Overview
- Interview Summary
- Richard Schifter, born in Vienna, Austria in 1923, describes the antisemitism in Vienna and planning to immigrate to the United States; his Polish parents; hearing on March 11, 1938 about the German annexation of Austria; being an only child; his family waiting too long to file for an immigrant visa to the US; being eligible for a visa to the US; segregation in his school and being ignored by the non-Jewish students; attending a Jewish school; leaving Vienna in December 1938; his parents’ drug store and how they experienced antisemitic boycotts; his parents reporting to the police station on October 27, 1938 and being told to leave the country after being detained for many hours; his parents’ fates in Majdanek concentration camp; staying with his grandmother’s brother in the US; the quota system in the US; Kristallnacht; going to the US and trying to get visas for his parents, who were in Poland; entering the US Army in 1943; learning of his parents’ deaths; learning from the New York Times in 1941 about the rumors of mass killings of Jews in Europe; and present day antisemitism in Europe.
- Interviewee
- Ambassador Richard Schifter
- Date
-
interview:
1990
- Credit Line
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of the Holocaust Eyewitness Project and Edith Fierst
Physical Details
- Language
- English
- Extent
-
4 videocassettes (U-Matic) : sound, color ; 3/4 in..
Rights & Restrictions
- Conditions on Access
- There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
- Conditions on Use
- Restrictions on use. Donor retains copyright. Third party use requests must be submitted to the donor.
- Copyright Holder
- Holocaust Eyewitness Project
Keywords & Subjects
- Topical Term
- Anti-Jewish boycotts--Austria. Antisemitism--Austria--Vienna. Holocaust survivors--United States. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Austria--Personal narratives. Jewish youth--Austria. Jews, Polish--Austria. Jews--Austria--Vienna. Jews--Education--Austria. Jews--Legal status, laws, etc.--Austria. Jews--Persecutions--Austria. Jews--Segregation--Austria. Kristallnacht, 1938. World War, 1939-1945--Participation, Jewish. World War, 1939-1945--Veterans--United States. Men--Personal narratives.
- Geographic Name
- Austria--History--Anschluss, 1938. Camp Albert C. Ritchie (Md.) United States--Emigration and immigration. Vienna (Austria)
- Personal Name
- Schifter, Richard.
- Corporate Name
- United States. Army
Administrative Notes
- Legal Status
- Permanent Collection
- Provenance
- The Holocaust Eyewitness Project produced the interview with Richard Schifter in 1990 in the Washington, D.C. area. The interview was received by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1991.
- Funding Note
- The cataloging of this oral history interview has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
- Special Collection
-
The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive
- Record last modified:
- 2023-11-16 07:57:57
- This page:
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn39558
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Date: 1987-1989
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Paula Dash, born December 3, 1920 in Łódź, Poland, discusses the German invasion; how Jews were beaten by the Germans; having to wear a star; Jews having to turn in their valuables; her life in the Łódź ghetto from 1940 to 1944; the rations in the ghetto and “ghetto sickness”; the death of her father in the ghetto due to starvation; the deportation of her sister to Treblinka and murder in the gas chamber; the deportation of her brother to Auschwitz and his death during a death march; the hanging of Jews in the street; deaths in the winter of 1943 due to cold and hunger; the daily deportations; how the deported Jews communicated with the ghetto by leaving notes in the wagons and described the atrocities they were seeing; the execution of Jews in Chelmno, Poland; a “Kinder Aktion”, during which the Nazis rounded up children from their homes, put them in a wagon, and burned them alive; being deported in August 1944 with her mother and youngest brother; arriving at Auschwitz and being separated from her family; being given a number but no tattoo; the conditions in the camp; using the latrine; the sleeping conditions; how one afternoon she was sent to the gas chambers, told to undress, made to wait until the next morning to be gassed, and being saved by a sudden need in the camp for 300 women; being sent to Breman to do hard labor until February 1945; being sent on a death march to Bergen-Belsen in March 1945; being crammed with other prisoners in a dark barrack where Nazis poured boiling water on them to quiet them down; seeing piles of dead people; sickness in the camp; watching a mass grave being dug and prisoners dragging bodies to it; seeing some male prisoners become cannibals and how one of these men was then kicked and beaten to death; coming down with typhus and being saved by four friends; being liberated the next day by the British; how she still has a towel she had during her imprisonment and a piece of soap made out of Jewish fat; and her immigration to the United States June 1, 1951.
Oral history interview with Nesse Godin
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Oral history interview with Henry Greenbaum
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Oral history interview with Maryla Orgel Korn
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Oral history interview with Helen Luksenburg and William Luksenburg
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Oral testimony of Abe Malnik
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Oral history interview with Lou Pohoryles
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Oral history interview with Harriet Steinhorn-Roth
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Oral history interview with Brenda Senders
Oral History
Brenda Senders (née Bronia Szyr), born in a small town in Poland and is now part of Ukraine, describes going to Hebrew school before the war; being age 14 when the Germans and the Soviets spilt Poland and being on the Soviet part; how her town was taken over the be Germans in 1941; the Jewish ghetto; going into hiding the day before the ghetto was liquidated; hiding in a barn with a group of people; an attempted uprising by the youth in the ghetto; leaving the hiding place and being sent to a camp in Sarny, Ukraine; escaping from the camp with a few other people, including her sister; joining up with the partisans and leaving her sister to be taken care of by a trusted friend; how her partisan group derailed trains, shot German soldiers, and grew from 500 to 1750 people; one story of leaving a German-occupied village with the partisans, realized she left her bullet belt, and had to back into the occupied area; finding her sister and uncle after the war; immigrating to the United States in 1952; having a family; and a book she has, which contains pictures of people in her town who perished during the war.
Oral history interview with Leon Senders
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Oral history interview with Flora Singer
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Flora Singer discusses her preteen and teenage years in hiding in Belgium during the Holocaust.
Oral history interview with Regina Gutman Spiegel
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Regina Spiegel, born in Radom, Poland on April 20, 1926, discusses her views on why the Nazis killed Jews; the Nazi invasion, during which she was age 13; her family; being vulnerable to those in control; how her family gave up all their valuables; the antisemitic laws; the establishment of the ghetto in 1940; bribing the ghetto guards so she could escape; taking a train to her sister’s home in a nearby village; working in a camp there; how her sister was turned in to the Gestapo and was later killed while trying to escape a train; being sent to Auschwitz; conditions on the train and the altruism of the passengers; getting to Auschwitz, being stripped of clothing, tattooed, and having all her hair removed in the showers; going back to Auschwitz in 1976; being put to work in a munitions factory at Bergen-Belsen; being on a train that was bombed by Allied Forces and sustaining shrapnel injuries; German and Jewish relations; the death of her sister and nephew; and the depression in Germany.
Oral history interview with Marion Wolff
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Marion Wolff discusses her experiences as a schoolchild in Nazi Germany, including her memories of Kristallnacht and her family’s escape from Germany to the United States at the start of the war.
