Advanced Search

Learn About The Holocaust

Special Collections

My Saved Research

Login

Register

Help

Skip to main content

Print

Oral history interview with Erica Laufer

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 2012.210.1 | RG Number: RG-50.106.0199

Search this record's additional resources, such as finding aids, documents, or transcripts.

No results match this search term.
Check spelling and try again.

results are loading

0 results found for “keyward”

    Oral history interview with Erica Laufer
    Transcript
    This is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    volunteer collection interview with Erica Laufer, conducted
    by Gail Schwartz, on August 19, 2012, in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
    This is track number one.
    What is your full name?
    Edith Erica Laufer.
    I do not use my first name.
    OK.
    And where were you born?
    In Klagenfurt, Austria.
    And when were you born?
    May 11, 1930.
    Let's talk a little bit about your family.
    Your parents' names?
    My mother, my father was variously
    known as Julius Laufer and Joel Laufer.
    My mother in Austria was known as Clara Schwartz Laufer.
    And she changed it in the US to Claire.
    And where were they born?
    My mother was born in Berlin, Germany.
    And my father was born someplace near Krakow, Poland.
    I believe at that time it was part
    of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
    And how did they meet?
    Apparently, his parents and him moved to Vienna.
    And my mother and her parents apparently moved to Vienna.
    And they both worked during the day.
    It was so modern.
    They took French class at nighttime.
    That used to be the way to meet people,
    to study French conversation.
    And they met there as a result in Vienna.
    Do you know when they were born?
    Yeah.
    But not offhand.
    My father was born on November the 14th, 1898.
    My mother was born May the 7th of 1905.
    Tell me again when your father was born.
    1898.
    1898.
    Yes.
    Thank you.
    Did you have any brothers and sisters?
    No.
    You are an only child.
    I'm an only child.
    OK.
    And what kind of work did your father do?
    Well, he had a limited education.
    And he was the support of a large family.
    And he was working, when I was born,
    he was in Klagenfurt working as a window
    dresser for the only department store in town.
    My mother had been sent to learn how
    to become a master milliner.
    And she was an apprentice for, I believe, seven years.
    They had the guild system in Austria.
    And she was a master milliner.
    And as a result, she had a store where
    she made hats and had four apprentices working for her.
    Meanwhile, they lived in a flat.
    We lived on the second story.
    And they always had-- every year, a different girl,
    a peasant girl would come from Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia,
    or some such place on a one year contract.
    And upstairs, there was another family.
    And Herbert was a little boy who played with me.
    He was a year younger than me.
    And if we wanted to play, we would
    push the broom on the ceiling or the floor
    as to whether or not we wanted to play.
    Let's talk about the neighborhood
    where your apartment was.
    Was it a Jewish--
    Haven't got the faintest clue.
    It had a yard.
    And it had a big, big peach tree which Herbert and I one day
    attacked and ate a great deal of peaches
    when there were not ripe.
    And we were sick for days and got very much punished.
    It had a very nice yard that we could
    use to our heart's content.
    And I had a little goose by the name of Pauline.
    And we would sit on the bench.
    It was very pleasant.
    Lots of plants and trees and things around there.
    Do you know if it was a Jewish neighborhood?
    Or was it a mixed neighborhood?
    Or you don't know?
    I have no idea.
    Couldn't have been a Jewish neighborhood.
    My mother wouldn't have wanted that.
    And secondly, Herbert certainly wasn't.
    And as far as I know, I was the only Jewish child
    in the entire school.
    Tell me about your school.
    I don't know.
    One thinks one knows things.
    But one doesn't necessarily know.
    And one doesn't know what it is one remembers
    or what one thinks one remembers.
    I remember being taught by nuns.
    I have no idea whether the public schools in Klagenfurt
    were run by nuns or whether just there was a Catholic school.
    My mother liked to deny her Jewishness
    and tried to tell me that her parents, her mother, Julie
    Holter, was Catholic.
    But I'm not too sure about that.
    So I sort of doubt it.
    But anyhow, I went to school.
    And I was the only Jewish child there.
    My father insisted that I not attend class
    during Catholic training.
    As a result, I recall spending my time out
    in the schoolyard, even in the fall and the winter,
    for the hour that they had the daily religious training.
    The nuns didn't like me.
    And they thought that I was slow witted and insisted
    that I be trained to learn how to read and how to do math.
    I was very slow.
    And I seem to recall sitting in front of the room in disgrace
    all the time.
    It sounds like your house was obviously not a religious home,
    in no way observant.
    Oh, my father was very observant.
    Oh, he was?
    Oh yes.
    He was Conservative.
    And oh no.
    Do you remember any holidays you observed?
    Oh yeah.
    Like what?
    Can you--
    Absolutely.
    I can still rattle off [PRAYING IN HEBREW]..
    Of course.
    So you did.
    Yeah.
    And he convinced my mother to light the Shabbos candles.
    And she would cook carp and all the special foods and all that.
    Yes.
    My father was very tolerant of this.
    But he prayed daily.
    Did you belong to a synagogue?
    Excuse me?
    Did the family belong to a synagogue?
    I have no idea what they did.
    I think everybody had to.
    I don't think that, in Austria, you had any choice.
    But do remember going to the synagogue?
    As a small child?
    Yeah.
    No.
    I don't have any recollection.
    So I don't have many recollections
    because, let's see, we left when I was eight years old.
    Yes.
    I know.
    And it was quite traumatic.
    We'll talk about that.
    It wiped out a lot of memories that I would otherwise
    have perhaps.
    I'm sure.
    I just want to talk a little bit about your life
    before 1938 a little more.
    Did you have any Jewish friends in the neighborhood or--
    No.
    No.
    No.
    I don't recall having had any other friend other than Herbert
    upstairs and his babysitter, or whatever you call them.
    Nursemaid, housekeeper and mine.
    We would go out together, like going skating and whatnot.
    What about Freddy?
    Oh no.
    Those were relatives that frequently came to see us.
    My father's family frequently came to see us from,
    I don't know from where they were.
    I don't know whether they were in Klagenfurt
    or whether they were in Vienna or where they were.
    But my favorite cousin Vera was very glamorous, very beautiful.
    A few years older than me.
    And my father had a sister by the name of Stella.
    And they were all in Vienna, I guess.
    The time I saw them frequently was
    after we had to move to Vienna.
    Other than that, we got photographs of them visiting us
    in our place in Klagenfurt.
    What about your mother's family?
    Well, my mother's parents were retired.
    I have no idea what they did before.
    But they moved to Klagenfurt to be near my mother and me.
    And every day, when I went to school,
    my father would take me, walk me to school.
    I would run after him because he walked so fast.
    And my grandfather, my mother's father, Otto Schwartz,
    would pick me up after school and take me
    either to the candy store to get one piece of candy
    or else to the coffeehouses, where
    he would sit and sip coffee and read international newspapers.
    Then they would take me to the little shop that they had.
    It was no larger than this room here.
    And they had imported fabrics, beautiful fabrics from Scotland
    and whatnot, wools for hand tailoring suits.
    Julie, his wife, would run the shop.
    He sat out front outside rolling cigarettes and translating
    German into Esperanto.
    What language did you speak at home?
    German?
    Yeah.
    That was the only language.
    OK.
    Not Yiddish at all?
    Never.
    Yiddish was basically done by Southern Europeans.
    People who could speak German spoke German.
    They were rather prejudiced against Yiddish.
    OK?
    Right.
    No one ever spoke Yiddish.
    Yeah.
    It was looked down upon.
    Yeah.
    So I know you left when you were very young.
    But do you have any memories that you
    can recall about when things started
    to get a little difficult?
    Oh yeah.
    This is before you left?
    Before we left.
    Yeah.
    OK.
    There we were one day, I've told this to my daughter
    several times.
    One day, suddenly, there were troops in Klagenfurt.
    And I went to school.
    And they sang Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles.
    And the miracle was that everybody in the class
    knew all the words and how to sing it.
    And then they were doing Heil, Hitler.
    And they all knew how to do these things.
    The very day after Anschluss, annexation in English.
    And I recall one of my friends in class, Herta,
    she kept raising her hand because she
    wanted to go to the bathroom.
    And the teacher thought she was saying Heil, Hitler too much
    and wouldn't let her go.
    And next thing you know, she evacuated right there in class.
    And we all laughed.
    And the nun was very, very angry at us.
    OK?
    Had you heard of a man named Hitler by that time?
    Now, wait a minute.
    I'm getting to that.
    OK.
    And when I went home, when I got home,
    the baby sitter, housekeeper, whatever she was,
    took me downtown.
    And there was this man-- this was my recollection-- there
    was this man with a funny hairdo and funny mustache
    and a uniform.
    And he was screaming and shouting.
    And everybody was heil Hitlering.
    The next day or the same day, almost immediately, Herbert
    came to see me and said his mother said we
    could no longer play together.
    He was forbidden to talk to me.
    The school told me I could no longer go to school there.
    Doctor Strite, the pediatrician, said
    he could no longer treat us.
    And then a short while after that, an edict
    came that everybody who was Jewish
    had to resume or acquire Jewish or Hebrew name
    and wear a yellow star.
    And everyone had to leave and move
    to the first section [GERMAN] of Vienna.
    Find relatives or anything to go there.
    And so, we moved into the small flat of my father's father.
    Shmuel Laufer was his name.
    I think he went by Samuel.
    But his name was Shmuel.
    His wife had died a number of years earlier, Esther.
    She had died earlier.
    And everybody descended on this little apartment.
    It was on one of the upper floors.
    Flats, they called them in those days.
    Can we back up a little bit?
    When the young boy came and said he couldn't play
    with you, when the pediatrician said--
    Everybody said they couldn't deal with us.
    I know you were young.
    Do you remember how you felt as a young child, young girl?
    Was it upsetting?
    Do you remember being very upset?
    Frightened?
    Or accepting?
    Just total confusion.
    Confusion.
    I don't really recall, other than total confusion,
    like what in God's name is happening?
    And when the troops came into your school
    room, what was that like?
    No no.
    No troops came to our school.
    I thought you said soldiers came to the school.
    No.
    We went, my babysitter or whatever it is
    took me downtown after school.
    And I think it was after school.
    Anyhow, it was in the afternoon.
    Although it doesn't make sense, but anyhow
    she took me into town.
    And when you saw those troops, what did
    that mean to you as a child?
    I don't recall.
    OK.
    I don't recall.
    OK.
    It wasn't anything you would see in a very half rural town.
    It was a very quiet town.
    You wouldn't have seen such a thing as troops.
    How far away from Vienna was it?
    Six hours by slow train.
    Six hours.
    So it was in the countryside?
    Klagenfurt was a capital of Corinthia in the Roman Empire.
    Oh OK.
    [LAUGHTER]
    Six hours by slow train.
    When we visited Austria many years later,
    it was still six hours by slow train.
    OK.
    But when my daughter was three years old--
    when did we go to India?
    Maybe five or six.
    OK.
    It was still six hours by train.
    So now you've moved.
    How did it feel as, again, a young child
    to have to leave your home and move into--
    I have no recollection.
    You have no recollection.
    I have no recollection.
    OK.
    I have no recollection.
    And my next recollection is being
    in the small, stuffy apartment with all
    of these many relatives.
    My mother was desperate.
    She finally-- oh yeah.
    My mother's story.
    My mother was a master milliner and had a very successful store
    as a milliner.
    And everyone, all the ladies wore hats all the time
    in public at that time.
    So that was very successful.
    Several years earlier, she had fired Dorothea,
    one of her apprentices, because she
    was stealing from customers and from the store.
    And after Anschluss, Dorothea came with an SS officer
    and said for my mother to get out.
    This now belongs to Dorothea.
    No.
    Don't take anything with you.
    Just go.
    My mother's brother Schwartz, meanwhile,
    had married a very beautiful Catholic girl
    by the name of Annie.
    Very stylish, very beautiful, very tall.
    She advised him, take all your money out of the bank.
    You don't know what's going to happen.
    And they put it in a paper bag.
    And she said she accidentally threw it in the trash.
    They spent two days at the city dump looking for the money.
    Of course, they never found her.
    And of course, she was seen next with an SS officer, as well.
    I don't know what happened to Richard and my grandparents
    at that point, my mother's family, until later.
    So now--
    I never saw them.
    No, I never saw them again.
    And so, we moved to Vienna with all the other relatives
    on my father's side.
    And--
    Did you take anything special with you?
    Oh, my mother was so happy.
    She had finally rund bau, she called it.
    All the furniture was inlaid and had round corners.
    And she was so thrilled with it, she finally had it.
    And of course, she couldn't take that.
    But I don't know how she did it.
    But in this very small apartment upstairs in Vienna,
    she had brought the dresser, the dresser with the tall mirror,
    vanity, whatever you call it.
    It was not a dresser.
    It was a vanity with a tall mirror.
    And every day, she would dust it.
    And she would be so sad because she
    had left the rest of the bedroom furniture there.
    And then being her and dusting every day,
    one day it was Saturday, she dusted the vanity
    and shook the dust cloth out the window
    to the horror of my father's family
    because it was the Sabbath.
    You don't dust on Sabbath.
    Oh yeah.
    OK?
    Very vivid recollection of her daily stroking the vanity.
    So how long were you there in that apartment?
    I don't know.
    Until you--
    Not long.
    A few months.
    We had to have black curtains in front of all the windows
    so it couldn't be seen from the street that people were there.
    And one day, I mean, every once in a while, we would peak out.
    And they would get very angry at me
    for trying to peek at the corner to see what was going on.
    And I'd see all these armed boys marching around.
    Was that scary?
    One day, there had been an impromptu synagogue
    next door downstairs.
    And that was burned down.
    Thank goodness they put the fire out.
    They had some kind of impromptu schooling, as well.
    And the teachers remarked what a good student I was
    and how brilliant I was.
    And I don't know how I suddenly, within days,
    became from the village idiot to being brilliant.
    But whatever.
    Miraculously, I suddenly became very intelligent.
    So there was an impromptu school.
    But it was very crowded there.
    And there was, one day, it was especially bad.
    And some SA--
    SA were the younger fellows.
    SS were the stormtroops.
    And the SA were like scouts.
