    They're all enormously poignant.
    Wear a clean shirt, this type of a thing.
    One of the things that you begin to realize
    as you watch these people is the enormous sense
    of family, which probably sustained them
    more than anything else through what they went through.
    And whenever they test upon some recollection
    of how they buried a father or how the mother was separated
    and they never saw the mother again,
    that is what I found was the most moving part and the part
    in which I found most difficult to control
    my particular emotions, I think.
    Actual grotesque scenes, we're almost distanced from them
    because they themselves could distance themselves.
    But they can never distance themselves from their families.
    That particular thing in general seems to strike me.
    There was a feeling sometimes, I was elated,
    especially after the interview if it went very well, elated
    in the sense where I said that considering everything
    they had gone through, they were able to go on.
    And it was in particular in the cases
    where they talked of strong family units,
    or they said, well, I knew I would survive.
    I always felt, I always saw the image of my mother.
    The face of my mother was always there.
    And somehow as long as I saw the image,
    I knew I would come through.
    Or in one case, well, my father said I must survive.
    I mean he ordered me.
    I must do it.
    I was really overwhelmed by the fact
    that considering everything that had gone through these four
    or five horrible years, this wonderful, wonderful image
    of this love of family, a father or mother,
    sustained them and is still there
    to help them through these difficult periods.
    I found myself searching for those kinds of messages
    or injunctions from a parent that
    said, make sure you don't forget this.
    Make sure the world knows about this.
    Bear witness.
    Testify.
    It made the event of our taping that much more significant.
    But the really painful stuff was where
    people were parted at a railway station, the mothers
    with the little children to the right,
    and the younger, healthier to the left,
    perhaps too stunned even to say goodbye.
    And that I think will never leave
    me, that sense of no closure and no burial, no peace with that.
    How do you think the taping will affect your life?
    I mean will it stay with you?
    Will it a year from now fade away,
    just as another experience?
    Let's get some feelings.
    Yeah, it's going to stay with me a long time.
    It is going to stay with me a very long time.
    And it's clearly something I'm going
    to be involved with in some way for a long time also.
    When I grew up, even though I grew up in a household,
    my father is a Cantor and a Jewish educator,
    the Holocaust was kind of a word that was mentioned sometimes,
    I really had no idea what it was.
    So I was about 13, 14 years old.
    And then I only knew a little bit.
    I didn't really have any idea what
    was going on until I was a camp counselor
    and somebody said, well now we're
    going to run in the camp, the program on the Holocaust.
    And that was when I really first began
    to have an acquaintance with it.
    And while I would be introduced occasionally to someone,
    and they would have numbers tattooed on their arms,
    my parents would say it was something from the war,
    it was something always, always, we stayed away from.
    There was no edict against it.
    It was just that is was just not talked about.
    I'm sorry.
    Why do you think that was, Ian, that it wasn't talked about?
    I don't know.
    My family came from Russia at the turn of the century.
    I really don't know.
    Because it wasn't talked much about in my home either.
    And I can remember the war.
    I think you're right.
    I think you're right that in most families,
    we knew about it.
    It's an interesting thing.
    One of the persons I interviewed,
    when I asked, why haven't you told your story until now,
    made a very interesting statement.
    That after all we had gone through, we were released,
    et cetera, et cetera, and we don't
    talk because we didn't feel that anybody was
    interested in listening to us.
    Well, I was around during that time as a social worker--
    Oh, you're not that old.
    Protected, protected-- a little, Arnie--
    because I didn't speak Yiddish.
    I really didn't understand it well enough
    and in some ways deprived of the opportunity
    early on of dealing with survivors.
    But I know that in me there's a piece of anger from that time.
    So I'm dating this to 1950 in a Jewish Family Service
    where resettlement was going on.
    Anger about what though?
    The anger had to do with the generalized feeling
    that you help people find the language, an apartment, job,
    close it up.
    The psychiatric perspective was help people not be inundated.
    And perhaps it was a sound judgment at the time.
    But people are remarkable.
    And I think perhaps we stayed too far away--
    they and us.
    There wasn't a oneness.
    There wasn't a unity.
    And, of course, I'm hoping that will
    come to pass within this Jewish community, particularly.
    And maybe it will, Sam, huh?
    I'd say it's possible that we didn't know quite
    how to handle it.
    And it was such a painful chapter.
    And it was so strange and so horrible,
    you were afraid to talk about it.
    For sure there was no role model for this.
    Not at all.
    And I think something that happened
    with one of your interviews, Arnie, I think one of them
    mentioned that she was so ashamed that there
    was a feeling of shame of those who survived.
    And--
    Nobody wanted to listen, therefore I must be wrong.
    I must be wrong.
    Or getting, again, old clothes, clothes of somebody else.
    And she said, but I came from a very wealthy or upper middle
    class home.
    And why don't you take that into consideration?
    Instead of giving me rags, give me
    something that is appropriate to me.
    And I'm still kept down in the level of where I was humiliated
    and shunted aside.
    And I think--
    Well, we know now that there were fantasies
    during the war that sustained people.
    And some of those fantasies were to be
    able to come back as the prodigal,
    as someone perhaps who could rise up above these situations.
    And you're right, they were getting used furniture
    and used clothing.
    They were getting adequate, you know.
    But it was not special.
    It was not--
    I don't know that anything would have
    been enough to have met the need at that time.
    And there was a wish not to listen.
    We know this from the psychiatric profession
    itself, that there was a sense of being inundated
    or traumatized by the evil, by the extent
    of the evil that people had been exposed to
    so that there was a distance.
    I was going to remind the therapist--
    it's a little bit before my time.
    But--
    A little.
    But-- before my professional time--
    but it would mean that therapist would
    have to be in touch with all those very painful separations
    and then multiply it times 100 and 1,000.
    As is the two of you were talking, what I was reminded of
    was more overwhelming than any of the events
    in the interviews, for me was when we would sit afterwards
    and they would talk about their family--
    not everyone, but many would talk about their families
    that didn't work for them.
    They put together families, and they had a rift with a child.
    And this was the great opportunity
    to succeed after the war and after the Holocaust.
    And to have gone through all of that
    and these dreams of having a family and having children
    and then being disappointed when a child would marry someone who
    wasn't Jewish or have fights and become involved
    in the problems of American culture and drugs and whatnot,
    or divorce would happen, that would
    be so overwhelmingly difficult it was a topic
    not to be discussed.
    That it was a feeling, and I we talked about it,
    sometimes even more unfair, even more unfair.
    Somehow an exemption should be offered.
    You're hitting here on something that
    has been very important to me.
    You know we started the Children of Survivor groups in 1977.
    I did the first group with a colleague
    who was a child of survivors.
    But before that, it took five years for me
    to get beyond a sense of this could injure the survivor
    further to hear in the community that children of survivor
    groups were meeting.
    But I then recognized that somehow we
    had to handle that and face it because it was collusion not to
    and we were shortchanging the children of survivors,
    who had issues that they needed to discuss with each other.
    Let me ask you, three of you, Janet and Ian and Flo,
    have professional training as therapists.
    And you obviously have experienced patients who
    are not Holocaust survivors.
    Is your attitude towards these people
    you've had or towards patients you
    might have who are Holocaust survivors, is it different?
    Or I'm trying to--
    I don't know how to articulate this-- is maybe
    the question of the uniqueness of the Holocaust in general,
    that question that we always talk about,
    is treating the Holocaust or handling a Holocaust
    survivor different from handling another person who
    has some sort of trauma in their background?
    Have you thought of it in those terms?
    I've thought about it a lot.
    And in some ways, I'd like to say,
    no, I think it's just a matter of degree.
    But actually, I don't think it is just a matter of degree
    all the time.
    Maybe in the case of a person who was very mature and very
    well-adjusted at the time that the trauma began,
    you might be able to say that.
    But even there, I'm not so sure.
    Because what we're talking about is
    a world gone completely awry.
    And as a therapist, to try and put myself in that position
    is first of all impossible.
    I mean it's not impossible to try, but to actually
    do it is impossible, whereas I think that I can,
    in certain other situations, I can put myself
    in the position of the person I'm talking to.
    Here, it's not possible.
    Furthermore, I think it's possible in certain cases
    in dealing with a person--
    I know exactly what you meant by trauma.
    But let's say it's something internal.
    You can work it out through dealing
    with the internal mechanisms.
    But in this case, that's impossible too.
    Because even though there is an internal side to it always,
    there's something on the outside.
    And I think this has been a big problem certainly
    in the psychoanalytic world to acknowledge that.
    Yeah.
    I have a very skewed population I work with.
    A large part of my private practice
    is working with trauma victims in the hospital.
    But they don't compare.
    They compare in the trauma.
    But they don't compare in the malevolence.
    And they don't compare in the group experience.
    So that that makes it different.
    But I also work at a child abuse institute,
    where I deal with infants from birth
    on up who have been physically abused and sexually abused.
    And that feels very similar.
    At times, it feels to me, especially when
    I'm working with children who are approaching the tens
    and they live in a world that has absolutely turned chaotic,
    but they never knew any better.
    In our stories and what we could hear,
    there was at least a remembered positive childhood.
    I'm not sure it was as positive as it was remembered.
    I think the event has split off in that the childhood became
    good because the Holocaust was so terrible.
    But these are children who are in the midst of a Holocaust
    kind of a life, where they get beaten without reason,
    where they just cannot comprehend what's going on.
    And there's no rhyme or reason.
    They're cut off from the world.
    And I've actually used my experience
    with Holocaust survivors to try to understand
    what that insight could be for a child who isn't verbalizing it.
    And that seems to be comparable.
    Go ahead.
    I'd like to bring up something.
    I have a different perspective, I
    think, than all the rest of you in that
    I haven't been intimately involved with Holocaust victims
    before.
    And I'm also not Jewish, which is another, I think,
    important factor.
    It's interesting because I thought
    you were all the way through the project till last week.
    So did I till last week.
    I was raised Catholic.
    Very interesting.
    See, to me, the Holocaust is only
    unique in its historical context and the specific individuals
    who are involved in the Holocaust.
    But to me, it's just another occurrence of a race
    or a group of people who have been destroyed
    or their whole lives turned topsy turvy.
    American Indians, the Chinese when the Japanese came through,
    the Cambodians, which is not to downplay the victims
    of the Holocaust experience.
    But it's just another example to me of what
    man can do to his fellow man.
    So I think I'm one step removed from it,
    although the experience that I've
    gained in listening to these people
    speak has made all of these tragedies
    a more personal experience to me.
    And when I hear about, it strikes home more deeply
    than they had in the past.
    I'm going to stop you for one second
    because when you say man's inhumanity, women weren't great
    either.
    I know, I was being generic.
    I know you were.
    But I'm going to make the point that war is not necessarily
    a product of men, although we tend
    to think about it that way.
    But sometimes men act out for women.
    From my perspective, though, this
    was a very significant moment in history,
    in the history of the human race.
    And you're right.
    I think this country has already a history of genocide
    towards the American Indian.
    So it's not just the German people that have this.
    But I think that teeters on the brink of something that's
    difficult because maybe the Holocaust should
    be viewed as unique.
    Maybe that's the issue, Sam, that we have
    to preserve that in some way.
    Even in Jewish history it's unique.
    I want to put it back to the level
    that we were talking about and our personal reactions to it.
    The question that I think is terribly important
    that you both answered.
    When you're dealing with this as a professional therapist,
    is this a trauma like all traumas?
    Or is it a different kind of a trauma?
    Well, you know, Ian put it together pretty well.
    But the length of time of this trauma
    may set it aside from all other traumas.
    Except-- well, you're right, childhood traumas
    can go on for many years, people involved
    in incest situations that go on for many years,
    death of parents, prolonged illnesses within the family.
    But first, there was the erosion of the individual's rights.
    And then there was the loss of a homeland.
    The thing that differentiates it for me
    is our people that we interviewed,
    when they went back to their communities
    to see if anyone was left, that fantasy of reunion that they've
    held through the war and maybe someone would be alive,
    the terrible disappointment.
    Not only that they were run out of town
    and were lucky that they got away with their lives, right?
    So there was no homeland to return to.
    Gentile survivors went back to their communities,
    sometimes as heroes.
    Our people didn't.
    They then had to be forced into an immigration process
    that they didn't choose.
    I mean, some of our people did not choose to be Americans.
    They would rather have been Czechoslovakian or Viennese
    or maybe Israelis.
    And they couldn't even get to Palestine at that time.
    And we didn't talk.
    And I think it's just coming out recently
    the horrible experience of the two or three years
    right after the war in the camps and the humiliation which
    continued by the servicemen and by some of the generals
    and so on, where you had, again, Germans who were--
    first of all, you had barbed wires,
    living in barbed wire camps.
    And then you had there you had some of the Nazis
    who were still your guards.
    In the social context, I absolutely agree with you.
    In the individual context of dealing with a patient,
    that the long prolonged trauma and the malevolence
    that goes along with that only seems to be comparable.
    It still means that they're different.
    But I can make comparisons in kids
    who have been abused for 5 and 10 years for sexual incest
    that's gone on for that amount of time.
    Outside of that, I can't even find anything comparable.
    Let me ask you one question.
    Of the 48 survivors who were interviewed,
    what were some of the weak points?
    In other words, what was the strength of the ability
    to survive and the weaknesses?
    I mean, let's hear some--
    I mean this is how you perceive some of these things that
    make them survive.
    I'm always hesitant to say this here
    because it grew in me pretty slowly,
    and I protested against even recognizing it.
    But I really felt not just in the people
    that where I was involved in the interviews,
    but the interviews that I watched,
    it came across time and time again that luck was necessary.
    But it wasn't just luck.
    It was never just luck.
    People made their luck.
    Or they used their luck.
    That isn't to say that anybody who didn't survive could have.
    I don't mean that at all.
    But the people who did survive did something
    with the opportunities that were given to them.
    And I had always believed the opposite.
    And yet I listen to these stories--
    What do you mean by the opposite.
    I'd always believe that it was just luck.
    And that was it.
    Was any religious belief, any unusual optimism
    that emerged from the things that you have witnessed?
    Yes, in certain situations, there
    was a religious belief and a certain optimism.
    But I think Janet is right.
    Besides the question of luck, somehow
    every single interview that I attended and I
