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Oral history interview with Wolfgang Mueller

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1998.A.0016 | RG Number: RG-50.106.0091

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    Oral history interview with Wolfgang Mueller
    Transcript
    This is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    interview with Wolfgang Mueller conducted
    by Gail Schwartz on January 21, 1998
    in Silver Spring, Maryland.
    This is tape number one, side A. What is your full name?
    Wolfgang Mueller.
    And where were you born?
    In Hanover, Germany.
    And when were you born?
    On March 10, 1919.
    Let's talk a little bit about your family first.
    How long have they been in that part of the world?
    Do you know how far back?
    Oh, yes.
    I actually have records of my grandfather's grandfather.
    And his name was already Karlmann Mueller.
    And he lived in a little town in Westphalia called Stormede.
    Stormede is near Geseke.
    And as a matter of fact, my my Hebrew name
    is the same name as his son.
    His son, who is actually also my ancestor, was Isaac.
    And my Hebrew name is Yitzhak.
    And what about your mother's family?
    Well, they are also from the same part of Germany.
    And my mother's name was Anna Rosenthal.
    And they are descendant from a rabbi in Westphalia.
    His name was Hirsch Cohen.
    And he was a very important rabbi
    who took part in the conferences that
    helped to establish emancipation for the Jews
    when Napoleon first came to Western Germany
    in the early part of the 19th century.
    Did you have a large extended family around you
    while you were growing up as a young child?
    Well, my father was an attorney in Hanover.
    He moved to Hanover, which was the largest city that was
    fairly reasonably close by--
    Hanover.
    And my father was born in Paderborn.
    These are all little rural country towns in Westphalia.
    And the records show that the family was, for centuries,
    involved in the feed and grain business.
    And of course, the Jews were only emancipated late
    in the 19th century.
    And that was after my father was born,
    very late in the 19th century.
    And he was able to go to college and become an attorney.
    And that's the reason that he set up his practice
    in Hanover, a law practice in Hanover, Germany.
    And of course, actually in Hanover,
    from my immediate family, there was only my mother, my father,
    my brother, and I. However, we would frequently go back
    to Paderborn and Neuhaus--
    I'll tell you about that later--
    where my grandparents lived.
    And we would spend a great deal of time there.
    And of course, we had millions of cousins.
    And it was always a wonderful time for us.
    What is your brother's name?
    And what is the difference in age?
    My brother's name is Dr. Klaus-Peter Mueller.
    He's seven years younger than I. And he
    lives in Palo Alto, California.
    Now let's talk a little bit about your childhood.
    You said you were born in Hanover.
    Were you born in the central part of the city,
    on the outskirts?
    Well, I was born fairly close to the central part of the city.
    And the apartment-- we lived in an apartment house.
    And we lived on the first floor.
    It was a beautiful, very large apartment, very luxurious.
    And it was at number 18 Ferdinand-Wallbrechtstrasse
    near the Lister Platz.
    And even though about 75% of the city of Hanover
    was destroyed during the air raids in the Second World War,
    that particular house is standing on that street,
    almost none of the others.
    And the other miraculous thing-- and I
    just seem to be very, very fortunate that way.
    The home that we moved to after that is also standing.
    It sounds like your family was upper class.
    Would you describe it that way, or upper middle?
    Yes.
    My father was a professional man.
    And of course, my grandparents on both sides
    were wealthy merchants, very wealthy merchants.
    So the Jews in Germany were somewhat
    different from the Jewish people that came more
    from Eastern Europe, because they had been emancipated
    for about 50 years.
    And they had very quickly worked very hard
    trying to become part of the mainstream
    of the life of a country.
    My father served in the First World War as a soldier.
    He was very proud of it.
    He went to the university.
    And he belonged to, of course, a Jewish fraternity.
    But he also fought with sabers.
    And he had these scars on his cheek.
    He was tall and quite handsome.
    And he had very good relations with the German people--
    German officials, too.
    Which university did he go to?
    He went to-- he went to Fribourg.
    In your neighborhood, was it a Jewish neighborhood,
    or non-Jewish, or mixed?
    It was mixed.
    It was a suburban neighborhood, oddly enough,
    almost reminiscent of where I live now.
    And the interesting thing about my life as a young boy--
    I find that there was great similarity
    between the way I lived and the way my grandchildren live now
    in this country.
    Let's talk about your early life.
    You said you then moved.
    At what age did you move from one house to the other?
    I think I was six or seven years old when we moved
    to the house, the second home.
    That was at 11 Wallmodenstrasse in Hanover, Kleefeld.
    And it was just at the time also when my brother was born.
    And I had terrible whooping cough at that time.
    I was sick.
    And they had to take me out of school,
    because it was no good to have me around the house,
    because my mother was expecting my brother.
    And I lived for several months during the fall of 1928--
    it was 1928, in the fall of 1928--
    with my grandmother in Neuhaus.
    I have very vivid recollections of all of that.
    Do you have any recollections up to the age of six, anything
    that you could talk about up to the age of six,
    before you moved?
    Yes, I do.
    What do you remember about that time?
    Well, I remember being very small
    and living in the apartment in Hanover.
    I think I can remember--
    I have a recollections that go back
    to when I was four years old, or even younger.
    Such as?
    Well--
    Did you have friends?
    --I remember, for example, my parents playing ping-pong.
    They set up a table in the apartment.
    And I was already trying to do it at that time.
    I'm an avid tennis player today.
    And I remember playing with my trains underneath the dining
    room table.
    And a very big thing for also Jewish children in Germany
    was Christmas.
    And the German Jewish people in those days in the city-- they
    had a Christmas tree.
    And the children got presents at Christmas, and so forth, and so
    on.
    Christmas was an important thing.
    Now, that doesn't mean that there
    wasn't any Jewish identification, because there
    was.
    And I don't want to give that impression.
    We knew we were Jewish.
    And we did many Jewish things.
    I was Bar Mitzvah, for example.
    But I do remember a lot of things
    about when I was very little.
    And also, my mother took me to the beach.
    There was a beach resort that was not too terribly
    far in the North Sea.
    And a lot of Jewish people went there.
    It was called Nordeney.
    It is an island of the Frisian--
    one of the Frisian Islands.
    And you had to take a train to a little town called Emden.
    And then we took a steamer to that island.
    And I remember that when I was a little boy.
    I even remember getting seasick on the steamer.
    And then I remember spending a lot of time on the beach.
    And I think I was very fortunate.
    I think a lot of my good health comes from the fact
    that, when I was a little child, I
    spent a tremendous amount of time on the beach,
    more than average.
    Do you remember at that young age having non-Jewish friends?
    Well, when I was that little, of course,
    I don't remember what kind of friends I had.
    But when I was a boy, I had non-Jewish friends,
    plenty of them.
    OK, let's move on then.
    Now you've moved to your second home.
    And let's talk again.
    Was that in a mixed neighborhood of Jews and non-Jews?
    Yes, definitely.
    And you had non-Jewish friends then?
    Very much so.
    Very much so.
    The neighbors next door to us, their name was Von Reden.
    And the father was an official.
    Of course, he was an attorney, too, like my father.
    But he worked for the government.
    But he worked for the provincial government there.
    And of course, I really didn't know that.
    His name was Baron von Reden.
    And he had a brother who was my sister's age.
    My sister's older than I. And then
    he had another brother that was my age.
    And believe it or not, they had a small son
    that was my brother's age.
    So you had a sister also.
    Yes.
    When was she born?
    And what is her name?
    Her name is-- she's called now Trudie,
    but her name is Gertrude.
    And she was born in 1915.
    She was four years older than myself.
    She's in good health, thank God.
    She lives here in this area.
    She's also a big contributor to the Holocaust Museum.
    What kind of school did you go to?
    Well, in Germany, children go first to the folkshule.
    And you start there at the age of six.
    Actually, your first day of school is a big day.
    I remember it vividly.
    And it was also the custom always to give
    the kid a big thing with candy.
    It was a bag, a cone-shaped bag.
    And everybody got their picture taken with that.
    It was my first day of school.
    And you go to that school for four years.
    And I went to that school.
    And then, after that, you go to the gymnasium.
    And I went to a school called the Leibniz
    School in the central part of the city.
    And I had to pass an exam.
    Everybody has to.
    Some children never go to the gymnasium.
    Many children, or the working class children,
    they go three more years folkshule.
    And then they don't go to school anymore.
    And they take up a trade.
    The young people take up a trade much younger in Germany.
    But if you plan to go to college or follow professional people,
    they went to the gymnasium.
    And in order to qualify for that,
    you had to pass a test, which I did.
    And I started in this gymnasium.
    So again, this was with Jews and non-Jews in the--
    Oh, yeah.
    --all the way through in your school.
    Any problems that you noticed?
    Well, there was very occasionally some--
    somebody called you a Jew, or something like that.
    And I would fight, a lot of times,
    with the kids about that, a lot of times.
    But--
    What do you mean you would fight?
    I would have fights if they called me a Jew.
    I'd hit them and stuff like that.
    I had some really bad fights.
    And what would happen?
    Nothing.
    We would just have a fight, and it was all over.
    But then I think what we're getting
    at is what happened as we got towards the time
    that the Nazis came into power.
    We'll get to that.
    I want to cover the part before that.
    But outside of that, I was very much interested, much more
    interested, in soccer football in Germany
    than I was in my schoolwork.
    And I remember already, very early, I
    used to spend when I was still-- before I was in the gymnasium,
    I spent most of my time making up teams.
    So we couldn't wait till we get out of school.
    And then I would play football with the other kids.
    And most of those kids that were my friends,
    they were working class kids.
    There were the kind that actually became Nazis later.
    Did you have any other interests besides soccer?
    Not too much.
    Oh, yes, I was an avid reader.
    And I don't think I had there so many disciplined interests.
    But I had many interests.
    And I belonged to the Boy Scouts.
    And I learned how to ski.
    And I learned all kinds of athletics.
    I started to play tennis in a club
    when I was already very young, 10, 11 years old.
    And of course, there I associated
    with a better class of people.
    But they weren't necessarily Jewish at all,
    all kinds of people.
    I didn't know whether they were Jewish or not Jewish.
    Did you run into any problems because of that--
    No.
    --there?
    No, not that I was uncomfortable back then in those early years,
    not that I was uncomfortable.
    You said you had a Christmas tree.
    How religious was your family?
    And how did you know you were Jewish?
    All right.
    We did also have a Seder.
    But it was not as important as Christmas for the children.
    And I went with my father to the synagogue
    occasionally on the high holidays.
    And then of course, as I got older,
    then I started to go to Hebrew school
    just like the kids do here.
    And then I started to get ready for my Bar Mitzvah.
    And then I was more around Jewish children.
    Also, then when I went to the Jewish community center,
    I got involved with Jewish young people's organizations.
    And I started to make some very good friends
    among the Jewish boys my age, and girls.
    How religious--
    There was another thing.
    My father was a member of B'nai B'rith.
    He was the president of the B'nai B'rith in that town,
    in Hanover.
    And I was very much aware of all these things, and all
    that it involved, whatever it was to be Jewish, and all that.
    I knew all of that.
    And the B'nai B'rith had a summer camp on the same island
    at the beach.
    And I was a young child already, prior teenage.
    And after teenage, every summer, I would go to that summer camp.
    And I'd be only around Jewish kids there.
    And that was very Jewish.
    I had kosher food there.
    And they sung "Hatikva."
    And they sang Hebrew songs.
    And it was very Jewish.
    And I met a lot of Jewish girls.
    So I had that mixed exposure.
    They're both Jewish and non-Jewish.
    Were you proud at that young age of being a Jew?
    Or what did it mean to you at that time?
    No, I can't say that I was proud about it.
    I can tell you that, as I got older,
    and as the anti-Semitism became more virulent in Germany,
    I thought it was a curse to be Jewish.
    I thought it was a terrible, terrible curse.
    And I thought it was very unfortunate that the--
    I was envious of the non-Jew, that I couldn't be a non-Jew.
    At the same time, I never had any ideas of not being Jewish.
    Don't get me wrong.
    I was too young to even consider that.
    But later, when I was going to school in England-- and I'm
    getting ahead of myself now.
    And I had a very good friend from a very good family,
    very similar background as myself, from Frankfurt.
    And I would take walks with him on Sunday afternoon.
    At that time, the Nazis had taken over in Germany.
    And we were already somewhat expelled from our homes.
    And we had to leave there.
    And we talked about that it was some kind of a curse that we--
    that we were cursed to be-- we were afraid.
    We were terribly afraid, terribly afraid.
    It was very, very scary to be Jewish.
    Let's move back a little bit in time.
    Tell me about your Bar Mitzvah--
    Well, I--
    --which would have been in 1932.
    Yes, it was in--
    actually, I think it was very early in 1933.
    My birthday is on March 10, very soon now.
    I'll be 79 very soon.
    But it was in 1933, I think.
    13 years would be '32.
    '32?
    Maybe it was '32.
    Maybe you're right.
    Maybe you're right.
    Or maybe it was a little late.
    I don't know.
    It could be.
    I'm not sure.
    It was '32 or '33.
    It seems that, in the year of my Bar Mitzvah--
    but maybe it was a year later--
    I left and went to England.
    Let me--
    I'm almost sure of that.
    I think I must have been Bar Mitzvah a little later.
    I think I was Bar Mitzvah in the very early spring of '33.
    Any problems with that?
    Well, there was no problem.
    But it became more evident--
    in relation to what we're talking about,
    I remember listening to the radio and hearing Hitler talk.
    It was in '33 when Hitler came to power.
    It was just about that same time.
    And it was shortly after that that the teachers in my school
    started wearing swastikas in their lapels.
    And in the morning, when we--
    I'm not talking about Bar Mitzvah now.
    I'm talking about something else.
    But in the morning, when we had to go to class in Germany, when
    the teacher walked in, you always
    had to go up and say, good morning, teacher.
    And after the Nazis came to power,
    you had to get up, and put your hand up, and say, heil, Hitler.
    But I wouldn't do it.
    And that probably saved my life.
    That's probably why I'm here today.
    I wouldn't put my hand up.
    And the principal of my school, his name
    was Dr. Heyligenstaedt, and he knew my father.
    He was a fraternity brother of my father's.
    He called him up.
    And he said, listen, Ernst, you better take that kid
    and send him out of the country, because he's
    going to get himself in trouble, and he's
    going to get you in trouble.
    And then, that summer, they sent me to England.
    Before Hitler came in, was your father active politically?
    No, I don't think he was active politically so much.
    But he knew everybody.
    My father knew everybody.
    And he was a very personable kind of a guy.
    And he represented-- he had some very big clients, banks,
    and places like that, and big business people.
    Well, that was horrible.
    What kind of relationship did you have with your parents?
    Was it a close, intimate relationship or a more
    distant one?
    I would say it was a normal relationship.
    I don't think it was very especially close.
    My father and my mother didn't have a good marriage.
    And they're a very different kind of people.
    And that put a strain on the family life
    when I was a young boy.
    It made it easier for me to be comfortable when I left, too.
    But my mother was the one that had the vision.
    And I remember she already very, very early
    wanted us to learn English.
    My mother knew English.
    She had been to England as a young girl.
    And she also knew French.
    She had studied in Lausanne.
    And she was a very unusual woman--
    a very difficult person, but very unusual.
    And I always opposed her.
    I didn't like what she wanted me to do.
    It's only lately when--
    even when I thought about this interview, I think about her.
