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Oral history interview with Doris Rauch

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1995.A.1219 DUP | RG Number: RG-50.106.0015

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    Oral history interview with Doris Rauch
    Transcript
    The following is an interview of Doris Rauch.
    It is taking place on July 7, 1995 in Washington DC.
    It is being conducted by Gail Schwartz
    on behalf of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
    Could you please tell us your full name?
    My name is Doris Rauch.
    And where were you born?
    I was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia
    on August 26, 1920.
    Let's begin about talking about the town that you grew up in.
    Can you describe it in any way?
    It had about 350,000 inhabitants.
    I have no idea how many Jews, but I
    suppose it can be looked up.
    And it was bilingual, both Czech and German.
    We spoke German at home because my parents
    were born in Austria, Hungary, and were brought up
    speaking German and going to German schools,
    and the same happened to me.
    What kind of neighborhood did you live in?
    Was it a mixed neighborhood of Jews and non-Jews?
    Yes.
    It was a mixed neighborhood.
    Can one hear your questions?
    Yes.
    There was no ghetto as such at all.
    Did you live right in town, in the downtown area
    or a centrally located?
    Yes, centrally located.
    And did you live in a house or an apartment?
    In a apartment.
    How would you describe your family, were you middle class?
    Yes, we were middle class.
    OK, let's now talk about your parents.
    What kind of work did your father do?
    My father had a wholesale leather business which
    he inherited from his father.
    He was not really a business man, but he couldn't help it.
    He had to become the owner of a wholesale leather
    business, which meant that he had
    to travel a lot to various manufacturers
    all over Czechoslovakia to sell leather,
    from which they made shoes and gloves and things like that.
    And your mother, did she work?
    No, my mother didn't work until when
    my father's business became very bad in the depression.
    We had a depression, too, in the '30s.
    She filled in as his secretary or answering
    the telephone and so.
    How religious was your family?
    Not very religious.
    We went to the synagogue on the high holy days, which
    was New Year's and Yom Kippur.
    And we all met in my grandmother's house when Yom
    Kippur was over to break the fast with cake and-- all sorts
    of cakes--
    and coffee, and the whole family congregated there.
    Any other holidays that you celebrated,
    or were those the only ones?
    We also-- not in our house--
    but for Seder, we always went to my mother's oldest brother
    and had the Seder there.
    Did you have any brothers or sisters?
    No.
    And did you have any religious training as a child yourself?
    Yes.
    We had an hour of so-called religion both in grade school,
    and then later in the gymnasium, which
    is a classical high school.
    But I'm afraid we were not very good students,
    and it was just something you had to go through.
    Now you said you lived in a mixed neighborhood of non-Jews
    and Jews as a child growing up.
    Were there any problems when you were young with any
    of your neighbors?
    No problems at all.
    I personally never knew about that anti-Semitism.
    Maybe it was kept from me, I don't know.
    And the school that you went to, was at a public school?
    It was a public--
    both schools were public schools, yes.
    So your schoolmates were also non-Jews and Jews.
    Yes.
    And in addition, they were Germans and belonged
    to the so-called Sudeten Germans, who became
    the worst Nazis there were.
    So I have very mixed feelings about my former classmates.
    Sentimentally, I feel very attached to them,
    but on the other hand, I attended
    a couple of meetings with them in Europe,
    but I broke up with them completely
    because they behaved as if they didn't
    know about the Holocaust.
    When you were in elementary school as a child,
    did you have any other interests outside of school?
    Any hobbies, did you do anything else besides go to school?
    Any sports?
    We went on hikes, and skiing.
    Did you belong to any youth groups?
    No, I did not.
    I had quite a few cousins my own age,
    so we very often played together and did things together.
    Did your relatives live nearby, your extended family
    live nearby?
    Yes.
    Everything was-- almost--
    all of them were reachable on foot, or at the most
    by bus or street car.
    Then you went on to gymnasium, and did
    you have any other outside interests at that time,
    at the high school age?
    Well I took French lessons and English lessons--
    no-- English-- yes, yes--
    the last two years of it.
    My high school didn't have any modern languages except Czech.
    The language, the instruction was in German,
    but you had Czech as a foreign language,
    and in addition to that, I was very often
    sent to Czech-speaking towns in the summer
    so that my Czech would become perfect.
    Was this your family went away, or you went away by yourself?
    I went away by myself to friends or relatives
    where the main language was Czech.
    And we had no other modern languages, so only Latin
    and Greek in school.
    So I had private lessons, first in French, for many years,
    and I was sent to Switzerland to speak French fluently.
    And I also had English lessons later on,
    which really stuck with me because the teacher was
    wonderful.
    With French, I've totally forgotten almost.
    And I even learned Spanish one year
    when Hitler was already occupying us
    to occupied myself, I guess, or for possible emigration.
    Were you interested in music, dance, any of the arts?
    I took piano lessons for I don't know how many years.
    I was absolutely unmusical, and one
    of the happiest days of my life was
    when the teacher said no, she doesn't
    think it had any use for me to learn piano anymore.
    So that is as far as my musicality is concerned.
    Yes, we had what you call gymnastics and dance lessons
    from a very good teacher who we adored,
    and that was something very pleasant in my youth,
    going twice a week to those lessons.
    So you said that some of your friends and your teachers
    were not Jewish, but you don't recall
    any anti-Semitic incidents, it was a very pleasant childhood
    growing up.
    Well pleasant, perhaps, but when my father had all his business
    difficulties, a child fears that.
    Even if they didn't talk in front of me, but I knew
    there was something going on.
    And I had inherited 10,000 Czech crowns
    from a great uncle of mine, and so I
    knew that my father needed money,
    so I offered him my 10,000 dollars,
    which I am sure would have been a drop in the bucket.
    So I remember this.
    But he lost his business, and my mother's brothers
    took him into their business, which
    was a wholesale fur business.
    What year was this?
    That was in the early '30s.
    I don't know exactly which year.
    So I was I don't, 10 years old or 12 years old.
    But you still were able to do other activities--
    Yeah, it didn't curtail my activities at all.
    OK, when did you start noticing, then, a change in your life?
    When did conditions--
    You mean this far--
    well, when I was I think 17 years old because--
    This is 1937 we're now in.
    1937, yes.
    For instance, one of my fellow students
    told me that I had remonstrated with him, remonstrated
    with him that he didn't do so well in school anymore.
    And he was a very intelligent guy,
    and he told me that he was very tired because every night he
    went across the borders to Austria
    to train for Hitler's coming.
    And I didn't even believe it, I thought
    he was just bragging in front of me,
    but today I know it was true.
    And then in 1938, Hitler occupied the Sudetenland,
    and I felt very strongly that my parents had
    done the wrong thing that they sent me to a German school
    and I wore a Czech flag on my lapel in that year
    after Hitler really occupied the entire state
    and we had to wear star instead of a flag,
    but I still feel that today it was a grave mistake that I
    did not go to Czech school.
    So of course, the outcome would have been the same.
    But there was a choice when you were
    younger to go to a Czech school or a German school?
    The choice was not up to me.
    The way we go to--
    yes, I could have gone--
    Your parents had the choice, but they decided
    to send you to a German school.
    I went to the same school that my father graduated from.
    All right, so it's now 1938.
    Yes, but there's a big event before that.
    My father had lung cancer and he died in 1936,
    when I was 16 years old.
    And that was very hard on me because I
    was very close to my father.
    Much more so than to my mother.
    And how did that change your life and your mother's life?
    My mother tried to make a living by renting out
    a room to two girls, students.
    She did all sorts of things she had representation-- no,
    you don't say that--
    she-- anyhow, she sold knit woolen materials to friends
    and got a commission on that.
    And then she said to all her friends
    to a certain coffee shop in the town,
    and there they had to say that they were sent by my mother
    and she got a percentage from that.
    So my mother was very capable, although she never really
    worked.
    But she was very intelligent and very practical,
    and although there probably was some money,
    my father hadn't left anything because we just
    lived on his salary.
    But I think my mother inherited money from her mother
    and I know she had stocks in the bank
    because I used to go her go with her to collect the coupons.
    But she always made an effort to earn some money herself.
    So that was 1936.
    Anything in 1937 that you recall?
    You mean as far as anti-Semitism--
    Or personally.
    Well, I was sent to Switzerland that summer
    into a French speaking family.
    What did you know about Hitler at that point?
    Well, we knew quite a bit.
    Perhaps not I, but my mother had a very close friend in Germany
    in Ulm, and this woman came to us once a year usually.
    And my mother went to visit her and she smuggled out
    some money from Germany before they emigrated to Argentina.
    So we knew what was going on there.
    And then also, Hitler occupied Austria in 1938 and one
    of my mother's brothers lived in Vienna,
    so they all emigrated first to Czechoslovakia to Brno
    before they attempted to get a visa to someplace else.
    And they did eventually go to France, and from France
    to unoccupied France, and they got to America--
    I don't remember-- maybe 1940--
    1939 or '40.
    Do you remember being particularly frightened
    in 1938?
    Not really, but that was perhaps because I was so naive.
    I grew up in a very protected way,
    and I was rather childish at that age.
    And my mother used to say nothing will happen to us,
    I am happy here as long as I have a roof over my head.
    That was her constant saying.
    And I would have liked to emigrate,
    but it wasn't easy because we didn't
    have any money out anywhere, and it
    was very difficult to get a visa to any place.
    But some of my friends succeeded, but we didn't.
    All right, and now it's 1938.
    Any other changes that you can recall?
    Yes, of course.
    I graduated from gymnasium in 1938,
    but I could no longer go to a university--
    wait a minute-- no, that was 1938--
    I don't remember how that was.
    Anyhow, I could not study, and my mother said--
    Why could you not study?
    Because they didn't admit Jews.
    How did that make you feel?
    Here you're a young 18-year-old young woman.
    I don't remember.
    Probably not very well.
    But I was not--
    as I said, I was very naive, and all this
    didn't touch me somehow.
    And my mother decided I should attend a class in a Czech--
    that's what it was, we were not admitted
    to German universities, German speaking universities.
    Maybe still to Czech, I don't know.
    But I went to a Czech you would call it
    maybe post-graduate textile school
    because Brno was full of textile factories,
    and the so-called English clothes that were so famous
    really came from Brno and was treated in England,
    had special process they treated it with,
    but it was woven in Brno.
    So she sent me to a textile school, which
    did not interest me at all.
    We had to learn all about textile machinery.
    And where there was a possibility that perhaps I
    could become a designer, my mother
    still thought that we could live a normal life.
    But it was a wasted years as far as my future--
    So you did go and study textile--
    I did go.
    I graduated from there and it was a lot of fun
    because we were two girls and there were young boys,
    so we had a good time not knowing
    what was waiting for us.
    So I graduated from there in June of 1939
    and we were already occupied by Hitler.
    How had your life changed when you became occupied by Hitler?
    Well, it all came very gradually.
    First we had to wear yellow stars,
    and then we had a curfew.
    We couldn't go into the street I think
    it was 7:00 or 8 o'clock in the evening,
    we had to stay at home.
    Then we were concentrated into certain streets
    of the city, which meant that because we lived
    on such a street, we got so to speak renters
    into the apartment.
    There were several-- there were two families in addition
