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Oral history interview with Phillip Abraham

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 2011.210 | RG Number: RG-50.106.0192

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    Oral history interview with Phillip Abraham
    Transcript
    This is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    volunteer collection interview with Phillip Abraham conducted
    by Gail Schwartz on August 21, 2011,
    in Silver Spring, Maryland.
    This is track number one.
    What is your full name?
    My full name is Phillip with two L's, mid-name Ben Zion,
    and last name Abraham.
    And when and where were you born?
    I was born in a little town by the name
    of Podu Turcului in Romania on August 10th, 1931.
    OK, let's talk a little bit about your family.
    And how far back does your family go in Romania?
    Well, the Romanian Jews, because this is a part of that,
    actually entered Romania from the invitation
    of, at that time, a prince of a portion of Romania.
    It wasn't called Romania yet at the time.
    He invited the Jews from Poland to come
    to Romania with their craftsmanship knowledge and so
    on and in being merchants and all that.
    And he gave them the idea that or he said
    they will be under his protection.
    So they came.
    So basically--
    What year was this?
    500 years-- 1500 something.
    OK.
    And they came, and my family was there,
    which there are two branches, so to speak, from my mother
    and father.
    And my grandfather on my mother's side was named Marcus,
    but my father on his side, he was a named Avram or Abraham.
    Marcus is a name that comes from the people--
    the Jews who were in Italy and Rome
    after the destruction of the temple and so on.
    So they basically moved toward the East
    from there into Europe and perhaps to Germany.
    And so, for instance, one connection
    is that Marx, the famous or infamous communist--
    Karl Marx.
    Karl Marx-- was based on the fact
    that his people were called Marcus,
    but the Germans made it into Marx.
    So my grandfather, his family name-- his last name
    was Marcus.
    So that was my connection there.
    This little town that I mentioned where I was born
    was actually a center of a lot of Romanian villages
    who were working the land, and they were raising crops.
    And this town-- there were 400 Jewish people there,
    mostly merchants who actually brought and bought
    from other places to give to their customers who
    were from the villages.
    So my father had a store with fabrics.
    In those days, there were no ready-made clothes.
    You had to buy by the meter or yard,
    and you went to a tailor -- and so on or a--
    what they call it-- mistress.
    And so my father brought this stuff from other places
    and sold a lot of from silk and so on,
    even British cloth that came from England.
    And also a variety of fabrics that were actually
    made in Romania itself.
    There were a lot of factories that did that.
    So my father, who's story is also of interest, at least
    to me, he had been--
    during the First World War, he was about the age of 14, 15,
    and worked in the store of an uncle of his,
    who kind of exploited him.
    So at one point, he decided to go on his own.
    And there was a war, and the Romanians
    fought against the Germans--
    the First World War.
    And he decided to go with a wagon and one horse,
    and he went and bought from the Germans
    and sold it to the Romanians and bought from the Romanians
    and sold it the Germans--
    food, basically, and so on.
    And he managed through three or four years
    to make a lot of money.
    Came back to this town where I was born, Podu Turcului,
    and started a regular store with fabrics.
    And that was his, and he became quite successful, basically
    the most successful among other merchants.
    And his philosophy was, if I can put that in,
    was to buy as cheap as possible, meaning--
    and how did you do that?
    By putting the money on the spot, not on credit.
    And he sold it to the older villager
    that came there on credit, because they didn't have money
    every time.
    Only after the crops came in they had the money to pay.
    And they came, and they were extremely good customers.
    They never defaulted.
    They came and paid and so on for many years,
    even during the Second World War that something happened.
    This little town--
    But we'll talk about the Second World War in a--
    All right.
    What was your father's name?
    Isaac Abraham.
    And he was born what year?
    He was born in 1899.
    Oh, OK.
    Yes.
    And OK, so that's my--
    That's your father's story.
    My father, yes.
    And your mother's name?
    My mother's name was Chaya or Clara Marcus.
    And you know when she was born?
    Yeah, she was born actually about three or four
    years before my father.
    So she was-- and a little story there, too.
    There were all sorts of--
    she was very beautiful and so on, and she was educated.
    And my father, on the other hand,
    had only two years of grammar school.
    But he was extremely good at math--
    arithmetic, I should say.
    And when he came back to the town,
    he said I want to marry Clara Marcus.
    And she didn't want to and so on,
    and then one of her brothers, who was older than she, said,
    you should marry him.
    He is going to be a success.
    And not only this, he gave her-- because there were--
    my mother's-- they were orphans.
    There had been 12 children and two separate mothers.
    One died, and then the father of her
    married another woman, which happened to have been
    the sister of the first one.
    Because that was the Jewish thing.
    She was not married, and when her sister died
    there were already six children.
    And she gave birth to another six.
    But not all of them survived.
    So when this older brother, who by that time
    was also very successful, said I'm not going--
    there is nobody.
    The father already died.
    My grandfather [INAUDIBLE] died.
    So there was no money to give as a dowry.
    So he said, Clara Marcus is not going to go without a dowry.
    My father never even asked or anything like that.
    So he came and gave her at that time 50,000 of currency.
    So in any case, it was a very successful.
    They loved each other throughout life and so on,
    until 1973 when my mother died.
    Do you have any siblings?
    Yes, actually I should say one elder sister
    who died several years ago.
    And I have a brother in Canada.
    What are the names of your siblings?
    My sister was Rosa, or Varda in Hebrew.
    She died in Israel.
    And my brother was named Carol, because that's
    the name of the king.
    The king.
    Right-- Carol Abraham.
    So he has been a citizen of Canada for quite a long time,
    but he was in Israel as well.
    It is another story, OK, with Israel and so on.
    Yeah, we'll get to that.
    Yeah, he's still-- we're in touch all the time.
    The difference in ages between you?
    He's about 2 1/2 years older than I am.
    So you were the baby?
    I was the baby, yes.
    Yeah, so there had been four children,
    but the first born died when he there were some epidemics when
    he was one year and a half.
    It was something that my mother would cry when
    she mentioned that and so on.
    How religious was your family?
    Well, they kept kashrut, never anything in the house
    or anything like that.
    My father was a member of the synagogue and so on.
    And also the community, the Jewish community that
    took in this little town care of orphans and widows and so on.
    And it was very, very interesting.
    They didn't force people to donate.
    And so they got together, said, well, you should do this.
    And they too took care of everybody.
    Nobody died of hunger or anything like that.
    If there was some problem in the winters and so on,
    people would go and cut wood for them-- for all these people.
    It was really civilized in that respect.
    We had a rabbi for life there.
    His son became the rabbi.
    And so it was very, very nice.
    And people would meet during the summer in the evening
    after all the stores were closed.
    They would meet, and actually would
    have outside on the sidewalks--
    they put tables and so on.
    And friends would come, and they drank something cold
    and talked and so on.
    So there were all sorts of things of that nature.
    And so it was a happy childhood, until the Second World War.
    Did you live in a mixed neighborhood
    of Jews and non-Jews?
    There were very few Romanians in this town.
    The majority were Jews.
    But there was a church and so on,
    and it connected between the--
    not connections, but relatively speaking they
    were a good friends and so on.
    And I'll come to a point before the Second World
    War in the '30s.
    There was a mayor.
    Ordinarily the mayor was a Romanian guy
    who happened to be very, very good and, in fact,
    very friendly with my father.
    And he said in the '30s when Hitler came to power
    in Germany--
    and he kind of was a very intelligent man.
    He was a lawyer as well.
    And he said to my father, Isaac, why don't you--
    he knew that we were capable, because my father was
    rich by the Romanian standards.
    Just go to America.
    Take your family and go to America.
    And he didn't follow this, because he said, well,
    I have all my family--
    his siblings and so on.
    And so he didn't want-- his parents were still alive,
    my grandparents on my father's side,
    and a sister, and a sister-in-law and so on.
    So he didn't do it.
    And so we were there when they--
    But what I wanted to say is that there
    was kind of a friendship between the Romanian people,
    at least in this little town.
    Not everywhere it was.
    Oh, there were some antisemites as well in Romania,
    and we know that things happened during the war.
    But prior to the war, for instance--
    to give an example of their relationship, is that when
    they said to put the yellow thing on
    to show that you are a Jew--
    we put on our sleeve--
    the police were supposed to enforce that.
    But they grew up with the Jews, so they never did.
    So it was-- you couldn't tell who was Jewish and was not.
    So that was the situation.
    And I went to kindergarten there.
    This was a public school or a Jewish school?
    No, it was a public school.
    They had also grammar school, all public.
    Until the war started, when suddenly in 1940,
    the order came.
    Romania at this that time was an ally of the Germans.
    And from the point of view of the Romanians,
    I want to say something that is not bad.
    Because they saw France defeated in three weeks,
    and Romania had just about--
    the older forces, they had cavalry against tanks
    and so on.
    And they said they couldn't survive.
    So they were from patriotism, they
    said we have to go, even with the famous or infamous men
    in power at the time--
    General Antonescu.
    He said-- and he was a patriot himself--
    that we cannot fight the Germans.
    In the First World War they did, but then France
    was not defeated, and all the others
    were attacking the Germans.
    So because of that, in the end when the war came,
    the Germans demanded from this general that the ambassador--
    the German ambassador to Romania--
    that they collect the Jews from the little towns,
    push them into the other centers so they
    would be there available for them to take and kill them.
    Of course, the Romanians at the time didn't know that--
    what was happening.
    That was quite secret--
    the Germans-- the way they did it.
    So the order came one day in the little town--
    this Podu Turcului tomorrow you have
    to leave and go to the larger town, which
    was about 20 miles away.
    So people had the stores.
    What to do with the stores and the merchandise?
    So most people took whatever they could in horses and wagons
    and so on.
    And so did my parents, with one exception.
    My father decided he couldn't take all of it.
    It was a large store with fabrics, and that's
    very voluminous, and how to carry this on a wagon
    with two horses, or something like that.
    So they took-- well, my parents took whatever
    is my most valuable and so on.
    And my father went and actually put all sorts of wood
    in the front part of the store and in the back and so on.
    And it was so effective that later,
    when I come in this story, nobody was able to enter there.
    Before we go on, let's go back a little bit pre-war.
    What language did you speak at home?
    We spoke Romanian.
    My parents, of course, spoke Yiddish, but on purpose,
    because at the time they didn't know where
    what was going to happen to us.
    They wanted-- if you spoke Romanian,
    you had a chance to go have a good life and so on.
    Nobody would bother you.
    But if you didn't speak Romanian kind of immediately,
    you are a Jew.
    So they didn't speak Yiddish with us.
    I never-- to this day, I don't know much Yiddish.
    A few things, but ordinarily they talked with us in Romania.
    So you celebrated holidays, Passover, the Sabbath?
    All of that.
    Absolutely.
    Very observant in that sense?
    Oh yeah.
    Yeah, absolutely.
    With extended family?
    With extended family and so on.
    For instance, Yom Kippur we'd go for the children
    so we'd be out of the synagogue and play and so on.
    And lunch came, and oh, let them eat something.
    Take them home.
    Yeah, I remember that.
    OK, you were born in 1931 you said.
    In 1931, yes.
    And Hitler came in power in '33.
    Yes.
    I couldn't do anything about it.
    So again, pre-war.
    At what point or were you ever before the war started aware
    of a man named Hitler?
    Did your parents talk about it?
    Oh, yeah, sure.
    Sure.
    Yeah, they knew that it happened,
    but the number of-- there were newspapers, of course,
    as well that mentioned what was happening
    in Germany to the Jews?
    Not really.
    No, I don't think even throughout all of Europe--
    people were not interested.
    The Jews may have been interested i and so on.
    So I remember only later on when just close to the war, 1939--
    so in one of the newspapers there was a huge headline
    that the war is about to start.
    Something like that.
    Did your parents say--
    I mean, you were young, of course.
    Do you do you remember if your parents talked
    to you about what was happening and who this man Hitler was?
    No, I don't recall.
    They may have done that, but I was kind of--
    You were a young child, I know.
    Yeah.
    It was 1939.
    You were eight.
    Yeah, I was 8.
    And I knew how to read this headline,
    and I remember that as if I am looking at it right now.
    But what we knew earlier, we had keren kayemet,
    a little box where we put money and so on all the time.
    And we're talking about Palestine, not Israel--
    Palestine.
    And I'm telling a story that I told my wife and everybody,
    and it's a true story.
    I said at the time when I was young, about six, seven,
    I said I want to be a general in Palestine.
    Well, I didn't become a general.
    I became a sergeant-- first sergeant.
    Almost.
    Almost.
    Right.
    So I was a Zionist, because--
    And your family-- I was going to ask if your family--
    All the family-- all the people there were for Palestine,
    but they couldn't go there.
    Right.
    The British wouldn't allow them.
    Already 1921, 1922, they put a stop basically,
    just only a few people could go to Palestine--
    Jews, meaning.
    Were your parents politically involved in the '30s at all?
    Only my father was a member of the Romanian party
    that was actually a party of the people living
    in the agriculture and the villages and so on.
    That was not against Jews or anything like that.
    They were quite good for Romania at the time.
    But later on, they lost in the elections,
    and other people came in and so on with antisemitism and so on.
    And at that point, my father, of course, was no longer,
    and nobody was interested in supporting them.
    And they knew that there is a danger, but nobody believed.
    If Jews in Germany didn't believe, and in Romania,
    yes, they were antisemites.
    Did you yourself as a child every experience--
    As a child, yeah.
    One thing that I remember very--
    I may have been seven years old, something like that.
    I was in one of my uncle's garden
    in the back of the building where he had fruit trees.
    And I was getting some plums or something like that.
    And there was a gate.
    And I was just about--
    I wasn't exiting through again back gate.
    And there passes a Romanian little boy like me.
    And she shouts, zhid, zhid.
    So my reaction-- I remember it as if it was today--
    I picked up a stone and threw it at him.
    I didn't hit him, OK?
    He was running by that time.
    That was my reaction.
    Did you talk this over with your parents?
    Oh, yeah.
    Yeah.
    What did they say to a child?
    What do you say to a--
    They said don't do that.
    Don't do that, because then you put everybody else in jeopardy.
    And then this boy, if he were hit by this stone,
    he would go and cry and so on and his parents--
    oh, the damn Jews, or something like that.
    How would you characterize yourself?
    Were you an independent child?
    My letter history, it will appear
    that I was really more independent than my siblings
    when I come to that point.
    And one other thing that happened,
    I want to show that basically the people
    in the town that were in power, so the mayor and so on.
    The mayor's name?
    Do you remember the mayor's name?
    I don't remember now.
    Because you were talking about him before.
    A Romanian man, yes.
    One day he came and told to the community--
    Jewish community, meaning the people
    who were kind of in charge.
    And they said, look, I heard news that the antisemites,
    and there was a group--
    In the town-- in the area.
    They could have been in the area.
    They intend to have a massacre-- to come and attack the Jews.
    So he said you better go and prepare yourself to fight.
    And I remember that evening, particularly we
    went to one of their relatives that had a bigger store and so
    on, and the only family there.
    And other people did the same thing with axes
    and sticks and whatever.
    Were ready to fight.
    It didn't happen.
    So but I remembered it exactly and so on.
    One of my cousins, as we were waiting there,
    suddenly we hear a noise.
    Something-- a big noise.
    Something fell on the ground in the store.
    This cousin was a little bit retarded,
    and he was sleeping on a bench and fell.
    So that was about all that-- we always remember that.
    But it didn't happen, so until we had to move [INAUDIBLE]..
    OK, let's get to that point, because up to that point,
    you were going to school.
    I was going to school--
    a Romanian school and so on.
    And did the teachers-- were the teachers--
    No, they were not--
    Antisemitic.
    No, they actually were harsh--
    much harsher on the children of the villagers and so on
    or who were Romanians.
    So in a sense, you had a safe childhood.
    I had a safe childhood.
    Yes, I cannot at all complain.
    Except for that one incident, you said.
    OK, so now, as you said, things started to change.
    Right.
    And so we were sent to another town, much larger than this.
    It was a real town.
    The name of that town?
    T-E-C-U-C-I. That's pronounced Tecuci.
    And all these still exist.
    Actually, we could look them on the internet
    to see their locations now.
    We did it here.
    And they have increased a little bit
    in population, all these places.
    Not that much.
    And so we moved there.
    Do you remember when this was?
    It was I think in the summer of 1940.
    OK.
    Oh, OK, war broke out September 1, 1939,
    when Germany invaded Poland.
    Did you-- OK, you were 8 years old.
    Were you aware of that?
    I wasn't aware of that.
    Yeah, my parents were.
    Yeah.
    We had a problem there with radios.
    For instance, not everybody had a radio,
    because there was no power--
    electrical power.
    So the only-- I have some older cousins who were kind of smart,
    and they put together a radio with batteries.
    Not the little batteries, but the battery like a car battery
    nowadays.
    And we heard the news.
    I mean, they heard the news.
    They heard the news.
    Yeah.
    So 1940 comes, and you have to move.
    1940 comes, and then this is happening that we have to move.
    What month?
    Do you remember?
    I remember that must have been--
    From what season?
    What was the season, if you don't remember the month?
    It was in the summer.
    The summer.
    And the reason I know exactly that it was the summer,
    I remember we went with this horses in the wagon.
    And I was thirsty, and we didn't even take water with us.
    And we stopped at a fountain.
    And what happened that fountain--
    actually the water was polluted.
    An nobody else got sick, but I did,
    when we reached the place when they were put in this work.
    We found a place to live there.
    One day I had some fever.
    They didn't know what it was at the time.
    So they thought malaria or something like that.
    But aspirin, something like this.
    And one day, my mother--
    my father wasn't there at the time.
    What happened?
    They took the Jews who came from this little town
    and other little towns that were brought in--
    were told to move.
    They took those men to labor camps.
    And they didn't take the men that were the residents--
    Jewish residents in this Tecuci.
    None of the men there were taken,
    but there were Jews who--
    The refugee Jews in the other towns.
    Right.
    They were sent to some labor camps.
    And that could have been bad, and for some people
    may have been bad.
    But if you had money, you could bribe the guards there,
    and they would say, Mr. and so on--
    treated you with respect because they were getting money.
    And that's one characteristic of the Romanian people.
    They like bribes, but they actually
    produce what they take the money for.
    Other places-- Hungary and so on, the Ukraine--
    they took the money, and actually, in many instances,
    they were going to move them over the border and so on.
    They killed them and took everything they had left.
    Or even if they didn't kill them,
    they take anything they had and left them there
    and didn't move them.
    That was--
    What did your parents tell you why you had to move?
    What do you tell an 8-year-old child?
    You've got to leave your home and go to another town?
    Orders came from above me.
    There was no time even to talk.
    Were you frightened?
    Oh, I don't know if I was frightened, but--
    Well, you were going with your family.
    Yeah, I was with my family and so on.
    I wasn't frightened, because I had my parents with me
    and so on, and my siblings.
    Were you able to take things special to you as a child--
    with you?
    I don't recall now.
    Like toys or books?
    No, because we had to do it fast, and so on.
    And there were all night long and so on to do all this.
    And it was difficult to find a wagon and horses,
    because it was a small town.
    So they had to go to the villages
    and say, OK, for money.
    So they came.
    And my father had friends in all these villages
    because they liked him--
    the way he dealt with them.
    So now you're in the new town.
    We're in the new town.
    We found a place to rent, actually, because we
    had money at the time.
    That was for us the beginning and so on.
    Later on it became more difficult.
    And so my father was taken.
    So my mother had the money and so on, and we lived in--
    what really happened to everybody in the population
    there at that point.
    And the food became scarce, because they
    were giving to the Germans.
    They were giving and so on.
    And the Germans crossed through Romania to attack the Russians.
    So everything was like you got--
    what is--
    Ration?
    Rations and so on.
    And the beef wasn't--
    you didn't want to buy beef.
    It wasn't kosher anymore.
    And so on.
    But we survived and so on.
    My mother was a very good cook.
    During the time in Podu Turcului, we had two servants--
    one that cooked, one that took care of the children.
    Because my mother was in the store with my father and so on.
    But she was a good cook in any case.
    So she managed to do for us, and we survived throughout the war.
    You stayed in that town throughout the war.
    We stayed in town throughout the war.
    OK, let's talk a little about your life during that time.
    Did you go to school in that town?
    Right, but another thing happened.
    The government said that Jewish children cannot go
    to the public schools.
    So they did as a favor.
    Why?
    Because the Jews said, well--
    they started a high school--
    the gymnasium.
    The Jews started a Jewish school.
    Right, the Jewish school.
    And they allowed that.
    They didn't care about that.
    And who were the professors?
    One was a pharmacist.
    One was an engineer.
    One actually studied in France and so on so
    was the French teacher.
    And so we had a much better school.
    Education.
    Education.
    Until the end of the war.
    OK?
    And we studied, of course, religion--
    Jewish and stuff like that.
    I mean they--
    Was there a synagogue in that town?
    Yeah, there were several synagogues.
    Oh, yeah.
    You felt free enough to go to service.
    Yes.
    Yeah, there was no problem--
    OK with that.
    So that's why I'm saying we didn't suffer that terribly.
    And also after I said my oldest men were taken to defend,
    their family stayed behind, after two years there,
    1942 something like that, they allowed them to come home.
    And they came home.
    That was that.
    Had you had any contact with your father in those two years?
    Yeah, letters.
    They allowed to send letters and so on.
    And they--
    Where was he taken?
    Do you know?
    I don't remember now.
    I think there is information, because somebody
    from Podu Turcului put together a book, which they actually
    sent to me--
    one copy with all the names and so on.
    So I could answer this.
    The only problem is, I sent it to my brother in Canada.
    He still has it.
    So I'll ask him to send it back to me
    so I can comment more details--
    the actual details.
    Because they did a search of--
    in all these little towns, they had the people--
    all the information about the births
    and so on in the town's records and so on.
    So they could go, and since there were so many survivors,
    people remembered.
    So they put together this book.
    I'm not sure that there is a copy of it.
    Maybe [? Micheline ?] may be able to.
    And I had it in my hands at the time, and I looked through it,
    and my father appears there and so on.
    And many other Jews.
    So during this time during the war, again,
    how aware were the adults of what
    was happening in the other countries and even in Romania--
    terrible things in other parts of Romania?
    Yeah, I'm sure they knew, for instance, that bad things
    happened in Bucharest.
    There was this so-called Legionnaires at a party--
    the green and so on.
    And they had a massacre of Jews in several places in Bucharest.
    And then they got this General Antonescu sent after them,
    caught them and killed them.
    And those who survived--
    [INAUDIBLE] ran and they left and went to Germany
    and stayed there during the war.
    You hadn't mentioned wearing yellow.
    When was that?
    That was when this Tecuci, I suppose.
    But I remember for the same reason,
    You didn't have to wear.
    [INAUDIBLE] Yeah, they didn't pursue that, probably
    because of bribing the police.
    And the police would say what do I care that, too, for them.
    Wear a yellow band, yeah.
    It was not a Romanian thing.
    It was done because of the Germans.
    Yeah.
    So what do you remember from those years of ward?
    Was it a very frightening time for you as a child?
    You were 14 when war was over.
    I mean, you were getting older and more aware.
    Right, I was aware that there was danger and so on, and be--
    Were you afraid of being Jewish?
    Did that bother you?
    No, I was Jewish.
    I was Jewish.
    Were you Romanian or were you Jewish?
    What did you feel?
    Of course, Jewish.
    Jewish.
    You did not feel Romanian.
    I didn't feel Romanian, even though that was
    the language I was speaking.
    Yeah, yeah.
    Yeah.
    But I was reading.
    I was reading a lot in Romanian.
    Incidentally, one good thing about that--
    they translated from other languages books.
    And in this Tecuci place, they had a huge bookstore
    that went like several--
    all the way, had to go on ladders.
    And they had translated from French and English and even
    Russian books.
    And they were kind of cheap.
    So I was able to read through the--
    Classics?
    Is that what you're saying?
    Yeah, the classics.
    And that was my real passion-- to read.
    Were you active in sports?
    Yes, to some extent, but you couldn't call it
    sports like here.
    You know, we played--
    if we played, let's say baseball,
    it was a ball made of pieces of old--
    String or something?
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    So we played the games like that and so on.
    But after the war it was different.
    Yeah.
    So did your family stay in the same apartment
    that they had rented?
    We stayed there until--
    yeah.
    You stayed in one place the whole time.
    One place, right.
    What were your parents' frames--
    do you remember what your mother or father's frame of mind was?
    Well, they were worried, but they wouldn't all the time
    let us just--
    we still were--
    Children.
    Children, yeah.
    Did you talk things over with your sister and brother
    about what was happening?
    I don't recall that we talked about that, OK?
    Maybe that was done on purpose not to make the little boy--
    yeah.
    But we knew that it was dangerous times.
    Did you see German soldiers?
    Toward the end of the war, and I'll tell you the story.
    The end of the war came and 1944 for us.
    The Germans were retreating from Russia,
    and they actually came toward our own town, Tecuci.
    And then retreat.
    After them were coming the Russians to attack them.
    So I remember this very clearly.
    It was August, 1944, and I was 13 at that time.
    And this is when they retreated.
    Did you have a bar mitzvah?
    I had a bar mitzvah, yes.
    And my father actually wasn't yet
    home at the time for my bar mitzvah.
    He came a few weeks later.
    And so an uncle of mine, and I was
    studying for the bar mitzvah with a teacher.
    And bar mitzvah there wasn't the kind of thing
    that it is nowadays here--
    a festivity and all this.
    You went to the synagogue.
    He didn't give a speech.
    You just came to the Torah and you read and so on, things
    that you learned and so on.
    I was the only one who read it in Hebrew, not
    in Yiddish pronunciation.
    Because I didn't know Yiddish.
    So my teacher taught me in Hebrew,
    and that was good for me later on when
    I started learning Hebrew.
    You had said that your father wasn't home,
    but I thought you said he came home after two years?
    I think that I was wrong about that--
    the two years.
    I think that maybe they were taken later or not immediately
    when they arrived in the town.
    So my dates are a little bit--
    OK.
    OK.
    And so in any case, yeah.
    So we-- on this trip to Tecuci and so on, I got all this.
    And my father wasn't there after.
    So one time after, my mother was left with me in this house
    that we were renting.
    And my father-- that was maybe a year after that and so on.
    I kept having attacks of malaria.
    That's what they called it.
    So one day, my mother--
    my siblings were sent to our relatives, because I was--
    Sickly?
    Yeah.
    Yeah, right?
    So if I had something for them to not to catch it from me.
    And I had a high fever and so on.
    And she had to go, and she locked the door
    and said, stay here.
    Don't go anywhere.
    And I couldn't go out, and she didn't want other people
    to be able to enter.
    And I had fever, and somehow I remember this,
    because it really happened.
    There was a window, and the window was open,
    but the window had bars.
    So I felt like I was in the room, and it was also warm.
    I wanted to go out into the air.
    So I managed to go to between the bars
    to get there, climb up and down into the--
    and my mother comes and screams, Phillip, Phillip!
    Then she would call me [? Phillamel. ?]
    That was my name--
    little Phillip.
    And so I was in bad shape.
    So she took me in, and she called a Jewish doctor
    by the name of Dr. [? Sheinwitz. ?] And he came.
    It was an interesting story with that man.
    He was suffering with his heart, and he was a devoted person
    to do everyone-- all the patients.
    And so he came, and he found out that it wasn't just malaria.
    I had typhoid fever.
    So there was a rule that anything that was--
    if a person is sick with something like this
    that is a catching thing, that they should be
    taken to the public hospital.
    But public hospital meant death in anybody
    that was brought like that.
    Not because they were Jewish, but the hospitals
    weren't the way they should be.
    My luck was that they didn't take me there.
    The major medical guy in the town-- in this Tecuci place--
    was a friend of my doctor.
    They had both studied in France.
    They got their degrees there in medicine.
    So Dr. [? Sheinwitz ?] told to this doctor--
    said, look, if he goes to there, he's going to die there.
    So but here.
    And the man said, but look.
    If he is not under--
    what do you call it?
    Quarantine?
    Quarantine-- then I can't let him stay at any other place.
    So the doctor said there is nobody else except his mother,
    and nobody can enter and so on.
    He is truly quarantined.
    So this doctor, the medical officer,
    came with Dr. [? Sheinwitz ?] to the place.
    And then remembering again, I was in bed.
    I had high fever above 106, something like that.
    And he sat next to me on this bed and so on.
    He saw they were clean and so on,
    and my mother was there, of course.
    And he let me stay there, and that saved my life.
    Saved your life?
    Yeah.
    And my mother--
    I had to have ice all over on myself to get down and so on.
    And at that time, there were no medications like nowadays.
    So somehow they managed, and so on.
    I remember I wasn't allowed to eat solid food and so
    on, so my mother made everything else was and so on, and cooked.
    And so many times during the night,
    she changed the ice sheets and so on.
    And they had ice on my stomach, and ice on my hand, and so on.
    And I survived.
    You survived.
    Yeah, so due to my mother and to luck.
    I'm trying to find out--
    I know that the man has died, Dr. [? Sheinwitz ?]..
    But wonder if there was any--
    I don't think he had children.
    He was married.
    So I would like to put his name among those people who
    saved and so on.
    We had been talking about as a child
    when you saw a German soldier.
    Yeah, I'm sorry.
    What reactions you had.
    Oh, yeah.
    As I said, they started retreating.
    And the Germans, they hadn't been there.
    They came from the east, but there was a whole army.
    So they started going through this town,
    and they thought they were going to exit through the road
    away from the coming the Russians.
    So they started doing that, and lo and behold,
    the Russians had been smarter than they,
    and they were waiting for them there.
    So there was a little bit of skirmish,
    and then they retreated back, and they
    went through another road, they thought.
    Well, they were caught again.
    So we heard the sounds of firing and all this.
    Somehow I found myself outside the house.
    My parents were there, but everybody was worried, OK,
    what's going to happen?
    So I got out of the house and took a walk.
    And what do I see?
    I see a German soldier on his back dead--
    a face like the yellow, dark yellow,
    and blood coming from his head.
    I looked at that.
    I didn't start running or anything like that.
    And that was one of my experiences
    in seeing and so on.
    I wasn't scared.
    So that was my reaction.
    And then to finish the story about this,
    they got some prisoners.
    They didn't kill them all, they meaning the Germans.
    So some were caught.
    They were put behind barbed wire in a camp and so on,
    but they weren't killed.
    So that's not what the Germans did to the Russians.
    They killed prisoners and so on.
    It's well known.
    And so that was one of my experiences at the time.
    Then the Russians came passing through the city.
    And now that this skirmish is finished and so on
    and some Germans escaped and so on, the Russians I mean
    came more in bulk.
    And once more, I was coming, getting out of the house.
    I had to see where the Russians were coming.
    They were on the boulevard and so on.
    They were passing with their tanks and trucks and all that.
    So I went there, and I saw indeed this tremendous group
    of men.
    They were just going, and they were shouting now Berlin,
    to Berlin.
    So as I was there, this is something that I did.
    I'm not sure that is a proud thing to say,
    but I saw some people coming from a building that
    was a government building.
    The government at the time--
    Romanian government-- had the power to sell tobacco.
    Nobody could sell tobacco, so everything
    came to this warehouse that was government.
    And the tobacco was not cigarettes--
    just packages with tobacco that you made a cigarette,
    and so on.
    And I knew about that.
    And that was 1944, so I was 13 years old.
    And I look.
    I let me go, and I saw people coming out with boxes--
    wooden boxes.
    And I go inside, too.
    I was dressed in shorts and sandals and a cap.
    I go in and I see people taking this and go out with boxes.
    And then I hear shouting.
    I was still inside.
    I hear shouting, and then a shot or several shots
    to the ceiling.
    The Russians had come and they--
    oh, tobacco?
    They wanted tobacco.
    They call it tabak.
    And so the people who were there who were adults--
    Romanian, probably.
    I didn't know anybody there.
    They got out.
    They were afraid to be killed.
    I wasn't afraid, so I took a box myself.
    It was heavy.
    And I couldn't carry it.
    I rolled it.
    It was a kind of a cube.
    Like a barrel?
    Not a barrel, no.
    Just a box-- a wooden box with a shape of a cube.
    So I managed to get down the steps there on a side street.
    The boulevard was here, and this was a side--
    small street.
    And there was nobody there, because everybody
    was in their houses by that time when
    they heard the shots there.
    And I started rolling it, and I brought it home.
    And my father said, what did he do?
    But I was there with that.
    That meant money.
    Why?
    Because when they opened up and so on,
    there were all these packages of tobacco.
    And so my brother, who was two years older and so on,
    said he was going to take a bag of this
    and sell it to the Russian soldiers for rubles.
    And he did that.
    And with that money, my father started a business again
    in this town and managed to recover.
    That's our family history, right?
    Just my brother reminded me just a few weeks ago.
    We were talking on the phone about that.
    And it wasn't-- ordinarily my parents would have said to me,
    well, this is stealing.
    But that was then.
    What other memories do you have at the end of the war in '44?
    Do you have any other memories?
    Well, at the end of the war, yes.
    It was in the very--
    basically since we were liberated by that time.
    The war ended basically in '45.
    Yeah, yeah.
    But in '44 we are liberated.
    We started hearing about what happened in Germany.
    That was going to be my next question.
    Because up to that point, did your parents--
    do you know if your parents knew?
    No, we didn't know--
    You did not know.
    --what was happening there.
    We knew that there was bad for the Jews-- something.
    But we didn't know details.
    Suddenly the news are opened, and they
    said, in fact, the German soldiers who had
    been in the town during the--
    there was an airport there--
    a big airport.
    And the German Air Force had there, and also the Romanians
    that were forced to fight with them against--
    and there was a little story about that, too.
    But the Germans used some soap that some people, Jews,
    bought them soap.
    They didn't know that this soap was made in Germany
    from the fat of Jews.
    It said so with letters.
    I forget-- Rhine--
    pure Jewish fat.
    Something like that.
    And whether that was--
    in any case, we had the city, this town.
    We had taken this from everybody that may have had it,
    and went to the cemetery.
    And they were putting as dead people.
    And rabbis were there and so on.
    You buried the soap.
    Buried the soap in the cemetery.
    Did you go to that?
    Did you go to that service?
    Yeah, I remember that.
    Yeah, so all of us-- all the Jews.
    They went to that.
    I mean, it was a big shock.
    Went what?
    And so on.
    And we didn't know all the other things that happened.
    But it was something that was--
    the soap.
    You know, the soap was incredible.
