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Oral history interview with Samuel B. Hagner

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1998.A.0080 | RG Number: RG-50.106.0098

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    Oral history interview with Samuel B. Hagner
    Transcript
    This is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    volunteer collection interview with Dr. Samuel Hagner
    conducted by Gail Schwartz on May 22, 1998,
    at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
    This is tape number one side A. What is your full name?
    Samuel Benedict Hagner.
    And where were you born?
    And when were you born?
    I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
    on November 1, 1925.
    Let's talk a little bit about your family.
    Who were the members of your immediate family?
    My parents, George Wills Hagner, my mother, Evelyn Benedict
    Hagner, I have an older brother, George Wills Hagner Jr.
    And I have a younger brother John Benedict Hagner.
    And what was your childhood like?
    When you were growing up, was it a very quiet, calm childhood?
    Yes.
    It was a quiet, calm childhood.
    My parents were Quakers.
    My older brother became a conscientious objector
    during World War II.
    He served in civilian public service.
    He refused to serve in the military.
    So he served in one of these civilian public service
    camps run by the US government.
    During those years, I can recall the early war years.
    Well, let's not get to the war time yet.
    Let's talk about just your child--
    what kind of education did you have?
    I started out in public schools in the Philadelphia system.
    Later on, when I was approximately--
    oh, let me think.
    It was 1936.
    I would have been about 11.
    My older brother was not doing well in high school,
    in the local high school.
    My father was concerned about what
    was going to happen to him.
    So he made arrangements to have him transferred
    to a local private school for boys in Germantown,
    Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
    And this was Germantown Academy, a private day school for boys.
    He found out at the time from the headmaster
    that he could send all three of us at a discount.
    So I entered into Germantown Academy in the seventh grade.
    My younger brother started in the first grade.
    We were five years apart, roughly, 1920, 1925, and 1930.
    So I graduated from Germantown Academy in 1942, in June 1942.
    How religious was your family?
    Not religious in the usual sense of the word,
    my parents became concerned about the war that was--
    what's the word?
    Started in Europe, or beginning to show
    signs of Hitler's activities, they
    became deeply interested in pacifism at that time,
    and became very active in the local Friends
    meeting, one of the Friends meetings in Philadelphia.
    I was not-- at that time, I had not--
    I was not born as a Quaker.
    I can remember, as a boy, attending the Unitarian church,
    for example, the local Unitarian church.
    My parents were not so much interested
    in dogma or doctrine, religious dogma or doctrine.
    They were more-- I think became interested in Quakers because
    of the pacifistic stand.
    They really were, I would say, adogmatic.
    It was more concerned about the politics
    and the social ramifications of what the Quakers were
    interested in at the time.
    And how did they impart that to you
    when you were a young child?
    I'm talking about pre-war.
    How did they impart that to you?
    Mainly by discussions around the family dinner table,
    I knew they were going to a Friends meeting.
    They made no requirements that I attend the meeting with them.
    I think, at that time, I was still
    going to the Unitarian church on my own.
    Because I had friends that attended the Unitarian church.
    And for me, it was a social experience more
    than a religious experience.
    Around the age of 13, 14, I became more interested in what
    they were doing.
    And my older brother, at that time, he was having to--
    he was in college.
    He entered college in 1937, Oberlin College.
    He became interested in what was happening worldwide
    and particularly, in pacifism.
    And I heard more and more family discussions.
    So I decided that I would have a look at the Friends meeting
    also.
    And I attended some Friends meeting
    with my parents and my older brother for a period of time.
    And then decided that I would become a member also.
    That was something that I had to take the initiative on myself.
    I had to make a formal request to the Quaker meeting
    to become a member.
    And I can recall being visited at my home
    by some of the elders who asked me questions for perhaps
    a half hour or more, and then decided
    that I would be welcomed as a member of the local Friends
    meeting.
    When they asked you questions, did any of them
    have to deal with war and fighting?
    Not so much, at that time, they were
    more interested in why I wanted to join the Friends meeting
    and what my concept was of Quakerism, if you will.
    And I can remember discussing things like the light within.
    And they wanted to know what I meant by the light within.
    I had done some reading on the subject.
    It was much more of that kind of a focus.
    I don't recall any real focus on the war at the time
    or what was happening in Europe.
    When did you first become aware of conditions in Europe,
    or let's say, how old were you when you
    heard of a man named Hitler?
    You were born in 1925.
    He came into power in 1933.
    So obviously, you were too young then.
    Do you have any recollections of your early memories
    of who this man, Hitler was?
    I don't recall exactly when.
    But it must have been somewhere in the late '30s, possibly
    1937, 1938.
    Somewhere in there I must have become aware of Hitler,
    because around the age of 14 or 15
    was when I began to have discussions
    with my so-called surrogate sister.
    This was a girl that lived down the street, two doors down
    the street.
    She was two years younger.
    We would get together mostly on Saturday evenings.
    I never had a sister.
    And I wanted the sister badly.
    And so she became the one that she
    obliged by taking on that role.
    We would get together on Saturday evenings.
    This was not a formal date.
    We would sit in her living room, usually.
    Her parents knew where we were.
    My parents knew where I was.
    They would leave us alone.
    And we'd talk to the wee hours of the morning about the kinds
    of things that teenagers talk about, boys, girls, sex,
    dating, so forth.
    But those were serious times.
    And we both knew what was happening in Europe.
    So the conversation would always steer around
    to what we thought was happening in Europe, to the war,
    to Hitler, obviously, and his gobbling up most of Europe,
    or at least parts of Europe.
    And we would get around to the subject of concentration camps
    sooner or later.
    She had information.
    I believe-- I can't be absolutely sure of this.
    But if my memory serves me correctly,
    she was getting information from relatives in Europe,
    which we non-Jews did not have.
    And the news media at that time gave very little attention
    to the subject of whether the camps existed, and if so,
    to what extent.
    Was she Christian or Jewish?
    She was Jewish.
    I can recall getting into many-- and I practically
    want to cry at this now.
    I would argue with her and say, no, no, no.
    Things cannot be that bad.
    Man cannot treat his fellow man in such an atrocious way.
    And she would look at me, shake her head.
    She called me her starry eyed idealist,
    or that poor little Quaker boy that didn't quite know
    what the world was all about.
    And that's what we would do.
    And this continued on until I went off to college.
    I was 16 at the time, but I went to college.
    I turned 17 in my freshman year at Oberlin.
    Did you-- we'll get to your college years in a moment.
    Did you have other Jewish friends?
    Or was she your only Jewish friend?
    Yes.
    I had several others, boys.
    But she was special.
    She was the sister that I always wanted.
    And somehow, we had a simpatico relationship.
    I understood her most of the time.
    And she understood me most of the time.
    We just liked each other.
    It's interesting that because she was two years younger,
    and teenagers being what they are,
    we just never saw each other in a romantic light.
    Who would think of dating a girl two years younger?
    I used to take her out to a movie, but as I would a sister.
    And her name?
    Doris, Doris [? Wile. ?]
    Did Doris go to your school with you?
    No, she went to an all girls school, a private school.
    She was quite well to do.
    Her father was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
    But she was economically better off than I was.
    They had a summer place on the Jersey Shore
    to which she would go every summer, which
    plays a part later when I returned from the war.
    What kind of work did your father do?
    My father was a CPA.
    During the '30s, he was a manager
    of a savings loan association.
    In those days, they were called building loan associations.
    Subsequently, I don't recall exactly when,
    I think it was after the war.
    He put into practice firms for himself
    and set up his own little accounting business, which
    my two brothers later joined.
    Did you go to Sunday school?
    Simply the Unitarian church that I mentioned earlier,
    and I did that, probably, I would guess
    during the latency period from probably
    age eight to perhaps 12 or 13.
    I don't have a memory of attending church
    before the age of eight.
    Do you have any memories of hearing about Hitler marching,
    annexing Austria in the spring of '38 or the war
    starting in Poland in September '39?
    Does any of that mean--
    bring back anything?
    My most distinct memory is, in 1939,
    climbing Mount Washington with my father and my older brother,
    I believe it was.
    We came down off of Mount Washington.
    And we're going to stay in a cabin,
    but they had cabins in those days
    for people stayed overnight.
    And there was a radio on the cabin table.
    And my father turned it on.
    I still remember hearing Neville Chamberlain
    give his famous speech.
    My father looked at us and said, boys, this means war.
    And we're going to be in it one of these days.
    Roosevelt will not stand for this, or comments
    to that effect.
    So that must have been 1939.
    So at least, by that time, we were definitely
    aware of what was happening.
    But my father's comment was that he was certain
    that we would be in the war.
    Were you frightened to hear that?
    You were, what?
    13, 14.
    13, 14, I don't recall.
    All I can remember is his saying that and saying, boys,
    this is the way it's going to be.
    I probably was.
    I mean, what does a 13, 14 year old know about war?
    So then you said you graduated from high school at 16.
    So that would be in 1941?
    '42.
    '42, and then what happened?
    I entered Oberlin College in the fall of 1942.
    Let's back up.
    What happened with the bombing of Pearl Harbor?
    What were your memories?
    I don't remember much of that.
    That's interesting that you ask, because that
    was 1941, start of my senior year or that summer.
    And that would have been what?
    December 7, '41.
    December 7, [INAUDIBLE] my senior high school, yes.
    United States is now at war.
    I don't remember much of that.
    It's interesting that you mention that.
    Because at some point later, I remember
    thinking in those discussions with my surrogate sister,
    we hardly ever talked about the Pacific theater.
    It was always Europe.
    I guess, the Pacific just seemed so far away to Easterners.
    Where had her family come-- you said
    she had relatives that were still in Europe.
    Do you remember where they were?
    No, I don't.
    No, I don't.
    I think her parents were American born.
    This must have been grandparents, or I don't know.
    Extended family, so then you decided to go to college.
    Yes.
    I entered Oberlin College in the fall of 1942.
    Part of the reason for that was that my older brother
    had graduated from Oberlin College the preceding June.
    I chose Oberlin for several other reasons.
    One, it was a small liberal arts college.
    Number two, it was a college that one could
    attend without very much money.
    I also had a scholarship, which got me
    through my freshman year.
    Number four, is it?
    Third or fourth reason, the only condition
    my mother made on where I went to college
    was that it be a coeducational school.
    You'll recall I went to an all boys school.
    And she felt that I lacked something in my education.
    And that I should get a [? look ?] away to college.
    And there was one final reason for choosing Oberlin.
    They had no fraternities or sororities.
    And to me, that was a more Democratic institution.
    Hence, for all those reasons, I entered Oberlin
    in September of 1942.
    And did you know what you were going to study then?
    I had not the foggiest.
    I just wanted a liberal arts education.
    And I just thought I would wait and see.
    I was interested mainly in the social sciences.
    I knew that at that time.
    How much knowledge did you have, at that point, of history
    and geography, especially if you are--
    did you have much?
    No.
    I had precious little knowledge.
    So then you began college.
    And then what happened when you turned 18?
    As the end of my freshman year was coming to--
    as my freshman year was coming to a close, excuse me,
    my mother suggested that I spend that last summer of freedom,
    the summer of 1943, doing something that I might not
    have a chance to do again.
    So I spent the summer of 1943 in a Quaker work camp
    in Indianapolis, Indiana, working in a Black slum
    with a group of Quakers.
    We were helping to renovate a settlement house.
    This had come on the heels of the race
    riots that occurred in Indianapolis in 1943, as I
    recall.
    So this was during the aftermath of that.
    We spent the summer, boys and girls,
    all of us working in this area helping to renovate, as I say,
    and build a new settlement house.
    I became more and more interested in the issue
    of pacifism at that time, because many
    of the members of the work camp were pacifistically oriented,
    or had tendencies towards that.
    In fact, there were several people in the work camp
    who were actively pursuing a noncombatant course in the war
    effort, if you will.
    During that same summer, my mother made this suggestion.
    Because she knew I was wrestling with what kind of a stand
    I was going to take in the war, that I
    visit my older brother in civilian public service camp.
    At that time, he was in a government camp
    located in Big Flats, New York, which
    is between Corning and Elmira.
    It was a so-called forestry camp,
    meaning they were pulling weeds.
    I took her suggestion.
    I took her up on her suggestion, and it must have
    been in late August of 1943.
    I hopped on the train and went up
    to visit him and stay with him for a week
    in the civilian public service camp.
    I was appalled, frankly, by what I experienced there,
    what I saw there.
    Here were these well-trained, well-educated persons
    like my brother who were idling away in this camp
    doing nothing but pulling weeds, doing menial tasks.
    And I think most of them were depressed.
    And the whole atmosphere was just overwhelming to me.
    And I came away from that thinking,
    that I could never take.
    Even though I already had doubts about my ability
    to take that kind of a stand, this put the lid on it.
    Or it kept it for me.
    To see that kind of an atmosphere to me was--
    it was just appalling to see people just
    sitting there doing nothing.
    Your--
    Morale was, the morale was very, very poor,
    as you might imagine.
    I remember my brother waving his hand
    at the beds in the tent in which they were living.
    There were perhaps 14, 16 cots in the tent.
    And he said, we could staff a small college
    with the degrees that are here in this tent.
    And he was one of them.
    He had a college degree at that point.
    When you were in your freshman year in Oberlin and this summer
    experience, how much did you all talk about the war
    and what was happening?
    How much did you know what was happening?
    We talked quite a bit.
    There was a Quaker meeting on campus, a student Quaker
    meeting.
    And I attended that on a regular basis.
    The whole war effort was on our minds
    constantly, partly because men were
    being drafted right and left.
    My fellow students were.
    One or two would leave every week to go into the service.
    This was constantly on our minds.
    My roommate at that time had suffered polio as a child.
    It was obvious that he was going to be a 4F, was a 4F.
    Two other housemates were 4F, one with rheumatic heart
    disease.
    I've forgotten why the other was.
    This obviously led us into more and more discussions
    about who was taking what position.
    And of course, the 4Fs wished that they could serve.
    And they were asking me what my feelings were about it.
    And of course, this got us into a number of discussions,
    because they didn't quite approve of my feelings.
    Were you upset that the United States was at war?
    Yes.
    I was upset.
    I think somewhere along the way I had been taught
    or got the idea that World War II was pretty much
    the direct result of World War I and the aftermath,
    the Versailles Treaty, and so forth.
    I don't wish to oversimplify that
    but just to make that statement that I became convinced
    that, even though by that time, 1942, '42,
    we were past the point of no return, obviously.
    And with what was happening in Europe
    there was no other way to stop Hitler.
    But I felt that the Quakers had been saying all along
    that things should have been handled differently
    possibly back as early as the late '20s or even early '20s.
    And so a witness was being made by certain people.
    And I think that was the position that my older
    brother took, for example.
    And that was the basis for his pacifism.
    I became torn between those kinds
    of thoughts and the feeling that I was part of society.
    I owed something to society.
    And I simply couldn't turn my back.
    So I struggled with this.
    I was on the horns of a dilemma, if you will,
    wanting to identify with my family,
    at the same time wanting to identify with society.
    I finally decided that I would take the 1-A-O position,
    the 1-A-O stand.
    And I applied to the local draft board with that in mind.
    That meant that I would serve in the Army or whatever
    branch of the military as a non-combatant.
    So when I turned 18 in November 1943,
    that's exactly what happened.
    Had you started your sophomore year at college?
    Yes, excuse me.
    I had re-entered college in the fall of 1943 in November.
    Because Oberlin had gone on a trimester system.
    So they didn't start the fall trimester
    until the 1st of November, which happened to be my birthday.
    I registered at that time in Oberlin,
    had the registration back to Philadelphia,
    to my draft board, which gave me a few
    more weeks of freedom as the correspondence
    went back and forth.
    I was formally inducted in Philadelphia
    in January of 1944.
    And actually, went into the service in February 1944,
    I was able to complete my third semester at Oberlin before I
    went into the service.
    I actually didn't take final exams.
    I didn't have to.
    When all the professors teaching my various courses
    heard what was happening to me, they just told me to go.
    I didn't have to take finals.
    What was the reaction of other family members
    and other friends to your decision
    to do this, become a conscientious objector?
    Of course, my parents were pleased
    that I was taking some kind of a conscientious objector stand.
    They were not pleased that I was going to serve in the military.
    I think they probably wished that I
    would have taken the same stand as my older brother.
    But they didn't object either.
    I was not told what to do.
    That was up to me to make that decision which
    I appreciated at the time.
    What was your friend Doris' reaction?
    I think she was worried.
    I can't remember exactly.
    I think she was pleased that I was doing something
    about it, that I was going to serve in the military.
