Advanced Search

Learn About The Holocaust

Special Collections

My Saved Research

Login

Register

Help

Skip to main content

Print

Oral history interview with Maryla Korn

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1998.A.0174 | RG Number: RG-50.106.0106

Search this record's additional resources, such as finding aids, documents, or transcripts.

No results match this search term.
Check spelling and try again.

results are loading

0 results found for “keyward”

    Oral history interview with Maryla Korn
    Transcript
    This is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    volunteer collection interview with Maryla Korn, conducted
    by Gail Schwartz on September 9, 1998, in Washington DC.
    This interview is part of the museum's project
    to interview Holocaust survivors and witnesses who are also
    volunteers with the Museum.
    This is a follow up interview that
    will focus on Maryla Korn's post-Holocaust experiences.
    In preparation for this interview,
    I read the summary of the interview
    you conducted with Marin Oschega for the Jewish Community
    Council of Greater Washington on March 27, 1985.
    I will not ask you to repeat everything
    you said in that interview.
    Instead, I will use this interview
    as an opportunity to follow up on that interview
    and focus on your post-Holocaust experiences.
    This is tape number 1, side A. What is your full name?
    Maryla Korn, I was born Orgel, O-R-G-E-L.
    And Maryla is a nickname.
    My name, my official name from birth was Maria.
    And what is your date of birth?
    June 10, 1938, in Krakow, Poland.
    As I said, you have been interviewed before.
    But just to put this interview in a framework,
    let's summarize where you were during the war.
    You were an only child from a large extended family.
    Your father ran a family business of lumber and flour
    mills in Kolbuszowa.
    Your father and grandfather, in 1939, went to Tarnopol.
    Your grandfather died in 1942 in Tarnopol.
    And your father survived in Siberia.
    In late 1940 or early 1941, you and your mother
    first went to Wieliczka and then to Bochnia.
    At one point, you were hidden with a peasant family
    but returned to your mother, because you cried so much.
    In the end of 1941 or early 1942, you went into the ghetto
    in Bochnia, where later on, the men
    were separated from the women.
    And at one time, you had to hide under a pile of mattresses.
    Your mother worked outside the ghetto
    in a factory that produced string shopping bags.
    You were too young for school.
    But you did take messages outside of the ghetto
    and brought back food.
    In June of 1943, you left the ghetto with your mother.
    It was liquidated soon after.
    Your grandfather was shot in the cemetery in Bochnia
    and your grandmother was taken to Auschwitz.
    Your uncle in the summer '42, had been taken to Belzec
    and did not survive.
    You traveled by truck to the border.
    And then after that, at night, by foot, and hid
    during the day.
    Your guides were paid partisans.
    And there were about 18 to 20 people in your group.
    You got to Kosice.
    But you were caught by Czech collaborators
    and then were let go.
    You proceeded, with the help of the Joint Distribution
    Committee to Hungary, and was caught again
    and sent to prison in Budapest.
    But the Joint got you out.
    In July of 1943 you went to Ouzoud in Hungary, stayed there
    until April 1944.
    While there, you lived as a Christian.
    You went to mass.
    Your mother was able to bring food to Polish Jews living
    in the farmhouse.
    And you had an accident where your leg had gangrene.
    In April of '44, the Hungarian Jews were being rounded up,
    and then the Polish foreign Jews were being rounded up.
    You went to Budapest.
    Your mother had stolen passes to get there.
    Then you went on to Bucharest with the help of the Joint.
    You had heard about D-day.
    You were liberated in the spring of 1945 by the Russians.
    You had almost boarded a ship for Palestine,
    which was torpedoed later.
    You went back to Hungary, lived in Budapest for a year,
    where you started first grade.
    When your mother went back to Poland to check on the family,
    you stayed in a children's home.
    She found, in Poland, that your father had been traumatized
    by his war experiences.
    You visited your father in 1947.
    Your mother had set up a business with your uncle
    in Vienna.
    In 1951, you went to Israel, returned to Belgium.
    In 1952, your father came to live with you.
    In 1959 to 1961, you lived in Israel, went back to Belgium.
    And then in May of 1961, you came to the United States
    and got married in June of that year.
    Two corrections.
    One is I don't know the exact date,
    but in July, we escaped, as I said, on June--
    I know it was June 10, because it was my fifth birthday.
    It was sometimes in either August or September
    that all these prison stays plus everything was true.
    So that we went to Kosice, we went to this little village
    in Hungary, to Ouzoud a little bit later.
