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Oral history interview with Jill Pauly

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1998.A.0033 | RG Number: RG-50.106.0092

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    Oral history interview with Jill Pauly
    Transcript
    This is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    Volunteer Collection interview with Jill Pauly, conducted
    by Margaret Garrett on February 27, 1998,
    in Silver Spring, Maryland.
    This is a follow-up interview that
    will focus on Jill Pauly's post-Holocaust experiences.
    In preparation for this interview,
    I observed the video interview that Jill Pauly
    conducted with the Shoah Foundation
    on February 20, 1997.
    I will not ask you to repeat everything
    you said in that interview.
    Instead, I will use this interview as an opportunity
    to follow-up on that interview and focus
    on your post-Holocaust experiences.
    This is tape number 1, side A.
    What was your name at birth?
    Gisela Renate Berg.
    And your date of birth?
    May 1, 1933.
    And your place of birth?
    Cologne, Germany
    Suppose we start this interview--
    this post-Holocaust interview--
    with an overview of your experiences in Kenya,
    where you were during the war.
    Fine.
    We came to Kenya, we arrived probably end of June, 1939,
    to the port city of Mombasa.
    The family on the ship consisted of about 10 family members,
    including my grandparents, my sister, and my mother.
    My late father, his brother, and his first cousin
    were already in Mombasa and met us at the ship.
    They had been in prison in Holland
    and were released to go to Kenya, luckily,
    and it was a great reunion.
    I remember very vividly how hot it was in Mombasa,
    but I was happy.
    And we stayed somewhere in Mombasa overnight.
    I don't remember where.
    And we got on a train, which is still riding today.
    The Mombasa-Nairobi train is a very famous train.
    It goes through the Serengeti.
    And it's a wonderful, wonderful trip, especially for children.
    Because the animals are all wild,
    and you see them from the train windows.
    In those days, in 1939, it was an overnight trip for Mombasa--
    at least an overnight trip from Mombasa to Nairobi.
    In Nairobi, there must've been some Jewish committees
    that my father had contacted that helped us, that had helped
    my father rent a big house.
    How would you characterize your family?
    My family-- my family were German-Jewish country people
    for hundreds of years.
    That does not mean that they had never been in a big city.
    They were very acclimated to city life.
    They only lived 20 minutes from Cologne and Krefeld,
    which was a big city.
    My grandmother on my father's side was from Krefeld
    and had a huge, enormous family.
    It's just that my family, in general,
    were not intellectuals or college-educated individuals.
    They all went-- some went to whatever level of education,
    I don't know.
    But I know my father's brother finished gymnasium.
    I think my father went into high school.
    And then they went into business.
    And were they successful in business?
    Extremely, Extremely.
    They were very wealthy people.
    We did not really understand how wealthy because it never
    really affected us after we were small children.
    So your family lived comfortably and you
    had all you needed and more.
    Oh, we had enough for our family and supporting other families.
    And they were just very wealthy.
    I would say, by today's standards,
    they were millionaires.
    But then there's millions and there's millions.
    I wouldn't say they had a hundred million dollars
    on today's level, but they were millionaires on today's level.
    How did that affect your leaving Germany, the family wealth?
    It really didn't affect our leaving Germany.
    What it did was they were very, very clever people.
    And what they had decided to do--
    on the day I was born, on the 1st of May, 1933--
    they smuggled a large amount of their money out of Germany,
    into Holland.
    There were three brothers and two brothers
    that were partners.
    So there were five men in the--
    four men in the business plus my grandfather.
    There were five men in the business.
    They pooled their money and took a large block of it
    and had it smuggled out.
    That is probably the money that saved us.
    Now that was in 1933.
    The 1st of May, 1933.
    So in 1933, they knew that it would be good to have money--
    Yes.
    --out of Germany.
    Mm-hmm.
    I think I had a brilliant grandmother.
    To say bright would be an underestimate.
    This is your mother's mother?
    My father's mother.
    You father's mother.
    And what was her name?
    Her name was Klara Dawitz-Berg.
    She came from Krefeld.
    She was 12 years old when her father died.
    She was a very poor child and became a milkmaid.
    She was very industrious and carried out milk at 4 o'clock
    in the morning before she went to school, for years.
    And saved up a dowry so that she could marry well.
    And she did marry well.
    She married my grandfather who, by then, already
    was comfortable.
    So when your family was in Kenya,
    was your family able to retrieve the money?
    No.
    No, that wasn't-- no, that wasn't an issue.
    The issue was that my grandmother was so clever
    that she never put any of the family's savings in a bank
    after 1930.
    1930?
    All the family money that was taxed, they banked.
    Everything else, my grandmother kept on her person.
    The money was hidden.
    And what happened to the money that was smuggled out
    of the country in '33?
    It went to Holland.
    My mother's brother and my mother's sister's husband,
    they all left from Germany to Holland in 1937.
    My mother's brother was also a very clever fellow--
    very little education but really a very savvy man.
    And he made all the arrangements, from Holland,
    to get 17 people into Kenya, with that money.
    And why Kenya?
    Why was Kenya the destination?
    It was the only option.
    It was an out.
    They tried to get out from Germany for years,
    and they had no place they could get in.
    So Kenya would take you and no other place would.
    At that time, Kenya would take us
    because we had a family contact there.
    He had studied law in England.
    And this man was sent by the British government
    to practice law in Kenya.
    So he had a connection.
    Now, he was a Jew?
    He was a relative.
    His name was Hermann Strauss, and he was a cousin of someone
    my cousin was married to--
    my mother's cousin was married to.
    And he was able to get the 17 passports.
    And he lived in Kenya?
    He was in Kenya.
    And he was able to help you get to Kenya.
    Yes.
    OK.
    And what I read two years ago at the United States Holocaust
    Museum, from a man who's written his history, who
    went from Vienna to Kenya, the British government
    required a 50 pound stipend to be paid
    in Kenya for each immigrant.
    Well, that, the family could handle 17 times 50.
    But when the war broke out and the British government realized
    that so many people wanted to come in,
    that's stipend went up to 250 pounds a person.
    That was a fortune.
    We all got in.
    And whether the last group that came from Holland
    that came in 1941--
    I doubt that they paid 50 pounds.
    I'm sure they had to pay the 250.
    So the relatives from Holland joined
    the family who had come from Germany, in Kenya.
    Yes.
    And by the time everyone got there, there was very little--
    I mean, there was some money left,
    but nothing to write home to mother about, you know.
    So most of it went just to get to Kenya.
    Right.
    OK.
    Don't forget, all properties and moneys that had been in banks
    or purchased or anything, that was all left behind.
    And each Jew was allowed to take 10 Mark out of Germany.
    So what our family had done was buy enormous amounts of things,
    had them stored in lifts, and shipped to Kenya.
    I mean enormous-- antiques and China and--
    So this was a way of using the money, which you could not
    take out.
    You could to take things, but not money.
    And they also left quite a bit of money
    for the families that stayed behind,
    that they were worried about.
    But they knew money wouldn't help them that-- but they
    left them money.
    They had money of their own.
    It was just stolen from them.
    My great-uncles and aunts were retired in Cologne
    and had a fortune, in 1938, of 200,000 Mark saved up.
    That's a fortune.
    Went to the-- went somewhere, we don't know where.
    So it's not that they-- they had money.
    And if we had tried to get out of Germany in '38, '39,
    '37, with money, you couldn't get out,
    because nobody would take you in.
    It wasn't a matter of having money.
    It was a matter of being able to get in somewhere.
    So having this relative in Kenya saved your lives.
    Yes.
    Oh yes, oh yes.
    On the videotape that I mentioned, from the Shoah
    Foundation, you give a lot of detail
    about your life in Kenya.
    But could you sum up--
    I can, yes.
    --that experience?
    The Kenya experience was a very, very high-level experience,
    really, for people who came from Germany,
    from a different culture, into a very strange land--
    who only spoke German--
    and the languages of the country were English and Swahili--
    who had little money left, who have
    to take a mortgage to start over again and build up a business.
    Now how could you get a mortgage,
    if you did not have many assets of your own?
    Who knows.
    I don't know.
    They must have had some money left.
    And they bought a big farm--
    a big farm, a 300-acre farm with two big houses on them.
    And then they bought another farm
    of 100 acres which had to be farmed in order
    to make a living.
    There were five families to support on one farm.
    So you, essentially, acquired a business through the mortgage.
    Right.
    And my grandfather, being 80 years old at the time,
    was extremely concerned that they would go bankrupt
    because they took out a mortgage.
    He was used to paying cash for things, by that time.
    But they had to.
    They had to make a new beginning.
    And the first three months in Kenya were tough.
    They didn't know the languages.
    They were trying to apply the European methods of cattle
    raising and animal husbandry and farming to Africa.
    It didn't work.
    The animals died.
    The prize bull died.
    He had to be immediately replaced.
    Which was expensive?
    Ach, he cost 1500 pounds.
    And he had to be imported.
    And there was some very nice Englishman, the Lord Napier,
    who worked with the men, and explained to them that they
    have to make a very quick adjustment
    or they would lose everything.
    So when you're up against the wall, you change.
    And they did change.
    And they changed their methodology.
    My father was an expert in untrained veterinary medicine.
    Well, who helped them learn the Kenyan methods?
    This Lord Napier.
    So he--
    He came over and just--
    --he hands-on helped.
    He didn't just tell them you have to change.
    He helped them.
    No, he saw that they were very competent.
    And that my father really was an A-number 1 expert in animals.
    But he helped to teach them what they needed to know.
    Yes, and he also impressed on them
    that the first thing they had to do
    was learn the language so that they
    could deal with the black people who ran the farms.
    It was a little different than Europe.
    Was Lord Napier Jewish?
    No, no, no, And it worked.
    If God wants something to work, it works.
    That's all I can tell you.
    It worked.
    So they learned, and God helped and--
    They set up an orthodox kibbutz on a farm
    high up in the highlands.
    The big problem for my parents were our schooling,
    the cultural changes of the demands of education
    and how it worked.
    But with much stress, as I explained in the other film,
    it was worked out.
    It was worked out.
    A big problem in Kenya was medical changes,
    health changes--
    different climate, different diseases,
    understanding them, not being able to get
    the right physicians to treat the diseases.
    You mean of the cattle or of people?
    People.
    Of your family?
    Of family.
    Cattle was less of a problem.
    But I would say the first three months
    were extremely difficult. They thought they would lose it all.
    But then it started coming together, somehow,
    like a miracle.
    And it all worked.
    And it started to produce and it started to make money.
    And they started to make a fabulous living again.
    And they really, really recouped and they didn't know
    what was going on in Europe.
    Their only contact with Europe was a battery-operated radio,
    a high--
    7,200 feet up in the mountains--
    that's all we had.
    We had no electricity for eight years.
    We had a generator in one house, but we
    lived with Petromax lamps in the other house.
    And which house did you live in?
    With the Petromax lamps.
    So you didn't have electricity.
    No, it was fine.
    Fine.
    You could see very well with them.
    And my parents had a lot of help.
    We had a tremendous social life, absolutely
    tremendous social life.
    With who?
    Every Jewish person that came to Nairobi landed up on our farm
    because my parents were strictly kosher,