    And the reason that I am alive today
    is probably only because of my mother.
    All of us are alive.
    And it goes further than that.
    They sent me to England in 1933.
    And they made arrangements with a family there.
    Well, we'll get to that in a moment.
    Yeah, OK.
    I want to cover a little more.
    OK.
    What language did you speak?
    What did you speak at home?
    German.
    And what other languages were you learning as a child?
    I learned French in school.
    And I knew-- they tried to teach English,
    but I knew very little English, very little English.
    I wasn't interested so much then.
    I was interested in Germany, and my friends, and my Boy Scouts,
    and my--
    like a boy.
    I was a boy--
    and sports.
    So you felt very German.
    Yes, I think so.
    I started to-- towards the end, during the time of my Bar
    Mitzvah, I became aware of it, that I
    was a Jew, that I was different than the rest of the Germans.
    In what way?
    It was already starting that Jews--
    for example, I used to go to an indoor swimming pool
    with a friend of mine.
    And then they made rules when I was--
    I was still in Germany then.
    The Jews couldn't go there anymore.
    So it wouldn't take very much to know that I was a Jew.
    And I remember I went with my friend.
    And we put our swimming trunks on real fast
    that nobody should see that we were Jewish.
    And it was scary to be there, because we were someplace we
    weren't supposed to be.
    And I was already aware very much very early
    that there was danger there.
    When did you first hear about Hitler?
    OK.
    I was going to school as a little boy.
    I was still very little.
    I'm going back now, maybe to 1929, to 1930, '29 or '39.
    So I was 10, 11 years old.
    And in Germany, they had a [GERMAN]
    on every street corner in the cities.
    What is that?
    That is a kiosk, an advertising kiosk.
    It was a round column.
    And the [GERMAN], the--
    Posters?
    Yeah, poster.
    [GERMAN] was oil, what you wash your clothes with, soap powder.
    And all those companies, they had their big posters there.
    And there were also political posters there.
    And the Nazis always had very prominent, very strong color--
    red, or bright yellow posters--
    with a tremendous amount of printing on it.
    And there are swastikas all over it.
    And I would stand in front of that [GERMAN]..
    And I would read every word on that poster.
    And my eyes were popping out of my head,
    because they talked about the Jews,
    and what the Jews were doing, and Jews
    were ruining the country.
    And that's what was going to save the country,
    to get rid of the Jews.
    And the Jews had to be--
    and this and that.
    And it was about that time, very shortly afterwards,
    that I was with my father in the car.
    And we were in Paderborn.
    We were going to Paderborn.
    And we had the radio on in the car.
    And the news came on.
    And they announced that they just had had an election.
    And the National Socialist party had gained a tremendous number
    of seats in the Reichstag, in the German parliament.
    I was worried.
    And I said to my father, what does that mean?
    What does that mean?
    It scared me.
    And he said, oh.
    He said, it's nothing, it's only politics, don't worry about it.
    That was my father.
    My mother was different.
    My mother was different.
    OK, now it's 1933.
    And Hitler becomes chancellor in January.
    By the way, when you saw these posters,
    what thoughts went through your mind?
    Were you very frightened?
    Yes.
    I was very concerned, very concerned.
    Of course, I was young.
    I tried to forget it.
    It was traumatic.
    It was scary.
    It was frightening.
    There's something out there.
    It was very similar to, like, a child
    is afraid to walk by himself through the woods,
    or be in the dark, very similar.
    Something very, very threatening was out there.
    Did you talk it over with your brother or sister?
    No.
    I don't think I ever said anything to anybody about that.
    Even your mother?
    No.
    Or friends?
    No.
    OK, now Hitler is chancellor in January of '33.
    Do you remember the parliament building burning?
    No, I was in Berlin.
    I was in Hanover.
    No, I know, but talking about it.
    First of all, when that happened,
    I think I was already in England.
    And I don't--
    I remember that it happened and all.
    But I was not intimately involved with that.
    OK, let's go talk more about your trip to England
    and how that came about.
    Well, OK.
    It was after my Bar Mitzvah.
    In this particular summer, they decided
    to send me there to this--
    they were already then thinking of saving their firstborn son.
    And they sent me to this to learn more English
    for the summer.
    It was also compromised, I think,
    between my father and my mother about what
    they should do about me.
    And I was the future of the children.
    And of course, some of this is a surmise on my part.
    I don't really know what.
    I did what I was told.
    I knew that they told me that I had to be taken out of school.
    That was one of the things.
    I had to be taken out of school.
    So for the first, they decided to send me to England.
    This is after the principal told your father.
    Yeah.
    And then, because I already--
    I was very uncomfortable about raising my hand, and all that,
    and saying, heil, Hitler, and he wants to kill the Jews.
    And that was not for me.
    You know?
    So this must have been the summer of '33, 'cause--
    Right.
    OK.
    So I arrived in England.
    And then and I stayed there.
    And I lived in a boarding house.
    How did your parents know where to send you?
    They made arrangement au pair.
    One of the girls from that family
    had been in our home the year before.
    My mother had sent away for college girls
    to come in as an exchange student plan.
    And she, my mother, arranged all that stuff.
    So your sister was not sent.
    No.
    I was sent.
    And--
    What was it like for you to leave Germany?
    It was a great trip.
    I was looking forward to it.
    It was exciting.
    I went on the boat.
    And then I had to take a train, a boat train.
    Did you go by yourself?
    By myself.
    And the lady picked me up at the Victoria Station.
    And I had to have a flower in my lapel.
    And she recognized me.
    And you said your English wasn't that good.
    No, my English wasn't--
    I hardly knew any English.
    But she knew who I was.
    And she took me.
    And it was in Norwood.
    It was south of London.
    Was it difficult for you to say goodbye to your parents,
    and your sister, and brother?
    No, not then.
    That was not a final goodbye.
    We're just going for a vacation then.
    And it was no--
    oh, I'm sorry.
    And then I was there.
    And that's how I learned English very fast,
    because if I wanted to get anything to eat,
    I had to ask for it in English.
    All these people are sitting around the table grabbing
    the food.
    It's a boarding house.
    Also, I went to the movies a lot.
    And in the movies, you learn English.
    And I watched the movies.
    And it was great in the movies.
    They had an organ, and you sing along, and all that stuff.
    And I walked by myself around London.
    And I had to speak in order to find my way home,
    and things like that.
    And I walked from Norwood to London Bridge all by myself.
    They were worried about me.
    I just kept on walking.
    It was a long way.
    And I saw London Bridge.
    And it was unbelievable.
    My eyes were popping.
    I saw so many new things.
    And I really wanted to learn more about the world.
    There was a lot to see.
    And--
    How long did you stay there?
    I stayed there for a month or so.
    And then what happened-- my mother, with her sister,
    came to London.
    And without telling my father, she enrolled me in the school
    over there.
    He was angry with her when she got home.
    But she did it on her own.
    She enrolled me in the school.
    And I left.
    I never went back home.
    I went to school.
    And actually, when I went to school,
    it was the Ewell Castle School in Surrey.
    And when they took me to school, school hadn't started yet.
    She had made all the arrangements.
    It was a boarding school.
    And--
    What were your thoughts about not going back to Germany then?
    That's what my mother said I was supposed to do.
    I did what I was told.
    I didn't have any thoughts about it at all.
    You didn't feel bad about not going back--
    No.
    --to your friends and your family?
    Not really.
    I made new friends.
    It was exciting, new things to do.
    And it was great.
    It was in a castle.
    And there were kids there, especially one boy
    in particular I remember.
    It was a Jewish boy from Israel--
    from Palestine, in those days.
    And he and I became bosom friends.
    He was already there, too, before school started.
    And he also loved to--
    I was a pretty good tennis player really by that time--
    very, very.
    For a boy, I was an excellent tennis player.
    Were there are many Jewish children in the first
    boarding house, that one that you were in for a month?
    None.
    I didn't know any Jewish children.
    None.
    English.
    Was that difficult for you to be the only Jew?
    No, not at all.
    Did they give you any difficulty?
    No.
    In England?
    No, not at all.
    No, not whatsoever.
    I don't think they even knew the difference between Jew
    and not Jew in England.
    It was just very nice.
    And on the contrary, it was very early on that I learned
    that people, even in different countries, if they spoke
    a different language, were very much
    like a people in my country.
    The young people, too-- the same things made them tick.
    And they wanted to do the same things.
    And they loved sports.
    And they loved to do things.
    And they loved girls, and loved all kind of fun things,
    and cars, and things like that.
    And those were all the things I loved.
    So I got along very well.
    This is a continuation of the interview of Wolfgang Mueller.
    It's tape one, side B. And we were talking
    about your time in England.
    And your mother had come over and enrolled you
    after that month in the school.
    Right.
    And then school started.
    And it was a military type school.
    We ate there, wore uniforms.
    And we used to go jogging every morning across country.
    And I was a very good runner, and I loved that.
    And we did a lot of running.
    And then I learned to play cricket.
    I learned all these new sports.
    And of course, I played soccer.
    I was a goalie for my school.
    And then I traveled all over England
    and represented my school.
    And I played tennis.
    And I was a big shot.
    And I had a great time.
    And I learned English.
    Now, all this time, things were happening back in Germany.
    How aware of those events were you?
    I must tell you that I was not aware.
    I don't know whether it was subconscious,
    I didn't want to know, or I was just too busy with my life.
    And as a matter of fact, occasionally
    during those times, I did go back to Germany on vacations.
    And I went back to Germany two or three times
    during this period that I was in England.
    And of course, by this time, I could speak English.
    And then I pretended that I was English,
    and that I wasn't Jewish.
    And I spoke English.
    And that took care of that problem.
    And did you see a change in conditions
    when you went back to Germany?
    Did you sense a tightening of restrictions?
    There were-- I knew that it was more dangerous to be Jewish.
    I was aware of that.
    How were you aware of that?
    Oh, it was already--
    the way the Nazis did it, they conditioned you for it.
    I got conditioned to it like everybody else.
    In other words, we just conducted ourselves in a way
    that we stayed out of trouble.
    And of course, for me, it was very easy
    because I spoke English.
    And then I just--
    I was English.
    When I was around Germans, I spoke English.
    Did you pretend you didn't know German?
    I don't know.
    Maybe I did.
    We spoke English, like my sister.
    I remember my sister and I were sitting in a restaurant.
    She knew English, too.
    She had been to England.
    And we stayed in England.
    And they waited on us.
    And we were pretty sure Jews couldn't go in there.
    But we talked English.
    And it was great.
    We were foreigners.
    Did you miss your brother and sister
    when you were at school in England?
    Well, yes, no.
    Not that much.
    Not that much.
    I was busy.
    I was busy.
    Really, I was busy with my life.
    And so many exciting things were happening.
    You see, then the groundwork was laid in that time for me
    to come to America.
    Well, what happened was I left Cranbrook.
    And I was enrolled in a better school.
    My mother took care of that, too.
    She came back to England, to London.
    I saw her in London.
    And she put me in the Cranbrook school
    in Kent, which was a very fine school.
    Your previous school was called?
    Ewell.
    Ewell.
    It was near Epsom.
    It was more of a--
    for younger children.
    And this was more almost like a junior college--
    very, very.
    As a matter of fact, they have a campus
    in this country somewhere, a very famous art place.
    In Michigan.
    Yeah, in Michigan.
    And that's where I went.
    And my mother wanted me to--
    only the best.
    What was your relationship with your father during this time?
    It sounds like your mother was making all the arrangements.
    What connection did you have with your father?
    But I really liked my father a lot better than my mother.
    You see, my mother always made me
    do a lot of things that were a little bit harder to do.
    But my father, he--
    even as a little kid, I used to go to my father's office,
    and play with the typewriters, and stuff like that.
    And my father, he was a different kind than my mother.
    And he was much easier to be around.
    My mother was not easy to be around.
    She was demanding.
    She was a demanding person.
    How was your father's practice affected
    when you would go back to visit and conditions
    were changing in Germany?
    My father was unbelievably busy during those years.
    Because of the connections that he had,
    he started to become in the local area
    there the focal point of the whole Jewish community,
    because he was the one that could get them out
    of the concentration camps.
    And he could get all kinds of permits for Jewish people.
    And they really rallied around him.
    And one of the reasons that it took him so long to leave
    was because he felt that he had a responsibility there.
    He was also making lots of money.
    How did he get that position?
    Was he elected to that?
    Or he just assumed that position?
    It was just his personality.
    And like you said, he knew the chief
    of police and the district attorney.
    And he had that way with him that he
    could get along terrific.
    He was actually a country boy from Westphalia.
    But he was also very highly educated.
    He was an intellectual.
    So he really knew how to handle himself.
    And they all liked him.
    And he had a down-to-earth way with him.
    And as a matter of fact, the chief of police of Hanover--
    like I told you, the director of my high school called him.
    Everybody knew him.
    And the chief of police from Hanover--
    my brother told me this.
    I didn't know.
    My father told me.
    He said, he called him in 1938, I guess, or whatever it was.
    And he told him, Ernst, if you don't leave,
    we're going to have to come and arrest you.
    You better get your boy and get out of here.
    And he called his relatives.
    I'm jumping ahead of myself.
    But he called his relatives in Paris.
    He had cousins in Paris.
    And he said, I've got to leave, and I
    can't take a thing with me.
    I don't have a thing I can take with me.
    They said, just go.
    At that time already-- that was after the Kristallnacht--
    my mother was already here.
    They said, just go, and take your boy to England.
    We'll take care of you.
    Don't worry.
    We've got plenty of business interests in England.
    And he did go.
    And it was so fast--
    the blitzkrieg, the war after that--
    that the whole family in Paris was arrested before he really
    got settled in England.
    And he almost was interned as a German alien in England.
    But he told them in London that he
    knew where all the airports were in Hanover.
    He went to the police.
    And they let him go.
    A lot of my other uncles and things,
    and cousins, were interned in England.
    So my father managed also to survive.
    And my mother was here at that time.
    Back to before that time, you had said earlier,
    before you left for England, that you didn't want to say,
    heil, Hitler to your teacher.
    And the principal called your father.
    Why didn't you want to say, "heil Hitler"?
    What did it mean to you?
    Well, I knew that Hitler was somebody
    that wanted to kill Jews.
    He threatened.
    The Nazis were singing songs about Judenblut
    should run in the streets, and things like that.
    But I was not that stupid.
    I didn't want to be killed.
    Yeah.
    Did any of the friends, the schoolmates of yours,
    taunt you for not saying, "heil Hitler"?
    Did they say, "heil Hitler"?
    Did they taunt you?
    Did they criticize you, make it difficult for you
    because you didn't say it?
    No.
    No.
    I don't know.
    No, I didn't have that kind of a problem.
    The friends that I had, the Jewish friends that I had,
    they were Zionists at that time.
    I was a little older then.
    And I was already exposed to Zionism then.
    You see, I was in this Jewish Boy Scout
    movement from the Jewish community center.
    And a lot of them were Zionists and stuff like that.
    And I was active in that.
    And so I started to know about Palestine and the other things.
    And one friend, the older brother of this one
    friend of mine, he had left on his bicycle,
    and going to Czechoslovakia.
    And he was going to Palestine.
    Did he make it?
    Yes.
    That's another story.
    Maybe that'll come later.
    It's a very exciting story.
