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Oral history interview with Gerald Rosenstein

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1995.A.1258 | RG Number: RG-50.106.0012

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    Oral history interview with Gerald Rosenstein
    Transcript
    The following is an interview of Jerry Rosenstein.
    It is taking place on January 13, 1995,
    in San Francisco, California.
    The interviewer is Gail Schwartz,
    and it is being done on behalf of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum.
    Could you please give us your full name?
    Gerald B. Rosenstein.
    And when were you born?
    I was born May 21, 1927.
    And where were you born?
    I was born in Bensheim, Germany.
    Let's talk a little bit about your childhood.
    Who made up your family?
    Who were the members of your family?
    My family-- my parents.
    And their names?
    Sophie Bendheim and Max Rosenstein.
    And I had two older brothers, Ernst and Hans.
    Ernst was four years older than I,
    and Hans was two years older than I was.
    What kind of work did your father do?
    My father was a manufacturer.
    He had at the time of-- when I was
    a child, a furniture and upholstery
    factory in Bensheim, Germany.
    Did your mother work?
    No.
    At that-- women didn't work there.
    And what kind of neighborhood did you live in?
    We lived on the--
    in the house that I was born in was
    a large house on a very, very big grounds on the outskirts
    of the small town.
    It's-- today if you look at the house, it's an Edwardian--
    a fake Edwardian house with lots of stucco on it,
    and the grounds have been subdivided in the meantime
    by the current--
    by recent owners.
    And there's about 20--
    15 or 20 individual homes and pools, and it's
    a very fancy neighborhood now.
    Let's talk a little bit about your town.
    How would you describe it?
    Do you know how many people were living there at the time?
    I would say at the time between 30,000 and 40,000.
    Today it's probably closer to 60,000 or 80,000.
    And what percentage of the people were Jewish?
    There were probably about 150--
    100 to 150 Jewish families there.
    And in your neighborhood, did you have Jewish neighbors?
    Yes.
    No.
    We had-- the Jewish families, the friends of my parents
    that I grew up with, were interspersed.
    They all lived in fairly large houses amongst Gentiles,
    and there was not that one Jew was living next to another Jew.
    It was fairly emancipated town.
    We were Orthodox when I grew up.
    But I would say most of the Jewish families in the town
    were not Orthodox.
    So there was only one synagogue, which was Orthodox.
    So your neighborhood was made up of, as you said,
    Gentile families.
    Yes.
    As a young child, then, did you play with Gentile children?
    Only very briefly, because when I was six,
    Hitler was already in power, and there was definitely
    a cessation of playing with neighborhood children then,
    and seven.
    And we were then not really playing on the streets
    with other children, which we had never done much anyway
    because the way the structure of the neighborhood
    was, one didn't play with other children on the street
    because people had lived in large houses with gardens.
    About how much property did your parents have?
    Oh, I'm sure it must have been five or six acres at the time.
    So your family was very upper class, obviously,
    to have this kind of property.
    Well, almost all the Jewish families in this town
    were well-to-do, were well-off, yeah.
    There were obviously Jewish families--
    there must have been--
    I researched that a little bit later in life--
    that weren't so well-off.
    And I'd always thought that the entire town had
    left, that all the Jewish families had left and settled
    in the United States.
    But that wasn't quite the case either.
    I found out in recent years that there were at least
    30 or 40 Jewish people from the town that were deported
    to Auschwitz or other camps.
    Did you have an extended family-- grandparents, aunts,
    uncles, cousins?
    No.
    Not-- when I was born, my grandparents had already died.
    On both sides?
    Except my father's father who lived in another town.
    He was a retired teacher, and we saw him maybe once or twice
    a year.
    There was not-- my grandmother on my father's side
    had died very young.
    What about aunts, uncles, cousins?
    Yes.
    We had aunts, uncles, cousins, but most of them
    lived either in Berlin or in London or in the United States.
    At that time.
    At that time.
    Most of them had immigrated earlier than we had.
    How much education did your father have?
    My father had gymnasium--
    no University.
    And your mother?
    My mother was educated in one of those Catholic girls
    schools, where all the Jewish girls in town
    went to a fancy Catholic girls school.
    And I imagine it went through about 14, 15, 16 years,
    and then she went to the conservatory
    in the neighboring town, in Darmstadt,
    and studied music, which she never pursued.
    Oh.
    Let's talk about your education.
    When did you start school?
    How old were you?
    I started school just before the age of six,
    or just at the age of six.
    And what kind of school did you go to?
    It was a public grammar school in Bensheim.
    And I only had first and second grade there,
    then we moved to a small town called Darmstadt
    just before we immigrated for about six months.
    And I also went to a Jewish public school there.
    When you-- let's back up a little bit.
    When you were very young and you went at the age of six,
    obviously there were children who
    were not Jewish in your class.
    And the teacher-- were the teachers Jewish?
    No.
    OK.
    Did you-- do you remember any unpleasant experiences
    at that time, or did you have a sense of being different?
    Granted, you were very young.
    Not very much, but it became--
    it came upon us very quickly the sense of being different,
    the sense of being singled out, the sense of being different,
    yes.
    When I was seven years old, seven and a half, possibly,
    on the way home from school in the dark,
    and it must have been in the wintertime,
    I was attacked and beaten up by the father of a schoolmate who
    was probably drunk.
    And he had-- he was--
    waylaid me in the portal of the neighbor's garden,
    and just because I was Jewish.
    It was not a terribly hard beating,
    but it was just being attacked by a man.
    Do you-- again, do you remember any thoughts or feelings
    that you had?
    Oh, yes.
    I was horrified.
    I was crying.
    And I had never been attacked by anybody.
    Did you know why you were being attacked?
    Well, yes, because I was Jewish.
    It was--
    You knew that?
    I knew that.
    At that young age?
    Right.
    And I came home, and my mother was out,
    and my father was traveling, and there was only the maid.
    And I'm sure she tried to console me
    as best she could, but she was not Jewish either.
    Any other incidents like that in the first couple years--
    No.
    Really, this is the one that really stands out,
    that singles out.
    Then, of course, in 1935, at the time
    I was seven or eight years old--
    eight, probably-- I remember that my father was away
    on a business trip.
    And they threw gasoline-soaked rags into our--
    not into the house, but into the garage, which was quite
    at the end of the property.
    But it didn't set anything on fire.
    But I do remember that.
    And right after that incident happened,
    and then we couldn't have--
    we were not supposed to have maids or personnel any longer.
    We moved to Darmstadt.
    My parents sold the house, and we moved to Darmstadt.
    When your family was living in Bensheim,
    and again, I know you were very young,
    do you remember your parents explaining anything
    to you as a very young child?
    Did they talk to you about what was happening?
    I'm sure they did.
    I'm sure we all knew what was happening.
    It didn't require too much explanation.
    And you did not have Jewish friends to talk this over
    with as a child?
    Oh, yes, we-- oh, yes.
    All our friends were Jewish.
    Oh, all-- OK.
    The only people we were associating with at that time
    were Jewish.
    We did not have other friends that I recall.
    So the changes that you remember in the beginning
    when Hitler first came in were these attacks and so forth.
    OK.
    Then your family, you said, moved to Darmstadt in 1935?
    Right.
    OK.
    And did you live in the town there?
    In the town in Darmstadt.
    We had-- they rented an apartment
    for about five or six months.
    And I do remember that the maid we had in Bensheim
    moved with us to Darmstadt.
    And she then also moved with us to Amsterdam,
    but then she didn't like it and she went back to Germany.
    And you started school in Darmstadt?
    I had-- yeah.
    And there was a Jewish school.
    There was a Jewish grammar school for six months.
    Uh-huh.
    1935.
    You had mentioned before that your family was at Orthodox.
    Right.
    OK.
    So did you have any kind of Jewish training?
    Yes, we-- I went-- we all-- all the Jewish children in Bensheim
    went to Hebrew school.
    I mean, this was--
    there was a Hebrew teacher there by the name of [? Mueller. ?]
    And we all had to go.
    We all hated him.
    We all hated Hebrew school, and he was a terrible teacher.
    But we all went to Hebrew school.
    This was after school?
    It was after school, yeah.
    How often did you go?
    Two or three times a week-- probably twice a week,
    I imagine.
    And did your-- your family was very observant then?
    Yes.
    Actually, my father's family was not.
    But my mother's family who had lived in Bensheim since 1750,
    1780, somewhere like that, were very Orthodox.
    And yes.
    And my mother's orthodoxy prevailed in the family.
    So you-- did your family keep kashrut?
    We kept kashrut, but we didn't write on Saturday,
    but there was no such thing as wearing a sheitel or--
    wasn't that Orthodox.
    Yeah.
    And obviously, observing all the holidays.
    Oh, yes.
    All the holidays were always observed.
    When you moved to Darmstadt you were now eight years old.
    Yes.
    Seven or eight.
    What did you do besides school?
    Were you in any kind of sports groups or any hobbies?
    Did you do anything besides--
    No.
    I was-- at that time was the only time in my life
    I was kind of interested in things Jewish,
    and I think I took a real interest in Hebrew school
    at the time for about six months,
    and was just about the only time I took an interest in it.
    I don't recall having any other hobbies at the time.
    You know, the Nazis were prevailing,
    and you just stayed off the streets.
    Right.
    Right.
    What was the next unpleasant incident
    that you remember as a child?
    Anything in Darmstadt that happened to you particularly?
    Nothing happened to me--
    Personally.
    --personally.
    Nor did anything happen personally to my parents
    or to my brothers.
    So you were just a young child going to school.
    Yeah, going to school, waiting to move to Holland.
    My father was mostly absent.
    He had already established an office in Amsterdam.
    And we then moved officially from Darmstadt
    to Amsterdam with all the furniture, with--
    by car.
    It was a regular transport.
    We were not refugees in any sense.
    We were regular immigrants to Holland.
    And what-- do you remember what your feelings
    were as a young boy having to pick up and move
    to another country?
    Oh, it was a-- we all left Germany
    with a great feeling of relief.
    We couldn't wait until we got to cross that border to Holland,
    and it was wonderful to be in Holland.
    It was wonderful from day one there.
    We had to go to a--
    we were quartered first, us three boys,
    with a Dutch family somewhere in the middle of town,
    because my-- the furniture hadn't arrived,
    and we didn't have-- my parents were just renting an apartment.
    And I'm not exactly sure anymore where
    my parents were staying-- probably in a hotel
    until the furniture came.
    [COUGHS] Excuse me.
    We were immediately sent to a special language
    school, a six-week Dutch high-intensive language school.
    And after that, we went to a regular Dutch school
    and managed this.
    Speaking of languages, what language did you speak at home?