    And then on the positive side, during the war, as I said,
    because it was an airport there--
    military airport-- the Germans were in with their planes, air
    force, and also some Romanian also
    were forced basically to fight against the American
    and British and so on.
    So they came, their pilots and officers and so on.
    And there was no room enough in their hotels or anything
    to put them.
    So why did they decide?
    The Romanian side said OK, let's put these pilots--
    put them in Jewish homes.
    So we got an officer who is a pilot--
    a fighter pilot-- a man named [? Lungulescu ?],,
    which means tall.
    Tall.
    And he was indeed tall and so on and he was a very nice man.
    He knew we were Jewish.
    So one room was given to him and so on.
    And he came from all part of Romania
    that had never met Jews.
    It heard all the stories about the Jews killed Christ--
    Christ Jesus, and so on.
    And suddenly he sees people like him and so on,
    and he behaved very nicely.
    He would bring us coffee.
    That was something that we didn't have, and so on.
    And he was not married, or he had
    somebody or a friend who later came to stay there with him.
    But he liked me.
    I was the youngest there.
    So one day he decided to show me what he does.
    He takes me to the airport and puts me in his plane--
    in the pilot plane.
    I mean, it was something that is so unusual.
    Of course he knew I was Jewish and so on.
    And he puts me there.
    And the pilots when they want to shoot something,
    there is a stick with a button.
    He doesn't take aim.
    He takes the full plane.
    So I was almost ready to push the button.
    Don't touch it.
    So it was lucky, and so on.
    Did you go up in it?
    Did you go up?
    No, you stayed on the field.
    Stayed on the ground.
    Just on the ground and so on.
    But I remember this.
    And so this man later on and during the war--
    that was not the end of the war.
    Actually, he was an excellent pilot in terms of fighting.
    He had actually downed quite a few planes,
    British and American.
    But he ended up in the ground dead, OK?
    He was shot down as well.
    He was?
    Yeah.
    And that was the end of his life.
    And he was against the Germans.
    He really was, but he couldn't do anything.
    He was kind of forced.
    You don't do that, we'll shoot you.
    Period.
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum Volunteer Collection
    interview with Phillip Abraham.
    This is track number 2.
    And we were talking about 1944 and--
    Right.
    --what was happening then.
    Another thing that happened-- now we
    come to the being Jewish.
    Suddenly, we have freedom and the Zionist organizations,
    youth Zionist organizations.
    And of course, everybody became a member
    of this or that organization.
    I happen to be in the Hashomer Hatzair.
    Most of us who went to the gymnasium
    chose this for whatever reasons.
    They decided this.
    But there were other organizations there--
    Had you been in this organization
    for the few years already?
    No.
    The Hashomer Hatzair.
    No.
    During the war, no.
    No.
    No they were not allowed to do that.
    Oh, OK.
    So only in '44.
    What month in '44 are we talking about?
    I think after August.
    After August, yeah.
    Suddenly, all this appeared with the--
    --the Zionists.
    All these things are--
    and so people came from other towns
    who had been maybe underground.
    Continued to be Zionist and so on and organized.
    But in this town, I didn't know anyone.
    Nobody did anything there during the war.
    So I became very involved in that and so on.
    I loved it to be and so on.
    And so did my friends that were there.
    And there was a competition between
    the various organizations at the time.
    But it was OK.
    So we continued to learn about what is happening and so on.
    And the idea of leaving Romania was, at that point,
    increased among all the Jews.
    But the situation was still so, after the war,
    people were not recovering yet, neither the Romanians,
    nor the Jews.
    And so there was a big problem.
    So in the meantime, we continued.
    Now we were allowed to go to Romanian schools.
    So we went--
    But the war is still going on.
    It's Spring of '45.
    But for you all, it's over.
    It's over because the Romanian army--
    But the war is still going on in other parts.
    No.
    They were no longer--
    they actually-- the king, King Michael told the army--
    No.
    I meant the war going on in other parts of Europe
    was still going on.
    Other parts of Europe.
    But we were off that.
    So some normality started building up.
    And we were allowed, in '45 or '44,
    I'm not sure whether it's possible,
    but it was too early to say that because the school starts
    basically like September, October, something like that.
    So they were disorganized.
    I think only in the next semester,
    it started, the high schools.
    So I was now going into the fifth grade
    in the public schools.
    So it was much better and so on in many ways
    than before that in a little town, Podu Turcului, and so on.
    This was a real school with Romanian teachers.
    But there were some French teachers as well that,
    well, again, was a Jewish guy.
    And there was Romanian friends who were very much in touch.
    Why?
    Because the Romanians got their independence in 1848,
    and they realize, at the time-- because they had been under
    the Turks and the Ottoman Empire--
    they realized that they were behind in so many ways.
    So they decided to introduce in the Romanian language
    French words and for the new in sciences and technology
    and so on.
    So to this very day, they're actually--
    that's the major language that they taught in
    those days and nowadays as well.
    Now, of course, English is part of it as well.
    So we studied.
    And I was, so to speak, not the greatest student.
    I wasn't failing or anything like that.
    But in 1946, I said to my parents--
    Do you remember VE Day, the end of the war in the spring
    of '45 and when Hitler died and--
    Right.
    And I remember with the atomic bomb, OK.
    Well, but before that.
    That was the summertime.
    Yeah.
    Do you remember when Hitler died?
    No.
    That I don't.
    No.
    I don't think it penetrated at the time.
    But in 1945, when I heard about the atomic bomb--
    Atomic bomb.
    Yeah.
    You had heard that.
    Yeah.
    And nobody understood what that meant.
    They used the word "disaggregation,"
    meaning that everything is coming apart.
    That was the word that was--
    so they were worried.
    I mean, it's going to world now explode and so on.
    But nobody knew physics, and--
    Did your parents or did you know about any
    of the other massacres taking place in Romania?
    Yeah.
    We heard about what happened [INAUDIBLE]
    and many other places.
    And, yeah, sure.
    And that's why one of the things was
    the Jews said this country is no longer for us.
    They didn't leave on the spot.
    In fact, it was no way that they could in any case.
    So--
    I was thinking of--
    I don't know if I'm pronouncing it correctly--
    Iasi.
    Iasi.
    Yes, that's exactly the pronunciation.
    They call it here Jassy as so on.
    But it's Iasi.
    That was one of the first places in Romania
    that had an independent--
    originally, 2,000 or more years ago, they had a kingdom, Dacia.
    And it is spelled D-A-C-I-A. And they fought.
    They had a king and so on.
    His name was Decebalus.
    And he was defeated by the Romans
    when he invaded Romania and went to the city that is Constanta.
    It's a name--
    And that's why Romanian language has a tremendous amount
    of Latin, but also from the tribes and others that
    had been there.
    And I'm saying this because many people don't understand.
    They thought it was some place, savage place.
    No.
    They had a kingdom.
    They had cities with buildings and so on 2,000 years ago.
    And they were quite civilized.
    Everything was written and so on.
    And they left who is what in the history.
    But they were defeated by sheer power and technology
    of the Romans.
    And so the Romans established themselves
    in the city of Constanta that they named in some actual--
    one of the poets, a Roman poet, was sent there as a penalty
    because he spoke against Nero or something like that.
    But to bring it more up-to-date, Iasi.
    Did your family know about what had happened there?
    Yes.
    Yeah.
    That became well-known because there were some survivors
    of the death train at Iasi.
    And not many.
    And one nice thing that appeared from the stories
    told, the peasants who were along the--
    living around the railroad were this were going on,
    and when they stopped and they heard the Jews--
    water, water-- they wanted to give them.
    The German shot them.
    This is not well-known because for some reason
    there was bad rumors about it.
    All Romanians were like that.
    They weren't.
    Yeah.
    There were bad, and still some and--
    no question about it.
    But you find them everywhere.
    But those people understood pity and human beings.
    So, yeah, we knew.
    We knew about that.
    And immediately, little books appeared written by the Jews,
    OK, about what's happened there.
    And so we knew about that.
    Absolutely.
    And what happened in other places
    where the Bessarabia, which is called Moldavia now.
    There is a difference between "Moldova" and "Moldovia."
    I was in Moldova.
    This is the old kingdom.
    And that one, Bessarabia, because it
    was next to the Russians, the Russians
    picked it up at the end of the war.
    They couldn't do that before.
    They never succeeded to defeat the Romanians.
    But after the war, they took it, so.
    Well, now you're a member of Hashomer Hatzair.
    I'm a member of Hashomer Hatzair.
    And of course, we learn all about Palestine and Zionism
    and all this.
    Were your brother and sister in the group too?
    No.
    My brother was interested in being in the store
    with my father.
    My sister was interested in other things.
    She ultimately studied to become a ballerina and so
    on and piano and all that.
    And in fact, when she stayed in Romania until 1950,
    and she finished actually at the university, she became a--
    she got a degree and being able to teach ballet.
    And when she came to Israel, she started a studio of her own.
    But to reach that point--
    Your story.
    My story was I said to my parents
    after finishing the fifth--
    You're 15 years old now.
    Right.
    I said, I want to go to--
    Palestine.
    --to Palestine.
    Said, how?
    What?
    Would leave us.
    No.
    And they wouldn't do that.
    They wouldn't let me and so on.
    Then I said-- I threatened them.
    I said then I'm not going to go to school.
    I'm going to stay home if you don't let me.
    And they believe me.
    And ultimately, I did leave.
    And the reason they believed me was that--
    I mentioned that earlier--
    that they had kind of a belief that I was strong,
    even more so than my siblings.
    And they base that on the fact that when
    I was about six years old, that uncle
    of mine that gave the dowry to my mother, he
    was married and didn't have children.
    And he visited-- at that time we were in Bucharest.
    That was before the war.
    My parents moved from the little town Tecuci
    to Bucharest because my mother said at the time this
    is small village near our town.
    I want my children to grow up, and they'll
    go to school in Bucharest, and all this.
    And my father sold his business, and we got money and so on.
    Come to Bucharest.
    Enters into another business but not his expertise.
    Groceries.
    And he had some also partners who cheated him and so on.
    And after a year or two, he decided that he goes back
    to Podu Turcului.
    And that's where we were before the war started.
    And so this uncle comes and visit us in Bucharest.
    And he said can I take him with me for a few weeks?
    He lived in another town, a big town.
    And so he asked me, you want to come?
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    I want to come.
    So they let him take me.
    But he said if he starts crying, just bring him back.
    So I was there six weeks.
    There was no telephone and so on at the time so they could call.
    Only letters.
    And I had a good time there.
    I was the only little boy there.
    And he had a business of--
    lumber business.
    He bought places with the trees and so on
    and had people cut the trees, lumberjacks and so on.
    And then he would sell the--
    do something to the wood and sell lumber to--
    and there was a big area with all this.
    And I played there and so on.
    And they treated me so nicely, why not?
    I was their--
    I didn't cry, I didn't do anything.
    So they knew that I could stand--
    could be that.
    So they had belief that if I go, I'm going to be OK.
    And it was organized, of course.
    So I remember in 1946, it was basically July 1946
    that we started from Bucharest, this organize from Bucharest,
    a whole train with Jews that survivors
    from Russia, Soviet Russia and would
    have been there during the war.
    This is all ages, not just teenagers.
    All ages.
    Right.
    And also from my old town, people
    that we have been together in school and so on,
    I was with them.
    So also Hashomer Hatzair.
    And we boarded the train one--
    actually, not evening-- but from Bucharest.
    What was it like to say goodbye to your parents?
    Well, it was just hugging and all this.
    My mother was crying.
    And they are there.
    I'm already in the train.
    I'm at the window.
    The window was down, and my brother and my sister
    and said, get off.
    Come, come.
    Don't go.
    Get off.
    The train started moving, and they run along say, get off.
    And I didn't.
    So from this, another story starts because we are now
    on the train.
    On this train were Russian officers
    and soldiers to protect us.
    Why?
    We're going to cross from Romania into Yugoslavia,
    and they knew there were still places
    in Yugoslavia, anti-Russians, they were for the Germans
    there.
    And somehow they allowed the Jews--
    the Russians did that for the Jews--
    because they thought ultimately that the Jews would
    be communists.
    They go to Palestine, so they'll have a foot in the Middle East.
    That's exactly where--
    So they did that.
    They had no reason to bring soldiers and so on.
    And the officers, who were actually nice.
    And so we cross into Yugoslavia.
    We come to Belgrade.
    Belgrade is on the River Danube.
    And there we had to cross over a bridge.
    But during the war, that bridge has
    been destroyed by the Allies.
    And so now the train stops.
    We couldn't go by train.
    So we are taken over by a shuttle kind of a place
    to cross from one side of the Danube to the other side
    because there was no other way.
    So we did.
    And another train waited for us because the Jewish agency
    organized all this.
    So they brought us, little by little.
    We had to stop and all this.
    There was food there.
    They organized huge breads, round breads.
    They cut pieces.
    And they had very well-organized, amazingly.
    This is 1946, still after the war.
    Nobody has recovered totally, and they managed to do that.
    And they brought us to a place where we waited.
    It was a place where it was prisoners of war place
    that they kept Germans or something like that.
    So we were there.
    And then they fed us.
    And we're waiting for the ship.
    The place where we were there was
    called Bakar, which is a city on the Mediterranean.
    Ultimately, we stayed there for about two weeks.
    And one day, they say, tomorrow, we are boarding the ship.
    And what ship was this?
    Was an American ship that was sunk
    on the Cherbourg in France, on the coast--
    sunk by the Germans--
    and was in the water.
    The Jewish agency bought it.
    It was somehow.
    They lifted it up.
    They fixed it.
    They moved it.
    They fixed it.
    And they arranged inside that we could go inside and lie down
    horizontally because they plan to have 2,000.
    And in the end, there were 2,600 close to 2,700 people
    in that ship, the largest ever ship for this migration.
    And so, basically, I said Mediterranean.
    But we are the Adriatic Sea.
    They call it this because it's next to Yugoslavia.
    It's part of--
    And toward the evening, we're told to come on the ship
    and boarded there.
    And--
    The name of the ship.
    What did they call it?
    Haganah.
    Oh, they called it Haganah.
    Haganah.
    Yes.
    And it's still in existence.
    It was used later on for the fleet.
    But now it's just retired and so on.
    And I'll talk a little later what happened years later.
    And we boarded the--
    it was full.
    But they were very well-organized.
    And as we came in, they gave us a package
    of things like certain food in a package.
    Very well-organized.
    It was chocolate there and cheese and so on, things
    that we haven't seen in a long time.
    Most of these people--
    and chocolate.
    So I make the mistake of eating the chocolate.
    After all, I'm only 15 years old.
    We didn't have that--
    I have no water.
    And my friends had gone inside the ship.
    And I was told to be on the deck.
    And the deck was full.
    People were sitting on the deck.
    And so full, they were families with children and so on.
    But these people, they knew what to expect
    because they have been in these situations before.
    So they had taken also bottles of water that they were giving.
    I didn't know anything, and I didn't have water.
    So I sit there.
    So I was thirsty.
    It's all night.
    I sleep there on the board, on the deck.
    And comes next day.
    And we started around 4 o'clock in the morning.
    From there, the ship started, and it's sunny.
    Very nice and so on.
    And I am--
    I'm thirsty.
    So I see people there with a lot of bottles,
    and I asked for a drink throughout that day.
    None of this people, survivors, Jews from whatever,
    they wouldn't give to another Jew.
    So later on in the day, my friends were down,
    and they found me.
    Said, oh, come with us.
    We have a place there and so on.
    And there was water and all this.
    And so they kind of saved me.
    But in the meantime, during that day, [INAUDIBLE] on this deck,
    I saw people.
    There were boats hanging on the sides of the ship.
    And I saw people going into--
    climbing over there, because it was better to be there.
    So why don't I do that too?
    It was crazy.
    But I could have fallen in the water.
    There was no--
    I just held myself by--
    there were some ropes and so on, some metal, and so on.
    And I reached up.
    And suddenly, a guy from the captain side says, all of you
    get out of there.
    Go back from the boats.
    So if they said that, I got down.
    And then later on, I was found by my friends.
    So now, who are these people who are the crew on this ship?
    Who was the captain?
    I didn't know until much, much later
    there was a man there who was about 25 years old.
    Born in Palestine.
    Jewish, of course.
    He had a little training in ships or something like that.
    And they made him the captain of this boat.
    Imagine 2,700 people on board.
    And the British knew of us, and they were waiting for us.
    And when the entered the territorial waters
    of Palestine, they came with a warship
    and told us to stop and so on.
    And first, they boarded with their Marines
    and so on, with the guns.
    And they said, where is the captain?
    Where is the captain?
    Trying to find the captain. but--
    Did you know any English at that point?
    No.
    I didn't.
    But that was other people who I knew
    that what they were saying.
    And then they were looking for the crew.
    But of course, they were kind of stupid.
    The crew was already mixed in the 2,700 other people.
    So they never found them.
    And they brought us to Palestine,
    to the port of Haifa.
    And they intended to take us to Cyprus.
    That was the very first time that they decided to do that.
    So what they did when they were they brought us there,
    there were other ships that they've
    caught before and arrested the people there,
    the Jewish immigrants, the British, I mean.
    And they had these three boats in the port there,
    in Haifa, in the Harbor.
    And they divided us into those little smaller, much smaller
    ships because it was such an accumulation of people there.
    It was very difficult to keep us.
    And the Jewish agency still came and brought the food, not
    the British.
    So they did that.
    And they said they are going to take us to Cyprus.
    And then the Jewish agency did something.
    They told the people on the ships, these 2,700,
    it's going to be a hunger strike.
    And there were a lot-- because it was such an event, 2,700
    people on a ship, that they were journalists
    from all over the world there.
    And they immediately-- when they heard about,
    oh, this hunger strike.
    No.
    The British are going to kill these people, survivors
    of the--
    so the British said, no.
    They'll be allowed to enter.
    And we were allowed to enter, but not into--
    they put us into a prisoner of war camp.
    And that was Atlit.
    And we were there--
    at least I was there for about close to two months
    because what they did, those families with young children,
    really small children and so on, they
    were given like 1,500 per month that was allowed to enter.
    And then when these were no longer there,
    they took the other group like the younger people,
    like 16, not adults and so on.
    So our turn came.
    And I and others my age were taken from there.
    The Jewish agency, again, came on buses and picked us up.
    Had you had any contact with your parents
    during those two months?
    No.
    No.
    Nothing at all they didn't know I arrived or didn't and there
    was no way to communicate and even
    a little later it was difficult. So they brought us
    to Mount Carmel, to a place.
    And it was a terrific thing for us to be there.
    Were the conditions in Atlit terrible?
    They were terrible because it was barbed wire [? in ?]
    [? a ?] [? way. ?] But the British didn't do anything bad,
    really.
    We were there simply.
    They counted us at night.
    Nevertheless, many people escaped, and it was organized.
    The captain and all the crew, they were among those people.
    But they disappeared, and they went for other ships to do.
    But what happened?
    The conditions there could have been--
    well, actually, the Jewish agency prepared everything.
    The food, brought in the food.
    They had local Jews who were dealing
    with that cooking and all this.
    And there were a lot of dining halls there.
    And if we come at this time and so on, fine.
    The trouble was were these Jews who were from--
    people who were born right there.
    And what did they do?
    They stole from the whatever, the Jewish agency.
    And we got very bad food and very little.
    The milk was-- they poured a lot of water in the milk.
    Who did this?
    The Palestinian Jews?
    The Palestinian Jews, yeah.
    And they would take away--
    the British let them come with the food
    and so on from the Jewish agency.
    Somehow, they organized themselves
    that only certain things were put a little bit.
    So we had hunger strikes there against these people.
    And not only this, but there were some people among us,
    not I, who actually went and beat up the cooks who
    were responsible for that.
    And the British had to come in through--
    but it was so surprising.
    Not many people know of that because it's
    shameful to mention that.
    But it was there.
    So after that, the Jewish agency changed them and so on.
    And, well, it was like paradise for two weeks.
    And they continue the policy that was there.
    But by that time, I was after that.
    So you went to Mount Carmel, to--
    Right.
    And there, we were for a little while.
    Were deciding where to put us, where to send us.
    So who were the people who were deciding?
    There was a committee from the various Jewish Zionist groups.
    The Hashomer Hatzair, and also the fathers, Jewish--
    religious groups and all that.
    And they wanted to send-- to some of us, they said well,
    you can go to here or here or here.
    And I said, I want to go to Hashomer Hatzair.
    And so did a lot of my other--
    my friends there.
    And otherwise, they wanted to bring us to a religious group.
    And I didn't want to go.
    Simple like that.
    So they thought-- finally, we had stayed there
    for several days.
    And it was a beautiful view of the Gulf of Haifa
    and so on and everything.
    The food was terrific, and the people
    were nice in those places and so on.
    And then they took us to a kibbutz, Ein HaShofet.
    Ein HaShofet is the first American kibbutz in Israel.
    Started in 1937.
    That's another story.
    And they brought us there.
    And it was like paradise.
    The people there behaved toward us--
    and we were like forty-some--
    in a way that is if we were their children.
    That was all children they took to Ein HaShofet.
    It was all teenagers.
    All teenagers.
    Right.
    And they treated us--
    you know it.
    Tremendous.
    And some of us were orphans.
    Lost their parents.
    Some had one parent, but not there and so on.
    And I was there for 3 and 1/2 years.
    And it was one of the times--
    the greatest time that I had.
    And so that's another story.
    But we were there.
    And we worked half a day.
    And half a day, we studied.
    Yeah.
    So--
    So you picked up--
    picked up conversational Hebrew.
    Right.
    Yeah.
    They taught Hebrew, and they taught--
    because most of us didn't speak Hebrew.
    So many of us had read for the bar mitzvah.
    So in a short while, at least in my case, after six months,
    I was able to be current in Hebrew and so on.
    And then we studied like a regular school.
    Everything.
    History, literature, and all this.
    And we had some terrific teachers.
    One is a man, [? Josef ?] [? Vilfund ?]..
    And the other one was a woman, [? Reva ?] [? Meisler ?]..
    And she is still alive.
    I saw her this year, and she is 93.
    Wonderful.
    And when we visited, she was having exercises
    with another group [INAUDIBLE].
    And she had-- memory, absolutely incredible.
    And it was so pleasant to be there and to see her.
    And she saw me.
    Oh, Ben Zion.
    Amazing.
    Amazing.
    Yeah.
    Tell me about the Partition Plan in United Nations in '47.
    Oh.
    OK.
    That was--
    You were still on the kibbutz.
    I'm still in the kibbutz.
    Right.
    Do they do anything on the kibbutz?
    Oh, yes.
    We celebrated a tremendous celebration.
    But before that, once I were in the kibbutz in 1946 and 1947,
    there were already trouble with the Arabs
    before even the United Nations decided on this.
    I have a little story about the day that this happened.
    So we were trained.
    We started being trained how to use a gun--
    Rifles, machine guns, what we called Sten guns,
    hand grenades, all this.
    And we learned even how to fight with bamboo sticks.
    Why?
    Because the Arabs were attacking with bamboo sticks.
    And you had to this day know how to use that because we
    had instructors that came from another kibbutz, a young man
    about 20.
    And so on he taught us how to do that.
    And then we had the training there.
    We are not in the army yet.
    Mm-hmm.
    Right, right.
    Yeah.
    And we were all happy about this.
    So then came the day of the 1947.
    I and a friend of mine who had some cousin,
    older cousin in a kibbutz near Jerusalem, Gush Etzion.
    And I forget the name of the group.
    So he said he wants to visit there.
    And we had a time every year we got a week off.
    So I said, do you want to come with me to that place
    and talk to them and so on that he can bring me?
    So I and he went there, and we had a very nice time.
    They treated us very nicely too.
    It was a religious kibbutz.
    But they didn't bother us with that.
    So on the day that the United Nations had--
    Voted.
    --had voted for that, we were on our way home,
    to kibbutz Ein HaShofet.
    So we came to Jerusalem, and we were
    in a bus that took us to Haifa because kibbutz Ein HaShofet is
    in that neighborhood you have to go through, Emek Israel,
    to reach that.
    So we come to Haifa.
    We had tickets.
    We had paid for the tickets.
    We had no other money though.
    We had been given a little bit of money and so on.
    And we are there.
    And we are in Haifa.
    And we don't have money.
    You can take a bus.
    There was a bus to Ein HaShofet.
    But you had to go to the center of town and pay the driver.
    So what do we decide?
    This bus station, which was down in the--
    not on the Carmel.
    And said, well, Shlomo--
    that's the name of my friend--
    why don't we go on foot?
    Exit Haifa, and we'll go to Yagur--
    this is a kibbutz, Yagur, where we
    knew that the bus that was going to Ein HaShofet
    is going to stop there.
    So we'll wait for them.
    Oh, sure, we go.
    We had this bags and so on.
    And we are in shorts and so on.
    And the equipment was sold or bought from the British army.
    And then we start walking.
    And how do we start walking?
    In the bottom of Haifa to exit.
    And we have to pass through a neighborhood.
    What kind of neighborhood?
    All Arabs.
    And at some point, as we go there, you see them.
    There were coffee shops with the tables
    outside and on the sidewalks.
    And they all sit and smoke and drink coffee.
    And suddenly, for one of them, one guy comes out running.
    And it was kind of toward us.
    And I say, Shlomo, [NON-ENGLISH]..
    And then we hear another shout, and another guy comes.
    But he was after that guy.
    And Shlomo was a bigger guy than I.
    I was kind of short in those days.
    I grew up later.
    And I said, Shlomo, let's go a little faster.
    Said, no.
    I'm tired.
    Well, I said let's go.
    But nothing really happened.
    So we came out of Haifa.
    And a bus stops toward the exit--
    came from the [NON-ENGLISH].
    And he sees us there, two little youngsters there.
    He opens the door to the bus and get in.
    Said, we don't have money.
    [NON-ENGLISH] said, [NON-ENGLISH]..
    You're stupid.
    Don't you know what happened today?
    It's this.
    Arabs are attacking.
    They are mad.
    And he took us to Yagur and let us off there.
    And then later on, a bus came, the kibbutz bus.
    And we ended up in the kibbutz, safe and--
    but that was the experience.
    What about in '48 when the state was declared?
    Well, that was--
    You're on the kibbutz.
    I was still in the kibbutz.
    Right.
    And we were left since the army was just started and so on.
    We were about like 17 at the time.
    But they were not taking people who were in the kibbutz
    because they needed the food that was--
    there was no other way, just to import and so on [INAUDIBLE]..
    So they didn't take youngsters like myself at the time.
    So we were still in the kibbutz.
    Later on, basically, in 1949--
    but for us, this was--
    I must say this because the feeling that we
    had in those days when the--
    one may say, oh, we were scared, right, and so on.
    Something is going to be war.
    We knew that that's going to happen.
    Didn't care.
    We didn't care one bit about that.
    What we were, this, after 2,000 years, we have our state.
    And this experience is something that nothing else in my life
    can be as that experience, to hear it.
    We are back after all this and being there.
    I'm sure many other Jews outside felt equally.
    But we were there.
    We were there in the place.
    So we had been there, as I said, for about three years
    and so on.
    So in 1949, our group was getting-- we were by now 18.
    And [INAUDIBLE] Kibbutz Artzi, which is the organization
    of the Hashomer Hatzair, decided to put us--
    to send this group, instead of leaving us in Ein HaShofet,
    they decided that they have a place to send us, to a place
    called Gan Shmuel kibbutz, Gan Shmuel near Hadera.
    And why?
    Because the people there were elderly.
    They were not even Hashomer Hatzair.
    So in the past, a year or two or three years before that,
    another group came in from Hashomer Hatzair.
    So the kibbutz will survive.
    But there weren't enough people.
    So they decided-- because it was political as well to have--
    so take this group, [NON-ENGLISH],,
    that was our name, bring us there.
    And so they decided that.
    We were all sad.
    And later, we found out that the kibbutz was sad as well.
    And we go there.
    So in the meantime, it is 3 and 1/2 years,
    we've learned all sorts of things to do.
    We worked.
    We studied.
    And I worked in the gardens [INAUDIBLE] fruit and all this
    and became an expert on that.
    But I learned also mechanical things to do.
    And we worked.
    I remember carrying, on my back, a 200 pound sack of stuff
    over some and so on to put it on a truck and so on.
    And it was OK.
    We were proud of doing that.
    We learned how to be on a rope and go up and down on a rope.
    That was the British army way.
    That is the best way that ever.
    And they still can do it.
    So we were proud of all these things.
    But we come to this kibbutz.
    We didn't know where we are going.
    And they were strangers to us.
    And they behaved not like strangers
    but like bitter towards us.
    They put us to do all sorts of things
    that only us to clean the bathrooms and so on.
    And we had a man who was our supervisor.
    Madrich.
    We didn't know that he was really a communist--
    amazing-- If he's alive.
    He still is probably.
    And at one meeting with him and so on, we started complaining.
    What are you doing, to us?
    We have [NON-ENGLISH],, meaning we have learned how to do this.
    And you are sending us only to do only the bad work and so on.
    And you're not treating us properly
    because in the kibbutz, it wasn't like that.
    If we learned something, and that was that.
    You could do what we learned.
    So they put us in some old, not buildings, barracks and so on
    and crowded.
    And everything was so--
    when I was one of those complaining.
    And I said, that's not nice what you are doing.
    And said, if you don't like it, you can leave.
    And at that time, at the same time,
    I said, that's exactly what I'm going to do.
    And next day or two days after, I went to Hadera,
    and I enlisted in the army.
    But the army said, you have to come a week from now.
    So where do I go?
    I have no place to sit, to stay.
    I have not one penny in my pocket.
    So I come back to the kibbutz.
    I don't know even how did I come?
    There were some buses, but sometimes you
    could do hitchhiking and so on.
    So I came back.
    And he found out that I was back.
    And he said to me, you cannot eat in the Hadera [NON-ENGLISH]
    no more.
    You should get out.
    But my friends who were still there,
    they came and brought me the food and so on, and survived.
    And it was only two of us who did that.
    I and another member, Ze'ev, Ze'ev [NON-ENGLISH]..
    They were two of them.
    One is small Ze'ev [NON-ENGLISH]..
    And we enlisted.
    And then a week later, we were taken from Hadera
    to another place where we trained in real training
    and so on.
    How long were you in the army?
    Four years.
    And it was supposed to be really only two years.
    But they said you can enter into the regular army.
    [? In fact, ?] you can continue if you want.
    And then you are a member of the [NON-ENGLISH],,
    the regular army.
    So I stayed because my parents had just arrived.
    It was like 1950.
    And I stayed in the army.
    I went into the Air Force, not as a pilot or anything
    like that.
    They sent me to the adjutant general of the Air Force
    which was in Jaffa, Yafo.
    And I worked on kind of--
    what can I call it--
    an organizer, not the community organizer.
    But at the time, that was--
    we're work on making units of the soldiers.
    And the Air Force was interested to have from the reserves
    because there were people in the reserves
    to actually organize them.
    We didn't have-- we had planes--
    but we didn't have airports, for instance,
    where we could go in the Negev or other places.
    So the idea was if they want to bring help to our troops
    somewhere, we need to have that to build an airport on there.
    And they were very smart in doing.
    I was designing, at the time, just--
    young as I was--
    put together people and so on and in this making groups
    and so on that from the reserve people.
    The reserves, until you were 50 years old,
    you were still in the reserves.
    So I worked like that.
    In the meantime, I was allowed, rather,
    the army put together after work schools, evening schools
    to get the Bagrut to finish high school,
    which I started in the kibbutz.
    But that was not--
    I didn't have a--
    so that actually was the way that within the last two years,
    I went.
    And I went through the exams--
    external exams.
    But that was exactly like the ones
    given in the schools at the time.
    The same time and so on and the same questions.
    And I succeeded very well due to my teachers.
    And at the end of that, in 1950, I started--
    I went to the university.
    I was accepted at university, Hebrew University.
    And I studied there for my degree.
    In what field?
    I studied in physics.
    And that's what I did.
    At the time, they didn't have a bachelor's degree there.
    So you had-- at least in the mathematics and physics
    and so on and chemistry, the hard sciences, maybe
    others as well.
    I don't know.
    But you have to get a master's degree.
    A master's degree meant that you have to write a thesis as well.
    And so I did all that.
    And I got my master's degree after four years
    at the Hebrew University.
    And that was good.
    In fact, later on, when I came to this country,
    I realized that what I have done for my master's degree
    was considered-- it could have been considered here
    as a PhD thesis because it was different standards at the time
    there.
    And in fact, some of the people who didn't do it,
    they didn't get their degree.
    If they didn't do that in Israel,
    they didn't get their degree.
    So they did something else.
    So that was my--
    So then you finished at the university.
    Then what did you do?
    Well, I went to the Weizmann Institute
    because there was somebody there who was
    looking for somebody like me.
    He was an American guy who had got his PhD at MIT
    in engineering, but nuclear engineering.
    And he was advised by the Institute.
    And he said he needed somebody with knowledge of what
    was the modern physics--
    quantum mechanics, stuff like that.
    And he accepted me.
    And he was supposed to lead to a PhD
    given by the Weizmann Institute.
    But we didn't quite see eye to eye.
    In what sense?
    I was trained in the Hebrew University,
    particularly in mathematics at a level that MIT didn't have it.
    And very few of university, the best universities in the world,
    we had that kind of training.
    And this man really didn't.
    So he gave me a topic to--
    and so on-- to go into it.
    And I did.
    I studied the literature and so on and what I had.
    And I would come to him with my results.
    And so the one time that I present to him, he said, oh.
    What you wrote here on the blackboard, it's not true.
    And I say, Dr. Lipkin, it's true.
    And he got red in the face.
    And then I said, I'm going to prove it to you.
    And I did.
    So that was the end with him.
    So he comes back to me a little later on,
    not the day, that day.
    Say, you know what?
    You should go to the US and get your PhD there.
    So how do I do that?
    I mean, I had no money.
    My parents don't have money to send me there
    or anything like that.
    Well, they had advertised at the time,
    in 1959, they advertised that they are looking for people
    in physics and to apply.
    Universities were applying.
    And how come?
    Where did they get the money?
    Their money came from the armed services
    because if you recall the Sputnik,
    everybody was scared that the Russians have
    taken over and so on.
    And they really didn't have enough people
    in those hard sciences.
    So they were putting this throughout the whole world.
    Come over.
    I applied to one of the--
    it was-- one was Yale, and one was Harvard.
    And they said at the time, they sent me back.
    Yes.
    I'm acceptable.
    But not for the very first semester in September.
    But if I wait, I'm accepted.
    And only one other university, University of Maryland,
    said come on over.
    So of course, I--
    and they were going to give me a salary to live and study.
    Well, what other country does that?
    Of course, I came.
    And I, again, separated from my parents and my family.
    And I arrived here.
    [? At ?] the time, the foreign currency in Israel was
    so tough, they would give you $120, one at a time,
    if you leave and don't [? want ?] [? to ?] travel.
    So my parents bought a ticket and so on.
    And I arrived in New York.
    And I had a little bit of money.
    Did you know English?
    By that time, yes, yeah, because I used English
    at the Hebrew University.
    I also shared a room at the Weizmann Institute with a guy
    from South Africa, a Jewish guy who was also a student there.