    They marched also with them.
    And they were, of course, young boys were the most vicious.
    They came upstairs one day.
    And they were looking for things.
    Unfortunately, nobody had anything.
    But they threw some furniture out the window.
    But then they left.
    Were you there at the time?
    I recall one of them actually looked at me and smiled.
    Oh, I was a little kid.
    Eight years old.
    I have no idea.
    With a big white bow in my hair.
    And after that, my father decided we're leaving.
    Up to that point, did your parents sit down with you
    and explain to you what was happening?
    I don't know.
    You don't?
    You don't remember asking them--
    I don't know.
    My mother was always in danger of being half hysterical.
    I have no idea.
    She was always very frightened, your mother?
    About everything.
    Yes.
    You know.
    Why me?
    Et cetera, et cetera.
    And my mother was real intellectual or whatever.
    So did you know what was happening?
    I mean, I know you were young.
    You were only eight.
    I don't know.
    But I have recollections, my mother's family was--
    my mother had family in Vienna who were Christian.
    And at least they were Christians
    before the Nazis got hold of them
    and didn't believe that their Christianity went
    sufficient generations back or something.
    Anyhow, I recall going with my father and my mother and me
    and hiding in doorways, going over to the other section
    and taking off the yellow stars and going in the other section
    and hiding.
    And trying to stay there until the pogroms were over.
    And you could go back home during the day or something.
    And nothing would happen.
    Just a recollection of total fright and terror.
    After a while, the relatives said
    they couldn't afford to have us come there anymore.
    Of course.
    What did wearing a yellow star mean to you?
    That nobody could tell who was a Jew
    and who wasn't unless they had a yellow star.
    You couldn't tell by looking at them, watching them,
    or anything else.
    Were you upset to have to wear one?
    I don't recall.
    OK.
    I absolutely don't recall.
    Anyhow, there we were.
    And my father said, after this happened, a lot of noise
    and a lot of broken things.
    Is this Kristallnacht?
    I guess that's what it was.
    Yeah.
    He said we're leaving.
    And he got tickets.
    Since we had always lived frugally,
    we were different from all other people.
    We had enough money.
    Although my father was just a window dressing and my mother's
    everything she had was taken away,
    we had enough money to go, to buy tickets,
    to go to China, which was willing to take anybody.
    And they laughed at him.
    I remember we were sitting around.
    There was just one candle and always sitting around.
    And they were laughing at him.
    They being your other relatives?
    His father and all his relatives.
    OK.
    As to how could you go someplace where
    it's so strange and different?
    And you don't know the language and the custom.
    And they've got slanted eyes and yellow skin.
    And nobody can understand anything
    they're saying, even when they speak German, which is true.
    You can't understand them when they speak English and are
    speaking English.
    But anyhow, they made complete fun of him.
    And they said these classic words
    that he's being very foolish.
    That God will take care of them.
    They have lived good lives.
    Good God fearing lives.
    And God will take care of them in the form of England
    and the United States.
    America and England would not let anything happen to them.
    OK?
    They laughed at him and said he was foolishly.
    He had no skill, no ability.
    What would he do?
    And he said, well, his wife makes hats.
    And he would figure it out.
    OK?
    One of his sisters apparently had
    a new husband who had more energy than the other people
    there.
    And she had a daughter.
    Or maybe it was his daughter.
    I believe it was her daughter.
    And he said they were moving to Sweden.
    And they laughed at him, too.
    What would he do?
    And he said he was going to make soap.
    And I remember they laughed, they
    had to hold their mouth so they wouldn't make so much noise,
    they were laughing.
    Everybody already has soap.
    Why would they need you to make soap?
    And what do you know about making soap?
    Anyhow, there was a big candle.
    And he proceeded to make soap.
    He did make soap.
    I understand they did move to Sweden.
    And I understand that the daughter became a nurse.
    I don't know her name.
    I don't know their married name.
    I have no idea.
    I don't know his name, his father's name.
    Anyhow, my father also had a sister
    whose name was also Clara.
    And she was, I believe, divorced or widowed.
    I think divorced or whatever.
    Anyhow, she didn't have a husband.
    Her daughter Vera was my favorite cousin.
    And they, of course, had no money to go anywhere.
    So we were going to leave and go to China.
    My father went to some kind of a building.
    I don't know whether it was the Kultusgemeinde
    or whether it was a government exit visa.
    I don't know what it was.
    Anyhow, he went there.
    And when he got there, it had been occupied.
    And there was a Kommandant sitting there.
    And there was blood on the wall.
    And he could hear men screaming.
    And it was my father's turn.
    And he said he went up and said, Herr Kommandant,
    I'm a veteran of World War I. I fought on behalf
    of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
    I'm a poor man.
    I'm a window dresser without any skills.
    I have tickets to China.
    If you have seen the movie Good Earth,
    you know that they are so poor that they are even
    eating earth.
    Undoubtedly, we will be killed there or starve to death
    or they will kill us or we will die
    as a result of the civil war they are in.
    You don't need us.
    And there's only me and my wife and my daughter,
    my small daughter.
    And we will have tickets to leave within two weeks.
    And the man said, let him go.
    As far as I know, he was the only person
    who ever talked his way out of a concentration camp.
    It's been my inspiration all my life.
    Speak up.
    OK?
    Speak up, and have something worthy to say.
    As he went out, a man approached him and said,
    do you want tickets to the Port of Spain?
    My father said, what's that?
    He said it's a British crown colony in the Caribbean.
    And my father said he asked, what's that?
    And the man told him it's a small island opposite Venezuela
    that's owned by the British and that he had gotten tickets
    where he wanted to go, namely where everybody wanted to go.
    Argentina.
    And did my father want his tickets to Trinidad?
    Of course, my father took it.
    I don't know whether he paid or had the money
    or whether it was all free in those days.
    You could only take 100 marks, shillings whatever they had,
    out of the country.
    So it didn't make any difference how much money you had
    or what you spent.
    Anyhow, I remember he came back and said,
    we're going to Trinidad.
    And he offered his tickets to China
    to the other relatives, who just laughed.
    I don't know if eventually they used them or what.
    I have no idea.
    I have no recollection or knowledge
    of what happened to the relatives
    after that, other than Clara.
    Anyhow, we had to go to Amsterdam.
    I believe we had 67 relatives when we left.
    And we went by train to Amsterdam,
    where we would wait until the ship, the Cotica,
    would come and take us on to Trinidad.
    What was it like again for you to leave your extended
    family, your relatives?
    I have no idea.
    I have no idea.
    A small child excited about leaving.
    And my mother desperate.
    She had to leave her vanity and her furniture.
    That I recalled.
    But she wanted to leave?
    Oh yes.
    She also wanted to leave.
    Oh, of course.
    They were devoted to each other.
    I mean, they were married 48 years until he died.
    They argued all the time.
    But they were devoted to each other.
    Did you take anything special, a special doll or a special book
    or special toy?
    Nothing.
    Anything?
    Nothing.
    My parents have two big containers,
    those big containers in which they had eiderdowns and woolen
    suits and woolen socks.
    All of which, of course, you wouldn't use
    in Trinidad, which is tropical.
    I forgot about Pauline, my pet goose.
    Oh.
    Well, tell me about Pauline.
    As we were leaving Klagenfurt one day, we were eating a meal.
    We were having a going away meal.
    And I said, what's this?
    It doesn't taste like chicken.
    Oh dear.
    They said it was Pauline.
    They ate Pauline, my little goose.
    [LAUGHTER]
    Oh dear.
    Oh dear.
    That was sad.
    That is very sad.
    The things that you remember.
    Yeah.
    You forget most everything.
    Thank you.
    I'm losing my voice, as usual.
    Where was I?
    Oh, we were going by train to Amsterdam.
    And we were sitting in the compartment.
    There was a man who sat opposite us in the same compartment.
    Now, this is November '38 we're talking about?
    '38.
    Yes.
    We left almost immediately.
    We left almost immediately--
    After Kristallnacht.
    Yeah.
    We landed in Trinidad in December of '38.
    So we left almost immediately.
    And we were on this train.
    And this man was sitting next to us.
    Apparently, he wanted to talk.
    And he wanted to ask my father how much money
    was he hiding in the suitcase.
    And my father was horrified.
    Because my father was the most honest person you've ever met.
    Even to people who wanted to kill you, exterminate you,
    he was going to obey what they said.
    He would never have done anything like that.
    He was shocked.
    Anyhow, the man said he had emptied his suitcase.
    And he had fixed it so that he had a lot of money and jewelry
    or whatever it is.
    And my father said the only jewelry we have we're wearing.
    There was a little locket.
    And my mother had a couple of bracelets.
    And my father had a watch or something.
    And I think maybe two gold chains.
    They were in plain sight.
    We were wearing them.
    Anyhow, when we came through the station,
    the SS agent came and took the man away.
    I mean, they overheard the conversation, obviously.
    And then, too, the agent looked at me
    and looked at my little locket and my parents' chains
    and watch.
    And he just smiled nicely, nodded his head,
    and left with the man.
    Did anybody ask for your ID papers?
    I have no idea.
    I wouldn't know an ID paper if I fell over one.
    OK.
    We stayed in Amsterdam until the ship arrived.
    And we were in a hotel room.
    And we were stunned by what we saw.
    I don't think they do this anymore.
    But every single morning, we looked out the window.
    And before it was daybreak, we would see housewives
    scrubbing their steps with brushes.
    Every single day.
    They were so clean in those days.
    Amsterdam was about the cleanest place
    on the face of the universe.
    Eventually, the ship came.
    And we went--
    What did you do with your yellow star?
    I don't know.
    I guess we threw it in the trash as fast as we could.
    Who knows?
    We didn't keep it as a souvenir, if that's what you mean.
    [LAUGHTER]
    I just didn't know whether you remember taking it with you.
    No.
    No.
    You left it?
    No.
    No.
    No recollection of ever seeing any such thing again.
    So how long did you stay in Amsterdam?
    It was at least over a week.
    I don't recall.
    Yeah.
    Because I remember we were going almost stir crazy.
    Little kid, mother, father in a small hotel room.
    Did you feel free to walk on the streets?
    Yeah.
    But I have no recollection doing it.
    Yeah.
    Just strange town, scary place.
    Whatever.
    No recollection of anything other than the hotel room.
    Then the name of your boat you said was the Cotica.
    Excuse me.
    The name of the boat?
    Cotica.
    How do you spell that?
    I don't know.
    OK.
    I would spell phonetically with a C or K.
    I don't know what the Dutch did.
    O-T-T-I-C-A.
    And do you know what line it was?
    No.
    OK.
    I haven't been able to trace it on the internet.
    But its name was Cotica.
    And it was a Dutch ship, as far as I know.
    So it was a Dutch line.
    So now you get on a boat.
    Yeah.
    Then we were on the boat.
    To go from there to Trinidad, you
    had to go past the Biscayne, the Key of Biscayne.
    The ship, we were first class since we had enough money.
    All the other kids were third, fourth, whatever, steerage,
    whatever way down there.
    Was it filled with refugees?
    As far as I know, that's all it was.
    I don't know.
    That's all it was.
    I have no idea.
    It was going to--
    who else would go to Trinidad?
    Why would anybody in their right mind want to go there?
    Did you talk to the other children?
    Oh yeah.
    Well, yeah.
    There were other children.
    They would come up.
    But there were days when the weather was very bad.
    I remember going up the Key of Biscayne,
    the ship was almost parallel, up and down, up and down.
    And of course, we were seasick, throwing up
    into the ocean, which was easy since we were first class.
    And we were up on the balcony.
    After a few days, you get your sea legs.
    And you no longer throw up.
    But yes, there were other children.
    The adults were taking English lessons.
    Us children, no.
    And some teenage boy came to see us.
    There were four or five of us.
    And some teenage boy came and saw us.
    And we complained that we didn't know any English.
    What were we going to do when we got there?
    And the parents all were learning English.
    And how about us?
    And he told us there was one phrase we should use.
    And it would get a big sensation.
    And we asked, how do you translate?
    What would it be?
    Oh, it's untranslatable.
    And he says, you look at the people straight in the face.
    Look straight in the eye.
    And smile as much as you can and say, shut up.
    [LAUGHTER]
    It got a reaction.
    OK?
    Did you talk about what happened to you with the other children?
    Did they talk about their stories and you
    talk about what you went through?
    I don't know what we talked about.
    I doubt it.
    I don't know.
    Yeah.
    I have no recollection.
    Nobody talked about anything.
    Then we got to Trinidad.
    So you went, there were no stops on the way?
    I don't know.
    I don't know.
    I don't know about that.
    I never heard about it in my whole life.
    That's something you got from your grandmother, not from me.
    She did a painting of the ghost that she saw on the ship.
    I have no idea.
    You know more then.
    You must repeat this, you must tell Mrs. Schwartz about it.
    Are we related, by the way?
    [LAUGHTER]
    Are all Schwartzes related?
    I hope so.
    So you land--
    Anyhow, we got to Trinidad.
    Yeah.
    And what did Trinidad mean to you as a young child?
    What did Trinidad mean to you as a young child?
    It was hot.
    It was unbelievably hot.
    Even in December?
    Trinidad is very close to the equator.
    And coming in December from winter--
    Yes.
    Bitter winter.
    Klagenfurt, of course, is at the foot of the Alps.
    And being used to snow and ice and whatnot,
    to get to the tropics.
    I meant, did Trinidad have any meaning for you
    before you got to know it?
    We were in Trinidad.
    And I believe we had spent two weeks or so, a month.
    They had arranged, I don't know where,
    probably the Jewish Refugee Committee.
    Who knows?
    I have no idea how it happened.
    Children don't ask questions.
    We were staying with a family.
    A Jewish family?
    Oh no.
    No.
    The man was, they told us he was Portuguese.
    He had very yellowish, brownish skin.
    And very curly whitish hair.
    His wife was obviously very British with blond hair
    and blue eyes.
    They had 12 different children.
    No two of them had the same shape, size, or color.
    I had never heard of adoption.
    I don't know if they were adopted
    or whether this happens through having enough children
    with a mixed race, whatever.
    The youngest ones were pale blonde.
    The oldest ones were much darker.
    That's all I know.
    Anyhow, we stayed with them for a month.
    That's what had been arranged.
    And then there was Carnival or something.