    heard afterwards, they seized a moment.
    They were able to somehow manipulate or realize
    in order to survive I need that extra potato.
    I have to adopt an accent that the German,
    that I came from that particular part of Germany.
    There was some ingenious--
    Some ingenious-- and it was almost a very natural kind
    of moment saying, well, they're walking to the river.
    That means I shouldn't go up there.
    And besides, I have to go through a tunnel
    and I'm afraid of tunnels.
    I'm going to walk the other way.
    But also there was-- in some of the people
    I sensed a certain strange type of fatalism
    that allowed them to take a risk.
    Like what have I got to lose anyhow?
    So this way I'm dead.
    This way I might not be dead.
    So I'm going to take this chance.
    The difficulty we have with that we
    don't have those who made the wrong decision, who
    went to the river and went--
    That's right.
    So that's not quite fair.
    I feel that too sometimes.
    To use the name of--
    And the dead often did take opportunities like that.
    But perhaps their luck ran out at some point.
    The point at which the typhus descended upon them,
    if it was 1943 halfway through the year,
    they might have made it, right.
    If it was 1943 at the beginning of the year,
    they would not have made it.
    Well, I'm sure that there were people who didn't make it
    who had that same kind of will.
    I mean, that's the combination of the will
    and the luck and the opportunity.
    That what was constant is that they didn't see it as a choice.
    They saw I have to survive.
    This is something I'm going to do.
    I have to do.
    I might not.
    But it's not going to be because of me.
    Whatever my part in this is I'm going to survive it.
    And each one either had a reason or manufactured a reason.
    And if that reason finished off, they
    manufactured another reason.
    And that was part of the creativity.
    That was part of the excitement for me.
    You think that there was something
    about the characterology about a survivor?
    When you see a whole bunch of people,
    if you've done 10 interviews or 12 interviews-- and some of you
    have done more than that.
    I've done less than that.
    Do you begin to see something common and you say,
    well that person would survive?
    We had an instance, incidentally,
    in which a mother said regarding a daughter,
    I knew you would survive, but I know your brother wouldn't.
    And husband, and my husband.
    And my husband wouldn't.
    In other words, there's a certain sense of who would make
    it and who wouldn't, who's tough or who's crafty or who
    wouldn't.
    Do you get that sense at all?
    Or is this just you need much more sampling for that?
    It's a tricky one, as Sam said.
    It's almost unfair.
    We may come to a determination that research wise
    isn't a fair determination.
    I think everyone at times was probably tough.
    Again, history plays a part in this.
    The Hungarian Jews who came in later
    into the camps in a little stronger condition
    may have been able to take certain opportunities.
    They may have also been very angry at the Polish Jews who
    already had some kind of system or knew what the fate was
    all about and did not welcome fully
    or did not assist them as fully as they would have
    liked to have been assisted.
    So there may be other factors that went into the ability
    to stand up or fight for themselves.
    There's also in terms of developing
    some kind of a character profile,
    I guess I'm impressed that the event became so powerful
    that it was grander, that it pushed character
    traits to the surface that regular life just
    wouldn't press.
    It wouldn't push those issues.
    Some of the people carried it on after the war.
    Some of the people didn't.
    But that how a person acts in that bizarre world
    I'm not sure that there's a lot to be
    learned in terms of general character
    trait in the general world.
    Excuse me.
    I think one of the things that what you just said
    is very important.
    One of the things that I so admire about the members
    of the 39 Club and especially many of them we interviewed
    was the fact when they came out and they
    were totally broken and all alone,
    that within a number of years they
    were able to marry, have children, start
    businesses, send their children to universities,
    and they are respected human beings.
    I mean it's an overwhelming thing.
    It's also a skewed sample because there were survivors
    who didn't make it, who committed suicide
    after the war, whose families were devastated,
    who did terrible things, who ended up in insane asylums.
    I mean this is a very select group we were interviewing.
    Let me ask you one question.
    How about a future, 20 years from now, a student
    or a researcher will get a tape, look at it,
    and see this facial expression.
    What will it mean?
    What value would it have for the future generations?
    Well, for me, that's what makes this project so important.
    It's different even than a memoir.
    It's different than a fictional accounting.
    What we have are human beings talking
    about their wracked souls.
    And you can see it.
    It's part of history that gets lost in pages.
    It gets lost in storytelling.
    And that we can put together the cognitive and the affective,
    what the rest of world calls the emotional--
    forget psychologists use the word,
    and it doesn't mean the same thing everyone else--
    but it puts together the event and the emotion.
    I didn't have that as much.
    As I had studied, as much as I had read,
    the event and the emotion never came together.
    That's what I hope we offer.
    Anybody else about that?
    Yeah, the small events, I think one
    of the nice things about the project
    was that we were concentrating on the subjective experience.
    And in a lot of the instances where
    I've seen tapes of the interviews
    where I was involved myself, that really happened.
    And these are stories that wouldn't necessarily
    be chronicled elsewhere.
    And to have the person actually there to tell the story
    and to be able to view that person listen to the voice,
    I think is a wonderful opportunity.
    Can anybody challenge the veracity of a tape
    after viewing it?
    I would hope not.
    I mean is it possible?
    I'm sure.
    I think it's absolutely possible.
    You could say it was doctored.
    You could say that anything was doctored.
    Or edited.
    It's edited, or they were acting,
    or it wasn't as bad as they thought it was, and so on.
    And that's something that I told people over and over again.
    Whatever the facts are we weren't interested in.
    You do have to have a sense of belief
    that these are real people.
    If you don't believe that, then, yeah, I
    mean it could be actors.
    And in 20 years, people I'm sure will make that claim.
    And we know who those people are going
    to be who will make that claim.
    But it wasn't.
    Sam, I think you touched on a very important point.
    I think because of the poignancy and the trying
    to struggle with the words and trying
    to struggle with the emotion, it was very real.
    And I think those interviews, where
    we were able to touch the emotional part.
    And people were able to become eloquent
    about it were the more moving.
    But then we also had some who were
    trying to give us speeches.
    And when you started to give a speech about something,
    you lost everything.
    And it sounded artificial and canned and not persuasive.
    But I think the simplicity sometimes
    of the narration, the body motion, the movement,
    the breaking down at certain crucial moments,
    you'd have to be a very fine actor or actress
    to say this is not real.
    But we knew that those who gave us those speeches that they
    felt it was too painful for them to share with us those
    experiences.
    They just went around.
    We knew that.
    In the pre-interview, we urged them really
    to tell that which was important to them, that they wanted
    to have recalled or historically documented or emotionally
    documented for themselves, for their families,
    a hundred years from now.
    And, by and large, people did pick out
    the things that were really very tender to them
    or really very terrible to them, but things
    that needed to be said.
    I'm thinking in the recent interviews in which we suddenly
    had a mother and daughter for the second time in our series.
    And this daughter is able to talk about her shadowy memories
    of being wrenched away from the family,
    not once, but then being wrenched away
    from the second family.
    And then at the end of the war, these strange people coming
    back for her who had survived in hiding,
    and what that all meant to her and how she would never
    let them out of her sight for years
    after that, how it influenced the life.
    These are things that were significant for this mother
    and daughter.
    And this mother was hearing things
    that she hadn't heard before as her daughter recollected things
    that occurred when she was hidden someplace in a basement
    unknown.
    We had, I think, many instances of people
    who in the process of telling us their story recall
    things which they had not thought of or heard
    of for years.
    And that in itself was an interesting process.
    We also know that they censored what they said on the camera.
    Because afterwards as we would walk out of the room
    and leave Peter or whoever behind,
    someone would say something like,
    well, I couldn't say on tape what else I couldn't
    do in that hole in the ground because they would hear me
    upstairs.
    It wasn't just that I didn't dare sneeze.
    And so there were little secrets and pieces of information
    that were shared with us almost as though out of relief.
    Fortunately, that we got that on regular tape afterwards.
    Yes, we do have.
    But you ask the question before it's the character traits.
    And what it points out to me is that the variety of character
    types is so enormous.
    That's what these tapes offer.
    The person who has the canned story
    to avoid the feelings, or because they've done it so
    many times and to go through the feelings that way each time
    would be too much.
    But they haven't done that much.
    These people were not professional storytellers.
    Most of them anyhow.
    But that's a defense.
    That's an important defense.
    And that's why we didn't want to push on it too hard.
    While other people had another kind of a defense.
    Their defense could be to split off and remember
    just the kindness of their mother
    and not be able to come up with a bad thought at all.
    Those are the different characters that emerge.
    And each one, we can see from the composite
    what the horror was.
    We can have at least an inkling of it.
    But then we can see all the different ways
    that people have learned to cope with that.
    And the variety is 48 varieties.
    Another thing I found extremely interesting
    was that except for one or two people,
    no one was angry that they were Jewish.
    Obviously, the reason they were being persecuted
    was the fact that they were Jewish.
    But that didn't seem to weigh upon them.
    They were worried about their families and their homes
    and what was going on in the war.
    But it wasn't the fact that they were Jewish.
    They weren't angry about that.
    A couple of people did tell us that not looking Jewish
    had helped them.
    Yes, and there were a couple of people
    I remember who did say that they were angry or tried to hide
    the fact or were ashamed that they were Jewish--
    Especially after the war.
    This weekend we had two people tell us
    that it was hard to come back to being Jewish.
    They had to face something because they
    had hidden this identity.
    And they weren't sure it was the greatest identity.
    In the few moments that we have, can we
    summarize some of our conclusions,
    some of our feelings?
    I think maybe we should have a chance to do that.
    Well, there's a--
    Ian, used the term what I learned from this.
    And you were very articulate on some of the points.
    One of the things that you mentioned
    that the great variety.
    You can't really-- you feel it.
    You can't really pinpoint any particular characteristics.
    There are a whole variety of people.
    It'd be interesting to try to sum up in our view, well,
    what did we learn from observing all these people
    over a period of time?
    I think one of the things that I have-- but,
    of course, many memories of my childhood and adolescence
    surface, which I haven't thought of for years.
    I am probably slightly younger than many of these people
    who we interviewed.
    And I lived up and was brought up in the security of Boston.
    At the same time, I was very well aware
    of what was known at the time in the public media,
    and a great deal was known.
    I remember Munich.
    I remember Kristallnacht.
    I remember the refugees coming, et cetera.
    But I never seemed to put them together.
    And the truth of the matter is despite the fact
    that I deal with this material all the time
    on an academic basis, the truth of the matter
    is I probably have repressed a great deal of what
    I knew from my childhood.
    But one of the things that always amazes me,
    and I think Ora touched upon this,
    is the tremendous resilience of these people.
    You say, yes, this is a select group.
    And I'm positive it is a select group.
    These are the people who survived,
    who made it, with all their problems.
    But it's probably, if we took a sampling,
    they would probably be a very select group.
    At their annual banquet, I'm tremendously
    impressed by the gusto with which these people who
    are about 60 years old can get on that dance floor
    and go to it as if they were 18, as if they're trying to make up
    now what they lost then.
    And it's just an uplifting experience
    to see this going on.
    This is one of the great things.
    And that comes through in the stories.
    Underlying that though, Arnold, could be some envy
    that we might have.
    We, as American Jews, may be comparing ourselves
    with this population and saying, gee,
    I don't think I'd have been able to do that or--
    Very possible.
    There may be some kind of perverse envy
    that exists within us.
    I don't envy them.
    I admire them.
    And that's why after some very good interviews, I feel elated.
    And I love coming to your banquets and I
    hope I'm invited to the ends of my days
    because as Arnie mentioned, the gusto of loving--
    of dressing up and of eating and of dancing.
    And it might be superficial, but it's unimportant.
    There's a certain sense of happiness and comradeship.
    And I think it's a wonderful thing.
    The other thing that happened, and since I'm not a therapist,
    perhaps I'd like to get your point of view,
    I've become very emotional or emotionally close
    to some of the people I have interviewed.
    This is what I was going to ask you whether you felt any--
    Protective or I would call.
    Barbara being the first one perhaps
    and hers being so moving, I keep in touch with her.
    And a few others, I feel when I see them,
    I need to continue the relationship that was started.
    Did you all feel that way?
    There has been a closer relationship, a kinship,
    or something developed, a certain bond
    between you and the people have interviewed.
    I think that's been very important.
    Yeah, I was going to say I did feel that.
    And I feel it's not the same sort
    of feeling that I have in a therapy situation where I--
    perhaps that's because there you try to hold back those feelings
    or whatever it is.
    But I think it's probably more than that.
    It's the nature of the project.
    Well, I think on that note, we can end our little discussion
    here on a note of optimism and a feeling
    of deep personal accomplishments.
    We've all gained a great deal from this
    and probably will miss our interviews in the future.
    I will
    We will and our contacts with each.
    I'd like to introduce the UCLA 1939 Club documentation
    project.
    My name is Florabel Kinsler.
    I'm a social worker and one of the interviewers
    in the testimonial project with Holocaust survivors.
    We have with us today the production staff and some
    of UCLA and 1939 Club staff.
    And I'm going to let them introduce themselves.
    I'm Chris [? Emhardt. ?] I was camera operator on about
    five hours of the interviews.
    My name is Mike Brown.
    I was the video engineer and videotape operator
    during the whole series.
    I'm Ellen [? Eisenstadt. ?] And I was
    the producer for the project.
    And I'm Bruce Butterfield.
    I was the audio operator throughout the project.
    I'm Arnold Band, professor of Hebrew
    and comparative literature at UCLA.
    I'm-- sorry.
    You're cutting in on me already.
    And the principal investigator of the project.
    I'm Bob Dixon.
    And I was one of the cameraman for most of the series.
    I'm Sam Goetz.
    I survived the Holocaust as a young man.
    And I helped to coordinate this project on behalf
    of the 1939 Club and UCLA.
    Ellen I would like to ask you a question.
    Since you coordinated this entire effort,
    all the technical aspects and otherwise--
    you were born after the war.
    I'm sure you knew a little bit about the event.
    How do you perceive this entire project,
    from the technical point of view,
    from emotional point of view?
    And how did it affect you?
    Well, that's a grand question.
    I hardly know where to begin.
    Yes, I was born after the war.
    I was also the only Jewish member of the production staff.
    So I was pretty excited to be asked to do this project.
    I felt it was a way that I could participate
    in the Holocaust, which I couldn't do in any other way.
    Let me first talk a little bit about the production,
    the technical side that we set up.
    Our first interest was making it a comfortable place
    for the survivors to be.