    And so it helped.
    And I learned in the kibbutz.
    That's a little bit of another story,
    how I learned English there.
    I said there were Americans.
    And particularly my professor, teacher,
    [? Josef ?] [? Vilfund ?],, he got his degree here
    in the United States.
    Himself was born in Russia.
    Came with his widowed mother here.
    And he managed to go and study and so on.
    Got his master's degree in literature.
    And so I said, I want to learn.
    So he said OK.
    He gave me some things to do and so on and ultimately said,
    oh, here is the Encyclopedia Britannica Junior,
    and here is an article about coal.
    And translate it into Hebrew.
    So I did.
    So he would check, do these things.
    And that's how I learned English.
    So I wasn't-- but I became really very easily here too.
    So you went to Maryland.
    I went to Maryland.
    For how long?
    Well, I was there 1960.
    And I was there until 1964.
    So I got my degree and PhD.
    And my advisor was a guy named George Weiss.
    He was Jewish and religious Jewish too.
    And he lives not far away from here.
    It's an amazing situation.
    And at the time when I finished, it
    was quite a different-- a difficult time
    with jobs for physicists.
    It's amazing.
    In a short time, the situation had changed because
    with the ride to the moon and so on suddenly they said,
    [? we've ?] reached out.
    That's no more money.
    So whatever you try to get a job,
    they said, we were firing people.
    And indeed, there was a disaster, 1966.
    So I got all sorts of little jobs in-between 1964 and '66.
    Finally, I managed to get a job with a company in--
    Raytheon Company-- way back on--
    what is the name?
    Rhode Island.
    And I worked for them.
    And I was doing work.
    And what they were interested [? which ?] [? was ?] actually
    was supported by the Navy.
    I didn't know that at the time, that the Navy.
    But it dealt with problems of the Navy.
    And I was there for about--
    but actually, before that, actually, I
    had the benefit of working after I got my PhD,
    the National Research Council awarded me a two-year salary
    to work at NASA.
    And actually, I have all this stuff here that--
    my documents, OK, I'm not saying.
    So I worked at NASA, Greenbelt, Maryland.
    And that was very interesting.
    And actually, this was basically before--
    a little bit before I got my PhD.
    And I finished my PhD and submitted a thesis at Maryland.
    And I was working at the time at NASA.
    And among the people on the committee that--
    the final thing, you know, you give a talk
    about-- you show them your PhD thesis and so on.
    And they ask questions and so on.
    And there is one guy from the committee
    that was part of the faculty at Maryland in the physics--
    nuclear physics.
    And said to some people there, wait a minute.
    In front of me, this is not physics.
    This is what you did is mathematics.
    Why?
    Because my advisor was a mathematician,
    applied mathematician.
    So actually, he did work on areas
    that were connected with physical things.
    And what I've done, where I worked for NASA.
    And I worked on things that dealt
    with what are called solar flares from the sun
    and things that hadn't been done before
    except in my work at the time.
    So as I'm there and he is talking like that.
    And then my advisor gives a talk to my boss
    at NASA, Dr. McDonald.
    And that guy hears about that.
    Comes immediately from Greenbelt,
    and comes to this meeting.
    He enters and he talks.
    What do you mean?
    Mathematics.
    This man has worked here for this and so on.
    He's a physicist.
    Indeed.
    And so the committee decided that I deserved the PhD.
    Was kosher.
    Yeah.
    And then you worked for how long for Raytheon?
    And then what did you do?
    OK.
    Then at that point, I forgot to mention the order of the--
    I worked for NASA.
    Now, I have my PhD.
    So because they liked what I was doing, they said, OK.
    You can stay with us for two years.
    They couldn't hire.
    I wasn't a citizen.
    So they said, you can work because the National Research
    Council will give you a two year.
    They'll pay my salary, which was not a few dollars, all right.
    And I said, OK, that's fine with me.
    And I stayed there two years, and I did some more work
    and published and all that.
    And at some point, I decided that I really
    didn't want to continue because the reason is
    that I, as a physicist, when I look at astrophysics that
    is called today like what NASA was involved-- but we actually
    were NASA was involved really in real problems that
    had an impact by the so-called astrophysics.
    It was not something realistic.
    I liked my work to be applied to something.
    And it wasn't with the exception of these things that
    were really important to study those
    because communications is actually
    affected by the solar flares.
    These things that happen every 11 years or something
    like that.
    And it was important for the Air Force, for the military,
    and even for NASA to know what is
    going to happen in such a case.
    If you send a signal, for instance,
    it can be affected by-- and really ruin it.
    And that is not something that you
    want to have when you are in, say, water or whatever.
    So I decided I want to go and apply
    to a place that would let me do things that are applicable.
    And I looked around.
    And one of my friends at school, from the school,
    said, oh, why don't you come over here
    to this company in Rhode Island and Connecticut and so on?
    We did.
    [INAUDIBLE],, he was working for the Navy at the time and said,
    well, Raytheon may.
    And indeed, they hire me, and I was with them.
    And I worked on problems and so on.
    I have even here my work that I did for them.
    And then that particular one collapsed.
    OK.
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum volunteer collection
    interview with Phillip Abraham.
    This is track number three, and you
    were talking about working for Raytheon in Rhode Island.
    Right.
    I worked there and problems that had to do with submarines, how
    to make sure that a submarine is not sunk by some missile
    or detected by an adversary, and this
    means that there is sound in the water.
    It's not like the sound that we hear in the air.
    But that can propagate through the ocean thousands of miles
    and in the process may hit an object, like a submarine,
    and reflect it.
    And if there is somebody there waiting with their own sensors,
    they say, oh, there is something there,
    and they can determine sometimes what that something is.
    So I worked on that, and in my opinion and others,
    they did good work.
    But this was a little company part
    that I was working in in this, and it was actually given
    money for that research by the Office
    of Naval Research in Washington because it
    was an important need.
    But the company itself didn't put money
    into this, and suddenly, money that
    came from this part of the--
    from the Navy stopped because, in other projects,
    they didn't provide what they were expected to,
    so they cut them off.
    And the Raytheon decided to close this place,
    so suddenly, all the people who were there are out.
    They gave me two weeks notice and so on,
    and now I'm without a job.
    And as I said, this was like 1968, something like that,
    and I'm without a job.
    And I'm married, and I have two little babies.
    When did you get married?
    I got married in 1964, when I finished my--
    Was your wife American or from Europe?
    No, she was an American, yeah.
    And we met through other people.
    She was at the American University
    when I was at the University of Maryland,
    and somebody said, oh, you should meet this one and so on.
    And we met, and we got married.
    So we have two children now, a daughter and a son.
    Of course, my daughter is close to 44 years old,
    and my son is just 41, 42, something like that.
    And so that was--
    I was in a--
    and at the time, I was living in New London, Connecticut
    because that's where--
    Raytheon group was there, that particular group [INAUDIBLE]
    in Rhode Island.
    So I'm looking, and I'm looking trying to find a job.
    Finally, I visited the University of Connecticut,
    the Physics Department, and I see
    something there maybe on the bulletin board
    outdoors that they were interested in something
    like physicist or something.
    So I knocked on the door, and I met
    somebody named like Paul Clements,
    Jewish guy actually born in Australia
    but had been in England, got his degree there, and so on.
    And he was the head of the Physics Department
    at the University of Connecticut.
    So he said, well, we don't have a spot on the faculty,
    but I can arrange for you to be here as a research associate.
    Some salary is better than nothing,
    so I moved there to basically--
    University of Connecticut is the College Park--
    sorry, not College Park.
    What is it called?
    Something.
    It escapes me now.
    In any case, I moved to that place with my family,
    and I was there for several years.
    And they didn't have a space for me to become a real--
    --professor.
    Yeah, and on the faculty, so I had
    to make do with jobs still with the University of Connecticut
    but not at that place.
    But in Hartford, they had a kind of a college
    or a branch of their, and I taught their undergraduates
    and some graduates.
    And ultimately, I escaped that because there was no hiring.
    And finally, I looked around, and my friends were
    in Connecticut-- and they said, maybe you want to work for--
    let's see.
    What did I do there?
    I was in Connecticut.
    There is a place that can hire you in New London that
    is not the University.
    It's the Navy.
    And I went for an interview, and they hired me.
    And I had to give some talks and so on, and they hired me.
    And I was there for eight years as a member,
    and I became, of course, not temporary but with the pension
    plan and all that.
    And then I decided to move elsewhere,
    and something happened, also, in my family.
    We got a divorce.
    So I moved from there to right here in Maryland, basically,
    at a Naval Research Laboratory.
    You probably heard of it.
    And I arrived there, and I was a member of the Naval and so on.
    And they started doing research on what they were interested in
    based on the work I've done before,
    and I stayed there for seven years.
    And one day, they asked me--
    and there was a temporary vacancy
    at the Office of Naval Research in Arlington, Virginia,
    and somebody that has your background--
    only for a month or something like that.
    Would you like to do that?
    Managing something-- I never managed anything, except myself
    and doing my work.
    But I said, well, I'll take it.
    We'll see what-- I wasn't losing my position at NRL.
    I come there.
    So they give me a whole program with money to go,
    and the first thing I do--
    I interviewed all these people who had already
    programs from this and so on.
    And I had to cut immediately a group at Catholic U. That was--
    But what I found about myself--
    I never thought of myself capable to do
    many managerial work.
    But I learned, and I became a manager as well,
    even though I continued to be--
    my interest, and I never stopped learning.
    So I was there for the rest of my--
    --profession.
    --profession with them until 2007,
    so that was after 32 years of the work for the Navy.
    And in the meantime, that program that I started there
    that I was given at ONR--
    but I mentioned the fact that I didn't
    know that Raytheon paid my salary because they got it
    from ONR.
    I never knew that.
    Suddenly, I am at ONR, and this is life going--
    So one day, in my program, they decided
    that they don't want to continue to do-- it was still
    with submarines and stuff like that,
    but they had been doing so long with submarines, basically
    since the beginning, if one goes back,
    the First World War when the submarines appeared.
    And they were continuing at that.
    And sometimes they reached a point
    where nothing new was done, really,
    to do better, so they decided, not because I failed
    or anything like that, that they're not
    going to put money in that.
    And so what to do with this guy, me,
    that I am an expert in that?
    They said, well, there is here a group
    that works in logistics, gives money to do
    science and technology of logistics,
    and right now it's headed by a captain who
    is retiring from this job.
    And we need somebody else.
    Would you like to take it?
    Well, I'll try.
    So yes, I tried, and yeah, in the meantime,
    I had become also--
    no longer belonging to NRL.
    I was belonging to ONR.
    So I'm entering this.
    I didn't know what logistics is, only some very primitive idea.
    I looked in the dictionary and so on.
    And then I looked at what this captain had done and so on.
    He was a very nice man, but he was not a scientist at all,
    and what he did was OK.
    But it wasn't the science and the--
    so here I was to try to find out exactly what other people have
    done who are being paid money and so on.
    And the first thing that I do--
    interview these people.
    I went, for instance, to Catholic U
    or there was a group there working with a program,
    and it's not logistics.
    And I wrote to my supervisors at ONR
    that this should be cut off.
    It was a million-something for three years.
    And they didn't quite cut it off because Congress intervenes
    in these things, and the people in Congress have the power.
    And the people upstairs in the ONR--
    unfortunately, instead of saying, no, this
    is not a good place to do--
    so I didn't suffer from it, but so ultimately, I
    took over this logistics program.
    And it became, indeed, science and technology
    with a lot of people that were doing in universities, and also
    industry, and Navy institutions themselves, so quite a large--
    it had ultimately something-- a program of $35 million per year
    that had to be-- and we'd travel a lot
    to see what they are doing and going directly
    to the people who were working on this.
    And they had to give me--
    every time, what have you done, and so on, and discussing it.
    And I would say, go in a different direction, and all
    that.
    And people, at least those who I didn't cut off,
    were happy with me.
    But I selected the people who--
    and I had connections.
    Sometimes I would be asked to come and see
    what they are doing prior to, and in one case
    it was something in San Luis Obispo,
    and that's in California.
    And they have Cal Poly there, California Polytechnic,
    and they said they have a new method of dealing
    with certain things and what they
    called an intelligent agent, "artificial intelligence,"
    so-called.
    And they showed me when I arrived there--
    they had three people with computers,
    and a task that they had was to load with the equipment
    a ship that can bring these things of the Navy
    into the ocean and to resupply and so
    on with all these things, whether it
    be a tank, or a truck, or everything.
    Now, to load something like that, it's not easy on a ship.
    A ship has all sorts of decks, and it has elevators.
    Can they do this or not?
    They have cranes.
    It's a very complicated story, and they
    used to put two people to work for one single ship, maybe two
    weeks or more, to decide how to do it.
    So with this intelligent agent just on a computer,
    having all the data about what loads
    they have to put on the ship, they
    could do it in half an hour, and they proved it to me.
    And indeed that was one of the most successful things that I--
    and with not a lot of money.
    Some other projects cost millions of dollars
    and didn't perform this--
    but this, with a quarter of a million dollars, they advanced.
    And nowadays, they have a company of about 200 people
    that work on this.
    And it's not only the US Navy, and the Marine Corps,
    and the army, but the British are
    paying to have this program.
    And it was really something that--
    and I also suffered from it, in one sense.
    When you are in the Navy or any government
    and so on, you defend yourself from anybody else by saying,
    this is no good for us.
    We don't do that.
    We don't want that.
    And indeed they refused to use something like that,
    and this is a long story in itself.
    Well, it sounds like you've had a very interesting career.
    That's for sure.
    Really, I did, yes, and these people from the university
    there are still in connection with me
    and send me what they are doing nowadays.
    And I started, also, much more-- and not only this thing,
    but I went deeper, myself, into what logistics should be about.
    And something that--
    I'm saying this, and people say, you are bragging.
    But it's a true thing.
    It's the truth because I started studying and see,
    what is this logistics?
    What do we do?
    It's all these supplies.
    Oh, I need water.
    I bring a tank of water.
    Is that enough to do--
    is that logistics?
    No.
    I realized, by studying it, really, not just for the Navy,
    that it's much deeper than that.
    It goes all the way to the people in a mine for coal
    or all these materials that we do
    or people who grow food and so on.
    Everything is connected.
    When you hear, oh, we'll do this or put this--
    we'll send shovels--
    Obama-style-- ready shovels.
    Who's making the shovels?
    Somebody.
    Well, what are they made of and so on.
    Oh, in the mine they bring.
    It's not a circle.
    You have so many routes to the final object,
    but even more so, even military philosophy
    and how to deal with the battle and all this.
    So I wrote about this and so on, and only some people
    paid attention.
    And interestingly enough, after 9/11, what did they do?
    The Navy decides they don't need logistics.
    It was the stupidest, absolutely--
    something that the public doesn't know.
    They cut it out.
    They no longer have anything in logistics.
    To me, it's a very sad thing because many people
    have died because of that.
    Can we get back to your--
    All right, but I'm just thinking because I feel strongly
    about that.
    I know you do.
    Not because my whole--
    I had my career.
    It's OK.
    But it's how sometimes people refusing
    to accept something, and then later on I'll tell you a story.
    Do you feel Romanian at all, any connections with the country?
    Not really, no.
    Have you been--
    No, I have never gone back there.
    You've never gone back?
    No.
    My parents came from there in 1950 with my brother
    and my sister, who--
    I have the roots there in the cemeteries, in the families,
    and so on, and maybe someday I may go in
    to visit where I was born and so on.
    Do you think you would have been a different adult
    if you hadn't had to get up and move to a different city,
    and then leave the country, and so forth?
    Did that mold you into who you are?
    Yes, I think so, and I will repeat the words of a guy
    that I worked with in New London.
    He was also a guy with a PhD, born here and so on.
    And he asked me about my history, and I told him.
    And he said, I really envy you of having all these experiences
    while I, he said--
    I went to grammar school, then high school, then college,
    then I went this.
    I'm now working here.
    I never had any obstacles that challenge,
    but you had all this.
    And I really felt good when he said that because indeed this
    is what happened to me.
    I didn't know that this is going to be,
    but somehow that's how fortune, or lack of it,
    or whatever made me into what I am so.
    Are you proud of being a Jew, even though you
    had to leave your home country?
    Absolutely, yes.
    Because of the fact that you were Jewish?
    Well, I'm Jewish because I know Hebrew.
    I know all these things that I've learned
    and more so than most Jews that don't live in Israel.
    Sometimes even those in Israel don't know so much about--
    I read and so on.
    I always loved to read.
    And I think that what happened to me
    was a faithful sort of thing.
    It's fate, if you wish.
    Do you feel that you still had your childhood?
    That was not taken away from you?
    No, it wasn't taken that way because, as I said,
    I was not a child anymore when I was in the kibbutz.
    But we had--
    No, but you were eight years old when you had to leave one town
    to go to another town.
    No, because we still had--
    we still had friends, and we did things together and so
    on in the snow and all that.
    And yeah, and so [? with that-- ?] for instance,
    I used to--
    when I was still a child like that,
    there was a little girl my age who
    had some books that I wanted to read and said,
    oh, I'll lend them to you if you pull me on the snow,
    so I did that in order to get the book to read.
    So my parents and my siblings said--
    first of all, my parents didn't like me, at the table,
    to read at the table and stuff like that
    because I was very much involved--
    when we lived in Tecuci, in this house, I and my brother
    slept in the room that had one wall as windows.
    So during summer time or something
    like that and the moon shined, you
    could actually read with this light of the moon.
    And I used to read, hiding my book under my pillows.
    My parents didn't know.
    You talked about seeing a dead German.
    Did you see any other destruction,
    any damage from the war at all?
    In Romania?
    Yeah.
    Yeah, there are things like that because they bombed the city
    and so on.
    Did you have to go into shelters and things like that?
    We didn't have a shelter.
    We would go down maybe in the--
    --basement.
    --basement, yeah, if you had a basement.
    And it was not a common thing.
    It was the basement that they cut--
    they didn't put real walls or something like that.
    And was there a lot of destruction in your area,
    in your neighborhood?
    Not that much because it was-- the only thing that
    the American and British air forces did--
    they bombed the airport, yeah.
    Sometimes, for instance, they did bad things in Bucharest
    that they shouldn't have done because they hit population.
    There were no military and so on.
    But I meant what you yourself experienced.
    No, I didn't experience that, no.
    You didn't experience any--
    No.
    Do you get reparations?
    No.
    No.
    Do you think the world has learned any lessons
    from the Holocaust?
    Sometimes I think no because we see
    what's happening right now when you
    have people killed in Israel, and so on, and Israel reacts.
    And immediately, [INAUDIBLE] [? Russia, ?] a failed country,
    if any, and so on that committed such massacres everywhere they
    went in their history, the whole history--
    and they are saying all this.
    And Belgium, and all these countries, and even here--
    what is our so-called president in the--
    it's not fair to react.
    So yes, definitely I think that we haven't learned yet.
    What are your feeling when you go into the Holocaust Museum
    building?
    Well, first of all, it's sadness,
    deep sadness that this happened because you cannot really go
    to it and not feel like crying when you see the youngsters,
    and the old, and the women, and the men, and so on for nothing,
    for just nothing.
    And I get mad.
    I get very mad.
    If I had been there and I had a gun, I would have shot.
    And one thing that made me mad as well--
    and the Jews-- they didn't react to or see in the beginning
    that this is so serious.
    No, the German Jews-- they believe that, oh,
    it cannot happen here.
    After all, such a cultural nation and so on--
    and they couldn't believe that this has happened.
    But even though your father was told to leave-- and he said,
    I can't leave because I have extended family.
    That's right, exactly, right.
    But at the time, in Romania, it was so bad.
    That's why.
    It was somewhere else.
    But many times we talked in the family.
    We could have been born in the United States or something
    like that or living in the United States.
    What are your thoughts about Germany today?
    I don't know.
    I've met some nice people from Germany.
    One of them is a man that I supported at Cal Poly.
    He was actually born in Australia.
    He's of German origin, and he is a professor there.
    And he was the one who pushed this new thing
    that I mentioned, and he's a religious man.
    And he really is a man with standards,
    and we didn't talk a lot about the Holocaust.
    He is not guilty of having done that.
    So there are people like that that I respect,
    and I think there are--
    but there are still groups there that are not.
    Have you been to Germany?
    No, and frankly, I don't want to visit.
    Because?
    I don't know.
    I would be--
    I'd feel really-- not because I'm afraid of them.
    At this point, I'm not afraid of anybody.
    I will fight for my life, but I'm not afraid.
    So I don't like it.
    I don't like-- and to some extent,
    I don't like the French, even the Dutch.
    They didn't behave in a way that they should have.
    People that had, actually, a tradition
    of helping the Jews in Holland during the Inquisition--
    and here they are, and instead fully support
    this small minority of Jews, they
    did bad things, yeah, not all of them, not all of them.
    You volunteer at the Holocaust Museum.
    Yeah, I did.
    What kind of work do you do?
    Well, basically, to translate from Romanian people who have
    been interviewed, like you--
    and I think my--
    I'll try to take--
    if you'll excuse me, please.
    Oh, [INAUDIBLE].
    Sorry.
    So we were talking about what do you do at the museum.
    Yes.
    Because I still know Romanian language, I can translate.
    And so I went in there, and I was
    given a task to get something like this
    that was an interview.
    Listen to it, and try to translate.
    And I started doing that.
    But because I was busy with other things,
    I didn't quite finish it.
    I still have to finish it and so on.
    It was somebody in Romania who--
    in the north of Romania on the border with Russia
    where the Jews were picked up and so on.
    It was a horrible thing and stories that are--
    and that was done by the Romanians, the Romanian police
    and army.
    And it's very-- in fact, one of my friends in Israel,
    the wife of a good friend--
    she was there and survived.
    And she was hit with a bayonet in the back,
    and to this very day--
    she is like 77 years old, and she still suffers from that.
    But she survived.
    How do you feel being from Romania,
    knowing that others in the same country suffered war--
    Yeah, well, I am suddenly very supporting for the Jews
    who suffered, yes.
    There is no question about that.
    And I was just lucky.
    We were lucky, those who didn't have that experience.
    It could have happened.
    But it wasn't their fault. Yeah, I'm
    not saying that the German Jews are at fault
    for this Holocaust of theirs.
    The Germans?
    The German Jews, yeah, because they
    couldn't believe that people will do something like that.
    Is there any particular part of the museum
    that you identify with?
    Identifying in what sense?
    Any exhibits that kind of strike you as--
    Well, I admire and identify with when they started
    reacting with force against--
    The resistance?
    The resistance, yes, because I feel
    that, small or without powers, and so on, as I am or I was,
    still would have taken a stone and throw at them.
    That's my feeling.
    To this very day, if somebody would try to attack me,
    I wouldn't sit there and let them, whether they have a gun
    or not.
    And I truly admire those people who defend themselves,
    and I believe in the death penalty.
    I think that a murderer should be executed.
    And I know people that say, oh, let's keep them 30 years,
    and then they say, well, he learned something.
    Let's let him out.
    When I hear this, I just see red because all the time it
    happens, if you read the newspapers, what happens.
    Well, he was given for this--
    he killed this, but after all, he is not--
    psychologists say that this or that and so on.
    I don't believe in that.
    Frankly, I will say it in public and--
    Has your experience affected you religiously in any way?
    You were a child, obviously, during the war.
    As a child, actually, until my bar mitzvah,
    I was still a believer.
    But now, as an adult who lived through this and
    experienced it--
    Also, being a scientist has something to say.
    When I hear that people talk about this spirit that
    created the world and so on, if people believe,
    I'm not laughing at them, no.
    I'm saying, that's fine.
    You believe in that.
    But what I believe in--
    it's a mystery whose answer or solving will never happen.
    So when you look out in the sky and you see the stars and all
    that, and if you are those who can actually
    look through a telescope and see much more than we do,
    how can you say there was some spirit or some somebody who
    created all this?
    Can we understand this-- absolutely not--
    and why it exists?
    There is a mystery in looking at an ant.
    And you try to pick it up.
    It turns away from you.
    It knows you are there.
    It's a mystery.
    How?
    I know Darwin said evolution, but that's
    a mystery, too, a big mystery.
    And sometimes even our rabbi at TI, Tifereth Israel,
    sometimes says that he doesn't know what to believe.
    He has the courage to say that to a congregation.
    So you are observant in the sense of holidays and things
    like that?
    The holidays, yes, because that's a tradition.
    In a way, it's not so much the religion as being a nation,
    being a nation that--
    it's another thing that we should really
    respect ourselves, a people who suffered
    so much in their history, and they survived.
    One can say it's God's doing, but can they
    say it's God's doing the Holocaust, the six million Jews
    killed?
    It never happened to other people in such way.
    No, never, in all the history of mankind.
    Are you more comfortable being with people
    who are born in Europe than those who were born here
    in the United States?
    No, no.
    I don't-- I can be--
    one aspect, though--
    I would say, the American Jews--
    there are a lot of them who are really not in connection
    with their history as a nation.
    No, they feel themselves Americans and so on.
    That's a major thing.
    And I feel that that is missing something.
    While those Jews who were born in Israel
    or who came to Israel--
    they know.
    That's a different story.
    And indeed, some Americans when they became Israelis--
    but when I see in the synagogue, for instance, what are they
    doing many times?
    They are very active in things that
    are done in Somalia to people, or other places
    and so on, or in the district and so on.
    They never talk about poor Jews, or let's give to Israel.
    Yes, in the prayer book there is a whole thing about Israel
    and so on, and we pray and read this.
    Fine.
    But what about-- yeah, many times
    they send their children to this new thing
    that youngsters can go to visit Israel.
    Birthright, Birthright.
    Yeah, and that's fine.
    And in fact, my wife's youngest grandchild, Samuel, Sam--
    he's going, actually, in a few days for nine months in Israel.
    And, oh, I like him very much.
    He is really for Israel and a great youngster, really.
    And I knew them from when they were born, OK.
    I don't have--
    So you remarried?
    Yes.
    Oh, you did remarry.
    Yeah, right.
    And my children are not married.
    I have no grandchildren of my own,
    and Naomi has five grandchildren.
    And I've been there.
    So one of them is already in college,
    in their second year in college, and the others are still--
    there is only a young one that is only 14.
    When your children were very young,
    did you tell them about your childhood?
    Yes, I did.
    I did, yes.
    And my first wife was not Jewish.
    So how were the children raised?
    Well, actually, I tried to raise them--
    but when I was a professor at the University of Connecticut,
    I met-- there was a synagogue there,
    and I would go there with them.
    But somehow it didn't work out, but my children now--
    one thing, of course, that is always told
    to them, since their mother is not Jewish,
    then they are not considered Jewish.
    So they point this out.
    But they are certainly for Israel and so on.
    My daughter has visited quite a few times.
    Have you gone back to Israel?
    Oh, yes.
    Do you consider yourself Israeli, or American, or both?
    This is interesting.
    Both.
    And I feel I'm Israeli, and I'll give you some examples of that.
    When I came here, I was not a citizen.
    I was a foreign student, so to speak, and I was--
    when I became a citizen in 1968, they never
    asked me, meaning, have you denounced
    your Israeli citizenship?
    Nobody asked me, and I thought that just by leaving--
    and I lived, by that time eight years here--
    I'm not a citizen anymore there.
    And I became a citizen.
    So I visited there in 1973.
    I took my children-- they were very and a time--
    for my parents to see-- my mother actually had died,
    so only my father saw them and my relatives there.
    But when I-- [? I never said-- ?] nobody,
    when I came back--
    I visited to Israel.
    I had my American passport.
    Nobody asked any questions.
    I went again later on a few times.
    Nobody there asked.
    The last time that I was there, in 2007, as a matter of fact--
    that was not the last time, but that's when something happened.
    They looked up, when I came to--
    on the computer, they had my name,
    that I'm an Israeli citizen.
    I had a passport once, which I still have
    a copy of that old passport.
    And they said, you won't be let out from Israel if you either
    renounce your citizenship or you have an Israeli passport.
    So I said, well--
    I said, OK, I'll get a new passport.
    And I had to go through and so on,
    and I was lucky because I and Naomi--
    she was with me at the time.
    We had a flight back in a few days,
    and the bureaucracy in Israel is such
    that it may take you a month and so on.
    Luckily, I have a friend from the kibbutz.
    So we've been friends from all these 60 years, almost,
    and he knew somebody in Haifa, at the place of the passports.
    And we went there, and they did it on the spot for me,
    particularly because they saw I served
    in the army and all this.
    So I said, I'm not going to do problems to just--
    so I have an Israeli passport, so I'm a dual--
    it's legal.
    Right, it's legal.
    One thing happened-- before I finished my work
    and I retired in 2007, they wanted me to continue to work,
    not at ONR but at NRL, by being a kind of contractor
    with a company.
    And they would pay me and so on and work as much as I wanted.
    And I said, OK, but for this, they said,
    you have to fill out this form.
    And this form asks you, are you a citizen of what countries?
    And I said, the United States, and they asked,
    do you have any other passport?
    And I said, yes.
    And they said, OK, we can give you a--
    what do you call it?
    A security clearance and so on and work.
    And I said, how is that possible?
    I had secret clearance, and now you're telling me--
    and then they came back and said, OK,
    if you give us your Israeli passport--
    and we'll cut it off into pieces--
    you can still enter the laboratory and around there.
    And I said no.
    I had enough of that.
    I don't want people to tell me what to do anymore.
    So money-- they were going to pay me, basically,
    $1,000 per day.
    That's pretty good.
    So I never had that when I worked a regular--
    and so on.
    But I decided, no, there is a point where it's not--
    So that's how I feel.
    I feel for America and Israel at the same time.
    Why?
    Because?
    I feel these two countries are so connected.
    Even many people don't realize, including the Jews, how come.
    If you look at the history of the United States--
    and I've learned a lot from the history and reading books.
    I collected books and so on, from biographies and all this.
    And when you read about the founding fathers,
    what did they depend on?
    They went to the Old Testament, which is
    the Hebrew Bible, and all this.
    So there is no other country that
    has that and believed in that, and the two are basically--
    the one invented this God and so on.
    The others invented how to behave as a nation,
    how to do it, liberties of human beings.
    That's what's the connection.
    And there is no other country in the world that
    has done that, neither Israel as a nation or the United States
    as a nation and as a--
    it will be a tremendous tragedy if one of these two countries
    will disappear, and sometimes I feel very strongly
    about the United States, that it goes in the direction that,
    to me, is extremely dangerous, becoming something
    that it shouldn't become.
    When I hear about illegal immigrants-- and this
    is, oh, no, these poor people.
    Well, they have their lands.
    When you talk about South America--
    and you can call me a racist or something like that,
    but I feel, they have a land, rich lands, Mexico and so on.
    They have natural resources and so on.
    They don't know how to conduct themselves as nations.
    And in a way, I remember in the time that I've been here--
    I arrived in 1960--
    the Americans were Americans.
    Really, when I looked at people they--
    suddenly we see groups of people that don't look--
    they looking differently.
    I'm not saying bad, differently, different.
    And to claim that--
    I even wrote an article--
    not an article but a letter to the editor--
    in The Wall Street Journal because there
    was a man who was in a consulate from Mexico here in the US.
    And he wrote, oh, he doesn't understand
    why people are against immigrants, illegal or not.
    We are giving you the best of us.
    And I couldn't stand it because--
    they are giving us the best of themselves?
    How many scientists are coming here who are illegal?
    Coming people that don't have jobs, that they have the worst
    jobs there, and they come here.
    And so I felt very strongly about that.
    And that's only one thing, that there are so many other things
    that are happening.
    The freedom of the people in this country
    is in danger with the government,
    what it's doing, taking over things
    that it's not-- it's unconstitutional.
    That's how I feel.
    That's what I am, and I'm not ashamed to say that.
    For instance, when people talk about--
    I hope you will not be--
    I have some views about those same-sex marriages.
    I'm totally against that, to force that
    on the rest of the country, no matter what.
    If they want to call me a bad guy, fine.
    But many people have this view that this is freedom.
    I'm not sure that this is freedom.
    I'm against hurting anybody like that.
    I don't want to do anything, in jobs or anything like that.
    But the truth is that--
    and that's my view, that they go beyond this tremendously,
    and that's bad for America.
    Well, thank you for telling the story of your life
    and expressing your views.
    Well, I was asked--
    I didn't want to talk, really, about--
    if my wife heard, she would have said, oh, Phillip,
    what did you do?
    Why did you do--
    let's just end up by you telling me why you did this interview,
    why you're willing to do the interview.
    Well, frankly, I never thought about looking back at my life,
    and so on.
    Yes, I have a lot of material, the things that I've--
    papers that I published and so on.
    But I decided, maybe I'm going to organize myself and so on
    and leave it as a memory for my children, yeah.
    And they know some of it but not really everything
    because when they were very young--
    they were very young and so on.
    And so I decided, yes, it's interesting,
    and if this can help other people make some decisions
    or whatever, it's up to them.
    But I'm not going out and shouting it in the street
    and so on because I know people--
    they have their own ideas, and they don't
    have to accept mine, yeah.
    That's freedom.
    That's freedom.
    Yeah.
    Well, thank you so much for doing the interview.
    All right, thank you.
    This concludes the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    interview with Phillip Abraham.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Phillip Abraham, born August 10, 1931 in Podului-Turkului (Podu Turcului), Romania, describes his prewar life in Romania; his family’s religious beliefs; his childhood in a close-knit Jewish community; his family’s move to Tecuci, Romania in 1940; his father being taken away and then released in 1942; the lack of food available to the population; his education in a Jewish school; his town’s liberation by the Russian Army; his post-war Romanian education; his membership in Hashomer Hatzair, a Zionist youth organization; his time in Israel; his education at Hebrew University and Weizmann Institute, where he studied physics; his immigration to the United States in 1959; his careers at Raytheon and the Office of Naval Research; his marriage in 1964; and his two children.
    Interviewee
    Phillip Abraham
    Interviewer
    Gail Schwartz
    Date
    interview:  2011 August 21
    Geography
    creation: Silver Spring (Md.)