    Were your parents Zionists?
    No, not at all.
    Just the opposite.
    Just the opposite.
    German.
    How did they feel about your being in a youth group?
    Well, there were no discussions, no political discussions
    in our house.
    Anyway, everything was what my father said.
    That's how it was.
    My father was the boss, what he said.
    But my mother, she didn't agree with him.
    But she did it behind his back.
    I remember I was back in Germany on a vacation.
    And my mother wanted me to take some money out
    of the country, put it in a bank in England.
    And my father would have killed her.
    It was strictly-- he wouldn't bend a rule or something,
    Nazi regulation, for anything.
    So I made a hole in my tennis racket.
    I took the back of my tennis racket, and I put the money--
    I had a room upstairs in our house.
    And I put the money into the tennis racket.
    Then I put the back back on it, put the leather thing
    around it.
    And I carried the tennis racket in my rucksack.
    And I was sure, when the guards came on the train
    and they asked if I had anything to declare
    that time when I was going back to England, that I
    was going to be-- like dogs can smell you when you're scared.
    I was terrified, but I made it.
    And then, even after I got to school,
    I hid the money for weeks, months.
    I was afraid that spies would know
    that I had that money before I called this person
    that my mother knew in London.
    There was a banker that I had to take the money to.
    How much did you give you?
    I don't remember, but it was a few thousand dollars, I guess.
    That was a substantial amount.
    Yeah.
    So you're now at school in England.
    And you're going back and forth to see
    your parents and your family.
    No, not back and forth.
    Well, I mean to visit.
    Yeah.
    Did your parents have-- or did your mother
    have any idea of sending your brother or sister along
    with you?
    I'm not sure.
    There was very little discussion.
    My trips over there were so short.
    And then I would tell stories about England.
    And they would sit and listen to me.
    And they would laugh.
    And I would travel to my grandmother's and to my aunts'
    [? And other parts- ?].
    I had a good time.
    And I wasn't really too much into what was going on.
    But whatever it was, it wasn't any good.
    And I wanted to get out.
    So it was not hard for you to leave Germany to go back
    to England after your vacation.
    Oh, no.
    I loved it.
    I couldn't wait to get out of there.
    It was a terrible place then, the way
    they were with the Jews.
    And it was getting worse all the time.
    And--
    Did you see any restrictive signs on stores?
    I think I did.
    But I don't-- it wasn't--
    it's very hard.
    I've read plenty of stuff since then.
    And all this has been explained in the literature.
    But unless you have experienced it, it's very hard to describe.
    Like I just told you earlier, the Jewish people
    that lived there were conditioned to it.
    They had a way.
    They were so smart, those Nazis.
    I have a lot of stories that I can probably tell you
    later about what happened to my grandmother who stayed there
    until they were finally sent to the camps, and how they still--
    and I just read again in the calendar
    that I got from the Holocaust Museum
    about Theresienstadt, Terezin, and how
    they were told that that was really a good place.
    You're going to pay a little more,
    and they could, 'cause it was a very special place to go to.
    And everybody rationalized everything,
    that it was really going to be OK.
    Nobody actually would believe rationally
    that their lives were really in danger,
    that people would actually take and slaughter people.
    And you know how people could rationalize that once
    they were discriminated against like we were.
    And I was very much aware of the discrimination.
    And I don't want you to think that I wasn't.
    And I always-- just like my father before me, and probably
    for generations Jews before me, I
    was very good to deal with discrimination.
    I was very, very skilled.
    And I think I am still that way, even
    in this country in my daily life.
    What do you mean, skilled?
    I'm very skilled in--
    What do you mean by that?
    --getting along and trying to make the world
    think that I'm just like everybody else.
    That's what I mean.
    That's being skilled in dealing with discrimination.
    But of course, today, my attitude has changed totally.
    What I felt as a little boy, I am that way very strong today,
    very, very strong.
    I am very, very right-wing Jewish today, very strong.
    I'm a hawk.
    I don't like Arafat.
    You know what I'm talking about?
    Yes, I do.
    OK.
    Yeah.
    You're talking about the visit of Arafat to the museum.
    Is that what you mean?
    Well, it's one of the things I'm alluding to.
    Yeah.
    And yet the Jews in Germany, they rationalized so much
    about what was going on.
    My father was such an intellectual, such a reader.
    He read everything.
    He knew everything about Zionism, and about Maccabees,
    and about Jews, and about Jewish history.
    And he knew everything about everything.
    But they rationalized.
    They rationalized how everything was going to be OK,
    and how we have to get along, and how we have to make it go,
    and how Israel is never going to-- that's never going
    to work, how the Jewish state in Israel never work,
    and things like that.
    I've heard all that stuff.
    I've been weaned on that.
    Believe me.
    So you were in England until what year?
    Until when?
    1936 I came to America.
    How did those arrangements get made?
    OK.
    In Cranbrook, there was tuition, a lot of tuition.
    And my father-- the Nazis had the Devisen regulations.
    It was not permitted to send German marks out of Germany.
    So even though my father was the way that I said,
    he was still a Jew.
    And he knew how to get along.
    And he knew about a man in America
    who also was a very distant relative on my mother's side,
    and who also had been the son of the rabbi in Paderborn
    where my father had gone to cheder.
    When my father told me about it, he said, when he was a boy
    and he went to the rabbi's study to cheder,
    there was this German school cap hanging on the mirror.
    And that was Max's cap.
    And Max had gone to America, the rabbi's son.
    So your father had a religious upbringing then.
    Of course.
    Of course.
    He was a Jew.
    He was a Jew very much.
    Not religious, he was a German Jew.
    That's all the children.
    The Jewish religion, they pretended the Jews--
    that it was a religion.
    You're Jewish, it's like being Christian.
    You just had-- you just don't believe in Jesus Christ.
    But Jesus Christ is very nice, too,
    and everything was all right.
    But the Jews don't have that.
    But they didn't--
    [COUGHS] excuse me.
    They weren't afraid, like Eastern Jews, of a progrom.
    You see, the Eastern European Jews were already persecuted.
    They were used to persecution.
    During my father's lifetime, there wasn't any persecution.
    There was social discrimination against Jews.
    In other words, the people of the class of professionals
    that my father belonged to--
    they really didn't like Jews that much.
    But certain Jews, they had enough money.
    They could get along very well.
    And that's the way it was.
    That's just like it is here today.
    So my father knew that Max Nordhaus, who
    lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico and was
    the president of a big company, was supporting two old ladies
    that had taken care of his parents
    when they had gotten old in Germany.
    So he corresponded with Max and made arrangements
    to send the money to the old ladies.
    And Max sent the money to me in London, in Cranbrook.
    And when the check came, my father told me what to do.
    When the check came, I had to go to the office
    and endorse the check.
    And then my father says, you have
    to write a note to Mr. Max Nordhaus,
    and thank him, and acknowledge the check.
    And I did in English.
    And the next time, he wrote to me with the next check.
    And he said, I want you to get finished in school,
    and come to Albuquerque, and work in my business.
    I couldn't wait.
    I couldn't wait.
    I was ready.
    I was 16 then--
    15, 16 years old.
    I want to go right now.
    So my parents decided that was the thing to do.
    So they sent me.
    So--
    How did your parents distinguish between you and your brother
    and sister?
    Well, my brother was much younger.
    You see, he was much younger.
    He was still too young.
    And my sister-- the boy was first, the firstborn son.
    I think.
    I don't know.
    I don't know.
    I can't exactly answer that question.
    She came a year later, my sister.
    She came to America a year later.
    But they wanted to get--
    by this time, they knew that she had to go, too.
    And I guess they knew that, eventually, they had to go.
    And my mother, she went.
    She left before my father.
    But my father and my brother were still
    there till the last minute.
    We were just absolutely very, very fortunate, very fortunate.
    So you get this letter from Mr. Nordhaus.
    Yeah.
    And of course, I told my parents.
    I think I even called them up on the telephone.
    And I went back to Germany.
    So I saw my teacher in school, in English school.
    And I said, I want to immediately take
    the school certificate.
    That was the exam.
    I wasn't finished with my classes.
    But I said, I can do it.
    I said, I want to do it.
    I want to take the certificate.
    And I told him I was going to take German.
    And math, I wasn't that good in.
    But I'd take German.
    And I'd take English.
    And I'd take French.
    And I'm going to pass it.
    I want to take the certificate.
    I want to get out of school.
    I'm going to America.
    And my teacher cooperated.
    He was a fabulous man, CH Osborne.
    And he took me out of class at that time.
    And he gave me-- he was an English professor, a fantastic
    guy.
    And he gave me reading.
    And he gave me schedules to do.
    And I worked by myself in the library for about a month
    or so.
    And then I took the certificate.
    And then I got out of school and went home.
    I said, OK, I took the certificate,
    I want to go to America.
    See, when you want to do something--
    How many other--
    You had to be 18 years old to take that.
    How many other Jewish children from other countries
    were with you at the school?
    That school in Cranbrook?
    I don't even know for sure.
    I don't know for sure.
    I know I didn't--
    Were there other Jewish--
    In Cranbrook was this boy that I was telling you about.
    [INTERPOSING VOICES]
    Is this the one that you were talking about?
    He was a different type of a boy than I was.
    He was not as athletic, and things, like me.
    And he was not so--
    Is this the boy you were talking about
    that you would take a walk with and--
    Yeah.
    --talk about it was a curse to be Jewish?
    I had an intellectual relationship with him,
    but I didn't really know what happened to him or anything.
    Did he agree--
    Maybe I was too selfish.
    And he agreed with you that it was a curse at that time
    to be Jewish?
    Yes.
    Oh, yes.
    Oh, there was no question about that.
    He was from this terrific family in Frankfurt.
    They were in the jewelry business, I remember.
    I don't even know what happened to him.
    I don't even know.
    I lost track.
    What was his name?
    I can't remember.
    I should know.
    I'm trying right now.
    I can't remember.
    OK, so now you've passed your exam.
    And what happens?
    I might remember his name tonight,
    but I can't remember it right now.
    I feel bad that I can't remember, but I can't remember.
    We can always add it later.
    That's OK.
    So you've passed your certificate.
    Yeah, I passed my certificate.
    Oh, we had to go get the visa.
    And right away-- it didn't take that long--
    my number was called.
    Max Nordhaus sent the affidavits and everything, all the papers.
    My father was very good in arranging all of that.
    And we went to Hamburg.
    I still remember sitting in the American consul's office
    in Hamburg.
    And they had-- what was the big magazine at that time?
    Life Magazine?
    No.
    They didn't have Life yet then.
    It was Look, I think.
    Oh, Look magazine.
    Or maybe something else even.
    But a magazine, and I opened it.
    And they had this double page of a white convertible Packard.
    I said, that's what I want.
    So anyway, I got on the boat.
    You went back to your family first--
    I went to--
    --and then went to--
    --Hamburg.
    And then--
    Who came with you to Hamburg?
    My father and mother.
    My mother was very teary and stuff.
    And she kissed me and hugged me more than I had ever
    been kissed in my life.
    It almost made me uncomfortable, kiss me so much.
    But I just wanted to go.
    And then--
    What month was this?
    It was in July, early July, very early,
    in the middle of the summer.
    Of 1936.
    Right.
    And then, that night, we got on the boat.
    Did your parents say anything special to you
    when you left them?
    Well, my father gave me a lot of things.
    I even have some stuff that he gave me--
    advice, and stuff like that, what I should do and things.
    One of the things he told me, I'll never forget.
    I always tell everybody.
    He says, you're going to America.
    And you're probably going to be in business, he said,
    because you didn't go to college or anything.
    I wanted you always have a college education.
    And probably that's not going to happen for you.
    But he said, you're going to be in business,
    so I want you to remember one thing.
    Don't lie to nobody, he says, because a liar
    has to have a very, very good memory.
    And he told me, you're not that smart.
    [LAUGHS] So that was one of the best things
    I ever got from my father.
    I never forgot that.
    Was it hard to say goodbye to your brother and sister?
    No.
    I hardly remember any of that.
    I can't remember.
    It was something that you just don't remember.
    I just left.
    They came on the boat, and we had dinner on the boat.
    What was the name of your boat?
    President Harding.
    I have a picture of it here.
    We had dinner on the boat in Hamburg the last night.
    They could come on board and have dinner.
    And I had a very good cabin class, or something.
    And they left.
    And they waved.
    And the boat left.
    You know, it's really--
    I must be a terrible person or something, but I wasn't sad.
    I kind of--
    I don't know.
    If you had been in camp and something over there,
    in school or something, you're kind of glad when your parents
    leave and you're on your own.
    At that point in my life, I was so glad to be out on my own.
    I wanted to prove myself.
    I wanted to-- you know.
    Well, I was sad.
    They were my parents.
    And I waved.
    I stood on the boat and waved.
    And I was a little bit upset, but not very much.
    How did you feel about leaving your homeland?
    Or did you, at that point, consider Germany your homeland?
    Let me tell you something.
    When I came to America, I never-- well, first of all,
    I had an unbelievable time on the boat.
    I had a ball on that boat.
    That trip was-- as young as I was,
    I already had a girlfriend on the boat.
    And it was wonderful.
    And she even got off with me in New York.
    And she showed me New York.
    But when I got to New York, the first night I was in America--
    I had had a little bit of that already in London,
    but it was different.
    When I knew I was in America and I had left Germany behind me,
    It was like a millstone was off my chest.
    I was free.
    I was in a world where it was different.
    I was free.
    I had escaped.
    I knew I had.
    As ignorant as I really was of everything,
    I guess subconsciously I wasn't as ignorant as that.
    I guess I knew how dangerous and how terrible it was.
    And I guess I didn't think enough about my--
    I should be worrying about my parents,
    and about my brother and sister, and about all the other people.
    But you know something?
    Everybody-- you can't really worry about the whole world.
    You have to live your own life every day.
    You have to be focused on where you are.
    And that's what I was doing.
    I was focusing on being in America and ice cream soda
    on the corner, banana split, and the gorgeous girls.
    I couldn't believe it was going on-- and the big buildings.
    And we went to the American Express.
    My father had bought me this Pullman from New York
    to Albuquerque.
    But I had a coupon or something.
    It was paid for in Germany.
    And I had to go to the American Express
    and exchange it for the ticket.
    Of course, my English was so lucky--
    talk in English, with an English accent yet.
    I had no problem communicating with anybody
    after all that time in England.
    And the girl says to me, well, you
    can take a plane to Chicago.
    And then there's a tourist Pullman out of Chicago
    that you can take into Albuquerque for the same money,
    which you already paid for.
    It's very expensive, this passage
    that you have on a Pullman from--
    and you make better time.
    And I think one of my interests was
    I wanted to stay a little bit longer
    in New York, another few days in New York.
    And I said, that's what I want.
    But she said, the only thing is you're going
    to have to send your bags.
    I had a lot of heavy bags.
    She said, you can't take all that luggage on the plane.
    At that time, you couldn't do that.
    You'd have to send that express.
    OK.
    I didn't know the difference.
    It was express collected.
    My relatives really loved it when
    they got that big bill when I got there, to New Mexico.
    So I did.
    I took a plane from New York, stopped in Cleveland.
    And on the plane was this guy with bushy eyebrows,
    white hair.
    And I was sitting here.
    And he was sitting there on the other side of the aisle.
    And I could tell he must have been
    an important man, because there was
    another man that kept coming to him
    from the front of the plane.
