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Oral history interview with Leo Bretholz

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1994.A.0447.8 | RG Number: RG-50.042.0008

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    Oral history interview with Leo Bretholz
    Transcript
    Once we start, they're going to look at you for a while
    and adjust the lights.
    This one, what do you think?
    Sandy, is it distracting?
    This is our roll one with Leo Bretholz.
    And this is camera one?
    [INDISTINCT CONVERSATION]
    [BEEP]
    Take one.
    Should I just lean back?
    Yeah, you do whatever you want.
    But you can look at me.
    Can you briefly and simply tell me
    what the underground was like in France?
    The French underground movement was made up
    of two major organizations.
    One was what was called the FFI.
    That was the abbreviation for Forces francaises de
    l'IIntérieur, the French Forces of the Interior.
    And the other one was FTPF, Francs-Tireurs et Partisans
    Francais, Snipers and Partisans--
    what you might call a--
    what do you call these organizations
    that fight the governments and the establishment?
    Francs-Tireurs-- what do call them in the Middle East?
    They're called the--
    The guerillas?
    The guerillas, right.
    That was the second group.
    The difference between these two groups were very fundamental.
    FFI was under the direction of the exiled French government
    in London.
    Charles de Gaulle was the man who gave the instructions
    and gave the directives.
    The others were Francs-Tireurs Partisans guerrillas.
    And they worked on their own.
    They had their own command and did not
    listen to the directives that came from London because they
    had a special interest.
    They had an interest to maintain,
    for instance, the French infrastructure.
    Because once they were coming back as victors,
    they wouldn't want to have to rebuild so much.
    Or they had an interest to protect, namely in properties.
    Let's say there was an English-owned--
    British-owned-- property somewhere in the center
    of France.
    And in that factory--
    and that factory was now producing
    raw materials for the Germans.
    Now the FTPF would go after those places
    and bomb them or destroy them.
    The French Forces of the Interior
    would be interested in not having these factories produce
    those tanks or those weapons, but they
    would like to maintain the property as an entity.
    So how to do one and not do the other without destroying?
    So there were these dichotomies.
    But FTPF didn't listen to it and did their own.
    The French Forces of the Interior had a command,
    and that, as I said, came out of London.
    And they had their military or paramilitary commanders
    here and there.
    The FTPF chose their leaders from within their ranks
    who were ragtag people.
    Now what did the FTPF include?
    This was 1941, '42.
    That was just six years after the end of the Spanish Civil
    War.
    So they had people who had come from Spain as refugees
    and were glad to take up arms against the German fascists
    again.
    There were deserters, to be sure, from the German Army.
    Now the Germans had incorporated into their army
    some people from Russia, from the Eastern Occupied
    Territories-- the Georgians especially, and Ukrainians.
    They were rabidly pro German, in fact.
    So some of them, after having been
    incorporated into the German Army
    and were then taken prisoners, escaped from the prison camps
    maybe and joined the FTPF.
    Or they were disenchanted with the German Army
    and decided, well, this is not for us, and deserted.
    And then there were real German deserters.
    Then there were a lot of people from Alsace-Lorraine,
    those people who had been--
    quite a few pro-German but many anti-German.
    So when the Lorraine people, who were
    taken into the German Army, refused
    to go along with them because at heart they were French.
    That reason had changed hands so many times.
    They were deserters.
    And then last but not least, there were the Jews.
    And the Jews had formed a group that was called Armée Juive,
    the Jewish Army.
    That group was not so much into fighting
    as into more harassing.
    Roadblocks, blowing up tracks, going into little villages
    and attack gendarmerie station and get some arms
    if they were available.
    But mainly to produce false identification
    cards and administrative things that
    would help people hide out safely, escape safely,
    children to be transported to Spain--
    to Portugal through Spain-- perhaps to North Africa
    or to Switzerland.
    Now the group that I finally wound up with in Limoges was
    one of those Armée Juive.
    The group was called--
    the whole Armée Juive was really called the Sixth.
    That was a nomenclature that was given, that we adopted.
    Or whoever was in charge decided that's what it will be called,
    the Sixth.
    The Sixth didn't mean much.
    Didn't mean anything, in fact.
    It was just drawn out of the air.
    But to the French Milice especially-- that
    was the French collaborationist paramilitary group
    that was under Vichy.
    And they did the dirty work for the Gestapo, in fact.
    But to them the Sixth was something ominous,
    something to be watched, looked out for, watched for,
    or be afraid of perhaps.
    Why?
    Because in their mind, if we were called the Sixth,
    there must have been a first, and a second, and a third,
    and a fourth, and a fifth.
    So to them the Sixth was something
    that was sixth in succession of a series.
    And to us it didn't mean much.
    This was mainly what I, personally,
    was engaged in after my various escapes,
    and when I finally acquired that nom de guerre, that French name
    Max Henri Lefevre.
    And our group did this, produced these false identification
    cards.
    To be sure, the French Resistance, the Maquis,
    was formed in the southeast of France in the French Alps,
    and in the area where I first was, in the Rhone Valley.
    But that resistance group in northern part,
    in the northern part of France, above--
    north of the demarcation line--
    did not really mean much until shortly
    after the landing in Normandy in June of 1944.
    That's when they got more into action.
    And that's when the police in France joined up.
    Up to that moment in the northern part of France,
    the Maquis and the Resistance was not so much organized
    as mainly people individually started resisting and grouping
    because in the northern part of France,
    the Germans had pretty much the run of things,
    if not the collaboration of many people
    in Paris, including perhaps the police.
    And there's an interesting book out by Davy Jones.
    The book is called Paris in the Third Reich.
    Not "and" the Third Reich, in which he propounds
    the idea that had Germany won that war,
    Paris would have become the capital of his New Europe
    because that was the main gem in the crown of his conquests.
    He always wanted-- Hitler always wanted
    Paris to be the showpiece.
    So he propounds the idea that the French may have even
    gone along with the New Order.
    So in the northern part of France
    there wasn't much resistance, to make a long story short.
    Our-- the southern part was where the beginning was.
    And this was basically what the resistance did.
    There many arrests, many people killed,
    many people executed-- summarily executed.
    Very good friend of mine, Eugene Bass
    was killed in Saint-Junien in southern France
    when he delivered a pack of ID cards
    and was arrested at the train station by the Germans,
    and two shots into the head.
    He's listed in that book Déportation des Juifs as one
    summarily executed.
    It was hit and miss.
    It was run-- what it amounted to be
    one step ahead of your pursuers then you had it made.
    It was not something that we could
    say was so well organized that if it
    had endured for much longer that we would
    have come out the winners.
    I don't think so.
    Armies-- the German armies were defeated.
    And that spelled the end of it.
    But as an outfit, in hindsight, it was an adventure.
    But I don't think, as the outfit was constituted
    or the whole movement was constituted,
    they could have fought the Germans
    on an even playing field.
    They had all the tanks.
    They had all the ammunition.
    But things turned out differently.
    How did your group get away with things?
    Roll two.
    Take two.
    [BEEP]
    And I want to go back to your specific resistance activities
    in your group.
    And I want you to tell a little bit about how you
    were able to get away with it.
    After my various escapes--
    the one from the train in motion, the deportation
    train, and later a jail sentence and I served nine months.
    And again a forced labor camp, and again being
    taken to a train to a work detail,
    escaping again this time from a standing train.
    I was contacted by my friend, a young fellow,
    who had escaped with me.
    We had communicated.
    And he knew where I was hiding after my last escape.
    And he sent me false identification papers.
    What he sent me, basically, was a birth certificate,
    which served later to establish an identity and identification
    cards and ration cards and everything
    that was connected with legalizing your--
    legalizing as it were, my false identity.
    And I could live with that under the regime.
    And after the war, if I would have wanted to,
    I could have continued that particular identity--
    in that identity.
    So after my last escape and hiding out,
    I was sent these papers with a letter of recommendation
    to join up with a group in the Rhone
    Valley in a little town called Saint-Vallier, south of Lyon,
    which at the time was a hotbed of Gestapo activity
    under the aegis of Klaus Barbie.
    I joined with that group in November of 1943
    not really knowing what that group was.
    To me it was a place where I'm going to go to hide out with
    other young people who had run away, with other--
    not just young people--
    men who had run away.
    It had nothing to do with children or women.
    But when I got there, I knew after a few hours what it was.
    Speaking to people who they were, where they came from,
    and I realized I had just been sent
    to a place where we will do illegal underground activities.
    What happened in that particular area or in this particular camp
    was mainly instructions.
    How to circulate with our papers without being detected.
    What to say if we were in a place like a restaurant
    and an inspection team came in, a patrol came in.
    How to act, and act natural, and to never speak or let
    on that you speak the language other than what you are,
    a Frenchmen.
    Don't fall into traps.
    And they were teaching some of us young people certain trades
    there too, so that the time should not go entirely
    with the knowledge that within some time,
    we will be sent to certain areas where
    they can use our services--
    underground activity.
    Little did we know at the time when I got there
    that in a few months later, we would
    be notified by the mayor of that village
    that there will be a raid.
    Evidently that mayor knew what this camp was all about.
    But we were notified that there will be a raid on the centre de
    pré-apprentissage, a center for pre-apprenticeship.
    That's what it was called.
    A name that was innocuous.
    Didn't mean much.
    They gave us the uniforms of the Compagnon de France
    so that we were incorporated into that whole image of New
    Europe.
    And the majority of the people in this camp were Jewish.
    My friend who had sent me to that camp with a letter
    had that from his brother.
    And his brother had a friend of his--
    as he explained to me--
    had already had a contact.
    That's what they did there.
    And little did we know that when that mayor notified us
    that we will-- this is the time when we would have to disband.
    And the whole thing was disbanded.
    And 60 or 80 of us who were there--
    that was less than 100--
    were sent into various areas of Vichy France.
    And I was sent into an area near Limoges,
    a little town called Chalus.
    And in Chalus, I connected with the Jewish underground.
    And we were there to produce false identification cards.
    That was our main endeavor.
    Very good friend of mine who was part
    of this group, a young lady by the name of Marianne Cohn,
    just a couple of weeks-- three or four weeks--
    before the liberation, had been put in charge of a children's
    convoy to Switzerland.
    And arriving near the border of Switzerland,
    near the town of Annemasse, she and her truck driver
    in the truck were stopped by a Nazi patrol that materialized
    at the last moment.
    And the kids were actually in plain view of the Swiss border.
    Soon freedom would be theirs.
    But that never came because they were arrested.
    They were beaten about, not the kids.
    The kids were then handled by the mayor of Annemasse
    who said he was going to put himself
    in charge of these kids.
    Marianne Cohn was arrested.
    The truck driver was arrested.
    She was interrogated.
    She didn't divulge anything.
    And then the henchman from Lyon came
    to interrogate her in her cell.
    The story wound up with her being killed with a spade
    to her skull.
    And for a week-- a few weeks later, after the liberation,
    her body was found in a shallow grave
    together with another prisoner lady
    who was with her in the cell.
    And then a poem was found in her pocket of a jacket--
    of a bloodstained jacket-- where she had written about
    the hobnailed booth and the--
    you have key chains in your fists and you are--
    but I am not giving in and all that sort of thing.
    And I'm not going to speak.
    I'll talk tomorrow but not today.
    And she never had a chance to talk or to not
    to talk because she was--
    she said, tomorrow I will be betray, not today.
    You can't get me to betray today, tomorrow.
    I know what you are doing, but I know what I am going to do.
    And then she was going to slit her wrists with a file,
    but she never got to that.
    She was killed.
    Anyway, that was the tragic story of one of our people.
    And when you go on the war front and you shoot it out
    with the Milice or the Germans, that's a quick thing.
    It's either them or us.
    And that's sort of action out in the field.
    But there is more to the underground than the field
    and the confrontations.
    There is that resistance of--
    sacrifice, and doing what you think is right.
    And this, Marianne Cohn really personified
    everything that was good in a person, that
    knew what she was doing.
    She was very studious.
    She was very pert little person, loved children, and loved life.
    A poet a musician.
    And that was also part of that underground, that resistance,
    that had to be there because documentation
    was very important.
    In fact, it was on the 10th of June 1944 that
    was the destruction of the village of Oradour--
    that I was on my way to Oradour with a pack of cards,
    identification cards.
    And my friend Eugene Bass took a batch of cards
    to go to Saint-Junien, a village beyond.
    Why did he do that?
    Because his mother was in that village hiding out.
    So he took that area because at the same time
    he could visit with his mother.
    So when he arrived at the train station,
    they caught him with these cards and killed him.
    And when we were on the train, on that commuter train between
