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Oral history interview with Rosette Konick

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 2010.350 | RG Number: RG-50.030.0607

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    Oral history interview with Rosette Konick
    Transcript
    Good morning.
    Good morning
    It's very nice to see you, Rosette.
    Thanks for coming.
    And I'm very pleased to be here.
    Thank you very much--
    You're very welcome.
    --for inviting me.
    Tell me what was your name at birth?
    My name at birth was [? Reizl Scheinbein ?]
    And the Hebrew name was Shoshana.
    And this is the name I went by when I was in Poland
    on all my report cards.
    They used the name of [? Reizl Scheinbein ?]..
    I see.
    And later as years went on, you'll
    see I had a lot of different versions of my name,
    depending which country I lived in.
    But [? Reizl ?] was the Jewish name.
    I was named after some grandma or something.
    And Shoshana, I don't know.
    I never used it, but they told me this would
    be the equivalent of Shoshana.
    And your name now?
    My name is now Rosette Konick.
    Want me to spell it for you?
    Yes.
    K-O-N-I-C-K, and my first name is R-O-S-E-T-T-E.
    And when were you born?
    I was born January 17, 1929, in Rovno, Poland,
    which is now the Ukraine.
    And we lived in Malyns'k.
    It's a small town, 60 kilometers from Rovno.
    And it's north of Rovno, is that right?
    It is north, yes.
    It's on a railroad track between Rovno and Sarny.
    And the reason why they have a station there,
    because they had a lumber mill, so they had the trains coming
    with nothing particular but Malyns'k--
    we didn't have electricity or anything.
    But because they cut down a lot of lumber and mill them,
    so it stopped.
    And as far as the Jewish population,
    we were only about maybe 10 families.
    In Malyns'k?
    In Malyns'k.
    They were essentially just for surviving the Jewish culture
    or something.
    There was the shohet.
    And then there was the--
    what you call it, a teacher--
    and all of this in here.
    And basically 10 families--
    about 10, 12-- and that's how it stayed until the war.
    Tell me something.
    Why were you born in Rovno, and then you were raised
    in Malyns'k?
    Do you know?
    Oh yes, I do know.
    Malyns'k had no doctors, had no hospital-- it was nothing.
    Rovno was a city with electricity and doctors.
    And whenever I would be sick or anyone need medical attention,
    we would go to Rovno.
    So my mother knew that I would go--
    this is where-- in fact, I had a little brother who
    died at birth.
    But Rovno is our center of culture, of family,
    and any other assistance we needed.
    We would go to Rovno.
    So your mother went to Rovno order to--
    did she have you in the hospital?
    Or she had you at--
    Yes, it--
    She did.
    --was a hospital.
    We had relatives.
    We had cousins.
    And then apparently, she went there earlier before the date,
    and she just waited there.
    And I don't remember much about my birth.
    I cannot tell you.
    [LAUGHTER]
    But I know when my little brother was born,
    and I was there with her, and this
    is where they'd use the hospital, definitely.
    When I used to get sick, she dragged me to Rovno.
    And how old were you when your little brother was born?
    Or do you remember?
    Yes, maybe just a few years.
    He died there because my mother complained
    the nurses neglected him.
    But I was maybe 3 years old.
    That's all.
    And then there were no other siblings.
    So you became the only child.
    I am the only child--
    very pampered.
    Yes, were you spoiled?
    Yes, very spoiled too.
    Were you in some way glad to be the only child?
    Miserable.
    You were miserable?
    Miserable.
    I used to cry and tell my parents,
    I would say, Mom, go ahead and eat a lot of food and get fat,
    so you will have me a brother or a sister.
    I assumed by being fat, this is how
    you give birth the children.
    And I used to go away from the house, run away way where there
    would be other children, and I envied my friends
    who would say, guess what, my sister does broke my this,
    or my sister did this to me.
    And I thought to myself, gee, I wish
    I could say I had a brother or a sister who
    I could share something with.
    But my cousins were very close to me.
    We lived almost in the same house,
    like my surrogate brother.
    But no, I did not like the idea.
    And what did your mother say?
    Did she say anything to you when you
    said you wanted to have a brother or sister?
    She couldn't.
    She just couldn't?
    She needed some kind of a special operations surgery.
    And I know a little bit of details.
    But anyhow she couldn't conceive unless she
    would have this procedure.
    And then the wars came, just one after another.
    They abandoned the idea.
    So is there a point at which you were not miserable?
    As far as being single?
    Yeah.
    No, from that point of view, I still carry now.
    Even when I tell my son who has only one little girl,
    and I said to him, I shouldn't be giving you advice,
    but you do a disservice to your child
    if you don't have a brother or sister.
    And that's where it stayed, of course.
    I think it's such a-- there's nothing can replace a sibling
    love, no matter how many good friends you have or something.
    The sitting around the table during the holiday, the sharing
    and leaning on them when you get older--
    I don't have to tell you all the benefits of the [INAUDIBLE]..
    So I'm all for family.
    So you miss it?
    Oh yes, I missed it.
    Yeah, I missed it.
    And tell me about your parents.
    Your father, what did he-- his name was Abraham?
    Abraham, yeah.
    And what does he do for a living?
    We lived on a farm.
    On that farm there were three families.
    There was my grandfather, who had still grown
    children who were not married.
    There was an uncle, my father's brother,
    who had three children.
    And then my father.
    The three of them, the father and two sons,
    owned the property.
    They owned the mill.
    They owned also the--
    what you could make from wool to make cloth.
    The peasants used to cut--
    they sheered their lambs or something and bring it to us,
    and then by the time they left, they had it all
    converted to material, so they can make coats or something.
    We also were involved in making some kind of a oil,
    I don't know-- from press it down.
    So there was a lot of enterprises on our--
    plus we had our own cows and horses.
    And we grew our own vegetables and garden.
    And it was a big-- people used to come to us
    and spend the whole summer because they
    had all the luxuries of fresh air and lots of food.
    And I don't know if you're familiar with Poland or Europe.
    In Poland your health was defined by how fat you were.
    So when somebody came to visit us and was going back to Rovno,
    they would go on the scale and say, well,
    how many pounds did you gain?
    This was the measure of the success.
    But basically we were in the business of producing flour
    and producing cloth from wool, making oil,
    and I'm trying to think of other things.
    And we were really self supporting
    because we had the vegetables.
    We had all this in here.
    And--
    Where did people stay when people stayed for the summer?
    Was there little dormitories or something?
    No, nothing like this.
    You stretch your house.
    You stretch your house.
    You put two people in one bed.
    We had a sofa.
    And then we made--
    they would take me out of my bed and put me in my parents' bed.
    It never was any problem as far as space.
    It was never any problem.
    And we only had a room, bedroom, living room,
    and then the kitchen.
    There was supposed to be temporary quarters until they
    built something more.
    And of course the war came.
    But we had people coming and staying--
    they managed somehow.
    Also we had little couches they could put down--
    pillows and something to sleep.
    They had fun.
    And they had--
    Did you like it?
    I loved it.
    I loved people.
    And I loved all my relatives.
    And we would go walking into the forest
    and collect berries and mushrooms.
    And all the gaiety, the singing--
    Saturday after eating the big meal, we would sing songs.
    And they brought with them the city flavor of Rovno,
    which we in Malyns'k didn't have.
    They had their [INAUDIBLE] and we were just country people
    there until we left Malyns'k.
    So it's a very nice contrast and very educational.
    I loved them.
    And what sort of songs did you sing?
    We used to sing--
    what you call it--
    Hebrew songs, Yiddish, and Polish, of course,
    but mostly Yiddish.
    The ones would always--
    and the next year in Jerusalem, Hebrew themed--
    Was there a particular song you liked more than others?
    No, each of them had its own character.
    And its own-- my-- but we would start singing songs
    and get up and make a whole ring,
    clap your hands, [HUMMING] something like that.
    Everybody could sing.
    My mother was singing very well.
    And she would stand up like this after a meal in front
    of everybody and sing a song, which was her specialty,
    [SINGING IN YIDDISH] I don't know the words anymore.
    But the story told, in this Yiddish,
    how we were burned with fire, and all this in here.
    And everybody applauded her.
    Everybody who wanted got up and sang a song.
    It was a make your own entertainment.
    And you were a little kid, right?
    I was a little kid.
    And people treated you well?
    My family-- of course, I was pampered.
    As I said, I was an only child.
    And I had bad tonsils.
    And in Poland they didn't know what tonsils even are.
    I used to be sick a lot because I used to get tonsillitis.
    So my neck-- my glands would swell.
    And my mother-- the only medicine we had was--
    other medicine, we would take a compress.
    And my mother had her own remedy.
    She would take a towel and dip it in alcohol.
    Some would put garlic.
    I smelled with garlic a lot because this was the old cure
    to bring the temperature down.
    And I sometimes missed a month and a half of school
    because I used to be so sick.
    And finally she took me to a bigger city, Lvov.
    And went to see a doctor-- ear, nose, and throat--
    and he said, you know your daughter has bad tonsils?
    They're all inflamed.
    They have to go.
    They're so bad.
    Take her home and fatten her--
    because she had to be fat to be healthy--
    and then bring her back to Lvov.
    And we're going to take her tonsils out.
    And that's what happened.
    I came home, about a week, nothing with eating,
    and then they brought me back to Lvov.
    And the doctor took out my tonsils.
    And they said they were very inflamed.
    Rovno, they didn't even know about tonsils.
    Tonsils was a modern disease.
    Everything the called in Polish, [POLISH]..
    It means-- I don't know how to translate.
    But the glands used to be smaller.
    And then it was an accepted thing
    that people had sore throats.
    And you just sweated it out.
    And one thing that was very common in Europe, and then
    later on we used that in the partisans, cupping.
    You know what that is?
    You put bankes they called it in Yiddish.
    It's those little glass cups.
    You lay down on your stomach.
    And on your back, they would take put it on your back.
    First they had to get rid of the air
    and then put them all over your back.
    And you lay for 10 minutes.
    And when they took them off, it left circles.
    And the dark of the circle, we used to say,
    that's where the disease was.
    But basically this was the old cure, bankes].
    Later on I learned how to do it when I was in the partisans.
    But it's all we could do is the bankes
    and give the compresses and lots of tea and just sweat it out.
    And then when things were very bad,
    I could tell because my father would put in a tallis
    and stay by the window and start praying.
    Then I knew that probably my illness is going out of hand.
    But he always would go and start praying.
    When Daddy prayed, I knew I was very sick.
    [LAUGHTER]
    And your mother, her name was Fay?
    Fay.
    My mother was just very protective of me.
    And I remember-- it's a strange thing--
    in Poland you couldn't get fruit like oranges or anything,
    certainly not in Malyns'k.
    So she used to bring them in from Rovno.
    They were very expensive.
    And she kept it for me in the cabinet.
    And she didn't want the other children
    to see because we didn't have enough
    and didn't want them to be jealous.
    But she pampered me.
    And [INAUDIBLE] with the clothes.
    And she did such a point that I didn't
    how to wash my hair long.
    She was overprotective.
    And of course I was cream of the--
    best thing.
    She would say, my [? Reizele ?].
    This is the Jewish word.
    And she would go to the teachers and talk about me.
    And yes, I was very protected and--
    overprotective, let's put it this way.
    You were close to both parents?
    Yeah, but in a different way.
    My mother, I found this overwhelming, her constant
    worrying about my health because she didn't know I
    had bad tonsils.
    But I used to get so sick.
    So she would insist I should eat and eat and eat.
    And I found it overbearing.
    I just couldn't eat.
    I didn't like certain things.
    I would throw out the window something.
    In a different way-- my father loved me,
    but it was in a different way.
    He wasn't so demonstrative, walking around.
    But he would also sing songs for me in a different way.
    He was more calm.
    Men are this way, probably, by nature.
    But they were in personality, very different.
    She was really too much.
    I was an only child.
    And she wanted me to be well and to live.
    But this was a burden for you?
    Very much.
    [BOTH TALKING]
    I used to run--
    I was telling my daughter the other day,
    I used to run away from home, not to run away--
    literally stay away--
    but if any opportunity I could, I'd
    leave and go to play with my cousins
    because over there, they had more children.
    My aunts were not so strict about they eat or not.
    But if I was at home, every minute my mother
    was to do this, eat that, eat, eat,
    eat-- that's the secret of good health.
    And don't forget to put your shoes on.
    Don't forget to put your handkerchief on.
    And she would dress me so heavy in the winter
    because we had to walk to school, so snow and all.
    And she would bundle me up with so many layers of clothes.
    By the time to school, I had to unwind everything in here.
    But everybody knew already that my mother was so protective
    of me and sympathized with her.
    They sympathized with her, not with you?
    They sympathized with her because she
    had to put up with a child who was sick so
    much, and an only child.
    With me?
    No.
    The better the mother is, the--
    The better--
    Yes.
    They didn't see anything wrong.
    But they're so protective.
    Even my teachers used to send me cards and say, remember,
    I am going on vacation.
    But when I come back, I wanted to see you a few pounds
    heavier.
    And that's from a teacher.
    That's the good wishes from a teacher.
    It's a different world.
    It was a different world.
    Did you have lunches together or dinners together with your--
    Lots.
    Lots?
    I mean, with the relatives?
    With your father and mother, or then with relatives?
    I mean--
    Yes.
    You did both?
    Yes, we did a lot.
    My father, because he worked right there on the property,
    he used to come for his meals.
    And my mother would--
    the table always was set with a tablecloth.
    And we always had the meals together.
    Or I would eat a long lunch because he was busy.
    But Saturday was beautiful because nobody worked.
    And everybody was going to shul.
    And after they came back from shul,
    there was the samovar sitting the middle
    of the table prepared already.
    And my mother would ask somebody-- some gentle person
    to light the light under the samovar.
    And then everybody would sit around the table.
    And she baked a lot of cakes and goodies.
    And people from other Jewish families
    would come because they knew this
    is where we would have first our meal,
    but then sit and sing songs and that here, or take a walk.
    That's the place to go.
    And mom loved-- and she was a wonderful cook.
    No recipes, nothing, but a wonderful cook.
    Was she?
    Yes.
    [LAUGHTER]
    And so you enjoyed those dinners a lot?
    Oh yeah, I loved the people.
    I've always loved-- in fact, we used to be jealous as children.
    And we used to say, oh we had today two people for dinner.
    How many did you have?
    To have guests--
    Really?
    This was a big--
    --was an honor.
    Really?
    And everybody who didn't know were--
    they would pass through Malyns'k on the way to somewhere else.
    They didn't know where to sleep.
    They would come to us or to my uncle,
    till somebody would put them up to sleep and feed them
    until they would go on their house.
    My mother used to say, I have rubber pots and pans.
    They can stretch as many people as they are.
    And it was no problem.
    We always had to guests.
    It was an honor to have a guest at your table.
    So did you feel poor or wealthy or neither?
    No, in comparison with the people in Malyns'k, we were
    considered well-to-do.
    It depends on whose standards because
    we were self supporting.
    We had food and all this--
    and never were hungry.
    But we were not on the--
    like in America we say, wealthy.
    If you had your own--
    we had our own horses, and we could ride around
    in the-- and cows and all this.
    We're self-sufficient.
    So we were considered, yes, well-to-do.
    Within that context?
    Within that context, yes, because the others were--
    either they were-- one was a seamstress,
    and this was a shnayder.
    And this was a shoemaker-- they were more working
    according to their specialty.
    But they didn't own that property
    and live on such a scale.
    Did you work at the farm at all?
    Did you help with the animals or help
    in some of these businesses?
    My mother would give me sometimes crumbs,
    and she says, don't to go and spread it
    in front of the house for the chicken.
    And I like to help in the garden.
    We grew our own strawberries and our corn.
    And my mother would say, you want
    to go ahead and pick some and bring it back?
    I didn't have so-called chores.
    But I would go there and tend to the yard.
    Just do things if Mom ask me something to do.
    And that's about it.
    I didn't go near the cows or anything, just around the--
    Did you like the animals?
    Yeah, I loved them.
    I used to observe them.
    We had animals in the house, like dogs and cats.
    But yes, I-- observing them, so certain personalities.
    I would see one, and I knew if I'm
    going to bring them some food, that chicken or the rooster
    is going to chase everybody away.
    And he's going to take the food from them.
    Then I used to get a kick out of those things, yeah.
    [LAUGHS]
    It was fun.
    You were part of a religious household, I gather?
    Oh, yes.
    It was orthodox.
    It was orthodox?
    Oh, yeah.
    Not just traditional, but real--
    Real orthodox.
    I remember we had a mezuzah on the door.
    And we observed all the holidays.
    And my mother kept kashrut.