    Apparently, he had a typewriter on the plane,
    writing letters and things like that.
    And the man started talking to me.
    And I told him, I just come from Germany.
    And he was interested in me.
    He started asking me questions.
    And I answered him.
    And he wished me a lot of luck.
    He asked me where I was going.
    I told him I was going to Albuquerque,
    and all that, with my relatives.
    He was very interesting.
    And then he got off the plane.
    And about three months later, I went to the movies
    and saw the March of Time.
    It was John L. Lewis.
    I told you the story.
    It was--
    No.
    It was John L. Lewis.
    I met him on that plane.
    I didn't know who he was, of course.
    And it was very hot that summer.
    And then, when I was on that Pullman from Chicago--
    and Chicago, I stayed at the Palmer House.
    I didn't know-- that's where the taxi took me.
    Oh, my, I saw Chicago.
    And I went to the burlesque and all.
    And then I went to the American Express again.
    And I got my tickets.
    And I found the station that I had to go to catch the train.
    And it was a several day ride to Albuquerque--
    very good accommodation, no problem.
    And it was so hot.
    And I remember it was the election.
    And Roosevelt, I guess, was running against Lyndon.
    And the election was going on.
    And I didn't know anything.
    And they were shouting, election.
    And there were people electioneering around there.
    And I thought it was so cool.
    And it was hot, though.
    And I never saw such heat.
    When I got off the train, I thought,
    my god, you could fry an egg right there on the platform
    it was so hot.
    But the compartments were not hot.
    It was nice.
    I don't know if they had air conditioning,
    or put fans, all that.
    It was fine.
    So Mr. Nordhaus met you when you arrived.
    When I arrived, there was somebody there at the station.
    His name was Rudolf Dreier.
    He was a cousin that was a little bit older than I.
    There was another German guy from Germany
    that had gone to the--
    Max Nordhaus always took these boys
    as the ones he wanted in his business.
    And Rudolf met me.
    And he told me, well, I'm going to take you over to the house.
    He says, but I want to tell you Max Nordhaus died.
    And I had to sent him a telegram when I was arriving.
    But I forgot to put whether it was AM or PM or something,
    and something on the telegram.
    But he was there anyway.
    He told me I didn't send the telegram right.
    So I couldn't believe it.
    When I got there, he had died.
    And they didn't even know I was coming.
    And they were still in mourning.
    And they didn't know I was coming.
    The only way that they finally found out--
    because he had written a letter to my father.
    And they found the letter on his desk in his office.
    And he told my father not to worry.
    He was going to take good care of me.
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum interview with Wolfgang Mueller.
    This is tape number 2, side A, and you've
    arrived in Albuquerque.
    OK, of course, the family was kind of in disarray
    because the head of the family had suddenly passed away.
    He had suffered a heart attack at his desk in his office.
    This is July 1936.
    It was around July 26 when I arrived there.
    Just I was getting closer.
    So they didn't know exactly how to handle
    it, what to do with me.
    So I was very fortunate again.
    I was there like one day or so, one or two days.
    And they put me up in their home.
    It was a magnificent home, extremely wealthy people.
    This was his home basically.
    And they had a place in the mountains
    above Las Vegas, New Mexico, called Trout Springs.
    And they said that the mourning period was about over,
    and they planned to spent a few weeks there in that place.
    And they asked me if I'd like to go with them.
    And I said, yeah.
    And also they found out, of course,
    right away, and talking to me, of course--
    I was easy to talk to because I knew English.
    And they knew that I played tennis
    and that I was also an avid skier and all that,
    and they liked all that.
    As a matter of fact, I think the first morning,
    I had to go play tennis with them.
    And, of course, I was very good, very, very good, much better
    than them.
    So that, they really liked me.
    And one of the girls was kind of cute.
    And then so I got to drive with her up to the mountains.
    And then I spend like a whole month of August
    and I think half of September in the mountains there.
    And there was a Jewish boy from Cincinnati, Bobby Weinshanker.
    That was a cousin of theirs.
    It was there too.
    And so I had a pal.
    And we took horses and we packed into the mountains.
    And there was a Mexican boy that was our age.
    It was a son of the caretaker that
    lived on the other hill opposite to where
    they had their cottages.
    And, of course, he was our guide.
    And it was the most incredible summer I ever
    had altogether, fabulous.
    And they had a tennis court there.
    They had a tennis court on their estate there.
    And they had these cabins like--
    Camp David I guess is like that--
    and with people sleep in there, the central place where you ate
    and everything and had company from New York and from all
    over.
    And these were young couples, a little bit older than me.
    But they were girls there that were my age.
    And then I played tennis with everybody.
    And I rode horses.
    And I had a ball.
    I thought America really was the best place in the whole world.
    Were you thinking about Germany at all?
    No.
    I forgot Germany.
    I didn't even remember where Germany was.
    I didn't even-- it was too incredibly wonderful.
    Did you have contact with your parents that summer?
    Maybe letters.
    Maybe occasional correspondence.
    I got a letter occasionally, maybe.
    I remember I have a letter from my Uncle Heinrich, who
    was really one of my favorite uncles, that
    died in a concentration camp.
    And he wrote to me.
    And I still have the letter.
    I have it in my archives.
    And he said I ought to marry that little Maxine.
    He knew about her.
    Not his daughter.
    I was thinking about marriage--
    like that was the last thing I was interested in, marriage,
    you know.
    So anyway, Rudolf Dryer came in September
    after about a month or six weeks.
    And he said they decided to put me in the hardware
    department in their business.
    He was going to take me back and put me to work.
    And I left there, and then I went to work.
    And then pretty soon I moved out of their house.
    And I started to make some money.
    I also met some American boys.
    One boy was working on a newspaper and everything.
    And I found out, you know, he was very impressed
    with-- he took me to wrestling matches and bought
    American teletype machines and cars and girls
    and drinking whiskey.
    And then I became very Americanized,
    and I started working, started working.
    That's what I was doing, working.
    And then pretty soon-- first, I was just
    like clerking there on the office.
    And then very, very quickly I moved up,
    because I guess I dedicated myself to the job pretty well.
    Like, for example, they had a catalog.
    I remember, a hardware business, they have a big catalog
    with all of that.
    Every week they had to change prices.
    And they had a ditto machine.
    And I would stay till late on Saturday,
    and I would make all the prices.
    And I would make the addition for the catalog.
    And they had 17 branches all over the state of New Mexico.
    And I would send them out to all the branches.
    And pretty soon they gave me more responsible work.
    Within a short time, I had a secretary.
    And I was bidding on government contracts.
    And I was moving up in the company.
    And by the time that it was time the war started,
    I was already selling.
    I had my car.
    And I had a room and everything.
    I had a nice place to live.
    And I was selling hardware.
    I was traveling.
    Had you heard about Kristallnacht?
    Do what?
    Had you heard about Kristallnacht?
    Yes.
    What were your thoughts?
    In the meantime, first, my sister came a year later.
    And she was supposed to join me in Albuquerque.
    But she didn't make it, because they gave her a package.
    What Jewish people did in Germany
    when the children went to America,
    in our class of people, first of all
    they try to train them in some skills
    that they could make a living over here.
    And my sister, like I told you, was four years older than me.
    So she had learned how to do calisthenics and massage
    and stuff like that, physical therapy.
    And also, these people from Hanover
    had a daughter in Washington that
    was also a physical therapist.
    She was about a year or two older than my sister.
    And-- I'm sorry--
    the daughter met her at the boat in New York.
    And because my sister had a package for her,
    my sister didn't know what it was.
    Usually gave her Leica, or something like that,
    something that they could send along, money, you know.
    So money was too dangerous.
    I don't think they gave money, but probably a Leica
    or something like that she had in her bag.
    And she gave her the package.
    Her name was Margaret.
    Goldman was her maiden name.
    I don't know if she married then.
    Later it was Green.
    And she said to my sister, you know,
    Trudy, I think there's a job for you in Washington.
    She knew that she was a therapist, you know.
    There is a job.
    They need somebody.
    They need a girl at this place on Connecticut Avenue.
    And my sister had the guts to get--
    she was supposed to come to Albuquerque--
    to get on the train to Washington and to apply
    for this job at 1747 Connecticut Avenue at Emile's.
    It was something like Elizabeth Arden.
    And she got the job.
    So she started to live in Washington.
    And down the street from where she worked on Connecticut
    Avenue, up the street towards DuPont Circle, in the basement,
    there was this German couple.
    She was from a family in south Germany.
    And he had been a waiter, a Jewish man
    on the Hamburg America Line.
    And then he-- a steward--
    and then he'd worked in the Mayflower Hotel.
    But he had gone back to Germany and gotten
    her a few years earlier.
    And they had opened up his little restaurant
    in the basement, a coffee shop in the basement of Connecticut
    Avenue.
    What happened that she had 11 brothers and sisters.
    And two of her brothers had been in a concentration camp.
    Their name was Kilzeimer, her maiden name.
    And his name was Brandler.
    And one of these brothers, they had got them out.
    They sent them money to get them out of the concentration
    and bring them over here.
    And they'd been in there for Rassenschande.
    You know what that is?
    So because they had German girlfriends, you know.
    And in Germany, they had been cattle dealers,
    had been in the cattle business.
    And also really, what they had in that little town
    in Konigsbach.
    It's near Pforzheim in Badens--
    that's Baden in Germany--
    they had had a butcher shop, kosher butcher shop.
    And you know, in Germany in the country,
    if you have a butcher shop, you actually
    have a slaughtering place too.
    They slaughtered animals.
    And they sold the meat.
    And the kids went out and started buying cattle for home,
    and later they traded in cattle.
    So they had become big cattle dealers.
    And they came over here.
    And one of them, this particular one, his name was Bernie.
    And he got a job at Briggs and Company
    making hot dogs when he got over here.
    He would go to work at 2:00 in the morning.
    He got off early, around 10, 11 o'clock,
    and he went to his sister's restaurant.
    And she had the lunch orders then from those office
    buildings.
    So he went around and delivered the orders for the tips.
    And that way, he got a little bit extra money.
    And they told him, there's this good
    looking Jewish girl, German girl--
    Jewish wasn't important-- German girl had started
    to work doing the cleaning.
    She comes up here and gets a cup of coffee almost every day.
    So he waited for her.
    So she met him, and he became her future husband.
    I had asked what your thoughts were when
    you heard about Kristallnacht.
    Oh, I'm sorry.
    Well, what happened my mother was here.
    And my mother had come to visit my sister.
    It ties into this.
    She'd come here to visit my sister.
    And she was in Washington.
    She came out to Albuquerque.
    And she stayed with me for a while.
    I was in Albuquerque.
    And then the Kristallnacht occurred.
    Of course, it was in all the papers and everything.
    And then my father sent her a telegram.
    And things had gotten rough in Germany then.
    And he told her to delay her return.
    But she was on a visitor's visa.
    Was this synagogue in Hanover destroyed?
    Oh, yeah.
    Hanover was destroyed.
    And Paderborn, it was burned down.
    And, you know, people were arrested.
    And my brother told me all about what happened.
    He was a little boy.
    He was 10 years old.
    But he told me so people getting--
    at night, my father was away a lot traveling.
    And he was standing in the front of the window at our house,
    and he saw this van pull up across the street there.
    And there was the Cohens living there.
    And these guys were coming out.
    And then he heard the screaming.
    And they dragged this man out and beating him with a stick.
    And the woman was running behind him and her hair flowing.
    And they beat him like he was dead.
    And then they threw him in that van.
    And when he saw that, little as he was,
    he told my father when he came, we got to leave.
    We got to get out of here.
    The children were smarter than parents.
    My brother told him, said that to my father.
    My brother tells the story.
    You should interview him.
    He was there.
    He saw that.
    He will never forget that trauma.
    And he had many other things happen.
    I was with my brother in Germany two years ago,
    and we went to all these places and the cemeteries.
    And he saw the grave of one of the women
    that had taken care of him for a short time during those years.
    But Just before they left--
    she was a cousin of my father's.
    And she died in a concentration camp.
    And my brother cried at her grave.
    And he didn't know it that she could have gotten out,
    but she stayed with her mother, lots of stories like that.
    And I'm short circuiting the story now.
    But, you know, the following year,
    they called me from Germany.
    And they opened a street.
    They named a street after my grandmother.
    Did you know that?
    Did I tell you that?
    Yeah, in Neuhaus.
    And I told them that if they do that, I
    would come with my family and attend the dedication,
    and we did.
    And that was last year.
    And they had that street there now.
    And it was quite a thing.
    And all my cousins were there.
    It was in all the papers.
    I have all kinds of newspaper articles
    from Germany and everything.
    And--
    Why did they name the street after your grandmother?
    Well, my grandfather and my great grandfather
    already owned the flour mill in this village, Neuhaus.
    And they were the major employers there.
    And my grandfather, my grandmother's husband,
    died before the First World War.
    And she had a German guy, an associate, and her son
    in the business.
    But she was a very wealthy lady, and she was very generous.
    And then they were very, very mean to her.
    My father, they tried to get her to leave.
    But she wouldn't leave.
    And eventually, she went to Theresienstadt.
    And she perished there.
    And her son was there too.
    And he died in Auschwitz.
    You know, the Museum have the letters and everything.
    And other son, we don't know where he died.
    He was sent to Bergen-Belsen and was probably sent to Auschwitz
    too, but he died too.
    So those are my uncles.
    And in Paderborn today, they have a Holocaust Memorial.
    And all their names are on there.
    And I have pictures of all that.
    And so in that sense, I'm connected with it,
    very much so.
    When we were in Germany last year,
    and I was there with my wife and my children-- and everybody
    was there.
    And my cousins were all there.
    All from my grandmother's children,
    they were descendants.
    Even my brother took his son.
    And they had a HaShoah service at the synagogue there.
    And you know, they didn't even have a rabbi.
    They had a Catholic guy doing some--
    they had a couple of guys and myself
    that could do a little davening, say a little bit of Kaddish
    and stuff like that.
    No Jews.
    But the place was filled.
    All the Germans were there.
    And they read all the names of all the people that got
    killed, a boy and a girl read it.
    I was very moved by that, the names and ages.
    So the Germans today, officially,
    are trying to do something.
    Not that I'm sticking up for the Germans or anything.
    But it makes you feel good that it's not totally
    forgotten in Germany.
    I still get a lot of literature from Hanover, from Paderborn,
    from everybody.
    They've written up histories of our family
    and histories of the Jewish people, all kinds of books
    and stuff like that on the pictures.
    To get back to where we were in time, so it's the late '30s.
    And war breaks out September '39.
    Yeah, like I said, it was probably in '39 when
    my father--
    a month or two, maybe a month, six weeks before my father
    and my brother got to England.
    And then--
    Your mother stayed in the United States?
    My mother stayed.
    And we tried everything, the relatives,
    and wrote letters to Congress to get her visa,
    get her some kind of a permit to stay.
    Nothing worked.
    The government didn't want to help the Jews.
    So the only thing that she could do, she had a cousin,
    on of my grandmother's brother, another brother
    of my grandmother's-- these families,
    these Jewish families in Germany at the turn of the century were
    huge, huge.
    12 children was nothing.
    And this was Bernard Schuster.
    And we knew this.
    He was living in El Paso.
    So he had a house there.