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    3 digital files : WAV.

    Rights & Restrictions

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

    Keywords & Subjects

    Corporate Name
    World Hashomer Hatzair

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Gail Schwartz, on behalf of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History Branch, conducted the interview with Phillip Abraham in Silver Spring, MD on August 21, 2011.
    Funding Note
    The cataloging of this oral history interview has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:12:58
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn44297

    Additional Resources

    Transcripts (4)
    Time Coded Notes (3)

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    Also in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum oral history volunteer collection

    Consists of interviews with Holocaust survivors and concentration camp liberators conducted by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History Department volunteer staff. The interviewees, among them survivors from Hungary, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, and Poland, discuss their experiences of life before World War II, life in the ghettos, life in concentration camps, and life after the Holocaust.

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    Oral history interview with Doris Rauch

    Oral History

    Doris Rauch, born August 26, 1920 in Brno, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), discusses her childhood in Brno; the death of her father in 1936; the German invasion of Czechoslovakia; being unable to attend a German-speaking university because she was a Jew; attending a textile school; working in a factory; buying goods on the black market; her deportation to Theresienstadt on a passenger train; volunteering to work planting trees in Bohemia with her mother; returning to Theresienstadt after six weeks; avoiding transports to the East; being put on a transport in September 1942 along with her mother and boyfriend; being taken to Raasiku, Estonia and separated from her mother; being taken to Tallinn, Estonia in December 1942 to clear rubble for the Holzmann construction firm; being taken to a camp in Ereda at the end of 1943; how she and other women stopped menstruating; working in the forest; a romantic relationship between a prisoner and an SS commander; being given a ring by male inmate; contracting hepatitis in Ereda; being taken to Stutthof; how she had written in a diary every day in Estonia; being very sick; arriving at Bergen-Belsen in April 1945; taking another prisoner’s place to work in a factory; finding fliers saying that the Allies were approaching; being taken to the Danish border at the end of April 1945 and turned over to the Danish Red Cross who provided food, care, and new clothing; living in Sweden for two years working as a secretary for the World Jewish Congress; living with two women she met in the camps; moving to the United States in May 1947 and experiencing culture shock; marrying and moving to Chicago, then Pittsburg, and then to Washington D.C.; the effect of her experiences on her religious beliefs; and reparations from Germany.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Elman

    Oral History

    Joseph Elman, born February 5, 1922 in Pruzhany, Poland (present day Belarus), discusses the German and Russian occupations of Pruzhany; his memories of the murder of 11 Jews in Pruzhany by Nazis; being forced into slave labor; the relocation of his family into the ghetto; daily living conditions in the ghetto, which included starvation and crowding; his work in the ghetto’s food department; the liquidation of the ghetto starting in January 1943; his father’s membership in the Judenrat; his father’s suicide; how he and others built a bunker in the ghetto; his contact with a resistance group which was smuggling weapons into the ghetto; his escape from the ghetto with a large group of people during the liquidation; his experience living in the woods as part of a partisan group; forming family bonds with members of the group; liberation by the Russian Army; returning to his home in Pruzhany to find a family living there; living with this family for a period of time; moving to Bialystok, Poland to join his brother; settling in Łódź, Poland; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Gerald Rosenstein

    Oral History

    Gerald Rosenstein (b. Gerhard Rosenstein) describes his early life in Darmstadt, Germany; being attacked and beaten by a schoolmate’s father as a child; immigrating to Amsterdam with his family in May 1940; trying to leave for England after the German occupation; the persecutions Amsterdam’s Jewish community faced; being separated from his family in Westerbork; being sent to Theresienstadt; reuniting with his parents there; living conditions in Theresienstadt; partaking in propaganda for the Red Cross; being deported to Auschwitz with his father; being transferred to Gleiwitz; working conditions in camp; being marched to Blechhammer in January 1945; how he felt at liberation; traveling through Poland, Romania, and Odessa before boarding a Red Cross ship to Paris;

    Oral history interview with Ivan Becker

    Oral History

    Ivan Becker, born in 1929, discusses his childhood in Budapest, Hungary; his memories of the "hanging priest of Budapest" who killed Jews for refusing conversion to Christianity; the Nazi invasion of Hungary; harsh restrictions on Jews; his father who was sent to Buchenwald; being sent on a death march with his mother from Budapest towards Austria; being separated from his mother and never seeing her again; his life in hiding; his experiences in an unnamed ghetto; his return to Budapest after liberation; his time in a displaced persons camp in Bad Gastein, Austria; his immigration to the United States as a "war orphan" in 1946; and his adjustment to life after the Holocaust and success in business.

    Oral history interview with Romana Koplewicz

    Oral History

    Romana Koplewicz (née Margitte), born April 26, 1919 in Warsaw, Poland, describes her pre-war life in Poland; her parents and sister; her father’s dye factory; her education at a private Jewish school; her law school education at the University of Joseph Pilsudski in Warsaw; the antisemitism she experienced in law school; meeting her husband in 1936; her inability to complete law school due to anti-Jewish legislation; the beginning of the war and ghettoization in Warsaw; working in her father’s factory; her father’s arrest and return in the spring of 1940; the liquidation of the ghetto; her work sewing German uniforms; her escape with her family from numerous selections; the false papers she and her sister acquired in 1943; her work in the ghetto in a manufacturing factory; working as a housekeeper to survive; her time in Otwock Poland working as a chambermaid in summer 1944 at a convent; her escape to Grodzisko Mazovieckie, Poland because the Gestapo were looking for her; her time working for a German in Warsaw; the Warsaw ghetto uprising; the ghetto’s evacuation and her transfer to Piastów, Poland; her survival and return to Warsaw; her reunion with her husband and their marriage; leaving Warsaw for Germany with her husband; her time in Germany with her husband waiting for their visa to the United States; her immigration to the United States in May 1949; her master’s degree in social work; and her two children and her life in the U.S.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Koplewicz

    Oral History

    Joseph Koplewicz, born December 7, 1915 in Kielce, Poland, describes his pre-war life in Kielce; his parents and siblings; his father’s occupation as a businessman; his education in Kielce and law school education in Warsaw; his family’s religious attitudes; his experiences with antisemitism while attending law school; the beginning of the war; his arrest in Kielce for not wearing a Star of David badge; the ghettoization of Warsaw; performing forced labor in Warsaw; his father’s death due to health complications; his stay with his sister and her husband in a comfortable apartment; his marriage in 1942; being wounded in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; his transfer to Majdanek concentration camp; his transfer to Budzyn labor camp near Krasnik, Poland until February 1944; his transfer to Mielec, Poland where he worked as a draftsman until July 1944; his short time in Wieliczka, Flossenbürg, Litomerice, and Dachau; his transfer to Augsburg, Germany where he worked in airport construction; his time in Kaufering and Nuremburg; a forced march to Landshut, Germany where the SS guards in charge fled; the marchers subsequent scattering; his survival and return to Poland; his reunion with his wife; their decision to leave Poland and immigrate to the United States in 1949; and his post-war life in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Irving Schaffer

    Oral History

    Irving Schaffer, born May 26, 1928 in Chust, Czechoslovakia (present day Khust, Ukraine), discusses growing up in an Orthodox family; his early education; a teacher beating him in front of the class in 1943; experiencing antisemitism before the war; his father’s arrest for receiving milk from a neighbor; the deportation of his father and brother to labor camps; his family’s eviction from their home and deportation to the Chust Ghetto; conditions of the ghetto, such as the Jewish leadership; his assignment as a messenger and pass to leave the ghetto; smuggling in bread from outside the ghetto; people being punished for being Hungarian; being transported by train from the ghetto after three weeks; how partisans blew up the train and told prisoners to jump off and escape; arriving at Auschwitz in the spring of 1944; his memories of Dr. Mengele; being separated from the rest of his family at Auschwitz; being sent to Warsaw, Poland after only three days at Auschwitz; working to clean out the Warsaw Ghetto; prisoners escaping from the Warsaw ghetto; being marched out of the ghetto in August 1944; arriving at Kutno on the German and Polish border; being transported by train to Dachau; living in Camp Seven and working in Mühldorf in an ammunition factory; stealing potatoes and bartering with other prisoners; being transported from Dachau; finding a train transporting sugar that had been bombed and eating the hot sugar; being transported to the Landshut camp; working in Landsberg, Germany; a bombing by American planes; being released by the Germans and then chased down and beaten into a coma; waking up in a German hospital; organizations that assisted in reconnecting families, such as UNRRA and the Joint Distribution Committee; being liberated in Feldmoching, Germany; finding his brother in Chust; how the Russians did not let him leave Chust; escaping across borders into Germany; attending school in Munich, Germany; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with William Klein

    Oral History

    William Klein, born in 1924, discusses growing up in Užhorod, Czechoslovakia (present day Uzhhorod, Ukraine), in a large family; attending Jewish school until the sixth grade, then entering a public high school; the friendliness between Jews and non-Jews in Užhorod; his two older brothers leaving in 1940 for Yugoslavia and Russia with the army; Jews being made to wear the yellow Star of David badge and comply with a curfew beginning in 1942; hearing rumors about Jews being killed in Poland; being forced into the ghetto in January or February 1944; being taken by train to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944; last seeing his parents and sister as they went through the selection process at Auschwitz; being advised by a kapo to volunteer for work outside the camp when he had the opportunity; being taken to what had been the Warsaw Ghetto along with his brother and brother-in-law to demolish buildings and clear debris; finding gold pieces in an abandoned house where he was working and hiding them in a belt; prisoners making up songs and singing as they worked; being forced to march to Dachau as the Russians advanced towards Warsaw; witnessing the death of a rabbi he and his brother had helped on the march; staying in Dachau for a few days; volunteering to work at a construction site; being seriously injured on the construction site and being helped by fellow prisoners, including one who was a doctor; escaping with his brother and brother-in-law from a train and hiding in a farmhouse as the Americans liberated the area; reuniting with his surviving family members in Bratislava and Užhorod; living in Sudetenland and then in a series of displaced persons camps in Germany (Wasserburg, Föhrenwald, and Bremerhaven) and applying to move to the United States; having his application delayed after being accused of being a communist; moving to Chicago in 1951; his pride in his Jewish identity; health problems caused by beatings he received during his time as a prisoner; telling his children about his experiences; and his response to the question of why he does not hate.

    Oral history interview with George Pisik

    Oral History

    George Pisik, born May 25, 1925, describes his experience as a soldier in the U.S. Army’s 15th armored division, 10th infantry battalion; entering Dachau in May 1945 without any prior knowledge of concentration camps; his battalion’s doctor trying to help the prisoners; searching a guard who was subsequently taken by prisoners and killed in the barracks; meeting a 19 year-old female prisoner in Dachau and giving her the mezuzah his grandmother had given him to wear; receiving almost 100 mezuzahs from his family and friends after writing them; giving these mezuzahs to chaplains to distribute and to his fellow soldiers, telling them they were good luck charms; entering Munich and seeing the giant swastika on Munich Stadium, which his commander ordered to be destroyed by tank fire; seeing Germans surrender; conflicts with German civilians; suffering from trench foot and impetigo; returning to the United States expecting to be sent to Japan but staying after the bombing of Hiroshima; after his homecoming, using a swastika flag as a doormat, which drew the attention of the neighborhood and the police when his mother washed it and hung it out to dry; bringing home pistols which his mother took to the army depot to be deactivated; returning to college; his frustration with Holocaust deniers, including a Catholic priest he met in 1950 in Louisiana; the failings of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust; his feelings towards the Germans; his belief that a holocaust could happen again; his level of religious involvement; and the importance of education in preventing another holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Rosicka

    Oral History

    Ruth Rosicka, born August 13, 1919 in Nowice, Czechoslovakia (present day Poland), describes her Polish father who was actively pro-Zion; escaping bombing in Bielsko, Poland; escaping through Krakow, Poland and being found by the Russian army; being deported to a camp in Siberia from which she was amnestied in 1941; being drafted by the Czechoslovakian army and working in the medical brigade, where in 1944 she met her husband; being taken to the Carpathian Mountains, to the war front, where they stayed until February 1945; being released from the Army in May 1945 because of her pregnancy; and living in Prague, Czech Republic after the war.

    Oral history interview with Salomon Cohen

    Oral History

    Salomon Cohen, born July 28, 1937 in Athens, Greece, discusses how his family escaped to the south of Greece in February 1943 with the help of partisans; hiding with his family in the mountains for six months; how the partisans obtained food from monasteries in the mountains for his family; using false names while in hiding; traveling to Izmir, Turkey then Syria; being captured by English troops; how the family was taken to British camps in the Gaza Strip; their escape with the help of a Jewish agency; traveling to Ted Aviv, Israel, where they lived from 1944 to 1952; going into the army as a tank fighter; going to Haifa, Israel after leaving the army; getting married and having children; and his visits to Greece.

    Oral history interview with Suzanne Foldes

    Oral History

    Suzanne Foldes (b. Zsuzsi Morvai) discusses her childhood in Miskolc, Hungary; her Jewish and Christian schooling; pre-war antisemitism; training as a gymnast but being denied entry into the Olympics because she was Jewish; her father’s conscription into Hungarian forced labor; getting married in 1942 to Paul Berkowitz; terminating a pregnancy; the German occupation of Hungary; being confined to a ghetto; being transported to Auschwitz by cattle car; learning of her mother’s death by gassing; moving to Buchenwald; how she was good at stealing coal; liberation; returning to Budapest after the war; reuniting with her father; learning of her husband’s death; marrying a friend from before the war; immigrating to the United States in 1956; and speaking about her wartime experiences beginning in the 1990s.

    Oral history interview with Tibor Vince

    Oral History

    Tibor Vince, born in 1910, describes his childhood near Budapest, Hungary; his medical studies in Italy; his escape to Cuba at the outbreak of World War II; his immigration to the United States; his work as a physician in the United States Army; his experiences at Dachau shortly after liberation; his medical treatment of Allied prisoners of war; and his life in New York, NY after 1945.

    Oral history interview with Elias Piorko

    Oral History

    Elias Piorko, born on May 15, 1919, discusses his childhood in Zambrów, Poland; his life in a kibbutz near Slonim, Poland (now Belarus); his experiences with forced labor in Russia; being in four different camps; his travels through Europe on the way to Italy after World War II; and his life in the United States after 1950.

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Hildesheim

    Oral History

    Benjamin (Beniek) Hildesheim discusses his childhood in Sieradz, Poland; his experiences with antisemitism and Jewish persecution in Sieradz before the Holocaust; his time in the ghettos of Sieradz and Łódź, Poland; his adoption by Chaim Rumkowski; his imprisonment at Auschwitz, Babice/Babitz (a small agricultural camp west of Auschwitz), and Buchenwald concentration camps; his participation in a death march to Theresienstadt, where he remained until liberation; his time in Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), immediately after liberation; his immigration to Palestine in the first Aliyah after World War II in 1945; his participation in the Israel-Arab War of 1948 to 1949; and his life in Brazil and the United States after 1962.

    Oral history interview with Peter Masters

    Oral History

    Peter Masters (né Peter Arany), born February 5, 1922, in Vienna, Austria, describes his prewar life in Vienna; his Viennese mother and Hungarian father; his escape to Britain after the Anschluss in 1938; his family’s internment as “friendly aliens;” his family’s reclassification as enemy aliens in Britain; his experiences volunteering for special hazardous duty in Britain and being assigned the 3rd Group, 10th Commando, an elite paratroop unit mostly consisting of Jewish or political refugees; his identity being anglicized for his protection; his work to petition for the recognition of Austrians who perished fighting the Nazis; his many family members who perished during the war; and his 1997 book, Striking back: A Jewish commando’s war against the Nazis, which he wrote as a counterpoint to the idea the Jews did not fight back during the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Wolke

    Oral History

    Joseph Wolke (Wolkeovich), born July 14, 1919 in Tomashov (Tomaszów Mazowiecki), Poland, discusses his family background and religious upbringing; his father’s successful farm outside the city; the rise of Hitler and antisemitism; racial laws against Jews; being deported during Rosh Hashanah; arriving in Krakow, Poland on a cattle train; his disbelief that the war would last so long; escaping from the Germans and returning to Tomashov by bus; how the farm provided for the family; increases in the deportation of Jews; living in the Tomashov ghetto; smuggling food into the ghetto; the liquidation of the ghetto on November 1, 1942; the mass burial of Jews in the ghetto for which he was forced to dig graves; being deported to Bergen-Belsen; being transferred on a cattle train to Auschwitz; forced labor digging ditches outside the camp; being relocated to Gross-Rosen camp; the death march from Rosen, which lasted over a week; starvation during the march; liberation by Russian forces; returning home to Poland; meeting his wife and having a child; immigrating to the United States in August 1950; living in Baltimore, MD with his wife’s family; adjusting to American life; creating a business; and learning the fate of his family members in the years following the war.

    Oral history interview with Ionel Ghelman

    Oral History

    Ionel Ghelman, born on March 27, 1929 in Bucharest, Romania, discusses his mother’s death in 1938 and being raised by his maternal aunt; experiencing antisemitism; seeing boys in 1936 practicing to be in the Iron Guard in the future; the German occupation in 1940; the events in January 1941, including pogroms, stores being burned, and Jews being killed; ration cards and how Jews’ ration cards were half of Rumanians’ cards; the Allied bombardments of Bucharest from late 1943 to early 1944; seeing Russian tanks and troops in August 1944; leaving school in 1946 to work in a locomotive factory; rejecting the Communist Youth Party and feeling a connection to Zionist Hashomer Hatzair; going to Bukovina to prepare for kibbutz in Israel; the banning of Zionist organizations in 1949; being a draftsman for oil pipeline company from 1948 to 1950; marrying a Romanian woman in 1956; his children; being expelled from the Communist Party because parents went to Israel; getting visas for Hungary, France, and Germany in 1976; going to New York in April 21, 1977 with the help of HIAS; and settling in Washington and working for Bechtel.

    Oral history interview with Irimia Solomon

    Oral History

    Irimia Solomon, born on November 3, 1924 in Dorohoi, Romania, describes his parents, who were divorced; how he and his mother lived with his grandparents in Falticeni, Romania; his granfather’s farm; the Jewish community in the town and his family not being particularly religious; Jews in Moldovan cities; his education; playing soccer with non-Jewish children; hearing about antisemitism; wanting to go to Palestine; going to school in Bucharest, Romania to learn a trade; his relationship with his father; an uprising in Romania in September 1940; the Iron Guard (Garda de Fier); returning to Falticeni in December 1941; going to Dorohoi; his father being taken away in June 1942; being taken to forced work, unloading rail cards and sweeping; being deported with his mother to Transnistria and conditions during the journey there; having to trade in their Romanian money for Russian rubles; arriving in Sharhorod, Ukraine; being housed in a synagogue for several weeks; staying in a room in a house of a Christian family with other Jews; being in a ghetto, where there was religious life but no cultural life; building roads and sleeping overnight in rail cars outfitted with bunk bed; typhus in Sharhorod and helping to bury the dead; his mother not working and staying indoors; being helped by a cousin’s Christian husband; being taken back to Dorohoi in December 1943; moving from house to house until they could contact relatives; not feeling relief or happiness; his mother being treated as a war widow and being allowed to sell certain items, such as stamps, alcohol, and tobacco; returning to school and going to the polytechnic in 1945; waiting from 1958 to 1972 to get a passport; going to Israel, where his wife did not like the heat; going to Canada, where they settled in Toronto; working as an engineer; and moving to Montreal.

    Oral history interview with Lotte Salus

    Oral History

    Lotte Salus (b. Charlotte Helena Cohen) discusses her childhood living near the Dutch border in Germany; working for a Jewish family; being arrested and pressed into labor after Kristallnacht; being sent to Amsterdam, Netherlands by her father; living with other Jewish teenagers in The Hague, Netherlands; learning her family had been deported to Westerbork; moving to Amsterdam in May 1940; receiving orders to register with the police; being deported to Westerbork; reuniting with her family; daily life in Westerbork; volunteering to go to Theresienstadt with her parents in 1944; her experiences in the camps Auschwitz, Stutthof, and Praust; being taken on a death march in March 1945; liberation by the Russians; sexual violence perpetrated by the Russians; returning to Germany; immigrating to the United States in 1949; and marrying and starting a family.

    Oral history interview with Irena Kirkland

    Oral History

    Irena Neumann discusses her childhood in Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic); not having a Jewish identity or religious education; evacuating Prague before the Munich Agreement; returning to the city and learning she was Jewish; adapting to restrictions placed on Jews; her feelings about wearing the yellow star; being deported to Theresienstadt with her family; daily life in the camp; contracting encephalitis; being deported to Auschwitz; conditions in camps Auschwitz and Sachsen Chemnitz; returning to Theresienstadt in May 1945; reuniting with her parents; liberation by Russian soldiers; returning to Prague; beginning university; being arrested and released by communists; and immigrating to the United States in 1956.

    Oral history interview with Hans Hirsch

    Oral History

    Hans George Hirsch discusses his early life in Stuttgart, Germany; his father’s role as executive director of the German Jewish Community; graduating gymnasium in 1934; prewar antisemitism; the difficulties he experienced attending university and holding a job in Nazi Germany; visiting Palestine in 1937; receiving a visa to leave for the United States in 1937; working on farms in the U.S.; trying to get his parents out of Europe; teaching German prisoners of war farm management from 1943 to 1946; his career trajectory in food administration and policy; and his retirement from foreign agricultural service.

    Oral history interview with Milton Shurr

    Oral History

    Milton Shurr, born January 28, 1911 in the United States, describes his work with the Jewish Welfare Fund in Oklahoma City, OK in the early 1940s; his draft into the military and entering Officer’s Candidate School; being shipped overseas to England, where he worked in preparation for D-Day in June 1944; his recruitment by the Civil Affairs Unit of the Military Government to gather and identify medical supplies left behind on Omaha Beach, France; helping to provide food for the 15,000 survivors of Buchenwald and working with the Red Cross and Joint Distribution Committee; traveling to Bavaria, Germany to work has a health welfare officer; working to reopen schools, hospitals, banks, and other institutions in Germany; maintaining correspondence with his wife in America during the war; returning to the United States after the war and moving to Chicago as an assistant in health planning; and sharing what he had witnessed in Buchenwald after years of being unable to speak about it.

    Oral history interview with Ludwig Jacob

    Oral History

    Ludwig Jacob discusses his early life in Schmalkalden, Germany; being arrested with his parents on Kristallnacht; being imprisoned in Buchenwald for a month; leaving on a Kindertransport to Holland; living in a children’s home; the German invasion; moving to his brother’s home in Amsterdam; the arrest of his brother, who subsequently was imprisoned and died in Mauthausen; receiving a deportation notice; choosing to live under a false identity; moving to Paris, France and working with the underground; sabotaging the German defense organization where he worked; being denounced and arrested; spending time in Fresnes prison before being deported to Drancy; jumping off the train on the way to Buchenwald; rejoining the resistance; working for Americans in Paris; immigrating to the United States in 1947; and his marriage and life in the US.

    Oral history interview with Barbara Artman

    Oral History

    Barbara Feuerstein Artman, born September 12, 1923 in Kosice, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia), discusses her parents Elizabeth and Henry Feuerstein and two younger brothers; her 14 aunts and uncles and 27 first cousins, who all perished in the Holocaust; her family’s move to Mukacheve, Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine), which in March 1939 was occupied by Hungry; the Nazi invasion of Hungary in 1944; being forced to live in a ghetto; conditions in the ghetto; her deportation with her family to Auschwitz; conditions in Auschwitz; the treatment of camp guards; being sent to a labor camp near Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) with her mother; their liberation by the Russians while on a march; walking, at the end of the war, to Krakow; reuniting with one brother; attending medical school but changing her major to chemistry; contacting uncles in United States who arranged for visas and transportation to the US for her, her mother, and her brother; and settling in Forest Hills, NY, where she married another refugee and had one son.

    Oral history interview with Fritz Schonbach

    Oral History

    Fritz (né Frederic) Schonbach, born in 1920, discusses his middle-class childhood in Vienna, Austria; attending private school until Jewish restrictions began in 1938; how life changed with the Nazi annexation of Austria; antisemitism in Austria and the terror campaigns; fleeing to Italy then to England in 1939; his family fleeing to Argentina while he remained in England; his internment in England because of his Austrian background; volunteering for the Australian army; daily life in the army; being discharged in 1946; enrolling in art school after the war; meeting his wife; reuniting with family in Argentina; immigrating to the United States in 1959; and discovering what happened to various family members in the war.

    Oral history interview with Charles Barber

    Oral History

    Charles Barber, born in 1932 in Budapest, Hungary, describes his father, who owned a liquor store; attending a public grade school, where some of the non-Jews wouldn't speak with him; his memories of the first bomb being dropped in Budapest in 1939; his father being drafted into the labor corps of the Hungarian army; his mother’s work as a tailor; being an only child; his father dying after two months in the labor corps; his mother being taken to a camp for eight months in 1943; living with several different people; his mother returning home; his memories of feeling guilty for telling his mother that he was hungry; the Jews being summoned to the courthouse in town and being separated from his mother by the officials; going to live in an orphanage with a Swedish flag out front; the Russian army and their activities in Budapest; his aunt sending him to the Red Cross then a Zionist orphanage in Sagat; returning to Budapest to work in a factory; attending law school but leaving when the revolution began; going to Austria and then the United States with the help of the Red Cross; living with an uncle in the US; becoming an accountant, attending Queensborough Community College and then Bernard Baruch College; working for ABC Transnational Transport; getting married to an Austrian Holocaust survivor; the effects of his Holocaust experience; losing his faith when he lost his parents; visiting Europe; antisemitism in Hungary; wanting to go to Israel; possessing a letter from his mother, which she wrote while she was in Bergen-Belsen, and a picture of his parents (which is in the USHMM Photo Archive); and his other family pictures.

    Oral history interview with Tibor Borsos

    Oral History

    Tibor Borsos, born on March 12, 1927 in Budapest, Hungary, describes his highly intellectual Catholic family; his family moving to Debrecen in 1936; having many Jewish friends; how he “looked Jewish” and was sometimes made fun of; his family’s possession of an American flag, National Geographic magazines, and a censored version of Time magazine; his family burning the American flag March 21, 1944 to be safe; his family storing carpets, silver, and jewelry for Jewish friends and hiding them in the university library; his mother being denounced, arrested, and released; his family leaving Debrecen in May 1944; witnessing Jews being rounded up; going to Budapest and living next door to a Swedish protected house; the closing of schools in the fall of 1944; his family going in December 1944 to Halle an der Saale, Germany, where his father taught in a medical school; being drafted into the Hungarian Army in March 1945 and riding on a train for two months to avoid finding his unit; finding his brother on May 8, 1945 in Mitterald; being rounded up by Patton’s troops and sent to Ludwigshafen, Germany; being sent to a POW camp in Heilbronn; going to Gottingen in the British Occupation Zone; sailing to the United States in December 1949 on the USS Harry Taylor; earning a Ph.D. in chemistry at Johns Hopkins; researching cancer at NIH; marrying a survivor of Bergen-Belsen; and his feelings about not being officially Jewish.

    Oral history interview with Robert Kertesz

    Oral History

    Robert Kertesz, born in 1933, discusses his childhood in Budapest, Hungary; antisemitism in Budapest; his family; his religious upbringing; being stuck in Hungary due to travel restrictions; his father being conscripted into the Hungarian Army; the Hungarian Nazis and Arrow Cross Party members in his neighborhood; the increasing antisemitism and abuse; how the ghetto grew in 1943; finding safe houses for children; escaping from the ghetto after his parent’s deportation; hiding in his Christian aunt’s home; returning to Budapest to escape violence; returning to the ghetto; living conditions in the ghetto; liberation by the Soviets; looting by the Soviet Army in the city; working as a guide and interpreter for Russians; his parents’ return; living in a displaced persons camp; immigrating to the United States in 1948; and his life in the U.S.

    Oral history interview with Fred Kahn

    Oral History

    Fred Kahn, born December 19, 1932 in Wiesbaden, Germany, describes being raised until he was six years old by an aunt (Rosa Nassauer) in Wehen, Germany; his older brother, Walter; his Christian friend, Walter Kaltwasser, who protected him from young Nazis; being raised religious by his aunt and uncle; his grandfather dying in 1938; being sent after the Munich Agreement to Aachen, Germany, where he crossed the border and joined his parents and brother in Verviers, Belgium; his father’s successful career as playing bridge; his aunt and uncle being sent to Łódź, Poland; starting school in Belgium; his parents and life in Verviers; going to Liege and Brussels in May 1940 with his family; returning to Verviers; Jews having to register; the small right-wing party, Rexiste, which collaborated with the Nazis; his father being interrogated; getting false identities with the last name Jejeune; being taught Catholic prayers; getting scarlet fever in the spring of 1942; leaving his school after getting in a fight; his principal helping him; going into hiding and the various ways he entertained himself; moving from village to village in 1943; getting a job in 1944, carrying milk; being liberated in September 1944 by the American Army; life when he was in hiding; his mother’s accused of being a German spy and arrested; the Battle of the Bulge; events he heard about involving the underground; factors that helped him survive; developing a sense of humor; and considering Verviers his hometown.

    Oral history interview with Susan Warsinger

    Oral History

    Susan Warsinger (née Hilsinrath), born in 1929, discusses her family and childhood in Bad Kreuznach, Germany; her memories of Kristallnacht; escaping to Paris, France; being homeless; fleeing to Versailles when the Germans invaded; going to Château des Morelles, a home for homeless children; her schooling; getting tickets to the United States from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society; immigrating to the U.S. in 1941; her life in the U.S.; her feelings about returning home to Europe; and her life since the war.

    Oral history interview with Arnold Weiss

    Oral History

    Hans Arnold Wangesheim, born in Nuremberg, Germany on July 25, 1924, describes his parents divorcing in 1930; his mother placing him in a very strict Jewish orphanage in Furth; his encounters with Hitler youth; getting passage on a Kindertransport with help of Quakers in 1938; going to Chicago, IL then Milwaukee, WI; running away from a Jewish orphanage and being placed with a family in Janesville, WI; attending a watchmaker’s college; enlisting in 1942 in the Army Air Corps and being a B-17 tail gunner; his training plane crashing in Utah in 1943 and being severely injured; going to OSS (Office of Strategic Services) in Washington in 1944; going in late 1944 to Paris, France then Germany; crossing the Rhine with the 4th Division behind German lines picking up mail from agents; seeing Nuremberg bombed; going back to Furth; going in April 1945 to Dachau to get important political prisoners, including the former French Prime Minister Leon Blum; locating the prisoners in Innsbruck, Austria; his counterintelligence work for de-Nazification and working with Hugh Trevor-Roper to hunt down Wilhelm Zander; being assigned to trace enemy assets including Nazi treasures and Reichsbank gold; his work interrogating Germans, doing anti-Soviet intelligence, and being sent to Czechoslovakia as a contact for Hungarian agents; returning to the US, attending school, and working for the US Treasury; and working for a law firm.

    Oral history interview with Sia Hertsberg

    Oral History

    Sia Hertsberg (née Izrailewitsch), born June 8, 1927 in Riga, Latvia, describes her early family life and schooling; the Jewish community and the state of antisemitism in pre-war Riga; the 1940 Russian invasion; her family’s persecution at the hands of the Russian communists; the 1941 Nazi occupation and implementation of Nazi race laws; the burning of Riga’s synagogues; the help her family received from non-Jewish friends; the establishment and the later liquidation of the Riga ghetto; how a Latvian soldier attempted to rape her; avoiding the Rumbula massacre; working as a seamstress in a Reichskommissariat workshop; her family’s transport to the Kaiserwald concentration camp; how her father saved her sister several times by hiding her amidst the trash or in a pot of soup when the Nazis were looking for young children; the Nazis’ theft of her childhood; the normalcy of discussing death; her family’s transport via ship and cattle car to Stutthof; the typhus epidemic and her work carrying the dead to the crematorium; her mother’s death; her and her sister’s escape from a death march; seeking shelter and being turned away by Polish peasants; liberation by Russian soldiers on March 23, 1945; hospitalization and her sister’s death; her deep depression at losing her family; her hospitalization in Kolomna, Russia; her return to Riga and reunion with her father; falling in love with her future husband; their attempts to illegally immigrate to the United States and her father’s subsequent imprisonment by the Russians; the birth of her two sons; finishing her schooling; her husband’s death; her move to Chicago, Illinois and her post-war life in the United States; and her father’s death on the same day as her sister, thirty years later.

    Oral history interview with Chava Frajhof

    Oral History

    Chava Frajhof (née Geister), born September 20, 1923 in Belzyce, Poland, discusses her family; the German invasion of Poland in 1939; hiding from the Germans; paying the Judenrat to be assigned work in Będzin, Poland; working as a seamstress; being sent to Kraśnik, Poland in 1943; being liberated by the Soviets; fleeing to Lublin, Poland; having a family; going to Frankfurt, Germany then Berlin, Germany; and immigrating to Brazil in 1953 to join her family.

    Oral history interview with Israel Frajhof

    Oral History

    Israel Frajhof, born March 3, 1920 in Krasnik (near Lublin), Poland, describes experiencing violent antisemitism in 1933; the establishment of a ghetto in the fall of 1942; the typhus epidemic and conditions in the ghetto; working outside the ghetto; the deportation of old men, women and children deported to Majdanek and Treblinka in December 1942; trying to become a policeman but being declined permission; doing carpentry work for Germans making furniture; appels, beatings, and sleeping in the synagogue; meeting his future wife Chava Geister, who was in Krasnik camp; the Russians’ arrival in Lublin on July 22,1944; the death march to Germany and escaping into the forest for 10 days; meeting up with Chava and going to Krasnik; going to Lublin; getting married in January 1946; going to Berlin , Germany and being helped by the UNRRA; going to Frankfurt, Germany; going to Brazil in 1953; visiting Majdanek in 1986; and living for his wife and children.