    But I think she was worried.
    She didn't want to see me go off to war.
    I think she thought I was a little too young to do it.
    But I--
    So then,
    But excuse me, I think she was pleased
    that I felt some obligation to society, that I
    felt that I owed society a debt to make some contribution.
    At that point had you heard in any detail
    about the persecution of the Jews and other prisoners,
    or anything about camps?
    Did you know anything about that at that point?
    I must have heard something from my conversations
    with Doris, my so-called sister from what she was indicating.
    I don't recall that the news media really gave us
    much information.
    But I was aware that something was happening.
    To what extent, at least I was being told by her, for example,
    that the Jews are being persecuted.
    To what extent, I don't think we were absolutely sure.
    And this certainly had played a role in my decision
    to serve in the military also.
    I really can't add any more to that, I don't think.
    Why do you say that added to your decision
    to serve in the military?
    Because if something indeed like this were going on,
    even though I wasn't sure, and I would argue with Doris
    about it, if it turned out to be differently,
    I don't know how I would have felt if I
    hadn't served in some capacity.
    I can't answer that, of course.
    Because my decision to serve in the military
    was based on a number of factors, of course.
    It was a complicated decision.
    What were the other factors?
    That I wanted to give some credence
    to what my parents stood for, and what
    they had been teaching me, and the people with whom I
    had grown up.
    I was torn, as I say.
    I wasn't quite sure that this would be a very sensible thing
    to do.
    How does one be a conscientious objector in the military?
    I remember going to the NSPRO in Philadelphia.
    That's the National Service Board for Religious Objectors,
    and telling them what my decision was.
    And I recall they're saying to me, well,
    you've taken a very difficult stand.
    It may not be easy, because what you're doing
    is neither fish nor fowl.
    It's not quite the way they put it.
    And I recall being advised that, since I was taking
    a position that the Army would allow for,
    I nevertheless might find myself in some difficult situations.
    And if ever I did, I have never forgotten this.
    Never, never, never, waver, never
    let the Army know that I was in doubt.
    Because then they would try to break me down.
    And there came a time later when I
    was very happy to have had that advice which comes on later
    in the--
    OK.
    Now it's, you said, wintertime of '44?
    This is February 1944.
    I went into the Army and was sent to Indiantown Gap,
    Pennsylvania.
    And from there, shipped to Camp Barkeley, Texas,
    in Abilene, which was a medical training, basic training camp.
    Were you with a group of other conscientious objectors?
    In the unit, no, actually not.
    This was just simply a medical corps or a medical department
    to be strictly speaking.
    We were corps men but not medical corps.
    Medical corps was a term reserved for officers.
    We were the medical department.
    There was the basic training camp for medics, if you will,
    to use a shorter term.
    What was the question?
    I'm sorry.
    I was asking if there were other conscientious objectors.
    I was assigned to a basic unit, which would later become
    some sort of a hospital unit.
    But we were not necessarily COs.
    As it turned out, there were six or seven of us
    in the basic training unit.
    Was that the option for conscientious objectors
    in the military to be medics?
    We didn't have an option.
    We were assigned.
    Most of the time, COs did end up in a medical service
    of some sort.
    But occasionally, a CO might end up in the quartermaster corps.
    He could end up in the finance corps,
    some kind of a non-combatant, non-combat unit.
    But basically, most of the 1-A-Os, as I recall,
    ended up in a medical unit.
    We were never told.
    The Army would never admit how many 1-A-Os were actually
    served in World War II.
    I think they didn't want it to be known,
    because it might give more support for that type of stand,
    if you will.
    But there were rumors that there might have
    been at least 100,000 of us.
    But we'll never know.
    There were six or seven of us in the unit,
    in my basic training unit.
    How we came to know each other, and how everybody else
    came to know us, was that when it came time for the unit
    to take their rifle training, they
    had to undergo two weeks of rifle training.
    We were assigned to the mess hall to clean the grease traps.
    So every morning at roll call, when the rest of the guys
    were going to go off to the rifle training course,
    they'd call out our names, repeat the assignment.
    And off we'd go to the mess hall.
    We knew exactly we were going every day.
    But that was the Army's way of letting
    everybody know who was what, separating
    the sheep from the goats.
    So this went on for two weeks.
    By the end of that time, of course, we all knew each other,
    and the rest of the fellows knew us too.
    We were treated pretty well.
    I don't think the other men really hated us for what
    we were doing.
    Many of them did not under understand us.
    We would argue at times at night having discussions.
    But I didn't feel that I was being ostracized necessarily.
    We were a motley crew.
    As I recall, I was the only Quaker.
    In that particular unit, there was
    two from the Church of the Brethren, one Mennonite, one
    Catholic, if you will, and two Seventh Day Adventists,
    a Motley crew.
    We served our-- we went through the basic training in Abilene,
    Texas, at Camp Barkeley, and then went
    into specialist training.
    We were to be given certain tasks in a future hospital
    unit.
    And so we went off, a number of us
    were sent off to El Paso, Texas to the William Beaumont
    General Hospital.
    And we were to be trained either as surgical technicians,
    medical technicians, X-ray technicians, whatever.
    I was assigned to the surgical technician training course.
    And we went through a 90 day course, if you will.
    We called ourselves 90 day wonders.
    I, personally, was trained to become
    a scrub nurse, if you will, a surgical scrub
    nurse, passing instruments and hemostats in the operating
    room.
    I was also trained to do ward work if and when
    necessary for bedside nursing.
    But chiefly, I was trained to be a scrub nurse in surgery.
    Were they also telling you, besides that kind
    of specific medical training, of what
    was happening on the front, and in the war,
    and in Europe in general?
    No, I don't-- well, yes, they probably told us what was
    happening in terms of the war itself, and troop movements,
    and that sort of thing.
    But there was no mention made of concentration camps
    that I recall.
    I don't think the Army knew that much about it,
    frankly, or at least, the extent to which things were happening.
    We were more aware of just general troop movements, who
    was doing what where, what army was moving this way, that way,
    and so forth.
    Now, that you mention it, thinking back,
    I was aware of the campaign in North Africa.
    So that must have been in, what, the early '40s.
    I remember the Rommel, Desert Fox, and things
    happening in North Africa.
    After serving in the technician training,
    we went back to Camp Barkeley, Texas.
    And at some point shortly after that,
    the 81st Field Hospital was formed.
    And that's when we really coalesced as a hospital unit,
    and were given definite assignments, and so
    forth and so on.
    Somewhere in, it must have been around late August,
    early September of 1944, we went to Camp Lee,
    which is outside of Petersburg, Virginia, for the final,
    if you will, putting together of the field hospital,
    getting people to know their roles,
    getting our equipment together, and really shaping up.
    How big a group was it?
    We were approximately 150 enlisted men.
    I think it was about approximately 15
    to 20 medical officers.
    And I recall about 30 nurses, but I'm not absolutely
    sure of those figures.
    I do recall we had, I think, 120 tons of medical equipment
    that had to be moved about.
    We had our--
    Were all the men that you had trained with in that 81st Field
    Hospital group?
    In the basic training camp?
    I don't think so.
    I think that the putting together of the 81st Field
    Hospital had its personnel.
    They took most of us from that basic training unit but not
    all.
    I think other people came from elsewhere.
    We were of all ages.
    I was an 18-year-old.
    There were maybe a dozen of us.
    But we ranged up to men in their 30s who we called old men.
    And many of them were men with certain physical disabilities
    that couldn't serve in combat units
    but were healthy enough to be serve in the Army
    in a medical capacity.
    But we were of all ages, 18 to 30, 35.
    We had one man was a grandfather, as I recall.
    He was in his late 30s, I think.
    And you were still as convinced of your views even in--
    this is August '44, September, August, September?
    Had you wavered at all are we still as
    definite about your views?
    I was still pretty definite about my views,
    because nothing had happened to really cause me to waver yet.
    Things are pretty-- we were in the States.
    We got information about the war abroad.
    But pretty much our lives were pretty organized,
    getting the hospital together.
    And there was really no reason to really question
    my stance at that time.
    As I said earlier, I wasn't being harassed by the other men
    in the unit.
    They pretty much accepted me for what I was, I think.
    I worked hard and learned my technician trade.
    And I think I was respected for that.
    How long did you stay in Virginia?
    We were there until we got orders
    to move to the port of embarkation, which
    was in New Jersey, Camp Kilmer.
    Is that the name?
    I've forgotten.
    I think it is.
    We got orders to move to Camp Kilmer in December,
    must have been around the 20th of December 1944.
    I recall getting one last pass before we were to board ship.
    We weren't that far from Philadelphia.
    So we took that path.
    We had a 12 hour pass.
    And three of us went down to Philadelphia,
    went to my parents' home, and spent two or three
    hours singing Christmas carols, then went back to Camp Kilmer
    and got on the ship.
    And we sat in New York Harbor on Christmas Eve 1944
    and saw the lights of Broadway, moved out
    on the 26th of December, and joined a convoy.
    I think it must have been 30 or 40 ships, most of them
    Liberty ships.
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum Volunteer Collection interview
    with Dr. Samuel Hagner.
    This is tape number one side B. And you
    were talking about how you got your orders to leave,
    and you went home to Philadelphia
    and then came back to New York.
    As I said, we moved out of New York Harbor on December 26,
    joined a convoy that was waiting for us outside of the harbor.
    It took us 21 days to cross the ocean.
    It was in January.
    It was an awful trip.
    I've never saw so many seasick people in all of my life.
    I, fortunately, was not one of the ones that suffered
    from sea sickness as such.
    I recall having a dull headache.
    But I was able to take my meals regularly.
    So they assigned me to the infirmary,
    the ship's infirmary.
    And I remember going out as teams
    and finding these poor guys, who had crawled off into cubbyholes
    who couldn't keep anything down, and dragging them back
    to the infirmary, putting them in bed,
    and giving them intravenous fluids.
    It was my first real experience with people
    who were deathly ill.
    If we hadn't found some of those men, they could have died.
    Because they literally wanted no parts of anybody, food,
    or anybody.
    They just wanted to be by themselves.
    It was the long trip.
    We finally got to Southampton, England,
    towards the end of January, must have been
    this third week in January.
    They had no orders for us.
    We were on the HMS [? Volendam, ?] a Dutch ship
    with a British crew.
    So they let off the ship those for whom they had orders.
    They sent us across the English Channel to Le Havre, France.
    They had no orders for us there either.
    So they sent us back to Southampton, still no orders.
    So they sent us around Wales and up to Greenock, Scotland,
    to the Port of Missing Men, as it was called.
    As you pulled into the Harbor at Greenock, Scotland,
    there was this huge, huge ship that towered over us.
    It looked like a skyscraper, battleship gray.
    It was the Queen Liz that had been
    converted into a troop ship.
    They got us off the boat, put us on a train,
    and sent us back to within 30 miles of Southampton, England.
    What was the point of sending you up there then?
    Nobody knows.
    That was the Army.
    By that time, we began to realize that the Army did
    things in mysterious ways.
    Having no orders on us, they assigned us to army hospitals
    in England, in Wales, actually.
    This was taking care of battle wounded
    that had been flown back from Europe.
    So that was very we really got our first clinical experience,
    if you will, working on wards.
    That's where I first learned to do bedside nursing.
    These were men who had been seriously wounded.
    In fact, I was trained by Army nurses
    on a colostomy ward, nothing but colostomies, 40 of them
    in one ward.
    That was during-- you said, during your training
    in the United States?
    No.
    This is in England.
    We are now in England, no orders.
    They don't know where we're supposed to be,
    so they assigned us to these Army hospitals
    located in Wales, England.
    And these were taking care of men who have been flown back
    from the front.
    Oh, I see.
    To get further medical care.
    Yeah.
    We were in England for about six weeks.
    How were you able to handle seeing people
    who were injured and wounded?
    How did you adjust to that?
    Or was this your first experience dealing with people
    who were so severely wounded?
    That was my first experience dealing
    with the severely wounded.
    It was a bit of a shock.
    It was kind of appalling.
    But I got so immersed in nursing that I
    didn't think anything about--
    I didn't think too much about that part of it.
    I became so engrossed in learning
    to take care of the ill, the sick, and the wounded.
    Specifically, I was being trained to change dressings
    on the colostomy patients.
    So I had nurses showing me how to do this.
    And that became my job 12 hours a day.
    What were your thoughts about seeing
    such terrible wounds, not because someone was ill,
    or a disease, but because of man's destruction of other men?
    In a sense unnecessary, not coming from a disease, but--
    I see what you mean.
    I guess, what you're asking is did I feel that this was right,
    or what kind of impact this was having
    that men had suffered these terrible injuries
    as a result of war?
    It certainly reinforced my feelings,
    my negative feelings about war, as a way
    of trying to solve problems.
    Yes, look at these young men who had one--
    maybe days earlier had been perfectly healthy
    and were now lying there, most of them,
    possibly to be crippled for the rest of their lives.
    I don't know.
    There's no question about it.
    That was reinforcing my disgust, if you will, with war.
    So I think what I did was, just as I said earlier,
    I immersed myself in the nursing end of it to try
    to deal with it.
    At least, if I could lose myself in the nursing,
    I didn't have to think too much about the other side of it
    and that I was part of it.
    And in a sense, I was aiding and abetting
    by taking care of the wounded.
    Why were you aiding and abetting?
    Well, possibly, I might help to send some back into battle.
    In fact, the friend that I mentioned earlier,
    with whom I spent the night several nights ago,
    my former companion in the Army, he felt that way, definitely,
    that here he was trying to send people back to the front.
    And he wondered about it.
    He, by the way, was a CO and a member
    of the Church of the Brethren.
    And so you stayed in England for how long?
    We were in England for about six weeks.
    And then suddenly, we move fast.
    They found orders.
    We were supposed to be in Germany.
    So they rush, rush, rush, and put us on a boat,
    and send us to Le Havre, France.
    And within hours, we were in Germany
    crossing the border, the Mannheim River, as I recall,
    and catching up with the 7th Army.
    And rumors had it that the 7th Army,
    when our commanding officer walked
    into the headquarters of the 7th Army said, where have you
    been all these weeks?
    We've been looking for you.
    What was it like for you to put your foot down
    in Germany knowing that the Germans had started the war?
    It was getting to be scary.
    I do recall seeing tanks burning by the side of the road.
    We didn't see actual fighting, because we were still that too
    far behind the front lines.
    But we're seeing evidences now of smoldering tanks, villages
    that have been burned, bombed.
    Things were now getting serious.
    We all began to get that feeling that, well, we've
    been in training all these weeks and months.
    And now, here we are.
    What is going to happen now?
    How are we going to deal with this?
    How are we going to help the wounded?
    How is this all going to work out?
    Ironically, we never did find out
    what it was like to take care of the battle wounded.
    This is now, mind you, this must be early March 1945.
    Their Wehrmacht was pretty much on the run.
    Luftwaffe had been pretty much blown out of the sky.
    The front line was moving so rapidly that every time we
    would move towards the front lines
    and set up our hospital unit, we were too far back
    to do any good.
    We had to be within a certain distance from the front lines
    to be of any help as a field hospital.
    A field hospital had to be fairly
    close to the so-called battalion aid stations
    to be of any real effective use.
    And every time we would try to get close,
    they'd move the front lines again.
    And so we'd wake up the next morning,
    and we were too far away to do any good.
    So we'd pack up and move on.
    We'd pack up and move on.
    I think we moved at least four times, what we called dry runs,
    and never saw a patient.
    They kept moving trying to keep up with the battle.
    During one of these moves, I experienced
    probably the most frightening experience
    that I had in the war.
    It's silly, because this had nothing
    to do with the war as such.
    It had nothing to do with battle wounded,
    had to do with my own personal safety, or lack of.
    And this is why I feel a little silly about it now.
    But it was the most frightening time.
    I wasn't the most frightened by being possibly strafed or shot
    at.
    As I'm about to tell you, I was most
    frightened by this one experience that had
    nothing to do with the enemy.
    It came time for the hospital unit
    to move again towards the front lines.
    Each time this was done, they would send up
    an advance party made up of an officer, perhaps two officers,
    and a handful of enlisted men, to select the new site to which
    to move the hospital.
    On this one particular move, I was
    elected to go up with the advance party for the reason
    that I spoke a little bit of French, high school French.
    Nobody spoke any German.
    Well, they figured, well, maybe I
    could speak a little French to the Germans.
    So up I went with the unit--
    I mean, excuse me-- with the advance party.
    I was the only objector in the group.
    I was the only CO.
    We arrived at a certain, I think it was a suburb, really,
    a German suburb.
    It was a private neighborhood.
    There was no battle around.
    But our commanding officer walked over
    to one of the private homes, and commandeered the home,
    and told the people that they had to leave.
    They had 15 minutes in which to get out,
    that we were taking it over as a billet,
    if you will, for us to stay, spend the night.
    How proud I was, ho, ho, ho, to watch
    these people have to leave their homes, while we, the Americans,
    are standing there watching them leave.
    That I wasn't very happy about.
    I think that bothered me almost as much as anything