    So my mother went to El Paso.
    And the idea was that she went to the consulate in Juarez
    and made an application for a permanent number.
    But she had to have legal residence in Mexico.
    So she got an address in Mexico.
    But she didn't really stay there.
    She stayed really in her cousin's house.
    And once a month, I think, she walked across the Rio Grande,
    across the bridge, and reported to the consul.
    And she had to stay there several years
    till her number was called.
    And in the meantime, the war was going on.
    In the meantime, I was drafted.
    Now, I was down in El Paso, and I visited her, of course.
    Well, so you continued to work in Albuquerque.
    Sure.
    And then, what was--
    I had an important job.
    I was making a good living.
    What was the next change?
    Well, I was drafted.
    When was that?
    It was about three or four months
    before Pearl Harbor in 1941.
    December 7th, it was in '41.
    And I got my draft notice.
    I had signed up for my first papers.
    You know, I hadn't done my citizenship yet.
    And then I went to the draft board.
    And the lady again--
    maybe my manipulation.
    I haven't changed, I guess.
    I'm still that way.
    The lady told me--
    I took my physical and all that in Albuquerque.
    And I passed all that.
    And she told me that you can have your number transferred
    to Washington.
    I told her that I had a sister in Washington.
    By this time, my mother had moved to Washington.
    She had gotten a visa, and she moved to Washington
    to my sister.
    And she says, you can-- and I hadn't seen my sister.
    I didn't know her husband.
    I didn't know my brother-in-law.
    So I had always wanted to go there.
    So she said you can have your number changed to Washington.
    And that way it would be about a month later before you actually
    have to go in, because before they do all that paperwork.
    That sounds like a winner to me.
    I did that.
    So I agreed to that.
    But I quit my job.
    I sold my car.
    I packed my bags.
    I brought a lot of presents for my sister
    and for my mother and stuff, like with a hardware business,
    radios and toasters and stuff like that.
    And I bought a bus ticket across the United States
    to Washington.
    It was a great, great experience.
    I never forget it, wonderful.
    It took like a week.
    And I saw the country.
    And I had a good time.
    And it was fabulous.
    I stopped in Kansas City.
    There was a place where we were dealing with a Kansas City
    Steel Company.
    And they entertained me because I'd been a customer.
    I'd been buying nails and stuff like that from them.
    They showed me a time like I never had in my life before.
    Took me out.
    And--
    Previous to that, what was it like for
    a 19-year-old, 20-year-old young man born in Germany
    to read in the newspaper or hear on the radio
    about the Anschluss in Austria and the invasion of Poland
    by Germany in September 1939?
    What were your reactions having been born in Germany?
    It was terrible.
    But there's nothing I can do about it.
    What can you do about when you read about something
    that's happening in China?
    Or in Southeast Asia?
    Or even maybe in Mexico or in South America?
    Did you feel any connection to Germany then
    having been born there?
    Yes.
    I knew that it was--
    but I was out of it.
    I was here.
    I was here.
    I was out of it.
    I was here.
    I guess I went to synagogue.
    I went out with Jewish girl.
    But they were American girls.
    Yeah, I went out with some German people.
    But we didn't talk about that either.
    Was it a feeling that this wasn't
    your Germany in a sense that was doing these kind of things?
    I don't know how to answer that.
    I don't know.
    I didn't-- I wouldn't want there.
    And all I wanted to do was stay in America and fit in here
    and become an American.
    That's all.
    That's the only thing that interested me.
    And anyway, I wasn't even thinking of it in cosmic terms.
    Again, I was just focusing on every day of my life.
    I was doing my life.
    It never occurred to me--
    I would have gotten, of course, crazy
    if they would have known that they
    had taken people and killed them and stuff like that.
    I didn't even know that when I was in the service.
    That was very, very, very later in the service I saw it,
    when I was in the intelligence.
    Then I really saw everything.
    And that, of course, changed everything when I saw that.
    But again, I just felt so fortunate.
    And, you know, I still do, because somehow I
    was able to just get out of all of that stuff.
    I was saved.
    I don't know for what I was saved, but I was saved.
    I was just a lucky guy.
    Just call me Lucky.
    Now you're in Washington.
    And your number has come up, your draft number.
    Yes, and then my draft number.
    And then I went to New York.
    I spent a week in New York.
    And I enjoy-- then I was drafted.
    And I was in the infantry.
    And I was sent first to Fort Lee.
    And then I was sent to Macon, Georgia, Camp Wheeler.
    What was it like to put on an American soldiers uniform?
    It was great.
    I was proud of it.
    I loved every moment of it.
    No, I loved being a soldier.
    I didn't love the regimentation by this time.
    You know, I didn't really love--
    I can't say that I loved that so much.
    But I made friends in the army.
    And I had a great time.
    And then Pearl Harbor came.
    And it was on a Sunday morning, afternoon, by this time.
    And I remember I was playing poker.
    I was in this bunk, in this barracks where I lived.
    I was downstairs.
    But I was in this game with these guys upstairs.
    I was sitting on the bunk.
    And they heard this come on the radio
    that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.
    And I had a full house, three 8s and a pair of kings
    or something like that.
    And I had made my bet.
    And all the guys left and went to the radio.
    I said, anybody-- you know, I didn't care about the radio.
    That's how I was.
    I was so different.
    I was out of it.
    I didn't know, I think.
    Maybe that came from having been through this in Germany.
    I had a deaf for this stuff.
    And I remember that night, the guys were all crying.
    You know, I heard them in my bunk, the other soldiers.
    I couldn't understand it, they were
    crying, because they knew war was really going to start.
    And their lives were really going to--
    they were aware of it.
    I didn't have any kind of feelings.
    On the contrary, I couldn't wait to get over there and kill
    Hitler.
    I didn't have any fear or anything like that at all.
    Then I heard Roosevelt's speech.
    And then we were on the drill fields the next day,
    and they called my name.
    Oh, my God, I said, KP again.
    Report to the First Sergeant.
    So I went and I reported.
    And I said, you have some books out from the library.
    You have to take them back, because you're shipping--
    hi.
    That's my wife-- you're shipping out tonight.
    And I said, oh, my God, what's going on?
    So I called home.
    And I told them I was shipping out.
    I didn't know where.
    And then they put me on a train.
    And I reported.
    And again, later, I found out why, there was a bunch of--
    we wound up after a couple of days
    shuttling around on the railroad in a field in Florida.
    And it was an air warning thing, because when the Japs attacked
    Hawaii, they had a radar there, and it
    had picked up the planes, but nobody paid attention to it.
    You remember reading that?
    And so the army decided as a crash measure
    to improve the radar, especially for the East Coast,
    because they thought then the Germans might attack the East
    Coast of the United States.
    The whole world was afraid of Germany.
    And why did they take me?
    Because you have a Form 20 in the army when you first go in.
    In those days, they clipped it on the corner with holes in it
    from your IQ test.
    And because I had such a high IQ test,
    I was selected-- when you had a certain IQ test
    to learn about this radar.
    Can you believe that?
    I didn't know where I was, what I was doing.
    And so anyway, that's why I was in the radar.
    All of sudden I found myself in the Signal Corps
    part of the Air Corps.
    And then I applied for officer candidate school
    after I was there for awhile.
    We called ourselves the Fighting 614.
    All the guys I was with were a college guys
    from Princeton and Harvard and really terrific Ivy League
    types, you know.
    And they all wanted to become officers.
    So I did, too.
    You know, everybody else.
    So when I marched out in front of the board,
    there was like this redneck captain and the lieutenant.
    They asked me my name.
    And they found out that I was from Germany.
    They told me to go outside.
    The next day, I was on a train to Jacksonville
    and I was in the MPs, because there was sensitive stuff.
    They didn't want a German spies there.
    That's how they thought, OK?
    And then I was there in the MPs.
    And then I volunteered for overseas.
    Did the other soldiers give you a hard time
    because you were from Germany?
    Did they what?
    Did the other soldiers ever give you
    a hard time when they heard you were from Germany?
    I don't think-- my English was--
    I was like an American.
    I was not any different than anybody else.
    I had lots of friends.
    And we worked at night.
    And we did duty.
    And we had a great time.
    I played a lot of tennis.
    My tennis always-- I played in the finest country
    clubs in Tampa.
    It was in Tampa where that was, where I was.
    We were stationed in a hotel.
    It's great.
    And I just always been lucky.
    But then I was in Jacksonville.
    And that wasn't so nice.
    So I volunteered for overseas.
    So I went back to Washington on the train.
    Had you gotten your citizenship yet?
    Yeah, I got my citizenship while I was in Tampa.
    How did you feel about becoming an American citizen?
    Oh, that was a great thing, you know.
    And I found out it was much easier because I
    had been in service and all.
    So I went and got my citizenship.
    Piece of cake.
    It was nothing to it.
    Was it a special day for you?
    Huh?
    Was that a special day for you?
    You know, I kind of took it in stride.
    My life has been like that.
    The special days are just another day,
    another day in the life of Wolfgang Mueller.
    On March 23 it will be my 50th anniversary--
    if I make it.
    It will be another day, right?
    Be married to this lady for 50 years.
    So you volunteered for overseas duty.
    Yeah, I volunteered for overseas duty.
    And they sent me overseas.
    And I was on a troop ship.
    And it was quite an experience.
    First, you're in a repple depple and all that.
    And then I was in a troop ship.
    And you know something, there's not too much else to do,
    but we gambled, you know.
    And I got so lucky.
    I must have won like all the money on the troop ship.
    I had a money belt and had all my pockets full,
    everything full.
    And when I got to England, I took my whole outfit
    out drinking.
    And--
    What were your thoughts when you returned to England
    in the uniform of United States Army?
    I knew my brother was over there and my father.
    And I couldn't wait to get to London and get to see him.
    You know, I wanted to see my father and everything.
    That's what I did.
    Did you get to see him?
    Oh, yeah.
    What was that like to see him?
    Yeah, well, by this time, my father was living with a woman.
    And my brother had been sent like with the children
    out in the country to get out of the air raids.
    And he had just gotten back.
    He was going to school in England.
    Oh, yes, and I took my brother--
    then I arranged for my brother to come to America.
    My uniform and my ribbons, I went to Grosvenor Square
    to the American embassy, and I made all the arrangements.
    And I took him to Cardiff in Wales.
    And I put him on the boat.
    That's how he got to America.
    And by the time I got home from overseas, he was in service.
    So now you're in England.
    And then what happened?
    With the military.
    Yeah, I'm in England.
    In the meantime, I've become a non-commissioned officer.
    And I was an RAF liaison.
    And our job was--
    I was connected with the Air Corps--
    and our job was to procure parts from the RAF
    for American planes.
    I was in an area, all around us were all the American air
    bases, the bombing bases.
    So I met all the guys that were on the airplanes and everything
    and went out drinking every night.
    Typical life of an American soldier in England.
    And then one day, again, I got notified
    and I was told to report to London,
    to the headquarters of the ETO.
    All the time, after a while they find out something about me.
    ETO stands for--
    ETO, European Theater of Operations,
    General Eisenhower's headquarters
    in the [INAUDIBLE] building.
    That's a big department store in London, office building.
    And I went there.
    And they said that they just found out--
    they just figured out from my Form 20 that I knew German.
    And they needed interpreters.
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum interview with Wolfgang Mueller.
    This is tape 2, side B. And you just got your new orders
    to report in England.
    So, again, all of a sudden, I found myself
    in an incredible environment.
    All the guys were German Jews like myself,
    not all of them, but 90% of them.
    And--
    What month, what time span are we talking about?
    It was after VE Day.
    It was after VE Day, but not too long after VE Day.
    So it had to be--
    VE Day, it was--
    So we're now in spring of '45.
    Yeah.
    So the entire time that you were--
    up to that, you were in England the whole time.
    OK.
    As a liaison to the Royal Air Force, you said.
    Hmm?
    As a liaison to Royal Air Force.
    Yeah, I was in the 8th Air Force.
    I was just in the 8th Air Force.
    But I was in what they call a repple depple, replacement
    depot or parts depot.
    And I was in the supply.
    And I became a technical sergeant, you know,
    five stripes.
    And I was in charge of a whole office of people and stuff
    like that, just getting supplies and things.
    So you never went on to--
    I did what I had to do, doing paperwork.
    But at that point you had not been on the continent yet,
    you were still--
    No.
    And now it's VE Day--
    In London.
    And now it's VE Day.
    Yeah, VE Day comes and goes.
    And they need interpreters.
    And I'm selected to become.
    And I get orders.
    I get assigned to this office, Air Technical Intelligence
    Office of New Staff, United States Air Force headquarters.
    That was the main office, honey.
    I was in the headquarters.
    General Spaatz's headquarters in the Intelligence.
    And this was the Air Technical Intelligence
    where they had the pool of interpreters
    that they sent all over.
    And I got orders, it said, Tech Sergeant Wolfgang Mueller
    can commandeer anywhere in the European theater
    any kind of transportation.
    He can go anywhere he wants to.
    He had under a special order, signed General Spaatz.
    And our office had an office in Paris already
    and an office in London.
    Did you know any of the other German Jewish soldiers
    at that point?
    No, I met them all there but--
    They weren't anybody from Hanover--
    But, of course, we talked and we've exchanged experiences.
    And it's all the same, you know.
    And then--
    Were you aware yet at that point of what happened to the Jews
    by then?
    No, not really.
    Not really.
    Not really.
    But I was in an environment then, of all of a sudden--
    like, for example, I was stationed
    right in the West End of London in a gorgeous apartment house,
    in like a flat.
    You know, it must be very rich people at one time.
    And it had been commandeered by the army.
    And again, like I had been in Florida, the people I was with
    were of a different class.
    And the soldiers that I been with on the air bases, these
    were all very intelligent guys.
    We had fabulous conversations, had great dates,
    you know, went out with great women and stuff like that.
    And we had a great time.
    But the war was still going on.
    The V2s were already coming to London.
    There was still a lot going on.
    And I was-- no, I guess after VE Day, there were-- no VE Day,
    sure the war was going on.
    There was a war in Germany, of course.
    Yeah, the V2s and the V1s were coming.
    And I was flying into Paris.
    By this time the army had taken Paris.
    And--
    Go back just one minute.
    I remember before I went in the service
    I was in my sister's apartment in Washington.
    And we were listening to the radio.
    And we heard about the Battle of Tobruk.
    And at that time, before that happened,
    we thought Hitler was omnipotent.
    He was going to take over the whole world,
    was a little bit afraid of Hitler at that time as Jews,
    because it looked like nothing could stop him.
    But then one of the greatest celebrations,
    one of the most elated feelings that I ever had
    was that night in my sister's apartment
    when I heard that the English army had
    defeated Rommel at Tobruk.
    I thought, I think maybe they really stopped him.
    The man on the radio said it was very important,
    because if he would have linked up with Japan and stuff,
    maybe nobody could stop him anymore.
    At that time, that was very, very big thing, very big day,
    very, very big day.
    I've had a few big days in my life.
    Another big day was when I was here in Washington
    and the Voting Rights bill was passed.
    And I went down to the Congress.
    Somehow I got passes.
    And I went in there.
    And I saw them vote on that.
    And that was also a great moment for me.
    I thought it was a great moment in this country,
    in the history of the world, that finally, I thought--
    And, you know, I always thought it
    was so terrible what's going on between the Blacks and Jews.
    My neighbor here and his wife both have
    numbers on their arms.
    And they're both dear friends of mine.
    They're wonderful, wonderful people, the Spiegels.
    They're very active in the Holocaust Museum.