    and they were fabulous cooks and loved people.
    And very few weekends went by, the whole eight years,
    that we didn't have guests.
    And my mother and father turned it
    into more or less of a bed and breakfast, which
    paid for our private school education.
    Because that had to be earned outside of what
    my father was earning on the farm.
    So your family was able to create a new life.
    Tremendously well.
    So at the end of the war, why did your family leave Kenya?
    Only for one reason.
    And that was because they were orthodox Jews.
    They had no orthodox communal life.
    They created it.
    And they wanted to go back into a traditional orthodox
    community.
    And they wanted my sister and I to be
    able to marry on the same level as the family.
    That's what they wanted.
    That's what they envisioned.
    Of course, things didn't all work out
    the way they envisioned.
    They made a tremendous mistake.
    And that was due to the lack of their formal education
    and worldliness.
    They made one tremendous mistake.
    Actually, you're going to balance it out with the fact
    that they didn't make a mistake, it turns out.
    But let's just say they made a terrible mistake.
    Two of the men should have come to the United States.
    And they should have looked around
    to see where best we would have fit in.
    And there were areas in the United States
    where we would have fit in beautifully
    and had less of a stressful life.
    Like where?
    In the East.
    They would have fit in beautifully in California
    because of the weather.
    Cattle farming was good.
    Climatically, they would have been happier.
    They were.
    But I am not sure whether the orthodox community,
    at that point, would have been satisfactory to them.
    My father did travel after he came here
    to the Northeast-- to Vermont, to New Hampshire, to Maine--
    because he loved the mountains.
    Kenya is very mountainous.
    Where you lived in Germany, was it mountainous?
    It was beautiful, but not as mountainous as Kenya.
    But he loved the mountains and he wanted
    to resettle in the mountains.
    And he picked Vermont.
    We loved it.
    There was nothing, as far as Jewish life, absolutely zilch,
    nothing, zero.
    Now, I don't understand.
    Did your whole family come to America together,
    or did your father come first?
    They came within three months.
    Everybody came within three months.
    So who came first?
    I don't remember.
    One other family, but they only were here a month when we came.
    So your family was not the first family.
    No, we were in the middle.
    Actually, I'm ahead of myself.
    Why did you come to America?
    Oh, because of orthodoxy--
    as we say, Yiddishkeit.
    My family wanted a traditional orthodox communal life
    that they had lived before the war.
    And your family thought they would be
    able to find that in America.
    Yes, with synagogues in walking distance,
    with schools for the children, with kosher food in the stores.
    They wanted a Jewish environment.
    They wanted an orthodox environment.
    And why America?
    The goldene land.
    There's gold in the streets.
    Haven't you heard?
    My father-- there were some psychological reasons.
    My father was a--
    the happiest eight years of his life were in Kenya.
    He loved the black people.
    He thought they were the most kind, wonderful human beings.
    He bonded with them.
    He saw that they were being miserably mistreated,
    that they had no future but killing each other
    and eating each other and being destroyed, and being
    hit and enslaved.
    He hated that.
    And his choices were Palestine-- there was no Israel.
    The state hadn't been declared yet.
    South Africa, which was great for many things.
    For a Jewish community?
    Yes.
    Or the United States.
    He did not pick Palestine because his brother
    was so much against it.
    And why was his brother against it?
    He says that he didn't want--
    I don't know.
    It was rocky.
    The state hadn't been declared.
    They didn't know-- they didn't want
    to go into another very unsettled situation.
    It was before the war, before the '48 war.
    They should have-- most of the Jews from Kenya
    did go to Palestine instead.
    South Africa-- my father would not go.
    He said it's jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
    Things are going to change with these black people.
    They're not going to be downtrodden forever.
    This is not a future for my children.
    So he came to America.
    OK.
    Now, you said that another family came first
    and then your family came very shortly after that.
    We all came.
    And where did you come to, in America?
    Unfortunately-- unfortunately-- here these Kenya people
    landed up in New York City.
    Why New York City?
    Because that's where the relatives were that
    brought us over.
    And these were relatives--
    Cousins of my mother's.
    OK.
    Close-- my mother's uncle, who survived, who was in the States
    with his two sons.
    They're the ones that sent us all the visas.
    So they helped you come to America.
    Helped us come to America--
    Did you have money to come to America?
    Oh yes, by then they had money again.
    So you had money.
    Everybody had money.
    But what you needed help with the visas and getting
    established.
    Yes.
    They could help us with the visas.
    Getting established was beyond them.
    But they lived in New York, so you came to New York.
    They lived in New York.
    The aunt and uncle were old by then.
    They had a 1 bedroom apartment.
    And they were very generous and gracious to everybody,
    but they couldn't put anybody up.
    My aunt was still working.
    She was 62 years old.
    She was working full-time.
    My uncle was a very old man.
    His son had a restaurant in Manhattan.
    He couldn't employ them because they were all Sabbath
    observers, and he was not, nor was his business.
    And then the tremendous, tremendous, unbelievable
    culture change for my family.
    They were German Jews.
    German Jews tended to be very insular and very critical
    of Polish Jews and Russian Jews and Czech Jews.
    For some reason, they could not integrate with them well.
    They were very-- is the word insular?
    Whatever you want to call it.
    And this was a tremendous problem for them.
    Wherever they went, the orthodox synagogues,
    if it wasn't a totally German synagogue,
    they didn't feel comfortable.
    If the Jews prayed in a different manner,
    they came from different backgrounds,
    they felt they weren't well-behaved.
    They felt they were weren't-- they had so many problems.
    They were so unadaptable in this country.
    Whereas in Kenya, they didn't have those problems.
    Were there German Jews in Kenya who were orthodox?
    No, they integrated beautifully with all of the Jews in Kenya.
    Yes, they realized they were a little different,
    but they were happy together.
    Why do you think it was so much harder for them in New York?
    Because they were fish out of water.
    They couldn't do anything in New York.
    They were country people.
    They were farmers.
    And my father was offered a job.
    The only job my father could get in New York
    was flicking chickens.
    He was 52 years old.
    He didn't want to flick chickens.
    And he was allergic to feathers.
    They couldn't get an apartment.
    There were no apartments to be gotten unless you
    paid under the table.
    We had to live together in two rooms, the four of us--
    rented rooms.
    Did you also not have enough money
    to get a larger apartment or--
    Well, no, by then my father became very, very insecure
    and frightened, and saw how expensive everything was
    that he needed to hold him and his money
    because he needed to settle his family again.
    Multiply this times seven families.
    And they all initially lived in New York?
    Initially, we all landed in New York.
    And lived there for a time.
    For a short-- some of us only for six weeks or two months.
    Some of them as much as a year.
    Unfortunately, the ones with the least money
    had to stay for a year because they eventually would
    get an apartment somewhere.
    And my uncle got a job in the restaurant
    and he couldn't keep his Sabbath.
    My aunt was heartbroken.
    The other aunt and uncle had a disastrous experience.
    They were the wealthiest ones in Germany and also in Kenya.
    They had no children.
    They had a lot of money.
    My uncle came to America feeling rich.
    Now, there's something very destructive about being very
    well-to-do-- and a lot of German Jews had this problem--
    and not knowing how not to be very well-to-do.
    It's a hard lesson to learn at 57.
    Came to America at 57, my aunt was 46, whatever.
    And he had money.
    When I say money, instead of $20,000, maybe he had $30,000.
    That was a lot of money in 1947.
    I don't know what it equates to now,
    but it was an awful lot of money.
    He decided to go into business with a man
    that he knew from Germany.
    They were going to go into warehousing.
    The man came with a contract, took his $10,000.
    They bought warehouses, and they were
    going to start stacking these warehouses.
    And for some reason, one of the families
    said, let's go out to Bayonne and look at your new warehouse.
    When they got there, there was nothing.
    He was robbed.
    So he had a little bit of money left.
    I don't know how much.
    They had to take an apartment.
    And my aunt, who was a very fancy lady in Germany--
    she wasn't fancy because she wanted to be fancy.
    She was fancy because he spoiled her.
    She went to work for a jeweler in Manhattan.
    And today, I still do business with his son.
    It's a tradition of 50some years.
    She worked for him.
    She earned enough to put bread on the table.
    They did that for a year.
    And then they borrowed money from the family--
    my uncle and my father, who had already
    bought a farm in Vineland, New Jersey.
    And they bought a little farm.
    It never went well for them.
    Now, back to your father, if you were
    living in a two-room apartment, your family of four.
    2 rooms.
    Two rooms, a 2-room apartment.
    And after six weeks, one of my uncles, when we first arrived,
    got a job as a farm manager in Elmer, New Jersey.
    And he got a big house for his wife and son
    while he managed the farm.
    And they asked the landlord if he would permit us--
    my family-- to move in with them until we've settled.
    So we went back to the country.
    We went to New Jersey.
    So you went to the house in Elmer, New Jersey.
    Right.
    And we were sent to New Jersey by the HIAS.
    That was an organization that was helping people resettle.
    Now what do you mean, you were sent to New Jersey?
    To look, by the HIAS.
    They said go into poultry farming.
    But your uncle already had the farm.
    No, he was a manager.
    He had a job.
    Oh, he was a manager.
    So it was after that the HIAS sent your family?
    Suggested that they go and look at poultry farms.
    So their role with your father was as a counselor, an advisor?
    At the best.
    But my father, after six weeks of being in New York,
    made a decision that we had to get out.
    So he was in touch with HIAS and they
    said, look at poultry farming.
    HIAS was in touch with all the immigrants, tried to help them.
    And they considered sending him on the chicken
    farms being helpful.
    Did they have specific farms to send him to, or just said,
    go to this area and look around?
    Just go to area.
    Go to Lakewood, go to Vineland, and see what you can find.
    Did they offer financial help or--
    No.
    My family wouldn't have considered financial help.
    So they were-- the idea was that they were helping to direct
    your family and where they thought they would be--
    They directed hundreds of thousands of immigrants
    to these chicken farms, which was not a good idea.
    So they advised your father to go to that area
    to look at chicken farms, and it just
    happened that your uncle was already there managing a farm.
    Yes.
    And so you moved in?
    He took us in.
    With him, OK.
    And for me it was a trauma, terrible trauma.
    To leave New York and go to--
    No, no, no.
    I enjoyed-- I didn't like school in New York
    because I had a teacher that didn't understand me,
    and I didn't understand her, verbally.
    Now you were how old?
    13, going on 14.
    And you didn't understand her English or--
    That's right.
    You might as well have put me in a Chinese class.
    And in Kenya, what language was your schooling?
    British English.
    British English?
    So this lady was from the South.
    So you couldn't understand southern American English?
    No, not a word.
    But you-- even though you were in New York for six weeks,
    you were in school.
    Every day, and I never adapted to her language.
    Maybe she had a speech defect.
    What about the other children.
    How did you get along with them?
    I wasn't there long enough to integrate.
    I found it a little strange.
    I came from a very elite school system.
    The schools in Kenya were topflight.
    Now, I don't remember from the previous tape what
    your last school in Kenya was.
    Was it a private school?
    They were all private.
    Was it a private Jewish school or private English--
    No, English.
    Private English school.