    Limoges and Oradour-sur-Glane--
    that's the village that on the 10th of May
    was burned to the ground, 900-some people.
    You may have heard of it.
    Women and children put into a church to be photographed.
    And then the church was burned down
    to the ground with straw and hay on the outside and gasoline
    poured over it.
    And that was the tragedy of Oradour.
    And when we were on that train going to Oradour
    and we saw the German column proceed
    alongside on the country road next to the train,
    next to the railroad track, we knew
    that they're going somewhere for some sort of action.
    So some of us decided we are not going to go to Oradour.
    We're not going to go further.
    In fact, the next stop, we will get off
    because when the Germans go into that direction,
    we don't want to go in that same direction.
    That was also part of the learning process.
    When you see trouble that you cannot--
    don't want to be involved in, just find another way.
    Be one step ahead.
    Think ahead.
    So we got off a station before.
    We found out that whoever descended
    from the train in Oradour, from the train, was also arrested,
    was part of the killing--
    was killed right in Oradour.
    So there was another time when I escaped just by sheer luck
    because I decided not to go to Oradour.
    The first things were escapes.
    This was not an escape but just a preemptive sort of decision
    that had to be made.
    The cards were never delivered.
    And the people to whom they would have been delivered
    were no longer alive anyway.
    --to deliver some cards when I collapsed
    because I had a hernia, a strangulation hernia.
    And I had an incident in a park where a nurse walked by
    and she says, you will have to be taken to the hospital.
    And I resisted that because they would recognize circumcision.
    And in France--
    French people do not get circumcised, you see--
    the non-Jews.
    And I wound up in the hospital.
    And it was an emergency operation.
    And when I woke up there was this nun, a Catholic hospital
    nun.
    Her name was Saint Joan of Arc, a beautiful black-eyed young
    nun, about maybe 19, 20, 21 years old.
    And she-- when I woke up and I had a hot [INAUDIBLE] of-- hot
    water bottle at my feet because I had that infection, you know,
    and I had a drain in my stomach there, groin--
    she said to me, you don't have to--
    as long as I'm in this ward, she says,
    you don't have to worry about anything.
    That's what she said to me.
    Later when I wrote to the hospital
    to get some documentation on that--
    I needed that for Germany for compensation,
    that sort of thing--
    I asked in that letter that I wrote to the administration,
    is Sister Joan of Arc by any chance still at your hospital?
    They said, no, she was transferred somewhere.
    They said, either Normandy or Brittany.
    I think it was Normandy.
    She's in another hospital, but if we have some communication
    with her, if we have a chance to speak to her,
    we'll tell her that you asked about her.
    And it's nice that you did ask about her.
    So that was-- there was a rabbi in--
    later was the Grand Rabbi of Strasbourg Abraham Deutsch.
    And he was the fellow through whose offices
    we always had our communication.
    But he was a rabbi in Limoges, but he had all this information
    and letters and instructions came through his office,
    really.
    And when I was in that hospital, I still
    made sure that I was in touch with Rabbi Deutsch,
    that he knew what was happening to me because I
    had gone to deliver some cards and dropped right in the--
    well, to get some information from kids in an orphanage
    to see what they needed to be done--
    and all of a sudden had disappeared off the street.
    So I had to send message to Rabbi Deutsch later
    after a couple of days after I had sort of gotten out
    of anesthesia.
    So these were all little incidents
    that were part of that whole mosaic of events, you know.
    All right, now let's not do the train now.
    Let's go back.
    And why don't you tell me how your distant cousin saved you
    when you were hiding.
    Just tell me that little story.
    Annie-- how she saved you when you were hiding in the attic.
    Oh, Annie, yeah.
    She's now a lady of 69 living in Belgium.
    What happened was that before we were--
    before I had my escape, I lived in this town Cauterets.
    You know, all these--
    all the information there--
    lived in this town Cauterets near the-- not I lived there.
    We were sent there as Jews to go into what was called forced
    residence, résidence assignée, assigned residence.
    Again there was a mayor responsible for letting
    us know that there will be a raid, so some of us
    took to the mountains.
    About a handful of us took to the mountains to hide out.
    Annie, who was with her parents there, was a Belgian citizen.
    And Belgians and Luxembourgers and Dutch people,
    at first, were never as much affected by that
    as people who had come from Austria, Germany, Poland,
    the East, or apatride, meaning stateless people.
    And then she was a girl.
    And women were not immediately-- some of them
    were under some sort of dispensation there.
    But men and young men, of course, were taken.
    When we came back from the mountain,
    I knew that I was no longer able to live
    in this town of Cauterets, which was near the Spanish border,
    about two or three miles away from the Spanish border.
    An enclave from which it was very hard to get away
    and to get to.
    But that's what they wanted.
    Wanted us sort of captive.
    I decided within a day or two we will
    have to get away from here.
    I will have to get away because I could no longer be there.
    Out of the 1,500 or so people who
    had been confined-- the Jews-- there
    was just about maybe a couple hundred left.
    And I went up to the attic in the place where we lived.
    My family, distant cousin, they said,
    you will stay up in the attic until a few days from now
    when you will be able to leave here.
    When all the tumult had died down and there's
    no longer maybe inspection or patrols.
    And I went up to that attic and stayed there
    with a little bit of provision that I took along.
    And there was a cot on the side that I was lying on,
    and a wooden door, as it is in attics,
    like a storage place with a lock--
    a padlock on the outside.
    And that wooden door had panels.
    And through these panels there were cracks.
    You could actually peep and see what's going on.
    So I had to be sure that I was out of the range of vision
    if somebody would look in, and was
    right on the side standing against the wall
    or lying down or sitting on that bed.
    At one point, I heard from time to time my cousin would come up
    anyway, would say--
    would find out if I'm all right, if I need anything, water,
    or anything like that.
    And they would supply me in these couple of days.
    But at one point one afternoon, I hear steps.
    And they were not the usual steps
    of that young woman or her mother.
    But there were several steps, and there were noises.
    And I was in there and moved my head to the crack,
    and peeped out.
    And there was Annie and two gendarmes with her.
    And they wanted to know who had the key to that lock to the--
    that's what I heard them ask her.
    She says, I don't know, we just moved in here a few months ago
    and never had access to this.
    But the person, the landlord who owns this--
    what was called a villa or something like that,
    it was called la pergola, Spanish name--
    they may have the key, but we would
    have to get in touch with them to get the key.
    But what is it?
    We are looking for this fellow that was living here with you--
    like they looked for others also.
    She says, well, he ran away.
    He ran away, never heard from him or some such excuse.
    And when they were debating the issue, the key,
    whether to get in or go get the key, they try to get near her.
    And touched her and sort of told her
    that if she would give in to their wishes,
    they would just forget about the whole thing.
    And when I heard that, it just sent a shiver down my spine.
    And they bent down over her, and tried
    to caress her and fondle her and kiss her.
    And she resisted to some extent, but also
    didn't want to make it to annoy them too much
    or anger them too much, so that they shouldn't get back.
    And after a while, they just got down
    with her-- walked down the steps again with her.
    And I don't know really what happened after that.
    But there was Annie, and due to the fact
    that she sort of played along with them,
    I think they did not insist on getting the key
    or maybe breaking the door down.
    But in their perception, someone who just disappears overnight--
    because they had all our names and we
    had to register every two weeks with the mayor.
    Another thing, as a follow up to that.
    A couple of years ago, I sent a note
    to the city hall in Cauterets just
    to inquire about the name of the mayor
    because I never knew the name, telling him also
    that he had done some good for us by notifying us,
    and that I live now in America.
    And I might write some memoirs or just
    write some mementos on the-- and it would be good
    for me to know his name.
    And they said of course the mayor died since then
    but we have his son's name and he lives in Limoges, in fact.
    And he's about 80 years old now.
    So that was the story in the attic in Cauterets.
    See, when you first said Annie, it so
    happens I have a cousin Annie who lives here in America.
    And for a moment I didn't--
    Yeah.
    In fact, I'm going to see them in Belgium
    when I go there this May.
    OK.
    We're probably running out of [INAUDIBLE]..
    Can you [BEEP] that comical story you mentioned once about
    the flash [BEEP] when you were stopped to have your--
    God-- That was after my escape.
    It's interesting.
    You bring all that back, then you saw the film, naturally,
    the clip.
    After my escape from the train in northern France,
    I made my way back to the southerns zone
    below the demarcation line into a town
    called Bagneres-de-Bigorre.
    That was also a town where we were sent on assigned
    residence, forced residence.
    Had many friends there.
    There were many of us Jewish families there.
    And we lived there for, oh, maybe close
    to a year, over half a year anyway.
    And from that town we were later sent to Cauterets.
    But when I came back, after my escape,
    I went down to Bagneres-de-Bigorre
    because there I had friends.
    And I knew the family Spierer, who lived there,
    would probably take me in because that's
    the family I stayed with after I ran away from Cauterets.
    And then I was deported, and then I came back to them.
    OK, we got to stop.
    We got to change.
    Camera roll four, take six.
    Because that's the family I stayed
    with after I ran away from Cauterets.
    And then I was deported.
    And then I came back to them.
    OK.
    We've got to stop.
    We've got to change.
    Camera roll four, take six.
    So now we're going to start with the transports out of Drancy.
    In October of 1942, in the beginning of October
    after I had run away from this forced residence in Cauterets,
    I made my way into Switzerland with a false identification
    card.
    Traveling on a train to the Swiss border.
    The Swiss arrested us and sent us back to France.
    The gendarmes took custody of us, sent us
    to a camp in southern France called Rivesaltes.
    On the 20th of October--
    I mean, a couple of days later.
    Yeah, on the 20th, we were sent from Rivesaltes to Drancy.
    That was in the north of France near Paris,
    near Le Bourget Drancy.
    And we stayed interned in Drancy till the 5th of November.
    On the 5th of November in the evening,
    we were entrained in the cattle cars
    in the train station of Le Bourget.
    The process of putting us into trains was very simple.
    They counted out 50.
    You got into the train.
    At the end of rifle butts, they pushed us in.
    And after the 50 were in the train, in that cattle car,
    in that car, they closed the doors and locked them.
    Now, if there was a family of four,
    they would count out 48, 49, 50.
    And the fourth person there would
    have been the 51st, a little boy of four,
    went into the next cattle car.
    He was not allowed to be with his family.
    The family was protested, and that didn't help.
    If they would have protested more,
    they could have been killed.
    The father, for instance.
    The family was worried.
    What would the little boy think of us?
    And the boy would think, thought the parents didn't love him.
    So this was the separation of families
    that began right there at the embarking into the transport.
    There was one bucket in the center of the car for the uses
    to relieve, to relieve yourself.
    And that bucket, within a couple of hours, overflowed.
    That stands to reason because there was 50 of us in that car.
    What we had seen in Drancy, some of the atrocities, my friend
    and I, Manfred Silberwasser, decided if we can,
    we'd have to get away.
    And there was no use trying anything
    while we were standing from about five
    or six in the evening till the next morning, which I later
    found out through the book that it was about 8 o'clock.
    We had no notion of time.
    We had no watches.
    We had no-- all that was all taken away from us.
    So during that night, during that long night waiting
    as to what's going to happen, when
    are we going to finally start?
    Because we didn't know what their schedule was.
    They went by schedule that was meticulously
    prepared and organized and bureaucratically enforced.
    We were thinking, what can be done?
    Luckily for us, the two windows that were at the opposite ends,
    diagonally opposite in the car, one
    had barbed wire bars and barbed wire.
    The other one had just bars.
    Barbed wire is never a real obstacle
    because they're rusted.
    They can break very easily.
    You can break them very easily.
    But the bars are still an obstacle.
    So we set all night and wondered, how can we make sure
    that these bars that are there at a distance like this,
    become separated enough for us to be able to squeeze through?
    And while we were sitting there thinking,
    it materialized in our minds that this is
    the way we're going to do it.
    We'll have to twist them in some way, separate them in some way.
    We couldn't do it while we were standing
    because the patrols were outside of the car
    seeing that everything is OK, shining up and down
    and looking, and shining in to see that everything's OK.
    But as soon as the train started in the morning,
    and we were out of Paris for about a half an hour or so out
    of Paris, we decided our task to pry these bars apart.
    And we know that when you make a cloth wet, a towel wet,
    it has tensile strength in ringing it.
    You can ring it.
    And when you twist it, it becomes like a tourniquet.
    So we took off our sweaters, pullovers, v-necks,
    and dipped them into that human waste in the bucket.
    And didn't even have to use the bucket
    because the floor of the--
    we were squatting in it and walking in it and [SNIFFS]
    inhaling it.
    And it's still up there in my nostrils
    right when I talk about it.
    And we used these sweaters to twist around the bars.
    If these are the bars, twist it around and twist,
    twist, twist, until all the liquid had poured out
    and had been twisted out.
