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Oral history interview with Leon Senders

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1993.A.0095.69 | RG Number: RG-50.163.0069

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    Oral history interview with Leon Senders
    Transcript
    My name is Gail Schwartz.
    Today is April 28, 1988.
    I am here to interview Leon Senders who
    is a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust.
    I am doing this under the auspices of the Oral History
    Project, Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington.
    The purpose of this interview is to add
    to the oral history of the Nazi Holocaust
    so that through this living memorial,
    future generations will know what happened.
    With this knowledge, hopefully we
    can prevent any such occurrence in the future.
    Could you please tell me your name?
    My name at present is Leon Senders.
    But actually, when I was born, my name,
    a Yiddish name was Lazar Senderovich, just like Lazar,
    the butcher in the thing.
    I had the same name, Lazar Senderovich.
    And could you tell me when you were born?
    I was born in March the 19th, 1923.
    And where were you born?
    I was born in Vilna.
    Vilna.
    Yes.
    And OK.
    At that time, Vilna was occupied by the Polish,
    by the Polish government.
    Because Vilna is actually the capital of Lithuania.
    But after the First World War, the Polish government
    occupied Vilna, and figured that this is a Polish city.
    Could you describe your household
    as you were growing up?
    In our household, were three children, a mother,
    and a father.
    I had a younger sister.
    She was four years younger than I,
    and an older sister who was a year and a half
    older than myself.
    In other words, I was the middle born child.
    My father was born in 1900.
    So when I saw him the last time, he
    was 41, a young man at that time.
    My mother was exactly the same year.
    And my father was a builder.
    His specialty was building ovens.
    We had ovens at that time in the houses.
    We didn't have any steam or electricity to heat the houses.
    So ovens were the thing to do.
    And he had several people working for him.
    And he made a pretty good living.
    What were the ovens made out of?
    They were made out of clay, but the squares
    were usually glazed, very pretty things, very pretty.
    You can see them in museums here, I think, like this.
    And then my mother wasn't working.
    She was running the household.
    She always had a maid to help her, because in those days
    we had to carry water and do the wash
    and everything was very hard.
    My mother was sort of a sickly woman, so she had have help.
    What were your parents' names?
    My father's name was Shlomo, and my mother's name was Rivka.
    And my older sister's name was Dvora,
    and the youngest sister was Pesia.
    And for my family, my oldest sister survived.
    She's in Israel.
    And I see her once in a while.
    Do you have any memories of your grandparents?
    Yeah, my grandparents, yeah.
    I didn't know the father's side of the grandparents.
    But I did know the mother's side of the grandparents.
    My father actually learned the trade
    from my grandfather, my mother's father.
    He was doing this work, like building ovens.
    And he just learned from him.
    But my grandfather was rather poor.
    They lived in a basement apartment, a huge basement
    apartment.
    And all the children got married, lived there with him
    until they could get out and start a life for themselves.
    And also, my grandmother was taking care of the house.
    And my grandfather was working.
    And he died right at the beginning of the war in '41.
    He was an old man.
    He actually wasn't an old man.
    But to me, it looked like an old man.
    But he was younger than I am right now.
    Did your father work at home?
    Was his factory near the house?
    No.
    He used to build ovens for people in their houses.
    So if you need an oven, you would come, visit him.
    And tell him that you would like Mr. Senderovich
    to go build for your oven.
    And he would come out, take a look, give you an estimate.
    And he would go in with some people and start working.
    So he couldn't build it in a factory.
    It wasn't prefab.
    He had to take out the wall and build the oven,
    so it would be warm for two rooms.
    You understand what I mean?
    Yes, yeah.
    Do you have any other memories of your relatives, cousins,
    aunts, uncles?
    Oh, yeah.
    We had-- we had a lot.
    Yeah, we had a big family in Vilna.
    They were there probably a couple hundred years.
    So we had big families in there.
    But I don't remember, because I was
    a young kid when they all left.
    Because actually the war started for us in '38, '39,
    when Germany and Poland had started the war in '39.
    I don't remember exactly.
    So Russia came in from the East and Germany
    came in from the West, and split on the river Bug.
    So all the Jews that were on the East side of Poland,
    not all, but a lot of them, run away to Russia,
    being afraid that the Germans would come in.
    And that's where my family run away.
    And we didn't run.
    We stayed.
    Let's talk a little bit more about Vilna
    before we get on to later times.
    What kind of a city was Vilna?
    Vilna was a very, very Jewish city.
    The population of Vilna at that time was a quarter of a million,
    250,000.
    85,000 of the population were Jews.
    And the interesting thing, even the signs over the stores
    were written mainly in Yiddish.
    Like you saw it on East side in New York, well,
    that was our city.
    And for a tax collector, he would go around
    and would know which business he wants to go in.
    So they made a special law that the name, the owner, everything
    had to be written in Polish.
    Otherwise he wouldn't know.
    So we had sugar geschaft, spice geschaft, all kind of things.
    A geschaft is a store.
    And it was a beautiful city.
    The city was laying on two rivers.
    And we had two big hills down there
    that we used to go sliding on things.
    It was really nice, always cool.
    And it was nice, but just we had problems with antisemitism
    down there.
    Otherwise, we had a lot of Jewish schools down there.
    They taught in Yiddish, a few in Hebrew, and around four of them
    were taught in Polish.
    Then we had a big technion in Vilna,
    the technical school where I finished
    my seven years primary school.
    From there, I went to a technical school
    where I studied for four years.
    And if the war wouldn't begin, I was
    scheduled to go to Paris to finish engineering school.
    But the war started.
    And I never went in there.
    Was your family considered very wealthy or middle class?
    Middle class.
    Middle class.
    Middle class, yeah.
    We didn't have any properties down there
    or anything like that, but we were very well dressed.
    We had a nice living room, living dining room,
    a bedroom for the parents, and a bedroom for the children.
    They're all one bedroom for all three children?
    For all three children.
    So you shared your bedroom with your two sisters?
    Well, no, actually, what they did
    is they put up the two sisters in one room
    and I slept in the dining room.
    And that was the way we lived down there.
    We had water in there at that time.
    And we had not a toilet.
    We didn't have.
    We had to go outside.
    It was a well upgraded with water, with sewer.
    But we didn't have it.
    We didn't have this one.
    Oh, yeah.
    Yeah.
    I make a mistake.
    No we had a little toilet in that house.
    We had toilet in that house.
    And we had a bath with water like in here, the heaters.
    Yeah.
    But we had to heat it with coal.
    Well, my father was a specialist in this thing,
    so he made sure that we had all the amenities.
    We live in there a long time.
    Is that the house you lived in when you were born?
    No.
    Where had you lived?
    I was born, of course, I told you
    that all the children that got married
    lived with my grandfather and grandmother.
    I was born in a hospital.
    And from there, my mother, and my grandfather,
    and my father and whole family lived together
    like that in that big basement, probably
    for I don't know how long.
    And then we left, and we moved into an apartment,
    because we didn't have any houses built
    in the middle of the city.
    Everything was all apartment buildings, not so tall now.
    But to me at that time, a four-story apartment building
    was very tall.
    How close was the house that you grew up in to the neighbors,
    or did you have land around your house?
    No, it wasn't a house.
    It was an apartment building.
    I see.
    Yeah, so we had neighbors down there.
    Did your family have a religious life?
    Did you observe holidays?
    No.
    My father was a Bundist.
    You know what it is?
    That's the Socialist Party of Poland.
    He belonged to this party.
    And he wasn't religious at all, neither was my mother.
    And as far as religion is concerned,
    I would go once in a while with my grandfather to shul.
    That's all.
    I had my bar mitzvah, also just the grandfather.
    My father didn't even go there.
    Didn't come to your bar mitzvah.
    Did your mother?
    No.
    It is not a big deal like in here.
    I was down there in the synagogue.
    They called me up to the Torah.
    I went up and said whatever I had to say down there,
    not such long drashas like in here.
    I said it, and that's what's over with, within 25,
    30 minutes.
    Were your grandparents all religious?
    Yeah.
    My grandparents were religious, strictly kosher and just
    like their parents, I guess.
    Your family life then was not religious.
    Did you observe Shabbat?
    Well--
    At home?
    We didn't observe as far as, yeah, we did.
    How did you observe?
    Friday night, we always have kreplach or chicken soup
    with all these things.
    Friday night, my mother lighted the candles.
    She didn't say any brachas, but she light the candles.
    It was tradition.
    And then my father wouldn't work on Shabbat.
    But Shabbat was a nice day, because we would go bike riding.
    My mother was bike riding with me.
    And my father would sleep.
    He liked to sleep that day.
    And Sunday, he would go back to work,
    like the whole Jewish community did.
    He would go to the movies or the theater
    on Shabbos, which was the main day to go to movies or theater.
    Everybody would put on their nicer clothes and walk around.
    We'd feel the Shabbos.
    But we didn't know why.
    We didn't go to shul or anything like that.
    Did you keep a kosher house?
    No.
    What about the high holidays, Yom Kippur and Rosh ha-Shanah?
    It was just Shabbat?
    Just Shabbat.
    Just Shabbat.
    Let's talk a little bit about your sisters and their lives.
    How did their lives differ from yours?
    Let's start with your older sister.
    The older sister went to a Yiddish school.
    She didn't go to Polish school like I did.
    School, she went to a Yiddish school, not a Polish school
    like I did.
    And then she was singing, belonging to singing groups.
    And she went to a trade school later on,
    where she learned sewing.
    And she was making nice clothes for herself.
    And she had a sewing machine in the house.
    And she was going out a lot.
    She had a lot of boyfriends.
    And they would come to the house to us,
    because my mother had always an open house,
    always the samovar was on the table,
    and there's tea and stuff like that laying around.
    And young kids used to come down there.
    And since we weren't so much for difference in age,
    I would spend some time with them too.
    Of course, her boyfriends were probably 5 or 10 years younger
    than me, because the guys--
    actually what happened in there is soldiers
    used to come to our house, Jewish soldiers who
    would be in the army in our neighborhood.
    Well, they just came out and saw us.
    And we had a good time with them, nice, nice people
    from different shtetls.
    So we always had a very happy house.
    My younger sister, she was much younger than,
    she was four years younger than me.
    So if I was let's say, 16, she was 12.
    She was a kid.
    We used to go every year.
    We got a dacha.
    You know what a dacha is?
    It's a summer house.
    That belonged to your family?
    No, no.
    They would go out to rent a cottage.
    Where?
    In, like, 10 miles out of Vilna.
    How did you get there?
    Well, the buses were running down there, of course.
    And there were the horse-drawn wagons.
    And I remember we would take a horse-drawn big wagon
    and put on all our mattresses and this thing,
    because the cottages, they were not furnished.
    We had to bring our own everything, like pots and pans,
    and then we would put on our thing
    and just sit on this thing, ride the 10 kilometers.
    How long did it take you?
    It would take us around 2 and 1/2,
    3 hours because it would walk very slowly.
    And we lived a good life down there.
    I like to swim.
    Well, I learned how to swim down there.
    I was a very good kayaker, and I belonged to a club.
    It wasn't a Jewish, it was a Polish club.
    But it was nice.
    I would come every morning, not every morning, but once a week
    or twice a week, and rent a kayak from them
    for a little money, very little money.
    And I would wait for my girlfriend.
    We'd get into this thing, and paddle up the river
    to 10 kilometers, paddle up.
    And then we would meet a lot of young guys like me
    and like here, also on kayaks.
    We'd put them together and there were always
    a few guitars and mandolins.
    And we would sing Yiddish songs in two voices and three voices.
    So it was beautiful.
    We wouldn't kayak at that time.
    Just sit still and the stream would bring us all the way
    to town.
    I remember this very good.
    It's one of my very good moments in life.
    What language did you speak to your friends?
    To my friends I was speaking two languages, Yiddish and Polish.
    And what language did you speak to your parents?
    Yiddish.
    And at home?
    At home we used Yiddish, yeah.
    But there were a lot of my friends
    who couldn't speak Yiddish at all, just English.
    We call them the assimilated Jews.
    But they were nice people.
    But their parents were speaking Polish,
    and they were speaking Polish and they couldn't speak Yiddish.
    There weren't many, but a lot of my friends
    couldn't speak Yiddish.
    Even my girlfriend couldn't speak Yiddish.
    She was a nice Jewish girl.
    What did you do when you were not in school?
    Did you have any activities outside of school?
    Well, of course, every evening, everybody
    would go down to a place like a boardwalk.
    But they were just walking on the sidewalk.
    There was not much going on in the middle.
    They didn't have many cars and bicycles.
    And we would walk the street from beginning to the end.
    And all the young people would meet on there to have dates.
    We wouldn't go to our house and pick up the
    meet on the corner around there.
    And everybody knew already at that movie, at that movie.
    And every night was really, really good.
    It was like meeting all your friends.
    Most of your friends were Jewish?
    Yeah, not most, but all of them.
    I didn't have Polish friends.
    What was your contact with the non-Jewish Poles?
    What kind of contact did you have?
    The contact was a bad, bad blood, I guess.
    We fight constantly.
    Constantly fighting.
    Do you remember any anti-Semitic incidents?
    Oh, yeah.
    Can you describe one?
    Well, when we lived in our apartment house, across from us
    was another apartment house that belonged to a church.
    And all the tenants were Catholics.
    And there was a boy that cleaned the streets down there.
    He was probably my age, maybe a year or two older.
    And every time I would go home, he would holler, hey, Jew.
    And we would start fighting because I never stopped.
    And he said, hey, Jew.
    I will punch you right in the nose.
    And then he would punch me in my nose.
    And that was our contact like this.
    I don't remember having any, any Polish friends.
    You see we lived in a part of Vilna that was like a ghetto.