    My sister had matriculated.
    She had been accepted at Oxford and at Cambridge.
    And I was just about to go into high school when we left.
    OK, so now you're in New York City.
    You're 14, and you went into what grade?
    (LAUGHING) I don't remember.
    I think eighth.
    Eighth.
    So the other children were probably younger.
    I don't remember those children.
    I don't remember being unhappy there.
    Do you remember any discrimination or antisemitism?
    No, nothing.
    No, not for those six weeks, nothing.
    It was in Jackson Heights.
    It was just a very cold, very uncomfortable environment.
    And I wasn't learning a thing.
    So it wasn't overtly hostile to you.
    It just was not helpful and was cold and not very caring.
    I wasn't adjusting well in Jackson Heights.
    And then we came--
    We have to stop here to turn over the tape.
    OK.
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum Volunteer collection interview with Jill
    Pauly, tape number 1, side B. Mrs. Pauly,
    you were talking about living in New York for six weeks,
    the difficulty of the school.
    And then you moved to Elmer, which you had described.
    We couldn't stay in Elmer.
    That was a temporary haven for this uncle and his wife.
    This uncle, Ernest, couldn't get a job in New York.
    He was a trained butcher.
    But we were Orthodox.
    And he could not get a job where he could observe
    his Sabbath and his holidays.
    So he took a job on a farm where he
    could be his own time manager.
    And on this farm, there was a gentleman
    who had the job before him, who hadn't left yet,
    who was supposed to train my uncle.
    Unfortunately, he was a very, very sick individual
    who had horrendous epilepsy attacks.
    I was 14 and my cousin's little boy was five.
    We were all living in one house.
    And when these epileptic attacks took place,
    we children became so absolutely mortified.
    We didn't know what to do.
    Our mothers were as mortified as we were.
    My father was wonderful.
    He would run in there and help this man.
    And it was, for me, a very traumatic terrible experience.
    I couldn't deal with it.
    I was so afraid of him because I was
    afraid he was out of control, and it
    would happen in front of me and I wouldn't
    know what to do with him.
    Well it landed up my not going to the bathroom
    alone without someone standing in front
    of the door for six weeks.
    It was a difficult six weeks.
    But during that time, my parents did make progress.
    They went to look for a home and for farms.
    They decided to go back to the land.
    The mistake was that they went into chicken farming
    when their expertise was cattle farming.
    Everybody was being advised to buy chicken farms.
    My father bought one.
    My mother got a very nice house.
    We moved in.
    It was a mile's walk from the synagogue.
    The social environment was very poor
    because we were 12 miles out of town.
    We were rural.
    But there were other refugee families there,
    and I found some girls.
    And--
    These were also--
    Refugees, immigrants.
    Were they German Jewish?
    Not all of them.
    Most of them.
    And after a while, we became friends.
    I was demoted in school for a year.
    To what grade?
    Eighth grade.
    I should have been in ninth.
    It was stupid.
    Of course, I was an honors student for that year.
    That wasn't so bad.
    I went to this little country school.
    Now, where were you living?
    What was the town?
    It was called Vineland, New Jersey.
    We lived in the area called Brotmanville.
    And I went to school, to the Elmer's school, for one year.
    It was socially, for my father, a nightmare
    to have girls from an elite British school system
    go into an American country school
    where things were going on that did not
    go on in British schools.
    Like what?
    Running around with boys at a very young age.
    The teacher taking girls and boys out once a week
    for skating lessons.
    You mean, away from academic studies for skating?
    There was very little academics, a lot of social life,
    and into the sexual behavior of young teenagers.
    And he was very, very, very mortified that--
    not that I would go astray, but that something
    would happen that I wouldn't understand.
    And how was it for you?
    Strange.
    But it was freer.
    It was something very nice for me
    about going to school without having
    all these very difficult teachers putting pressure
    on me.
    It was an opportunity for me to blossom a little
    and develop my own thoughts and feelings.
    And get into a curriculum that was different,
    that I was enjoying.
    I might not have been in an elitist school
    and I might not have been getting top grades there,
    but I was really enjoying the freedom
    of the way this teacher was dealing with the classroom.
    I sat mixed with black kids, which I had never done.
    And I liked them.
    There were Jewish children in my class.
    There were non-Jewish children.
    There was one very bad little anti-Semitic girl.
    But I handled her.
    I had no problem handling her.
    How did you handle her?
    I chased her. (LAUGHING) I hit her.
    I took care of her.
    It wasn't a problem in America.
    And did she stop after you hit her?
    I chased her long enough.
    Yes, Tootsie stopped eventually because she ran out of steam,
    you know, didn't go anywhere.
    She was told to stop by the teacher.
    Tootsie was a bad girl.
    I had some really bad, bad, bad kids in the class
    there, in this little country school.
    And it was an education.
    I learned-- you know, we didn't have
    to wear uniforms, which was nice for me.
    I went to school by bus.
    I liked the socialization on the bus.
    It was freer.
    It was-- I didn't mind it.
    Now, how was it for you, enjoying
    this more relaxed social atmosphere, and your father
    worried and disapproving?
    Oh, we had tremendous difficulties at home.
    Like what?
    He wouldn't allow me to participate
    in most of the things that were going on.
    And he was absolutely right not to let me.
    You mean in activities or--
    In activities, social activities.
    He would not let you participate.
    No, he would not.
    And so how did you take that?
    I didn't take it well.
    I fought with him
    But you think, looking back on it, that he was right?
    Oh, he was absolutely right.
    And it was so foreign to him.
    He couldn't adapt to that.
    He felt that we had been demoted, you know.
    And he was so concerned of our educational level.
    He was so mixed up.
    He had so many problems at that time.
    He was so confused.
    Did he think this was discrimination against you?
    No, not at all.
    Discrimination wasn't the problem at the time, no.
    Discrimination we had in Kenya but not in the United States.
    Nothing that had any value.
    It was just not academic enough.
    That year was bad, actually--
    academically bad-- for me.
    The school was not good enough for what I had had
    and what they felt I needed.
    But in all honesty, I had the opportunity
    to develop more as a little person.
    And I enjoyed that.
    Even though you couldn't go to a lot of the activities,
    you still feel that--
    We were always restrained because we
    were Sabbath observant, we were Orthodox,
    and they didn't want certain exposures for us.
    Did you have lunch at school?
    I took my own lunch.
    Everybody did.
    So that wasn't a problem.
    Right.
    The integration problem began--
    really painful integration problem
    began-- the following year when I went to Vineland High
    School, where there were lots of Jewish kids,
    and I felt very happy with that.
    And there were Jewish organizations.
    And my uncles took me.
    They were very encouraging.
    The problems were that there were no orthodox organizations.
    Everything was done on Friday nights and Saturdays.
    The general was that the kids got jobs on weekends
    in high school.
    All the kids worked.
    I couldn't work because I couldn't work on Saturdays.
    So the only thing I could do was babysit.
    But I had a few orthodox friends who were in the same position.
    It wasn't a bad experience.
    My experience wasn't so terrible,
    but my family's experience was a disaster.
    They could not make a go of those chicken farms.
    They couldn't make a living.
    They had a hard time getting the $20
    to buy the food for the week.
    They were poor in Vineland.
    And what was the problem with the chicken farms?
    It was hard for them to learn chicken farming
    or the industry was just in trouble?
    The industry was in trouble, always.
    There was an overproduction of chicken farms.
    One season the chickens would grow beautifully
    and they'd lay eggs like crazy.
    But then the prices were low.
    The following season the chickens didn't lay eggs.
    It wasn't a good crop.
    The prices were high.
    So it wasn't just your father it was--
    Everybody.
    People on chicken farms really--
    let's put it from small to medium chicken farms--
    they could hardly get food on the table and pay their bills.
    A lot of them had debts.
    But my family, being as conservative as they
    were, because they were always well-to-do,
    debts was not something that one lived with.
    So one had nothing--
    paid all the debts and had nothing.
    And I virtually grew up, those four years in high school,
    with nothing.
    If I had two skirts to see me through the school year,
    and a pair of shoes, I was lucky.
    How did you take that?
    I was a kid.
    Did you want more, like some of the other girls had?
    I was very-- no.
    I always managed-- my parents tried hard.
    If I needed-- if they allowed me to go--
    I'm talking about a couple of years later, when I was 17.
    If they allowed me to go to a dance--
    they'd allow me to go to B'nai B'rith girls' dances
    or whatever-- and I needed a dress, I got the dress.
    It was a hardship, but I got it.
    And then they'd buy me a pretty one.
    What I was very envious about, and I had real problems with,
    was that I was such a very serious-minded girl.
    And I understood so much of what was going on
    in my parents' lives that it had an emotional effect on me
    that I really did not do as well in high school as I should.
    The emotional problems of the family
    had a very bad effect on me.
    And I was so envious of all the other Jewish kids that
    had been born and bred in the United States, rich
    poor or indifferent.
    They didn't have those problems.
    They were happy.
    Their whole lives were made up of doing good school work
    and having a good time.
    And that was it.
    They had no responsibilities.
    They didn't have to keep Shabbos.
    They didn't have to keep Kashrut.
    They didn't have those problems.
    They didn't have to stay out on Jewish holidays.
    And we would always have to make it up or flunk.
    You know, we had pressures.
    The American kids were so lucky to have that freedom of not
    having had that background we had,
    of growing up at five-and-a-half.
    I was never a kid.
    And you just have to multiply that.
    I mean all the immigrant kids that I grew up with in Vineland
    were all alike.
    Some were better students.
    Some were able to hold it together,
    like my husband, who was able to focus
    and do very well in school.
    Others were not.
    Others were like me.
    And then there was always the emphasis,
    where my father's confusion came in,
    which I think hurt my sister and I both very much.
    He was confused as to our role in life.
    He said, you don't have to go to college.
    It's ridiculous.
    You're going to get married.
    And I would be in this confusing situation
    of seeing my friends taking--
    they all took college preparatory courses.
    Nobody pressured me into doing--
    I took whatever I wanted.
    Because they were going to go to college.
    They had to go to college.
    And my father was saying, we can't afford it.
    And then my reaction was, well, why should I do it?
    What am I going to take college preparatory
    courses for when I'm going to end up in a secretarial school?
    Or what am I going to become?
    Where am I going to go?
    He did the same thing with both of us.
    He made an enormous mistake.
    Both parents realized they made an enormous mistake.
    Now your sister is older than you by 4 years.
    And what was happening with her that was
    the mistake of your parents?
    She had even-- her misguidance was dreadful.
    My sister was ready to go to Columbia
    when she got off the boat.
    When you say ready to go, you mean she was prepared.
    She had matriculated--
    Oh, she had matriculated at Columbia.
    --at Oxford and Cambridge.
    All she would have had to do was apply
    and she would have gotten a scholarship.
    But no, he couldn't afford it.
    She had to go out work and earn her $20 a week.
    So he didn't understand how it worked.
    He was too troubled and worried, and didn't realize
    the damage he was causing.
    Later on, he did, before he died.
    So what was your sister's path?
    What did she do?
    It was much worse than mine.
    It was much more difficult. She didn't
    go to Vineland with us, to the farm.
    She had to stay in New York and go
    to business school for a year.
    Had to-- you mean your father said she had to?
    And she became a secretary.
    In New York?
    In New York.