    Oral history interview with Edward Novakoff

    Oral History

    Edward Novakoff, born in 1926 in Boston, Massachusetts, discusses his Ukrainian and Lithuanian immigrant parents; enlisting in the U.S. Army in December 1943; being shipped to Marseilles, France with the 90th Infantry Division; seeing his company wiped out in November 1944; fighting in southern Germany in January 1945; arriving at Flossenbürg in May 1945 and seeing the conditions and the survivors; his transfer to the 26th Regiment, 1st Infantry in August 1945; guarding prisoners for the Nuremburg Trials; having contact with Nuremburg prisoners; returning to the U.S. in December 1945; his life after the war; and helping to create the largest Jewish cemetery in the Boston area.

    Oral history interview with Celia Feldschuh

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Nicole Yancey

    Oral History

    Nicole Yancey (née Guggenheim), born July 26, 1941 in Saint-Amand-Mont-Rond, France, describes having one sister, Nanette, born November 1938; being separated from her family when she was two years old and sent to a farm to live in a safe and secure environment; still today calling the farmer and his wife her real grandparents; members of the French Resistance coming in for meals because the farm was close to the demarcation line and there was lots of Resistance activity; her daily routine of working, hiding, and eating; how her relationships were all very harmonious; being moved back to Orléans, France when she was five years old and starting school; the severe personality changes of her parents because of their experiences during the Holocaust; the torment her father experienced because he was not able to save his brothers from being murdered; being sponsored by a French/American agency to attend William and Mary College, where she met her husband; remaining in the Tidewater, VA area; converting to Catholicism because her husband is Catholic as are her children; her position now as Consul for the French Embassy in Norfolk, VA; and her assertion that tragedies like the Holocaust will continue as long as people do not learn to accept each other and their differences.

    Oral history interview with Jaffa Munk

    Oral History

    Jaffa Munk (née Noemi Donath), born April 10, 1931 IN Ónod, Hungary, describes her father Philippe, who was a Rabbi, and her mother Olga Shick Donath; having one brother, Joseph, and one sister, Esther Judith; living a very normal life with a family that was religious yet open-minded and encouraged academics; the many changes that began in 1942 and 1943; being moved in May 1944 to the ghetto, where her father was put in charge; being sent to Auschwitz; the brutal arrival and her father’s last words to her: “Wherever you go, continue to believe in God;” being marched to Birkenau, which was the very last time she saw her mother; being selected by Mengele in September 1944 to go to Bergen-Belsen and the grim living situation there; the forced evacuation in January 1945 and a subsequent six week death march; escaping to a forest and being liberated May 8, 1945 by Russian soldiers; eventually returning to Budapest, Hungary, where she lived at an Orthodox refugee orphanage facility, which was started by Esther Eckstein with education as the primary goal; going with a Zionist group with 1800 refugees to Palestine on a boat leaving from Bucharest, Romania and the refusal of the British to allow them entry, but finally being allowed to land at Haifa, Palestine; the break-out of war in 1947 and the desperate living conditions during the war; being taken to Tel Aviv, Israel, where there was less danger and where she attended teacher’s seminary; meeting her husband, who was in the Army; the birth of her first son, Gabriel, which was the highlight of her life because it meant continuation of her family; her teaching positions, starting with 1st grade, where students came from 30 different countries; and how her personal strengths are her sense of hope and having a positive outlook.

    Oral history interview with Frances Hirshfeld

    Oral History

    Frances Hirshfeld (née Frieda Miriam Rosenbloom), born in 1918, discusses her family and childhood in Opatów, Poland; moving to Zawiercie, Poland and its local Jewish population; the beginning of the war; her religious life; antisemitism; Kristallnacht; going into hiding in Ukraine and returning to Poland; the Judenrat; adjusting to anti-Jewish laws; moving into the ghetto; living conditions in the ghetto; being deported to Auschwitz in 1943; living conditions in Auschwitz; being moved to Birkenau; contracting typhoid fever and scabies; lack of medical care; bombings near the camp; returning to Auschwitz; hearing about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; working in a munitions factory; being on a death march to Ravensbrück; escaping into a forest; liberation by the Soviets; immigrating to the United States in October 1946; her husband immigrating to the U.S. in 1949; visiting Poland; her feelings about Holocaust deniers; and her life after the war.

    Oral history interview with Moris Gluckman

    Oral History

    Moris Glukman, born in Suceava, Romania in 1924, discusses his childhood; the rise in antisemitism; deportation announcements; his arrival in Bessarabia (in Moldova and Ukraine) with his family and how the peasants took the belongings of the Romanian Jews; travel to Moravia, Czech Republic; living at the mercy of the Romanian Gendarmerie; the spread of typhus and diphtheria during the winter of 1941-1942; how the Ukranian police guarded the village in Moravia; the German entrance into Moravia; building bridges and excavating coal from open mines; his knowledge about events in Bessarabia and Russian positions and the approaching front; working in a Kolkhoz; being liberated by the Russians; his schooling in Bucharest, Romania; and immigration to the United States in 1983.

    Oral history interview with Margie Rosenthal

    Oral History

    Margie Rosenthal (née Margit Mary Miedzwinski), born July 19, 1927 in Gleiwitz, Germany (Gliwice, Poland), describes her prewar childhood; her family’s immigration to the Philippines after the Nazi invasion so that her father could continue in the lumber business; her pleasant life in the Philippines until the Japanese bombing in December 1941 and subsequent invasion; severe changes in their lives in Pasay City as Americans began bombing nearby Manila; the delay in her family’s move to the United States in 1948 as a result of immigration quotas; her life in San Francisco; and her marriage to her husband, Ernie.

    Oral history interview with Emma Mogilensky

    Oral History

    Emma Mogilensky (née Hubert), born May 22, 1923 in Kronheim, Bavaria, describes living in the house that had been built by her great-grandfather; having one brother and one sister; living in a friendly and peaceful community until Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938 when antisemitism became so violent that she was sent to Nuremberg, Germany; enrolling in a very strict, all Jewish high school; moving to Augsberg, Germany after her father was released from Dachau; the children’s transport, going to Munich, Germany and being transferred to a boat; finally arriving in London, England, where she and the other children were chosen for English homes such that not one of them would become a public charge; being sent to live with a couple, both physicians, who were extremely helpful; attending school again where English Literature became her best subject; being a Fire Watcher at St. Paul’s Cathedral and joining the British Army when she was 17; antisemitism in the Army; being a cook for 2,000 men; receiving her GED; subsequently attending college on the GI Bill; a trip to Israel with her children after her husband’s death; finding that the cemetery where her grandparents were buried was not desecrated and finding their graves; visiting her foster parents in England every year; and her serious commitment to speaking about the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Isaiah Henig

    Oral History

    Isaiah Henig (né Yeshiah Henig), born in 1915, discusses his childhood in Szydlowiec, Poland; his family and the Jewish community; his religious upbringing; the absence of antisemitism before the war; changing anti-Jewish attitudes after the German occupation; the outbreak of the war and changes in daily life; being conscripted for forced labor; the creation of the ghetto; living conditions in the ghetto; working as a laborer in Starachowice, Poland; diseases in the camp; working to build replacement parts for machines; not believing reports about Jewish deaths; being deported to Birkenau in the summer of 1944; working in a factory; being moved to other concentration camps, including Mauthausen and Hannover; Allied bombing of the area; being deported to Bergen-Belsen; living conditions in the camp; his job building cannons; liberation by the British; moving to a displaced persons camp; immigrating to the United States in 1951; his life after the war; and his feelings about what happened.

    Oral history interview with Ida Henig

    Oral History

    Ida Henig (née Markowicz), born in 1924, discusses her family and childhood in Lódź, Poland; Łódź’s Jewish community and economy; not experiencing antisemitism before the war; changing anti-Jewish attitudes when the Germans invaded; fleeing to Częstochowa, Poland; working in the ghetto; not believing stories of mass murder; the Jewish police; liberation by the Soviets in January 1945; going to Germany; coming to the United States in the 1950s; the fates of her family members; and her feelings about the Holocaust and war.

    Oral history interview with Marcel Drimer

    Oral History

    Marcel Drimer (b. Marceli Drimmer), born in 1934, discusses his childhood in Drohobych, Poland (present day Ukraine); his family; his religious upbringing; life before the war; the Russian occupation; the German invasion in 1941; the looting of Jewish property; the deportations in 1942; moving into the ghetto; the fates of his family members; Ukrainian and German police; the Judenrat; hiding in an attic for a week; escape plans being postponed due to the death of his father; how his female relatives were saved by a woman who was recognized as a righteous gentile; their living conditions while in hiding; liberation by the Soviets; adjusting to life after the war; his education; difficult living conditions in Poland; post-war anti-Semitism; immigrating to the United States in 1961; his family going to Israel; and his feelings about the war, Poland, and anti-Semitism.

    Oral history interview with Michael Silberstein

    Oral History

    Michael Silberstein (né Mieczyslaw Silberstein), born in 1930 in Grudziadz, Poland, discusses his family; life before the war; the arrival of the German Army when he was nine years old; moving to Łódź, Poland; the establishment of the Łódź ghetto; being an errand boy and getting arrested in 1942; escaping arrest; living conditions in the ghetto; being deported to Birkenau in the summer of 1944; being sent on a death march in January 1945; arriving in Mauthausen; conditions and life in Mauthausen; liberation by the Americans; reuniting with his family; meeting family in England; immigrating to the United States in1952; being drafted into the U.S. Army; and his life after the war.

    Oral history interview with Joan Schwab

    Oral History

    Joan Schwab (née Nussbaum), born on March 24, 1926, describes living in the Tiergarten area of Berlin, Germany; her memories of Kristallnacht and how two men came for her father; being placed on a Children’s Transport to England on May 21, 1939; staying with Norman and Elsie Denham and going to secondary school and Hebrew school; her brother joining her in August 1939; evacuating in September to Chichester; conditions in the home, where she shared a bed with four girls and showered every two weeks; graduating from high school in 1944 and going back to Denhams in London; sleeping in an air raid shelter when V2 rockets attacked; going after the war to the Joint Distribution Committee in Munich, Germany and finding out that her parents perished in Auschwitz and her grandfather died in Theresienstadt; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Erwin Deutscher

    Oral History

    Erwin Deutscher, born on January 28, 1923 in Vienna, Austria, describes being raised with thorough religious training; being in the Zionist Youth group, HaShomer HaDati; how his maternal grandfather had gone to the United States in 1898 to Oklahoma City, OK; his Bar Mitzvah in 1936; hearing about Hitler’s arrival on March 11, 1938; his father’s dairy business closing; his mother being arrested; getting notice that his youth group was going to go to Palestine and meeting Eichmann at the emigration office with his father; conditions getting worse in Vienna; traveling with 25 others by train to Trieste and by boat to Haifa and arriving October 24, 1938; going to Mikveh Israel agricultural school for two years then to Bnai Akiva yeshiva for another two years; working for Haganah and meeting his wife; fighting in the Israeli War of Independence; his father being taken to Dachau after Kristallnacht and then to Buchenwald from June 1939 to January 1940; his parents immigrating to the United States; his life after the war working for a life insurance company; and getting a Ph. D. in Hebrew letters at Hebrew Union College.

    Oral history interview with George Pick

    Oral History

    George Pick, born in Budapest, Hungary on March 28, 1934, describes his very large extended family; his father losing his job in May 1939 and being sent on labor brigade in September 1940 for three months; seeing German tanks in the streets on March 9, 1944 and the subsequent anti-Jewish laws after including wearing the yellow star and not being allowed to attend school after April; his father having to leave again; being ordered to move to special Jewish houses in the summer of 1944; the air raids in Budapest and the massive bombings on July 2, 1944; his father’s return; he and his mother joining his father in hiding in a uniform factory building in November 1944; the factory being raided December 2, 1944 and bribing their way out; being taken to a Red Cross building and running away; going to the ghetto on December 14, 1944 and his father being in the ghetto police; the siege of Budapest; Wallenberg saving Jews from a massacre in January 1945; liberation; starting school; his Bar Mitzvah in 1947; attending university; going to Austria and then the United States, where his uncle lived; working for the Navy as mechanical engineer and retiring in 1996; his three marriages and not having children; and his commitment to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Oral history interview with Hedi Pope

    Oral History

    Hedi Pope (née Politzer), born March 18, 1920 in Vienna, Austria, describes her prosperous family, which was neither religious nor political; wanting to be a dancer as a child; the increase in anti-Semitism in Vienna; her memories, day-by-day, of Hitler’s invasion of Austria in March 1938; rising fears to speak out about Hitler’s actions; her memories of Kristallnacht; her father being sent to Dachau; the difficulty of getting all the documents to go to the United States; immigrating to the U.S. in January 1939; living in Newark, NJ; joining the Refugee Artist’s Group as a dancer; going to Miami University in Ohio and graduating in 1942; having two children; maintaining a dance studio in Alexandria, VA until 1980; and working with the volunteer corps at USHMM.

    Oral history interview with Bella Simon Pasternak

    Oral History

    Bella Simon Pasternak, born in 1928, discusses her liberation from Auschwitz by Russians; walking home to Hungary during the winter; being hospitalized with frostbite and starvation; living in a displaced persons camp in Innsbruck, Austria; immigrating to the United States in 1946; her first impressions of the U.S.; Americans’ disbelief at her experiences; meeting her husband, who was also a survivor; her religious views becoming more orthodox; desiring to immigrate to Israel; coping with the Holocaust many years after it occurred and still experiencing nightmares; and how important her grandchildren are to her.

    Oral history interview with Marion Friedman

    Oral History

    Marion Friedman (b. Traute Marion Julia Georgia Sulimas), born in 1922, discusses her childhood in Hamburg, Germany; being raised with her Christian mother and Jewish father; her parents’ upbringings; celebrating both Christian and Jewish holidays; her brothers’ immigrations to China and the United States; the Aryanization of her father’s bank; her mother’s resourcefulness; receiving a visa along with her mother to go to the U.S.; being sent to the U.S. on her own because her mother decided to stay with her father; learning of her parents’ arrest and deaths; adjusting to life in the U.S.; meeting her husband; returning to Germany long after the war; meeting her German family; and dealing with her losses on a daily basis.

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Strassburger

    Oral History

    Elizabeth Strassburger, born in 1938, discusses her childhood in a small town near Zakopane, Poland; her father’s arrest and imprisonment in Siberia; being forced into the Tarnow ghetto with her mother and grandmother; watching her grandmother being taken by the Germans; hiding under an assumed Christian identity; being drugged and hidden in a basement during dangerous times; the family who hid her and her mother; believing she was a Catholic; her Catholic schooling; liberation by the Russians; learning she was Jewish after the war; being smuggled out of Poland with her mother; living at a Jewish orphanage with her mother in Germany; learning her father was alive; moving to Italy to be with her father; immigrating to England with her family; immigrating to the United States; adjusting to life as a teenager in the U.S.; her marriage; studying social work in college; her volunteer work; and her family.

    Oral history interview with Jadwiga Dziekonski

    Oral History

    Jadwiga Dziekonski, born in 1919, discusses her family’s emigration from Kiev, Ukraine to Warsaw, Poland in 1921 because of the revolution; her Catholic upbringing; attending public school; following the political situation in Germany; meeting her husband; the German invasion and occupation; her father’s exile in London, England as a member of the Bank of Poland; moving to Warsaw with her husband; her husband’s role in the Home Army; her daughter’s birth in 1943; sheltering two Jewish women in her mother’s apartment; the Polish underground’s participation in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; the Warsaw Uprising; her husband’s arrest and imprisonment in Bergen-Belsen and Gross-Rosen; liberation; readjusting to life after the war; escaping to London through Sweden in 1947; leaving her mother behind; reuniting with her father; immigrating to Detroit in 1951; visiting Poland in 1988 to see her husband’s family; her feelings about being Polish; how she feels about Jewish people and German people; and her two visits to Israel.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Harvey

    Oral History

    Ruth Harvey, born in 1928, describes growing up with mixed Jewish and Christian heritage; her childhood in Berlin, Germany; being expelled from public school in 1938; attending a private Jewish school; witnessing the burning of Berlin’s temple during Kristallnacht; hearing Hitler’s speeches over loudspeakers; leaving Germany in 1939 with her mother to meet her father in Cuba; immigrating to New York in 1940 with her parents; growing up in New York City; moving to Washington, DC for a job with the State Department; getting married and having children; having a sense of confusion about her religious identity; why she chose not to visit any concentration camps; and volunteering at the USHMM.

    Oral history interview with Thomas B. Gardiner

    Oral History

    Thomas Brown Gardiner, born on March 26, 1920 in St. Louis County, Missouri, describes being raised by his widowed mother; life during the Depression; working for a house painter as a teen in St. Louis; getting married in 1940; working for a manufacturer that made small parts for the M1 rifle; being drafted in 1944; training at Camp Robinson in Arkansas; being sent to England in the fall of 1944; going to France; being assigned to the 45th Infantry Division; seeing action in the Vosges Mountains and Alsace-Lorraine; participating in the capture of Schaffenburg; going through Nuremberg and Munich; liberating Dachau as a member of L Company in the 157th Infantry Regiment; guarding the camp while waiting for the military police to arrive; billeting in apartment buildings outside of the camp, where the Nazi officers had lived; typhus in the camp and the high death rate of the survivors; speaking with the survivors and being shown the camp by them; going to Munich then Augsburg for a month; being sent to Le Havre, France; returning to the US; working in military camps in Texas until his release; the effect seeing Dachau had on him; and how he feels stronger in his Christian faith.

    Oral history interview with Roberta Jones

    Oral History

    Roberta Jones, born October 15, 1921 in St. Louis, Missouri, discusses growing up during the Great Depression; enlisting as a nurse in the United States Army; being commissioned as a second lieutenant with the 3rd Army and assigned to the 121st Semi-Mobile Evacuation Hospital; traveling by ship to England and helping in a hospital there; traveling to Luxembourg and then into Germany under dangerous conditions; going to Buchenwald; seeing a crematorium, stacked bodies, and starved prisoners still in uniforms; being offered bread by the prisoners; seeing a lampshade made of human skin in the office of a Nazi official; visiting a smaller liberated concentration camp and watching as American soldiers distributed clothing to naked prisoners; traveling with her hospital to a concentration camp near Linz, Austria (possibly Mauthausen); female nurses being kept outside of the camp fence as men worked inside the camp; meeting newly-liberated English prisoners of war who had been captured at the Battle of Dunkirk; returning to the United States and working at McCormack General Hospital in Pasadena, California; the difficulties of severely disfigured patients integrating into the community in Pasadena; marrying her husband; working at Camp Swift in Texas and Camp Polk in Louisiana, and, during the Korean War, in a military hospital in Michigan; encountering Holocaust deniers; and her insistence that her children know everything about her experience so that they can continue to spread the truth about the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Christine Cohen

    Oral History

    Christine Cohen, born April 27, 1940 in the Warsaw ghetto, describes living in the ghetto until 1942 when they escaped; using forged papers showing that they were Christian; having one brother, born in 1948; being sent alone to live with a farm family; being helped and protected by an aristocratic woman, who had befriended an old German officer while she worked for the underground resistance; living with a series of families and caretakers; living in Walbrzych, Poland; not knowing she was Jewish until she was 10 years old and not admitting to it until she moved to Israel (seven years later) in 1957; visiting Germany and Poland after the war and going to Auschwitz, all of which was very difficult; wanting to stay in Israel but because of her parents, moving to the United States; the bitterness she still feels about having her entire extended family taken from her; the recurring nightmares and physical ailments that are all tension-related; and her current life in San Antonio, TX, where there are only a few survivors of her mother’s generation.

    Oral history interview with Hugh Jenkins

    Oral History

    Hugh Jenkins, born December 29, 1914 in Lester, England, describes being the youngest of eight siblings, whose father was a Welsh minister; working before World War II with Quakers and being a conscientious objector even before the war; moving to London, England in 1944 to take part in training at a Quaker institute; being sent to Antwerp, Belgium after the training to do relief work; going to Belsen, Germany on April 22, 1944, soon after the camp had been discovered and the horrific scene; the various response processes at the camp; setting up a hospital, known as the “new camp,” maintaining a first aid station, and finding food; eventually being sent to Poland to be in charge of another camp; how even now he has a sense of desolation in how war is used to settle problems; working as the overseas secretary for the British Friends Relief Service until 1948, when he went to Philadelphia, PA to work with the American Friends Service Committee; and being sent to Washington, DC to be the director of the Foreign Student Service Center.

    Oral history interview with Rene Edgar Tressler

    Oral History

    Rene Edgar Tressler, born April 16, 1927 in Strakonice, Czech Republic, describes his childhood in Strakonice; his parents and brother; escaping to Prague, Czech Republic to live with his grandparents; his brother’s selection to be on the Board of Elders at Theresienstadt; how Theresienstadt was used as a showcase for the Red Cross; his deportation to Auschwitz; his camp number; being moved to Birkenau; his movement to Blechhammer camp; his experiences on a death march in February 1945; his arrival at Buchenwald; reuniting with his parents and brother after the liberation; escaping Czechoslovakia in 1956; immigrating to the United States; and authoring several books.

    Oral history interview with Stefan Wohl

    Oral History

    Stefan Wohl, born February 4, 1934 in Vienna, Austria, discusses the Anschluss in 1938; leaving Vienna through Switzerland to Kraków, Poland; traveling with 14 family members in September 1939 to Jaroslav, Zloczow, and Kolomyja; being captured with his father in November 1939 while trying to cross the border; being released and going to Zloczow; being on a transport for six weeks with his mother, sister, and other relatives in July 1940; arriving in the Yakutsk, Siberia labor camp settlement; leaving in May 1941 by train through Moscow to Lvov where they were reunited with their father; the German invasion on June 22, 1941; going with his sister to a farm in Jaroslav; going to Budapest, Hungary via Monkacs, Hungary (Mukacheve, Ukraine) in the fall 1942; changing their name to Wolinski and pretending to be Catholic; going to Leanyfalu in 1943 and staying for a year; the family going to Seged (Szeged), Hungary; being captured and jailed; being released and staying with an uncle in Budapest; his father’s illness; being liberated by Russians in January 1945; going back to Poland in the spring 1945; going to Sweden in the summer 1946; sailing to Brazil in October 1946; attending school and a university in the United States; and being a film producer in Brazil.

    Oral history interview with Yehuda Adam

    Oral History

    Yehuda Adam (né George Strn), born on July 3, 1929 in Budapest, Hungary, discusses being raised in a reform Jewish household; being put into forced labor in Budapest; receiving a Schutzpasse and his family working for Raoul Wallenberg; being liberated by the Soviets in January 15, 1945; going to Palestine in 1949; going to the United States in 1962; and living in both Israel and the US.

    Oral history interview with Arlette de Long

    Oral History

    Arlette de Long, born June 15, 1937 in Brocourt, Somme, France; describes her parents’ medical practice; her early love of the church and uncertainly whether her family was Jewish; villagers’ willingness to maintain friendship with the family because her father was the only physician in the village; having no memory of life before the war; the liberation of France; moving to a suburb of Paris, where she attended Protestant churches rather than synagogue; father’s unwillingness to discuss the Holocaust; her own reluctance to discuss the Holocaust until her sixteen year old daughter insisted that she talk about it; moving to the United States; her work as a psychotherapist for underprivileged children; and her feeling that her story is one of hope, compassion, and gratitude.

    Oral history interview with Eva Adam

    Oral History

    Eva Adam, born September 3, 1932 in Budapest, Hungary, describes her Orthodox Jewish family; her family’s awareness of what was happening to European Jews; their reluctance to leave Hungary; her father and brother’s membership in the Jewish Legion; serving as adjunct personnel to the Hungarian Army; changes in their lives in the late 1930s and early 1940s; her family’s unawareness of concentration camps before 1944; the Arrow Cross Party taking over the Hungarian police; deteriorating conditions for Jews; the murder of Jews at the Danube River; conditions in the ghetto; her post-liberation search for family members; finding that only three of her thirty-six family members survived Auschwitz; leaving Budapest in 1949; living in Israel and then the United States in 1961; her plans to return to Israel in the future; her pride in being a Jew and a Hungarian; the value in caring about others; and her strong work ethic as an explanation of why she was able to survive.

    Oral history interview with Herbert Bitter

    Oral History

    Herbert Jerome Bitter, born August 4, 1919 in New York City, discusses his parents who were Romanian immigrants; growing up in a Jewish neighborhood in Manhattan; becoming more religious during his service in the United Sates Army from 1943 to 1945; his experiences at Ohrdruf in 1945 soon after the Germans evacuated the camp; seeing three U.S. generals, Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton, at the camp on April 5, 1945; the generals’ return visit on April 12, 1945 with photographers; how the freed inmates at Ohrdruf were eager to tell their stories to the American liberators; the effect of witnessing the horrors of the Holocaust had on his Jewish identity; and his reluctance to talk about his experiences during the war, especially to children.

    Oral history interview with Rachel Goldfarb

    Oral History

    Rachel Goldfarb, born December 2, 1930 in Poland (now Dokshytsy, Belarus), discusses her life following her liberation by the Russians and her time living in the forests near Bialystok, Poland with her mother; working and living on Russian trains; traveling to Prussia to find shelter provided by various Jewish organizations and the Red Cross; traveling to Italy’s southern coast; attempting to board a ship to Palestine but being blockaded by British authorities; eventually getting to New York City in November 1947 after two and a half years in Italy; visiting Washington, DC after graduation from high school; taking a job with the District Court; attending George Washington University at night; meeting her husband, also a Holocaust survivor, and marrying in 1952; raising two children, both of whom are architects; finally visiting Israel; her good life in the United States; and her advice about valuing what you have in life.

    Oral history interview with Tania Rozmaryn

    Oral History

    Tania Rozmaryn, born on June 16, 1928 in Vilnius, Poland (present day Lithuania), discusses her family as strong Zionists; the changes that took place after the German occupation; family’s escape towards the eastern Russian border; working in the house of an SS officer and being offered guidance on survival; frightening years in the Kovno ghetto; going into hiding until 1944 when the ghetto was liquidated; her deportation with her mother to Stutthof; her mother’s struggles and strategies, trying to make her look less like a child so that she would be chosen for work; being sent to various work camps until March 1945 when they were liberated by the Russians and taken to Central Poland to a displaced persons camp; being sent to Germany with false documents to a kibbutz in Munich; going to the American Zone and teaching at a school in Bergen-Belsen in 1947; getting married in 1949; immigrating to the United States in 1950; graduating summa cum laude from the Teacher’s Institute and receiving an M.A. from Queens College in 1960; moving to Maryland in 1990 where she received an M.S. in Marriage and Family Counseling; nightmares about her Holocaust experiences; and her feelings about her Jewish faith.

    Oral history interview with Frank Ephraim

    Oral History

    Franz Gunter Ephraim, born February 19, 1931 in the Schöneberg district of Berlin, Germany, describes his family and being raised Jewish but not Orthodox; living an integrated life in the community until 1937 and his participation in the 1936 Olympics events; how Kristallnacht was the impetus for his family immigrating to the Philippines; attending a Hebrew school in Manila before the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Japanese invasion of the Philippines; the politics in Manila; experiencing an open Jewish life; their favorite playing areas, holidays, their several living spaces, and the daily routine in Manila; the attack on Pearl Harbor and his memories of the alarms, airplanes, gas masks, and lack of school for about a year; how after the US declared war there were more air raids and an exodus from the Philippines began; how the US was closed to Jews who still had family in Germany and Europe and his family could not go to the US; the Japanese invasion of the Philippines; the many wartime restrictions, including food shortages, looting, changes in currency, and a new governmental organization; how 1944 was the year when things were really deteriorated and the people were starving; the daily air raids from B24 bombers; the Japanese systematically burning down the city of Manila; how February 1945 brought total chaos and there was no food for several weeks; the liberation of Manila by US forces; leaving the Philippines on November 19, 1946; arriving in San Francisco, CA where relatives were waiting for them, along with HIAF; the closeness of the Manila Jewish community in San Francisco; attending UC Berkeley until the Korean War when he was drafted into the Army and sent to Europe as an interpreter; becoming a US citizen in 1952; his philosophy that the importance of Jews as a nation is far more important than Jews as a religion and that self-reliance is the most important quality to have; graduating from UC Berkeley in 1957; and working for a naval architect specializing in submarines, United Airlines, and the Maritime Administration in Washington, DC.

    Oral history interview with Peter Phillips

    Oral History

    Ernst Pieter Philipps, born December 5, 1931 in Essen, Germany, describes his twin brothers, who were three years younger; moving to Prague, Czech Republic in 1936 because of his father’s position with his company; life in Prague, which was normal until the Germans occupied Prague beginning April 1939; moving to Genoa, Italy and spending six months there; relocating by an Italian steamer to Quito, Ecuador, where living conditions were rather primitive and where at their second address they experienced antisemitism for the first time; spending two years in Ecuador; relocating to New York City, NY, where the instances of antisemitism directed at him were violent and ugly; his parents moving back to Rotterdam by 1950 while he remained behind in the house his parents had bought in Queens; attending City College of New York for five years and in 1955 joining the US Army and being sent to Germany where, among other duties, he worked as a teacher and Boy Scout leader for American and German boys; after leaving the Army, working first for the New York Times, a newspaper in Danbury, CT, and Business Week magazine; going to Washington, DC to work for McGraw Hill for 20 years; his experiences as a volunteer at the USHMM; and how he believes his experiences as a Jew have affected his outlook.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Ichiuji

    Oral History

    Joseph Ichiuji describes his parents as having immigrated to the US in the early 1900s; his father being a truck farmer and then owning a shoe repair business; working in a fish cannery and living in Fresno, CA until Executive Order 9066, which required that all Japanese Americans be evacuated to internment camps; being sent by train and truck to Flagstaff, Arizona, where they were assigned to barracks number three of the internment camp at Poston, AZ; conditions at the camp, which was run like an army installation with strict regimentation; volunteering for the 442 Combat Team, formed in 1943 and consisting solely of Japanese American soldiers who had families living in internment camps; fighting in Italy at the front lines north of Rome; liberating Livorno, Italy; helping liberate a subcamp of Dachau; conditions of prisoners still alive at the camp; helping two Lithuanian prisoners reconnect with important people in their lives; going home in December 1945 to find his parents released from the internment camp; helping his father with his business until May 1946 when he went to Washington, DC, where he worked in government service for 37 years; and the reunion of Japanese American soldiers in Los Angeles, CA, which a few of the survivors of Dachau attended.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Horowitz

    Oral History

    Ruth Horowitz (née Salzburg), born March 23, 1930 in Hamburg, Germany, describes her Polish parents Isaac Salzberg and Rose R. Kleinert and her sister; life in Hamburg, where they lived until November 1938; leaving Hamburg two days before Kristallnacht; how Hamburg was very open to Jews until Hitler’s regime, though she experienced many instances of antisemitism; being fascinated with the 1936 Olympics; how her father’s efforts to leave Germany began in 1936 and finally succeeded when he dramatically threatened to commit suicide at the US Consul if the visas were not granted; how crossing the Atlantic was very difficult, with cold and seasickness, but they arrived and went to Detroit, MI for a short while, then to New York City, NY, and finally to Washington, DC; learning to speak English by going to lots of movies; her father’s death at age 54; her mother’s transformation from being a housewife to running her husband’s jewelry business after he died; the wartime antisemitism, the problem of quotas, the Nuremburg trials, and the State of Israel; getting married in 1950; traveling to Germany in 1995; and her views on present day Germany.

    Oral history interview with Hermann Kosak

    Oral History

    Hermann Kosak, born May 2, 1924 in Vienna, Austria, describes his younger sister, Margaret; how antisemitism was pervasive and being involved in instances of physical violence as early as kindergarten; the growth of the Nazi movement in Austria; the Anschluss in March 1938; seeing Hitler arriving in Vienna in his car; how quickly the Jews were affected by the Nazi’s changes; Kristallnacht and being arrested the next morning; trying to get out of Vienna at age 14 and finally getting to Brussels, Belgium with his mother; the Germans attack on Belgium; how enrolling in art school after the invasion was the most important thing he did; learning survival, watchfulness, and self-reliance at age 16; beginning a diary on May 9, 1940, describing daily life, and keeping the diary until three weeks before liberation; how out of 50 family members, 43 were killed in camps; finally getting visas for him and his sister in November 1947 by forcing his way into the US Embassy and leaving for the United States; arriving in New York City, NY; being a painting instructor; being drafted, released to Reserves, working for a while, and being called back for the Korean War; being married and eventually getting a job with Boeing as an illustrator; and his views on the effects of the Holocaust on humanity.

    Oral history interview with Dolly Bestandig

    Oral History

    Dolly Bestandig (née Hirsch), born July 24, 1939 in Vilna (Vilnius), Lithuania, discusses her family, which had been in Lithuania for 11 generations; her father, who was a mathematical engineer, and her mother, who was a concert pianist; how her parents were both very religious and wealthy; being sent to the Vilna ghetto, the hardship of which marked the beginning of her mother’s psychological changes; the presence of 90 members of her mother’s family in the ghetto; how at age five, after living in the Minsk ghetto, she and her mother were sent to Auschwitz, where her mother managed to save her life by hiding her in a garbage can during the day while her mother worked; being moved to Bergen-Belsen with her mother and father after four months, where she was again hidden in a garbage can every day until liberation on April 15, 1945 by English soldiers; being sent to Sweden for medical care; being hospitalized in Gothenburg and then in Stockholm, where surgery on her palate was performed; leaving Sweden in 1947 and going to New York, where an uncle met her family; going to Mexico City, where two uncles were waiting; how her mother’s psychological state was deteriorating and she died in 1958; having flashbacks to her life in the camps; going to the Margaret Sanger Institute in New York City in 1967, where she received counseling help and tuberculosis was found throughout her body; recovering and adopting two children; being the Sub-Director of Hebrew instruction at the Yeshiva in Mexico City; and her feelings about her survival.