    to us in an apartment that was only a three room
    apartment with one bathroom.
    What did it feel like to wear the star?
    It was-- what is the English word--
    it was not pleasant.
    Upsetting?
    Was it upsetting?
    It was upsetting, and it was--
    what is the word--
    I need her again--
    it made you feel that people were looking down on you.
    Demeaning?
    Demeaning.
    That was the word I was looking for.
    And so we had all those people in the apartment,
    which for me, it was not too bad because I liked other people.
    I don't know how it was for my mother,
    but there was nothing we could do against it.
    And my favorite aunt, who was the only one of her family left
    behind, had to move to-- they had a villa in the suburbs--
    but her husband was gone, her three daughters had gone
    and she had to move into our neighborhood.
    That made me very happy.
    Were these restrictions frightening to you?
    Yes, and it became more frightening as time went on.
    But in the meantime, after graduating
    from the textile school, I got a job--
    an unpaid job-- in a textile factory out in the country,
    and I lived there five days, five and a half days
    of the week and came home for the weekend.
    And I worked then all phases of the textile industry.
    The factory still belonged to a Jewish firm.
    That's, I suppose, how I got the job, although it was unpaid.
    But it was good training for me had I ever
    gone into that field, which I don't think I would have
    under normal circumstances.
    So I was home only over the weekend and--
    Were there any anti-Semitic incidents
    that you were aware of particular to you at that time,
    besides the general restrictions?
    The non-Jews that you came in contact with
    were still pleasant to you at that-- '38, '39?
    No, they were nothing at all.
    They were not in touch with me.
    Like my school friends, I never heard from them.
    We were forbidden to have telephones,
    so we could telephone only from a neighboring store that
    had a telephone, but only at certain hours because Jews were
    not allowed to go into those shops except from 2:00 to 3:00
    or whatever it was.
    So if you had to make a telephone call,
    you had to make it during those certain hours.
    And I remember meeting one of my classmates in such a store
    and being afraid what she would do or say,
    but she didn't do or say anything,
    she just made believe she didn't see me.
    When you were working at the textile factory,
    were there non-Jews with you?
    Yes, mostly non-Jews.
    They were very nice.
    They were Czech peasants, Moravian peasants.
    There was no--
    I didn't feel any anti-Semitism.
    In fact, some of those people came to town on weekends
    and came to visit us in the apartment
    and brought food from the country for us.
    So no, I didn't suffer there.
    Were you on food rationing at that point?
    I think so, yes, but I don't know really--
    yes.
    I think we were because I remember going shopping
    to those stores during certain hours
    and having those ration cards with me.
    So what did you do on the weekend
    when you would come home from the textile factory?
    See my friends or my uncle, my mother's youngest brother,
    who will figure a lot in this interview I think.
    What is his name?
    Norbert Troller.
    He and I were the only ones who survived the war,
    and he was in Theresienstadt, in Auschwitz.
    He was everywhere, but he made it.
    My uncle had a weekend house in the country someplace,
    so we sometimes went there.
    We still could go hiking as long as we kept
    within the hours allowed to us.
    Did you have a radio?
    Yes, we had a radio.
    We had a radio when--
    I think we rented a radio when my father was
    so sick for a whole year--
    but then we had a deal when Hitler was already
    occupying us, which we inherited from a relative who emigrated.
    And I remember sitting in front of it
    and hearing about peace in our time, but it didn't get to me.
    I was so--
    Were you aware of the invasion of Poland in September of 1939?
    Yes, of course, and the outbreak of the war.
    Yes, naturally.
    And you were a young woman of 19.
    Yes.
    Do you recall any thoughts that you had at that point?
    Was it a very fearful time for you?
    Yes it was because one was always
    afraid of what was coming next.
    You see, we knew about things in Germany and in Austria,
    but there it went much slower.
    It took some time until they did this or that.
    But with us, it all came pretty fast,
    all the caveats, all the restrictions all
    came very fast.
    What was the next change then?
    You had finished-- you'd worked in the textile factory and then
    what was the next development?
    That was the end I think.
    I worked, and that's about all that was left to me.
    I went to take care in the afternoon
    of a group of children.
    There were, I don't know, maybe four children
    and I went hiking with them, I did their--
    Are we talking about 1939?
    Yeah.
    And I don't know how long I did that.
    As long as it was possible.
    They were a family of several sisters, and only two husbands
    I think.
    They all had children.
    And I did the school work with them
    and I went to sledding with them.
    These were Jewish children?
    Jewish children.
    They all went to Theresienstadt, too,
    but I do know that any of them survived.
    So 1939 continued on.
    Now it's winter 1940.
    Any particular--
    I can't really say exactly what happened in winter 1940.
    I know in December 1941--
    So your life went on in a sense in the same way.
    How was your health at that time, 1940, 1941?
    Our health was OK.
    And the food situation?
    Was not so good.
    But my mother and I think most people
    were to get things on the black market,
    like coffee, for instance.
    There was no real coffee, but we were
    able to get it on the black market.
    And cigarettes.
    I was smoking by then, unfortunately.
    And you were still speaking German with your mother?
    I was still speaking German with my mother.
    In fact, my mother, her Czech--
    it was called Kuchelbohmisch, which means "kitchen Czech."
    She just could talk Czech with the maids--
    with the maid, we had only one.
    [AUDIO OUT]
    Been talking about 1940 and '41, and how did conditions
    change even more?
    There was less food to be had, and I
    guess the hours were shorter, and we were--
    the hours we could shop were shorter--
    and you couldn't sit on a park bench
    because it said there "not for Jews,"
    you couldn't go to a coffeehouse or a restaurant.
    It was all forbidden to Jews.
    So you spend most of your time doing your chores
    and being at home and shopping when you could
    or visiting friends when you could.
    What did you and your friends talk about during this time
    of terrible restriction?
    I don't remember.
    I know we couldn't go--
    we loved movies-- we couldn't go to movies anymore.
    But we could read.
    I remember reading Gone with the Wind day and night.
    In what language?
    In German, of course.
    And I guess we talked about boys.
    Oh, I never talked about [NON-ENGLISH]..
    That was a very important part of our life in normal times,
    that we had so-called dancing lessons.
    But what really it was was--
    we didn't learn to dance.
    Somehow, we knew how to dance, and that's
    where you met boys and had dates with boys.
    Did that continue on in 1940 and '41
    The dates as far as--
    young men were still there, it continued,
    but not the dancing classes, no.
    Now it's 1941.
    1941.
    And then the deportations started.
    And I remember we had a poor Jewish lady who
    came to us for the midday meal, which was the main meal,
    every week.
    It was sort of a [NON-ENGLISH],, if you know what I mean.
    And she was one of the first to have to go because she was not
    a Czech citizen.
    Maybe she was from Germany or Austria, I don't know.
    She went to Poland with the first transport.
    And then-- I don't know, but that was in the same
    transport--
    a cousin of my mother's-- one of the owners of the fur business
    where my father later worked--
    he and his two daughters--
    the mother was no longer alive--
    were also sent to Poland, which was unheard of because he
    was very well to do.
    And why they had to go I don't know.
    You knew that they were being taken to Poland?
    That's what they said, that's what we were told.
    And then Theresienstadt was founded, and my mother's oldest
    brother--
    the one where we used to have our Seder--
    and his family, which consisted of his wife and three
    children--
    no, no, the youngest son had emigrated to England--
    but the two oldest sons who were still at home,
    they were sent away.
    We didn't know where.
    What month in '41 was the first transport in Brno?
    I think in November.
    But December came and then it was our turn,
    and we had no idea where we were going,
    but we went to Theresienstadt.
    OK, let's talk a little bit about that.
    How did you know--
    how were you called up?
    We had to-- some time before that-- we had to register.
    The Jewish community.
    All Jews had to register.
    I don't know whether all did, but we did.
    Most Jews did.
    And the way you learned about it was
    that you got some sort of printed paper
    under the door where you were called for a certain day
    to a school--
    that's where we all were assembled--
    and they told you exactly how much--
    what you can take.
    I think it was 50 kilos if I'm not mistaken.
    And you were allowed to take blankets--
    feather blankets and a pail, I guess for washing the floor.
    But that's what we were allowed.
    And I remember my mother packing for this trip
    and putting a whole little pail, again, of jam into that pail
    and covering it up with other things.
    And I was very upset about it.
    I thought they would catch her with that
    and we would be punished.
    I was very cowardly, but fortunately, my mother
    wasn't, and it was a very good thing that she
    brought that pail of jam.
    And friends who were still in here came to help us.
    And I remember a Jewish classmate of mine
    who had learned to be a--
    what is it-- it's my age when I can't think of a--
    a poster.
    He came and sewed for us something
    to cover those feather beds.
    We each had some very--
    there was a handle so they could carry it.
    And the housekeeper of someone else came to--
    you must know it--
    in our bathroom, you had to heat a huge stove--
    A heater of water?
    A water heater?
    But it wasn't gas.
    You had to use wood and coal, I guess.
    She came in and tended to that stove
    so that we all could take a bath, the ones who had to go.
    And people were very kind and helped out.
    Things that you could possibly use
    were immediately sold out, like flashlights.
    We all wanted to take flashlights.
    It was very hard to get things like that
    that you could possibly use.
    And so we were in this school--
    well first of all, I have to say we were not transported,
    we had to walk to this school at night
    when it was dark so that the population wouldn't see it.
    And then we spent I think three days in that school, where
    we were registered, and the SS was already
    in there, or the Gestapo.
    I don't remember.
    What was the name of the school, do you remember?
    No, the name I don't know, but the street is M-E-R-H-O-U-T.
    And about how many people?
    I don't remember, but probably 1,000.
    Transports usually were 1,000, but I'm really
    not sure about that.
    So you stayed there for three days.
    Where did you sleep?
    On the floor.
    And we young ones helped with the luggage
    to get it up the stairs because I think
    it was a three-story school.
    What about food?
    I don't remember anything about it, whether they fed us or not.
    I don't know.
    I just remember then on the third day early in the morning,
    we had to stand in attention in the courtyard there.
    It was still dark.
    Then again, we walked to the train, which
    left from the usual station.
    I don't know how--
    well, it was night and I guess no other trains left.
    These were regular train cars?
    These were regular train cars, yes.
    And on the way, we somehow learned that we
    were going to Theresienstadt.
    Did you know what that meant then?
    I don't think so.
    Of course, my mother's older brother was already there,
    but they were not allowed to ride
    so I don't think we knew it.
    How long a trip was it?
    I think it took days, if I'm not mistaken.
    I don't know why.
    Maybe it didn't.
    I really don't remember.
    But we were really one of the earliest transports,
    so we left behind everything we had left, the furniture and--
    Were people calm on this train ride to Theresienstadt?
    I have no recollection.
    I think I was calm, but only because I was young.
    We had no idea of what was in store for us.
    And almost all through those three and a half years
    when there was a prisoner, I always
    thought it would be better in the next place.
    So optimism helps, I think, but it's the optimism of youth.
    So you arrive at Theresienstadt.
    We arrived at Theresienstadt and were put into a barracks.
    You and your mother are still together?
    Yes, we were still together.
    First we were in a smaller room.
    I think we were the first people in this particular barracks.
    Did the barrack have a number or location?
    A name.
    They called it Dresdner Kaserne, which was--