    I think Carnival's in February actually.
    I don't know why.
    But anyhow, there was Carnival in Trinidad
    where they go singing through the streets and marching
    and dressed in costume and singing Mardi Gras
    and whatnot and so on.
    They do nothing except sing and dance through the streets.
    And I ran afoul of the color line,
    which we knew nothing about.
    Because off in Austria, we had never seen anyone--
    oh, we once had gone to Vienna and saw a gypsy with a baby.
    She was nursing a baby in the middle of the street.
    Very shocking.
    Other than that, we never saw anybody except a white person.
    And in Trinidad, which we didn't know, there was a color line.
    And we had no costumes.
    So my mother had dirndl skirt and an apron.
    And my mother put a kerchief on my head
    upside down, Mammy style.
    And apparently, I crossed the color line
    and caused a sensation.
    Because a white person doesn't dress like a Black person.
    Oh my.
    [LAUGHTER]
    Anyhow, I don't know how it happened.
    But my mother immediately got a job in a hat store,
    making hats.
    My mother was a very nervous woman.
    And we had no place to leave the little jewelry
    and money that we had.
    Are you still living with the family?
    Except in her purse.
    Are you still living with the family?
    I don't know.
    Oh OK.
    I guess so.
    Because it was almost immediately.
    She almost immediately got a job.
    And she's carrying all this stuff in her purse.
    And she went to the bathroom at work,
    put the purse down on the sink while she
    was washing our hands.
    And a Black man came in and stole her purse.
    She, of course, could not identify him
    because, not having been there long enough,
    every Black looked like every other Black.
    When you first see Chinese, you think they all look the same.
    After a while, you see everybody is different.
    Anyhow, all she could say, he was Black.
    Of course, he was never found.
    We now had no money.
    No jewelry, which they had hoped to be able to sell.
    Anyhow, my mother worked.
    And she hated Black people all the rest of her life.
    Detested them with a passion.
    Thought they were all ignorant stupid and Black.
    And they were no better than a gorilla.
    And she absolutely detested them.
    They later had more reason to hate them.
    But anyhow, she was working there.
    And in the evening, she cut apart our curtains and made,
    I think, maybe a dozen or less little children's dresses,
    little fluffy children's dresses.
    And my father was, nobody would hire him.
    There was nothing he could do.
    They found a little hole in the wall
    selling children's dresses, which my mother
    had sewn after working all day.
    And they were an instant success.
    They were very fluffy and ruffly and whatnot.
    And they were a tremendous success.
    And as a result, this got around.
    And wholesalers came to see him and gave him credit
    so that he was able to start a nice little business selling
    children's dresses.
    And he even put an ad in the newspaper
    saying delicious little children's dresses,
    which he sent to my mother's relatives in New York.
    Because we were hoping to get a visa to go to New York.
    My mother could have gone instantly,
    since she was on a German passport.
    There was an endless ability of any German to enter at any
    time.
    But my father, since his place had become Poland,
    was on a Polish visa.
    And there weren't that many Poles in the United States
    at that time.
    And he had to wait until his visa would come up.
    And he sent this to show what they were doing in Trinidad.
    And they never lived down, my aunt's husband, Alex Kramer,
    they never stop giggling and laughing
    about delicious children's dresses.
    My mother, meanwhile, opened up her own store,
    naturally, and was very successful because she
    created hats of a kind they hadn't seen before.
    And they were doing very, very well.
    And then it became time for England
    to enter World War II, at which point
    it was said that it's a crown colony.
    An oil colony.
    And so, they clapped every last refugee
    into a detention center with barbed wire all around it.
    Black guards in white uniforms, high socks,
    with bayonets guarding us.
    And there we all were in a detention center.
    Not that we were mistreated or anything.
    But every family got one room.
    Was this in Port of Spain?
    Oh yes.
    Somewhere in the suburbs, I guess.
    It was apparently a barracks at one time or whatever.
    But there we were.
    As far as I know, I was the only one
    who would leave all the time.
    I had been chosen by Mrs. Lake who had studied in Germany
    and wanted to practice her German.
    And although they were a number of children there,
    I was the one chosen to be a companion to her daughter, who
    was one year younger.
    Little monster.
    And so, I got the benefit of a British boarding school
    education for the two years we were there.
    You actually went to a British boarding school there?
    Yes.
    I went to a British boarding school.
    I stayed at the boarding school.
    While your parents were in the detention camp?
    Even before then.
    Almost immediately after we arrived, I was chosen.
    I never went to whatever schooling
    they have in Trinidad.
    It would certainly be segregated.
    The British would be with British.
    The Portuguese with Portuguese.
    The Chinese with Chinese.
    The Black with Black.
    The Spanish with Spanish.
    No one spoke to anybody outside of their own whatever.
    There were countless people from India.
    I don't recall the women.
    But I remember the men.
    There were so many of them.
    They had turbans and were wearing some kind of diaper
    and would be sitting on the public steps all day long.
    I don't know why.
    But they would just sit there, old men sitting in the turbans
    and sitting on all the public steps.
    So you obviously lived at the boarding school.
    I lived at the boarding school.
    Did you see your parents frequently?
    Oh yeah.
    They had rented a very, very nice house
    before this happened.
    It was somewhere on the way, on the outskirts.
    It was a very nice little house.
    Within the first month of our arriving there, because
    undid those wooden crates that you have.
    He opened up the crates.
    And he took out a saw hammer and nails.
    And he sawed apart one of them to make a table and two benches
    out of the crates.
    So we instantly had furniture.
    It was very interesting.
    There were coconut trees.
    And the houses had metal roofs, corrugated metal roofs.
    And when it rained, it has monsoons there, rainy season.
    The coconuts would fall on the roof
    and would go bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
    And opposite us there was some guy, some man,
    some Indian man who wore just his diaper and a turban
    and had a goat.
    And the goat would be there all day long on a chain
    saying meh, meh.
    I would carry on a conversation with the goat.
    That's all I remember of that.
    I don't remember any children there whatsoever.
    By the time we were in the detention center,
    there were, I think, five children.
    They had duties.
    They had to decide who would cook and who would clean,
    who would do what.
    Were these Jewish refugees?
    Oh yeah.
    Oh yeah.
    They were all Jewish except there was a separate section
    for one Christian.
    That was the only one who was a Christian.
    They claimed they couldn't tell.
    The British claimed they couldn't tell if some of us
    might be spies.
    And that was very important because it was an oil crown
    colony.
    Besides which, I believe the natives didn't want us there.
    I think they hated us with our zeal to work, specifically.
    They all had siestas.
    They would have their big meal at lunchtime.
    Everybody would go home from work and eat and sleep.
    And the refugees would just continue
    to work and walk around in the heat of the sun.
    Nobody would care about whether it was hot or cold or whatever.
    And everybody would make fun of us because of that.
    Since nobody had ever seen refugees
    before and the zeal they have, they
    assumed that's the way Jewish people are.
    Instead of that's just the way refugees
    are, people who have lived wherever they were.
    Did people exchange their stories,
    the refugees among each other?
    I don't know what they did.
    OK.
    I know they had their own synagogue and everything else.
    They had a synagogue?
    Oh yeah.
    Instantly, they had the usual mentality of everything.
    Synagogue.
    Shops.
    Stores.
    Did your parents observe the Sabbath--
    Hm?
    Did your parents observe the Sabbath in Trinidad?
    Oh yeah.
    Sure.
    They observed the holidays.
    They still kept that up.
    Yeah.
    They did all their lives.
    Even in the detention camp, they did?
    I don't know.
    I don't know what they did in the detention camp.
    Because after a while, I would just stay in the school.
    And on weekends, since I hated having
    to go to the Anglican church, they
    went to the Anglican church.
    And I had never been to church before.
    And you had to kneel down at certain times.
    And Mrs. Lake's daughters, the oldest ones, were in the choir.
    And I was certain that if I kneel down or attend
    the church, any minute God would come
    and lightning would strike me dead.
    And as I discovered, he didn't.
    I was terrified at the boarding school
    because we had to say a certain prayer.
    Oh, the mosquitos.
    Your mosquito net.
    And you had to say a prayer at nighttime
    before you went to sleep.
    Something about, if I should die before I wake,
    I hope the Lord my soul will take.
    Sleep with angels at my head and feet.
    I was terrified to go to sleep.
    I didn't want to see these damn angels.
    And I sure didn't want to see God taking my soul
    while I was sleeping.
    Meanwhile, Valerie, Mrs. Lake's daughter, the little monster,
    would have her fun.
    I couldn't speak English, you see.
    And in the dead of night, we shared the room.
    In the dead of night, she would get up every once
    in a while out of her mosquito net, come over to my bed
    while I was actually sleeping.
    See?
    I did sleep.
    And wack me one.
    And I would scream.
    I mean, I had gone through a lot.
    All I needed was something like that.
    I would scream.
    And Nanny would come in.
    And Valerie would say I had done this to her, that Valerie was
    sleeping and I had done this.
    And I couldn't defend myself.
    I couldn't speak English.
    So I had great incentive.
    Every single day, we had lessons.
    And I would go, after I'd studied the lesson,
    go to school all day.
    And then you have to learn your homework.
    And then I had to go see Mrs. Lake every day
    and recite my homework.
    And I complained to her, I didn't
    know what these words meant.
    I can't memorize this.
    I can't understand this.
    Gaily died, a gal at night, in sunshine and in shadow
    was riding along, singing the song,
    in search-- what does it mean?
    And she said, you don't have to know
    what something means to learn.
    Just repeat it often enough.
    You can learn anything.
    When you are old enough, you will know what it means.
    Unfortunately, I'm now 82 years old.
    OK.
    Anyhow, I owe Mrs. Lake a great deal.
    I learned a huge number of things.
    I learned how to memorize.
    I learned how to do mathematics, English, and everything else.
    British history.
    You name it.
    French.
    It was an excellent school.
    Every single day, we had lunch.
    And they would serve these tropical foods
    I'd never seen before.
    Fried bananas.
    Bread fruit.
    These horrible things, as far as I was concerned.
    Secondly, we had to eat at lunchtime,
    whereas we were used to having a small lunch and a big dinner.
    They had these huge lunches, after which they took a nap.
    And then ate hardly anything at all in the evening.
    I would spend all night long starving to death,
    crying to myself being so hungry.
    But at lunchtime, when they served these foods,
    I would make horrified faces.
    And Mrs. Lake would send me out of the room.
    I had to stand outside where I could see the children
    but stand outside.
    And I wouldn't get to eat anything.
    The next meal that was served, I had the same food.
    I had to learn to eat it without making a face,
    without dawdling, eating just as rapidly as everybody else.
    And I learned to eat any garbage you put in front of me
    without making a face.
    What was the name of the school?
    Mrs. Lake's Boarding School.
    Oh.
    As far as I know.
    Did the detention camp have a name?
    I have no idea.
    No.
    But on weekends, since I was so terrified
    of having to go to this Anglican church if I stayed there,
    I said I was homesick.
    I wanted to see my parents.
    And it was a two hour ride going by tram.
    And you had to transfer in the middle and wait for one
    to get to the detention center.
    And there I was, a little girl all
    by myself going on this open air tram every single weekend, all
    the way over and all the way back.
    No one ever spoke to me, looked at me twice.
    That's what strict color line does.
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum Volunteer Collection
    Interview with Erica Laufer.
    This is track number two, and you are still in Trinidad
    going to school and visiting your family on the weekend.
    You said going by tram yourself.
    Did you hear me?
    You were talking about being in--
    Yeah, Trinidad, and going home on weekends.
    Trinidad.
    Yeah.
    Anything else about that time?
    Yeah, and as far as I know, they were only
    about five children, four or five children
    in the whole camp.
    And we would be together on the weekend when I got there.
    And this is so strange.
    They had an old piano outside.
    This is a tropics with tropical rains and all that.
    There was an old piano outside opposite the entrance
    to the Soul Christian.
    This man looked like, my recollection, he
    looked like the classical picture of a German spy,
    baldheaded, and whatever.
    Anyhow, he was the nicest man you ever met.
    He could play the piano.
    The parents just didn't approve of this,
    but he would come and play the piano, and we would sing along.
    We were the only people who ever spoke to the man.
    He was all by himself in there.
    What kind of songs did you sing?
    I don't know.
    I guess German.
    I don't know, I have no idea.
    Were you a musical child?
    No.
    No.
    Painting, artist, whatnot, but not musical.
    My uncle, I understand, Richard, my mother's brother,
    I understand was an understudy at the Vienna Opera,
    but I don't know about that.
    OK.
    So I was told.
    Yeah.
    I can't always believe everything my mother said.
    Did you think of Klagenfurt when you were
    in Mrs. Lake's School at all.
    Did you think back to when you were--
    did you miss your hometown?
    Did you think about them, think about it?
    No.
    OK.
    Not that I know of.
    Hasn't occurred to me.
    So how would you describe, in general, those two years?
    You were in boarding school for two years?
    Was it mostly positive, mostly negative, part of each?
    Other than being hungry all night long and hating the food,
    having to learn a new language, and having
    to memorize all kinds of things, I was miserable.
    I had no friends.
    I didn't play the strange games they played.
    Eventually, they were knitting sweaters, khaki sweaters
    or socks or something, sweaters for the troops.
    And I found I could annoy the wits out
    of people a certain way, get even, by reading.
    I would sit on the swing and read and knit at the same time.
    This wold annoy the living wits out of everybody around me,
    but I felt I got my revenge that way.
    How long did it take you to learn English?
    I don't know.
    I was desperate to learn because I thought
    that if I could speak English, I could explain
    that Valerie is doing this to me instead of me doing it to her.
    And then I discovered the great knowledge
    that one needs to have in life.
    The truth does not set you free.
    That the fact that you can speak and say something, no one
    will believe you against the daughter of the owner.
    And so I learned so many things in Trinidad.
    Were you aware, did people talk or your parents