    It wasn't July '43.
    It might have been late August.
    It might have been September.
    But it definitely was not July.
    That's too early after all of this.
    The other one which I would like to correct that in the winter
    of '46, after we had--
    after we had left Budapest, we went to Prague,
    where we stayed a couple of months.
    And then proceeded to Belgium to Brussels.
    In the winter of '46, again, whether it was December,
    whether it was January '47, that I really cannot--
    but it was, I think, it was December of '46.
    And the reason we went to Belgium,
    it might have been, as I always said,
    might have been Timbuktu, because we had no family
    left was because my mother's only surviving
    member of the family, which was my maternal grandmother's
    sister had lived in Antwerp before the war.
    She had survived in Brussels.
    And so we came to join her.
    That was the only reason.
    Now, the only person, again, who survived the war
    was my mother's older brother, who had gone from Poland.
    He had also gone to Hungary.
    And from Hungary, he went back to Poland.
    And from Poland, in 1951, he left for Vienna.
    And this is where the connection comes in.
    Thank you.
    Before we go on to the post-Holocaust experiences,
    I just wanted to clarify some more points.
    In the summary of that very early tape,
    it was said that your paternal grandfather had
    a non-Jewish assistant who took over the business
    and brought you money in the ghetto.
    My maternal--
    This is your paternal.
    No, my maternal grandfather, who later
    was killed in the cemetery in Bochnia had a store in Krakow.
    They were from they were from Lublin.
    And OK, let me say, my grandfather's family was
    from Lublin.
    My grandmother's family was a rabbinical family that
    was around the city of Krakow.
    That's how, in 1914, my mother, and her older brother,
    and my grandparents came back to Krakow.
    So this is where we have the Lublin connection
    from my grandfather and the Krakow
    connection from my grandmother.
    My grandfather had a store for all those years
    that was in Krakow that was oriental rugs and linoleum.
    He had always had an assistant in that store.
    And it was, in some cases, it was a shabbos goy.
    But in this case, it was an assistant in the store.
    This was a young guy by the name of Yuzik.
    Now, Yuzik was a very young man.
    What was his last name?
    That's a good question.
    I'm very bad at names.
    I can maybe get it out.
    Maybe later, OK, anyway, Yuzik was his assistant.
    By the time war came, he was a young man and already married
    into, really, a totally primitive peasant family,
    who, during the war, could have helped.
    But they were too frightened.
    And they were too primitive to even know
    what on Earth they were doing.
    He was-- he took over the store in Krakow
    when the Germans did not allow Jews to own stores anymore.
    And he was the exception to the rule,
    because what he did during the war
    was to bring us suitcases full of money into the ghetto.
    That's how we had money to eat, to survive, and to,
    later on, to escape.
    And he is the one who kept the store until after the war.
    And after the war, interestingly enough,
    when my older uncle Lishek went back from Hungary to Poland,
    he rejoined Yuzik in that business.
    And they had a business together,
    the same business that my grandfather had before the war.
    At one point, by the way, that business
    was on the main square of Krakow,
    which was quite unusual, because he was an Orthodox Jew.
    And Jews were not exactly welcome on that main squared,
    per se.
    But anyway, my uncle was in business
    was that Yuzik until my uncle left for Vienna
    and gave him the whole business.
    And the man died a couple of years ago in Poland.
    In the ghetto, are there any--
    were there any sounds, or smells,
    or sights of the ghetto that you still remember?
    Yes, and this is what, when I went into Daniel's Den--
    This is the exhibit at the Holocaust Museum.
    Museum, I could connect to it even more,
    maybe, than some adults.
    I mean, the adults have different memories of it.
    What struck me is--
    as much as it's, I think it's wonderfully well done
    for the public and to be palatable.
    OK, I mean, but what was missing--
    I remember coming out and somebody say to me, so?
    And my reaction was so where is the overcrowding, the smell,
    the dirt, and everything that went with it.
    So, yes there were these--
    maybe you don't realize it when you're a child.
    But there was always somebody around.
    I mean there was no such thing as having a peaceful time.
    But then I was a three or four-year-old child.
    You go with it.
    I don't remember.
    I must tell you, I asked my mother a while back,
    because everybody asks the same two questions.
    One was were you ever hungry?
    And I turned to my mother and I said,
    I don't remember ever being hungry.
    So she smiled.
    And she says, no wonder, we paid almost was gold.