    I'll spell it-- in English, it's Dresden, isn't it?
    So it was called D-R-E-S-D-N-E-R barracks,
    and this was strictly women's barracks.
    The men were in the Sudeten barracks.
    Which was-- you know how to spell Sudeten?
    And about how many women were in your barrack with you?
    I think we were the first--
    no, we couldn't have been the first transport
    because my aunt was already there, the wife of my mother's
    oldest brother.
    I don't know, I think there was a room for 3,000 people.
    We were 3,000 when the barracks were filled.
    But in the beginning there were not many people.
    And we picked a small room.
    There were maybe 10 people in there.
    Now, when you came there, you were with your mother.
    Were you with any other relatives or friends,
    or was it just the two of you?
    I think it was just the two of us.
    Of course, we came to know all the others who were there.
    And what did you do in the beginning?
    Nothing, I think.
    We just made it as comfortable as possible with our blankets,
    and we slept on the floor, of course.
    I'll tell you a typical story for me.
    One day, things started to disappear from our luggage
    and we couldn't understand it, or I certainly
    couldn't stand it.
    And I remember asking my mother, mother
    do you think the Jews steal?
    I couldn't imagine the Jews would steal one from the other.
    I learned much better later.
    But I eventually worked in the post office.
    You will laugh about the post office.
    It was like that in the first few months
    in Theresienstadt, the Czechs we lived in the town,
    and we were in the barracks and we're not allowed out,
    but there were some people who were allowed out.
    Like the guard-- not the guards--
    they were the ghetto policemen who watched over each barracks,
    and they could go to the administration.
    There were certain people who were allowed out,
    but until I think June 1942, the Czechs still
    lived in their houses there.
    Then they were evacuated, and then the ghetto was open,
    then we could go out.
    But we left soon after that, so I didn't experience that.
    But as long as we were confined to the barracks, I worked--
    every barracks had a post office, which was a room,
    and since the men were separated from their wives and children,
    they wrote letters to each other.
    Or the husbands sent dirty laundry to their wives to wash.
    From the men's barrack to the women's barrack.
    Or the women sent the clean laundry back.
    Or if someone had two extra potatoes,
    he could send it to his wife or his children and so on.
    And that kept me busy, and I made a lot of people
    that way because I had to go and distribute.
    I had to put the room numbers on the letters
    and then distribute them.
    And my mother worked--
    I just saw that I'd forgotten it,
    but when I started reading the letter,
    she worked in the office of--
    each barracks had a Jewish commander,
    and she worked in the office there for him.
    And we later on moved to a different room
    where his wife was also in that room.
    So maybe that's how she got the job, I don't remember that.
    And of course, there was not much food.
    And they gave us soup made from I don't know what it is--
    it's a vegetable and it's big--
    Turnips?
    Turnips.
    Turnips, they were orange.
    Everything was made with turnips,
    which in Czechoslovakia, they were used
    to feed the cattle, the pigs.
    You must have learned about turnips
    in your other interviews.
    And we got a piece of bread and sometimes margarine, sometimes
    jam.
    Whatever happened with the jam that your mother
    put in the pail?
    I guess we ate it in the course of time.
    And so you stayed in Theresienstadt for six months.
    No, then I still went--
    I voluntarily went to a place in Bohemia
    where they needed people to plant trees.
    Now, when was this?
    This was from Theresienstadt maybe in May--
    May '42.
    I'm not sure it was May, but I think so.
    And I didn't tell my mother, but when she heard it,
    when I told her eventually, she volunteered
    to go along on the transport because she
    felt we shouldn't be separated, which we later were.
    So the two of you left in May.
    We left in May and we were there for maybe six weeks.
    And in a way, it was a very fortunate thing
    because we rode to some of our friends who were still there,
    and they sent us--
    Still in Theresienstadt?
    No, still in Czechoslovakia.
    Not yet in Paris.
    It took some time until they got all the Jews in Czechoslovakia
    to Theresienstadt.
    And we did this through--
    every day, we went for supper to an inn in the country.
    There were various places in Bohemia where we did this work.
    But in that place where I was with my mother,
    we went to supper every day to a certain inn,
    and there we talked to the owner of the event
    and asked him whether it would be all right
    if we had a package sent to him, to his address.
    And we always told the people to whom
    we rode what name to write us, to send
    by that we recognized which was for us because other people did
    the same thing.
    And so we collected quite a bit of food, which we brought back
    to Theresienstadt.
    What kind of work did you do for six weeks, you planted trees?
    Trees, yeah.
    Was that hard work?
    For us, it wasn't so hard, but we had--
    for the young people--
    but for my mother it was very hard.
    And the man in charge of us was very nasty to her
    and kept talking about the old pail lifter
    can't do her work and so on.
    So that was hard, but she took it in her stride.
    So we came back to Theresienstadt.
    In the meantime, my uncle Norbert Troller
    had arrived there.
    And I don't know if he was there when we left or not,
    I don't know.
    But anyhow, he had lost so much weight.
    He had always been roly-poly, and he was terribly thin.
    And of course, we were very happy to have brought that food
    and to contribute to his subsistence.
    He became stronger again.
    Now you're back at Theresienstadt.
    Now we are back in Theresienstadt,
    and in June, as I said, the Czechs were evacuated.
    And in the meantime, there were more and more
    people coming, of course.
    There was, for instance, a transport from Vienna
    where a sister of my grandmother's was in there,
    and it was just terrible for the people.
    There was no room anymore and they put them in the cellars.
    Did you know that she was there?
    Yeah.
    You did know.
    We did know she was there.
    How did you know this, how did you find out,
    through word of mouth?
    Probably word of mouth.
    By that time, we were allowed to go out,
    and so we went to visit her.
    She died soon after that, fortunately.
    But by that time, Theresienstadt was full.
    Full of people from everywhere.
    Germany and-- also, I don't remember it,
    but I remember this old aunt, Tante [? Fritzen. ?]
    And also my favorite aunt, the one I told you about,
    who was left in Brno all and all her family was gone.
    She came to Theresienstadt, too, and she became a nurse there.
    What was her name?
    Amie Weiner, W-E-I-N-E-R. And I loved her almost as much
    as my father, much more than my mother,
    so I was very happy she was there.
    This is your father's sister?
    My father's oldest sister.
    What else do you remember about the summer of 1942
    in Theresienstadt?
    Transports left for the east all the time.
    We had no idea where they were going.
    It was rumored it was to Poland, but we didn't really know.
    And the most important thing in Theresienstadt
    was to have connections to get out of transport,
    not to have to go.
    Because there at least we knew what we had
    and we did not know what was waiting for us.
    So mother and I got into transport twice, I think.
    And once, I had a boyfriend there
    who was a ghetto policeman, and he
    said that we were engaged, which we were not.
    And ghetto policemen could save people,
    so he saved us that time.
    Or at least I think it was.
    We don't really know.
    And then I think there was the second time
    where possibly my uncle--
    Norry is his name--
    saved us because he was in the technical department.
    He was an architect.
    And the technical department had a lot of clout.
    And so he said that my mother was his sister
    and that we couldn't possibly go, and so we didn't go.
    But the third time it didn't work anymore, and--
    you want me to tell you something about Theresienstadt?
    Well did you do any work over the summer?
    Yes, I was again in the post office.
    Oh, you went back to the post office?
    I went back to the post office, yes.
    And a minimal amount of food.
    Minimal amount of food.
    One unusual thing in Theresienstadt
    was that they made dumplings--
    Czech dumplings-- which I am sure
    did not exist in any other concentration camp.
    And that was always a day of joy when they made dumplings.
    They were so big, and inside was jam.
    And of course, we were very happy about that.
    Did you go back to your--
    did you live in the same room?
    In the same room.
    Well, no.
    Maybe it was in between that first and the second room.
    I really don't remember.
    But all together, we were only in two rooms, my mother and I.
    Did people eat in a central location?
    No, no.
    You ate in your room
    In your room?
    You sat on your mattress on the floor, and that's where--
    you had to stand in line to get your food.
    Each barracks had a kitchen, and that's
    where you stood in line to get your food or to get your bread,
    whatever you got.
    What was a typical breakfast in Theresienstadt?
    That was something they called coffee,
    but it was just brown water, and a piece of bread which
    had to last you all day long.
    And then lunch was?
    Lunch was, I think--
    lunch was the main meal, so it must
    have been that horrible soup.
    What is the name of the vegetable?
    Turnip?
    Yeah, turnip soup and bread again.
    And then dinner?
    And then dinner, it was again turnip soup and bread,
    and maybe that's when we got the dumpling.
    Or maybe it was at lunch, I don't know.
    How often was dumpling day?
    Once a week?
    Once a week, perhaps.
    And what was the sanitary facilities
    like in your barracks?
    Well there was a big sort of a wash room with-- since it
    was a barracks for soldiers, there
    were maybe 20 spigots there where
    you washed with cold water.
    And I don't remember anything about the toilets.
    They must have had lots of toilets.
    Anyhow, I don't remember any hardship with toilets there.
    And at least we had plenty of cold water.
    The funny thing was that in Europe, people
    put their bedding into the windows to air out.
    Everyone does it all over Europe,
    and we did it even in Theresienstadt
    because there were sort of--
    what do we call them--
    Archways?
    Yes, arches.
    There was a walkway to the various rooms,
    and then those archways, and we put our bedding out there
    to air every morning.
    Maybe that's why we didn't have fleas or lice, I don't know.
    Because later we had that, too.
    So you said your health was OK still at that point?
    Yes, our health was OK.
    All right, and so the summer is over
    and now it's September 1st.
    Yeah, or a few days before then, we got the summons
    that we had to go.
    And my boss in the post office--
    he was the head of the overall administration post office--
    and he said that he knew that the man who
    was the top man on the transport,
    and he would tell him about me.
    That if you needed any help, a secretary or whatever,
    that he recommended me.
    And then we were put into a separate barracks, those
    who went on with transport, and were there again
    I think for three days, and my mother
    met some distant relative whom she
    hadn't seen for years and years who had a daughter,
    and she introduced us.
    And then I also found a boyfriend there
    with whom I thought I fell in love,
    but I think it was just leaning on someone.
    And then we were loaded into the train.
    I have no recollection how we got to the train.
    We must have walked, but I can't imagine that we
    carried all the luggage.
    We were talking about you're being called up
    in September 1942.
    And you were taken out of your barracks
    for three days in a different location with your mother.
    And then we were loaded on train and traveled northeast,
    I guess.
    We had no idea where we were, because the train
    in the beginning never stopped.
    Or maybe I was too involved with my boyfriend
    and didn't pay attention where we were going.
    But I remember that we stopped in Riga,
    which is the capital of Latvia.
    Was this a regular train?
    This was a regular train, not the freight train.
    Not that other persons around me, no.
    Well, what do you mean by a regular--
    You were sitting on benches.
    Yes, we were sitting on benches.
    And we stopped here and there and they distributed
    some food and water, which we had gotten along
    from Theresienstadt, so that we had something to eat
    and we had something to drink.
    And I remember at one of those stops,
    I saw a woman in a white nursing uniform
    with a red cross on her cap distributing water.
    And she was blonde and blue-eyed,
    and I thought that must be someone from the Swedish Red
    Cross.
    As it turned out later, I was with her
    in camp for a long time, and she was from my home town.
    I'd never seen her before.
    She had a very Scandinavian name.
    Her name was [? Amy ?] Sylten, S-Y-L-T-E-N.