    else that I'd seen up to that point in time,
    standing there, as bullies, and making
    these people leave their homes.
    Even though I was to find out later
    that somebody else was the much greater bully.
    So they left their home, and we moved in.
    And we were assigned rooms, roommates, and paired off.
    And we had just the one officer with us.
    He was a surgeon.
    He was a captain.
    I can remember his name, Captain [? Riesman. ?]
    He decided he wanted an armed guard.
    You might say, armed guard?
    Weren't you a hospital unit?
    Didn't you have red crosses on your helmets?
    Yes, we did.
    We had an ambulance with us.
    But we were armed.
    Our aimless drivers had rifles.
    This particular officer was packing a 45 on his hip.
    I can't explain it.
    We were abusing.
    We were not following the Geneva Convention.
    And I know the Germans knew it.
    I might say, parenthetically, that periodically we
    would get strafed by German aircraft,
    our hospital unit would.
    And a person not knowing better might say, well,
    what an awful thing for the Germans
    to strafe an American hospital unit.
    But I'm sure they knew we were armed.
    And we shouldn't have been.
    I, to this day, I have no explanation why we were armed.
    People just did it.
    So on this particular night, the captain
    ordered an armed guard to walk around
    this house for the rest of the night.
    And guess who got the first call to walk?
    Sergeant said, Hagner, you take the first walk,
    the first guard.
    And I said, all right, Sergeant.
    But there's something you have to know.
    He said, what is that?
    I said, well, I'm a conscientious objector.
    You're a what?
    He was from Georgia or Alabama.
    I don't think he'd ever even heard of the term.
    He looked at me and kind of blinked.
    He said, well, what does that mean?
    And I said, well, I'll walk guard,
    but I won't take that rifle.
    He was just rigid enough, and I think
    had that much experience enough to take back his order.
    He had already given an order.
    And he couldn't rescind that order.
    So he said, all right.
    Then go out walk guard without the gun.
    I thought, this is interesting, kind of ridiculous,
    but all right.
    So I went out in the dark with a flashlight
    and started walking around the building in the dark, pitch
    dark, wondering about how ridiculous this whole situation
    was.
    Why even have a guard if I'm out there without a gun?
    This went on for maybe 15, 20 minutes.
    And out came the captain to inspect the guard.
    He found me in the dark.
    He looked at me.
    And he said, where's your gun, soldier?
    I froze.
    I could hardly talk.
    I thought back to the NSPRO, that National Service Board
    for Religious Objectors in Philadelphia
    and what they said, don't ever waiver.
    And the time had come.
    Here we are.
    Do I waver or don't I?
    Not because of my beliefs but for my personal safety,
    I couldn't waver.
    I looked at the captain, and I said, sir.
    I'm a religious objector.
    He said, you're a what?
    I could hardly talk.
    I choked out the words.
    And I said, well, sir, this is how I came into the Army,
    with this in mind that I would not bear arms.
    He looked at me.
    He said, do you mean to tell me that if I give you
    a direct order to go back and get a rifle that you wouldn't
    do it?
    This is here we are.
    I'm at the brink.
    Do I say, yes, or do I say, no?
    Because I knew that in a combat zone,
    the commanding officer is--
    I mean, martial law exists in a combat zone.
    And a commanding officer is everything.
    He's court.
    He's judge.
    He's jury.
    He's executioner.
    The law was in his hands.
    That's what martial law is all about.
    I finally shook my head and said, I'm sorry, captain.
    I can't.
    And I did this then too.
    He looked at me.
    I don't think he knew what to make of me.
    Oh, this is [? silly, ?] 53 years later.
    He went back in the house.
    I didn't know whether I was going to live or die.
    I think he, up to that point, I didn't know him that well.
    He was the man under whom I worked.
    He was my surgeon.
    And I really didn't know [? him ?] as a person.
    And he had that gun on his hip.
    A couple minutes later, one of my friends came out and said,
    Sam, go back in the house.
    And he had a gun on his shoulder.
    I'm taking over.
    So obviously, the captain had--
    excuse me. {?_{?_[BLOWS NOSE]_?}_?} Had changed the guard.
    I went back in the house.
    A couple of guys are playing cards in one room.
    A couple of guys sitting over there talking,
    you could have heard a pin drop.
    The captain was nowhere.
    He had gone off to this room.
    No one said a word.
    [CRYING] I never felt so alone.
    I'm sorry.
    I didn't think this would happen.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    I went upstairs to my room.
    And my roommate was sitting there.
    I still remember his name, Mark Stark from the Bronx.
    He called me Sammy boy.
    And he had a Brooklyn accent like you've never heard
    your life, or Bronx accent.
    He looked at me.
    He says, Sammy boy, come over here.
    He was 28 years old.
    He was like an old man to me, like my father.
    He said, sit down, Sammy boy.
    I sat down.
    He put his arm around me.
    He says, Sammy boy, he said, I'm here because of Hitler
    and what he's doing to the Jews.
    But he said, I couldn't kill anybody either.
    I know where you're coming from.
    And he held me.
    And I cried.
    And he held me most of the night.
    I've never forgotten [? that. ?] The next day the sun came up.
    Nothing happened.
    Nothing happened.
    The captain never said a word.
    It was like it had never happened.
    Nobody ever said anything.
    It was all over.
    It never came up again.
    And I had to work under that captain in surgery
    for the next number of months.
    He even promoted me from tech five to tech four
    and later, tech three, which is the same as a staff sergeant.
    And he never mentioned it.
    You ask me, why?
    I don't know.
    Maybe he knew what he saw, a scared kid, a kid I was.
    But I think probably, he just crossed me off the books
    as a religious fanatic.
    And what are you going to do with a guy like that?
    And I was a good worker.
    I was one of the best that he had under him in the operating
    room.
    I remember he used to drill me on how many CCs of this would
    it take to give a hypodermic to somebody.
    And I could rattle it off.
    That [INAUDIBLE],, was the most difficult. Again, it's just me.
    I'm not talking about concentration camps are I?
    I'm just talking about me.
    Well, things went on.
    We never, still didn't see any battle wounded.
    [BLOWS NOSE]
    The war was about over, and we all knew it.
    And that's when the day came.
    And we got this mysterious order to pack up and move over now
    near Munich, to pack up and move to an unknown destination.
    And within the next day, we'd moved into Dachau.
    What did they tell you about where you were going?
    Was there any preparation?
    Nothing, not one word.
    Told us nothing.
    We had no idea we were going, just suddenly,
    we were going into this camp.
    What was this?
    And somebody mentioned the word Dachau.
    Did that mean anything to you, the name?
    Yes.
    What did it mean to you?
    Somewhere I had heard of Dachau, as I
    had Auschwitz, and Buchenwald.
    Somewhere they had become that I knew.
    I don't know how, but Dachau, I knew.
    Did you get close?
    Were you walking or by truck?
    Pardon?
    How did you get to the location camp?
    Were you walking or by truck or?
    We were trucks.
    We were in trucks, ambulances.
    We had I don't know how many ambulances.
    We had two semitrailers in which all of our equipment
    was stored.
    Did--
    We were in trucks, yeah.
    Did you sense anything as you were approaching?
    Did you feel anything, have any sense, an atmosphere,
    as you were--
    First reaction was-- this absolute first reaction
    just numbness.
    What in God's name?
    Because first there was the bodies like cordwood,
    stacked up like cordwood.
    The stench was absolutely overwhelming.
    [? I thought, ?] what in God's name?
    How could this be?
    I don't remember when I saw the crematory ovens.
    That came somewhere, next hour or two.
    I don't know.
    But I thought, no, this can't be.
    And all, suddenly, somewhere, I must
    have thought about all those discussions I'd had back
    in Philadelphia with Doris.
    And I said, no.
    But this.
    When the numbness wore off, and that took a while.
    And somewhere in there, they started us--
    I mean, after we got, were walking around and looking.
    They started to give us assignments.
    DDT teams to go into the barracks, which
    came later, and typhus inoculation teams but,
    [BLOWS NOSE] somewhere before that
    happened, and I can't give you the sequence.
    When the numbness started to wear off,
    the strangest thing happened.
    I began to feel unspeakableness, rage.
    Something that I had never felt before in my life,
    not to that degree.
    Oh, I'd been angry, sure.
    We all get angry.
    And I used to fight with my parents.
    But not this, this was rage.
    It scared me.
    I could've killed.
    I became overwhelmed with fantasizes of revenge.
    I imagined all kinds of things like--
    and maybe this did happen.
    I don't know.
    Maybe you know.
    I imagined finding an SS guard and throwing him
    into the compound, the prisoners compound,
    and letting them tear him apart.
    Maybe that happened.
    Part of me says, I heard that happened.
    Did I hear screams of that really happening?
    And yet, maybe I made that up.
    I don't know, because I could have easily made it up.
    Because I was so angry.
    And it was-- what was scary about it was it was not
    a nice, hot, fiery anger.
    It was a cold rage.
    That's the worst part of it, a cold rage, a murderous rage.
    And that's not fun.
    That's not funny.
    To begin imagining all kinds of things,
    torturing Germans, guards, SS guards, SS guard--
    the Germans civilians I didn't have anything against.
    It was the guards.
    Even the soldiers, I think they were just
    like us doing what they had to do.
    [BLOWS NOSE] [INAUDIBLE].
    For some reason, I got in my mind
    that the SS, the Gestapo, they were the perpetrators
    of all of this.
    Yet, I never even saw one in person, I don't think.
    And this went on for a number of days.
    Somewhere in there I sat down to write a letter to my parents.
    I don't think I could at first.
    But I know I wrote to Doris and told her, OK.
    You're right.
    I was a dumb kid.
    And I don't know.
    This is what I'm feeling, I guess, I must have told her.
    I don't know how much I put--
    I don't know how much I could put into words of that.
    But I did tell her, I remember saying this to her,
    I'm not sure what I'll be like when I come back.
    Her response caught up with me in six weeks,
    and that was most unusual.
    Usually it took months for mail to catch up with her.
    Somehow my letter got to her, and it got back to me,
    her response came back to me within about six weeks.
    That's amazing.
    She was graduating from high school, May or June 1945
    in Philadelphia.
    Her letter was tears stained.
    [BLOWS NOSE] She tried to write a little poem in the letter,
    something about her dog was sitting by her side.
    He smells like he's been in formaldehyde.
    And then she said, I'm glad you now
    see the world for what it is or what it can be.
    I guess that's the way she put it, the way it can be.
    I'm terribly sorry that you found out
    in a way which you did.
    I guess, my rage must've gotten through to her,
    because she said something about I want you to come home.
    I can't wait till you do, but I'm
    going to be a little bit afraid.
    I thought, afraid?
    Of me?
    All I could think was, maybe I've turned
    into some kind of a monster.
    Somewhere I thought, the whole world's gone crazy.
    And maybe I'm going crazy with it.
    I don't know when I wrote that letter.
    I've never seen that letter since.
    I never saw it.
    I just knew, when I got home, that she, obviously, had it.
    But I'm getting ahead of my story, I guess.
    I wrote, at some point in there, to my parents.
    And that's the letter that you now will have in the archives.
    There's nothing of this anger in the letter to my parents.
    And I wonder why, all these years?
    All I could think is, number one,
    I didn't want to frighten them.
    Number two, if I started to tell them about my anger, my rage,
    I'd have to also tell them about another anger.
    Not a rage, but an anger, anger at them,
    those kind, gentle Quakers who somehow let me down.
    They didn't tell me.
    They didn't prepare me for this.
    I can't accuse them of setting me up, no,
    but they let me down.
    I really felt that they had let me down.
    They had betrayed me, whereas Doris
    had been trying all those years in those discussions
    in Philadelphia to prepare me.
    She did her best.
    So I didn't, all I did in my letter to my parents,
    and as you'll see, it's quite evident.
    I intellectualize.
    I try to explain to myself how these camps could have existed,
    how the German civilians could have allowed them to exist.
    Because they knew they were there.
    In fact, I can remember talking to some
    of the Germans, the Bavarians.
    We'd go out when we had a chance and talk to some of them,
    ask them about the camps.
    And at first, they wouldn't admit it.
    But they knew they were there.
    But they were farmers with their pitchforks.
    And I'm sure they were terrified, at least some
    of them must have been.
    So I didn't say anything about that to my parents.
    I just talked about, well, this is what I think happened,
    and why the camps existed, and so forth.
    I never did tell them about my rage.
    So you won't get that in that letter.
    Only Doris got that.
    But you have it in the Oberlin College notes.
    And you have it here.
    We only stayed there about a week.
    I can remember going into the barracks.
    That was-- the people standing there staring at us,
    eyes deep in their sockets, in those striped uniforms,
    staring at us, hardly able to stand up,
    the urine running down the bedpost,
    lying in their own excrement.
    And what do you do with the DDT spray in that situation?
    They're infested with lice.
    30,000 people or something like, that 28,000,
    and you couldn't even feed them, because they couldn't eat.
    They couldn't take solid food.
    And you couldn't let them out.
    Because where are they going to go?
    So they kept them in the prison compounds.
    Even that didn't seem right.
    They keep them locked up, even though they were liberated.
    Ho, ho.
    Yeah, liberated.
    I don't think the Army really knew
    the immensity of the problem.
    When they realized what was going on,
    they knew that we were not big enough to handle it.
    So at the end of, I don't know, five, six days,
    we were given orders to leave.
    And two general hospitals, I remember as we were leaving,
    two general hospitals were moving in,
    maybe 1,000 personnel each, to take over.
    And I'm sure others had to follow.
    Because what do you do with 30,000 people?
    [BLOWS NOSE]
    I think one of the worst things too, before leaving Dachau,
    was this one building.
    It was a warehouse of bodies.
    They weren't even outside.
    They were inside, and walking into that building,
    turning around and throwing up.
    I can't believe it.
    So we left Dachau.
    I don't know, must have been 8 or 9 of May.
    We went into a--
    oh, this is another great episode.
    Well, let's stop here for the moment.
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum volunteer collection interview
    with Dr. Samuel Hagner.
    This is tape number two side A. And we were talking
    about your experience and how--
    just to back up a little bit, you
    were not given any preparation or any--
    you had no knowledge ahead of time.
    Your leaders did not tell you anything.
    So when you first walked in, were there any precautions
    that they told you to take?
    Did they give you any helpful advice?
    What was that when you walked in as a group?
    Did they give you any instruction?
    I don't remember any specific instructions
    except now you're juggling something in my memory
    or jogging something.
    Could it have been that we were told not to get
    too close to the prisoners?
    That rings a bell.
    And I wonder why.
    Whether they ever thought that we might pick up a disease.
    I don't know.
    But there is something now that you're touching,
    not to get too close to them.
    Were you wearing any protective uniform or clothing?
    No.
    No.
    I don't even remember having gloves, rubber gloves.
    And we didn't have any special uniform, no.
    No, I wasn't part of the typhus inoculation team.
    Now maybe they did have gloves.
    I don't know.
    They must have been using--
    I hope they're using sterile equipment.
    But no, we were the DDT spray team
    and we didn't have any special clothing or garments.
    I don't recall being told anything
    else other than that we couldn't feed them,
    that that had to be done by somebody else.
    And that we couldn't feed them regular food.
    That I can remember.
    But that wouldn't have been my job anyway.
    No.
    I think the fact that we weren't warned
    as to we were coming into, I don't think they knew.
    Maybe they did and just weren't telling us.
    But I don't think my particular, I don't think the officers
    in my unit knew.
    I think they were in the dark just as much as--
    the maybe the seventh army knew, but they weren't telling us.
    But I can't think of anything else.
    As I said, we were housed only in the camp.
    I'm not quite sure where.
    All I remember are these sweeping,
    sweeping out barracks, empty barracks
    and then moving into them.
    That's all I can remember.
    I don't I don't remember where we ate.
    Must have set up a vessel somewhere.
    That's all I remember.
    I think so much of that has been wiped out by the memories that
    have persisted.
    Speaking about where you ate, what is it like?
    I can't even remember taking a bath
    or how we washed or brushed our teeth.
    Probably didn't.
    Do you remember what it was like for a 19-year-old to eat food
    after seeing people--
    what was it like for a 19-year-old young man to sit
    down and eat food after seeing people whose--
    how do you do that?
    How does one do that?
    You don't do that.
    We could hardly.
    I don't think we ate much at all.
    It was terrible.
    No, there was no appetite.
    Couldn't sleep either, as I recall.
    The whole thing seemed like a dream, like just a dumb dream.
    Just walking around and looking at this thing and being told,
    hey, go do this, go do that.
    And then that rage.
    But there's so few visual memories of that anymore.
    Is that common?
    I remember the ovens.
    Did you know what they were for?
    Oh, yes.
    Yes.
    How did you know?
    We saw the gas, gas chambers too while they were still warm.
    The ovens were still warm.
    And the gas chambers are obviously gas chambers.
    What else would they have been for?
    They're supposed to look like showers.
    To this day, I don't know if that's
    my own imagination or what.
    But somehow, something sticks in my mind
    about where they're hot air ducts running
    from the crematory ovens to the German soldiers' barracks.
    Maybe I'm making that up.
    I don't know.
    But I would think somebody could verify that.
    And I'd like to know.
    It's one thing you might do for me.
    See if you could find out whether that was true or not.
    And I just didn't make it up.
    To warm the barracks?
    Yes, to warm the barracks.
    Exactly.
    Were you able to talk to any of the survivors?
    No.
    No.
    We were not able to.
    I think that was part of the soldier, do your job,
    and just don't get too close to them, and just keep moving.
    So somehow that's my impression that we were just told to do it
    and that was not our job to talk to them.
    So what were your specific duties?
    We were there, as I say, my specific duty
    was to be part of a DDT spray team
    and to go into the barracks and spray these prisoners.
    There was another group that formed the typhus inoculation
    team.
    I was not part of that.
    I don't even remember much about how many we sprayed.
    What do you do with 30,000 people?
    30,000 people.
