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Oral history interview with Sandra Mandel

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1993.A.0087.97 | RG Number: RG-50.091.0097

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    Oral history interview with Sandra Mandel
    Transcript
    I'm Sally Weinberg.
    Today we are interviewing Sandra Mandel, a Holocaust survivor.
    The project is sponsored by the National
    Council of Jewish Women, Cleveland section.
    Sandra, could you tell me how old you are and where you live?
    I'm 60 years old.
    And I live in Cleveland Heights.
    Ohio?
    Yes, Ohio.
    Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
    And do you work?
    No.
    At the moment, I'm not working.
    I'm just a busy grandmother.
    A busy grandmother.
    Are you married?
    No.
    I am widowed.
    How long have you been widowed?
    Seven years.
    And what did your husband do?
    My husband was a rabbi.
    I see.
    And do you have children?
    I'm sure you do.
    Tell us how many you have and about your grandchildren.
    I have three daughters--
    Barbara, Regina, and Sally.
    Two of them live in Cleveland.
    And they are married.
    Each one has four children.
    I'm a busy grandmother of eight grandchildren.
    The youngest daughter lives in Youngstown,
    and she is expecting her first.
    How long have you lived in Cleveland?
    My first station, my first time I came to the United States,
    I lived in Cleveland for eight years.
    Then we moved away.
    We lived in New Philadelphia and Wooster, Ohio
    for about 20 years.
    And now I'm back in Cleveland again.
    I see.
    Now, I'm going to ask you a few questions
    about your previous life, long before you came to Cleveland.
    Could you tell us about your life before the war?
    Where did you live?
    I was born in Pausha, Romania.
    How do you spell Pausha?
    P-A-U-S-H-A. It is pronounced Pausha,
    that is the Romanian version of the community.
    It's a small village.
    My grandfather owned land in that village.
    And he also has had a store, a little grocery
    store for the community.
    This was my mother's parents' home.
    Is that where you lived?
    Not really.
    I remember that only as a summer resort
    that we used to go back to my grandparents' home.
    But in 19-- let me see, 1932, I was
    eight years old at that time.
    And I remember my father and mother moved
    to this community called Barod.
    How do you spell that?
    B-A-R-O-D.
    And where was that?
    That was in Romania at the time.
    It is a larger community, I would say.
    The population of that community, I would say
    is 3,000.
    How many Jewish people do you think
    were in the community of 3,000?
    60 Jewish families lived there.
    Most of them were merchants.
    They had grocery stores, dry goods stores.
    We had two shoemakers.
    We had a tailor.
    We had a watchmaker.
    It was an active Jewish community I would say.
    They even had a beautiful temple for worshiping.
    And they had to have a rabbi, and the shochet.
    A shochet, could you tell us what a shochet is?
    A shochet is somebody who is slaughtering for kosher meat.
    And my father specified for these things.
    And they needed somebody to do the job.
    And he did everything.
    He was the rabbi.
    And I learned this trade of slaughtering later.
    And this community hired him.
    And I was eight years old when we
    came to this small community.
    How many brothers and sisters did you have?
    I was the oldest.
    I had a brother and two sisters.
    We were four children in our family.
    What kind of a house did you live in?
    Do you remember it?
    Well, yes.
    The community that we lived in was very primitive.
    We didn't have electricity.
    We didn't have running water in the house with faucets
    and things.
    We had an outhouse.
    And most like pioneer time here in the United States.
    But we had a very nice home with two large rooms and a kitchen.
    And that was considered a large home.
    A beautiful house, it was a building for itself.
    Our home was in the backyard of the temple.
    And we had another building in the same backyard
    where the shammes lived.
    Tell us what a shammes is.
    Let me see, how will I define a shammes in English?
    He's the one who takes care of the temple, not really
    a custodian job, but the religious part of the temple.
    And he had a special little house in the same back yard,
    so to speak.
    It was a huge backyard.
    We also had a beautiful vegetable garden
    next to our house what we worked very diligently, because that
    was very important.
    We didn't have grocery stores where you
    could go in for fresh produce.
    Did you have to help your family with the garden and any
    of the chores?
    Definitely.
    Especially, I remember being the oldest, I had a lot of chores
    and a lot of responsibilities.
    Like what kind?
    Well, at a very early age, my responsibility
    was to say the prayer in the morning
    before children my younger ones sat down to the table
    to eat breakfast.
    Where was your mother?
    My mother was a very busy woman.
    She had to get up early in the morning to prepare things.
    We didn't have any refrigerators in the house.
    Everything had to be prepared fresh every day cooking.
    The baking was done at home.
    Our kitchen was like a bakery oven,
    had a bakery oven built in.
    And we were all busy or did something.
    But we went to school.
    Was it a Jewish school?
    No.
    It was a regular public school that we went to.
    What language did you speak?
    We spoke Romanian in the school, Hungarian outside the school,
    and Yiddish in the house.
    So we were a trilingual family.
    My father insisted on the Yiddish language,
    because they said every Jew has to learn this one language.
    You have to speak Yiddish at home.
    But in school, the Hungarian language kind of
    seeped in to us through our parents,
    because my mother went to a Hungarian school.
    In her time, this part of Romania
    was Austro-Hungarian time.
    So she spoke German and Hungarian.
    Therefore, the Jewish children all spoke Hungarian.
    The rest of the pupils in the classroom
    were peasants, Romanians, farmers.
    All of them were farmers.
    How did your family get along with the other families
    in the community?
    You were a Jewish family.
    Yes.
    Well, that's a very good question.
    We got along beautifully.
    We needed them for their produce,
    and they needed us to buy their produce.
    Because they were the ones who really
    had the corn fields, the wheat fields, and the chicken,
    and the milk.
    For instance, milk, we didn't have a grocery store where you
    go in and buy a carton of milk.
    We had to go to the farmer with our own pail,
    and they milked the milk right into our own pail.
    So every morning, we had to get up early
    in the morning with their milking time,
    and we had our milk every morning fresh.
    So you see, we've been very close to our neighbors.
    And we had very good communication with them.
    I remember at Christmas time, they
    used to go and sing Christmas carols.
    They used to stop in at our house.
    And my mother especially prepared little white rolls,
    those Shabbos rolls, because that was
    a delicacy for these people.
    They had only wholewheat bread in their house,
    because our mill in town was a water mill,
    and they did not produce white flour.
    They had only the whole wheat flour.
    So they were not used to the white flour.
    White bread was something special.
    And my mother especially baked these little rolls so when
    the carolers came, this children, she
    used to give each one a white challah so to speak.
    And I remember I had a lot of non-Jewish friends.
    I remember a girl named Rosanda.
    She was an artist in school.
    And her father was a cobbler.
    He was a shoemaker.
    And she was the only one of all the Romanian friends
    that I had who wore street dresses like we did,
    regular dresses.
    The others had long skirts, the peasant
    outfits they used to wear to school,
    beautiful embroidered sleeves.
    But she was the only one who wore the same type of dresses
    as we did.
    And we've been very close with her.
    Did you find that there was any antisemitism in your town?
    Do you remember anything about anyone
    not wanting a Jewish family to associate with?
    Yes.
    Well, antisemitism was in the air in Europe all over.
    And I could tell you an incident with my brother.
    My brother wore ear locks.
    We were a very religious family.
    And my father insisted it's part of our dressing.
    You were Orthodox.
    Orthodox.
    And in school the non-Jewish kids would pull his ears,
    pull his hair and will call him you dirty Jew.
    And because of this, my father took out my brother
    from school.
    Where did he go to school then?
    He did not go to school.
    It was in the fourth grade that he did not
    go back to school anymore.
    How did you celebrate the Jewish holidays in your town?
    Well, the Jewish holidays were celebrated
    just like it says in the Bible.
    Everything up to par.
    We were, as I said, an Orthodox Jewish home.
    And most people in my community were Orthodox.
    They closed their stores on Sabbath.
    And they all had a kosher home.
    Was there anything other than the Orthodox shul?
    No.
    That was the only temple in our community.
    In fact, I remember my family always
    when I think back around the table,
    at the holiday, the beautiful set
    tables and all of us around it.
    Was your family at all involved with Zionism?
    Not really.
    Zionism came later, in later years to our Jewish community.
    We were only dreaming about Jerusalem.
    It was only in our prayers that next year with God willing,
    we will be in Jerusalem.
    But that was just a dream that we never even knew
    that it will ever come true.
    What kind of books were in your home?
    Well, my father being a rabbi, had a Talmud.
    And of course, the Bible, interpreting
    all kind of Hebrew books.
    And I might mention we did have a Hebrew school.
    Our community kept a teacher for our children
    throughout the year.
    So after public school, the Jewish children
    would go to Hebrew school.
    And so that is where we got our Hebrew education.
    And books, my mother was a very modern thinker.
    She had a better education than many others do.
    Though she lived in a very small community,
    her father sent her into a nearby city
    to get an education.
    She had, I would say, the equivalent
    of a high school education.
    And she believed that her daughters should go to college,
    and go to higher schools.
    It never materialized.
    But nevertheless, that was her wish.
    And therefore, she allowed us girls to read.
    And reading was a very important thing in our home.
    We had a newspaper coming to our home.
    We did not have a newspaper in town.
    What language newspaper?
    A Hungarian, Hungarian newspaper.
    It came from another city.
    It was a weekly paper.
    And I might mention it now that our news, our daily news
    will come to through a drummer.
    Now, this is an unusual way of communication
    I know here in the United States, like a town crier.
    You heard about that?
    And this drummer will drum away in certain spots
    in the community.
    And he will gather, everybody gathered around him.
    And he will announce the news for the farmers.
    Today, the eggs dropped or the eggs are higher.
    The price for eggs, let's say it's 50 cents this week.
    And this is how the farmer knew how much to charge,
    how much we should pay for it.
    Also, other news will come around telling the people when
    the threshing machine is coming into town, to prepare
    the wheat for that week.
    Because the government will send down to this farmer
    certain machines.
    They didn't have any modern facilities.
    They would plow with oxen.
    And everything done by hand.
    They worked very hard.
    And so certain things, like I said,
    the threshing of the wheat, we couldn't do it by hand.
    And the government would send down.
    So that was all announced through the drummer.
    Were there any other types of entertainment, any theater
    that your family experienced?
    Not in my community.
    And if we wanted to have a book, we
    had to go into the nearby city what was about 80 kilometers.
    What was that name?
    Nagyvarad.
    And do you know how to spell that?
    Yes.
    N-A-G-Y-V-A-R-A-D. Nagyvarad.
    That's a Hungarian name.
    Did your family ever go on vacations together, away
    from the little town?
    Well, the only vacation that I remember
    was when I went back to my grandparents' farm
    in the summertime.
    And that was beautiful and memorable.
    My cousins were there and so on.
    Did you go there every year?
    Yeah, almost every summer.
    For the whole summer?
    For the whole summer.
    Now, let's discuss you personally.
    How do you remember yourself in those days?
    Were you healthy?
    And what was your outlook on life?
    Well, I was a very skinny girl.
    They thought that I'll never survive.
    They thought the wind will blow me away.
    I was very skinny.
    My sister was beautiful, and always had rosy cheeks.
    I was a very serious type of kid who
    always lived within herself.
    I liked books.
    I liked to read.
    And I was very studious.
    I got good marks in my grades.
    And I got along fine with the children.
    I loved to take long walks.
    We had two rivers in town.
    It was a beautiful community.
    We lived down in the valley.
    We had mountains around us.
    In fact, that was also a very big business for the community.
    A lot of Slovaks lived in the mountains.
    They will bring us potatoes down to the market.
    We had a marketplace, a weekly market
    where merchants will unpack their wares,
    and had little boots.
    And we lived right at the market ground.
    So it's a beautiful community, a very prosperous, very busy
    community I would say, comparing to the standards
    where I lived, not to the standards of the United States.
    Did you have any hobbies or talents?
    Were you interested in anything, sports, or music--
    Yes.
    Any--
    Well, singing was a very important part in our home.
    My father's job required it, I would
    say to chant services, and have new songs bring
    into the congregation.
    And I know we all sang along with him.
    And our holidays were always full with songs.
    Singing, at one time I wanted to take violin lessons.
    But I didn't have a chance.
    I didn't have money to buy a violin.
    And of course, my education stopped at the seventh grade
    because this is how high our schooling was in our community.
    After then, I learned how to sew.
    I took also--
    I did everything that was available
    in that little community.
    Somebody raised angora rabbits.
    And he needed people to weave the angora wool into thread.
    So I learned how to weave, how to spin the wool of the angora,
    and to thread.
    And we learned cooking.
    At home?
    At home.
    I helped my mother.
    I was the oldest.
    I had to do the help.
    Did you have any plans for the future?
    At the moment?
    When you were in your little town?
    You mean at home.
    Well, there wasn't too much time for me to plan.
    You see, in 1940 the war was on already.
    How old were you then?
    I was 16 years old.
    In 1940.
    1940.
    So you were actually 14 when the war broke out?
    Yes.
    But you see to us, the war did not come in until 1940,
    when changes took place in our community.
    That is when the Hungarians came in.
    You see, this part of Romania was given back
    to the Hungarians.
    In what year was that?
    In 1940.
    It was in the spring of 1940.
    And what happened to your family at that point?
    My mother was very happy to see the Hungarian police come in.
    They had such beautiful plume feathers in their hats,
    and she remembers the Hungarians from the good times
    when she went to school and she learned the Hungarian language.
    That was a cultured language for my mother.
    She loved the Hungarian language.
    In fact, she sent me away when I was
    seven years old to her brother who lived in a small community
    to learn the language, to go for one year to school there
    that was a Hungarian village.
    And the government, the Romanian government,
    allowed them to have Hungarian in school.
    And she thought that was such an important language
    for me to learn.
    So for one year, I was there, very homesick though
    at the age of seven.
    And that's why I say my mother was very happy when
    the Hungarians came in.
    But we found out later that it wasn't such a happiness.
    It wasn't the same Hungarian government
    it used to be once before.
    You see, when the Hungarians came,
    the whole town made a big welcome for the new regime.
    So the soldiers were coming in on horseback.
    And I remember going out with all the kids and everybody.
    The whole community went out in the end of the town.
    And we had little red, white, and green flags,
    as the Hungarian flag.
    And we were waving it and we children, we were so happy.
    I wasn't very happy because I still
    remember the Romanian ways, and the Romanian flag.
    That was my school years.
    And it didn't seem to me such a happy time.
    But everybody welcomed the new regime.
    That was very important.
    And I remember Mr. Gross who had a grocery store right where
    this welcome committee was.
    And he came out and had a beautiful flag
    at his store, a Hungarian flag.
    He had a white beard.
    And when the soldiers marched in and they
    saw a Jew sitting in front of his store,
    they jokingly called to him, hey, go in Jew.
    Hitler is in the back of us.
    Did you know at that point who Hitler was?
    Yes.
    We heard about Hitler.
    But just what the media wanted us to hear.
    We didn't know about the atrocities
    or that people are being carried away from home.
    We heard other things that there is a ruler.
    There is a man who is doing so much good for his country.
    And he wakes up the Jews, and telling them
    you have to go to shul.
    This was in our papers.
    It was a very humorous article at one time
    that we read that Hitler in Germany
    sent letters to certain people that it's time
    for you to go to the synagogue.
    You are a Jew.
    And these people were thinking about it.
    I don't know.
    Why am I a Jew?
    They were very assimilated.
    My grandmother, yeah, she spoke about being Jewish.
    And somebody reminded them that they are Jews.
    You see, it was all put down in a form of a sarcastic way.
    That look here, Hitler comes and wakes up the Jews,
    and sends them to the shul.
    And this is the kind of news we got from Hitler, and about
    the war in Romania.
    But when these soldiers told Mr. Gross
    to go in because Hitler in the back of us,
    he didn't like that.
    And it was a sarcastic remark, of course.
    But it was an insulting remark too.
    But that was the first encounter with the Hungarian regime
    that we had.
    Excuse me.
    After the soldiers came in, did you
    find that your life in this little community
    started to change?
    Well, at the moment, at the beginning
    we lived in peace with them.
    Because they needed us.
    We spoke the Hungarian language.
    They could not communicate with the peasants
    who spoke Romanian.
    Did all of the other Jewish families also speak Hungarian?
    All of them spoke Hungarian.
    And so we lived in peace.
    My sister still went to school and she
    learned the Hungarian books.
    They changed the books in the schools?
    They changed immediately teachers, the director,
    from the old time moved from there.
    And new teachers came in.
    Hungarian teachers, Hungarian books, of course,
    it was a Hungarian school.
    And I remember at Christmas time that year,
    they put up a beautiful play in school.
    They do that every year.
    And you know who the players were?
    The Jewish kids.
    They were the ones who knew Hungarian.
    They could not put up a play without the Jewish children.
    So you see, we were blending in, in any type of situation,
    because that what Jewishness was in Europe.
    We pleased the government wherever we lived.
    At what point did your life begin to change
    and in what year?
    In 1942.
    That is when they drafted all the men from our community.
    Well, they were called into their regiment, so to speak.
    How old were you then?
    I must have been 18.
    And I remember my father was one to go with the first transport.
    And of course, the only ones who were left in the community
    were the women, children, and older people who did not
    go to forced labor camp.
    Did they know where they were going?
    Did you know where they were going?
    Well, they said it's a war.
    And we need the people.
    And you are going to war.
    We found out later that the Jewish people did not
    get a gun in his hand.
    They had spades for them, and they dug out--
    they work behind the scenes, and they dug out
    these unexploded bombs.
    And they put them to do the dirtiest
    work behind the scene of the war,
    because they did not trust them with a gun.
    They said, you are a Jew.
    You cannot be on our side.
    And of course, Hitler wouldn't have allowed them to do that.
    Where did you hear about this?
    How did you know where your father went?
    Did he correspond with you?
    Yes, letters came.
    And they told us.
    They even made out a beautiful song about spade
    is our gun in Hungarian.
    And we even knew it, knew the song.
    What was your family doing after your father left?
    Did you have to still make a living?
    That's right.
    It was a very rough time for everyone.
    The women had to operate the stores.
    They still had the stores.
    And I think our salary was cut, to a very small--
    and we worked very hard to make ends meet.
    Well, you didn't have a store.
    So what did your family do?
    What did you do personally?
    Do you remember?
    Did you have to work somewhere?
    No.
    I didn't.
    There was no place where to work and earn money.
    Well, little things that we children used to do
    is crack nuts for a store, and they were paying by the pound.
    You crack a pound of nuts, you got a certain amount of money.
    But I think my mother still got a little salary
    from the congregation.
    And we had very rough times.
    We had to do a lot of things ourselves.
    Did your brother leave also?
    Was your brother called out?
    No.
    He was only 16 years old at that time.
    So it was only your father?
    Only my father left.
    But in 1943, after the men left, the drummer
    announced the news that all the Jewish people
    must wear a Jewish star.
    And we accepted.
    It we weren't ashamed being Jewish.
    So we sewed up the beautiful stars in the front
    and in the back of our coats.
    Outer garment, you had to be wearing a star.
    So we're wearing a star.
    You didn't-- you weren't concerned about it?
    Well, it was an insult to be stamped.
    But we weren't ashamed of wearing a star.
    And in the same summer of 1943, we got a letter.
    Actually, it was an official letter,
    telling us that our father disappeared,
    and they could not locate him.
    And we heard rumors that apparently he
    was a deserter, because they were in the Russian territory
    working.
    And it was very hard.
    He was together with another man in town, Mr. Friedman.
    And in the end of the war, I found out that they just
    decided they cannot go on.
    They will stay in the Russian side.
    After the war, they will come home.
    They didn't think that they will survive
    this war as it was going because they were right there.
    And--
    Actually, where was your father sent?
    Do you know where it was?
    I don't remember, but it was at the Russian border
    where they were fighting.
    And that is where they took them.
    So in 1943 you received this letter.
    Yes.
    And so we hope that he is somewhere.
    We of course, never heard from my father again.
    But in the same summer, as I said before,
    the news came through the drummer.
    The drummer would drum away and it will say,
    all Jewish stores must not unpack at the market.
    They weren't allowed to put their wares anymore
    on the market.
    And the next time we heard from the drummer
    was all Jewish stores have to give in their licenses.
    Their licenses were taken away.
    So what is next?
    Nobody knew.
    But there was so much fear in the air.
    We knew something is going to happen.
    And nobody knew what, because everything went in secrecy.
    So my mother had an idea.
    It looks like they're going to take us to a ghetto.
    They're going to take us away from here.
    The men are not here, and we don't earn a living anymore.
    What will happen to us?
    Maybe they take us to work somewhere on a farm.
    We couldn't think of anything worse than that.
    So my mother said, I want to save all the linens that she
    embroidered for her daughters.
    We had a metal tub what very few people had.
    A bathtub?
    A bathtub.
    And my brother and I will dig a hole in the wood shack.
    We had a wood shack.
    That was the only way we heated our home, with wood.
    So we dug a hole in the wood shack
    and we lowered our metal tub.
    And we threw in there all the precious linens that we had.
    And my father's praying shawl, and my father's kittel.
    What is a kittel?
    Kittel is a white garment that a rabbi
    puts on on Yom Kippur when he attends services.
    So those were the precious things that we had.
    And we covered it, and we hoped someday
    we'll find them there when we come back,
    if we go away from home.
    Because a lot of rumors came from the city,
    from here, from there.
    We always heard some little rumors.
    This said one thing.
    The other one said another thing.
    But we never knew anything specific what will happen.
    Were you able to visit with your neighbors,
    with your Jewish friends?
    Is this how you got the rumors, you
    were visiting with the neighbors?
    Well, yes.
    In temple or in the shul?
    In the temple.
    That's right.
    In fact, in 1943 a lot of trucks, German trucks,
    will pass by our community.
    See, we lived on the highway.
    That was a highway.
    Our community was right, and all the Jewish stores
    were lined up at the highway.
    And the farmers were in little alleys down the road, you know?
    And these trucks, these German trucks
    will stop at the Jewish stores.
    Because you could read Schwartz, Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Friedman,
    the Friedman grocery store, Schwartz grocery store,
    and so on.
    They will stop in and order, I don't five dozen eggs,
    and whatever they saw the grocery store had, and walked
    away without paying.
    And I remember Mr. Schwartz.
    He was an elderly man who did not go.
    His sons went into forced labor camp, but he was home.
    And he said, this doesn't sound good,
    when people are walking into a store
    and they have the right to pack up and go.
    And one of them said, listen, Hitler
    is going to pay you for it.
    He knew that we are in trouble.
    And something is going to happen.
    But nobody knew what.
    It was such a quietness.
    It was so hush-hush everything.
    Nobody knew what was going on.
    Now, that was in the spring of 1943.
    Yeah, '43.
    How did your life change after that?
    Well--
    You were 18 years old at this point.
    Yes.
    What happened, we just lived in fear,
    and hoping that something good will come.
    But nothing good really came.
    You see in 1944, May the 10th, even before a drummer
    came and said no Jewish persons are
    allowed to leave their home.
    And there was a penalty.
    They always promised that something terrible
    is going to happen if you leave the home.
    You must stay in your home.
    And of course, that was the time when they--
    They were saying only Jews stay in their home,
    the others could go?
    That's right.
    Of course, it was only for the Jews.
    This news was only for the Jews.
    And my brother wanted to run away.
    And my mother said, if you run away, maybe they will kill us.
    So he didn't.