    But she was Jewish.
    And so yes, my mother, who as I told you was very smart,
    wrote a post card to someone at home
    and threw it out of the window hoping someone would get it.
    Whether someone got it, I don't know.
    And I told you we stopped in Riga.
    And word got around that they wanted us to get out there,
    but we did not.
    Were you ever allowed off the train during the journey?
    No.
    I guess there were toilets.
    I don't remember.
    No, we were never allowed off the train,
    except for the people who came around
    with the food and the water and so on.
    They went outside the train.
    And so we went on from Riga.
    And the whole thing took five days and five nights.
    That I know.
    And finally, we came to a small station, which as it turned out
    later was in Estonia.
    Estonia is the northernmost of the three Baltic countries.
    And there were some SS men out there, and we all were--
    we all got out of the train.
    No, before we got out of the train, they came in,
    and they distributed post cards.
    And they said that we could write home
    that we would work in an agricultural environment
    and that we are fine.
    So we all did that.
    Whether they ever sent it, I don't know.
    But just imagine that they think up something like that
    just for shame, you know?
    Do you remember who you addressed it to?
    No.
    No idea.
    My mother did it, I'm sure.
    Maybe I did too.
    I don't know.
    I don't remember.
    So then we got out of the train, and those SS men
    were standing there and telling some to go where
    light blue buses were standing.
    They told them to go there, and some they
    picked out, mostly young people, and said that they should
    help unloading the luggage.
    Now, what city is this?
    Where are you?
    It's not even a city.
    It's a small place called Raasiku.
    R-A-A-S-I-K-U.
    This is in Estonia?
    In Estonia.
    And the men were I think mostly Estonian SS,
    because we saw them later, an they were Estonian.
    But there were some Germans there too.
    And so I was picked out to help with their luggage,
    and my mother was sent on ahead.
    And we each had in our hand a pillow,
    a pillow case into which was folded
    the fur from our, in our--.
    We came to Theresienstadt with a coat and a fur lining which
    could be buttoned in.
    So this was somewhere so, the fur lining was out,
    and it was in those two pillows.
    And my mother went ahead, and then I ran after her
    and gave her my pillow and said, look, I really have to work,
    and we'll meet later, and you take both of them.
    And they told us that we would meet those people who go
    in buses later on in the camp.
    So we helped unloading the luggage, which
    I don't remember having done, but I must have done it.
    And then they put the luggage and us on trucks.
    And we drove and came into the woods,
    and there was like a camp there, wooden barracks,
    about five wooden barracks with a--
    you should have come five years earlier when I still
    could think of words.
    It'll come to you later.
    It's all right.
    Surrounded by barbed wire, and towers with soldiers up there
    with guns.
    And I had some hand luggage.
    And I went into--
    I saw that there was a line of people lined up in front
    of one of those barracks.
    But I went to another barrack and put my hand luggage there.
    Was the transport made up of men and women?
    Men and women, yes.
    And children?
    Were there any young children?
    Yes, there were children too.
    And they picked out I would say about 50 women and 50 men.
    Only the men did not come with us.
    I don't know what--
    they came in to a different camp, but around there too,
    because once we were allowed to see them.
    So I left my hand luggage in the barrack,
    but I myself, stupid as I am, I went into that line
    where the other people stood in line
    to get into this one barrack.
    I had no idea what it was.
    And when my turn came, it was pitch dark in the barrack.
    And there were those SS men who made us
    undress and to do all sorts of gymnastics.
    They went through, but I probably really hit a purse,
    you know?
    And they found various things in there that they wanted to have,
    took them all.
    Then we had to exercise, so if we had anything in our vagina,
    that it would fall out.
    And it was pretty awful, you know, to undress completely
    in front of those men.
    But there was nothing we could do.
    So then when we got through, we just walked out, got dressed
    and walked out, and went into the barrack
    where I had left my luggage.
    You know, if I had just stayed there,
    I probably wouldn't have had to go through all that.
    But that's how naive I was.
    So then we unloaded all the luggage
    and put it in another barrack.
    And then we lived in this barrack.
    Yeah, and our families were not there.
    So we asked, you said we would meet our families here?
    And they said, well, we sent them to a camp that is heated--
    it was September, you know--
    so they wouldn't freeze in winter.
    Were you with anybody you knew at that point?
    No, only this one young girl where
    my mother had met a relative in the separate barracks there.
    She was only 15 or 16 years old.
    I was 22.
    Not yet-- no, yes, just 22.
    She was the only one.
    And there were some girls there, they
    were mostly young girls, who cried terribly
    because they were separated from their families.
    And most of us couldn't understand it.
    Well, they said they're in a camp that is heated where
    we are going to see them again.
    So we lived for I don't know how many years, two years or more,
    thinking we would see our families again.
    We'd never heard about gassing or shooting.
    We had never heard about anything like that.
    So we spent our time unpacking the luggage.
    You know, that it didn't occur to us, how come--
    what do the other people wear whose luggage it is?
    It didn't occur to-- or at least not to me.
    And of course we had the advantage
    that if we found something that we could use, we took it.
    But there was also we found a lot of jewelry
    that we gave to the Germans and money.
    You know, I told you in the dark barrack
    how they took things out of my pocket book.
    For instance, I had--
    it was a pencil, like an automatic pencil.
    But it was a much thicker pencil,
    which my uncle had given me.
    He used that in his work as an architect.
    And he had given me that with rolled up money in there.
    And they took it.
    So that they must have known that people hide things.
    And then the clothes had to be sorted into, I don't know,
    dresses and shoes and whatever.
    And those SS people took them away by and by.
    But we found food there, too, so we cooked for ourselves.
    We found alcohol stoves in which we cooked [INAUDIBLE]..
    We just used them.
    And we found our own things, of course,
    which came in very handy later on, because we exchanged them
    for food with peasants and other people
    in Estonia so that we were not as starved as most people were.
    So you lived in this first barrack that--
    [INTERPOSING VOICES]
    How big a barrack was it?
    I don't know.
    There were about 50 of us.
    And there were two wooden platforms, downstairs
    and upstairs.
    And we lived--
    That's where you slept, on the platform?
    That's where we lived.
    That's where we cooked.
    We did all of that there.
    It was like our home.
    And people formed groups.
    And I formed a group I think with this 16-year-old girl.
    What was the youngest age there?
    Do you know?
    That was the youngest.
    She was the youngest.
    She was the youngest.
    And we christened her Baby.
    Baby [INAUDIBLE] we called her.
    And she still has that name.
    She lives in Israel.
    And her husband doesn't like that at all
    that we call her that.
    So, you know, gradually friendships developed,
    and certain people moved in together, and cooked together,
    and shared everything.
    Did you do any work?
    Only that sorting, unpacking and sorting.
    Was your work.
    It was our work, yes.
    And you said you were there for two years?
    No, no.
    Not in that camp.
    I then was the--
    because the Germans or the SS elect--
    not elected, but stipulated a leader of the group of us.
    And she happened to be a schizophrenic individual,
    I think.
    And for instance, she picked--
    that was to go in transport for work to an agricultural place.
    And I was picked because I spoke German.
    So she was against German speakers.
    And there were about, I don't know, 25 or 30
    of us who were sent on the transport.
    The others stayed in the barracks
    and still worked with their luggage.
    And that was pretty tough, because we
    didn't get enough to eat, and we had to work very hard.
    Where were you sent to?
    It was in the--
    you want to know the name?
    If I find it do you want?
    Was this a permanent move, or just a temporary move?
    No, it was just temporary.
    Oh, to go and work and then come back?
    Yeah, but we took everything we had, which wasn't much, along.
    And it was so--
    What kind of work do you do there?
    We harvested potatoes and carrots.
    There was a man who was supervising who had a--
    Whip?
    A whip, yes.
    The clothes you were wearing were the clothes
    that you brought from home originally?
    Yes.
    That's what you were wearing.
    That's what we were wearing.
    Were you still wearing a star?
    I don't know if we did there or not.
    I don't think so.
    I know that when we later came to Reval,
    which is Tallinn today, they made us take off the stars.
    So maybe we still had them.
    Because they didn't want the population of Tallinn
    to know who we were.
    And so we went there, I think harvesting for about six weeks.
    And it was really backbreaking work,
    which we were not used to.
    And then you came back.
    Then we came back.
    And they separated us to a different barrack.
    We were not to be in touch with the others who
    had stayed there.
    Like we were pariahs.
    And so we were still in that barrack in winter.
    And we didn't do any work except that they took us
    out about once a day to collect wood in the woods
    there for burning in our stove.
    And they brought us food, whatever there was.
    I don't remember it at all.
    And I was made to be in charge--
    oh, I forgot-- of this particular group
    in the barracks, because he remembered my name.
    Because they had once caught--
    I forgot to tell you, when we--
    I told you we met the men once.
    The men who were on our transport
    were in a different camp but close by.
    They let us get together one day, one Sunday,
    so that some of the girls saw their fathers
    and their brothers.
    And I saw my boyfriend.
    And then I discovered a very good friend of my father's.
    A man probably in his 50s whose wife had probably
    gone with my mother.
    But they had picked him, so he must
    have looked pretty healthy.
    And when I saw him walking by later,
    and I threw him in a package with socks and things
    I had found--
    food, too-- that I had found in the luggage there.
    And one of those SS men remembered me because of that,
    because I was caught, and he was caught.
    But they didn't do anything to us.
    But he remembered me.
    And that's why he made me-- he had remembered my name,
    and he put me in charge of the people in this barracks.
    We had come back from work.
    Now, I am the least likely person to lead the group.
    And I know I always had to find someone
    who would clean the toilets.
    I remember the toilets there.
    And no one wanted to do it.
    And so in the end, I did it.
    [LAUGHING] I said, that's how much of a leader I was.
    So we were there back in the woods.
    And then they said we were going to Tallinn,
    which was Reval then.
    And we would work in making clothes,
    you know, like the manufacture of coats or dresses
    or whatever, which was an absolute lie.
    But that's what they said.
    And they took us--
    now, those were most--
    I forgot to say something again.
    I think that happened while we were away on the potato farm.
    Another transport came from Germany,
    from Berlin and Frankfurt.
    And they again picked out the young people, mostly.
    There were a few older women and more girls.
    And so they moved in with those other people.
    And then the call came for us to go to Reval, and there were--
    some of the Germans went.
    And we went in separate barrack, in the right barrack.
    And they brought us to the prison.
    We stayed in the political prison in Reval.
    OK, what month was this that you left with other--
    This was I think December.
    Of '42?
    Of '42.
    And how far away was Reval from where you were?
    Not very far, because I don't remember how far it was then,
    but I was there in '92, in 1992.
    The barracks don't exist anymore, but the place
    where my mother--
    where all the families were shot is there, and it's not too far.
    Not too far.
    It was maybe half an hour.
    So let's say this was perhaps an hour [INAUDIBLE]..
    Oh, I see.
    So you just walked there?
    No, no.
    On trucks.
    On trucks.
    On trucks, yeah.
    No one ever tried to run away.
    I mean, later on, some tried.
    But not seriously.
    So there they put us to work for a German construction firm
    by the name of [COUGHING].
    I know that name very well.
    We can come back to it.
    Holzmann.
    H-O-L-Z-M-A-N-N. In the head of that--
    well, let me tell you about the prison first.