    By that time, it had developed that strength.
    And we did that often enough alternating between him
    and myself until the bars started
    to somewhat move in the frame.
    We saw them move.
    Why?
    Because the rust in the frame started falling down in dust,
    rusty dust.
    And when we saw these bars moving,
    that was the light at the end of the tunnel,
    to use a cliche or--
    what do they call it? --a metaphor.
    That was it.
    We knew that if we would continue that often enough,
    that eventually these bars will be giving enough for us
    to be able to bend them up and down,
    up and down, until finally they had moved enough where we could
    bend them into a position where the opening was wide enough
    for us to be able to squeeze through.
    And we did.
    At a given moment, we did.
    And after we escaped, that we lay there
    in the ravine for a while, that almost seemed like an eternity.
    Made our way into a village.
    Went to a bakeshop.
    The apprentice came to the door and told
    us there was no bread now.
    Not until the morning.
    And we said we're not interested in bread.
    We would like to know where the village priest lives.
    And he said he was going to take us to his house or home, which
    was right adjoining-- a sacristy adjoining the church.
    And we got to him.
    We had torn off our Jewish stars.
    I feel now that if we had them on,
    it would have been more reassuring for him because he
    would have known who we were.
    Although, we could have been-- it could have been a trap.
    But he reckoned and we told him that we
    had escaped from a train.
    We were very frank with him.
    And we didn't know.
    He could have been a collaborator too, you know?
    But we felt we were in good hands
    as we saw the face of the man.
    And he said, yeah, they come through here several times
    a week.
    And we know.
    We know that.
    But you know, he says I can let you stay here for the night.
    But in the morning, very early, I'd
    have to get you out of your warm bed.
    Because between 5:00 and 6:00, a patrol
    can come by here almost regularly.
    So he gave us milk and bread and cheese, warm milk.
    Put us into a feather bed.
    Into a crisp, white sheet.
    And that, after being in Drancy with the straw on a cement
    floor and vermin putrid stench and--
    it was like you were on a cloud.
    And when he woke us with that soft voice in the morning,
    hey, fellas.
    [FRENCH]
    You have to get up.
    [FRENCH] You have to get away because, you know.
    Gave us a letter to another colleague of his.
    Also a priest in the village, not too far.
    And we spent the next day in his place, an adjoining stable.
    Not a barn, a stable.
    And we spending that night lying between cows, two cows.
    And we-- a cozy feeling to fall asleep hearing
    them chew the cud.
    And that odor is still here.
    And when I go through a countryside today,
    I say that too often.
    And it's really an interesting aspect
    of when I go through a countryside
    and I smell manure, dung, I Inhale it with a relish.
    And my kids, ah, what's?
    I said, well, that brings back memories.
    But it is interesting that these little things
    are all a process of surviving and a process of resisting.
    You look back at some of the thing with horror.
    You look back at some of the things
    with a different kind of a feeling, a feeling of freedom
    and you have made it.
    In fact, the feeling after we had escaped--
    whatever will happen from now on in will no longer be
    an obstacle because if we made that, we will come out
    of it all right.
    That was our gut feeling.
    So we did make that escape in that respect from the train.
    When we walked the country road the following days,
    a couple of days later, and I told my friend Fred,
    I said, Freddy, 30 years from now we'll talk about that.
    We won't believe it.
    He says, you're crazy.
    I said, what do you mean?
    He says, what are you talking about 30 years from now?
    You don't know what's going to be three days from now.
    And he was right, because I wound up in jail after that.
    But again, all that was an aftermath
    and even while I was in jail serving nine months in there.
    From a year, it became nine months.
    A quarter off for good behavior.
    Even while I was in jail, I knew wherever they're
    going to take me from now on in, I will not let it happen to me.
    And that's just the way it worked out.
    I had the view, I had the desire, the deep desire
    and the premonition with it that I will come out of it,
    if for nothing else but to be able to tell a story.
    Because those who have gone and have perished
    are not able to do it.
    So we are here, and that's--
    in hindsight, everything just fell in line for me.
    Thank God.
    Were you heroes?
    Are we about out?
    [LAUGHS] We're timing these running outs.
    Sound roll two, camera roll five, take seven.
    The question was, do I consider myself a hero?
    Whether I did something heroic.
    It's strange, an escape is not being rewarded by a medal.
    That's the thing that heroes get as a symbol, a token.
    There is a reward for that.
    The reward is that we survived, and I survived
    to be able to tell a story.
    That is enough of it-- and pass it on
    so that maybe future generations can learn from it.
    But heroism is not something that you plan
    or that comes after a big consideration of what you're
    supposed to do or whatever.
    Heroism is a spur of the moment phenomenon.
    When somebody saves-- like it happened some years ago,
    a young lady from the icy waters of the Potomac in Washington.
    That man, when he got up in the morning didn't say,
    today I'm going to become a hero.
    I'll be a hero.
    He happened to be at the time at a place
    where he took something into his own hands and said,
    I'm supposed to do that.
    And that night and that evening and following ensuing weeks
    and months, he was interviewed.
    And it was a heroic thing in a way.
    And heroism springs from a fear, basically.
    Now, when you see a monument of a general
    there in a park and he has won this or that battle.
    And he was a hero, and he was decorated for it.
    What that monument doesn't tell you,
    that stone or bronze statue does not tell you is one thing--
    how scared he may have been at the time when it all happened.
    So my escape is not so much heroic
    as it is, as they say in the ethics of the fathers,
    there isn't a thing that hasn't its place,
    and there's a man who has in his time, or something of that.
    I'm paraphrasing it vaguely.
    It was the right person at the right time at the right place.
    And there's two factors in that particular escape
    and that whole situation of my survival.
    One is fear.
    And not just fear spelled out normally,
    but with a major capital letter.
    Fear.
    And the second is luck.
    There has to be an amount of luck or fortune or fate,
    what you want to call it.
    Something metaphysical.
    Because the train that left the two days earlier, according
    to what I hear, there was one escape attempt by man.
    And he fell under the wheels of the train
    and his legs were amputated.
    He was thrown back into the car to bleed to death.
    So we had to be lucky after we had taken the decision for it
    to succeed, and all the ensuing months.
    To be arrested and to run again and to escape
    and to have a situation with a German SS officer
    in the train station of Limoges, when I was observing something,
    as was the truth.
    And I told the man then that I was just watching something,
    not observing.
    There's a difference between the two.
    Because I was there to find out something.
    But that is my point of my escape.
    The question was, are you a hero?
    I don't like to relate to myself as a hero
    because it was fear and luck.
    And I don't even enjoy or exalt in the term "survivor."
    There are many people in the world that have to survive.
    In circumstances that were not life or death,
    like mine in this particular time.
    Because 72 hours later, I would have been gassed
    according to the statistics.
    But people sometime have to survive on a daily basis.
    We see that in our cities.
    We see that in present life.
    The word survivor has a connotation.
    Almost, it's almost a word of curiosity.
    You know, I often feel that when I speak to schools and people
    ask questions, I'm an object of curiosity.
    And I don't want to be that.
    This word "survivor" connotes a special situation
    that you're in, a special character
    that you are, a special place in life that you have.
    Yes, we are survivors.
    The word tells you that.
    But the real heroes are really those who are no longer
    here to tell the story.
    I think they are the people who went there and--
    martyrs in a way, yes.
    But quite heroic because they were good people.
    And especially when we speak about children.
    Seeing my own granddaughter, when
    I look at a million and a half children lost,
    they were the real--
    what do you call it?
    In football, you call it the unsung heroes, in a way.
    Yes, unsung.
    Remembered.
    But very much unsung.
    That could have been a nation today.
    A million and a half children growing
    into a fully grown nation.
    As Gerda Weissmann Klein says, they were ordinary children,
    but quite a few of them could have been
    extraordinary, extraordinary.
    Yes, these are the heroes.
    Can you tell about on the train when you made the decision,
    and how different people felt on the train
    about your decision to escape?
    It is interesting, when you're together
    with a group of people of 50 coming from all walks of life.
    A microcosm, if you will, of Jewry, of humanity
    abandoned by the rest of the world.
    At the time, we didn't quite sense
    that we were abandoned because we were given all
    kinds of psychological means to think
    that we were going to be working and resettled
    and that sort of thing.
    People were trying to talk us out
    of escaping, especially the males in that train.
    There was one woman on crutches there.
    I often mentioned her.
    Dark, deep-set eyes.
    Gray, streaky gray hair.
    Taking care of a young child.
    It was there without parents.
    On a crutch, on crutches.
    She had a leg amputated.
    And she pointed that at us.
    Punctuating the air with that crutch like a weapon.
    You must do it.
    Run, run.
    You will tell a story.
    And others tried to talk us out of it.
    We had to work feverishly on this thing
    because we never knew when the train would come to a halt
    and the guards would step down and try to look.
    Lucky.
    Again, luck.
    Luckily for us, the train did not stop during that period
    during the day where they would come by and see
    perhaps or notice that something has been worked on those bars.
    They were trained also to watch out for things,
    like we were trained--
    like sixth sense tells us what to do and what not to do.
    Yes.
    And the psychology of it was, why
    did they try to talk us out?
    Because before we left the camp, our belongings
    were taken from us.
    Jewelry, watches.
    And we were given a receipt with a number
    and our name was on it.
    And that receipt said that this is what we deposited.
    And we were told, don't lose that.
    Because you won't get your things back when you get there.
    That was the psychology of it.
    Now, when we worked feverishly and they
    tried to talk us out of it.
    Foolish!
    We'll all be killed.
    That they will discover you, that you're missing.
    And then they'll take it out on us.
    Well, if that's the feeling that you have,
    then you're not going anywhere where you deal
    with human beings, certainly.
    Which only fortifies our premonition
    that where we're going we're not going to make it.
    Rumors had been flying, but they were never
    entirely confirmed, verified.
    And then they said, look what we have in our hand.
    They wouldn't bother giving us this if they didn't mean
    to return these things to us.
    That little receipt for the meaningless little pieces
    of jewelry.
    In this respect at that time, all that had no meaning.
    It was just something you wanted to hold on to,
    because that presents you with a feeling
    that you're still alive.
    But to them, that certificate was in fact,
    that little receipt was in fact a document telling them
    that they will be all right, they will be alive.
    And to me, it didn't mean anything.
    That was the psychology of it.
    And we had to overcome not only our own perhaps sometime
    hesitation.
    There were still this thing we have to get out and jump.
    And there's still danger ahead.
    That one thing versus them admonishing us
    don't leave us, in a way.
    Stay with us.
    Don't do it to us.
    Now, Manfred Silberwasser was and Leo Bretholz, we
    were single young men.
    And it's part of a young person's
    make up to be somewhat adventurous.
    Maybe not thought out too much.
    Just to do it.
    Impulse.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    We're going to reload the film.
    Start with you and your friend.
    Coming back one more time to this hero thing.
    There are some people that had a lot
    to do with me during those months and a couple of years.
    First of all, a priest.
    Now, there's an unsung hero.
    He could have gotten into trouble.
    The lady in Limoges with whom I boarded.
    And my friend Eugene Bass hiding us out up in the attic,
    knowing who we were.
    Madame Bergot, lovely lady, non-Jewish,
    who had a tragedy of her own.
    When she was 21, lost her husband in the First World War,
    never got married.
    A life like this, always helping people.
    This nurse in the hospital that I mentioned before.
    By her telling me she knows who I was,
    but as long as she's going to be there,
    nothing's going to happen to me.
    That's a little unsung heroic story
    because she put herself out.
    She could have just gone about her way
    without saying anything.
    And I don't know.
    Madame Bergot's name, I know.
    And that sister Joan of Arc, I know Saint Joan of Arc.
    She was a saint, in fact.
    But the priest's name I never knew
    because names, in that moment, didn't mean much,
    as long as he didn't know ours, we didn't know his.
    But his action meant so much.
    So that's more about what you might consider heroic
    or in the vague description of it,
    something that borders on maybe being heroic or being
    there when you needed.
    Maybe that's also a point of it.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    Oops.
    Here we go.
    I want to go to the choices and the difference
    in choices, like you and your friend on the train
    were young men.
    But choices that other people wouldn't have
    had with families.
    It is very simple for young people who are unattached, want
    to be impetuous, adventurous.
    Take it into their own hands.
    Make a decision at the spur of the moment.
    Well thought out or not thought out at all.
    But the decision, it had to do with basically survival
    in mind.
    And I have to come back to the big word, "fear."
    No matter how a family that was, for instance,
    in the cattle car.
    No matter how such a family would
    have wanted to get out of the situation,
    no matter how much a father, perhaps seeing me
    squeeze through, would have been tempted to also squeeze
    through and get to freedom.
    There was that family situation that would prevent him
    from doing so.