    Oral history interview with Goldie Gendelman

    Oral History

    Goldie Gendelman, born November 17, 1933 in Lechowichi (possibly Lyakhavichy, Belarus), Poland near Baranowichi (possibly Baranovichi, Belarus), discusses her parents, Chaim and Chana Wolochiwianski; growing up in an extremely Orthodox family; being raised to speak Polish and Yiddish; her family’s attempt to immigrate to the United States; how she and her family made it to Cuba and stayed there for 11 years; living in Regla, Cuba; her struggles to communicate in Spanish; being run over by a bus in Cuba; how she and her family finally were able to immigrate to the United States in 1948; her paternal uncle in the United States who assisted with the immigration process; her experience with antisemitism in Poland and Cuba; graduating from high school in the United States; volunteering at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; and her feelings about leaving Poland, living in Cuba, and starting a new life in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Rhoda Kuflik

    Oral History

    Rhoda Kuflik (née Ruzenka Husen), born in October 1937 in Kitev, Poland (now Kuty, Ukraine), describes living in the Kuty ghetto; escaping to Romania and hiding there; being liberated by the Soviets; and immigrating to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with William Hess

    Oral History

    William Hess was born William Verna on August 8, 1921 in Stuttgart, Germany. He was an only child and lived a pleasant life there. Despite the Nuremberg laws, he was permitted to continue his schooling as his father served during World War I. Nevertheless, they lost the service of their maid. William experienced little anti-Semitism in Germany but knew that Hitler made anti-Semitic speeches and had newspaper articles written against the Jews. His father's business suffered little from the boycotting but he sold it in 1938. Anti-Semitism was more severe in the outlying towns than in Stuttgart. William studied English for two years before immigrating to Danville, Illinois with his uncle's assistance in 1937. He had difficulty adjusting to the US so had an English tutor. Additionally, he had difficulty living on his wages of $12.50 as $9 went toward room and board and he also had to cover tutoring and transportation expenses. Kristallnacht and his father's internment in Dachau influenced his parents to leave Germany in 1939 for Danville.

    Oral history interview with Jutta Levy

    Oral History

    Jutta Levy, born in 1926 in Hamburg, Germany, describes growing up in a pleasant upper middle class family in a large Jewish community; listening to Hitler’s speeches on the radio and seeing him on a school field trip; witnessing Nazi book burning; learning of the death of Hindenburg; drastic changes in Germany after 1933; living in fear as children were taken from school and acquaintances disappeared; father’s dramatic pleading for visas to leave Germany; obtaining passage on the last train from Hamburg on November 6, 1938; traveling to Paris, France and then to Cherbourg, France, from which her family sailed to New York on the Queen Mary; arriving on November 11, 1938; learning about life in concentration camps from family members who survived the Holocaust; and her return to Hamburg and visit to Bergen-Belsen as an adult.

    Oral history interview with Wolfgang Mueller

    Oral History

    Wolfgang Mueller, born in Hanover, Germany on March 10, 1919, discusses his father’s role as a leader in the Jewish community and being head of B’nai B’rith; being aware of the Nazis at an early stage and seeing posters on kiosks denouncing Jews; refusing to say “Heil Hitler” in school and being advised by the principal to leave the country; going to London, England the summer after his Bar Mitzvah (1932); attending Ewell School and going back to Germany on vacations, pretending he was English; attending Cranbrook School with funding from a relative, Max Nordhaus, in the United States; receiving an affidavit from Nordhaus and getting a visa to the US; arriving in the US July 26, 1936 and moving to New Mexico; his mother and sister emigrating; hearing about Kristallnacht; being drafted in September 1941 and being sent to Florida; being in the Signal Corps; applying to officer’s candidate school and being in a group that called themselves the fighting 614s; being made into an MP after his superiors found out he was from Germany; being stationed in Tampa, FL and Jacksonville, FL; getting his American citizenship; volunteering to go overseas; being stationed in England as a technical supply sergeant and a liaison with the RAF; working after V-E Day in the Air Technical Intelligence Office; interrogating prisoners in Czechoslovakia and Austria and engineers at Zeiss works; being in Nordhausen for an hour; translating V-2 documents; being discharged on January 11, 1947; getting married; working in the meat business, real estate, and as a wholesale fish company; being proud to be Jewish; and his dedication to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Oral history interview with Klari Rudnai

    Oral History

    Klari Rudnai (née Takacs), born May 19, 1930 in Budapest, Hungary, describes her well-to-do family that was not at all religious; her older sister; her father, who was her hero, and her strict mother; how their cook was instrumental in saving their lives by getting counterfeit papers with non-Jewish names for them and by bringing them food as they hid in a one-room apartment in 1944; moving to a nice hotel and having to go to the hotel’s underground bunkers during all the bombing for almost nine months; her father’s seven siblings, who were all sent to Auschwitz; going back to the hotel, the Vadasqur, until it too was bombed; moving to a new villa in 1946; how when she was 19 years she was picked up by Russian soldiers in a jeep and had to fight her way out of an attack by them and was saved by American soldiers who took her to the hospital for a few days; marrying an American soldier and wanting to go to the United States; finishing high school; how the solitary military life and moving a lot to odd places didn’t suit her; divorcing her husband and moving back to Washington, DC; getting married in 1960 to a Jewish doctor, who had been in many concentration camps and was instrumental in getting her interested in her Jewish religion; volunteering at the USHMM in the Archives and Volunteer Services; enjoying all parts of talking to people and the volunteers in her job; and reading a lot of books and newspapers about the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Jill Pauly

    Oral History

    Jill Pauly, born May 1, 1933 in Cologne, Germany, describes her large, very well-to-do country family; the efforts of her grandmother and uncle to get money to Holland and make arrangements for the family to get to Kenya, where they bought two cattle farms that eventually were very successful; wanting a more orthodox Jewish life after the war; moving to New York City then moving to Vineland, NJ; her family buying a chicken farm, which was destroyed by a hurricane in 1952; the death of her father when he was 66 years old; her mother being her guiding light in terms of religious practice; attending the Pierce School of Business in Philadelphia, PA; working for the Quakers and then for a synagogue; getting her real estate license at the University of Maryland; her two adopted children; retiring in December 1993 from real estate; volunteering at the USHMM in Visitors’ Services and in the Office of Survivor Relations; having very strong feelings about people having access to the Museum; and some of the artifacts that she’s donated to the Museum.

    Oral history interview with Jack Reuben

    Oral History

    Jack Ruben was born Yaakov Ruben on December 8, 1921 in Cincinnati, Ohio and after six months the family moved to LA. He was the only child to Joseph and Sarah Basha Ruben who came from Russia and were not religious. His mother was a garment worker and his father sold fruits and vegetables in a horse and cart in the local area. Due to an eye condition, Jack went to a health camp for a year. Jack's father left the family in 1927 and since lost track of him. Jack was placed in foster homes until the 11th grade and would visit his mother on the weekends. He graduated from high school and worked his way through UCLA by working part-time. In summer of '43 Jack volunteered for the Air Corps and was sent to Pomona College for nine months to study meteorology. He was not picked to be a meteorology officer so joined the infantry and was selected to be a coding clerk. He went to several camps and was shipped to Le Havre. His division had little information of the overall war and no details of concentration camps. From there he was part of the effort to form a bridge over the Moselle and next in a major assault at the Rhine River. Jack was in the Division furthest east in Germany which took many German prisoners as they quickly drove east. His company going east and meeting a surrendering German battalion who were permitted to march on their own. His company formed perimeters around villages and often stayed overnight in a civilian's home. They went through a rural area and saw dead prisoners and dead horses along the road without understanding the situation. They reached Ohrdruf Concentration Camp and saw a few emaciated prisoners leaving and many dead bodies piled up or laying on the ground. Jack did not realize it was a concentration camp at the time or that others existed until later when he returned to the US. The Army newspaper did not publish such information. From there, they went to the Czech border for 3 months which they guarded until VE Day. Then Jack was relocated to a relocation camp near Paris until Christmas '45 when he was shipped home and arrived in NY on New Year's Day '46. He was discharged and married a second time as his first wife was killed in an auto accident. Subsequently, he received a BA in economics, MA in family counseling and PhD in psychology and has practiced 10 years in the field. He has four children. Jack still does not understand how the crimes in the concentration camps could have been performed by fellow human beings.

    Oral history interview with David Bayer

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Tilda Finzi Cohen

    Oral History

    Tilda Finzi Cohen (née Mazel Tov “Tilda” Finzi) born in Split, Yugoslavia on July 11, 1933, discusses Germans passing through their city in early 1941; her father getting called into the army and returning after one month; the Italians occupying Split, closing businesses and setting a curfew; not being permitted to go to school and the formation of community Jewish schools in different locations around city; her uncle being imprisoned and bringing him food; the Italian capitulation in September 1943; her family joining other people fleeing to partisans in the mountains; going with her mother to Brac Island, to Vis Island; sailing to Bari two days before Yom Kippur; living in a camp then a private house; the Germans dropping gas bombs on ships on December 2, 1943; her family moving to a village near Bari and attending school; attending a Seder arranged by the Jewish Brigade in Bitonto, Italy in the spring of 1944; how after the war their relatives told them of the camps and atrocities and advised them not to return to Split; her family moving to Milan, Italy in 1948; her family immigrating to the United States in 1950; finishing high school and attending college; getting married; and feeling that she is not a part of any country and that she lost her childhood.

    Oral history interview with Zwi Golombek

    Oral History

    Zwi Golombek, born in Warsaw, Poland on September 15, 1934, describes his father’s large construction business; the formation of the Warsaw ghetto and his family moving into one room on Nowolipki Street; his father’s ability to exit and enter the ghetto because he possessed building permits; being aware of danger and seeing beatings; his father striking a German guard in early 1942 and being taken to a ghetto prison then Treblinka; his Uncle Mietek placing him with the Abramzuc family in Jozefow, Poland and his mother and sister disappearing from the ghetto two weeks later; staying hidden for three years and his uncle visiting often and playing the family to hide him; being called Henyek; his uncle placing him in a kibbutzim in Poland and Germany after the war; going to Israel on October 6, 1948; working in Tel Aviv and joining the Israeli army in 1952; fighting war in 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982; getting married; and his two sons.

    Oral history interview with Samuel B. Hagner

    Oral History

    Samuel Hagner, born November 1, 1925 in Philadelphia, PA, discusses his Quaker parents; becoming a Quaker member at age 14; going to a Quaker work camp; being told about antisemitic events in Europe by a Jewish friend named Doris Weil and not believing her; his brother being a conscientious objector and working in a forestry camp during war; attending Oberlin College; being inducted into the army in January 1944 as a 1-A-O; training as a medical corpsman; sailing to Europe in December 1944; joining 7th Army in Germany and moving as the front moved; being made an armed guard at a billet even though he refused to carry a gun; going by truck to help liberate Dachau; the overwhelming experiences of seeing Dachau and feeling anger towards the SS guards; staying in the camp for one week; wavering about being a conscientious objector and writing to Doris to tell her she was right; going to a German hospital with nuns; going to France and the war ending before he was deployed to the Philippines; becoming a scrub nurse during plastic surgery on war victims in Indiana; being discharged and returning to college in the fall of 1946; practicing psychiatry for adults; living with his Dachau experience but not being at peace with it; and his continued abhorrence of war.

    Oral history interview with Werner E. Michel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Guta Jacobson

    Oral History

    Guta Jacobson (née Rogowitz), born on April 23, 1925 in Łódź, Poland, discusses her early life in Łódź; relations between Jews and Christians; her activity in a Zionist organization; various holiday celebrations; the German invasion of Poland and the implementation of Nazi race laws; food shortages; the establishment of the Łódź ghetto; her family’s indecision on whether or not to flee; life in the ghetto; losing her faith in God after seeing her parents give up their children; her father’s disappearance; the typhus epidemic; hearing rumors of Chelmno and Auschwitz; hiding from the liquidation of the ghetto and their eventual deportation to Auschwitz in August of 1944; her immediate understanding of what was happening in the camp; Dr. Josef Mengele taking her mother away; being transported to a camp in Birnbäumel, Germany (now Gruszeczka, Poland), to work digging anti-tank trenches; the differing conditions of various camps; hiding in the woods during a death march; her return to a liberated Łódź; marrying her husband; her reunion with her sister who had been recuperating in Sweden after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen; immigrating to the United States; the birth of her children; the death of her husband; her avoidance of discussing her experiences with her children when they were young; her motivations for sharing her story now; and her hopes that the world will never forget.

    Oral history interview with Helen Luksenburg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with William Luksenburg

    Oral History

    William Luksenburg describes going on a death march from Regensburg, Germany to Lebenau, Germany; a German farmer picking him up from the road, where he fell; being brought by the farmer to American troops stationed in the nearby town of Laufen, where he was treated for malnutrition; his cousin coming to the same camp a few months later; returning with his cousin to Bayreuth, Germany, where there were other family members; reuniting in Prague with his future wife, Helen, whom he met in the Blechhammer work camp; getting married in 1947; receiving money and support from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency; attending a technical school organized by the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training; immigrating to the United States in September 1949 with Helen; and becoming a mechanic and starting his own business. [Note: This interview focuses on the interviewee’s post-Holocaust experiences. There is an earlier interview focusing on the interviewee’s Holocaust experience. This interview can be accessed by requesting RG-50.030*140.]

    Oral history interview with Rose Weisfeld

    Oral History

    Rose Weisfeld (née Friedman), born on March 28, 1914 in Radom, Poland, discusses her early life and schooling; social integration between Jews and Christians at home and at school; keeping Jewish customs and traditions at home; her religious education; her brothers’ conscription in the Polish army; being badly injured and hospitalized for a year; her family’s forced relocation to the Radom ghetto; her father’s death; the liquidation of the ghetto; doing factory work; being transported to Auschwitz via cattle car; the process of selections; being transported to Ravensbrück in 1944; being liberated by Swedish soldiers and their compassion; weighing 32 pounds at liberation; her hospitalization in Denmark and Sweden; finding work in a factory and regaining her humanity; her marriage in Sweden to another survivor; the birth of her children; finding her brother through the Red Cross after four years; immigrating to the United States to be with her brother; the difficulties of adjusting to life in the US; and the importance of raising her children with Jewish traditions.

    Oral history interview with Ruth E. Greifer

    Oral History

    Ruth Greifer (née Dahl), born May 30, 1922 in Geilenkirchen (near Aachen), Germany, discusses her father, who was a cattle dealer, and her Dutch mother; attending a private Catholic school and experiencing antisemitism but being treated well by the nuns; how the plaque on father’s business was shattered in 1938; moving to Valkenburg, Holland in the spring of 1938; Germans occupying the city on May 10, 1940 and her family hiding in catacombs during the bombing; having to wear the yellow star and obey curfew; her father’s business being taken away; the Germans ordering them to leave in June 1942, but she was allowed to stay because she was sick; her brother and two aunts being taken to Auschwitz; how a Mr. Jansen from the underground arranged for she and her parents to go into hiding; going to a coal miner’s house, while her parents went to another; being thought of as a risk and being relocated to a doctor’s house to be a maid; going into hiding at the Robertson’s house near Treebeek and Hoensbroek with another Jewish woman; getting money from the underground organization; hearing about the June 1944 invasion; going to a house in Treebeek; the heavy bombing in the city and hiding in a potato bin for three days; being liberated September 17, 1944; returning to her parents in Valkenburg; the loss of all of her mother’s Dutch family; sailing to the United states in the spring of 1948; settling with her sister in Pittsburgh, PA; getting married April 8, 1951 and having three daughters; moving to Washington, DC in 1957; and her feelings about Germany.

    Oral history interview with Nesse Godin

    Oral History

    Nesse Godin (née Galperin), born on March 28, 1928 in Siaulai, Lithuania, discusses her life after the war; being liberated by the Russians in Chynowie (known as Chinow in German) near Wejherowo, Poland on March 10, 1945; suffering from typhoid and dysentery and weighing 65 pounds; joining her mother and brother in Feldafing DP camp; going to ORT and UNRRA sponsored classes; getting married to Jack Godin, who had escaped from the Vilna Ghetto and whose family was killed in Ponary; having her first child in Munich, Germany; immigrating to United States in 1950 and settling in Washington, DC; becoming a citizen in 1955 and working as a dressmaker for 26 years; raising her children; sharing her Holocaust experience; working with the UJA, Jewish Community Council and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and the US Holocaust Memorial Council; working on projects at USHMM, including the “Remember the Children” exhibit, the ID project, and within the education and development departments; and her thoughts on the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Maryla Korn

    Oral History

    Maryla Korn (née Orgel), born on June 10, 1938 in Kraków, Poland, discusses going with her mother first to Wieliczka and then to Bochnia between late 1940 and early 1941; hiding with a peasant family but crying so much that she was returned to her mother; going to a ghetto in Bochnia at the end of 1941; her mother working outside the ghetto in a factory; taking messages outside the ghetto and bringing back food; leaving the ghetto in June 1943 and separating from her mother; carrying diamonds and money, but no luggage and bribing Germans and the Judenrat; traveling by truck to the border then by foot at night; being guided by paid partisans; her grandfather being shot at Bochnia cemetery, her grandmother being taken to Auschwitz, and her uncle being taken to Belzec in the summer of 1942; being by Czech collaborators in Kosice, Slovakia; being released and proceeding to Hungary with help from the Joint; being caught and sent to a prison in Budapest and the Joint getting her out; going to Usod, Hungary in the fall of 1943 and staying there until April 1944 under name of Orglowska; living as a Christian; being treated for gangrene in her leg; the roundup of Hungarian Jews in April 1944; her mother stealing passes and going to Budapest; staying with a Jewish Polish friend and then going to Bucharest, Romania with help from the Joint; almost boarding two different ships in Constanta, Romania going to Palestine, one of which (the Merkur) sank and the other ended up in Cyprus; being liberated by the Russians in the spring of 1945; going to Budapest and staying in a children’s home while her mother went back to Poland to check on family; her mother setting up a business in Vienna, Austria with an uncle; her father returning traumatized from the war; going to Brussels, Belgium in the winter of 1946-1947; going to Israel in 1951; living in both Israel and Brussels until immigrating to the United states in May 1961; getting married in June 1961 to David Korn, who is also a survivor; visiting her parents in Germany; and her work translating for USHMM.

    Oral history interview with Michel Margosis

    Oral History

    Michel Margosis, born in Brussels, Belgium on September 2, 1928, discusses immigrating to the United States in 1943; being taken in by father’s cousin in Brooklyn, then to foster home; his parents coming to the US in 1946; graduating from high school in 1947; graduating with honors from Brooklyn College in 1951; enlisting in the army and being sent to Germany as an interpreter but requesting to be transferred; becoming a medic near Verdun; feeling very American, but did not speak about his childhood with other soldiers; his feeling about Germany; working at USHMM with the Speakers Bureau and translating materials; speaking about his past; and being featured in the book “The Triumphant Spirit” by Nicholas del Calzo.

    Oral history interview with Lena Jurand

    Oral History

    Lena Jurand (Salzberg), born in Przemysl, Poland on September 13, 1917, discusses being an only child, educated in a Catholic school then at a music conservatory; meeting her husband Julian Jurand in 1931 and getting married in May 1940; living in the Russian part of town; her father being chosen for the Judenrat when the Germans took over; Jews having to give up jewelry and wear a star; the ghetto being formed in July 1942; moving with parents and in-laws from Lvov; working in a factory disinfecting uniforms; her father being taken away and how she went to the Gestapo headquarters and saved him from deportation to Auschwitz; meeting a Polish woman in the factory who offered to hide her and Julian; hiding for 22 months in room off of kitchen in a woman’s apartment; being liberated by Russians in August 1944; living in an apartment with her husband and cousins; living in Munich, Germany with UNRRA staff of the Neu Freimann DP Camp; teaching music to child survivors in camp for one year; moving to Genoa, Italy, where Julian practiced medicine; visiting her uncle for six months in New York, NY; going to the United States in 1951; living in New Jersey, where Julian worked in state hospital as a psychiatrist; and Julian becoming the clinical director at St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, D.C.

    Oral history interview with Wallace Witkowski

    Oral History

    Wallace A. Witkowski, born January 12, 1928 in Kielce, Poland, discusses his escape from Poland on a ship to Goteborg, Sweden in 1948; going to the United States; how his sister was caught by the communists and imprisoned; his struggle to find his father who had immigrated to the United States earlier; settling in Detroit, Michigan and adjusting to American life; how his mother and sister arrived in the U.S. later; attending high school and then Wayne State University; getting married in 1951; working as a radio disc jockey using the on-air name Jan Alexander; earning a law degree; working in Washington, DC and traveling between the United States and Poland; working for the Federal Trade Commission; living and working in Micronesia; his thoughts on religion and how the Holocaust affected him; his identity as a Catholic; his work as a translator; and his work with the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission.

    Oral history interview with Peter Masters

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Lena Gitter

    Oral History

    Lena Gitter (née Lieba Rosenblatt), born in 1905 in Vienna, Austria, discusses her life after the Holocaust; immigrating to the US in July 1938 with her husband and small daughter; her husband who worked as a physician; feeling guilty for many years about having escaped Vienna before the Holocaust; her long involvement with the Montessori schools both in Vienna and the United States; the Montessori method; working with people in Mississippi under Johnson’s War on Poverty program; the death of her husband in 1974; her plan to donate her collection of early childhood education materials to a library in Vienna; working under several Presidents of the United States.

    Oral history interview with Jacob Wiener

    Oral History

    Jacob Wiener (né Koppel G. Zwienicki), born March 25, 1917 in Bremen, Germany, discusses his experiences in the United States after World War II; the reaction to the war by the American media; his wife’s experience on the Kindertransport; his memories of watching Nazi war crime trials on television; his thoughts on Israel and Palestine; the Eichmann trial; how he was involved with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum from its founding; Holocaust education in American schools; antisemitism in the United States; and how he founded a school for mentally disabled children in the 1950s.

    Oral history interview with Noah Roitman

    Oral History

    Noah Roitman, born in Baranowicze, Poland (Baranavichy, Belarus) on January 10, 1923, discusses his religious upbringing and schooling; being very athletic; receiving warnings from his Christian friends in November 1938; his town being under Soviet rule in 1939; people being deported and his house being burned down; the German invasion on June 27, 1941; the formation of a ghetto on December 12, 1941; wearing the yellow star and working in arms factory; joining the resistance group of Mome Kopelovitz; the first action in the ghetto in March 1942; joining the partisans led by Pougatchov in the forest in August 1942; his activities sabotaging trains and bringing others out of ghetto (saving approximately 80 people); being sent to Pinsk, Belarus in late 1943; joining a group led by Major Igor, attacking trains; being ordered into Russian Army in Slutsk, Belarus in December 1943; fighting Germans and seeing Warsaw destroyed; being wounded by a sniper outside of Berlin, Germany; running a canteen for the Russian Army at the end of the war; returning to Poland; helping Jews get to Czechoslovakia; being captured and jailed, but escaping to Łódź, Poland; meeting his wife; traveling through Germany and France to get to Israel; being detained in Cyprus for 3 to 4 months; having a construction business in Israel; and immigrating to the United States in October 1963.

    Oral history interview with Richard W. Peterson

    Oral History

    Richard W. Peterson, born September 29, 1925 in Iowa, discusses his family’s Danish background; growing up in a Baptist family; first learning about the war in Europe and his family’s concern for Denmark; antisemitism in Iowa; hearing about the attack on Pearl Harbor; his involvement with ROTC and Boy Scouts; attending Drake University; joining the Army Specialized Training Reserve Program (ASTRP); reporting to Fort Crook for the reserve program and then to Camp Dodge in Iowa; being sworn into the U.S. Army; training at Camp Livingston in Louisiana with the 86th Blackhawk division; being assigned to A Company, 342nd Infantry; being sent to Le Havre, France; traveling through France, the Netherlands, and Germany; fighting in a battle in Attendorn, Germany; entering what appeared to be a factory in Attendorn and seeing starving people there; the reaction of his comrades to seeing the prisoners; the liberation of Auschwitz; being sent to the Philippines from September 1945 to March 1946; finishing his degree at the University of Iowa; graduating from law school in 1951; getting married; his father’s appointment to the Iowa Supreme Court; how he was a United States Magistrate Judge; his three children; and how he feels about American current events, politics, and world news.

    Oral history interview with Riane Gruss

    Oral History

    Riane Gruss (née Wohl), born on August 18, 1932 in Vienna, Austria, describes her father, who was a banker in Kraków, Poland and an industrialist in Vienna, and how her parents lived half a year in each place; she and her siblings being raised by a governess in Vienna; being in Kraków on September 1, 1939; going to Jaroslav, where there was bombing, then to Zloczow and to Kolomyja; her father and brother being captured at the border and her brother’s release; returning to Zloczow; being sent to Siberia by the Russians in July 1940; her younger brother getting scarlet fever; arriving in August 1940 near Yakutsk and Aldan and going to a labor camp; conditions in the camp; the hard physical labor for adults; how in April 1941 the NKVD said mothers and children could leave; their New York relatives getting them Bolivian passports; leaving in May and meeting her father in Lvov (L'viv, Ukraine); going to a farm in country for four months after the German invasion on June 22, 1941; her family following her uncle Joseph Stieglitz to Munkacs, Hungary (Mukacheve, Ukraine); getting Polish Christian papers; going to Budapest, Hungary; going to Szeged, Hungary, where her father had to be hospitalized; the children being hidden in the fall of 1944 in a caretaker’s house in Buda, Hungary; escaping when the Russians arrived and reuniting with her parents; going with her family to Mako, Hungary for four weeks then to Vienna; her parents returning to Kraków; going with a smuggler to Brno, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic) and then joining her parents in Kraków; going with her family to Stockholm, Sweden; going to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in October 1946; going to New York, in February 1951; and getting married in December 195 and having two children.

    Oral history interview with Regina Spiegel

    Oral History

    Regina Spiegel, (née Gutman) born May 12, 1926 in Radom, Poland, discusses her post-war experiences starting with her liberation; traveling with 3,000 other female prisoners by train from Elsnig, Germany to Dachau, Germany; how the train stopped on the way to Dachau because the railway line had been bombed; how the train itself was bombed by the Allies while stopped on the tracks; being able to escape during the bombing; traveling with 15 other women by horse and buggy to Poland; sleeping in German homes while traveling to Poland; avoiding large groups of Russian soldiers; promising her mother and her boyfriend that if they were separated during the war, they would meet in Radom, Poland; how she and her friends boarded a train in Poznań, Poland without any money; meeting a man on the train with whom she had been imprisoned in Pionki, Poland; returning to Radom where she was told that returning Jews were being killed; returning to the Radom Ghetto, where many displaced persons were gathering; writing her name on a list of displaced persons in the Radom Ghetto; traveling from Radom to Kozienice to reunite with her boyfriend, Sam; leaving Poland with Sam and traveling by train to Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic); traveling with the Joint Distribution Committee from Prague to Pilsen, Czech Republic and then to Germany; staying with Sam in the displaced persons camp Föhrenwald; her marriage to Sam in 1946; moving to Stuttgart, Germany, where she learned to be a seamstress through ORT classes; her involvement with the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York; her religious beliefs and how they changed throughout the war; moving to Washington, DC; how she and Sam learned to speak English; working as a seamstress before giving birth to a daughter in August 1951; her thoughts on the Yugoslavian conflict; her work with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum during its early development; her activity with the Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Friends of Greater Washington; returning with Sam to Auschwitz in 1975; speaking publically about the Holocaust; receiving an award from the United Jewish Appeal; and how she and Sam take groups of 16 to 18 year olds to Poland and Israel through the B'nai B'rith Youth Organization.

    Oral history interview with Charles Stein

    Oral History

    Charles Stein (né Karl Robert Stein), born in Vienna, Austria, on November 28, 1919, describes his childhood; attending medical school at the University of Vienna; immigrating to the United States and arriving on December 18, 1939; his draft into the army on October 7, 1941; discovering that his parents had gone into the Łódź ghetto; training at Camp Ritchie in Maryland; going to Normandy, France with the 9th Infantry Division as the commander of a prisoner-of-war interrogation team; helping to liberate Nordhausen and interrogating its Ukrainian guards; becoming an Army captain and then the chief of the translation section in the Office of Military History at the Pentagon; serving in Korea and Tokyo for five years; marrying an Air Force lieutenant in Tokyo; returning to the US and settling in Washington, DC; working for the Air Force Intelligence and for the State Department until his retirement in 1978; serving as a foreign service officer and being responsible for the resettlement of refugees in Europe; and writing about his experiences during the war.

    Oral history interview with Hannah Kalman

    Oral History

    Hannah Kalman (née Hannah Finer Kalmanowicz), born in 1912 in Opoczno, Poland and describes her family; moving to Łódź, Poland when she was 12 and joining a Zionist organization; meeting her husband in the Zionist organization and getting married in 1937; moving into the Łódź ghetto in 1939; living with her son, sister, and nephew in a small room with bad conditions; being deported with her family on one of the last transports out of the Łódź ghetto; never seeing her son and nephew again after their arrival at Auschwitz; her transport to Waldeslust, Germany, where she did hard labor; going on a death march to Bergen-Belsen; conditions in the camp; being liberated with her sister on April 15, 1945; the death of her sister two months after liberation; traveling around Poland looking for relatives; reuniting with her husband later in Poland; moving to Germany and having a son; immigrating to the United States; settling in Scranton, Pennsylvania; having a daughter; and living in Israel for a short time but ultimately settling in the United States for medical treatment.

    Oral history interview with Morris Rosen

    Oral History

    Morris Rosen, born on November 10, 1922 in Częstochowa, Poland, describes his family; being forced to paint rooms for German troops during the war; his deportation to Theresienstadt; being forced on a death march to Buchenwald; receiving help from the Red Cross after the war; traveling around Poland and Germany trying to find his sister; his time spent in displaced persons camps; his memories of the Nuremberg Trials; immigrating to the United States and settling in New York; the mental stress with which he dealt after the war; attending the international law program at Columbia; moving to Baltimore, Maryland in November, 1949; getting married in 1953; collecting items from the World War Two era; and his reflections on the state of antisemitism in today’s world.

    Oral history interview with Sam Spiegel

    Oral History

    Sam Spiegel, born in Kozienice, Poland on August 23, 1922, describes his family and childhood; being forced into a ghetto; his father’s involvement in the underground movement; working for the Judenrat and getting papers to leave the ghetto and get extra food; his deportation to Auschwitz in 1942; meeting his future wife in the camp; the Ukrainian camp guards; conditions in the camp and how inmates helped each other; going on a death march as the Allies neared Auschwitz; returning home and experiencing antisemitism; spending time in displaced persons camps; working for the United Nations Relief Organization and the Joint Distribution Committee after the war; getting married; immigrating to the United States; and returning to Europe to visit the concentration camps.

    Oral history interview with Fred Gutter

    Oral History

    Fred Gutter, born on December 25, 1926 in Sanok, Poland, describes his family and childhood; his memories of celebrating the Jewish holidays and Sabbath services; attending a high school and experiencing antisemitism; increasing persecution against Jews in the 1930s; moving to Lwów because of the difficulties his family faced; his family’s capture by Russian troops and living under Russian control; being released by the Russians at the end of the war and briefly returning to Sanok; staying in several displaced persons camps; reuniting with his father after the war; receiving aid from the Joint Distribution Committee; spending some time in Palestine and fighting in the 1948 war; immigrating to the United States in 1959; and his feelings about American politics.

    Oral history interview with Henry Greenbaum

    Oral History

    Henry Greenbaum, born on April 1, 1928 in Starachowice, Poland, describes his family and childhood; his memories of his family celebrating the Jewish holidays; being too young to understand the persecution that was happening around him; his family deciding that one of his sisters should immigrate to the United States in 1937; the establishment of a ghetto in Starachowice; his deportation to a labor camp in October 1942; attempting to escape but getting severely wounded and having to stay in the camp; his transfers to Auschwitz and then Flossenbürg; going on a death march from Flossenbürg; his liberation by the U.S. Army on April 25, 1945; spending time in a displaced persons camp after the war until his sister in America could send papers for him and his brother; immigrating to the United States in June 1946; adjusting to life in America and finding a job at a department store; settling in the Washington metro area; and interacting with other Holocaust survivors who live in his community.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Alper

    Oral History

    Ruth Alper, born on February 18, 1932 in Germany, describes her family and childhood; experiencing little antisemitism as a child; her memories of Kristallnacht; receiving an affidavit from family in Detroit, MI in 1939 to immigrate to the United States; arriving in Cuba and staying there until 1941, when she and her family moved to Miami, FL; the small Jewish community in Havana, Cuba; listening to the progress of the war on the radio; experiencing antisemitism in Miami; her recollections of the response of the American Jewish community experiencing the war from abroad; and creating a new life for herself in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Michael Lin

    Oral History

    Michael Lin, born in Riga, Latvia on September 14, 1936, describes his family and childhood; the Jewish community of Riga; the beginning of the war in 1941 and his family being forced to leave their home to settle in Yaroslavl (IAroslavl' ), Russia; catching malaria and developing pneumonia in 1941 but not being able to get medication; moving to another small village in Russia, where he remained until 1944 when his family moved farther east; having to shave his head to avoid getting lice; his father’s draft into the Russian Army; the end of the war and preparing to return to Riga; his experiences with antisemitism in Russia; beginning school after the war in Latvia; his draft into the Russian Army in September 1955; attending school in Moscow after he left the army; immigrating to Israel in 1969 with his wife and children; immigrating to the United States a few years later; and his reflections on sharing his memories of the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Hannah Kalman

    Oral History

    Chana Kalman, born on January 20, 1912 in Opoczno, Poland, describes her family and childhood; her experiences with antisemitism; moving to Łódź, Poland when she was eighteen years old; participating in a Zionist organization with several other young people; working during the day and attending a Hebrew school at night; getting married shortly before the death of her father in 1937; giving birth to a child on January 25, 1939; moving into the Łódź ghetto in 1940 and struggling to find food for herself and her son; the liquidation of the ghetto in August 1944; her deportation to Auschwitz with her sister and being forced around by SS men; her transfer to Bergen-Belsen shortly before her liberation; finding out about the death of her husband and child; getting remarried in 1946 and having a son and a daughter; remaining in Germany as a displaced person until 1950, when she immigrated to the United States; settling in Scranton, Pennsylvania; spending some time in Israel once her children had grown up; and her reflections on life in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Dorrit L. Ostberg

    Oral History

    Dorrit Liane Ostberg, born in Vienna, Austria on September 29, 1929, describes her family; her father fleeing to Paris, France after the Germans entered Austria; escaping to Paris with her mother and sister but discovering that her father had fled to Yugoslavia; arriving in Yugoslavia several months later; obtaining Yugoslavian citizenship and living in Slavonski-Brod and Zagreb (both in present day Croatia); fleeing to Crikvenica, Croatia after Croatian guards arrested her father; her family’s deportation to an Italian internment camp on Rab; attending school until she contracted hepatitis and had to stay in a hospital for four months; her liberation in September 1943; her family fleeing on a fishing boat to Italy and living openly as Jews in Bari, Italy with two Italian women; immigrating to Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York in July 1944; attending junior high school; moving to New York City after the war ended; attending university and becoming a math teacher; getting married three times and having one son; and her religious feelings.