    We were in rather modern cells where
    we were 10 people to a cell.
    10 women?
    10 women, yes.
    And there were only seven beds there.
    The beds were just--
    they could be-- they were made out of metal and canvas.
    And then--
    Could be folded up?
    Folded up to the wall.
    So there were seven beds and 10 people.
    And then there was a cabinet there to put our things.
    And then in one corner we had our rucksacks.
    So we were always so very fair, you see.
    We changed beds.
    Always different people had to--
    one had to sleep on the cabinet.
    One-- no.
    Yes, and two on the floor.
    One on the luggage, and one on the floor.
    And seven in the bed.
    But we always took turns.
    And in the morning, the guards came, they were women,
    and threw in the raw fish heads on the floor
    that we were supposed to eat for breakfast.
    And again, some brown water, that was the coffee,
    and I think a piece of bread, either in the morning
    or we got it in the evening.
    I don't remember.
    So with that, we were--
    do hard labor.
    We were in the harbor, in the port.
    And we were tearing down--
    you see, the Russians had attacked in Estonia.
    Or was it?
    First the-- no.
    The Russians had attacked Estonia,
    and the harbor was in disrepair.
    All the barracks or whatever, the little houses
    they had there, it was all kaput as they say.
    And so this firm of Holzmann was charged
    with rebuilding the harbor.
    And on the first day, when we went
    to work, the man in charge of Holzmann,
    his name was [PERSONAL NAME],, he was a not very tall man
    with a red beard and red hair.
    He had a long speech saying that if one tried to escape,
    that 10 would be shot.
    So that put us in our place.
    And every morning, some men from the firm
    came to get us out of the prison and marched us
    to the harbor, which was not very far.
    What kind of work did you do?
    We did-- some of us cleared away the rubble.
    And then we worked on [INAUDIBLE]..
    The piers?
    Some of us worked with a diver, with a German diver, who--
    I don't know.
    Maybe he-- I don't know what he was looking for.
    But he was diving.
    And they had to keep him alive.
    Most of those men were pretty good to us, really.
    And then there were some Polish men.
    They were the so-called Volksdeutsche.
    They make believe that they were German-speaking,
    but some of them were not.
    They didn't know German.
    And they, some of them were pretty antisemitic.
    But altogether, they were not really antisemitic.
    And I think it had to do with the fact
    that we were all young girls and pretty good-looking.
    So most of them treated us all right.
    And one of them was also from Frankfurt.
    He was in charge of the whole group.
    And he picked out some girls who came from Frankfurt.
    And he really was like a father to them,
    and brought them food and let them do all sorts of things.
    And after the war, he still came to New York to visit.
    He's dead now.
    But he was pretty decent.
    What was his name?
    Hohmann.
    H-O-H-M-A-N-N.
    You said you were--
    We cleared away the rubble.
    Some of us were--
    then we had to unload trucks with [? teak ?] or building
    stones.
    Not-- tell me the word--
    Building blocks.
    Building blocks, yeah.
    Something like that.
    And you still had energy.
    You were able to do this even though your diet was so poor?
    Well, I will tell you, the Germans later on gave us
    an extra meal, because they really needed us.
    So we got some extra food for that from them.
    And then, as I said, we exchanged things
    that we still had for butter and bread, and eggs
    and whatever we could get.
    And some of the girls learned how to--
    bricks is the word I was looking for--
    how to--
    Lay bricks.
    Lay bricks, yes.
    And were all sorts of [INAUDIBLE]..
    And how long did you stay there?
    I think we stayed for at least a year.
    A year doing this kind of work.
    Doing this kind of work.
    And I remember one day when it was minus 28 Celsius, which
    is very cold.
    So that even the Germans were not willing to go to work.
    And we didn't have to go to work.
    So that was very nice.
    And what about your shoes?
    Did you have good shoes?
    Some of us did, and some of us didn't anymore.
    But we also tried to exchange things we had for shoes.
    Whatever we needed, we tried to find someone who would do that.
    So again, you were still pretty healthy.
    We were still pretty healthy.
    My health didn't break down until in Hamburg.
    But at [INAUDIBLE]-- no, no, no.
    It's not true.
    No.
    In the next camp.
    So yes, comparatively healthy we were really.
    So you kept living in the barracks
    and working all day long?
    Was it a long day?
    No, we lived in the prison.
    Excuse me, in the prison.
    And yes, we worked all day long.
    Also on Saturday, but not on Sunday.
    What did you do on Sunday?
    On Sunday we were in our room in the prison.
    And we talked, and we [? sewed ?]..
    Were people optimistic?
    The young women?
    Yes, really.
    But you know, there are so many things
    that I have to come back out, because--
    back to, because I don't know if you want me to.
    Should I just go on?
    No, everything is--
    For instance, when we left, we still
    saw that our families were alive.
    And for instance, when we were going to Reval,
    we had to bring all our stuff that we were taking along
    to a meadow.
    And the SS went through it.
    And for instance, I hit sewn together
    two of those feather blankets.
    That's not the right word for that.
    I have it now.
    What is it?
    A comforter, or a feather pillow?
    No, no.
    It was a comforter, but with feathers.
    It's down.
    Whatever.
    Quilt or down?
    Quilt. Yeah, maybe quilt. And I had
    sewn a whole dress, and stockings, and underwear,
    and everything for my mother in between those two blankets,
    and sewn it together.
    But of course they found out.
    They ripped apart, and that was all in there.
    So we always tried to look out for them, still hoping,
    you know?
    But later on, for instance, when we worked in Reval,
    we did not always work in the port.
    Sometimes they sent us to a different assignment.
    Like, once we were in a sewing--
    sewing mill?
    Not sewing.
    Yes, sewing mill.
    And two of us always tried to get out of that.
    And we went begging, which had two purposes.
    First of all, to get something to eat.
    And secondly, if the people were friendly, to ask
    did they know anything about any other camps?
    So we found out about another camp,
    and we thought that maybe our families were there.
    The camp was Klooga, K-L-O-G-A. And others told us,
    they are not alive anymore.
    But we didn't believe them.
    So yeah, we sometimes went to other assignments.
    That was always enjoyed.
    Something different, something new.
    One of our-- of my friends in the camp, I mean in Estonia,
    was from a mixed marriage.
    Her father was Jewish, and her mother was not.
    And they still lived in Prague.
    And one or two of those Germans who were in charge of her
    went to visit her parents, and I'm
    sure got some money from them, and brought stuff
    back for her, money and food and so on.
    So some of them were really decent.
    So you went back and forth working at the pier
    and then going and doing other things?
    Yeah, but mostly at the pier, really.
    It was our main job.
    And as I said, we were not allowed to wear the stars.
    But eventually, something must have
    happened, because for a week or so,
    we were not allowed to go to work.
    And then they sent us to another camp,
    and we were not able to say goodbye to those construction
    workers.
    This is after being there for a year?
    Yes.
    So this is the end of '42, beginning of--
    No, end of '43.
    Excuse me, end of '43.
    '43 I think.
    And so then we were sent into another camp,
    which was called Ereda, E-R-E-D-A.
    And there were already Lithuanian and Polish Jews,
    most of them, men and women.
    When you said we were sent, does that mean the whole camp?
    This whole group.
    The whole group.
    How big was this group that you were talking about?
    It must be, I don't know, maybe 80.
    80?
    8-0?
    Mm-hmm.
    I don't know exactly, but I think something like that.
    And there were already Polish and Lithuanian Jews.
    Most of them were from Vilna, which
    is probably familiar to you.
    And now they told us--
    first of all, we heard Yiddish for the first time
    in our lives--
    that didn't exist in Czechoslovakia or in Germany.
    Maybe it did, but I don't think so.
    And so at first we had trouble understanding, but we did,
    because it's really sort of similar to German,
    only some words really confuse you.
    Like, I remember one taught me [NON-ENGLISH]..
    You know, they were the peasants.
    And I thought, well, how can they--
    nacht in German is night.
    How do they get out at night to go to the peasant
    to get some food?
    So it turned out [NON-ENGLISH] means yesterday.
    Were these all women that used [INAUDIBLE]??
    No.
    It was a mixed group.
    Men and women.
    A mixed group.
    And were in the same camp.
    Again, did you live in a barrack?
    We lived in barracks, yes.
    And The men had separate barracks from us.
    Still wearing their own clothes.
    Still wearing our own clothes and no star.
    I don't think we had to.
    No.
    How clean were these places?
    That camp was terrible.
    You know, the toilets were really--
    were not toilets.
    It was a big--
    Latrine.
    Latrine, yes.
    That's the word.
    And you had to go for, I don't know, 10 minutes to get there.
    And it was all mud in the camp, in winter, anyhow.
    In summer it dried up, fortunately.
    So then you had to pace in front of each barrack
    where you could go.
    You should go only if you urinate at night,
    so that you don't have to go.
    And we tried to keep it clean.
    We had brushes and cleaned it with water and soap.
    And we tried to keep as close--
    as clean as possible, but eventually we had lice,
    and we had all sorts of vermin.
    Fleas.
    Well, fleas we already had.
    I forgot to mention.
    You know, there was a time in the prison when
    all the ones who had stayed back in that first camp
    were brought to prison.
    But then they moved us all into rooms
    in another part of the prison.
    We were no longer in those cells but in those rooms.
    And we had straw pallets which were full of fleas.
    So that was awful.
    You yourself got fleas?
    Yes.
    And I remember I had a pajama, and I put a rubber band
    down here so that they couldn't get in, and with my sleeves
    too.
    But it didn't help.
    They got in.
    Yes, we had fleas, and lice I think we acquired in Ereda.
    And then people started having typhus, typhoid fever.
    Or no, typhus.
    But the lice transmit.
    Were you getting your menstrual period
    all this-- during those years?
    No.
    In fact, it first started in Theresienstadt
    that people stopped having their menstrual.
    And there was one young woman in our room who was so--
    she was married, and she was worried to death
    that she was pregnant, because we didn't know all of that.
    I don't know any more how long I had my menstrual period,
    but I lost it.
    Which was a blessing, because there
    were times where we didn't have any material to protect us.
    So what kind of work did you do in Ereda?
    There we did very, very hard work.
    Felling trees, do you say felling,
    and then carrying them on our shoulders.
    And it was really very hard work.
    And eventually, I just said, I can't do that.
    I went to one of the doctors in the camp, there were Jews,
    and told him, couldn't they assign me to something else?
    That I just can't do that kind of work.
    We fell trees, and cut them up, and then we
    started building barracks in the [INAUDIBLE] some place else.
    In other words, you were felling trees with axes, you yourself?
    Yes.
    You were swinging an ax.
    And what we were building there in the woods
    was another camp, which we didn't know.
    But some of our people then later went to that camp.
    Who were your guards?
    Our guards were--
    Were they German guards?
    Were they--
    [INTERPOSING VOICES]
    Yeah, they were German.
    They were all German at camp.
    German guards.
    But the guards, if they were guards, which I can't think,
    you know, they were really German SS.
    But not the guard.
    I don't remember that we had any guards, but maybe we did.
    Watching over you.
    We must have had, but I have no recollection.
    And how were you treated?
    Were you ever--
    I know you said the work was very physically difficult.
    Yeah.
    But were you treated by the SS any--
    Yes.
    You yourself?
    Did you yourself have any particular--
    No, I don't think I was mistreated there.
    And how long did you stay in that camp?
    In that camp, if I knew when we came there, it was in winter.
    Winter '44, you said.
    Beginning of '44.
    Winter '44.
    Let me think.
    No, it can't have been winter '44.
    It must have been '43.
    Or end of '43, beginning of '44.
    Maybe.
    Yes, yes.
    I think end of '43, beginning of '44.
    And I don't remember any guards in the camp,
    but there must have been.
    I just can't remember.
    And your clothes and everything.
    Most everything had been taken away.
    Either taken away or sold by us, so we
    didn't have very much anymore.
    Did you have any sweaters?
    I was going to say sweaters or coats?