    And if she wanted to have a chicken,
    we had to go to the shochet.
    You know what it is, right?
    It's the--
    Person who--
    --who cuts, yeah.
    It kills the chicken according to the Jewish law.
    But yes, we definitely had separate dishes and all.
    And my mother was very strict about--
    in fact she wanted to engrain this into us--
    into me when I came to this country
    and I was married, to carry on.
    But this is America.
    Now things a little bit different.
    But yes, she was very law abiding in the religious way.
    Did you go to school regularly?
    Yeah.
    Did you go every week?
    I went to what you would call here elementary school.
    And we started school in Poland at the age of 7.
    And then I had--
    all the Jewish children were getting instruction in Hebrew
    and in Jewish history.
    We had a teacher who used to come after classes when
    we came home, he would come to the house
    and teach us Hebrew, which we resented--
    the Jewish children resented because why do I
    have to sit home?
    And all the other kids are playing.
    We just came from school and all.
    But nevertheless this was part of our Jewish education
    and Hebrew too.
    And otherwise we played--
    Jewish children tended to be together.
    Although I had a very good friend,
    Catholic, and she would come over and play with me too.
    But there was never a lack of fun.
    There was always something to do.
    And people coming passing through,
    happened to be in the neighborhood or something.
    And as I said, I had cousins my age.
    My cousin is still alive, and he lives in Israel in Tel Aviv.
    He was my surrogate brother, my protector.
    And sometimes mischievous, but anyhow, this is
    my only I could call brother--
    so-called.
    Were there particular games that you liked, that you played?
    That I played?
    Yeah.
    Yeah, we had something-- the rope, jumping.
    Everybody did the rope.
    And then we hit something on the ground, like squares.
    Hopscotch?
    Maybe this is called hopscotch here.
    We would jump around.
    And hide-and-seek, of course.
    And what else did we do?
    These are the most common ones, hide-and-seek and the--
    So most of your friends were Jewish?
    So it was a mixture.
    But the closest ones were Jewish.
    I don't know, not by choice, but we have
    something that we could share.
    We also could compare experiences.
    If somebody beat you up on the way to school,
    and did somebody call you Żyd?
    Żyd means Jew.
    So we had experiences that we could share,
    and saying so-and-so wasn't nice to this--
    anti-Semitism was heavy in Poland.
    Poland was a very anti-Semitic country.
    And we as children sensed it too.
    So this was one reason why also the Jewish children
    tended to be together.
    But I did have Gentile friends too.
    And they lived by.
    And they would come to us--
    sometimes the parents.
    And we played-- all kinds of children and things.
    But the really closeness was with the Jewish children
    because we shared the same anxiety.
    We knew we were Jewish.
    We knew that we were singled out as Jews.
    They called us Żyd.
    And I know that Sundays used to be very--
    we used to be very apprehensive because the local people would
    get--
    they would get the money by Sunday, get paid,
    so they would get drunk.
    And they would go in the street.
    They would see a Jew, especially the one
    with ear locks, the very Orthodox.
    They beat them up, cut the things.
    So fear of such things kept us Jewish children closer
    and warning, this and this.
    But we did have other [INAUDIBLE]..
    We're going to stop the tape.
    So when you grew up, you experienced antisemitism
    among--
    was it mainly Polish children?
    Or you experienced with adults, your teachers in school?
    OK.
    What was it like for you?
    The antisemitism in Poland was overt and covert.
    Poland, before it was came to be--
    it used to be under the Russians.
    And they used to have pogroms, as you know, and all this.
    So the antisemitism was instilled in the population.
    And when-- we felt it in--
    you can call it, maybe in the beginning, in a subtle way,
    like being assaulted and getting sometimes beat up--
    not me, but some of the Jews.
    They discriminated.
    They constantly used to be called [POLISH] and something
    like that.
    But they did allow--
    this time, it was under the Marshal Pilsudski,
    who was [INAUDIBLE] Poland.
    They did allow Jews to have property, you know?
    But it was a very uncomfortable feeling.
    Parents wanted their children to--
    eventually, to migrate.
    They would have liked to migrate, too,
    but they wanted their children to grow up
    in a free atmosphere.
    And until Pilsudski, the marshal, died, it was still OK.
    They loved him, the Polish people.
    And we felt more comfortable.
    And then when he died, it was tragedy to the--
    everybody cried.
    And then a new leader came in, Smigly-Rydz.
    And he was the disaster for Poland.
    First of all, they don't even know where he-- how he came
    to be in the head of Poland, but as you
    know, that Poland gave up, after eight years of resistance
    to the Nazis.
    And when he came in, it became much more difficult
    for the Jews.
    I don't remember it myself, experience,
    but I remember tell--
    reading that Jewish students-- they only
    took in so many Jewish students, the universities,
    and they would tell them to sit in a certain place.
    So it became more and more known.
    My father and my uncle and my grandfather were very assertive
    people, and didn't-- they wouldn't let anybody push them
    around.
    And they were very--
    the people know it, like if he--
    somebody would do something which is wrong,
    they would speak up.
    Like I told my family the other day,
    my father came to a post office one time to pick up something.
    And it was 10 minutes before closing time.
    And the master there says to him, well, I'm sorry.
    It's closing time.
    And my father says to him, no, it isn't.
    There's still 10 minutes to go.
    He says, no, well, I am not going to wait on you.
    My father took him to court, which is a very unusual
    [INAUDIBLE].
    And he won the case, because he had no right to refuse service.
    They wouldn't do it to Polish people,
    but they pushed the Jews around.
    I'm just giving you a little sample.
    But my father and, I said my uncle,
    they were assertive and very proud of themselves.
    And they weren't meek, you know?
    They could stand up.
    Plus, they-- all the people there needed us, too.
    They were poor.
    And they would come to us and say,
    would you do something, for-- like,
    make flour out of the corn?
    But I don't have money to pay now.
    And my uncle's-- my father said, don't worry about it.
    Go ahead.
    So we did a lot of favors for them.
    Sometimes, they would bring a chicken to pay for it,
    but basically, they depended in some help on us too.
    When they came and stayed on our farm for a while,
    until everything was done for them.
    They slept down there, too.
    Was some quarters, I don't know.
    But we were very good to them.
    And that showed later during the Holocaust, that they--
    some of them helped us, and--
    when we were hiding in the forest.
    In fact, my father had his own rifle from-- given--
    he traded something off with another family.
    He gave something, and they give us a rifle to--
    so-- which is very unusual.
    You didn't see a Jew hiding in the forest with a rifle.
    And so it's a mutual sort of codependence,
    you can say, between the people there.
    They also-- they worked on our farm.
    They helped with the growing things
    and whatever had to be done.
    They were help, tending to the animals, or something this.
    Did you do things with your father by yourself?
    Did you go for walks, or did he read to you?
    That was an honor, when my father would take me with him,
    because he was a very busy man, and he wasn't--
    what you call it?
    I knew he loved me, but he wasn't, as I told you,
    overpowering.
    And he would take me sometimes to show me the horses
    or take me into the place where they made the fabric out
    of the wool, show me-- he-- how they do it, you know?
    So he was, in a different way-- yes, I adored my father.
    I adored my father.
    And, well, if he had the time to take me for a walk
    or take d show me how the old industrial things worked,
    I was very, very happy, yeah.
    Because as I said, as much as I loved my mother, this--
    being so overprotective, I would [CHUCKLES] just
    take off, you know, somewhere and play somewhere else, yes.
    And did your mother take you for walks or read to you?
    Oh, yeah.
    My mother--
    She did.
    Yes.
    [INAUDIBLE]--
    My mother would take me with her shopping, "shopping"
    meaning you go to the center of Malyns'k where there--
    they had a store to buy products.
    And she'd take me, yes, and--
    because they wouldn't let me go alone, God forbid, you know?
    So she would-- yeah, I was very happy.
    She would take me or visit--
    something, you know, had to do, seamstress or something.
    Yeah, she-- it was different.
    My father was more intellectual, you know?
    Bringing up things and telling me.
    And it's amazing how different in personality they were.
    And they got along well?
    As far as your recollection, they got along well?
    They got along well, as much as marriages can be.
    There was always some friction in the family,
    you know, because they had different ideals.
    But the family ties were very strong.
    To give you an example, when the Russians came--
    no, when the Germans came to-- invaded Poland in 1941.
    You know the Barbarossa and he--
    and all this thing.
    A lot of Jewish men left from Malyn'sk or anywhere,
    and they followed the Russian army,
    because we were told that the Germans kill--
    take away the Jewish men, and they kill them, or something.
    So a lot of the men, including the very religious shochet,
    they all ran and left their families and children
    all alone.
    And I cried.
    And I said, Daddy, are you going to leave us and also go away
    with [? everyone? ?]
    And he says-- Daddy says, no, I'm not going to leave you.
    I will stay with you no matter what.
    And he stayed.
    He did.
    And my uncle stayed, also.
    But those others decided they're going
    to follow the Russians, because they felt much more comfortable
    with the Russian army.
    The Russians at least did not tell you-- they killed them.
    They had their own problems.
    So, yes, he was very protective of us, too.
    Very protective.
    Did you hear a lot about Germany when you were growing up?
    Because you were born in 1929 and the Nazis take over in '33,
    and you're still a little kid.
    But by the time 1939 comes, you're 10 years old.
    So in between '33 and '39, do you hear things about
    what's going on in Germany, or--
    We heard a little bit.
    My father used to subscribe to a Jewish paper.
    This was a big thing.
    And whenever the paper would come once a month,
    my father would sit at the table.
    It was Yiddish.
    And he would put-- sit me on his lap, and my mother,
    and he would read to me all the happenings in Europe.
    And I remember him talking something--
    my mother cursed this guy.
    She was saying Chamberlain-- was it Chamber-something?
    Something with the umbrella?
    I didn't know, as a child, what his--
    this person's title was.
    But my mother was cursing.
    And I knew he was probably antisemite or something.
    And he would tell me what was happening in Europe,
    that, I think, the Germans came into Czechoslovakia
    or something.
    And then I think maybe Austria, too.
    And we always were--
    felt very insecure and unsure of ourself.
    And as a child, I was very curious
    about the world situation.
    We didn't know how far the-- what this is going to end up.
    Will the Nazis just take over part of Czechoslovakia, some--
    well, we didn't know where it was going to go.
    But this is how the Jews always lived, in fear
    and never knowing what--
    we would always say when a new--
    some official would come into power,
    would-- the first question was, are they going--
    is he going to be good to the Jews?
    Does he like Jews?
    Because they had the power to do what he wanted.
    So we-- the only thing I had, the--
    we-- I didn't know about Hitler, but I knew that the Germany--
    we knew, was expanding in Europe.
    This was maybe in the--
    well, in the middle '30s, never thinking
    that they would come to Poland, or even
    take over the whole world.
    This was--
    Were you worried about war?
    Did you-- did--
    We were always-- yes.
    We were very apprehensive about war,
    because we were unsure where Poland--
    what's going to happen to Poland.
    Poland was shaky.
    The government was shaky.
    And when-- we didn't think that they would come to Poland.
    Maybe they were just going to--
    the fascist concentrated the central Europe.
    We didn't know.
    But yet, when you're a Jew, you're always apprehensive.
    You didn't know where--
    how far they will go and what we'll--
    and where the Jews were beaten up, where they were-- burned
    synagogues.
    We used to hear about that, burning synagogues in Germany,
    and maybe beating up.
    But yes, we were never, never secure in Poland.
    Did it affect your sleep?
    My sleep?
    No.
    It didn't?
    No.
    So you didn't have bad dreams?
    No.
    At this time, we didn't know anything about--
    what you call it--
    concentration camps.
    Of course, they didn't exist yet,
    but even ghettos, so nothing.
    It was just the beginning of the fascist rule.
    And we knew that Jews were discriminated or beaten up.
    At that time, we didn't know-- and in fact, I, personally--
    our part--
    we, in-- around Poland didn't know about concentration camps
    until after the war.
    We knew that the Germans were putting
    people, Jews, in ghettos, and they were shooting them.
    They told them to--
    [CLEARS THROAT] excuse me-- to dig ditches,
    and they would kill them, like [INAUDIBLE] [? here, ?]
    because people would run away, come and tell us.
    But as far as concentration camps,
    we didn't know until after the war.
    So Jews were never secure in Poland.
    This is why they wanted their children go to Israel.
    This is-- we wanted to migrate to America for--
    first of all, because my mother had two brothers and two
    sisters who came to America to Washington, right
    after the First World War, with the idea
    that as soon as they get settled, they'll bring us over.
    And it took, as I told you, 10 years
    to do, because then my mother got married and all,
    and until--
    America didn't open the doors so easy to everybody.
    You know, they took you to--
    what do you call it?
    In New Jersey, what was this called?
    The-- well, anyhow, you couldn't come in so easily to America,
    so we just stuck it out.
    But we-- everybody wished to leave Poland, or even the--
    Ukraine, particularly, was very, very antisemitic.
    They carried this-- my mother used
    to talk about the Cossacks and the pogroms.
    But she used to call the Germans,
    before the war, the good Germans.
    She says, those were the good Germans.
    You know, after First World War, they
    were the good ones, because they were persecuted,
    and all, and all.
    Now, the ones became-- this was already
    became, of course, the bad Germans.
    And it was just serious--
    a whole lot of events that took place.
    It was-- put us on guard.
    We could feel it.
    And you felt it as a child?
    Oh, yes.
    Oh, yes.
    I grew up with antisemitism.
    But I was very protected by my parents, by the family.
    We were sort of clinging together.
    And we started to make an attempt to come to America.
    Right.
    I had-- we had wonderful family here in Washington who came.
    And they were relentless in trying to bring us to America.
    And we got, finally, our visa.
    And we missed the boat by three days.
    But we-- my mother's family was-- the two brothers and two
    sisters were already established in Washington.
    But one uncle of mine, [? Asca ?] [? Rosenski-- ?] he
    was the elected leader in trying to bring us down there.
    It was very hard.
    Roosevelt, you know, was not very too keen about letting--
    in general, letting people--
    to come to America, before the war, you had to have--
    who would vouch that you will have a job waiting for you.
    You couldn't come to America and become a burden to the country.
    Right.
    So-- even after the war, you know?
    Which is-- maybe you want me to tell you later about if.
    We could-- we stayed for three years in Paris
    waiting to get a visa to come to America,
    because we thought maybe they'll honor our first visas in 1939.
    No, nothing of the sort.
    You had to show--
    the family here in the United States
    had to show that when we come there,
    there'll be a job waiting for my father.
    And was a lot of work.
    And finally, my parents came in '48,
    and I came-- then they brought me over 1949.
    So--
    But before the-- was it before the Germans attacked
    Poland, September 1939, that you were on a boat and the boat
    had to turn around?
    No, I'll tell you.
    In 1939, we finally got to rid of our-- whatever property we
    had and packed up our things.
    And we were heading to Gdynia--
    Gdansk?
    Was it Gdynia or Gdansk?
    One of the Polish ports, to take the boat and to come.
    We never got on the boat, because we were on our way
    to the port, and the--
    as you know, the Germans came in the first of September.
    There was no point going.
    They were bombing, there, the ports,
    and even if we got on it, who knows if the boat would even
    be able to take off?
    So nothing.
    So you went back?
    We went back.
    At least our home was still there.
    My aunt and uncle were still there.
    There was still family in here, so we just, regretfully,
    had to pick up where we left off.
    But your father didn't sell the property?
    He gave it to his brother.
    He gave it to his brother.
    I see.
    So when he came back, did the brother give it back?
    We came back-- our property was confiscated by the Russians,
    you know, in 19--
    Oh, because they had an agreement--
    Yeah, but then the Russians came, as you know, in 1939,
    and they divided up Poland.
    We were under the Russians, and the Russians
    do not allow personal property.
    So we were allowed to leave--
    still live on the farm, and this.
    But the mill and all this, this was no more.
    So before leaving, my father turned over
    the-- his share of the mill and all to my father.
    Plus, my mother had a sister, because she
    couldn't come to America because as a child she had--
    she was brain damaged.
    And then-- so she had my uncle and aunt--
    took her in and said they'll take care of her.
    So it was a lot of things, why our delay was--
    you know, [INAUDIBLE] didn't want
    to leave her unless they found somebody who
    really can take care of her.
    Her name was Rivka.
    And did you know her?
    Oh, yes.
    You did.
    She was wonderful.
    Was she?
    She was wonderful.
    When I was born, she lived with us.
    My mother was her only sister who was left in Poland.
    And she lived with us, and she used to sing songs for me,
    and she--
    I mean, a very warm person, very, very warm.
    But of course, because she had brain damage, her--