    talk about when the war started, when Germany invaded
    Poland in September '39?
    No, I have no knowledge or recollection.
    My parents didn't speak about such things
    in front of children.
    Secondly, as far as I know, nobody ever
    talked about anything again.
    Period.
    Tried to forget it like it never happened.
    And go on with your life from here.
    And never think as to what happened in the past.
    It's only very recently, in my old age,
    that I've been ruminating on it.
    Everybody always-- and now, I keep
    wishing I had asked my mother or my father certain things
    long before they died for which I will never have the answer.
    But nobody ever spoke about it again.
    We never mentioned Austria or anything.
    My parents did go back to Austria once after the war.
    They were offered to come back.
    They were requested to come back, and they went back.
    But of course, you can't go back again.
    There were too many memories.
    My parents drew double social security.
    They drew social security from Austria
    as a result of having worked there as well
    as US social security.
    Yeah.
    Were you, just to go back in time,
    were you aware of the book burnings?
    Was I what?
    To go back in time.
    Yeah, I got that part.
    Preceding Trinidad.
    Yeah.
    Were you aware of the burning of books, book burning?
    Have any memories of that?
    Not in Trinidad.
    No, no, no.
    To go back before Trinidad.
    Klagenfurt, well, in the middle of the streets.
    Yeah.
    You actually see that?
    Yeah, in Vienna, yeah.
    Well, yeah, but they were so angry at me
    because I kept peeking out of the corner
    of the black curtains.
    Oh, I see.
    You saw it from your windown.
    Yeah, from the upstairs.
    Oh, I see.
    They were so angry at me because somebody
    might see that the black curtain was moving.
    Yeah.
    But, yes, you could see those things.
    Of course, you could smell the smoke.
    And that would be enough for you to look to see whether you all
    were going to burn any minute.
    Yeah.
    Did you ask your parents why are they burning books?
    I have no idea.
    I don't think people spoke to children--
    this was a generation where children were not
    meant to be heard.
    I mean, they were to be seen and not heard and not seen
    all that much, either.
    I mean, stay to yourself and don't bother us.
    Let's get back to Trinidad.
    Yeah.
    So you're in the school for two years.
    Yes.
    What did you do in the summertime?
    Did you stay?
    It was very, very strict.
    There was nothing you could do.
    I mean, you couldn't go back to your bedroom.
    You couldn't do this, you couldn't do that.
    You had to stay in this room and study.
    You had to go outside and play there.
    It was very, very strict.
    But in the summer, they have of a place on the water.
    And I went there with them for two weeks one summer.
    And there was no electricity.
    THERE was no radio or anything, but there was a wind up
    Victrola where you could play records, ancient records.
    And I learned how to swim and how to dive and how to jump in.
    Did you see other parts of the island besides Port
    of Spain and the beach?
    No, not that I know of.
    No.
    People didn't have cars in those days.
    My parents were working all the time,
    and their excuse for everything, the rest of the days
    were they're working.
    They never did anything.
    Well, let's move on then to the time
    that you're getting ready to leave.
    Yeah.
    What were the plans?
    What were your parents' plans and how did they
    make it come about?
    I have no idea.
    I haven't any idea at all.
    I have no idea.
    Recently, my family, my son or my daughter,
    pointed out that it says on the internet
    that we left from Argentina which
    I have no recollection of ever having
    even dreamed of Argentina or seen Argentina
    or how we got here.
    The only thing I remember is that we came on ship
    and that we were very disappointed because it
    was very foggy, and we didn't see the Statue of Liberty.
    Well, now we're talking about December 1940?
    Yeah.
    So you were in Trinidad for two years.
    Yes.
    Were you sorry to leave Trinidad?
    I don't know.
    You're now 10 and 1/2.
    You're now 10 and a 1/2 years old.
    Yes.
    10 and a 1/2 years old.
    I have a photograph of myself where
    I'm sitting there hunched over with the space between my teeth
    and the stupid white bow on top of my hair.
    What did the United States mean to you as a 10-year-old?
    That it was very cold compared to the tropics.
    We were at Macy's.
    And Aunt Irene, my mother's distant cousin,
    somehow vouched for us.
    And in those days, you couldn't come to the United States
    unless you had somebody vouch for you
    that you would never need one penny from the United States
    or from any state or city or anything.
    Something for some reason they stopped doing.
    But anyhow, in those days, you needed that.
    And Aunt Irene, her husband, Uncle Alex, worked in New York.
    He checked music to see if that sound was copyrighted.
    And they sponsored us.
    And she had never worked.
    And they sponsored us.
    And she said they could only sponsor
    a limited number of people depending on how much money
    they make, Alex made.
    And made my parents sign a contract that they would never
    ask for one penny from them regardless of what they
    promised the United States.
    I sort of never forgave Aunt Irene for that,
    but that's a different story.
    But they had gotten us one month rent
    in a brownstone in Manhattan.
    It was a huge efficiency.
    And my father pulled out the dictionary, encyclopedia,
    whatever it was.
    It was orange covered.
    And it showed the flags of all the different countries
    and whatnot.
    And he pulled up the United States,
    and he found out that Washington DC is the capital,
    and that's not too far from New York.
    And it didn't cost that much by Greyhound to go from New York
    to Washington.
    And there was a small town, and since it was a government,
    they all would be needing hats because the ladies would
    be attending functions and would need to wear a hat.
    And so it would be a good place for my mother to be a milliner.
    And they decided we would move at the end of the month
    to Washington DC.
    Did your parents speak English well by then?
    No, but they could make themselves understood.
    And your English was good by then?
    I don't know, I guess so.
    After two years in Trinidad.
    Yeah, oh, yes, so very British tipped English.
    Yes.
    Yeah.
    Very proper.
    What boat did you come on from Trinidad to United States?
    I don't know.
    You don't know.
    I don't know.
    I don't remember.
    Yeah.
    Yeah, they didn't need much English in Trinidad
    other than the store and whatnot, how much and,
    you know, and no and Yes and next week and things
    of that nature.
    But before, what I asked before, before you
    came to the United States, what did America mean to you?
    Did it have any--
    Nothing.
    I don't think I heard of it.
    It had no meaning for you.
    Nothing.
    OK.
    So now you're--
    They discovered my family, my son and daughter,
    discovered that I came through Ellis Island.
    I swore up and down I never heard of Ellis Island,
    but they showed me where on the internet
    it shows that we came, got my name,
    came through Ellis Island.
    I don't know what Ellis Island is, I never saw it
    but they told me that's where we came.
    And then we came from Argentina which
    I don't understand either because we
    came from the Trinidad.
    Children don't know these things.
    Yeah.
    So now, you're in New York.
    So now, we are in New York.
    And your father's talking about Washington.
    No, we're in New York, and we're at Macy's and seeing
    all these sites and it's snowing outside and it's bitter cold.
    And my aunt had gotten me, without knowing me,
    had gotten me a snowsuit.
    Here, I'm 10 and a 1/2 years old.
    A snowsuit, this dark maroon with snow
    drops in turquoise and a big hood,
    and I looked like a dwarf.
    That was because it was very, very cold.
    I don't know about shoes, I must have had boots.
    I don't know.
    But we walked through Macy's, and I'm
    dressed in this weird outfit.
    And I suddenly got whatever.
    And I started to howl.
    I cried and cried and cried.
    I wanted a doll.
    And my mother said you never liked dolls, you hate dolls,
    you're too old for a doll.
    What you want now was a baby doll.
    And they said didn't have much money,
    but eventually, they got me a doll just to shut me up,
    I guess.
    And of course, I never played with it again.
    But anyhow, that's a vivid recollection.
    Somehow, we had one month.
    Every place we went to we had one month.
    When we got to Washington DC, we had one month.
    It must have been through the refugee committee, I guess.
    I don't know.
    We were staying with a rabbi and his family
    in Northeast Washington.
    And it was just so different again.
    So very confusing.
    So you were in New York only for a month?
    Yes.
    Oh, I see.
    But we couldn't afford the rent.
    My parents were anxious to get on with it
    and not have to be thankful or whatever
    and just get on with life.
    Yes, we were just there for a month.
    And then we had this one month, I think, in DC with the rabbi.
    And looked around and there was obviously,
    to my parents, not the right neighborhood in which people
    would be wanting to buy designer hats made to order.
    And discovered a place in Georgetown, which at that time
    was a slum, where they rented a building at 1330 Wisconsin
    Avenue NW.
    That there was a store downstairs,
    and there was a little efficiency upstairs.
    My parents stayed upstairs.
    And the store had, in the back of the store,
    there was a little room which was my mother's work room.
    And it had a cot, and that's where I would sleep at night
    time, that was my place.
    They were upstairs, I was downstairs.
    There was a small refrigerator, an ancient one.
    A gas refrigerator with a motor on top of it.
    And one day, apparently, the gas, my mother
    was always very--
    she couldn't do anything.
    Oh, her husband had to do everything.
    Everything was such a crisis.
    She couldn't do anything at all.
    And one day, the gas leaked.
    And this person who could never do anything
    somehow called the authorities, had them removed the thing,
    and got a new refrigerator.
    By the time my father came home, we had a new refrigerator.
    OK?
    Where did you go to school in Georgetown?
    It was just-- there were three schools next to each other.
    It was just a block and a half away.
    Not on Wisconsin Avenue, but the side street.
    And it was Addison Curtis and Hyde.
    Two of them were elementary schools, and one of them
    was a school for bad girls.
    And we all shared the same playground.
    And the bad girls learned how to can and cook and iron.
    And I know we went over there, too.
    We learned how to--
    this was during World War II.
    And we were taught how to iron your husband's shirt
    and how to sew and how to darn socks
    and how to cook spam and string beans and potatoes
    and foods, very cheap foods, and so on so
    that we could manage on your husband's income.
    Do you remember December 7, 1941?
    Pearl Harbor?
    No.
    You do not?
    No.
    No.
    When the United States entered the war.
    No.
    No.
    We had a lot of air raid drills at the school.
    And we would go into the basement
    and sing patriotic songs.
    And being me, I one day raised my hand and got
    called on and asked, why are we in the basement?
    If there really was an air raid and a bomb dropped on us,
    we'd be buried alive.
    And the teacher gave me the same reply
    that people always give to this kind of question, apparently.
    Just keep quiet and keep singing.
    I heard this so often in my life.
    I would ask a question so basic and always get
    that type of response.
    So all life has been a learning thing.
    I was picked on mercilessly.
    They called me the little Hitler because I was German.
    And, of course, the only one in the school and, of course,
    the only Jewish person within miles around as far as I know.
    And I was not ever going to tell anybody
    that I was Jewish again.
    I've had enough in Austria where it
    was out there when they were in a nice warm classroom
    and I had to be outside all by myself in the snow and whatnot.
    So I wouldn't have my brain filled up with Catholicism
    or whatever.
    So I said nothing.
    I was picked on mercilessly.
    They played games like dodge, and it finally
    occurred to me that they really wanted
    to hit me as hard as possible.
    So I would refuse to play.
    And remembered what I had done in Trinidad.
    And I would sit during recess, and I would sit and read.
    You won't believe this, at 10 years old, 10 and a half,
    I would read Plato and all the classics.
    The others could barely read.
    They were American students, and the education system
    was ridiculous.
    My parents, of course, were terrified of authorities,
    wouldn't dream of saying, no, that's not right.
    The teachers felt I needed to learn how to adjust
    to learn American history.
    I could have learned it by reading a book in one weekend.
    But no, they insisted that I go in class according to my age
    instead of according to my knowledge which
    is far superior having gone to a boarding school.
    They were learning adding and subtracting,
    and I was doing algebra, doing math in my head and what not,
    doing compositions.
    Anyhow, I sat in the back of the room for two years.
    Teacher said I could join in any time I wanted to for whatever I
    wanted to do and spent my time painting pictures
    the whole time, two years.
    And yeah, and then what happened?
    Did you leave that school?
    Oh, Georgetown was a slum in those days.
    And we would play hide and go seek in buildings,
    huge, huge, huge buildings.
    The floor, there were no windows,
    the doors were wide open.
    The floor would have holes in it.
    We would play ghost and whatnot.
    And I was on the swimming team, having learned how to swim.
    I was on swimming team, and we had
    a swimming thing against whatever the major school is
    in Northeast.
    And they disabled me almost instantly by kicking me
    in the stomach after we dived in.
    But anyhow, I went to the playground.
    We never had anybody watching me after we
    came to the United States.
    I spent all my time after school,
    I would go to the library and read books every single day
    until it was time to come home and eat dinner.
    And in the summer, I would go to the playground.
    Georgetown playground is just a few blocks away.
    And the crafts and whatnot and fended off
    boys who kept saying annoying things to me.
    No longer picking on me, they were interested in me.
    How aware were you of World War II going on
    at the time besides the fact that--
    In Georgetown?
    Yeah.
    How aware were you?
    I know you had drills.
    We had air raid drills all the time.
    But of knowing what was happening.
    Well, there was rationing, and you couldn't get anything.
    There was rationing for everything.
    And there was a butcher across the street
    who had his eye on me.
    And my parents would send me there because if I went there,
    we would get butter and meat, whereas if they went there,
    they didn't get anything, even if they had ration cards.
    Did your parents have any contact with their family
    back in Europe?
    My mother had some kind of a stomach condition.
    And her cousin, cousin?
    Yeah, Freddy's father, [? Holtze, ?] one
    of the [? Holtze's, ?] Leo [? Holtze, ?] had moved
    to Switzerland with my cousin Freddy who was I think a year
    younger than me who eventually became a physician,
    I understand.
    I don't know if he's still alive or where he is.
    I think he left, they all left Switzerland
    because Leo was in Czech Republic when he died.
    Anyhow, where was I?
    I was asking if--
    I'm looking at pictures of Leo.
    What?
    I was asking if your parents had any contact.
    Yeah.
    Since she had the stomach condition and needed medicine
    and kept ranting and raving at the American doctors
    are far behind, she would send to her relatives in Switzerland