    I don't think we even got through a tenth
    of the barracks.
    I don't know.
    I don't know.
    I think somewhere what must have happened,
    the army realized, finally, it's great insight--
    if you hear in there some bitterness in there,
    you're right.
    I never completely admire the army for its expertise.
    As parenthetical comment, we often
    used to say that we won the war not because we were smarter.
    But because we had more money and more supplies.
    Back to Dachau.
    So you would go into a barrack with a DDT spray gun
    type of thing?
    It wasn't very sophisticated.
    Just a spray gun.
    I can't tell you any more than that,
    because it's a little black after that.
    And would you wear anything special yourself?
    No.
    You would be breathing in the DDT?
    Yeah, we didn't wear any masks that I recall.
    I could be wrong about that.
    I don't know.
    What I remember is doing that and I just
    see these people in the bunks.
    And as I said, the stuff going down the bed posts.
    Two and three in a bunk.
    They were so weak, they couldn't even get out of the bunks.
    And I think that is just so overwhelming that I hardly
    remember anything else.
    And you before this experience, had you ever
    seen a dead body before?
    No.
    No.
    Maybe I did somewhere on the way to Dachau as I saw--
    someplace I saw an American soldier's body.
    Must have been in a morgue.
    It was set up in a tent.
    I remember that being, hey, that's
    the first dead body I've ever seen.
    Because I come from a family of long, long livers, long lived,
    I should say.
    And my grandparents were still alive.
    I had a great grandmother still alive, I think,
    when I went to service.
    No, I had never seen a corpse before.
    I wish I could tell you more of the details.
    But it was all blotted out, I think,
    by just these two overwhelming.
    One, the visual and the other the internal, emotional.
    That just took over.
    Did you in your group talk over what you were all experiencing?
    I'm sure we did.
    I'm sure we did, we talked amongst ourselves.
    I don't remember anything specific.
    I do remember all of us just walking around gazed, dazed.
    But I can't remember any specific conversations.
    I don't even remember sitting down and writing
    those two letters, one to Doris and the other to my parents.
    And actually, now that I think about it,
    I may not have written the letter to my parents
    from Dachau itself.
    It must have Been when had left.
    That would make sense now that I think about it.
    We went in on the 1st or 2nd of May.
    And I dated that May 11th.
    We were there a week.
    We must have already left Dachau when I wrote that letter.
    So correct my note, my comment on that.
    But the one Doris, I think I wrote for the camp.
    What do you think kept you going during that week
    that you were there?
    I didn't have very much choice.
    I was there.
    I was under military order, under military control.
    I didn't have a choice.
    If I were to imagine if I hadn't been under military order,
    would I run away?
    I don't know.
    Interesting questions.
    What did keep us going, or what did kept me going, you ask.
    I think there was a--
    it's funny to say-- but there was some kind of a dedication
    too.
    Dedication to duty, whatever.
    And that was part of the duty, wasn't it?
    In some respects, I think I felt that I was
    even I feel this sometimes now.
    And I'm a very emotional person.
    But I think I also felt that I always
    had a certain wellspring of strength on what's to draw.
    Like that like walking guard that even I was petrified.
    I still felt I could handle it, I suppose, in some funny way.
    And maybe thinking back, way, way back
    to what I first decided to take the stand in the army,
    even though part of it frightened me--
    frightened anybody, of course-- but I
    think something said to me, you could handle it, I think.
    I don't know.
    Did you have any thoughts about your philosophy
    of being a conscientious objector when you were standing
    in the middle of Dachau?
    Oh, yes.
    Oh, yes.
    I didn't waiver before with the good captain
    who want to be the walk guard by the gun.
    I didn't waver then, though I was scared.
    But I sure wavered at Dachau.
    Because that unspeakable rage, I thought,
    my Lord, if I could feel like I could
    kill right now, because I'm so angry
    and this rage is so murderous, what does this
    say for your pacifism, buddy?
    Big joke.
    Big joke.
    And there it started, a conflict that has never ended.
    I couldn't solve it in my later, my own personal psychoanalysis.
    I make a comment to the group at Oakland in 1995,
    this will probably never be resolved to my satisfaction.
    Because on the other hand, I still abhor war all the more,
    I suppose.
    But yet, it's down to the personal level.
    There I was entertaining all kinds of fantasies of revenge,
    fantasies that scared me, terrified me.
    That's why I thought I was going crazy for a while
    there, like everybody else.
    It's funny you mention that.
    But on the way down here, I told you on Wednesday night,
    I spent the night with a fellow who had served
    in the same unit with me.
    On Tuesday night, I spent the night
    with a former medical school classmate.
    I hadn't seen him in 30 years.
    He was a conscientious objector also.
    But that's long before I knew him in medical school,
    of course.
    He refused to register.
    He went to jail.
    He served two or three years as an 18-year-old, mind you.
    Well, Tom and I were talking the other night around the dinner
    table after dinner.
    Tom is now 77, 78--
    75, I think he said-- no, 76, 76.
    Tom's retired first, as a general practitioner and then
    as a psychiatrist himself.
    But we got talking about that period
    before we knew what the concentration
    camps were really like.
    He thought they were a hoax.
    Can you imagine that?
    I thought they were propaganda.
    He thought they were a hoax.
    He used the word hoax.
    And he looked at me just a couple of nights ago,
    he said, when I found out they were not,
    he says, Sam Hagner, you have no idea.
    He looked at me.
    I said, I know, Tom.
    I know.
    It's funny, as I was leaving his house and Wednesday morning,
    he said, you a little bit scared of going down there?
    And I said, yep.
    I'm scared.
    He says, good luck.
    That's good.
    This is beside the point.
    Was there any older person or anybody else in Dachau
    that you could turn to to help you talk
    these things over at the time?
    No.
    No, we had a chaplain, but I never felt that close to him.
    I don't know.
    I never thought of going to him.
    I think I thought it was just simply something that I
    had to work out with my peers.
    Except the minute as I left, as I said to you earlier,
    And a 28-year-old seemed older.
    Like Mark Stark.
    No, other than that.
    You had talked about some of the things that you had seen.
    Are there any sounds that stay with you from that time?
    There's this one sound only.
    and I'm not sure is it's my imagination or not,
    the screams of an SS trooper being thrown into the prison
    compound.
    And that may be strictly imagination.
    I don't know.
    But no, the rest is silence.
    Just looks, people standing there looking at you.
    That's it or staring.
    Those eyes, you've seen those eyes.
    At Dachau, there were medical experiments going on.
    Was that part of your introduction
    or did you learn anything about them when you were there?
    I knew nothing about the medical experiments, no.
    I didn't learn about those until later.
    I don't think I learned about them until later.
    They certainly were not part of my immediate experience.
    Did you feel 19 or did you feel much older?
    I felt both.
    I felt 98 and I felt 19.
    Both, if that's possible.
    I felt like I had suddenly aged 100 years.
    And yet, another part of me said, oh my god.
    Somehow, I guess, the idea of age, of being 19,
    didn't really occur to me that much.
    It did later and it does now when people like you talk to me
    and say, well, you're only 19.
    Somebody not too long ago at home, a neighbor,
    said something about when I happened
    to mention I was coming down here,
    you were already 19 years old.
    Why, you were just a baby.
    Oh, yeah, I guess, I was, wasn't I?
    But I didn't feel that at the time.
    I think my mother felt it.
    I had an opportunity not to go overseas,
    at least not with my unit.
    My mother wanted me to play it for all it's worth.
    And I refused.
    I never told her that.
    I refused.
    It's funny, I just thought of that now.
    I hadn't remembered this for years.
    Before we were moving up to camp Kilmer,
    we had a last weekend pass from Kimberley, Virginia.
    So there are five of us from Philadelphia,
    including the first Sergeant.
    And one of us had a car.
    He said, fellas, let's go home for one last weekend.
    So we drove all the way from Camp Lee in Petersburg,
    Virginia to Philadelphia.
    Can you believe this?
    We left on a Friday after--
    Friday 5 o'clock and had to be back by reveille on Monday
    morning.
    Crazy.
    And we drove in order to have what?
    One day at home.
    And we were to meet again Sunday night
    and drive all night long and get back by reveille.
    We made a mistake.
    We let the one guy do all the driving,
    the guy that owned the car.
    Well, he insisted, I think.
    So he went off the road somewhere
    near Richmond, Virginia.
    And we rolled over and rolled over a couple of times.
    And we ended up in the Richmond General Hospital.
    The driver went through the windshield.
    The guy riding shotgun went out the door.
    Three of us in the back seat, the first Sergeant
    in the middle, he saved us in the back seat.
    He was awake.
    I was sound asleep.
    But when he saw what was going to happen,
    he put out his elbows and wedged us tight,
    so that we rolled over, we never even moved.
    It landed right side up.
    But I suffered some kind of a bruised hip or whatever
    and the hospital wouldn't let me go.
    The two guys that were hurt, of course,
    I don't know what happened to them.
    I never saw them again.
    I remember the screams of the one guy in the emergency room.
    He was sewn up.
    But I was submitted for x-rays with this hip.
    For some reason it hurt and I could walk on it.
    I limped.
    And so I was there for a week or more.
    My mother came roaring down from Philadelphia.
    She said, son, here's your chance.
    I said, what do you, Ma?
    What's my chance?
    Here's your chance, you don't have to go.
    Play this for all it's worth.
    And I looked at her, no, Ma, you don't understand.
    I didn't say that to her.
    I was thinking it.
    What she didn't understand was that I was convinced
    that this was not permanent.
    And that if I didn't get back to my outfit,
    I'd be put into a replacement depot, what
    we called a repo depot.
    And I could be assigned to any unit after that.
    And if I were going to go, I want
    to go with the guys with my train.
    These are men I knew, including the first Sergeant
    from Philadelphia.
    So I said, Ma, we'll see what the doctors say.
    So she went on back to Philadelphia
    thinking that I've agreed with her.
    And I didn't.
    Next day, the doctor came in and I said, get me out of here.
    Give me a cane.
    Give me anything.
    I'm leaving.
    He said, OK, soldier.
    Gave me a cane and discharged me.
    So I went down to the bus station.
    This is an interesting little episode.
    I'm not sure but this pertains to everything else.
    Well, it tells you about me.
    That's what you want to know, is it?
    You don't know about Dachau.
    You want to know about me.
    Both.
    I got on the bus in Richmond, took go back to Petersburg.
    And little old me, I forgot all about Jim Crowism.
    So I got on the bus and there's a soldier
    in the back, a Black soldier.
    But he was a soldier.
    He was the only soldier on the bus.
    So I went back and sat down next to him.
    And we're starting to talk, waiting for the bus
    to leave the terminal.
    The bus didn't leave.
    And I'm not paying attention.
    I'm talking to him.
    What outfit are you from?
    Blah, blah, blah, you know how soldiers do.
    Suddenly, I realize people are turning around staring at us.
    I think the Black fella knew before I do what was happening.
    Then the bus driver said, hey, you white soldier,
    you move forward.
    That's for Black people.
    But he did say Black, because he said
    colored or something like that.
    Black didn't come into being till later.
    I looked at him and I was shocked.
    Because there were no seats in the white section.
    But there were seats in the back.
    I had to get up with that cane and walk forward and stand
    all the way to Petersburg.
    Do you think anybody will get up and give me a seat?
    Not at that point.
    Not those white, white people.
    I stood all of my way 40 miles to Petersburg.
    And I bet everyone had laughed all the way.
    I go back to the outfit.
    I walked into the day room.
    It was at night.
    And that came, first Sergeant was
    sitting there, the guy that saved my life, probably.
    He said, what are you doing back, back here?
    I said, I'm here, Sarge.
    With a cane?
    What am I supposed to do with you with a cane?
    I said, I'll throw it away then.
    I'm afraid you're leaving soon.
    And I don't want to go without you.
    If I have to--
    whatever I said.
    He said, we're leaving in the morning.
    I was about to strike your name.
    He said, all right.
    All right, Sam Hagner, I'll take you.
    Even if I have to carry you to support myself.
    And he did.
    And that's when I went, went to war.
    I threw away the cane.
    He said, you've got to get rid of that cane.
    I can't take up the guy playing with the cane.
    Did he go with you to Dachau?
    Oh, yeah.
    No, wait a minute.
    He might not have been at Dachau itself.
    Because he was always at headquarters.
    And headquarters wasn't always where we were.
    So I don't know whether he was there or not.
    I can see what you're thinking, maybe
    I could have talked to him.
    I don't think he was there.
    He was a nice guy.
    He didn't have to carry me.
    I walked.
    That's a funny little episode.
    I could never tell my mother.
    Maybe that's another reason why I
    couldn't tell her some other things, that I lied to her.
    I lied to her.
    I said, oh, yeah, Ma.
    I'll play it for what it's worth.
    Was there any burial of the bodies when you were there?
    No, they weren't even touched.
    I don't know why they did that.
    But they didn't move anything while I was there.
    Did any townspeople come into the camp?
    No, I recall-- all I recall is this armed guard
    around the camp.
    And nobody in, and nobody out, but authorized personnel.
    And you said you stayed within the camp during that week.
    I'm pretty sure we did.
    I don't remember going anywhere else.
    We didn't have tents--
    we had tents, but I don't think we used them.
    We stayed in-- must have been barracks of some sort.
    Were you concerned that you would become ill from what
    you were in contact with?
    No, I was not concerned about becoming ill.
    Somehow, that didn't cross my mind.
    There's too much else going on.
    Do you think the other soldiers, the young soldiers
    that you were with, felt the way you did?
    I can't speak for everybody.
    I think some of them did.
    I'm sure that some of my friends did.
    I wasn't friends with everybody in the unit, obviously.
    Perhaps some of them didn't.
    I don't know.
    I think the fellas with whom I felt
    empathy felt the way I did.
    People that I called my friends or else they
    wouldn't have been my friends.
    But you're saying you don't remember the sitting around
    and talking about what you were going through?
    No.
    No, I don't.
    All I remember is going to work in the barracks,
    on the details, as we called them.
    Coming back, I guess, we did stand around and talk.
    I remember this picture of standing around and talking.
    And then trying to sleep.
    And writing a letter, that must have been to Doris.
    Writing that letter, I remember trying to write it
    and wondering whether it was going to be censored
    and wondering how to write it so that I wouldn't be censored.
    Because I didn't want anything to be censored.
    And yet, I didn't know what the officers would allow.
    I think why they allowed--
    why the letter you see now that I sent to my parents
    was not censored was that it didn't really
    contain any military information, like how many
    troops, how many were stationed here, whether we're
    going to move there.
    That's more what they're concerned about, I think.
    Nor was I really castigating the army.
    I didn't say anything about that.
    Though, I had pretty strong feelings about some of that,
    as we all did.
    What was it like to hear that you were
    going to be leaving Dachau?
    Relief.
    Because I was aware that we couldn't do
    much for these people.
    We didn't have the sophistication
    that a general hospital would have,
    the personnel, the equipment, the size, the brute size
    to deal with the immensity of 28,000 people.
    Though, I was glad to leave.
    I was glad to leave for my own personal--
    what's the word-- equanimity.
    But I was glad to leave too, because I knew that we were not
    the people for it, that we couldn't-- simply couldn't do
    the task, meet the task, do the job.
    So I was glad to leave.
    Did you sense that any of the prisoners
    were grateful to see you?
    I have no recollection of that.
    I have no recollection of that.
    I would assume they would.
    But that doesn't come true.
    Did you see any prisoners who were your age?
    No, I don't think so.
    Interesting question.
    I don't have any memory of that.
    Of course, even a 19-year-old would look pretty old
    after being in that place for a while.
    And where did your group go to?
    The next episode was not very pleasant.
    We went to and commandeered a German hospital,
    small community hospital, I guess, we would call it now,
    staffed by German nuns.
    They didn't have any patients.
    But they were there because that was where they live.
    It was inside a cloister.
    And we took over the hospital with the idea
    of treating displaced persons, taking care of them,
    what we could find and bring them in.
    Treat them for what they needed.
    What town was this in?
    I have no idea.
    I have no idea what town.
    Somewhere-- that memory is lost.
    What I do remember is that we were there possibly a week.
    And then we weren't doing that much, so they decided--
    maybe that's what we got orders to move to France.
    Did you keep any kind of a journal
    while you were in the service?
    No, I didn't.
    I should have, but didn't.
    I don't know why it didn't occur to me to keep a journal.
    I wish I had.
    Any way, as the day came to leave this hospital,
    and the very miserable, disgusting thing happened,
    the ugly Americans.
    In the laboratory of this cute, cute little hospital-- and it
    was a cute little hospital.
    It was just beautifully equipped and the nuns
    were taking this beautiful care of it.
    In the laboratory was a by binocular microscope, a Zeiss
    microscope, the best in the world.
    If you may or may not recall, that back during the war,
    I don't think even the US we had many binocular microscopes.
    They must be nonocular.
    Anyway, one of the officers decided
    that he wanted that microscope.
    So he gave orders for a couple of guys
    go up take it and put it in a crate and take it with us.
    I remember the nuns coming out and pleading with him,
    don't, sir.
    Don't, please, don't take our microscope.
    But he turned a deaf ear.
    I could have spit in his face.
    I can still see those nuns.
    Those nuns standing there begging and crying.
    And he said, nope, to the victors belongs the spoils,
    I suppose.
    And That must have been when we were on our way
    to southern France.
    Let's back up a little bit.
    When you were in Dachau, do you think
    that the older medical people, the doctors in your group
    had any different response than you did?
    Because they were older.
    They had had medical training.
    They were educated to save lives and they come in
    and they see this.
    | don't know.
    I would guess that from a theoretical point of view,
    yes, I would think that they would