    she could do things in the house.
    She wasn't any threat to anyone.
    But all she could to remember was, like,
    singing songs and children's games or something.
    But she was very protective of me, too, all the time.
    And, don't go there, you're gonna, you know,
    protect the younger.
    You want to fall here?
    You'll scratch your knee.
    Made you a little crazy?
    Yeah, yeah.
    All these protective--
    Oh, yes.
    Oh, yes.
    Oh, yes.
    So when the Germans--
    do you remember the Germans taking over part of Poland?
    Or was-- because you were on the Russian side?
    Well, I-- we were with the Russians only one year.
    In 1939, Hitler and Stalin were pals, and they divided Poland.
    Because we were near the Eastern border, near the border,
    we were under the Russians.
    And this lasted one year.
    And then Hitler decided to--
    he wanted to take over all of Europe.
    And he launched the--
    called Barbarossa, if you--
    and he went into--
    going east.
    And it didn't take very long until they came
    to Malyn'sk, too.
    We knew that-- we had people staying, sometimes,
    with us who ran away from Poland, per se,
    Warsaw, something.
    And they told us the horrible things
    that the Germans do there.
    But as long as we were still under the Russians, we were--
    felt more secure.
    The Russians weren't killing us, at least.
    But this lasted only one year.
    And then in 194--
    I think it's '41, yes--
    Hitler decided to go east.
    And they took over.
    They went east.
    They went to Rovno, and then they came to [? Ostroh. ?]
    And that was the beginning of our--
    Let me go back for a minute.
    Do you remember being under the Russians as a kid?
    Yes.
    And what--
    For a year, from 1939--
    or from 1940 to '41 we lived under the Russians.
    I went to a Russian school.
    Oh, you did?
    Yeah, but we didn't have any more--
    we couldn't run the mill or the--
    I mean, the property was no longer ours,
    because the communism doesn't believe in private property.
    But your father ran the farm still?
    No, we could use the farm just for ourselves.
    But my father got a job.
    And he was in charge of some kind of dairy
    that's making milk.
    The peasants would bring the milk.
    No, he had a job.
    No more mill as private property.
    No more-- I don't know who took over.
    And probably, nobody even took it over.
    So for a year we lived with the Russians, and--
    Was this bad for you?
    Do you remember it being bad, or--
    Bad being with the Russians?
    Yeah.
    No, because-- well, it was out of the two evils.
    We were-- felt lucky to be with the Russians.
    The only threat we felt in the beginning
    is that the Russians used to--
    if somebody was well-to-do in Poland, comfortable,
    they would come in the morning, knock on your door,
    and say, pack up.
    You're going.
    And they send them to Siberia, because you
    were considered what they call the Russian "kulak."
    Kulak means the-- you know, the wealthy one.
    Wealthy by their standards, you know?
    So we were always afraid that maybe they
    will call us the wealthy ones, and to expatriate us, too,
    you know?
    Come in the morning.
    Some people were sent in--
    to Siberia.
    I don't know.
    They were suspicious of them.
    They didn't trust them, something.
    So-- but it's still, I could go to school.
    Nobody called me Jew under the Russian.
    And this was sort of like a temporary arrangement.
    We never knew that the Germans are
    going to come in a year later and invade us, too.
    So we-- given the choice, we would have preferred
    staying with the Russians.
    Yes.
    Do you remember when the Russians--
    when the Germans came into Malyn'sk?
    Very well.
    What was it like?
    We knew they were going to come any day now, because they
    were coming from the west.
    And I remember our shtetl Malyn'sk only had one road
    going across.
    And then we hear motorcycles, people-- soldiers
    on motorcycles coming in.
    We never saw motorcycle in Malyn'sk, you know?
    We didn't-- and they came in, and the people in Malyn'sk--
    I don't know who they were, whether they
    were Ukrainian-- anyhow, sympathizer, Nazi sympathizers,
    were standing alongside the road with flowers and greeting them
    and applauded.
    We stayed tight in the house hiding.
    We didn't know what they were going to do.
    They were just passing through this town, city--
    city, whatever.
    The village.
    And just to let them know that they are now in power.
    I may say another thing, is what used to scare us all,
    is the time when there's a change of the guard.
    When one country leaves, like the Russians have been away
    from the Germans, because they knew they were coming.
    And until the Germans came and really showed--
    say that they are now in power, there was this--
    like, it's not normal.
    It's like nobody was in charge, and anybody
    could go ahead and do anything for somebody, set fire
    or something, because there was no law.
    It became lawlessness.
    So when, finally, the Germans came, as bad as it,
    at least they could control the population.
    And that's what happened.
    As soon as they came, they didn't
    make us move from the house, but the first order they gave
    is for the Jews to wear patches, the yellow.
    And Jewish children couldn't go to school.
    We could still stay in the house for a while.
    They would come in sometimes and order something-- cook
    something for me, or beat up a jew, like for the fun of it,
    or something.
    But we could still stay in our house.
    This lasted not very long.
    I regret it very much, not being able to go
    to school or something.
    But the young Jewish girls-- they used to be hiding and wear
    little scarves, not to look young,
    because they're afraid maybe they will--
    you know, the Nazis would, you know--
    Rape you?
    Yes, something.
    But this was just for a--
    they came into us, I think, in June or something.
    And then shortly after, in 1942, the order came out for--
    and they put us in Berezne, in the ghetto.
    They took all the Jews from all the small places scattered
    and put them all in one place.
    Like, we were close to Berezne.
    They put us in Berezne.
    Some other people were, I think, in other ghettos.
    So our stay in Malyn'sk under the Germans was very short.
    We still were not hungry, because we had our home,
    and we had still our garden, which helped us with food.
    And they-- other than just the laws
    not to go out late at night, we were not really
    yet persecuted until they took us to the ghetto.
    You mean persecuted in a hard way?
    In a hard way, yes.
    They didn't--
    Because clearly you were persecuted some.
    Oh, we were, yes.
    That is right.
    Yes.
    We knew it.
    They were not-- came here with very friendly intention to us.
    But they were not going around to get out and something.
    They just left it for a while.
    It was all hanging.
    And if we didn't have any food, we had a lot--
    well, some Gentile friends who used
    to come and bring us some food.
    Some would be a gift.
    Some would be bartering.
    I'll give you this.
    I'll give it-- and my mother, my parents
    would give something from their clothes,
    or something like that.
    So we were not really hungry while we were still
    in Malyn'sk, until the--
    OK.
    We're going to stop the tape.
    You were talking about when the Germans came in, and eventually
    you had to leave Malyns'k and go to the ghetto.
    Is that correct?
    Berezne correct.
    Berezne ghetto.
    This came about the time when the order came up,
    and all throughout Europe it was I think August something.
    Heinrich came out with the villa,
    when he they got together all the Nazis
    and decided they're going to exterminate all the Jews.
    And Heinrich was the mastermind of all this
    Heinrich Himmler?
    Heinrich, Heinrich.
    Heydrich?
    Heydrich?
    Is it Heydrich?
    I don't know.
    Maybe I'm pronouncing it wrong.
    It doesn't matter.
    I know how to write it, but not to spell.
    Anyhow, the order came out throughout Europe
    that all the Jews have to be exterminated.
    What they did ghetto, Berezne was a bigger place than
    Malyns'k.
    They already had maybe about 3,000 Jews or something.
    They were already all put together sort of
    in like a ghetto.
    So they brought us from Malyns'k--
    in comparison, we were a small group--
    into the Berezne Ghetto.
    Do you remember that day?
    I remember one thing.
    Yes, they had horses pulling buggies,
    so the people who couldn't walk-- it
    was about 20 kilometers or something.
    And I think I was sitting there right in one of those too,
    where people could sit on it, and the man would walk next it.
    And there were horses pulling the buggies and the carriages.
    And we got to Berezne.
    What was it like for you?
    Was it frightening?
    Were people nervous?
    Were people upset?
    Very nervous.
    The people were apprehensive.
    The people were afraid, leaving your own environment,
    no matter how bad.
    But your family, you have people who came to see, gentle people.
    When they're grouped together we knew
    it's a bad sign, based on the rumors
    were heard from other people that this is no good.
    Whenever they bring all the Jews together,
    that something is going to happen.
    So they brought our whole family,
    everybody who lives they bring to Berezne, and they had--
    maybe just they were packed two families
    in one room or something.
    But they put this all together in one area.
    And they delineated the area, which
    was going to be Berezne Ghetto.
    My father and my uncle and some other men
    were sent to work outside of the ghetto
    in a place called Polany, because they could work.
    There was a farm there.
    But also they were doing something with trees, whatever.
    They were working outside of the ghetto.
    And I begged, can I go and be with my father,
    and I will help on the farm.
    I feel more secure with my father than be with the women
    hysterical and yelling and this and that.
    And there was more freedom, because you were out
    in the open.
    So they let me go.
    And I stayed with my father on that big farm.
    And I supposedly worked in the field.
    But my father was there and my uncle.
    And shortly after, we heard the rumor,
    somebody came and told my father that there
    is an order came out in Berezne Ghetto
    that all the Jews must be gathered in the ghetto,
    must stay, and that also they saw that a lot of police
    was coming to Berezne and also the--
    I don't know how the German word is-- the troops ,
    German troops do.
    So they were closing up the ghetto,
    wouldn't let people out, so we knew that things are bad.
    My mother was still left there, my aunt uncle in here.
    And so we never went back to Berezne regardless
    they said you all have to.
    We just stayed.
    We were fortunate to be near a forest that
    would save a lot of Jews from our area,
    that we were in the forest.
    We were not stuck in a ghetto like in the big cities
    or something.
    We could only sneak into the forest.
    So we never went back to Berezne.
    And the Germans didn't come there?
    They didn't come to get us.
    There was just a few of us.
    They were too busy rounding up people in Berezne.
    How my mother got out of there is a story of it itself.
    I had a cousin, a year older than me,
    and he was there in Berezne, Benjamin,
    and he was very shrewd.
    He would go up and down the street and see what's going on.
    He came back to the house, and he
    says to his mother, and my mother, and to his sister,
    we're getting out of here.
    And he could see that something's happening.
    You could see the preparations.
    So how do you get out of the ghettos of Jews?
    So my mother and and my aunt, they
    put a kerchief on their heads.
    They looked like peasant women.
    And they had on the shoulder to carry the thing that you dig
    the ground hose or something.
    And they all looked like they were Ukrainian
    or the native peasants.
    And they started leaving.
    Nobody suspected them as being Jews,
    because they looked like they blended in with the others.
    And they ran in the forest.
    It didn't matter who, or what, just be in the forest,
    because they knew that in the forest, at least
    they were safer.
    We didn't know if my father didn't
    know a thing that my mother ran away from the ghetto
    and all us--.
    We went to right away in the forest too.
    We stayed alone, my uncle, my father, and me.
    And we thought that they were all killed.
    We knew that they were killing people in the Berezne.
    And you knew this?
    We knew it.
    You knew it?
    We knew it already after this.
    We knew what was going on because people, peasants, would
    tell and to bring us the news.
    So when we were in the forest, there was interesting story.
    My uncle, we thought that the whole family was dead.
    So my uncle picked 10 trees to represent a minyan.
    He put on the Tallis--
    he always carried the Tallis.
    And he put it, and he said Kaddish for his family
    and for us because we thought that they're probably
    dead by now and they'll never come out.
    And he said Kaddish for the family.
    We will for a little while just along
    going for sometimes to a farm.
    And then we heard that my mother and my aunt, they did survive,
    and they were hiding somewhere, so we
    had a reunion in the forest, a very happy reunion.
    At least they were alive, and all this
    because my cousin, who was only a year older than me,
    had enough sense and enough presence of mind to say,
    we're getting out.
    If they would have stayed overnight,
    they would have had to dig their own ditches
    and would have been shot like everyone,
    all the Jews in the ghetto.
    When you were older, did you ask your mother,
    why did you listen to this little boy?
    Because he was 11 years, 12 years old or something.
    No, she listened.
    She went.
    She followed my cousin.
    Why did she listen?
    Because nobody was smart.
    He could have gone out of the ghetto
    and then stabbed by the police or shot on the highway.
    There was nothing foolproof.
    But you live in the ghetto, you got out,
    you were taking a chance.
    And when you're still alive, you say
    maybe it's just a false rumor.
    Maybe they want-- we lived by the rumors.
    Maybe they just came to relocate us, maybe something.
    Nobody right away wanted to accept the fact
    that this was it.
    So once we were reunited, we stayed together,
    my uncle, and his wife, and his three children,
    and my mother, and father, and us.
    And we were going from farmer to farmer.
    Some of them were very kind and would
    let us stay, spend a couple of nights in there
    of hiding in hay.
    What do you it?
    The barn.
    And then at night, they would come out
    and they would give us some food.
    They were taking a chance of their lives,
    because if a neighbor's child would come over and see us
    there, they could tell on us.
    And they would kill not us, but also
    kill the people who were hiding us.
    Life was cheap.
    For a pound of salt, anybody could turn in to do.
    Salt was a big commodity.
    What did they care?
    Got the Jew, they give them a pound of salt.
    So they would let us stay sometimes
    for a few nights, until they felt it was dangerous.
    And I recall one thing as a child.
    I was sitting in hiding in the barn in the hay,
    and I made a little opening to see what's doing.
    This was daytime.
    And I see all the chicken running around.
    And I said, God, why don't you change me into a chicken,
    because take a look.
    They can be free and run around, and I have to sit in here.
    God, make me one of the domestic animals or something,
    the wishful thing.
    But we would stay in one place, then go to the forest
    and stay a few days, then go somewhere else.
    But basically what we tried to do is go east.
    Maybe we'll still catch up somewhere.
    We wanted to be on the Russian territory,
    pre-war Russian territory, because they were not
    so anti-Semitic.
    So we would stay in there.
    Some other people would come and join us, the survivors,
    stay a little.
    We'll hear the stories.
    And they will go away, hoping they can find
    some relatives in the forest.
    So this was an ongoing thing.
    What we needed the most for survival in the forest
    is two very important things, is to have an ax, so we
    can chop wood and then make a tipi or something, and also
    a shovel to dig a hole, so we can have water.
    So those things were essential for survival.
    So you made something like a tent?
    Correct, yeah, we had it like this.
    We put all the trees and just left and opening to in.
    The fire was always in the center.
    And it would come out through the chimney.
    So we were laying with our heads to the fire.
    And then to eat, if we didn't have food,
    there were always mushrooms.
    There were berries.
    And then at night, the grown ups would
    leave me and my little cousin alone,
    and they would go into the fields to look for food.
    They could dig up potatoes.
    They could dig up corn, because at night, they felt secure.
    And if they knew somebody who would
    be sympathetic to the Jews, they would go in
    and then the person give them maybe some other food.
    But you had to be careful.
    You never knew even who's going to turn you in.
    And then all these people who all
    stay together, they would come back
    when the sun would come out.
    You had to return to the forest before the sun--
    before it was daytime to get out of there.
    And then we'll all sit down and told rumors.
    So what did you hear?
    So where is the front now?
    So where is this going?
    And then we also used to--
    it's silly, but we gave a lot of credence to dreams.
    We'd get up in the morning, and we would say, so
    what did you dream?
    And this person said, I had a dream of this.
    That's good.
    That's a good sign.
    Jews have this capacity of always
    we survived so many wars that to interpret it,
    something will be for good.
    That's a good sign.
    If you dreamed about this and this and this,
    it's going to be good for us, or maybe we won't be caught,
    or maybe we'll get one.
    So we also would exchange stories about dreams.
    We had the food.
    And at night, when all the grownups went to look for food,
    and I was left alone with my little cousin, who was maybe
    about four years younger than me, we sat by the fire,
    just all alone, and we could hear
    the bears howling, because they saw people in the wood.
    But they never came in, inside.
    They were there.
    But could see them all running.
    And we had to be very quiet while we were in the woods,
    so nobody would find, because anybody,
    shepherds who were tending to cows
    or whatever, if they would see a Jew, they can come home
    and tell.
    And the minute we saw that somebody saw us,
    we had to change the place, run, because the chances of them
    telling us were very great.
    So we just walked, and we decided
    to go on Russian territory, Russian pre-war territory,
    which meant to cross the River Sluch.
    To cross the river, there was no bridge.
    There was just a very narrow railroad,
    because the Polish people used it to transport something
    from carriage.
    They were building fortifications.
    They thought they were going to fight with the Russians.