    And we selected a suite of offices
    where we could, in effect, keep the interview
    separate from the people who were coming in
    and the people who were leaving.
    We also were interested in making
    it a very warm atmosphere.
    So we picked an office that had comfortable furniture
    and windows so that people wouldn't feel too enclosed.
    And we made sure there were plants and greenery around
    so that people would feel more comfortable there.
    There was a waiting room where people could come in and serve
    themselves refreshments.
    There was a post-interview area where
    people wouldn't have to see the people who
    were coming in again.
    So we really gave a good deal of thought to their comfort,
    and we were sensitive to that.
    During the taping, we really didn't
    have much concern about how the taping would
    go because we do this kind of thing all the time.
    But we did devise a few things during the actual tapings
    that might be helpful to other groups who are doing this.
    We originally had our cameraman, who
    was in the room with the survivor and the interviewers,
    as our only liaison.
    He was the one who took the information from the director
    and, if necessary, could pass it on to the interviewers.
    After a while, we realized that might not
    be working too successfully because it was a disruption.
    So what we did is we put a headset
    on the secondary interviewer, who
    could then receive information and interject it
    into the discussion.
    And somewhere along the line, we figured out that might also not
    be the best approach.
    And we finally just put the headset
    on the primary interviewer.
    They were able to hear the director.
    They were able to hear suggestions.
    They were able to get their time cues
    so that we knew when to change tapes
    and that worked out the best I think.
    Flo, you were an interviewer.
    And you might have some comments.
    Well, I think it was an ideal situation, the fact that we
    were working Saturdays and Sundays,
    the University traffic was down.
    It was quiet.
    And it was as relaxed as such a project could be.
    Of course, we wondered how it was for the crew.
    This was fairly traumatic material
    that you were listening to hour after hour.
    And I don't know that you knew that we
    were concerned about what was happening for you guys, but--
    and Gail-- but we wonder if you could
    share some of that with us with a second thought on that this
    is material that will be shown hopefully
    to a broad community over many years.
    And you are the first viewers of it really.
    So we're wondering about the impact for you.
    Hoping you can tell us what it felt like.
    Well, we knew what we were getting into to an extent.
    We were, I wouldn't say briefed, but we
    did meet with some of the interviewers ahead of time.
    And we talked to our own production people, Ellen
    and Will.
    And they kind of gave us an idea that this was not
    going to be your normal talking heads kind of shoot,
    that there's going to be a little more going on.
    And at least from my standpoint, I've
    done a fair amount of reading about the Holocaust
    and what had happened.
    So it wasn't like I've never heard of it before.
    And certainly the media has been playing up
    quite a bit of that lately.
    There was a lot of that in movies of the week and such.
    So we've seen at least from a dramatic standpoint
    what happened.
    But it was--
    I don't know that it was quite enough preparation, frankly.
    It was a little harder to take for me in the very beginning
    than I thought.
    And as such, I turned off to it almost
    after like the second day.
    We were in there for eight hours each day,
    interviewing usually about four different people,
    two in the morning, two in the afternoon.
    And it was a good 8 solid hours of tragedy and misery
    and people dying and burning and a lot of pretty awful stuff
    that you don't run into in your average suburban community
    these days.
    So I thought that, as such, I tended not--
    to consciously not watch and to consciously
    not hear because we had to do all
    however 50 people or something.
    And it wasn't like the interviewers
    who, although they were in more direct contact,
    at least got a break.
    I think Mike and I actually ended up seeing and watching
    more of it than anyone because we were on it the whole time,
    and even than the cameramen because they had breaks
    as well.
    I would say that after the first couple of times,
    I did have some interesting dreams, let's say.
    And I still do every once in a while.
    And I think it's related.
    I don't know that.
    I don't know that it's related.
    So I started to consciously stop watching it.
    And I would read and things like that.
    But there are times when it just got to be so fascinating.
    I mean, these people are fascinating.
    They're very interesting people.
    And I'd like to know some of them
    because they're neat folks.
    Let me interrupt you for one second.
    I sat with both of you for many, many hours in the room.
    And I kind of watched your reactions.
    And at the beginning, I noticed that you
    try to distract yourself.
    Was it a defense mechanism on your part
    to not to get-- to absorb too much of it?
    Yes.
    Can you tell us a little bit about it, Mike.
    Well, the same as Bruce.
    I started listening to it at the beginning.
    And probably about I'd say the second weekend we started
    on it, I brought in I think about three books
    and just buried myself in the books.
    You still can't separate yourself from what's happening.
    You're still hearing a lot of it.
    What was happening to you?
    I mean were you getting emotionally involved?
    Was it--
    Well, yes.
    See, I was in Vietnam for about three or four months.
    So a lot of it hit kind of close to home.
    Did it bring up memories?
    Yes, it did.
    I didn't have to deal with relatives and things like that.
    Everybody that was over there I didn't know them at all.
    Right.
    And that's a lot easier to deal with that way, I guess.
    It never is really easy to deal with.
    But it was a conscious effort for me
    just to try and not listen at all.
    So that is an ego defense that you
    have to use to distance yourself from something that's
    so painful or so violent as a Vietnam experience may
    has been for you.
    You know, it's interesting because we're
    hoping to be able to use this material at times
    in conjunction with work that vet centers do.
    The vet center here in Westwood, the director
    is very knowledgeable about Holocaust literature
    and the psychodynamic of survivors in general.
    So you're really touching a critical point, Mike,
    and what it meant to you.
    It was a very interesting thing in planning this,
    we originally thought, and in fact approached
    Peter who met with us in the first times and--
    The cameraman.
    --asked him, the cameraman, and asked him,
    do you think you could take this four sessions a day
    for two weeks, two days, because after all he'd
    be right on top of it.
    And we figured that the people in the back
    could somehow tune out by reading or something like that.
    And it was interesting at the first time,
    he said, well, of course, you know,
    I watch operations at the hospital, et cetera, et cetera,
    and I've done things of the sort.
    But after the first weekend, he also had great difficulties.
    And the interesting thing is that how
    do these difficulties-- in both of your cases,
    how are they manifest?
    You said you had nightmares of some sort.
    Yeah.
    Interestingly enough, for some reason
    I started dreaming about a nuclear holocaust.
    I mean it was really strange.
    You know, I don't think of myself
    as being a person that's particularly
    in touch with himself.
    I mean I don't I'm not a very introspective person.
    I just don't really think about that stuff very much.
    And all of a sudden, you kind of wake up
    in the middle of the night, and there's
    been nuclear blasts going off and strange things like that.
    It's weird because I hadn't--
    I wouldn't say that I didn't have the usual childhood
    dreams.
    I mean you always are going to dream
    about something that's scary.
    But I think it increased in intensity to the point
    where I would remember some nightmares.
    And it was just a little different
    because I'm not used to that.
    And I don't know that it was related.
    I don't.
    I can't say that, yes, this was obviously
    because this stuff was seeping into my subconscious.
    But I would imagine it probably had something to do with it.
    I think I came at it with a little bit
    of a different perspective because, as I said,
    I was the only Jewish member of the crew.
    And I was very anxious before the first weekend.
    Before the first taping, I really
    was anxious because I just thought
    I wouldn't be able to handle emotionally
    what I was going to be hearing.
    And I was surprised to find out that I reacted
    a little bit differently.
    I didn't have any dreams about it.
    I took it home with me, but in a way
    I just had to talk about it.
    So I kind of cornered friends or relatives
    and just sat them down and talked at them for a few hours.
    And that's the way I got rid of it.
    I got angry, you know.
    I was letting it out that way, rather than nightmares
    or needing to blot it out during the tapings.
    I found it fascinating.
    As Bruce said, a lot of these people were fascinating.
    And I was finding out a lot of things I didn't
    know about the Holocaust.
    I didn't know about a lot of the resistance.
    I didn't know that there was a camp that was completely
    closed down because--
    Sobibor.
    --of a revolt. And we had a survivor from that camp.
    And, you know, I got to meet people who I really only heard
    about or only read about.
    Schindler's Jews, I never imagined
    I would meet anybody who had been saved by Schindler.
    So it was really very exciting for me in that way.
    And I didn't find it depressing because there weren't
    surprises in a horrible way.
    I knew about the horrors from reading about it
    and having seen films.
    Those weren't the surprises.
    The other things were.
    I'd like to ask Bob a question since you're from Europe, not
    very far from where the event took place, maybe
    one-hour flight today.
    But did it bring--
    the interviews, the people that you noticed
    and the expressions, did it bring it closer home to you.
    I mean did it mean more to you?
    Very much, yes, and partly too because I'm probably
    the oldest member of the crew.
    I was born in Scotland, before the war started.
    I was in Scotland during the war.
    And I have read a great deal about the behavior of Germany
    during the war and after.
    And I've seen all the films, most of the films
    from the camps when they were open and so on.
    So this has always been--
    I can't say an interest-- a concern of mine
    because to me it is one of the most appalling events
    in history.
    And to be able to experience--
    re-experience with the interviewees
    all of the hell that they went through it
    was, for me, a very noble and humbling experience because.
    For me, it's a privilege to listen to these people
    because I think what emerges too is
    there was a tremendous resilience in the human spirit
    and the human condition.
    And despite all the hideous, negative aspects of it,
    there is permeating all of it a very positive resilience
    that is most affecting.
    But you also experienced some of the anger
    and the anger towards Gentiles, didn't you?
    Or the disappointment about Christianity, I wondered
    how that affected any of you?
    Or whether you might have resented that?
    I didn't get that.
    Surprisingly, until actually just some
    of the very last interviews, I didn't hear an awful lot
    of hatred toward the Germans.
    I mean an awful lot of them hated the Poles
    and hated the Ukrainians and people like that.
    Very few until just--
    I don't know there were maybe three or four interviews out
    of the total of 50 or so that we did that were saying,
    well, the Germans are bad too, which, I mean,
    I couldn't believe that.
    I mean now maybe I was mishearing it.
    And again, I'm not sure that's exactly what went on.
    But that was the impression that I got.
    And I couldn't imagine them being able to live and not
    have a fairly interesting feeling toward know
    the German people.
    But I think there was largely a kind of a live
    and let live, but then also a closeness--
    they had a community to go back to, a Jewish community.
    I don't think very many Americans
    can understand what being in a community like that is.
    I mean I think probably most of us were brought up in suburbs,
    and we lived the urban experience.
    I mean, I moved around a lot as a child.
    I lived all over the country.
    And I've had friends for numbers of years
    but I've never had a cultural matrix, as it were,
    where I could say that's my family, that's my home,
    this is what I have.
    And I think that might have had a lot
    to do with why these people are-- were so resilient,
    you know.
    I mean they had something, at least a backbone.
    If you were set down suddenly in the middle of Israel
    or South America or someplace today,
    what would that do with your identity as an American,
    for instance?
    Because I'm thinking our people had an identity
    as Polish Jews or German Jews.
    And all of a sudden, they sit down some place--
    If I was set down with other Americans, and they--
    I don't think there was that much isolationism in the camps.
    I don't believe they could afford to have been isolated.
    They were all herded together.
    I'm certainly not trying to say it was a big circus
    and everyone was having a great time because they
    were with all their friends.
    But they did have something.
    They had a spirit, I think, because they
    were in the same boat.
    And they had had a cultural history that
    went back thousands of years.
    And I think that was something, anyway,
    to help them through perhaps an extremely traumatic--
    I think that's a good point.
    I think the emphasis that comes through time
    after time with each person we talked to
    was this the tradition, the cultural background, which
    seemed to be a tremendously important core to their lives.
    And as someone who perhaps does not
    have that in himself, I find that a very wonderful thing
    to have, I would think.
    I would tell you one thing I have in my life
    a rather irrational prejudice, which I'm conscious of,
    is that I have never set foot in Germany.
    I have two or three occasions gone out
    of my way not to set foot in Germany,
    largely because I find myself very
    uncomfortable around people of my father's generation
    from Germans.
    That is irrational.
    I understand that.
    But it is part of me.
    And I register it.
    I was just in Europe.
    And while I was there, the new--
    I forgot whether he was the president of Germany
    or the prime minister--
    Helmut Kohl.
    Chancellor, Chancellor Kohl was visiting--
    Israel.
    Israel, yes.
    And he was very heavily picketed by people
    who were carrying signs saying, never forget, never forgive.
    And I think I would be out there carrying the sign too, likely.
    So this reinforced your feelings in a way?
    Yes, yeah.
    Bruce, we're leaving you out, I think.
    Well, I worked on only two of the interviews.
    And I found myself while we were--
    because I was a camera operator, I had to listen, you know--
    I was in the room with the people.
    I thought it was different than Mike and Bruce
    because they were in another room,
    and they could read a book.
    And I found myself getting into the conversation.
    And then I even at one point I was
    thinking the nuclear holocaust just
    to get out of their conversation.
    So I would daydream, but I still had
    to pay attention to what they were talking about
    because I would zoom in or zoom out.
    I can't help it as a clinical social worker--
    and I should say here that I do work for Jewish Family Service.
    And so for many years I've worked with survivors.
    Your unconscious, both of you, seems
    to be very logical because in our waking moments
    we also see that if the human animal could
    do what was done in the Holocaust, we could do it.
    We could push ourselves into a nuclear holocaust.
    You have to forgive me for editorializing.
    But I think this is so real.
    I think this is--
    This is very obvious that what you're connecting,
    you're connecting the thing that is a bit foreign to you,
    the Holocaust itself, with something which
    is familiar from everything that you brought up with,
    the nuclear holocaust.
    It seems the connection is going to be rather logical.
    Mike, I wonder if you would care to go back
    to the question of your Vietnam experience.
    When you saw these--
    when you heard these various stories, what did it evoke?
    It evoked horrible scenes that you saw?
    Did it evoke certain kinds of emotions that you had
    from the time you were there?
    What was it precisely that you were trying in a sense
    to block out by reading?
    Can you elaborate a bit?
    Just what people can do to each other.
    The human animal is probably the nastiest animal on the Earth.
    They have an infinite capacity for hurting each other,
    whether it be killing or maiming or just doing it subconsciously
    or psychologically.
    If I find probably half the people
    I know like to nail people.
    They like to just give them little digs.
    And it's all the same, you know, whether you're
    out there shooting at somebody or whether you're
    consciously trying to get them, trying to get them mad
    or get them to do something?
    Not to over idealize our population,
    didn't you pick that up sometimes
    that there was great altruism?
    But at times some pretty negative feelings