    He probably could have saved himself.
    So he stayed with you until what point?
    May the 10th, 1944.
    That is when the police came into our house.
    Were they German police?
    No.
    The Hungarian police.
    The Hungarian police.
    They had the Hungarians to do the work for them.
    It was a deal made with the Hungarian government.
    We gave you the back Hungary, and you give us the Jews.
    And the Hungarian government was glad to do that,
    as long as they got the territory.
    And they came and they said, you can take along with you
    five kilos, that would be 10 pounds for each person.
    And we are going.
    Where are we going?
    Well, we are going into the auditorium, the school
    auditorium.
    All the classrooms were open to house the Jewish people.
    And I remember we went into the school auditorium
    with my mother, and brother, and my two sisters.
    You see, these men knew us very well.
    We were friends.
    But they were very generous and kind.
    They said, you can take anything you want.
    They did not measure our baggages.
    But there's one thing, I had an earring in my ear.
    And he made me take off the earring.
    He said, you're not allowed to take jewelry.
    So I gave him my earrings.
    But from home, we took pillows and quilts, and our best pots.
    My mother said, wherever we go, we'll have to cook.
    And so the best parts were the Pesach [INAUDIBLE] pots,
    the Passover dishes.
    We took them down from the attic.
    And we took some of those pots, along because they
    were in better condition, since you use them only once a year.
    So I remember this is how we packed up
    and we were moved into this big auditorium.
    And we stayed there for a couple of days, for three days.
    You slept in the auditorium?
    Yes.
    We took along a lot of food, because they
    allowed us to take enough.
    So we prepared a lot of food, much more
    than you need for a little trip, whatever we could take,
    whatever we could put cheeses and so on.
    And after the three days, May the 13,
    it was a Saturday morning.
    Somehow everything happened to us on holidays.
    I think they planned it that way, to hurt us a little more.
    Because we don't travel on Saturday.
    We were Orthodox Jews.
    That's the religious holidays.
    That is when we're going to have to travel.
    So we didn't have a railroad station in our community.
    They had to take us.
    It was 8 kilometers from our community
    to the railroad station.
    So all our friends, the Romanians
    where we bought our milk and our produces,
    they were the ones who were drafted because they
    had the horse and buggies, to transport us
    to the railroad station.
    And in the railroad station, we got in those cattle cars
    for traveling.
    They had a lot of straw on the floor,
    so we could sit on straw.
    And they took us into the city, to Nagyvarad.
    To what?
    The city of Nagyvarad.
    Over there, they used to-- they had soldiers stationed there.
    There's a name for it.
    Anyway, they had a barracks over there
    where they could house us for the short time.
    It was a temporary ghetto.
    And I remember we got a basement place to stay.
    Just and your family?
    My family and others too, because they
    were this huge basement.
    So we had a corner of that basement,
    where we put down our blankets and our pillows.
    That was our corner.
    That is where we slept.
    Were you frightened?
    Was your family afraid?
    Did you have fears of what was happening?
    Yes.
    But there was nothing we could do about it.
    We had no guns.
    We had no word.
    There was one inspection we got from the Germans
    before they took us in there, to see if the transport is
    ready to move.
    And this German officer made that remark it looked
    so [NON-ENGLISH] here.
    And the word [NON-ENGLISH] to my mother was very low.
    And actually it meant it's dirty.
    How could it be cleaned with straw
    on the floor sitting on your packages?
    How could it be cleaned?
    It doesn't look very neat and clean.
    My mother said if that is what they think of us,
    that is the lowest that anyone can think of a human being,
    to call them, they are [NON-ENGLISH]..
    She was very insulted.
    Of course, our human dignity was hurt
    when they took us away from home without any rights.
    We had no rights to speak.
    We had no rights to do anything about it.
    So this transport was all women and children then?
    We had some men, elderly men.
    Elderly men.
    Elderly men.
    The young men were gone by then, only elderly men.
    You see, we were there for three weeks in the city of Nagyvarad.
    During these three weeks, we didn't
    know how long we were going to stay here,
    or where our destination.
    Are we going to be moved?
    Nobody knew anything.
    So Mr. Schwartz, he's a very intelligent man,
    he talked to the officials.
    And they said, we don't know yet where are we going.
    But he asked for some food.
    And they said the only thing we can bring you is potatoes.
    And that is when he appeals to every one of us
    to pool together everything that we brought from home.
    We had flour.
    We had oil.
    We had eggs or something, whatever
    we brought from home, cheeses.
    And we formed a common kitchen.
    And with the potatoes that we received,
    we were able to cook a meal for everyone once a day.
    So this is how we spent our three weeks in Nagyvarad.
    Eating potatoes mainly?
    Potatoes, and whatever warm soup, or whatever we could.
    During this time, officials will come and take
    the older people into the city for interrogation.
    And when they came, we were all very scared
    when we heard about that.
    We didn't know where they take them.
    Will they come back?
    And of course, in the afternoon they came back.
    So we all stormed around them, asking them where were you.
    What do they want?
    What did they say?
    And they said we were tortured.
    They wanted to know where the Jews hid their gold before they
    left home.
    Mr. Gross, with a long beard, came back without a beard.
    They cut his beard.
    We were all crying.
    Because it was so sad to see him without the beard.
    Well, it didn't take very long.
    We moved from there.
    It took about three weeks.
    And they just came in one morning.
    You have to pack and go.
    But you can't take anything, just what
    you have on your back.
    And my mother had a very good idea.
    Wherever, we go we need clothes.
    And she made us put on, I had two slips, four dresses,
    and really dressed up well.
    And I had a little bag, a little leather bag
    and I put in a nightgown in it, and a toothbrush, and a comb
    and brush, and ready for the trip.
    And here we are lined up five in a row and counted.
    And the train was waiting for us there.
    They put 75 of us in a cattle car.
    And they gave for Mr. Gross, he was in my wagon,
    I don't remember how many loaves of bread, three or four
    loaves of bread for the road, and some water.
    On the two ends of the wagon there
    were two barrels for a bathroom.
    And they locked the doors.
    And we were on our way to a destination unknown.
    And this was the trip to Auschwitz.
    How long was your ride in the transport?
    Let's see.
    We were there three days.
    Three days.
    The 27th.
    The reason I have all these dates dotted on for myself,
    is after the war, I had a friend of mine.
    And together, we put our heads together and said,
    we are going home.
    We lived through a horrible war.
    And what happened to us?
    When did we leave?
    And we sat down.
    Things were still fresh in our memories.
    And each one of us remembered.
    This happened to me.
    This happened to you.
    When it was it?
    Was it on Monday?
    One is one a Tuesday.
    And we kind of figured out our year.
    And we put down everything on a sheet of paper.
    And this is why I have dates to remember.
    Very good.
    And when we arrived to Auschwitz,
    we were tired, exhausted.
    You had been riding for three days.
    For three days without any good food.
    Just the bread and the water?
    The bread and the water.
    There was nothing else.
    We didn't have pillows to sit on anymore,
    because they were left.
    And it was an exhausting trip.
    And the doors opened.
    It was a Friday night.
    In fact, before the doors opened in Auschwitz,
    Mr Gross lit Sabbath candles.
    He took along two candles.
    We all stood around praying.
    Something, something I cannot forget.
    Sandra, I think we'll come to a close right now.
    We'll take a break, and we'll come back
    and finish your story.
    Thank you.
    I'm Sally Weinberg.
    Today, I am interviewing Sandra Mandel, a Holocaust survivor.
    The project is sponsored by the National
    Council of Jewish Women, Cleveland Section.
    Sandra, we will start again where we left off.
    You were on the way to Auschwitz.
    You were just departing from the transport.
    And you told us, with tears in your eyes,
    the situation as you saw it.
    Could you continue from there?
    Yes.
    That was a Friday evening when Mr. Gross lit the candles.
    And we were staying and praying.
    Was this right in the train station?
    It was still on the way going before we arrived to Auschwitz.
    It was in the transport itself?
    In the transport, on the road, as we traveled to Auschwitz.
    You were off the transport?
    We were in the wagon.
    In a wagon?
    In the train wagon, or so to speak, the cattle cars,
    that is what they transported us, in cattle cars.
    Shortly after, the train stopped.
    It was in the middle of the night.
    Must have been early in the morning, maybe 3 o'clock
    in the morning when finally the train stopped
    and the doors opened up.
    And there were soldiers there.
    There was dark there.
    And they told us to get out.
    And whatever package we had in our hands,
    we had to leave there.
    And they separated the men from the women.
    And immediately, they put the men to one side, and the women
    to the other side.
    That is the last time I saw my brother, so to speak.
    He immediately was taken away from our group
    to the men's side.
    And we hope to see him somewhere.
    We didn't know that we will never see him again.
    And here we are, standing in the line,
    under the big floodlights saying Auschwitz.
    And--
    There was a sign that said Auschwitz?
    Auschwitz.
    Did that name mean anything to you--
    No.
    --when saw it?
    Nothing.
    Just the station, I thought.
    And there were men in striped uniform helping us line up,
    telling us-- first, when we saw the striped uniform,
    we were sure we are in a prison camp with murderers
    because that was the sign of a striped uniform.
    And we said, oh, my goodness, where we?
    We are not murderers.
    But soon we found out that the striped uniform men
    were Polish Jews.
    They spoke Yiddish to us.
    And they kept on telling us, hey, you are very young,
    don't hold that baby in your hand.
    Don't you have your old mother here?
    Let her hold the baby in her hand.
    And, of course, many of them didn't give their babies up.
    We didn't know why they said that.
    And many of them did.
    Here, Mom, hold the baby.
    This man said I have to give you the baby.
    And this woman survived.
    These men knew where the babies and the mothers are going.
    They went straight to the crematorium.
    From that point?
    From that point, that is where they selected us.
    We had Mengele there.
    Dr. Mengele was there welcoming the transports.
    Did he say his name?
    No.
    But we-- later on, he came to inspect us in the barracks
    where we lived.
    And they told us, this is Dr. Mengele.
    And, of course, we remembered him from the station
    when we arrived.
    What happened to you at after the selection?
    Well, they pointed to some people
    to the right and some people to the left.
    My mother, my sister, my two sisters went to the right.
    And it was a road type of thing, an alley, where you go.
    It was dark.
    You did not go with your mother and your sisters?
    No.
    They shoved them to one side.
    And he looked at me.
    And he said, you are a big girl.
    And he shoved me to the other side.
    I looked big enough to live.
    And the other ones went to the other side.
    In fact, at that moment, I was the only one
    who was shoved to that side because too many went
    to the other side.
    And I came back.
    I said, I don't know where to go.
    By then, my mother was away.
    And I didn't see her anymore.
    And somebody else showed me, see, over there,
    there are people in that row.
    You just go over there, and you'll find them.
    Soon I found my friends from my community.
    And I hitched on to the row.
    And we walked.
    Not on your mother's side?
    Not on my mother's side.
    I didn't see her anymore.
    That was the last time I saw her.
    I have a sister.
    My sister was 16 years old.
    She was a beautiful girl.
    But she was holding on to a little girl who was limping,
    her friend.
    And so they decided to let them both go to that side.
    Somehow I was selected out to live.
    And as we walked, they took us to Birkenau,
    where they gathered us in a big room.
    And the German officers, the SS women,
    could not communicate with us.
    We were Hungarians.
    So what they did, they took Polish Jews
    who spoke Hungarian.
    Those were there already four years in camp.
    With the Polish Jews, they built Auschwitz.
    They took the Jews to build the barracks and the fences
    and the crematoriums.
    And then, they were the ones who welcomed us and told us
    what to do when we got into Auschwitz.
    This girl will come up and spoke Hungarian to us
    so we could understand her.
    She hollered until she got hoarse.
    Take off your clothes.
    You are going to take a bath.
    The only thing you keep with yourself is your shoes.
    And, of course, we looked around,
    and there were soldiers, German soldiers around,
    both sides, with guns.
    And we were waiting for them to march out of the room.
    Why would we undress in front of soldiers?
    And, of course, she kept on repeating herself, you know.
    And she said, you are in a place where you do not ask questions.
    You do what you are told.
    And take off your clothes.
    So we soon found out that these soldiers will not move.
    They will stay there.
    So we had to drop our clothes and hold on
    to our shoes and march.
    We marched into a room, in a corridor type of room,
    where there were a lot of tables and a lot
    of Jewish workers, who cut our hair, immediately,
    that was the first thing, clipped off all our hair,
    shaved all our hair from our body.
    And--
    Was your head shaved or just clipped?
    Clipped.
    And they told us we're going to take a bath.
    We were lucky because we did take a bath.
    Later on, we found out that our parents were not as lucky.
    And they did not take baths when they went in
    into the shower room.
    They were gassed.
    But we took baths.
    And it felt very nice.
    The warm water was so beautiful after such a horrible trip.
    And we hope we're getting back our clothes.
    But after the bath, we picked up our shoes.
    And we walked out.
    The bathhouse was a very unusual bathhouse too.
    It was a shower room with probably 200 showers in it.
    It was designed for a mass, for people who
    take showers, so at least 200.
    I didn't count them, but at least that many
    in that one room.
    And after the warm water stopped,
    we went out in another door, where there were tables
    with black sleazy dresses.
    I never saw so many black dresses in my life.
    They threw us a black dress to put on our wet body.
    Oh, you had no towels?
    No.
    To dry off.
    You don't need a towel when you are in Auschwitz,
    but you need a bath because the Germans are very clean people.
    And beside that, they were afraid of an epidemic.
    You had to take baths and disinfect yourself.
    That was a very important part in Auschwitz.
    And, of course, I was lucky, the dress fitted me.
    But I know, I remember a heavier girl
    who came back to say I can't fit into this dress.
    Give me another dress.
    They said, go trade with somebody whose
    dress is better than this.
    So it was a rough morning.
    By the time the sun came up, we were finished with our bath.
    And they threw us out in the open.
    And we looked around.
    We didn't recognize each other anymore.
    We didn't look the same.
    And from our voices, we realize that, oh, that's Magda,
    you are the one.
    Hey, sure, I remember you, Sandra.
    You are from my community.
    And we laughed and joked and cried at the same time.
    But here we were, and said, did you see your mom?
    Is she here somewhere?
    Is my sister here?
    Of course, we didn't see them.
    But we said, well, maybe we'll find them somewhere
    because we came together on the same train.
    But that wasn't the case.
    And, of course, they lined us up, five in a row.
    That was the procedure in Auschwitz.
    You count people five in a row.
    It's easier to count them that way.
    And we marched.
    They took us to C camp.
    C?
    C camp.
    The letter C?
    The letter C. They were marked according to the A, B, C,
    I guess.
    But that was very good camp, so to speak.
    It was well equipped.
    With what?
    It had barracks.
    And the barracks had three rows of bunk beds.
    The bunk beds, if you think of a bunk bed
    is one bunk bed for a person.
    One bed for a person.
    Bunk meaning one over the other?
    One over the other.
    These beds were as wide as I would
    say a double bed or a king size bed, let's say, the largest.
    And there were three, one on top of the other.
    14 girls slept in one of these bunks.
    There were no blankets, no pillows, no covering.
    We were packed like herrings, seven in a row,
    seven in the other row.
    Feet to feet, meeting feet to feet.
    And that's where I stayed for four months.
    Life in Auschwitz was to degrade the human beings.
    They handled us like animals, cooped up in the barracks.
    We had to learn to train our bladder, train our thoughts,
    and train our stomachs to accept unappetizing food.
    And it was very hard to do that.
    We had a lot of questions to ask.
    We had a leader, a young Polish girl, who was very rough.
    She had to be rough with us.
    We were about 1,000 women in that one barracks.
    Did you all speak Hungarian?
    Yes, this was a Hungarian transport.
    And this Polish woman spoke Hungarian to you?
    Yes.
    We had two leaders over there.
    There was an elderly lady and this young woman.
    The first one who was our leader couldn't take us.
    They changed her to another one who was stronger and said,
    I am talking to you, and you have to be quiet.
    You got to listen to me.
    We are in a place where you don't talk,
    you do what you are told.
    And that's all you can hear from me.
    And we had to be very quiet because that's what it was.
    And, you know, strange as it may sound, as they selected us,
    the men, some of the men who came in our transport
    were also in the same camp, but in the opposite side.
    See there was a road between in the camp,
    between the two barracks, two rows of barracks.
    My brother was in one of the barracks.
    And one of my friend's father was there,
    who was an older man.
    And he didn't go to concentration camp--
    he didn't go to forced labor camp.
    And he came into Auschwitz.
    And she went to meet her father.
    And I went along with her.
    And I met my brother, just for a moment
    because there were so many people
    there watching him and hitting us
    if we went to the other side.
    So we just briefly saw each other.
    And three days later--
    there was too much confusion over that-- three days
    later they marched out the men from this camp.
    And they fill that with new transports,
    with new women, who came in transports.
    Transports came in to Auschwitz almost every day.
    Was that the last time you saw your brother?
    That was the last time I saw my brother.
    Did he-- did you discuss where your mother and sisters were?
    No.
    There was no time, no place to discuss.
    I know the father of this girl, Sylvia Blau, who told her
    that we'll meet at home.
    I'll come home.
    And you go home when the war is over.
    And he had to leave.
    How long were you in Auschwitz?
    I was in Auschwitz for four months.
    And what kind of work did you do?
    What was your daily life like?
    In Auschwitz, you didn't do anything.
    That was the worst thing.
    They did not take us there to work or to do something.
    That wasn't the purpose of Auschwitz.
    And we, who were still alive, they
    kept us there for a reason.
    You see, they needed workers in factories.
    It was almost the end of the war.
    This was 1944.
    And they thought that they can still have some use out of us.
    Their men were in the war, the Germans.
    And they needed ammunition.
    They needed production.
    And they took us to these factories to work for them.
    From Auschwitz?
    From Auschwitz.
    You left Auschwitz--
    They selected transports.
    But you know, they did all kinds of selections over there.
    At one time, they asked girls over 16 to sign up for work.
    But they needed just that many for that particular transport.
    Those were the ones who were tattooed.
    I wasn't tattooed.
    Only those who left Auschwitz were tattooed.
    You never knew the reason why they did anything over there.
    You see, soon after we arrived there, we had Zaehlappells.
    Had what?
    That means-- Zaehlappells.
    That means counting.
    Twice a day, they had to count us, make sure
    that we don't run away.
    There was no way to running away.
    Our camp had tall barbed wire fence.
    Plus, it was electrified.
    Nobody could go close to that fence.
    They had a barrier type of row that you're not
    allowed to go there.
    But I remember I witnessed once a girl
    whose brother from the opposite camp threw over a package
    to her.
    And it caught on the barbed wire.
    And she went to get it.
    And she was electrified.
    And she died holding on to the camp-- on the fence,
    she was hanging on the fence.
    Immediately, there were whistle blowing.
    And they shoved us quickly back into our barracks
    so we wouldn't see it what's happening.
    And, of course, we knew at that time
    that it is very dangerous to go close to that fence.
    Were you told not to go near the fence?
    Yes, definitely.
    Like, for instance, they will select--
    they will call at one of these Zaehlappells, one
    of these counting sessions, they will select out
    the older women who they didn't see, they missed,
    they skipped at the time we arrived,
    and younger looking children.
    And we never saw them--
    I remember a young girl.
    She was very fat.
    She was selected out from the group, pointed out.
    She's going to another camp.
    We never knew why.
    We never knew where she was going.
    Were you, at this point aware, of the extermination going on
    at Auschwitz?
    No.
    I remember an incident in August when the roof was leaking.
    So men came to fix our roof.
    And we asked him, did you see our parents?
    Did you see the children?
    Which camp are they?
    We were sure they are here somewhere.
    They came in to the same station.
    And he said, well, don't you think about them anymore.
    They are dead already.
    You know?
    And he spoke in Yiddish to us.
    We almost clobbered him.
    We didn't want to believe him.
    He's only scaring us.
    We didn't want to believe such cruelty exists.
    Why would they be killed?
    Or where?
    But there were a lot of them who knew the truth.
    And there was nothing to talk about.
    And we hope it is not true.
    Deep in ourselves, we knew that it is a bad place to be.
    But we didn't talk about it.
    And we only hoped that it isn't true.
    What kind of food did you receive?
    We got one meal a day.
    And it was some kind of a mush, you would call it.
    It consisted of barley, some vegetables, and once in a while
    a little bit of meat in it, bits of scraps.
    And we have our pharmacist's wife from my community.
    She was with us.
    She was my mother's age.
    But somehow she's very skinny.
    And she came in into our group.
    And she ran around telling us girls, listen,
    I analyzed the food.
    And this food is pretty good.
    As long as they give us a food that is nourishable,
    you got to eat it.
    Nobody could eat that food.
    It was so salty.
    They put something in the food in the kitchen,
    later we learned, so to stop our menstruation.
    I don't know what kind of a additive it was.
    They call it brome.
    I don't know what it was.
    Did that work?
    Apparently, it did because nobody had a period
    during the time we were there.
    In fact, a young woman said, I am pregnant.
    And so we finally figured out that she wasn't pregnant.
    But she wasn't the only one who skipped her menstrual period.
    And, of course, I said before the Germans
    liked us very clean.
    In June, we were marched to go to Birkenau, again,
    to take a bath.
    Once a month, they gave us a bath.
    Birkenau was close by?
    Close by.
    Apparently, that is where the crematoriums were.
    Because this is the railroad station, brought the people,
    they processed them.
    And then they met their destiny somewhere.
    Whenever we went to the bath, to take a bath and disinfection,
    it was called to disinfect yourself, not to take a bath.
    They will sprinkle powder on our head.
    So some kind of a powder to clear us
    from lice, or whatever, and then go to take a bath.
    Used to throw in our clothes, our one dress.
    And you never got back the same dress, of course.
    At one time, I got a blue dress with an open back.
    It was a torn back.
    And, of course, it was summer.
    So it didn't matter.
    In the daytime, it was very hot.
    In the evening, it was very cold in Auschwitz.
    But it was kind of a life that we lived there.
    In the morning they will wake us up at 5 o'clock
    in the morning to go out and prepare to be counted.
    The preparation was to go to the washroom.
    They had a washroom with faucets running for a whole hour.
    It was a rusty water.
    And they told us 100 times not to drink that water
    because it is contaminated.
    It's only good to wash yourself.
    And you had to wash yourself, of course.
    So you sprinkled water over your face.
    And you rinse your mouth with it.
    And that was the time that you were
    allowed to go to the bathroom.
    And opposite this barrack--
    they assigned a barrack for these cleanliness.
    And the other barrack was the toilets.
    Over there too, probably 200 people fitted in at one time.
    They had cemented platform with holes in it.
    And so you went to the bathroom and--
    With 200 other people at the same time?
    Yes, of course.
    It was one barrack at one end assigned for this.
    And in the other end of the camp was also another toilet
    and another washroom.
    That was 5 o'clock in the morning.
    It was cold and the cold water and hungry.
    And then they let us stand outside until 7 o'clock
    when the SS will come and count us.
    And at that time, they will serve us
    some kind of a breakfast.
    It was a liquid cereal.
    If they would have given it to you
    in one bowl for each person, well, we battled with it.
    But they gave to each row a pot.
    You drink a little bit.
    And the next one drinks a little bit.
    And the one who was very hungry said, hey, you took two drinks.
    And, of course, it was very rough.
    But we had one good meal a day, as I said, the barley soup.
    And that was at noontime.
    In the evening when they counted us again,
    that is when they gave us a slice of bread.
    It would have been easy if they sliced
    the bread in that kitchen and gave each one a lump of bread.
    They did not do that.
    They gave one bread to a row of girls.
    So five girls had to divide the bread.
    We didn't have a knife to divide.
    We just looked at that bread.
    Somehow, we got a hold of a knife to cut our bread.
    And it went from row to row to cut, slice our bread.
    When new transports came and we saw
    them dressed up so beautiful--