    We spoke German at home.
    And then later on in the camps, we spoke Dutch mostly.
    In Auschwitz-- I know in Auschwitz we spoke Dutch.
    At home we spoke German.
    Yeah.
    Do you remember any feelings that you had in Germany
    when you would see a Nazi soldier or a uniform?
    Was it frightening?
    Fear, yes.
    Oh, absolutely.
    And did you talk it over with your parents?
    No.
    Why not?
    Because we were just not a very communicative--
    I think it's generational.
    We didn't talk about things.
    We'll get into this a little bit later.
    OK.
    OK.
    OK.
    OK, now you're in Holland, and you're in Amsterdam, you said.
    And you and your two brothers temporarily
    were living with a family until your parents got settled.
    Right.
    And then what happened?
    And then we all moved into a very nice apartment
    in Amsterdam.
    If you want, I can show you pictures--
    building's still standing exactly where it always
    was in the south of Amsterdam, which
    was a neighborhood which was--
    where many German Jews were settling.
    And I went to school.
    And I loved school there, and I loved life as a child
    in Amsterdam.
    My older brothers were in different schools.
    Did you talk things over with your older brothers--
    Actually, the--
    --about the changing times?
    The age gap was tremendous.
    When you are eight and nine, two and four years old is hard.
    They had lives of their own.
    We all had lives of of our own.
    We were not particularly close, but boys that age aren't often.
    And when you were in Amsterdam, did
    you do any sports there or--
    Skating.
    Oh.
    Skating and swimming, yes.
    But not-- nothing serious, nothing competitive.
    Right.
    Were you part of any youth groups,
    or you just did solitary and personal things.
    Yeah.
    No.
    We had a lot of friends, and it was a very friendly time
    with lots of neighbors.
    Jewish friends.
    No, both.
    In Amsterdam it was both.
    And certainly in those years if--
    there was no-- you didn't pay-- they didn't
    pay much attention to it.
    Yes, there were, of course, a lot
    of-- my parents had a lot of Jewish friends,
    but they also had non-Jewish friends.
    They also made friends with non-Jewish people.
    Did you-- do you know if your parents had contact
    with people back in Germany once they moved to Holland?
    Some.
    I'm sure that there were some business contacts
    my father had, but minimal.
    What happened to your father's business back in Germany?
    Oh, he sold that business at a bad price.
    And like he sold the house at a bad price,
    he sold the business at a bad price.
    He reestablished himself--
    To non-Jews.
    To non-Jews.
    He reestablished himself in a new business in Holland,
    which was surgical instruments and surgical--
    supplies for surgical--
    drug supplies and surgical instruments, primarily.
    And he also had maintained some of his older business
    in the upholstered furniture.
    And he managed to do fairly well, I imagine,
    because he supported a family with three children.
    OK.
    When is the next change that you remember?
    You were going along, swimming and skating.
    And then when is the next--
    Well, when my grammar school was over--
    in '39 or '40, I was finished with grammar school.
    And I was a very good student, and I got into the--
    one of the better high schools.
    But I could only stay in the high school for a very short
    period of time.
    My bar mitzvah was in May 1940, and the German invasion
    had taken place three weeks before my bar mitzvah.
    Tell me about your bar mitzvah, what you remember.
    It was very sad [LAUGHING].
    It was not a very happy affair.
    It was a small-- it was a bar mitzvah,
    and it was a small-- at synagogue.
    And it's like all bar mitzvahs.
    You had to study for it, but not as hard as kids do here.
    You just did a minimal.
    And I think my parents had a little open house
    or a little reception in the afternoon and that was it.
    They allowed me to smoke my first cigarette, which
    was a bad mistake because from that day on,
    I became a chain smoker.
    But the family obviously had a sense
    of foreboding at your bar mitzvah?
    Oh, yes.
    Oh, yes.
    Most certainly.
    The Germans were there, and there
    was real a sense of foreboding.
    During the invasion--
    What do you remember about that?
    --which was two weeks earlier, we tried-- at the last minute,
    we packed up the car with another family or friends,
    very good friends of my parents, and we
    drove to Zandvoort, which was a beach resort really,
    to see if we could find a fisherman
    to take us to England.
    But that was a little late in the game,
    and there were no fishermen left and no boats left.
    And we just go back to Amsterdam.
    And then the next change in your life?
    Well, then the next changes came very gradual,
    or not so gradual.
    First of all, I was in this wonderful high school,
    and I'm not sure I'm going exactly chronologically now,
    and I don't think it really matters
    for the purposes of this interview.
    But in matters of importance, I had to--
    not just me, everybody who was Jewish
    had to leave the non-Jewish high school
    and go to a Jewish high school.
    This Jewish high school was in a different part
    in East Amsterdam, and it entailed a long walk.
    Meanwhile, our bicycle had been confiscated,
    and Jews were no longer permitted
    to use to the streetcar or public transportation.
    So I had to walk to school.
    My parents had friends who lived in the neighborhood,
    and they were nice enough to feed me lunch
    every day so I didn't have to go home.
    What other restrictions?
    You did mention some about confiscation of your bicycle
    and walking to school.
    What other restrictions--
    The car.
    My father's car was confiscated right away.
    But most cars-- or many cars were.
    Not just Jewish cars were confiscated.
    But that happened almost within weeks,
    the first couple of weeks that the Germans were there.
    Did your parents have to turn in any valuables?
    I believe they did, yes.
    They were asked to turn in valuables.
    Not everything was turned in.
    I still have today silver from my great grandparents
    or grandparents--
    some items which were buried by business friends of my father's
    outside Amsterdam that they were underground.
    And some of the carpets, some oriental rugs and so on
    were saved.
    But basically-- eventually, everything else disappeared.
    What were you thinking when you had to give up your bicycle?
    Were you angry?
    Well, everybody else did.
    You know, if something happens to you
    that happens to everybody else in your group,
    you do accept it.
    You do not feel singled out.
    Right.
    Of course, one was not happy about it,
    but it was just one of those things
    we had-- we learned to accept a whole lot of things,
    and this was just one of them.
    And I suppose what we learned to do
    is to suppress or supplement the trauma that we
    were going through all along.
    We did that very well.
    We became most professional at it.
    What about when you had to change schools, and--
    Yeah.
    That was--
    Was that a difficult experience?
    That was a difficult experience.
    Leaving your friends and--
    Leaving this-- well, particularly
    leaving the academic environment of that particular school.
    And I managed to do quite well in the next school,
    but I'm sure my heart wasn't in it nearly as much as it
    was in the first school.
    Did the teachers in the next school
    talk to you about what was happening in Europe?
    More, because they were Jewish.
    Right.
    Oh, yes.
    They did.
    Was this a coed school or--
    This was coed, yes.
    Yeah, the schools in Holland were always coed.
    All right.
    So you tried to take the boat, but you couldn't.
    Then you came back to Amsterdam, and then
    what was the next experience?
    Well, as I was saying, Amsterdam--
    during the war there were no bombing incidents,
    but there were many bad experiences.
    It built up gradually.
    First one was [INAUDIBLE],, then the next was [INAUDIBLE],,
    then we had to wear the yellow stars.
    We couldn't use public transportation.
    Let's talk about the yellow star.
    OK.
    Did that bother you a lot?
    Yes, I think it did.
    I think it really did.
    But again, it was one of the things everybody else had
    to do, and you couldn't be caught without it
    because it would-- you'd be in real trouble if you did.
    Where did you wear it?
    On what part of your clothing?
    On the--
    On the left side?
    On the left upper.
    Did your mother sew it on?
    Yeah.
    You had to have it sewn on.
    You had lots of them, and they were
    sewn on all outer governments.
    Were you proud of it or--
    No.
    --embarrassed?
    I was neither proud nor embarrassed.
    It was just one of those things.
    But it wasn't pleasant.
    But, of course, we lived in Holland,
    and the population in general was very sympathetic.
    One day in the summer of 1942, I got
    caught in what they called the [GERMAN],,
    where they closed off the street on two blocks
    and just picked up all the Jews they could find on the streets.
    You are 15 years old now?
    14.
    14.
    Probably 14.
    And our iceman-- we did not have an electric refrigerator.
    We still had an old ice chest, and ice was delivered every day
    by a guy with a leather jacket with the ice on his back.
    And he was in the same block with his horse
    and his carriage.
    And he spotted me on the street as the street was being closed
    by the Nazis on both sides.
    And he just grabbed me and shoved me
    in the back of his ice truck, and drove
    me home, cold, but frozen, and so probably saved me.
    I don't know if they would have picked up a little guy,
    but that might have.
    Did you see any, at that time, any beatings on the streets?
    There were very few beatings on the streets in Holland.
    You never saw that.
    OK.
    OK.
    That didn't happen in Holland.
    What kind of curfew did you have?
    We had dawn to dusk curfew, I'm sure.
    Or rather, dusk to dawn curfew.
    Right.
    OK.
    But in 1943, or was it '42, the deportations began in Holland.
    By October '42 [INAUDIBLE].
    In October '42, deportations began in Holland.
    And my middle brother was the first one
    to be called on for deportation.
    And he was then 16, and he was sent
    to Birkenau, after which we received one postcard from him,
    a handwritten postcard.
    How was he taken away?
    He was told to report to the railroad station and--
    Did he say goodbye to you?
    Yes.
    He had about three days notice I think.
    He said goodbye, but of course, we didn't know.
    We didn't know what was happening.
    But I must backtrack here a little bit
    because my older brother, whom I hadn't mentioned,
    was a Zionist.
    And at a very young age, he did not
    want to stay with the family.
    He did not want to stay in Holland.
    He wanted to go to Palestine.
    And he went to--
    when I was in school, a regular school in Amsterdam,
    he already was outside Amsterdam in an agricultural college
    situation where Jewish boys were trained for immigration
    to Palestine.
    And he made Aliyah in 1938 from Amsterdam--
    '38 or '39, before the war--
    and he went to a kibbutz in Israel in Palestine.
    He then enlisted in the war very early, in the Palestine Corps,
    and did very well, became a commander and a parachutist.
    And he was shot down and killed over Albania or Yugoslavia
    in 1944, very much towards the end of the war.
    We found out about that right after we got to Paris.
    And--
    What were your parents' reactions
    when he had to leave the house?
    He didn't have to leave.
    He wanted to leave.
    I'm sorry.
    I'm talking about your other brother.
    I'm sorry.
    OK.
    [INAUDIBLE] I am.
    Your brother--
    You're going back to the middle brother now.
    Yeah.
    Oh, they were-- you know, it was very traumatic, obviously,
    and very sad.
    My father was a very calm and quiet man.
    But obviously, everybody was terribly upset about it.
    But in retrospect, we would have--
    everybody would have been much more upset had they
    known what's on the other side.
    So you were the one child left at home?
    Right, the youngest.
    OK, and then--
    And was raised to reason you couldn't go out at night.