    Now, I don't know if really it was gold.
    But she said, when there was an apple available,
    we paid was gold that you would have the apple.
    The money was there, because of this Yuzik.
    And at the same time--
    and also there was money for another reason.
    My paternal grandmother, at the beginning of the war,
    when the men escaped, and she was left with--
    in Kolbuszowa, she was left with two daughters and two boys.
    Out of this group, only, by the way, one survived.
    It's my uncle who is the head of the enzyme research in Mount
    Sinai in New York.
    All the rest were killed.
    She brought to my mother half of what my paternal grandfather
    had left her.
    So there was this money also.
    But the money really that made us eat and everything else
    is definitely the one that Yuzik was bringing into the ghetto.
    So this is why I don't remember ever any hunger.
    I remember overcrowding.
    I remember these rooms with these stacked up beds
    all over the place.
    There must have been--
    I don't know how many people were in one bedroom.
    But I mean, stacked like in the army, not one
    on top of the other, but maybe four or five in height.
    They were building, obviously, in height
    to leave space for the floor.
    That I remember.
    The interesting thing is in 1985, I went back to Poland
    with my father, who had never been to Bochnia.
    And after visiting the family where
    we had lived with them outside of the ghetto for a while,
    I said to Marysia, who was 13 years older than I am, I said
    to her, take me to the ghetto.
    And then I will try to find my own way.
    And interestingly enough, I retraced the way
    to where the Judenrat was.
    And from there, I retraced the house where we lived.
    And there it stood.
    And it stood the same way that it was in my memory.
    Only thing different, it's a two story house
    with an entrance on the side.
    And there it was.
    So these are the only memories.
    But there are no memories--
    there are memories of being hidden.
    There are memories of my grandmother,
    much more than my grandfather.
    My grandfather, for some reason, I
    don't know whether it's a question
    because he was separated from us and whether a child--
    but I remember things before entering the ghetto.
    So I can't figure that one out.
    But I remember my grandmother, the way she was built.
    I remember-- those things I remember.
    Overcrowding, and one little kitchen that I think
    must have been a closet, whatever it was.
    That's all the memories out of that.
    Any particular smells?
    No, absolutely not.
    I mean, smells in the sense that people were there.
    But I don't know why my reaction, when
    I saw Daniel's Den, was where is the smell, the dirt, et cetera.
    Because obviously there must have been subconsciously some,
    but no.
    What were the sanitary facilities like?
    Probably terrible.
    I mean, even until today, there are no sanitary conditions.
    So when somebody says, was it clean, how could it be clean?
    I mean, that's why there were--
    well, mice where that was maybe.
    But that's why there were lice.
    There were other things.
    I mean, but I don't remember dirt.
    I just remember that I left Bochnia
    with this wonderful little cold.
    And believe it or not, my mother definitely not
    was flat foot shoes, when she was flat--
    heeled shoes when she was going crossing the mountains.
    What crossed their minds, I don't know.
    Never remember, anything, remember in Hungary,
    not having shoes.
    But again, that type, no absolutely no memories
    of incredible hardship.
    What was the address of your-- the building in Bochnia?
    That I don't know.
    What street?
    I don't remember.
    I know where it is.
    But I don't know the street number.
    What was the incident where you hid under mattresses?
    They were coming.
    There was a program already--
    I mean, program, there was an [? atzia ?] in the ghetto.
    And they were looking, obviously, for children.
    They were coming either for children, or women,
    or whatever.
    OK, if they didn't take everybody together.
    They were coming then for children.
    And my mother and grandmother piled
    me on top of the first mattress was all the other mattresses
    on top.
    And that's it.
    That's the episode.
    And when the [? atzia ?] was over, they took me out.
    Do you remember this?
    That one I remember.
    I also remember a very strange conversation
    which is not a question that it haunts me.
    But I, very often, I think about it, especially now
    that my mother is--
    maybe God should have been good to her
    and she should have gone.
    She had a massive stroke.
    She's paralyzed.
    She cannot speak.
    And I said, to myself, when somebody said, well,
    at that age, it's natural that parents go.
    And I keep saying to myself, this is not just a mother.
    This is a mother plus the whole--
    My grandmother, this conversation, whether, and it's
    not any--
    this is in the back-- my mother confirmed it a long time back.
    And then she dropped the conversation,