    She lived with my aunt and uncle.
    My parents paid her a little bit, whatever they had,
    to my aunt.
    But she had to work.
    How is that for your family to be separated,
    to have your sister in New York and you all were in Vineland?
    Oh, that wasn't a problem.
    She was 17 by then.
    That wasn't a problem.
    But after all you had been through--
    No, that didn't-- but nothing bothered them.
    They were so confused, they didn't know what bothered them.
    They were just so troubled trying to make it.
    You've talked about your father.
    What was your mother experiencing?
    My mother, bless her, she was wonderful, very sanguine.
    She's still living, in the Rockville home.
    This is she.
    You have a picture album here that we're going
    talking to talk about later.
    Yes.
    My mother was a lovely, sanguine homemaker.
    And don't forget, in those days, everything was done by hand,
    everything was manual.
    My mother had difficulties with my father.
    She wasn't as tough as I was.
    She was different.
    What should have happened was that my mother should
    have gone out to get a job--
    I don't know what--
    and paid someone to clean her house.
    And the family would have gotten established much more quickly.
    Do you think that occurred to your mother or your father,
    that your mother would do that?
    They felt so inconstant.
    This is a woman that the only thing she had ever done
    was housework.
    And it would have meant becoming a cook
    or a homemaker for someone.
    And that was something my father absolutely
    was heartbroken about.
    He didn't want that for my mother.
    So he would have felt it as demeaning for his wife
    to have to work.
    Not really demeaning, but--
    Reflection on him is a provider?
    No.
    He felt it would have been terrible for my mother
    to have to do that.
    Not for himself.
    My father was not a macho kind of--
    not too much of a macho kind of a person.
    He was very encouraging.
    And he helped in the house and he cooked
    and he wasn't that kind of a person.
    He just didn't-- he loved my mother very much and he knew
    she loved to be home.
    And he felt it was too much for her to go out and get a job
    and come home and do her own.
    He always felt richer than that, (CHUCKLING)
    which was a mistake.
    You know, feeling rich and comfortable
    doesn't always have to do with money.
    It's a mindset.
    But I think their mindset was confused and construed.
    I think the people who came from Europe straightaway and didn't
    have those eight years somewhere else
    where it was softer and economically easy,
    had an easier time adapting to America.
    And the age-- the ages they were when they came here.
    Your father was how old?
    He was 50.
    And your mother?
    42 It was hard.
    It wasn't "young," quote unquote, for America,
    to start over.
    It wasn't only the first start over.
    It was two starting overs.
    And it was devastating.
    My parents really didn't recuperate
    until, believe it or not, a hurricane came in 1952.
    We came in 1947.
    In 1952, a hurricane came.
    That's five years later.
    Yeah, Hazel.
    Blew away the chickens and the chicken coop.
    And they were insured.
    Well, everybody was.
    And they all they had left was a house.
    You said they were or were not?
    They were.
    They were insured.
    Mm-hmm.
    And my father told his brother, who he was in business with,
    were not going to go back into the chicken business were not
    buying another single chicken.
    And he bought a cow.
    And he went back into trading.
    And from 1952 until 1964, my father and uncle
    built up a big cattle business again.
    On the same property.
    They had two properties next to each other.
    They hired help and they established a big cattle
    business.
    By the time he sold out, he must have
    had over 100 head of cattle.
    He traded, he milked, and he turned the two chicken farms
    into a cattle business.
    He made a living.
    It wasn't-- you couldn't retire on it, but at least they had--
    you know, those first five years were overcome by that.
    It was hard work.
    And then my father got sick.
    And--
    While he was still farming?
    Yes.
    How old was he when he got sick?
    62.
    And then later on--
    three years later, I believe--
    he got his pension.
    They got money from Germany.
    The whole family got restitution for their properties.
    They were cheated like hell.
    But then, who wasn't?
    But at least it was money to live on and back pay.
    And that gave them a very, very--
    would have given them a very nice retirement They sold
    the farms in 1965 and they bought a house in town,
    in Vineland.
    And my father died from the house.
    He had leukemia and he passed away a year and a half
    after he got his pension.
    But those first-- my goodness, those first whatever years
    in America were a nightmare.
    So backing up, after the cattle business got underway,
    did his state of mind improve?
    And did his adjustment otherwise improve?
    Yes, somewhat.
    Yes.
    Let me think about that.
    He became much happier.
    First of all, both of us got married.
    How did he feel about that?
    Wonderful, because is he adored his son-in-laws.
    And he had grandchildren.
    Some of them were on-- my brother-in-law and sister
    lived across the street from my parents.
    Made a lot of mistakes with my sister and brother-in-law.
    You know, they were older.
    You know, my sister's turn to get married and all this,
    he was still very much an immigrant
    and doing things the European way because that's the only way
    they know how.
    And they were not adaptable to this country.
    Now, did they find a synagogue that they felt comfortable in?
    No, but they found a synagogue they could walk to, to pray in.
    And my father's brother, George, had a magnificent singing
    voice, magnificent voice.
    And he re-established the little country synagogue
    near the house where we lived, so that for about 15 years
    they had big services.
    People came from far and wide to hear him.
    And so, that was better for him to have
    that synagogue than where he had previously attended?
    No, once they bought the farm, they were always
    in the same synagogue.
    Oh, I thought--
    It was a country synagogue.
    Oh, I see, that was the same one.
    It wasn't a different one.
    Yeah.
    It wasn't ideal.
    My sister and I didn't have the kind
    of-- obviously-- the kind of Jewish education
    that we gave our children.
    Our children went to Jewish schools.
    Our children learned Hebrew.
    Our children got what we didn't get.
    They haven't-- and they're not putting--
    some of them are not putting it to use, but they have it.
    So what religious training did you have?
    Very little, very little.
    My religious training is--
    in Kenya, I had a few teachers who couldn't even
    teach me the Alefbet.
    And what is that?
    The alphabet.
    I couldn't even do that.
    I had got most of my religious training
    at home, on the farm, living Judaism from A to Z.
    And then when I came to Vineland,
    I did go for religious training for a few years.
    But that--
    Where did you go for the religious training in Vineland?
    There was a school in Norma, New Jersey, which
    is the next little hamlet over.
    There was a teacher there.
    I went there for a few years.
    And I suppose I took some lessons in Vineland
    in the synagogue.
    I don't remember.
    But it was limited.
    Did you say in Norman, New Jersey?
    Norma.
    Norma.
    Norma was a very vibrant little country town
    and had a lot of Judaism.
    And so did you go regularly for lessons?
    Yes, I did.
    Like once a week?
    More than once a week.
    I went for a few years, several times a week.
    I just wasn't very motivated.
    I didn't like the teachers and they didn't bring it across
    very well.
    But, here and there, I would take courses
    that I would enjoy.
    And I read a lot.
    And what about in your home?
    Oh, my home was Orthodox.
    Keep strictly kosher home, and I know it--
    when you live a living Judaism, like we did, from the roots
    up--
    I mean, in Kenya my parents--
    my uncles were the ritual slaughterers, the shochtim.
    They were trained.
    So we always had kosher meat.
    My family knew how to do everything else,
    including growing their own food, making their own food.
    They were country people.
    Sometimes I think of them when--
    there was a wonderful movie out a few years ago.
    It was called From Water To Chocolate or from bread?
    Did you see it?
    Where everything centered around the kitchen.
    That's how it is in Jewish homes as well.
    The whole spiritual life--
    every holiday, every observance--
    is from the kitchen.
    And that's how we grew up in Kenya, really.
    We had Sukkot.
    We had Passover.
    We never needed anything for the whole eight years,
    except matzahs, which came from South Africa.
    Thank God, every year, they did arrive.
    Or maybe some oil.
    But other than that, everything was self-made--
    cheeses, everything.
    And in Vineland?
    Same thing.
    But in Vineland, it was easier.
    You could buy things from New York.
    Philadelphia didn't have such an orthodox community
    many years ago.
    But it did have some.
    You see, my father could have also--
    they were very sorry later on.
    But the economic problems and the emotional problems
    they had, they could have very easily sent me
    to a Jewish school in Philadelphia.
    There were other children in Vineland
    who commuted for years.
    Oh, you mean day school.
    Yes.
    I have no idea why they chose not to do that.
    Because-- I think I do know.
    Because of their background of girls' education
    being secondary.
    So there were these confusions there, these--
    But in Kenya they went to great lengths
    to have their girls well educated.
    It wasn't such a problem there.
    Things worked.
    Things didn't interfere to stop them.
    But so to send you to a Hebrew school in Philadelphia,
    it would have been more complicated.
    It would have been more expensive.
    He didn't have the money.
    And wouldn't have thought of asking for a scholarship, which
    was foolish.
    Do you regret that you didn't have that opportunity?
    Oh, and how I regret it.
    More than that, I regret that I could have
    gone to University for nothing.
    If only I wouldn't have had this constant pressure
    of having to get out and produce $20 a week to live on.
    I did get him to send me to business school.
    And I engineered that.
    I refused to take business courses in high school.
    I told him I would not sacrifice my liberal education
    to learn steno and typing.
    Now, why was that important to you?
    Because I wanted a liberal education.
    And where did that idea come from?
    Because I felt it was necessary.
    I guess my good background in education did that for me.
    Do you think that was a carryover
    from your school in Kenya?
    Yes, definitely, definitely.
    I said, absolutely not.
    I will not spend half a day, for four years,
    sitting there learning how to type a typewriter
    and learn steno when I could be learning a language
    or at least trying crafts.
    I was very good in home economics.
    I loved it.
    I sew well.
    But I will not.
    I will not sacrifice.
    I wouldn't do it.
    So you persisted.
    I persisted.
    It was four years later.
    It was four years after my sister.
    And I had a different personality.
    And I said, OK, buddy, now, if you
    want me to go out and make my $20 a week,
    you're going to have to send me to a school.
    Did your mother have any part in these decisions
    or did she express opinions about what
    she wanted, what she thought should
    be done about your education?
    Or was it mostly between you and your father.
    She was not-- she was very insistent that we both
    graduate from high school, I can tell you that.
    She was not persistent enough about higher education, no.
    My mother was at fault. My mother
    was at fault. I could have gone to Glassboro State Teachers
    College with my eyes closed, for free.
    My problem was-- and in those days, that was not only
    my problem.
    That was lots of girls problems.
    That was nothing to do with being an immigrant.
    The choices were, you became a secretary, a nurse,
    or a teacher.
    Well, I wasn't going to become a nurse.
    Teaching wasn't the field I wanted to go into.
    But what I didn't know and I didn't have any guidance,
    and I needed, was, take the four years of Glassboro
    and do something else with it.
    That creative, I wasn't at 17, 18.
    And there was no teacher in the school who--
    nobody to steer you in that direction.
    No, they were only interested in the honor students.
    They were very good in helping the honor students
    and directing them.
    Now, there may have been some religious problems
    with going to Glassboro.
    I don't know.
    Like what would the religious problems be?
    Holidays, Friday afternoons early-- that
    might have existed.
    I don't know.
    So are you saying that if you had actually gone
    there might have been problems, or that your father was not
    for it because of problems?
    No, I myself was observant.
    I was very firm about that.
    I would not want to have--
    I mean it just didn't-- it wouldn't have been possible