    No, no.
    Gloves?
    We didn't.
    Well, we made do with what we had.
    We exchanged things.
    I remember I had a short, warm coat.
    I don't know where I got that.
    And I gave that to this [? Amy ?] Sylten.
    I must tell you a story about [? Amy ?] Sylten, which
    is really like a novel.
    There was an SS--
    the SS commander in this particular camp.
    I even know his name.
    It was Drosin.
    D-R-O-S-I-N.
    He fell in love with her.
    And she with him.
    And she worked-- there was a separate barrack where
    the command lived.
    She worked there as a, you know, cleaning up.
    And this friend of mine of mixed parentage was the cook.
    She was a very good cook.
    And so she knew about what was going on between [? Amy ?]
    and this man.
    But I will say that [? Amy ?] behaved very well.
    She always spoke up for us.
    And he minded her.
    I remember, for instance, there came the command
    that we had to have our heads--
    Shaved?
    Shaved.
    And they started shaving the heads,
    and she finally convinced him he shouldn't do that.
    And so he stopped the whole thing.
    But to make a long story short, the two
    escaped together, because word about what was going on
    got to Germany, to his superiors,
    and they sent another SS commander.
    And before he even came, I think,
    they escaped together and hid in the woods.
    But they caught them.
    There was a-- they just came from all sides.
    And he shot her and shot himself.
    Can you imagine?
    So we learned that.
    We knew it for sure.
    So anyhow, that was the--
    So you stayed in Ereda?
    Ereda.
    I stayed there until late in 1944.
    And I had a male friend there too from--
    I have-- I'm leaving this to the Holocaust Museum,
    but I'm not parting with it yet.
    I had a young man friend there who had this ring made for me.
    There were people in the camp who were
    very clever with their hands.
    I don't know where they got the silver, but they did.
    And so I still have that ring.
    What does the ring say?
    The ring gives my name on top, and on the inside is his name.
    And his name is what?
    Isaac.
    What was his last name?
    I cannot remember.
    I asked my friend the other day, and I can't
    remember what his [INAUDIBLE].
    But I got a letter after the war from a relative of his
    who was in Paris at the time who also had been in camp with us.
    And he told me that Isaac had died in Bergen-Belsen.
    So you stay there until late 1944.
    We stayed until late 1944.
    Anybody else try to escape besides the couple
    that you told us about?
    I understand yes, but I don't know personally about it.
    Did it ever occur to you to try to escape
    from any of these places?
    No.
    I was too cowardly.
    But I know of several young women
    when we were in Tallinn, who had offers from Estonians who
    worked on boats to take them to Finland.
    But no one ever had the courage to do it.
    Because they told us if one escapes, 10 will be shot.
    And then what happened at the end of 1944?
    End of 1944, the Russians were coming close,
    and one could hear shooting.
    And so they brought--
    they evacuated us back to Germany.
    How did you get there?
    Well, they first brought us by train
    to a place called Lagedi, which was outside Reval, I think.
    L-A-G-E-D-I. And that's where we lived for six weeks under the--
    just with no protection at all.
    There were no tents, no anything.
    Just in the meadow.
    You slept outside.
    We slept outside.
    That's where they finally shaved my hair.
    And we were there for six weeks.
    It didn't rain once.
    Like if god had-- or the weather god
    had been looking out for us.
    Why did they shave your head?
    I think because of the lice.
    Or that's what they said.
    They shaved all women.
    For us, it was very late in the game.
    That was the first time.
    For us it was the first time.
    You know, they had made an attempt
    in the beginning in Ereda when the [? Amy ?] stopped then.
    But that's where they finally did it.
    What did that feel like?
    Terrible, Terrible.
    Sometimes I see young women on TV nowadays.
    Like yesterday, I saw some-- or this morning,
    a singer who had such very short hair.
    I thought, how can she do that to herself?
    Yes, and I was very--
    well, I didn't even talk about it.
    But still in Ereda, I became very sick.
    I had a very high temperature.
    But there was a barrack for sick people.
    But I didn't want to go there, because I was afraid they
    would do away with me.
    So I just existed with the high-- oh, sorry.
    With the high temperature.
    And then we came to Lagedi, and I really felt terribly sick.
    The doctor, the Jewish doctor, thought I probably have--
    Typhoid?
    No.
    Smallpox?
    Tetanus?
    I mean diphtheria?
    No, you know when your eyeball--
    the white of your eye becomes yellow.
    Jaundice.
    Hepatitis.
    People were put to work digging ditches to defend themselves--
    the Germans against the Russians.
    But I was so weak, I just couldn't do it.
    And I sort of went into a meadow and laid down there.
    And just lay.
    And two SS officers came by, and I
    was sure they would shoot me because I wasn't working.
    But they just looked and went away.
    So it was good luck.
    Then, after six weeks, they put us on a freighter, on a boat.
    And we-- again, I was very sick.
    I didn't know what was going on.
    Were you able to walk?
    No, I was just lying there.
    So they carried you onto a boat?
    Well, I probably walked on my own with support to the boat.
    But on the boat I didn't walk.
    That's what I meant.
    And I don't know how long we were on the boat.
    Then they transferred us to a [? canal ?] boat
    where we were so crammed in that I couldn't even
    sit or lie down.
    We were just standing up like sardines.
    That I survived that is a miracle.
    This is this group of women or men and women?
    This was men and women.
    And we came to Stutthof, which was
    a big camp in Eastern Germany.
    And there we had to undress completely
    and go under the showers.
    We didn't know about gas, not yet.
    We had known about-- we had heard about shootings and so
    on, but gas we didn't know.
    So it was-- they were real showers.
    It wasn't gas.
    And I still have-- that's another treasure from there.
    This is a watch that I had at home with me always.
    I carried it with me all the time.
    And in Stutthof, when we were under the--
    first, I had hidden it in the soap.
    And then I thought they would probably take the soap away
    from me, so I put it in my mouth, soapy as it was.
    And so of course it didn't survive, but I still have it.
    Whose watch is that?
    That's my watch.
    Oh, that you had--
    From home.
    From home.
    Yeah.
    That you'd kept with you all that time.
    All that time.
    Yes, and I had written a diary in Estonia.
    I wrote a diary every day.
    But now when I saw they took everything away from us,
    I gave it to a man who was also a prisoner there,
    and said would he save it for me?
    And he said yes, but I never saw it again.
    I didn't see him.
    You had brought the diary with you from home?
    No, from Estonia.
    I had written the diary while we were in Estonia.
    And I never, unfortunately, saw it again.
    What did you do in Stutthof?
    In Stutthof, nothing.
    We were just sitting in the sand.
    And I met several people there from my home town
    who had been in Riga.
    And there were daughters with mothers.
    One daughter, one mother.
    Two couples like that.
    And one of these couples, one daughter and mother survived.
    The daughter lives in Vienna now.
    And the other couple did not survive.
    So, you know, you just ran in to those people.
    It was an immense camp.
    And we didn't have--
    we didn't own anything.
    I didn't even have a spoon to eat with.
    But someone else shared her spoon with me.
    Do you remember what they gave you to eat?
    No, very little.
    Nothing.
    Probably there was something, soup, again, the turnip soup.
    I don't really know, because that
    was the first real concentration camp that I had been to.
    And it was pretty awful.
    Thousands of women there.
    The women were separate again.
    And where did they finally put you there?
    You said you were on the sand in the beginning.
    Well, we were in barracks [INAUDIBLE]..
    You went to barracks.
    We were in barracks.
    But there was sand all around where
    we sat around all day long.
    Did you work?
    No, we didn't work.
    We were not there for very long.
    How long were you there for?
    I can tell you exactly.
    We came there on my birthday, August 26 1944.
    And in October, we were sent on to Hamburg in Germany.
    I think it's enough.
    Do you still feel like it?
    In Hamburg, which was Hamburg Ochsenzoll,
    I became very sick immediately.
    I had pneumonia.
    And I had--
    I think I had typhoid, but this is not for sure.
    Pneumonia, and pleurisy, and typhoid.
    And a terrible diarrhea, probably enteritis,
    or it may have been typhoid.
    I don't know.
    And after a month or so, they build a barrack,
    which they called a [INAUDIBLE],, where
    the sick people were sent.
    There were only I think six or seven of us in there.
    And I was there for what seems like months,
    but I don't know really how long it was.
    But I survived, which was a miracle in itself.
    And my best friend was at that time [? Shriba, ?] [? Shriba ?]
    in this camp.
    She was in charge of counting people,
    and she was the secretary to the SS man and so on.
    And she arranged for me not to have to go to the factory,
    but to be in the [NON-ENGLISH],, which is the place where they
    did sewing for the Germans.
    There were a lot of SS men and women there,
    and there was a professional seamstress, also
    a Jewish lady from Frankfurt.
    So that's where I ended up working.
    And then one day in April, they said that we would be sent--
    that we are being sent to Sweden now.
    And we couldn't quite believe it, but they said it.
    So they put us into cattle cars, and we traveled.
    Then on the way, we saw open cattle cars with dead people
    in there.
    And then they unloaded us in I think it was called Lüneburg.
    And from there, we walked to Bergen-Belsen.
    So the thing with Sweden was not at all true.
    It was just another of those lies.
    What was it like to be in the cattle car?
    Terrible.
    You know.
    We all know how that is.
    Because there was no air, and no food, and just a pail, I guess.
    I don't know.
    I really don't remember.
    It was terrible.
    And to see those cars filled with dead people
    was just awful.
    Of course, in the cattle cars there
    were little windows up there that we could see through.
    Anyhow, they unloaded us there, and were
    marched to Bergen-Belsen.
    And on the side of the road, in the ditches,
    there were dead people everywhere.
    That was in April of '45, shortly
    before Bergen-Belsen was liberated.
    And we got into Bergen-Belsen, and what it was like there,
    I knew that I couldn't survive there.
    Fortunately, I didn't have to survive it there,
    because three days later, the highest SS from Hamburg
    came back and said the factory needed people.
    And he started reading all our numbers.
    But since I had never worked in the factory,
    he didn't read my number.
    But not everyone was around, so when no one responded
    to a number, I went there, because my two best
    friends were there.
    Had you-- when had you been originally assigned a number?
    In the beginning?
    Well, I had one in Theresienstadt.
    You had different ones in different camps?
    I don't know.
    I don't know if I had the same number all the time
    or whether they changed it.
    So anyhow, I joined this group.
    And he marched us out of Bergen-Belsen along
    the lagerstraße, where on one side there was a band that
    played music.
    And across from it was to a big hole with people just--
    dead people just
    Piled up.
    Piled up.
    That was the word.
    And so we came out of there.
    We marched along the road, and there were [INAUDIBLE]..
    You were talking about your journey from Bergen-Belsen
    back to Hamburg in April of 1945.
    '45.
    And there were flyers thrown down from some airplane,
    telling that the British were close
    and that they would soon be here.
    We did not save that flyer.
    But it was very good to know about it.
    And the men had to march us.
    I forget to where.
    Because the rails had been bombed.
    And there were no more trains leading
    to Lueneberg no, the place was Celle bei
    Hanover That's where they unloaded us when
    we went to Bergen-Belsen.
    You know, after the war, I read in Time Magazine, some letter
    to the editor from someone who lives in Celle either that,
    I'm not sure.
    Anyhow, they said that they didn't
    know there was Bergen-Belsen there,
    when all the dead people were lying close to the road.
    Anyhow, this guy marched us to I don't know where.
    We slept in the woods, covering us with leaves.
    We didn't run away.
    We got back to Bergen-Belsen.
    And when we got there, there was a whole new crew there.
    I mean, a whole new--
    But back to Hamburg
    Hamburg.
    So it was filled with people from other camps,
    who had been evacuated there.
    And so we never went back to the factory to work.
    But we registered those new prisoners.
    That was our new job.
    And then one day--
    Your health had improved by that time?