    A distant relative of mine was in that same train with me.
    And she was the one that handed me my bag, my rucksack,
    through the window, between the bars.
    Handed it to me and I put it over my shoulder.
    Toni [? Gutfreund, ?] she went to Auschwitz and perished.
    And these faces I see.
    The choice was ours because we were free.
    Unfettered, in a way, to do it.
    Free to jump and go and do what we wanted to do.
    Families couldn't.
    Ill people couldn't.
    Infants couldn't.
    Somebody came and was dragged into a cattle
    car on a stretcher.
    Actually brought from the camp on a stretcher, couldn't walk.
    These people couldn't.
    And it so happens that, according to what I hear,
    there were less than a dozen attempts at escape
    during that period from Drancy to Auschwitz.
    Between the period from spring 1942
    to almost into the fall of 1944.
    There were about a dozen attempted escape
    and only several, three or four succeeded, actually.
    So.
    When I did mention my escape to Professor Gilbert
    when he wrote the book Holocaust,
    he became very interested in it.
    His first question was, if you were on that train, so how are
    you here talking to me?
    That's when I told him about the escape.
    And he was especially interested in the aspect of the Swiss
    having sent me back.
    Because he had a very prominent chapter
    there on Switzerland and their dastardly
    acts during that period.
    Not everybody could make the decision.
    In fact, "not everybody" is quite, quite,
    quite an understatement.
    The majority could not make decisions
    like this from a train because trains
    were quite often entirely without windows at all,
    especially in the east.
    The trains are also packed much more in the east.
    About 100, I understand, per cattle car.
    And escape routes were not as available.
    Although some people tried to hack a board out of the floor.
    There were sometime older cars and they were loose anyway.
    And with an instrument that you may have fashioned,
    manufactured in camp, a knife or some such sharp instrument
    could do it.
    Some of it went through the roof, perhaps trying.
    But there was not everybody could do that.
    In fact, the psychology-- and that's
    again, prevented you from doing foolish things
    to endanger yourself.
    You can get killed for that.
    They will take it out on you.
    And the proof of it is that down to the very last minute
    and these are the reports.
    Then they were taken to the gas chambers
    being told that it was showers.
    And they were told to hang up their clothes on those hooks
    and put their shoes right under their clothes.
    So when they came out, don't forget where you hung them.
    Don't misplace them because you will not
    be issued new clothes or different clothes,
    other clothes.
    That psychology worked until the very last minute
    when the men and women and infants in their arms
    walked into the gas chambers.
    Nobody in France could believe in these cattle cars
    that they were going to transport us
    72 hours, though we didn't know how long we were
    going to be in these trains.
    But turns out, about 70 to 90 hours.
    Nobody having been put in that cattle car
    at the moment, if you would talk to people,
    would actually believe that they're taking us there
    to be killed or gassed.
    Because if they wanted to do something to us,
    they could do it right here.
    Why drag us 3,000 miles?
    That was so Machiavellian, that was so organized,
    so psychologically prepared down to the most minute detail.
    All that created at Wannsee the conference
    that we just remembered that happened 50 years ago last week
    on the 20th of January.
    Everything was meticulously prepared.
    And the word went out from the SS,
    from Himmler, and from the generals, from the colonels,
    that when you will--
    nobody in the future will believe that anyway.
    So you don't have to really worry about it.
    And that was the psychology of it.
    Why we were so unusual in having done it
    when others didn't do it.
    Because we were free and they were not free to do it.
    And they were also, as I said, never quite psychologically
    prepared to believe that it was within the power
    of a human being to do that to another human being.
    And I come back to the thing, to a child, to a child.
    That's the big tragedy.
    That people still believed in people,
    in the goodness of people.
    When you see Winds of War in the last segment and the woman
    opened the door.
    They open the door for her and she stands there
    and she talks to the SS man standing there
    with his dog and his white gloves.
    And she said, sir, we have seven people,
    seven dead people in this car.
    And he turns to her and says in a very wry smile,
    these are the lucky ones.
    That's when she realized that she
    was confronted with somebody who was not really human.
    But in the car, as the car was rolling
    on through the French countryside,
    that beautiful, bucolic countryside,
    nobody could believe that this was possible to be happening.
    Because human nature doesn't want
    to believe that another human being can do that.
    Anne Frank says it.
    At the last sentence she says, at the bottom of it all,
    I still believe that people are good.
    In the final sentence in her diary.
    And that's what the belief was, that no matter
    what they say, what the rumors say, that isn't quite possible.
    There were these gamuts of moods running through that train,
    from prayers to tears to despair, resignation,
    quite a bit of hopelessness.
    And some people were telling jokes to overcome,
    to still life, show life.
    We're going to reload.
    And some people were telling jokes to overcome,
    to still live a sure life.
    Yeah, we've got to reload.
    Camera roll seven, take 10.
    [BEEP]
    I want you to talk a little bit about how Germans saw Jews
    and how things changed in Vienna,
    how you remember the changes.
    Your question is about how I remember
    what happened in Austria, let me say,
    at the time of the Anschluss, the annexation.
    I was 17, had just turned 17.
    It was an overnight traumatic change.
    People who were your friends on the 10th of March
    and the 11th of March were no longer your friends
    on the 13th, or at least showed that they
    went no longer, or at least maybe
    you thought they were your friends before
    and they were really never friends.
    To a young person like myself, maybe I
    did not feel the impact as much as perhaps parents felt
    when it happened because they had
    to worry about their children.
    But it was an overnight turmoil more-so
    emotionally than anything else.
    It was a disruptive interruption of a normal life.
    This was March.
    We had neighbors with whom we were very friendly
    and they were Christians, and at Christmas time
    that particular year and previous years
    when we were smaller we would go to their apartment
    and help them decorate their trees, share the cookies,
    go to school together.
    Overnight, within hours, Vienna was transformed
    into a sea of swastikas.
    Where did they come from overnight?
    They were not manufactured overnight.
    It was a total metamorphosis of attitudes, of feelings,
    of emotions, of relations, everything more emotionally
    and psychologically than the physical aspect of it,
    although physically, within hours or a couple of days,
    Jews were taken out to the streets to scrub the streets.
    They were give given little brushes, toothbrushes to go
    and try to rub away oil paint that the Austrians had
    painted on the sidewalks and on the walls.
    [SPEAKING GERMAN] Red, white, and red
    until we are dead, which was Schuschnigg's,
    the Austrian government's, slogan
    not to vote for a referendum to vote
    for Austria to remain Austrian.
    That was the Austrian colors-- red, white, red--
    and still are.
    So how could these Jews, these women, children, and elderly,
    get these oil-painted slogans off the sidewalks?
    It was impossible, but this was part of the harassment.
    And sometimes this was done to the strings of Wagner's music,
    you know, Tannhauser and Gotterdammerung.
    People dancing around and poking fun,
    and elderly Jews having their beards set afire with matches.
    And when the flame finally seared towards the chin,
    they would take buckets of water and pour it into their faces.
    These were utter denigration, harassment
    for the pure joy of doing it.
    This is what we saw in Austria, hundreds of thousands
    of people standing on the Heldenplatz, the square
    of the heroes in the Innere Stadt,
    the first district in the city, and applauding, and cheering,
    and receiving the Germans, the Nazis.
    The Austrians later claimed that they were the first victims.
    I did not see at that time any, and I can say that
    without any hesitation.
    I did not see any victimization of the Austrian German
    non-Jewish population, although those
    who were part of the socialist movement and those
    who were in the labor unions were also hiding out,
    and some of them ran away.
    And I know that the center forward
    of the Austrian football team called
    Austria, a fellow by the name of Matthias Sindelar,
    committed suicide because he was emotionally so inflamed by what
    had happened.
    Yes, that happened.
    But if an Austrian wanted to put on a brown uniform
    and walk with that brown uniform,
    nobody would have known what he was thinking.
    He could have done it, but the Jew couldn't do it.
    But basically the heil and sieg heil was a shot that was heard.
    I only wish it would have been heard far enough
    so that some of the Western powers
    would have done something about it at the time.
    Maybe in hindsight they might have a feeling
    that that could have prevented a lot of things
    if they would have right then and there started with
    to resist Hitler with Austria.
    Instead, they went to Munich and gave him
    another piece, and that land for peace thing
    that we hear a lot of now pertaining to the Middle East.
    As far as I'm concerned, the land for peace
    has really in history--
    nowhere in history you can go from beginning
    to end of history books.
    Land for peace has never worked because those
    who want land are never satisfied with that land.
    It's like a spider.
    Hitler caught Austria, and that was his first victim
    into that spider web, and he wasn't satisfied.
    There would have had to be more.
    In fact, the resistance would have come before Austria when
    they walked into the Saarland.
    The Germans and the French would have resisted then,
    but that's history.
    That has not much to do with my particular story,
    but being the question is ask how did Austrians
    and how did the Germans--
    of course, I had more contact with the Austrians
    than with the Germans per se, but the Austrians were not
    really the first victims.
    They received the Germans with open hands,
    as far as I could see then, and history has borne that out.
    I'm sure there's always exceptions.
    Now, assume that I don't know what a deportation is.
    Explain to me what a deportation is.
    To deport someone is to send someone against his will
    into a place where he will be exposed
    to hardships, to harassment, to forced settlements,
    to being in a surrounding that isn't his,
    in a country where nobody speaks his language.
    And it is the forcible shipping of people into areas
    away from their home in order to fulfill a certain agenda,
    a political agenda or a plan that was conceived to do harm
    to a certain group of people.
    People get exiled because they have politically done something
    to--
    Napoleon was exiled.
    The kaiser went into voluntary exile.
    We hear about the South American dictators.
    They go into voluntary exile.
    If they had not voluntarily taken exile upon them,
    they may have been arrested, tried, and maybe executed,
    or if they live in a country that doesn't execute,
    they would have been deported.
    They would have been asked--
    other countries would have been asked to accept them,
    like Archbishop Trifa was in Detroit.
    After he was denaturalized here, he was deported.
    Nobody wanted him.
    Finally Portugal took him in.
    He was the fellow who was the head of the Iron
    Guard in Romania.
    Killed thousands of Jews.
    Lived in Detroit.
    And what did deportations mean?
    What?
    In France?
    Throughout Europe.
    Throughout Europe, deportation means taking whole populations
    and moving them against their will
    into an area of confinement, where they were exposed
    to the whim and all the vicissitudes that
    came with being in that particular confinement,
    and these confinement were camps.
    OK, we got to reload.
    Take one.
    So just to quickly sum up, what did it mean to be deported?
    Under normal circumstances, a deportation of a person
    takes place when that person or that group
    have made an attempt to topple a government
    or to do something that is not lawful,
    do something that is against the law.
    And they could be deported.
    They could be undesirable aliens or as whatever
    the designation is.
    These Jews-- men, women, and children--
    were deported for nothing else but to send them
    from their country of residence into an area
    to be confined in camps that can be called concentration camps,
    and the real word for some of them is extermination camps.
    To be deported, not, as they said, to be resettled
    or to work, but for one thing-- namely, to be exterminated,
    but that wasn't the case of the Jews.
    Deportation normally means the sending away
    of a person or group of persons who
    are at the moment under some cloud of suspicion,
    or endangering a situation or government,
    or rebellious or instigating away from their home.
    Deportation is also a form of punishment.
    It's banishment and punishment.
    In a way, you're being exiled away from your home of origin
    into an area where you are not at home, as long as you are
    away from the place where you are not desired,
    and Jews were undesirable under the German occupation
    in these various countries that they were deported from.
    Now, I want to go back to Oradour,
    and I want you to just tell me what
    that massacre was, and tell me about the confusion of the two
    names.
    There were two Oradours in the area of Limoges.
    One was Oradour-sur-Glane, and one was Oradour-sur-Vayres.
    Glane, G-L-A-N-E, and Vayres, V-A-Y-R-E-S.
    The German division was Reich, who had advanced from Toulouse
    towards the front lines in Normandy--
    that was after the 6th of June landing in 1944--
    had encountered some resistance Maquis activity on the way
    up from the south to the west, to the coast.
    And they had been informed that the village of Oradour has--
    being that they had already been harassed and attacked,
    and they were already in the village of Tulle, and had--
    was it Tulle or Brive?
    But, anyway, in the Corrèze had already hung a lot of males
    on butcher hooks in front of butcher stores,
    and their families had to parade in front of them to see that.
    Being that there was resistance to their advance,
    they had taken that out on these men who were taken hostage.
    They advanced and had heard that the village of Oradour
    in [PLACE NAME],, the department--
    well, Limoges was the capital of that department--
    had a Maquis resistance movement,
    except they confused Oradour-sur-Vayres
    with Oradour-sur-Glane.
    It was the "Vayres" on the river Vayres.