    So we lived outside of the ghetto.
    That's why I had the Polish people across me.
    But it wasn't far.
    It wasn't far to the ghetto.
    No, it wasn't far for the ghetto.
    Yeah.
    From the ghetto.
    Did you go into the ghetto often?
    Oh, yeah.
    What was it like in the ghetto?
    Well, to me, at that time, it looked very normal.
    But now I understand a lot of poor people.
    A lot of poor people didn't have any clothes.
    We lived good because all my friends would come to my house
    and say, how come you live so nice?
    What is your father doing?
    It was I don't know.
    In the ghetto, I used to come down there,
    and they had houses, rooms without windows.
    We walk in.
    In a bedroom, you got to go through two bedrooms
    through them to get to the third one.
    And it wasn't good in there.
    It was a poor life, very poor.
    How is it that you lived outside the ghetto?
    Well, a lot of Jews lived outside the ghetto.
    But that's where the richer ones, the people.
    Yeah.
    It was a matter of economics.
    Economics?
    Yeah.
    It's what you could afford.
    Yeah, exactly.
    Exactly.
    Could the Jews in the ghetto pass outside of the ghetto
    easily?
    Well, It was just streets.
    There was not a ghetto.
    But later on, it became a ghetto.
    And before, well my father told me what happened,
    maybe before him yet, there was a ghetto.
    But not for my time.
    There was no ghetto.
    People just walked in and out.
    I don't know if I'm making sense to you.
    Yes.
    Who were your closest friends?
    Yeah, I had some very close friends.
    And do you want to hear some names?
    Well, they were other students at your school with you?
    Yeah, yeah.
    I had some very close friends that we spent primary school
    and in the technikum all together.
    And they lived not far from us.
    We walked to school together or go out with a girl.
    Then, yeah, I skied down there a lot in Vilna.
    We had some hills, very nice hills.
    And I was the president of the sport club in technikum.
    And we built our own skis with our own bindings.
    And we had a whole group of boys who would ski the whole winter.
    We got long winter, like in here.
    There was no chairlifts or anything like that,
    but we managed to climb up.
    Now let's talk a little bit about the middle-to-late
    '30s, did you start to notice that the atmosphere was changing
    in Vilna?
    As far as I'm concerned, I had always
    a hell of a lot of antisemitism, and nothing
    changed when I was little or when I left Vilna.
    It was the same thing.
    We knew that we were Jewish and we were keeping to ourselves.
    Although my sports you take me outside from Jewish circles,
    because there were a lot of skiers, non Jews.
    There were a lot of kayakers, non Jews.
    Did you experience antisemitism in sports?
    Yeah.
    I remember we had a 10 kilometer run,
    and we had to run 10 kilometers.
    It was a cross country deal.
    And there were standing some Polish students with sticks.
    And every time they would see a Jewish racer,
    they'd come behind and knock the hell out of us.
    And when you are racing like this
    and you come to the sixth or seventh kilometer,
    you can't even breathe well enough,
    so you couldn't fight them.
    And then you got the sports.
    So, they were just standing there and beating us up.
    Let's now talk about the late '30s.
    Your last grade in high school or in the technical school
    was what?
    How old were you and what grade was it?
    This was already '41.
    After I finished technikum, that was probably around a month
    or so when the war started.
    OK.
    Do you have any specific memories of 1939?
    Or did life go on the same?
    Life went on for us.
    The same?
    The same.
    We had a lot of antisemitism right
    after '39, when you see what happened,
    Russia went from the East, and she took all the land up
    to the Vistula, yeah, the Bug and the Vistula.
    And when they took the land away,
    they split the land between Hitler and Stalin.
    They gave our city back to the Lithuanians,
    so they would have the capital again.
    Then the Lithuanian soldiers marched in.
    And they were just beating, just like hell.
    Any place they could catch one, they would beat them up
    for no reason at all.
    That I remember.
    I was still a kid.
    You actually witnessed incidents?
    Yeah.
    I witnessed when that came up and they beat them up
    with the guns.
    What it's called?
    The bottom of the gun.
    The butt.
    The butt, yeah.
    I saw this thing myself.
    Were you very frightened?
    No.
    Why not?
    I was a boy, 16 years old or 15 years old.
    And I thought someday we'll give it back to them.
    I wasn't frightened.
    I was never frightened in anything like that.
    What was your parents' reaction?
    I don't remember.
    They were not fighting.
    Also, they didn't think about escaping someplace,
    going someplace else.
    We just thought that this thing will pass,
    because it's they came in the soldiers.
    They are not from our place.
    They are from someplace else.
    We don't know them.
    And truly, it took us maybe a week or 10 days
    and they stopped this business.
    OK.
    And now, 1940, '41, as things started to change.
    Can you describe some of the conditions?
    In 1940 it was better for us because the communists
    were down there.
    And the Poles didn't have so much to tell us.
    They were afraid themselves because the communists
    were taking out the ringleaders from the anti-Semitic groups
    down there.
    And the people were rich that had
    farms and land, the big shots from the Polish big shots.
    They were being sent to Siberia.
    So it created a situation that they had their own problems,
    so many that they forgot all about us.
    And there were a lot of Jewish communists
    down there that were working hand-in-hand with the Russians
    at that time.
    So they were afraid of the Jews and life was good.
    You know, they didn't bother us.
    The Russians would come and buy anything
    they could buy in Vilna.
    Yeah.
    So there the industry was doing very well at that time.
    And people got a little better off.
    They were moving into better apartments,
    and this lasted until 1941.
    And in the meantime, was your father concerned?
    He was a Bundist.
    Was he concerned?
    No, he wasn't concerned.
    He was a socialist.
    He wasn't concerned about nothing.
    I remember he didn't work anymore.
    What he did, he had already contracts,
    like they were building new barracks for soldiers.
    So they had to put in 200 or 400 ovens here.
    So when the Polish government was there,
    and you couldn't even go out and bid on a job like this.
    And all of a sudden, they came up and said, look,
    we know you're a very good oven maker and whatnot.
    Why don't you take on this thing?
    So it was good.
    So he was not concerned?
    He was not concerned.
    No.
    And the only thing is when the war started.
    Let's now talk a little bit, OK, now 19--
    Can you stop it for a second.
    I want to bring something to drink.
    [AUDIO OUT]
    Now we are up to about 1940, 1941.
    And conditions are beginning to change.
    Can you describe that time?
    The conditions didn't start changing
    until they bombed our city.
    We knew what's going on in the occupied Poland, which
    is under the German occupation.
    How did you know what was going on?
    We had newspapers and would read the newspapers.
    But we didn't think about '41.
    Because '39 was just that we heard about this thing.
    But actually, we didn't see any fights in Vilna.
    The Russians just marched in, took up to the Vistula from one
    side, and the Germans from the other side.
    And that was it.
    This was over with.
    We had just the incidents that I told you about,
    the Lithuanian soldiers that were giving us
    a hard time for a while, just for maybe 10 days or so.
    And it was over with.
    It was bad with food at that time because the money
    that we had were Polish money.
    And we could not buy nothing with that.
    So I remember my father's brother who lived in Lithuania,
    and they didn't have any problems with their money,
    with their thing.
    So they would send us packages with food.
    And I remember this thing.
    They would send you pack, your family packages?
    Yeah, because we lived in Poland and they lived in Lithuania.
    They lived in Kovno.
    And we lived in Vilna.
    And they didn't know nothing of the war at all.
    The money was still good because it was Lithuanian.
    But the Polish money wasn't good anymore.
    So that was the problem.
    This was the only problem.
    But this wasn't for long, just maybe a couple of months or so,
    and this passed by.
    Everything was OK until the war in 1941.
    That's what, all of a sudden, with one chop,
    like you would take a knife and cut a thing in half.
    That's what happened to us.
    Just well, if you want me to start telling you about it?
    Yes, yes.
    Yes.
    Well, when I finished the technikum in 1941.
    And you were 18?
    I was 18, yeah.
    And I got myself my first job in my life in a radio manufacturing
    company.
    There was a company that was making radios in Vilna.
    And they were making all the parts and things like this.
    And since I was from technikum, I knew how to work the machines.
    So I worked down there for a month.
    You know, we graduated, let's say, at the end of May,
    beginning of June.
    And the war started a month later.
    So when the war started, I was on a trip with that factory
    to some lakes that was not far from Vilna.
    It was not only me, but there were probably a couple hundred
    youngsters like me.
    I started to work down there and the factory gave us the trip.
    They lent the trucks to us, and they let us go down there.
    On the way out to the lakes, we stopped the columns of trucks.
    And they were talking, talking amongst themselves, the drivers.
    We didn't know what it is.
    Then we drove another couple of kilometers and then
    they stopped and came out and said,
    look, guys, this and this what happened.
    Vilna was bombed.
    We were maybe around 30 or 40 miles away
    from Vilna at that time when he told us about it.
    And we are returning.
    We turned around, and we came to Vilna.
    I saw things bombed, broken up, terrible things happened.
    And I run to my house, the apartment we lived.
    And I saw a whole wall from the living room torn out.
    We had a grand piano.
    This was pushed out, hanging with one leg down there.
    I will never forget this thing.
    And nobody was there.
    So I run to my grandparents.
    I thought, well, that's when I came down there,
    I saw my whole family down there, everybody together.
    And we were talking about what are we going to do.
    Are we going to run, if we're going to stay in here.
    And while we were talking like this,
    there are a few guys walked by and say,
    hey, Lazar, are you going to stay here or are you
    going with us?
    I said, tell my father, papa, I would like to go with him.
    He said, go, go.
    And I remember he had some bread.
    He gave me a loaf of bread.
    And he gave me some 60 rubles.
    Whatever it was, I don't know.
    And I just didn't even go in to say goodbye to anybody,
    just walked away.
    That was the last time I saw my family.
    Did you know where you were going?
    I knew that we were going East to Russia.
    Because as a young man, I didn't want to be under the Germans
    when they came over in here.
    The first thing they'll do is start with the young boys.
    We knew that they had the ghettos.
    We knew that they had concentration camps
    from the newspapers.
    Like I said before.
    This was written up in the newspaper?
    Yeah.
    It was written up when they had the [NON-ENGLISH],
    the nights of the--
    Crystal Nights and things like this.
    So we knew about all.
    So--
    Which newspapers wrote this?
    Yiddish newspapers.
    We had probably at least 10 different newspapers.
    Every party had its own newspaper.
    They were published in Vilna?
    Published in Vilna.
    Yeah.
    And so I just kept on walking.
    And I came to the border.
    And they said, they let me in, into Russia.
    Go on.
    A lot of them, they didn't let in.
    But I don't know why.
    They looked at me and they let me in.
    What about your friends?
    My friends also.
    Almost half of them went in and half of them went back to Vilna.
    How many were there in your group?
    12, and we just walked.
    We didn't have any rides.
    Nobody gave us any rights.
    Nobody, but then when we crossed the border,
    we boarded a train across the border.
    We boarded a train.
    And how long was it from Vilna to the border?
    It was probably around 60 kilometers.
    We walked a day and a night, maybe longer.
    I don't remember, really.
    And we boarded the train.
    And every 10 minutes we would be bombed.
    Every 10 minutes the train would stop
    and everybody would run into the field to hide.
    And until I came to Smolensk with the train, that's
    a city not in Ukraine, that's in the White Russia.
    And from there, we were gathered down there,
    and we sent away to Penza.
    When you got to Smolensk, who did you meet up with?
    When I got what?
    You said, you got to Smolensk.
    Smolensk?
    Yes.
    Who did you meet up with?
    Well, we were always the same group holding out together.
    And then there was a refugee committee or something
    like this.
    I don't remember exactly.
    They gathered us.
    They gave us some food and something
    to drink, water or whatnot.
    And they loaded up on an echelon, and sent us to--
    what's the name?
    Penza.
    These were Jews?
    These were all Jews, yeah, only Jews that knew of.
    Maybe there were some Polish communists,
    something like that, that were running with us.
    But I didn't know.
    In that group, we stick together.
    And we came to Penza.
    We were again put in a transfer place.
    And from there, another transit place, they brought us transit.
    And from there, we were sent away
    in a kolkhoz, this collective farm in Russia.
    They have a lot of collective farms in there.
    And that's why they have nothing to eat, because it doesn't work.
    And from there, I was sent to--
    How long were you on the collective farm?
    I was down there probably for a season, a whole season.
    Now, what time of year this was in?
    This was in-- that was between June and December.
    Of 1941,
    1941.
    I was working in a tractor repair shop.
    And after--
    And what city was the collective farm in?
    It was in the region of Penza.
    Because a collective farm cannot be in a city.
    It's a farm.
    So I worked down there for that period until winter.
    And then I went to the army.
    I applied for the Lithuanian division.
    Lithuanian division in the Red Army.
    The Lithuanian division was 98% Jewish.
    Whether there's a few Lithuanians,
    I don't even how come they are there.
    But like I said, if there were communists,
    if there were communists, they were running away from there
    too.
    So the few Lithuanians that were running were in that division,
    but most of it were Jewish.
    You could walk around and hear Jews talking all over.
    We didn't speak any Lithuanian or Russian.
    We spoke Jewish amongst us.
    You did not know Russian?
    I knew very little Russian at that time.
    And Lithuanian?
    Lithuanian also were little.
    So it was just Polish and Yiddish.
    Polish and Yiddish, yeah.
    That you were able to speak.
    Yeah, but at that time, when I was in the army,
    we were terribly hungry that year.
    They gave us very, very little food.
    And I remember even that they didn't have any pots for us
    to eat for them.
    Forget about plates.
    They had the little aluminum--
    I forgot what its name pots that we were eating from.
    So let's say we were in our place that we stayed at.
    There were 2,000 soldiers.
    They had only 500 pots.
    So we had to eat in--
    In shifts?
    In shifts, yeah.
    So the first shift would eat, let's say at 8 o'clock.
    And then if I was in the last shift,
    they would wake me up around 3 o'clock
    in the morning to take my pot and go.