    that our interviewees expressed, angry feelings,
    rageful feelings.
    Some of them.
    Murderous feelings.
    Some of them.
    Some of them didn't.
    Some of them were surprisingly--
    I found myself wondering how much, if at all,
    people were censoring themselves because this was being
    put on tape and this was forever and this
    was for their children.
    And were there things that they didn't want their families
    to know?
    Things they didn't want their families
    to know about their experience or about the way they felt?
    Yeah.
    I think we have to be able to lay that out straight, Sam,
    right, that a lot was censored.
    Because sometimes as we'd walk out of the room,
    people would say now I didn't want to say this on the audio,
    but such and such happened.
    I couldn't go to the bathroom, the more basic human needs that
    were neglected.
    I found this--
    --not just hunger.
    --the kinds of questions that I had never heard or read
    anywhere, I had some questions very few people addressed them.
    I remember Erika Jacoby was talking about her experiences
    when she was first taken to a camp and the whole experience
    of being stripped and shaved and tattooed and so forth.
    And very few people talked about that.
    And she said that was the part that was dehumanizing
    and so hard on her.
    And there were a few others who did that.
    That really gave me an insight into their personalities,
    I think.
    It wasn't a recitation of events.
    It was really their gut reactions to it.
    Right.
    The only time there was talk of lice,
    of cessation of menstrual periods was off tape, I think.
    It wasn't on tape, perhaps maybe in one instance.
    People were avoiding it.
    I would like to give you some impressions of what basically
    went in their minds before they came
    and you notice them on your monitors
    or in front of the camera.
    They were all very apprehensive.
    There were no exceptions.
    And many had thoughts really about going through with it.
    And I would receive phone calls, maybe three or four days prior
    to the interview and say, well, do you really
    think that I should do it?
    Or do you think that I--
    I don't remember things.
    I really have forgotten the dates.
    And so there were a variety of anxieties and apprehensions.
    And also, how will I perform in front of this camera?
    Will I break down?
    You see, you'll notice that some of them did shed tears.
    Others didn't.
    Some went around not to relate these individual tragedies.
    You're talking about lice and all these horrible things,
    shaving and dehumanization and so on.
    Most try to get away from it, although some couldn't.
    And I have talked to most of them afterwards.
    And there was a sense of relief.
    And this is something that I thought
    that I should leave you with these thoughts
    because I know it wasn't easy for you.
    But there was a sense of relief.
    Most of them felt that they are happy they did it, you know.
    I'd like to ask you a question--
    Yes, sure.
    Perhaps not right away were they relieved
    because we would keep in touch with them during the week.
    The men that I interviewed invariably
    stonewalled the experience and denied
    that they were having any problems with it
    two or three days later.
    And about half the women did.
    But some of the women were able to say the nightmares have
    come back or I can't sleep.
    They also talked about being unable to sleep beforehand.
    And we had prepared them for the fact
    that the nightmares might reactivate because survivors
    tend to have this anyway.
    I just want to pick up on a little point, just one
    little point.
    Did you did you, as technicians and involved in the production,
    notice a difference between the men and the women?
    Oh, yeah.
    Well, how would describe it?
    Well, I didn't put it into words quite as well
    as one of our interviewers did who
    said, have you noticed the men all come on
    and say, I'm going to tell you exactly everything
    and how it was.
    She said the women come in and say,
    you should speak to my husband because they're
    the ones who really know how to say what went on.
    And what happens is the men come in and they-- some of the men--
    some of the men came in and they couldn't
    keep the stories too straight, and they didn't want
    to talk about their emotions.
    And some of the women came in and were magnificent.
    They were just magnificent.
    They just let it all out.
    And that's what our aim was to get as much of the personal
    and as much of the emotional as we could.
    And the women seemed more willing to do that for us.
    I found some of the men much more emotional.
    It's really a terrible thing you ask these people to do really
    because it's an awful thing to have
    to relive in front of a camera.
    It's a very naked experience.
    But I thought-- I was tremendously
    impressed by how well virtually all of them
    delivered-- if you like.
    It's not the right word, but--
    the information and the emotion and the tone
    of their interviews.
    It was largely due to your ability
    to be able to lead them along.
    But I thought the men, for the most part,
    tended to be more emotional than the women.
    I can't imagine having to go through that experience.
    It must be utterly traumatic because obviously it's
    something you try to put away at the back
    of your furthest recesses of your mind.
    And then to be asked to produce all this again suddenly--
    There's a counter theme there for many survivors,
    because to put it too far away and to live to too fully
    may give them, some people, the sense that they're
    betraying their dead.
    No, no, I didn't mean to suggest that.
    And obviously, I mean there's something that is there
    with you every minute of your day,
    and it must never be distanced to that extent.
    In fact, it's a very valuable project
    because it's only 40 years ago all this happened.
    40 years ago is nothing in world history.
    I mean it's just--
    it's so recent.
    And--
    As Brian says, it's with us all the time.
    Yeah.
    I have a question.
    Since I worked with you, Ellen, very closely,
    I have sensed a sort of a feeling of a mission
    that you almost had as we were going
    through this, from inception and as we were moving along.
    I mean was it really a--
    Well, I grew up in New York.
    And most of my friends were children of survivors.
    And nobody ever talked about it.
    Were you aware of the fact that they
    were children of survivors?
    Oh, yeah.
    Yes.
    Sometimes you're not.
    That's the interesting thing.
    But no one ever talks about their experiences.
    But I was thinking about this the other day.
    It's almost like--
    I was wondering why Jews get so involved with the Holocaust
    when they weren't there.
    Why do they feel this need to touch it, to be part of it
    somehow?
    And I was thinking, it's like Passover
    when you say it's as if I came out of Egypt.
    And I think we put ourselves into that same sense
    that it could have been me.
    And it could have been me.
    I mean my grandparents were from Poland.
    It very easily could have been me.
    And I just--
    Go ahead.
    I just felt that, I don't know, I just wanted so much for this
    to be good for them, for it to be
    a healthy experience for them.
    I was just going to say, it surely--
    I mean you can't limit it just to an experience
    in the Jewish faith.
    It is a human experience.
    And I cannot imagine any reasonable human being being
    unaffected by the testimonies we've seen.
    I mean there's an appalling thing.
    And the fact that we have these testimonies on tape,
    I think can only help other people outside of the faith
    or no matter what religion.
    It it's nothing to do with religion.
    It has to do with how people treat other people.
    We know there were many Gentile survivors who
    went through much degradation.
    The distinction, though, was the period of time,
    that they didn't have the erosion of civil rights,
    say, for five years or seven years beforehand.
    And they didn't have the dropping
    away of their whole world afterwards.
    They usually had a home to be able to return to and
    a community to return to.
    And what our people had after that was further degradation.
    That was interesting as it came up
    as we interviewed the survivors the other evening
    in their group, the assault that they felt that continued
    upon them afterwards.
    That also--
    After liberation.
    After liberation.
    I think the distinction, Bob, is that most Gentiles
    my age haven't been exposed to the kind of information
    that I, as a Jew, have throughout my life.
    And that's the difference.
    I mean, sure, people are touched by this.
    I think it's impossible not to be.
    But when this has been something you've
    been taught about and exposed to and so forth
    throughout your life and identified with,
    then I think that's why it was so powerful for me.
    That was obvious.
    I mean when I spoke to you, you could sense that devotion
    and dedication--
    I mean, I noticed that in all of you.
    I mean, to watch you sitting through this thing,
    and it was, for me, who relived this thing every time
    I watched these tapes-- it wasn't easy to take it.
    And I thought I was immune to it myself
    by having discussed this many, many occasions
    and develop a certain form of a defense mechanism.
    But at the end of the Sunday, last session, I
    would say I would go home, and it
    would be a feeling of depression in a way
    to see this horrible thing again relived by these individuals.
    And I thought of all of you.
    And I said, my God, I wonder how you're taking it?
    I really didn't know how much exposure
    you had to the tragedy before.
    Let me ask you a question in general.
    Did it bring the tragedy closer home?
    I mean did it bring the human element rather than
    just the historical?
    For me, it put a face on many, many things.
    The Khmer Rouge, the Stalinist purges, the--
    I mean, history is filled with things like this.
    And it's one thing to read about these things,
    to read about the Holocaust, and then
    to meet someone who has gone through it
    is quite another experience.
    And to see someone that had nothing
    to eat for weeks at a time and someone who, even though that
    had happened to him, hadn't been degraded to the point
    where they couldn't fight back.
    I mean Freddy the other night and he in his interview,
    what an interesting man.
    I mean that guy, you know, is his own army squadron
    just about.
    And we had those type of people.
    And we had the other type of people who were perhaps
    more passive in their resistance,
    but still had this inner strength.
    And you could see that in other human tragedies as well.
    I would tend to perhaps more than a Jew would generalize it
    to other things that I think are equally horrible--
    the American Indians, I mean, you know,
    what has happened to a lot of peoples in the world.
    But this, because it was so recent and so systematized
    and because certainly in Los Angeles there were so many
    Jews, and we all know lots of Jews,
    and we all have lots of friends that are Jewish and-- except
    for Ellen here--
    but it does put a very real, very human face on all this.
    And you just kind of have to turn back and say, well, yeah,
    it'll happen again.
    I mean, it's really a horrible thing.
    And especially if people don't see something like this to help
    them understand why it shouldn't happen again.
    So that's how it affected me.
    You mention the fact don't see it.
    We, of course, this is going to be
    part of the library, et cetera.
    They're going to be used for classes, et cetera.
    What kind of uses--
    if you were thinking in the future of perhaps making
    a documentary out of this, of parts of it,
    there are all sorts of ways of doing
    this, what kind of an impact--
    obviously, we would like this material
    to be used in such a way that people will understand,
    put a face--
    it's one thing to read something in a book.
    It's another thing to have a face on it.
    It's one thing to hear about Vietnam.
    It's another thing to know something about it
    from a personal experience.
    Do you have any ideas of how an audience-- how would you
    approach an audience, how would you
    prepare the material for people like you
    to learn something from this about the future?
    The difference with the material that we
    did that I think that I've ever seen
    from The Sorrow and the Pity and, you know, documentaries
    is that these were people that had gone through it.
    And we were just talking--
    I mean, you couldn't get away from--
    there's a shot just like this.
    And this person is saying, yes, my baby
    was thrown into the back of a truck
    and whatever happened to them.
    What I would do is I think that if I was putting something
    together I would go for the emotional
    rather than the historical content of it, which
    is what we were trying to do in the first place.
    And I think largely succeeded.
    There were people that, like you say,
    tried to come back and put it, well, then we did this,
    then we did this, then we did this.
    But there was enough there of how these people felt
    that I think you could put a pretty
    powerful statement together just on almost just a show of heads.
    I mean there isn't much more powerful than that.
    You don't need to have a shot of a crematorium
    to have someone that was shoveling ashes who's
    talking about it on the screen.
    That's got to be a little more powerful than that.
    Could I ask you a question?
    Yeah.
    I've been intrigued over the years
    by reactions to prime time TV movies about the Holocaust.
    There was one, which I did not see,
    which was called Holocaust, I think.
    I was out of the country when that was running.
    But there was the recent Playing for Time film.
    As a survivor of a camp, do you resent these films?
    Do you find them at all valuable?
    No, I don't resent them at all.
    I feel that at least it exposes a large segment of population
    that was born after the war and knows very little about it
    and is exposed not in schools and so on to this event.
    No, I feel that it has merit.
    They are not realistically portrayed.
    But at least, it lets the other generation,
    the young generation think about it.
    I think I've been bothered by them because I
    think I have a sort of cynical attitude about network
    television.
    And I think somehow they cheapen the event.
    You're contrasting it with what we
    have done in other words, where we're putting--
    Yes, with other films like--
    Yes.
    The Sorrow and the Pity and [BOTH TALKING]
    which was a marvelous film.
    Well, do you see a way where we can possibly
    maybe create some form of a documentary out of all this?
    Well, I think the most important aspect of what you all
    have done here is that these are very obviously
    real people in tight close-up telling horrible things.
    And that can only be enormously affecting.
    I'm concerned, though, about a Jewish stereotype,
    a Jewish middle class stereotype, that in a way
    we've captured.
    Because our people that we've interviewed,
    Sam, have pretty much entered the upper middle class.
    This has been not a cross-section of all survivors
    in this country.
    I feel I have to make that point.
    We have people who are poor, who are perhaps not
    willing to be able to-- or don't feel adequate enough,
    good enough about themselves to make this kind of testimonial,
    perhaps who are still living with some
    of the shameful feelings.
    And our people were talking more about
    how they've come through into a time
    of some pride and a decision to make a statement.
    It's been--
    At the same time is one of the things
    that you mentioned is that one of the wonders
    of the whole thing is that these people have come through hell
    and have come back.
    And I can't restrain my amazement every time
    I see them and say to myself, a human being is,
    as you say, is a horrible vicious animal,
    but look at the resilience, look at how a victim can come back.
    And these people are generous.
    And they why they need the restorative element.
    Right.
    That's one thing that amazed me about these tapings is
    I can't understand how these people went through what they
    did and were able to leave these camps one
    day liberated and free and really put their lives back
    together.
    I couldn't understand how they were
    able to get over at all what they had been through.
    And they came to this-- or the ones
    we met who came to this country came here with nothing.
    And they were all very-- or many of them
    who addressed that issue were very quick to point out,
    they didn't want anything from anybody.
    They wanted to do it themselves.
    How?
    How did they take on a new language?
    And many of them were children or teenagers in the camp
    and had no skills.
    I'm amazed by that.
    Yeah, but I think Flo made a very good point
    in that we are seeing in these interviews
    the people that wanted to do it.
    And we've talked about this before.
    These aren't the people that maybe are still very haunted
    by it, may be mentally disturbed, maybe they're poor
    or they're ugly, whatever they feel about themselves.
    And they don't want to be shown.
    Some people have been afraid to have possessions, anything
    of a material nature, because they
    know what loss is all about.
    Our population seems to have taken the risk of having again.
    But they've paid a great price for it.
    And I think because people look and sound great, let's not
    make the assumption that it's all been all well
    and good for them.
    It's interesting that in the group
    they began to discuss their relationships
    with their children and the costs in those relationships.
    And I just want to make a--