    have had different responses.
    But I really don't know.
    Because we didn't have that kind of contact with the officers.
    We took orders from them.
    We worked with some of them, but we were not friendly.
    What did they do, the doctors?
    You all did the typhus injections and the DDT
    spraying.
    What did they do?
    I have no idea what they did other
    than tell us how to do this.
    But whether they went with us, I don't think they did.
    But maybe they did.
    I have no idea what they did.
    I have no idea.
    Was your group made up only of men
    or were there any women in your group?
    The only women were nurses, registered nurses
    who are officers.
    We had, I think, approximately 30 nurses with us.
    In fact, in one of those photographs you saw,
    there's a nurse standing in one of those Dachau photos.
    Did you talk about any of this over with the women?
    No, we had no contact with the nurses either.
    They were officers.
    We were enlisted men.
    You don't fraternize with nurses in the army.
    No.
    Now whether if one of us had tried
    and whether they would have been receptive, I have no idea.
    But it wouldn't have occurred to us
    to even try, because that was crossing the lines.
    We were second class citizens, if you recall.
    And yet the people in charge didn't feel the need
    to sit down with all of you in Dachau
    and talk about what you all were experiencing?
    They certainly did not.
    No, I can't credited with any sympathy there.
    Each of you are on your own to deal in the way
    that you could deal with this.
    Absolutely.
    Each of us was on his own, other than what we could
    do for each other as buddies.
    Each of us had a buddy usually.
    The army has a buddy system.
    There's a reason for that.
    You and your buddy, you kind of pair off.
    You look after each other.
    And so you protect each other to the insipid little things
    like if one of you wants to go take a shower or take a bath,
    you leave your wallet and your watch with your buddy.
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum volunteer collection interview
    with Dr. Samuel Hagner.
    This is tape number two side B. You are talking about the buddy
    system in the army.
    And when you were in Dachau, did you and your buddy
    have any kind of special relationship
    and talk about what you were experiencing?
    I'm sure we did.
    I don't have any specific memory of that.
    But I'm sure we did, because we talked about a lot of things
    constantly.
    I still remember him.
    He was an old man of 25 or so from Fostoria, Ohio, Avery
    Hall.
    Very quiet.
    Do you think the others were as deeply affected as you were?
    I'm sure some of them must have been.
    I don't think-- I don't know how many special talents
    in that area other than that, as you can see,
    I'm easily moved to tears.
    But I don't think I have any deeper insights or awarenesses
    than anybody else does.
    Now to get back, so you left the nuns' hospital.
    And then went where did you go?
    We were redeployed-- that was the term-- we were redeployed
    to southern France with the idea of ultimate redeployment
    to the Philippines.
    And it was a staging area for the moving units
    from Europe to the Pacific.
    And so we were at an area outside of Marseilles, France,
    and spent a number of weeks there crating
    our equipment, our supplies for shipment
    across to the Philippines.
    In those weeks and months after Dachau,
    did you think of Dachau?
    Dachau never left my mind.
    Never left my mind, hasn't even yet.
    But we became busy with getting our stuff packed up.
    And I became seriously ill at one point in southern France
    at that area.
    And I'm sure that took some of my attention, too.
    I got into some bad water and I developed
    the bacillary dysentery.
    Spent three weeks in the hospital.
    And they had no antibiotics those days.
    So we just had to sweat it out.
    I went from 140 pounds down to 110.
    I was a sight.
    Someone took a photograph of me.
    And I think I have that still.
    I look almost like the people that I
    left in the concentration camp.
    That's a bad joke.
    Speaking about photographs, did you have a camera with you
    in Dachau?
    No, I did not.
    No, I did not.
    You said you wrote your letter May 11th to your parents
    about your experience.
    Where were you?
    Do you remember where you were when you wrote the letter?
    And you were still in Germany?
    We were still in Germany.
    We might have been at that hospital run by the nuns
    that I just mentioned.
    I don't recall exactly where we were.
    But we were in Germany still, yes,
    because the letter suggests that we
    were looking after displaced persons or trying to--
    or seeing them and watching them try to get themselves
    home and so forth.
    I think I talk about that in the letter.
    What did you do for the displaced persons?
    I think this is what we were trying to do at that hospital
    where the nuns were working.
    We were trying to bring in those that
    were ill with whatever diseases they had.
    But I don't think we really did an awful lot,
    to be perfectly frank.
    I don't remember helping that much.
    Frankly, I think we were doing an awful lot
    of moving around and not accomplishing very
    much, to be perfectly frank.
    I'd like to read one or two paragraphs from your letter,
    or would you--
    could you read this?
    And I'd like to know your feelings now.
    I haven't changed my mind concerning
    the German civilians and the bulk
    of the German regular army.
    I feel that they were only doing what they were forced to do.
    The cause of these atrocities most likely
    lies with a few high end of the SS or Gestapo.
    There is the old argument for many,
    "well, if the German civilians didn't
    have enough guts to stand up against the Nazi party,
    they are guilty and deserve the same treatment
    as the fanatics."
    Well, this is not logic and doesn't work out that even
    these are people who have the power or opportunity to revolt
    against a certain system.
    As one friend said, "the remains of people in the US, especially
    the Midwest, who oppose conscription in 1940.
    Yet the Bill of Draft went through regardless.
    If in our so-called democracy things went ahead regardless
    of the opinions of millions, how could anybody
    expect breeds of Germans threatened with death
    if they opposed to put a stop to Hitler and his doings."
    I think there is a great deal of truth in this.
    All of this just about reflects my present status.
    Would you write that today also?
    No.
    No, I would not write that today.
    I think but you see there is the ramblings of a 19-year-old
    trying to explain how these camps could
    exist in the first place.
    And he ended up intellectualizing, pure and
    simple.
    I still would not put the as much guilt
    on the German civilians as I would on the German military.
    But I think that the guilt had to have been shared.
    No, I think that was my attempt to try
    to explain the unexplainable.
    I didn't know the term then, but I learned later
    that's rationalization or intellectualization.
    All right, let's continue with your journey
    after the end of the war.
    Somewhere around the middle of August,
    we left Southern France bound for the Panama
    Canal and Pacific for Manila.
    A couple of atom bombs were dropped in the bill
    of the Atlantic Ocean--
    or excuse me-- the atom bombs were dropped on Japan.
    We were in the middle of the Atlantic
    Ocean steaming towards Panama.
    After we heard that the second bomb had been dropped,
    the war had ended, Japan had surrendered,
    we waited, and we waited, and we waited.
    The ship kept steaming towards Panama.
    Perhaps six hours later, we heard, now hear this, now
    hear this.
    The ship's orders have been changed
    to Newport News, Virginia.
    What were your thoughts when you heard the atom bomb dropped?
    Interesting question.
    I was relieved.
    I thought, thank god, the war is over.
    A lot of lives would be spared.
    But the idea of the atom bomb was terribly frightening.
    I don't think I really understood
    what it meant at that time, the immensity of the atom bomb.
    I didn't come to comprehend that until later.
    I think mainly it was a very selfish feeling,
    thank god we're going home.
    Because if we'd gotten to Manila,
    we'd have been getting home, maybe years.
    This meant we were going to be home in a week or so.
    And we were.
    We arrived in Newport News, must have been--
    the war ended 15th of August or something like that.
    I guess, we were in Newport News by the 20th or 21st of August.
    We were one of the first troops to step on American soil.
    And within 72 hours, I was in Philadelphia.
    And within 48 hours after that, I was on the Jersey Shore
    walking the sand dunes with a young lady named Doris.
    We walked, I talked, and she listened
    for three straight days.
    One of the best things that ever happened to me.
    Because I could do with her what I couldn't do with my parents.
    And also she was the one that started all this back
    when we were teenagers, started questioning me.
    So here we are, I'm back at the source, so to speak.
    And now we're talking about it all.
    I can still remember her.
    She didn't say a word.
    She just listened.
    At one point, I asked her, I said,
    you said something in your letter
    about being afraid when I came home.
    Are you afraid now?
    She kind of giggled and said, no, that was an exaggeration.
    But I think she was a little bit.
    She did say that I wasn't the same.
    And I said, well, I'm not surprised.
    But there was three wonderful day--
    wonderful in that allowed me that catharsis that I needed
    and the support that I needed that only a peer can give you
    anyway.
    Yeah, that was very precious time.
    Did you go into explicit detail about what you experienced?
    Oh, yes.
    I told her everything.
    She wanted to hear everything.
    She wanted no holds barred.
    And I didn't bar any holds.
    I think she felt that she had to hear everything.
    Because if she didn't hear everything,
    I wasn't going to say everything.
    So it was a bargain, a good bargain.
    What about your brothers?
    Were you able to tell your brothers everything?
    Yes, my younger brother, I think, was at a summer camp.
    I was 19, he was 14.
    He was at the summer camp still.
    But my older brother by this time
    had left the forestry camp at Big Flats, New York.
    He had begged, and begged, and begged for some kind
    of significant work.
    Because what they were doing up there, as I've said before,
    was stupid.
    And if only the government granted him his wish,
    they sent them to Pownal, Maine outside of Portland
    and assigned him to what was then
    called an Institute for the Feeble-minded, what people call
    a state hospital.
    He had never had any training or expertise .
    But they put them on a ward.
    And he worked as a ward attendant
    till the end of the war and then some.
    I don't think he was discharged about when
    I was, which is in May of 1946.
    So he worked until the end of the war
    as a ward attendant, 12 hours a day, looking after the inmates,
    the mentally defectives, most of them.
    They were wards of the state.
    They had no medications for them, of course.
    So I went up to stay with him and his wife.
    He was married and she was living
    outside of Portland, a suburb of Portland,
    and working in Portland.
    I spent three or four days with them.
    And he wanted to hear everything.
    Even though I took a different course than he,
    I was his brother.
    And he wanted to hear it all too.
    So I went through it again with him.
    It's interesting, because he couldn't stand the idea
    of serving in the military.
    But boy, he wouldn't let me omit one detail.
    So what do you want to know next?
    So what did you do until you got discharged?
    Our unit reconvened in Gadsden, Alabama.
    And we were assigned as a complete unit
    to the Crow General Hospital outside of Cleveland, Ohio.
    The whole unit lock, stock, and barrel,
    went up to be absorbed by this general hospital, which
    was a plastic surgery center for those who've
    been wounded by shrapnel, chiefly,
    and disfigured in one way or another.
    And this was an amazing place to be.
    If I had to stay in the army, which I did,
    I had to serve for another--
    well, until May of 1946.
    So I had to serve through that fall and winter, end
    of the spring until I had enough points to be discharged.
    So I worked at the surgery there as a scrub nurse,
    for which I had been trained.
    But I saw some fascinating things.
    The US army was footing the bill for--
    plastic surgeons were able to try all kinds of things
    that they wouldn't have dared otherwise.
    Because they had the time and the money.
    And I'm sure this gave an impetus to modern day plastic
    surgery.
    But I saw amazing things happening during that winter.
    And my chief job was to every day scrub up for surgery.
    When wasn't working in the operating room,
    then I was free to come and go as I wished.
    Ironically, Oberlin College was only 20 miles away.
    So every free moment I had, I was back on campus
    getting ready to return.
    Did you go back to Oberlin after you got discharged?
    Yes, I did.
    I returned to Oberlin in fall of 1946.
    And then what happened?
    And I graduated from Oberlin in 1949 after a bit of--
    How does one go back to a college campus
    after being in Dachau?
    That's an interesting question.
    I do remember--
    OK, that's summer before I went back to Oberlin,
    I remember having a hard time getting back
    into civilian life.
    OK, this all comes back to me now.
    I didn't go back to Oberlin until September.
    But I was discharged in May, so I was home that whole summer
    with my parents.
    I worried them.
    They were afraid I was sick.
    They thought I was detached.
    And I was.
    They thought I was depressed.
    I'm not sure I was depressed in a clinical sense,
    but I was depressed.
    I was footloose.
    I remember thinking, how do I get back into this world?
    These are civilians.
    They don't know what happened.
    And sometimes I'd hear them complain about things.
    I thought, what are they complaining about?
    They don't know what to--
    there are things out there to really complain about.
    And I'd get annoyed.
    I also had to work through these feelings of feeling
    having been betrayed by them.
    And I had a hard time going back to a Quaker meeting
    and sitting there and looking at that these people who
    turned the other cheek.
    I'd think, hey, how can I talk to you anymore?
    I'm on a different planet.
    I'm not in the same world with you folks anymore.
    And I had a hard time with that.
    They were very nice people.
    They come up to me and they'd say, how ist thee, Sam Hagner?
    We're glad to see you home.
    Yeah.
    So I didn't do much that summer.
    I read.
    I thought about Dachau.
    I remember even trying to write a poem about Dachau.
    I tried to put a verse, blank verse.
    I didn't get very far.
    I just couldn't.
    And my mother said, hey, you better take a typing course.
    You're not doing much else.
    I went and learn how to type.
    Do you remember any of the lines in that poem?
    Something about I know I had to put into words.
    And I couldn't quite do it.
    Lying in her own excrement with the urine running down
    the bedposts.
    That had to be there.
    And I couldn't make it work.
    I just couldn't shake it.
    It wouldn't go away.
    And it wouldn't go away.
    I couldn't put it in.
    I couldn't do anything with it.
    That was a tough, tough summer.
    I think I worked through most of it by time
    I got back on campus.
    And back on campus, all these guys
    are coming back the way I am, so we had a lot in common.
    The girls, they looked at us like we were a little bit
    strange, I suppose.
    Did you talk to the other soldiers
    about what you had experienced and found out if any of them
    had experienced the same?
    Yes, my first roommate, I talked to him about it.
    And the fellows in the--
    I lived in a small house.
    This was a small private house.
    So there are only six of us that lived in the house.
    And I talked to them about it and talked about it with them.
    I couldn't do that at length, because they really
    didn't seem to want to hear it.
    I think they thought, all right, enough of that.
    The war is over.
    Let's get on with it.
    That's pretty much the feeling that I had that they really
    didn't want to talk about it.
    And those who had been in real battle--
    because, see, if you think about all this,
    I never really wasn't a battle.
    Not with bombs bursting overhead.
    Except for an occasional strafing of the hospital,
    I was never fired at.
    But guys had been and they didn't
    want to talk about their experiences.
    I kind of thought, well, I guess,
    I shouldn't talk about mine either.
    What about to the professors?
    No.
    No.
    Until-- no.
    Yes, there was one professor.
    I didn't go into it at great length.
    But there was a reason for that.
    I went back Oberlin with the idea of majoring in economics.
    Because as you may recall, my father was a CPA.
    My older brother already was a CPA or about to become one.
    Younger brother later became one.
    I'm the black sheep.
    So I figured GI Bill would see me through college
    that's all I could expect.
    And I couldn't really ask for any more than that.
    And my father didn't have the money.
    And he wouldn't have approved of going past a bachelor's degree
    anyway, because he was a guy that
    had to work his way through night school to become a CPA.
    And for him, a college education was all the guy needed.
    But I wasn't happy in economics.
    And I was taking all the sociology and psychology
    courses that I could take.
    Because at this point--
    I missed a very important episode, I'm sorry.
    When I got off the boat at Newport News,
    we got back to Philadelphia within 72 hours on a Furlough.
    My father was alone.
    And he was in a very bad shape.
    He was in what I now know was an acute major clinical
    depression, what you might call the male menopause.
    I didn't know it at the time, but I
    learned later, he was suicidal.
    I knew he was suicidal, excuse me.
    I didn't know that he was delusional.
    But he was.
    He was off the wall.
    And I was terrified.
    I didn't know what was happening with the old man.
    I'd never seen him like that in my life.
    My mother wasn't home.
    She was out in California attending-- get this--
    a seminar on psychology, because she was a Carl Jung fan.
    There she was.
    And my old man, her husband, was off his rocker,
    crazy as a hood owl.
    And I was floored.
    I don't know what to do with him.
    And of course, my mother, when she heard I was home,
    she started on her way from California.
    But it took her a couple of days to get home.
    So before she arrived, I was alone with him.
    And I didn't know what to do with him.
    Mind you, I hadn't had any medical training at this point.
    I'm still 19.
    No medical training, no psychiatric training.
    I didn't know what was going on.
    But he was seeing a psychologist.
    And when she heard I was in town, she wanted to meet me.
    So I went up the saw her.
    And she explained what was happening.
    She said, your father ought to be in a hospital.
    I said, he certainly should.
    In fact, she said, he ought to be
    getting electroshock treatment.
    I said, well, what's holding it up?
    Your mother won't give consent.
    And she has to give consent.
    I though, oh my god, where we go from here?
    She said, well, I'm seeing him twice a week.
    I'm trying to keep them alive.
    I said, well, good.
    Thanks.
    Because as you may recall, there was no specific treatment
    for that kind of depression back in those days other
    than electroshock treatment.
    Very interesting thing happened one night.
    I borrowed the family car, went out to see a buddy,
    have a couple of beers, talk about the war.
    Came home around 11 o'clock.
    It was raining cats and dogs.
    And he met me at the door.
    He was wild.
    His eyes were red.
    He'd been crying.
    He said, give me the keys.
    I said, to the car?
    Yes, god damn it.
    Why do you want them, Pop?
    None of your business.
    I thought, he's not going out on a night
    like this in this state.
    No, Pop.