    And they didn't give you anything to eat, really.
    Just a little soup, a couple potatoes.
    By the time you bought it from the kitchen to our barracks,
    it were ice cold.
    How many times a day did you eat?
    We ate three times a day.
    But we didn't have any meat or anything like that, all soup
    and potatoes.
    In the morning, they would give you a kettle with what was it?
    Tea without sugar and your bread.
    The bread was a piece like that, that thick,
    and if you squeeze it hard, water would come out of it,
    because they wanted to--
    they were stealing.
    They were stealing the flour.
    So for every kilo of flour, they would put in a kilo of water.
    Who was stealing the flour?
    The management of the kitchens, the camp, whatever it is.
    Because it was very bad and the population did anything to eat.
    So anything you could take out, it was sold right away.
    They didn't have to look for customers.
    People were running around.
    They had money, but they couldn't eat.
    There was nothing to buy.
    That was my worst period of my being away from home.
    I was very thin.
    I weighed probably no more than 85 pounds.
    And I remember my gun was bigger and heavier than I was.
    And I always had to wear big stuff because I'm small.
    And they wouldn't have nothing on my size.
    So always this thing was, the sleeves were rolled up.
    And I was stepping on my coat when I was walking around.
    We didn't have any boots, of course down there.
    We had some short boots and then we had the bandages on the feet,
    and that was our wares.
    We never had any socks at all.
    We had to wear some schmattas down there.
    And well, they send out a whole division to the front
    after training.
    How long were you in the army?
    I was in the army--
    Camp?
    I was in the camp around 3/4 of a year.
    Almost a year.
    And then--
    So that was towards the end of 1942?
    Yeah.
    Toward the end of 1942.
    That's right.
    Could you just repeat the name of the camp.
    Do you remember?
    Where we were?
    The army camp.
    That was in Gorky.
    Oh, in Gorky?
    Gorky.
    Yeah.
    And--
    Did it have any other special name,
    or is that all you remember?
    Gorky.
    Gorky is the region.
    And there was Balakhna, another place outside of Gorky
    where we had our camps down there.
    There was no specific name of your army camp?
    No specific name.
    OK, now it's the end of 1942.
    And you've finished your training.
    It's now '42.
    Yeah '42.
    Because you'd been there about a year.
    Yeah.
    And then all of a sudden, the army went on the front.
    And they kept me down there.
    And I didn't know why.
    What I found out that they are sending me
    to a school because of my technical training,
    where I would learn how to build my own radio
    station, a little radio station, a little one.
    And how I could receive on it.
    And I learned also how to send telegrams.
    And then this was for a year or so.
    And then it's a long story.
    They send me to Moscow.
    I stayed on there for a year and a half.
    OK.
    Let's go back a little bit.
    Where on the front were you?
    I wasn't on the front.
    When everybody left--
    You left your camp.
    And where did you go directly?
    We left the camp to go to the front, and I walked with them.
    We were marching to the front.
    I don't know if I'll have to march a month to get down there.
    But at that moment, when I was marching with them,
    somebody came and told me that, look, the officers of the staff
    wants to see you.
    And let's go back down there, with the guy
    that came to call me.
    And I went back with him.
    And they told me--
    Back to the camp?
    Back to the camp.
    And they told me what they want to do with me.
    They're going to send me to Moscow,
    and they want me to learn to be a diversion guy.
    It means that I would be parachuted
    in the back of the Germans.
    And then there I would get in touch with the underground.
    And I would send telegrams from the partisans to Moscow
    and receive telegrams from Moscow to the partisans.
    And they would know what to do.
    Otherwise, they didn't have--
    what Stalin said actually at that time.
    he wanted the partisans to have eyes and ears.
    And he said the telegrams will be like eyes and ears.
    Because this way they can be always in connection,
    stay in touch with Moscow.
    And Moscow would tell them, look,
    we got to bomb this and this, because there are echelons
    or that where they are sending troops and tanks
    and whatnot to the front.
    So, well, I stayed in their school for a year and a half.
    Where was the school?
    Moscow.
    Oh, so you went from the camp--
    To Moscow.
    To Moscow.
    Yeah.
    How did you get there?
    Well, the trains, I guess.
    I don't remember anymore.
    Not with airplanes, trains I'm sure.
    OK, now you're in Moscow.
    Now I'm in Moscow.
    And you're starting your training course.
    Starting my training course.
    And I was trained in there for 1 and 1/2 years.
    1 and 1/2 years.
    Yeah.
    What was it like living in Moscow then?
    It was much better than in camp.
    But I was still hungry.
    I was hungry always.
    Did you live in army barracks?
    No.
    No, no.
    Then we lived already in a school.
    They set up little cots with pillows.
    It was nice.
    That was living, because there in camp,
    we didn't have any what we call--
    bed--
    Blankets?
    Blankets, bedspreads, nothing.
    We didn't have anything at all.
    We were sleeping on the wooden--
    what's it called?
    The cots.
    The wooden beds?
    Wooden beds, cots, wooden--
    Slats?
    Like what's it called?
    Like the-- like in the camp, you saw people.
    The bunks.
    Bunks, yeah.
    Yeah, wooden bunks.
    And they were always frozen.
    I don't know why.
    Because they would chase us out in the morning for training
    in the camp.
    So we come back, the windows were open,
    and the boards are frozen again, covered with ice.
    Well, so now in Moscow, I feel very good.
    How many men, young men, were with you
    in this training program?
    10,000.
    Not in Moscow in camp.
    In the camp.
    10,000, it was 20 divisions.
    10,000 Jewish young people.
    And how many were with you in the training program?
    In the training program I was by myself, taken out from division
    all by myself.
    But when I came to Moscow, they put me
    in a school where I saw from Latvia, from Estonia, from,
    I don't know, from all over the world, other people who
    were being trained down there to jump, to parachute.
    Jews and non-Jews?
    Jews?
    Non-Jews.
    Very few Jews.
    I remember very few.
    I couldn't say how many, maybe a dozen.
    I'm trying to think.
    And in a winter night, in October night, I
    remember, they loaded me on an airplane.
    And I had my radio station with me.
    And I had some gold.
    I don't know why they gave me gold.
    I don't remember.
    I had to give it to somebody so they could buy out
    whatever they had to do.
    And I had a pack of money, a big pack of German money,
    a few million marks or whatever it was.
    And I had my gun, automatic gun, my knife, and all those things.
    I had so much stuff on me that I couldn't even
    move in the airplane.
    I was laying like a--
    and yeah, I had my parachute on the back.
    So I was that little and I was packed like this.
    And we flew across the--
    I remember the President of Lithuania came to see me off.
    And his son flew with me.
    So he wanted to be over Lithuania, because he
    hasn't been in there.
    So he flew with me.
    And I was all by myself, a parachutist.
    There was the pilot, of course, the guy, and myself.
    And I brought with me some weapons for the partisans.
    I remember 11 big bags.
    A bag was as big as the table, and they pushed them out.
    So they the parachute would open and it
    would have a soft landing, sort of soft landing.
    And of course, there were a lot of automatic guns, ammunitions,
    and whatever there had to be for the thing.
    And I jumped off.
    And I remember.
    It was night in order for the airplane
    to know where it got to drop me off.
    They would get information from the partisans that
    would say, we are going to burn five
    fires in the formation like this and this and that, or five
    fires in a row or four fires, in middle another one.
    That was so the pilot would come.
    He knew where I had to go.
    But yet the fires told him that this is it.
    They were expecting me, or otherwise they
    can drop it off and fly back and nobody is there,
    or Germans can be there.
    Well, they saw the fires and I was drunk.
    I'll tell you the truth.
    I was drunk.
    I was scared.
    And they gave me a bottle of whiskey.
    Yeah, and I jumped off.
    I was falling and falling and falling and falling forever.
    And I had my parachute comes with two straps around the legs
    and two straps around your back.
    And there's a strap that you got to sit on.
    So it wouldn't-- the two straps wouldn't hurt you so much.
    I couldn't sit down on the strap to save my life.
    I was so heavy that I couldn't pull myself up
    on one string and then the other one.
    By the time I got there, I thought, I'm castrated.
    And then to all these things, I got hung on a tree,
    and a branch poked me right in my eye in here.
    And I'm hanging there.
    And I said, what's going to happen now.
    And I was afraid.
    And yeah, and I heard voices.
    And they were talking amongst themselves
    that, look, there is a pack, there is a pack, come on, let's
    get at it.
    And they talk amongst themselves, Yiddish.
    And to me, being so scared, I thought Germans, talking German,
    because German and Yiddish is such a close.
    But then I heard them cussing, terrible Yiddish cussing
    that was just cussed on the market, market women like this.
    And I said oh my god, look at that.
    I'm back in Vilna.
    And I was this was probably around 100 kilometers,
    halfway to Vilna.
    I was parachuted in woods.
    And I came down.
    Yeah, I hung it on that branch until it finally broke off.
    And I landed maybe around 12 meters or so
    that I fell on my behind.
    And I undid my parachute.
    And I felt better.
    I could now move around.
    And I started gathering this and digging.
    I had to dig also a--
    Shovel.
    A shovel.
    And everything was so heavy, I couldn't barely breathe.
    And I dig the hole.
    I buried my parachute.
    And I hear the voices from far away.
    And I start seeing the fires, you
    know, reflections of the fire down there.
    So I walk myself up down there.
    And there is a fallen tree.
    And I see the commander of the whole area down there.
    The partisans, sits down there and he hollers.
    There is a descent.
    You've got to find the guy.
    You've got to find the guy.
    There is a descent.
    And I sit next to him.
    And he doesn't see me.
    He's so upset that he can't find me.
    So I told him in Lithuanian, because he
    was a Lithuanian, the guy.
    Look, I'm a guest from Moscow.
    Don't you give me a hug or something like this?
    Oh, Lyonka, he called me Lyonka down there.
    And they were so happy with me and everybody else.
    And I had my own bag with my own stuff that I had to have.
    You know?
    And partisans usually don't have anything.
    But they thought that they were going
    to send me in a city to live.
    Yeah.
    So I had to have my suits, and my shoes, and my coats,
    outfitting me.
    So the guys from Vilna.
    They saw the bag, they ripped it apart.
    Everybody was stealing it.
    I had chocolates and things.
    I met a guy in Tel Aviv 10 months ago.
    And he says, you know, now I remember.
    He said, I stole the chocolates from your bag.
    So when they find out I'm from Vilna guy,
    next day everybody came and brought back whatever they had,
    whatever, they brought it back.
    And I met my friends.
    And they thought that I'm crazy.
    They are trying to get out of here.
    And I came up with a parachute to be with them.
    Well, and then--
    What were the conditions like in the partisan camp?
    In the partisan camp, we were living in dugouts.
    We were living in dugouts.
    Of course, there are no beds, nothing like this.
    But what they had a lot is parachutes
    from the bags and everything.
    There were a lot of parachutes.
    So they knocked around the--
    the dugouts are made out of--
    well, dig out a hole in the ground.
    And then you put around the logs.
    Yeah.
    You make a roof out of the logs and put this thing back
    on it, the sand and thing back on it.
    But in order to, to not to have all the sand coming
    in your eyes, they put parachutes on it.
    It was very thin.
    We thought it's silk.
    But now we know it's nylon.
    And so everything was in white down there, dirty white.
    I stayed with them around four days or five days.
    How many people, how many partisans were there?
    I don't know.
    There were probably in that place
    that I was, around 400, 500 partisans in that area.
    Who was the leader?
    The leader was a Jewish man by the name of--
    I don't remember his name.
    I forgot.
    But his partisan name was Jurgis, Jurgis.
    And everybody knew Jurgis.
    He was the chief of the partisan movement in Lithuania.
    And I was his guest.
    His name was Zeman Zemanas.
    Was he Jewish?
    Yeah, he came from a very religious family.
    But he was a communist, of course.
    He was a great communist.
    He was one of the leaders of the Communist Party in Lithuania.
    We were talking about the partisan camp
    and you were talking about your leader.
    Yeah.
    So is there anything more you wanted to say?
    Yeah.
    OK.
    I was in the camp for four or five days.
    In that time, I met some neighbors
    from where we lived in the city.
    And they told me the whole story of what
    happened to Vilna at that time and how they were killed,
    how they were taken to camps.
    I didn't know about it at all.
    Because being in Moscow, the newspapers
    weren't too much telling about what's going on down there.
    They had other stuff to write about.
    So I didn't know.
    And she told me exactly what happened to my family,
    how they died, and everything.
    And I talked to her about it for two nights,
    until I find everything out.
    We'll talk about later, maybe, about this thing.
    But at that moment, we have three or four days down there.
    And I had to go to my--
    because of the work.
    Again, I don't remember.
    I had to go to my whatever I came to do down there.
    Because I didn't know, they didn't tell me
    what I'm going to do down there.
    Yeah?
    Because in case if the Germans would catch me, since I don't
    know, I couldn't tell them.
    Yeah?
    So I didn't know.
    But when I came to the camp, I didn't know even
    where I'm flying.
    Just the president told me that you're going home.
    So I assumed that that's what it is.
    And, of course, flying over the front, and we were shot at,
    you know, and then finally landing down there
    and bring this thing.
    So I was, myself, confused about what's going on.
    But then he told me that we are going deep in Lithuania.
    We're going west.
    And we were not a big group, maybe
    around close to 100 people.
    100 partisans?
    Yeah.
    And we had fights almost every day.
    Men and women?
    There were two women, not even two.
    Only one woman was in there.
    What were the ages of the people?
    The ages of the people were from 18, like I was at that time, 19,
    sort of, up to 45, I would say.
    And I don't remember women being active in there.
    Actually, the leader from the group had a girlfriend,
    and he took her with him.
    She was the woman?
    Yeah.
    Where were the most of the partisans from?
    Most of the partisans were from Lithuania.
    And there were, I would say there were half Jews
    and half non-Jews.
    And this guy Jurgis went with me at that time, too.
    And we had fights, I remember.
    Fighting with whom?
    With the Germans.
    They followed us.
    They knew that there was a group going in there.
    But make a long story short, they killed a lot of us.
    And we remained maybe 12 or 15 people,