    "sur-Vayres" means on the river Vayres.
    That really had a small resistance detachment there,
    and there were arms there in that area.
    They confused it.
    They went into Oradour, arrested the mayor,
    and asked him to show him the cage of arms,
    and he says we have no.
    We have peaceful citizens here.
    You can search the village.
    They arrested him, and in the main square-- there's a report.
    I have that report also with me.
    There's a report on the main square.
    They were getting ready to saw his legs off
    in front of the populace, and his two sons begged them
    not to do it and they would stand in for him.
    They still did it and then killed the sons,
    too, and in the village between 800 and 900 people
    were killed that day.
    That was the confusion.
    They went in there toward the female
    and children's population.
    Come to the church.
    We'll photograph you, and that was the end of them.
    They were marched into the church,
    and, as I said before, the church was surrounded
    by hay and straw and was set aflame, and of course today
    the village of Oradour about a 1/4 mile away, 1/8 of a mile
    away has been built up again.
    And this ruined locale, where the ruins of the church
    were and with other mementos, is still
    there in the original site of Oradour,
    with all kinds of mementos like baby carriages, and dolls,
    and shoes, and buckles, and belts, and toys,
    and that sort of thing.
    That was the tragedy of Oradour, for which there
    was a trial held in Bordeaux, and some of them
    were sentenced to what amounts to minor sentences.
    Tell me how you witnessed the November pogrom that's
    known as Kristallnacht.
    I did not witness it.
    Talking about the Kristallnacht?
    I did not witness it because I was lucky enough.
    Again, a stroke of luck that I left Vienna
    on the 25th of October, 1938.
    The Kristallnacht happened during the night from the 9th
    to the 10th of November.
    It so happens during that night I had already escaped Vienna.
    I had been swimming through Sauer River into Luxembourg
    during the night from the 31st of October
    to the 1st of November.
    It was All Saints' Night.
    After it had been raining for about five or six days,
    I had to swim a river that a smuggler had told me
    I will be able to wade through.
    And he said to me keep a pair dry socks in your coat,
    and I put them in my coat, and the next step
    was up to here in water, so here would go my dry socks.
    And I did not witness it in Austria
    because I have a strong feeling had I been there
    I would have been arrested with so many young men that were.
    My mother had beseeched me to leave,
    and she was the one that prevailed
    upon me to leave early, and I see this woman's eyes
    in tears and gray hair.
    It was prematurely gray, and it was due to her
    that I am frankly alive today.
    Had she not sent me away then, I would have been there
    on Kristallnacht.
    Who knows?
    This is all conjecture, but during that night
    from the 31st of October to the 1st of November
    across the river, and from the 9th of the 10th of November
    I was smuggled into Belgium.
    And there was about 6, 7, or 8 people in this car,
    and the smuggler that smuggled me to Luxembourg
    was also the one that smuggled us to Belgium.
    As we are approaching the Belgian border going north
    from Luxembourg in the Ardennes region, we look to the right,
    and there was a strange appearance in the skies,
    a strange coloration into reddish,
    and purplish, and weird colors, almost
    like some sort of a natural phenomenon.
    And it was interesting to view at the time,
    but little did we know that this was Kristallnacht
    and all of Germany was a flame.
    It wasn't till the next day, the 10th of November,
    arriving in Brussels that we saw the headlines describing,
    headlines speaking about what had gone on
    and then reading further of what the tragedy of it was.
    And that is the way I witnessed Kristallnacht--
    from a distance, just with its reflections.
    Tell me about your who in your immediate family survived
    and what happened to some of your siblings.
    When you speak about the immediate family,
    nobody in my immediate family survived.
    My mother and two sisters were gassed.
    My father died a natural death in Vienna in 1930.
    He was only 39 years old.
    He would not have survived.
    He was an activist.
    He would not have survived the Nazis, I know.
    Then there were figuring that on my mother's side
    were 10 brothers and sisters.
    On my father's side is nine.
    Quite a few of them were married and had children.
    I have still a few surviving relatives in Israel now,
    and an aunt in Paris, and a couple of cousins.
    In fact, three cousins, but between 40 and 50 members
    of my family perished, immediate family,
    speaking about family family.
    My mother and two sisters.
    I said goodbye to them in Vienna in 1938 on the 25th of October
    and never saw them again.
    A very stark scene that brings this back to my memory--
    and I will never forget it-- is when I went to the hospital
    to visit my youngest sister.
    She was then confined with scarlet fever.
    She was not only in confinement but in quarantine.
    This was incurable at the time.
    They had to go to the hospital.
    See, there was no injections for that.
    Scarlet fever was quite a current thing,
    and I went to visit her to tell her goodbye.
    She was on the second floor, like a little elevated
    at the window, and I in sign language
    wrote toward her that I will be leaving tonight.
    And she wrote on the blackboard, good luck.
    Hope I see you soon.
    [BEEP]
    I want to go back to the story of Annie
    again and have you just encapsule this story,
    and then talk about how you talked with her about it
    later, when you were hiding in the attic.
    That story with the hiding in the attic in [? Cotterêts ?]
    was a very scary situation because I had just come back
    from the mountains, and I didn't want to be caught again.
    But as I said before, these gendarmes went up
    the stairway with her, and in order to entice her to open up,
    I don't know what they--
    she didn't want to open up, and she had no key to open up.
    They could have broken down the door,
    but when they approached her and made advances to her,
    and she sort of implied, yes, if you would just
    get off the stairs and just go down she'll talk to them.
    Now, later when we talked about it,
    she told it to me with tears and never went
    into any kind of details, but I don't
    think that they actually violated her
    because it was in the house where her parents lived also.
    But later when we spoke about it,
    there was just another aspect of a moment of tension
    that worked out to the good rather than
    what it could have worked out.
    Namely, I could have been arrested right then and there
    and sent into deportation rather than two months later,
    when I was sent back from Switzerland,
    and it could have been a whole together different situation.
    But later on in life, we talked about it
    when I visited Belgium again, and it was a tense moment.
    It was mainly we talked about it in a very light way.
    No details to any effect.
    How was it different for people in your mother's generation
    to experience the war from how it was for you?
    You mean in 1938?
    Through the whole thing in general.
    In general terms.
    I wish I could really other than speculate and conjecture
    have some sort of a--
    I wish it would have been a bug in that transport
    where my mother and sisters were.
    How she took to that situation, and how she coped with it,
    and what her trepidations were, and what her thoughts were,
    and what the feelings, and all this.
    When I heard that they were in trucks
    and were gassed in trucks, I almost
    was relieved actually because I know when you travel in a truck
    you can doze off, you can fall asleep, you're tired,
    and then you just doze off and that's
    it because this is odorless and colorless and can kill you,
    these gases, carbon dioxide that kills you.
    But how was her generation taking it?
    By sending me away, I know it was a trauma to her.
    It must have been because we do that when
    we send kids to camp only for two weeks, or for two days,
    or for day camp.
    We admonish them.
    We say take care of yourselves, and when
    you go away for a longer time it is write to us.
    Let's keep in touch.
    Don't catch a cold.
    My mother coped with it I hope in a courageous way.
    She had two daughters with her.
    She had become a widow eight years earlier,
    and she was used to a life of hardship, perhaps.
    Unfortunately, between the end of her hardship after the First
    World War and then the depression in the late '20s
    and early '30s to 1938, there was very little breathing room
    for them to recover.
    So I think the life of my mother,
    my relatives, and my grandparents
    during that period was one of hardship,
    all the time overcoming.
    My grandparents living in Poland had
    to overcome pogroms at the turn of the century,
    and even in the early 20th century, and harassment
    My mother didn't have much time to probably
    cope with anything, just to know that there's
    enough food on the table next day for the kids
    after my father died and she was a seamstress.
    And she did the best, and we went to school,
    and we had our food, and we had clothing, and we had schooling,
    and we went to movies, and we had good times and bad times.
    But I could never really go into a detail
    then and ask my mother, how do you feel about this now?
    Because it was all spur of the moment decisions.
    I mean, we couldn't sit down and discuss it really.
    We could discuss the fact, yes, you
    have to leave rather than us.
    Why?
    I knew I was going to have to go through a river
    and perhaps swim.
    I was the scout.
    I went there hoping that if that succeeds eventually
    my mother and sisters will be able to follow.
    But from '38 to 1940, when the lowlands were invaded and I was
    a refugee and I had no financial means--
    and to have a smuggler smuggle you, you need to pay somebody.
    So I hope that eventually I will accumulate a little bit
    and maybe get somebody to help, but there was no time between
    '38 and '40 in those 18 between--
    I said '40.
    1940, the lowlands were attacked,
    but in '39 the war started on the Eastern Front.
    After that, there was no leaving anywhere anymore,
    so it was just a year had gone by or maybe a year and a half.
    And that was the end of our being together, in a way,
    because if it had lasted longer--
    if the Germans had not attacked in 1940 but maybe in 1941,
    maybe there would have been a chance for my sisters
    and my mother to follow me to Belgium.
    But we did correspond, yes.
    They wrote to us in veiled terms,
    in code terms, that things were bad and what's happening,
    and they were going to a ghetto, and all that sort of thing.
    But I think in the life of a Jewish mother--
    any Jewish person-- I think one other little period
    of suffering was just another segment
    of a totality of sad events.
    You know?
    This was part of the psyche.
    Did not have time to go into any kind of details
    as to what she thought of the future maybe.
    Yeah, I know what she thought of the future.
    I hope we'll see you soon.
    That was the hope.
    Naturally, that was always the hope,
    and if you don't have any hope anymore,
    then you don't have anything, and I
    was hoping against hope of course, which at the time
    we didn't know.
    And anything I would say as to her feelings or attitudes,
    I would only be guessing and using a lot of conjecture.
    Who was Marguerite Berjeaux?
    Just give me a little portrait of her.
    Marguerite Berjeaux was the lady whom I referred to
    before who was the owner of that little house
    that I stayed in in Limoges.
    I lived in an attic--
    mansard, it's called in French--
    apartment, and actually shared it with my friend Eugene Bass.
    And when we had people come into Limoges from our groups
    from surrounding areas with cards, or with material,
    with printing materials, or inks,
    or just communication-- and they would come into Limoges.
    They would also stay with us, something in that
    little mansard up there with one bed and two armchairs.
    We may have had six or eight people sometime up there,
    and then we just stretched out on the bed
    and made two for one night on the floor, the bed,
    and the chairs, and there was no running water in that mansard.
    We had to go out to the corridor one flight below
    and bring water up from that faucet to a washbasin.
    And Madame Berjeaux was the owner of that place,
    and she knew exactly who we were.
    She knew me by name Maxon [INAUDIBLE] Lefevre.
    Later, she learned my real name.
    She knew all of our names, and when
    somebody would come to the door and inquire or ask
    any kind of questions that she would feel were sort of digging
    into trying to find things, she would just
    play so dumb as can be.
    I don't know what you're talking about.
    She was a witty lady.
    She was a very good Lady.
    A constant smile and very human and understanding, and Madame
    Berjeaux sent me a silver napkin ring engraved with MB,
    and she says that's for your son,
    because my son has the same initials, Myron
    Bretholz, so she just gave me that as a token.
    We went to visit her in 1970.
    Yes, in 1970, and--
    no, actually not.
    That was 1970.
    We didn't go to Limoges.
    In 1954, we went to Limoges, my wife and I,
    and we went to visit Madame Berjeaux.
    We walked through the Limoges main square,
    and they have a market there three days a week.
    Chinaware all over the place.
    People are just stepping over it.
    Some people would think that's a crime to step on china,
    you know?
    But there she was, Madame Berjeaux, in the main square,
    and we fell into each other's arms.
    What are you doing here?
    I said, well, we came to France.
    We're just on the way to visit you,
    and my wife met Madame Berjeaux.
    Very, very nice and pleasant get-together,
    and that's when she gave us--
    she sent us later that ring for my son,
    later when she found out we had a son.
    You know?
    And she did a lot, yeah.
    She's also one of those little heroes, unsung heroes.
    She's no longer alive, Madame Berjeaux.
    Marguerite Berjeaux.
    Oh, yes.
    Beautiful lady.
    Thank you.
    Thank you very much.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Leo Bretholz discusses the underground resistance movement in France and its two parts, the Forces Françaises de l'intérieur (FFI) and the Francs-tireurs et partisans français (FTPF); his involvement in the Armee Juive; his various arrests and escapes from prison during his time in the Jewish resistance movement in France; his use of false identification documents to avoid deportation; his time in Rivesaltes concentration camp; his time in hiding in various locations including the attic of a cousin's home; his reflections on being transported by cattle car and the horrors endured by people on the transport; his memories of the Anschluss in Austria in 1938; his witness to the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre in June 1944; his memories of Kristallnacht in 1938; and the fate of his immediate family during the Holocaust.
    Interviewee
    Mr. Leo Bretholz
    Interviewer
    Sandra Bradley
    Date
    interview:  <empty> 1992 January 28