    I went into an intensive reading thing in my life.
    I learned how to play bridge, and I read a great deal.
    What about any sports during the day?
    No.
    That was restricted?
    No.
    You couldn't go to swimming pools,
    and you wouldn't be out on the streets unnecessarily.
    There were no sports.
    But we also were mentally prepared.
    People were disappearing constantly
    and were being deported constantly.
    And we were also prepared that this would be our fate, that we
    were going to be deported.
    There was no way for us to go underground, apparently.
    And I don't know if my parents had discussions about this,
    but I wasn't privy to it.
    And so in 1943, middle of the night the doorbell rang.
    And we had our suitcases packed, and we were deported.
    At first we were taken to a theater.
    The suitcases were already packed?
    Oh, yes.
    Why?
    Because we knew it was going to happen.
    We just knew.
    It was just a question of time.
    Had any of your friends disappeared--
    Yes.
    --and been deported by then?
    Yes.
    By then most of them had.
    Most of them had.
    Friends and distant relatives we had, most of them
    had been deported by then.
    Did you pack your own suitcase?
    I don't remember that.
    Do you know what you packed?
    [INAUDIBLE]
    Do you know what you had in your suitcase?
    Yes.
    Good shoes, good socks, sweaters, that sort of thing.
    Did you take anything especially personal to you?
    Some photographs.
    I'm sure I had some photographs, but all of that
    disappeared eventually.
    But I didn't know, but my father had some American dollars
    which he packed.
    So--
    So it's the middle of the night, and then she
    said the knock on the door.
    Oh.
    Knock on the door, and there were Dutch policemen
    collaborators who took us to a [INAUDIBLE] station which
    was an old theater in an East Amsterdam.
    [? Scarborough ?] House, I believe, it was called.
    And we stayed in that theater for about two days.
    And then we were sent--
    Did you have any food then?
    Yes, they fed us.
    Where did you sleep?
    On the ground.
    On the floor.
    In the seats.
    Were there a lot of people?
    Yeah.
    It was not too full, but it was pretty full.
    And you could either sleep in theater seats,
    or you just made yourself comfortable on the ground.
    It was carpeted theater.
    It was no-- was not terribly traumatic.
    But people already were--
    I was a rather sheltered boy, and I
    was being exposed right then and there
    to people with epileptic fits and things
    that you were not prepared for in life.
    And--
    Was the overall atmosphere calm or very nervous then?
    Very nervous.
    I would say very nervous.
    From there we were sent to Westerbork, which
    is in Northeastern Holland.
    And my parents were put in a different--
    I think all three of us were in different barracks
    in Westerbork, but Westerbork was not a bad camp at all.
    And I forgot whether my parents were working or not.
    They were there for a short period of time.
    I was put to work, partly agricultural work
    in the summertime, partly as a messenger and as a typist.
    And I had to type lists of incoming transport,
    outgoing transports, and do bicycle messenger work
    and things like that, so--
    or peel potatoes or work in the kitchen.
    I always was occupied.
    There wasn't a day that I didn't have to do something,
    which was very good basically.
    You were talking about your experiences in Westerbork.
    What were the living conditions like?
    Where did you sleep?
    Today, we view the living conditions
    in all the camps from hindsight.
    And we slept in barracks.
    I slept in the men's barracks with double-tiered beds.
    But you were not with your father.
    No, my father was in a different barrack.
    Let me inject here, my parents were only a few weeks
    in Westerbork.
    We were separated.
    It was probably a very traumatic experience for me.
    My parents were sent to Bergen-Belsen
    after about two weeks, and I was kept in Westerbork.
    Were you able to say goodbye to them?
    Yes.
    Yes.
    Did they say anything special to you
    when they left that you remember?
    I'm sure they did.
    But--
    And so you were on your own then?
    I was on my own for a couple of months in Westerbork.
    Any friend-- previous friends there?
    Yeah, there were lots of previous friends.
    There were people coming through.
    There were people I knew-- we knew.
    There were probably relatives.
    There were-- I didn't feel alone, strangely enough,
    even though I was a small-- a young child.
    But there were people there, and there were
    other people in my position.
    And I managed it quite well, I imagine.
    Though I do know, you know, emotionally
    it was a bad situation for me at the time.
    I don't think the interview will be
    long enough for me to go into details
    and relate individual things that happened.
    I do--
    Any particular experience?
    Yes, there was one experience, which was very moving.
    A friend of my parents, a woman, she and her husband had
    befriended me as a child in Amsterdam, and she would--
    they had a--
    She was a very famous bridge player.
    He was a theatrical agent from Berlin.
    They entertained a lot of the movie people and the theater
    people from Berlin at their home in Amsterdam.
    And I got to know them because they were elderly,
    and I was there every day after school
    to walk their big German dog, Boxer, which they were both too
    feeble to walk.
    Her husband was dying of lung cancer,
    and luckily died of lung cancer.
    They had tenants-- a German brother and sister, non-Jewish,
    anti-Nazis who had fled Germany.
    I believe he was homosexual.
    And both these tenants, I think, were picked up by the Germans
    and executed.
    Well, as I was in Westerbork-- the name of the lady was--
    of the woman was Mrs. Jacoby.
    Mrs. Jacoby arrived on a transport in a pink nightgown.
    And I tried to help her and I tried
    to get her blankets and clothing,
    and she absolutely refused to wear any clothing.
    She came in a pink nightgown.
    She was deported in the same pink nightgown from Westerbork.
    She made absolutely no effort to survive.
    She must have sensed more than anybody
    else what was ahead of her.
    It was a very tragic but not uncommon
    thing to have happened.
    I was in Westerbork probably two or three more months
    after my parents had been sent to Bergen-Belsen,
    and then I was given orders to report for transport
    to Theresienstadt.
    How did you get these orders?
    The bureaucratic way.
    I'm sure that they were posted in my barracks,
    or somebody handed me a piece of paper or whatever.
    And how big were your barracks?
    It's very difficult to describe.
    I would say there were probably 50 people in a barracks.
    Were they young men like you or all ages?
    Well, I was the youngest.
    I was always kind of the youngest.
    There were very few people younger than myself
    in the camps at that time.
    They were not uncomfortable.
    I mean, there were bunk beds.
    There was a stove.
    And there was good camaraderie--
    people looked out for one another.
    I was going to say, did the older men look out
    for you being the young--
    Yeah.
    People looked kind of after each other.
    And there were no problems that I can remember from Westerbork.
    And you still had your suitcase?
    I still had my suitcase.
    So we were--
    I was told to go to--
    get on the train to go to Theresienstadt.
    And all the other trains that left for the East, the camps,
    were always cattle cars.
    And this was a regular passenger train
    with regular compartments.
    You were part of a large group.
    I was part of a large group, yes, of course.
    And so took the train to Theresienstadt, and I
    don't remember, there was--
    we were probably given some food in Westerbork, some rations
    to eat on the train.
    You had enough food while you were in Westerbork?
    Yeah.
    That was not a problem?
    Oh, that was not a problem, because food
    was sent to me from Amsterdam.
    Friends in Amsterdam of my parents--
    non-Jewish friends-- had money that my dad had left with them,
    and they could send me food packages from Amsterdam.
    And so I was not uncomfortable.
    And they even managed to get food packages to us
    in Theresienstadt for a while.
    And your health was good?
    My health was always good.
    OK.
    So you took this train now to Theresienstadt.
    To Theresienstadt.
    And it probably took a couple of days to get to Theresienstadt.
    And we were unloaded from the train
    and marched into the town of Theresienstadt.
    And possibly you've been there.
    It's an old garrison town going back to the 18th century.
    And it had the special feel and looks of a garrison town--
    lots of barrack-like building-- called kasárny.
    And it was a motor town.
    Who were your guards?
    The guards were locals, or they were Germans.
    I don't recall exactly who all the guards were,
    but it was well guarded.
    But basically, it was not bad.
    It was not a concentration camp in the sense of hard labor
    or in the sense of physical deprivation.
    Now, what month are we talking about now in the--
    That's a very good question.
    We were talking about the winter of 1944.
    Early '44.
    Early '44.
    OK.
    In spring of 1944--
    Where-- let's talk also now about the living conditions.
    The living conditions-- again, we were living in these
    barracks in these kasárny, also in the bunk beds.
    And--
    Did you have blankets?
    Oh, yes.
    There were blankets.
    And you had enough clothes to keep you warm?
    And we had enough clothes.
    Oh, we had our own clothes and there was enough clothes.
    Yeah.
    There was--
    Were you still wearing your stars?
    Yes.
    We were still wearing our stars, but we
    didn't have to wear any blue and white striped uniforms
    or anything like that.
    Right, right.
    When you had clothes [INAUDIBLE]----
    In Theresienstadt there was some schooling.
    I remember there were some school--
    there was some schooling.
    There was some work.
    Again, I did some agricultural work,
    and I forgot what else I did-- actually, very little,
    probably.
    My mother-- oh, my mother.
    Now, I have to go back like a little bit.
    After I was in Theresienstadt for six weeks,
    I was in the middle of the day, somebody called me
    on the street and say, hey, Jerry, or [DUTCH],,
    or whatever my name was in Dutch,
    your parents have just arrived.
    I just couldn't believe it, and it absolutely true.
    That's in a transport from Bergen-Belsen
    to Theresienstadt, and my parents
    were both on the transport from Bergen-Belsen.
    So we were again together, but not in the same barracks,
    and that was wonderful.
    And my mother went to work in a place called the glimmer.
    The glimmer was a place where they
    did hand work to manufacture mica
    used in the insulation of submarines.
    And there were about 300 women working in the glimmer,
    as I was told.
    And those were the only survivors.
    The old survivors in Theresienstadt
    were probably the 300 women who worked in the glimmer.
    Everybody else who survived, there
    were people that had been sent in at the last minute
    from other camps.
    I don't understand exactly because the numbers are fairly
    high that are given, but when I was in Theresienstadt,
    everybody had been sent to Birkenau, Auschwitz
    during the summer of 1944.
    What was your parents' state of mind?
    They were coping?
    They were coping.
    They were coping?
    They were working?
    They were coping.
    My mother's state of mind was probably better
    than my father's in the sense that she was a real survivor.
    And she was a real coper.
    She managed to look well and do well and stay
    healthy physically, and they were coping reasonably well,
    I would think, yes.
    Your father's health?
    My father was diabetic before the war-- has always been
    diabetic, severely diabetic.
    And the starvation diet in the camps was very good for him.
    He lost weight.
    He was very thin.
    But because of the weight loss, his diabetes disappeared,
    and he didn't have any kidney problems.
    He didn't have any heart problems.
    He didn't have any problems at all,
    and he could work very hard.
    And that was particularly noticeable