    I don't remember, from the whole group.
    But we finally came to the place.
    12 and 15?
    Out of 100?
    Yeah.
    Finally, we came to the place.
    You see, I would be fallen probably, too,
    more than everybody else, because I
    liked to push my nose in not my business.
    But I had guys that were guarding me,
    and they didn't let me move.
    And I remember about that Jurgis,
    you know, nobody knew he's a Jew, because he had big--
    what you call it?
    Mustache?
    Mustache, a big black mustache, and he was wearing heavy boots
    with his gun on.
    Nobody could tell is that true.
    But I remember we had a fight.
    And I was jumping up to go shoot or do something.
    He told me he in Yiddish [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].
    What do you mean, your father and your mother are here?
    They're going to watch you?
    You got to watch for yourself?
    And don't go.
    He didn't let me.
    But we were surrounded.
    What could we do?
    We had to fight ourselves out of there?
    Was this in the forest?
    That was in a forest.
    Yeah.
    But there was a big--
    I don't remember.
    There was a house, and there was a barn.
    And we were in the barn, I remember.
    And they were running around from all sides.
    But we opened fire in one place and half run.
    Then the other half that is there, open fire
    and the other half run.
    And then we run in the woods, and we scattered.
    Do you know approximately where this was located?
    No, I don't remember.
    I just don't remember.
    I would say around Siauliai in there, the little town.
    Siauliai, not so little.
    But that area, I remember.
    And then we came to a place called Lazdijai.
    It's very close to the border of Prussia.
    And there we had to organize a group.
    And this would be the most Western group
    from the whole partisans.
    We had to organize our group.
    So we organized because you see, they knew where people are.
    They had connections.
    But of course, I didn't know.
    I had to do my job.
    So I stayed with them for a while.
    There was a small group, maybe 25 people.
    That's all.
    And I had my job to do.
    I had to go to not far from Konigsberg.
    Konigsberg, this is the capital of Prussia.
    And this was Germany then there.
    When you say you had to know, you knew what your job was,
    was that because you were told in Moscow
    or you were told by the partisans?
    I was told by the leader of the partisans.
    The leader of the partisans.
    Jurgis.
    I had to move out all by myself on a farm, a Lithuanian farm.
    The Latvian-- Lithuanian farmer, I think, was a communist,
    or was a paid spy.
    I don't know, whatever it is.
    And we had five spies that worked with me.
    They would go to the city.
    They would go to different places
    and find out different things, come to me,
    and I had to cipher it, like a telegram,
    cipher it, double cipher it, and then send it
    in numbers to Moscow.
    They would disnumber it again and they would decipher it.
    And they had a telegram in which I would tell them
    that on the railroad from Konigsberg today
    20 echelons of soldiers and so many echelons of the howitzers
    and so many echelons of tanks.
    Because everything went to the Eastern front from Germany.
    And then, six hours later, I would see our bombers coming up
    from Russia and bomb them.
    And I knew that I did my job all right.
    And how would you send these messages, by radio?
    Yeah.
    I had a radio.
    You had your radio.
    Yeah.
    That's what I stayed in Moscow--
    For the training.
    --for the training.
    And I would have to move.
    I could never stay in one place long enough.
    Because when you send a telegram, there are two waves.
    One goes through the ionosphere, and the other one
    is an air wave.
    The air wave is not good for us, because the Germans
    can detect where I am.
    There are detector to detect us.
    And wherever their waves cross on my signal,
    they know that I'm exactly down there.
    Two, forgot again.
    So I had to move right away after sending a telegram.
    I would move at least 15 kilometers.
    And I remember once I was sitting at a farmer's house
    and I was eating, I don't remember what,
    whatever I was eating.
    And a German walked in.
    And he says that he wants to eat,
    but he's not going to eat at a table
    with a little orange swine.
    And he threw me out.
    [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] And this was after I sent the telegram,
    so I didn't mind.
    And you were by yourself doing this?
    By myself, yeah.
    And you were about 20?
    19, 20.
    And then I was called back from there to Lazdijai.
    There was another partisan group which I was working with.
    How did you get your messages?
    When you say you were called back, how did you know that?
    Oh, I was getting information from Moscow.
    On the radio?
    On the radio, yeah.
    They would tell me that this and this group
    is organized down there, and they need now radio contact.
    So somebody else probably come down there
    and did the same job I did.
    I wasn't asking nobody.
    Nobody was telling me.
    I was always walking around with a grenade,
    not for my life itself.
    But I was wearing on myself the codes, the codes
    for sending telegrams.
    And if they catch me, they can, of course,
    do whatever they want with me, but the codes
    are never to be seen by them.
    So I had always a grenade with me
    in case if they would catch me, I pull the string,
    and that's it.
    I would be gone.
    The codes would be gone and you would be gone.
    Yeah, sure.
    But I wouldn't like to be caught and questioned and beaten
    and hung upside down.
    It wouldn't be any help to me.
    They would cut the little pieces of me to give information.
    Who is my leader?
    Who is here?
    Who is my contacts?
    So there is no sense to--
    well, we were trained.
    And it didn't bother me at all.
    It didn't bother me.
    Were there any times you were very, very frightened?
    No, not while I was in the partisans.
    Never.
    I don't remember ever being frightened in there.
    I remember we walked with a big group, yeah?
    When we walked from barracks--
    not from our barracks-- from our camp in the partisans,
    when I said we walked around 100 people,
    and every time we would stop and rest, everybody would rest.
    And I would have sit down there and make contact,
    catch the wave, and receive telegram, sent telegrams.
    So when I was doing it, they were sleeping.
    And then when they finished, when I finished my thing,
    I would take my antennas up and undid everything.
    And we march again.
    So I couldn't even sleep enough.
    I learned how to sleep walking.
    Honest, I learned how to sleep.
    I had my lifeguard on there.
    And I would hold on to him.
    I remember it well.
    He was around 45, a redhead, a Lithuanian, little guy,
    smart like a whip.
    And I would hold my hands like this and go to sleep.
    And we came also to the road, and we wanted to cross the road.
    And the Germans were then going with the tanks, waiting.
    So we hid in the bushes.
    We laid down, laid like this.
    And then we signaled each other.
    When it's over and the commander wants us to cross the road,
    he just gives us a little signal--
    [SCRATCHING NOISE] like this.
    Well, I was laying, lo and behold.
    And I was waiting for the Germans to cross,
    and I fell asleep.
    And everybody [CLICKS TONGUE].
    And they run up.
    And I'm in the bushes.
    I wake up.
    What do I do?
    And I didn't know where we're going.
    I didn't know what direction, nothing,
    because I'm not supposed to know anything.
    No partisans know where he is going.
    Just the Germans-- just the commanders know,
    and the people who got to know.
    I didn't know nothing.
    I did my job.
    And that's it.
    And I was all by myself.
    Here I am.
    God.
    And the Germans weren't there anymore.
    The road was clear.
    So I ran across the thing.
    And I walked down here.
    I walked there.
    It was middle of the night.
    You don't do it in daytime.
    Everything is done at night.
    And all of a sudden, I saw this redhead.
    And the guard went [PANTING].
    Come on.
    What's the matter?
    I said, God, is it nice that I see you, that you're alive.
    Otherwise they would shoot me, that I left you in there.
    Things like this, you know, little things I remember.
    And even in the fights, I was never afraid.
    I had a coolness in here in my chest, cool.
    I always felt cool when the fights would start.
    That's my only expression of what I felt inside.
    Just cool, that's all.
    All right.
    We left you in the farmhouse and the German asked you to leave.
    Yeah.
    And then what happened?
    Well, OK.
    It was just an incident, a little thing
    what happened down there.
    But after three months or four months, I don't remember,
    they took me out of there.
    Remember I said I received a telegram?
    And they send me to a group that wasn't far from there.
    And they send a guide who met me,
    and he took me across the woods and all this thing
    that I had to be.
    And I stayed on there with a group of partisans, again,
    and sending telegrams.
    Do you know where that was?
    This was Lazdijai.
    Oh, yeah.
    Lazdijai, that's the most Western point
    of our partisan movement.
    And then I stayed on there until the Germans lost the war.
    What did you do there?
    The same thing, I was sending telegrams for the partisans.
    Were you moving around?
    Oh, yeah.
    We moved around always.
    We would walk to a place where I send in the woods, do like this.
    We would turn around and walk backwards.
    So when the Germans would see our footsteps,
    they would think that we went this way.
    Yeah?
    That's the kind of stuff we did.
    You know, we just lived in the woods.
    Cold, oof, was it cold.
    We would lay down, like, five partisans would lay down
    on the floor, on the ground to sleep.
    So everybody would take off his coat and put a couple of coats
    under us.
    And then we would just lay together,
    you know, just hug each other like this so it wouldn't freeze.
    And then the guy who stood guard would cover us up
    with the rest of the coats and cold.
    We would wake up in the morning and shake like this.
    And right away, take a few bottles of moonshine,
    and everybody would drink.
    And you could talk and sit until there would be,
    all of a sudden, a command.
    We always had guards around here.
    You put out guards to know what was going on outside,
    so the enemies couldn't come to us, you know, surprise us
    in there.
    So, of course, the guards then, the guard
    would come over and give signals.
    And then we have to pack up and move someplace.
    Who was the leader at Lazdijai?
    At Lazdijai?
    At Lazdijai, yeah.
    I thought you said last day.
    Lazdijai, I don't remember.
    It was a nice guy, a Lithuanian, short, bushy hair.
    He looked a real Irishman.
    Now, when I say was an Irishman, he's, like, red cheeks.
    And he was good.
    He was good, this guy.
    And then he stayed with me after the war.
    We stayed together for a couple of weeks, a couple of months,
    because there was no connection between you're throwing up
    telephones and telegrams and everything.
    There was no connection.
    I had my radio, so I had to stay down there
    and do the local management of the area
    down there, whatever it was.
    Now were there anybody from your first partisan group with you
    in the second partisan group at Lazdijai?
    No.
    No.
    You went by yourself to that next group?
    Yeah.
    There was a guy that I never knew he was Jewish.
    He was the head of the NKGB.
    You know, it's, like, let's say here in the Central Intelligence
    Agency, CIA.
    We had on there from NKGB, a man.
    And he would execute people.
    He knew about a farmer or something like this.
    And then once he was laying around in my tent.
    We had a little tiny tent, laying down there.
    And he says something in Yiddish to me.
    I was so surprised.
    Well, I remember when he executed,
    they find a spy in our midst.
    You see, he said that he's a Lithuanian.
    That he would like to join the partisan movement because he
    whatever he told him, a Communist or he just
    wanted to fight the Germans.
    But we find out after a while that he
    is sent to us by the Germans to spy on us
    or to bring down there because he would go to told us
    to his girlfriend, you know.
    He would walk from the woods out from there
    and be with his girlfriend.
    But we find out, it wasn't the girlfriend.
    It was somebody who was working with him.
    So he executed him.
    Let's go down there.
    I want to talk to you.
    Walked up, boom, boom and came back.
    That's it.
    Did you stay in the same places?
    Or did you always move around every day?
    In the partisans?
    When you were in the partisans.
    Every day.
    You slept in a different location.
    Every day in a different location.
    Sometimes, yeah.
    Even if we would take a bath.
    So once in a month, if you need it or not.
    We had lice.
    Oh, god, was it dirty.
    You had lice, did you say?
    Yeah.
    You know, we would take off our shirt and shake it on the fire.
    And you heard them, just like you
    hear the mosquito killers in here what we got in the yard.
    It was very dirty.
    But we would go to a bath once in a while.
    And we would take off our clothes and the rest of us
    would stand on the guard.
    And then the guards would go.
    We would stand around, too.
    But very seldom, we didn't have often this.
    Maybe once a month, maybe not.
    You would take a bath in a stream, you mean?
    No, we would come into-- oh, I forgot to tell you this.
    We'd come in a village, yeah?
    And they had the little A-frames where
    they dig a hole in the ground, put an A-frame in there.
    And they make fires and put in the rocks,
    stones they put it in there.
    And they heat them up very much.
    And then they pour water on it.
    And you got a steam bath, yeah?
    What were the names of some of the villages that you went in?
    I don't--
    You don't remember?
    I don't remember at all the Lithuanian villages.
    And now how many partisans, how many people were with you
    in that group of partisans?
    That was 25, 25 partisans.
    It was a very small group, but active.
    They would blow up things and, you know, do
    a lot of damage for the Germans on there.
    It was a good group.
    Nobody was from that area.
    Everybody was sent over there.
    I remember there was another couple of guys that were there
    from Moscow also to do the--
    but they weren't radio operators.
    They were saboteurs.
    That was their job.
    And I also knew how to make bombs and how to blow up.
    I knew it all because they taught us.
    Did you ever have to do it.
    No.
    I taught this thing to the other.
    They didn't let me do nothing like that.
    I was their eyes and their ears.
    They had to have me.
    I remember in Moscow, they told me that cost us $25,000 to teach
    you this job.
    And I'm talking about 45 years ago,
    when money was money, to teach you how to do it.
    And you cannot go out and do this.
    My wife was doing it, but that was the end of the war.
    So, OK, how long did you stay in that second one?
    So you were only in two groups of partisans, the first one
    and then the second?
    And so for how long were you in the second group of partisans?
    I don't know, probably four months, three months.
    I don't remember anymore.
    It's hard.
    I don't remember dates.
    It's hard for me.
    Yeah.
    You said the conditions were difficult. It was very cold.
    What did you have to eat?
    Oh, to eat was all right.
    They would go into to a farmer and take away from him
    anything that you want.
    And Lithuanian farmers are very rich.
    They have a lot of food.
    They were very active, good farmers.
    They knew how to do it, and they were rich.
    Compared to the Russian farmers, let's say,
    they had enough food, enough everything, eggs
    and butter and whatnot.
    Did the same 25 people stay together with you
    or was there a change?
    Yeah.