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    3 film reels : color ; 16 mm.
    3 sound tape reels : analog, mono ; 7 in..
    2 videocassette (D2) : sound, color ; 3/4 in..

    Rights & Restrictions

    Conditions on Access
    There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
    Conditions on Use
    Restrictions on use. The interviewee restricts the use of the interview, in all formats, from any type of commercial purposes or purposes of financial gain.

    Keywords & Subjects

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Sandra Bradley, a film production consultant for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, conducted the interview with Leo Bretholz on January 28, 1992, in preparation for the making of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum exhibition film, "Testimony." The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History branch received the films and tapes of the interview in August 1994. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives received the films and tapes of the via transfer from the Oral History branch in February 1995.
    Funding Note
    The cataloging of this oral history interview has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:08:44
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    Contains oral histories interviews with 32 Holocaust survivors from the United States

    Date: 1992

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    Oral history interview with Frank Blaichman

    Oral History

    Frank Blaichman discusses his memories of hard labor and various persecutions suffered by Jews when Germany invaded Poland at the beginning of World War II; his time in a ghetto in Poland; his escape to and time in hiding in a forest in Poland; his involvement with a group of Jewish partisan fighters in the forests of Poland where he was a key figure in acquiring firearms and organizing acts of sabotage against the Germans; avoiding capture by Germans and Polish collaborators; his memories of a visit by General Rolojemerski, head of the Polish Partisan Support; and his reflections on the choices Jews faced during the Holocaust and how those choices impacted survival.

    Oral history interview with Shony Braun

    Oral history interview with Shony Braun

    Oral History

    Shony Braun discusses his transport by train to Auschwitz concentration camp and his encounter with camp doctor, Josef Mengele, during a selection; the death of his mother and younger sister, Golda, in the gas chamber at Auschwitz; his selection to work on a Sonderkommando; his transport to a camp in France with his father and his brother, Zolton, where they worked in an ammunition factory and his work to sabotage bullets in the factory by mixing sand with gun powder; his transfer to Kochendorf concentration camp, a subcamp of Natzweiller concentration camp in France, where he labored in a salt mine; the death of his father in Kochendorf after a severe beating from SS guards and Kapos; his transport to Dachau concentration camp; volunteering to play the violin for camp personnel in exchange for food; how he was shot in the chest during the confusion of Dachau's liberation; how mental and spiritual strength played a role in his survival; his thoughts on his acts of sabotage as a form of heroism; and his "Symphony of the Holocaust," and how composing it helped him cope while in the camp.

    Oral history interview with Chaim Engel

    Oral history interview with Chaim Engel

    Oral History

    Chaim Engel discusses his transport by train to Sobibór concentration camp; his time on a work detail to sort the clothing of gassed prisoners in Sobibór; his job cutting the hair of female prisoners in Sobibór before gassing; his thoughts on the differences between concentration camps and death camps; his experiences with the extreme cruelty of the Sobibór guards; his acts of sabotage while on the clothes sorting work detail; the massacre of an entire transport of prisoners from Belzec concentration camp; his participation in the murder of a German Kapo; the prisoner revolt in Sobibór in October 1943; his escape after the prisoner revolt and his time in hiding with other Sobibór escapees; his relationship with his girlfriend, Selma Engel, also a prisoner from Sobibór, and their time in hiding on the farm of a Polish farmer; his thoughts on the choices made by Jews in order to survive during the Holocaust; and his thoughts on heroism as part of the prisoner revolt in Sobibór.