    in Theresienstadt and in Auschwitz
    because he was already at the upper age limits in Auschwitz
    where people would not survive.
    Right.
    My mother stayed well.
    My mother did quite well emotionally in Theresienstadt.
    I do remember her always being a physically attractive
    and upbeat.
    There was a lot of underground and also officially sanctioned
    entertainment in Theresienstadt.
    This entire group of theater people
    that I knew in Amsterdam--
    Kurt Gerron and [PERSONAL NAME] and playwrights and whatever,
    only one of them, I believe, survived--
    they kind of looked after me in Theresienstadt, too.
    You know, I was the little pet from Amsterdam,
    and so I was invited to rehearsals
    of the three-penny opera and musical things.
    There was chamber music there.
    There was a certain amount of cultural life
    in Theresienstadt.
    As you probably know, there were many famous
    Czech and German composers there, and a lot of the music
    survived.
    I wasn't particularly well-versed in music
    at that time of my life, but I must
    say it was a very positive influence.
    And Theresienstadt on the whole was a camp that was survivable.
    I mean, there wasn't enough food.
    People died-- OK, many people died.
    You remember seeing dead people?
    Oh, yes.
    And as a teenager, how did that make you feel,
    seeing people dying?
    Well, sadly--
    It's such a vulnerable age.
    It's such a vulnerable age, but you also
    have to put yourself into the mindset of people
    in the concentration camp.
    You always-- you only survive by thinking you will survive.
    You do not survive if you think you're going to be dying next.
    Because if you think you're going to be dying next,
    you're going to be dying next.
    So your mindset is it's always the other person that dies.
    I'm sure that there's almost a thread that
    runs through most of survivors.
    Kind of like a protective armor?
    Kind of like a protective armor, yes.
    And my mother had it very strong.
    My father probably had it, too.
    My father had a lot of sense.
    Did your parents or any of the other people
    know what was happening in other camps?
    No.
    Had we known, I don't think anybody would have had the will
    to live or to go through it.
    So you were not aware?
    We did not know.
    The camp elders must have known.
    We did not know what went on in the other camps.
    I also was at Theresienstadt during the time
    that they did that Red Cross film,
    and I'm sure I participated in it.
    I was filmed, and it's the only time
    we were allowed in the swimming pool was when they did that Red
    Cross film.
    But I wasn't aware what was going on at all.
    What did you think was happening?
    I didn't give it much thought.
    I really didn't give it much thought.
    I didn't know what was happening.
    But it was just--
    you were grateful for the opportunity of a--
    getting to swim in a swimming pool,
    and maybe being fed an extra meal or something.
    Did you talk to any of the Red Cross people?
    No.
    No.
    No.
    I had no contact with anybody on the outside.
    So Kurt Gerron and some of these German movie makers and film
    people that were there, I'm sure were participating
    in making that particular film.
    I learned that much later.
    So at this point, you knew German and Dutch,
    were your two languages?
    Yes, and also in French.
    And French?
    Yeah.
    You learned that in school?
    And I also had a fair amount of English, too.
    Where did you learn French and English?
    In Holland in school.
    When you go to school in Holland,
    you learn four languages.
    I learned German really in school in Holland,
    better than I learned it at home.
    I took German as a foreign language,
    and that's why I speak very good German today.
    When you conversed with your parents
    you said you spoke always in German.
    Always in German.
    But it's still different if you learn the language in school.
    Were there many other teenagers like you--
    Yes.
    --around?
    Yeah, there were quite a few teenagers like myself around.
    Did you all stick together?
    Yes.
    I know I had a Czech friend, a boy my age
    who his mother was an opera singer.
    And he knew all the Puccini opera, [INAUDIBLE] at age 15.
    So there you are in Theresienstadt
    talking about Puccini.
    Well, Theresienstadt was a rather special place
    for these many-- for many reasons also.
    It was a bit of a privileged place, but as I said,
    there was just--
    as we all know, it was a terrible place
    in that everybody, almost everybody,
    was deported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz.
    Trains went every week, and you just
    were lucky you weren't on the train, until one day my dad
    and I were told to report for transport.
    Your father?
    Yeah.
    But not your mother.
    Not my mother, because she worked
    in this particular place, the glimmer.
    My mother stayed in Theresienstadt
    until the end of the war.
    My father and I were deported to Auschwitz
    in a cattle car with about 125 people and a bucket of--
    for toilet purposes.
    Did you know where you were going?
    No.
    We had no idea.
    All we knew was somewhere in the East,
    relocating to a camp in the East.
    We had no idea where we were going.
    I'm sure we didn't.
    Do you remember saying goodbye to your mother again?
    Yes.
    I do remember that.
    Did she say anything special to you this time?
    I blocked everything.
    You blocked it.
    Yeah.
    I blocked a whole lot of stuff and it remains blocked.
    Right.
    We--
    So you were with your father in the car?
    In the cattle car.
    Was it all men, or was--
    No.
    It was mixed.
    To the best of my memory it was mixed.
    People died in the car.
    It took three days I think to get to Auschwitz, three or four
    days.
    I can't remember [INAUDIBLE].
    Were you in the car the whole time?
    Oh, yes.
    Doors were never opened.
    What did you and your father do?
    Did you comfort each other?
    [? We did. ?]
    How did you manage to get through those three days?
    We managed.
    We managed.
    Everybody else had to get through those three days.
    Were people a help to each other?
    Sure.
    I am sure that--
    I don't recall anybody fighting over anything.
    We were all there in the same--
    but people did-- some elderly people I'm sure didn't survive.
    So again, you saw dead people?
    Yes.
    Well, by that time you're used to seeing dead people.
    I mean, you saw them every morning
    in Theresienstadt being picked up
    and carted off to the crematorium.
    A cousin of my mother's in Theresienstadt
    was dying of throat cancer, and I remember
    visiting him every day.
    And there was no morphine.
    There were no drugs to help.
    Poor man was suffering horribly until he could finally die.
    He had a son my age and a wife.
    And the son and the wife were both sent to Auschwitz
    about the same time I was.
    And the son didn't survive, but his wife had survived.
    I remember seeing her once after the war in New York.
    She had immigrated to the states.
    But she was very sad case.
    So you were on the train for three days and--
    We came to Auschwitz in the middle of the night, and--
    What was the first scene that you saw?
    The scene was-- raus, raus.
    And the SS with the German shepherds, and line up
    five in a row, and the harsh lights coming, shining down.
    And we were told--
    Did you have your suitcase with you?
    No, no.
    We were not-- yes, I did, but we were not
    allowed to-- it had to be left in the railroad car.
    You could not take anything out except ourselves.
    Were you still standing with your father?
    I was with my father.
    And as we were marching up, and we saw that selection table
    with Mengele--
    How did you know it was him--
    We didn't know that at this--
    At the time.
    --after the fact, of course.
    We saw a selection table with two officers sitting there,
    and people being assigned left and right.
    And as we were walking up, my father
    said to me, if they ask you what your profession is,
    tell them we are metalworkers.
    The German was [GERMAN],, meaning metal separators.
    And it was just a very good idea of my father's.
    And we said that, and we were sent to the right.
    The two of you?
    The two of us together were sent to the right--
    to the left.
    And right then and there, one of the kapos
    who was herding us or shepherding us,
    who were whipping us, who were beating us, whatever it was,
    told us that all those that had gone--
    wait a minute.
    All those that had gone to the right, I believe--
    we went to the left.
    The ones to the right went to--
    he said, they're all going to be smoked in no time
    and pointing to the chimneys.
    Did you believe him?
    We could smell the--
    the smell was very pervasive of flesh burning from the ovens,
    from the crematorium.
    And we saw these six chimneys with a flame,
    because there's no oxygen in those chimneys.
    The flames were burning above the chimney.
    It's like when you go to an oil field,
    and you see the fires above the--
    the flames above.
    That's what the chimneys looked like except much higher.
    Oh, yes.
    We believed them all right.
    And well, there was a harsh dose of reality
    right there on arrival within the first hour or so.
    You knew everything.
    How was your father then?
    Was he--
    Very calm.
    He was calm?
    You had to be very calm.
    He-- so we were marched with this group of men,
    all more or less--
    I was probably the youngest, or amongst the youngest.
    And I was a small--
    Oh, you were a small child?
    I was a small person always, yes.
    And I look much younger than my age.
    My father certainly did not look younger than his age,
    and in 1944 he was 51.
    And there are very few people that age that--
    particularly with gray hair--
    that managed to get through.
    So we were--
    Were there any other familiar people with you?
    Yes, there were--
    You were still with people [INAUDIBLE]----
    Yeah, a group of Dutch people with us that
    were familiar, about 10 of them.
    None of the names that I remember, but there
    was a nucleus of people that--
    So you were surrounded by at least some familiar faces?
    That were familiar to us, yes.
    We were-- then the usual treatment--
    I'm sure you have this on many tapes.
    We were told to disrobe.
    We could put our shoes aside.
    I mean, we were allowed to keep our shoes.
    Everything else was confiscated.
    We were deloused.
    We were shaven, all bodily hair.
    We were tattooed.
    I do not have a tattoo now.
    I had it removed.
    Do you remember what your number was?
    Yeah.
    B12773.
    And there was a number at the Holocaust museum
    on the second floor, I believe, in Washington,
    which was 12778 or--
    within eight or nine numbers.
    It had to be somebody who was in the same transport.
    Was that very painful to have done to you?
    The tattoo?
    No, it was humiliating, but it was not painful.
    It went very quickly.
    And it being 1944, we were tattooed--
    What month?
    What month was that?
    This was in summer of 1944.
    Summer of '44.
    And we were tattooed on the inner arm,
    whereas the earlier first couple of years,
    the A numbers and the earlier serial numbers
    were tattooed on the outer arm with huge numbers,
    and that got the technology [INAUDIBLE]..
    Was your father's number--
    His was 12772-- either 2 or 4.
    But he never had his removed.
    And then what were you given to wear?
    Well, first of all, we were deloused
    and showered and shaven and tattooed,
    and then were given the blue and white uniforms
    and the blue and white cap with that number on the uniform
    and the yellow star--
    a triangle.
    That's what we were given to wear,
    but then we were allowed to take our shoes back.
    And unbeknownst to me, and even then I didn't know it,
    my father had hidden a $10 bill, his same $10 bill he still had,
    and it was is the lining of his shoe.
    Of his shoe?
    Of his shoe.
    And we kept our shoes, and they were good, sturdy shoes.
    And without those shoes, we would never have survived.
    These were leather shoes?
    Good leather shoes with thick soles.
    Well, then the usual--
    the Auschwitz torture started.
    You then went to a barrack?
    We went to our barracks.