    I still remember when Budapest, people came in from Pest.
    And we heard them speaking Hungarian.
    So we started hollering, where are you coming from,
    to over the fence.
    We were outside at that time when this transport lined up.
    And we saw them dressed up so beautifully.
    And they told us, we come from Budapest.
    Oh, yes?
    Do you have a knife?
    Throw us over a knife.
    That's the only thing we ask from them.
    We knew that they cannot--
    they will be confiscated from them, everything.
    Lots of them looked at us, oh, these are crazy people.
    Look how they holler.
    And they really didn't look like normal--
    we didn't look like normal people anymore,
    shaven and black dresses and torn rags
    and hollering and crying and talking at the same time.
    And those people didn't want to believe us that we are actually
    normal people.
    But some of them said, hey, these people
    are asking for something.
    And a lot of them did throw in knives to us.
    And this is how we had knives to cut our bread in the row.
    What did you do from the time you had the breakfast
    until the evening, or noontime?
    They kept us in the barracks on your bed.
    They wouldn't let you go out.
    They didn't give you any work.
    And that was Auschwitz.
    And, you see, had plenty of time to think of your dear ones
    and just think and do nothing.
    And that was the worst thing.
    You just couldn't do anything.
    Did you lose weight, do you think?
    Yes.
    We were skinny to the bone.
    Did you become ill at all?
    I was lucky.
    I don't know why.
    I was skinny and apparently very strong
    because I did not get sick.
    I mean sick not to be able to stand up in a row,
    because a lot of girls taller than me
    and heavier and stronger looking, so to speak,
    will faint in the row until the SS came to count us.
    It happened already that it was a rainy day.
    And it took longer for him to come.
    They let us stand in the rain.
    And we still had to stand up straight
    when he finally came with his raincoat on to count us.
    It happened already.
    He didn't count right.
    Or some sick people couldn't come to sit outside.
    They used to put down the sick people in a row
    to sit down with a blanket.
    They couldn't stand up.
    They also had to be counted.
    And for some reason, it was miscounted.
    They called it off again.
    And they asked us to stay longer because they had to recount.
    Were you ever beaten?
    It was a torture.
    Well, I avoided the beating.
    Were any of the other girls--
    Yes.
    --beaten?
    For what reason?
    If you got into somebody's way, in the middle of the day--
    this is why they kept us closed.
    They didn't want us to see the transports coming.
    They didn't want us to talk to them.
    So that's the main reason they kept us locked up.
    And many of them ran out.
    I was one of them who ran out a lot because I just
    couldn't hold so long until they allowed
    you to go to the bathroom.
    And I just had to get out.
    And I remember I ran into my--
    Stefka, Stefka was her name, the girl who took care on us.
    The Polish girl?
    The Polish girl.
    And she said to me, where are you going?
    Don't you know over there they are going to kill you?
    And I said, I had to go.
    You better-- I managed to run out.
    And she slapped me several times for wanting to run out.
    But otherwise, I avoided her.
    And I avoided everyone else who had anything in their hand
    to be able to be slapped.
    Did you have any kind of religious service
    at all in the barracks?
    Were you able to do anything together in any religious form?
    No.
    We only prayed within ourselves and quietness.
    You see, in July, they decided they're
    going to bring the disinfection project here into the camp.
    For some reason, they didn't take us out of the bathhouse.
    But once a month, they had to sprinkle powder on us.
    And they had to do something so we don't get sick.
    So they brought some equipment into our camp.
    And at the washroom, they washed and they dry
    cleaned our clothes.
    They put it in some kind of a machine,
    like a washing machine, a circular washing machine that
    tumbles, and with some powder in it or what.
    And that's called clean.
    And we got back a dress here and there.
    You say you were in Auschwitz for four months.
    How did you leave?
    And when?
    After the four month, a lot of things
    happened in Auschwitz, like unusual sign-ups,
    never knew where you go, unusual Zaehlappell.
    They counted us extra in the middle of the day once.
    And you had to just march back into the barracks.
    Nothing happened.
    We had Mengele came once in the middle of the day to count us.
    And I had a friend who had an allergy.
    And because of the food she ate, she was all broken up that day.
    And she said, oh, I am terrible afraid
    he's going to take me out from the row,
    and I don't want to leave you girls.
    And so she tried to explain him she has an allergy from home.
    She doesn't have the medicine what she used to take.
    And he said, I know.
    She doesn't have to explain it to me.
    And he let her go.
    Now, this was an unusual thing for a doctor
    like him to let her go.
    She was all broken up like with measles, you know.
    And here, he decided to let her live.
    She never came home, of course, in the end of the war.
    But that one instance, he let her come back with us
    into the barracks.
    Another thing happened in Auschwitz in my barracks,
    a baby was born there.
    That was an unusual case.
    And it was in August.
    They had to report the baby was born.
    And the SS woman came.
    They were not aware that the woman was pregnant when she--
    Well, she was hidden by every one of us.
    We knew that she was pregnant.
    But nobody-- so we managed to hide her
    where she wasn't selected out.
    But after the baby was born, the SS woman came.
    And--
    Who delivered the baby?
    Well, there were some women who delivered the baby.
    We only knew in the morning that there is a baby.
    We all went to see the baby.
    And when the SS woman came, she said, it's a beautiful baby.
    And what name are you going to give the baby?
    And she was very kind.
    But next day, they moved her.
    We never know where to.
    The woman and the baby?
    And the baby, yes.
    They moved them together.
    I don't know if she came home.
    You mentioned that Dr. Mengele was at this barracks,
    at this camp.
    Yeah.
    Were you ever examined by him?
    Well, the only examination he gave me,
    he told me I'm a big girl and I should go to the left.
    You see, later on, I learned that he
    was called the Angel of Death.
    He had that power to send people to the death chamber
    or to live.
    There was no reason why one should live and one should die.
    It was just a selection process.
    This group goes there.
    This group-- besides they didn't have
    that much room in those crematoriums at one time.
    So they had to start with the older people and the younger
    people.
    I don't know what their destination--
    what their plan was with us exactly at that moment.
    But in September, I have to mention one thing,
    we got quilts in Auschwitz.
    In August, a lot of rain was going on.
    And Stefka, she told us we're going to get blankets.
    Isn't that a good thing?
    The Germans are giving us blankets.
    So the blankets came in.
    It was quilts.
    And everyone got one quilt. So we
    had to decide, put the quilt underneath or put the quilt
    to cover us?
    So I think we decided to cover us with the quilt
    because it was cold.
    And we were used already to the hard boards.
    So--
    There were no mattresses?
    No mattresses.
    That was too good for us.
    But anyway, as I said, many selections
    happened in Auschwitz.
    And this one time in September, September the 6th,
    when there was a big selection, they looked for young girls
    with good vision.
    And I fell in into that selection.
    I said I have a good vision, and I did
    a lot of embroidering at home.
    And they selected me for that.
    And a lady from my community asked
    me to tell him that I can't see and I
    used to use glasses and things like that because you
    don't know where they're going to take you.
    And I figured I was already selected out.
    My parents, my brothers, my sisters nobody was there.
    So there is no good reason for me to stay here.
    Wherever they take me, it won't be worse than Auschwitz.
    And I didn't listen to her because I figured I cannot do
    anything to mold my destiny.
    I will just have to tell them the truth.
    I have a good vision.
    And they selected me into this transport.
    What happened?
    They took us into another camp across the street
    from this one.
    It was called Camp A. And it was a more modern camp,
    a newer type of barracks.
    These barracks, once upon a time, were horse barracks.
    Over there, they had like a ranch type
    home, everything on one floor.
    The windows, we had windows.
    These barracks did not have windows.
    They just had big gates like in a stall.
    They were horse barracks.
    So we said, maybe this looks already better.
    How many did they select?
    They selected probably 400 or so.
    But over there, we got a test.
    They actually tested our eyesight.
    They brought from the factory--
    later on, we found out they were engineers from a factory.
    They needed workers.
    And they came down here to select.
    They had a very large selection here.
    They could pick whatever they wanted.
    And we had to count.
    They had brought along some little gauges,
    maybe 2 inch big.
    And tiny little lines were in this gauge.
    We had to count them, how much we see in a certain amount.
    I don't know, centimeter or so.
    Apparently, I passed because my vision
    was very good at that time.
    And to today's day, I really think
    I have to thank to my vision that I'm still alive.
    And while we were there, in this A Camp, nothing happened.
    They were giving us food--
    Better food than you had before?
    I don't think it was better.
    But we were used to that food already.
    So that's what it was.
    It was food.
    It was an unfinished camp.
    Windows were not put up yet.
    It looked like they were still working.
    They didn't have barbed fence around this camp.
    We felt a little more free in this camp.
    But it was a temporary place.
    And after a few, let's see, about two weeks,
    in September 11, they said they take us and give us a bath.
    So they took us to--
    This is 1944?
    1944.
    It was in September 11.
    We took a bath.
    And to my surprise, they gave us underwear.
    Oh.
    Before that you had no underwear?
    I just had a dress.
    And I got a nice blue dress.
    And I felt kind of dressed up.
    And they also gave us food for the road.
    Were you aware at this point-- this is 1944.
    Were you thinking about the war?
    Did you get any news about what was happening at all?
    No news came into Auschwitz.
    So you knew nothing about what was happening with the war?
    We knew the war was going on.
    But we did not know how far they are and where they are.
    You never heard any bombing or any noises or anything?
    We heard planes going by Auschwitz.
    When we were outside, we prayed and hoped
    a bomb is falling down here.
    How come nobody knows about this God's forsaken place?
    Nobody bombs Auschwitz?
    If it is a war, what's going on here?
    Somebody should know about it.
    We used to holler up to the airplanes.
    Apparently, there was their own airplanes.
    We never knew what was going on what we were there.
    And here, as I said, we were dressed and ready for a trip.
    They put us in a cattle car again.
    We didn't know where we are going.
    They didn't tell us.
    But we were the 250 girls were selected out of the 400
    to go to this particular factory.
    And we traveled for a few days.
    And in September the 12th, we left Auschwitz, 250 girls.
    And on September the 14th, on a Thursday,
    we arrived to Hatlerdorf.
    How do you spell that?
    H-A-T-L-E-R-D-O-R-F. That's a German name, Hatlerdorf.
    Dorf is a village.
    And we got there during the night in the evening.
    And it was dark.
    And the SS women were waiting for us.
    We came along with SS personnels from Auschwitz
    who will be in charge of us during all
    our stay in that factory.
    And the transportation for us from the railroad
    station to the factory was probably 4 kilometers,
    I would say.
    We walked.
    The only thing they were very surprised
    when we got into the factory, they asked us
    where is your packages?
    Where are your packages?
    Your clothes?
    Your packages?
    According to those people, we supposed to have packages.
    And I said, what packages?
    We have with us, we were glad we had underwear and a dress.
    Those people didn't know, not know about Auschwitz.
    Everything was done in such secrecy.
    Were those people, the local people?
    They were local people.
    These were-- this was in Czechoslovakia, ,
    a factory called the Lorenz factory.
    Lorenz?
    Lorenz.
    Used to be a radio factory.
    And during the war, it was transformed.
    Did you, at that point, start to work in this factory?
    They taught you something there to do?
    Yes.
    It was like piecework, but easy to learn.
    I was given a stove to operate, an electric stove, where--
    it was a stamping place where we stamped down little glasses
    with tubes.
    They looked like little tubes, glasses with tubes.
    Later on, it went upstairs where they added some kind of wires
    into it.
    We made parts to some kind of a bomber.
    And this was a factory designed for that.
    And they needed-- young girls could do things like this,
    you know.
    And where did you live?
    Where did they have you living?
    Our living quarters was on the third floor of the factory.
    They took the attic.
    And they fixed it up with bunk beds.
    But this time, we had one bunk to each girl.
    They actually treated us like human beings.
    And we had two blankets and a pillow on every bed.
    And coming from Auschwitz, this was heaven to us.
    And, in fact, we bunched up next to each other.
    We figured they would probably put two of us in a bed.
    How is-- such a good thing couldn't happen to us
    to put one.
    And so the SS woman comes, what are you sitting two on a bed?
    One to each bed.
    Oh, we looked at each other.
    Hey, that's fantastic.
    Each one had two blankets.
    So it was nice.
    And they let us rest until Monday.
    By the way, we got very good food there.
    Because we were workers, they had to give us food.
    And so we had a very good meal in the evening.
    It was always cooked potatoes with a peel on and a soup.
    That was a good meal.
    On Sundays, I think we had some meat too.
    But potatoes, standard every night.
    And a lot of mustard soup, I never
    ate so much mustard soup in my life as they served over there.
    But apparently that was the food.
    And we were treated pretty good, so to speak.
    We worked seven hours every day.
    Were you paid?
    Paid?
    No.
    But they were very alarmed that they didn't send clothes
    with us.
    I mean the owner of the factory.
    We should get some kind of clothes.
    We didn't need anything because we stayed indoors.
    We went downstairs was the factory.
    And our dorm was in the third floor.
    We had a washroom for ourselves, for the workers.
    And it had probably 20 washtubs in it with warm water and soap
    every day.
    So it was something human I think.
    Anyway, I thought that way.
    But before you went to that bathroom,
    there was an SS woman standing at the door.
    And you had to stand up straight and say,
    may I go to the bathroom, please?
    That was already in the factory, you know.
    But she was over us.
    And she had to know exactly where we are going
    and what we are doing.
    We had to answer to these SS women.
    Were they German?
    German, yes.
    And we had a new transport coming in, in November.
    Another 150 girls came in from Auschwitz.
    Apparently, we were good workers.
    And they asked for another 150 girls.
    So by the time in November, we were already
    400 girls over there.
    They put up more beds.
    And kitchen grew and so on.
    The kitchen was in the back yard.
    And they brought up the food every day.
    I started an interesting thing over there.
    A lot of girls got sick, and they couldn't digest the food.
    They could eat only toast.
    And as I started this potato baking,
    since I was working with the ovens,
    I had two ovens to work with.
    One was to stamp this little glasses.
    And the other one is to dry certain things.
    And under this trace where I was drying,
    it was an electric stove.
    I would shove in the potatoes what
    the girls stole at the kitchen.
    And I will bake it for them.
    For every five potatoes, I got one potato free for myself.
    That was my business.
    And that potato, I would take it into the sick room
    for those people who couldn't eat the food.
    And I will toast their bread on those ovens
    where I was drying those glasses.
    So they soon knew me as Potato Sandra.
    Everybody called me, would you please do this for me.
    My friend told me, you are crazy.
    They are going to find you.
    They send you back to Auschwitz because they
    kept on threatening us if you talk
    to the workers in the factory.
    See, we were working there, but they were foremen
    from the city, German foremen.
    And we were not allowed to talk to them, anything.
    We were silent workers.
    And if we talked to anyone in the factory,
    the SS woman was right there, and she will punish us for it.
    At one time--
    What kind of punishment?
    She sent us to bed one day without food
    because we were talking-- and somebody
    was talking in the factory.
    And next day, we acted very weak.
    And we decided we're not going to give out work
    if they don't feed us.
    And so the director of the factory told the SS woman you
    cannot punish these women with food.
    You must feed them.
    They are not giving out work.
    So she didn't do that anymore.
    But it happened that food was delayed for us.
    And at one time, she punished the girl by cutting her hair.
    And that was a terrible thing because our hair was just
    starting to grow in, and we just began
    to look like human beings.
    And she punished that girl by cutting her hair.
    And we were all watching it.
    And it was a very traumatic experience for us
    to see her being punished like that.
    We'll take a break right now, Sandra.
    And we'll continue your story when we come back.
    OK.
    I'm Sally Weinberg.
    I'm interviewing Sandra Mandel, a Holocaust survivor.
    The project is sponsored by the National
    Council of Jewish Women, Cleveland Section.
    Sandra, we left off when you were
    working in the factory in Hatlerdorf in Czechoslovakia.
    Yes.
    Can you continue your story about your work there
    and what happened to your life from that point on?
    In the factory, as I mentioned, we worked early in the morning
    until 7 o'clock in the evening, from 6:00 to 7:00
    in the evening.
    We had a half an hour break at lunchtime, at which time
    we came upstairs.
    That is where our living quarters were.
    And it was going on like that.
    One day went into the other.
    At Christmas time, we put up a nice Christmas show
    for the SS women, a choir.
    We formed a choir for them.
    And we were part of the worker's group.
    I was considered as a hard worker in that factory
    because I worked with two ovens and I was operating these two
    ovens back and forth.
    So I got a bonus on Christmas time.
    I got a bowl of potato salad.
    It was delicious.
    And you had to be privileged to get it because it
    wasn't for everybody.
    There is one more thing I want to mention about this place.
    One day, they told us somebody is coming for inspection.
    We have to fix our beds beautifully,
    so it looks nice and neat, and sit on our bed.
    And soon, we found out who came to inspect us.
    It was Dr. Mengele.
    It was in March.
    Of what year?
    1945.
    We found out that in March 1945, Auschwitz didn't exist anymore.
    How did you find this out?
    That was later, after the war, because in January, Auschwitz
    was bombed by the Russians and he had to fled from there.
    And he became the doctor over there,
    over the other camps from Auschwitz.
    So he came to visit our place.
    And he recognized one of the girls
    with beautiful blonde hair.
    And he said, boy, you look beautiful today.
    And for the first time, I heard him talk like a mensch.
    He looked human, and he even joked with us.
    And he asked one of the girls, would you
    like to go back to Auschwitz?
    And the girl just shuddered, and he shuddered with her and said,
    you know, I don't like to go there back, either.
    So that's what I know about Dr. Mengele.
    He came again later to see our camp, April the 10th.
    1945?
    1945.
    I mentioned that I had a very close friend, Clara,
    Clara Klein.
    She used to live in a nearby community back home
    and we've been very close friends.
    She took sick.
    She couldn't go to work.
    Was she in the factory with you?
    Us in the factory.
    And she was put in the sick room.
    There was one sick room with about eight beds.
    And the very young children who were there
    could not take the work they were doing.
    Many people worked at open gas.
    They blew these glass tubes on open flame,
    and apparently they got sick, and tuberculosis
    was very common in Europe.
    And these are the kids that couldn't digest the food,
    and I mentioned I toasted their bread.
    Clara went into this infirmary.
    And she tried to get out from there as soon as possible
    because there was a girl who died
    and she knew this is the death room.
    And she was taken into the city at one point to have an X-ray.
    She had a chest X-ray.
    And they found out she had bronchitis,
    but they had no medication for it.
    So she said the only thing I could eat just
    eat something better, so I gave her all the potatoes I
    could get through my business.
    I had a place where to deposit my potatoes.
    In the camp, many times in April--
    April the 13th, we worked until 5 o'clock at one point,
    and they sent us up early.
    Apparently, there wasn't much to do anymore
    so they sent us upstairs.
    We didn't know exactly why.
    In May, May the 5th, was a turning point
    in the Lawrence factory.
    Louisa, the girl who was--
    she was also a survivor.
    She came along with a transport and she was the leader of us.
    She spoke German beautifully, so they
    made her to be the leader of the whole group.
    And she came to us and she said, listen,
    I'm going to take your names and birthplaces, because maybe
    soon we will need that.
    The war is about to end.
    Was that the first time you heard that the war was
    coming to a close?
    We heard rumors, and the rumors always came from the washroom
    because that is where we gathered
    and that is where we talked.
    And the rumors came from a very good source.
    We had French men working in our factory who
    used to fix our machineries.
    They were French prisoners of war.
    They lived in Hatlerdorf in the community.
    We lived on top of the factory in the outskirts
    of this little village.
    But they were the ones-- there were two girls in our group
    who spoke French.
    They took French in school.
    And they communicated with them.
    They would bring us the news, that Budapest doesn't exist
    anymore, they already fallen into the enemies there anymore,
    and the Russians took over Hungary.
    A lot of news came in through these workers.
    So when she came to tell us-- and it was very confidential.
    She told us, we are still in their hands.
    You're not allowed to talk.
    We don't know what their plans are with us.
    Are they going to march us away from here or are
    they going to abandon us?
    Or what will happen, we never know.
    They still they still have the gun pointing to us
    because they worked.
    How old were you at this point?
    How old was I?
    It was in 1945.
    I must have been 21 years old, close to 21.
    20, I would say.
    And May the 7th, at 10 o'clock in the morning,
    we went down to work that day.
    But at 10 o'clock in the morning, all electricity,
    all the factories stopped.
    We went on with the work in the morning as usual.
    At 10 o'clock, everything stopped.
    The electricity turned off.
    The lights went out.
    And we just looked at each other.
    An announcement came.
    "Pick everything that you keep in this factory"-- somebody
    had a spoon there, somebody had a fork,
    or whatever, little packages we left in the factories
    many times.
    "Take all belongings with you until further notice."
    They did not tell us the war was ended.
    They just sent us back upstairs, and they locked us up there,
    because every night we were locked upstairs in our dorm.
    In fact, we witnessed, during our stay
    in the factory, air raids.
    They would rush us up to the attic.
    They locked us up.
    And the rest of the workers and the SS
    would run to the shelters.
    And we were watching them from our attic upstairs,
    how everybody was running to the shelters.
    And if the bomb comes, who cares for the Jewish girls?
    They will just go up in flame with the rest of the factory.
    But thank God it didn't happen.
    But we witnessed-- we knew that we were still
    prisoners at that time.
    So May the 8th, we were told that we
    can stay in the factory.
    The war is over.
    And you know how we knew that the war was over?
    We went down to the bathroom and an SS woman was still there.
    And we stopped and asked her if we
    are allowed to go to the bathroom,
    and she didn't answer us.
    So we passed her and she didn't call us back.
    We knew the war is over.
    If she did not hit us for passing her,
    we knew the war is over.
    We wandered down to the yard because we wanted
    to know how far we can go.
    So we did go all the way downstairs, all the four
    flights from the top of the attic, and it was wonderful.
    We were able to go down to the backyard of the factory
    and come back upstairs.
    And other girls said, did you know that you
    can go down to the backyard?
    So we knew the war was over.
    And May the 8, that was the day when they told us
    that the factory is closed.
    We can stay here and wait for the Russians
    to come in and liberate us, or if we want to--
    we had to make a decision-- walk down to the nearby city, what
    is Hatlerdorf.
    And over there, they are already in, and we should do that.
    So we made a decision, six of us, decided to walk down.
    And it felt beautiful to be a free person.
    We walked in the middle of the road.
    It was kind of a little walk.
    I don't know, two kilometers, I suppose, to this little town.
    And of course, I had two girls from my hometown,
    and Clara with me and some other girls, that we walked together.
    One was Blau Sylvia, whose father told her,
    in Auschwitz, we meet at home, and she stuck together with us.
    And Clara had a friend from her hometown.
    And we all walked together.
    When we got there, the French prisoners
    who used to work in the factory were just
    about ready to leave home.
    They were first to go home.
    And they gave us-- their quarters
    were given to the Jewish girls to stay until transportation
    will be for them to go home.
    So it was nice.
    We were six people in a room.
    We had a bunk.
    Wait, were you rejoicing?
    Were you happy?
    Yeah, we were very happy and.
    See, this was a Czechoslovakian territory.
    And the authorities came up to tell us
    that we are going to be fed.
    There is an open kitchen for us.
    Any time of the day, we could go in and eat.
    Well, they had breakfast and they had noon
    and they had supper, and I think we were always hungry.
    There was no time that somebody would say, well,
    you want to eat?
    Yes, we were always ready to eat.
    We were so very hungry, because toward the end,
    they cut our breads in 10 slices at the factory.
    There was enough food to go around,