    They stayed together with me, the three months, four months.
    If I'll think about it, I can't remember
    what happened in there, was a Polish partisan group,
    anti-Semitic group came in, came in touch with our partisans.
    He had, actually, not Polish partisans.
    He had Russian POWs.
    Yeah, prisoners of war, they had those POWs break out
    of the camps and they kept them with them as a partisan group.
    But they were very anti-Semitic.
    And I remember when the captain from that group,
    from that Polish group came to us with his wife.
    And he wanted to sit down and talk.
    And my chief of partisans takes him
    into my tent to show him see, look, we got a radio in here,
    show them that we are business meaning thing.
    And while he was sitting in my tent,
    and his wife was with me down there, and I was a young guy,
    and her husband was an old guy.
    And she tried to chase him out so she
    can spend with me some time.
    And those things happen.
    And then our partisans went out to his partisan unit.
    And they told all the partisans that you
    don't have to be with the Polish, come with us.
    And they came to stay with us.
    And they were probably around 130, 140 people.
    And when they came with us, we couldn't keep them
    because we didn't have the means to support all those things.
    We sent them down to the east, to Eastern partisans.
    They came all right.
    And this was already toward the end of the war, anyhow.
    So they wanted to be in a Soviet partisan group instead
    of a Polish.
    So that's what happened.
    So that's a little thing that I remember from this thing.
    I remember the girl down there.
    I don't know, but I remember it.
    Did you come in contact with any other partisan groups?
    Yeah.
    How did that happen?
    We would receive a telegram from Moscow telling us
    that this and this group is going through and then
    down there and make sure that you don't shoot each other.
    So they had a radio operator, probably somewhere in our group
    had.
    So through Moscow, we made contact, i that they come up.
    And they would say there will be a parole, yeah.
    You'll say bomb, and they will say squeeze.
    Whatever it is, you know?
    And they hollered to us bomb.
    And we say squeeze.
    Bomb.
    Squeeze.
    We know what it is.
    And we come up and talk.
    Usually, we didn't have any parties.
    We just talk.
    And then they would walk away and we would walk away.
    Have our jobs.
    But just in the movement, we could meet each other
    and kill each other.
    We had it once.
    We fought, fought.
    and they were so loud around that we
    couldn't hear their parole.
    But we killed one guy.
    I remember it was a nice guy.
    Can you tell a little more about the activities of the partisans?
    I know you were the radio operator.
    You were to send back information.
    What was the role of the other people?
    The other people would, say, I would get the telegram
    from Moscow.
    It would say I would like you to mine this and this railroad
    stretch.
    And they want us to go ahead and do it.
    Then the partisans knew themselves
    where there are pockets of soldiers, of guards, what not,
    just disrupt everything that moves in Lithuania.
    So they couldn't move.
    Because to them was very important to move their troops
    up to the east.
    And they couldn't because the partisans
    were blowing up the railroads.
    The main thing was blowing up railroads.
    Then taking care of--
    what's it called?
    I forgot the name of it.
    Taking care of guys who would kill Jews,
    let's say, things like this, the Lithuanians themselves, yeah?
    Since there was a lot of Jews in the partisans,
    we had to go out and kill these guys that
    would inform on us, on the Jews, not on the partisans, informed
    to the German Gestapo, informed that this and this family
    is Jewish, or this and this family
    has a Jewish girl, a Jewish boy, and they are hidden.
    So that's what we would do, too, you know, a lot.
    You would do that because you wanted to, well,
    because Moscow told you to, or that was
    something that did on your own?
    Yeah.
    What other kind of activities did the partisans do?
    OK.
    Something that's important to us is
    I received a telegram from Moscow
    telling me to take in families that are scattered all
    over the woods, to take them around and create
    a group of partisans, non-combatant, no combat groups.
    But they would fix guns, fix saddles,
    because there were a lot of artillery, cavalry down there,
    fix saddles and prepare foods.
    Like, I don't know, whatever they did in there, prepare
    foods and all those things.
    And then all those scattered people were Jewish people,
    but running away we think.
    So sometimes they say that the Russians didn't do anything
    for the Jews.
    It's not true.
    Because the family partisan groups
    were just for Jewish people.
    The what partisan groups?
    The family partisan groups.
    What do you mean, family?
    Family, OK.
    There was a family who hides in the woods.
    There's a father, a mother and two children,
    maybe a bubbe or something like that.
    So we knew where they were hiding, yeah?
    So in order to make it easier on them,
    we would go and take the families together in one way.
    And we would-- it was our thing to guard their lives.
    Well, but that's what I knew was going on.
    Fights every day, you go out and you got to blow up stations.
    You got to blow up police stations.
    Oh, my God, there were so many things
    that you always had to do things.
    And we would get instructions from Moscow.
    But the going out and killing them there these son of a guns
    down there, that was our thing that we wanted to do.
    We had freedom of movement and do
    whatever you want to as far as our group is concerned.
    Moscow never said no to us.
    We just did those things.
    Then sometimes it was slow.
    I would sit there and telegraph articles
    from German newspapers about lice or whatever.
    That was my job in there.
    What was the spirit of the men in the partisans?
    High.
    High.
    And it was higher toward the end when
    they saw that there, the fights and everything is finally
    paying off.
    The Germans are pulling back.
    And that was the area, the time when
    I came back from Konigsberg and back to the partisans.
    Maybe that's why they took me out of there, because it
    wasn't important anymore.
    They were going forward, the Russian army.
    OK.
    Now let's follow from the four months you were in Lazdijai.
    Then what happened?
    After the four months, the war was over.
    I see.
    Yeah.
    And I came back to Vilna.
    And that's where I really suffered.
    Because all my life in Russia and in the partisans,
    I knew that my family doesn't exist anymore.
    [TAPE STOPS]
    You had said you wanted to say something about the time
    when you were in mobilization.
    I'm talking about this is the period when
    I wanted to get into the army and they
    didn't take me because I wasn't 20 yet or something like this.
    I don't remember.
    And I see all my friends who live with me in, in Penza, yeah,
    in Penza, all of them are being taken into the army.
    And they don't want me because I'm too young.
    So I was sitting on the steps of that point,
    there were they mobilized us.
    I was sitting there and crying like a baby.
    I didn't want to stay by myself.
    So the president was then there, the president for Lithuania.
    He comes up and said, what do you think?
    They'll give you then their donut and this thing?
    What are you rushing so much?
    And I said I don't care.
    I want to go.
    I want to go.
    And finally, they took me into the army.
    And so-- and then I remember they put us in cattle wagons
    on the railroad.
    And we were packed, you know.
    You couldn't sit on the floor.
    You had to stand up.
    But they had a shelf on there.
    And that shelf could sleep around 12 people,
    across this thing.
    So we decided that we were going to change.
    Everybody's going to sleep, let's say,
    three hours, and then somebody else
    is going to change every three hours,
    12 people would climb in there.
    Well, there was a sergeant, a Lithuanian sergeant,
    I remember him, with a thin mustache, nice hair, combed.
    And he was the leader of the whole thing.
    When my three hours came to sleep, he said,
    what do you need this stuff for?
    You are a Jew anyhow.
    You don't need this thing.
    And I jumped on the shelf and I beat him right in the--
    what is it called?
    Throat?
    In the throat, yeah.
    And I was so vicious at that moment.
    I didn't know what I'm doing.
    But he got scared.
    He climbed off and let me sleep right there.
    Little kid, I took care of myself.
    Now we're back to jump ahead, back to the part in time
    of the partisans.
    And you were--
    Well, I was already-- we talked about until the end.
    Yeah.
    And can you tell us a little bit about how
    you knew things were ending?
    Well, I knew that things are ending because, well,
    the front passed me over.
    You know, the tank passed me and went further to Germany.
    And I was in Lithuania.
    Lithuania is east of Germany.
    So I knew, of course, that the war was over.
    Did you have any relations with the army
    at all, the Russian army?
    No.
    Matter of fact, as soon as I jump off from the parachute,
    jumped off with the parachute, I'm
    taking off from the registration with the army registration.
    I'm a civilian from that moment because of the work
    that I had to do.
    I don't know why, but they said a soldier cannot be a spy,
    some kind of regulations like that.
    So when I came back from my place, what I had to do that.
    When I came back, I was civilian.
    I wasn't there anymore.
    So now it's, what, 1945?
    1945.
    And you're with the partisans, but you
    see the front passing you?
    I start telling you about this thing when I went back to Vilna.
    And I said that's when my--
    How did you get back to Vilna?
    Well, there's another story.
    There's a lot of stories.
    I packed up my everything, and I just hitched a ride.
    Where were you at that point?
    Lazdijai, that's where I finished the war, in Lazdijai.
    And I stayed on there for weeks or for months, I don't know.
    After the war was over?
    After the war was over--
    not after the war was over.
    The war was still-- go back.
    There was no more war in the place where I was.
    Because the Russians went forward and took it back.
    Yeah?
    And this was what, what month and what year?
    That was in the end of '44, end of '44.
    Because I stayed on that still a couple of months.
    And then I went back to Vilna.
    And then we had the May the 9th, when the thing was,
    when the war was over.
    You were talking about how you were getting back to Vilna.
    Yeah, I was getting back, hitching rides.
    And then I finally got to the railroad.
    And I got myself a place to go to.
    I sat in a place.
    And of course, I fell asleep down there
    with my packages, everything I had.
    And I woke up.
    And I see my radio station is gone.
    It was a tiny little radio station made in England.
    And I hollered, oh, my radio station.
    I speak very well Russian, but I got an accent in Russian
    also when I talk.
    So they said look at that guy with the accent.
    He's got a radio.
    Yeah.
    And I looked and I find the guy that stole the radio.
    Yeah?
    And first thing you know, there are four soldiers
    with the guns around me, and they
    are taking me off the echelon.
    They're taking me to commander from there, the little town.
    They took me into this thing, and they keep me around there.
    I tried to tell them, I give you my code number.
    They don't want to hear it.
    What they want, they find on me German papers,
    because that's what I had to have in order
    to in there get in.
    Well, and I'm sitting in there maybe a night or two nights.
    I don't remember.
    The echelon's gone.
    Everything is gone.
    And I sit in there in that little town in Lithuania.
    You remember the name of the town?
    Yeah.
    I can't remember now.
    OK.
    I got to remember, because my Bubbe was born down there.
    Kashudar?
    Kashudar.
    Yeah, Kashudar.
    And they asked me, bother me, ask me questions,
    and again, and again, and again.
    Then they said look.
    We are taking you to the commander of this point
    and let him talk to you.
    I walk in in there.
    I see a guy with a nose like this.
    [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] You know, he got white as this paper.
    He said we were about to shoot you.
    And then he believed me, what I told him.
    Of course, he knew.
    Right away, he believed me.
    He called the number, from my operation number.
    And he kept me in there for another day
    until a taxi came from Vilna-- not a taxi,
    a car came from Vilna especially to pick me up and bring me
    to Vilna.
    And this is the toughest thing happened.
    I knew that my parents don't exist anymore.
    I knew that my sisters are not there.
    I knew that no family is there.
    I knew with my head.
    But my heart didn't believe it.
    I was always walking around with the idea
    that I'll go down on the boardwalk down there,
    and all my friends will be walking.
    And that's what I saw.
    I couldn't believe my eyes.
    And then I come to Vilna, and I see the big shoah,
    the big thing that is--
    everybody's dead.
    There was a thing.
    I walked in, into the house where we lived.
    There were living some non-Jews, of course.
    And I opened the door.
    And I didn't know what's happening with me at all.
    I walked around over the rooms.
    And I don't know what happened.
    I was suddenly in the hospital, because my friends
    came to pick me up from there.
    I lost my consciousness.
    I didn't know what happened.
    And four or five days, I just don't remember at all.
    And that was my hardest thing.
    That was it.
    And after that, I never forgot it.
    How did you know that your parents had lost
    their lives, and your family?
    Well, I knew that in the partisans.
    The partisans?
    Yeah, I talked to them, talked to my neighbors.
    And they told me the story about-- but nobody
    knew where my sister was.
    And this is the only one that I've got now.
    Nobody else, just my sister.
    Your parents lost their lives in Vilna?
    In Vilna, yeah.
    Ponar?
    You never heard of the Ponar?
    Ponar is a place outside of Vilna, about 15 kilometers
    outside of Vilna, where they dug the holes
    and where they buried the Jews out there.
    On Yad Vashem, there's a special place for Vilna from the Ponar.
    So they took a little sand from the Ponar
    and put it under the name of Ponar.
    Ponar was the place.
    And how did your sister escape or survive?
    My sister had her boyfriend.
    This was your older sister?
    My older sister had a boyfriend that she loved very much.
    He was from Warsaw.
    He ran away from Hitler before, and he settled in our city.
    And they were going out for a couple of years,
    thinking about getting married.
    And all of a sudden, they took him away
    and sent him in a working camp.
    And she wanted to go also.
    So she volunteered to go in a working camp.
    Where was that?
    That was in Estonia.
    Then they sent him to Auschwitz.
    And she couldn't see him anymore.
    And she was in Bergen-Belsen.
    She survived Bergen-Belsen.
    And he survived Auschwitz.
    And they met again in Germany.
    And they got married right after the war.
    And now he died of cancer 10 years ago.
    To get back to Vilna, when you came back
    and then you were in the hospital
    for a certain number of days.
    And then what happened after?
    Then I just walked around.
    Of course, I had to go to register
    someplace to get food stamps and allocation to [INAUDIBLE]
    and all these things.
    And by doing it, I met two friends
    that I knew from before the war.
    But both of them were invalids.
    One was in the artillery.
    They'd taken out the whole muscle.
    And his hand was hanging like this.
    And the other one also, but he couldn't stay.
    He walked around with hand like this.