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    Did you get better because you were given medicine?
    Or it was just--
    No, there was no medicine.
    So it was the resting?
    Just being in bed and not working,
    but it was for a long time.
    And I remember when I, for the first time,
    went into the bathroom, there were mirrors there.
    And I just couldn't believe it when I saw myself.
    I said I look like Christ on the cross.
    Mhm.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    So we were used to register the new prisoners.
    And then one day, towards the end of April,
    they said now we would go to Sweden, again, you see?
    So of course, we didn't believe it.
    But lo and behold, we really went in cattle cars
    and got out in Flensburg, which is the border between Germany
    and Denmark.
    And there was already a normal train standing.
    And we were taken over by the Danish Red Cross.
    And on every seat, there was a package--
    [CRYING]
    --with sandwiches and chocolate.
    So then we came through Copenhagen.
    And the Danes were on the platform.
    So I remember one Dane holding up a newspaper saying,
    Hitler død, Hitler dead.
    And of course, that was wonderful to me.
    Ah.
    So then we went by the train.
    And then they unloaded us onto a boat, you know, a ferry.
    And there they had papers set for--
    I never got to eat anything.
    Because it was so--
    you know, everyone just threw himself on those papers,
    with flowers, and anything you can imagine.
    And then we arrived in Malmo I don't know.
    I think we went on the train once more after the ferry.
    I'm not sure.
    And in Malmo we were taken over by,
    I guess it was the Red Cross.
    And we had to, once again, undress completely.
    And they burned all our clothes.
    So that was, I don't know, the 2nd of May, maybe.
    And then we had to run into some tents and take showers there.
    They had it all set up.
    It was wonderful.
    And they put us, after we were all bathed
    and so on, they put us in a covered tennis stadium
    where we slept on the floor.
    But for us, it was luxurious, because they had white--
    white paper sheets, you know?
    Could you believe you were free?
    It was hard.
    [LAUGHS]
    But they apparently knew exactly what to do.
    Because they fed us very little.
    And we, of course, thought they should feed us much more.
    But as we later heard, in Bergen-Belsen,
    it was a catastrophe.
    People died from eating too much.
    And you know, the Swedes gave us new clothes.
    We went to factories and could pick from clothes and underwear
    and everything.
    But that was before the end of the war.
    You know?
    The war, I think, ended on the 8th of May or the 7th of May.
    So for us, the war was over.
    And then you stayed in Sweden for how long?
    I stayed there for two years.
    Because it took so long for me to get a visa to the United
    States where I had an uncle, my mother's
    middle brother, who was the only one who was able to emigrate.
    He's the one where I told you that they
    came from Vienna first to Czechoslovakia
    and then eventually landed in the United States.
    Did you work in Sweden at all?
    Yes.
    What kind of work did you do?
    I worked as English-German secretary
    in the World Jewish Congress office.
    So that was very nice.
    It was like a family.
    When I went back to Sweden in '92,
    I looked for that World Jewish Congress.
    It was no longer there.
    They've closed it.
    They don't need it anymore.
    But they certainly needed it then.
    Were you able to adjust to life in Sweden, after all that
    you had been through?
    Yes.
    Actually, yes.
    I mean, I'm not-- still not quite normal.
    But you were able to cope?
    Yes.
    I was able to --
    To get through those two years.
    --to work.
    Yes.
    And in the beginning, my two best friends were there.
    We had a room together, a furnished room in a family.
    And we all three worked.
    These are friends from the camp?
    Yes.
    Yes.
    And one of them left first.
    She went back to Czechoslovakia because her sister
    and the sister's husband had returned.
    They were in camp too, because, well, it's
    a long, involved story.
    The sister, of course, was Jewish.
    But the husband was not.
    And they had hid--
    her father and my friend's father,
    had hidden in the village on false papers.
    And someone told on him.
    And so then they sent his daughter and her husband
    to camp, too, but just for a year.
    So they both survived.
    So when did you arrive in the United States?
    On May 19, 1947.
    And where did you go?
    I went to New York.
    And my uncle had already found me
    a job in an import-export firm.
    And I had a furnished room in the family again, East--
    no, West 86th Street.
    But those were difficult times.
    It was what they call culture shock.
    It was all so different from Sweden.
    And I was very unhappy at first.
    And it took me some time to get used to it.
    The climate was so hot.
    Altogether, you know, at the World Jewish Congress,
    I told you, we were all like a family.
    And there, the people who owned that business
    were not at all friendly.
    It was all so cold and unfeeling.
    And no one wanted to hear about my experience, not even
    my own uncle, you know?
    No one asked any questions.
    And we were so full of [INAUDIBLE]..
    And then you stayed in New York?
    I stayed in New York for two years.
    And then I got married and moved to Chicago.
    Was your husband from Europe?
    Yes.
    Had he been through--
    He was Viennese.
    Had he been through the war?
    No.
    He was here.
    During the war?
    Yes.
    And you moved to Chicago.
    To Chicago, and then we moved to Pittsburgh,
    and last, we moved to Washington.
    I really like it here.
    I'm glad I ended up here.
    Can we talk just a little bit before we close about some
    of your feelings and reflections and thoughts
    about what you went through?
    How do you feel about being Jewish?
    Did this experience make you more so, or less so,
    or no change at all?
    Maybe less so-- no, not Jewish.
    It made me more Jewish.
    But it made me irreligious.
    I don't believe in God, I'm afraid to say.
    This is because of what you went through?
    Yes.
    During that--
    I don't think if there were a God He
    would have let all that happen.
    Mhm.
    No.
    But I'm consciously a Jew.
    And I would never hide it.
    But I'm just not religious.
    Mhm.
    Do you receive reparations?
    Yes.
    I get two pensions.
    One is like social security.
    And the other one is what they call Gesundheitsschein
    I had to prove that the experience was
    bad for my health.
    And since then, I'm getting a pension for that.
    How do you feel about getting reparations from Germany?
    I now feel about it very good.
    But it was the hardest thing I went through,
    to dig all that thing out, everything,
    the lawyer wanted from me.
    I was in psychotherapy for several years.
    And it was not easy.
    And every time a letter came from the lawyer in Germany,
    I thought now.
    Now what now?
    What does he want now?
    But in the end, of course, I could not
    live from the pension I get here.
    So that makes a big difference in my life, in my lifestyle.
    You say you've returned to visit Europe?
    [INTERPOSING VOICES]
    Oh, yeah.
    I've been in Europe many times.
    But in '92, I was back in Estonia.
    Because that was just 50 years--
    I never told you about what happened
    to my mother and the others.
    You want me to tell you?
    If you're able to.
    After the war, when we were first--
    I told you we were in [PLACE NAME]..
    And then they sent us for recuperation
    to various places in Sweden.
    And my Czech friends and I were in a town called [PLACE NAME]..
    And there, one day, there we didn't do anything.
    You know?
    They were just nice to us and we went on hikes
    and had fun together, bicycle [INAUDIBLE]..
    And one day, they had a sort of a little feast
    for us, where there came a couple of ministers.
    I forget of what religion.
    And they lectured to us.
    I forget about what.
    And afterwards, there was coffee and cake.
    There were maybe 30 or 40 of us in that scout hall
    where we were.
    And I just happened to sit next to one of those ministers.
    And another friend, the mixed one,
    sat on the other side of him.
    And he asked me where we had been during the war.
    And I told him about Estonia and so on.
    And he said, strange, with Estonia, you know?
    I have a friend, an Estonian minister,
    who told me a terrible story about a transport that came to
    [PLACE NAME].
    I don't know whether he said [PLACE NAME]..
    But that came.
    And that some members of his congregation
    had to shoot those people.
    And that some of them became quite emotionally sick from it.
    And from what he said, of course,
    he didn't know the details, I thought, that could be us.
    You know?
    So he gave me the name and address of this minister.
    And it took me a while.
    I didn't write right away, or [? be where ?] go to see him.
    And I never did go to see him.
    I think I just didn't want to know, really.
    But I did write him a letter.
    And he wrote me a letter back saying
    that such and such happened.
    That the people had to dig their own graves
    and were shot on the spot.
    And he wrote where it was.
    But he wrote very consolingly that maybe our families
    were not among those people.
    Because he remembers that there were some Jewish women seen
    in the river, working there.
    Maybe that's where my mother was.
    So of course, that was us.
    And so that was that.
    And then, in 1960, was it--
    I think in 1960.
    How did that come about?
    I can't tell you the whole story.
    However, they caught some of those Estonian SS people.
    And I mean, I can tell you this story,
    but it would be too long.
    And some of our friends who lived in Czechoslovakia
    went to [INAUDIBLE] as witnesses in the trial of those people.
    Trial of the Estonian SS?
    Yes.
    And two of them were hanged.
    And others were convicted in absentia.
    And one of them was the commander, Laak was his name,
    L-A-A-K.
    And it turned out that he had emigrated.
    He had fled after the war to Canada.
    And the Russians were broadcasting those news
    about the trial at the time and that they were looking for him.
    And he apparently got frightened and he hanged himself
    in Canada.
    So one of our girls was the living in Canada.
    And when she write in the paper about that she
    called the newspaper and said that she
    was one of his victims, then the newspapers
    interviewed some others of our girls in New York.
    And one called me, too.
    I was living in Chicago then.
    And so three of them, at least, are dead.
    And then while the girls were testifying,
    they took them to that place where it all had happened.
    And there's a monument there now.
    And it's not, apparently not only our transport,
    but the German transport.
    They also killed some Russians, I think.
    So on that monument, it was in all languages, I think.
    And so in 1992, we went there for the 50th anniversary
    of those [INAUDIBLE].
    And one of our friends who was also at the trial as a witness
    now lives in Switzerland.
    She escaped in 1968 with her husband.
    And she really built friendships there in Estonia.
    And they go there quite frequently to visit.
    You see, this woman, Eugenia Gurin-Loov,
    works for the Jewish community there.
    Yeah.
    This Eugenia Gurin-Loov works for the Jewish community
    in Tallinn.
    And she worked on this book for years.
    She was already working on it in '92.
    She found all the documents.
    And it's all about the Estonian Jews and what happened to them.
    Is there anything else you would like
    to add that we haven't talked about, or any other thoughts?
    Oh, I'm sure there are other things.
    [INTERPOSING VOICES]
    That you'd like to say.
    The reflections are--
    Any messages to the world?
    Anything that you'd like to add?
    The reflections are that I cannot stop to hate
    the Germans.
    I would never set foot there.
    But not all of our girls feel that way,
    because some have been there.
    But I personally just don't want to do it.
    And as I told you earlier, I have
    all those conflicting feelings about my former classmates.
    And I'm very attracted to reading everything
    about the Holocaust.
    Where some people like to stay away,
    I am very attracted to it.
    And my uncle Norbert Troller wrote a book
    about Theresienstadt, which was published after he died.
    But that was his retirement job.
    He wrote his memoirs, not only about the war,
    but about his whole life.
    Do you still speak German?
    Yes.
    And I read German a lot, too.
    And I have friends, but very few now, with whom I speak German.
    Now with [? Ava, ?] I never speak German.
    Anything else you wanted to add before we close?
    No.
    Close it.
    [LAUGHTER]
    That's enough.
    Well, thank you.
    But I'm very glad that you came to talk to me
    and I didn't have to talk to a complete stranger.
    Well, thank you so much for doing the interview.
    You're very welcome.
    This concludes the interview of Doris Rauch.
    It took place on July 7, 1995.
    It was conducted by Gail Schwartz
    on behalf of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    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.
    Interviewee
    Ms. Doris Rauch
    Interviewer
    Gail Schwartz
    Date
    interview:  1995 July 07