    so food was very scarce.
    And it was just about the time for us to be liberated
    in order to survive.
    And so that kitchen was just the most marvelous kitchen
    that I will always remember.
    And we stayed there for about two weeks or three weeks.
    May the 29th, 1945, we were ready to go home.
    They said the Hungarians are going home.
    Every day they announced who is going home.
    The Romanians are going home.
    Who made the announcement?
    Well, it was from the Czech government, officials.
    Was it a newspaper or a bulletin board?
    No.
    It was at this dining hall we got all
    of our instructions and news.
    Announced out loud?
    Announced out loud, so we knew.
    And they told us, go and welcome the Russians when they came in.
    We make a celebration.
    They freed you.
    So we had to go and say hello to the new people who really
    freed us, but soon we learned that they
    were very wild people.
    All they wanted is watches and girls.
    So the Czech government put up curfews for us.
    9 o'clock, we had to be in our place.
    And they had soldiers watching our borders
    so nobody will intrude.
    So we really were protected and I think
    it was very nice to know that.
    Did you at that point try to find any of your family?
    At that point, our aim was to go home.
    To go back, everybody back to their own city?
    Everybody wanted to go home.
    And we hoped, still hoped, that somewhere our family survived.
    The way we survived here, maybe they survived somewhere else.
    And finally, we got a freight car,
    because that was the only transportation they had
    those days, and we left home.
    We got food for the road, bread and liverwurst,
    and we had utensils at that time already.
    And we made some suits for ourselves from blankets.
    We sewed by hand.
    Everybody was a seamstress over there.
    We tried to fix our hair, and so on.
    So we started to begin to be human again.
    But our train stopped.
    It didn't go very far because it was right after the war
    and there was no room for our train to go through.
    So they took this locomotive from here
    and they put it to a passenger train.
    So we had to wait and wait.
    And nothing happened, so we walked into that city
    where we waited.
    And we found out there was a station not far from there,
    and the Red Cross was there serving out hot soup and bread.
    Wherever we went, the Red Cross always
    showed up to help the people after the war.
    At one point--
    Was that the American Red Cross?
    No.
    It must have been the Czechoslovakian Red Cross.
    We couldn't even speak to those people.
    We didn't know their language.
    But it was always a place where there
    was Kitchens and food prepared for the people who came home
    from the war.
    And this is the only way we survived.
    We got to a little community where
    there was an open kitchen, where they served
    scrambled eggs all day long.
    It was scrambled eggs and bread.
    And so that was wonderful.
    We slept in a school room and we went in for scrambled eggs.
    And then over there, one of my friends
    got acquainted with a Romanian officer,
    who took home his own people, back home to Romania.
    And we said, we are Romanians, too.
    We come from Romania.
    So she told us, don't speak Hungarian,
    because we spoke both languages.
    Speak only Romanian, because the Hungarians were
    on the German side and they think you as an enemy
    if you speak Hungarian.
    So we became Romanians again and we spoke Romanian.
    And this officer helped us get to Prague, to the big city,
    and from there to Budapest.
    And how did you get there?
    By train.
    But every train was laden with people.
    People were hanging from windows.
    People were sitting in top of the train just to get home.
    Soldiers were all over.
    And this officer said, toward his soldiers,
    you know these girls?
    These are soldiers, too.
    They suffered plenty in the war and we're
    going to take them home.
    And I remember, they threw us through the window
    into the train in order to get home to Budapest.
    So that was my trip to Budapest.
    How far was Budapest from your small community?
    Well, see, we went first to Prague in Czechoslovakia.
    And then from Czechoslovakia, we waited through the night--
    waiting through the night wasn't so easy, too,
    but at least we knew we were going home.
    And you were free.
    We were free.
    In Budapest, we had a beautiful welcome
    from the Jewish community.
    At the train station, there were people there waiting already
    for the people who came home from the war.
    And they had donuts and some kind of a drink,
    I don't remember.
    Some kind of a fruit punch or something they had.
    And they told us that we have a place for you.
    And they had beds, clean beds.
    And the Joint worked in Budapest to welcome
    the displaced persons.
    And they are the ones who fixed up papers
    for us so we can continue with our trip from Budapest.
    We got a train to Nagyvárad.
    We went home.
    We went to Nagyvárad, and over there, from there,
    we took a little train that took me home.
    To your little town?
    To my little town.
    My friend stopped at her community.
    We said goodbye.
    I didn't see her since then.
    Our pad stopped there.
    And I'm still looking for her.
    Somebody told me that she is here in the United States,
    but I didn't find her yet.
    And when I came home--
    Is that your friend Clara?
    Clara.
    When I came home to Romania, that was in June already.
    Of what year?
    1945.
    '45.
    There was one old lady who wasn't
    deported from our community because she was
    a widow of the First World War.
    And this police chief said to her, you are immune.
    You do not have to go with anyone
    because you are a widow of the first war, and we honor that.
    And they didn't want to take her.
    And she begged them and she cried, please take me along.
    Don't leave me alone.
    All my Jewish people are leaving.
    In fact, she had a husband, a second husband,
    but they were married only in the Jewish way.
    Because she didn't want to lose her pension,
    so she wanted to go so badly, but they wouldn't take her.
    This is the lady--
    we called her Aunt Helen--
    who waited for us.
    She will cook for us and she welcomed us home.
    How many of you were at that point going back
    to your little town?
    Well, by the time I came home, the people
    who went on forced labor, the men were home already.
    They came home much sooner than we did because they
    were liberated much sooner.
    I think in January of 1944 they already came home.
    Were any of your relatives among the ones that came back?
    Well, not in this community.
    I had no relatives in this community.
    But many of the men came home, but not the women.
    The women went into Auschwitz with the children.
    They did not come home.
    Only two women came home, one who did not have
    a child and one who had a baby.
    She had a baby when she went in and she gave her baby
    to her mother, to the grandmother.
    And she came home, the baby didn't.
    So two wives came home in our community,
    and they both live in Israel now.
    So I stayed there for a while in my hometown.
    And Paul, whom I knew from before, came down to get me.
    Who is Paul?
    Paul is my husband.
    He heard about me because the names
    that Louisa took in the camp, in the factory where we worked,
    she sent them in to Romania.
    Because we came from Romania, all our names that she took
    were sent into our communities, to the authorities.
    And they were placed on bulletin boards
    everywhere so survivors could see who is alive,
    and he heard about me being alive.
    And where did you meet at that point?
    He came to Borod.
    And you knew him when you were younger?
    Yes.
    You were friends?
    We were friends.
    He used to be the teacher in my community, the Hebrew teacher.
    That was in November.
    He helped me dug out the tub.
    And of course, from there, I went to a cousin of mine,
    to Sibiu.
    How do you spell that?
    S-I-B-I-U. And I stayed there with her.
    And in November of 1945, Paul decided
    Romania isn't a place for us to stay, we are going to America.
    But we had to get there, and by then, the Iron Curtain
    closed all the gates and there was no way to get out legally.
    Israel didn't exist yet.
    So in November, he just left with other guys.
    And they just walked through the borders,
    to Hungary, and from there to Germany, from there to Austria.
    And in Austria, they formed a committee, like a community,
    for all the displaced persons.
    And the Joint Distribution Committee
    again helped them survive.
    The food came from the Joint.
    A lot of people started working or planning or going and papers
    being made, and so on waiting, for a quarter to go somewhere.
    So this is where he sent somebody for me.
    There was a boy named David Stern who
    came to Romania to get his family out,
    two sisters and a brother-in-law,
    and I don't know who else.
    And he told him, when you go, bring my bride along.
    Were you married at that point?
    No, we were engaged.
    You were engaged.
    So that was the time when, in April, I got a long distance
    card, in 1946.
    The long distance call was very interesting.
    In Romania, you didn't get it to your house
    because nobody had telephones, but there
    was a telephone center where you could call in,
    like a post office.
    And they send you a notice that you
    have to be there at 4 o'clock tomorrow afternoon
    because somebody wants to talk to you.
    So this is how I got this long distance call.
    And David called me, and he told me
    he has a message and a long letter from Paul,
    and he wants me to go to Austria.
    And he told me the procedures and he told me
    when he is leaving.
    And of course, I made calls, made the arrangements
    here to go.
    I packed up.
    Now, what do you think I could take along from all
    the trousseau that I found?
    I found, actually, a real trousseau in my tub.
    I could only take along what I carried on my back
    in a backpack.
    So I put in it my father's praying shawl,
    my father's kettle, and some of the embroidery from my mother,
    what I still have.
    We had to walk.
    We were not going on a regular train to Hungary.
    You couldn't go.
    So you had to go walking through the borders.
    It was an illegal way of getting out.
    So you couldn't carry too many things.
    May the 1st was a holiday.
    It's a Labor Day type of holiday.
    This was 1946?
    '46 was the time when we crossed the Romanian border to Hungary,
    and we stayed in a farmhouse.
    You were traveling with this other family and David?
    Yes.
    And we were waiting there until a train passed by.
    And we hopped on the train.
    We paid our fare.
    We had already money with us at that time with little packages.
    And we spoke Hungarian.
    Again, we all spoke Hungarian.
    And we went home to Budapest.
    If anybody should have asked us, we
    didn't have any identifications at that time,
    but we didn't look very suspicious
    because we spoke Hungarian.
    And we got to Budapest, and the Joint Distribution Committee
    helped us.
    For 12 days we spent there.
    They got us papers to go to Vienna.
    I don't remember my name, what name they gave me.
    But this girl once lived in Vienna and they had her name,
    and I got her name with my picture on it.
    And so we traveled by train, in a normal passenger train,
    to Vienna.
    It was a nice trip, all six of us.
    When you got into Vienna, we were
    told we can sleep at the Rothschild Hospital.
    The Rothschild Hospital was converted.
    It wasn't a hospital at this time of the war.
    It was bombed, and so on.
    But there were a lot of mattresses
    available for passersby.
    You could get a mattress to sleep there
    until further travel.
    So the only thing, in order to get a mattress,
    you had to get some shots, because so many malaria
    and other things were coming in.
    So we were immunized and got our mattresses
    and went to sleep there.
    And from this immunization, we were so sick
    because it reacts on you.
    The shots are very dangerous, I guess.
    I was sick for three days with high fever.
    But after then, the food was there, was available for us.
    And we got new papers from Bregenz, Austria.
    Paul sent us our new identification cards
    as being local residents of Bregenz, Austria.
    Bregenz?
    How do you spell Bregenz?
    Bregenz.
    B-R-E-G-E-N-Z. Bregenz is a beautiful,
    little community on the Bodensee.
    Bodensee is a lake and it is the border of Switzerland.
    It's a very nice community, and by then it
    was an established Jewish community
    for displaced persons.
    Was anybody helping you at this point,
    other than the Jewish agencies?
    Were any of the local people--
    I really don't know.
    I don't know how we governed ourselves exactly.
    But I know this committee was very active,
    and Paul became the rabbi over there.
    And we had a beautiful temple, schul, so to speak.
    We had a Torah, and Jewish lifestyle began in Austria.
    And this is in Bregenz?
    Bregenz, Austria.
    And were you married then?
    Yes.
    We were married in July the 7th, 1946.
    It's very interesting.
    We didn't have clothes, too many, anyway.
    We started anew, from scraps and so on.
    But the bridal dress was very hard to get.
    One kibbutz in Germany owned a bridal dress,
    and one girl got married in our place.
    And she, a brother or somebody who lived in that kibbutz,
    brought the dress for her.
    And three brides got married in the same dress,
    and I was one of them.
    We lived in Bregenz and it was nice.
    We lived at the rooming houses.
    Actually, we rented a room, but then we
    were in touch with the brother in America.
    Your husband's brother.
    Yes.
    And he sent us a very nice wedding gift.
    When did your husband's brother come to America?
    He came after the First World War, maybe 1918.
    I don't remember exactly the date.
    But my husband didn't see him since he left Romania.
    But they had kept in touch?
    They kept in touch.
    And where did the brother live in America, what city?
    He lived in Cleveland, Ohio.
    And that was our destination, to come here.
    It was our aim to get to Cleveland,
    but that wasn't an easy road.
    From Bregenz, the quarter was still
    closed to come to America.
    The displaced persons quarter wasn't open yet.
    If your life was so nice in f why did you want to leave?
    Well, there was no reason to live there.
    It was a temporary place until we
    find our way to get to America.
    You wanted to leave Europe?
    Definitely.
    Actually, the Berihah is an organization
    formed by the Haganah.
    The Berihah worked with the underground and smuggled
    transport into Israel.
    We had to join the Berihah in Austria
    to get to Italy, because they will bring people to Italy,
    and from there they will go to Israel.
    And if not for the brother in America, in Cleveland,
    we would have gone to Israel.
    But of course, that was a very important thing,
    and that road was a very hard road.
    Were your husband's family all gone except for the brother?
    Nobody survived?
    He is the only survivor from his family
    and I am the only survivor from my family.
    See, there were children in this group
    that we crossed the Alps from Austria to Italy.
    And they would give sleeping pills for the children
    so they wouldn't cry at night, because we
    had to cross the Alps by foot.
    Our packages were taken by trucks.
    Trucks were passing by on the road,
    but people could not be in the truck.
    They would transport us to a certain place, the narrowest
    passage, where they could take the people across.
    And at night, they would drop us off on a field
    and the truck will go on.
    And in that field, we had people guides, who came along with us,
    of course.
    And we had a trail to follow.
    Were these guides from a Jewish Agency?
    How did you find-- or were they the local people?
    Well, I'm sure they had some local people who
    knew the roads.
    They were probably paid well to show them the roads.
    I am sure of that.
    Paid by whom?
    By the Jewish agencies.
    As I said, as far as I know, it was the Berihah
    who transported these people.
    They from Romania, from Czechoslovakia.
    We met all kinds of Jews.
    Even though you weren't necessarily going to Israel,
    they were helping anybody.
    Anybody who wanted to cross the border.
    And our first stop-- we had two nights to walk.
    And in the daytime, we just stayed put in a farmhouse.
    So you slept during the day and walked at night?
    Walked at night.
    Our stop in Italy was Chiari.
    Chiari is--
    How do you spell that?
    --was a very important stop.
    C-H-I-A-R-I. Chiari.
    In Italy?
    In Italy.
    We stayed there two weeks.
    That was almost like a rehabilitation camp.
    By the time the people got to this point,
    they were so exhausted from traveling, from everything,
    with children.
    I was lucky I didn't have a child yet.
    The Joint put up the most beautiful kitchen.
    That was the first time I saw sliced roast.
    I always saw roast at home in chunks.
    I never saw it sliced so beautifully.
    But they had the best cuts for this group because
    of the children and the people who
    had to take another road from here to Israel,
    and they had to build them up to be able to make that trip.
    So you see, this was a very important kitchen,
    and they had the best food that you can imagine for us.
    So here we were, waiting for our packages to arrive,
    because we had only a dress.
    That was all I had on my back.
    After two weeks, we left the group in Chiari.
    We met some people who lived in Rome.
    Were the Italians helpful to you at this point at all?
    Very helpful.
    From there, we went to Ostia, Lido de Roma.
    Ostia is the beach of Rome.
    How do you spell that?
    O-S-T-I-A. O-S-T-I-A. And in Lido de Roma--
    that is the same thing.
    Ostia, they called it lido in the beach, "beach of Rome."
    And as we got familiar with people and we met some people--
    and Paul, of course, met the rabbi who was over there--
    they invited us to live in the kibbutz.
    They formed a kibbutz.
    It's a transit camp, that's what it was, for people, until they
    go either to Israel, they have to go to America, or wherever.
    And the Joint, again, from Rome, will provide us
    with a lot of canned goods.
    And a lot of people already worked in Italy here,
    and they had a beautiful kitchen set up in this transit camp.
    And we got this camp from the Italian government.
    They gave us a villa to form our camp.
    It must have been some kind of a Nazi who lived in there.
    And so they just gave it to us to live until we needed it.
    I understand that the Russians have come out now,
    also have a stop in Ostia.
    I found that it looks like it is a very close place to Rome,
    where they can be helped because it's only a half an hour
    ride from Ostia to Rome with a little train.
    So we were in Rome often.
    And we lived in a place like Miami Beach.
    Ostia is a beautiful summer resort.
    So I got pregnant in Rome, in Ostia.
    And Barbara was born in February 26th, 1949.
    By then we already had papers sent in,
    and the quota opened up for the displaced persons
    to go to America.
    We had to send in a picture of Barbara after she was born,
    the baby with me, so she can be put on our affidavit
    so she could travel with us.
    She was nine months old by the time we came to America.
    And when did you leave?
    In 1949 in August, we were called in.
    Our papers were ready.
    We were called into the American consulate.
    And we were accepted.
    We went through all kinds of examinations,
    because only healthy people could
    come into the United States.
    They didn't want to get in any diseases or so on.
    So we passed.
    And they right away separated us, calling us Americans.
    They sent us to Salerno--
    Salerno is not far from Naples--
    to wait until they find a boat for us.
    This was still closed after the war.
    They didn't find a boat.
    So finally, we got a boat, and the name of the boat
    was Marina Jumper.
    And November the 9th, 1949, we left with the Marina Jumper
    to sail to America.
    And November the 21st, we got to the New York Harbor.
    You mean December?
    No, in November.
    It took only two weeks.
    20 days, something, 21 days.
    In November the 21st, we got on the boat, the 23rd.
    The 9th.
    The 9th, I'm sorry.
    The 21st we got to New York.
    We didn't stay long in New York.
    Who met you in New York?
    We had a cousin and I have an aunt in New York.
    My mother's brother and his wife lived in New York at that time.
    You were able to locate them?
    They came out to the harbor to meet us there.
    We didn't want to stay long in New York
    because my husband was very anxious to meet his brother.
    So two days later, it was November the 23rd
    that we came by train to Cleveland.
    Did you learn any English before you came to the United States?
    Yes.
    My sister-in-law used to correspond with us,
    and she told us, the most important thing for you
    to do while you are in Europe is learn the English language.
    And we took her advice.
    And I knew already a few English words,
    but of course, it wasn't very much, only to get by.
    But it was a memorable day when we came in.
    It was Thanksgiving Day, and we had a lot
    to be thankful for in this free country.
    That's when you arrived, in Cleveland on Thanksgiving Day?
    Thanksgiving Day.
    And what has happened to your life
    since you arrived in Cleveland?
    Tell us what your husband did, how you got along.
    We lived with my brother-in-law and sister-in-law
    for eight years.
    We learned the language.
    We Americanized a little bit.
    And after that, a small community not far
    from Cleveland--
    New Philadelphia, Ohio-- looked for a rabbi.
    It was during the high holidays.
    And my husband applied, and apparently they liked his
    chanting the services.
    And that was on Rosh Hashanah.
    And on Yom Kippur, they invited me and the children
    to go down there.
    What year was that?
    Let me see.
    It must have been 1963.
    How many children did you have at that point?
    Three daughters.
    Two girls were born here in America.
    In Cleveland?
    Your other two were born in Cleveland?
    Yes.
    Gina and Barbara were born in Cleveland.
    What is your daughters' names?
    Barbara is my oldest daughter.
    She was born in Italy.
    And Regina.
    Regina?
    Regina and Sally.
    She got a real English name.
    My doctor asked me, what are you going to name her?
    And I said, I don't know yet, but I
    know I'm going to pick a very English name.
    And every day he came to visit me
    and he asked me, what is the name?
    And of course, Sally, she lives in Youngstown.
    The other two daughters live here in Cleveland,
    and I enjoy my family very much.
    Well, in New Philadelphia, we stayed for eight years.
    And then Wooster needed a rabbi, and Wooster
    is a much larger community.
    And they invited him, and he auditioned.
    And apparently, they enjoyed having him there
    and he was hired.
    We lived in Wooster, Ohio, a very lovely community.
    And I really enjoyed every day that we lived there.
    I'd like to back up just a little bit.
    During the eight years that you lived
    in Cleveland and you lived with your brother-in-law
    and sister-in-law, did the Jewish community
    help you in any way?
    Did you take English classes?
    My husband went to night school.
    Where?
    He first went to John Hay.
    That was the first classes he took.
    Of course, it was more important for him
    to go to school than for me.
    I had a baby, and in Europe, you don't have babysitters.
    And my sister never had children,
    and it was very hard for me to go back to school,
    so it was more important for Paul
    to continue and have his degrees.
    Meanwhile, while we were in Cleveland,
    he worked in different places.
    He was an insurance salesman at one point
    and he worked in real estate.
    My brother-in-law was in real estate,
    and so he was working in the same business
    until the job in New Philadelphia opened up.
    Apparently, he felt more comfortable being a rabbi
    because that is what he studied for all his life.
    Did he have to go back to rabbinical school here at all?
    No.
    Did he remain--
    He was accepted.
    --as an Orthodox rabbi?
    Yes, we are very Orthodox.
    But his community in Wooster is a conservative community,
    a conservative shul.
    The people over there, at that time anyway,
    the elderly people, who were very respected by the children,
    were very Orthodox.
    So in a community like this, you find Orthodox Jews
    and conservative Jews.
    But Wooster was just a marvelous community.
    The temple in Wooster is everybody's second home.
    When you think of that, they're treating it
    like their own home.
    It's always updated and decorated, redecorated,
    and new dishes, and the women are very active.
    We had a community Seder.
    Every year I used to be the chairman of the community
    Seder.
    And the students in the College of Wooster,
    the Jewish students, were always invited to all our affairs.
    I always had a house packed of students at holiday time.
    Did you talk about your experiences,
    before and during the war, to anybody
    during all of this time?
    Yes.
    In New Philadelphia, the Daily Times over there
    asked me to give my story.
    And a lady with the name Sally Steis from the radio station
    there, said she will help me put together my story--
    I wasn't that good in English yet--
    to put it down in words, that people
    would really get the story.
    And she helped me with the story, and it was published.
    I can even tell you the date when it was published.
    That is important.
    Here is a picture they put in the paper.
    1964.
    We just have a short time left, Sandra,
    and I wonder if you have any thoughts that you
    want to share in your experiences
    as to why you survived the Holocaust and your family
    did not?
    And do you think that survivors have
    a message for other people?
    Well, it is hard to tell why one survived
    this horrible experience.
    It is maybe your religious belief that kept you alive.
    That kept me alive.
    Your belief in religion?
    My belief in God was so strong and I
    didn't think that God would allow such atrocities.
    I didn't want to believe that something like this
    could happen to humanity.
    And I think that is what kept me alive, because if I
    would have believed it--
    I couldn't believe that I would survive.
    And I knew, even in Auschwitz, that I will have to survive.
    I have to come home and meet my family again.
    That is what kept me alive.
    I really think that being religious
    helps you overcome your troubles.
    Life is not that smooth always, but you learn to accept things.
    What appropriate way do you think
    we should commemorate the memory of those who lost
    their lives in the Holocaust?
    Have to commemorate them?
    We believe in the art side.
    But I think the stories told is the way to commemorate them,
    because as we survived, we were always thinking of,
    will anyone believe us, what we went through?
    Does the world know what happened?
    And that is why I think this is a wonderful thing for me
    to tell the story.
    That's why I came forward, to tell my story,
    and I feel very good about it because I always wanted
    somebody to know about it.
    And I think this is the way to memorialize
    those who didn't come home.
    They were not fortunate enough to be here and survive.
    So we, the survivors, do have to come forward and tell our story
    to the world so that this will never happen again to anybody.
    I want to thank you very much.
    It was not an easy task for you to tell your story.
    It was very difficult. I'm Sally Weinberg.
    Our Holocaust survivor today is Sandra Mandel.
    This project is sponsored by the National
    Council of Jewish Women, Cleveland Section.