    So the river was very wide.
    And we had to cross it.
    And to go from one of--
    what we call this thing in here-- to another,
    you could see the water underneath.
    So if you missed and you didn't step right--
    Was there stones?
    No.
    There were just two tracks, and there were ties.
    Is that what you call them?
    So you had to walk on these?
    We had to walk on the ties, make sure not to miss,
    because if you missed it, you would fall into the river.
    My uncle carried my little cousin on her back.
    So wait a minute.
    That's above the water.
    Above the water.
    So you could really fall and hurt yourself?
    We could have, if you don't fall.
    This was little.
    It was a very narrow.
    This was the little tracks, and there were just
    ties going across.
    It wasn't meant to walk on.
    They used to push little carts with sand,
    the samples they were building.
    Until we crossed the river, we felt already being on Russian--
    so-called Russian, it wasn't Russian anymore-- territory,
    we were relieved, because we knew
    the people will be kind to us, that they will not turn us in.
    And they were, after all, former Russian citizens.
    So they were not buddy buddy with the Nazis.
    So once we came there and we sat , down,
    the Germans did know more that there were a lot of Jews hiding
    in the forest.
    They knew?
    They knew it.
    They did, yeah.
    They knew it through the Ukraine and whoever used to tell them.
    They knew the Jews, there were a lot of Jews hiding.
    But there used to be a rumor saying that Germans are not
    country people.
    They're city people.
    They will never go into a forest to look
    for people, because they don't know how to get around.
    So if anything, they relied on sometimes the plane
    would fly over our heads, because just looking in.
    And sometimes you could hear troops,
    and we hear this going on, we knew it's time
    to move to another place.
    And once we came, as I said, on this Russian territory,
    some person told us that if you go in this and this house,
    there are some Russian partisans and to meet them,
    and maybe they can help your or whatever it is.
    We were elated.
    Anything Russian felt good to us.
    It meant that the Germans were left way behind us.
    They were on the other side of the Sluch River.
    And we didn't even think that they were anywhere around here.
    So my father and my uncle went into this house,
    and they met with the partisans.
    They were-- I don't know who the exact people.
    That were just Russian, just local people
    who worked for the partisans.
    They were keeping guard to let the partisans know
    the Germans are coming or something.
    So when my father and my uncle came and asked could we
    join the partisans, they took us in,
    because we were a three member family, my parents and myself.
    First of all, I was not a baby anymore.
    And my father had a rifle, or a gun.
    So he knew how to shoot.
    My mother knew how to cook.
    So we were really a help to them.
    So they took us in.
    But they wouldn't take in my uncle,
    because they didn't come to save the Jews.
    They took us as more if we can help them for something,
    which makes sense.
    So once we got into the partisan,
    they were just elated to know that there
    were some people here who actually came from Moscow.
    How much can you ask for?
    We just absolutely couldn't believe the good fortune.
    And this is what happened once we got there.
    There was still a very small group of people,
    because the Medvedev partisans were just beginning
    to form, maybe about 50 people.
    And we were also anxious to help to them.
    So my mother cooked.
    My father had the rifle.
    And whenever the people were going to look for food
    or whatever they wanted, he was going with them.
    And I worked with sick people.
    They called it [INAUDIBLE].
    And what I used to do is we didn't have bandages.
    Whenever somebody was hurt or wounded,
    you take off the bandage, you wash it by hand,
    you put it in a pot where the bandages
    would boil, sterilize them, and dry it, and roll it
    up, and reuse them over again.
    So I was helpful in this way.
    I would sit with the sick people and change the bandage.
    I used to know how to do [? cupping ?],, as I told you,
    [? banki ?],, as we say in Russian,
    all out cure for everything.
    I also you'll have to take a rifle apart,
    to take a rifle apart, clean it, and put it together.
    So I learned that too.
    And then, just before leaving for Moscow,
    I remember I was trying to learn how to ride a horse.
    And it didn't go very well.
    But the idea was we were so grateful that they took us in,
    and they protected us after all, they were in touch with Moscow.
    They had a few people who were in constant radio
    contact with Moscow and taking orders what to do.
    And we were not alone anymore.
    Out of gratitude, we didn't know what to do more.
    So I felt very good too.
    I was needed too, even as young as I was.
    You were 12 by then.
    Let's se in 19--
    I was about 12, yeah, 12, 13, something like that.
    And then I remember I learned--
    it was on the job training.
    They even taught me once, I remember, to give a shot.
    But we didn't have any penicillin.
    We didn't have any of the latest thing.
    Sometimes a plane would come in at night and land
    and bring us some--
    I don't know if maybe--
    I don't think penicillin even existed then, but bring
    some medication.
    But we relied on ourselves with the people.
    We had two doctors on the premises, one doctor who
    flown in from Moscow, Dr. [? Sasarki. ?]
    He was handsome tall man.
    He was an artist in private life.
    But he volunteered to go ahead and be in the path to help.
    They called it the Motherland.
    So he was parachuted in.
    Then we had a Jewish family with us, Dr. Martin.
    And they took him in with the two tiny children, two
    or three years old, because they needed him.
    He was an all round too.
    He could do operations.
    He could do whatever was needed, to amputate legs.
    He could do abortions.
    He could do everything that was needed.
    It was a makeshift little place, where they put branches along.
    And he didn't even have any instruments.
    They used the saw that you use for sawing wood or something.
    And they sort of wiped it and sterilized it.
    They did have maybe some alcohol and maybe set a match,
    and anyhow to try to--
    and they amputated the legs for one guy I know very well.
    I used to change his bandages below the knee,
    because he got gangrene.
    And if he didn't cut off the legs, and he survived.
    They sent him later to Moscow.
    God knows how this happened.
    But we had no medicine.
    People did get sick.
    They had scarlet fever.
    They had typhoid fever because of the dirt, the water.
    And if you had anything, like I remember,
    I had a scratch or a sore on my leg.
    There was no bandages too.
    But by word of mouth, my father told me
    you took certain leaves that have medicinal properties,
    and you put that leaf on it and just cover it up,
    and by God, after a while, the sore would disappear.
    I still see that leaf in front of me.
    But my parents living on the farm
    knew, and my uncle, certain things about vegetations
    and all on their property.
    So this was the medicine for sores.
    This guy survived.
    As I said, I used to take off this, and his bandage,
    take it off, wash it, and dry it, and another one,
    and then put it back on.
    The only thing I was told to do is
    take cotton dip it in alcohol or something
    and just wipe the wound and put it back on.
    And he had a sense of humor.
    The reason why this happened to him,
    because one time the Germans did find out where we were.
    And they start closing in on us.
    And we, the partisans, started to run.
    He got, for some reason, detached from the group.
    He got lost in the forest.
    And he was a radio operator.
    He carried his radio on his back.
    He got lost in the forest.
    For about two or three days, he couldn't find us.
    So he got frostbitten.
    He legs got frostbitten.
    By the time he did find us already,
    the rest of the group of the partisans,
    he was already had gangrene set in his legs.
    And they had to, as I said, they amputated his legs.
    And he survived.
    He used to sit and tell some jokes.
    And then he was sent to Moscow later
    on with some other wounded people.
    Would you like to talk more about the partisans
    or am I going too fast?
    I'm going to go back a little bit to the ghetto,
    just for a second.
    You said that the women were hysterical,
    so you didn't want to stay with them.
    That's why you wanted to go with your father and uncle.
    What were the women like, versus what the men were
    like, as far as what you saw?
    I'll tell you, because men had more strength.
    They were stronger.
    They were more logical.
    And they were more like presence of mind.
    Women, they were helpless.
    The men knew the area or something,
    then I had confidence that no matter
    what, I feel more secure with the men.
    The women were always, as I said, they were crying.
    They didn't know what's going to happen.
    They just weren't strong, psychologically,
    to handle something like that, presence of mind,
    and whatever it is.
    And I felt that my father was the stronger between the two,
    and he would be able to protect me or take care of me
    until they're all together.
    Was your mother upset when you decided
    you didn't want to stay with her,
    you wanted to go with your father?
    No, no.
    She wasn't?
    I must say one thing.
    We had an agreement just when the war started,
    and the Germans came that we are not
    going to cling to each other.
    Suppose the Nazis come, and they want to go ahead and kill us.
    We had agreed that we're going to have
    everybody run for himself.
    Don't say I'm waiting for Mama, I'll wait for your sister.
    Run for your life.
    So she knew that whatever my father decided, what I did,
    is probably the best for me, because she
    knew that my father would be there, my uncle,
    so she didn't protest it.
    She wanted me to live, like all parents.
    And if I felt this was better there for me, by all means,
    I could go.
    But you made the decision.
    The decision was with me and yes, I asked my father there.
    I wanted to be out near a forest.
    If anything happens, we can just run in the forest.
    Once you were in the ghetto, you were in the city,
    they closed in all the streets or something,
    and then what do you do?
    There's nothing.
    But once you're outside and you're close near a forest,
    you were like half liberated, can you see?
    Because you can go.
    The forest in Poland was so--
    it would start in the Ukraine, and it was so deep,
    that you can go all the way through the forest, all
    the way deep into Russia, and never see a human being.
    That's how thick and heavy they were.
    So I felt much more secure with my father.
    And when I left, at that time, we
    didn't know that it was going to be so soon
    the Holocaust will take place.
    I thought we were just temporarily there.
    There wasn't much really.
    Yes, my mother let me go.
    She didn't hold on to me.
    She felt it was I was happier to be there.
    Stop the tape.
    [TONE]
    Let me-- let me stick with the ghetto for just a little bit.
    OK.
    You were with the women for what, a couple of days,
    a few weeks?
    What?
    Which women?
    Your mother and your cousins before you went to your father
    in the ghetto.
    Yes, it was just a few days.
    Just a few days.
    Yeah.
    Did you eat bad-- was it terrible food?
    I don't remember what we ate or who gave us,
    but I don't remember also being hungry.
    I don't know where the food came from.
    Or maybe we brought some with us.
    So you weren't very hungry.
    Were you--
    Those few days, no, we weren't.
    We were just settling into the ghetto.
    And I have a feeling we brought some with us from Malines
    because we still had our own food.
    Right.
    When you went to be with your father--
    Yeah.
    --and your uncle--
    And my uncle, yeah.
    --what was the food like?
    We had food there.
    God knows I don't know where it came from, whether the--
    well, it was on a farm.
    We could always get something that's growing there,
    but I know, on the farm, you're not hungry
    because you always had potatoes and corn and some other things.
    And it wasn't parceled out, you know,
    like you've seen a city ghetto.
    You have to stand with your part.
    You just sort of--
    I'm just not clear about that, but we were not hungry there.
    And where did you stay?
    Where did you sleep?
    It was a barn, a big barn.
    And that's where all the men who worked
    were just people slept there in the barn.
    There was sort of some hay or something, whatever
    you call it.
    And then, in the morning, you go out and do your work.
    We weren't there long enough to sort of settle there,
    but I felt so much more comfortable
    and relieved being in the open, not being kept in the ghetto
    with a wall around me, because, anything happens,
    we can run into the forest.
    And they don't want to chase after.
    Were you the only girl?
    I was an only child at that time.
    The only child at that time.
    Yeah, I'm the only child.
    And, no, the others all stayed in the ghetto.
    I don't know how my father pulled it
    or how I got to go to--
    what do you call it?
    To go with him.
    It's just too far, but I was so grateful
    because, in comparison with city people, ghettos,
    you had the walls.
    You had streets.
    And, if you go out of the ghetto,
    well, you'll find yourself-- even
    anybody can catch you and turn you in, whereas we
    were fortunate in our ghettos.
    In our area, there were those forests, and you could hide.
    And we became so skillful at it.
    You could sometimes cover your head
    with branches or something.
    So I felt very good, but, as I said,
    this didn't last long because then the--
    It was only a few months.
    --execution.
    Very little.
    I cannot even tell you dates, but I don't know, the most,
    two months.
    I just couldn't.
    Now, when you joined the partisan group,
    did they know that the family was Jewish?
    Oh, yeah.
    They did?
    There were so many Jews hiding in the forest
    that we told them right away that--
    I mean, they were prepared anyhow
    that we ran away from the ghetto.
    And this is why we came to ask for shelter with them.
    So they knew it.
    And did they take the family because your father
    had a rifle do you think?
    Because we were-- yes, we were sort of--
    because we were not helpless people.
    My father-- they could always use
    somebody else who has a weapon if you have to shoot.
    And my mother could cook.
    She actually cooked for Medvedev and all the big shots.
    She would cook, and then there used to be a man who would come
    later, an officer, and taste the food to make sure it wasn't--
    this is part of their ritual--
    and then eat.
    So she was needed there too.
    And I made myself needed to.
    They weren't going to break up the family.
    So we were not a burden to them.
    But your uncle was not taken in.
    They wouldn't take him.
    And they wouldn't-- he kept coming back to them and begging
    them.
    Would you take us in?
    I don't know why.
    They said, if you don't stop coming,
    we were going to shoot you--
    You never know how they thought.
    They didn't take people just like that.
    It's what's good for them.
    There was a family by the name of--
    I told you, the Dr. Martin, his wife,
    and then two small children, maybe a year
    and three-years-old or something.
    And they took them in because he was useful to them, a doctor.
    And then the children started crying very often.
    They were hungry and all.
    And they threw them out.
    And, the doctor and the family, they
    started walking with the children.
    Where will he go?
    He goes, and he sees far away there.
    That's where the Germans are standing.
    So, if he leaves, he knows he's just walking into their trap.
    So he turned around and went back to the partisans.
    And he told them, look, if you don't want to keep me,
    you might as well shoot me because, if I go straight
    to the Germans, they will shoot me.
    So they felt sorry for him, and they took them in,
    the whole family, because he was very--
    they only had one doctor, the one who came in from Moscow.
    And he certainly knew more I think than this other guy.
    So they took him in because they felt sorry.
    They were kind, but I don't know why.
    Maybe taking in my uncle meant five people.
    What are they going to do with three children?
    And you never can explain their reasoning,
    but, later on, they were taking more people,
    but they were just beginning this--
    They were just starting.
    --detachment, just not long ago.
    They're just getting established and didn't want any extra--
    what do you call it--
    baggage or something to drag.
    I don't know.
    But they refused to take him.
    And they threatened him.
    If you don't stop coming and complaining
    that you want to be taken in, we tell you we won't take you.
    He says that we'll shoot you.
    Life was more than-- you had to be careful what you said.
    And if I may tell you the story about how
    they were very suspicious of outsiders
    because they never knew if somebody comes around
    and wants to sniff around and then turn us in.
    Or, one time, they did find out that one of the people
    from the local population--
    I think they took him in maybe to work.
    Anyhow, he turned out to be a traitor.
    And, when they found out, they took him
    in the middle of that forest, the square,
    and they hung him in front of everybody as a deterrent so
    that, if anybody ever attempted to go against or tell on us
    or turn us in, this is what's going to happen.
    And I remember seeing this man.
    In fact, they didn't want children to see this,
    but I said, no, he was a traitor.
    I want to see how a traitor--
    you know, it was patriotism.
    And I wanted to see.
    And I saw this man.
    They hung him in front of everybody to serve--
    And you saw the whole thing?
    Yeah, I saw him, yes, because I was so full--
    we were so full of hate of the Nazis or those people,
    even local, who used to turn us in or kill us or something
    that, to see one less--
    and this sort of gave us satisfaction
    and hope that maybe the others will be put away some way.
    But this is a deterrent.
    They had to be suspicious of everybody.
    Did that bother you, seeing that man killed?
    Or did it--
    I wouldn't want to see it here, but not at that time.
    It depends in which context you see it.
    if it's a traitor and if he went against the motherland
    and if he wanted to kill us, why should we?
    It's like taking a Nazi and killing.
    I would not want--
    as a matter of fact, after the war was over,
    they apprehended a lot of those traitors.
    And, in Rivne, in an open place, they used to hang people.
    I saw people hanging.
    I don't know where they hung, but they
    were hanging for days in an open place
    those who collaborated with the Nazis.
    So they had to be very cautious.
    But life was not--
    they didn't look at people so much at them
    as is it going to help our cause because Medvedev came there,
    parachuted down over wherever he came from,