    for me to go to a school where I had to stay and couldn't get
    home on time for Sabbath.
    I wouldn't-- you know, that didn't exist.
    Still doesn't.
    But things weren't as flexible then as they are now.
    But I don't think that's why I didn't go to Glassboro.
    I think I didn't go because I had this pressure of having
    to get out and work.
    To help the family with income?
    To help the family take care of myself.
    So I could take care of myself.
    And the pressure was coming from your father
    and from inside you, also.
    No, the pressure was coming from--
    by then, the pressure inside me had been distorted.
    I think it was coming from my father.
    OK, we have to stop and turn the tape.
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum volunteer collection
    interview with Jill Pauly.
    This is tape number 2, side A. Mrs. Pauly,
    could you say something about the immigrant experience
    for you and your family as survivors of the Nazis
    and as orthodox Jews?
    Yes.
    I think it's really the key subject
    of what I'm speaking about.
    I think the intensity of observance by my whole family
    is really the glue that got us through, everything that we
    went through, from A to Z. I mean,
    I was born shortly before a time where all these Nuremberg
    laws came through, where Jews couldn't do kosher killing,
    where there was to be no kosher meat.
    And there were people who obeyed all these laws.
    From the beginning, as far as observance and Judaism
    was concerned, my family was defiant.
    They would not give one inch of their religious observance
    for the sake of Hitler.
    Did they know what they were doing?
    No, they didn't know what they were doing.
    This is how they worked out their lives.
    Now, was it based--
    When you say, "did they know what they were doing,
    no, they didn't," what do you mean?
    They didn't know to what extent they were exposing themselves
    to danger.
    They did and they didn't.
    They knew if they got caught killing kosher meat on the sly,
    they would be sent to prison, but they did,
    and they had help from non-Jews to keep their observance.
    They kept everything.
    My grandfather wouldn't budge a half an inch.
    Now, had my grandfather known in 1939
    that he could have almost gotten all of us murdered,
    because he would not leave Italy on the ship
    because he needed kosher food, he
    might have said, OK, I'll eat bread and coffee for the two
    weeks before going.
    Because he didn't know exactly.
    Nobody knew the camps were coming.
    It was written in Mein Kampf, but who believed that then?
    But that's the way they were, and that's
    the way they remained.
    And that's the way they hoped we would be,
    and that's the way we hope our children would be.
    Because the faith and the ritual and the structure has kept us,
    no matter how rich we were, no matter how poor we were.
    We always observed.
    And we never, in all those years,
    had a holiday where we didn't have food on the table.
    Never had a Sabbath where we didn't have peace.
    [PHONE RINGING]
    So it was most difficult.
    We'll turn this off until you get the phone.
    Now that I'm at this point of my life,
    I start to wonder about religion and faith.
    Is it something you learn or is it genetic?
    Because when you have a family of many people,
    some people are more observant than others.
    Some have more faith than others.
    And some don't even know what faith is.
    You can bring up people in a home
    where there is tradition, structure, Jewish education,
    and they may not feel a thing.
    So maybe it was my parents luck that both of us
    were born with this faith.
    My mother was very instrumental in transmitting it to us.
    And how did she do that?
    I don't know how she did it.
    She was very, very strict in her observance.
    She set us a marvelous example.
    She was totally inflexible about it.
    When it came time for us to go to school in Kenya,
    and the schools couldn't obviously provide kosher food,
    so she said we wouldn't go to boarding school.
    So my parents boarded us with families that
    didn't give us non-kosher food.
    They didn't give us kosher food, but they
    didn't give us non-kosher food.
    The first family didn't feed us at all.
    After three months, we had to be removed from them.
    Second family fed us very nicely, et cetera, et cetera,
    et cetera.
    But my mother would not flex one inch.
    And you said you thought that maybe you
    got your faith from her?
    Yes.
    I think we both got our strength from her.
    And her strength was in faith.
    She was just totally committed to God and always dependent
    on Him for everything.
    And how it transmitted, how did that manifest itself,
    depending on God for everything, in your mother?
    I don't know how it manifests.
    She prayed three times a day.
    Her whole life was keeping the Jewish home, doing good deeds.
    There were 632 good deeds, so she had plenty to pick from,
    and she always did them.
    She would set an example.
    She was always kind.
    She was wonderful to family.
    She was the most supportive, kind parent.
    She loved us.
    She loved her son in-laws.
    She loved her grandchildren.
    She devoted herself to family.
    And she had such a load to bear in Germany.
    I think that's what did it.
    I think what we saw what my mother withstood in Germany,
    it set us for our life.
    It set a pattern.
    It did.
    And everybody in the family really,
    really centered around her.
    She was a centrifugal point of a huge family
    because she was very strong, but kind, and very kind
    to everybody.
    Everybody loved her.
    And she was extremely bright.
    She saw through things that she would see the answer to things.
    But this difficulty that she had when
    we came to America with my father
    and the economic survival was a nightmare for her.
    But somehow she held on to God by a rope
    and she pulled herself through it.
    That's all I can say.
    And I think I'm the same way, maybe a little different.
    Maybe a little different--
    how shall I say?
    I do things a little differently, of course.
    I think both my sister and I are both the same way,
    and we've seen a lot of miracles happen.
    We have.
    Can you talk about that?
    Yeah, for another six hours.
    [LAUGHS]
    No, but we could spend a few minutes on that.
    I've seen a lot of things happen that were unbelievable,
    unbelievable, that I know was God's hand.
    It had to be, under the circumstances.
    I don't think they just come together like that.
    Where should I start?
    I couldn't have children.
    I was pregnant four times and never had a child.
    On top of the childhood and the youth that I had,
    I've never spoken about it because it was horrendous.
    Can you talk about it now?
    A little.
    OK.
    We don't know what was wrong.
    I conceived, and I would carry three, four months,
    and then I would have a miscarriage.
    And we wanted to be parents.
    I wanted to be a mother.
    I was tired of being pregnant.
    I just wanted to be a mother.
    So in those days, things were different in America then.
    If you wanted something, you went after it.
    Like everything else in my life, I went after it.
    And you caught on by now that I'm quite assertive.
    If I want something, I go get it.
    And Kurt wanted it, too.
    And it was very hard for us not to produce children
    because of where we came from, because of our backgrounds.
    You mean having lost so many?
    Yes, and the family having been destroyed,
    and hardly anybody left on Kurt's side.
    It was very painful.
    So having children had an extra importance for you.
    Yes.
    So we decided we'll adopt.
    And it wasn't easy.
    It was very difficult, but we got children,
    and we were very thrilled with the children.
    I hope they hear these tapes someday.
    They were both extremely difficult to raise.
    I don't mind them knowing that.
    I think they both do know it.
    What would you like them to know about how
    they were difficult for you?
    Well, they had brought with them their own baggage.
    Every little human being comes with his own little pickle,
    as they say in Yiddish.
    And we didn't understand their pickles.
    We did the best we could with them.
    We got some help with them, but nobody else
    understood them, either.
    You can go to all the professionals in the world,
    and I don't have a whole lot of faith in what they know,
    or what they knew then.
    And it was always difficult for us
    to work their problems through with them.
    The oldest one never talked, was never
    able to express his feelings.
    He started becoming very expressive and wonderful,
    and he was enable--
    how do you call that?
    Brought out by his wife.
    It's much easier for him now to express his feelings.
    It's very difficult to live with any human being that
    can't express themself.
    You guess all the time.
    We were guessing, which made it very hard for me.
    And the little girl was very expressive, a little bit more
    expressive, but she came with many, many problems.
    And we got her as much help as we could.
    It was very busy.
    And we had a lot of happiness with them
    and we had a lot of difficulty with them,
    but the bottom line is we're very grateful to God
    that we had any children.
    And I really like my grandchildren.
    If I could have skipped my children, [LAUGHS]
    it would have been easier.
    Tell me about how you feel with your grandchildren?
    How I feel with them?
    Their overwhelming.
    They're wonderful.
    I love them.
    And there's very little they can do that I would ever
    say is not OK to do.
    I feel it's our position in life to love them
    and to make them happy, and to take some of the grandmothering
    that we had from our beloved grandmother and grandfather
    that we remember-- my mother's mother was very sickly.
    I loved her, too, but she couldn't give of herself
    much because she was very sick.
    But my father's mother was such a wonderful human being.
    She lived in our house, and she imbued us
    with everything that's good.
    I hope to be able to do that for my grandchildren.
    I do do it for my grandchildren.
    They're far away, and whatever extra money
    we have, whether it's extra or not--
    we take it from my savings if we don't have it--
    we go and see them, we spend on them, and we enjoy them.
    And that's of great importance to both of us.
    So that's been a very happy part of your life.
    My children have been a happy part also in their later life,
    but in their early lives, it took them a very long time
    to work out their issues.
    So what kept you going through the difficult times
    with your children?
    Oh, we had, thank God, a terrific marriage.
    We're happy with each other.
    We enjoy each other.
    We have a great marriage.
    We were lucky to find each other.
    And I learned from my mother first
    is God and then your husband and then your children.
    There's a pecking order.
    And I think it's the pecking order and faith and structure
    and living in a community where you have friends and support.
    That's what kept us going.
    That's what put us together.
    That's the glue.
    Now, I have not been able to transmit it
    as heavily to my children as my mother transmitted it to us,
    but I think my son is growing up--
    and in fact, I heard a remark from him
    a couple of weeks ago that thrilled
    me, indicating that a lot of this stuff comes with maturity.
    Is that something that you feel free to say?
    No, no, I don't want to say.
    OK.
    Well, we've skipped around.
    Maybe we can go back to the chronology.
    You graduated from high school and then
    you went to business school.
    And where was the business school?
    I picked the finest business school on the East Coast.
    It was called Peirce School of Business in Philadelphia.
    I finally went to Philadelphia.
    And how was that for you, going to business school?
    Hard.
    It was a very school.
    I had to work very hard, but I really
    didn't want to be a secretary.
    And it's never easy learning something if you don't love it,
    but I had to learn a skill.
    It's a very good school.
    It had not only stenography and typing, it had business.
    It was a business school.
    It had economics.
    It had psychology, English.
    And when you came out of it, you were supposed
    to be a top flight secretary.
    I went to school.
    I did my work.
    I didn't graduate because it would
    have cost my father another $1,000 probably in tuition
    and board.
    I left six weeks before graduation.
    I achieved my speed levels in my steno and typing,
    and I finished all my other courses,
    but I didn't sit for six weeks with the white gloves
    and get the degree.
    Did you commute from Vineland or live in Philadelphia?
    No.
    In the beginning, it was too difficult.
    So I boarded in a girl's dormitory in Philadelphia,
    and I had a good time.
    And your father was able to pay for that?
    Yeah.
    And you had a good time?
    Yes.
    And you got along with the other girls?
    Oh, yes.
    I didn't have social problems.
    Did you feel like an immigrant?
    I felt different because I had to provide my own food.
    I couldn't eat the non-kosher food.
    But it wasn't a major problem.
    We managed.