    soap and perfumes and candies and whatnot.
    And they would, instead, send us to Austria or Germany or France
    or wherever they had relatives for [INAUDIBLE] which
    some kind of a stomach thing.
    I think she lacked sufficient stomach acid or something.
    And this would cure her.
    They had nothing comparable in the United States.
    I haven't been able to find it on the internet.
    It's long since gone, whatever it was.
    My mother's brother, meanwhile, when we were--
    I said I had never seen when we left Klagenfurt,
    I had never seen my very beloved grandparents again,
    my mother's parents, the Schwarz's.
    Apparently, Uncle Richard, my mother's brother, took them--
    I know he was in Italy and that way.
    I know that they were in several countries
    and, eventually, took him to France.
    From there, after World War ended,
    the Red Cross informed my parents
    that her parents had died in Buchenwald concentration camp.
    Apparently, the French sent them to their death in Buchenwald.
    My uncle somehow-- remember, he was the one
    that the nuns had said when he was a kid that he would end up
    on the gallows.
    But because he always found some way out
    that wasn't the standard one.
    Anyhow, he wound up in the French Foreign Legion
    and spent World War II in North Africa with the French Foreign
    Legion.
    He eventually went back to Austria after the war,
    and he eventually came to the United States.
    Let's move on.
    So you spent the war years going to school, and now it's 1945.
    Yeah.
    Oh, I was on the swim team.
    And I had a good friend by the name of Audrey.
    Very, very pretty girl who was also very, very good swimmer.
    And I remember being shocked going
    to see her in their apartment as to how many people there
    were who slept all in one bed and how little they had.
    Anyhow, next thing you know, it was World War II
    and sailors would come home on the weekend
    and you couldn't go downtown to the movie houses without--
    the sailors and soldiers were lined up
    on the street, but four deep, trying to pick up any girl that
    walked by screaming after them.
    Anyhow, next thing you know, little Audrey was pregnant.
    And she asked me whether I knew where babies came from.
    And I said, oh, of course.
    I had no idea.
    No idea whatsoever.
    I foolishly went home and asked my mother
    and she went, why do you want to know?
    And I said, well, Audrey says she's going to have a baby.
    I thought my mother was going to drop up on the floor.
    She was so shocked.
    Within, I think, a month or weeks, she
    had found a house to buy in Petworth,
    a row house, all the way across town.
    I remember my father being stunned,
    how would we have money for down payment on the house?
    And she had done that.
    My father had never gone to a grocery store.
    And she worked, and she gave him all her money.
    And he would take care of it as well as the ancient method.
    And he would give her grocery money
    and she would skimp off the grocery money to such an extent
    that she had enough for a down payment on the house.
    And he wanted to know, how would they pay
    for this every single month?
    And she said, they would rent out the apartment
    they were living in now.
    And she had her store and he had an income by now, too.
    And they would be able to do that.
    And they would rent one or two rooms in the house.
    I could sleep on the sofa, and they would rent enough
    and they would pay for the utilities and the mortgage.
    She had read a book that's called
    How to Make a Million Dollars in Your Spare Time in Real Estate,
    and she took that as a recipe and followed
    every last word of it.
    Toward the end, they own six houses.
    She could never get my father to do that because every penny
    he had, by that time, he had a uniform shop.
    And every penny he had, he stuck into the uniform shop.
    I would work there on Saturdays.
    He would go on shopping trips for his store
    to Philadelphia or New York, mostly Philadelphia,
    and would take me along.
    And I would try on the uniforms and see which were comfortable
    and which ones didn't wrinkle and which
    ones look very stylish.
    And as a result, he had very stylish uniforms.
    And the wholesalers made a lot of money telling people which
    uniforms had been proven to be the most comfortable, most
    stylish.
    They were selling them all over the place.
    These are military uniforms?
    No, no.
    This was a day of segregation and white women--
    For waiters?
    Well, Black women couldn't be in a white neighborhood
    without being in a uniform.
    I see.
    And besides, which you wouldn't want
    to see the clothing they wore, it
    would be too risque or too dirty or too weird by our taste.
    And you wouldn't want to have one
    of them walking through your neighborhood
    because they would be in great danger probably, undoubtedly.
    And so they all had to have a uniform.
    So he had a shop in a Black neighborhood
    on Seventh Street which had uniforms, ladies uniforms.
    And then he also took in for pretty white fluffy blouses.
    And then he took in white stockings
    and then dressy stockings for holidays and so on.
    And I would go there on Saturday and help him.
    So now you're in high school I don't know.
    Probably junior high.
    OK.
    I would go there, and I was so shocked.
    Little Black girls came in, they looked like they were 10 or 11,
    with boyfriends who would buy them fancy stockings.
    And the girls would act so thankful to the boys
    and the boys were so nonchalant.
    I became so disgusted with the whole thing.
    I hated it.
    The moment I was 15, I got an underage permit,
    and I was able to get a job at a department store
    as a sales lady for the summer.
    I didn't tell them that I was going to go back to school.
    They just assumed I was one of the many girls who
    stopped going to school and was working.
    And so I got a job in a very nice department store.
    And two months later, my parents insisted that they
    were going on vacation.
    A friend of theirs, a man who had a shop across the street,
    his brother had a place up in Accord,
    New York in the Poconos.
    And insisted I go with them for a week
    because a man had a son by the name of Harold
    that they wanted me to meet.
    And of course, I hated him at first sight.
    And when I came back after the week up in the mountains,
    Landsberg said it didn't need me anymore, that my job was gone.
    So I got a job in a 5 and 10 a block
    or so further down, [? Creskey's ?] 5 and 10.
    And I was in the basement and they put me
    to counting 100 marbles and putting them
    in the sack, 100 marbles to the bag, all day long.
    And there was a curtain there between this and the store.
    And I would sit as far in the curtain
    as I possibly could because there was a Black man who
    worked the stockroom.
    He was big.
    I was terrified of him.
    I had never been this close to a Black man before.
    I was terrified of him.
    Anyhow.
    Did you ever go back to high school?
    Huh?
    Did you go back to high school?
    Oh, yeah.
    I went through high school, college, and law school.
    Oh, all right.
    And secretarial school and halfway through a Master
    of Laws.
    Yes.
    No, I mean, you were talking about what you were doing.
    Oh, no.
    At this time, yeah, sure, I went back.
    It was sort of interesting.
    I was in the basement of the 5 and 10.
    And then they transferred me to selling goldfish.
    And I was opposite a lady, a very old lady,
    who painted Polaroid photographs,
    and I learned from her in my spare time, which is much,
    how to paint on photographs.
    A very good skill that came in handy many years later.
    Anyhow, from there, they transferred
    me upstairs next to the entrance selling wall paint.
    And one day a sailor came in, and I was
    very sheltered you understand.
    I had not ever gone out or anything.
    And he came over, and he wanted to meet me
    later as soon as I got off and proceeded to tell me
    what he wanted to do.
    And like an idiot, I opened up my purse
    and took out a day's worth of wages, $5, handed him the $5
    and said here go buy it on Ninth Street.
    That's just two blocks over.
    Ninth Street was a red light district.
    He took my $5.
    A short while later, the lady who was a floor walker
    walked over and said I was fired for being
    uppity with the customers.
    I found out later he was her son home on leave.
    I never mentioned anything about the $5
    or what he had said because I knew I wouldn't be believed.
    I had learned this at Mrs. Lakes.
    Yeah.
    No use saying.
    Let's move on a little bit.
    So you finished high school?
    Yeah.
    Where did you go to high school?
    I went to, first, McFarland.
    It's in Petworth.
    Went to McFarland Junior High, and it
    next door to Rosewood High School.
    I was very popular.
    I was considered very good looking in my day.
    And I had many friends, and I joined a Jewish sorority.
    They were outlawed, but we were in them.
    Did you talk about your childhood
    with them, with people?
    No.
    No?
    No.
    OK.
    You don't want to show that you're
    different from other people, that you
    had different backgrounds from what other people have.
    No, never mentioned it.
    Never mentioned it.
    Nobody asked, either.
    Had you dropped your British accent?
    Oh, yeah.
    I lost it very rapidly in elementary school.
    Elementary school, I first got there,
    the teacher walked in the room, I
    stand up, and say good morning, Miss Jones.
    And she would call on you, yes, Miss Jones.
    Right away, Miss Jones.
    And the others, yes, you learned very rapidly to drop that.
    Then you go on to college.
    Did you start college right after high school?
    Oh, no.
    Oh, no.
    My father wanted me to open up a chain store,
    and I didn't want any part of that kind of business.
    By that time, he had moved up to 14th Street
    to a better neighborhood so-called for a while.
    And I wanted no part of selling.
    And I want to go to New York School of Fashion Designing.
    And my mother said over her dead body
    would I leave the house until I was married.
    So my father said that he had been supporting his family
    at a much younger age and they saw no reason
    why they should support me.
    But anyhow, they finally decided they would give me
    one year of any education that would then make
    me financially independent.
    I could then do whatever it is I wanted to do with my whatever.
    One of the problems was in high school in those days,
    people were very insecure.
    We all were sure we were going to die
    as a result of an atomic bomb from the Russians.
    And everybody got married.
    It seemed everybody was engaged, including me,
    in high school, ready to get married the day
    they got out of high school.
    And we decided on McLaughlin School for Medical and Legal
    Secretaries, one year of learning how shorthand, typing,
    blood tests, urinalysis, diathermies,
    all the systems of a human body, et cetera.
    Very, very intense for one year.
    Upstairs, two rooms, and I learned
    how to take blood, give blood, all these things,
    look at microscopes, count how many blood cells there are,
    et cetera.
    And then after I graduated, I got a job.
    They gave me a job for the summer for some physician, Dr.
    Goldstein, while his nurse was in England on a three month
    honeymoon.
    And I worked there, and learned I would never again work
    for a physician in my entire life,
    that they're total phonies and whatnot.
    Anyhow, I then got a job with the American Trucking
    Association which was a lobby for the trucking industry
    in the legal department.
    And the men would come in at 10 o'clock with their hats
    on, sit down at the desk, smoke a cigarette,
    and read the paper, and send me out to get coffee
    and have me doing typing and shorthand and whatnot.
    And I soon realized that I could do what they were doing
    a lot better than I was doing.
    And saved my money.
    Needed all the money I could, I had to work for two years
    to pay for dental work.
    I had never had dental work, shoes, feet, and whatnot.
    I had all kinds of disabilities.
    Nobody ever had money for.
    And after that, decided I didn't know I had the brains for it,
    but I decided to--
    I went to George Washington University
    and they said I didn't have the requirements to get to college.
    I had decided in high school to enjoy myself and not
    take geometry.
    I dropped geometry and algebra two and physics and whatnot
    and enjoyed myself in high school
    instead of studying because I thought
    I was going to marry Ralph as soon as I got out,
    but instead I broke up with him.
    But anyhow, as a result, I didn't have requirements.
    They told me I could go as a non-degree student.
    And if I got good grades when I was 21,
    I could petition that my grades be counted.
    And miraculously, I got all A's.
    I went all the way through college
    and got all A's and one D. The D was
    in sociology of the criminal.
    I just want to throw them all in jail
    and throw the key away instead of mollycoddling them.
    But anyhow, all the rest of them I got A's.
    And I became Phi Beta Kappa, which was an honorary society.
    I requested a scholarship the last /
    I was working during the day and going to night school.
    Or other years when I had enough money going to day school,
    and I would go to school during the day or night
    depending on which I had money for.
    And one year, the last year, I won the scholarship,
    and they told me my father made enough money
    to send me through college.
    And I said, my father refuses to send me to college.
    He believes women have no business being in college.
    They should be married and having children.
    And that if I got an education, I
    would limit my choice for a husband.
    And he was adamantly opposed to it.
    And they didn't care about that.
    But the head of the political science department
    said if I were to switch my major to political science,
    they needed a secretary.
    I could work there three afternoons a week,
    and they gave me a scholarship of $150 which, in those days,
    was something.
    And between that and working for him in the school,
    I was able to pay for my last year of college.
    And then, I was working as a secretary, got good wages.
    I finished, and I got all A's and whatnot.
    I tried to get a job, and I couldn't find a job.
    The only job I could get was as a typist
    for the congressional record at a reduction of what
    I was making as a secretary.
    By that time, I was a crackerjack secretary
    and legal secretary.
    And I was so shocked that you could
    get all A's, show that you had the ambition to work your way,
    pay for it yourself, and nevertheless
    couldn't get a job.
    I walked across the campus to law school
    and said I would like to apply to become a lawyer.
    And the gal there said to fill out this form.
    And she saw my Phi Beta Kappa key,
    and she said it wouldn't be any problem admitting me,
    no test, no anything.
    OK?
    So I went to law school and worked for lawyers.
    One year, I went to the most outstanding law firm
    in Washington.
    They had an ad for--
    two ads.
    One for a law clerk and one for a secretary.
    And I applied for secretary, and they gave me an IQ test
    and refused to hire me because they
    said my IQ was as high or higher than the lawyers.
    I said, so, that means I can really help them,
    and they said, no.
    This would be too confusing.
    So I said, well, how about the job,
    you have a job as a law clerk?
    Oh, no, we don't hire girls for that.
    I said, well, if my IQ is so high, I'm going to law school.
    I said that would confuse everyone.
    They said absolutely not.
    So I became a women's lib very soon.
    And what did you do after law school?
    Well, my last job was with a law firm.
    It was fabulous.
    They were going to hire me as a lawyer,
    but I'd have to find my own clients because one of the men
    was pulling out.
    He was becoming a lawyer for the musicians union,
    and I could take his place.
    Unfortunately, I had to pass the bar within less than a month
    after school was out.
    And the DC bar, at that time, was three days' ordeal.
    Three solid days of writing without stopping.
    I thought I knew everything since I