    with a special assignment.
    He came, and he brought Kuznetsov with him.
    And they had a special assignment
    that they will go to do away with this--
    I don't know the German title, Ober something, Koch, K-O-C-H--
    he was in charge of the whole Ukraine--
    and to try to get close to him and do away.
    Kuznetsov spoke fluent German.
    He knew it still from Russia.
    He lived somewhere in this colony.
    He volunteered to come to the partisans.
    He looked, what you call it, German
    with blond hair and blue eyes.
    And I only saw him once.
    We were-- maybe I told you that we
    were forewarned there's going to be a German officer coming
    in here.
    Don't get scared, or don't kill him because this
    is one of ours, just dressed.
    And he was so cheerful, very self-assured with this setting.
    And he was humming a song.
    He was going to meet, apparently, with Medvedev.
    This is the only time I saw him.
    The rest, what I know is from people who were there.
    And he did quite a job, but that's a story all by itself
    how this man--
    he died when he was in his 30s.
    That's how young he was.
    And so--
    Did you see Medvedev?
    Oh, yeah.
    You did?
    Yeah, I think policy was I didn't go sit with him,
    but I knew, occasional, when he crossed
    the grounds because, the way the camp was set up, in the center
    was the--
    what do you call it?
    They called it the [GERMAN] where
    all the people who were running with Medvedev
    and all his assistants who were planning all.
    Then, around them, was another circle
    with little huts like of people.
    So he stood-- he stayed with his own people, I mean,
    those who came and gave him reports and all.
    And we had there a Ukrainian family who
    was completely devoted to us.
    The sons didn't have to be afraid to commingle
    with the population because they looked like they lived there,
    but they used to bring reports back and forth
    and go to Rivne where Kuznetsov lived and bring information.
    Don't go here.
    Don't go there.
    We got this in here.
    An interesting thing, I just found out not long ago that,
    when Kuznetsov just came there, he met Koch.
    They sit around the table.
    They sat around the table, and he said he could--
    it would have been so easy to kill him,
    but he says they were watched so closely that,
    if he would just put his hand in the pocket--
    he did have a gun with him.
    But, if he put his hand in the pocket
    or even take out the handkerchief,
    he would have been shot immediately.
    So he knew that, even though he was pals with Koch,
    he'll never be able to kill him like when he was very guarded
    very much.
    So he still kept an eye on him, hoping some other ways
    to kill him.
    They had a lot of people who collaborated with the Russians,
    with the partisans, but they lived among the population.
    So nobody knew that they were and bring reports and all.
    And they were in Rivne, but he's a historic figure in Russia,
    both of them, heroes of the Soviet Union
    and all this stuff like that.
    Did your father go on missions against the Nazis--
    He did.
    --with his rifle?
    He did, but I don't know what.
    I know he used to go when they went to look for food,
    to come to peasants homes and say give us food.
    And, if they wouldn't, that's what my father said.
    If they refused to give food, they
    would say, well, we're going to set your roof on fire.
    So I knew he used to go on this.
    Maybe he went also to go to derail trains.
    They would derail trains, but he never
    went to Rivne or any of this where his face would be, right
    away, recognized as a Jew.
    He was just one of many, but he helped them.
    He stood maybe guard too.
    I don't know.
    But the idea was, if you take a Jewish person
    and put him back into the population,
    they'll catch him right away.
    They'll right away tell this.
    And so he didn't go out from much.
    And, if he went, he went with a group
    by the cover of the night.
    They used to derail trains or something.
    Did you live with your mother and father?
    I mean, or were you all outdoors?
    No, no, we a hut.
    I have the book downstairs.
    I'll show it to you.
    And then I slept with my mother and some other women.
    My father slept where the men were
    because they had to be ready whenever you have to go.
    And, yeah, I slept next to my mom.
    And I found out that we had the fire in the middle,
    and we slept with our legs towards the fire and the head
    there.
    But, sometimes, it would be so cold
    that people's heads would--
    hair would freeze.
    But we didn't mind it.
    Also, I should say that life in the partisans wasn't all sad,
    and it wasn't all like a funeral or something.
    There were joyful times when they would sit around the fire,
    and somebody would play the accordion.
    And we would sing.
    This doctor from Moscow, [PERSONAL NAME],,
    by profession, he was an actor.
    So, when everything was quiet, he would come stay by the fire
    and cite poetry.
    He was a very handsome man, and we would sing.
    So it wasn't all the time a feeling like of death
    is going to--
    is imminent or something.
    And we made the most of it.
    And, also, of course, they had contact with Moscow.
    And Moscow could tell them where the front was.
    They didn't come and tell us, but they knew
    exactly where the front was.
    And they had to do what Moscow told them,
    take the order, which is different
    from any partisan groups who were formed by themselves.
    They got together themselves, and they didn't
    have any other assignment.
    They just kill, kill the Nazis.
    And ours was very special.
    The main thing for them was just to kill
    the guy Koch, the head of the Ukraine,
    and some of his helpers too.
    Did they ever do it?
    No, Kuznetsov could not do it.
    He saw it was impossible.
    It was guarded too much.
    He was killed later, but he was able to do away
    with some of his helpers, assistants or something.
    He was saw-- he blended in so well with them
    that he used to drink together and party together.
    And never, never did anybody suspect
    that he was a spy until later on, until later on.
    And all assignments he did successfully,
    but then he would always sit in a car dressed in his uniform,
    and the German had a chauffeur and a lot of chutzpah and all
    and drink with them and all.
    He had a girlfriend.
    She was a Russian, sure.
    And she lived somewhere.
    I don't know with him or somewhere along the way.
    But she was there.
    Towards the end, when they found out things are going on,
    they did arrest her.
    And the Gestapo took her, and she told his story.
    But so they already had an eye on him,
    but they couldn't apprehend him because the front was moving
    towards Lviv, west, west, west.
    But it is sad how he died.
    He had a lot of chutzpah.
    Life didn't mean anything to him.
    All of us were very patriotic, and we all had the same slogan.
    In Russian, [RUSSIAN SPEECH] means for the motherland.
    So he didn't kill Koch, but Koch did die by somebody else.
    And you want me to talk some more of the partisans?
    Yes.
    Oh, please.
    Sure, absolutely.
    OK, yeah, well, anyhow, as far as life concerned in the group,
    it was, more or less as possible, structured.
    Everybody knew, more or less, what he had to do.
    And they used to change sometimes.
    They had to move the camp around if they knew that somebody
    might have seen us there.
    And they would start taking in more people later on.
    And the news-- planes would come, periodically, and land.
    And that's a story itself.
    They would find an opening somewhere in the forest,
    enough for a plane to land.
    And they would put fire--
    what do you call it-- fires, three fires like in the corner,
    in the open.
    So, if a plane comes, and he'll be looking for a space
    where there's three fires, it means
    this is the landing place.
    And he had to come by the cover of the night, land there.
    It was a transport plane of course.
    It wasn't a passenger plane and bring whatever
    may be news or maybe medicine, something,
    and take the wounded people.
    And, in one of those trips, my parents
    asked Medvedev or whoever was there, please, let
    my daughter go to Moscow too.
    Let's at least know that one from my family survives.
    So there were some other children
    he was sending off in a family.
    So he agreed to let me--
    to let go.
    And, this other family, the woman
    says I will take care of her.
    I'll be her surrogate mother.
    So we got on the plane and sitting.
    And, because it was not seats, it was just like benches.
    And then we see in the corner a bunch of they
    had the geese and chicken and--
    what do you call it--
    sheep or something because there was hunger in Moscow.
    And they were coming here from the Ukraine,
    which was rich and --.
    So they [INAUDIBLE] the whole thing.
    Yeah, yeah, yeah, you don't need the ducks.
    And [INAUDIBLE] God, how are we going to fly?
    I don't know how they calmed him down,
    but they had to be practical.
    They had to leave by the cover of the night
    because the front was still around Stalingrad.
    When we flew in the dark, very, very high,
    you could see, sometimes, bullets flying.
    But, if you looked down, you could see the front,
    and it was like a snake with lights.
    And this is where the front was at that time.
    It was very cold.
    I remember because we had to fly very
    high so they wouldn't spot us.
    And we flew through the night.
    I remember, in the morning, we were in Moscow.
    And it's amazing.
    Now that I think, they didn't need any gas getting something,
    because from let's say the Rivne area until Moscow--
    It's far.
    --it's quite a-- but they were so skilled
    and maybe a little drunk too, the pilots.
    Who knows?
    You know, the geese and the ducks
    and all the things and the children,
    nobody thought [INAUDIBLE],, gee, my goodness
    we were so happy to get out of the Ukraine
    and go into Moscow into maybe on safe territory.
    So were you concerned that your mother had
    asked that you be taken away?
    I mean, were you upset by that?
    No.
    You weren't?
    No, we had, as I told you, an agreement.
    You save yourself.
    And, if my parents could arrange for me to go and save myself,
    they didn't know what was going to happen to them.
    This whole group detachment, the Germans
    could have maybe come along and threw bombs.
    She could have been killed.
    Her life was not safe.
    And, even the partisans too, it could change very quickly.
    But, at least, she felt that I am going
    so-called on safe territory.
    The Germans were repulsed from Moscow maybe
    I don't know how many kilometers there.
    And, at least, I will survive.
    So this is why everybody was glad to send
    the children to Moscow.
    So you had been in the partisan group for what, about a year?
    I was about a year.
    We went into the forest ourselves,
    before the partisans, in 1942.
    This is when the order came out to kill the Jews.
    And we met the partisans like maybe in the fall of '42.
    '42.
    And I left for Moscow in 1943.
    And I thought it was going to be great
    because I don't have any more Nazis to worry
    about or anything.
    It was a nightmarish year.
    Why?
    Because, first of all, I was never without my parents.
    And I was very lonely.
    I was only about 13 or 14.
    I didn't know.
    And there was nobody I knew in Moscow.
    And I only told them.
    I said I want to go to school, but I also
    would like to work to help the country, blah, blah,
    and all this propaganda.
    So they put me and another girl who
    came with me into a technical school
    where I worked for about eight hours a day
    at this factory on a lathe.
    It was like a cup, and I had to make it a certain diameter,
    you know?
    And then somebody else would take it and put grooves on it.
    And then they would take this and screw it into the bomb,
    you know?
    So they put me in there.
    And, also, during the day, when we came back,
    we would have like four hours of lessons.
    The year was very--
    I was hungry.
    We were so hungry.
    There was no food.
    It was cold, and we didn't have the right clothes for Russia.
    And I think the loneliness was even bigger than anything.
    I took sick because of the lack of food.
    I had rashes on my body.
    I had a lump in my breast, and I had other things.
    And they did treat me some, but there were no antibiotics
    there yet, you know?
    There was not penicillin, something like this.
    And I didn't even know if my parents were still alive.
    You couldn't send letters to the partisans to the forest.
    Occasionally, somebody would come back and say, yeah,
    we saw your mother or something.
    And the worst thing of all that I remember standing once
    at a railroad station--
    the railroad stations, like in where I lived,
    had like an overpass for pedestrians
    to go through from one side to the other.
    And I stood there one day, and I said, gee, God.
    I said I wish I had the strength to just throw myself
    off that bridge because life has no meaning to me
    because I didn't know if I'll ever see my parents.
    And the most important is to say,
    as soon as I finished that class,
    they're going to make us work 12 hours a day.
    And how can you work 12?
    I knew that, physically, I couldn't.
    So life had no meaning.
    So, in this respect, being in the partisans was easier for me
    because my parents protected me, the partisans.
    And I had food or something, whereas I came to Moscow.
    Maybe I didn't see the Nazis anymore, but it was grueling.
    In Russia, everybody-- kids were taken out of school
    and put to work in factories and work everything.
    And all able men were put in the army to fight.
    And you can see, sometimes, pictures of little kids
    standing, working the lathes and some stuff like that.
    But there was no hope.
    We knew that the war was still going on.
    The Germans were still--
    the Russians never even got into Germany yet.
    And we didn't know whether, one day,
    they could turn around and push back.
    But, for me, I was so homesick for my parents, nothing else.
    Even being hungry, I used to say to myself--
    I was about 14.
    I'd say, mama.
    I said, you know, if ever we get together again,
    I promise I'm going to be good.
    And I promise I'm going to eat everything
    that you make for me, and I'll never throw it out.
    And I want to be with mama again.
    And I hope God to unite us.
    And so this is the work was hard.
    The climate was very hard and the despair.
    There was no future to look forward to.
    We didn't know what's going to happen,
    if my parents will survive, and when the war would end.
    And then this was the fall of 1943.
    And then, in this spring of 1944,
    I remember working in the factory, working my lathe.
    And the supervisor says to me, Rosa, come here.
    I want to see you.
    Oh no, somebody wants to talk to you, he says,
    the supervisor or something.
    Come into the room.
    So I come down there.
    And who sits there?
    My mama.
    My mama because, at that time, Rivne was already liberated.
    And she would turn the world around
    to come and fetch her daughter.
    So they let her come on a military train to Moscow.
    And she came there to the factory,
    but they didn't want me preparing
    for me to come and see her.
    So they said somebody wants to see you.
    And I walk in, and there is my mother sitting.
    I had no warning that she was liberated and come.
    Oh, well, of course, we're overjoyed.
    And all the supervisors were very touched at the reunion.
    And my mother said she was very proud.
    They had a lot of respect for her
    because she just was a partisan, and she was fighting the Nazis.
    But they would not let me go home with her
    unless she would promise that, when I come back to Rivne,
    I will continue working at the factory
    because they spent all the training on me.
    And I should continue with my work and all this
    like this and here.
    Of course, she says yes, yes, but we didn't.
    When I came there, we don't have factories.
    But the basic thing is that they figured they invested in me.
    They trained me.
    It was a miracle that I made it that winter to--
    We're going to have to stop for a moment
    because we have to change the tape.
    I'm sorry to interrupt you.
    No, no, no.
    You said you were really miserable during your time--
    When I was in Moscow.
    When you were in Moscow--
    Right
    Did you have friends at all.
    Were the other children helpful?
    All the girls who lived with me in the dorm
    were, maybe, if not my age maybe a couple years older.
    There were three other girls, who were also partisans, who
    were also flown in to Moscow.
    And this is how I ended up in this school,
    because I met them somewhere in Moscow.
    We said, what are you doing?
    They say, well, we go to school in here.
    We work.
    Oh, great, we'll be together.
    So there were four of us.
    And we aroused a lot of interest on the outside.
    They didn't know how starved we were.
    But one painter from the--
    it's called Tretyâkovskaya Galereya--
    it's a very famous museum in Moscow--
    it's the equivalent of our East Wing,
    or whatever-- came and had us pose for a painting.
    And they called us the three partisans.
    And we were three girls.
    And we were sitting for her.
    And we never saw the finished product.
    But apparently people did see it in the gallery.
    We just posed.
    And I don't know how she found out about us, or who told her--
    in the middle of all this [INAUDIBLE] the head there.
    He was sitting-- we posed for her for the portrait.
    And apparently it did end up in the gallery.
    You see on one side, you had this very deep gratitude--
    patriotism--
    and willing to make your life a success
    and see the Germans you know, do away.
    But the conditions, you had to be very hearty.
    Like in Moscow, it was very--
    for breakfast, they would give me--
    after working a whole night [? at least ?],, I would come.
    And they'd give me 200 grams of bread, which was like a slice.
    And then a bowl, which they called it soup.
    It's more like [INAUDIBLE] or something.
    And then you take this hot thing,
    and then you went another window.
    And there was a girl standing there with a bowl.
    She had oil in it.
    And she would take one little teaspoon of the oil
    and pour it into your soup.
    This was the fact.
    So you had the 200 grams of bread,
    and you had that so-called soup.
    And because of that-- of malnutrition--
    this is why I had all the illnesses.
    If I lived at this country, I probably wouldn't make it.
    There was no lack of, probably, vitamins.
    Whatever it is, I had all these illnesses.
    So I didn't have it in the partisans,
    because we were never hungry.
    Food was constantly [INAUDIBLE].
    But here-- and I had nobody to complain.
    Because you don't complain during the war.
    They would tell you, how dare you to complain?
    Look at this, people are dying on the front.
    And we did you a favor, and we saved your life.
    And we brought you to this country.
    And you don't have to fight.
    How can you even ask for anything?
    They would turn around psychologically.
    They would make you feel guilty, and you apologize to them,
    rather than them apologizing to you-- sorry,