    And I went home a lot, brought the food back.
    Fish I ate.
    Vegetables I could eat.
    I had a room.
    I went to school.
    I met a lot of girls.
    I had a lot of life experiences, some good, some bad.
    I started dating a little bit more.
    And how was that, starting dating?
    It's nothing I really wanted.
    I wouldn't say that's part of--
    it's OK.
    I met people.
    Was it hard to find Jewish boys?
    No.
    It wasn't hard at all.
    Orthodox?
    Yes.
    Did you go out with non-orthodox Jewish boys?
    Yes, I did.
    And I dated a while.
    I enjoyed myself in Philadelphia.
    I honed my musical and artistic skills
    by going to concerts every week, sometimes two, three times
    a week.
    It was cheap.
    Was this the first chance you'd had to do that kind of thing?
    Yes.
    Yes.
    But my mother encouraged me.
    She had taken me to see a few things from Vineland
    in Philadelphia, so that when I went,
    I would have a taste for it.
    And I loved it, musical theater.
    All the time I loved musical theater.
    I could dance.
    I love to dance.
    I had a good time.
    I had a very good time for a year, 13 months.
    And then I start to have to find a job that
    would give me Friday afternoons and Sabbaths in the winter.
    And I could not find a job.
    Friday afternoon and Saturday in the winter?
    Friday afternoon off so I could observe Saturday.
    I thought you said in the winter.
    In the winter.
    In the summer, the Sabbath started later.
    Oh, OK.
    So you don't have to take Friday afternoon off in the summer?
    Right.
    OK.
    Couldn't get a job, to make a long story short.
    I worked for the Friends, the Quakers, for the six months.
    The other girls who graduated from Peirce
    were making $85 a week and I was making $42.
    Because the Quakers could not pay?
    Because I couldn't take a job where
    I had to work to 5 o'clock on Fridays.
    But the Quakers would let you off?
    Yeah, they gave me a break.
    There was a nice girl they used to switch in for me.
    And I worked like five minutes from where I lived,
    so I could walk home.
    I did that for six months and I decided
    that wasn't for me, that I should get into synagogue work,
    into synagogue offices.
    That way, I wouldn't have any observant problems.
    So I did that for a while.
    Didn't like it very much.
    I hated being a secretary.
    I couldn't stand it.
    And I had jobs here and there for about a year,
    and then my father said, come on back to Vineland
    and then save some money.
    Take a job at home.
    When you get married, the young man that marries you
    will want you to have a bank account.
    Where his came from, I don't know.
    Like a dowry?
    No, just some money, another one of his European ideas.
    I went home.
    I wasn't happy.
    You weren't happy living at home?
    No.
    Away from Philadelphia?
    No, I wasn't happy.
    I wasn't happy in Philadelphia, and I wasn't happy at home
    because I wanted to be in a more orthodox environment.
    You weren't happy in Philadelphia
    because of your job.
    How was Philadelphia otherwise for you?
    I enjoyed Philadelphia as long as I went to school.
    But when it came to work at an environment
    where I would meet my kind of people, I wasn't happy.
    So I left Philadelphia.
    Told my father I want to go to New York.
    That's where it was at.
    I was right, but he wanted me to come home and save some money
    first.
    Wasn't such a terrible idea, it's
    just that it was very boring for me.
    And he was very good about it.
    After I was home for nine months--
    He wanted you to do it, and so you did it
    because he wanted you to, not because you wanted to?
    Yes.
    Or because he thought--
    He said, it's OK to go to New York
    and live, but come home for a while
    first and then see what happens.
    So I went home for a while.
    I stayed home for about a year, and I had these boring jobs.
    But I saved money.
    I saved a lot of money.
    And after a year, he said, this is not for you.
    I want you to go.
    This is really not for you.
    You have to go.
    So I went to New York, and I lived with a--
    [PHONE RINGING]
    Should we stop it?
    OK.
    I'm going to make this short because it's not that unique.
    All the Jewish girls went through,
    all the frum girls, the religious girls.
    From New York, wherever they were,
    they had to find a niche for themselves
    where they could find and meet people
    that they could socialize with.
    So I went to New York and lived with an aunt
    and I got myself a good job.
    And I lived with her.
    I didn't have the right environment religiously again.
    I made the most of it.
    And dated and met friends, and did things
    like any other young girl.
    And then when I was 23, I came home on a vacation to Vineland
    and a friend introduced me to Kurt.
    In Vineland?
    Mm-hmm.
    He was going to school in Philadelphia
    and I just started working in New York.
    I'll turn the tape off again.
    When Kurt and I met, Kurt was having a very serious family
    problem, which he had lived with all his life.
    But of course, I didn't know about,
    and that was that his mother was basically depressive,
    and I had not had experience with that.
    I did recognize it very quickly, and to make a long story short,
    we lived with it for the next 20 years with great difficulty.
    We took it in stride.
    We worked with it.
    Aside from the fact that she was a survivor and lost everybody,
    which gave her great guilt and pain,
    she also had this disorder, and we now
    believe that she was manic.
    Not extremely manic, but definitely
    had serious depression, which was
    very hard on two young people who were trying to forge ahead.
    But with all the strengths and the experiences
    I had in my life, I coped with it.
    And not always well, but I coped with it
    because Kurt was always very supportive,
    and he knew that I had the total family's direction in mind.
    My mother-in-law died in 1978, and as soon
    as she had passed away, my children's adolescence
    became very severe, both of them,
    and we had many difficult years with that.
    I would say we had about six really difficult years.
    But because of all the strengths and experiences and places
    we'd been in the world, the glue kept us together.
    The faith kept us together.
    And we had goals and we always went after them.
    We set ourselves levels of achievement
    that we wanted to acquire, and in this country, it's possible.
    If you got the mechanics, you could do it.
    So in 1978, I started studying at the University of Maryland,
    got myself a real estate license.
    And I realized I would never go back to being a secretary.
    I retired from secretarial work when I got the children
    and I was home for 15 years.
    And then I tried it when we moved to Washington.
    I took sort of an administrative assistance job
    downtown three days a week.
    And I thought, this is not for me.
    I have to do something where I develop a plan
    and create my own work study program.
    I couldn't work for anybody anymore.
    And so I went into real estate.
    And Kurt thought and I thought that I was just
    going into real estate to learn to understand what happens
    when you buy and sell a house, because I was not
    knowledgeable.
    But I was terrific always at negotiating, trading, buying,
    and selling.
    And it's something I love to do.
    Where do you think that comes from?
    From my father, from my family.
    Were you around them when they were talking about it?
    Oh, yes, both.
    And it's genetic.
    My sister has the skill.
    One of my nephews has it to beat the band, and my niece has it.
    And you enjoy it?
    I love it.
    I love it.
    And what I did do is I worked very hard, because remember,
    I didn't have that college degree, that formal college
    degree.
    I had a pretty good educational background, but it wasn't--
    and I had been out of everything for 15 years being a homemaker.
    So it wasn't easy to go back and study, but I loved it.
    I really enjoyed it.
    It took me a while to get my license because I
    tried to do it too quickly.
    So I took the exam a few times, but that didn't bother me.
    It didn't faze me.
    I knew I would do it.
    It was a four-hour exam.
    I failed it the first time with two points.
    The second time because I inverted
    everything and my mother-in-law had just died.
    And the third time I took the exam in an hour and a half.
    So it wasn't a matter of I felt that it
    wasn't material I could handle.
    And in Maryland, the advantage is that you really
    have to learn the law because you have
    to write your own contracts.
    And it was a big challenge, and I liked it very much.
    And instead of just becoming something I learned--
    you don't know anything when you get your real estate license.
    You know nothing.
    You know what you learned in the book
    and what you passed on the exam, but you
    don't know how to apply it.
    So I had my license with a broker and I started learning,
    and I would say the first three years
    were like an apprenticeship.
    And after that I really started selling.
    As a matter of fact, the first year
    I was in real estate I sold, oh, I'd made $12,000 or $13,000,
    which was someone who was beginning,
    certainly was paying for the buttons and the thread.
    So that was very encouraging.
    And in the 15 or 16 years that I was in business,
    I had two weak years.
    Most of the time, I always made money.
    It wasn't the money.
    It was putting the deals together and bringing them
    to settlement, which gave me tremendous satisfaction.
    Why did you stop?
    Because of the migraine headaches.
    Oh.
    I really got so worn down and worried because there
    was so much legal acumen.
    There was so much material that you really
    had to be fully entwined with every minute of your day
    while you were working.
    There was so many legalities and things that mustn't go wrong.
    I mean, we were filling out contracts and affidavits,
    between 15 and 26 pages to a deal.
    And it was detail work.
    That was the pressure.
    And then keeping people happy, driving them around
    in the summertime was very hard on me
    with the heat and my headaches, so that the last year I really
    had a hard time.
    I really, really had a hard time.
    And Kurt had already retired, and I
    wasn't the kind of person who was going to stay in and not
    achieve.
    I can't do that, and I couldn't do it part-time.
    I either did the work or I did not do the work.
    So I chose to stop.
    And when was that?
    I stopped in December '93.
    And I'm happy I stopped because Kurt and I are really enjoying
    our retirement together.
    What do you enjoy about your retirement?
    Doing what we want when we want.
    What do you like to do?
    Oh, we're very multifaceted, both of us.
    We have tremendous interests.
    Like what?
    Well, our number one key thing is
    that we want to work at the Holocaust Museum
    and be involved.
    Why do you want to work there and be involved there?
    Because I consider that to be one
    of my big charitable contributions to life,
    memorializing my family, Kurt's family, and all
    the other people that were so horrendously wiped out.
    Very, very meaningful to my life to memorialize them,
    and to teach decent people from all over the world
    what it meant and how they can change their lives
    and how they can--
    especially young people in the springtime.
    I love to take groups, because if we
    can instill a direction in young people on how to think
    and what it meant not to think for yourself
    and to be directed by the government,
    then we're achieving something.
    What do you do exactly at the Museum?
    For the first four years, I was in visitor services.
    That meant greeting guests, directing them,
    and working on the different posts in the Museum
    where it was needed.
    Because I get the migraines so often, I was missing a lot.
    And even when I went, I felt stressed,
    standing around for four hours.
    I found it stressful.
    So I decided I would try and get a job
    working for Martin Goldman in the survivor--
    he developed a new office called Office of Survivor Relations.
    I would like you to talk about that,
    but we have to change the tape.
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum Volunteer Collection with Jill Pauly.
    This is tape number 2, side B. Mrs. Pauly,
    you were saying that you have started
    working in the office of Martin Goldman, who is?
    He runs the office for survivor relations.
    Survivor relations.
    Yes.
    And what does that all do?
    Survivor activities and relations and programs.
    They set up programs.
    For example, when the Kovno ghetto opened,
    material was sent out and the survivors of the ghetto
    were invited, and there was a gathering in Washington.
    And one of our jobs was to go down and make
    the invited guests feel welcome for the day, which
    I enjoyed very much.
    Whenever I go in to Mr. Goldman, we
    try to have some work set up for me
    to do, really on any different subject matter
    that he needs done.
    I have been very absent for a few months
    because of health reasons.
    I, with God's help, plan to go back every week.
    Sometimes I type minutes.
    Sometimes I go to meetings.
    I'll run the computer for him.