    Couldn't stand him out.
    So we all three met.
    And we decided that we were going to move into an apartment
    altogether.
    Well, I head down there, of course.
    I was a big shot at that time.
    Came back, parachutist, all those things.
    So I walked in the street.
    I heard my name, Lazar Sendarovich on the radio.
    Somebody, because they have radios,
    you know, just speakers, all over town.
    And you hear what the other--
    A hero today, he came from--
    so I-- and they had a meeting down there
    from the communist party and the government.
    Because everything down there, the party and the government
    is mixed up.
    So I went right straight to the palace
    where they had the speeches and everything.
    And I walked in.
    And of course, they put me up on the rostrum down there.
    And everybody was squeezing my hand there.
    And here I'm walking around with torn shoes with the schmattas
    coming out of it.
    Well, so when I met these guys, so I
    got myself an apartment in a very nice place.
    And I took them in.
    We're living all three together.
    And we're still in touch.
    Today, I talked to the guy.
    One went to Argentina.
    One went to Mexico.
    I went in here.
    So how long did you stay in Vilna?
    In Vilna, I stayed for '50, '56--
    '46?
    Until '46.
    I stayed in Vilna until '46.
    What was the reception of the people of the non-Jews in Vilna
    to you when you came back?
    Did you have any contact with them?
    I had contacts, yeah.
    That was then different.
    Well, all of a sudden, I'm a young man,
    and there are so many young girls
    down there, very few Jewish girls.
    Didn't survive.
    So I got my apartment.
    I got [? that. ?]
    And all of a sudden, I see girls going on high heels,
    and they wear lipstick.
    And they wear little hats.
    You know, I left home when I was a little kid.
    And when I came back, I'm already a young man.
    And then that was our life.
    Then mine meanwhile is just those girls.
    And I had a good post.
    I worked for the radio industry down there.
    I worked for them.
    And I was the guy that hired and fired everybody there.
    Because they told me, look, if you
    see a collaborator or a thing like this, just don't hire him.
    You know?
    Put him in jail if you can, do something.
    But if you see some good people, people that
    want to work for you, hire him.
    So it was a broadcasting system, actually, that I worked for.
    But there was only one broadcasting.
    There is not anything like in here,
    that you got ABC, BBC, or whatnot.
    We didn't have it on there.
    So I had the whole one thousand people worked in there.
    I was hiring a thousand people.
    I was personnel department, chief of personnel department
    in the broadcasting system.
    Did you ask a lot of people at that time about what
    it was like during the war in Vilna?
    Did they tell you what it was like?
    Yeah, sure, sure, sure.
    Well, look, as far as the ghetto is concerned, of course,
    I was very much interested.
    But even beside the ghetto, outside the ghetto, what
    happened while the people lived in there,
    they didn't have any luxuries.
    They didn't have nothing.
    With the Germans was very bad, they hadn't any food.
    And so it was bad down there during the war.
    And after the war wasn't much better, either,
    as far as things were concerned, I
    had better, but still not enough.
    But the population didn't have anything.
    They just were suffering a lot from hunger
    and from no clothes, no shoes, no anything like this,
    no apartments, no heating.
    Broken windows, nobody fixes them, a thing like this.
    Did you lose many of your friends, the young men your age
    during the war?
    I lost everything, absolutely everything, my close friends.
    Of course, you live in Vilna, you know people.
    But your real close friends, I lost everybody.
    And of course, family, I lost everybody.
    We were a big family.
    You lost other relatives?
    Yeah, my grandfather and grandmother had seven children.
    And all of them were married, and all of them had children.
    So it was a big family, you know.
    And then, not only this, but how about second cousins,
    third cousins?
    You know, my grandmother had so many brothers and sisters,
    and all of them had children and children--
    you know, it was a real family with yeah,
    a couple hundred years living in Vilna.
    And they were all lost during the war?
    All lost.
    All were killed.
    In vilna?
    In, around Vilna.
    In and around.
    Just to back up a little bit, in the partisans,
    you were saying that you really weren't frightened.
    Did you have any other emotions that you can remember?
    No.
    We were always busy, no time for emotions.
    We just couldn't allow ourselves to think about things.
    Winter time, we walked around.
    All of us were a little tipsy, constantly.
    It was so cold that you couldn't, you
    know, you couldn't stand it yourself,
    how cold it was in the woods, snow.
    Then when it rains, it's even worse.
    Then you're all wet.
    Walking around, you take off your clothes,
    and you're like an old lady, all shriveled up.
    Now you stayed in Vilna for how long after?
    We stayed in Vilna--
    Working for the radio.
    OK.
    Until '56.
    In May '56, we left Vilna.
    Who is we?
    Oh, my friends, the ones I told you from Mexico.
    We lived together in apartment.
    We did our girl chasing down there enough.
    And we all had jobs.
    But we decided that we don't want to be down there anymore.
    And let's go.
    Let's go to Poland.
    And from Poland, we'll go to Austria.
    And from Austria, we'll go to wherever it is.
    Now what year was this?
    That was in '56.
    And the Jews that were in Lithuania
    had the right, not only the Jews,
    but every citizen, had the right to choose their country
    they want to be in.
    Or Poland, we could say we are Polish citizens,
    or we could say Lithuanian citizens.
    And of course, we had the right to go to Poland, legally.
    And we left, three of us.
    And we stayed together for so long.
    And I remember we applied for emigration, emigrate from--
    we lived all in Italy at that time.
    You lived in Vilna for 10 years, about.
    Vilna?
    For about 10 years you said.
    You said 1956.
    1946.
    Oh, OK.
    So it was 1946.
    OK.
    In 1946, I should remember, because I got married in '46.
    OK.
    Yeah, we went to Poland.
    Whether we stayed 10 days or two weeks, I don't remember.
    Is this before you were married?
    That's before I was married.
    Back, we're leaving Vilna, and we're going to Poland.
    1946.
    1946.
    And from Poland, we stayed just two weeks or so.
    We went to Czechoslovakia.
    And in Czechoslovakia, we stayed, again,
    a couple of weeks in Prague.
    And from there we went to Austria, Vienna.
    And we stayed in Vienna probably two months
    or something, three of us.
    What kind of passport did you have?
    We didn't have any passport.
    We just went.
    We had to smuggle across the border.
    Once we smuggled across the border,
    we go to the Jewish camps that they have them there.
    There were Jewish camps for emigres--
    Displaced persons.
    DPs, right.
    From there, we went to Vienna.
    From Vienna, we went to Salzburg.
    And we stopped on there.
    And not far from Salzburg, there was another town
    called Braunau, Am Inn Braunau, Am Inn.
    Hitler was born on there.
    And then there was also a camp, a little camp.
    And I choose to live in the same house where there were
    the [NON-ENGLISH].
    There were Zionist organizations.
    So one of them was more extreme organization,
    and I choose to be with them.
    And my wife came down there to this place.
    And she saw me.
    She fell in love, and I fell in love,
    and we got married in there.
    The day when we got married, I got a telegram
    from my friend that's now in Mexico.
    He went to Italy, to Milano, that he
    find my sister down there.
    And that was a double [NON-ENGLISH] and went to Italy,
    Brenda and myself, my wife and myself, right next day,
    after we got married.
    Beautiful, isn't it, honeymoon in Italy?
    It wasn't so simple.
    We had to cross the border in the Alps,
    smuggle ourselves across the Alps in the wintertime.
    Yeah, there was a lot of snow in the Alps.
    And we got married in October.
    Yeah, wintertime.
    Down there is winter.
    And we had to smuggle across the border.
    And we stayed on there a couple nights, cold like hell.
    And finally, I sent Brenda with the guides.
    There were guides that were taking us across the border.
    So they couldn't smuggle us all in at the same time.
    So they took Brenda in and another couple of women,
    and took them to the little town down there in Italy
    where they could stay in a hotel and relax and we would come.
    So instead of coming there, the police arrested us all,
    put us in a basement, I remember.
    Kept us for a couple days, Italian police.
    And then they released us.
    And we went to Milano, where I met my wife again.
    And we stayed on there happily.
    We stayed in Milano for six years, six years.
    And what did you do there?
    Well, stayed in the camps, in the DP camps.
    But later on, I quit the camp and I went--
    By this time, it was 1952.
    1952.
    My daughter was born in '49.
    So we applied for United States, for the visas.
    And I worked in import-export.
    I used to.
    And then I made a pretty good living in there.
    I rented myself an apartment.
    We got a maid.
    And she was taking care of the girl.
    And I was half the time in Germany, or in Austria,
    or in Switzerland doing my business,
    whatever I did on there.
    And my friend, that is now in Mexico
    was the first one that left for his brother.
    He had a brother in Mexico, left us.
    So we went all of us, all three of us went to a cellar
    where we had a lot of wine, I remember.
    We had to say goodbye to our friends.
    We were together so many years.
    And we smoked cigarettes, I remember.
    And I took out the silver paper from the cigarettes.
    And I turned over our glass and I made a circle
    and I tore it up for everyone a little piece.
    I said boys, let's drink now for that,
    that no matter how long it will take, a year to 10, 20,
    we shall be people again with homes and with families
    and with everything.
    My wife wasn't with us.
    Just three of us were in Genoa.
    Genoa is the port where we were shipped out to.
    Everybody took a little piece of that, and--
    maybe I went-- what was it, 13, 13.
    It was on 17 years later, we met.
    And we took out the pieces of paper
    and put together a circle again.
    And now, of course, the paper was already shredded.
    So the wife of the Mexican--
    my other friend went to Buenos Aires.
    And I was in here.
    And we met all in our house, my son's bar mitzvah.
    And we put together a circle again.
    And we stay in touch.
    And you went from Italy to--
    From Italy, we went to the United States.
    And that was in--
    In 1952.
    1952.
    Yeah.
    We came in here in December '52, something like this.
    I don't remember.
    Or in January '52.
    I don't remember.
    I remember that we spent New Year's on the ship.
    So I don't remember really what is--
    well, we spent Christmas on the ship.
    New Year's, we were already here.
    And this was [? amazing. ?]
    Let's now talk a little bit about the living conditions
    in the DP camps.
    OK.
    The longest time that we stayed in a camp
    was actually a little bit in Austria,
    where it was pretty nice down there.
    We had homes of Germans who worked down there in a factory.
    And when we came out in there, the factory was bombed.
    It wasn't there.
    And nobody was in their homes.
    So they subdivided, they put in so many people in a home.
    So in order to keep it straight, like every Zionist organization,
    had its own couple homes like this.
    And they called it a kibbutz.
    And we lived down there, you know, boys, girls.
    We had cots, army cots most of the time.
    We were getting from UNRRA, we were getting the food.
    And that's what we were cooking and doing things.
    So it was nice.
    It was nicer than the other camp.
    Then from there, that's the camp when I got married in.
    And then from there, we went to Italy.
    In Italy, it wasn't as good anymore.
    We had in there big barracks for soldiers.
    And a barrack was big enough to put up,
    let's see, 800 soldiers to sleep in there,
    had latrines, had all amenities that you need in there.
    And they build up from two by fours little cages.
    And every cage had linen on the walls
    like this, so have a little privacy.
    So they had rooms like this.
    In a room, there were around three, four couples.
    And and all the wives were there.
    You sleep like this and eat like this.
    Again, the same thing you get always the cots, the army cots.
    And there were kitchens.
    And we would go and stand in line
    and get the soup and whatnot.
    But it was too much to die, too little to live, you know?
    Let's continue talking about the conditions in the DP camp.
    Yeah, in the DP camp in Milano, we had a big thing.
    Remember I said, we had divided the big rooms.
    They all-- we was like a barrack.
    We divided it into little cages.
    In each cage, in every cage, you had three couples living,
    normally.
    Sometimes you had more, sometimes less.
    And most of them were married.
    So you all had married couples staying together.
    But at that time, ORT organized schools.
    So people, while they're in the camp waiting for to immigrate,
    would learn trades.
    So I went down there.
    And they had from Olivetti.
    They had a-- set up a school for typewriter mechanics.
    I joined at school.
    And I graduated from them there.
    It took me a year or so until I learned
    how to repair typewriters.
    When I came to here in the States,
    I said, of course I'm a typewriter mechanic.
    And I went to work for United Typewriter
    Company at that time in here.
    And I learned the trade.
    If I wouldn't learn this thing, I wouldn't succeed in business.
    So the ORT was very important to me.
    Even in Vilna, while I was going to-- the technical
    was also subsidized by ORT.
    This was an organization to learn trade
    amongst Jewish people.
    So I learned this thing.
    Even me learned.
    It was so many years ago.
    And I'm still here.
    And here's the ORT again.
    And history repeats itself.
    Did you have enough food in the DP camp and enough clothes?
    Yeah, not really.
    But I would say, yeah.
    Nobody was there hungry.
    There was a thing that the aliyah was going on.
    So, of course, all of a sudden, at night,
    they are missing 10, 20, 30 people, which went on aliyah.
    The aliyah was illegal at that time, so nobody talked about it.
    So let's say we had probably more than 1,000 people in this
    camp.
    So there--
    Is this the Milan camp?
    The Milan camp, yeah.
    So they're giving us cards so we can get our food every morning
    for every day.
    So the people that left would leave their cards behind.
    So people had at least two, three cards, each one of us.
    And then there was the funny thing about--
    they knew what's going on, the management from the camp, yeah?
    But they couldn't put a finger on us, exactly what's happening.
    Why do we have so many cards and so little people?
    So at night, they would go around in the barracks
    and give everybody a card.
    And with this card you had to get your food.
    The old cards weren't good anymore.
    So since we lived on there like this, all of a sudden,
    I hear a girl jumps into my bed.
    And I said, what?
    They give them cards.
    So she gets a card.
    She got already her card first.
    But she's with us in bed.
    So she gets another card.
    I jump out and climb to somebody else's into the bed.
    And I get a card.
    So all of a sudden, instead of having less cards,
    they give us more cards.
    So that's how we managed to get enough food.
    Clothing was no problem.
    We didn't have anything, and you don't need much there.
    It's warm.
    What about medical care?
    Medical care was also good.
    We had medical.
    We had a hospital on there.