    we cannot accommodate you.
    This is typical propaganda, that they
    make you feel like, you know, how dare you?
    s so this was, like, one side--
    you felt happy being there.
    But I could not handle the loneliness and the uncertainty,
    and also the work.
    12 hours for a 14, 15-year-old kid with a stint on their leg.
    You know, we didn't having a breaks--
    like coffee, or something.
    The only place we could rest, we would go to the ladies room.
    And a lot of the girls would come there.
    And then we'd sit on the floor and fall asleep,
    until I our supervisor would come.
    And she'd come--
    I remember her face.
    Oh, what do you think you're doing in here?
    You know.
    Get to work.
    Get to work.
    And then get all up.
    This is where we sneak in a little sleep.
    And then when the session was over and the [INAUDIBLE],,
    we would trudge through this very heavy snow.
    And Russian snow is not our snow.
    I had to walk back to the dorm.
    I don't know how much.
    It was a mile, or something.
    You put your foot in, you had to drag it out.
    I had a hard time getting out.
    And there was nothing waiting for you
    in the dorm-- not like something hot.
    But you kept quiet, because you do not complain.
    They brought you here.
    They giving you your life, in a sense.
    And everybody suffers.
    Everybody suffered in Moscow.
    And if you were starving--
    anyhow, that's a story all by itself.
    But the surprise of my mother coming without any warning--
    no letters, or something.
    One very pleasant thing happened when I was--
    no, two things happened.
    When I was once walking to Moscow,
    I was walking down the street and very depressed.
    And I hear ahead of me a few people are walking.
    And they speak Yiddish.
    And I followed them.
    I didn't have the nerve to go up and say, I am Jewish, too.
    And I don't know what they were talking.
    But just to hear the Jewish thing--
    voice-- Jewish words-- got me all choked up.
    And I was feeling, well, maybe there
    are some other people like me.
    I don't know where it came from.
    And another thing is also the head of our partisans sent--
    Medvedev gave his address of his wife
    in Moscow, to give to me to go visit her.
    And I did go to see her--
    Oh, you did.
    --to her apartment.
    It was very nice place.
    I met his wife.
    And then she gave-- she saw how probably dehydrated and hungry.
    She served me borscht, from beets.
    And she says, would you like to eat some?
    I'd say yeah, yeah, yeah.
    She gives me the borscht to eat.
    And I eat and eat.
    But then there were still pieces of beets left.
    And I remember my mother telling me,
    it's not good manners to clean a plate up.
    You must leave something in the plate.
    It's not nice.
    Oh, this is strict.
    So I left a little bit of the borscht on the plate,
    even though I was dying to eat it.
    But this is how my mother taught me.
    And the upbringing I got at home wasn't prepared for war,
    and it wasn't prepared for something like this.
    But it was very uplifting to talk to his wife.
    And she wanted to know how things are doing
    in the partisans and what was.
    So there were little things, which
    were like pleasant things, happen, if you can say.
    But as I think back, I consider it the hardest for me
    because I was alone.
    I had no family.
    I didn't have p--.
    I wasn't prepared for it with all the--
    And the uncertainty--
    Because you didn't know what was happening.
    I didn't know what was happening with the partisans.
    Because just because they felt secure when I was there,
    they were always subject to bombing, or somebody
    could turn them in and bring the Germans there-- the Nazis.
    And this guy, Kuznetsov, even though he impersonated a Nazi--
    and he felt very secure.
    If they would have caught him earlier,
    and they would torture him, he could
    have told a story about us.
    They had to be very careful about how to get around.
    So I didn't if I was going to see my parents or not.
    It was very difficult. But everyone suffered in Moscow
    at that time.
    It wasn't just me.
    This was the time.
    So when my mother brought me back here--
    back to this Ukrainian territory--
    and we met some other survivor relatives.
    We got together and were overjoyed.
    We went to Rovno.
    We waited there for a year, and I enrolled to a regular school.
    And it's a Russian school.
    And we were getting help--
    I don't know which organization--
    with food in Rovno, because nobody worked.
    And my father and my uncle, they would
    go in the streets of Rovno.
    And if they would hear somebody talking Jewish, or something,
    they would come up and say to them, [NON-ENGLISH]..
    You know what that means, right?
    [NON-ENGLISH] means, are you Jewish?
    if the person said, yeah, because--
    so they would right away bring them to our house,
    because they knew he's a survivor alone, and feed them.
    And said, if you don't mind sleeping on the floor,
    you can share our house.
    It was constantly.
    They would go on the streets.
    And you'd see somebody who was alone and a survivor.
    They would try to help them.
    So were you able to go back to your house?
    No, that wasn't ours.
    We never went back to Malinsk.
    You went to Rovno?
    We went to Rovno.
    Because, Malinsk, first of all, there
    were all the families killed.
    We wouldn't go back there.
    I wouldn't even go even today.
    Basically, the people down there,
    they were very antisemitic.
    And they were so glad to get some of the property,
    or something from the Jews.
    And they were certainly not going to try to save us.
    They were sorry we survived, probably.
    No, we never went back.
    We went to Rovno.
    Rovno had a bigger population.
    It had more people.
    It was more modern.
    It was not Malinsk.
    So your mother rented a place?
    Did your father come soon?
    Oh, you mean after my mother brought me back from Moscow.
    She brought me right back to my father, who was already in--
    it's near Rovno-- [? Kostopol ?]..
    And from there we decided to go to Rovno,
    because Rovno was a bigger city.
    And we felt safer.
    There shouldn't be any pogroms.
    We will be more protected.
    Yeah, we were reunited after my mother brought me back.
    And you said that the Russians said
    that your mother had to promise that you
    would go to the school?
    Yes.
    Yeah.
    But there was no school.
    There was no school.
    I think it was just propaganda.
    They had a good excuse to let me go.
    The Russians are soft hearted.
    And they weren't going to deny a mother to reunite with a child.
    But the same, they did train me.
    I was starving.
    And they had to show some kind of precedent-- say, oh, you
    are going, but under this condition--
    so other people wouldn't take off.
    I don't know what was the reasoning behind,
    but they let Mom take me home.
    Did you go to school there also?
    Yeah.
    When I came to Rovno.
    No, no.
    I mean when you went to Moscow.
    Yeah.
    It wasn't the regular school.
    It was a technical school.
    It was called a Tekhnikum in other words, everything
    we studied had to do pertaining to machinery and metal
    melting and stuff like that.
    We all hated it, because we were sitting hungry.
    And we learned how to get around our teacher.
    He was hungry, too.
    And we were all sitting at the tables.
    And somebody would bring a piece of bread, or a slice of bread.
    And he would come into classroom and look at it.
    And this would completely change his mind another way.
    Oh, you got bread.
    So where did you buy bread?
    And you would spend a whole lot talking about food--
    forgot about lecturing [INAUDIBLE]..
    That's why we played tricks on him, because food
    was the primary concern.
    But this was what you call technical school,
    to prepare us to go work on the factory 12 hours.
    This is it.
    And your mother knew where to find you?
    I didn't know how.
    She knew by word of mouth where we are.
    But the fact that we know-- she knew it.
    She knew it.
    Because some people would come from the Party zones and maybe
    fly back.
    I don't know how she knew, and even find the factory.
    I don't know.
    Yeah, because Moscow is not small.
    Well, this is not small.
    It was a town called Lublino.
    You had to take a train to get there--
    like a streetcar.
    And we lived in that city--
    Lublino-- where the factories were.
    Moscow, used to go in down there for just
    maybe sightseeing, or if I had some business to do.
    But basically the city I stayed in was called Lublino.
    And I know somebody who went back there.
    And they say, there's nothing left there anymore,
    where the Tekhnikum was.
    There's no more where the dorm was, or something.
    I didn't cry.
    [LAUGHS]
    And how did your mother get from the partisan group
    to where you were?
    By train?
    Yeah.
    She had a lot hutzpah.
    And she had a medal that says that she was a partisan--
    a recognition.
    And my mother was very fiesty.
    She went to a military train, that was going to Moscow.
    And there was nothing but for military people.
    And she went in.
    She says, I was a par-- and I have to go see my daughter.
    And she went to talk to somebody up high there-- whoever it is.
    And they let her get on the truth.
    There was a military train.
    If anybody could do it, my mother could do it.
    That's [INAUDIBLE].
    So she got on the train, and I didn't even
    know she was coming.
    I didn't know.
    She had to get special permission from Rovno
    to be able-- who went to Moscow after the war.
    It was forbidden.
    So she knew how to get around.
    And they respected her-- whatever.
    This may sound silly.
    As much as I promised my mother--
    to myself I was saying, if we ever are reunited, Mom,
    I will do everything you want me to do.
    And within an hour--
    [LAUGHS] You weren't.
    My mother says to me, what are you, complaining?
    Look, you've got the bed and this.
    I said, Mom, wait till you stay here a couple
    and you see what they give us to eat.
    And she lavished on her the praise.
    She was in the partisan, you know?
    But anyhow, I wasn't very easy child.
    So you started complaining right away?
    It didn't last very long--
    the truce.
    Truth, truce.
    Right.
    And your prayer to God didn't last too long?
    You [? didn't ?] [INAUDIBLE].
    Yeah.
    But then when I came home--
    if you want me to tell you about how the war finish.
    We leave Rovno.
    I was going to Russian school.
    And we knew that the war wasn't over.
    This must've been maybe in the spring or something of '44.
    And then during the night, we hear shooting.
    We heard shooting going gone and all this.
    And we said, oh, boy, apparently the Nazis are coming back.
    The front turned around, and they're coming back.
    So we jumped out of the bed and laid down on the floor,
    because we were afraid the bullets will
    come from the window.
    And we lay there until daybreak.
    Finally, when the sun came out, somebody in our group came out.
    They says, let me see what's happening.
    Are they really here?
    And he goes out and finds out they
    were shooting because the war was over.
    They're celebrating the end of war.
    And they were just shooting-- what do you call it?
    What do you call it?
    Blanks?
    The bullets.
    Not the rockets, too.
    But it was a happy occasion.
    It wasn't to kill anyone.
    Well, we couldn't believe it.
    We couldn't believe it.
    We were never secure.
    We never knew when the front was going to turn around.
    The Germans are going to come right back.
    So the war wasn't over for you at that point [INAUDIBLE]??
    For us it was over.
    This is was May 8, 1945 when the Nazis declared the war is over.
    And in the same time, an order came out
    in the Ukraine and Russia--
    all Polish citizens who want to return home may do so.
    And because we were Russian citizens--
    not Russian, excuse me--
    Polish citizen-- we decided, let's go west.
    Let's go as far away from here as possible.
    Let's go to Lodz, which is in the west part of Poland.
    And we'll come there.
    We'll see where we go from there.
    It was on our mind to get out from Poland.
    It was a cemetery for us-- and the Ukraine.
    Everybody was killed.
    So we got on a train, and we came to Lodz.
    And in Lodz, we found an empty apartment--
    because there were a lot of them that the Germans left.
    They ran away.
    And I lived there.
    We lived there for a year.
    Again I had to learn the language-- pass exams.
    And I went to Polish gymnasiums, which
    is the same like equivalent of a high school.
    But we felt better.
    The Germans were defeated.
    And there was already contact witih Israel.
    And there was an embassy in Warsaw.
    So my parents decided to go to Warsaw
    and get in touch with the embassy,
    and see what they can do for us.
    I don't believe I told you what--
    oh yeah, I told you a thing about why we never got
    on the ship, because the war.
    So we thought maybe they'll honor papers
    and say, yes, you can go ahead to America.
    Well, it didn't work this way.
    The embassy in Warsaw was powerless.
    But they had in Poland at that time trains
    going all from Poland all the way to Germany.
    They call it the return home trains,
    that people who the Germans took to Poland,
    or Polish took the Ger--.
    Everybody could return to their own country.
    So after living one year in Lodz--
    and when this was offered, we got
    ourselves one of those trains that say, let's go to Paris.
    Let's go as far as we can away from here.
    By then our family in the United States
    knew already that we survived, because of that little card
    I showed you--
    that little card, where my father wrote the address,
    to let relatives know.
    So they knew it from [? Oscar. ?]
    So we got on those trains.
    They were cattle trains.
    It went from Poland all the way to Paris.
    Paris was much better in many ways.
    They had to hire us.
    They had a lot of Jewish organizations.
    And we lived with this family, which were wonderful to us--
    the Mann family.
    They were actually related to my uncle.
    And we stayed with them until we find that he did get visa
    to come to this country.
    But I worship [INAUDIBLE],, then what do you walk around
    don't see anybody calling you names.
    I could go to school.
    I could go to the opera.
    I could go to culture and all this-- come when I want.
    I mean, this was unbelievable to me.
    And my father got a job, also.
    He worked in some organizations.
    But there were a lot of refugees in Paris.
    They were put up in hotels.
    And the joint organization, I think, paid for them.
    And they had cafeterias where everybody could
    go once they get a hot meal.
    And guess where was the restaurant.
    It was on Rue des Oiseaux.
    We used to called Goldbergs or something now, it's called now.
    It's right on the corner.
    And we used be able to go and get a hot meal.
    And by then, once we'd got in touch with our family,
    they knew what's going, they could start making efforts
    to bring us to this country.
    What was it like in Lodz for you for that year after the war?
    Because a lot of survivors came to Lodz and registered
    and tried to find out what was going on in various places.
    But was that [INAUDIBLE]?
    It was a stepping stone.
    Because you came to Lodz.
    It was a city.
    It was not destroyed by bombs or anything.
    But it I helped you get in touch with the world.
    You can take a train from Lodz and go to Warsaw,
    go to Krakow, something.
    They were, I think, embassies in Warsaw.
    And communication was better.
    And there were Jewish organizations.
    And I belonged to a youth organization.
    And people were all trying to find ways to leave Poland.
    Poland was not secure.
    So the [INAUDIBLE] for us was pretty good.
    But we knew that, also, we don't want to stay here.
    Our goal was really to come to America,
    and once and forever be united with our family, who
    wanted us to come-- my mother's brothers and sisters.
    Is that the major reason why you wanted
    to come to the United States?
    Oh, no, not only for this.
    We had a big family here.
    Well, the major, yes.
    Because some people went to Israel.
    But our relatives-- and I should mention the Rozanskys,
    the Weinsteins, and Burkes-- they said, no, you
    don't go anywhere.
    You're coming once and forever to America,
    and so we'll be all together once and forever.
    And it took them over 10 years.
    It's a miracle that we survived.
    And then we started building a new life in here.
    It was adjustments.
    For me it was harder, I think, than my parents.
    Because when I came in here, it was--
    from my Paris, what was it?
    Maybe 19 or 20.
    Age wise, I wasn't a child any more,
    even when I was in Paris or in Lodz.
    I lost five years of life-- no school for five years.
    And when the war was over, I was walking around
    with my friends-- survivors.
    And we were pondering these very-- quite existential
    questions.
    But what is the meaning of life?
    Why did you kill those people?
    How come we survived.
    We were old, in a sense.
    We were kids, but in our mind we were wondering,
    is this going to be for good or something?
    So even when I came to this country,
    my contemporaries weren't thinking on my level.
    I wanted Frank Sinatra and all this [INAUDIBLE]..
    And it was a different thinking.
    And it was a big adjustment, again, to fit in--
    into the young people in here.
    Because they didn't understand.
    I used to my cousins always, what
    was it like in America here during the war?
    Did you know what was going on?
    And I understand that till the United States
    entered the war, you really didn't know much, do you?
    I don't know.
    Or did people not pay attention?
    Right.
    But later on, when they came in.
    And my cousins used to--
    I said, did you have the windows covered?
    Did you have bombings, or something like that?
    But nothing comparison with what we went through.
    So I had adjustments from the beginning, each time
    I come into the country.
    I have to learn a new language.
    I get this a year later, again.
    But the main thing is I just wanted
    to say that I feel so blessed.
    And I'm so full of gratitude that after all that,
    I have made it.
    When I look at my life I say to myself,
    I feel like I lived nine lives, not one.
    Because each life, each country I lived in,
    had its separate, maybe, help, but also
    problems and adjustments and all this.
    So I am happy with my family.
    My husband, my children.
    And they all are wonderful.
    A wonderful husband.
    We're living here-- as I said, this summer, we
    were married 60 years.
    Wow.
    And I also got my education.
    And I missed five years of not going to school at all.
    So I was able to go to college, and went to the University
    of Maryland and got my degree.
    And I started going, in fact, for a master's degree too.
    But then I went to work for JSSA,
    because they needed people who knew Russian.
    And later on, I had two interesting jobs.
    But I had to wait until my children got bigger.
    And then I worked for JSSA as a social worker,
    helping to resettle the Russian Jews that came in here.
    I knew Yiddish and I knew Russian,