    You can't.
    He said, what do you mean?
    I'm your father.
    Give me those keys.
    And I said no.
    Something told me he could not go out that night in the car.
    If he could walk out, OK.
    But he's not going to drive.
    So I have them in my hand.
    He raised a fist.
    I thought, oh, boy.
    Then he dropped his fist, sobbed, and ran upstairs.
    Went into his bedroom and slam the door.
    And I stood there.
    I thought, the child is the father of the man.
    My mother got home two days later.
    And then I was able to get out and visit Doris at the shore,
    at the Jersey Shore.
    I was angry with her.
    What was she doing out in California
    attending this seminar on psychology?
    And she's missing the major act back in her own home.
    But speaking about that, she did have an influence on me.
    She used to talk psychology to me.
    She talked all about Carl Jung and mechanisms of defense,
    and this, and that, and the other thing.
    The word projection got to be almost a dinner table by-word.
    You're projecting now.
    You're projecting now.
    But that had something to do with my
    becoming a psychiatrist.
    Even though I disagree with her on a lot of things,
    she did have an influence on me.
    And I was close to her.
    I was the one son that would listen to her.
    I didn't always agree and I'd argue with her.
    But at least I would listen to her.
    My two brothers didn't always.
    They would just turn her off.
    That would make her mad.
    But to get back to Oberlin, somewhere in my senior year,
    I was happening to write a thesis on international trade
    as part of a seminar.
    And I was having a terrible time writing it
    and I knew I was in the wrong field.
    And I thought, I've got to do something about this.
    But in meantime, I had to go and see
    the professor who was my advisor for the thesis.
    He was the leader of the seminar.
    He pushed the right buttons.
    All he said was, you're not doing very much
    with this thesis.
    You've got about eight weeks to graduation.
    And that did it.
    There was something about him.
    And I liked him.
    And I just exploded all over the walls of his office.
    Not at him, but just at the walls.
    When I climbed down off the ceiling, he said, well,
    what was that all about?
    I said, I'm in the wrong field.
    He said, it sounds like it.
    What would you like to do with your life?
    Nobody had ever really asked me that.
    And I said, you're going to laugh at me.
    He said, try me.
    I'd like to be a psychiatrist.
    He said, psychiatrist?
    He sort of laughed.
    Then he said, OK.
    I said, you don't think that's funny?
    He said, no.
    You think I could do that?
    He said, I think you might.
    But do you want to graduate or don't you?
    I sat down and--
    oh, wait.
    I'm getting ahead of myself.
    I went back to the dorm where my future wife was.
    She was a Oberlin student then/ She had transferred from Smith
    the year before.
    We were, I guess, they say going study by that time
    and talking about getting married.
    So I went back to the door and told her what had happened.
    And she sat there with a funny smile on her face.
    I said, you knew this is going to happen, didn't you?
    She said, hm-hmm.
    I said, oh, and he knew this was going to happen?
    What makes you people so smart and I'm so dumb?
    And she just laughed.
    I said, well, if I start thinking
    about going to medical school, you
    realize this is going to be one tough road to hoe?
    I've never had a chemistry course in my life.
    I would have to go back and pick up some things.
    She just sat there and smiled.
    I said, are you game for this?
    And she hmm-mm.
    I said, all right.
    So I wrote the thesis in eight weeks, graduated.
    And two weeks later, enrolled in a chemistry course for freshmen
    at the University of Pennsylvania.
    And that started it.
    Because I found out that with GI Bill,
    I could use it if I could get my goals changed by the VA,
    I could probably get halfway through medical school
    before I'd have to borrow money.
    And that's exactly what happened.
    I went to the VA and told them what I wanted to do.
    And I said, I have to change my goals.
    You have to set a goal with the VA.
    So they approved it on the proviso
    that I got accepted into medical schools.
    I said, OK.
    Do you think your decision to go to medical school
    to become a psychiatrist was influenced by what
    you experienced during the war?
    I certainly think it had something to do with it, yes.
    I think my mother had something to do with it.
    I purposely mentioned the episode my father.
    I think that had something to do with it,
    because I was puzzled by what was happening to him.
    I think all of these things came into play.
    And I certainly-- if I hadn't gone into psychiatry,
    I would have gone into my own therapy
    anyway, because I wanted to delve more deeply-- or not more
    deeply, but more thoroughly, perhaps,
    into these feelings that had been aroused
    by being at Dachau, yes.
    Yes.
    I figured, if I didn't make it in psychiatry,
    I was still going to--
    if not analysis, at least get some kind of psychotherapy.
    I even got some psychotherapy in medical school, a little bit.
    But when the guy realized that I was thinking
    of becoming a psychiatrist, he said,
    hey, why don't you wait and do it the right way?
    So I waited until later.
    So then you went from there then you went on to medical school?
    I was accepted not very readily, not very easily-- excuse me.
    Because I was not a premed major and I was picking up chemistry
    courses as fast as I could.
    But I was making applications to medical schools
    at the same time.
    A lot of medical schools didn't very much like me.
    I made 10 applications.
    I was refused by nine.
    And I was the only son at home at that time.
    And dinner tables became kind of--
    dinner table conversations or atmosphere
    became kind of tense.
    Because as each rejection would come in the mail,
    my father would look at me and say, well, now son,
    what are you going to do with yourself?
    Well, dad, let's just wait.
    Haven't heard from all of them yet.
    And my mother would back me up.
    She said, now George, he hasn't heard from everybody yet.
    It got down to number nine and things are looking pretty grim.
    I then I a call from Temple University.
    The Dean wanted me to come down and talk to them.
    The rest is history.
    And then you completed medical school.
    And then just can you tell me where you lived after that.
    I completed medical school in Philadelphia in 1954.
    Did my internship also in Philadelphia.
    And I went into a psychiatric residency at Temple University
    also in Philadelphia.
    Finished the residency in 1958.
    Entered private practice in 1958 and also
    my own psychoanalysis, as I became a postgraduate student
    in the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Society.
    How much of your analysis was devoted
    to your talking about Dachau?
    I can't give you an exact figure.
    Certainly, a healthy--
    I guess, a healthy amount.
    It would come up--
    I spent a lot of time in the beginning, of course,
    as he was getting to know me getting
    and I getting to know him and getting
    used to the whole experience talked a lot about it.
    And them later, he would come back in from time to time.
    So it was like a red thread wound its way
    through my therapy.
    And that was someone you felt who
    had an understanding of what this meant?
    Yes.
    Yes.
    My analyst was Jewish.
    He knew where I was coming from.
    He also made a comment one day, something about--
    how did it go?
    How the hell it came up-- he said, Sam Hagner, he said,
    I know where you're coming from.
    He said, you come from a matriarchical society.
    You had a strong woman for a mother.
    I know exactly where you're coming from.
    I thought, oh, baby, he had a Jewish mother.
    And then when did you get married?
    I was married actually before I started medical school.
    We married in the summer of 1950 after I had my acceptance.
    And I started medical school in the fall of 1950.
    Did you talk to your wife about your wartime experience?
    Oh, Lord, yes.
    Lord, yes.
    I can remember-- poor gal, I put her
    through some terrible times.
    I can remember at times as we were courting, if you will,
    at Oberlin, I tried to tell her how confused I was.
    And I remember saying things to her like-- or asking her,
    could you put up with a guy who might or might not defend you
    if--
    the typical question-- what if a intruder came into the house
    and threatened to rape your wife,
    would you defend her physically?
    And I tried to say to her, you know
    what problems I have with that?
    She said, sure.
    And she accepted that.
    In fact, in some ways I think she's
    a better pacifist than I am.
    When our sons were of age to be drafted,
    she was urging them to go to Canada.
    She said, and if you won't go, or if you want help,
    your dad will take you across.
    What she's joking about was that I could lead him
    through the woods, because I'd become
    a pretty accomplished hiker by that time.
    Let's talk a little bit about your children.
    As they were growing up, did you ever tell them
    about what you had experienced?
    No, I really found it difficult to talk to my children about it
    when they were very, very small.
    Because I didn't think that they could
    comprehend that kind of thing.
    And I think I just thought it was too horrible to expose them
    to that.
    When they became grown, I would at times bring it up.
    But it never went very far with them, because--
    I don't know-- maybe it's their generation.
    They just didn't seem to want to hear much about it.
    They know I'm here today.
    My daughter lives 25 minutes from us.
    She said, dad, I hope it goes all right.
    But she really didn't go into detail about it.
    My two sons, one's in Detroit, Michigan.
    The other is in Acadia, Maine, Bar Harbor.
    They really haven't asked an awful lot about it.
    I don't know if that's their generation or what.
    I think this their generation and even the one coming up,
    my granddaughter's generation, they
    have trouble with this, Gail.
    They have trouble.
    I had a patient once, about 1992.
    He was a history teacher in high school,
    one of the local high schools in New Hampshire.
    Came in one day and told me an amazing thing.
    He said, doc, I have a class that
    doesn't believe the concentration camps existed.
    I said, you're kidding me.
    He said, I'm not kidding you.
    I said, well, I have a letter.
    I can make a photocopy of it.
    Or I'll come in and talk to your class.
    He said, really?
    I said, yeah.
    You were there?
    And I said, yeah.
    I was there.
    He said, let me try the letter first.
    I said, OK.
    But I'd be glad to go in person.
    So I made a photocopy.
    He took it to this class.
    And apparently, that was enough for him.
    He was satisfied with that.
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum Volunteer Collection interview
    with Dr. Samuel Hagner.
    This is tape number three, side A. What kind of practice
    do you have, psychiatric practice?
    What kind of practice do I have?
    I've been retired since 1994.
    Prior to that--
    Did you have?
    I was in practice for 36 years in the practice
    of general psychiatry, general adult psychiatry.
    I've practiced for 11 years in Philadelphia.
    And then I moved to New Hampshire to a semi-rural area
    and practiced for another 25 years.
    In dealing with people who have gone
    through terrible trauma, which you,
    yourself, had gone through during the war,
    do you feel you brought an additional insight
    into dealing with these people?
    Excuse me.
    Yes, I think I was able to empathize, if you will,
    with people who had suffered traumatic experiences.
    And even with people who had not.
    If one has ever experienced a severe depression,
    that could be traumatic in itself.
    In fact, I, myself, experienced a major depression
    in the early 1970s.
    This was long after my own analysis.
    This was long after I had left Philadelphia.
    And so I know what it's like to not only have experienced
    something like Dachau, but I also
    know what it's like to have experienced a major depression.
    And both these have allowed me to--
    and did allow me to empathize with
    and to have insight into what other people were experiencing.
    Do you attribute any part of that experience in the 1970s
    to what you went through in Dachau?
    No, I really don't think so.
    I think that had more to do with what I now
    recognize as a biological predisposition in the Hagner
    family.
    I remind you of the finding my father
    in that state in August of 1945.
    My daughter's had three postpartum depressions
    and three pregnancies.
    She's batting a thousand.
    And these are serious depressions.
    And now as I think back, and this occurred to me somewhere
    in my psychiatric training, my father's mother
    was probably prone to depressions, which they weren't
    called that back in the '30s.
    So I really can't attribute by Dachau experience
    to that depression.
    I think-- because I think because the Dachau experience
    has never really left me, and yet I
    haven't been depressed in a major way since 1970s.
    And I wasn't prior to that.
    I think I've assimilated, if that's the word, the Dachau
    experience.
    I've had to live with it.
    I'm not saying that I've made my peace with it.
    It's just become a part of me.
    That's not the same thing as making a peace with it.
    You live with it.
    It's like-- I can't think of a good analogy.
    Maybe if you have a permanent physical disability,
    you learn to live with it even though you don't like it
    and maybe you never make a peace with it.
    Well, that's the Dachau experience for me.
    How often do you think about it?
    I can't say with certainty.
    Certainly, in recent months, as I
    knew this interview was coming up,
    I've thought about it more frequently,
    but that's an artifact really.
    Aside from that, I don't know how often.
    It's strange how it will come up in different ways
    through free association, if you will.
    Something will trigger it, bring it to mind.
    I could be watching something on television or reading
    something.
    I don't know.
    I don't think there's any pattern, any rhyme or reason
    to it.
    I wish I could answer that in a more definitive way.
    Do you read a lot about what happened during war
    in the camps?
    No, I don't.
    No, I don't.
    I went through a time when I did some of that,
    but I think I have always felt that I was there.
    That's enough.
    I don't want-- it's not really pleasant, you know.
    Like this hasn't been pleasant this afternoon.
    I don't-- I'm not a masochist.
    I don't like to dredge this stuff up anymore
    than I have to.
    When your children were 18 and 19,
    did that bring up for you what you
    had experienced at their age?
    Like an anniversary reaction?
    No, I don't think so.
    No, these things that bring the experience to mind are not so--
    they're just oddball things, happenstance, random.
    Random events can bring it to mind.
    Now putting on your psychiatrist hat, how do--
    or also because of your experience,
    how do you analyze that terrible evil in humanity
    that can be done?
    The extreme evil that you witnessed?
    I wish I had an easy answer for that.
    How can I explain that degree of man's inhumanity to man?
    The simplistic explanation would be
    that man is capable because of what I guess Freud referred
    to as the dark side of himself, the aggressive impulse
    or whatever.
    But that's never been very satisfactory to me
    as an explanation.
    I really can't explain it.
    I wish I could.
    I think it can only be done in theory.
    And that's never been very satisfying for me.
    Any more than I could explain some other acts of violence.
    People killing their parents, people killing their children,
    or their wives, or their husbands,
    I can't explain any of that.
    You can try.
    But I've never been that happy with psychiatric theory
    when it comes to trying to explain those things.
    I don't think there's any explanation.
    Walk away from the concept of the death instinct
    that I was taught in psychoanalysis.
    It's just not very satisfying.
    Do you feel that within each of us
    there is that capacity to do the kind of evil
    that you witnessed?
    I certainly wonder when I experienced that rage
    that I did, that cold rage, as I said to you, in Dachau.
    It made me wonder.
    But then I thought, but I haven't committed murder since.
    I live with that cold rage.
    Interesting question.
    If I had had the opportunity, would I have while in Dachau,
    or while in that mood?
    I'd like to think that like I couldn't have,
    even though I was feeling like it.
    It's one thing to want to do something.
    It's something else not to.
    I'd like to think that we have enough control over ourselves
    that even though we may have a murderous impulse,
    we don't have to act on it.
    I'd like to think that.
    Good Lord, what else is man all about
    if he isn't a little more civilized than the wild beasts
    in the forest?
    Can you elaborate a little bit more?
    You said, it's been a conflict in your life
    since you experienced the whole--
    the war, the idea of pacifism, and do
    you feel there's something-- such a thing as a just war,
    there is a time when certain measures have to be taken?
    Over the years, have you talked about it with yourself?
    I certainly have.
    And I guess that dialogue will never--
    or monologue will never stop, that discourse.
    I don't know whether there is such a thing as just war
    or not.
    People have often said to me, well, you were lucky,
    you were in a just war.
    Pity the poor guys that fought in Vietnam or Korea.
    And I can understand that.
    I can understand that.
    I would like to think, though--
    well, I'd like to think that there is no such thing as just
    war, but I really can't--
    I can't defend that very far.
    I remember saying to the folks at Oberlin
    during our war reunion, I said, when
    I was discharged from the army after World War II,
    I was convinced there was going to be a World War III,
    just as there had been a World War II after World War I.
    But a funny thing happened, those atom bombs were dropped.
    And the nuclear deterrent now I think
    has changed the whole map of the world.
    It's changed the way we think.
    Or maybe it hasn't, but it's changed the way we feel.
    Now we're afraid, maybe.
    And maybe we should be afraid.
    And maybe in that sense, the nuclear deterrents
    are serving a very good purpose.
    But that doesn't answer your question.
    And I realize it doesn't.
    Is there such a thing as just war?
    Gail, I don't know.
    I know that's not a very good answer, but I do not know.
    I didn't find the answer in psychoanalysis.
    I haven't found it since.
    All I know is what I felt then and what I feel now.
    And I still abhor war.
    I think it's miserable, awful.
    And every day, I pick up the paper
    and I see the little wars going on all over the world.
    It disgusts me.
    Rwanda, Ireland, people blowing each other up.
    For what purpose?
    But I do recognize that if I went
    over the edge that one time in Dachau, well, it's possible.
    But at the same time, I didn't act on it.
    But that doesn't answer your question, does it?
    Would I still go to war if I thought it was a just one?
    I don't know.
    I have to be honest with you.
    I do not know.
    And I am 72 years old.
    And I will probably not know.
    And I will probably go to my grave not even knowing.
    How would you stop a second Hitler now?
    How would I stop a second Hitler now?
    I'd like to say that I would be smart enough not
    allow him to get a foothold in the first place.
    I think, for example, we learned some things after Hitler.
    Thinking about how he got his start.
    We've handled things differently since World War II.
    The Marshall Plan, for example--
    we didn't just exact revenge and sit them on the enemy,
    say, all right, now, tough-- tough luck, make your own way.
    We helped them back.
    Look at Germany, what he did for Germany.
    It was tough, to take the enemy, but give them a helping hand.
    But look where they are now.
    I'd like to think that we could avoid another Hitler, at least
    on that scale.