    Oral history interview with Alice Eberstarkova Masters

    Oral History

    Alice Eberstarkova Masters, born in Trstená, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia) in 1925, describes her youth; her experiences with antisemitism before the war; immigrating to England in 1939 on a Kindertransport; working as a secretary for the Czech government-in-exile in London during the war; following the BBC broadcasts of the war’s progress; the end of the war and discovering that her parents had died in Auschwitz; her reflections on the Nuremberg Trials; participating in Zionist and Jewish organizations while in England; immigrating to the United States in March 1948; working for the International Monetary Fund; losing her religious faith; getting married and starting a family after the war; and telling her children and grandchildren about her experiences during the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Martin Weiss

    Oral History

    Martin Weiss, born in Polana, Czechoslovakia (possibly present day Veľká Poľana, Slovakia) on January 28, 1929, describes his post-war experiences living in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic with his sister; receiving papers to immigrate to the United States in 1946 and living with a distant cousin; working at a butcher’s shop, so he could support himself; opening his own meat store later in life; eventually deciding to volunteer at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; and not participating much in his faith anymore.

    Oral history interview with Leonard Gordon

    Oral History

    Leonard Gordon, born on June 8, 1925 in Tilsit, Germany (Sovetsk, Russia), describes growing up in Siauliai, Lithuania; his family; attending Jewish grade school and high school; the German invasion of Lithuania in 1941; trying to escape to Russia but instead having to return home and go into the Siauliai ghetto; his family’s transport to Stutthof in 1944; being transported with his father and brother to Dachau, where they worked at Mühldorf; building the German underground airport, Messerschmitt; his father’s proposal that the three of them commit suicide; hearing about the invasion of Normandy; the liberation of Dachau in May 1945; staying in a displaced persons camp in Feldafing and planning to move to Israel; traveling to Italy and studying to be a radio technician; immigrating to the United States; becoming an electrical engineer and serving in the United States Navy; and rediscovering religion after the death of his wife.

    Oral history interview with Fritz Gluckstein

    Oral History

    Fritz Gluckstein, born January 24, 1927 in Berlin, Germany, describes the end of the war in Berlin; the food and housing shortages; cleaning up rubble from bombings with his father; the difficulties of re-starting his education after the war; immigrating to the United States in January 1948 and settling in the Minneapolis and St. Paul area; becoming a veterinarian; and volunteering for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Oral history interview with Brigitte Freidin

    Oral History

    Brigitte Freidin, born in Augsburg, Germany on June 3, 1930, describes her family and childhood; her memories of Kristallnacht; her father being arrested and sent to Dachau after Kristallnacht; her father’s release and her parents’ decision to try to immigrate to the United States; traveling to England while waiting for permission to go to the U.S.; immigrating to the U.S. in 1941; staying with relatives who were taking in refugees in Washington, DC; losing touch with much of her family left in Europe and then discovering that many had died; participating in American student clubs during the war; working as a salesgirl when she was fourteen years old to help support her family; getting married and starting a family; and speaking about her personal experiences during the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Eva Kristine Belfoure

    Oral History

    Eva Kristine Belfoure, born on October 1, 1924 in Kraków, Poland, describes growing up in a Roman Catholic home; having many Orthodox Jewish friends in her childhood; teaching Catholic prayers to an elderly Jewish lady who was hidden in her home during the war; exchanging goods and delivering messages in the ghetto; being arrested in January 1942 and being taken to the Nordhausen concentration camp, where she worked in various labor camps; her deportation to the Rathsfeld firm, where she worked as a kitchen aide and remained until liberation; doing translation work in a field hospital in Nordhausen after the war; going to the displaced persons camps in Dora, Heilbronn, and Darmstadt; attending the university in Frankfurt after receiving aid from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency; immigrating to the United States in June 1950 and marrying a sailor in 1953; teaching languages in Baltimore County for twenty-five years; and translating for the Red Cross and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Oral history interview with George Hill Leonard

    Oral History

    George Leonard, a concentration camp liberator born on December 24, 1921 in Malden, Massachusetts, describes his childhood; his training in Alabama and California before he and his unit went to England; becoming the company runner, staying close to the captain and lieutenants; translating codes and delivering messages while at war; his memories of the fights at the Siegfried Line; receiving the Bronze Star after being wounded; traveling through parts of Germany along the Czech border and getting ordered to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria; helping to give the victims a proper burial; staying in the Mauthausen area for about six weeks until he went to Spital am Pyhrn, Austria in late July; leaving for America on December 15, 1945; getting married; and teaching at Harvard University after the war.

    Oral history interview with Kurt Roberg

    Oral History

    Kurt Roberg, born May 16, 1924 in Celle, Germany, discusses his childhood; attending a German school where he was the only Jewish student; his father Victor Roberg’s profession as a merchant for the firm Gebrüder Freidberg; his family’s religious practices; Kristallnacht; antisemitism in his hometown; details of German politics of the time; the boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933; how a retired teacher, Hal Lotheim, taught local Jewish students; the Hitler Youth in his community; his Bar Mitzvah; how his brother, Harry, immigrated in 1936 to Holland, the Netherlands to live with their maternal uncle, Wilhelm Marx; how his father had to close his business in 1937; his mother’s 1938 trip to Hamburg, Germany to visit the American consulate; how his father was sent to Oranienburg after Kristallnacht; his father’s release and experiences in Oranienburg; his journey to Holland to join his brother and uncle; how his mother and father used American visa applications to travel to Holland; how his mother, father, and brother immigrated to the United States from Holland in 1940; German attacks on Rotterdam, the Netherlands; being interned in Holland for his status as a German citizen; being sent out of Rotterdam to Gouda, the Netherlands; how a woman organized transports of children from Holland and Belgium to reunite with their parents; receiving his American visa in January 1941; leaving Holland in March 1941; traveling from Germany to Spain and then to Lisbon, Portugal by train with other children; traveling by American ship from Lisbon, Portugal to the United States; being held on Ellis Island for a month because of visa complications; living in New Rochelle, New York with his family; learning about Pearl Harbor; how he and his brother joined the army in 1943; experiencing antisemitism in the army; his experience in the Pacific during World War II; and his life with his family after the war.

    Oral history interview with Alfred Schnog

    Oral History

    Alfred Schnog, born January 25, 1931, discusses his childhood in Cologne, Germany; growing up in a relatively secular Jewish family on Universität Straße; his relationship with his grandparents who lived in Deutz, a suburb of Cologne; seeing Nazi parades and looking on with interest but feeling unwelcome; being harassed by Nazi Youth on his way home from school with his twin brother, Norbert; seeing signs in businesses barring Jews and learning that few business owners enforced this policy; spending Passover in a Catholic hospital after being injured in a car wreck and being provided with kosher food by the nuns; watching his father throw pieces of a gun into the Rhine when guns were banned for Jews; his father’s metal trade business being taken over by non-Jews; hearing about concentration camps but believing they would primarily affect immigrants (particularly Poles) and seeing Polish children taken out of his classes by the Gestapo; his parents’ search for a way out of Germany and eventual escape to the Netherlands in the summer of 1938; his family’s return to Germany in November 1938 to retrieve belongings; witnessing Kristallnacht from an upper-floor window of the Dome Hotel; his family being taken to jail as they tried to return to the Netherlands after the German borders were sealed, but eventually being allowed to go; attending Jewish school in Amsterdam and learning Dutch; applying to move to the United States and first going by plane to England in Jan 1940, then by ship (the Britannic) from Liverpool to New York City in April 1940; attending school in the United States; speaking Dutch with his brother because they did not want to be associated with Germans; experiencing discrimination in school when his third grade teacher admonished him and his brother for wearing an American flag pin on a holiday when they were not born in America; having his Bar Mitzvah and attending Hebrew school at the synagogue in Regal Park; experiencing antisemitism as his family vacationed in the Adirondacks, finding many signs restricting Jews from staying at hotels; learning that his grandparents had been killed in a concentration camp; graduating from Forest Hill High School and then receiving a degree in engineering from Cornell; going to Korea in 1954 to serve two years in the U.S. Army; starting and running a company; learning that a pair of his father’s cufflinks were given to his father in recognition of his Bar Mitzvah by Claus von Stauffenberg, a German officer who later led an assassination attempt against Hitler; his reflections on the way those who did not experience the Holocaust and WWII view it; his children’s knowledge of his and his parents’ experiences and how it has affected them; and his thoughts on Israel.

    Oral history interview with Fred Taucher

    Oral History

    Fred Taucher, born on January 29, 1933 in Berlin, Germany, describes his half-brother’s suicide to avoid Nazi concentration camps; the destruction of his father’s store during Kristallnacht; moving to a ghetto in 1938; his father’s inability to leave Germany despite his United State’s citizenship; his family’s relationship with a high ranking Nazi member; his father going into slave labor and then being sent to Auschwitz in 1943; his family’s escape from arrest; living in subway stations to avoid Allied bombings; getting arrested, tortured, and sent to Dachau in April 1945; escaping from the Nazis with some Russian soldiers; his mother’s death during a crossfire between the Germans and the Russians; his 1946 Bar Mitzvah in Berlin; life in Berlin after the Holocaust; his 1946 arrival in America; his decision to join the U.S. Army; his experiences trying to obtain United States citizenship; his life in America as a citizen and his activism in Holocaust survivor networks.

    Oral history interview with Helen Goldkind

    Oral History

    Helen Goldkind, born in Czechoslovakia (near Volosyanka, Ukraine) on July 9, 1928, describes her early childhood; experiencing antisemitism as a child; her recollections of the Nazi occupation of her town in 1944; her deportation to Auschwitz; how her grandfather was beaten to death for not relinquishing a Torah scroll; being sent to work at a munitions factory in Germany; being with her sister when they were liberated by British troops in 1945; spending time in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp to recover; receiving help from the Swedish Red Cross and traveling to Sweden to recover; immigrating to the United States in 1946 with her sister; finding a job as a secretary in New York City; getting married and moving to Baltimore; the death of her sister and raising her children; and her reflections on the current state of the world.

    Oral history interview with Inge Katzenstein

    Oral History

    Inge Katzenstein (née Berg), born March 27, 1929 in Cologne, Germany, describes her family; having to move in with some of her extended family in Cologne after Kristallnacht; attempting to illegally cross into Holland; getting into Holland but immediately being captured and imprisoned; immigrating to Kenya but not being able to leave their home their without permission; attending stenography school to become a secretary; immigrating to the United States in 1951 and settling in Vineland, New Jersey; getting married and raising her children as Orthodox Jews; and returning to Germany twice and getting treated well.

    Oral history interview with Werner Katzenstein

    Oral History

    Werner Katzenstein, born in Wallensen, Germany on April 29, 1922, describes his childhood; having to leave school in 1933 after Hitler came to power in 1933; his father going to prison because he was Jewish but getting released after about a week; his father being forced to close down his business; buying property in Holland and immigrating there in 1937; immigrating to the United States in 1939 and settling in Somerville, New Jersey; being considered an enemy alien; registering for the draft and being called to service in March 1944; being sent for basic training to Camp Blanding in Florida; being classified for intelligence and reconnaissance work; joining the 100th Infantry Division in Fort Bragg, North Carolina; his deployment to Europe; going through southern France and the Vosges Mountains; and getting wounded in combat; returning to his platoon in January 1945 and going through Germany; being in combat in Heidelberg; working for the military government; visiting family who had been in Theresienstadt; returning for New Jersey on April 30,1946; and getting married and settling in Washington, D.C.

    Oral history interview with Fred Goldman

    Oral History

    Fred Goldman, born in Fürth, Germany on September 6, 1915, describes his childhood; his memories of Hitler coming to power; finishing high school and moving to Berlin to train to be a cantor and teacher at a Jewish Teacher’s College; returning to Fürth after three years and moving back in with his mother and sister; immigrating to the United States in January 1939 because a distant cousin vouched for him; arriving in the U.S. with twelve dollars and taking a job as a busboy at a department store in New York; marrying Ruth Schuster, a Jewish women also from Fürth; working in a uniform factory until he was drafted into the army in March 1943; becoming a member of the medical corps but then being transferred into the military intelligence unit when the army learned he was fluent in German; going to Camp Ritchie in Maryland; interrogating prisoners in Europe; staying with the army until March 1946, when he returned to the United States and became a diamond setter; and settling in Silver Spring, Maryland after the war.

    Oral history interview with Paulette Stessin

    Oral History

    Paulette Stessin, born in Metz, France, discusses her family and childhood in France; her parents, who sold clothing in the market; keeping kosher; her understanding of events in Germany in 1938 when she was 17 or 18; her family’s move to Angouleme, France where they thought they would be safe; daily life in Angouleme; her work as a hairdresser in Brive la Gaillarde, France, where there was one Jewish family; being arrested near Brive in April 1944; being transferred to Drancy and then to Auschwitz-Birkenau; her memories of Auschwitz; working on a road hauling stones; “Pitchipoi,” a term referring to the imaginary place they would be sent to and used by the prisoners in Drancy; the addition of a chemical to the women’s soup to suppress their menstrual cycles, which did not work on her; deciding to join her “camp sister”, a Dutch woman in another barrack, who was being deported; arriving at Bergen-Belsen; her memories of the camp; being liberated in April 1945; traveling to Paris; her reintegration at the Hotel Lutetia; and her decision to return to Angouleme.

    Oral history interview with Margitta Cooper

    Oral History

    Margitta Cooper, born on June 10, 1929 in Speyer, Germany, describes her family and childhood; her relationships with her non-Jewish friends; her memories of Kristallnacht; her father being arrested and sent to Dachau after Kristallnacht; her family’s arrest in 1940 and being taken to the Gurs concentration camp; gathering with about 20 other children and being told they were to be sent to the United States; separating from her parents and seeing them for the last time; spending time in a small French town before her immigration; finally travelling to the United States by boat in 1941; taking a train to Baltimore, MD to recover with the other immigrant children; meeting an uncle in New York City; finding out about the fate of her family; settling into life in Baltimore and receiving a job at the Johns Hopkins hospital; and her reflections on what the world knew about the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Erika Eckstut

    Oral History

    Erica Eckstut, born June 12, 1928 in Znojmo, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), describes her family; staying with her sister and brother-in-law at the end of the war; marrying a member of the Czech Army, Robert Kauder, on August 28, 1945; living in Freiwaldau (Jeseník), Czech Republic; how her husband was the big boss (Velitel) in the city, removing Germans from the Sudetenland area; moving to Prague, Czech Republic; having two children over the next few years; how her husband testified at the Nuremberg Trials; the death of her husband in 1957; immigrating to the United States; finally arriving in the United States with her children on April 11, 1960 and being greeted by a swarm of reporters because she was among the first to be allowed to leave Communist Czechoslovakia; attending technology school; living with her sister, her sister’s husband, and their children for a year before getting her own apartment; meeting her current husband in 1962; her diagnosis of lung cancer in 1989; participating in a cancer research study and being one of two survivors of the seventy-five person study; and volunteering at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Oral history interview with Tole Johannes Madna

    Oral History

    Tolé Johannes Hendricus Madna, born June 8, 1931 in The Hague, the Netherlands, describes his Indonesian father and his Dutch Protestant mother; living in Holland during the war; the divorce of his parents in 1936; living with his father and a nanny; hiding the infant son, Alfred Munzer, of family friends; the child staying with his family for three and a half years and calling him Bobby; moving to Belgium after the war; and immigrating to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Henri Dupuy

    Oral History

    Henri Dupuy, born June 5, 1920 in Thiviers, France and designated Righteous Among Nations, discusses his anger at the French government and Germany; his decision to join the Resistance; Constantin, nom de guerre Jambard, leader of the Armée Secrète (AS) who formed the Maquis in 1942 in Perigueux, France; how his mother, Helene, hid Maquis members in her home and procured ration cards; joining the police to avoid the draft; guarding the Perigueux Gestapo headquarters and stealing letters stamped “Dordogne,” denouncing French citizens; the November 10, 1943 Maquis attack in Perigueux and roundup and deportation of 350 Jews to Auschwitz; the arrest of the Gruska family and escape of their children; how his mother placed two Gruska sons with rural families and the daughter in a convent; how his mother secured forged identity papers with the complicity of Secretary-General Lafont, joining the Messignac Maquis; Maquis attacks from the woods; the supply of small arms by the Riberac police and by parachute drops; how the Maquis were denounced and attacked by Germans; hiding in Coursac, Dordogne, France and joining the Roland Maquis; a Maquis attack on the Neuvic-Bordeaux train carrying French francs to Germany in July or August 1944; and how the Maquis offloaded the francs in a truck to Saint-Alvere, a resistance center in the Dordogne, to support Maquis families and resistance activities.

    Oral history interview with Halina Peabody

    Oral History

    Halina Peabody (née Halina Janna Litman), born in Kraków, Poland on December 12, 1932, describes her childhood; taking on a false identity (Halina Litinska) during the war and pretending to be Catholic; hiding in Jaroslaw with her mother and younger sister; being injured on the day of liberation by a hand grenade; being liberated by the Russian Army; living in group homes with her sister after the war; traveling to Italy with her family and staying at a displaced persons camp; traveling to England and then going to Israel in 1957; taking a job at the American embassy in Tel Aviv; marrying a Bulgarian Jew who worked for the U.S. Information Agency; leaving Israel in 1968 with her husband and five year old son; immigrating to Palo Alto, California, where her husband could get a job at the Hoover Institute; moving to Washington, D.C., where Halina’s husband got a job working for “The Voice of America”; getting a divorce from her husband in 1972 and then marrying Richard Peabody; volunteering at the Holocaust Museum; and getting involved with survivor groups such as the Association of Child Survivors.

    Oral history interview with Marcel Bercau

    Oral History

    Marcel Bercau, born October 17, 1920 in Paris, France, describes his Romanian family; restrictions placed on Jews during German occupation; his deportation to Drancy in 1941; working in a locksmith's workshop and remaining in Drancy with his father and brother for a year before they were deported; going to Auschwitz, where he worked as an earth-worker and then as a bricklayer; working in the schlosser-electriker division, which allowed him to find a little bit of extra food; the evacuation of Auschwitz on January 17, 1945; going on a death march with 60,000 other prisoners and traveling through the snow and the cold with no food; arriving in Gleiwitz, Germany (Gliwice, Poland), where they were put in open cattle cars and transported to Oranienburg; how while they passed through Prague, Czech Republic people threw them bread and water containers; how four out of five people died during the transport; the German abandonment of Landsberg, where he was being held; being rescued and taken to Augsburg, where there was a repatriation camp; and returning to Paris to start a family.

    Oral history interview with Rolph Hammel

    Oral History

    Rolph Hammel, born on September 11, 1912, in Karlsruhe, Germany, describes his family; his involvement with a Zionist youth movement; being forced to do military service in 1933 in Dijon; getting scarlet fever; moving to Strasbourg, France and working in a hardware store before starting his own faucet and fixtures business in 1937; being allowed to remain in France because he had inherited citizenship from his mother who was French; working in the DCA during the war; helping to save 70 Jews in Périgueux, France; going to the ORT school; and his reflections on the treatment of Jews during the war.

    Oral history interview with Norbert V. Hilsberg

    Oral History

    Norbert Hilsberg, born on September 3, 1914 in Vienna, Austria, describes his family; graduating college and serving in the Austrian military for three months; starting the forms to immigrate to the United States after the Anschluss; his parents’ immigration to Cuba, where they stayed until April 1941, when they attained visas for the United States; receiving his visa in June 1938 and traveling to the United States; living with his uncle in Philadelphia, PA when he arrived; learning about the invasion of Poland; working in the advertising department of the Litz department store in Philadelphia; volunteering for the US Army in February 1941; getting sent to an engineering camp, where he made maps; the attachment of his outfit to the general headquarters in DC; being forced to remain in the US when his unit went abroad because he was not yet eligible for his American citizenship; receiving his citizenship in April 1943 and working on plans for the invasion of southern France and Austria; living in North Africa for nearly a year; being sent to Hawaii; leaving the army in 1945; accepting a job with the war department; and settling in Washington, DC with his family.

    Oral history interview with Alfred Munzer

    Oral History

    Alfred Munzer, born in The Hague, Netherlands on November 23, 1941, describes his family; how his parents debated over having him circumcised; his family going into hiding in May 1942; his father being admitted into a psychiatric hospital and his mother working at the psychiatric hospital as a nurse’s aide; his two older sisters being taken in by a Catholic family; going into hiding with a family friend and neighbor, Tolé Madna; how he played in the backyard and was called Bobby; his parents being sent to a concentration camp on December 26, 1942; his mother surviving the war, working first as a seamstress and later as an electrician; how his father died soon after liberation; the death of his sisters in Auschwitz; immigrating to Brussels, Belgium in 1952 and to the United States in 1958 with his mother; settling in New York where he attended Brooklyn College; going on to attend medical school at the State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn; becoming a lung specialist and interning at several well known-hospitals before doing military service at Andrews Air Force base in Washington, D.C.; and settling in D.C. with his partner Joel Wind.

    Oral history interview with Maria Mandel

    Oral History

    Maria Myriam Mandel, born 1938 in Czerwinsk, Poland, discusses the assembly of the town's citizens in a square and their deportation; her family's escape through a bakery door; hiding from the Gestapo in granaries, cemeteries, and the woods; her parents’ execution by the Gestapo in 1942; her placement by her parents in a neighbor's home from 1942 to 1947; her new name, Katia Gortak; the kindness of her foster mother and brother; her Catholic education; her antisemitic feelings; the painful loss of her brother and sister who were placed in other families and abandoned; the arrival of the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) at the end of the war; reuniting with her uncles in America and France; her shock at learning she was Jewish; her transfer to a Jewish orphanage in Czerwinsk, where she received a Jewish education; her recollections of antisemitism at the war's end; her life in the orphanage from 1947 to 1949; visits by her foster mother; her bitterness when visits ceased; how the JDC changed her birth date from 1938 to 1937 to allow her to travel alone from Poland to France; her arrival in Paris, France; her refusal to join her uncle in America; and her life in Perigueux, France with her paternal uncle and his family.

    Oral history interview with Yvonne Mignot de Royere

    Oral History

    Yvonne Mignot de Royere (née Roux), born in Clermont d’Excideuil, France on February, 22, 1925, describes how she and her father, Joseph Roux, saved 21 Jews during World War II; the evacuation of Jews in Strasbourg in 1939; working with her father, who was the mayor; taking in French Jewish refugees; how her work as a municipal clerk gave her access to forms and papers, which she used to provide the Jews with forged identity papers and ration cards; hiding Jews in the village rectory; one of the Jewish women giving birth to her daughter, Arlette Veil, in 1943; she and her father saving several families (last names: Robertso, Schwab, Wertz, and Veil); how three of the families were hidden in the caretaker’s house at the Chateau du Noyer and she helped them secure food; how she occasionally left the mayor’s office unlocked so that the families could secure additional ration cards; living in Excideuil from 1942 to 1944, after which the Jews returned to Alsace to rebuild their lives; staying in touch with the people she helped; and being honored with her father by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among Nations in 1982.

    Oral history interview with Susan Berlin

    Oral History

    Susan Berlin (née Suzanna Reichman), born on June 22, 1926 in Rožňava, Czechoslovakia (present day Slovakia), describes her family; her childhood in Rožňava; her memories of the rise of Nazi power; immigrating to the United States on August 3, 1939; settling in New York City, where she went to Julia Richmond High School; graduating in 1942 and attending Brooklyn College for her undergraduate degree and the University of Pennsylvania for her master’s degree; graduating in 1947 and moving to Washington D.C., where she got a job in the Army Intelligence Map Service as an Army Intelligence Research Analyst; marrying in 1950 and having three daughters; retiring from the Army Intelligence Map Service to raise her daughters; becoming an art teacher when her children got older; and volunteering at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in the Education Department.

    Oral history interview with John Bucur

    Oral History

    John Bucur, born in Youngstown, Ohio on March 5, 1925, describes his childhood; his Romanian-American parents; the multiracial community he grew up in; graduating high school in 1943 as the valedictorian of his class and receiving a scholarship to Ohio University; enlisting in the Army and being sent to Fort Sill, where he received training to be in Battery B of the 17th Observation Battalion; his first assignment watching a ship off the shore of Omaha Beach in France on D-Day; his unit’s move through England, France, and Germany and then going on a tour of Buchenwald at the end of the war; taking college courses at an American School in Biarritz, France after the war; returning home on December 7, 1945 and being discharged from the army; finishing his degree at Ohio University and graduating in 1948; going on to medical school and becoming a neurosurgeon; having five children with two wives; and moving to Arlington, Virginia to found Fairfax Hospital, Northern Virginia Doctor’s Hospital, and the National Orthopedic Hospital.

    Oral history interview with Lore Schneider

    Oral History

    Lore Schneider (née Heti Lore Koppel), born on October 10, 1924 in Bochum, Germany, describes her family; seeing the Nazi youth in her neighborhood; observing the Nazi parades from her home on the main street; immigrating to the United States in June 1934; settling in Washington, D.C. and attending public school; obtaining U.S. citizenship in 1939, five years after her family’s arrival; attending college at night and working as a stenographer at the Interior Department during the war; and marrying in 1946 and having three children.

    Oral history interview with Frank Liebermann

    Oral History

    Frank Nathan Liebermann (né Franz Natan Liebermann), born in Gleiwitz (Gliwice), Poland on January 19, 1929, describes his family; celebrating Jewish holidays; immigrating to the United States in October 1938 and moving to Dayton, Ohio, where his father set up his medical practice; his family’s involvement in the Jewish community and helping many European Jews to immigrate to the United States; attending Western Reserve University; meeting his wife during his sophomore year and marrying her soon after he graduated; working for a textile converting firm for many years before retiring and moving to Washington, D.C., where his two daughters had already settled; finding a job at a travel firm; and beginning to volunteer at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum after September 11th, 2001.

    Oral history interview with Marianne Liebermann

    Oral History

    Marianne Liebermann, born in Vienna, Austria on October 29, 1929, describes her family and childhood; her education; her father searching for ways to leave Vienna and immigrating to the United States after the Anschluss; her father’s efforts to convince a gentile American family, with whom he had previously done business, to vouch for his family; boarding a train to Cherbourg, France in September 1938 and transferring to the Europa ship, which took them to the U.S.; arriving in New York on October 3, 1938 and living there when the war broke out in 1939; graduating from Barnard University and later going on to get her master’s degree at Adelphi University; marrying Frank Liebermann on November 23, 1950; settling down in Great Neck, New York and having three children; becoming a teacher and spending many years teaching English as a second language; and settling in Maryland.

    Oral history interview with Thea S. Rips

    Oral History

    Thea S. Rips, born in Trieste, Italy on February 24, 1922, describes her childhood; her family moving to Rijeka, Croatia when she was five years old; growing up in a Catholic family but having many Jewish friends; witnessing the persecution of nearby Jewish families; aiding several families in their attempts to escape Italy; wanting to become a doctor and working in a shipyard infirmary in Rijeka; getting a job working on the Marshall Plan after the war in Rome, Italy; being offered a chance to move to the United States and work as an interpreter in 1955; meeting her husband, who she was engaged to for eighteen years before they married in February 1976; going to the United States and living in New York; moving to Washington, D.C.; and the death of her husband in September of 1994.

    Oral history interview with Andrew Glass

    Oral History

    Andrew (né Andrej) James Glass, born November 30, 1935 in Warsaw, Poland, discusses his early childhood; spending time in his wealthy grandfather's house because of his mother's illness; his grandfather, Jacob, repatriating millions of dollars which had been deposited in Switzerland, New York, and London, back into zlotys in Poland because of a 1939 government decree; hearing planes and bombs exploding in September 1939; his father being forced to clear rubble and fill sandbags; supplying gas to a gentile taxi driver and two families driving east on September 13; going by horse and cart and then by train and on foot to Vilnius, Lithuania; his father getting picked up by a Lithuanian patrol but being released when he agreed with them that President Roosevelt was Jewish; his family receiving three Japanese visas from Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese Consul; paying 600 dollars to get Soviet transit visas; traveling on the Trans-Siberian Railway and arriving in Japan in December 1940; getting three residence visas to the Dominican Republic and a one week transit visa from the American Consul in Tokyo, Japan; sailing on the Kama Kumakara in April 1941 to San Francisco, CA; taking the train to New York, NY and staying there until 1943; immigrating to Canada; re-entering the U.S. under the Polish quota; his father working in a defense plant and his mother working as a seamstress in New York; how he determined to not feel different; working for the New York Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, Senators Javits and Percy, and Cox newspapers from 1974 to 2001; becoming a Fellow at Harvard and the managing editor of The Hill newspaper; and feeling that he is living on borrowed time, that life is precious, and that there is a randomness to who survives.

    Oral history interview with Renate Fischer Chernoff

    Oral History

    Renate Fischer Chernoff, born on June 25, 1929 in Breslau, Germany (Wrocław, Poland), describes her early childhood; moving to Racibórz, Poland with her family in 1934; being sent to Berlin, Germany to stay with her grandmother in 1937; her family choosing to immigrate to Canada since her father was a physician; arriving in 1938 and settling in Montreal; moving to New Brunswick; her parents adopting Saul Silvershein, a sixteen year old Polish boy from a displaced persons camp; attending college at Dalhousie University; meeting her husband while in graduate school at the University of Chicago; marrying in New Brunswick in 1953 and moving to Saint Louis, MO where her husband finished his residency and their first child was born; moving to Durham, NC, where they had two more children; and settling in the Washington, DC area in 1980.

    Oral history interview with Eli Dortort

    Oral History

    Eli Dortort (né Klemfner), born on August 30, 1920 in Zdachov, Galicia, Poland, describes his family and childhood; escaping his hometown a few hours before the Germans invaded; traveling with some Russian soldiers to Kiev, Ukraine and then to Starobielsk (Starobil's'k), Ukraine, where he volunteered for the Polish Army; his unit being sent to Israel, where he deserted and worked in a kibbutz; staying in the kibbutz for a year before he joined the British Army and was sent to Italy; later being stationed in Teheran, Iran and Egypt; returning to Israel after the war and fighting in the War of Independence; staying in Israel until the late 1950s, when he immigrated to the United States; and settling in New York City, where he met his wife and had a daughter.

    Oral history interview with Hilda Seftor

    Oral History

    Hilda Seftor (née Cohen), born in Edinburgh, Scotland on August 21, 1923, describes her family and childhood; finding out about the Nazi invasion of Poland; helping her local Jewish community and finding homes for thirty-five Jewish refugee children; her parents founding the Whittingehame Farm School; teaching the school’s Jewish children how to farm and giving them a traditional education; attending the Edinburgh College of Domestic Science and graduating with a degree in household and institutional management in 1943; working in the Edinburgh school system and later at a wartime nursery preparing meals for children; marrying after the war and immigrating to the United States; having four sons; moving to Washington, DC in 1994; and volunteering at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Oral history interview with Felix Nicinski

    Oral History

    Felix Nicinski (né Fievish Nicinski), born December 7, 1925 in Lochów, Poland near Lódź, Poland, discusses his early childhood; moving in to the fenced-in ghetto in early 1940; how the Germans bombed their city before entering it; being taken to a work camp in Lienzingen (Mühlacker, Germany) in late 1940 with the other 14 to 18 year old boys to dig ditches; slipping away on a march in the summer of 1941 to work and escape to the fenced-in ghetto in Kalisz, Poland; receiving the false identity of an escaped 27 year old; Kalisz Jews being sent to the Lódź ghetto in 1941; being forced to wear the yellow star and beaten by the German guards; working at an ammunitions plants in Skarżysko-Kamienna for 10 months in 1942; being sent to Dora in 1943 and then to Buchenwald in 1944 for six months; his transfer to Bergen-Belsen in 1944; being liberated by the British on April 15, 1945; living in Bamberg, Germany between 1945 to 1948 and learning how to be a barber; immigrating to Australia in 1948 and living there for ten years; immigrating to the United States in 1958; and marrying another survivor of Bergen-Belsen.

    Oral history interview with David Brombart

    Oral History

    David Brombart, born on August 3, 1933 in Brussels, Belgium, discusses his childhood; the German invasion in May 1940 and being able to attend school until mid-1941; the deportation of his sister, Sarah, and his mother in August 1942; running away from a boarding school in Ikla (possibly Uccle in Brussels) and his father placing him in the home of business clients; going into hiding in Hornu, Belgium but visiting his father, who was in hiding in another city; his liberation in September 1944 and returning to Brussels with his father; finding out that his grandfather was a member of the Jewish Committee which made up lists for the Germans; returning to school at age 11 and learning how to write; serving in the Belgian Army from 1952 to 1954 and becoming the head of the Socialist Democratic Youth until 1958; having a full time job with the Young Socialist Guard and attending international conferences as the Labor Secretary from 1958 to 1964; living in Paris, France from 1958 to 1959; getting married in 1961; being offered a job to direct the African Labor Institute of the American organization AFL-CIO; moving to New York and advising labor movements in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia; becoming Deputy Director of the International Department of the AFL-CIO under Lane Kirkland; and being honored for his international labor work by the governments of Dahomey, Togo, and Senegal.

    Oral history interview with Gunter Haimann

    Oral History

    Gunter Haimann, born on January 26, 1922 in Koblenz, Germany, describes his childhood and family; his parents deciding that it was time to leave Germany in the beginning of 1937, when Jewish children were banned from public schools; immigrating to the United States and living with his aunt in Queens, New York; attending high school and night school to learn English; graduating in June 1941 and finding a job at an auto shop; his draft into the army at the beginning of the war and being trained as an interrogator; teaching interrogating techniques at Camp Ritchie in Maryland; his transfer into the 101st Airborne; going to England and jumping on D-Day and landing in Carentan, France; serving with the 101st for the remainder of the war; receiving a Purple Heart after being wounded in Bastogne, Belgium; not taking religion in to account while he was fighting; jumping onto Holland on Rosh Hashonah in 1944; going into Düsseldorf, Germany; finding Hitler’s stationary and using it to write letters; going to Austria and finding Mr. and Mrs. Goering and speaking with Mrs. Goering; seeing Holocaust survivors walking home; returning to the United States and starting a luncheonette business; and meeting his wife and having three children.