    It was very tightly--
    herded into a barracks.
    You and your father?
    My father and I and the whole group, yes.
    And we had to sleep on the ground
    on cement floor, body to body, very close together
    under lights.
    The conditions were terrible.
    The arrivals every day were horrible.
    I saw a man beaten to death by other inmates in the barracks
    the second day I was there.
    Why was he beaten?
    He had just arrived from-- he was a traitor.
    He had betrayed other people in the underground in Holland.
    And then he himself had been sent to Auschwitz.
    And people that he had betrayed found him there,
    and they just beat him to death, slowly but surely.
    And you witnessed this?
    Yeah.
    It was very cruel and very gruesome.
    That's where you learned a whole lot of life very quickly.
    People who didn't want to live would and did
    walk to the barbed wire and killed themselves.
    That was an easy way to commit suicide.
    We were stand-- we had to march.
    We had to stand on the parade grounds.
    We had to stand on one foot and--
    For a long time?
    Yes, it was all cruel and unusual punishment
    I would say for a long time.
    And there wasn't-- in Birkenau itself,
    there was no meaningful work for us to do,
    and we were there for about four, six weeks,
    perhaps even longer.
    I just don't remember exactly how long we were there.
    And I do remember that after two or three weeks,
    we had to go through a selection,
    and that was probably the worst part of all the camp
    experiences.
    Because the first time we arrived
    we did not know that there was a selection
    and it was a life and death matter.
    But then we had to undress, and we
    had to jump and run and do all kinds of physical things
    in order to prove that we were fit to work.
    And if you couldn't pass that selection,
    you knew you were going to go to the gas chamber.
    So that was probably one of the worst experiences
    we all had in those--
    This is in Birkenau?
    In Birkenau, yeah.
    What about your father?
    He had to do this also?
    He had to do this.
    And how did he get through it?
    He got through it.
    He did?
    He was able to do the physical--
    He was able to do--
    yeah, he got through it.
    I got through it.
    We all got through it.
    How long did it take?
    It seemed forever, but it probably
    was just a few minutes.
    You know, that's hard to say.
    The food was terrible.
    If you were lucky and you got fed something out
    of the bottom of the bucket, you probably
    got a little bit more substance than
    if you got something from the top of the bucket.
    You had a tin can, and the sanitary conditions
    were terrible.
    And you could see people who were slated for death.
    We called them [GERMAN].
    You've heard the expression.
    And it was almost some people who no longer could--
    had the will to live and that showed a certain demeanor.
    They were almost self-selected for death.
    Fate selected them for death first, and then they gave up.
    And they became sort of--
    not pariahs, but you avoided contact.
    It was your own way of survival, I
    suppose, is to avoid contact with these--
    with people we termed to be [GERMAN]..
    How supportive were the older people to you-- the older?
    You obviously were still with men, the older men.
    Did the older men take care of the younger men?
    Well, yes.
    There was really-- there was really support.
    The second day or the third day in Birkenau--
    I was a cute little kid.
    The kapo who was a criminal for the barracks
    had picked me out to become his room boy.
    And I knew, and my father knew, what would be involved.
    And I somehow managed to play dumb and get out of it,
    because it--
    they used these--
    How did you do that?
    Huh?
    What did you say?
    How did you get out of it?
    Well, I just played very dumb and said
    I didn't know what he wanted from me, et cetera, et cetera.
    No, I wasn't interested in the sardines or in the chocolate.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    And--
    And he let you get away?
    Well, there were other cute kids in the barracks.
    And I knew that--
    I had already heard earlier what would happen to these kids
    is they get tired of them, and so they let them go to the gas
    chamber, you know, [INAUDIBLE].
    So I got out of that, and somebody else
    was picked instead.
    But there was no dearth of people for them to pick on.
    And there--
    We were talking about your experiences in Birkenau.
    Are there moments that you wish to talk about?
    You said you were able to get out of--
    Oh.
    --being a room boy.
    Well, you know, all of Birkenau was a continuous unbelievable
    horror story, much of which I'm sure I
    and many others probably have tried to suppress.
    I don't remember too many details anymore.
    And you were still with your father?
    I was always with my father in the camps.
    Do you feel that made a difference
    being with your father?
    Oh, definitely.
    It made a big difference.
    Do you think you would have been able--
    Made a difference to him, too.
    But, as I said, my father was very cool and very collected
    and very unemotional.
    And he stayed that way even in Birkenau?
    Always.
    Yeah, well, it's how we survived.
    Because he had the right ideas at the right time for survival.
    And also he never made waves.
    You hardly ever knew he was there.
    Did he give you advice ever about how to act?
    Yes, probably.
    Sure.
    He must have given me enough hints.
    But you learn very quickly in an environment like that
    how to act and how to protect yourself and how to survive.
    But you're close to 17 now?
    Or about 17--
    I was 16 or 17.
    Did you consider yourself very old at that point?
    Well, you do get--
    I was very young 17, but you do grow very old very quickly.
    I was a-- yeah.
    You were saying about, though were a young 17,
    you were old in other ways.
    Yeah, we grow very old or very wise in an environment
    like that very quickly.
    What about the other boys your age?
    The teenagers?
    Were they reacting the same way and responding as you
    in coping?
    Yes.
    Those that survived.
    Absolutely.
    Did you still at that point know people from Holland?
    Yes.
    So some familiar faces?
    There were familiar faces.
    All during this period that we were with a group of people
    from Holland and also with many other people
    whom we didn't know, but there were always familiar faces.
    Was that a help?
    That was a help.
    It must have been a help.
    We were then sent--
    after, I don't know, six, seven weeks,
    I believe I said, in Birkenau, maybe longer--
    to Gleiwitz.
    Gleiwitz was a labor camp.
    Auschwitz was surrounded by numbers of factory-type labor
    camps, like the Buna, for instance,
    where IG Farben had the rubber factory, where Elie Weisel was.
    Gleiwitz was a very small camp.
    How did you get there?
    By a truck.
    It was only about two hours or so from Auschwitz.
    With your father?
    With my father and the whole group on the back of a truck.
    And it was a great relief to get to Gleiwitz
    because while it had a crematorium,
    it did not have any gas chambers.
    It was not an extermination camp.
    When you were in Birkenau, how much freedom of movement
    did you have?
    None.
    None to speak of.
    We were adjacent to the experimental block.
    And I did get some information.
    I did get some input as to what was going on at--
    At the time, you're talking about?
    --at the plant at the time, yes.
    What was your reaction?
    Horrible.
    We were totally horrified when you found out
    what they were doing to people.
    And yet, some people thought perhaps being there was
    a means of survival.
    That they might not even survive if they hadn't been
    in the [? e-block. ?]
    Did you worry at that time when you were in Birkenau
    that you might be taken away right away
    or did you feel because you were young
    and you were pretty safe for the time being?
    You could never feel pretty safe, but you always,
    as I said earlier, you couldn't survive unless you thought
    you were going to survive.
    But you could never feel pretty safe.
    And once we got to Gleiwitz, you could feel a little bit safer.
    The dangers were different.
    And it was very, very cold winter,
    and we had to work very hard in factories.
    My father worked in a factory making railroad equipment.
    And I was working in an ammunitions factory welding.
    Were you still wearing your Birkenau uniform?
    Oh, yes.
    That never changed.
    But as we got to Gleiwitz--
    With your shoes?
    With our shoes.
    But as we got to Gleiwitz, there was an old German Wehrmacht
    guard, not an SS guard, and as he was marching my father's
    group out to work one morning at 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning,
    he looked at my father and he said, weren't you
    Lieutenant Rosenstein?
    And didn't I serve under you in World War I?
    And so he was a decent man who had
    been drafted into guard duty when
    he was in his 50s or early 60s, an older man.
    And so my father managed to speak to him
    and he slipped him the $10.
    And the guard slipped him occasionally
    some bread or a newspaper.
    So that's part of the tale of survival.
    What were the living conditions at Gleiwitz in the barracks?
    In Gleiwitz, we were again living
    in three tiers, either two or three-tiered,
    I think, three-tiered barracks with those straw mattresses
    and one blanket.
    And the mattresses had to be made up like a razor
    every morning.
    So it had to be absolutely straight.
    You couldn't have a lump showing or else there would
    be some kind of cruel punishment.
    And the punishment often was that you
    had to stand on one foot in the snow for about an hour
    or something like that.
    And that would kill you if you didn't manage to do this.
    If you lost part of your uniform, they would kill you.
    It was very severe.
    And we had to stand at Appell twice a day where people--
    We're talking Gleiwitz now?
    In Gleiwitz, yeah.
    How often in Birkenau did you have the Appell?
    At least twice a day, too.
    For how long did that take?
    It wasn't so cold then.
    It was still fall.
    In Gleiwitz, it was winter and it was freezing cold
    and there was no warm water.
    And we had to take [INAUDIBLE] and thaw out the water line
    every morning in order to get some water to wash with,
    which was outdoors.
    They did feed us enough to keep alive.
    The same soup, always.
    Did you get any bread?
    Yeah, coffee and some rye bread, I believe.
    The food was just barely enough to keep you going.
    I had started developing holes in all my feet
    and in my fingers from malnutrition.
    You mean sores?
    Yeah, deep sores from malnutrition.
    My father did not.
    About how much did you weigh then?
    About 90 pounds, 95 pounds, I think.
    Maybe 100 pounds.
    And you said your father did not develop--
    Any sores.
    No, he managed to stay quite healthy through it all.
    I managed to stay quite healthy.
    You could not not be healthy under those conditions.
    So we stayed in Gleiwitz until just about January 17 or so.
    50 years ago next week.
    And we didn't have newspapers, but we had some news all
    the time.
    And we managed to get information--
    How did you get those?
    From the guards or from when my father managed,
    one of the guards slipped him a paper occasionally.
    From overhearing radio reports or something like that.
    And people were drawing maps in the snow
    to show where the Russian Army was.
    There was always somehow information got to us.
    And information was hope.
    You know, with information, maybe
    they would get here before they got us.
    There were three camps in Gleiwitz, one, two, and three.
    We were in number three.
    And the German orderliness is, of course,
    that they evacuated camp number one first, then number two
    second, and number three last.
    We luckily were in number three, and so we
    were last to go on this terrible march to the east.
    And stragglers were shot.
    And the SS shot the stragglers amongst the Wehrmacht,
    amongst the older people that they
    had hired from retirement, like that man, that guard
    that recognized my father.
    We believe he was shot at the end himself
    and that he couldn't make the march.
    What was his name?