    Yeah, they were very cold to their children.
    At least we got that impression, at least I did that--
    I wouldn't say cold.
    But they had turned off that part of their past.
    Almost invariably when they talked about their children,
    they said, oh, I've never discussed this with my kids.
    And that was brought up by one of the interviewers.
    I mean, this is the most human thing probably
    you've ever gone through, and you can't even talk about it
    with your own blood.
    Let me make a point.
    If Ellen and I after the interviewing
    have to go out and talk, which was my defense,
    I would spill over to my family or friends
    and then close it off, and did have
    during the taping after many years of working
    with children of survivors and survivors
    my first Holocaust dream.
    It was stimulated by another incident.
    But I'm sure the impact had something
    to do with the taping.
    My point is if Ellen and I need to talk,
    then I think you have to understand that survivors
    have needed to talk.
    And the only place that people have listened
    is amongst themselves.
    But they've also talked to the children.
    And oftentimes the children have turned them off and said,
    it's enough already.
    Beba was saying that to us.
    Her kids can hear just so much.
    They're not disinterested.
    They're wonderful kids.
    Although you did point up that someone mentioned
    I think to Beba or one of the others, wait until they're 30
    and then they'll start asking you.
    And a real triumph, I found a real triumph
    was the case of Sophie Weinstein, who
    was very interesting for me to watch because she came in
    and she didn't want to be there.
    She fought it every minute.
    She was in the waiting room waiting
    to leave, rather than come in.
    And she finally came in.
    And she did her interview.
    And she came out.
    And she nodded her head.
    And she said, well, I feel relieved.
    And she mentioned in the interview
    she hadn't discussed this with her children.
    And the other night when we did our survivors' taping,
    the group discussion, she had decided
    she was going to share this with her children.
    And I thought, what a full cycle she's come.
    She's really made a leap.
    Her children must be grown up people maybe
    with their own children by now.
    One of the children is a child survivor
    remember from the father's interview.
    Yes.
    One thing that is interesting that you mentioned,
    you use the term cold to the children.
    Actually, a very few discussed their present families
    and the relationships to the children.
    But you must understand one thing.
    There's very ambivalent feeling on their part
    on what to tell the children and what not to tell.
    They don't want to hurt the children by telling
    them what happened to them.
    Yet, they want the children to know.
    So they are basically caught between two forces.
    The children resent the fact that they don't tell them
    what happened to them.
    And yet, it's sort of a game going back and forth.
    And this is something that we haven't really
    touched upon at all asking them about the relations
    with their children.
    It's a very sensitive and touchy subject.
    And I really don't know.
    This is something that may be sometime in the future we
    may address ourselves.
    But this is what emerged.
    You noticed that.
    It wasn't that we're cold.
    It's a very painful experience for them
    to really tell the child this is what happened to me.
    And it also dehumanizes them in front of their own children,
    who may even look up to their parents and so on.
    Do you think these tapes will be a helpful way to share it
    with their children?
    Well, we tried to experiment.
    We did show these tapes to 40 children.
    And the reaction was unbelievable.
    They want to see more.
    They want the parents to see it so that the parents could
    see how other survivors were able to cope with it,
    so that they could possibly now share with them
    to what happened to them.
    I suppose one of the things we could do
    is the taping of children of some of the people
    that we've taped.
    That has a potential--
    Actually, a tape of children watching their parents
    might be a real interesting to see--
    tape their reactions to what's happening to them.
    Well, we would have one hour of that in March
    where there will be a Western gathering.
    And, Flo, you're going to show a tape of some of the survivors
    to the children.
    And this will be very interesting to see how--
    I know that they all had tears in their eyes.
    I mean for two hours in the morning and the afternoon,
    all the children watching not only
    their parents but other survivors,
    they were all crying.
    I mean there were no dry eyes in the room.
    It would be good to have a tape of their reaction to that.
    Our purpose at the Western Regional
    is, again, to do some intergenerational dialoguing,
    to try to see if we can preach this thing.
    It's like there's been a no-win situation.
    The survivor's been in a damned if they do
    and damned if they don't spot.
    If they tell too much, then the kids
    are inundated and bathed in kind of a death experience.
    If they tell too little, then they're withholding.
    So there's some-- it's walking a tightrope either way.
    And we're hoping to keep improving that if we can.
    You talk about kids, I mean I don't
    know what age group that means.
    In their 30-ish--
    30s.
    Average.
    Average.
    Some of them have their own children.
    Well, they range from 19 to 33.
    Some still have young children.
    Others have-- some were born after the war
    in displaced person camps.
    Those are the ones in their 30s.
    And those are the ones who want to know.
    The younger ones still have the difficulty
    really to ask the parents--
    Some of those who were 35, 36, who were born, say--
    '47.
    '47 in the DP camps, or on the run between the Iron Curtain
    falling and everything else that they went through, and then
    by the way waiting in DP camps for 4 and 5 years
    till their quota so that they come
    could come to the United States.
    And perhaps they had intended to go to Israel.
    Maybe Zionists could never get into Israel,
    came here as a second or third choice.
    Those children have some shadow memories of that time.
    And they spoke English oftentimes
    before their parents did.
    And they would conduct business for the parents.
    And then they get slapped down and said, what do you know?
    You're just a dumb kid anyway.
    Well, how would you feel?
    If you had gone through this tragedy
    and you had grown up children, can you think for a moment
    and would you want your children to
    know about their grandparents?
    About your brothers and sisters?
    And--
    There's no way of putting yourself
    I think in that situation.
    At least for me.
    I mean, it's dilemma.
    What, any comments?
    Anything traumatic I think, at least personally,
    I mean I don't think I've gone through anything like this
    so I can't really say.
    But I would tend to just shove it way back in my head
    and not talk about it at all.
    That's just the way I am.
    And I think it would be very difficult-- you brought up
    a good point that it degrades you in front of someone
    that you want to have their respect.
    And so it must be incredibly difficult to talk about it.
    Why does it degrade you?
    Well, because you've been--
    if you're talking about, well, and then they herded us over
    and then they shaved my head and then they threw me in a shower
    and then they deloused me, I mean
    I don't think that I'd want to talk about that to someone
    that I wanted to command that respect because that's
    very, very degrading.
    I would think.
    Or stole a piece of bread from somebody
    or took it from a brother.
    Or I killed the German--
    well, that I'd probably be pretty proud of.
    But--
    We have in just in literature from earlier periods
    stories of people, people tell stories
    of the first time they found that their parents were
    humiliated in their eyes.
    And when they're walking down the sidewalk and the father
    was forced to walk into the gutter.
    Yeah.
    That is a recurrent, almost a nightmare in people's minds.
    The first time the father was forced off the sidewalk.
    He's not God anymore.
    He's not God anymore.
    He can't walk on the sidewalk.
    And he can't protect me.
    And he can't protect me.
    We want to be protected.
    We always want to have the parenteral protection.
    Well, let's take Vietnam for a moment.
    I mean you were in Vietnam.
    Let's say you have children and so on.
    And you were only the three months.
    Let's see these people suffered four, five years.
    Would you relate-- how would you feel
    relating your experience of Vietnam
    or some of the horrible things you saw?
    I wouldn't.
    You wouldn't?
    No.
    No way.
    Why wouldn't you?
    They'll find out.
    They'll find out just how nasty people are.
    And you might as well not ruin it for them
    until they get old enough to deal with it.
    So you're trying to protect your children.
    And you're basically trying to protect them from--
    Right.
    There's another interesting parallel with the Vietnam
    situation because many of our people whom we interviewed
    felt that they didn't want to talk for many years
    because nobody was interested in listening.
    And we all are painfully aware of the way
    that the whole nation has treated the Vietnam veteran.
    I mean you certainly have not been welcomed home
    with open arms.
    There's a great deal of resentment
    on the part of all people who are Vietnam veterans
    that they did this service.
    They didn't go over there because they wanted to.
    The nation sent them for God knows what reason.
    And you come back and you're treated like a leper,
    and nobody wants you.
    And by the same token, these people felt when they came out
    of the camps-- and I ran into this in several interviews--
    we came out of the camps.
    And we thought that, well, look, people
    would be willing to be open and help us.
    At least listen to our story.
    And here's a communication--
    and this is what we're talking about most of the time--
    the tapes are communication.
    It seems to me quite often it's the only hope
    to break this cycle of violence is to talk it out,
    to get the story out, to humanize it all,
    to put a face on everything.
    And it's the same thing if these people came out
    of the camps and nobody was--
    they felt that nobody wanted to hear their story.
    And therefore, if nobody wants to hear your story,
    you feel that maybe you're guilty of something.
    It's a terrible shock.
    Speaking of guild, I periodically felt guilty
    for small complaints.
    You know, you go, I can't be depressed,
    I haven't gone through anything.
    Or I hear friends of mine saying, oh, I'm so depressed,
    life is so rotten, and immediately finding
    myself judging them.
    Well, look at what these people have gone through.
    It's strange--
    You're having a little of the experience that children
    of survivors have where they feel their experiences are
    less than.
    Yeah.
    But I think that we have to underscore what you're saying.
    I think it's very powerful that people
    did come out of this experience and again felt ostracized.
    First, they were ostracized by their Gentile neighbors
    or lost their country or their homeland
    were called pigs, swine, whatever.
    And then to come out and have the world not ready for them,
    not ready for their--
    we didn't understand anything about bereavement
    and unfinished mourning in that period of time
    and how much rage is encompassed in loss.
    And when you're in an army situation, a wartime situation,
    such as were in, you were also bathed
    in that same kind of loss.
    It strikes me as an American Jew that the first important book
    that I think I ever read was All Quiet on the Western Front.
    And it struck me in a very deep way.
    It's with me I guess into this work.
    It may have been one of the precursors of how
    I got involved with the studies I've done
    or the work I've done.
    But in a way, it may be that there is something
    that your children will hear better from you
    than from someone else or from the film, the humanness
    of having been through a terrible human experience.
    I just want to make sure we get one thing on this tape
    before we close that was something we considered
    before we began taping.
    And that was how close we were going
    to get to the survivors just in terms
    of seeing them on the screen.
    And it was a real conscious decision on our part
    that because they would be going through so much
    and because they would be emotional that we would never
    intrude too much on them.
    I mean we would never close in on the tears
    or the trembling lips or anything like that.
    That we would get close enough only to feel the impact,
    but no closer.
    And I think that worked very well for us.
    And if other groups are going to be pursuing this,
    I'd recommend that.
    Were there any other technical things
    that you were aware of, particularly Bobby,
    in shooting?
    No, not really.
    No, I think the decision that was
    made to sort of distance a little bit
    was a very wise one because from a television point of view.
    I mean the material is so incredibly dynamic if you like
    the word, that any pushing in for dramatic effect
    is just exploitive.
    Just from an audio standpoint, the less that we
    heard the interviewers, the better.
    It was because we never saw the interviewers, it's intrusive.
    And most of these people, you wind them up
    and they're going to go.
    I mean, it was amazing to me that they would say, well,
    why don't you say your name my name is Beba Leventhal, blah,
    blah.
    And it would be for--
    Half an hour later.
    --half an hour later.
    Then they might have to be prompted a little bit and then
    another half an hour.
    They had a lot to say.
    And they didn't have enough time to say it.
    And as we saw so many times, it was
    in the last couple of minutes when
    they knew the tape was wrapping up
    that it all started coming out.
    And that was invariable.
    And I guess that's an axiom in psychoanalysis or something
    is that's the opening the door or something,
    it's time to leave now.
    OK, but-- you know, and there's--
    Do the last 10 first.
    Yeah, the last 10 minutes first, and then you
    want to roll another tape.
    And that's apropos since we have just a couple
    of minutes left to wind up and turn to Sam here.
    Well, I would like to sort of summarize
    and give you my own impressions and feelings about.
    And before I do it, I certainly would
    like to express my thanks and appreciation to all of you.
    I know what it meant to you.
    I know it was not easy.
    And I know it's going to stay with you.
    It will probably remain as part of your life.
    I don't believe you'll be able to forget it.
    It will also stay with me.
    And I will always remember you sitting there.
    And I know how much effort all of you put in.
    I know, Flo, it was not easy for you to spend these weekends
    away from your family.
    Ellen, I know how much you put in.
    Arnie, I know the fact that you and Ora and--
    it has brought us all closer to each other.
    This is a very amazing thing really
    that we felt a certain kinship.
    A bond has developed, a bond through a tragedy, which
    happened 40 years ago.
    Nevertheless it's a bond.
    I would like to thank you also on behalf of the survivors who
    came with great sense of apprehension
    and left with a sense of relief.
    The only thing that they are concerned about
    is there's so much more to tell.
    Will I ever have a chance to do it again?
    So with these words, let me say again, thank you all.
    And we hope that this certainly was a worthwhile project
    for the future generations.
    We have a couple of more minutes and if each of you
    would like to summarize your own feelings,
    we have a chance to do that.
    I just pretty much have said it all.
    That it's been a very powerful experience in my life.
    And I'm frankly going to miss this.
    I miss being with all of you in this project
    and meeting the people, the survivors.
    I really felt like they were mine to take
    care of for a little while.
    And I was glad that we were able to help them through this.
    I guess I've said it to most of you.
    I've hoped in some way that maybe this
    will be some kind of a release.
    I know it's not a cure, but some kind of release.
    And I have to thank the crew for those times
    that I came in after an interview
    and needed to sit down and babble
    and intrude on what you had to do.
    But I appreciated your friendliness and caring.
    Arnie, we have one more minute.
    Would you like to say something?
    Well, it seems to me that one of the things
    that when you're doing this job and when you're
    watching a monitor, et cetera, you may not think that you're
    doing something of importance.
    But even small little gestures, the people
    who were being interviewed and the people
    who were doing the interviews were
    under enormous, enormous pressures.
    And the fact that you people all handled it
    with a certain quiet degree of sensitivity
    made all the difference.
    I don't know if you realized how great you were.
    But it's very, very important that nobody blew up.
    Nobody was angry.
    You might have had this tremendous anger within you.
    You were trying to repress certain emotions, et cetera.
    And you were struggling with yourself.
    You had to read a book or something of the sort.
    But this did not spill out.
    And that made our job so much easier.
    And--
    Thank you very much.
    --so we're enormously grateful to all of you.
    And we realize what you've been through
    and how wonderful you've come through.
    OK, well, thank you, all.