    knew where the courthouses were, the judges, since I
    had composed wills and contracts and I knew everything about it.
    I said, oh, well.
    I can whiz through it in no time.
    Unfortunately, I flunked the law exam
    on contract, a course in which I had gotten an A. I flunked it.
    I sat through this law exam.
    My mind was blank.
    I had writer's cramp.
    I couldn't even concentrate.
    Anyhow, within a week of having taken that exam,
    I also took the Federal Service Entrance Exam as backup.
    And I apparently passed that barely,
    within two points or something, but was picked up
    by the Veterans Administration not because my school was high,
    because everybody else had a higher score since they had
    studied for a year, but because I had worked for a doctor
    and gone to McLaughlin's Medical School.
    I knew one bone from the other.
    I knew the blood systems.
    I knew all the stuff backwards and forwards.
    And they were doing disability.
    They were rating disability of veterans and people on Social
    Security and old age and so on.
    So they hired me.
    And they couldn't promote me fast enough.
    They thought I was a genius.
    I got one promotion after the other,
    even taking off several weeks to have a baby.
    When did you get married?
    I got married in my last year of law school.
    At that point, I was working for the Teamsters Union.
    And I suddenly had the--
    Chris was at the Indian Embassy and he
    was studying, at that point, he was studying on his--
    was he still on his master's?
    Yeah, at that point, he was on his--
    no, he was on his PhD.
    He had gotten a masters in PolySci,
    international relations.
    And he was working on his PhD in this,
    peaceful uses on atomic energy was his field.
    His name?
    Huh?
    His name is--
    Christian Mathur.
    M-A-T-H-U-R.
    OK.
    Christian [? Diel ?] Mathur.
    Were typing his thesis.
    We rented a typewriter.
    My girlfriend Beatrice and I was sitting there
    on a table just like this.
    We had two typewriters, and he had written something
    and his English was atrocious.
    You couldn't make heads or tails of half of the stuff.
    And what do you mean here, what do you mean?
    And here I am within weeks of delivering,
    and I'm sitting there drinking gin and water and smoking,
    chain smoking, the entire time.
    Nobody ever told us you shouldn't drink
    and shouldn't smoke.
    You can see my daughter here.
    She Is perfectly normal.
    Where was your husband from?
    India.
    From Hyderabad, India.
    Oh, it was India?
    Yeah.
    She needs to go over why, well, you didn't marry
    the Jewish person because one--
    Oh, yeah.
    I couldn't find anybody.
    I would go out with--
    in those days, you were on dates.
    You took a date.
    And you would have them meet you at home.
    Your parents met your--
    you didn't just go out.
    Your parents had to meet with you.
    If I brought home a Jewish boy, my mother would have a fit.
    This is wrong with them, that's wrong with him, this is wrong.
    She'd carry on.
    If I brought home a gentile boy, my father, I'm heart broken.
    How could you do this?
    I couldn't satisfy them no matter who I went out with,
    they disapproved totally.
    And I don't know how, but anyhow,
    I never found anybody who was--
    I tried desperately.
    I never found anybody who was intelligent.
    They all seem shallow, thinking of drinking beer
    and girls and whatnot.
    And Chris was different.
    So you had your first child?
    Yeah.
    So I had a child.
    Yes.
    You can imagine how unique this was.
    Well, first of all, there were only five people
    in my law school graduating class out
    of a couple of hundred.
    Five women you mean?
    Huh?
    Five women?
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    I thought there were two.
    No?
    No, there were five in the law school.
    We would meet in the ladies room.
    We would dash in the ladies room to hide from the guys.
    The guys were so angry with us because we were in law school.
    It wasn't unusual in those days.
    It was so rare.
    Did you have any other children?
    Yeah, I had a son a few years later.
    But I brought the baby in to the office
    because it give me a shower.
    And the women were very angry at me for politicking.
    I want to show them, see, this is a beautiful baby
    I have as a result of the shower.
    But anyhow, I came back to work very soon.
    Chris got his PhD.
    And I came back to work very, very soon.
    And kept getting promoted.
    And then, word came--
    this is the Veterans Administration,
    only veterans should have jobs as long
    as there's a veteran available.
    And so I was out of a job.
    And I found a job at a central office
    where they didn't have this requirement at that point.
    I was drafting letters for the signature of the commissioner
    of social security as to the final whatever
    it is to Congressman, and I got promoted.
    And then the word came--
    I was section chief at that point,
    I got promoted-- that there was a disabled veteran who
    hadn't gone to college, but he was a veteran
    and he would qualify with his 15 points for the job I had.
    And so, again, I lost a job and got
    into a category of simply sitting there and writing
    with 100 other people in the same category.
    Instead of being the local genius,
    I was the bottom of the pile.
    OK?
    Then I had another child.
    I was pregnant.
    And Roy, my son, and those are the only children I have.
    I have seven grandchildren.
    So you stayed in the Washington area from then on?
    Well, after a while, my marriage to Chris sort of disintegrated.
    It was my fault. Somehow, eventually,
    I could no longer take the views as to--
    he kept saying I didn't speak to him the way a wife should,
    et cetera.
    And I kept saying--
    anyhow, I was earning a lot more than he was, whatever.
    After a while, I could no longer take the difference
    in personality, in background.
    He was a party guy, and we would be working all day long,
    and I would come home and he would
    have invited 40 people to come over and cook and eat and drink
    in our basement.
    My parents would give me a down payment for a house
    in Arlington off Lorcom Lane.
    And we built out the basement, and had parties all the time.
    And the weight of it all got too much to me
    between the racial thing and the difference
    in views and whatnot.
    I could take it no longer.
    And Medicare was enacted.
    And I was, again, in one of those positions,
    and I got transferred.
    I applied for transfer to San Francisco where
    a friend of mine had moved and had inherited a huge mansion
    or something, but they said the only vacancy was in Baltimore
    that Medicare had started.
    They needed a lawyer to interpret the Medicare law.
    And so I moved to Baltimore and Catonsville.
    And general counsel and me were not a good fit.
    General counsel means that you spend your time
    in the library looking at books and deciding things.
    Instead, I like to handle cases and people
    and work fast and whatnot, which is not anything I could do.
    So I transferred over to Medicare in the programs
    and wound up promoted and whatnot.
    And was president.
    I married a well-known lawyer in Baltimore
    who had a trial practice and spent all of my vacation
    time handling court cases for him
    since they were all in the morning
    at the rate of three hours here, three hours there, and whatnot.
    And had special dispensation to do that
    and enjoyed my life for a while.
    I was married to him for 13 years until that disintegrated,
    and here I am.
    I was President of the Women's Bar Association
    for two times, President of Catonsville Business
    and Professional Women's Club, you name.
    I was in the newspaper constantly.
    NOW.
    Were you in National Organization for Women?
    Yeah.
    Organization for women, you name it.
    I was in all those things.
    And I was being viewed for becoming a judge in Baltimore.
    And Bill Gosnell, my husband, said over his dead body.
    He practices law in the city.
    He can't possibly have a wife who is a judge.
    And so that ended that ambition.
    And so then when did you come back to Virginia?
    When did you come to Virginia?
    I got divorced and move to Ocean City, Maryland
    and lived there 15 years.
    I retired on early out during Reaganomics.
    And I think on 1/3 of my salary.
    I had been in the government as a grade 15,
    I think, step three or four, as high
    as one can get without political appointment.
    And I lived in Ocean City for 15 years.
    And then, I sold my place and moved
    to be close to my family, all of whom
    are in Arlington or in Leesburg.
    Yeah.
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum Volunteer Collection
    Interview with Erica Laufer.
    This is track number three.
    Let's talk about some of your thoughts
    and your feelings about what you went through.
    Do you think about your childhood often now
    and what you had to go through, leaving your home
    going to different places?
    Do you think about it more often as you've gotten older?
    Oh, yeah, because once you're retired,
    you don't have as much to do, so you have time
    to think about these things.
    Otherwise, one keeps oneself so busy
    one doesn't think about anything,
    leave alone anything that might be difficult.
    I've thought about it many times.
    My parents had a chance to go back to Austria,
    and then they did visit.
    I also was sent something or other,
    and unfortunately, any time I see
    something German or Austrian, I have mixed feelings.
    I don't want to give them a penny of my existence.
    Other than that, I don't think much of them.
    I'm grateful that I'm not living there, that they sent me away.
    They want to exterminate me.
    The thing that bothers me endlessly in my brain
    is something that is politically incorrect, and you can't ask.
    The Germans went through people's history,
    as to how many generations back they had Jewish blood,
    and if so, they were sent to concentration camps.
    How are the Germans now that they have the pure Aryan blood?
    That has been bothering me terribly.
    When the Moors and Jews were thrown out of Spain,
    we know what happened to Spain.
    They went downhill.
    And why hasn't this happened to Germany yet?
    [CHUCKLES]
    All the intellectuals, all their money people,
    everybody who was anything was Jewish.
    The men all tried to marry a blonde girl,
    as non-Jewish as possible, if they possibly could.
    What's happened to those children?
    Were they all sent to concentration camps?
    Did they wind up in Argentina, New York, Israel?
    My father's sister, Kara, and her daughter Vera,
    my favorite cousin, were in concentration camps.
    They apparently survived and was sent to Israel.
    In the last days of concentration camp,
    Vera married a fellow from the concentration camp.
    However, she became pregnant in Israel,
    and he said he had never had a life.
    He had no use.
    He had nothing.
    He didn't want to be burdened with a wife and children.
    And that was the last heard from him, I understand.
    She went insane finally, and she habitually
    would run through the streets stark naked.
    They would arrest her and put her in whatever it is.
    And my father would send money for some medicine that would
    temporarily make her sane.
    I don't know what happened to them.
    Eventually, somebody-- maybe it was her mother, grandmother--
    the son wanted to go to a technical school
    and they didn't have money, and my father sent money for him
    to go to technical school.
    After that, my father died in 1975.
    My mother, I think, tore up everything
    she could possibly find where there were
    any knowledge of anybody else.
    She says all they want is money from you.
    So I have no way of knowing other relatives.
    Obviously, I have some in Israel.
    I obviously have some in Sweden, unless they've all
    gone back to somewhere else.
    Who knows?
    Because I don't know where Freddie wound up.
    Men usually die earlier than women,
    but he may still be around somewhere.
    But I saw some photographs.
    I was doing a history of the family
    and I came across a picture of Freddie
    and his children and his wife.
    But that was somewhere in Germany.
    I don't know if they were just on vacation or what.
    I don't know where these people are.
    I don't have any relatives.
    I didn't really care.
    I never thought about them.
    I agreed with my mother, forget about them.
    But my children keep wanting to know, do we have relatives?
    Some of my grandchildren.
    Do we have relatives in some other country?
    Where are they?
    Who are they?
    I don't know.
    And I guess I could find out before I die.
    I'm already 82.
    Do you know how many relatives you definitely lost?
    I don't know.
    Well over 60, I guess.
    I don't know if any of them rescued themselves or not.
    Never heard of them again.
    When your children were the age that you were when conditions
    got bad and you had to leave--
    Hitler got into power and you had to leave.
    Yeah.
    When your children were that age,
    does that make you think back on your childhood at that time?
    No.
    I never thought back.
    I never thought back until old age.
    Never thought back.
    I did what everybody else does, just remove it from your brain.
    Well, you've been talking about [this for years though.]
    Yeah, since I'm retired.
    Not before.
    Because I have time.
    And also with your parents, just to repeat what you said,
    you did not really discuss war years with them.
    My parents never mentioned it again, ever, no in my presence.
    Did you try to ask them?
    No.
    We all agreed on the same thing, without discussing it.
    Forget it.
    Forget about it.
    It's gone.
    You can't bring it back.
    It was no good.
    Why waste your effort on it?
    Think of what you're doing now.
    Have you been back to Austria?
    I went back only once when the children were very small.
    They were still on baby bottles, but only because we
    were going to India, because Chris
    went to see his uncle who had raised him,
    who was sick and old or something.
    And we stopped off in London, where
    one of my mother's cousins lived there,
    always long before the war, and all that.
    Alice, she lived there.
    We stopped off to see her, and stopped off
    in Germany, Switzerland, and went to Vienna.
    I went to go to Klagenfurt, but it was snowing
    and it was six hours by train, and the train
    couldn't go because the tracks were full of snow.
    And no airplane could leave Vienna airport.
    There I had a little overactive son and a daughter
    at Vienna Airport, and we couldn't go.
    We were stuck there for days at the airport.
    And finally, I let him run loose, and he did what boys do.
    He ran up to the conveyor belt and played with the conveyor
    belt, and within minutes, somebody came and said, Madam,
    we do not let our children run loose.
    Perhaps in America.
    And so I took the queue and said,
    Oh, I don't know what to do.
    I don't know.
    We've been here for so long.
    What can I possibly do?
    I can't control him.
    Within minutes, they found us a plane to get us out of Vienna.
    I think it was to Egypt, and from there we
    would go to India.
    Unfortunately, there seemed to have
    been some problem on the plane because we all had to depart,
    stand in the middle of nowhere.
    They brought our luggage next to us
    and we had to stand next to the luggage.
    Nothing seemed to happen.
    The luggage went back on.
    Everybody got back on the plane, and they
    said it would be, I don't know, four hours or something
    before we would leave, six hours.
    And so I left Chris with the children
    and decided to go to the airport and enjoy it.
    I thought I couldn't get back on the plane
    until it was departing.
    Hours and hours at the airport.
    I couldn't leave outside.
    No permission to go outside the airport.
    But there I was.
    That was the only time we ever went back.
    What were your thoughts?
    Hmm?
    What were your thoughts of being in Vienna?
    Well, we went to see lectors.
    I had no recollection of any of it,
    because I never lived there.
    We didn't even go to the first section where we had fled to.
    We saw all the palaces.
    We saw the palaces.