    Overview

    Interviewee
    Sandra Mandel
    Interviewer
    Sally Weinberg
    Date
    interview:  1984 September 04
    Credit Line
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of the National Council of Jewish Women Cleveland Section

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    3 videocassettes (U-Matic) : sound, color ; 3/4 in..

    Rights & Restrictions

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

    Keywords & Subjects

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    The interview was acquired by the United Sates Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993 from the National Council of Jewish Women Cleveland Section.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:11:32
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn505038

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    Transcripts (3)
    Summary (English)

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    Also in Oral history interviews of the National Council of Jewish Women Cleveland Section Holocaust Archive Project

    The interviews document the experiences of 136 Holocaust survivors, Righteous Gentiles, and former concentration camp liberators from the Cleveland, Ohio, area.

    Date: 1984-1985

    Oral history interview with Molly Akst

    Oral history interview with Molly Akst

    Oral History

    Molly Akst, born in Bodzanow-Ktodzisko, Poland, describes being one of seven children born to Orthodox parents; her grandfather living with the family; her family owning a dry-goods store; the positive relations between Jews and Gentiles in her town; belonging to the Mizrachi youth group; how the only antisemitic acts in Bodzanow were perpetrated mostly by young boys; leading a quiet, studious life and planning to eventually go to Krakow to teach Hebrew; the German invasion; the many restrictions placed on Jews; most men, including her father, being forced to go to work camps; her father returning home shortly before they were deported in March 1941; being sent to Chasno, where Jews were still living in their own homes and moving freely through the city; the creation of a ghetto in Chasno; convincing four of her siblings to escape with her; hiding for two years with gentile families and fields; keeping the other children safe; her sisters being denounced by a former neighbor in 1944; the arrest of the girls and their release after two weeks, but never seeing their younger sister again; taking her brothers and her sister to live in the woods; remaining in hiding, living outdoors until their liberation in January 1945; returning to Bodzanow, where they lived in a cousin's empty house; several Jews returning to the town and learning that her parents had died at Treblinka; getting married and going to a displaced persons camp in Germany; becoming ill with chronic hiccups; going to Montreal, Canada in 1948 after the birth of her son; her brothers and sister eventually moving to Cleveland, OH and joining them in 1957; living in Cleveland with her husband; and her two children and three grandchildren.

    Oral history interview with Jennie Alpert

    Oral history interview with Jennie Alpert

    Oral History

    Jennie Alpert, born in Czechoslovakia, describes being the second of three daughters; her mother dying when she was three; her father remarrying and going to live with her stepmother's sister; becoming a dressmaker and having a small business, which employed several young girls; being sent with her aunt to a ghetto in Ungvar (Uzhhorod), Ukraine in 1941; her father, stepmother, and eight brothers and sisters being sent elsewhere; being sent with her aunt to Auschwitz and wearing red arm-bands since they were barracks workers; the mass killings in the camp, and the death of her aunt; being selected for death but being forced to wait three days and then selected for work; being given a piece of bread and a dress, and then being transported to Traxenberg; their work digging trenches in the woods and being forced to sing as they walked to work; becoming a favorite of the camp commander, who was not a member of the SS, but of the Wehrmacht; the camp being evacuated in November and being forced to march for three weeks; the emotional state of one of the guards; being taken to Bergen-Belsen, where she remained until the liberation in April; being very sick at the end of the war and taken to a hospital in Juttaborg, Sweden (possibly Goteborg, Sweden); immigrating to the United States along with her brother and two sisters; meeting and marrying a Polish man who had moved to the US in the 1920s; and having a daughter and living in Cleveland Heights, OH.

    Oral history interview with Emerson Batdorff

    Oral History

    Emerson Batdorff describes being drafted into the American Army on May 18, 1942; being classified as “limited service” due to his health problems, but eventually being accepted to Officer Candidate's School; being sent overseas in 1943 as a member of the 103rd Division, 41st Infantry Regiment; being assigned to Casablanca, Morocco, where he became an instructor in a leadership and battle training school; experiencing battle for the first time in 1944 when his unit landed at Naples, Italy; being shot in the leg and spending a short time in a hospital; rejoining his unit in time to enter southern France one hour after the main Allied invasion; his unit going through Alsace and Strasbourg, and then into Germany; not actively participating in battle; being assigned to the 15th Corps' historical section; arriving at Dachau one day after it was liberated and staying for four hours; seeing a transport train filled with dead concentration camp inmates; his current life and retiring from his position as entertainment editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer; living in Cleveland Heights, OH; and his son, stepson, and stepdaughter.

    Oral history interview with Estelle Beder

    Oral history interview with Estelle Beder

    Oral History

    Estelle Beder, born in Lutsk, Poland (Ukraine), describes her father, who was a tailor, and her mother, who sold hand-made clothes from a covered wagon; her two brothers and one sister; her family struggling financially; the German invasion and the restrictions imposed including curfews and mandatory armbands; the sexual abuse and fear during that time; the creation of a ghetto in 1942 and her family suffering terribly; her father being very ill and still sewing; helping her family by delivering clothes and procuring food; acts of great cruelty to the Jews while in the ghetto; her father being beaten and her brother being killed in public; she and her sister being separated from the family and sent to the Łódź ghetto, where they were treated very poorly; remaining in Łódź until 1944 when they were transported to Auschwitz; the great physical and mental cruelty at Auschwitz; being selected with her sister for death in the gas chambers, but the Germans ran out of their supply of gas; being sent with her sister to work in an ammunition factory for a short period, where they received better treatment; being moved from place to place without reason; passing through Bergen-Belsen and walking on thousands of skeletons, wondering if her family was among them; being selected with her sister to be exchanged for German soldiers in Sweden; enduring a perilous trip to Sweden and being nursed back to some normalcy; her entire family, except her sister, dying during the war; her cousin in the United States arranging for she and her sister to live in New York City; marrying another survivor, Sam Beder; having three sons and moving to Cleveland, OH, where she has enjoyed a peaceful life in a community of other survivors; still suffering from the physical and emotional effects of the Holocaust; and being thankful for her family and her community.

    Oral history interview with Adam Beer

    Oral history interview with Adam Beer

    Oral History

    Adam Beer, born in Liptovsky Mikulas, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia), describes his conservative Jewish family; his older sister, Gabriela, and his younger brother, Otto; his mother dying when he was very young and his father remarrying within a year of her death; his father owning a business in electrical contracting; the cultural amenities in Liptovsky Mikulas; the active Jewish community; the Slovaks separating from the Czechs in 1938; Tiso coming to power in 1939; finishing school in 1940 and problems for Jews beginning soon after; the restrictions placed on Jews; his grandmother being deported to Poland on April 2, 1942; his father losing his business in 1940 and preparing an emergency bunker in the mountains outside the town; partisans attacking the town and killing several Germans on August 28, 1944; his family and other families escaping to the bunker in the mountains; the Gestapo finding the bunker on December 15, 1944 and destroying it; his younger brother running away; building a second bunker; Russians finding them and taking them back to Liptovsky Mikulas; his family finding his brother hidden with a family; going to Bratislava, Slovakia to begin medical school; communists taking over the country in 1948; deciding to leave rather than finish his studies; going to Cleveland, OH with his fiancée; finishing medical school; opening a medical practice in Cleveland; and his wife and two children.

    Oral history interview with Susan Eisdorfer Beer

    Oral history interview with Susan Eisdorfer Beer

    Oral History

    Susan Beer, born on May 14, 1924 in Budapest, Hungary, describes growing up in Topolčany, Slovakia, describes being an only child of a physician; the family being very comfortable and Orthodox; the good relations between the Jews and the Gentile community; attending a Jewish public school and a gymnasium, hoping eventually to become a doctor; her studies being interrupted when the civil war broke out; Slovakia becoming independent and allied to Germany; the restrictions placed on Jews; her father being forbidden to practice medicine; her father arranging for her to be smuggled into Hungary, where she stayed with relatives; her parents later joining her; her father passing as a Gentile and being caught by the police; her father escaping the police and making plans for the family to Partisan-held Czechoslovakia; the family being arrested and held in a jail for three weeks; being deported to Auschwitz, and classified as political prisoners; her father working in the camp hospital; being sent with her mother to the "model camp," which was organized for the Red Cross inspectors who occasionally toured the camp; the evacuation of Auschwitz and being sent on a death march; being taken with her mother to Ravensbrück, where she worked as a camp translator; Ravensbrück being evacuated and being sent to a camp deeper in Germany, attached to a camp filled with French prisoners-of-war; the German guards running away and the French prisoners cutting the wires enclosing the camp; the prisoners discovered stockpiles of food; going to the nearby town; going with her mother to Bratislava, Slovakia, where a man recognized them in the street and told them that Susan's father was in Budapest; remaining in Budapest for a year; finishing her studies at the gymnasium; returning to Topolcany; beginning medical school in Bratislava; her family being anxious to leave Europe; going to Williamsburg, New York with her fiancé; moving to Cleveland, OH; her husband’s podiatry office; and their two children.

    Oral history interview with Sidonia Benedek

    Oral history interview with Sidonia Benedek

    Oral History

    Sidonia Benedek, born in 1924 in Caraseu, Rumania in the region of Transylvania, describes her large, religious family; her father’s role as the spiritual leader of the community; her happy childhood, having many friends, and doing well in school; her family supporting themselves through a small family farm and being very well-respected by both Jews and gentiles; first seeing antisemitism when Jews in Bucharest, Romania, were killed in 1937; the lack of physically-threatening antisemitism in Caraseu; her teachers having to fight for her status as class valedictorian; the fear and sadness in the Caraseu Jewish community; Germany's influence in the region growing and the Jews suffering the loss of rights and privileges; her family being split up and deported in 1944; the deportation of her brother and brother-in-law to work camps (her brother-in-law survived and her brother did not); the deportation of others to a ghetto in Szatmar (Satu Mare, Romania); her family being transported after five weeks to Auschwitz; her parents, two sisters, and her sisters’ children being killed immediately; surviving the camps along with her younger sister and younger brother; another brother dying in a forced labor camp in Russia; being sent to work in Stutthof, and then to Prost to build an airport; being evacuated in a two-week march during January 1945; escaping with her sister and being liberated by the Russian Army; returning home and reuniting with her brother; reuniting with a childhood friend, Les Benedek, whom she married in September 1945; her brother-in-law (who survived the forced labor camp) moving to New York; her younger brother, Martin Lax, who left Romania in 1946 and lived in Austria for several years before moving to the United States (Cleveland, Ohio) in 1949; leaving Romania in 1965 with her husband and three children (Aliz Benedek, Michael Benedek, and Vera Benedek); and settling in Cleveland.

    Oral history interview with Alice Ben-Horin

    Oral history interview with Alice Ben-Horin

    Oral History

    Alice Ben-Hurin, born in Hungary (along the Danube between Budapest and Vienna, Austria), describes being the youngest of three children; her father working in the import-export business and her mother assisting him with the bookkeeping; her prosperous family; how education was very important to the family and several cousins stayed with them while attending school in the city; finishing high school in 1939; the German takeover and her father being temporarily arrested; working for the local Jewish committee with her older sister; her brother joining the army and disappearing in 1942; trying to persuade her family to escape from Hungary; being sent to the ghetto with her family the day after her brother returned; being sent to an old army post with Jews from the city and the surrounding countryside; her brother returning to the army and being the only survivor of the massacre of his unit; being deported to Auschwitz; the immediate killing of her family except for herself, her cousin, and her sister; being sent to Dresden, Germany, where she worked in a munitions factory; being evacuated in a march to Bergen-Belsen; being liberated by American and British troops along the way; working for the Red Cross for a short time; going to Austria with a friend's brother who worked for the US Army; working as a high school teacher in Philadelphia, PA after coming to the US; living in Cleveland, OH; and her three children and three grandchildren.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Benson

    Oral history interview with Joseph Benson

    Oral History

    Joseph Benson, born in Strasin in the Northern Bohemian section of Czechoslovakia (now in Czech Republic), describes his German mother and Czech father; having a happy life on a farm with his family and receiving a strong Catholic education; acquiring a love for aviation early in life; being a teenager when the Germans occupied the Sudentenland; being loyal to the Czech ideals and people at that time; becoming involved in anti-German activities; joining the underground movement when he turned 18; being smuggled to England to join the Czech Army in exile; eagerly volunteering for intensive combat flight training and mastering all facets in a short time; his plane being shot down over Germany during an early combat mission; being discovered by the Gestapo and imprisoned for interrogation; suffering torture and imprisonment in Nuremberg, Selenstrausse, and Stadelheim prisons; being in isolation for a great deal of the time; refusing to divulge any information; being transferred first to Dachau and then to Buchenwald; performing labor in aircraft component factories; being transferred to Schoenbeck and escaping with a friend to the American lines; his methods for survival; being a strong believer in personal freedoms; and lecturing to youths about the dangers of totalitarian governments.

    Oral history interview with Jack Beigelman

    Oral history interview with Jack Beigelman

    Oral History

    Jack Biegelman, born in Łódź, Poland in 1930, describes being part of a large family, where music was the major vocational and recreational focus; being a young boy when the Germans invaded Poland; the turmoil and the powerful images of the German military force; life in the ghetto; doing forced labor; being transported with his family to Auschwitz in 1944; the death of his mother and younger brother; his father surviving several months, but dying from illness; enduring the horrors, starvation, and work at Auschwitz; being transferred to Glechamberg camp, where he was liberated by the Russians; returning to Łódź; living with an uncle in Germany; going to the United States and, with the aid of Jewish organization, being placed in the home of a retired school teacher; his studies in music; enlisting in the Air Force during the Korean War; getting married and having three children; his life in Cleveland, OH; and his commitment to Jewish organizations, especially those dealing with education and commemoration of the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Leah Binstock

    Oral history interview with Leah Binstock

    Oral History

    Leah Binstock, born in Jaroslaw, Poland, describes the prevalence of antisemitism before the war; the large and active Jewish community; her parents’ candy factory; her sister; her family being very religious; attending a private Jewish school; belonging to a Zionist organization and hoping to someday go to Palestine; being 14 years old when the Germans invaded; the anti-Jewish measures; all the Jews in Jaroslaw being forced to move to Krakow, Poland; escaping with her sister and going to a work camp for Polish women; assuming the identity of two Ukrainian girls they befriended on a train; living as Christians in Terezin, Poland, where they worked for the telephone company; her sister learning to speak German and getting a better job; being denounced to the Gestapo by their co-workers; being deported to Auschwitz in February 1943; being evacuated on foot with the other prisoners; escaping on the second night with four others; being hidden by a priest for several days until the war officially ended in May 1945; returning to Jaroslaw with her sister; learning that their parents died in the Krakow ghetto; moving to Germany, where they opened a grocery business; meeting her husband through a girl she knew in Auschwitz; registering with a Zionist organization that helped refugees immigrate to the United States; settling in St. Louis, MO; moving to Cleveland, OH after experiencing antisemitism in St. Louis; living in Mayfield Heights, OH; working for her husband's business; and her three children and four grandchildren.