    Oral history interview with Selma Engel

    Oral history interview with Selma Engel

    Oral History

    Selma Engel discusses her arrival in Westerbork concentration camp; her transport from Westerbork to Sobibór concentration camp; her participation in a work detail sorting the clothing of gassed prisoners in Sobibór; her first meeting with her future husband, Chaim Engel; her recollections of the three separate camp areas in Sobibór; the mistreatment of Dutch prisoners in Sobibór; the extreme cruelty of the SS guards in Sobibór; her acts of sabotage while sorting the clothing of the gassed prisoners; the prisoner revolt in Sobibór in Oct. 1943; her escape from Sobibór during the prisoner revolt; her time in hiding with Chaim Engel, her future husband, on the farm of a Polish farmer; her reliance on Chaim for survival; and her reflections on the German and Ukrainian guards in Sobibór and the choices they made to be cruel to the prisoners there.

    Oral history interview with Paulette Fink

    Oral history interview with Paulette Fink

    Oral History

    Paulette Fink discusses her involvement in the resistance movement in France during World War II and her sabotage activities; the French Jewish Scout movement in France (Eclaireurs de France); the saving of many Jewish children by a French Huegenot pastor and other citizens in the town of La Chambon-sur-Lignon, France; the amount of risk and fear that she lived with during World War II; getting fake ID cards made; her marriage in 1934 and the death of her husband, a member of the French resistance, in 1944; her thoughts on her resistance activity as a form of heroism; her involvement in the illegal immigration of thousands of Jewish displaced persons to Israel after World War II; and her continued dedication to and support of the State of Israel since World War II.

    Oral history interview with Sam Goldberg

    Oral history interview with Sam Goldberg

    Oral History

    Sam Goldberg discusses his use of the false name Sigmund Kamkowsky in order to avoid persecution; his time working with the underground movement in and around Warsaw, Poland; his time living and working in the Warsaw ghetto; his escape from the Warsaw ghetto to the Pietkov ghetto in order to locate family members; his acts of smuggling and encounters with the SS; the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto and his subsequent transport by train to Birkenau concentration camp and his eventual move to Auschwitz; hearing about Josef Mengele's medical experiments in Auschwitz; working in the "Canada" commando, sorting the clothing and valuables of prisoners near the gas chambers in Auschwitz; working in the commando assisting prisoners upon arrival at the Auschwitz train platform; his experiences with Kapos and Blockälteste in Auschwitz; the prisoner revolt in the Auschwitz crematoria in October 1944; his evacuation from Auschwitz by train; his participation on a death march; his friendship with a young boy named Herbie; his time in Flossenbürg concentration camp after a death march and his memories of the various colored triangle badges he saw there; his transport to Mittendorf concentration camp near Munich, Germany via Prague, Czech Republic; his experiences during Allied bombing raids on Mittendorf; his memories of the liquidation of the Romani camp in Auschwitz; his acts of sabotage while working on airplanes; his thoughts on spiritual resistance; his liberation by American troops during a transport; how telling jokes and singing songs helped to lift the spirits of fellow camp inmates; his memories of the meeting between Josef Mengele and Chaim Rumkowski, head of the ghetto in Łódź, Poland upon Rumkowski's arrival in Auschwitz; his thoughts on the choice of German Kapos and soldiers to be killers; his reflections on the nature of humanity considering his Holocaust experiences; and the selection process that took place upon the arrival of new transports in Auschwitz.

    Oral history interview with Siegfried Halbreich

    Oral history interview with Siegfried Halbreich

    Oral History

    Siegfried Halbreich discusses his desertion from the Polish Army in October 1939 and his brief time working as a pharmacist in Oświęcim, Poland; his imprisonment in Sachsenhausen concentration camp and the cruel treatment of prisoners that he witnessed there; his time in Gross-Rosen concentration camp and his work in a stone quarry near the camp; his experiences with Blockälteste in Gross-Rosen; his time in Auschwitz concentration camp and his work as a nurse in the camp hospital; his role as Blockälteste at one time in Auschwitz; his participation in a death march after the evacuation of Auschwitz; the camp personnel hierarchy in Auschwitz from the SS guards down to the Kapos; his thoughts on the role of mental resistance as a part of survival; the support he received from friends and family while in the concentration camps; his memories of religious practice and celebration in Sachsenhausen; his role as teacher and leader of young Jews for religious education in Auschwitz; the various types of torture he witnessed in Sachsenhausen; and his thoughts on taking revenge on Germans after liberation.

    Oral history interview with Isadore Helfing

    Oral history interview with Isadore Helfing

    Oral History

    Isadore Helfing discusses his arrival in Treblinka concentration camp and his work burying the bodies of persons who died during the transports in mass graves in the camp; his recollections of the physical layout of Treblinka and how prisoners were led through the gassing process; his recollections of many people dying inside the railroad cars while waiting to unload in Treblinka; his experiences with Kapos in the camp; his participation in the prisoner revolt in Treblinka and his escape to a nearby forest; his time in hiding after his escape from Treblinka; his witnessing the murder of a German camp guard by a fellow prisoner and his thoughts on the murder as an act of revenge; how German and Ukrainian guards in the camp made choices to follow orders; the attempts of some prisoners to pray in the camp; participating in soccer games on Sundays, a free day in the camp; the suicides of several persons from his barracks; the orchestra in the camp and a boxing match that took place one day; and the fate of his parents in Treblinka the day before his arrival in the camp.

    Oral history interview with Kurt Klein

    Oral history interview with Kurt Klein

    Oral History

    Kurt Klein discusses the political situation in Germany during the early 1930s and how Jews did not take the Nazi rise to power seriously; his thoughts on why the Nazi party gained power so easily; the persecutions suffered by Jews and the boycott against Jewish businesses in the early 1930s; his withdrawal from school and his apprenticeship in the printing business; his immigration to the United States in 1937; how he learned of Kristallnacht events through newspaper reports in the United States; his service with the Fifth US Infantry Division of the Third Army during World War II and his assistance to Jewish women abandoned by their German guards in a factory building in Volary, Czechoslovakia; his first meeting with his future wife, Gerda Weissmann Klein, in the factory and the development of their relationship after World War II; and his participation in the interrogation of Erich Kempka, a former chauffeur for Adolf Hitler.

    Oral history interview with John Komski

    Oral history interview with John Komski

    Oral History

    John (Jan) Komski discusses the German invasion of Poland; his involvement in the resistance movement in and around Kraków, Poland; his imprisonment at Auschwitz concentration camp in June 1940; the different types of prisoners in Auschwitz and the various identification badges and triangles used to mark the prisoners; the museum and orchestra in Auschwitz; how he planned and prepared a successful escape from Auschwitz by disguising himself as an SS guard and using false identification documents; the types of mental and spiritual resistance used to survive in Auschwitz; his thoughts on how some Auschwitz prisoners utilized special talents and skills to survive in the camp; the gassing of children and their mothers immediately upon arrival in Auschwitz; his memories of Palietsch, the official executor in Auschwitz; the tattoos used to identify prisoners in Auschwitz and the tattoo he received when he entered Birkenau concentration camp; and how families were treated differently from individuals upon arrival in Auschwitz.

    Oral history interview with Stefa Kupfer

    Oral history interview with Stefa Kupfer

    Oral History

    Stefa Kupfer discusses the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and the persecutions suffered by Jews during the German occupation; being 10 years old when the war started; her memories of the Gestapo and their dogs; how the Germans used citizens from her town for forced labor; the confiscation of Jewish property by the Germans; her mother's refusal to register the family with the German authorities, thereby saving them from a round up; her family's time in hiding in the attic and basement of an apartment building in Krosno, Poland, and how she and her family were protected and ultimately saved by Penny Olefska, a Christian woman; the various ways she and her family occupied themselves while in hiding; her thoughts on living in constant fear while in hiding; the assistance her family received from Mr. Vishbitsky, a Polish farmer; her thoughts on those who risked their lives to rescue and hide Jews during World War II; her recollections of the many possessions she and her family lost during the war; and the responsibility of each Holocaust survivor to tell his or her story in order prevent another Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Cecilie Klein-Pollack

    Oral history interview with Cecilie Klein-Pollack

    Oral History

    Cecilie Klein-Pollack discusses the deportation of her family from the ghetto in Hust, Hungary (now Khust, Ukraine) to Auschwitz concentration camp; her and her family's experiences upon arrival at Auschwitz, encountering Josef Mengele, and the death of her mother and young nephew in the gas chambers shortly thereafter; her experiences with Kapos and Blockälteste in Auschwitz and Birkenau; her sister's desire to commit suicide and her attempts to keep her sister alive; her memories of a young ballerina in her block who was forced to dance for the SS camp guards; her witness to the beating death of the ballerina and a poem that she wrote to memorialize the young dancer; her many delousing experiences in Auschwitz and Birkenau; her transport to Nuremberg where she and other female prisoners worked in a munitions factory; her time in Holleischen concentration camp in Czechoslovakia; the types of spiritual and religious resistance that she experienced in the camps; the cruel beatings that she and other prisoners received from SS guards in the camps; her time in Budapest, Hungary after World War II; and her memories of her mother as she was before her death in the Auschwitz gas chamber. During the interview, Cecilie Klein-Pollack recites her poem, "Ballerina," and reads a letter she wrote to her mother (a copy of the letter is located in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives).

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malnik

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malnik

    Oral History

    Abraham Malnik discusses the German invasion of Lithuania; his family's life in the Kovno ghetto; how his father, Josef Malnik, rescued him and his mother from a selection of elderly, children, and handicapped persons, thereby saving them from the massacre at the Ninth Fort near the ghetto in Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania; his time hiding in a cellar in the Kovno ghetto to avoid capture during a "Kinder aktion" by the Germans; the liquidation of the Kovno ghetto during which many of the remaining Jews were massacred by Lithuanian collaborators; his family's transport to Stutthof concentration camp and subsequently to Dachau, Flossenbürg, and Leitmeritz (Litomerice) concentration camps; how he and his father participated in forced labor in a mine in Leitmeritz; the yellow star and number insignia the Germans assigned to him in Leitmeritz; his experience with Polish Kapos in Leitmeritz; his time spent in the Leitmeritz hospital with typhoid fever; his "walk" to Theresienstadt concentration camp in April 1945 and his liberation there by the Soviet Army; his thoughts on taking revenge against the Germans for their brutality during the Holocaust; and the special bond he and his father shared throughout their Holocaust ordeal.

    Oral history interview with Lilly Appelbaum Malnik

    Oral history interview with Lilly Appelbaum Malnik

    Oral History

    Lilly Appelbaum Malnik discusses her time in hiding in Belgium; her forced labor in a factory; her neighbors in her apartment building who denounced her and her aunt and uncle to the Germans; her family's arrest and their time in the Malines detention camp in Mechelen, Belgium; her family's transport from Belgium to Birkenau concentration camp and her encounter with Josef Mengele upon arrival; the tattoo number she received on her arm; volunteering for work in Birkenau; her transfer to Auschwitz concentration camp and her work in the kitchen there; the transports of new prisoners into Auschwitz and how many prisoners were sent immediately to the gas chambers; contemplating suicide while in Auschwitz; how some prisoners in Auschwitz prayed as a form of resistance; her time on a death march from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp; her friendship with a young girl named Christian while in Bergen-Belsen; Christian’s death from typhus; and her thoughts about how the young had a better chance of survival in concentration camps.