    I remember one boy had to go to the bathroom.
    There were 200 rooms for the palace, magnificent palace.
    Where's the bathroom?
    And they said, there's only one in the tower.
    [CHUCKLES]
    Did you feel any sense of belonging in Austria?
    No.
    No.
    It was the same thing as if I had visited France or China.
    Do you feel Austrian?
    Hmm?
    Do you feel Austrian?
    Apparently, I had lost my accent,
    because when we were in German Switzerland,
    somebody in the taxi had stolen a little case in which we
    had stuff.
    And I reported to the front desk in German.
    We were in Germany.
    And the man didn't want to do it.
    Unbelievable.
    I insisted he call the gendarmes,
    and police finally came.
    And he said, Madam, perhaps comes from Chicago.
    There is no crime in Switzerland.
    Huh.
    [CHUCKLES]
    Only financial.
    Yeah, right.
    OK.
    No, I had no desire.
    The Swiss food was delicious.
    I will say the German-Swiss food,
    we thought it was delicious.
    The English food was not good, I thought.
    But no, I had no desire for any of it.
    Do you feel that because of your difficult childhood,
    that you really--
    I didn't have a difficult childhood.
    You don't consider it a difficult childhood?
    No.
    Even though you were uprooted.
    They did me a big favor, as I've been told
    many times from other people.
    If people had lived in Austria, they never
    would have had the opportunity that we
    have in the United States.
    We immigrants are the most patriotic Americans there are.
    So you consider yourself American?
    Oh, absolutely.
    Not Austrian?
    Oh, no.
    No.
    I become very angry at people who tell me that they're
    Irish or Czech or something.
    How can you be?
    You were born in this country.
    If you feel you're Irish or Italian--
    they were always telling me they were Italian-- go back.
    What are you doing here?
    No, I have no desire for it.
    If you meet a German today in public, what are your thoughts?
    That he's German and that he's a Nazi.
    You do feel that way?
    Yes.
    I will always feel that way.
    They keep talking about they couldn't
    do anything else about it.
    They were in that kind of a country.
    There was no whatever it is, this, that, and the other,
    and so on.
    No.
    No.
    The day after Austria was annexed,
    everybody knew the national anthem.
    No, they were all Nazis.
    They were Nazis before they became officially Nazis.
    No.
    Every last one of them.
    There's no such thing.
    Are you angry that you had an uprooted childhood,
    whereas other children your age were very safe in the United
    States, let's say.
    No, I feel blessed.
    I've had so many interesting experiences instead of being
    one of those boring people.
    So you're not angry that your safety was--
    Not at all.
    I'm glad I'm not where they didn't want me.
    [CHUCKLES] I'm glad where I could contribute.
    I have a ton worked for the government.
    I did work that I think was very, very valuable, very
    helpful to the public.
    Because of your family history, and again,
    what you went through-- having to leave Austria and going
    to Trinidad and then coming here and not speaking the language,
    and so forth--
    did that affect how you raised your children?
    Well, I was raised in a very strict Prussian style.
    Children were seen but not heard, and hopefully
    not seen very often, either.
    Raise yourself and shut up.
    Don't get us in trouble.
    Don't do anything that raises any problem.
    We're not here for you.
    Very simple.
    No.
    When I see how they raise their children, how
    my grandchildren are raised, they're
    just a bunch of spoiled brats.
    The parents spend all their time.
    The mother and father spend all their time on them,
    instead of telling them go outside and play and shut up.
    What do you mean you don't want to eat this?
    Eat this or you don't get anything.
    But my question was, did your background
    affect the way you raised your son and daughter, do you think?
    Because there were times when you had to be independent.
    You went to this boarding school.
    You went to this boarding school and you had to come
    home, go back to visit your parents.
    You were a child.
    Mm-hmm.
    You were very independent.
    Yeah.
    Did that affect how you raised your children?
    Well, I expected them to be independent, too.
    Yeah.
    This one here would go to school.
    She wanted to belong to Girl Scouts.
    I told her to call up a taxi and have a taxi pick her
    up and take her to the--
    in those days it wasn't dangerous to have
    your taxi pick you up.
    She neglected us.
    [LAUGHTER]
    [INAUDIBLE] let it out.
    I'm saying, is it because you had to be independent
    when you were so young?
    Yeah.
    I thought that was normal.
    OK.
    I thought that was a normal way of raising people.
    Life came before [? hell. ?] You better
    be able to handle it, no matter what happens,
    and keep going and being happy about it
    instead of whining about it.
    We don't go to psychiatrists and psychologists.
    We don't have mental problems.
    We follow what my mother's mother.
    Did you got problems?
    Here's a small brush and a pail.
    Start in the upper left-hand corner
    and keep scrubbing the floor until you get
    to the lower right-hand corner.
    You will have guaranteed no problems
    by the time you're finished.
    Are there any sights today or sounds or smells
    that bring back your childhood to you?
    It's been a long time.
    Anything that you hear or see or read about that
    brings back your childhood?
    I have successfully suppressed everything I possibly could.
    I don't believe in Freud and racking it all up
    and bringing it out.
    No.
    Just hide it and go on.
    You had said that your family, your parents
    got restitution and reparations from Germany?
    Oh I got $25,000 from Austria.
    I got $25,000.
    You yourself got it?
    Yeah, recently, within the last few years.
    You've gotten payment, yeah.
    $25,000 for loss of all the relatives that I mentioned.
    I see.
    From the Austrian government.
    They had to divide it equally among the people who are still
    alive.
    And I wrote them several letters saying,
    you're waiting for all of us to drop dead.
    [CHUCKLES] I got $25,000.
    I couldn't prove the name of the bank
    that my parents had money in.
    I don't know.
    I was a little kid.
    They wanted to know the bank account number.
    [LAUGHS] How should I know?
    But your parents did get reparations
    when they were alive?
    They got Social Security.
    I don't know what else they got.
    I have no idea.
    They would not have discussed it with me.
    From Germany you said?
    From Austria.
    Excuse me, from Austria.
    They would have discussed it.
    Huh?
    They would have discussed it with you
    when you were an adult.
    They never discussed any of those things with me.
    We didn't discuss these things.
    OK.
    Do you think your children were affected by the fact
    that you had such an uprooted child?
    Yes.
    They complained I neglected them.
    Because you wanted them to be independent?
    Yeah, I want them to be independent, be able to cope.
    I don't like to talk on the telephone.
    I'm very shy actually.
    I taught her from an early age to make all the phone
    calls for me, and she's a genius at it as a result.
    She became a financial advisor and got all her client sales
    by cold calling on the telephone.
    I gave her her trade.
    [LAUGHS]
    Have you been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington?
    She dragged me there one time.
    And what was your --
    It was very, very crowded and very busy.
    Yuck.
    I don't want to be reminded, actually.
    I'm hoping, after I speak to you,
    I will go one more time to the Holocaust Museum
    and see about Trinidad, because when I look up
    Trinidad on the internet, they don't
    mention the fact that they had refugees
    and put them in detention center.
    Wiki did say that it was full of Blacks
    who had been Muslims and slaves, and that
    may explain some of it.
    Have you been back to Trinidad?
    No.
    I wanted to go several times and the travel agent
    warned me not to go there.
    They seemed, at that point when I mentioned it
    several times, that they were having
    a problem with White people.
    It wouldn't be safe, you mean?
    Hmm?
    That it wouldn't be safe?
    Exactly.
    Have you been to Israel?
    No, never have.
    I sort of dropped every last bit of everything.
    My father insisted I become batmitzvah,
    which I did against my will.
    After that, I went to a synagogue a couple of times,
    mostly because we sat outside to see what boys we would meet.
    I did go to reformed services.
    I was very active for a long time in the Jewish Community
    Center on 16th Street in DC.
    I used to go there for dances at night time on weekends,
    in hopes of finding somebody.
    I was in a Jewish sorority in college,
    but couldn't stand the--
    sounds like I'm talking like my mother--
    couldn't stand the personality of the people,
    the flamboyancy, showing off, empty-headedness.
    I just couldn't see it.
    And I gave it up and never went back.
    Oh, no, I did last year or a year before.
    I did go to a reformed synagogue here in Reston.
    My daughter kept trying to insist that I go to the one out
    in Ashburn, but I never went.
    I took them off my internet, my email,
    after a while never did go.
    How did you raise your children?
    Did you raise your children as Jews?
    No, no, no.
    I promised my mother.
    I gave a holy oath, with me, being chosen
    people would end forever.
    Never again would we be chosen for death, extermination,
    plunder.
    No, never again.
    So you promised your mother what?
    I swore a holy oath.
    She made her promise.
    That what?
    That with me, any trace of being Jewish would terminate.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    And so you did not raise your children--
    Absolutely not.
    --in any way.
    Not even mention it.
    Yeah, as a matter of fact, this just came out recently.
    At my grandfather's funeral, a man
    walked up to my brother and I and said,
    you can't hide from being Jewish.
    One day you will admit it, because it
    had been hidden from us.
    And I hope you're going to do anything in the future, right?
    I used to have a lot of problems.
    People would look at me and say--
    it was endless questions.
    Every single solitary person I ever met, whether I knew them
    or not or whether I ever would see them again,
    are you Italian, Greek, or Jewish?
    There was always that accent on it.
    And finally, one day I decided to bleach my hair platinum
    blonde, and no one has ever asked me that again.
    [CHUCKLES] Because I also bleached my eyebrows.
    That was the secret to it.
    What was your reaction during the Eichmann trial?
    Did you follow that, the Eichmann trial?
    No.
    You did not follow it?
    I did not follow it.
    I just hoped that he would be hung by his thumbs
    and whipped to death.
    But other than that, no, I didn't follow it.
    There is no punishment adequate.
    But as I say, with me ends.
    Were you active in the Civil rights Movement,
    let's say in the '60s and '70s?
    No.
    Are you kidding?
    First they stole my mother's money.
    Then we were in a detention center
    with armed guards and bayonets guarding us.
    [LAUGHS] And you want me to be in favor?
    No.
    Well, I meant--
    I handle my own things.
    Let them handle theirs.
    There's lots more of them than me.
    They don't need me, OK?
    I was active in women's lib.
    I meant because your parents' civil rights
    and your civil rights were taken away.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    We left.
    You left.
    We left.
    Yeah.
    Those who didn't leave died in concentration camps.
    How do you think your parents were affected emotionally
    by the loss of all their relatives?
    You said they didn't talk about it.
    Nobody ever talked about it.
    No, but what are their thoughts to you?
    I have no idea.
    I can't psychoanalyze dead parents.
    They didn't talk about it.
    We didn't want to talk about it.
    I never met anybody else, as a matter of fact.
    Never did I meet any other person who had gone through it.
    I did briefly.
    At the Community Center, Jewish Community Center,
    I did meet one guy who his mother was
    in some place in Holland.
    I did meet him.
    They had been refugees.
    And other than that, that's the only one.
    And I only went out with him briefly, maybe a few months.
    Other than that, I never met anybody else who was a refugee.
    Never.
    All those years in community centers, in synagogues, no.
    Never, never.
    But now in today's world, if you meet someone who is a refugee,
    do you feel more comfortable?
    I've never met people.
    You mean even now you haven't met?
    I haven't met anybody.
    Up till now.
    No.
    I introduced you to Dora that one time.
    Oh, well, it just left me blank.
    Did I discuss it with Dora?
    Yeah, we had lunch with her.
    I was just making talk then because I don't even remember.
    Is there any message you'd like to leave to your grandchildren?
    Any message to your grandchildren?
    I see them all the time.
    They don't want my message.
    They don't even want their parents' message,
    are you kidding?
    People are born knowing everything.
    All old people are a bunch of old fogies.
    What are they going to say?
    That's not how they treat you, Mom.
    No.
    They're very nice, very sweet, every last one of them.
    Leah's going to paint my bathroom on Monday and Tuesday,
    powder room.
    How do you feel about the Holocaust Museum
    being in Washington?
    Well, that's where it belongs.
    Why?
    Because it's the nation's capital.
    [LAUGHS] [INAUDIBLE].
    No, just because of that doesn't mean
    that I feel better about people discriminating
    about Muslims or Blacks.
    No.
    That's a separate story altogether.
    They have their thing, I have mine.
    I'm not responsible for them.
    They sure as hell didn't do anything for me.
    That's true.
    Hmm?
    That's true.
    Everybody expects so much charity nowadays,
    when you look at them.
    Actually, I thought your parents owned 10 houses at one point.
    They became like millionaires, just out
    of their own hard work.
    No welfare, no handouts, nothing.
    I just can't believe how much charity people [INAUDIBLE]..
    Well, our clothing came from Goodwill.
    My father had training from Goodwill
    to become an upholsterer.
    He couldn't handle it because of his nose.
    But he learned how to use hammers, and whatnot and so on,
    and got good jobs with hardware stores.
    And from then opened up that which
    is simplest for a Jewish refugee, opened up a shop.
    It comes natural.
    Do you feel that you, in a sense,
    are two different people, somebody on the outside
    different from the person on the inside,
    because of your experiences?
    Are you the same?
    No, I think I'm all one person.
    I'm not psychotic.
    I know, I didn't mean psychotic.
    I know people who have several personalities.
    [LAUGHS] You're comparing it to the wrong person.
    I didn't mean it in that sense.
    I just meant because of what you--
    No, no, no.
    I'm all one solid person.
    No.
    I don't have any psychological scars as a result
    that I know of.
    I don't believe in all that stuff.
    Like I said, like my grandmother said, you take a brush
    and do some physical labor, and that's the end of that.
    You won't be moaning and groaning anymore.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    Well, that's, I guess, a good note to end on.
    [LAUGHS]
    I'm glad you got grapes, I mean cherries.
    It's one of the few things I can eat.
    Is there anything else you wanted to add?
    No, I've already added too much.
    OK.
    You want to find your relatives, that's all.
    Yeah, I would.
    Well, you all would.
    We desperately wanted to.
    You want to find more, yes.
    Yes.
    This concludes the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    interview with Erica Laufer.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    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.
    Interviewee
    Erica Laufer
    Interviewer
    Gail Schwartz
    Date
    interview:  2012 August 19