    Oral history interview with Elias Cala

    Oral history interview with Elias Cala

    Oral History

    Elias Cala, born in Dobrzyn (Golub-Dobrzyń), Poland, describes the Jewish population in the area; being the third of five children in a close, loving family; his father being extremely religious; the lack of anti-Semitism in Dobrzyn prior to 1934; working at a cousin’s shoe store in Łódź, Poland in 1936 when he was 16 years old; his father’s death in 1938; being drafted into the army in 1939; his unit being on the German boarder when Germany invaded; a fierce battle lasting several days; his unit being taken prisoner by the Germans; the Jews being immediately separated from the rest of the unit and pretending he was a gentile with the help of his fellow soldiers; the non-Jewish prisoners being released soon after their capture; staying with his cousin in Łódź; going to Dobrzyn, where the Germans were persecuting Jews; being expelled from Dobrzyn; settling in a town near the Russian border with his aunt and uncle and their children; getting married; being deported to a camp at Dzialdowo, and then sent to a ghetto in Piotrkov; escaping with his wife and going to Warsaw, Poland; going to Nalewaj, where they found his wife's family; working on a road crew, but getting sick and being hospitalized; being badly burned during a fire; his wife giving birth to a daughter; being deported to Auschwitz; being separated from his wife and baby; being sent to an I.G. Farben factory; the bombing of the factory; being evacuated and forced to move from camp to camp; going to Mauthausen and Oranienburg; being left at Flossenbürg; being transferred to a work-camp near Stuttgart, Germany; being evacuated from Stuttgart and traveling again from camp to camp; hiding in a haystack with 21 others; being discovered and many of them being shot; surviving and being taken in by villagers and given food and clothing; being liberated by the Americans on May 1, 1945; remaining in Germany, where he got married again; moving to the US in March 1949; living in Beachwood, Ohio; and his five children.

    Oral history interview with Vincent Cochrane

    Oral history interview with Vincent Cochrane

    Oral History

    Vincent Cochrane, born in 1919 in Cuyahoga Falls, OH, describes enlisting in the US Army in 1937 and serving until 1950; serving in Germany from 1944 to 1945; being a captain and commanding a medium tank company; being present at the liberation of three concentration camps in Ahlen near Hannover, Gardelegen, and Salzwedel; his unit only staying about an hour until back-up units and medical units arrived; how it took a while for the liberators to realize what they were seeing; becoming an operating engineer after his service; being the on the security staff of Cuyahoga County, OH; feeling that his experience in the war may have helped him become more sensitive person; and wanting to be interviewed to help make sure the Holocaust is never forgotten.

    Oral history interview with W. Louis Cohn

    Oral history interview with W. Louis Cohn

    Oral History

    W. Louis Cohn, born in Berlin, Germany in 1925, describes having a younger sister, born in 1927 as well as an older brother; his father, Waldemar, who was an attorney with the German government; his father working from 1925 to 1931 in the German embassy in Nice, France; his mother, Lottie Epstein, who came from a prosperous family; his family moving to the outskirts of Berlin in 1937; being assimilated into German life and belonging to a Reform congregation; attending elementary school from 1931 to 1935 without problems and attending gymnasium from 1935 to 1938; being kicked out of school in November 1938 and attending an improvised Jewish school; antisemitism increasing; the deportation of men to concentration camps; his brother going to the US; being sent on December 10, 1938 with his 11-year-old sister and his ten-year-old cousin on a train to Holland, where his cousin's grandmother lived; missing the train and being sent to a refugee camp for two to three months, then a children’s home, and then to a camp near Utrecht; his mother finding then in May 1939 and taking them to Brussels, Belgium; attending school in Brussels for a year; being arrested by Belgian police in 1940; being sent to Paris, France then moved from camp to camp; finding his father in Gurs concentration camp; working in the censorship office at Gurs and being able to smuggle news out; getting caught smuggling letters; being deported to Mauthausen and escaping with some other young men in August 1942; going through France to Spain; being sent from Barcelona to Africa for basic training; going to England where he was trained in counter-espionage by the Office of Strategic Services; being assigned him to parachute into France and blow up wheels in a German motor pool; completing his task and searching for his sister and parents; finding his sister in a convent under the false name Elise Carpentier; returning to England and receiving further training from the US Army 82nd Airborne Division; parachuting into France on D-Day and being wounded on the beachhead; staying in a hospital for three days; fighting with the Allies in Northern France, Holland, and accompanying them into Berlin; going to his family's apartment building, which had been bombed and finding his family’s possessions, which were buried in the yard; losing all his family except his sister and his uncle’s family; going to Palestine, where he worked on a kibbutz and helped train the Haganah; having special status because he was a captain in the US Army and becoming a US citizen; going to Cleveland, OH in 1947 and attending college to become an engineer; marrying Lottie Wolff in 1951; believing he survived because he worked hard and took care of himself; receiving help from Quakers in Spain and counseling from Catholic chaplains during the war; and missing out on his youth but feeling that perhaps he learned something from the experience.

    Oral history interview with Peppi Dekker

    Oral history interview with Peppi Dekker

    Oral History

    Peppi Dekker (née Chajes), born in Apeldoorn, Holland, describes having a twin sister; her parents’ successful textile business; attending public school until the war began; Germany invading Holland and being forced one year later to attend the local Jewish school; her family escaping the first roundup of Jews in May 1942; her family being deported the following September; being sent with her sister, mother, and grandfather to Westerbork, where they found her father; her father becoming a "law and order officer" at Westerbork and the family acquiring special status; being sent in 1944 to Bergen-Belsen with a transport of Dutch orphans; staying at Bergen-Belsen for two years; being sick often; her mother’s strength and determination to survive and maintain the family's dignity; her mother’s cleaning job outside the camp; her mother being beaten and sexually assaulted; being evacuated from the camp and sent by train to Elba; being liberated by the Russian Army; her family being given a home which had been occupied by a German officer; moving to the American zone after several incidents with Russian soldiers; returning to Holland; receiving reparations from the Dutch government; her father sending she and her sister in 1957 to the United States, where they stayed with her father's brother and his wife; getting married and moving with her husband to Chicago, New Jersey, and then to Cleveland; living in Strongsville, Ohio; and her two children.

    Oral history interview with Maury Feren

    Oral history interview with Maury Feren

    Oral History

    Maury Feren describes being a member of the 2nd Infantry Division, 5th Division, Medical Detachment from 1943 until 1945; his unit being located near Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic) in early May 1945 when they suddenly came upon 75 emaciated, dying women between the ages of 20 and 35; how these women had been among a group of 500 who had started on a death march from Auschwitz and most had died along the way; the horror and pain of discovering human beings in such a state of suffering; how the army tried to help these women medically and emotionally in their struggle for recovery; being moved and disturbed by his role as liberator; and feeling heartened by the courage and devotion of those who tried to help the survivors.

    Oral history interview with Simon Fixler

    Oral history interview with Simon Fixler

    Oral History

    Simon Fixler describes being one of 16 children, born to a prosperous family in Kelca, Czechoslovakia; his happy childhood, with religious freedom and no sense of antisemitism; the introduction of antisemitism with the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Hungarians; the anti-Jewish atmosphere escalating; the Jews being forced to perform menial work in labor camps; evading conscription to the labor camps for a year and a half; being discovered by the government and sent to a parachute factory; getting married in 1943 and being able to see his wife after the work days; being sent in November 1944 to a more severe forced labor camp in one of Eichmannfs last transports; enduring terrible working conditions and witnessing mass murders and atrocities at the labor camp; being transferred to the concentration camp at Mauthausen in April 1945; he and his brother supporting each other physically and emotionally throughout this horrible ordeal; being liberated by the Americans in May 1945; wandering through the countryside with his brother; seeking the aid of the Jewish Federation in Prague, Czech Republic; moving to Budapest, Hungary, where they reunited with the six other surviving family members; moving with his wife to Germany, where they remained for three years; being selected for sponsorship to Cleveland, OH by a knitting mill; having several knitting jobs and building his life in the US; becoming interested in Jewish fund raising and Holocaust memorial activities; enjoying the freedoms of the US; believing that it is his duty to share his experiences; and believing the best investment in the future of Judaism is education.

    Oral history interview with Herman Frank

    Oral history interview with Herman Frank

    Oral History

    Herman Frank, born in Łódź, Poland, describes being the only child of a well-to-do family in the textile and fur business; having an active and happy childhood, attending concerts and the theater and vacationing abroad; the antisemitism in Łódź; his father’s death before the war and deciding not to emigrate; the German invasion; his mother’s preparations for the war; being moved to the ghetto; his mother’s death in 1942 when he was 17 years old; attending a textile engineering school in the ghetto; his various jobs in the ghetto; the liquidation of the ghetto and the deportations to Auschwitz; being transferred to Gleiwitz; being evacuated in January 1945; escaping but being captured and sent to Gross-Rosen; being propositioned sexually by the camp commander; being evacuated to Buchenwald; being moved a few weeks later to Berga-an-Elste; being assigned to work in the kitchen because of an injury and getting more food; the evacuation of the camp and escaping with his friends; convincing SS that they were Polish civilians; how after liberation he went to the American zone in Weiden, Germany, and worked for the US Army; marrying another Polish survivor in Germany; the birth of their first son in Germany; his wife’s aunt sponsoring their entry into the US in 1949; the difficultly of adjusting to life in the US; owning his own carpet cleaning business; living in Pepper Pike, Ohio; and his two sons and two grandchildren.

    Oral history interview with Helen Fried

    Oral history interview with Helen Fried

    Oral History

    Helen Fried (born circa 1926) describes being the third of ten children in a large, orthodox family in Hust, Czechoslovakia (Khust, Ukraine); the Jewish community of Hust; her mother supporting the family by running a leather store, while her father was a Torah schlar; her grandparents living in an adjoining house and helping to raise the children; her family having good relations with their gentile neighbors; the start of the war and her family losing their store; the Hungarian invasion of Hust; the store being returned to her family under the Hungarian occupation and living a relatively good life; anti-Jewish measures being imposed when the Germans were in control again; the creation of the ghetto in 1943 and the deportation soon after to Auschwitz; her parents, four brothers, and one of her sisters being killed immediately; remaining in Auschwitz with her four sisters until late 1944 when they were sent to work on a farm; being evacuated and forced to march; escaping with her sisters and taking the identity of Polish maids who had worked for the German army; maintaining their identities until liberation but being separated; going to work in a factory with 60 Russian women; being liberated before the official end of the war by Russian soldiers; reuniting with several cousins and her sister in Dobrzyn, Poland; going to Prague, Czech Republic; living in a displaced persons camp in Leipheim, Germany to wait for a visa to the United States; marrying a man she met in Budapest, Hungary; going to the US in 1949; settling in New York, NY; the Joint Distribution Committee helping them find a place to live and a job for her husband; moving to Cleveland, OH; not telling her son about her Holocaust experiences; her feelings about Judaism; the effects of the Holocaust on her life; and her thoughts on why she survived.

    Oral history interview with Marcel Friedman

    Oral history interview with Marcel Friedman

    Oral History

    Marcel Friedman describes having a comfortable childhood with his family in Presov, Slovakia; his numerous non-Jewish friends; having a religious home life; his educational and recreational interests; being denied admission to the University of Bratislava in 1939 due to a Jewish quota; deciding to go to Palestine, as he had been an active Zionist; beginning his journey to Israel in 1940 and encountering political problems, a shipwreck, and bombings; being interned on the island of Rhodes in a tent camp; being moved to a camp in Southern Italy; being treated fairly well during his internment; being liberated by the British in 1943; joining the Czech Army and being part of the weather department; being transferred back to Czechoslovakia, where he was reunited with his brother and sister in 1945; his parents' fate in the concentration camps; being recruited for Palestine in 1948; joining the Israeli Army and serving in the weather service; determining that life was too difficult in Israel in 1953 and moving to the United States; his American family members sponsoring and financially aiding he and his wife and child; working in a travel agency in the US; joining a synagogue and becoming active in Jewish activities; believing his luck, personality, and religion contributed to his survival; his belief that survivors have a responsibility to make others aware of their experiences; still feeling some bitterness; and his interests in learning more about the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Ann Frum

    Oral history interview with Ann Frum

    Oral History

    Ann Frum, born in 1925 in Zdunska Vola, Poland, describes her Orthodox Jewish family; experiencing antisemitism before the war, but enjoying a fairly stable, carefree childhood; the German invasion and fleeing for safety; being forced to live in a ghetto in her small town; the liquidation of the ghetto in 1942 and being sent to the large ghetto in Łódź, Poland; the terrible living conditions during her transport and her internment in the ghetto; being sent to work in a munitions factory in Czestochowa, where she met the man she later married; being transferred to a concentration camp in Ravensburg, Germany, where she was forced to dig trenches for the burial of other Jews; being sent to Bergau (Burgau) and Turkine (Türkheim), smaller concentration camps, where she again was forced to work amid horrible conditions; being liberated at Allach, near Dachau, by the Americans on May 1, 1945; reuniting with her future husband and getting married in 1946; going to the US in 1951 and settling in New Jersey; moving to Cleveland, OH; having three children, and creating an extended family of close friends in the Cleveland Jewish community; and her belief that it is essential that survivors tell others of their experiences.

    Oral history interview with Jack Gildar

    Oral history interview with Jack Gildar

    Oral History

    Jack Gildar, born in Tarnowa, Poland, describes his the strong Jewish community in his town; his close, loving family; his father’s death; going at the age of nine to attend school in Lomza; becoming an apprentice carpenter; antisemitism in Tarnowa; working in a town near the German border when the war began; returning home and discovering that Tarnowa had been bombed; the Russian occupation; the German occupation beginning in 1941; being sent to a ghetto in 1942 in Lomza; being sent to a camp in Zembrov (Zambrów); being sent with his family to Auschwitz; being separated in Auschwitz and never seeing his family again; being sent to Birkenau, then to another section of Auschwitz, where he worked in an SS hospital; being able to trade for extra food, medicine, and items such as soap and razor blades because of his work; sharing much of his good fortune with others, sending food and medicine to friends and cousins in other parts of the camp; remaining relatively strong and healthy; the evacuation of the camp in January 1945 and being walked for four days to the Czech border, where they boarded trains for transport to Mauthausen; volunteering for a transfer to Ebensee; being liberated by the American Army; spending June through November after liberation in an abandoned lake house in Austria; going to Germany, where he lived on a kibbutz in Landsburg; the closing of the kibbutz in 1949 and discovering relatives in Cleveland, OH; going to Cleveland in June 1949; living in Beachwood, OH and his work as a butcher; his wife Sara, who is also a Holocaust survivor; and their two children, Rochelle and David.

    Oral history interview with Ileen Green

    Oral history interview with Ileen Green

    Oral History

    Ileen Koslov Green (née Chaia Koslovsky), born on September 23, 1926 in Holsczaly, Poland (near Vilnius, Lithuania), describes being the middle child of three daughters in an orthodox Jewish family; her father owning a dry goods store and the family living in 13 rooms located behind the store; living with her parents, sisters, grandmother, aunt, and cousin; her father leaving in 1938 to live with his brother in Cleveland, OH; the family planning to follow her father later but their plans being interrupted by the war; the Russian occupation, during which the family's store was closed; surviving by trading merchandise for food with local farmers; the German occupation in 1941; being sent with her mother and sisters to a ghetto; Gentile friends supplying Jews in the ghetto with food; being sent to a labor camp in Lithuania soon after her sister was sent there; her work building streets; her mother and other sister arriving in the camp a year later; being sent to Dunjeje in Estonia, and then to Kaiserwald in Lithuania in 1943; going to Stutthof and life there; being beaten for stealing food; volunteering for farm work; being sent to Dresden, Germany, where she and her older sister worked in an ammunition factory; the bombing of the factory and being forced to march to Prague, Czech Republic; being liberated by French and Russian soldiers; returning home; going to Fahrenwart displaced persons camp and contacting her father in the US; immigrating to the US in 1948; living in South Euclid, OH; and her son, daughter, and five grandchildren.

    Oral history interview with Phillip Green

    Oral history interview with Phillip Green

    Oral History

    Philip Green describes his Orthodox family; his older sister and younger sister; the vandalizaton and boycotts of his family’s dried-goods store; being 14 years old when his family moved from their small Polish town to Łódź, Poland; the creation of the ghetto in 1939 and moving there soon after with his family; he and his sisters being forced to work in factories; his father dying after being attacked by the Gestapo in his home; surviving in the ghetto with his mother and sisters until 1944; returning home from a food search one day to find a note saying that his family was taken; surrendering himself and being taken to Auschwitz; being transferred to Braunschweig, a truck factory, where he worked under deplorable conditions and near-starvation for over eight months; being moved to the Hermann Goehringwerke airplane factory for a month's work; being transferred to Ravensbrück; being moved around until the Russians liberated Philip and his group of near-dying men on May 5, 1945 near Ludwigslust, Germany; being taken to a hospital for treatment and slowly began to recover their health and their lives; trying to locate his family in Łódź and finding no one; going to Munich, Germany, where he joined a displaced persons camp, and later worked in the office of an American aid organization; meeting his future wife, also a survivor, and going to the United States in 1948; getting married in 1951; working for a plumbing supply company; his daughter and son; and how he is a strong supporter of Israel.

    Oral history interview with Ervin Heksh

    Oral history interview with Ervin Heksh

    Oral History

    Ervin Heksh, born in a village 60 km northwest of Budapest, Hungary, describes how there were few Jewish families in his village; having a happy and active childhood; not being able to attend a university and going to yeshiva instead; entering his father’s grain business; the rise in antisemitism after 1935; his father being forced to take on a partner; the deportation of many Jews and his near deportation because he bought a house that a Hungarian gendarme wanted to buy; being sent to a forced labor camp in Crimea, Ukraine in 1942; witnessing many instances of brutality; being transferred to Belopolye, Ukraine in October 1942; working through a harsh winter, which few of the men survived; the cruel commander; a group of Italian prisoners joining his unit in Belopolye and the kindness they showed to Jewish prisoners; working at a hospital in the Bryansk forest; returning home that summer, where he found his family and his son, who had been born while he was in Russia; working for a while as a traveling salesman; the creation of the ghetto in Budapest, where his parents, wife, and son were confined; working in a mine; he and some friends being arrested and placed in the ghetto when they were caught sneaking in to visit their families; being taken out of the ghetto to work; being arrested and sent to a labor camp, which he escaped; finding his wife and child in a Red Cross community; being deported to Bergen-Belsen; hearing rumors that they would be sent to Switzerland as part of a special exchange; being evacuated to Theresienstadt in April 1945; their train being stopped between stations and the SS guards abandoning them; being liberated the next day; spending time in Hildenheim, Germany; returning to Budapest; learning that his parents died at Auschwitz and his wife died at Bergen-Belsen after liberation; finding his son in Budapest, living with his wife's parents; his son dying from illness when he was two years old; secretly crossing the border into Germany and living in several refugee camps; working for the UNRRA; eventually remarrying; going to the US in 1948; working at a plumbing supply company; his son and daughter; and his reasons for sharing his story.

    Oral history interview with Karel Hoffman

    Oral history interview with Karel Hoffman

    Oral History

    Karel Hoffman describes being 21 years old when he was ordered to report to Terezin, Czechoslovakia to help in the construction of a model prison camp; how Terezin was originally a fortress town from the Austro-Hungarian Empire; the many ironies and falsehoods of this model camp; how the Nazis touted Terezin as having many services, such as a bank, but money was totally worthless within the town; the outward appearance of Terezin versus the actual treatment of inmates within the concentration camp; the poor living conditions; the food rations and overcrowding; the inmates suffering beatings, physical abuse, and intimidation from the Nazis; remaining at Terezin for three years; being one of 5,000 taken to Auschwitz; the horrors of induction at Auschwitz, especially in the later years of the war; being transferred to Gleiwitz, where he participated in the construction of platforms for cannons and machine guns; being liberated at Gleiwitz in 1945; wandering through the woods, witnessing the chaos and confusion; returning to his home to search for family members and being unsuccessful in his search; moving to a displaced persons camp in Germany, where he remained until 1949; being sponsored for immigration to the United States by his aunts in 1949; pursuing furniture and carpentry work in the US; and getting married and having one son.

    Oral history interview with Al Horwitz

    Oral history interview with Al Horwitz

    Oral History

    Al Horwitz, born in Ohio, describes being part of an American Army division that liberated Nordhausen concentration camp; being drafted into the army in 1941; serving as a staff sergeant in the 104th Infantry Division, 387th Field Artillery; being stationed at Camp Adam, Oregon, went on maneuvers in the California and Arizona deserts, and spent time in Washington state; being sent with his unit in June 1944; landing in France and being part of the battle to free the port of Antwerp, Belgium; being active in Holland; moving into Germany through Aachen, as part of the drive to Koln (Cologne); going to Nordhausen, in the Hartz Mountains; how Nordhausen was attached to a German bomb factory, and the inmates were Jews and political prisoners; being there while Generals Eisenhower and Bradley toured the camp; moving on to Leipzig, Germany, where he helped set up the "Lucky Strike" displaced persons (DP) camp; being in Leipzig when the famous conference was held to divide post-war Germany; returning to the US in June 1945 and being discharged from the army shortly after; living in Cleveland, Ohio; working in the life insurance business; and his wife and three children.

