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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

    Oral history interview with Nicole Yancey

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jaffa Munk

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frances Hirshfeld

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Moris Gluckman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Margie Rosenthal

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Emma Mogilensky

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Isaiah Henig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ida Henig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marcel Drimer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michael Silberstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joan Schwab

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erwin Deutscher

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Pick

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hedi Pope

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bella Simon Pasternak

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marion Friedman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Strassburger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jadwiga Dziekonski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Harvey

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thomas B. Gardiner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Roberta Jones

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Christine Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hugh Jenkins

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rene Edgar Tressler

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Stefan Wohl

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Yehuda Adam

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Arlette de Long

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Adam

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Herbert Bitter

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rachel Goldfarb

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tania Rozmaryn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frank Ephraim

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Peter Phillips

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Ichiuji

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Horowitz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hermann Kosak

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Dolly Bestandig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Goldie Gendelman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rhoda Kuflik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Hess

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jutta Levy

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Wolfgang Mueller

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Klari Rudnai

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jill Pauly

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jack Reuben

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Bayer

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Tilda Finzi Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Zwi Golombek

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Samuel B. Hagner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Werner E. Michel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Guta Jacobson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helen Luksenburg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with William Luksenburg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rose Weisfeld

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth E. Greifer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Nesse Godin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Maryla Korn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michel Margosis

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lena Jurand

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Wallace Witkowski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Peter Masters

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Lena Gitter

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jacob Wiener

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Noah Roitman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Richard W. Peterson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Riane Gruss

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Regina Spiegel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Charles Stein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hannah Kalman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Morris Rosen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sam Spiegel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Gutter

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henry Greenbaum

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Alper

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michael Lin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hannah Kalman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Dorrit L. Ostberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alice Eberstarkova Masters

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Martin Weiss

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Leonard Gordon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fritz Gluckstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Brigitte Freidin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Kristine Belfoure

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Hill Leonard

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Kurt Roberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alfred Schnog

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Taucher

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helen Goldkind

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Inge Katzenstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Werner Katzenstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Goldman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Paulette Stessin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Margitta Cooper

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erika Eckstut

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tole Johannes Madna

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henri Dupuy

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Halina Peabody

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marcel Bercau

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rolph Hammel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Norbert V. Hilsberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alfred Munzer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Maria Mandel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Yvonne Mignot de Royere

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Susan Berlin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with John Bucur

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lore Schneider

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frank Liebermann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marianne Liebermann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thea S. Rips

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Andrew Glass

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Renate Fischer Chernoff

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eli Dortort

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hilda Seftor

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Felix Nicinski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Brombart

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gunter Haimann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alfred Lakritz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rita Rubinstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anita Etzyon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Melvin Galun

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Magdalena Farkas Berkovics

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sol Mackler

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Theresia Bauer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Carolina Taitz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helen Schwartz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irene Silver

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Herman Taube

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Regine Ginsberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ursula Guttstadt McKinney

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Rappaport

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Edith Langer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marianne Milkman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Phillip Abraham

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Arnstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gertrude Scarlett Epstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Matilde Neuwirt

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Susanne K. Bennet

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marianne Roberts

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Harry Markowicz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Julie A. Keefer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erica Laufer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Barbara Goldberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Liselotte Epstein Ivry

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hans Ziegler

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Vera Levine

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Guenter Lewy

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Malvy Solomon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elia Miranski and Genia Miranski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Maria Kordalewski

    Oral History

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

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