    I'm not sure that we can keep some of the African nations
    from genocide.
    But at least on that large scale,
    with so-called developed countries, quote-unquote--
    I like to think we're developed in all ways--
    I'd like to think that we could.
    And I think maybe we could--
    we can avoid another Hitler.
    Have you been back to Germany?
    I did go back the one time.
    My wife and I went back to visit some friends in Munich.
    And we took a two-week automobile trip,
    through Austria mainly.
    Drove by the entrance to the camp.
    My wife said-- no, I said, "Do you want to go in?"
    She said, "Only if you do."
    I said, "No.
    But I'll take you in."
    She said, "No, if you do want to go,
    you're enough experience for me, that's enough for me."
    Meaning that we had talked about it.
    Why didn't you want to go back in?
    [INAUDIBLE], no.
    No.
    But it was just brought it all back.
    It's one thing to sit here and talk about it, but, uh-uh,
    I didn't want to go back there.
    Because I could just imagine if I was standing there,
    I'd start trying to picture where everything was.
    And I'd look.
    No.
    No way.
    I've been there once.
    That's enough.
    Or as somebody would say, been there, done that.
    Have been other times in your life
    when you have resisted remembering that experience?
    Resisted?
    Remembering that experience.
    I don't know.
    I have to think about that one.
    I think in part--
    you asked earlier, when I returned on campus,
    I resisted remembering, because I
    was resisting talking about it.
    I didn't want to sound like, oh, there
    goes a vet telling old war stories again,
    whether it be flying an airplane and being a real hot shot
    or doing what I did.
    And since then, there've been times
    I really haven't wanted to think about it,
    because I didn't want to talk about it
    and I didn't want to feel it.
    Then there are times when I don't mind feeling it
    as long as it doesn't last too long.
    I think that partly depends on the circumstance,
    the situation in which I am at the moment, the person I'm
    with.
    Now, for example, as I was planning
    to come down here today, there were
    people in the neighborhood that perhaps knew that I was coming
    down here for this purpose.
    Or didn't know-- they just said, "Oh,
    we hear you're going away for a week."
    "Yep."
    And I might let it drop at that.
    And with others, I might say, "Yeah, and this is why."
    So I think part of it depends on with whom
    I'm speaking at the moment, whether I'm
    likely to bring it up or not, or want to remember it and talk
    about it, or just remember it.
    And I guess that has to do with trust, doesn't it?
    Do you trust the person with whom you're talking.
    Not just that they would tolerate my saying,
    "I one time was very, very angry."
    But also, I don't want to be seen as an old man,
    talking old stories and repeating himself.
    Would you be a different person today
    if you had not experienced Dachau?
    Oh, I think so.
    Oh, I think so, yes.
    I think probably I would never have
    gotten in touch, thoroughly, that thoroughly,
    with that dark side that's in me.
    That may or may not be within all of us,
    but certainly I found out was in me.
    Yes, I'd be a different person.
    I might have-- I might have not dealt
    with certain issues in my analysis.
    I don't know, it's hard to say.
    It's a humbling experience to come into--
    to come into touch with a part of yourself
    that you didn't know existed.
    It's a pretty humbling experience.
    Are you angry or bitter that you did witness Dachau and other
    people didn't?
    That you were forced to witness this?
    It depends on the day of week when you ask me that.
    There are times, yes, when I am angry, that why should
    I have been exposed to that.
    That wasn't fair.
    You don't do that to 19-year-olds,
    or 18-year-olds, or even 25-year-olds, I don't know.
    But then at other times, no, I'm not bitter about it.
    Because it did teach me something about myself.
    It taught me something about people, too.
    Not all of it very pleasant, obviously, but it did teach me.
    Yes, I grew up there, I suppose, you might say.
    But as I say, that depends on the day
    of the week in which you ask me.
    How do you, as a psychiatrist, explain the response of people
    in so many different ways.
    Here we are capable of doing so much evil, as you witnessed,
    and yet there were people during the war
    who put their lives on the line to save others out of altruism.
    How do you explain the difference?
    Is it in their upbringing?
    Why does one person put his life on the line
    to save someone and another one do other terrible things?
    Why could one person be selfless and another
    be so overwhelmingly selfish and arrogant?
    I suppose-- well, I was going to say,
    I suppose it is conditioning, upbringing,
    if you will, environment, or nurture, as oppose to nature.
    But I don't know whether that's the complete answer.
    If you had asked me that question early in my training,
    I probably would have said, oh, yeah, that's all upbringing.
    That's all environmental conditioning.
    I'm not so sure about that anymore.
    I'm not so sure that we're all born equal
    when it comes to feelings.
    Oh, I think we're all born with the capacity to be angry.
    But I'm not so sure that we're all born with the same capacity
    to control that anger, or to accept that anger,
    or to deal with it, or whatever the word is.
    For years, I used to wonder in my training,
    and even later in practice, about that term, resolution.
    They used to say in training, "Well,
    the patient's cured when they've resolved their conflicts."
    And I used to wonder, what does that mean?
    What is resolution?
    How do you resolve something?
    Does it go away?
    Does it change its shape?
    Its form?
    Does it become less intense?
    I don't know.
    I don't think anybody really has a good answer.
    There are a lot of articles been written in psychiatry--
    a lot of articles have been written
    in psychiatry about the beginning
    and the middle of therapy, but not a heck of a lot
    about the end of therapy, meaning that wonderful,
    things have been resolved.
    I think the best working definition
    I finally came up with was--
    this is after years of experience--
    a person has finished treatment when
    they can tolerate-- when they can let themselves experience
    the whole gamut of emotions available to man.
    Let those feelings wash over them.
    Not hide them, not blunt them, not wish them away.
    Let them be there.
    And then decide in a rational way what to do about them.
    I think that's the best definition I can come up with.
    So to get back to your question, I
    think anybody is capable of this--
    whatever leads to genocide.
    People are capable of those kinds of feelings.
    But what they do with those feelings
    is something else again.
    And I think that's what we're talking
    about when we speak of maturity or having resolved issues.
    In other words, I think Hitler was crazy.
    Certainly, he was immature, but I think he was also crazy.
    And he could never see his anger in terms of anything else.
    His aggression, in terms of anything else, but himself.
    He could never see it in terms of society or other people.
    It was just what he, Hitler, believed and wanted.
    And I think some of it was truly delusional.
    But he was able to carry a good part of the country with him.
    He certainly was, indeed.
    And I think that, therein, we get
    into issues like mob psychology, how
    a charismatic or a strong leader can sway people, ala the way
    lynching mobs used to operate.
    Then there were also social factors.
    Some of the Germans, I'm sure, weren't crazy,
    who finally swung over to Hitler and the cause.
    Maybe they truly believed that he would
    bring about a new social order.
    I'd like to think that at some point
    they realized they been sold a bill of goods,
    but I don't know when and where.
    I'm sure some of them did.
    Of course.
    I don't think everybody, but by that time,
    things had gotten out of hand.
    Were you completely comfortable when you went back to Germany
    to visit?
    No, no.
    Part of me thought, isn't this ironic?
    Here's the enemy from World War II doing very well indeed,
    probably the leading industrial nation in Europe.
    And I thought, isn't this ironic?
    And yet, that's a far sight better
    than what happened to Germany after World War I,
    far sight better.
    And I'll tell you something else too.
    As we were going from France to Germany in the trucks,
    going into the war, we saw how the French lived.
    We thought they were dirty and unsanitary.
    And we got into Germany, and these people were clean.
    They believed in sanitation.
    They didn't live in filth.
    Why, they lived like people do at home.
    Isn't that funny?
    And we saw that right away.
    These people have the same day-to-day values
    as we do, in terms of health, sanitation, and so forth.
    Whereas the French, we just thought, my Lord,
    how can anybody live this way?
    Now that was back then, of course.
    And that was rural French.
    I mean, we're not speaking Parisians or whatnot.
    In other words, maybe we have more in common with Germans
    than we like to admit.
    When you meet a German today, are you
    comfortable with him or her?
    I think it more depends on who that person is, how he
    comes across as an individual.
    I try not to--
    what's the word I want--
    oh, dear, it slips me--
    put people in categories.
    I try to take them at face value.
    Take them at face value, give them a chance
    to tell me who they are.
    And the same goes for other races, of course.
    I try to do that.
    When you are in Dachau, did you realize
    that the greatest percentage of the victims were Jews?
    Oh, yes.
    How did you know that?
    I don't know how, but I was very much aware
    that a few were political prisoners, but most of them
    were Jews, yes.
    I think I even mentioned, 98% or something like that,
    was some figure I'd gotten.
    I don't know where I got that.
    Is that in the letter?
    I think it is.
    I have no idea where I got that.
    Sorry.
    Are you still in contact with Doris?
    Doris, no.
    I was in touch with her up until she married.
    In fact, I went to visit her after she had her first child.
    I can remember vividly, she was having a terrible time.
    The child was allergic to milk so she was using soy.
    Oh, stained everything under the sun.
    And she was coping with all this.
    And that I married.
    And I remember visiting her and her husband one evening
    with my wife.
    It didn't go well.
    With her, it was fine.
    But we didn't mesh with her husband.
    It just didn't click.
    And something told me, uh-huh, we'd better not push this one.
    And she made no attempt to keep in touch either.
    I think we both knew that evening
    that that episode was over.
    He was-- we just didn't click.
    I don't know why.
    He was not Jewish.
    He is not-- or was--
    I don't know whether she's still married to him or not.
    He was not Jewish, but he was a little too macho for me.
    Did she lose any of her family, extended family?
    Not that I know of.
    I'm not sure of that.
    I don't recall her ever speaking of that.
    I don't recall.
    Are you still a Quaker?
    No, I'm not a practicing Quaker.
    Somewhere, when I went back and tried
    to rejoin those, as I said, those kind, gentle people,
    it just didn't work.
    Somehow, I felt that they were not seeing everything
    for what it is, either in themselves, or in the world,
    or in me, or whatever.
    And I didn't know how I could ever tell them about me.
    And I just drifted away.
    I married a woman who's an avowed atheist.
    You might say, well, maybe that was no accident.
    Well, maybe not.
    She's a very-- in her own way, a very religious person,
    but she's an atheist.
    And one of my sons is.
    And she had something to do with that, I think.
    So she's never attended church, but she's never
    stopped me from doing so.
    But suddenly-- not suddenly, but gradually, it just
    became meaningless for me.
    It just didn't hold any more water.
    And I can't say that I've missed it.
    I think I found worship, ways to worship in other ways.
    Have your political views been affected by your experience?
    No, my political views were in part framed by my mother.
    She voted for Norman Thomas for 20 straight years.
    She was a woman ahead of her time.
    And she used to laugh and say that,
    "Well, George," my father, "I'll cancel your vote every time
    I--".
    But no, no, it's been pretty--
    I guess you have to call me a liberal Democrat.
    It's been that way all along.
    Hasn't changed a bit.
    And my wife is too.
    And our kids are pretty much.
    Well, maybe my daughter--
    she's a yuppie.
    But my sons are pretty non-traditional, shall we say.
    Did you say that as you've gotten older,
    you think about this more?
    You think more about your experience
    as you've gotten older?
    Did I say that?
    Do you feel that way or not?
    No, not necessarily.
    No, as I say, what would cause me
    to think about the war or my experience in the war
    is a random kind of a thing.
    It depends-- it could be something just completely out
    of the blue.
    Or it could be something I'm reading,
    or something-- a remark that somebody makes.
    Or it might be the mood I'm in.
    Is there a sound today or a smell today that triggers?
    Today, you mean--
    In today's world that triggers something about Dachau to you?
    I guess what is likely to is when
    I read about atrocities in some of the African nations,
    for example.
    When I read about the genocide in some of those countries.
    That can do it, sure.
    They can do it.
    I'm trying to think of something else.
    Any smell or sound that--
    any sound or smell?
    Besides the pictures, anything visual?
    No, I have think it's mostly visual.
    No particular sound or odor would call that to mind.
    I don't think we talked in detail about your work
    with the displaced persons.
    What did you actually do with them?
    I don't think we did a lot, as I think about it now,
    and had you asked that question earlier.
    I don't think we did a lot with displaced persons.
    I think after we left Dachau and entered that one hospital,
    the nuns' hospital-- the Catholic hospital run
    by the nuns, I think we were--
    we just didn't do a lot.
    And I'm not sure why.
    It wasn't too long before we were sent to southern France
    for the--
    for the future redeployment.
    I recall at one point being in a rest camp after Dachau.
    Now whether we went there directly, we might have.
    Maybe people felt that we needed a break or something,
    I don't know.
    Because I recall being in a place somewhere in Germany,
    near a river, and having time to go down, and sit by the river,
    and talk to German civilians, young boys, kids, for example.
    I remember one of those offering us a ride on his motorcycle.
    That was probably one of the few times we
    had contact with the civilians.
    This is after the war, of course.
    The war is now over.
    But I really-- and why we deserved that kind of a rest,
    I have no idea.
    Now you're raising a question.
    Could people have felt that we were all pretty frazzled
    when we came out of Dachau?
    I don't know.
    But there's a letter somewhere.
    I don't know whether I talk about being in a rest camp.
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum Volunteer Collection
    Interview with Samuel Hagner.
    This is tape number three, side B.
    And you were talking about being in a rest camp
    after you got out of Dachau.
    I'm not quite sure.
    I believe we were only in the rest camp for maybe a week
    or so.
    Just where that fits in with how long we were out of Dachau
    and when we were at the Catholic hospital,
    and then shipped over to France, I
    don't know where it all fits in.
    But I don't think we really did much in an organized fashion
    after we left Dachau.
    I don't know whether it's because we
    were such a small unit and that we really didn't fit in well
    with the post-war scene, which required
    an organized medical effort to deal
    with the displaced persons.
    I have a hunch that that's part of it.
    That the field hospital is really a type
    of unit designed for war.
    And it doesn't really fit into a non war situation
    or a post-war situation.
    It's a MASH type hospital, really,
    if you can imagine that television series.
    And it really does not adapt well to a post-war situation.
    We just didn't have the facilities,
    the type of equipment to deal with chronic illness.
    I guess this is--
    now I'm coming to it, yeah.
    We were equipped more to deal with acute traumatic injury.
    We were not equipped to deal with chronic illnesses,
    the dietary problems that you would have to--
    that you would see in the displaced persons, for example.
    Sure, we could treat the infectious diseases,
    but probably not so well as a general hospital.
    Because our pharmacy was not that sophisticated.
    We were a pretty simple outfit.
    We were not as simple as a first aid station,
    but we were not much more sophisticated than that.
    Strictly, we were geared and designed
    to take care of the battle wounded.
    And that was about it.
    We couldn't take care of battle fatigue, for example.
    When you were talking to that German villagers,
    did you ever talk about what you had seen at Dachau.
    The couple of occasions where we had--
    you mean with the boys, the young boys?
    I don't think we discussed it with them.
    But in the immediate area of Dachau,
    we did have a chance to talk to a couple civilians.
    And I recall I did personally.
    And this was when I was really wrestling with, well,
    how could you let this happen if you
    knew the camp was in existence?
    And I was trying to find the answer to that.
    But I didn't do that with these young kids
    that we met later, no.
    What were the older people's answers to you?
    The responses were that--
    at first, they didn't want to admit that they
    knew that the camps existed.
    But when they finally said, yes, because we pressed them,
    they said they were frightened.
    They were terrified that if they stepped out of line
    that they would be killed.
    That's about the only answer we could get from them.
    Did that satisfy you?
    Yes and no.
    I think probably, yeah, at least with the Bavarian farmer.
    He's not a very sophisticated individual.
    And he didn't have much wherewithal for dealing
    with those kinds of problems.
    I was never exposed to the educated or cultured German,
    the aristocracy, or the well-to-do.
    So I have no idea.
    These were simple folk that I came into contact with.
    Well, is there anything that we haven't covered,
    any thoughts that you have, any feelings you wanted to express?
    I can't think of anything.
    We've covered more ground than I thought we would ever--
    you have a way about you.
    Why did you do this interview?
    I thought, well, maybe there is something
    that I could add to what you already know.
    Oh, I know, I wanted some answers for myself too.
    One of them was, could you tell me
    whether there were hot air ducts?
    That's one you could help me with.
    I was curious.
    I was afraid, but I was curious, just what would you
    be asking me.
    And maybe I'd be answering some things
    that I wouldn't have not known I would answer in the way
    that I was going to answer them.
    I certainly did not expect that I would have
    had the catharsis that I had.
    I knew I might get emotional, but I had no idea
    I would get that emotional.
    I have no--
    I'm not sorry about it.
    It doesn't bother me.
    I was just a little bit surprised.
    You sometimes think that you have everything tucked away
    neatly.
    And then I know I don't.
    But sometimes the force with which it reasserts itself
    surprises me.
    Have I answered your question?
    Well, we're very grateful that you did do the interview.
    Thank you very much.
    Thank you for asking me.
    This concludes the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    Volunteer Collection Interview with Dr. Samuel Hagner.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    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.
    Interviewee
    Samuel B. Hagner
    Interviewer
    Gail Schwartz
    Date
    interview:  1998 May 22