    Overview

    Interviewee
    Peter Prayder
    Ora Band
    Florabel Kinsler
    Ion Russ
    Sam Gates
    Janet Hatter
    Date
    interview:  1984 September 02
    Credit Line
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of the University of California, Los Angeles

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    1 videocassette (VHS) : sound, color ; 1/2 in..

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    There are no known restrictions on access to this material. Museum staff are currently unable to copy, digitize, and/or photograph collection materials on behalf of researchers. Researchers are encouraged to plan a research visit to consult collection materials themselves.
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    Keywords & Subjects

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History branch produced these interviews in cooperation with the University of California, Los Angeles. Both institutions house copies of the interviews.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 07:57:47
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    Also in Oral history interviews of the University of California, Los Angeles Holocaust Testimonies Project

    Contains interviews with 59 Holocaust survivors in the Los Angeles, California area recorded by the University of California, Los Angeles Holocaust Testimonies Project in cooperation with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Date: 1983-1984

    Oral history interview with Edgar Aftergood

    Oral history interview with Edgar Aftergood

    Oral History

    Edgar Aftergood, born in Berlin, Germany in 1923, describes his memories of the day Hitler came to power; his parents; studying music as a child; experiencing antisemitism; his parents moving the family back to Warsaw, Poland in 1934; life in Warsaw; the bombardment of Warsaw in 1939; his father being hit by a soldier; the creation of the ghetto and conditions there; living in a hospital with his family and seeing Dr. Janusz Korczak; his outspoken aunt, Dr. Anna Heller; having to report to work camps in 1942; playing music and being in a study group; concerts in the ghetto; going through a selection; his sister’s death; his father’s connections to people outside the ghetto; hiding out in an apartment on the other side of Warsaw in Bielany district; his father having a stroke; the Warsaw Uprising; fleeing the city and walking to Bioney (possibly Błonie); their interactions with the Germans; the Russians arriving in 1945; going to Lublin, Poland and then Łódź, Poland; attending a conservatory; his father’s death; going to Paris, France illegally; meeting his future wife; and immigrating to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Marianna Birnbaum

    Oral history interview with Marianna Birnbaum

    Oral History

    Mariana, born in Budapest, Hungary in 1934, describes feeling that her experience during the Holocaust has affected her whole life; her parents; attending a Jewish school; life changing in 1944; losing her Gentile governess; a family story regarding the Russian massacre of Armenians; her father and uncle hiding separately from her and her mother; returning to their house; what it felt like to wear the Jewish Star; her family refusing to live in the ghetto; her father and uncle hiding in a German building but being betrayed; her father escaping from a camp; her mother being taken but saved by a Hungarian Nazi; being alone in hiding for a time during the war; obtaining false papers later when she was reunited with her mother; one of their hiding places, which was a small space in her uncle's building; her escape from the massacre of Jews at the Danube during the time when she was in hiding alone; how she’s been affected by her Holocaust experience; her view of Hungarians; and Hungarian Jewry.