    Whatever needs to be done.
    I feel it's contributory.
    This office was set up recently?
    About a year ago.
    Not even.
    Six months ago.
    The nice thing about us volunteers,
    I love the other volunteers.
    I love meeting them.
    I'm very happy interrelating with the personnel that
    works at the Museum.
    We enjoy seeing each other, especially
    the Thursday afternoon group, because we're always
    there together.
    We've become friends.
    And they're not all survivors.
    Some of them are just Americans who give their time every week
    and feel strongly.
    We meet a lot of interesting people.
    And some of our experiences are very funny.
    Some of them are deadly serious.
    Some of them are annoying.
    Some of them need to be corrected.
    So you just kind of get involved,
    and we seem to have a background that
    can be very helpful to the permanent staff in running
    the Museum, because we've had experiences
    that a lot of these young people have never had.
    You mean as survivors.
    Survivors, so they learn from us.
    Could you give an example of a time?
    Yes, I can give you an example.
    It may not be a positive example, but it's an example.
    About a year ago, I was on the floor at the information desk,
    and a group of Israelis came in.
    Now, I've had many groups of Israelis,
    and it's quite well-known that the Israeli way of speaking
    can be abrasive to Americans.
    They don't mean to be abrasive, it
    is just their way of speaking and expressing themselves.
    And a lot of the young people working in the Museum,
    they back up.
    Their back goes up.
    They get a little resistance to them.
    And I understand them.
    And I will speak to them and I will tell them,
    I don't feel abrased by them.
    And when they see my name--
    I have a little Hebrew name that I sometimes wear--
    they feel affiliated with me.
    They feel very strongly about the place.
    And it's difficult for them to conceive that this is not
    a Jewish Museum, that this is an American
    Museum about Jewish people.
    This is an extremely difficult concept
    for Jewish people who live in a Jewish homeland,
    where everything is Jewish.
    And they come to an American society
    where this is a Jewish theme.
    But they say my people, my relatives,
    and you're telling me this is not my museum?
    It's very hard for them, but it's
    even harder for the Americans to understand them.
    So this group comes in, and they come to me for their tickets.
    And I said, you have to go to the pass desk
    to get your tickets.
    They'll give you your tickets.
    And the man says, yes, our tour guide reserved them for us.
    OK.
    I didn't see them again.
    I would say an hour later, it was my turn at the pass desk,
    and here comes this group of Israelis.
    And they speak to the young lady behind the desk
    and ask her for their tickets.
    And I said, why don't these people have their tickets?
    She said, they didn't have any tickets in reserve.
    And I kept quiet.
    I'm not a staffer.
    I'm only a volunteer.
    And I just sat there.
    And the people kept wanting their tickets and understanding
    why couldn't they go up.
    It was crowded.
    The lady explained it to them, the young woman.
    She had not been in the Museum a very long time.
    She was a professional.
    She was trained, and she explained to them
    why they couldn't go up.
    And they could not understand, or they would not understand,
    or a combination of everything.
    They just were getting angrier and angrier.
    Their tour guide was supposed to have reserved seats for them,
    and I could understand their frustration.
    These people came from half a world
    away to see this Museum to honor their dead,
    and they were being told, because
    of some fluke with their tour guide,
    that they wouldn't get in.
    And I thought that was wrong.
    This Museum was not built to keep people out.
    This Museum was built to keep people in
    and to bring people in.
    And yes, we have to follow the rules.
    And yes, we have to have tickets.
    But there are always a block of tickets somewhere for people
    who've had an incident like this, where
    the tour guide either made a mistake or told a lie,
    you name it.
    I'm not there to examine everybody's motives.
    I mean, truths or lies, that's not our job.
    So I wanted to be very careful.
    I didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings.
    So I did call the young lady aside, the staffer.
    And I said to her, could you please
    tell me, what is the problem?
    Their tour guide lied to me, and they're
    going to get in there over my dead body.
    I said, their tour guide lied to you,
    therefore you're punishing these 15 people?
    They come from half a world away.
    I don't think this is quite right.
    If you want to punish someone, punish the tour guide.
    Well, that went nowhere.
    I said, and you don't have anything left?
    No spare tickets?
    Nothing, nowhere.
    I picked myself up and I went to see
    a lady, who was a volunteer with me, who had told me,
    somewhere, somehow, that for very special occasions,
    she can go upstairs and get tickets,
    because she's in a major donor category.
    I told you, I'm aggressive.
    So I went up to her and I told her, look,
    I don't want to surpass anybody.
    I don't want to hurt anybody, but I'll
    be damned if these people are not going to get up.
    She says, what do you need?
    I said, I need 15 tickets.
    She says you'll have them in two minutes.
    She called upstairs and she got her 15 tickets and those people
    went upstairs.
    It happened so fast I thought lightning hit.
    The woman, the young woman, reported me
    and her to her supervisor, who came up to this woman
    and told her that by no circumstances
    did she have the right to do what she did.
    So I called somebody, and she had her
    in tears, a major donor.
    I called the next day.
    And I told the lady, who was my whoever, I said, look.
    This woman did nothing wrong.
    What happened at the desk is unacceptable behavior to me
    as a survivor.
    I'm sorry.
    You have to do a better job training your personnel.
    If she didn't have a way of getting these people in,
    she had to call somebody and have them work with them.
    I found out that way that I was a major donor,
    both financially, but more so because I've
    given a lot of artifacts, and at any time a crisis occurs,
    I can have some extra tickets.
    I have asked for them once in four or five years.
    If I need extra tickets, I go around
    and I beg all my friends till I have them,
    and then the following month, they beg me.
    But those kinds of things have happened
    in the Museum, where there is structure and form
    and they teach.
    And then these situations, run into survivors,
    who find out that they can't let these few people in, who
    come from 12,000 miles away.
    Even if they're not nice.
    It's not a Museum for nice people.
    You don't have to be nice to get into the Holocaust Museum.
    You have to have space and you have to have tickets.
    And I think the people there have to be accommodating,
    because if we don't let people in,
    they're not going to learn anything.
    So you have very strong feelings about the Museum?
    Indeed I do.
    Indeed I do.
    Indeed I do.
    How are young people going to learn?
    And how do you turn someone away from memorializing their people
    because their tour guide lied?
    That's not their fault. If they lied, and I have to tell you,
    many people lie.
    They come in, and it's very crowded
    and they want to get in.
    And they say, well, my plane's leaving in 15 minutes tonight
    and this is my only chance.
    We all know that.
    We all deal with it.
    It's just that some are nicer about it than others.
    There was one man once who virtually attacked
    me and screamed at me.
    I had tickets in my pocket.
    I wouldn't give them to him.
    I was afraid of him.
    But other than that, I don't know
    why people get themselves so wired up
    because someone's a little corrosive in their approach.
    So I made that an issue.
    I felt that they needed to work on it,
    and the other survivors also, who were not only survivors,
    experienced volunteers who worked there for years.
    Let's say the Museum is full and three or four Germans come
    along, and they're between 35 and 45
    and they don't have tickets, and we have tickets in our pocket.
    Does it make sense not to let them go up?
    I feel terrible about everybody that has to be kept out,
    and that should be the thrust of the Museum.
    They should feel terrible about turning every visitor away,
    and we do have to turn thousands away,
    which is annoying because most of them
    don't read the paper that says you've
    got to have tickets ahead of time or stand, whatever.
    But I think it's terrible to turn people away.
    I can see that you do.
    You mentioned that you had given some things to the Museum that
    are very important to you.
    Can you talk about that?
    Well, yes.
    We gave my German passport with the Nazi symbol
    on it, which, by the way, my picture is being
    used nationally on a brochure.
    I can give you one, if you'd like to see.
    I'd like to.
    We gave a piece of sterling silver
    that was given to my mother-in-law
    by Annie Frank's grandmother for her wedding.
    We thought it would be best served
    by bearing witness in the Museum to Annie Frank's
    life, that in my silver drawer, because at some point
    its identity would be gone.
    It took us years, by the way, to research that and get
    it together the, relationship between my husband and Annie
    Frank.
    But we finally did do it this past year.
    It was very sad and painful.
    But we knew it was true because his mother always
    told us about that.
    I gave something else.
    There's a family that died out.
    Their name was Henrietta.
    [KNOCK ON DOOR]
    We'll have to stop the tape.
    OK.
    We gave an album, which belonged to a family
    by the name of Henrietta Hammons Meyer,
    and Sol Meyer, her husband.
    They were the lone survivors of a family from both sides.
    They had a son, Harvey.
    Immigrated to the United States.
    The same background story as ours,
    and landed in Rockland, Vermont.
    Got a better start in America because they came those eight
    years previous that we had been in Kenya.
    He became a manager for a Puritan clothing chain,
    and they lived up there all their lives.
    Unfortunately, my cousin died young,
    and we inherited many of their things,
    amongst them a picture album.
    And it was a pictorial story of both families
    going back, starting in 1922.
    It was so poignantly beautiful.
    I had it for 20 years.
    I didn't know what to do with it.
    I took it into the Museum, to Collections, and I said,
    what should I do with this?
    This is so gorgeous.
    And if you look at these pictures, how
    beautiful these Jewish people were, their families,
    their lives.
    And as you go through the album, what happens?
    You don't have to read.
    All you have to do is look.
    They said, we don't usually take this.
    This is gorgeous.
    And this week, I got a letter from the Museum
    asking if I'd give permission to put one of the family pictures
    on the website for Holocaust education of Jewish families
    in Germany in the early '20s.
    So I feel everything that we've contributed, in some way,
    is going towards education.
    And I think I'm also going to contribute
    the genealogy of my late grandmother, which
    goes to our grandchildren.
    We just got about three months ago.
    It starts in 1725.
    And I think it'll make a marvelous learning
    tool for children studying the Holocaust.
    So we would like to continue to be contributory as
    long as we can.
    Well, you're making a great contribution,
    including doing this tape.
    Thank you.
    Is there something else that you would like to talk about?
    I don't really think so.
    No.
    Well, thank you very much for speaking today
    about your experiences.
    You're welcome.
    This concludes the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    interview with Jill Pauly.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Jill Pauly, born May 1, 1933 in Cologne, Germany, describes her large, very well-to-do country family; the efforts of her grandmother and uncle to get money to Holland and make arrangements for the family to get to Kenya, where they bought two cattle farms that eventually were very successful; wanting a more orthodox Jewish life after the war; moving to New York City then moving to Vineland, NJ; her family buying a chicken farm, which was destroyed by a hurricane in 1952; the death of her father when he was 66 years old; her mother being her guiding light in terms of religious practice; attending the Pierce School of Business in Philadelphia, PA; working for the Quakers and then for a synagogue; getting her real estate license at the University of Maryland; her two adopted children; retiring in December 1993 from real estate; volunteering at the USHMM in Visitors’ Services and in the Office of Survivor Relations; having very strong feelings about people having access to the Museum; and some of the artifacts that she’s donated to the Museum.
    Interviewee
    Jill B. Pauly
    Interviewer
    Margaret Garrett
    Date
    interview:  1998 February 27