    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

    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 Samuel B. Hagner on May 22, 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 08:12:25
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    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn506674

    Additional Resources

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

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    Also in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum oral history volunteer collection

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

    Date: 1993

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    Oral history interview with Tana Gelfer

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    Oral history interview with Maria Devinki

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    Oral history interview with Jerome Stasson

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    Oral history interview with Adriana Pacifici

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    Oral history interview with Ernest Kolben

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    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

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    Oral history interview with Ruth Greifer

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    Oral history interview with Anna Wollner

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    Oral history interview with Kate Wacz

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    Oral history interview with Erwin Forley

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    Oral history interview with Ernie Marx

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    Oral history interview with Doris Rauch

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    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

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    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

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

    Oral history interview with Romana Koplewicz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Koplewicz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irving Schaffer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Klein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Pisik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Rosicka

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Salomon Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Suzanne Foldes

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tibor Vince

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elias Piorko

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Hildesheim

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Peter Masters

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Wolke

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ionel Ghelman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irimia Solomon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lotte Salus

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irena Kirkland

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hans Hirsch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Milton Shurr

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ludwig Jacob

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Barbara Artman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fritz Schonbach

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Charles Barber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tibor Borsos

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Robert Kertesz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Kahn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Susan Warsinger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Arnold Weiss

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sia Hertsberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Chava Frajhof

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Israel Frajhof

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Edward Novakoff

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Celia Feldschuh

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Nicole Yancey

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jaffa Munk

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frances Hirshfeld

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Moris Gluckman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Margie Rosenthal

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Emma Mogilensky

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Isaiah Henig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ida Henig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marcel Drimer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michael Silberstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joan Schwab

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erwin Deutscher

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Pick

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hedi Pope

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bella Simon Pasternak

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marion Friedman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Strassburger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jadwiga Dziekonski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Harvey

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thomas B. Gardiner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Roberta Jones

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Christine Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hugh Jenkins

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rene Edgar Tressler

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Stefan Wohl

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Yehuda Adam

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Arlette de Long

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Adam

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Herbert Bitter

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rachel Goldfarb

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tania Rozmaryn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frank Ephraim

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Peter Phillips

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Ichiuji

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Horowitz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hermann Kosak

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Dolly Bestandig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Goldie Gendelman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rhoda Kuflik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Hess

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jutta Levy

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Wolfgang Mueller

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Klari Rudnai

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jill Pauly

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jack Reuben

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Bayer

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Tilda Finzi Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Zwi Golombek

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with 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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