- Interview Summary
- Esther Moses (née Zelmanovic), born November 15, 1920, discusses her childhood in Tacovo, Czechoslovakia (now Tiachiv, Ukraine); her father’s early immigration to the United States; her family’s relocation to a ghetto where her older and younger sisters died; her deportation to Auschwitz with her mother and brother; staying in Lager 16 in Auschwitz; meeting one of her cousins in the camp; avoiding the gas chambers on multiple occasions; witnessing resistance fighters in Auschwitz blow up the crematorium; her experience with moving bodies from a pit into a warehouse that was stacked with corpses; seeing people thrown into flames; how, as the Allies advanced, she and other female prisoners were put into cattle cars where they were raped by an SS officer; her relocation to an underground factory where she was placed into forced labor; her transfer to a factory in Hamburg, Germany; being marched to Salzburg where she was liberated; learning the fates of her family members; moving to Belgium following liberation and staying in a displaced persons camp where she met her future husband Herbert Moses; how her father in the United States discovered she was still alive and sent money for her to fly to the US; how she used the money instead to help two other girls come to the US with her by boat; arriving in New York and then traveling to Wichita, Kansas to live with her father; encountering the former SS officer who had sexually assaulted her; and how Herbert Moses came to Kansas and asked her father’s permission to marry her.
Herbert Moses, born November 16, 1920, discusses his prewar life in Altwied, Germany; his family's attempts to leave Germany; living in hiding in Germany, France, and Belgium until their capture; his time in several concentration camps, including Drancy, Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, and Buchenwald; living conditions in the camps; forced labor and death marches; his liberation in 1945 and time in a transition camp in Belgium, where he met his future wife Esther Zelmanovic; his postwar life in New York City; and his marriage to Esther in Wichita, Kansas in 1948.
- Interviewee
- Mrs. Esther Moses
- Interviewer
- Mindi Wisman
- Date
-
interview:
1997
- Credit Line
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Molly Wisman