    Do you remember?
    I do not remember his name.
    So you and your father began this forced march--
    Right.
    --out of Gleiwitz?
    With the whole crew.
    And we had the blankets around us and we were--
    you know, it looked like something out
    of [PERSONAL NAME] drawing.
    And it was the harshest of winters.
    It was January with deep snow and was very cold.
    And one night, we were in some barn or other
    where we were allowed to sleep.
    And then the next day we were marched on and we ended--
    About how many were in your group?
    Do you have any memory?
    It was sort of a long, long column.
    And it was we were just at the end of it and in front of us
    were the other camps, probably.
    But these all men in your column?
    They were all men, no women.
    And we ended up in a camp called Blechhammer.
    About how long a march was that?
    A couple of days.
    Were you given any food on the way?
    No, I don't think so.
    I don't remember.
    I don't think we had any food.
    And where did you sleep?
    Did you--
    One night I remember sleeping in some barn.
    And then I remember being in Blechhammer.
    And there was terrible conditions.
    There was lots of typhoid and lots of people dying.
    And the guards were in the towers,
    but they were not on the ground, and they were just
    shooting at anything that was moving on the ground.
    In the camp?
    In the camp.
    So you didn't dare go out of the barracks.
    And then all of a sudden it became very strangely quiet.
    I remember when I looked up and looked at the towers
    and the towers had been deserted and the guards had fled.
    And then the camp gate opened and the Red Cross came in,
    two people from the Red Cross.
    But they didn't go into the camp,
    wisely, because there was probably so much typhoid there.
    And then before we knew it, we found out
    the Germans had indeed fled.
    And we organized ourselves within a group of 10 or 12,
    that same group from Holland that had been together,
    and said, the first thing we got to do was get out of here.
    It's much too dangerous to stay here with all the disease.
    What were your thoughts at this point
    that the Germans had fled?
    People think--
    Did you believe it?
    --you throw your caps in the air and start dancing.
    No, it was just traumatic.
    We believed it, yes, but we were so
    traumatized it made no emotional difference whatsoever.
    You were still--
    You were still surviving.
    You were still surviving.
    And the Russians could not be trusted.
    We found that out very quickly.
    How did you know that?
    We found that out they were, A, very drunk and very
    undisciplined, and they were shooting and raping
    and shooting and raping.
    And women had a terrible time, particularly
    if there were Catholic orders in that part of the world.
    And the Russians made it the sport to rape,
    gang rape the women in the Catholic orders.
    That happened constantly.
    So the minute we met the Russians and we saw that--
    we knew that we had to be very careful with them, too.
    Because, A, we weren't sure that they knew who we were.
    Would they think we were Germans?
    But at the time we only spoke Dutch,
    we didn't speak German for self-protection.
    So anyway, 10 or 12 of us decided
    immediately we should not stay in Blechhammer
    and we should head east towards Poland.
    So we just left the camp.
    We had our blankets and started marching.
    And we found--
    This was the group of 10 or so?
    Oh, yeah, 10 or 12, yes.
    All ages?
    Well, I probably was the youngest.
    My father was the oldest, I would think.
    Everybody else in between.
    But mostly people in their 20s, I think.
    We found an abandoned prisoner of war camp
    where English prisoners of war had been--
    Incarcerated?
    Incarcerated by the Germans.
    Do you remember the name of it?
    No.
    It was near Blechhammer.
    It was near Blechhammer?
    It was near Blechhammer.
    It was within kilometers.
    We didn't have the strength to walk more than a couple
    of kilometers.
    But it was clean and there were bunk beds
    and we found blankets in there.
    We found dishes in there, tons and tons
    of dishes, clean dishes, and a canister of tea.
    And the canister of tea is the one can see over there.
    It's not [INAUDIBLE] coffee.
    [LAUGHS] It's the only piece that survived from then.
    Well, we--
    How long did you stay there?
    About two weeks.
    Two weeks to recover.
    There was one of the guys in the group was a butcher.
    In your group?
    In our group.
    And the first thing that wandered by
    was a pig from some neighboring farm.
    So we slaughtered the pig.
    We had an ax and we killed the pig
    and we had found some knives and we butchered the pig.
    And everybody--
    Did you eat the pig?
    Everybody else did, I didn't.
    I couldn't eat the pig, but I ate the liver.
    I had the liver.
    And everybody--
    Did your father eat the pig?
    Yes.
    Oh, religion had nothing to do with it.
    Hey, we're talking about survival here.
    And at that stage, my father had absolutely no idea
    that he would ever set foot in a synagogue again.
    I remember we killed the pig and everybody got terribly,
    terribly ill because nobody's body could handle anything
    as heavy as that and had terrible diarrhea.
    And I didn't because I didn't eat the pig meat,
    I only ate pig liver, and I was fine.
    And after a couple of days, I started getting--
    the sores started healing.
    After about a week or two it will disappear.
    I mean, the scars never went away,
    but I started healing pretty quickly.
    Then we slaughtered a heifer.
    We found a heifer, and that was more easy to digest.
    And I think we found potatoes or something.
    So we found food.
    And we--
    Were you left alone, the 10 of you there?
    Well, the Russians came by and checked us out constantly.
    But, yes, we were pretty well left alone.
    Did you understand Russian?
    No.
    No.
    But there was one Russian officer who spoke English.
    So we could communicate with him in English.
    What did you talk about?
    Who knows?
    [LAUGHS]
    Any Russian Jewish officers?
    He was a Jew.
    Yeah, he was Jewish.
    And what was his reaction to you all?
    Well, he had seen a lot by that time.
    He didn't react anymore.
    He had seen-- he'd already been liberating Poland
    and Auschwitz and other places.
    I don't recall that there was much--
    He wasn't especially sympathetic to you?
    I don't imagine so.
    But, you know, the Russians looked at us to very strangely.
    They couldn't make us out either.
    They didn't know exactly who we were, what we were, et cetera.
    Were we the enemy or what?
    But we were there and we were left alone pretty well
    for 10 or 12 days.
    And then the Russians came and said
    the Germans had counterattacked and they needed us,
    and we had to help them dig trenches.
    So back with the shovels.
    We helped the Russians dig some trenches.
    And so we didn't find that very conducive to our survival.
    And after 10 or 12 days, we were probably well enough to manage,
    and we just packed up our belongings.
    By that time, we had scrounged things together
    and we had some belongings, and we loaded them
    on little hand-held carts.
    And like a troop out of Mother Courage,
    we marched off to the east.
    And then we spent the first night--
    that was after the night after we
    had to dig the ditches for the Russians--
    we spent it at a monastery.
    And one in our group was a doctor.
    And he was asked at the monastery
    to examine some nuns who were there
    and who had all been raped by the Russians.
    I mean, the mass rape was just horrendous.
    And there was this enormous exodus
    of people fleeing towards Germany,
    probably Nazi collaborators and what they called Volksdeutsche,
    the German settlers of the east, who
    couldn't understand that we were moving
    in the opposite direction.
    So we finally got to a town named Katowice.
    Katowice is in Western Poland.
    And there was a Red Cross or some kind of refugee service
    there that--
    or the Russians did it, I forgot.
    But we were simply quartered in with the Polish families.
    They were told they have to house us and feed us, period,
    and did.
    And there was some communication there with these people.
    Between the Polish--
    Between us, yeah.
    My father and I, we were with this Polish woman
    and her daughter.
    And I know there was some communication there
    and it was pleasant.
    And we were fed and registered and looked after.
    And we were given some--
    we finally got rid of our blue uniforms and we were given--
    This was the first time you were out of them?
    No, actually it is not.
    I stand corrected.
    Because in the English Army barracks,
    we found English Army uniforms, and that's what we had on.
    By that time, we had already changed to English Army.
    Had you been wearing the same uniforms in the camp
    or did they give you new uniforms?
    That's a very good question.
    They must have given us new uniforms at one time,
    though I do not recall this.
    I don't recall this.
    Just to back up then, do you remember ever
    being deloused again and again as a precaution?
    Oh, yes.
    Yes, we were shaven--
    No, in the beginning, yes, but I meant--
    No.
    Again, yes.
    Oh, yes.
    This was a standard procedure?
    We were kept-- it was every--
    once a month or so with a haircut and we were deloused.
    Which, in retrospect, was probably a very good idea,
    you know, because when we saw how many people
    died of typhoid afterwards.
    And the hair does grow back quickly.
    Did you find that demeaning?
    Of course it was demeaning.
    Everything, the whole experience is demeaning.
    It's just one of those things that just made you
    a non-person not having hair.
    But on the other hand, once we were in Katowice, by that time
    I had a full growth of hair again.
    And there, I also found another survivor,
    a guy I went to high school with in Amsterdam, about two
    of them.
    And also there we found a young woman
    who was a friend of my oldest brothers
    and dated my oldest brothers in Amsterdam.
    Her name, I remembered, was Ruth Asher.
    And she came from a very fine German-Jewish family
    that lived in the neighborhood.
    And she had had terrible experiences in Auschwitz
    and she lost it after the liberation.
    We had to guard her and watch her.
    She was totally-- well, she was pretty insane by then
    and very suicidal.
    And for all that period she was with the group,
    we had to watch her and look out after her.
    I don't know what happened to her afterwards.
    But we encountered a troop of gypsies,
    of dwarfs that had survived.
    You know, they had experimented on small people
    in the [? e-block. ?] And they were Romanian.
    They were on a train with us from Katowice to Janowice,
    and they got off the train somewhere in northern Romania.
    You stayed--
    It was very hard to communicate with them because we
    didn't have a language in common,
    some French, but very little.
    That they had-- and very traumatized in there also.
    I remember that there was not only lack of communication,
    there was a wish for no communication.
    On their part?
    On their part, yeah.
    But I suppose then it came the time where none of us
    really communicated or talked about it anyway.
    That had already, that was beginning
    to set in pretty soon after the liberation, in my case.
    We stayed in Katowice, what did I say, four or five weeks?
    I forgot how long.
    And then the Red Cross organized this train.
    Because all those British prisoners of war
    that had been in the barracks there had also been liberated
    and they were on the same train.
    And because of them, this was organized, not because of us.
    Now I have to backtrack a little bit.
    After we were liberated from Blechhammer, in our group
    there was one guy, a Czech fellow,
    whose wife had also stayed in Theresienstadt.
    And we knew that my mother had stayed in Theresienstadt,
    that she had not been transported.
    Because we knew from the last transport
    that had come in from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz,
    where people had survived and that we talked to, that she
    was still in Theresienstadt.
    And this fellow knew his wife was still in Theresienstadt.