    so I helped resettle them in the area.
    And then when they stopped letting the Jews out
    from Russia, I went to the Library of Congress.
    Should I stop?
    OK.
    You should pat me on my back.
    That's the only way you can stop me talking.
    Let me go back a little bit.
    Were you sorry to leave Paris, in some way?
    In some ways, I must say.
    There was nothing like Paris.
    And what I gained in these three years,
    the joy of living there, the culture, the people, the way
    they treated us like a--
    not only healing effect after coming from the Holocaust,
    but in general.
    The three years, I told my friends,
    the Manns, I said they were the happiest three years of my life
    because there's nothing I had to do but just go and absorb
    everything in Paris.
    I was going to school, and I was going
    to get a job, maybe to work.
    I love the language.
    I like the city.
    I like the-- and they were very good to us, yes, in a way,
    but we knew this was not the end.
    We had to finally go somewhere and settle.
    And America was our-- and the family was our purpose.
    But who would want to leave Paris?
    Yeah.
    [CHUCKLES] Did you like the food?
    We didn't go out much to eat.
    We couldn't afford it.
    I liked everything about Paris.
    I liked there-- and I had a shock, cultural shock when
    I came to Paris from Poland, because Poland was still
    a country that was very, how do you say, traditional.
    When I went to gymnasium, I had to be home by 10:00, and then
    very tradition.
    And then I come to Paris, and I said, ooh, la, la.
    I say, what's going on in here?
    They're all sitting, smooching on the benches
    and on the trains.
    I said, what kind of a country did we come in here?
    There's some perversion or something like this.
    I wasn't prepared for anything like this.
    What to expect in Paris, you know?
    [INAUDIBLE]
    Well, it didn't take very long, and I learned--
    [CHUCKLING]---- not quite as much [INAUDIBLE],,
    but this is part of living in Paris, you know?
    Nobody will ever laugh at you if you
    want to kiss somebody on the bench, or something like this.
    So it was a culture shock.
    And yes, I had a lot of friends there,
    because we were all going to Alliance Française,
    and we all had the same experiences,
    and get away from Poland, waiting for our papers to go
    on to another country.
    But what I wanted to tell you, and I didn't mention to you
    before, when the war was over and I missed five years
    of school, and I wanted--
    I always was a very good student, and I wanted to learn,
    but besides that, I was so very eager,
    and I went by the motto, a Jewish word--
    I don't know if you know it-- says "davka."
    "Davka."
    It means in spite of.
    And this was push me to everything.
    And I said, in spite of what they wanted
    to do to us, the Nazis, and kill us, and deprive us
    of school and [INAUDIBLE],, I'm going to make it.
    And I remember my teacher used to read it
    in my English papers, and it said the word "davka."
    And it's a Jewish word meaning in spite of.
    And that really was my guiding light
    until I achieved what I wanted, which I did.
    I came in here, I have my wonderful family,
    and I got my education, and my jobs were very rewarding
    because working with the Russian refugees
    was very rewarding to me.
    When I came to this to Washington,
    I said, I would like to have some day a job
    to help those people who are newcomers too,
    because I understand what it is like to adjust
    to a new country.
    So the job, when it turned up, I loved it,
    and we got along well, because I was able
    help them get jobs, and all, and I love the Russian language.
    So I had this job, and then I loved working
    at the Library of Congress.
    Again, I used the Russian language.
    I loved it.
    And I couldn't believe it that I have
    lived to get a job working for the government.
    It was such an honor.
    And then I just couldn't-- coming in here,
    and even getting education, you have to have the education
    to get a job for the government.
    And I work in the library for 10 years using
    the Russian language in here.
    So in some ways, life was very rewarding to me, and kind.
    If I didn't go, maybe, through this war,
    I wouldn't have met the people I met.
    I would have never lived in Paris for three years.
    So looking on the bright side, as long as I'm here,
    and alive, and enjoy the fruit of my efforts,
    I am very blessed--
    I feel very blessed.
    Does it make you sad, in some ways,
    that you went through what you went through,
    or it's just part of--
    No.
    It doesn't.
    Because it wasn't directed at me.
    It was a horrible thing that happened all over,
    and who do I have the right to complain to?
    I'm the one who survived.
    It's the people who perished, the people down there who say,
    why me, what you do to us?
    I had to go through, but I did make it on the long run.
    I survived.
    I never even knew about a concentration camp
    until the war was over.
    Nobody ever talked--
    When did you find out?
    After the war.
    When you were in Lodz, or when you were in Paris?
    No, when we were in Lodz, and when we came to Lodz,
    and we bumped into other people who
    were survivors from the camp.
    And I remember once, two women were sitting in our house,
    and they were sewing.
    And one says to the other, it was Yom Kippur,
    and she says, I can still remember the smoke coming
    from the chimneys.
    And I didn't know what chimneys.
    This is something-- it didn't register
    because we didn't know it.
    There was so many different stories people had.
    This one was in Russia, and this one
    went this, and this one that, that--
    little by little.
    And then when I came to France, really, I knew more.
    Ran into survivors from the camp.
    And incidentally, during the war--
    you probably know yourself that, when the camps existed,
    and Roosevelt was told that something was going on there,
    they had planes flying over the area
    where the concentration camps were,
    and they could tell that they were active because there
    was no snow on the roof.
    So they knew that something was going on in those barracks.
    This was during the war still.
    And they said, there must be something going on,
    but nobody believed.
    Nobody would believe that something that is--
    could have this-- even now, still, people
    can't believe what happened.
    I watched the History Channel religiously,
    when they opened up now all the files and all.
    And I hope this-- but it's not--
    human nature is strange.
    It doesn't seem to deter people from fighting.
    When I came in here, I thought there will be no more wars.
    I came in 1949.
    And take a look how many wars we had since then.
    Every time you look around.
    This one, [INAUDIBLE] I remember--
    Korean, this Vietnam, and then you had the Irish,
    and then you had the Isra--
    I mean, every time.
    What is it in human nature that has this need
    to constantly hurt others?
    I don't know.
    I just don't know, but it's a shame.
    It is very much a shame.
    Did it shock you when you heard about the camps?
    Yeah, I couldn't understand it.
    I thought it was just--
    the first time-- they didn't show picture,
    they just said [? the word camp ?]..
    To see burn-- Yes.
    Very much.
    It was, to me, so unbelievable.
    And the scope of it.
    We never knew that--
    or maybe one or two, but we never believed
    at such a rate people came.
    And what also shocked us later on to see,
    that even after the war was over--
    and Poland did too--
    these people came to their homes,
    and there was pogrom in Kielce or something,
    in spite of the fact--
    because they didn't-- antisemitism was still
    so great.
    They didn't want the Jews.
    They were sorry they weren't killed.
    And do you think your parents knew more before you
    did because you were so young?
    Or did they find out about the same time you did?
    About the camps?
    Mm.
    No.
    We all found out more or less the same--
    Time.
    We found it by word of mouth.
    People you sit down in the cafeteria,
    or we meet some survivors.
    And it always was the first question,
    so how did you survive?
    And everybody has their unique story.
    I survived, my mother didn't, my wife didn't.
    And I heard there was incidents--
    one incident particular told me.
    A young man survived the war.
    And they say when he found out that nobody in his family
    survived, he didn't want to live.
    He didn't want to live.
    So--
    Did he commit suicide?
    He committed-- yeah.
    I didn't see this.
    This is old story, you see.
    People came out with--
    you see sometimes movies too, where
    families' survivors, the husband stayed,
    and they made a life with them, something,
    and then something snaps.
    Something snaps.
    And it's like a delayed reaction or something that they--
    it comes late to them.
    Some of them came here.
    And even though they lost a wife or family,
    they tried to make a new life for themselves.
    They remarried, and they have children.
    But it's never left them.
    And they would have later breakdown, or--
    Sometimes children had to carry also the--
    listen to the-- what went on.
    They couldn't-- it's called the second generation.
    Yeah.
    But--
    And what about you?
    Do you think there's a price that you've
    paid for your experiences?
    Is there a place [? where I pay? ?]
    No, price.
    A price.
    Is--
    A price that I paid?
    Well, I don't think it's my personal--
    it's not like I was the only one punished.
    I think the year in Moscow, starving and hungry,
    I almost died there.
    It was-- the others were more hardy.
    The others were more hardy.
    They were peasant stock, and this.
    And I was used to my mother pampered me always.
    There you go.
    She always did everything for me.
    She wouldn't eat until I have something to eat, you know.
    And I wasn't prepared for it, and I wondered, maybe
    it was a mistake for me to come to Moscow.
    But then again, I look around, I'm not the only one.
    All around me, people were hungry.
    Once, a girl invited me to come to her grandmother.
    Some were way out in the country.
    You know what the kolkhoz is, right?
    You know what a collective commune, the Russians.
    And she says, you want to come with me
    to my grandma for about a week?
    We'll take time off from working at the plant.
    I said, sure.
    I thought, when we come there, probably there's
    going to be food and so on.
    So we went on the train in the middle of the night,
    God knows where in Russia.
    We get off the train, and we start walking.
    We had to walk a long distance on a highway.
    The snow was so high.
    There was no transportation to come and pick us up
    we were the only two girls walking.
    And the wolves was in the forest looking
    at us, and with those big eyes.
    I said, well, any time, they'll come eat us up.
    But we walked the whole night till we
    came to the grandma's house.
    She was a very kind old Russian lady,
    and the week was wonderful.
    I remember all I did is lay there on top of the--
    in a warm spot in the house.
    I didn't want to come down, because at least we
    had enough bread.
    I wasn't hungry for a week.
    This was the highlight of [INAUDIBLE]..
    But people had it worse.
    People had it--
    I always look at it this way.
    God blessed me.
    I always look at it that I survived,
    there wasn't any camp, that I achieved what I wanted--
    the hard way.
    The hard way, but I achieved what I wanted.
    I had my parents with me, became reunited with our family.
    I have my family.
    I got my education, which I was--
    wanted so much.
    And now all I want is good health.
    And I hope it will stay all well.
    And I was--
    I appreciate the opportunity for letting you
    the first one I told the story.
    Even my children didn't get--
    if there's anything else I can tell you, or if any questions--
    Well, is there anything that you think you would like to talk
    about that you haven't?
    Sorry?
    Is there anything you would like to talk about
    that you haven't ta--
    I don't reme-- probably when I come home.
    You may think--
    Don't expe-- [CHUCKLING] [INAUDIBLE] the middle
    of the night, you know.
    Well, let me ask you something.
    What have you told your children?
    Or is the testimony you're giving today
    really a gift to them as well?
    It's [INAUDIBLE] them.
    They knew little bits.
    They knew like that I was in the partisans.
    And then when I start telling my daughter,
    so then I went to Moscow, she says, now wait a minute,
    she says, mom, you told me you were at that time in Poland,
    so how can you be Mo-- they couldn't piece things together.
    And my youngest son, the one who lives in New Hampshire,
    he says he refused to read any books of somebody else's life
    story.
    He says, I want to read your story, your account,
    how you survived.
    So I found a note yesterday in the computer, on email.
    Good luck, mom.
    We wait to-- excuse me--
    we wait impatiently to see it.
    But he was very firm, they wanted
    to have it for their children, for their grandchildren.
    And I feel I owe it to humanity too, to leave something behind.
    Not to take it for granted, everything that I have.
    This is it.
    So I'm still in relatively good health at 81.
    I hope to travel some more.
    I hope so too.
    I hope so too.
    [INAUDIBLE] I was-- be realistic, but I hope so.
    And I look forward to very many good occasions
    with the family, and all this, and yeah--
    Well, I thank you for taking the time
    and being willing to do it.
    I know how difficult it can be.
    Oh, yeah, but don't thank me.
    You have no idea what a mitzvah this was.
    You know what that means, right?
    Yes, I do.
    I have never sat down and fully--
    you made me very comfortable, and very at ease.
    And it was hanging [? over me ?]..
    I wanted to do it, and then I would back up, and--
    and I'm very grateful for you--
    patience, and for your kindness, and for the-- [? everything. ?]
    If there's anything else that you want me to tell you,
    I don't know.
    Nothing else--
    I can't think of anything right now.
    I wore you out.
    How many hour-- how many hours did we talk?
    We've been doing a number of hours.
    Oh, really--
    So I think we'll stop the tape, and we'll do your photographs.
    Yes.
    And Rosette, who's this on the left?
    The woman on the left is my mother.
    It's a picture of her before the war, probably taken in Rovno.
    I'm not sure.
    And the gentleman in the uniform?
    The gentleman is my father.
    He was a Polish officer, and he served in the army.
    I'm not sure if it was--
    what part, but-- cavalry--
    I don't know.
    But anyhow, he was an officer in the Polish army.
    And this photograph, the couple?
    OK.
    The couple in this photograph are my parents, probably
    shortly after the engagement, or after the wedding.
    And who's this on the left?
    The person on the left is my father's stepsister,
    and she was feeding the ducks, something--
    all the domestic animals which we had on our farm.
    Behind her is one wall of the mill
    where they were making flour.
    And what was her name?
    Her name was Feigel.
    And what is this group?
    This is a group of Jewish youth who
    used to come every summer, almost every summer, to spend
    on the farm to learn agriculture and farming in preparation
    of going to Palestine and work on a kibbutz.
    And this photograph here?
    The photograph here is of myself when I was in grade school.
    And we always had to wear a certain uniform.
    But the inscription on the back is very significant
    because my parents wrote the address of my uncle, Rozansky,
    who lived here in Washington, in case we separate,
    the family breaks apart, I should
    know that we have family in Washington,
    and alert them that I survived.
    It's--
    And just say how long you carried this.
    You carried this--
    I carried this picture just the beginning
    of the Nazi occupation, and I had it all
    until the war was over.
    This was my lifeline with the outside world
    should my parents perish.
    The picture on the right.
    The picture on the right is myself in a uniform,
    like a Russian school uniform, when
    I worked in Moscow on the--
    I was attending the technicum.
    How old are you here?
    Over there, I must been about maybe 14 years,
    between 13 and a half, 14, somewhere like that.
    And what about this shot here?
    This shot in here, that's my parents
    and myself taken after the war in the city of Lodz.
    And what is this here?
    This is my passport issued in Poland, in Warsaw.
    This is my photo and my signature on the bottom.
    And on the left is the description when I was born,
    and in which city, Rovno, and my face, and the color of my eyes,
    and height, and the hair color, and physical characteristics,
    you should say.
    And where could this picture have been taken?
    OK, this picture was taken only one place, in Paris.
    And we lived in Paris for three years,
    and in the front of the Eiffel Tower.
    And very dear to me.
    And what is this ship here?
    Oh, this ship is the Queen Mary.
    It's the ship I came on from--
    boarded in France and came to the United States.
    And who's that on there?
    And that's me descending the ramp on the Queen Mary,
    coming down of the ship finally to the promised land.
    [CHUCKLES]
    To coming-- and this is New York.
    That's where I arrived.
    And Rosette, what is this?
    OK.
    This is my mother's prayer book.
    It says in Hebrew letters, machzor,
    which means prayer book.
    My mother had this with her always during the-- in Poland,
    and she carried it with her during the Holocaust,
    wherever she was.
    She held it close to her heart.
    There are inscriptions there pertaining to the Holocaust,
    when it took place, and where, and some dates
    of some of the members of the family who perished.
    This is my father's handwriting.
    Here.
    And this is your father?
    My father's handwriting.
    Writing on all of it.
    Explaining.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Rosette Konick, born January 17, 1929 in Malinsk, Poland (now Ukraine), describes her prewar life in Poland; her father Abraham and mother Faye; her father’s occupation converting wool to thread for textiles; her family’s orthodox religious beliefs; her family’s awareness of the political situation in Germany before the war; antisemitism in Poland; her family’s unsuccessful attempt to leave Poland; the beginning of the war and initial Russian occupation; various transports to Siberia under the Russian occupation; the German occupation beginning in 1941 and the harsher anti-Jewish legislation that followed; her life in the Beresno ghetto; her work in the fields at the Beresno ghetto; the liquidation of the ghetto and her escape into the forest; her time hiding in various barns; her travels across the River Sluch into Russian territory to search for safer hiding; her family’s involvement in the partisan movement; her family’s stay in France while waiting to obtain visas to the United States; and her immigration to the United States in 1948.
    Interviewee
    Rosette Konick
    Interviewer
    Ringelheim, Dr. Joan
    Date
    interview:  2010 October 12
    Credit Line
    Interview funded by a grant from Katharine M. and Leo S. Ullman.