    didn't want to talk about it.
    My grandmother turned to her, and this was her daughter.
    My mother was then 31, at the most, 32.
    She was born in 1912.
    So now, we're talking about 1942, '43.
    OK, either she's 31 or she's 32.
    This was her child.
    And she said to her, if they take Marylka,
    maybe you should think about yourself.
    And she said, no, if they take her, I will go with her.
    And this, I always remember this, because it's normal.
    It's so normal.
    She said no, she would go.
    She never had, thank God, to do it.
    And I really think, I mean, these are the years--
    it's the same age as my children are.
    Would I react the same way?
    I guess so.
    I mean, my grandmother adored me.
    OK, I always remember things about it.
    But at the same time, she thought,
    if somebody had to survive, then let it be at least one.
    So that memory comes.
    And this, again, it must have been sometime '42, early '43,
    whatever.
    So that those are the memories.
    How did your mother comfort you living under these kind
    of very difficult conditions?
    Did she have a certain way about her
    to comfort that small child like you?
    No, I don't remember her as being--
    I think I remember my grandmother
    being the strength, the caregiver,
    the person who was there.
    At the same time, I'm thinking.
    Again, my mother, born in 1912.
    So she was 27 years old when we war started.
    Here is this upper middle class, very comfortable,
    very well-off young woman.
    She married very, very well.
    OK, my grandparents were middle class.
    But that, that other one, although they
    were in a village, and they didn't know how to live.
    I always think they lived like 17th, 18th century,
    the fact is they were very wealthy.
    There she was.
    Suddenly, she's left alone with a baby.
    And the war starts, and then all the things that happen.
    So at 27, a baby.
    OK, a young mother, but a baby.
    32, then she goes all through this.
    I really wonder where the strength came in.
    She's an extraordinarily strong woman.
    Now, whether the strength came from that
    or whether this was the character, well,
    who was there to know?
    She is she is until today very difficult,
    but an extraordinarily self-reliant--
    when everybody, for example, in Hungary,
    when we were there already, people
    were going back to Czechoslovakia.
    See, Czechoslovakia, by then, and Poland were already clear.
    I mean, the Hungarian Jews were being taken there.
    But nobody was looking anymore almost--
    if I can say, of course, they're always looking for Polish Jews.
    But the fact is that there were now--
    Czechoslovakia was emptied of Jews.
    Some people were going back.
    And she says, I'm not going backward.
    I'm going forward.
    And until today, she says she put herself and me
    through unnecessary hardship in some way,
    because she could have stayed in Hungary at that point
    and be fine without putting--
    but she was going forward.
    She was going for--
    She wanted to go to Palestine.
    She just wanted to get out and to survive.
    You look at some of the movies like Europa Europa,
    some crazy things happened why somebody survived.
    I don't believe that anybody survived because they
    were so darn smart.
    They survived because either they were lucky,
    or whether they were in the right place,
    or whatever happened.
    And in her case, she had an incredible perseverance.
    Let it go.
    Don't worry, machine will pick up.
    Did you have a favorite toy in the ghetto?
    No, oh, yes, I had a favorite toy.
    But I don't know what it's called a toy.
    And this episode is in--
    I said it on the show I was interviewing.
    Sure, I'm not sure whether it was there.
    My grandfather managed, in the very early times of our being
    in the ghetto, to bring me--
    I don't know what to call, a tricycle, or whatever.
    It was a little--
    well, it's called a [POLISH] in Polish, which
    was a board with two wheels.
    And then you pushed on it.
    Anyway, whatever it's called.
    And I had it in the ghetto, which there were no toys.
    There was absolutely nothing.
    And I guess there were maybe toys
    that people had brought in.
    But nobody talked about toys.
    And one of the Jewish policemen, who I understand now, I just
    heard a couple of months ago that he finally died,
    should have.
    He was very much collaborating with the Germans.
    He was scaring everybody off.
    And he's the one who, by the way, when my grandfather was
    being taken to the cemetery to be shot,
    even gave him, hit him in his face and tore off his arm,
    here, from his suit, thinking that he
    had some money in there.
    Because he kept saying that [INAUDIBLE]
    had to have some money with him.
    There was a book written, by the way, after the war about him.
    And it said for eternal disgrace.
    In Polish, it says [POLISH],, for eternal--
    I mean, for a eternal disgrace, for eternal [POLISH]..
    And he came to take away this bicycle, whatever you call it,