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    3 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

    Personal Name
    Rauch, Doris, 1920-

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Tapes transferred to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with other interviews from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum oral history volunteer collection, RG-50.106 on February 5, 1995.
    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 08:11:56
    This page:
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    Additional Resources

    Transcripts (4)
    Summary (English)
    Time Coded Notes (4)

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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

    Oral history interview with Marie Schwartzman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Nathan Kalman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Esthy Adler

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tana Gelfer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Maria Devinki

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jerome Stasson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Adriana Pacifici

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ernest Kolben

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henry Kolber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Greifer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anna Wollner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Kate Wacz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erwin Forley

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ernie Marx

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Elman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gerald Rosenstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ivan Becker

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Romana Koplewicz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Koplewicz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irving Schaffer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Klein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Pisik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Rosicka

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Salomon Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Suzanne Foldes

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tibor Vince

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elias Piorko

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Hildesheim

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Peter Masters

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Wolke

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ionel Ghelman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irimia Solomon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lotte Salus

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irena Kirkland

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hans Hirsch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Milton Shurr

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ludwig Jacob

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Barbara Artman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fritz Schonbach

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Charles Barber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tibor Borsos

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Robert Kertesz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Kahn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Susan Warsinger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Arnold Weiss

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sia Hertsberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Chava Frajhof

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Israel Frajhof

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Edward Novakoff

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Celia Feldschuh

    Oral History