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    2 sound cassettes (74 min.).

    Rights & Restrictions

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

    Keywords & Subjects

    Personal Name
    Pauly, Jill, 1933-

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Margaret Garrett, on behalf of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History Branch, conducted the interview with Jill Pauly on February 27, 1998.
    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 08:12:23
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn506657

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    Time Coded Notes (3)

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    Also in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum oral history volunteer collection

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

    Date: 1993

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    Oral history interview with Joseph Elman

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    Oral history interview with Gerald Rosenstein

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    Oral history interview with Joseph Koplewicz

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

    Oral history interview with Irving Schaffer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Klein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Pisik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Rosicka

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Salomon Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Suzanne Foldes

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tibor Vince

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elias Piorko

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Hildesheim

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Peter Masters

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Wolke

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ionel Ghelman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irimia Solomon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lotte Salus

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irena Kirkland

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hans Hirsch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Milton Shurr

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ludwig Jacob

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Barbara Artman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fritz Schonbach

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Charles Barber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tibor Borsos

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Robert Kertesz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Kahn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Susan Warsinger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Arnold Weiss

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sia Hertsberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Chava Frajhof

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Israel Frajhof

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Edward Novakoff

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Celia Feldschuh

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Nicole Yancey

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jaffa Munk

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frances Hirshfeld

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Moris Gluckman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Margie Rosenthal

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Emma Mogilensky

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Isaiah Henig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ida Henig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marcel Drimer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michael Silberstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joan Schwab

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erwin Deutscher

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Pick

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hedi Pope

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bella Simon Pasternak

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marion Friedman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Strassburger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jadwiga Dziekonski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Harvey

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thomas B. Gardiner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Roberta Jones

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Christine Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hugh Jenkins

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rene Edgar Tressler

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Stefan Wohl

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Yehuda Adam

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Arlette de Long

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Adam

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Herbert Bitter

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rachel Goldfarb

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tania Rozmaryn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frank Ephraim

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Peter Phillips

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Ichiuji

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Horowitz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hermann Kosak

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Dolly Bestandig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Goldie Gendelman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rhoda Kuflik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Hess

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jutta Levy

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Wolfgang Mueller

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Klari Rudnai

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jack Reuben

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Bayer

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Tilda Finzi Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Zwi Golombek

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Samuel B. Hagner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Werner E. Michel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Guta Jacobson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helen Luksenburg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with William Luksenburg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rose Weisfeld

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth E. Greifer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Nesse Godin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Maryla Korn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michel Margosis

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lena Jurand

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Wallace Witkowski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Peter Masters

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Lena Gitter

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jacob Wiener

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Noah Roitman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Richard W. Peterson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Riane Gruss

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Regina Spiegel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Charles Stein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hannah Kalman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Morris Rosen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sam Spiegel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Gutter

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henry Greenbaum

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Alper

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michael Lin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hannah Kalman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Dorrit L. Ostberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alice Eberstarkova Masters

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Martin Weiss

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Leonard Gordon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fritz Gluckstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Brigitte Freidin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Kristine Belfoure

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Hill Leonard

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Kurt Roberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alfred Schnog

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Taucher

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helen Goldkind

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Inge Katzenstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Werner Katzenstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Goldman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Paulette Stessin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Margitta Cooper

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erika Eckstut

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tole Johannes Madna

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henri Dupuy

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Halina Peabody

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marcel Bercau

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rolph Hammel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Norbert V. Hilsberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alfred Munzer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Maria Mandel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Yvonne Mignot de Royere

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Susan Berlin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with John Bucur

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lore Schneider

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frank Liebermann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marianne Liebermann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thea S. Rips

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Andrew Glass

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Renate Fischer Chernoff

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eli Dortort

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hilda Seftor

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Felix Nicinski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Brombart

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gunter Haimann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alfred Lakritz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rita Rubinstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anita Etzyon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Melvin Galun

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Magdalena Farkas Berkovics

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sol Mackler

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Theresia Bauer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Carolina Taitz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helen Schwartz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irene Silver

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Herman Taube

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Regine Ginsberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ursula Guttstadt McKinney

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Rappaport

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Edith Langer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marianne Milkman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Phillip Abraham

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Arnstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gertrude Scarlett Epstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Matilde Neuwirt

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Susanne K. Bennet

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marianne Roberts

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Harry Markowicz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Julie A. Keefer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erica Laufer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Barbara Goldberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Liselotte Epstein Ivry

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hans Ziegler

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Vera Levine

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Guenter Lewy

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Malvy Solomon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elia Miranski and Genia Miranski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Maria Kordalewski

    Oral History

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

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