    Oral history interview with Alfred Lakritz

    Oral History

    Alfred Julian Lakritz, born on June 1, 1934 in Kiel, Germany, describes his family; narrowly escaping deportation to Poland in 1939 and moving to Antwerp, Belgium and then Marmande, France with his family; experiencing antisemitism from his peers in Marmande; how his father was arrested; speaking with the men who arrested his father many years later, and their regret; being sent with his brother to a Jewish summer camp in Creuse, France in July 1942; going into hiding in various safe houses for two and a half years after leaving the camp; ending up at a convent in Lourdes, France, where they met a Jewish French woman who took them in for the remainder of the war; being placed in a Catholic home in Tarbes with his brother after the war; reuniting with their mother in Marmande and applying for visas to the United States; immigrating to the United States in 1950 and settling in Oakland, CA; attending the University of California at Berkeley; completing his law degree; moving to Los Angeles, CA with his wife, whom he had met in law school; and raising a family.

    Oral history interview with Rita Rubinstein

    Oral History

    Rita Rubinstein (née Frieda Rifka Lifschitz), born on December 12, 1936 in Romania, describes her family and early childhood; her father’s draft into the Russian Army; going into hiding in Transnistria, Ukraine in September 1941; her liberation by Russian troops in April 1944; returning to their home in Romania and discovering that her father had died during the war; attending school for the first time and learning Russian and Ukrainian; traveling to Munich, Germany and posing as a Greek refugee; living in the Feldafing displaced persons camp for some time; developing tuberculosis in 1947 and having to go to a sanitarium in Augsburg, Germany; immigrating to the United States with her mother in September 1949 and settling in New York, NY; and getting married in 1959 and starting a family.

    Oral history interview with Anita Etzyon

    Oral History

    Anita Etzyon, born on October 4, 1941 in Boryslav, Poland (present day Ukraine), describes her family and childhood; being one year old when her mother died from tuberculosis; having few direct memories of the war but being told about her family’s life during that time; being taken away to live with a Christian family and getting baptized to better fit into her surroundings; returning to live with her father, who had remarried, after the war; living in a Jewish neighborhood and attending a Jewish school; moving to various cities around Poland with her father and step-mother; being the only Jew in her school in Swidnica, Poland; adjusting to life as a Jew after she had spent four years as a Christian; immigrating to Israel in 1951; learning Hebrew and adjusting to life in Israel; getting married to avoid serving in the Israeli Army; having a daughter; immigrating to the United States with her husband and daughter 1963; settling in Washington, DC and working for a Jewish Day School; and her reflections on being a Jew in the modern world.

    Oral history interview with Melvin Galun

    Oral History

    Melvin Galun, born on May 10, 1940 in Kowal, Poland, describes his parents’ participation in the Zionist movement; his mother’s stories about Jews being sent away to the camps; going into hiding in the nearby forests; his memory of his family’s liberation by Russian troops; staying in several German displaced persons camps after the war; his early education in the displaced persons camps; participating in Zionist youth movements in the camps; immigrating to the United States in November 1949; his studies in the United States at a Yeshiva school; traveling to Israel after graduating school and working in a kibbutz for a year; and getting married in 1963 and starting a family.

    Oral history interview with Magdalena Farkas Berkovics

    Oral History

    Magdalena Farkas Berkovics, born on July 15, 1919 in Cluj, Romania, discusses her childhood, schooling and musical training in a conservatory; experiencing low level antisemitism; getting married in 1939; living in her house in the Cluj ghetto with other women after the city’s Jewish men had been taken away for forced labor; conditions in the ghetto, including food scarcity and the black market; providing piano lessons to Christian children; being deported in June 1944; terrible conditions in the train car; her arrival at Auschwitz; being separated from her family except for one 25-year-old cousin; how her clothes were taken away and her hair removed; going to Stutthof in August 1944 and then digging ditches in Steinort (Sztynort, Poland), Elbing (Elbląg, Poland), and Groudentz; speaking about freedom with the other women and singing Hungarian songs; being liberated and traveling to Satu Mare, Romania, where Jewish volunteers helped her return to Cluj; how she found Christians living in her house and learned that she was the only survivor in her family; marrying, Zoltan Berkovics, in 1946; the birth of their son, Tiberius, who later changed his name to John Sylvanis because of antisemitism in Romania; how Communists nationalized her house and forced her to pay rent; teaching in the Romanian conservatory for 30 years; immigrating with her husband to the United States in the 1980s; and feeling very grateful for American liberty and democracy.

    Oral history interview with Sol Mackler

    Oral History

    Sol Mackler, born on January 15,1921 in Poland, discusses his childhood in a small village; visiting relatives in nearby Radom; being forced to live in a ghetto in 1939 with sixteen people in one house; wearing a yellow star; in late 1941 walking seven miles to Pionki labor camp, being given a striped uniform and the number 1058; working in a munitions factory, then laying railway tracks in a tunnel; escaping with four other prisoners to the forest and joining Polish Jewish partisans; being captured by Germans and being sent by train to Sachsenhausen; seeing his sister and her baby there; smuggling his one year old nephew into Pionki to the child’s father, a tailor who made Nazi uniforms; waiting for Russians at liberation; going back to his village and being severely beaten; living in Bad Nauheim displaced persons camp in Germany; working on the black market selling diamonds from Belgium; arriving in the United States in December 1949 after being sponsored by two Jewish Californian wine makers; moving to New York to work and getting married in 1956; working for his brother-in-law; and finding out his parents were executed in Treblinka.

    Oral history interview with Theresia Bauer

    Oral History

    Theresia Bauer discusses her involvement with the League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel), which paralleled the boys’ Hitler Youth (Hitler Jugend); the Soviet occupation of Austria, a time period in which she was constantly hiding from soldiers; and her husband's experience as a prisoner of war in Russia.

    Oral history interview with Carolina Taitz

    Oral History

    Carolina Taitz (née Lena Knoch), born on February 24, 1929 in Russia on a train, discusses her childhood in Viesite, Latvia; having friendly relations with schoolmates in her Latvian public school; how her father, a tree doctor, lost his business and the family house and was temporarily imprisoned as a capitalist when the Russian Communists occupied the town; experiencing a lot of antisemitism; seeing Jews being shot on the street when the Germans came in 1941; being forced to live in the ghetto in Riga, Latvia with five people to a room and little food; getting hit in the eye when a German soldier caught her with a cooked potato; being forced to work in a shoe polish factory from 5 AM to 5 PM; going on a forced march with 30,000 people guarded by German soldiers; seeing and hearing people being shot in a ditch in the Rumbula forest; walking with her mother, sister, and 200 other women to Termini prison; staying on the roof in the cold for two weeks in November 1942 and the birth of a baby, named Termina; going back to the ghetto; dressing as a boy going to work and escaping during a second Aktion when she was 14 years old; taking off her yellow star; being sheltered by a Russian Evangelist priest, Vladimir Michko, and his sister for two and a half years; living in their cellar; going back to Riga at liberation; her mother returning from Auschwitz but dying soon after; attending acting school; getting married and having a daughter; trying for 10 years to go to the United States, and finally getting a visa with the help of Eleanor Roosevelt; arriving in New York in March 1966; working at the New York City Opera for 19 years in charge of costumes, wigs, and makeup for the productions; being widowed twice and moving to Washington, DC in 2008; and still seeing her mother and little brother in her dreams and herself running away from German soldiers.

    Oral history interview with Helen Schwartz

    Oral History

    Helen Schwartz (b. Hela Kirschner), born in 1925, discusses living in the Łódź ghetto in Poland from 1939 to August 1944; working in a laundry in the ghetto; being taken with her family to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944; being marched from Auschwitz to Stutthof; her liberation by the Russians near Gdansk, Poland; contracting typhus in an outbreak that hit a group of female survivors following liberation; returning to Łódź and reuniting with her sister; reuniting with her brother at the displaced persons camp in Ainring, Germany; immigrating in 1949 to Portland, Maine, where her husband worked in a clothing factory; opening a tailor’s shop in 1954; raising a family; volunteering at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; and speaking at schools in Silver Spring, Maryland.

    Oral history interview with Irene Silver

    Oral History

    Irene Silver, born Irena Dynkewicz in Łódź, Poland on January 30, 1933, discusses raising her children in the Jewish tradition, being comfortable with friends who understand the Holocaust experience; her anger with people who ask why victims did not fight back during the Holocaust; being tolerant of strangers after having lived with strangers in the Warsaw Ghetto; her work as a social worker and how it was influenced by her wartime experiences; her sympathy with the civil rights movement; her membership in the Hidden Children group in New York where she feels a common ground; receiving Holocaust reparations which she used to help her children; her view that the world has not learned any lessons from the Holocaust; and her emotion at the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, feeling that the rain at the opening ceremony was the heavens crying.

    Oral history interview with Herman Taube

    Oral History

    Herman Taube (né Herschel Taube), born February 2, 1918 in Łódź, Poland, discusses his family; being orphaned by age nine; living with grandparents and later moving to Piyotrkov; attending a yeshiva; being encouraged by a Polish doctor to become a medic; returning to his grandparents in Łódź in 1935 and seeing antisemitic incidents; writing poetry; belonging to a literary society and meeting the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber; working in a military hospital in Alexandrov (possibly Aleksandrów Łódźki, Poland), arranged by Father Jagla, a Catholic priest; joining the Polish Army in August 1939; serving in a medical group that marched to the Bug River where the Soviet Army ordered the group to go to Volodymyr-Volyns'kyĭ, Ukraine to get educated so as to lose their capitalist mentality; accompanying a wounded soldier to Poltawa (Poltava), Ukraine, where an Ukrainian militia man arranged for him to take a new name, Grigori Arionowicz Taube, and live with a Jewish family; going to Samarra (Koibashov or possibly Kuybyshev) and getting more medical training; being sent to Tyumen (Tiumen') in Siberia and working in hospitals and in gulags; in November 1941 going to Tashkent, Uzbekistan and then to Andizhan, Uzbekistan; working in a malaria clinic; leaving the clinic after reporting that people were stealing food from the hospital; going to Seratov, Russia to the Polish Army; being assigned to the Kotsk offensive in June 1944; being badly injured by a mine explosion while riding in a truck; recovering enough by December 1944 and going to Lublin, Poland to the Polish Army headquarters in Majdanek; being assigned to Platte and opening a Red Cross repatriation station where he treated people with typhus; going to Keslin in Bessarabia in June 1945 to acquire more medicine from a CIBA warehouse; meeting a young woman, Susan Strauss, a survivor from Germany and traveling together to Potsdam, Germany; staying in a displaced persons camp in Halle-Merseburg, Germany, where he opened a Red Cross station; meeting a young Auschwitz survivor, Henry Rothfogel; traveling with Susan back to Platte, and getting civilly married and later religiously married; traveling with Susan and Henry in the summer of 1946 to Berlin, Germany with help from the Bricha; adopting a two year old child survivor, Mark; having first child in the Zingenheim displaced persons camp in September 1946; arriving in the United Sates on April 18, 1947 and being interviewed at the pier by the Jewish Daily Forward; going to Baltimore, MD to join Susan's father; writing for the Jewish Daily Forward; traveling to New York, NY to edit a Histadrut yearbook; returning to Baltimore and helping Susan run a grocery store; working for various Jewish organizations; obtaining accreditation as a journalist at the White House and in Congress; and continuing to write poetry, stories, and essays about the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Regine Ginsberg

    Oral History

    Regine Ginsberg, born on November 19, 1925, discusses her childhood in Brussels, Belgium; her father’s work in the leather industry; religious observances in the household; speaking Yiddish at home and French in school; how her father wired money to Chase Bank in New York in the 1930s; her family abandoning their home in Brussels to travel by train to France; staying with a farmer in St. Gaudens, France; the family’s arrest in St. Gaudens; how her brother and father were sent to a prison near Toulouse, France and then released seven weeks later; how her mother returned to Brussels and brought back Sabbath candlesticks, prayer shawls, tefillin, and diamond jewelry which she used to bribe guards; how her father contacted a cousin in Pennsylvania; being on the last boat out of France from Marseilles; arriving in New York in June 1942; staying with cousins in Pittsburgh, PA and then settling in McKeesport, PA; her mother and father’s work in the leather industry; moving to Texas where she met her future husband Reuben Ginsberg in Athens, TX; her brother enlisting in the army and being sent to Belgium where he did intelligence work acting as a French interpreter; studying along with her husband at Columbia University in New York; becoming an art dealer and opening up a gallery in the 1970s; her emotional state after the war; and how her wartime experiences affected her life, her marriage, and the way she raised her children.

    Oral history interview with Ursula Guttstadt McKinney

    Oral History

    Ursula Guttstadt McKinney, born November 17, 1925 in Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany, discusses her family’s professional and religious background; her childhood and the troubles she faced obtaining schooling due to being half-Jewish; the difficulties her Jewish father and cousins faced; worrying about her father getting arrested; being able to say goodbye to her father when he was taken to prison and subsequently transported to Mauthausen in October 1942; receiving news that her father died; the Third Reich taking ownership of her family’s house; getting expelled from school in October 1942; moving to Berlin, Germany with her mother and sister; the psychological effects of the war, especially the bombings; her limited contact with the underground; working at a convent where there were some hidden Jewish children; her difficulties resuming a normal life after the war; her education after the war; feeling like an outcast because of being half-Jewish; immigrating, along with her sister, to the United States; not wanting to identify as German; her feelings on being a “mischling,” or having a mixed background; not identifying with one religion and being wed in an Unitarian church; and her work as a founding member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Rappaport

    Oral History

    Ruth Rappaport, born May 27, 1923 in Leipzig, Germany, discusses her parents, Mendel Rappaport, a Romanian subject, and Helene Rubinstein, who was born in Poland; how her mother’s cousin, also named Helene Rubinstein, was a well-known cosmetics businesswoman, attending an Orthodox Jewish school and an English language school in Leipzig, Germany; her membership in the Zionist youth group, Habonim; her Romanian passport, which did not identify her as a Jew; moving to Switzerland with her family shortly after Kristallnacht; staying in Zurich, Switzerland as a nanny for the Herzog family after her parents returned to Germany; selling nail polish, which her parents sent because they could not send money; being sponsored by her uncle, Carl Rubinstein, who lived in Seattle, Washington to come to the United States; leaving Europe in December 1939 on the Holland American Line boat, the Veendam; her parents’ attempt to leave Germany with Cuban visas; how her father died in Buchenwald and her mother in Ravensbrück, both in 1943; attending high school in Seattle, then the University of Washington, and finishing at Berkeley, majoring in sociology; working after graduation for a Jewish newspaper in Seattle and for the Zionist Emergency Council; working with Bartley Crum for UNSCOP (United Nations Special Committee on Palestine) in San Francisco, CA; working in Israel during the War of Independence in 1948, where she exchanged gunfire with Palestinians; working with Golda Meir; helping establish the Israel Photographic Archives; returning to the United States and working for the Department of Defense as a librarian; living overseas in Okinawa, Japan; Taipei, Taiwan; and Vietnam; and retiring from the government after 19 years.

    Oral history interview with Edith Langer

    Oral History

    Edith Langer, born October 4, 1932 in Hamm, Germany, discusses living on a farm; her devout Lutheran mother; memories of the prewar Jewish community in her town; her early approval of Hitler because his support of public works; meeting Hitler as a member of her scout troop; attending a one-room school with 30 children, 10 of whom were Jewish; her father’s offer to hide the families of two of his Jewish customers in her family’s farm house; her mother’s feeling that hiding Jews was the right thing to do as a Christian; her father's murder by the Nazis for hiding Jews; being sent away from her family to work on a farm, where she stayed from 1941 to 1945 and had no contact with her family; being afraid of German soldiers; seeing murdered Jews in the streets; giving food to the Russian prisoners, who were living on the farm; emigrating from Germany to the United States in 1956; becoming an American citizen in 1961; her hope that more Nazis would be tried, including the one who shot her father; her membership in the Methodist Church; and taking part in protests against the American Nazi Party.

    Oral history interview with Marianne Milkman

    Oral History

    Marianne Friedenthal Milkman, born May 13, 1931 in Berlin, Germany, discusses her childhood in Germany; being baptized and raised as Christian to have more opportunities; changing schools and apartments in 1938 because of anti-Jewish laws; her aunt Lotte Friedenthal, who worked with Pastor Martin Niemӧller; her father’s deportation to Sachsenhausen in 1938; traveling to Switzerland in January 1939 and then flying with her sister to England on a Kindertransport in May 1939; living with relatives in Cambridge, England; the arrival of her parents in England and her father’s internment on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien; joining her father on the Isle of Man in May 1940; returning to Cambridge in May 1941, where she remained throughout the war; graduating from high school and Cambridge University; coming to the United States in 1957 to study biology; getting married and living in Iowa for 30 years; settling in Washington, DC; her Jewish identity; and her feeling that her experience during the war made her a stronger person.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Cohen

    Oral History

    Ruth Friedman Cohen, born April 26, 1930 in Mukachevo, Czechoslovakia (present day Mukacheve, Ukraine), describes her life after the Holocaust; her prewar life in Czechoslovakia; her family’s religious beliefs; her family’s deportation to Auschwitz in 1944; her mother and brother’s death immediately after their arrival at Auschwitz; her transfer to Nuremberg, Germany and then Holachov; the painful effects of tuberculosis that she contracted in Holachov; her survival and liberation by the Russian Army; her and her sister’s return to Mukachevo, where they reunited with their father; her time in Budapest, Hungary and Prague, Czech Republic, where she recuperated from tuberculosis; her immigration to the United States in 1948; the various jobs she had to support herself; her marriage in 1952; her education at the New School for Social Research; and her struggle to recover from the damaging emotional and mental effects of the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with George Arnstein

    Oral History

    George Ernest Arnstein, born September 20, 1924 in Stuttgart, Germany, describes his prewar life in Germany; the repercussions of the Nuremberg laws; his experiences with antisemitism; his father’s arrest on Kristallnacht; his father’s time in Dachau; his family’s decision to leave Germany and go to Geneva, Switzerland; his family’s immigration to the United States in 1938; the anti-German sentiment in America during World War II and its effects on him; his service for the United States Army beginning in 1943 and his duties as a crypto-analyst; his work in Germany helping to perform interrogations, monitoring anti-American efforts, and denazification; his return to Wisconsin after the war; his education at Berkeley and Geneva; and his life post-war.

    Oral history interview with Gertrude Scarlett Epstein

    Oral History

    Gertrude Scarlett Epstein, born July 13, 1922 in Vienna, Austria, describes her early life growing up in Vienna; her Czech father’s belief in free thinking; how her family was not religious; her parents’ and older brothers’ experiences during World War I; her Uncle Willie, who became wealthy as a textile factory owner; how she began to notice antisemitism in Vienna when her family moved to a non-Jewish part of town in the 1930s; her father’s and oldest brother’s activities in the socialist movement; her memories of a strike in Vienna in 1934; her memories of the Anschluss; her brothers’ immigration to England; her experience securing visas for Czechoslovakia on the day Hitler entered Vienna; her feelings that her moral code shifted as it became necessary to lie; her father’s arrest and later release from jail in Czechoslovakia; the family’s move to Albania by train; help provided to the family by her Uncle Willie; how she smuggled money out of Austria and Czechoslovakia; her family’s life in Albania from November 1938 to April 1939; the reaction of native Albanians towards Austrian refugees; how the Joint Distribution Committee helped refugees in Albania; her experiences teaching German to Albanians and the Italian consulate; problems she and her mother had in securing passage from Albania to England; brutal treatment she and her mother received from German police at a fuel stop in Germany; her memories of learning about concentration camps in 1943 or 1944; and how she tracked down an Albanian family to whom she taught German.

    Oral history interview with Matilde Neuwirt

    Oral History

    Matilde Neuwirt, born December 26, 1930 in Belgrade, Serbia, describes her early life in Belgrade; how her parents spoke Serbo-Croatian and Ladino at home; her family’s upper-middle class lifestyle; her schooling at both a public and a Jewish school; the lack of apprehension she felt in the pre-war years; her mother’s decision that the family leave Yugoslavia in the summer of 1940; her family’s escape westward through Dubrovnik, Croatia and then to Italy; how her parents smuggled money out of Yugoslavia; her family’s arrival in Italy without visas; living in Vicenza, Italy; how her family was moved to a detention camp in Sandrigo by the Italian authorities; the unofficial schooling that families set up for the children in Sandrigo; how the Italian authorities encouraged families to leave Sandrigo when Italy capitulated to the Germans; the help Jewish families received from a government official to get false documents; her family’s experience traveling to Rome, Italy; her memories of German brutality on the streets; how she did not know what was happening to Jews elsewhere in the country nor the rest of Europe; her brother’s return to Yugoslavia to fight with Tito’s partisans; the anti-Jewish sentiment of the partisans; her brother’s disappearance and the lack of information about him from the Yugoslav government; her family’s decision to emigrate from Italy to the United States in 1949; her family’s arrival in New York, NY; her feelings about Americanization and leaving memories of Europe behind; her memories of the Eichmann trial; her experiences returning to Yugoslavia and Italy after the war; and her belief that her family was lucky in the way they lived through the war.

    Oral history interview with Susanne K. Bennet

    Oral History

    Susanne Klejman Bennet, born August 11, 1938 in Warsaw, Poland, discusses her memories of entering the Warsaw ghetto; seeing the brick walls being built in the ghetto; living with her grandparents, aunts, and uncles all together in one apartment; beggars asking for food in her building; how her father, a successful art and antiquities dealer, arranged with a non-Jewish friend to have a Polish policeman take her out of the ghetto to a farm in the countryside; how, just before the destruction of the ghetto, her mother escaped from her work group and hid with nuns who gave her a habit and a new name; how the nuns were later rounded up, but were saved on the train platform by a Catholic commandant; how her father escaped from the ghetto through the sewers right before the uprising and went into hiding throughout Warsaw; how as a young child, she knew not to talk about her parents; seeing the red sky in the distance when Warsaw was burning in 1944; her reunion with her parents; the death of most of her relatives during the Holocaust; moving with her parents to Stockholm, Sweden in 1947; receiving visas in 1949 from the Swedish ambassador to Mexico where she and her family stayed for nine months; immigrating to the United States in 1950; living in New York where her father opened up a store off of Fifth Avenue and became a major art dealer with John and Robert Kennedy, the Rockefellers, the Fords, and Greta Garbo as his clients; attending Wellesley College, where she received a masters in library science; meeting her husband Douglas Bennet, who later worked for Hubert Humphrey, Senator Abe Ribicoff, and was an Assistant Secretary of State, head of US AID and NPR, and president of Wesleyan College; their eldest son, Michael, a United States senator from Colorado; their second son, James, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Monthly; their daughter, Holly, a financial adviser; her feelings when visiting Germany with her husband; how her father never spoke about his wartime experience; and how she has only recently started talking about her childhood during the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Marianne Roberts

    Oral History

    Marianne Roberts (née Marianne Cohn), born June 20, 1920 in Ludwigshafen, Germany, discusses her childhood in Ludwigshafen; experiencing antisemitism; her father's death from tuberculosis in 1933; her expulsion from school with her sister, Lottie, because they were Jewish; her mother's death in 1936; being photographed at the City Hall to show her "Jewish left ear" and being given the name ‘Sarah’; living with her sister until Kristallnacht; hiding in a basement for three days with no food while their apartment was being destroyed; moving into her sister's fiancé’s family's house for a few months and never going outside; going to the American Consulate to get visas their mother had applied for three years previously; leaving Germany in early 1939 with 4 dollars, pots and pans, and a family ring; sailing on the Cunard White Star to New York, NY; working in a doctor's office in Brooklyn; getting married and having two children; and speaking for past 20 years in schools and colleges about her wartime experiences.

    Oral history interview with Harry Markowicz

    Oral History

    Harry Markowicz, born August 9, 1937 in Berlin, Germany, discusses his childhood in Antwerp, Belgium; being hidden during the war with the Coons family in Brussels, Belgium, then in a children's home, and then in the Von der Linden's house under the name Henry Von der Linden; his parents who lived in hiding with another couple; how his father did not go outside for two years while in hiding; his brother, Mani, who was saved by Father Joseph Andre; how his mother found him after liberation; the removal of Allied flags at the time of the Battle of the Bulge because of fear that German forces would make their way to Brussels; arriving in the United States with his parents in March 1951; settling in Seattle, WA and going to high school and the University of Washington; traveling to Paris, France for a year for training as a French teacher; traveling to Israel to learn Hebrew; teaching French in Tacoma, WA; learning sign language and working at Gallaudet University for 29 years; feeling more comfortable among Holocaust survivors; and volunteering at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he feels a bond with the other volunteers.

    Oral history interview with Julie A. Keefer

    Oral History

    Julie Keefer (née Jula Weinstock Eisen), born on April 19, 1941 in Lvov, Poland (present day L'viv, Ukraine), discusses her family’s forced relocation into the Lvov ghetto; the escape of her grandfather, Aiski Eisen, from a camp in Janov; her grandfather finding help from Mr. Borecki, who told him in late 1943 that the ghetto was to be burned, and her grandfather’s rescue of her family from the ghetto; her memories of a tunnel or bunker in the forest, to which a few dozen people were smuggled out of the ghetto; her memories of her grandfather donning a Nazi uniform to smuggle people out of the ghetto; being taken out of the bunker because she and her baby sister, Tola, were endangering others by crying; being placed with Mrs. Szwarczynski, a Catholic woman; the arrival of the Russians in Lvov in June 1944; staying in three displaced persons camps in 1945; living in Camp Taylor in Linz, Austria; traveling alone at seven years old to the United States, where she lived in a series of Catholic orphanages, seeing relatives on weekends; being called a Nazi because she spoke German; being sent by the Joint Distribution Committee to the Bellefaire Jewish Children's Orphanage in Cleveland, OH; her adoption by Fred and Tea Klejstadt; attending Oberlin College; getting married and earning a graduate degree in education; feeling grateful to United States; and her desire to find out what happened to her hidden sister whose name became Antonina Noviska.

    Oral history interview with Erica Laufer

    Oral History

    Erica Laufer, born May 11, 1930 in Klagenfurt, Austria, discusses being the only Jewish child in her school, where she was taught by nuns; her mother denying her Jewish identity but her father being observant; an appearance by Hitler after the Anschluss; being forced to wear the yellow Star of David; being barred from attending school; moving into her grandfather's apartment in Vienna, Austria and living there in secret; SA attacks on Jewish homes; witnessing the events of Kristallnacht while hiding in a doorway; how her father obtained tickets to Trinidad; sailing on the Dutch ship Cotica with other refugees; establishing a life in Port of Spain, Trinidad; being forced, as refuges, to live in a detention center after England entered the war; going to a boarding school to be the companion to the daughter of the director; sailing to New York, NY with her parents in December 1940; moving to Washington, DC where she was discriminated against by other children because of her accent; her academic success; her work for the federal government; getting married and starting a family; not raising her children as Jews following an oath to her mother; the number of relatives she lost in Europe; and her attempts to suppress her feelings about the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Barbara Goldberg

    Oral History

    Barbara Goldberg, born in 1943 in Wilmington, DE, discusses her parents, Emma and Erich, who received visas from the Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes to emigrate from France to Portugal; their journey over the Pyrenees to Spain and then to Portugal; their arrival in the United States; her uncle Paul Brennan (born Pavel Briess) who had been in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz; how other relatives made it to Palestine, Australia, and South Africa; speaking only German in the house; how her parents’ personalities were shaped by the war; never discussing the past or other relatives' stories; feeling a connection to refugees; living with the memory of the Holocaust; and her discovery later in life that Aristides de Sousa Mendes had helped her family.

    Oral history interview with Liselotte Epstein Ivry

    Oral History

    Liselotte Epstein Ivry, born July 21, 1925 in Lichtenstein, Czechoslovakia (possibly present day Lichtenstein, Saxony, Germany), describes her family, including her father Victor Ivry, mother Elsa Sicher, and younger brother Hans; the large families on both her father’s and mother’s sides; having heard of Hitler at age 12; being taken by truck with soldiers to live with relatives in a nearby village and then by train to live in Prague, Czech Republic; the many changes after the Germans marched in on March 15, 1939; having been set to go to Great Britain in 1939 on the Kindertransport but instead being sent first to a children’s facility in Prague and then to a private home; being sent to Terezin September 9, 1942 to work as a nurse in the hospital; the transport and death of her mother and brother on March 8, 1944; being sent on December 15, 1943 in a cattle car to Auschwitz, to Block 11; being given number 70663; how the will to live was what kept you alive; being sent to Hamburg, Germany to work first in a sand pit, then as a train switcher, and finally as a brick-maker; how their camp was bombed and they were moved to Bergen-Belsen; the ensuing chaos and then the emotion and celebration after being liberated by the British; eventually going to Canada in 1949 to stay with her uncle; marrying in 1950 to a Lithuanian, Sydney; her children; her attitude about Germany now and forgiving but not forgetting; her book, I Am Their Voice, which is a collection of poems, letters, and anecdotes by children from her 25 years as a speaker; and how now she is doing research for a work about Madeleine Albright.

    Oral history interview with Hans Ziegler

    Oral History

    Hans Ziegler, born June 12, 1925 in Brno, Czechoslovakia, discusses being raised as a Christian with a Jewish father; his parents divorcing in 1934; his father’s factory going out of business in 1937; attending a German elementary school; his father’s deportation to Terezin (Theresienstadt concentration camp) in 1942; being transported to Berlin, Germany in 1943 for forced labor; being sent in September 1944 to Postelberg (Postoloprty), Czech Republic; escaping in April 1945 with two others to the woods; hiding in Brno until the Russians arrived; getting repatriated and going to university for three years; being expelled by the Soviets in 1949 because his father was a capitalist and a diplomat; being in the military for two years; being employed as a chemist in an armaments factory; working in Egypt and Afghanistan; escaping to Germany in 1970 and staying until 1983; going to the United States and working in Warren, Ohio until 1990; going back to Germany; feeling more Jewish than Christian; and how he thinks more about his father and his war-time experiences.

    Oral history interview with Vera Levine

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Guenter Lewy

    Oral History

    Guenter Lewy, born August 22, 1923 in Breslau, Germany (Wrocław, Poland), discusses his childhood in a large extended assimilated family; his memory of seeing Hitler at the 1936 Olympics; belonging to a Jewish Zionist youth group; being attacked on a hiking trip by German storm troopers; his father’s three month imprisonment in Buchenwald after Kristallnacht; going with Youth Aliyah via Trieste to Palestine in March 1939; being met in Haifa by his uncle; living on Kibbutz Tzarad where he worked as a shepherd; his parents’ escape to the United States in late 1941; volunteering in early 1942 for the Palestine Regiment of the British Army; joining the Jewish Brigade and being stationed in Egypt; traveling to Italy with Montgomery's 8th Army in late 1944; traveling to Holland at the war’s end; his role in organizing illegal immigration to Palestine; interrogating German civilians in Berlin; returning to Palestine; traveling to the United States to see his parents in late 1946; graduating from college in 1951 and earning a Master's and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1957; teaching at Columbia, Smith College, and University of Massachusetts; teaching in Germany from 1961 to 1962; his feelings about German people today; the strong influence of his youth group on his resilience; his writings on the moral dimensions of history and the Nazi persecution of the Romani peoples; his current interest in writing about Holocaust perpetrators; reoccurring dreams about Nazis brutality; and feeling that some of the best Holocaust scholarship has being written by contemporary young German scholars.

    Oral history interview with Malvy Solomon

    Oral History

    Malvy Solomon (née Aizic), born in 1938 in Bacau, Romania, discusses pre-war violence against Jews; her father’s conscription into forced labor for the Romanian military in 1941; living with her mother and grandmother in the ghetto with little food; her father’s return in 1944; attending a Jewish primary school and learning Hebrew; surviving bombings; the Soviet arrival in Romania at war’s end; Soviet looting after the war; her school’s closure by Soviet authorities; post-war antisemitism and anti-Capitalist feelings; her father’s job working for the communist government after he was forced to close his store; finishing high school at 16; her medical schooling and career; her marriage; immigrating to Israel in 1961; attending medical school in Tel Aviv; getting divorced, treating soldiers and bombing victims; remarrying in 1971; immigrating to the United States; her education in the U.S.; working for the Department of Veterans Affairs; and her feelings about the war, communism, and her life.

    Oral history interview with Elia Miranski and Genia Miranski

    Oral History

    Elia Miranski, born on August 3, 1922 in Mir, Poland (present day Belarus), describes growing up in a poor, moderately religious family but experiencing no antisemitism until the German invasion in 1939; his parents’ deaths in the first few days of the occupation; escaping with his brother, Israel, from the ghetto which had been set up in a castle; joining Russian partisans in the forest; blowing up railroad tracks for two years; trains near Valozhyn, Belarus; planes dropping supplies; others taking the wounded away from the front lines; Russians mobilizing all partisans into the army; being wounded by the Germans; traveling back to Mir after the war; working on a dairy farm for seven years as a supervisor; moving to Minsk, Belarus and working as a house painter; getting married and having a daughter; going to Israel in 1972 and then to the United States in 1995; thinking day and night about his wartime experiences; and going back to Mir from Israel for a memorial ceremony in the cemetery. Genia Miranski, daughter of Elia Miranski, adds to her father’s interview by translating it into English and by describing Elia’s membership in the Zionist youth group Hashomer Hatzair; Elia’s parents and two younger siblings being shot by Germans; Elia building bridges and roads; witnessing his friend being mauled to death by a dog; living in the castle ghetto; Elia’s experience escaping and hiding in a swamp for three days and at times breathing through a straw when German dogs were nearby; joining Russian partisans; his return to Minsk at the end of the war and experiencing a significant amount of antisemitism; the Six Day War in Israel; going to an underground bakery at night to get Passover matzo; arriving in Israel in 1972; living in underground bunkers in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War; and her own arrival in the U.S. in 1985 and her parents’ arrival in 1995.

    Oral history interview with Maria Kordalewski

    Oral History

    Maria Kordalewski, born April 13, 1924 in Poland, describes her Ukrainian parents and her two siblings, Nicolai and Nadja; going to school and her Jewish friends; the Russians coming in 1939 and the subsequent food shortages; how people were being sent away to Siberia; the absence of antisemitism in their small town until the German occupation in 1941; how her family hid two boys until the boys escaped; how her brother was arrested in 1942, along with other young men, as a means of preventing an uprising; the Russians coming in 1945 when the war was over; being sent with her sister to Lvov (L'viv, Ukraine) to get away from the communists; being sent to a displaced persons camp in Regensburg, Germany and going to school to study pharmaceuticals; arriving in the United States in 1950 by herself; landing in New York City, NY; the various jobs she held at first; moving to Detroit, MI then to California, and finally to Miami, FL; and her feelings that the Holocaust should never be forgotten.

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