    Oral history interview with Ludmilla Page

    Oral history interview with Ludmilla Page

    Oral History

    Ludmilla Page discusses being arrested with her mother and members of the Polish intelligentsia in November 1939; their transport to Kraków, Poland, where they spent time in a fortress prison; her thoughts on the similarities and differences between the Kraków and Warsaw ghettos; her relationship with Oskar Schindler and how he protected the Jews working in his factory; how Schindler compiled his list of names of prisoners from the Płaszów concentration camp; Schindler’s attempt to persuade a fellow factory owner, Julius Madrich, to save the Jews working in his own factory; how Jewish workers in Schindler's Bruennlitz concentration camp factory sabotaged bomb shell casings; an incident in which she and other female Schindler Jews were transported to Birkenau by mistake instead of going directly to Bruennlitz; how some of the Schindler Jews used gold fillings to fashion a gold ring for Schindler on his birthday in April 1945; Schindler’s friendships with the Jews he rescued; and his designation as Righteous Among the Nations.

    Oral history interview with Leopold Page

    Oral history interview with Leopold Page

    Oral History

    Leopold Page discusses his first meeting with Oskar Schindler and Schindler's physical appearance; how Schindler rescued several female prisoners from Auschwitz (Birkenau) concentration camp and male prisoners from Gross-Rosen concentration camp after they were misrouted on the way to Bruennlitz concentration camp; the establishment of the Kraków ghetto and resistance activities he witnessed there; how he and his wife, Ludmilla Page, escaped from the Kraków ghetto during the liquidation action; how he and other prisoners kept statistics on the number of prisoners killed each day in Plaszów concentration camp; his memories of Amon Goeth, commandant of Plaszów concentration camp; how the prisoners of Plaszów prayed as a form of resistance; how friendships among the prisoners helped them survive; how the Schindler Jews sabotaged bomb shell casing while working in Schindler's factory in Bruennlitz concentration camp; Schindler helping the Jews disarm and imprison their German captors in Bruennlitz; how Schindler attempted to persuade Julius Madrich to save the Jews working in his own factory; Russian soldiers liberating the Schindler Jews in Bruennlitz; Oskar Schindler receiving the award of Righteous Gentile for his efforts to save Jews during the Holocaust; his memories of Kristallnacht in November 1938; and how some prisoners in Bruennlitz fashioned a ring from gold fillings as a birthday gift for Schindler in April 1945.

    Oral history interview with Esther Raab

    Oral history interview with Esther Raab

    Oral History

    Esther Raab discusses her transfer from a forced labor camp to Sobibór concentration camp; how Sobibór commandant Wagner selected her and other girls to work sorting the belongings of people gassed in the camp; how the SS camp guards processed arrivals of new prisoners in the camp; the extreme cruelty of two camp guards, Frenzel and Wagner; how she and other workers found notes among the belongings of prisoners from Treblinka and Belzec concentration camps and how the notes mentioned revenge against the Germans; how she and other Sobibór inmates planned and executed the revolt in the camp; escaping into the woods near the camp during the revolt and receiving a gunshot wound during the escape; how the Sobibór camp guards punished prisoners who attempted to escape; her thoughts on the differences between a concentration camp and a death camp; how she and other Sobibór escapees received food and shelter from a Polish farmer; her memories of life in Poland before World War II; her time in "Stafnovushulke" forced labor camp; her thoughts on her actions during the Sobibór revolt as being actions of heroism; the types of spiritual resistance that occurred in Sobibór; and how her mother prepared her for World War II by telling her stories of life in Poland during World War I.

    Oral history interview with Agi Rubin

    Oral history interview with Agi Rubin

    Oral History

    Agi Rubin discusses being age 14 when she and her family were deported to Auschwitz; her family's arrival in Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944 and her separation from her mother during a selection; being registered and tattooed in Auschwitz; her work on a special commando sorting the belongings of recently gassed prisoners; how she and others in the commando sabotaged the clothing they sorted and tied into bundles; how the camp guards in Auschwitz singled out certain commandos for certain tasks; her observation of the gassing and cremation processes in Auschwitz and Birkenau; her experiences with a Kapo in Auschwitz; her memories of the "Garnerlager" or so-called "Gypsy" camp in Auschwitz; her observations of the selection process conducted by Josef Mengele at the Auschwitz train platform; her thoughts on how the crematoria in Auschwitz affected her senses; how some prisoners recited prayers on their way to the gas chambers; her experiences with lice; her time in Ravensbrück concentration camp; being sent on a death march in January 1945; and her thoughts on heroism as a part of survival. At the end of the interview, Rubin displays and discusses photographs from a family photo album.

    Oral history interview with Bart Stern

    Oral history interview with Bart Stern

    Oral History

    Bart Stern discusses his experiences on a cattle car transport from Hungary to Birkenau concentration camp with his brothers; his subsequent move to Auschwitz concentration camp; his time working in a coal mine near Auschwitz; how religious celebrations became a form of resistance in Auschwitz; how he and other prisoners told jokes as a way of coping; his experiences with Kapos in Auschwitz; his thoughts on humanity in light of his Holocaust experiences; his thoughts on revenge; and how many Jews resisted and did not go willingly to their deaths.

    Oral history interview with Tina Strobos

    Oral history interview with Tina Strobos

    Oral History

    Tina Strobos discusses her experiences during the German invasion of the Netherlands and how life changed for the citizens of Rotterdam; the role of Arthur Seyss-Inquart in the Nazi-occupation government of the Netherlands; the role of the Gestapo during the German occupation of the Netherlands; her involvement in an underground resistance group in the Netherlands lead by Johann Brower; her time in hiding and the hiding place she used inside her own home; the underground work of the "Lomlok Organization" to help Jews find hiding places; how she and her family rescued other Jews by letting them hide in their Rotterdam home; and how some Nazi sympathizers in the Netherlands denounced and betrayed their Jewish neighbors.

    Oral history interview with Emanuel Tanay

    Oral history interview with Emanuel Tanay

    Oral History

    Emanuel Tanay discusses how life changed for the Jews in Miechów, Poland, after the German invasion in 1939; how the Germans increased persecutions against Jews with collaboration by Ukrainians and Lithuanians; his thoughts on the differences between Polish Jews and Jews from Western Europe; his family's time in the ghetto in Miechów, Poland; hiding in a monastery in Mogila, Poland, where he posed as a novice for the priesthood; the assistance he received from the monastery's prior, Father Kuhar; his flight from the monastery when the Gestapo raided his cell; how the Germans imprisoned Father Kuhar and other priests from the Mogila monastery in Auschwitz concentration camp for giving assistance to people in the underground resistance; his thoughts on how being a teenager helped him to survive; how he and his family fled to Hungary in 1943 using false identification papers; his time in a prison in Budapest, Hungary, and subsequent escape; volunteering to the Gestapo to be executed and how the Gestapo failed to carry out the execution; his brief time in the ghetto in Warsaw, Poland, just before the uprising; and his thoughts on what special qualities a person needed to be a survivor.

    Oral history interview with Bella Tovey

    Oral history interview with Bella Tovey

    Oral History

    Bella Tovey discusses how life changed in Sosnowiec, Poland, and persecutions increased for Jews after the German invasion; how the Germans established a ghetto in Sosnowiec; how members of the intelligentsia started to disappear and how others went to work camps; being taken to a work camp and her parents gained her release by having her younger sister, Pina, replace her in the camp; the liquidation of the Sosnowiec ghetto and her family's move to a smaller ghetto called Srodula; her time in Gräben (a.k.a. Gräen) concentration camp near Striegel, Germany, where the prisoners worked in a flax mill; her experiences with a Kapo in Gräben labor camp; how the Germans incorporated Gräben into the camp system of Gross-Rosen concentration camp; her time on a death march to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and her bouts with typhus and typhoid while in the camp; the various friendships that she had with other girls during her time in the camps; her thoughts on spiritual resistance in the camp; her reaction to hearing about what happened to Jews in Auschwitz; the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by British troops in 1945; and her loss of faith in God during the Holocaust and how she regained her faith and began her Jewish and religious studies later in life.

    Oral history interview with Helen Waterford

    Oral history interview with Helen Waterford

    Oral History

    Helen Waterford discusses her family's time in hiding in the Netherlands and how she and her husband decided to hide their daughter with another family; her family's relationship with Joe Fisch, a rescuer of many Jews in the Netherlands; her and her husband's arrest and deportation to Auschwitz concentration camp via Westerbork concentration camp; her experiences during a selection upon her arrival in Auschwitz; her thoughts on the lack of resistance in Auschwitz; how at one time she was in a barracks with Anne Frank and Anne Frank's mother; her memories of Josef Mengele in Auschwitz; her move from Auschwitz to work in a factory in Czechoslovakia; and her opinions on humankind in light of her Holocaust experiences and how she does not consider survival to be an achievement.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Webber

    Oral history interview with Ruth Webber

    Oral History

    Ruth Webber discusses her memories of the Germans invading Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski, Poland, in 1939; her time in Botsohov (Bodzechów) work camp with her parents; moving to the ghetto in Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski, Poland with her mother; their escape from the ghetto and return to the Botshohov work camp; her time in Austrowiec (Ostrowiec) concentration camp; her time in Starachowice concentration camp; her transport to Auschwitz concentration camp; her arrival in Auschwitz and her memories of the registration process; her time in the Auschwitz infirmary suffering from measles; her memories of the Auschwitz crematoria and her realization of what was happening to the prisoners there; what it was like to be a child among mostly adults in Auschwitz; her move to the "children's block" in Auschwitz after her mother moved to another camp; the special care and protection she received from her mother while in Auschwitz; how she considers her mother to be a hero; and her thoughts on humanity in light of her Holocaust experiences.

    Oral history interview with Ernest Weihs

    Oral history interview with Ernest Weihs

    Oral History

    Ernest Weihs, born in Vienna, Austria in November 1908, discusses his conversion from Judaism to Lutheranism at age eleven; the changing situation for Jews in Vienna, Austria in 1938; the aid that he and his future wife received from Swedish missionaries in Austria; his imprisonment in Theresienstadt in 1942; his marriage while in Theresienstadt; his escape from a death march on the way to Dachau concentration camp; his experiences with Kapos; the religious practices that took place in Theresienstadt; his brief time in Auschwitz concentration camp; and his witness to a suicide while in Kaufering concentration camp.

    Oral history interview with Norbert Wollheim

    Oral history interview with Norbert Wollheim

    Oral History

    Norbert Wollheim discusses his parents' deportation from Berlin, Germany in 1943 and his deportation with his wife and son to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943; how some prisoners prayed and celebrated Sabbath while on the transport to Auschwitz; his arrival in Auschwitz and his separation from his wife and child; his registration and tattoo; the role of the SS in Auschwitz; his time working in the Buna factory near the camp; his work as a welder in Auschwitz; his friend Fritz Schaeffer who committed suicide while in Auschwitz; his experiences with Kapos; his thoughts on spiritual resistance in the camp; his memories of Kristallnacht in Germany in 1938; his involvement in a Kindertransport of children from Berlin to England shortly after Kristallnacht; his memories of life in Berlin before 1933 and how conditions changed for Jews after the Nazis came to power; his memories of the voyage of the St. Louis; his thoughts on revenge; his feelings at the time of liberation; his thoughts on the different types of concentration camps; his thoughts on forced labor and work camps used during the Holocaust; the choices he made in order to survive; how he relied on the friendships with other inmates for support and how he befriended British prisoners of war while in Auschwitz; how age and gender played a role in who survived the Holocaust; and his memories of the "Appel" in Auschwitz.

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