    Oral history interview with Rose Ickowicz

    Oral history interview with Rose Ickowicz

    Oral History

    Rose Ickowicz, born in Vicovu de Jos, Romania, describes enjoying a pleasant family and community life as a child before World War II; being the oldest of seven children and raised in an atmosphere of strong devotion to family and pride in country; the invasions of Hungary in 1944 and life changed drastically for her family; being taken to a ghetto for three weeks and then sent to Auschwitz; arriving at Auschwitz near the end of the war; suffering the atrocities of the Nazi regime and also the cruelty and jealousy of other Jews who had been imprisoned much longer; believing she survived because of her strong faith, clear values, and what she calls "miracles"; doing manual labor; being transferred to Bergen-Belsen; being liberated a year after she entered the camp; trying to immigrate to the United States and going to Canada with her husband; life in Canada; encountering difficulties; moving to the US; building an economic and social foundation; and retaining great pride in America and being grateful for the opportunity to start over in this country.

    Oral history interview with Munci Katz

    Oral history interview with Munci Katz

    Oral History

    Munci Adler Katz, born in Rakov, Czechoslovakia, describes her hometown, which had 60,000 people, was near the Polish border, and was later part of the Soviet Union; the large Jewish community in Rakov; belonging to Mizrahi, a Zionist youth organization; her very orthodox family; her father working in a factory and being financially stable; her mother dying when she was 13 and her father remarrying; her three sisters; attending a Czech public school for eight years; learning the trade of dressmaking; the increase in antisemitism in Rakov after the German invasion; the Jews of Rakov being ghettoized briefly; being were sent to the crowded ghetto in Matejovce (possibly Matejovce nad Hornádom, Slovakia); being deported four weeks later to Auschwitz; the death of her father, stepmother, and two sisters; being selected with her sister to go to a work camp in Geistlingersteiger, Germany; being the camp seamstress and receiving extra food and better treatment; being evacuated to Dachau then Allach; being the seamstress under the same commander from Geistlingersteiger; staying behind at the camp with her sister while most of the women were evacuated to the Tyrol mountains; being liberated on May 9, 1945 by a unit of black American soldiers; finding her father's brothers in Tsiget; being forced to get engaged to her uncle’s friend; returning to Rakov and finding a farmer neighbor living in their house; returning to Tsiget and going to Bucharest, Romania to escape her fiancé; getting engaged to Harry Katz; losing touch with her sister; received permission to emigrate in 1964; going to Cleveland, OH, where Harry had an aunt; working as a dressmaker; and their two children.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Klein

    Oral history interview with Joseph Klein

    Oral History

    Joseph Klein, born in Strabyczowa, Czechoslovakia (a small town in the Carpathian Mountains that was later part of the Soviet Union), describes being part of a large, orthodox family; his three brothers and three sisters; his father working in the lumber, sand, and gravel trade; his youngest sister dying in childhood and his father dying of liver cancer in 1943, one year before the family was sent to Auschwitz; how the Jews of Strabyczowa were among the last to be deported; being sent to the ghetto at Munkacs (Mukacheve, Ukraine); being sent to Auschwitz; the death of his mother and sister; being sent to work camps with his other sister; spending ten days in Buchenwald, then going to a work camp near Leipzig, Germany, where he repaired a bomb-damaged petroleum refinery; being evacuated by train and escaping the train with another prisoner; being recaptured several days later and returned to their unit; being marched back and his friend being shot by their Gestapo guards; being forced to march to Theresienstadt; remaining in Theresienstadt for one month; being liberated by the Russian Army on May 8, 1945; becoming gravely ill with typhus; obtaining a train ticket to Czechoslovakia when he was well enough to travel; returning to Strabyczowa and finding his brothers, uncle, and sister in Chop; crossing the border into Czechoslovakia before it was permanently closed; going to England in May 1946 through an orphan-refugee program; immigrating to the United States three years later; his surviving siblings settling in the US; serving in the American Army for 19 months during the Korean War; working as a printer at the Cleveland Press; travelling to Israel for the country's tenth anniversary and meeting his wife, Bela, there; living in South Euclid, OH and working as a property manager; and his two daughters, Audrey and Mona.

    Oral history interview with Paul Kuper

    Oral history interview with Paul Kuper

    Oral History

    Paul Kuper, born on December 31, 1933 in Brussels, Belgium, describes being the youngest of three children; having a sister who was four years older and a brother who was six years older; his mother, who came from a White Russian family; his Polish father; living in a small apartment with no running water; his father working long hours as a baker; the German invasion in 1940; hiding in a basement with his mother when the Germans bombed the city; the Germans establishing their headquarters in a school on their street; being required to wear the yellow star; Jews being banned from theaters, movies, and hospitals; the deportation of his brother and sister; being taken by his mother to the Tuberculosis Society, where the underground was active; being placed in a sanatorium in a suburb, under a non-Jewish name, and staying there in 1941 and 1942; his parents being sent first to Malines and then to Germany; staying with a non-Jewish family friend, Seline Sinn, in his old neighborhood; attending a Catholic school; living with Seline’s sister in a different neighborhood; being discovered by the Germans in 1943 and sent to a village near Brussels, which was controlled by Jewish youth; being sent to another camp in Aix-la-Chapelle, where he lived in an old castle; the liberation of Belgium and being told by underground members from nearby Peruwelz to run into the woods so the Germans would not use them as hostages; the children being taken to stay with families in Peruwelz; going back to Brussels; attending Catholic school and living with his godparents; immigrating to the United States on his 21st birthday; living with his godmother's cousins and becoming a truck helper for Dean Supply; settling in Cleveland, OH and being in the military; living in South Euclid, OH; and being married with four daughters.

    Oral history interview with Bertha Lautman

    Oral history interview with Bertha Lautman

    Oral History

    Bertha Lautman (née Berkovitch), born in Banska Stiavnica, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia), describes her religious family; her Hasidic father; attending school in Swidnica; being taken by train to Auschwitz on March 23, 1942; her mother taking her out of hiding to send her to Auschwitz instead of her father; her parents, along with her youngest brother, being taken to Majdanek three months after her; the death of her parents and her brother’s survival; being a teenager and put to work digging ditches in Auschwitz; being moved to Birkenau in August 1942; working as part of the Leichencommando, taking care of the dead bodies; being taken from Birkenau to Bergen-Belsen on October 31, 1944; being liberated by American soldiers in April 1945; reuniting with her sister and brother; getting married another survivor; going to the United States in 1949; and visiting the concentration camps she was in three times over the years as well as Majdanek, where her parents were killed.

    Oral history interview with Dina Leiser

    Oral history interview with Dina Leiser

    Oral History

    Dina Leiser, born in Paris, France, describes her parents, who had immigrated to France from Poland to escape antisemitism and worked as tailors; her younger brother; her family not being religious; experiencing antisemitism from her schoolmates; wanting to be identified more as French than as a Jew; staying with her brother for several months on a farm in Souillé as part of a school-sponsored program; the war beginning in 1939 when she was 12 years old; her father enlisting; joining her brother on the farm; her mother obtaining false papers and joining them on the farm; the villagers in Souillé being very protective of them; remaining in Souillé for the duration of the war; finding out her father had been deported and learning only recently that he had been sent to Auschwitz; studying shorthand and typing; experiencing antisemitism at work and going to work for a Jewish firm; immigrating with her brother to the United States in 1947; her mother going to Canada and then the US five years later; teaching herself English by listening to the radio and reading; her brother being drafted into the US Army; getting married to one of her brother’s soldier friends in 1952; her son and grandson; living in University Heights, OH; and working for the Jewish France.

    Oral history interview with Sylvia Malcmacher

    Oral history interview with Sylvia Malcmacher

    Oral History

    Sylvia Malchmacher, born in Vilna, Poland (Vilnius, Lithuania) in 1926, describes the Jewish community in Vilna, including the many synagogues, Hebrew schools and universities, and the many Zionist organizations; her older and younger sisters; her father, who was a printer, and her mother, who kept house; experiencing antisemitism after 1939; living in the Russian zone of Poland; food rationing and being forced to work for the government; the German invasion in 1941; the collaborators in Vilna; the creation of the ghetto; her sister’s work in a fur factory; the liquidation of the ghetto in 1943; being ordered to report with all the children under 18 and old people and going with her younger sister; being sent home because she was 18 and her sister never coming home; being deported on May 16, 1944 on trains to a camp in the Kaiserwald, where they remained for three weeks; being sent in August 1944 to Stutthof; remaining in Stutthof for two weeks under horrible conditions; selections for work and being sent to Milldorf, a camp near Mannheim; clearing the debris as tunnels were blasted into a mountain; washing clothes for the German camp staff; being liberated by American troops on May 2, 1945; going to a displaced persons camp; learning that her father, mother and sister had died; attending a training school and marrying Israel Malchmacher in 1946; going to Cleveland, OH in 1949, sponsored by the Jewish Family Service; and her two grown daughters.

    Oral history interview with Marguerite Morris

    Oral history interview with Marguerite Morris

    Oral History

    Marguerite Morris, born in Paris, France, describes her parents, who had emigrated from Poland; enjoying a comfortable childhood; keeping kosher, but not being orthodox; living in a predominantly gentile neighborhood; her father enlisting in the French Army and returning to Paris in October 1940; her father being sent to Beaune-la-Rolande concentration camp in 1941 and never seeing him again; fleeing with her mother to unoccupied France; going first to Limoges then Oradour; living on their savings; returning with a Gentile friend to Paris to retrieve family valuables they had left with a neighbor; staying with 20 other Jewish families in Oradour until liberation in August 1944; going to Limoges and returning to Paris after the war ended officially; her mother receiving government assistance to reopen the family business; attending an accelerated school; being depressed and deciding to move to the United States to live with cousins in Akron, OH; studying accounting and working for Firestone; getting married to an American, who had been stationed at Normandy during the war; her two sons; and becoming certified public accountant.

    Oral history interview with Anna Moses

    Oral history interview with Anna Moses

    Oral History

    Anna Felsn Moses, born in Milicz, Poland, describes her large, traditional, religious family; her family moving in 1933 to Krakow, Poland, where her father was a businessman; acts of antisemitism carried out by the Poles of Krakow before the war; the boycotts of Jewish businesses; the German invasion and life rapidly becoming more difficult for the Jews; "Black Monday," when Torahs were desecrated and synagogues were burned; her family being among the 10,000 Jews enclosed in a ghetto; living in the ghetto from 1940 until the end of 1942, when she became separated from her family and was sent to Płaszów concentration camp; remaining there for nine months; being sent to Skarszysko, where she worked in a munitions factory; being sent to Buchenwald, where she remained for nine months, working at making grenade timers; being marched for three weeks; escaping with eight others and being liberated by the Russian army several days later; returning to Krakow; meeting her husband in 1946; arriving in the United States in 1948; and living in Cleveland, OH, where her husband is a rabbi in Menorah Park.

    Oral history interview with Mimi Ormond

    Oral history interview with Mimi Ormond

    Oral History

    Mimi Ormond describes growing up in Marienbad, Czechoslovakia (Mariánské Lázne, Czech Reublic); the German community in Marienbad; switching from a German school to a Czech school; her family deciding to flee after Kristallnacht; the Jewish population of Marienbad; her brother, who was away at college when her family fled Marienbad; belonging to a Zionist organization; her parents’ lack of interest in Zionism; feeling isolated from other students during the Nazi salute and Catholic prayers; fleeing to an apartment in a small town called Kolín, Czech Republic; the German invasion; her father being a socialist and on a Nazi arrest list; leaving on a children’s transport to Palestine via England; living on a farm in England; being moved with the other children to unoccupied castles in 1940; learning Hebrew and receiving agricultural training; receiving a notice that her parents were going to Palestine; the British authorities declaring Jewish refugees over the age of 17 to be enemy aliens; being left alone in the castle; night bombing near the castle; moving to another castle and joining an Orthodox Mizrahi labor group when she was 15 years old; going to live with an uncle in London; studying early education at a university; meeting her future husband, who was an American soldier; having a temple wedding; visiting her parents in Palestine; living in Ann Arbor, MI then Indianapolis, IN; feeling isolated from other Europeans; moving to Cleveland, OH and meeting survivors from her hometown; having survivors guilt; and her feelings about Israel.

    Oral history interview with Dan Pavlovitch

    Oral history interview with Dan Pavlovitch

    Oral History

    Dan Pavlovitch, born in 1928, describes being the oldest of three children in a fairly unconventional family in Ploesti, Rumania; his parents and their attitude toward Judaism was one of respect for tradition rather than of religious belief; his grandfather, who was a rabbi; living in an enlightened household, which valued music and literature and open discussion with the children; his father working as an engineer for an American oil company and his mother owning a dress shop; the Iron Guard, a fascist organization, becoming powerful in the late 1930s and Jews beginning to suffer; his father being forced to resign from his job and the family being forced to go to Yugoslavia; being sent to Belgrade (Serbia); living safely in Belgrade until the German takeover; his father being sent to a labor camp and never hearing from him again; being put in a camp across the river from Belgrade in December 1941 with his mother and two sisters; conditions in the camp; his mother getting false identities for them and being released from the camp; going to Bulgaria and then Turkey; living as Christians in Turkey from 1943 until 1948; his mother working as a translator for the US consulate in Turkey; working at a YMCA hospital as a translator for the US War Information Office; working for a German film company in Yugoslavia; leaving Turkey and returning to school; attending Roosevelt College in Chicago, IL; his mother and sisters eventually settling in the US; going to the Cleveland area with his wife and two sons in 1963; and living in Cleveland Heights and working as a paint distributor and with wood and stained glass.

    Oral history interview with Hilda Prooth

    Oral history interview with Hilda Prooth

    Oral History

    Hilda Prooth, born in Carlsbad (Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic) in 1904, describes her father, who was a painter and chose to become a Czech citizen after WWI; having three brothers and two sisters; the fates of her siblings, some of whom died in concentration camps; going to Prague, Czech Republic to earn a living as a governess; teaching German to Czech children; becoming a seamstress after the German occupation; meeting her husband, Mike, in 1939 in the Jewish community and getting married in 1940; coming under the protection of the Swedish government after she was married to Mike, who was Russian; being deported to Theresienstadt in 1943; being considered a Russian internee; being sent to Prague in 1944 then by train through Austria to an internment camp in Vittel, France; being liberated by the French in March 1945; being evacuated with a group of about 100 internees to the French Alps, to a former resort for asthmatic children; returning to Paris, France in August 1946 to get permission to return to Prague to find her husband; being sent to Epernay, France and traveling for three weeks in cattle cars back to Prague; reuniting with husband in Prague; working in an old printing house while her husband taught at the university; crossing into Germany in 1947; her husband working as an interpreter between the Jews and the Americans in Munich, Germany; waiting for passage to the US in displaced person camps in Bremen and Hamburg; going to Cleveland, OH in 1948; life in Cleveland and her husband’s death in 1960; working in the needle trades at Keller-Kohn and being very active in the ILGWU (International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union); and her reasons for volunteering to be interviewed for the Holocaust Archives Project of the Council of Jewish Women.

    Oral history interview with Isidor Reisman

    Oral history interview with Isidor Reisman

    Oral History

    Isidor Reisman, born in 1920 in Bilka, Hungary (Bilky, Zakarpats'ka oblast', Ukraine), describes being the oldest of nine children; his father, who was a monument engraver and a good provider; the active Zionist movement in Bilka; being inducted into the army in 1941; the uniforms having yellow badges to identify the Jews; doing hard labor, building railroads, for two years; receiving word from his parents that they were moved about 37 kilometers from Bilka and visiting them in 1944 in the barracks where they were living; his division being walked in January 1945 toward Germany and told to go to a synagogue which was controlled by the Germans; living in a ghetto and working as an emergency volunteer for several weeks; being freed by the Russian Army; deciding to go to the United States; going to New York, NY, where he worked as a monument engraver for about two years; going to Cleveland, OH in 1952; living in Mayfield Heights, OH; teaching Hebrew at the Bureau of Jewish Education and consulting on religious education; getting married to Ann (née Zaremsky) and having two children; and rebuilding his life after the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Sally Rettman

    Oral history interview with Sally Rettman

    Oral History

    Sally Rettman, born in 1923, describes growing up in Bedzin, Poland; being 16 years old when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939; her father, who was in the textile business and died suddenly in 1942; being sent to the ghetto in 1939; her mother being taken to Auschwitz and killed in 1943; being forced into another ghetto on the outskirts of Bedzin; getting married to Yakov (Jack) Rettman in the ghetto; her aunt being sent to Auschwitz; being moved to the Greenberg labor camp and being assigned to textile factory; her husband being sent to the camp also but not being allowed to see or talk to one another; being evacuated and marched to the Czech border at the end of 1944; their numbers dwindling from 1,500 female prisoners to 120; escaping from the transport with her sisters and two friends; being housed and taken care of by a Mrs. Schmidt living in Langesdorf; being liberated by American soldiers; finding her husband back in Bedzin; living in Hungary for five years then Germany; and going to New York, NY in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Ursula Rosow

    Oral history interview with Ursula Rosow

    Oral History

    Ursula Rosow (née Braatz), born in Berlin, Germany in 1919, describes growing up in a middle-class, gentile family; her parents being active socialists; her father, who was part Hungarian and was a laboratory technician; her mother, who was part Polish; the Nazis coming to power and street fights beginning all over Berlin; the SS shooting at her father in 1934 for making anti-Nazi comments in a local pub; her father’s imprisonment that same year for distributing anti-Nazi propaganda; her family belonging to an organization that helped Jews escape Germany with false identity papers; helping to obtain ration cards for Jews in hiding; hiding a Jewish dancer; leaving the city with her mother when the Allies beginning to bomb Berlin; going to Wurzburg while her mother went to Bad Kissingen; marrying a Jewish American soldier after the war; going to the US in 1948 with her husband; settling in Cleveland Heights, OH; being divorced; and her two children.

    Oral history interview with Leo Rzepka

    Oral history interview with Leo Rzepka

    Oral History

    Leo Rzepka, born in 1913 in Ruckzyn, Poland, describes the Jewish community in his hometown; being one of nine children (five girls and four boys); his father, who was a wagon-wheel maker; working with his father after finishing school at age 13; the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and his family fleeing to Russia, where they lived for several years; attending chauffeur's school, from which he graduated two days before the Germans invaded Russia; life becoming difficult for Jews in Russia; trying with one of his brothers and one sister to return to the home of one of his sisters in Poland; living for many months in the woods and staying with farmers in exchange for work; going to a small concentration camp in Zembrov in late 1942 with his sister, brother, and brother-in-law; remaining there for three weeks until January 1943 when they were deported to Auschwitz; working as a carpenter; spending time in Birkenau; being evacuated in January 1945 to Mauthausen and then to Ebensee, Austria, where he worked in the stone quarries; being liberated by the Americans on May 5, 1945; going to Israel illegally; being intercepted by the British and spending 21 months in Cyprus; being able to go to Israel, where he spent five months in the army; getting married; going to the United State in 1956; living in Cleveland, OH; having a wife, a son, a daughter, and one grandchild; and being retired.

    Oral history interview with Eva Sands

    Oral history interview with Eva Sands

    Oral History

    Eva Sands, born in 1940 in a Jewish ghetto, describes her parents, who came from Piotrkov, Poland; her father, Zev Wolfe, who was in the wood veneer business and was also a Talmudic scholar; her mother, Hannah, who died when Eva was seven months old; her father remarrying shortly after her mother’s death; her aunt Esther obtaining false papers and escaping the ghetto with two-year-old Eva and Eva's cousin, Naomi; Esther finding refuge for Naomi in a convent and leaving Eva on the doorstep of a woman named Maria Zaider; her parents remaining in the ghetto, having another child against ghetto rules, and being shot when this was discovered; living with the Zaiders throughout the war in Pustelnik, Poland (possibly the Pustelnik in Łódź Voivodeship) and not being aware of her Jewish identity; her Aunt Esther passing as a Polish Aryan until the war ended, and then reclaiming Eva from the Zaiders; being hysterical for several days after the separation from Maria Zaider and not wanting to be in the same room with her aunt; living first in a displaced persons camp in Germany, where her aunt was married; settling in Frankfurt, Germany; antisemitism in Frankfurt; attending a Hebrew school in Salzheim, Germany; growing up in Germany; moving to the United States in 1952 and spending a year in New York, NY; attending an Orthodox Jewish boarding school in England at age 14 and attending a finishing school in Switzerland; attending college at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH, and meeting her husband, Barry Sands; going to Poland to find Maria Zaider in 1976 and her painful visit with her; living in University Heights, OH; and her two children.

    Oral history interview with George Sapin

    Oral history interview with George Sapin

    Oral History

    George Sapin, born in 1924, describes entering into the army in 1943; being a member of the 67th Signal Battalion, the 82nd Airborne, and the 1286th Engineer Combat Battalion; going to England and arriving before the Battle of the Bulge; antisemitism in the army; his life after the war, becoming an electrical engineer then a technical writer; being originally from New York, NY; moving south with his unit along the Rhine as the war drew to a close; his emotions during the war and not having developed a Jewish identity; being Jewish in the army; not being present at the actual liberation of any camps; having many experiences with German citizens and seeing physical evidence of Nazi atrocities, including pictures of torture and rapes; his experiences having a strong influence on his political and social philosophy; and his attempts to live according to his belief that one should be committed and active.