    No, it wasn't bad at all.
    And of course, you got already sort of a family feeling.
    All of a sudden there's a wife, there's a husband,
    there's a sister-in-law, a brother-in-law.
    You get already into families.
    You break up again into families.
    And it wasn't bad.
    The women would get meat, that, you know, from the thing.
    Cook, make something good out of it.
    And you lived already like that.
    You had your own kitchen at times?
    No, we didn't have a kitchen.
    But you took two bricks, made a, build a fire on that.
    And you had the big cans for the Kisko or Kesko, whatever it is.
    Crisco.
    Crisco.
    And that's your pot, and you cook.
    And we had some plates.
    You start accumulating.
    You already a family.
    It's different.
    But I had my [? kid. ?] We weren't in a camp anymore.
    I decided I wanted to be for myself.
    I went out, start doing business.
    And I had enough money that I rented an apartment.
    And I had a car.
    I bought myself a car down there even.
    And I did all right in Milano.
    I didn't want to leave.
    The way I came, I didn't come with a ship that was
    from the UNRRA or the camps.
    I paid my own voyage in here.
    I came in here.
    I had a few thousand dollars myself already.
    I was well off.
    I didn't want to come to the United States.
    But--
    Where did you want to go?
    I wanted to stay in Milano.
    But I would be always a stranger, always somebody--
    in somebody else's country.
    And I decided I had enough of it.
    And we came to the United States.
    Can we now talk a little bit about your feelings
    and reflections about what happened during the war?
    What are your feelings today about how
    the war influenced you?
    Well, I was a socialist like my father.
    I thought that the Jewish question
    would be solved if the whole world would be socialist.
    And there wouldn't be any antisemitism or anything
    like this.
    And I thought that the best thing is to live in the country
    where you were born.
    But of course, with the war, the people
    showed their true colors, our neighbors, the Polish people.
    And for me to live in Vilna at that time
    was like I would live in a cemetery,
    because every corner told me that, look, that's
    where Bubbe lived, and that was your Zayde lived,
    that's where your cousin lived.
    I mean, I was walking around on a cemetery.
    And the feelings from my other friends
    was exactly the same thing.
    And we knew that the Russians are all right right now in here
    because they need us.
    But we could see that they didn't
    like to have Jews around on there,
    because the population, the Lithuanian population says,
    look at that.
    The communists come, and right away the Jews are here, too.
    And they are our [INAUDIBLE].
    They had problems with giving us good places and good posts.
    So I saw it wasn't good.
    So we left.
    And I became a Zionist.
    I always thought I understood that the Jewish problem can
    be solved just in Israel, and that's what we wanted to do.
    And I wanted to go to Israel.
    But the times then there were awful.
    My sister went down there, and she wrote me
    a letter-- she wrote many letters saying that don't come,
    because we're living in tents.
    We don't have enough food.
    We don't have any clothing.
    Said later on, maybe.
    But right now, don't come in here.
    In the meantime, we had a sister-in-law
    with us, a young girl.
    She was 14, something like this.
    And we sent her to--
    she was on the Exodus.
    Exodus, the girl.
    And my wife brought her back from Germany
    to live with us in Italy.
    And we sent her as a child.
    I remember she flew with a aeroplane to Washington here,
    but she had an aunt, her mother's sister.
    And she start writing to us, look, it's so good in here.
    Why don't you come in here?
    Why don't-- da-da-da-da.
    By yourself.
    And you don't have anybody.
    And here you got so much family, because my wife
    has a lot of family in here.
    And we came in here.
    But I'm active in Zionist movements.
    I was active for bond selling or whatnot, whatever I got to do.
    Do you ever talk about your experiences during the war?
    Do I talk about it?
    Yeah.
    Constantly.
    We talk a lot about it.
    To whom do you talk?
    When the kids were small, I didn't
    want to tell them about all those things.
    But when they grew up a little, and could understand,
    we told them.
    We constantly talk to them about it, because my wife speaks--
    my wife is-- I don't know.
    She's a born storyteller.
    She can tell.
    She can talk about it.
    She did this thing.
    I think they took three days to do it.
    So we talk about.
    Then we got friends who are also survivors.
    Most of our friends are survivors.
    So whenever we get together, no matter
    what, we always end up on the same theme about what
    happened during the war, what happened
    to them, what happened to that.
    We always talk about it.
    So it's--
    And now my wife is--
    runs around.
    And she lectures in schools, in universities,
    in synagogues, churches about what--
    about her being a partisan and being--
    there are so many who survived the camps,
    and they tell about the camps.
    But nobody knows that Jews were also fighters
    with a gun in their hand.
    So that's what we are trying to do, me and her.
    Well, I'll have to be Saturday or Sunday--
    I don't know-- I'll be in the Children's Museum.
    And we got there a little corner where we sit, and people come in
    and ask us questions.
    So we tell them things.
    And that's what we do.
    Well, we got to tell the story because there are so
    many antisemites who tried to spread
    that the whole thing is a lie, yeah?
    And if the population doesn't get in touch with us,
    they'll believe whatever they read in the papers
    then, that it is a lie.
    The Jews wanted just to get money from Germany
    and organize the things.
    That's why they go out and lie.
    And they want to tell everybody that they
    suffered so the people would feel sorry for them.
    We know about it.
    We go out and tell the truth.
    People, there a lot of people who go around with the numbers,
    and they show it to the people, and we do our job.
    Even what you-- with Demjanjuk, the guy from Ukraine,
    they kept him for a year and a half talking about it.
    Well, once you got him to stand, he got on television,
    he spreads the news.
    They talk about the concentration camps,
    about the killings, about the ovens, about all these things.
    So the world says that the couple professor, whoever they
    are that spread the lies about the thing,
    that it never existed, the concentration camps.
    So there it is on television.
    You see it.
    You hear about it.
    So here comes a guy, and talks to you about it, and say,
    don't listen to me.
    Watch the television.
    You'll see.
    I had a Muslim working for us in my shop in the business.
    And he came up and asked me, was it really true
    that that really went on?
    I heard it's different.
    I said, what in the heck did you-- who did you talk to?
    Why don't you talk to me?
    I was there.
    Why do you have to go to meetings with Farrakhan
    and whatnot to listen to them, when here I am here.
    Talk to me.
    That Farrakhan wasn't there.
    So I think that we got to tell the story of the world
    so we would know about it.
    That's why I talk about it.
    You asked me if we talk about it.
    That's the reason.
    I told my children.
    They know.
    And they are very proud of Mother and Father They know
    they were fighting with a gun.
    They were doing their job.
    Did your degree of religious observance
    change because of the war?
    Well, I told you before that I wasn't religious.
    But now I go to synagogue, and I go for the holidays.
    I go for yom tavim I think-- yeah, we have always the--
    my wife is doing the candle lighting with her, the brokhe,
    with everything.
    Yeah.
    And we invite a lot of people.
    Many, many times we invite here a lot of people,
    especially with other guys.
    And we have a dinner together.
    We talk about it.
    So actually, I became more religious.
    I could hardly daven before I came to the United States.
    And I learned how to pray in here.
    Does the war still affect you?
    Obviously it does.
    I don't know about it, but I remember, I get up
    in the middle of the night.
    I'll scream.
    I'll holler.
    I don't know why.
    And I was very much affected by it for a period of time.
    I went to a psychiatrist, and he finally
    made me understand what happened, why I'm suffering.
    Because I never tied up the ends.
    I never saw-- I never mourned my parents.
    I never mourned the family.
    So this thing, it's still there.
    But once I talked it out with him and everything it's better.
    But I didn't know why I was upset, why I was nervous.
    But things were, for me, terrible.
    So I went to him.
    We talked it over.
    A very nice guy.
    And it's all now I finally, finally understood.
    I finally mourned, and I got it over.
    Do you have many friends who are among the partisans?
    Have you kept up with any of those people besides--
    any of the people that you were with?
    Well, there are only one couple were partisans.
    You probably know them.
    You know of Katz's Market?
    Charlie and Betty Katz?
    OK.
    They are from Vilna.
    They are my friends.
    And they were partisans.
    I don't know anybody else partisans in here.
    Not from our woods, anyhow.
    Is there anything else that you would like
    to share that we've left out?
    Not that I remember.
    Of course, we could spend two more days,
    and I would tell you about battles, and how it went,
    and where we fought, and results,
    and people being operated in the woods with a kitchen knife,
    and how it looked, how terrible it was, how we--
    that kind of stuff.
    But I think what I'm trying to tell
    you is how I felt about all these things,
    and not tell you about the battles--
    What do you mean?
    --and the strategy.
    What do you mean, the different battles?
    Yeah.
    And the strategy then there.
    Of course, it's a lot of stuff that we went through.
    Who made up the strategy?
    Your leader?
    The leaders.
    And sometimes I had to be the leader.
    There was nobody else to do it, because we weren't a big force.
    We were small.
    So there came a time when--
    I remember with that Jonis, the big, big guy down there.
    He got so scared that he hollered at me,
    you tell them what to do.
    I can't.
    You tell them what.
    I can't.
    He was so scared.
    I don't know what happened to him because he was always
    a good fighter.
    But who knows what happens to people?
    Well, thank you very much.
    You're very welcome.
    Let's add a little bit more, talking
    about what Vilna was like when you returned after the war.
    If you remember, I returned from last day.
    Last day.
    I came back and I find Vilna in ruins.
    All the streets where I used to walk by,
    I said, and they're like boardwalks.
    The sidewalks were gone.
    The houses all bombed.
    You barely could see a livable quarter, like a room or at least
    something on the roof.
    There was nothing like that.
    There were quarters a little bit out of town that were all right.
    But in the meantime, it was like this.
    The big Jewish synagogue where the Vilna Gaon was sitting
    was one of the beautiful architectural--
    beautiful, architecturally.
    It was bombed, and everything was upside down.
    And it made for me a terrible impression.
    At that moment, I started to believe that my parents are not
    here anymore, because I saw it.
    It's impossible physically to--
    it's always my dreams that I had that someday I'll come back home
    and I'll find everything.
    It's probably just a bad dream.
    But when I saw this thing, it wasn't a dream anymore.
    And that's about it.
    You said you had a story about a Jewish officer.
    Yeah.
    During my stay in Vilna, we used to meet in--
    there is another synagogue, also a very pretty one,
    that was still standing.
    And we could go out of there and meet.
    And we would meet--
    everybody would go down there to look at the walls of people
    who were--
    there was a committee who would register all surviving Jews,
    and then post it on a poster.
    And we would go out on there and read.
    Maybe you'll find a name.
    Maybe we'll find something that we know of,
    somebody that is alive.
    And then there, all of a sudden, we find out
    that a colonel in the Russian Army, a Jewish man who
    lived in Vilna, couldn't take the pressure of the-- not
    the pressure, but the impression, probably,
    or whatever it is, of the situation.
    And he hung himself in the shul.
    And then another story very interesting.
    I remember it was Rosh ha-Shanah or Yom Kippur,
    something like that.
    And you, as young boys, would go upstairs
    where the women used to sit in the olden days.
    And downstairs, there were the guys
    who were really religious and praying in the tallit
    and whatever there.
    So we sit on there.
    And there is a guy who came from the army
    after the war that was a good friend of ours.
    Matter of fact, I got a third cousin.
    He's married to her.
    And they're in South Africa.
    So while I was sitting on there, all of he
    sudden start screaming like a lion.
    What happened to him, he saw his father downstairs
    sitting amongst the Jews that were praying.
    And that's how he find his father.
    Things like this.
    I don't remember them.
    But sometimes something comes in mind and you talk about it.
    Any other feelings that you had when you were walking
    around Vilna after the war?
    Well, the first couple of weeks was terrible.
    I just didn't know what happened to me.
    I just couldn't get myself together
    and think about starting a life, or eating,
    or sleeping-- nothing.
    And little by little, I got used to it.
    Was there a lot of destruction in the city?
    Oh, yeah.
    Like, 80% was destroyed.
    80% at least.
    How many Jews were left after the war?
    I don't know.
    We talked about it, and I talked to different--
    we think that around 5,000 Jews left from Vilna,
    but it was 80,000 were murdered.
    Excuse me.
    Well, this is the [INAUDIBLE].
    This has been Gail Schwartz interviewing Leon
    Senders about his experiences as a survivor
    of the Nazi Holocaust.
    This interview will be included as a valuable contribution
    to the oral history library, the Oral History Project,
    Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Leon Senders (Lazar Sederovich), born in March 19, 1923 in Vilna, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania), describes his father, who was a socialist and bid on oven-building jobs for Russian Army in 1940; the bombing of Vilna in June-December 1941; traveling with his friends to Russia; traveling to Smolensk, then to Penza, where a refugee committee gave them food; living on a collective farm, doing tractor repair work; applying to Lithuanian Division of the Russian Army; going to Balakhna in the Gorky Region of Russia; the difficult living conditions; attending school in Moscow, Russia from 1943 to 1944 and learning to build radio stations and relay messages; parachuting into Lithuania in October 1944 and helping the partisan group led by “Jurgis” (Heinrich Zimman or Henrikas Zimanas-Jurgis), who was a Jewish communist; sending radio messages to Moscow, giving them the German troop movements; going deeper to Siauliai, Lithuania and fighting Germans; going to Lazdijai, Lithuania and sending coded messages; hitching a ride to Kashudar and being arrested then released; staying for five days in a hospital in Vilna; how his entire family except his sister was killed in Ponar; staying in displaced persons camps in Poland, Prague (Czech Republic), and Vienna (Austria); going to Salzburg, Austria; getting married; crossing over the Alps to join his surviving sister in Milan, Italy; learning typewriter mechanics at an ORT school; and going to Washington, DC, where his wife’s relatives lived.
    Interviewee
    Leon Senders
    Interviewer
    Gail Schwartz
    Date
    interview:  1988 April 28