    And we were in the B'nai B'rith together here years ago
    already.
    And we had one project.
    I remember, a civic project.
    And we were both on the board.
    One time I was a president, and he
    was a president of the large.
    And the project was where we gave a kid in the inner city
    a citizenship award, like $100 or something,
    and a certificate.
    It was one of the things that our lodge did.
    And my neighbor, Sam Spiegel, was vehemently
    opposed to that project because he didn't want
    to do anything for the Blacks.
    And you know something, I could never
    understand how a man that had been through what
    he had been through, how he could
    have that kind of an attitude.
    I didn't let it interfere with my personal feelings
    towards him, but intellectually, I never could beat that one.
    But I fought for it, but we always gave him
    that citizenship award.
    I think you feel that way because of your background?
    Or what you saw as a child?
    Those posters on the street.
    Well, I think the only thing that's important
    for a person is to be able to stand up for what they really
    think is right.
    I think I have learned that a little bit.
    And I tried to teach that also to my family and my children.
    I've tried to live that kind of a life.
    And I think it's very, very hard.
    It's also a very hard thing, because, you know, like
    in this country where we have discrimination here
    against Black people, for example,
    or the minorities, all of them-- it's not just in this country.
    Everywhere.
    In this country it's so terrible because it's
    such a free country.
    And everything else is so great.
    And still we have that going on.
    And we have so much of it.
    And for a Jew to subscribe to anything like that I think
    is a most unworthy thing in the world.
    And most people, if they're--
    and we're getting onto something else now,
    and I feel strongly about that too, and very few Jews do--
    most people go along with the program,
    especially if their job is at stake,
    their livelihood is at stake.
    Regardless of whether it's right or wrong,
    if this is the program, if this is
    what the establishment expects of you,
    you better do it, because otherwise you
    might lose your job.
    You see what I mean?
    Well, you know, the German people,
    the average people in Germany, that's what they did.
    The average people in Germany didn't
    want to go and kill a few Jews.
    And even the people that were in the army
    or in the concentration camps and working there,
    and they did what they were supposed to do,
    they didn't really want to do that.
    That was the program.
    That's what you did.
    And human beings are very funny.
    You know, I've worked in the meat business.
    And when I was first working in a slaughterhouse
    and I saw animals and lambs and calves getting killed,
    it made me sick to my stomach.
    It didn't take me very long to get used to it.
    And when people get treated terrible,
    pretty soon you don't know that they're people.
    And for Jews-- now, I'm talking about Jews, about us, OK--
    to discriminate against anybody, even Germans, for what they
    are, to group them together as whole bunch of people,
    that's a terrible thing, because everybody is one person.
    And I think that's important.
    And you've got to remember that.
    And that's what I believe in.
    I don't know why I brought that up.
    I didn't really want to make a speech.
    But we got around to that subject.
    That's what life has taught me.
    And that's what I think about when
    I think about all the terrible things that are happening.
    Now, you know, it's not finished.
    You know, terrible things are still
    going on in Africa, in Asia, in Russia, in South America.
    If you've done any traveling at all,
    you know it's so wonderful to be in this country.
    And we really don't appreciate how good we have it here.
    But I try not to forget it.
    You got to Paris.
    You're flying to Paris.
    Sorry.
    You had left England.
    And then you were sent to Paris, you said, after VE Day.
    Yeah.
    And then I reported to the office there.
    There was a lot going on there, went to Paris.
    Also, I visit my relatives in Paris.
    I found them, you know, the ones that had survived.
    I had a great time.
    And I brought them stuff from the PX and stuff like that
    and became very popular.
    And very, very nice to me and became very friendly.
    And then pretty soon, I was assigned
    as this interpreter to American engineers and officers
    that were sent into Germany to check out
    different technical things that the Air Force was
    interested in, intelligence matters,
    also arrest certain German guys that they wanted to bring back,
    like these space scientists and people like that.
    So I participated in all those programs.
    And I made many, many trips into Germany
    and got all over Germany.
    I also got a chance to get into places
    where had been slave labor camps and where there were still
    terrible conditions going on.
    And I was actually on the ground.
    And I saw what was really had happened.
    I was in a factory in Nordhaus where they made V2 rockets
    and stuff like that.
    Yeah, we'll talk about that.
    It's unbelievable.
    We'll talk about that.
    So your first trip back to Germany was to do what?
    What year was that?
    No.
    Your first trip back to Germany--
    Afterwards?
    No, no, no.
    During the war, you were in Paris
    and you said they sent you--
    Yeah, almost immediately, very soon.
    That's what I was there for.
    And where did you go in Germany?
    I was in Munich.
    And I was in Goslar.
    And I was in Brunswick and--
    Did you interrogate--
    I was in Leipzig.
    I was in Czechoslovakia.
    I was in Austria.
    I was everywhere.
    And you are now interrogating Germans
    for-- this is intelligence work.
    Yeah, I was interrogating Germans.
    Part of my job was interrogating Germans.
    Part of my job was interpreting documents.
    And part of my job was driving a Jeep for American officers.
    So you're now doing intelligence work.
    Right.
    And--
    I'm an interpreter.
    And did those people that you were interpreting for
    know you were Jewish?
    I didn't waste any time telling them about it.
    But I don't think--
    I'm talking about the Germans.
    Oh, the Germans?
    Oh and how.
    How did they know you were Jewish?
    Oh, I told them.
    They were shaking in their boots when I came.
    American intelligence officer.
    Oh, my God, I was at the Rosenthal factory
    in Selb, in Czechoslovakia.
    And because the Germans--
    actually, I went there without an officer.
    I was just there with a secretary.
    It was a Jeep.
    They sent me there on a special mission,
    because they wanted me to get certain information.
    We had an office in Munich at that time.
    And because the Germans were doing a lot with ceramics,
    and a lot was around technical.
    And one of the interesting things
    was the prime target, intelligence target,
    at that time that technical intelligence pursued
    is the intelligence that the Germans had on the Russians.
    We were getting ready for the next war already.
    And one of the things that was always
    very important like-- that was very far east.
    I was in Leipzig too.
    Always try to get in there before the Russian armies got
    in there.
    I was in the place--
    what is it?
    Zeiss and the Zeiss works, all over Zeiss works.
    Interviewed all the engineers.
    And then they we couldn't get rid of them.
    They wanted to go back with us, because the Russians
    were coming the next day.
    What was it like to come back to Germany,
    put your foot down on German soil?
    It was unbelievable.
    The cities were all destroyed.
    The people were homeless.
    The children were hanging around the garbage
    cans trying to get some food.
    And you gave a girl an orange, and you could never
    get rid of her or something like that.
    And it was incredible.
    And, of course, also underneath, the scene
    that I saw all these DPs.
    The country was full of DPs and also
    around all the military posts.
    And the DPs, and they were so poor,
    and they were so desperate.
    And they were trying to find a way.
    But they were dirty, and they were stinking.
    And you didn't know to be nice to them
    or whether to get away from me, you know.
    Did you identify with any of them?
    No.
    No, not really.
    I did in a very abstract way.
    What could I do?
    You know, I couldn't--
    it was not within my--
    I had no way to help anybody.
    Most of those people that I saw couldn't even speak German.
    They spoke broken German.
    They're Eastern European people.
    It's pathetic kind of a situation, bad, bad, bad, bad.
    I remember the only emotional reaction
    I had be anger when I came back here, because people didn't
    even seem to care, because all the misery that I've seen,
    the misery.
    I felt sorry.
    I didn't feel anger then at the German people.
    No, no, no, I don't feel anger.
    Not at all.
    I never felt angry with anybody at that time.
    I just felt sorry, because it's so terrible.
    It was a devastation.
    And we were so much better off, because we had everything.
    And everybody was kowtowing to us.
    We were big shots.
    I told you in Selb, the president of the company
    was there taking me around.
    And I was the big shot American.
    He wanted to give me the whole 100 piece
    set of Rosenthal porcelain.
    He couldn't do enough for me.
    Give me all the information, you know,
    whatever I wanted to know about and whatever secrets they had,
    I couldn't even write it all down.
    They couldn't do nothing.
    Again, the people, they were running,
    they were trying to save their lives.
    Look, later, I was with my-- how people are--
    I was with my family in Germany in the '60s, in '65 I guess.
    And we rented a car.
    And my children and my wife, we stopped in a filling station,
    fill up the car.
    I had a Mercedes.
    And I spoke German to the guy at the filling station
    to fill up my car.
    And he could tell the I looked, my family.
    He says, you're American, aren't you?
    I said, yes, Deutsch, you know, German.
    And spricht Deutsch, your German is wonderful, you know.
    So I said, well, ich bin Deutsche Jüde.
    I'm a German.
    I was at the Eastern front.
    He didn't know a thing.
    You see?
    We laughed.
    We laughed.
    When you were interviewing people,
    when you were doing this intelligence work,
    did you feel that you had to tell them you were Jewish?
    Oh, when it was strictly business, I probably didn't.
    You know, we talked to psychologists.
    And we talked to all kinds of people, technical things.
    I was very busy.
    Sometimes, it was very difficult for me to interpret.
    I didn't know the English words, just very technical a lot
    of the stuff.
    And a lot of them were very interesting people, you know.
    And some were Nazis.
    What did that do to you to be sitting
    there talking to a Nazi?
    Or interpreting for a Nazi?
    Nazis, we just arrested them.
    We made sure that they were arrested.
    If they weren't some where they were locked up,
    we saw to it that they were locked up.
    There were places all over where the Nazis were being kept.
    Did you have any gut reactions to being with Nazis?
    Just damn Nazis, you know, Nazis.
    There were all sorts of people.
    Sometimes I talked to German people
    that defended their position.
    And then, of course, I argued with them.
    But deep down, I saw that everybody
    is just trying to get by, trying to make a living, get by.
    It was Hitler.
    It was Hitler that did it all.
    Nobody but Hitler.
    The rest of them just did what they were told.
    You can't believe how brutal they were.
    You can't believe how terrible it was in Germany.
    I mean, I know I have people that told me--
    I was with my granddaughter in Paderborn three years ago.
    And we had dinner in this lady's house
    that is a professor that is writing
    books about the Jewish families there.
    And I had been corresponding with her.
    And that's how I first met my connections, contacts
    over there.
    Fantastic lady.
    And she invited this man.
    His name was Dr. Offenberg.
    He was man in his 80s.
    And we were talking, and he knew a lot of the Jewish families
    in Paderborn, my grandparents.
    He knew my grandfather.
    And his father had already been an attorney there.
    And he had himself had been a captain in the Wehrmacht.
    And my brother's daughter, my niece, was sitting next to me.
    And she said to him in English-- he spoke English--
    she said, Dr. Offenberg, she said,
    how was it possible that in a country like Germany
    people could do things like this?
    And he said, let me tell you something.
    He said, when Hitler first came to power,
    Hindenburg had prostate cancer.
    The country was in a mess.
    He was a [GERMAN].
    He was an idiot, subaltern.
    We thought this guy not going to last three months.
    he was an idiot.
    He was a rabble rouser.
    Nobody paid much attention to him.
    But then, they were so good and they were so ruthless.
    I had a friend--
    I was actually there when it happened.
    It was a young man in the district attorney's office.
    And the Nazi [? bunsens ?] came in
    with their swastikas and their brown shirts and armbands.
    They clicked their heels, and they said,
    Heil Hitler, you see.
    And this guy didn't raise his hand.
    So they said to him, don't you know
    what you're supposed to do?
    And he answered, nicht mehr langer.
    That means not much longer now.
    Well, he disappeared.
    And I found out after the war that he was executed.
    That's all he did.
    If you showed any attitude that you
    didn't go along with the program, sister, that was it.
    That's how they operated.
    And that's how that whole thing was organized.
    That was demagoguery.
    That was power.
    They knew how to use that power.
    They had made up their mind before they started.
    And Hitler himself personally orchestrated all that.
    He was the one.
    The people were terrified.
    Let's talk about your journeys to some of these labor camps.
    Where did you go to?
    Nordhausen.
    I was in Nordhausen and was in another place
    near Braunschweig too.
    Let's talk about Nordhausen.
    Were you prepared for any of this?
    Did they give you any background information?
    No.
    They said it was a place where they had made V2 rockets.
    And the Air Force was interested in it.
    I was in there with engineers.
    And they still had people there that were very, very sick.
    It was really almost before the infantry got there.
    It was still terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible
    conditions.
    Can you describe Nordhausen?
    The smell and, you know, the people,
    they looked like animals.
    They looked terrible, in tatters and rags and eyes,
    and you could see they were dying.
    And it was terrible.
    Did you go up to any of them?
    No.
    I was scared.
    Nothing I could do.
    No.
    I stayed with the program.
    I stayed with the officers, you know.
    And everybody-- all the Americans,
    they couldn't believe it.
    Nobody could believe what we saw.
    Nobody could believe it.
    I couldn't even describe it.
    You can't describe it.
    I can't describe it.
    And then you think that could be me.
    What do you think when you see a homeless person in the street?
    All right, that's a good analogy.
    You go downtown and you see these people that are laying
    on these grates or whatever.
    What do you do?
    Do you go up and talk to them?
    You don't, right?
    And neither did I. I was just like everybody else.
    But it was like terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible,
    something like that could have happened.
    How is it possible?
    You don't know.
    Did any of them, any other prisoners
    try to talk to German to you?
    No.
    No.
    They didn't, no.
    I didn't have any contact.
    It was not like that.
    There was not an opportunity for that.
    We had to--
    How long were you in Nordhausen?
    An hour.
    Did you go into any of the barracks?
    No.
    You just went into the factory?
    Went into the tunnels.
    And they had already abandoned the work area.
    But we got some documents and some things that they needed.
    When were you there?
    Very, very early, one of my first trips out of Paris.
    So this would be what, May '45?
    Yeah, '45, late '45.
    What other labor camps did you go to?
    I don't remember the name.
    But I was in a place near Brunswick.
    It was in a field.
    What was there?
    By this time, the Germans had left.
    And there was still the stragglers around there.
    There were still people straggling around.
    There were already American troops in the area.
    Terrible condition.
    Terrible.
    Again, were you given any background information,
    any preparation?
    No.
    No, not really.
    Not really.
    Nobody really knew.
    No nobody had any idea of the dimensions of it.
    It was just even recently that people
    knew that there were concentration camps everywhere,
    hundreds of them.
    First you thought there was just Dachau and Auschwitz
    and Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen.
    It was everywhere, everywhere.
    And everywhere these terrible cruelties were going on,
    and these terrible, terrible things were happening.
    I was in Westphalia in a place after the war
    where they had a place where the Nazis had
    taken this whole village.
    This was for the SS.
    And they'd made the farmers--
    they'd resettled the farmers somewhere in Eastern Germany,
    promising them better farms.
    And what they were trying to do, they
    were trying to create a super race there.
    They had women there that they were breeding perfect Nazis.
    Well, of course, the experiment failed.
    But then it was in the castle.
    And the big shots-- and it was something that was actually
    endorsed directly by the top people, Hitler, you know,
    whatever the top lieutenants were, Goebbels and whatever.
    And now, it's a museum.
    And they had like a guardhouse.
    And they have all the letters there.
    And they had all tortures and the prisoners