    Oral history interview with Thomas Blatt

    Oral history interview with Thomas Blatt

    Oral History

    Thomas Blatt, born in Izbica Lubelska, Poland, describes the Jewish community; hearing about Kristallnacht; the German invasion; the restrictions placed on Jews and the ghetto; his town becoming a collection point for other Polish Jews; the Judenrat ordering people to work; the roundup and deportation of Jews; receiving false papers and heading towards Hungary; being caught and escaping; going to a hospital and surviving a massacre of the Jewish patients; traveling home with false papers given to him by a doctor; being taken to Sobibór with his family in April 1943; the selections and meeting the German SS officer Karl Frenzel; his methods for surviving psychologically; the organized revolt in the camp and escaping; hiding out and receiving help from farmers; going to Izbica Lubelska but returning to the forest to hide; being taken care of by a farmer; the famer killing some of the people hiding with him and trying to kill him; his various hiding places; liberation but still being under threat; going to Lublin, Poland; not wanting to escape his memories; and teaching people about the revolt in Sobibór.

    Oral history interview with Stanley Bronner

    Oral history interview with Stanley Bronner

    Oral History

    Stanley Bronner, born on March 19, 1923 in Auschwitz (Oświęcim), Poland, describes his good childhood; experiencing antisemitism and fighting back; leaving home to learn the jewelry trade when he was 14 years old; the war starting; his work laying train tracks when the concentration camp was being built; almost getting shot; the Appels (roll calls); running away from the camp; witnessing the hanging of three men; his father being taken to the camp and being a translator; being beaten daily; building Auschwitz; being transported to Oberlober, which was a few miles away on a small farm; working in a sugar factory; hiding in a tank for a day before the evacuation of the camp; seeing a Russian crossing over the river Oder; and the importance of never forgetting the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Barry Bruk

    Oral history interview with Barry Bruk

    Oral History

    Barry Bruk, born in Łódź, Poland in 1924, describes his Orthodox family; finishing school before the war started; reading the Jewish and Polish newspapers before the ghetto was blocked in; his encounters with antisemitism; life in the ghetto and how it deteriorated after the ghetto was closed in; becoming a sewing machine mechanic; the daily transports from the ghetto; hearing rumors about the war and the German treatment of the deported Jews; the liquidation of the ghetto hospital; being deported from the ghetto with his family; being separated from his mother at Birkenau; being sent to Dresden, Germany, where he worked in a mill; the bombings and not being allowed in the shelters; being transferred to another factory, where he was an electrician; stealing a pot of soup from the kitchen and sharing it with the people in the camp hospital; running from the camp on May 8, 1945 after the SS guards had disappeared; returning to Łódź, where he stayed in a Jewish community house; his desire to leave Europe; and going to Canada.

    Oral history interview with Selene Bruk

    Oral history interview with Selene Bruk

    Oral History

    Selene Bruk, born in Bialystok, Poland, describes her family and living with her mother, two brothers, grandparents, and her aunt and uncle; being in the 5th grade when the war began; the German invasion and the killing of many Jews; having to wear yellow stars and the formation of the ghetto; conditions in the ghetto; hiding during a roundup of Jews; being forced to work and her brother getting her onto his construction crew; her grandmother being shot in the street; hiding in the ghetto with her brother and meeting up with partisans; being sent to Stutthoff for a short time until they were sent to Birkenau; making sure that her mother was selected for work and not killed; working in the IG Farben factory, building bombs; sabotaging the bombs; her mother falling and breaking her arm; being taken to Auschwitz; being next to Block 10; her aunt being experimented on; being taken to Ravensbrück and then Neustadt; she and her mother surviving; her mother becoming ill; working for the Russian Army; going to Łódź and then Bialystok; getting a letter from her father, who was living in the United States; going to the US and attending school; returning to Poland years later with her husband and children; how she met her husband, Barry, on a train; living in Canada with her husband; living in California; and speaking to school children about her Holocaust experience.

    Oral history interview with Marion Chervin

    Oral history interview with Marion Chervin

    Oral History

    Marion Chevrin, born in Warsaw, Poland in 1920, describes his father dying when he was 12; graduating from an industrial school two months before the outbreak of the war; his parents' financial situation worsening in 1929; experiencing antisemitism; the German invasion; wanting to enlist but not being accepted; leaving his mother to travel to the Russian zone of Poland; his mother's death; staying in Warsaw on the German side; being a welfare officer; getting married in 1941 and living in the ghetto; wife being a volunteer while he worked at the Jewish Center; conditions in the ghetto, including the scarcity of food and the prevalence of typhoid; the division of the ghetto into two sections; children smuggling food into the ghetto; the forced deportations in July 1942; cultural activities in the ghetto; being helped by a Polish policeman who was working with the underground; hiding during deportations; being deported to Majdanek in April 1943; his aunt committing suicide; being taken to Budzyn; one of the cruel guards, who killed many people; working on a railroad; Jewish commandants; going to a school where they taught him to build parts for airplanes; walking daily to a labor factory; their meager rations; being transferred to another camp; receiving a letter from the Polish policeman he knew in Warsaw; how he attributes his survival to luck; being sent to the concentration camp in Flossenbürg, Germany; daily life in the camp; being liberated by American troops; not wanting to speak about his experience for many years; and the importance of sharing Holocaust experiences.

    Oral history interview with Fred Diament

    Oral history interview with Fred Diament

    Oral History

    Fred Diament, born in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, describes his Orthodox parents, who were Polish Jews and moved to Germany in 1919; the distinct differences between the strong Eastern Jewish community and the German Jewish community; how after Kristallnacht, all Jewish students were expelled from German schools; his parents sending each of their six kids to live with gentiles for two weeks; being arrested with one of his brothers and his father and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp; life in the camp; being attracted to the Zionist movement; his family’s store, which sold linens; his family’s attempts to emigrate; his work in Sachsenhausen; befriending the camp’s cook; an uprising in Sachsenhausen; being disinfected before being transferred to Auschwitz in 1942; two of his brothers joining a Zionist group in Poland and receiving fake certificates to enter Palestine; going to Auschwitz with one of his brothers and his father; the fate of the intellectuals; the social hierarchy within the camp based on the number of years one survived in the camps; working in Buna, where they produced synthetic fuel and rubber; his father’s death; the strong underground in Auschwitz and he and his brother joining them; the communal atmosphere in the camp; the new camp leader; some acts of sabotage but nothing serious; the death of his brother, Leo, during an escape attempt; being transferred to Gleiwitz; his successful escape during a death march in January 1945; being liberated; discovering that his family was dead; and finding a group going to Israel and helping to found a kibbutz in Israel.

    Oral history interview with Ilse Diament

    Oral history interview with Ilse Diament

    Oral History

    Ilse Diament, born in Krefeld, Germany in 1928, describes being one of five children; her family’s supermarket; attending a Jewish school in Stettin, Germany (now Szczecin, Poland); two of her sisters going to Israel before the war; her father being arrested during Kristallnacht and sent to Buchenwald; being deported in February 1940; the journey to a ghetto near Lublin, Poland; selections in the ghetto; a brutal action in the hospital barracks; being selected for a mass killing in a ditch; surviving and going to an Arbeitslager (labor camp) in the forest for a year and a half; being evacuated and walking to Madjanek; being sent to Krasnik, Poland; being taken to Auschwitz; finding a friend; hiding under dead people to save herself; how her hair was shaved and she was given her number, a dress, and some food; working with a Dutch group, cleaning out latrines in the crematoriums; a big evacuation; how the Lagerkommandant, Josef Kramer, liked the orchestra; being sent to Bergen-Belsen; working with parachutes and meeting a woman (Emily Zinger) who knew her father; contracting typhus and the orchestra protecting her; her happiness upon seeing a British soldier wearing the Star of David; the sexual assault and murders in the camps; what it was like for her after liberation; how the testimony of the survivors is crucial; going to Israel via France; meeting Fred Diament on a Kibbutz; her children; her religious feelings; and the importance of not forgetting the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Fenton

    Oral history interview with Joseph Fenton

    Oral History

    Joseph Fenton, born May 6, 1919, describes working in Łódź ghetto; arriving home after work one day to find his immediate family gone; never seeing his two brothers, three sisters, and parents again; witnessing deportations and hearing about the massacres outside the city; the evacuation of the ghetto in 1944; being deported to Auschwitz; working in a coal mine, where many people died; being marched to Czechoslovakia; Czechs helping some of the prisoners escape; being sent to Mauthausen; going through a selection; having to carry huge stones up stairs to build factories; being taken to Ebensee on trucks and working there until he was liberated; meeting a civilian who told them that the Americans were getting closer and that they shouldn't lose hope; speaking to an American in Polish; receiving help from the Americans; Eisenhower and his staff coming and ordering the townspeople to bury the dead instead of burning them; meeting his wife; not wanting to stay in Poland; immigrating to Canada in 1949; how it’s helped him to speak with other survivors; sharing his story with his daughter; taking an American club to Mauthausen in 1977 to show them the camp; and the importance of fighting for a free country.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Fenton

    Oral history interview with Ruth Fenton

    Oral History

    Ruth Fenton, born in a suburb of Łódź, Poland, describes having two brothers; her grandfather being a successful manufacturer of men's clothes; hearing of the humiliation of Jews beginning in 1933; the German invasion in 1939; her brother being drafted; the ghetto laws; public hangings; the synagogue being burned down; her father being deported and never seeing him again; being deported with her mother in August 1944 to Auschwitz; the selection and being separated from her mother; being in Birkenau in a barracks with doctors and nurses from the ghetto; contracting scarlet fever; being sent to the so-called "Gypsy" camp; stealing and taking pills in an attempt to get better; being sent to a work camp in Auschwitz; going to Linz, Austria then Lansing, where they manufactured clothes for the Nazis; conditions in the camp; prisoners walking to work while civilians just watched; being liberated by the Americans; the American Red Cross taking over; meeting her husband at a refugee camp; being reunited with her brother; going to Italy after she and her husband decided not to go to Israel; and living in a hotel in a German city near Munich.

    Oral history interview with Henriette From-Cohen

    Oral history interview with Henriette From-Cohen

    Oral History

    Henriette From, born in Holland in 1923, describes living comfortably as an Orthodox Jew in Amsterdam until the age of 17; the German invasion of Holland in 1940; going into hiding in 1942; staying in hiding for nearly two years, during which time she got married; being betrayed by the foster daughter of the family that was hiding them; being five months pregnant and taken by the Germans by cattle car to Birkenau; her work building a new railroad; being beaten; her large dress hiding her pregnancy; having her daughter born prematurely at eight months; her baby being taken one night and dying; surviving the starvation, the hard labor, and the illnesses at the camp until the Russian troops liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau; staying in the Russian zone for six months before returning to her family home in Amsterdam; marrying her second husband and having a child; realizing that she could no longer live in the country that held so many terrible memories for her; and moving to Los Angeles, CA, where she established new roots.

    Oral history interview with Georgia Gabor

    Oral history interview with Georgia Gabor

    Oral History

    Georgia Gabor, born Budapest, Hungary in 1930, describes being the only survivor in her family besides one cousin; growing up in a prominent family; becoming aware that she was different from other Hungarians because she was Jewish in 1942; hearing what was going on in Poland with the Jews; the Germans arriving in March 1944; the formation of a Judenrat (Jewish council), which her father was part of; the book she wrote (My Destiny: Survivor of the Holocaust); restrictions on the Jews; the bombings in Budapest; keeping a notebook of her experiences during that time; the roundups and deportations; receiving a Swiss affidavit; not wearing the star; getting her mother released from the brick factory with the help of a Nazi, who was a former client of her father; witnessing the brutal beatings and torture of Hungarian Jews; hiding out; and her view of American Jews during the war.