    He said he was not going to go to Eastern--
    with us.
    He was going to wait until the Russian army advanced
    far enough to go to Theresienstadt,
    which was only days.
    And he went to Theresienstadt and he told my mother then
    who had survived in Theresienstadt
    that my dad and I were alive.
    That we were somewhere in Russia, but we were alive.
    So my mother knew this.
    Now let me backtrack.
    Let me go back to Katowice.
    We were put on a train then with our group.
    There were by then not just us 10.
    There were about 100 or 150 survivors
    and all those British prisoners of war.
    And it was a regular passenger train
    that was organized by the Red Cross
    and it was sent from Katowice to Janowice.
    Janowice is in the Bukovina.
    It's Northern Romania.
    And today, I think it's Belarus.
    It's a beautiful wide town in the Carpathian Mountains
    that had gotten through the war virtually unscathed.
    It was just beautiful with an intact Jewish population.
    Somehow or other, there were a lot
    of wealthy Jews living in that town that managed to survive.
    And the Jewish community kind of really looked after us.
    They took us into their homes.
    And they had beautiful homes with bathrooms and hot
    and cold running water and something.
    And, again, we were first deloused in Janowice.
    But it was Russian occupied and everybody was very paranoid
    because Russian spies were everyplace.
    And the Russians also had to be quartered
    with the civilian population.
    So I know in the house where I was quartered--
    and they had a son my age, and it was very, very nice,
    a nice kid--
    A, the family, they were all preparing
    to go to Palestine, that entire population,
    virtually within weeks after we were there,
    moved out to Palestine.
    But in their home there was also a Russian woman agent,
    probably NKVD.
    and so they were extremely careful about what
    could be said and so on.
    But on the whole, it was a wonderful experience
    to be in a town, in a war-torn part of the world, that somehow
    like a little paradise had survived.
    I mean, most of the Jewish population was intact.
    I've never exactly figured out how that was.
    Were you jealous of them?
    No.
    You weren't?
    No, not at all.
    We stayed there for four or five weeks.
    And by that time, it was spring?
    What was your reaction to seeing bathrooms and nice houses?
    You hadn't seen--
    Oh, you took it--
    it was very easy to accept.
    [LAUGHS] It was very easy to accept.
    By now, we-- yeah, somehow or other, also at one time my dad
    and I were lodged, well, my dad was
    lodges with a rabbi and his wife.
    I think this may happen in Janowice, too.
    But they were so orthodox that they
    wouldn't sleep in the same room when
    my father was in the house.
    It was all very strange.
    We were then told in Janowice to move on to Odessa,
    which we did by train.
    And when we got to Odessa, the Russians put us in a sanitarium
    on the Red Sea--
    on the Black Sea like maybe a couple
    of miles outside of Odessa.
    What may have been sort of a little resort town
    at one time or another.
    And a Russian officer who spoke English recruited
    me to be a translator for the Dutch people,
    Dutch to English, to Russian, so they
    could do their administrative work with us.
    The weather was pleasant.
    There was no running water in the sanatorium
    or in the place where they had quartered us.
    And they gave us some cold, some salt water soap.
    And I know we washed in the Black Sea.
    We did our bathing in the Black Sea every day.
    But myself and another guy who were doing the translating
    were given a treat one night.
    The Russians took us to the ballet.
    My first time at the ballet in Odessa.
    And I remember it was [?My Death by Delibes?]..
    And there were two Russian officers, a man and a woman,
    with the two or three of us.
    And we were sitting in a box and we
    were speaking English because that's
    the language we had in common.
    And one Russian officer, he was getting out of the box,
    was saying something in Russian to the woman,
    but her mind was set on speaking English.
    And she answered him in English and says, don't worry,
    I'll watch them.
    [LAUGHS] So we knew we were carefully guarded.
    We were not supposed to have any contact
    with the civilian population there.
    Well, this was--
    Russia under Stalin was extremely paranoid.
    We stayed in Odessa waiting until the English Red
    Cross sent a ship for us.
    And I remember there were 300 English prisoners of war
    and maybe the hundred of us survivors.
    We were then loaded aboard a passenger ship.
    And in Constantinople, now Istanbul, the Red Cross
    or the British consul came aboard.
    And that's where we could make--
    and he took telegrams for us.
    And so that was the first contact my father
    and I could make with the outside world.
    You got on the boat and went to Istanbul?
    Well, the boat was docking in Istanbul.
    But my father was docking in the Bosporus.
    We were not allowed to get off the boat--
    To get off?
    --but the British consul came aboard--
    And you gave him the telegram?
    And we gave him telegrams to the United States and England
    and Egypt, where my uncle was living.
    And so that was in May of 1945, May 5, 1945.
    Because we had all been written off for dead by then
    by the family.
    We knew that.
    We found out in Paris when we saw some correspondence.
    It's now May 5, 1945?
    Mm-hmm.
    OK, and you--
    And we were able finally to give signs of life
    to the outside world.
    The ship then proceeded to Marseilles, where we unloaded.
    And on the dock, I found an old school friend
    from Amsterdam, who was just there
    to help the Red Cross, who had survived
    the war in the Southern France very nicely.
    And that was very nice.
    So my dad and I got on the train,
    which was going to Amsterdam.
    Because by then, the entire group was from Holland.
    But we knew that the conditions in Amsterdam were terrible.
    And my father had some accounts receivable
    and some money available to him in Paris,
    which I didn't know about.
    And in the middle of the night--
    we were in Strasbourg-- he wakes me and shakes me up
    and he says, come on, we're getting off this train.
    I remember I said, why?
    He said, we're not going to Amsterdam.
    It's terrible.
    We're going to Paris.
    And so off the train we went at 1:00 in the morning.
    And there was another train he had spotted
    standing near an American Army train going
    from Strasbourg to Paris.
    It was the two of you?
    The two of us.
    Just got on the army train to Paris.
    And from Paris, there was a big reception at the--
    that was really terrible when we got to Paris.
    In the morning at the [INAUDIBLE],,
    as we got off the train and came out,
    there were all these women, Jewish women, standing.
    There was pictures, portraits of their children,
    their husbands, their fathers, their family--
    crying.
    Would we recognize any of these people?
    And if you look at somebody's picture with hair
    and a well-fed face, and then to equate that to somebody
    you may have known as a skeleton in the camps, impossible.
    You wouldn't recognize anybody.
    So the first thing was, as we came out of the station,
    was this gamut of people there that
    had survived in Paris trying to identify their loved ones.
    The French [? records ?] were very well organized,
    and they had a [FRENCH] on the Boulevard Raspail and then they
    quartered us in a wonderful villa outside [PLACE NAME]
    and got us back on our feet.
    And that's when I got sick and my father got sick.
    What from?
    My father got sick from overeating.
    His body couldn't handle food at all.
    He got terrible kidney problems and fluid problems.
    He had to be hospitalized.
    And I got a galloping case of terrible pneumonia.
    And when you can afford to be sick, you get sick.
    And so you stayed in Paris?
    We stayed in Paris.
    A friend of ours, a son of a family from Benshein,
    a very good friend, was in the American Army in the Signal
    Corps, and he was stationed in Paris.
    And when his family told--
    when they wired him that we were there,
    he found us and made contact.
    And meanwhile, my mother had been repatriated to Amsterdam.
    So he gave me one of his spare uniforms.
    And I got on an army train to Brussels and then
    on a streetcar to Antwerp and then
    on an American Army truck, a flower truck,
    and hitchhiked to Amsterdam.
    Do you remember the meeting with your mother?
    I certainly remember the meeting with my mother.
    When I got to Amsterdam, I found a dime, a payphone,
    and I called her, and I said where I was.
    We knew where she was going to be-- with these friends who
    was my dad's banker.
    And his wife was Jewish, he wasn't.
    They had survived, and she was going to be with them.
    Yes, I remember that very well.
    And I called and it was wonderful.
    And she had survived in fabulous shape.
    She looked great.
    And she had lost two children, but she'd also not lost
    her husband and another child.
    And that's more, under the circumstances, than any family
    could have hoped for.
    And, yeah, she wasn't physically in very good shape.
    So I had to get her back to Paris.
    Of course, we had no papers and we had no passports.
    We had nothing.
    And I think I had some French identification
    papers [INAUDIBLE] passport.
    But I wasn't worried about myself.
    But she drove back with friends of these friends in Amsterdam.
    They had a farm near the border, near the Belgian border.
    And so they just drove her.
    And they had a car and they managed to have gasoline.
    So they drove her to the border, just took her across the border
    and drove her to Antwerp, to Brussels.
    And we met in Brussels at another business friend
    of my dad.
    We had an address, and I managed to get to Brussels, again,
    hitchhiking with the army.
    And in Brussels, there was a regular way
    of getting train passages and so on.
    The survivors, they leaned over backward to be accommodating.
    So we then got to Paris.
    And how long did you stay there?
    A year and a half.
    I was in school.
    My father started a business.
    My mother, no she didn't work, basically.
    She was a housewife.
    We had a little apartment outside of Paris
    in the suburbs.
    But we started our psychologically ill-advised
    behavior right then and there.
    In that, the camps were not a subject of discussion, ever.
    For the rest of our lives, we never talked about it.
    This was something you all three didn't want to do or--
    This was something we all three couldn't do.
    Couldn't do, OK.
    So it wasn't that one of the three
    felt or was able to [INAUDIBLE]?
    All three of you were on the same--
    Wavelength.
    Wavelength.
    Yeah, very unhealthy.
    And then how long did you stay here?
    In Paris?
    Yeah.
    Yeah, a year and a half.
    And then where did you go?
    New York.
    With your family?
    Yeah.
    We were together, yeah.
    We lived in New York first.
    Well, my parents lived in New York
    for the rest of their lives.
    My father died in 1959 at age 65.
    He died relatively young.
    He had a stroke and uremia, mostly a result of diabetes.
    And then you moved out to California?
    I came to California in '49.
    Why 1949?
    I was very unhappy in New York.
    And I think a lot of the trauma caught up with me afterwards.
    And I had eating problems.
    And probably living under the same roof as my parents
    was not a good idea.
    So I needed to get away.
    So I've been in San Francisco since '49.
    Can we now talk a little bit about your reflections
    and your feelings about what you experienced?
    How do you feel about being Jewish now that you've been
    through what you went through?
    Oh.
    Did it make you more Jewish, less Jewish?
    Much less Jewish.
    Much less.
    I have gotten to be much more Jewish since we
    started the gay synagogue in San Francisco in 1980.
    And I was involved fairly early in that.
    And I was recruited for it, so to speak.
    It's the same thing to the Holocaust.
    I was not dealing.
    I could not deal with the Holocaust most of my life.
    I didn't do any work forward.
    I couldn't talk about it.
    I didn't go to schools.
    I didn't give seminars.
    I had my tattoo removed so that--