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Genre/Form
    Oral histories.
    Extent
    6 videocasettes (Betacam SP) : sound, color ; 1/2 in..

    Rights & Restrictions

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

    Copyright Holder
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

    Keywords & Subjects

    Personal Name
    Konick, Rosette, 1929-

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History Branch conducted the interview with Rosette Konick on October 12, 2010. The interview was transferred to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in October 2010.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:03:51
    This page:
    http:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn42261

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    Time Coded Notes (6)

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

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    Oral history interview with Gerda Blachmann Wilchfort

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    Oral history interview with Gidon Arye

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    Oral history interview with Nina Schuster Merrick

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    Oral history interview with Eva Rozencwajig Stock

    Oral history interview with Eva Rozencwajig Stock

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    Oral history interview with Ivo Herzer

    Oral history interview with Ivo Herzer

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    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Brodecki

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Brodecki

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    Oral history interview with Irene Weber

    Oral history interview with Irene Weber

    Oral History

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    Oral history interview with Josef

    Oral history interview with Josef

    Oral History

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    Oral history interview with Stanislaw Soszynski

    Oral history interview with Stanislaw Soszynski

    Oral History

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    Oral history interview with Abraham Lewent

    Oral history interview with Abraham Lewent

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Miriam Storch Lewent

    Oral history interview with Miriam Storch Lewent

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Liane Reif-Lehrer

    Oral history interview with Liane Reif-Lehrer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Preben Munch-Nielsen

    Oral history interview with Preben Munch-Nielsen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anny Rubinstein Kast

    Oral history interview with Anny Rubinstein Kast

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helen Waterford

    Oral history interview with Helen Waterford

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thomas Ward

    Oral history interview with Thomas Ward

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred R. Wohl

    Oral history interview with Fred R. Wohl

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Norbert Yasharoff

    Oral history interview with Norbert Yasharoff

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frank Meissner

    Oral history interview with Frank Meissner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mina Perlberger

    Oral history interview with Mina Perlberger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Klebanow

    Oral history interview with David Klebanow

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Franz Wohlfahrt

    Oral history interview with Franz Wohlfahrt

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tove Schöbaum Bamberger

    Oral history interview with Tove Schöbaum Bamberger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Morris Gordon

    Oral history interview with Morris Gordon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Raya Markon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ernest G. Heppner

    Oral history interview with Ernest G. Heppner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Emanuel Mandel

    Oral history interview with Emanuel Mandel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Leo Bretholz

    Oral history interview with Leo Bretholz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Paul Matasovski

    Oral history interview with Paul Matasovski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Zelda Piekarska Brodecki

    Oral history interview with Zelda Piekarska Brodecki

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Stefania Podgórska Burzminski

    Oral history interview with Stefania Podgórska Burzminski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rose Galek Brunswic

    Oral history interview with Rose Galek Brunswic

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Renée Schwalb Fritz

    Oral history interview with Renée Schwalb Fritz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Martin Spett

    Oral history interview with Martin Spett

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ion Cioaba

    Oral history interview with Ion Cioaba

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Niels Bamberger

    Oral history interview with Niels Bamberger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ray Buch

    Oral history interview with Ray Buch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Nina Kaleska

    Oral history interview with Nina Kaleska

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Judith Meisel

    Oral history interview with Judith Meisel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thomas Buergenthal

    Oral history interview with Thomas Buergenthal

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Leif Donde

    Oral history interview with Leif Donde

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Kaufmann Koenig

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Kaufmann Koenig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Max Amichai Heppner

    Oral history interview with Max Amichai Heppner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Charles Bruml

    Oral history interview with Charles Bruml

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Pollack

    Oral history interview with David Pollack

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eugene Lipman

    Oral history interview with Eugene Lipman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hetty d'Ancona de Leeuwe

    Oral history interview with Hetty d'Ancona de Leeuwe

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marty Glickman

    Oral history interview with Marty Glickman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Susie Gruenbaum Schwarz

    Oral history interview with Susie Gruenbaum Schwarz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hessy Levinsons Taft

    Oral history interview with Hessy Levinsons Taft

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bella Jakubowicz Tovey

    Oral history interview with Bella Jakubowicz Tovey

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Krautwirth Meyerowitz

    Oral history interview with Ruth Krautwirth Meyerowitz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Peretz Milbauer

    Oral history interview with Peretz Milbauer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Judah Nadich

    Oral history interview with Judah Nadich

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hana Bruml

    Oral history interview with Hana Bruml

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Meed

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Meed

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Johanna Neumann

    Oral history interview with Johanna Neumann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alice Lang Rosen

    Oral history interview with Alice Lang Rosen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jay Ipson

    Oral history interview with Jay Ipson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Margaret Jastrow Klug

    Oral history interview with Margaret Jastrow Klug

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Solomon Klug

    Oral history interview with Solomon Klug

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helene Baraf

    Oral history interview with Helene Baraf

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Morris Kornberg

    Oral history interview with Morris Kornberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michael Diamond

    Oral history interview with Michael Diamond

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malach

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malach

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michael Bernath

    Oral history interview with Michael Bernath

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Kate Bernath

    Oral history interview with Kate Bernath

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Paul Kovak

    Oral history interview with Paul Kovak

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Abraham Kolski

    Oral history interview with Abraham Kolski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sylvia Kolski

    Oral history interview with Sylvia Kolski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Steven Springfield

    Oral history interview with Steven Springfield

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Liny Pajgin Yollick

    Oral history interview with Liny Pajgin Yollick

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Bachner

    Oral history interview with Fred Bachner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Murray Pantirer

    Oral history interview with Murray Pantirer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Barbara Marton Farkas

    Oral history interview with Barbara Marton Farkas

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Farkas

    Oral history interview with William Farkas

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sheila Perec Etons Bernard

    Oral history interview with Sheila Perec Etons Bernard

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frima L.

    Oral history interview with Frima L.

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Esther Terner Raab

    Oral history interview with Esther Terner Raab

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Guy Stern

    Oral history interview with Guy Stern

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Toby Stern

    Oral history interview with Toby Stern

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ion Butnaru

    Oral history interview with Ion Butnaru

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jeanine Gutman Butnaru

    Oral history interview with Jeanine Gutman Butnaru

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Cecilie Klein-Pollack

    Oral history interview with Cecilie Klein-Pollack

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Schwartz

    Oral history interview with Fred Schwartz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malnik

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malnik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lilly Appelbaum Malnik

    Oral history interview with Lilly Appelbaum Malnik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Masha Loen

    Oral history interview with Masha Loen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Madeline Deutsch

    Oral history interview with Madeline Deutsch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Amalie Petranker Salsitz

    Oral history interview with Amalie Petranker Salsitz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Norman Salsitz

    Oral history interview with Norman Salsitz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frederic Bernard

    Oral history interview with Frederic Bernard

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Isaac Bitton

    Oral history interview with Isaac Bitton

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Max Haber

    Oral history interview with Max Haber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William P. Levine

    Oral history interview with William P. Levine

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Leo Schneiderman

    Oral history interview with Leo Schneiderman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Adam Starkopf and Pela Starkopf

    Oral history interview with Adam Starkopf and Pela Starkopf

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Carla Heijmans Lessing

    Oral history interview with Carla Heijmans Lessing

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Edward Lessing

    Oral history interview with Edward Lessing

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Werner Goldsmith

    Oral history interview with Werner Goldsmith

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Beatrice Pappenheimer

    Oral history interview with Beatrice Pappenheimer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with John Komski

    Oral history interview with John Komski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Curtis Whiteway

    Oral history interview with Curtis Whiteway

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lore Baer

    Oral history interview with Lore Baer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erich Kulka

    Oral history interview with Erich Kulka

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Cornelia Schouten

    Oral history interview with Cornelia Schouten

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Drexel Sprecher

    Oral history interview with Drexel Sprecher

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bela Blau

    Oral history interview with Bela Blau

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Magda Blau

    Oral history interview with Magda Blau

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Barbara Ledermann Rodbell

    Oral history interview with Barbara Ledermann Rodbell

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jerry Slivka

    Oral history interview with Jerry Slivka

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rochelle Blackman Slivka

    Oral history interview with Rochelle Blackman Slivka

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Francis Akos

    Oral history interview with Francis Akos

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Beno Helmer

    Oral history interview with Beno Helmer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jerry von Halle

    Oral history interview with Jerry von Halle

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall

    Oral history interview with Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ralph Codikow

    Oral history interview with Ralph Codikow

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Borsos

    Oral history interview with Ruth Borsos

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Simone Marguerite Lipman

    Oral history interview with Simone Marguerite Lipman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Shony Alex Braun

    Oral history interview with Shony Alex Braun

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Doriane Kurz

    Oral history interview with Doriane Kurz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Lieberman

    Oral history interview with David Lieberman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Laura Margolis

    Oral history interview with Laura Margolis

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Paul Strassmann

    Oral history interview with Paul Strassmann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ernest James

    Oral history interview with Ernest James

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Chaim Engel

    Oral history interview with Chaim Engel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Selma Engel

    Oral history interview with Selma Engel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Morris Engelson

    Oral history interview with Morris Engelson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lonia Mosak

    Oral history interview with Lonia Mosak

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Agnes Grossman Aranyi

    Oral history interview with Agnes Grossman Aranyi

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Bergman

    Oral history interview with David Bergman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lila Lam Nowakowska

    Oral history interview with Lila Lam Nowakowska

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Yaffa Rosenthal

    Oral history interview with Yaffa Rosenthal

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eve Wagszul Rich

    Oral history interview with Eve Wagszul Rich

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Magda Mezei Lapedus

    Oral history interview with Magda Mezei Lapedus

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Avraham Ronai

    Oral history interview with Avraham Ronai

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Konigsberg Lang

    Oral history interview with Eva Konigsberg Lang

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Cornelius Loen

    Oral history interview with Cornelius Loen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thomas Blatt

    Oral history interview with Thomas Blatt

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anita Magnus Frank

    Oral history interview with Anita Magnus Frank

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Guta Blass Weintraub

    Oral history interview with Guta Blass Weintraub

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henry Schmelzer

    Oral history interview with Henry Schmelzer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helen Liebowitz Goldkind

    Oral history interview with Helen Liebowitz Goldkind

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Johanne Eva Liebmann

    Oral history interview with Johanne Eva Liebmann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Max Liebmann

    Oral history interview with Max Liebmann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Giorgio Perlasca

    Oral history interview with Giorgio Perlasca

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David J. Selznick

    Oral history interview with David J. Selznick

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Model

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Model

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Levine

    Oral history interview with Joseph Levine

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eugenia Blau Szamosi

    Oral history interview with Eugenia Blau Szamosi

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irene Dynkiewicz Silver

    Oral history interview with Irene Dynkiewicz Silver

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alice Lok Cahana

    Oral history interview with Alice Lok Cahana

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Brust Cooper

    Oral history interview with Eva Brust Cooper

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jacob Vogel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Frieda Belinfante

    Oral history interview with Frieda Belinfante

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Philip Vock

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Gatenio

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mariette Moscovici

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henry van den Boogard

    Oral history interview with Henry van den Boogard

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jack Moss

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Dytlow

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Dytlow

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mel London

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henry Cohen

    Oral history interview with Henry Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gisela Feldman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bert Fleming and Irene Fleming

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Norman Belfer

    Oral history interview with Norman Belfer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Carol Stern Steinhardt

    Oral history interview with Carol Stern Steinhardt

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Haim Shmueli

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Itka Zygmuntowicz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gertrude Granirer Flor

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Renee Scheuer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bent Melchior

    Oral history interview with Bent Melchior

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Reuven Paikowski

    Oral history interview with Reuven Paikowski

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Renata Laqueur

    Oral history interview with Renata Laqueur

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Carl Hirsch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lotte Hirsch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Walter Meyer

    Oral history interview with Walter Meyer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Dora Kramen Dimitro

    Oral history interview with Dora Kramen Dimitro

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Herma Barber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Zeck and Belle Mayer Zeck

    Oral history interview with William Zeck and Belle Mayer Zeck

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michel Reynders

    Oral history interview with Michel Reynders

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marthe Hoffnung Cohn

    Oral history interview with Marthe Hoffnung Cohn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Miriam Kabacznik Shulman

    Oral history interview with Miriam Kabacznik Shulman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anna Szyller Palarczyk

    Oral history interview with Anna Szyller Palarczyk

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Steven Galezewski

    Oral history interview with Steven Galezewski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Havas

    Oral history interview with George Havas

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Maria Rosenbloom

    Oral history interview with Maria Rosenbloom

    Oral History

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

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