    Oral history interview with Barbara Gerson

    Oral history interview with Barbara Gerson

    Oral History

    Barbara Gerson (née Branka Nomberg), born May 30, 1924 in Warsaw, Poland, describes growing up in Łódź, Poland; being the youngest of three children; losing a brother on July 8, 1932; her strictly orthodox family; attending a private school; the war beginning; being required to wear a yellow star of David; her family's textile business being taken away; her father being beaten; going to live with a family in Czestochowa, Poland and never seeing her mother again; passing as Polish while she was aboard the train; going to Warsaw before going to Czestochowa; having to wear arm bands and moving to the ghetto; falling in love with a man originally from Krakow, Poland; Aktions in 1942; being taken to a small ghetto and getting married to Bolek; being chosen to clean the big ghetto; working in a fabric factory; her husband smuggling out furs from the ghetto; getting hepatitis and going to the hospital; going to the factory, which became a guarded camp; her husband’s work making bullets for guns; being transferred to a part of the factory that was involved with calibrating machinery; experiencing starvation and no longer menstruating; Bolek getting typhoid; being transferred to her husband's factory; having an abortion; her husband smuggling bullets to the underground; hiding during the evacuation of the camp; being liberated and returning to Łódź; reuniting with her brother; she and her husband staying at the displaced persons camp in Landsberg am Lech, Germany; telling her children about her experiences; and hoping that talking to people about the Holocaust will prevent it from happening again.

    Oral history interview with Gertrude Goetz

    Oral history interview with Gertrude Goetz

    Oral History

    Gertrude Goetz, born in Vienna, Austria September 7, 1931, describes being the only child of a middle class family; her parents’ store; her parents not being religious and not being exposed to much Jewish culture; antisemitism in Austria; Austria being annexed by the German Reich; Jews being deported; her mother being outspoken and getting into an argument with a Nazi and being arrested; her mother’s release; not being allowed to attend school; her father being sent to Dachau; synagogues being burned; her family getting passes to Italy and her father’ release; her parents working for Jews, cleaning houses, in Milan, Italy; her father being imprisoned when Italy joined the war; being sent to a small village and spending two years there; her mother falling ill; being treated kindly by the locals; being converted in order to attend school; listening to the radio; leaving the village and going to a farm; being liberated in June 1944; living at a refugee camp for six years; her father’s depression; and meeting her husband, Sam, at a refugee camp in Italy.

    Oral history interview with Samuel Goetz

    Oral history interview with Samuel Goetz

    Oral History

    Samuel Goetz describes living in Tarnow, Poland; his Jewish family being assimilated into Polish society; Jews not being able to attend school; being 11 years old when the war began; the Germans rounding up the Jews on the one year anniversary of Kristallnacht; the family breaking apart; living in the ghetto and the restrictions placed on Jews; his family selling belongings on the black market; preparing for his bar mitzvah; events in the ghetto and his parents being deported to Belzec, where they died; briefly escaping the ghetto and hiding in a small room; returning to work in the ghetto; the liquidation of the ghetto and being sent to Cracow-Płaszów concentration camp then to Gross-Rosen; being marched to Mauthausen; his last week in the camp; and liberation.

    Oral history interview with Sam Goldberg

    Oral history interview with Sam Goldberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Zelda Gordon

    Oral history interview with Zelda Gordon

    Oral History

    Oral history group interview with Barbara Gerson, Barry Bruk, Marion Chervin, Sophie Weinstein, and Fred Diament

    Oral history group interview with Barbara Gerson, Barry Bruk, Marion Chervin, Sophie Weinstein, and Fred Diament

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Bertha Haberfeld

    Oral history interview with Bertha Haberfeld

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Felicia Haberfeld

    Oral history interview with Felicia Haberfeld

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ruth Halbreich

    Oral history interview with Ruth Halbreich

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Siegfried Halbreich

    Oral history interview with Siegfried Halbreich

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Isadore Helfing

    Oral history interview with Isadore Helfing

    Oral History

    Isadore (Isaak) Helfing describes growing up in Kielce, Poland; being 17 years old when the war began; doing forced labor for the Germans; his time in the Kielce Ghetto; being transported to Treblinka, where he worked unloading dead bodies from incoming transport cars; working in the stables and taking care of a Gestapo soldier’s horse; playing soccer in the camp; suicide in the camp; having a part in the organization of the Treblinka camp uprising; his escape from Treblinka at the time of the uprising; going into hiding with a Polish farmer and working on his farm for almost a year; living with a band of Jewish runaways for a month before the end of the war in foxholes in the open fields; going to Lublin, Poland then returning to Kielce and working for the Russians; helping to reorganize the Jewish community; trying to get to Palestine; going to Bari, Italy; getting restless and going to Germany; living in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany for five years; immigrating to the United States and marrying a woman he had met originally in Germany; and the nightmares he had after the war.

    Oral history interview with Alice Hemar

    Oral history interview with Alice Hemar

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Joseph Hess and Max Hess

    Oral history interview with Joseph Hess and Max Hess

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Henia Weit

    Oral history interview with Henia Weit

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Erika Jacoby and Malvina Engel

    Oral history interview with Erika Jacoby and Malvina Engel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Elly Kam

    Oral history interview with Elly Kam

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ben Kam

    Oral history interview with Ben Kam

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Hanka Kent

    Oral history interview with Hanka Kent

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Cesia Kingston

    Oral history interview with Cesia Kingston

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with David Klipp

    Oral history interview with David Klipp

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Leon Kushynski

    Oral history interview with Leon Kushynski

    Oral History

    Leon Kushynski, born in Sulmierzyce, Poland, describes his life growing up in Poland and receiving a good public and private education until he was 14 or 15; going to work in the leather business belonging to his uncle in Chanclerhoff (Częstochowa), Poland; the increasing antisemitism before the war; the intolerable conditions when the Germans came; the shooting of people in the plaza during “Bloody Monday”; how young men were sent to labor camps; the Judenrat (Jewish council); his home becoming part of the Jewish ghetto; being sent to a camp in Ukraine and running away several weeks later with several people; getting back to Chanclerhoff and living in the ghetto; deportations from the ghetto; his work in several different factories; how the Germans recruited "new Germans" from groups of Lithuanians and Latvians to help them; joining an underground group and digging a tunnel; surviving much of the war because of his skill in leather working; bribing a German to help him during the war; and starting a leather goods business after moving to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Sophie Lazar

    Oral history interview with Sophie Lazar

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Henryk Leman

    Oral history interview with Henryk Leman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Beba Leventhal

    Oral history interview with Beba Leventhal

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Fred Levis

    Oral history interview with Fred Levis

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Rudolph Yerahmiel Loebel

    Oral history interview with Rudolph Yerahmiel Loebel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Maurice Markheim

    Oral history interview with Maurice Markheim

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Jay Markoff

    Oral history interview with Jay Markoff

    Oral History

    Jay Markoff discusses his life growing up in Bialystok, Poland and witnessing the September 1939 German occupation of Poland; the arrival of the Russian “liberation” and occupation forces; going to school but living in tough conditions under the Russian occupation; how the Russians sent many people to Siberia and shut down businesses; the return of the Germans in June of 1941; the round-up of 2,000 Jewish men into a temple that was then burned down; his experiences during ghetto round-ups and escaping them; the German “Action” and how approximately 10,000 people were killed; joining the Jewish partisan forces in 1941 and creating schemes to destroy German railcars; various experiences during the war like keeping his hair long, so people would not suspect him of being a Russian soldier and working as a photographer for the SS photography department; spending two and a half months, from August 17 to November 3, 1943 hiding in the attic of a building; eventually joining the Russian Army and becoming a Russian artillery commander; returning to Poland where he found his old mother and sister in Bavaria; and getting his exit visa in December 1946.

    Oral history interview with Samuel Michaels

    Oral history interview with Samuel Michaels

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ralph Miles

    Oral history interview with Ralph Miles

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Henry Nusbaum

    Oral history interview with Henry Nusbaum

    Oral History

    Henry Nusbaum, born in Żyrardów, Poland, describes moving to Warsaw, where he was raised and attended school; his father's job in the wholesale food business and his attempts to care for his family; his naivety about the events taking place in Europe; the daily bombardments of Warsaw and the scarcity of food and water; the German invasion of Warsaw; leaving Warsaw with one of his brothers and a friend to live and work in Byelorussia (Belarus); returning to Warsaw when the ghetto walls were going up; being involved in smuggling food and goods from the outside of the ghetto with his father and brother and then being arrested; the typhus epidemic in the ghetto; escaping the ghetto and living with peasants in the countryside; his sisters and parents later joining him; his flight and capture when the Germans came looking for boys to fight in the army; being sent to Janiszów labor camp with other Jews; being transferred to Budzyn work camp in 1942; being sent to Tomaszów then Auschwitz; avoiding hard labor because of his mechanical abilities; being sent to another camp, where he was a cook; being transferred to several other camps via cattle cars towards the end of the war; being liberated by the Swiss Red Cross; managing to piece together an existence, find food and shelter, and begin a search for family; his pessimistic attitude after the war; and his hope that along with others he will be able to help the world from experiencing another Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Leopold Page

    Oral history interview with Leopold Page

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ludmila Page

    Oral history interview with Ludmila Page

    Oral History

    Ludmilla Page, born in July of 1920 in Kishinev, Romania (Chisinau, Moldova), describes her life growing up in Poland; how her parents practiced medicine in Poland and inspired her to also pursue a medical career; the death of her father when she was 14 years old; the German occupation of Vienna, Austria when she was studying medicine at the University of Vienna; the arrest of her mother in November 1939; being taken to Krakow, Poland with her mother, 3,000 Poles, and 1,700 Jews; the formation of the Krakow Ghetto in March 1941 and her work in a factory; her mother’s transfer to Warsaw, Poland, where she worked as a doctor; being sent to the Płaszów concentration camp and never seeing her mother again; working in the factory run by Schindler during the day at the camp; her husband working as welder; being sent with all of the other factory workers to Birkenau, where she spent three weeks; returning to Schindler’s factory where he gave them guns to defend themselves against the Germans; her and her husband’s liberation on May 8, 1945; living in Germany from December 1945 to 1947; and immigrating to New York, NY where she and her husband had one daughter.

    Oral history interview with Israel Rosenwald

    Oral history interview with Israel Rosenwald

    Oral History

    Israel Rosenwald, born in 1924 in Piotrkow Trybunalski, Poland, discusses his family; his father’s grocery store; the beginning of the war; being moved with his family to the Łódź ghetto; working at a factory that manufactured glass plates; his father being injured at the factory; life in the ghetto; a hiding place his parents made in their attic and staying there during the liquidation of the ghetto; being discovered and sent to the smaller ghetto; the Jewish police and the Gestapo; being herded into the big synagogue surrounded by Ukrainian guards and his parents sneaking out; being evacuated to Czestochowa in September 1944; doing forced labor in a factory manufacturing goods for the army; being liberated by the Russians in January 1945; returning home and reuniting with his mother; going with his future wife to Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp, where they stayed until 1951; immigrating to the United States; the fates of his brothers; his two children; and experiencing nightmares for many years after the war.

    Oral history interview with Jack Salzberg

    Oral history interview with Jack Salzberg

    Oral History

    Jack Salzberg, born May 25, 1923, describes his life growing up in Yanov (Janów), Poland (known as Potok Złoty) in an observant, Zionist family; his family moving to Bedzin, Poland in 1938; entering the Bedzin Ghetto and dealing with the Judenrat (Jewish council) and Moses Meryn; being deported to Auschwitz and selected to an elite program designed to train top Jews to be supervisors in the Krupp armaments factory; being taken to Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald, and Flossenbürg; ending up in a French convent hospital after he gorged on the food given to him by the American GIs during liberation; being treated for pneumonia; going to Weiden, Germany; hitchhiking home in July 1945; his wife’s experience escaping from a death march; getting married in February 1946; living in Germany for four years; and immigrating to the United States and moving to San Jose, CA.

    Oral history interview with Frances Simon

    Oral history interview with Frances Simon

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Frederick Spiegler

    Oral history interview with Frederick Spiegler

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Bart Stern

    Oral history interview with Bart Stern

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Emilia Stern

    Oral history interview with Emilia Stern

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sarna Stoger

    Oral history interview with Sarna Stoger

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Rose Toren

    Oral history interview with Rose Toren

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Harry Wasser

    Oral history interview with Harry Wasser

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sara Wasser

    Oral history interview with Sara Wasser

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Leon Weinstein

    Oral history interview with Leon Weinstein

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sophie Weinstein

    Oral history interview with Sophie Weinstein

    Oral History

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