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    3 sound cassettes (60 min.).

    Rights & Restrictions

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

    Keywords & Subjects

    Personal Name
    Senders, Leon, 1923-

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    The interview with Leon Senders was conducted on April 28, 1988 as part of the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington's oral history project to document Washington, DC area survivor's experiences of the Holocaust. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum received the interview on May 26, 1993.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:19:58
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    Summary (English) Time Coded Notes (English)

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    Oral history interview with Anna Weiss

    Oral History

    Anna Weiss (née Loewi), born on January 26, 1911 in Gratz, Austria, describes attending medical school in Munich, Germany in 1932; returning after seeing swastikas on the street; attending medical school in Vienna, Austria for two years; going to Prague, Czech Republic in 1936; her father, Otto Loewi, receiving the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1936; getting married to Ulrich Weiss on May 23, 1937; living in Aussig on Elbe (Ustí nad Labem, Czech Republic) and having a child; seeing the Nazis marching and their attempts to emigrate; going with her child to Stara-Boleslav, Czech Republic and hiding in a furniture van to get to Prague; getting visas to Belgium; meeting her father in Brussels, Belgium in March 1939; going to Argenteuil, France; seeing planes and shooting; going to Clermont-Ferrand then to Vert-au-Laye; renting a room on a farm; going to Lyon, France to the Spanish, Portuguese, and American consulates; going to Marseille, France in March 1941 and staying in an inn with Spanish soldiers; persuading HIAS to give her money for tickets; sailing with 250 people, including artists and scientists; docking in Martinique and staying in an internment camp for one month; sailing to the Dominican Republic then New York, NY; arriving in New York on June 2, 1941; getting a job to pay off the debt of her father’s trip; going to Washington, DC in 1957; and working at the National Institutes of Health with her husband.

    Oral history interview with Arnold Weiss

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ulrich Weiss

    Oral History

    Ulrich Weiss, born on June 24, 1908 in Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), describes earning his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1930; working for a pharmaceutical company; getting married to Anna Loewi in May 1937; his wife and child going to Stara-Boleslav, Czech Republic then to Prague; going to Belgium in March 31, 1939; his company setting up an office in Paris, France in July 1939; his wife and child living in Argenteuil, France and experiencing antisemitism; the German approach in June 1940 and fleeing to Clermont-Ferrand; staying in a shelter with Belgian refugees; going to a farmhouse in Marat and helping with the harvest; his wife going to Lyon, France and getting American visas; going to Marseille, France in March 1941 and staying in an inn with Spanish soldiers; sailing with refugees, including Andre Breton, Victor Serge, and Anne Seghers; docking in Martinique and staying in an internment camp for one month; sailing to the Dominican Republic then New York, NY; working at a pharmaceutical company; going to Washington, DC in 1957; and working at the National Institutes of Health with his wife.

    Oral history interview with Shulamith Wellisch

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Eddie Helmut Willner

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Arno L. Winard

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Bernhard Witkop

    Oral History

    Bernhard Witkop, born on May 9, 1917 in Freiburg, Germany, describes being raised by a Catholic father and Jewish mother; being baptized as a Catholic; his mother’s move to Bavaria in 1935 and his parents’ divorce in 1936; living with a cousin; being considered a mischlinge by the German government and not being allowed to attend university; his mother being forced out of the country and winding up in Holland; working on his Ph.D. in Munch, Germany in 1939; being rejected for an American visa in 1940; moving in 1942 to Freising as conditions worsened in Munich; living in a farmhouse and doing lab work in a technical high school; the destruction of his records in Munich during the bombardment; not registering with the government; Professor Heinrich Wieland getting him an identity card to show he was an employee at a pharmaceutical company on the Rhine; being liberated by Americans in May 1945; getting married and contacting his mother in Holland; becoming a university professor in 1946; how his friend, Hans Heiman, arranged a position for him at Harvard; sailing on the Ernie Pyle from an UNRRA camp in Bremen, Germany to New York, NY; his Mellon fellowship at Harvard from 1947 to 1950; being a visiting professor in Japan; and how he considers himself a devout agnostic.

    Oral history interview with Frederick Wohl

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with John Wolff

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Marion Wolff

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Renee Barr

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sonia Blickstein

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Candy Krasnostein

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Margaret Bogler

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Irving Bogun

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Leslie Solomon

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Cy Vaber

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Christine Jan Flack

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Jack S. Orick

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Hy Asin

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Shirley K.

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with William Kost

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Emanuel Mandel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Daly Burrell

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Marion Rosen

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Eda Saks

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Michael Schofield

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Mildred Steppa

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Marshall Treado

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ella Tulin

    Oral History

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