    and what they did to them.
    Unbelievable.
    And even to this day, nobody knows,
    because they told me there that when the Allies came,
    there was a fire and burned a lot of the stuff up
    towards the end.
    The Nazis knew to destroy it.
    Do you think you were any different when
    you went into places like Nordhausen and other labor
    camps, were you any different than
    another typical American soldier because of your background?
    Do you think your response was different?
    No, I don't think my response was any different.
    But I think I was different.
    All the time, I told my buddies, now, more than ever--
    and I had already told them that earlier too during the war--
    I knew why I'm in the army.
    I know what I'm fighting for.
    I've really got something to fight for.
    But they said, no, we're right with you.
    We're fighting for the same thing, they told me.
    You're not by yourself.
    My friends told me that.
    We talked.
    We drink a beer and we talked about stuff like that.
    I said, I really--
    this is my people, you know.
    But, you know, I was also with the other German guys
    too when we got back to Paris or back to London
    when we were in the office.
    And you know something it's a funny thing that it comes up
    that we never talked about it.
    We talked about, did you go back to your hometown?
    Things like that.
    What did you do?
    Did you take a gun?
    Did you kill somebody?
    You know what I mean?
    We talked about stuff like that?
    Did you go back to Hanover?
    They wouldn't let me go.
    I was in Brunswick, which is very close.
    And I wanted to go.
    But I was with this colonel.
    And I wanted to go to Hanover, which was only about an hour,
    you know.
    At night, I was going take a Jeep and I said,
    I want to see Hanover.
    No, he says.
    If you go, I'm going to declare you AWOL.
    I don't want you to go.
    You stay right here with me.
    There are Russians out here, and I don't want you to go.
    So I didn't go.
    I never did get back to Hanover until long after the war.
    I didn't get back to Westphalia either.
    That was in the British zone.
    See?
    Paderborn and all these places, I didn't get back to many years
    later.
    So you stayed over in Europe for how long?
    In where?
    In Europe for how long?
    In the army.
    Yeah, I came back in 1946.
    1946, I came home.
    What did you do in the summer and in the fall of 1945?
    Well, I was sent back to England.
    And then the war was over.
    And they made me a translator.
    And I worked in an office above Marble Arch
    translating German technical documents.
    And then because I had a lot of time
    in the ETO and everything-- of course, I spent a lot of time
    with my father.
    I sent my brother away ready.
    My brother was here.
    And I applied to get home, you know.
    What I had a chance to do, the translation center--
    oh, my life, I did these things--
    they had something in Wright Field, Ohio.
    And they decided to send me to Wright Field in the service.
    I was in the service, special kind of accommodations
    and everything, to go to Wright Field to be a translator there.
    What was your rank then?
    I was still a technical sergeant.
    And, of course, I was ready to go right away.
    I was getting back to America.
    And I went to Wright Field.
    I went on a boat, went through New York.
    I got out at Times Square and I saw Frank Sinatra singing
    and the women, the girls, screaming.
    And then and then I went to Wright Field.
    And as soon as I got to Wright Field,
    I applied for my discharge.
    And they came-- they told us that I was eligible.
    And they came and they offered me a government job right away.
    They needed us--
    To do what?
    Civil service job, to stay there as a translator.
    And I could have gotten like $100 a week,
    which was a lot already, and then right away,
    a civil service rank.
    But I didn't want any part of it.
    I wanted to get out and be free.
    Be free.
    And I applied for my discharge.
    And on January 11, 1947, I was discharged.
    Why did you want to be free?
    What did you mean by that?
    I didn't like the being in service,
    of being in the government.
    I wanted to be on my own and do my own thing.
    So where did you go then?
    I came to Washington.
    I stayed with my mother at first.
    She lived in Washington then.
    And my brother was already in service.
    And first, I took a trip.
    I hitchhiked on an airplane.
    I had my uniform still.
    And I hitchhiked from National Airport
    all the way to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to different places.
    And I applied back for my job, that company
    was working, because as a veteran,
    I was entitled to get my job back.
    And they offered me a job.
    They wanted to make me the manager of the tired apartment
    in Las Vegas.
    And I think that job paid $100 a week.
    And I knew then that cab drivers were making $100 a week
    in Washington.
    My mother was here.
    And I told them I'd let them know.
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum interview with Wolfgang Mueller.
    This is tape three, side A. And you
    said you were offered-- it's the end of the war.
    You've been discharged, and you were offered
    a job back in Albuquerque.
    Well, I came back to Wash--
    First, I stopped in Kansas and visited my brother in the army.
    We had our pictures taken together in uniform,
    and then I made my way back to Washington.
    And I tried to--
    I lived with my mother, and I wanted
    to get on a boat coming home and everything.
    I was going to be a writer or do something really fantastic
    with my life.
    And I wasn't going to be a slave to anything
    and really do something really fabulous.
    And then my mother knew some really great people,
    and she introduced me to them, and I applied
    for all these different jobs.
    I never did manage to get any of those jobs.
    I did get one job.
    A guy promised me in the real estate thing,
    and that was going to then-- he was going to Florida.
    And he was going to get me a better job.
    And then when he came back, I couldn't get together with him.
    I didn't like what he offered me.
    I didn't want to do that.
    So my brother-in-law, he was in the meat business.
    But he had rented the slaughterhouse during the war
    to the Giant food.
    He got me a job in the Giant food and road and rail cars.
    So that's the first thing I did, and I got a car.
    And then the Giant food decided that they
    didn't need the slaughterhouse anymore
    so I went to work for my brother-in-law.
    So that's how I got into the food industry.
    And while I was working for him, I met my wife,
    and I got married.
    Is your wife from Europe also?
    No, she's from here.
    Her great grandfather is buried in Washington.
    Unusual, really Jewish.
    And my Jewish identification got much stronger
    after I married her.
    And then I don't know what the hell she married me for.
    She thought I had money.
    She liked my accent.
    I fooled her about that.
    I didn't have any.
    So then I worked in the slaughterhouse,
    and eventually, after both of my children were born,
    I quit there, and I went in business for myself.
    And then I was in the wholesale meat business for myself,
    and I retired from that in 1976, 1977.
    And I didn't have much to do so I decided to real estate.
    So real estate for about 15 years.
    And then my son-in-law, he stayed in the meat business.
    My daughter's husband, and he did really well with it.
    And he sold his partnership in the meat business,
    and he signed a covenant that he couldn't sell meat
    for 10 years.
    He got paid for that, and he had a chance to buy a fish company.
    So we were very close, and he said, dad, you have to help me.
    He was a partner in this other company.
    If I do this, you think should I do that?
    Yeah, let's do it.
    So that was six years ago now, going on seven years.
    And we bought this fish company in Jesup, Maryland.
    And we're doing absolutely fantastic.
    It's very exciting.
    I'm very, very busy selling fish.
    Wonderful.
    Because fish is not meat.
    [LAUGHTER]
    Before we finish, let's talk about some of your feelings.
    What some of your thoughts are.
    Do you think you have changed religiously
    since what you were as a child and a young person?
    Because of what background you come from?
    No, I don't think I've changed very much about anything
    that way.
    I think what has changed now is I'm
    really proud of being a Jew.
    Really proud.
    It's no more a curse.
    It's no more a curse as you thought when you were younger.
    I don't have to be-- and I know I will never
    be afraid of anything or anybody again.
    I've been afraid.
    I mean, in that respect, I've maybe learned something.
    That's a great feeling.
    And I think after I went through what I did,
    and I think from the stories that I've
    told you and my feelings, I was never scared of anything.
    Never scared of going into business,
    taking huge risks in business, and making a pile of money,
    and losing a pile of money.
    That's never bothered me.
    Finding a girl that I wanted and just
    going ahead and marrying her.
    Or do whatever I wanted to do.
    I've done those things.
    And I really am living a great life,
    and I think that's the way to live.
    And as far as the religious part is concerned, I mean,
    I'm a Jew, and I'm very comfortable
    in a traditional, Jewish environment.
    But I'm also a modern person, and I
    know that I'm not hung up on ritual and stuff
    like that, on what somebody says you're supposed to do this
    and supposed to do that.
    I don't go for that at all.
    And like for example, I give you for example.
    My mother died on January 10, 1970.
    It was just a few days ago 28 years ago.
    So I said my mother died 20 years ago.
    I want to light a candle.
    So my wife says, well, it's not her yahrzeit.
    You haven't got a card from the shul.
    I said it is her yahrzeit.
    I'm lighting a candle.
    That's the extent of my religion.
    I do it my way.
    Is it painful for you to think back about some
    of the sights and smells and sulfur
    that you saw when you were in these labor camps?
    Is that painful for you to think about that?
    Any kind of stuff--
    it's a detached feeling.
    It's not personal.
    I personally didn't experienced that,
    and I think it's an interesting question that you ask.
    Like for example, when we read my grandmother's letters
    before she went to the camp and stories in the books,
    my sister goes to pieces.
    And she can't stand it.
    She doesn't want any parts of Germany.
    I don't feel that way.
    I'm not built that way.
    It doesn't touch me that way at all.
    It's something that happened, and we have to deal with it.
    You know what I mean?
    Whatever it is, it's painful.
    It's painful.
    My mother died.
    My father died.
    Terrible things happen in life.
    I've been fortunate.
    I mean, I have always avoided personal suffering
    to a very large extent.
    I've always gotten along really well.
    But I'm not that way.
    I'm hard.
    Are you hard--
    And honest about it.
    Are you hard because of what you had to do as a young teenager
    to leave your family?
    Do you think that led to it as a contributing factor?
    I think in every person's life, there's all kinds of trauma.
    There was trauma in my life because
    of the terrible marriage my father and my mother had.
    And I think that was much stronger to me personally,
    and these are the things that you're talking about.
    Of course, all of it contributed to it.
    And of course, it was a trauma to be a Jew in Germany.
    But I think it did toughen me.
    I think I'm so hard because of all these things.
    I think that has made me very, very hard.
    I went to the--
    they had a Holocaust thing at Frostburg College,
    and my granddaughter was a manager of the whole thing,
    and they had hundreds of people there.
    It was a huge success.
    And they had a couple there that was from Schindler's List,
    and they spoke.
    And she's done it for several years.
    As a matter of fact, the year before, Regina, next door,
    had been there and talked to them and everything.
    It's like a terrific thing that she does.
    Because she's a great girl, my granddaughter.
    And they did all this stuff, and people talked.
    And I talked to them.
    We had dinner with them.
    And then I found out that they were getting $5,000 for coming
    there, and they were getting all the expenses paid,
    and they do it all the time.
    And that's how they make a living.
    What can I tell you?
    (LAUGHS)
    When your children were the age that you were,
    14, 15, 16 when things were getting bad in Germany,
    and you were then--
    when conditions were getting bad,
    and you saw the Hitler posters and so forth.
    Did that--
    You mean, when I was little?
    My children weren't little.
    No, no, no, when your children became the age that you were.
    Yes.
    When you were going through a difficult time.
    Did that bring it back to you in time?
    Did it make you think of your childhood
    again when your children were that age?
    No, no, at that time I was very busy making a living.
    Very busy.
    I was working day and night trying
    to make some money in order to support my family.
    And I didn't think about that.
    But I did notice one thing about my children.
    My daughter in particular.
    We were in Glen Echo once years ago
    and they didn't allow Colored people in Glen Echo,
    and my children were furious.
    And they feel like they had those kind of feelings,
    and my daughter's very, very active
    in [? Washington ?] Hebrew Congregation.
    She's on the board of directors and all that stuff.
    My son-in-law, he's a great guy, but he
    talks like a terrible bigot.
    He hates Blacks, and he talks about them all the time.
    And you should hear how my daughter lies into him.
    She doesn't stand for that stuff.
    And my children have a lot of me.
    Are your political--
    You don't have to tell them.
    They know.
    My children know.
    Are your political views today influenced by your background?
    Well, obviously.
    How could it not be any other way?
    I'm certainly for freedom, and I don't
    believe in vested interests, and things like that.
    And I believe in a lot of opportunity.
    I believe in a free country.
    I believe in everything that the American Constitution
    believes in.
    And I would fight anybody for that.
    And I will not stand for anything, anybody,
    to step on any of it.
    Not even a little bit.
    You said earlier that you've become more right wing
    as you've gotten older.
    Yeah, I am.
    I am.
    I'm definitely for Israel.
    And I'm for the rights of the Israelis
    to have a country over there, and I support it
    in every way I can.
    And I'm for the Holocaust Museum, and I went to the--
    maybe we should finish up on this note.
    I'm a contributor, and everybody in my family is.
    We all are strong contributors to the museum.
    I had the opportunity to go to the dedication.
    I was one of the people that was there.
    The dedication was a terrible day.
    Were you there?
    It was raining and awful.
    And I saw those seven presidents and their wives
    sitting on that beam there, on the platform.
    And it was a great day for me, and I said to my wife,
    you know something?
    I can't believe it, but we won.
    And that's how I feel.
    Are you comfortable--
    At one time, it didn't seem like we would ever win.
    No, we did.
    It was a lost cause.
    I was part of a lost cause.
    A lost people.
    A lost cause.
    For [? Phalen, ?] but it turned around.
    So now I know that things do turn around.
    Are you comfortable when you go back to Germany?
    Yes, no problem.
    No problem at all.
    So you don't bring any preconceptions?
    No, no, sometimes I think, the first trip in '65
    I had twinges of that.
    I think maybe another trip and my wife
    and I went for the first time to a little a town.
    And we went to some of these restaurants,
    and we saw twinges of it.
    But I see, in this last time, there
    was this guy that had a bakery shop.
    And his grandfather already bought his flour
    from my grandfather, great grandfather.
    Big, big fat guy.
    Looks like Jerry Snyder.
    So I became friendly with him.
    We kidded around and laughed and drank together.
    And then the morning--
    I'm an early riser because I'm in the food business
    and very early in the morning there, I left the town.
    I went back to the little village, and I looked for him,
    and he was back in his bakery place baking bread.
    And we were talking.
    We're talking German.
    We talked about a lot of stuff.
    He traveled all over the world.
    With a lot in common.
    And then I thanked him for coming to the dedication
    the day before.
    And he said, yeah.
    It's very, very lot of insight about what you saying,
    he said to me.
    He said, I wanted to come.
    A lot of the fellows here said that you shouldn't go there
    for that.
    But I didn't care.
    I wanted to come.
    I wanted to come.
    And I hugged him, and I thanked him, and I left.
    But you see, all the people are like that.
    People have killed.
    Do you feel German in any way today?
    No, I don't feel German, but I still
    like a lot of German things.
    I like good white wine.
    I like salami.
    I like it when I'm in a German hotel.
    I like the service.
    I like the European way.
    I feel very, very good with a lot of those things.
    And yeah, I do.
    I like a lot of positive things about it that I like.
    My wife can tell you more about it than I can.
    But, yes.
    We have to go.
    OK.
    We have to terminate it now.
    Yes, well, thank you very much for doing the interview.
    OK, I enjoyed it.
    Thank you for taking all this time and trouble.
    I hope it was worthwhile.
    It certainly was.
    This concludes the interview of Wolfgang [Mueller.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    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.
    Interviewee
    Mr. Wolfgang Mueller
    Interviewer
    Gail Schwartz
    Date
    interview:  1998 January 21