    Oral history interview with Werner Sauer

    Oral history interview with Werner Sauer

    Oral History

    Werner Sauer, born in 1918 in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, describes the Jewish population of Gelsenkirchen; his family considering themselves German and being financially well-to-do; his father’s meat-packing plant; attending a Jewish Volkschule (an elementary school) for four years and then a gymnasium until he was forced to leave in 1933 at age 15; having to relinquish his license in 1938; becoming a bricklayer with the help of his father's friend; the ruin of his father’s business; the gradual changes under the Nazis; Kristallnacht and being arrested; deportations in 1940; being deported with his parents to the ghetto in Riga, Latvia in the winter of 1941 along with 500 Jews from Gelsenkirchen and 500 from Dortmund; conditions in the ghetto; his family being taken to Stutthof concentration camp; going to a section called Lent a where the Nazis had gathered all the artisans and skilled laborers; living and working in the factory, which he was ordered to rebuild with virtually no materials; being transferred with his father to Buchgarten, a section of Stutthof where people were exterminated; escaping with a friend and being caught briefly and passing as marine deserters; escaping the deserters’ camp and hiding on farms; being caught by Russians and having to prove they were German Jews; obtaining identity papers; his parents’ deaths; walking toward Germany; working in a Russian-occupied hospital after the liberation; living in Berlin, Germany until he received his emigration papers in May 1949; flying out of Berlin in an empty cargo plane and then taking a boat to New York, NY; getting a job in Cleveland, OH, where he had an aunt and uncle who sponsored him; working for Carling Brewing Co. for three years; his work installing boilers for the Ira E. Baker Co. until the company liquidated and he retired at age 60; and living with his wife in Middlefield, OH.

    Oral history interview with Freda Schmelzer

    Oral history interview with Freda Schmelzer

    Oral History

    Freda Schmelzer, born in a small Romanian town in the region of Transylvania, describes her parents, who ran a small general store; being one of seven children; the beautiful Jewish traditions and the peaceful life among the gentiles during her childhood; her home life and learning homemaking by assisting her mother; the arrival of the Hungarians; the restrictions placed on Jews; her family’s last time together at their Passover meal in 1944; the great psychological distress of not knowing what was happening elsewhere or of what was going to become of her family; the Jews of her town being taken to a ghetto in Soluge (possibly Vynohradiv, Ukraine), where they remained for four weeks; being transported to Auschwitz and being separated from her family; the conditions in the camp; being selected to work in a grenade factory, where conditions were slightly better; being marched to an unknown location and detained for four weeks in a horse barn; being liberated by the Russians; and returning home.

    Oral history interview with Max Solomon

    Oral history interview with Max Solomon

    Oral History

    Max Solomon (ne Slomovitz), born in Drahova, Czechoslovakia (Drahovo, Ukraine), a small town in the Carpathian mountains; being the oldest of four boys and having six sisters; his father’s saloon and restaurant; being raised religious and being part of a relatively small Jewish community; being affected by the war in June 1941 when the Germans invaded; Jews being deported from his town and the remaining Jews being forced to work; being taken with his family to Kolomyja, Poland (Ukraine) and then to Horodenka, Ukraine; his family’s attempted escape and the women being successful while the men were captured and killed; escaping the massacre; passing as a Christian and going to Russia, where he lived as an adopted son on a communist co-op; a flood causing a famine in the area; meeting people who were looking for food and reported that many Jews were still living in Drahova; returning home and finding his mother and sisters; being sent to a Hungarian forced labor camp while his mother and sisters were sent to Auschwitz; escaping and joining the Yugoslavian underground; fighting until the war ended; returning home and finding two of his sisters; going to a displaced persons camp in Egenfelder, Germany where he married in 1945; going to the US in 1949 with his wife; living in Beachwood, OH; and being an active member of Green Road Synagogue.

    Oral history interview with Helen Stone

    Oral history interview with Helen Stone

    Oral History

    Helen Stone (née Kahan), born in Napszolok, Czechoslovakia, describes her life in Cleveland, OH with her husband and her son, daughter, and grandchild; growing up in Nagydobryn, near the large city of Ungvar (Uzhhorod, Ukraine); the Jewish population in Nagydobryn; being very close to her mother, but having a bad relationship with her stepfather; her five brothers and sisters; her stepfather sending her to an orphanage, but returning home at her mother’s request; antisemitism increasing in 1939; getting typhoid; being deported with all the Jews in her town shortly after Passover in 1944; being sent to Auschwitz and separated from her mother; conditions in the camp; witnessing medical experimentation on the inmates; being sent to work in a factory in either Altenburg or Waldenburg (Mrs. Stone is not certain); being forced to march with her fellow prisoners for many days; being liberated by American soldiers, but having to go to a Russian refugee camp since she was a resident of the Russian-occupied zone; returning to Nagydobryn; escaping with a friend over the border and getting married to him shortly after; going to the United States in 1948; her husband working in a meat market in Cleveland, OH; and feeling proud to be Jewish.

    Oral history interview with Inge Weiss

    Oral history interview with Inge Weiss

    Oral History

    Inge Weiss, born in 1923 in Hannover, Germany, describes her father, who was born in Warta, Poland and became a men's clothing manufacturer in Germany; her mother, who was born in Germany but lost her citizenship when she married; her younger sister; her family being active in the Jewish community and keeping kosher; attending public school and having a Jewish education; attending business school for a short time; her family’s plan to immigrate to the United States; antisemitism increasing as the Nazis rose to power; being ostracized in school; the vandalism of her father’s store; her family being deported to Poland in October 1938; staying in crowded stables in Spoczynek; living with relatives in Kalisz, Poland; not being able to speak Polish nor Yiddish; the war starting and her family being deported to Krakow where they lived under very poor conditions until 1941; escaping to Warta; the atrocities in Warta; the gathering of the Jews in the town square and being separated from her family; being sent with her father to the ghetto in Łódź, Poland, where they stayed from 1942 to 1944; being deported to Auschwitz and sent to Bergen-Belsen in September 1944; her job distributing bread, which she got because she spoke German; getting typhoid; being liberated by the British and living in the German officers' quarters until she recovered; returning to Hannover in 1946 and working for the Jewish community; getting married in 1947; getting half of her father’s business and running a notions business there; going to the US in September 1949; her son’s birth in 1948; going to Cleveland, OH; and receiving help from the Ratner family.

    Oral history interview with Jack Wieder

    Oral history interview with Jack Wieder

    Oral History

    Jack Wieder, born in Bozkov, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), describes being the fourth of 11 children in a happy, religious family; his father, who was a wood processor; the existence of some antisemitism but his family being treated well because of his father’s good reputation; the Ukrainians taking over in 1939; the situation improving temporarily when the Hungarians came to power in 1941; the deportation of some Jews; the Nazis arriving in Bozkov in 1943; his sisters fleeing to Budapest, Hungary and Belgium; his father and older brother being sent to a work brigade; his father returning in 1944; being deported with his remaining family to a ghetto in Matejovice (possibly Matejovce nad Hornádom, Slovakia), where they stayed from five weeks; being taken to Auschwitz and the death of his mother and six younger siblings; being sent with his father to Warsaw, Poland to work at clearing the remains of the Warsaw ghetto; being sent to Dachau to work the camps in Kaufering and Landshut; being sent back to Dachau; his father dying at Dachau four days before liberation; being evacuated from Dachau to Garmisch-Partenkirchen; being liberated by American soldiers; returning to Bozkov and discovering that his brother, Hermann, and sisters, Julia and Toni, had also survived the war; being inducted into the Russian army; serving in the army for one year and escaping to Hungary; working for a refugee assistance organization and meeting his future wife, Eva; going to Vienna, Austria; immigrating to the United States; and living in Cleveland, OH, as do Toni, Julia and Hermann.

    Oral history interview with Abraham Akst

    Oral history interview with Abraham Akst

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Roni Berenson

    Oral history interview with Roni Berenson

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Beatrice Berger

    Oral history interview with Beatrice Berger

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Leon Bergrin

    Oral history interview with Leon Bergrin

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Betty Berliner

    Oral history interview with Betty Berliner

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Henry Billys, Sophie Billys, and Millie Korman

    Oral history interview with Henry Billys, Sophie Billys, and Millie Korman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Mayer Bitterman

    Oral history interview with Mayer Bitterman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Helen Cik

    Oral history interview with Helen Cik

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ann Cyncynatus

    Oral history interview with Ann Cyncynatus

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Paul Cyncynatus

    Oral history interview with Paul Cyncynatus

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Madeline Dautartus

    Oral history interview with Madeline Dautartus

    Oral History

    Madeline Dautartus, born in Strasbourg, France, discusses her parents, two sisters, and one brother; being raised Catholic; attending a Catholic high school; the evacuation of the entire town to Perigueux in Dordogne 1939; her father and brother being drafted into the army; the German occupation; her family’s return to Strasbourg; the Aryanization of Alsace-Lorraine; the burning of books; participating in the resistance; refusing a job in Germany; working at the social security office and being given a pass to enter the POW camp; bring food, clothes, and information to the prisoners; her desire to join the French army in Africa; being caught in 1942 while attempting to escape from Strasbourg with two young men; swallowing the message she was carrying; being detained in prisons for a month; being interrogated; being taken by train to Schirmeck camp (near Struthof extermination camp); her work in the laundry and cutting trees; a rosary that was shared amongst inmates; contracting diphtheria and pneumonia; the doctor who visited the isolation unit regularly to see who should be sent for extermination; being released after a year; being required to sign a statement saying she would never reveal anything about the camp; returning to Strasbourg and her job; being warned that she was being watched; being arrested twice more and questioned about her resistance activities; being prepared to commit suicide when she arrested two months before liberation; the Gestapo building being burned by US bombers; her family hiding two wounded US soldiers and two Arab soldiers from the French army in their basement until liberation; her brother’s experiences during the war; the liberation of Strasbourg in November 1944; serving as civilian in the Bureau Militaire; enlisting in the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps in France; being posted in Stuttgart, Germany and then Freiburg, Germany for five years; her encounter with a former SS guard; preparing the papers for a Lithuanian scout, who later became her husband; serving as a secretary to General Jean de Lattre; and working as a civilian in the military until 1950 when she immigrated to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Eugene Davidovits

    Oral history interview with Eugene Davidovits

    Oral History

    Eugene Davidovits, born in 1930 in Satu Mare (Satmar), Romania, discusses being raised in an Orthodox family consisting of his parents, five brothers, and one sister; working at forced labor two days a week after the Hungarians occupied the county; being beaten by a teacher and others as antisemitism rose; Rabbi Teitlebaum influencing Jews against going to Israel; living in the closed ghetto for before being taken by cattle car to Auschwitz; going through selection; being separated from his father and his two older brothers; being taken to Krakow-Płaszów where he worked for four months; the Germans killing the leaders of a resistance attempt; being transferred to Gross-Rosen death camp where he witnessed a rabbi being beaten to death; being taken to a subcamp in Gorlitz where he did chores for the doctor who treated him decently, gave him food, and later arranged for him to work in the kitchen; getting caught giving food to other prisoner; being sent to work in the tank factory that was run by German civilians; being treated relatively well by civilians within the factory until a Gross-Rosen inspector enforced limitations on food; being sent to make bunkers for German soldiers in March 1945 as the Russians approached; witnessing weaker workers being shot and sometimes buried while still alive; returning to Gorlitz in May 1945; leaving camp with a friend when the guards were away; being given food and civilian clothes by a policeman; staying in a well-supplied former Gestapo building; returning to Satmar in hopes of finding his family; realizing that he was the only member of his family who survived; living in a Jewish hospital for one month; living with the son of the Cantor until he was placed in a Joint-supported orphanage where he stayed from 1945-1947; getting married; and moving to Cleveland, OH at age 36.

    Oral history interview with Karola Dorfberger

    Oral history interview with Karola Dorfberger

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Helen Dub

    Oral history interview with Helen Dub

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Louis Dub

    Oral history interview with Louis Dub

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Leon Faigenbaum

    Oral history interview with Leon Faigenbaum

    Oral History

    Leon Faigenbaum, born in Gniewoszow, Poland in 1917 describes his life before the war; being taken to a labor camp near Radom; his father being buried alive when he was too ill to work; running away to rejoin his family in the Gniewoszow ghetto; being forced out of the ghetto in early 1942 and going to Zwoleń; being sent to labor camps in Deblin and Stawisk; getting caught while attempting to run away; being taken to Budzyn labor camp, run by SS Feix and a Jewish leader, Stockman; being saved by Stockman when Feix was about to kill him; being sent to Majdanek; being saved in December 1943 by the person overseeing the shoe makers when other Jews were gunned down at the edge of an open grave; being taken to Płaszów concentration camp, led by Göth; receiving daily beatings by non-Jewish Kapos; being sent towards Auschwitz in August 1944 but the train was sent onward to Mauthausen, a journey of eight days without food; surviving another selection and being put to work mining stones; volunteering to work as a toolmaker in St. Valentin, Austria, where an Austrian manager saved him by teaching him the skills he lacked; being moved to Ebensee in 1945 after US bombers destroyed the factory; being beaten so badly he could no longer work and then placed in a barrack with men waiting to die; witnessing cannibalism; being rescued by US forces in May 1945; spending six months in a nearby hospital; living in a displaced persons camp before returning to his hometown to search for relatives; fleeing to Łódź, Poland after being warned by an old friend that Poles would kill any Jews who remained; returning to Austria where he stayed at a DP camp in Linz, Austria; marrying his wife, a woman he knew from before the war; going to Palestine in 1947 with the help of the Haganah; serving in the Israeli Army and then working as a shoemaker; and immigrating to the US in 1959 so that his wife could be reunited with a brother and sister living in Cleveland, OH.

    Oral history interview with Helen Feig

    Oral history interview with Helen Feig

    Oral History

    Helen Feig, born in 1925 in Craciunesti, Romania, describes being the only child of Orthodox parents; the roundup of 500 Jews in 1941 who were taken to Galicia and killed; Hungarian soldiers chasing Jews out of synagogue on Rosh Hashanah; never seeing her father again after he was taken to the Kasho ghetto while he was out of town on business; being sent to the ghetto in Selo Slatina (Solotvyno, Ukraine) along with her mother and other women and children; being taken by cattle car to Auschwitz in 1944; being separated from her mother; running away from Block C-8 to be with her cousins; being transferred to Lübberstedt labor camp, near Bremenhof, Germany; being required to sew a different color sleeve on the left side of her dress; building bunkers to stay safe from bombing that was occurring at Bremenhof; being transported from place to place by train as the Germans were facing defeat; just missing a boat going to Mare Baltica and then being forced to walk until Ukrainians and Russians told them the war was over; being liberated by English soldiers who housed them in a summer resort near Neustadt; returning to her hometown where she stayed with family in a nearby town; neighbors who refused to return her family’s home or belongings; going to Frankfurt, Germany; getting married in 1948 and immigrating to the United States with her husband in 1949; living in Cleveland, OH until her husband became ill; living in Allentown, PA for two years while her husband was in a sanitarium in Colorado; and returning to build a life in Cleveland.

    Oral history interview with Lilly Feig and Helen Kormis

    Oral history interview with Lilly Feig and Helen Kormis

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Esther Friedman

    Oral history interview with Esther Friedman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Nina Frankel

    Oral history interview with Nina Frankel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Art Gelbart

    Oral history interview with Art Gelbart

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Rose Gelbart

    Oral history interview with Rose Gelbart

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Erika Gold

    Oral history interview with Erika Gold

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Wiera Goldman

    Oral history interview with Wiera Goldman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Elaine Grunwald

    Oral history interview with Elaine Grunwald

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Maurice Grunwald

    Oral history interview with Maurice Grunwald

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Zev Harel

    Oral history interview with Zev Harel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Jacob Hennenberg

    Oral history interview with Jacob Hennenberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Larry Hersh

    Oral history interview with Larry Hersh

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Rose Kaplovitz

    Oral history interview with Rose Kaplovitz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sara Kay

    Oral history interview with Sara Kay

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Phillip Wexberg

    Oral history interview with Phillip Wexberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Jack York

    Oral history interview with Jack York

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sylvia Lavon

    Oral history interview with Sylvia Lavon

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ezra Lazar

    Oral history interview with Ezra Lazar

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Olga Lebovitz

    Oral history interview with Olga Lebovitz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Bella Lebowicz

    Oral history interview with Bella Lebowicz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Abraham Lerer

    Oral history interview with Abraham Lerer

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ruth Lidawer

    Oral history interview with Ruth Lidawer

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Danny Lieberman

    Oral history interview with Danny Lieberman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Eva Luedecke

    Oral history interview with Eva Luedecke

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Rosette Lurie

    Oral history interview with Rosette Lurie

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Harold Mailman

    Oral history interview with Harold Mailman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ita Majzner

    Oral history interview with Ita Majzner

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Isador Malcmacher

    Oral history interview with Isador Malcmacher

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with William McKee

    Oral history interview with William McKee

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Tibor Messinger

    Oral history interview with Tibor Messinger

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Henry Miller

    Oral history interview with Henry Miller

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Jack Mintz

    Oral history interview with Jack Mintz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Mark Moss

    Oral history interview with Mark Moss

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Louis Muller

    Oral history interview with Louis Muller

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ben Nebel

    Oral history interview with Ben Nebel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Mark Newman

    Oral history interview with Mark Newman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Marvin Newman

    Oral history interview with Marvin Newman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Esther Pinkas

    Oral history interview with Esther Pinkas

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sally Pitluk

    Oral history interview with Sally Pitluk

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Mike Prayzer

    Oral history interview with Mike Prayzer

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Alex Rabiner

    Oral history interview with Alex Rabiner

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Eva Reis

    Oral history interview with Eva Reis

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Leslie Robicsek

    Oral history interview with Leslie Robicsek

    Oral History

    Leslie Robicsek, born in 1924 in Oradea, Romania, describes being the son of a kosher butcher; singing in the synagogue with a famous cantor; the destruction of a synagogue in 1933 during an Iron Guard riot; becoming an apprentice in in a plastics factory owned by Glick in 1937; the repressive measures against Jews being put in place after the Hungarians entered in 1940-1941; his brother and other Jews being removed from the army and sent as forced labor to Nagybánya (now Baia Mare, Romania); being sent to the ghetto in May 1944; being taken daily to a cadet training camp to do maintenance work; his father’s non-Jewish friend sending word to him that he’d help the family get out of the ghetto, but his father refusing; being transported to Birkenau where they went through selection; claiming he was a tool and die maker when volunteers were sought; his father being taken to work in the stone quarries at Melk where he died; being moved to Auschwitz where he was sent each day to work at Union Machine Works, an ammunition plant; watching famous actors and musicians perform at night; witnessing hangings after Sonderkommandos blew up a crematorium; beginning a death march on January 18, 1945; arriving at Gross-Rosen where he was selected to work as a Sonderkommando for three weeks; moving on to Flossenberg at the end of February and then to Pocking where he was put to work constructing an airport; being liberated by American troops on May 6, 1945; his wife who had also survived Auschwitz; his reluctance to dicuss the camps; and his thoughts on his Jewish identity and faith.

    Oral history interview with Celia Rosenfeld

    Oral history interview with Celia Rosenfeld

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Celia Roth

    Oral history interview with Celia Roth

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with David Roth

    Oral history interview with David Roth

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Rena Rubinow

    Oral history interview with Rena Rubinow

    Oral History

    Rena Rubinow, born in Kraków, Poland, describes being the oldest of three sisters; her mother dying when she was a child; one sister moving to Palestine in 1937; being a married mother of a two year old child when the war began in 1939; being forced into an open ghetto; fleeing to a small town 20 miles from Kraków in 1940 when the ghetto was closed; running away from the town and being hidden by a peasant in October 1942 when they were warned that Jews in the area were being killed; walking back to the ghetto in Kraków three weeks later as they believed it offered their best chance for survival; working in Madritch’s uniform factory outside of the ghetto and sewing bras in her spare time which she sold to female guards; arranging for her former maid to hide her young daughter; being taken to Płaszów concentration camp on March 13, 1943, her maid and child also being sent to the camp where her daughter was killed; being transported via cattle care to Birkenau with her sister, Rose, in 1944; her husband being transported to Mauthausen where he was killed; being sent to Lichtenburg at the end of the year; remaining there for five months before being liberated by Russians on May 5, 1945; receiving no assistance and walking to Kraków where they learned that none of their other relatives survived; supporting herself by sewing; remarrying in 1946 to a man who had served in the underground; moving to Sweden, then Montreal and finally to Canton, Ohio, where husband had two brothers; struggling financially and eventually moving in 1958 to Cleveland, where she had a grocery store; supporting herself and three children after her husband killed himself; remarrying and putting her two sons through college; and her daughter dying while she was a student at Boston College.

    Oral history interview with Freda Salick

    Oral history interview with Freda Salick

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with David Schneider

    Oral history interview with David Schneider

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with William Seas

    Oral history interview with William Seas

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Edith Simon

    Oral history interview with Edith Simon

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Julia Simon

    Oral history interview with Julia Simon

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Alfred Spitz

    Oral history interview with Alfred Spitz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Jetse Sprey

    Oral history interview with Jetse Sprey

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Milton Steinbock

    Oral history interview with Milton Steinbock

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Eric Stern

    Oral history interview with Eric Stern

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Andrew Sternberg

    Oral history interview with Andrew Sternberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sam Teitelbaum

    Oral history interview with Sam Teitelbaum

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Hannah Rath Trabitz

    Oral history interview with Hannah Rath Trabitz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Freda Traub

    Oral history interview with Freda Traub

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Harry Unger

    Oral history interview with Harry Unger

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Marcel Weintraub

    Oral history interview with Marcel Weintraub

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Malke Weiss

    Oral history interview with Malke Weiss

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Miriam Wexberg

    Oral history interview with Miriam Wexberg

    Oral History

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