    and until that was removed, I would never wear a short sleeve
    shirt because I just simply didn't
    want people to ask me about it.
    I couldn't deal with it.
    How old were you when you had your tattoo removed?
    Was that a quick--
    It was in the early '50s.
    So soon after the war?
    Yeah, in the early '50s.
    And then I went a couple of years into analysis
    and dealt with things and started
    getting out of denial about the whole experience.
    But I still wouldn't deal with it for many years.
    The Jewish involvement started really, more or less,
    with the gay synagogue.
    Until then, I only was forced into synagogue
    for funerals or holidays when I was in New York or something
    like that.
    So I never felt--
    I felt positive as a Jew, but I didn't feel positive
    about the religious end of it.
    Do you still think about the Holocaust?
    Yes.
    Does it still influence you in any way?
    It doesn't influence me at all.
    I don't-- maybe it does influence me and maybe
    I'm wrong there.
    But one doesn't ever not think about this.
    There's far too much, when it's reminded too frequently.
    Yes, one does think about it a lot.
    And in recent years, I've been more involved
    since I'm the board of the Holocaust Research Center here.
    You know, one does get involved.
    I'm also much more involved in recent years
    in all kinds of community activities, which
    I wasn't heretofore.
    But heretofore, I was working until 1980.
    I was working full time and I didn't have
    time or money for these things.
    But now that I have both, I'm much involved in the community.
    Did you ever apply or receive reparations?
    Oh, yes.
    I received reparations.
    How do you feel about getting them?
    Perfectly fine.
    They owe me.
    I don't get a hell of a lot.
    And I get health reparations, but I got a lot of reparation
    for a lack and for missing education.
    Got paid a lot of money for that without me ever
    applying for this.
    It was kind of money that came automatically.
    And because I had a bad injury in the camps,
    I've been receiving health damages all my life.
    What bad injury?
    I was on unloading a railroad car
    and they overloaded me with a cement bag and my back cracked.
    Which camp?
    In Gleiwitz.
    And you said you hurt your back?
    Yes.
    And so you got extra payment?
    Yes.
    And also, that paid for a lot of surgery.
    That paid for all the operations.
    I have a fused spine.
    When you were injured there, what kind of treatment
    did you get?
    There was no treatment.
    You just had to ignore it.
    You couldn't even tell anybody that you'd been hurt.
    So you had to continue working?
    Of course.
    Actually, the reason-- well, I noticed
    when I was injured what had happened,
    the results didn't show up until three or four years later
    or five years later.
    You had alluded to some of it before,
    what do you think helped you get through this?
    To survive this experience, these experiences?
    What do--
    Luck.
    99% luck.
    99% is to be at the right places at the right time,
    to have the right reactions and not to be in the line of fire.
    Now, you have interviewed a lot of other survivors.
    Let me ask you a question.
    How do they-- what do they say?
    The same answer.
    OK.
    And being with your father sustained you?
    Yes.
    Did you feel that made a difference?
    Mm-hmm.
    Oh, absolutely.
    It did make a difference.
    And if you let Elie Wiesel, I'm sure you have,
    who had virtually the same identical story as I have,
    and who also was with his father,
    and who was in the camp three more months--
    because from the death march, they
    left a day earlier than we did or two days earlier,
    and they were put on a train near Blechhammer
    and sent to [PLACE NAME] or east to Germany or Austria
    to other camps, we escaped that because of maybe 24 or 48 hours
    time difference.
    That's luck.
    Because I'm sure we would not have survived another three
    months.
    Because of your health, you mean?
    Yeah.
    Do you have friends who are Holocaust survivors?
    I have one very good friend.
    My oldest friend from school in Paris is a Holocaust survivor.
    He lives in New York.
    And I didn't know him in the camps.
    He knew Elie Wiesel.
    He was in the same camp at the Buna in Monowitz.
    And his name's Ernie [PERSONAL NAME]..
    And he has three children, and they all
    live here on the West Coast and the Northwest.
    And we get together every once in a while.
    He was kind of like adopted by my parents.
    He lost everybody and his parents.
    He was alone.
    And he survived Auschwitz for one more year than we did,
    one and a half more years.
    He's a tough guy.
    Yes, and we are in touch.
    We see each other quite often.
    As a matter of fact, we're going to have a 50th year anniversary
    this year in Seattle.
    We're going to meet.
    Have you been back to Europe?
    Often, very frequently.
    Have you gone to Germany?
    Yes, I go to Germany quite often.
    I have many friends, much younger than myself,
    in Germany, both Jewish and non-Jewish.
    What is your reaction, your feelings about going back?
    Oh, I'm very OK about it.
    I have no--
    I have forgiven a lot, I've forgotten
    nothing or very little.
    And I consider myself not only a survivor,
    I think, I consider myself that I have won in the sense
    that I'm not carrying a lot of baggage
    with me of negative things that are totally useless, you know?
    I don't associate with Germans much older
    than myself, unless I know who they are.
    Why?
    Well, because I can't trust them politically.
    And I'm very outspoken.
    I make-- I can be very unpleasant.
    I will ask people questions that shouldn't be asked
    or don't want to be asked.
    So I just simply avoid and I don't really know people.
    The people I know in Germany are either Jewish or not Jewish,
    but friends much younger than myself.
    Why should I feel negative about?
    How can you blame them for what happened in another generation?
    I mean, that doesn't make any sense.
    Any other ways that the war influenced you
    that you wanted to talk about?
    Well, I suppose we're all a product of our earlier
    background.
    And what happens to you for the first 10 or 15
    years of your life is something that
    is far more important than what happens to you in the next 50.
    And so, yes, I would think, like everybody, not just survivors,
    who we are has been determined by what happened to us
    or who we were very young in life.
    And, of course, those of us who have gone through Auschwitz
    and other camps have been psychologically, profoundly
    influenced by that.
    And not all of us have learned a lot from the experience.
    Do you feel you have learned?
    Well, I think I have learned a fair amount.
    But when I'm together with a lot of other survivors,
    I'm sometimes shocked by their intolerance
    and their un-liberal attitudes, not just to its gays,
    but to its minorities, to its--
    I have sensed that very often.
    But, of course, there's I'm sure many amongst us
    who are more liberal.
    When you were in the camps, were you
    aware of the persecution of gays at the time?
    No.
    Or was this something you found out later?
    Exactly.
    Well, I was aware that there were gays in the camp,
    but in Auschwitz there were very few.
    You saw very few pink triangles.
    They were mostly in Dachau and Buchenwald
    and in the German and the Austrian camps.
    And also, I had found out later that the persecution
    of one person is one too many.
    But recent research seems to show
    that the numbers were much smaller than it's usually
    anticipated.
    It cannot be established that more than 8,000 or 9,000 people
    total were in camps because they were gay.
    And surely there were millions of gays in Germany.
    So, you, as a child, you did not come into contact
    with gay prisoners--
    No.
    --when you were there?
    Not at all.
    Criminals, yes, but I don't remember having
    any contact with gay prisoners.
    Because I don't think many of them
    were in Auschwitz as gay prisoners.
    Right, right.
    And besides, I was a kid.
    I wasn't--
    Right, you were still very young, right, right.
    Anything else you wanted to share--
    Well, no--
    --or you left out?
    Anything you'd like to say?
    We've covered half my, [LAUGHS] you know,
    in something like two hours.
    There's obviously a lot of stuff that we have left out,
    but there's just no way of--
    You don't have any other--
    Well, I've been very fortunate in life.
    I've done well.
    And I've been leading a very nice and productive life here
    in San Francisco.
    And I think I was very lucky to get here when I got here.
    And I have many friends and I'm very active in the community
    and all kinds of communities.
    Any message to the younger generation
    that you would give if you could?
    Well, the only message is one of tolerance.
    Others are better able to give those messages than I,
    you know?
    We all have our limitations, and I'm not
    a very good spokesperson.
    OK.
    Good.
    Well, thank you very much for doing the interview.
    You got through that one.
    [LAUGHTER]
    Thank you.
    This concludes the interview Gerald Rosenstein.
    It took place on January 13, 1995,
    in San Francisco, California.
    It was conducted by Gail Schwartz
    on behalf of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    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;
    Interviewee
    Gerald Rosenstein
    Interviewer
    Gail Schwartz
    Date
    interview:  1995 January 13

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    2 sound cassettes (60 min.).

    Rights & Restrictions

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

    Keywords & Subjects

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    The Gerald Rosenstein interview was transferred to the United States Holocaust Research Institute Archives in February 5,1995, along with other interviews of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum oral history volunteer collection, RG-50.106.
    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 08:11:55
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    Transcripts (2)
    Summary (English)
    Time Coded Notes (3)

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    Also in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum oral history volunteer collection

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

    Date: 1993

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    Oral history interview with Nathan Kalman

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    Oral history interview with Esthy Adler

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    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

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    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

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    Oral history interview with Adriana Pacifici

    Oral History

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    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

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    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

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    Oral history interview with Erwin Forley

    Oral History

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    Oral history interview with Ernie Marx

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    Oral history interview with Doris Rauch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Elman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with 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 Erica Laufer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Barbara Goldberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Liselotte Epstein Ivry

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hans Ziegler

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Vera Levine

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Guenter Lewy

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Malvy Solomon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elia Miranski and Genia Miranski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Maria Kordalewski

    Oral History

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

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