    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

    Personal Name
    Laufer, Erica, 1930-

    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 Erica Laufer in Sterling, VA on August 19, 2012.
    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 08:13:00
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn47794

    Additional Resources

    Transcripts (4)
    Time Coded Notes (3)

    Download & Licensing

    In-Person Research

    Contact Us

    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.

    Date: 1993

    Oral history interview with Marie Schwartzman

    Oral History

    Marie Schwartzman discusses her early life in Paris, France; her large Polish family; her father’s arrest and imprisonment in Drancy; becoming the head of the family due to her mother’s illness; hiding house for three months; being arrested and sent to Drancy in October 1942; being deported to Auschwitz; living conditions in the camp; working in the crematorium sorting clothes; being marched to Ravensbrück in January 1945; living conditions in Prchin-Malkov camp; liberation by the Americans; turning in a German officer who was arrested; returning to Paris and Grenoble; immigrating to the United States in 1949; and marrying an American soldier.

    Oral history interview with Nathan Kalman

    Oral History

    Nathan Kalman (b. Natan Kalmonowitz) discusses his early life in Łódź, Poland; joining a Zionist organization in 1930; living on a kibbutz in Krakow for a year; marrying in 1939; the beginning of the German occupation; his mother’s work smuggling food; moving into the ghetto; the deaths of his mother, father, and son; being deported to Auschwitz in cattle cars; keeping a photo of his family in his shoe; conditions in Auschwitz; being moved to Gurlitz; working in an ammunition factory; liberation; remarrying; immigrating to the United States; and living in Israel from 1969-1989.

    Oral history interview with Esthy Adler

    Oral History

    Esthy Adler discusses not knowing her real name or when and where she was born, noting that many of her childhood memories are vague; her papers that say she was born in Kaliningrad, Russia, where she thinks her parents had a summer home; staying with her mother’s sister in a compound where there were frequent bombings; her mother’s death during their stay; her father’s remarriage, despite the family’s disapproval; how the Germans found her, her father, and stepmother; the last time she saw her father; how she, her aunt, cousins, and stepmother were relocated to another compound where they slept on cots in places similar to bunkers; seeing a man digging a ditch and holding a machine gun; being lined up and fired upon, but surviving; finding her way back to the barrack where she found her stepmother and another woman; being loaded onto a cattle car and taken to another location (possibly Treblinka); escaping into the forest with her stepmother via a hole and tunnel dug by another woman; living with a partisan group that consisted of Polish-Ukrainian prisoners of war and Russian deserters; the death of her stepmother by machine gun fire in the winter of 1942; being shot; becoming ill from drinking poisoned water and being nursed back to health by a peasant; living with a woman named Margot who got her a job in a factory sewing pants; leaving her job after a man paid for her to go to a private school; living with the Katz family; becoming legally independent after she turned 18; attending graduate school and being accepted into a program where she was trained as a paralegal; meeting her future husband Jim Adler at the University of Heidelberg in 1954; and immigrating to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Tana Gelfer

    Oral History

    Tana Gelfer, born October 7, 1939 in Berlin, Germany, discusses her parents Herman George Reichman and Johanna Kahn and her family background in Gelsenkirchen, Germany; how her father lost his banking job after the Nazi party came to power; her father’s arrest on December 27, 1942; never finding out what happened to her father; her deportation with her mother to Theresienstadt; living conditions in Theresienstadt; sharing a bunk with her mother; how her mother worked in the fields harvesting crops and sorted through prisoners’ belongings; being hospitalized frequently; how a woman in the camp, Minnie Simon, gave birth to a son in secret; how Minnie Simon, her husband Fritz, and their child all survived; being made to watch, along with other small children, the cruel treatment of men who were brought into the camp from trains; her and her mother’s liberation by Russian forces; living with her grandmother in Berlin; immigrating to the United States; marrying and raising a family; and how her mother helped sponsor several people emigrate from Germany to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Maria Devinki

    Oral History

    Maria Devinki, born June 1, 1920 in Hannover, Germany, discusses her family’s move to central Poland; her parents’ successful business there; the Nazi invasion of Poland; how Jews were forced to live in a ghetto; having to give up her large house; her father’s deportation to Treblinka where he perished; marrying her fiancé and being hidden with family members by a Polish farmer in small underground space; traveling with her husband to Regensburg, Germany to wait for U.S. visas; and settling in Kansas City, MO.

    Oral history interview with Jerome Stasson

    Oral History

    Jerome Stasson (b. Jerome Stashevsky) discusses his early life in Detroit, Michigan; coming from a family of Polish immigrants; being drafted into the U.S. army in 1943; following General Patton to Germany from England; liberating Buchenwald; his first impressions of the camp; speaking Yiddish to the survivors; destroying the letters he sent home to his family due to their distress; and his memories of the smell of the camp.

    Oral history interview with Adriana Pacifici

    Oral History

    Adriana Funaro, born in Rome, Italy on July 28, 1923, describes her early life in Rome, Italy; being expelled from public school in 1938 and afterward attending a Jewish school and a Catholic school; her father’s decision not to emigrate; a doctor’s efforts to help her father avoid a roundup in 1943; hiding with her sister in a Dominican convent; living under a false name; learning prayers while hiding; working in a partisan group while in hiding; the arrival of American soldiers; marrying a childhood friend; immigrating to the United States; and her nightmares about the war years.

    Oral history interview with Ernest Kolben

    Oral History

    Ernest Kolben describes his early life in Vienna, Austria; feeling like an outcast at school; his brother’s arrest and imprisonment in Dachau on Kristallnacht; changing conditions for the Jewish community; being sent to Theresienstadt; living and work conditions in the camp; being moved to Auschwitz in September 1944; volunteering to move to Buchenwald; arriving instead at Kaufering, near Dachau; being force marched to Camp Allach; liberation by American soldiers; his 30 day hospitalization; working for the Counterintelligence Corps to find SS members; returning to Vienna; marrying; immigrating to Montreal; moving to Chicago; and splitting his time between Vienna and the US.

    Oral history interview with Henry Kolber

    Oral History

    Henry Kolber (b. Hirsch Kolber), born June 6, 1923 in Przysietnica, Poland, discusses his early life in Barcice, Poland; moving with his family to Nowy Sacz, Poland after the German invasion; how the Germans shot and killed 15 Jews and selected 100 other Jews, including his father, to be locked up overnight; working as a grave digger with his father after the Aktions; how he was selected by the Judenrat to go to Rabka, Poland; upon arrival he discovered it was a school to train Ukrainian volunteers to become SS; being assigned work to dig a shooting gallery in the mountains where the new recruits would learn to shoot; covering graves and filling them with dirt and antiseptic; the commander, Rosenbaum, whom he testified against in Hamburg, Germany in 1968; his parents’ deaths in Treblinka; being sent to Krakow to build Płaszów concentration camp; being transferred to Auschwitz; marching in December 1944 in the snow for two days then being taken to Buchenwald by train; living in the barracks with Elie Wiesel; being liberated by American troops; moving to Switzerland with the help of the Red Cross; immigrating to the United States in 1947; and his marriage and children.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Greifer

    Oral History

    Ruth Greifer (b. Ruth Dahl) discusses her childhood in Geilenkirchen, Germany, and Mastricht, Netherlands; her experiences during the German invasion of the Netherlands; her life in hiding during World War II; her reunion with her parents after World War II; and her life in the United States after 1948

    Oral history interview with Anna Wollner

    Oral History

    Anna Wollner (b. Jakab) discusses her early life in Nagy-Varad, Transylvania (Oradea, Romania); her fiance’s conscription into forced labor; his return and their marriage; being forced into a ghetto; her feelings about wearing the Jewish star; being sent to Auschwitz; being transferred to Stutthof; her friend Suzy, who taught her to sabotage the materials they were working on; being moved to Riga, Latvia by boat; building roads out of Jewish headstones; acts of violence by guards; being marched back to Germany (near Gdansk, Poland); liberation by Russian soldiers; witnessing rapes; returning to Budapest, Hungary; reuniting with her husband; leaving for Munich, Germany after the communists arrived; immigrating to the United States in 1949; divorcing and moving to Israel; returning to the United States; and her feelings about German reparations.

    Oral history interview with Kate Wacz

    Oral History

    Kate Wacz (née Katalin Kadelburger), born in 1932, discusses her childhood in Budapest, Hungary; her father’s death performing forced labor; going to the Jewish gymnasium; the Germans arriving in March 1944; the school closures; moving to the ghetto; anti-Jewish violence from members of the Arrow Cross Party; the Allied bombings in January 1945; living conditions in the ghetto; liberation; readjusting to life after the war; her mother becoming a Swedish citizen; getting passage to Sweden in 1951; and her life after the war.

    Oral history interview with Erwin Forley

    Oral History

    Erwin Forley (b. Feuerstein) discusses his childhood in Košice, Czechoslovakia, (now Slovakia) and Munkacs, Hungary (now Mukacheve, Ukraine); his life in the Munkacs ghetto; his family's deportation to Auschwitz at the hands of Hungarian gendarmes; his work in Budy, a sub camp for farming near Auschwitz; his experiences with Kapos in Auschwitz, some of whom he describes as homosexuals; the evacuation of Auschwitz and liberation by Russian troops; his return to Mukacheve; his reunion with his mother and sister; and the family's life in the United States after 1946.

    Oral history interview with Ernie Marx

    Oral History

    Ernie Marx (né Ernest Ludwig), born in Gelnhausen, Germany on November 8, 1925, discusses his childhood in Gelnhausen and Speyer am Rhein, Germany; his experiences during Kristallnacht; his arrest by the Gestapo and imprisonment in Dachau along with his father in November 1938; his father's work to organize Kindertransports of Jewish children from the Rhein area to France; his travel to France on a Kindertransport; his imprisonment in Gurs concentration camp; his involvement in the Maquis resistance group in France; his reunion with his mother and brother after World War II; and his life in the United States after 1947.

    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 Phillip Abraham

    Oral History

    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.

    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 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.

    View All 264 Items in the Collection