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    3 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
    Mueller, Wolfgang, 1919-

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Gail Schwartz, on behalf of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History Branch, conducted the interview with Wolfgang Mueller on January 21, 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:
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    Additional Resources

    Transcripts (3)
    Summary (English)
    Time Coded Notes (4)

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

    Oral history interview with Ernest Kolben

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henry Kolber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Greifer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anna Wollner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Kate Wacz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erwin Forley

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ernie Marx

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Doris Rauch

    Oral History

    Doris Rauch, born August 26, 1920 in Brno, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), discusses her childhood in Brno; the death of her father in 1936; the German invasion of Czechoslovakia; being unable to attend a German-speaking university because she was a Jew; attending a textile school; working in a factory; buying goods on the black market; her deportation to Theresienstadt on a passenger train; volunteering to work planting trees in Bohemia with her mother; returning to Theresienstadt after six weeks; avoiding transports to the East; being put on a transport in September 1942 along with her mother and boyfriend; being taken to Raasiku, Estonia and separated from her mother; being taken to Tallinn, Estonia in December 1942 to clear rubble for the Holzmann construction firm; being taken to a camp in Ereda at the end of 1943; how she and other women stopped menstruating; working in the forest; a romantic relationship between a prisoner and an SS commander; being given a ring by male inmate; contracting hepatitis in Ereda; being taken to Stutthof; how she had written in a diary every day in Estonia; being very sick; arriving at Bergen-Belsen in April 1945; taking another prisoner’s place to work in a factory; finding fliers saying that the Allies were approaching; being taken to the Danish border at the end of April 1945 and turned over to the Danish Red Cross who provided food, care, and new clothing; living in Sweden for two years working as a secretary for the World Jewish Congress; living with two women she met in the camps; moving to the United States in May 1947 and experiencing culture shock; marrying and moving to Chicago, then Pittsburg, and then to Washington D.C.; the effect of her experiences on her religious beliefs; and reparations from Germany.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Elman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gerald Rosenstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ivan Becker

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Romana Koplewicz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Koplewicz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irving Schaffer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Klein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Pisik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Rosicka

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Salomon Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Suzanne Foldes

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tibor Vince

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elias Piorko

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Hildesheim

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Peter Masters

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Wolke

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ionel Ghelman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irimia Solomon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lotte Salus

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irena Kirkland

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hans Hirsch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Milton Shurr

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ludwig Jacob

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Barbara Artman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fritz Schonbach

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Charles Barber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tibor Borsos

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Robert Kertesz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Kahn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Susan Warsinger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Arnold Weiss

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sia Hertsberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Chava Frajhof

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Israel Frajhof

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Edward Novakoff

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Celia Feldschuh

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Nicole Yancey

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jaffa Munk

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frances Hirshfeld

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Moris Gluckman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Margie Rosenthal

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Emma Mogilensky

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Isaiah Henig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ida Henig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marcel Drimer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michael Silberstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joan Schwab

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erwin Deutscher

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Pick

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hedi Pope

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bella Simon Pasternak

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marion Friedman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Strassburger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jadwiga Dziekonski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Harvey

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thomas B. Gardiner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Roberta Jones

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Christine Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hugh Jenkins

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rene Edgar Tressler

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Stefan Wohl

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Yehuda Adam

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Arlette de Long

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Adam

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Herbert Bitter

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rachel Goldfarb

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tania Rozmaryn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frank Ephraim

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Peter Phillips

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Ichiuji

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Horowitz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hermann Kosak

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Dolly Bestandig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Goldie Gendelman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rhoda Kuflik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Hess

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jutta Levy

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Klari Rudnai

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jill Pauly

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jack Reuben

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Bayer

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Tilda Finzi Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Zwi Golombek

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Samuel B. Hagner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Werner E. Michel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Guta Jacobson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helen Luksenburg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with William Luksenburg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rose Weisfeld

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth E. Greifer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Nesse Godin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Maryla Korn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michel Margosis

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lena Jurand

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Wallace Witkowski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Peter Masters

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Lena Gitter

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jacob Wiener

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Noah Roitman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Richard W. Peterson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Riane Gruss

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Regina Spiegel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Charles Stein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hannah Kalman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Morris Rosen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sam Spiegel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Gutter

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henry Greenbaum

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Alper

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michael Lin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hannah Kalman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Dorrit L. Ostberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alice Eberstarkova Masters

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Martin Weiss

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Leonard Gordon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fritz Gluckstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Brigitte Freidin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Kristine Belfoure

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Hill Leonard

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Kurt Roberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alfred Schnog

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Taucher

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helen Goldkind

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Inge Katzenstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Werner Katzenstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Goldman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Paulette Stessin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Margitta Cooper

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erika Eckstut

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tole Johannes Madna

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henri Dupuy

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Halina Peabody

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marcel Bercau

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rolph Hammel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Norbert V. Hilsberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alfred Munzer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Maria Mandel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Yvonne Mignot de Royere

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Susan Berlin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with John Bucur

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lore Schneider

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frank Liebermann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marianne Liebermann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thea S. Rips

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Andrew Glass

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Renate Fischer Chernoff

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eli Dortort

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hilda Seftor

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Felix Nicinski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Brombart

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gunter Haimann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alfred Lakritz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rita Rubinstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anita Etzyon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Melvin Galun

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Magdalena Farkas Berkovics

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sol Mackler

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Theresia Bauer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Carolina Taitz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helen Schwartz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irene Silver

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Herman Taube

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Regine Ginsberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ursula Guttstadt McKinney

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Rappaport

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Edith Langer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marianne Milkman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Phillip Abraham

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Arnstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gertrude Scarlett Epstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Matilde Neuwirt

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Susanne K. Bennet

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marianne Roberts

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Harry Markowicz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Julie A. Keefer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erica Laufer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Barbara Goldberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Liselotte Epstein Ivry

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hans Ziegler

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Vera Levine

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Guenter Lewy

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Malvy Solomon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elia Miranski and Genia Miranski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Maria Kordalewski

    Oral History

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

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