    that I had.
    And so my grandfather said to him, please, leave it.
    The children have nothing here.
    The child has nothing.
    Leave it.
    So he says, what's the difference?
    He won't survive anyway.
    So that was--
    What was his name?
    Rothkopf, Marion Rothkopf.
    I remember when I wrote this, I told her the name.
    And then I said, wrong, wrong, wrong.
    This was another policeman.
    But that one was OK.
    It's Rothkopf.
    And Rothkopf came, believe it or not, came to Belgium.
    And survived.
    And lived that very well and has just died of cancer in Belgium.
    How did you take messages out again,
    you were such a small child--
    Can I just go back?
    He changed his name from Rothkopf to Rogovski.
    And he lived in Belgium.
    So that's his family under the name of Rogovski.
    Sorry, OK.
    You were very small.
    How is it that you took messages out of the ghetto
    and brought back food?
    Because I was small, I could get under the fence,
    or I could go somewhere where adults couldn't.
    That was basically the whole idea.
    I mean, it wasn't because I walked through the gates
    of the ghetto.
    It was because underneath, they had dug, probably, something.
    And this is how--
    this is how we also escaped, at night, from the ghetto,
    to the outside, to be taken by truck to the Carpathian
    Mountains, because we had to go under.
    I mean, nobody opened the gates of the ghetto for us.
    What kind of fence was this?
    What was it made out of?
    Was it barbed wire?
    I don't remember what it was.
    But I think that there was barbed wire on top.
    But somehow, I think it was--
    either, I think it was wood.
    It was the wood.
    I don't remember the fence.
    I remember that there was a fence there.
    I don't remember what it was.
    And what kind of messages did you take out?
    Whatever they had.
    What did I--
    I didn't read.
    I didn't write, whatever it was.
    How did you know where to go?
    That how do I know after all these years to remember
    where the house was?
    I don't know, maybe somebody waited on the other side
    immediately and picked it up, whatever it was.
    I have no idea.
    And then you brought food back.
    Yeah, whenever we could.
    That's the story my mother, with this apple.
    Whenever there was something I brought or somebody
    else brought, but whenever I could,
    if I had an apple or something, I guess I brought it was me.
    These stories my mother told me later on.
    Do you have a memory of doing this or is this just--
    No, absolutely no memory of this.
    That I have no memory.
    I have memory of many things.
    But I don't have a memory of that.
    Have a memory of running away with this Marysia, who
    was 13 years older, when one day, the Germans were coming.
    And she took me by the hand.
    And we were running, because she my mother said, get her out.
    That I remember.
    What is your very first memory?
    Very difficult to say what are my first memories.
    I don't know what are my first memories.
    At this point, maybe they were there.
    Maybe 20 years ago, there were some.
    Absolutely no memory.
    Your uncle was part of the resistance in the ghetto.
    Do you know what he did?
    I don't know.
    This was a young group.
    This was 1942.
    They were all working in the Judenrat downstairs,
    because everybody wanted some pull, tried
    to put their kids into a position
    so that they wouldn't be taken.
    They had still these illusions.
    And I know that they were counterfeiting some stuff,
    whatever they were doing.
    And then he was taken, he was taken in 1942.
    Just to back up a little bit, do you
    remember being hidden with that peasant family?
    No, I remember the story being forever told
    that if I had been quiet, I would have been in that place.
    And I would probably have survived there.
    It turns out that the story I was
    told about this little girl that was with me, which I told 15,
    20 years ago was totally false.
    The story was she was put there by her parents.
    I was put there by my mother, or by, at least,
    by these people with whom we lived in--
    I'm sorry, in Bochnia, Marysia and her parents.
    OK, they took me to this farmhouse.
    And that baby was there already.
    Her parents were in Bochnia.
    So were her grandparents.
    She was good, year old baby, sat under the table.
    Didn't do anything.
    I was three years old.
    And I screamed my head off, I wanted my mommy.
    So I was taken away.
    We were always told that she had survived there.
    And then, after the war, vanished, somehow vanished.
    Well, the story's a little bit stranger than fiction.
    She was kept there for a short time.
    My mother and grandparents and her parents and grandparents
    were hidden together in this attic
    of this farmhouse in Bochnia.
    She was then returned to her parents
    and given, again, to somebody else.
    Her parents died.
    Her grandparents died.
    She survived the war being adopted by this Polish family.
    And she lived in Bochnia until '61 not knowing
    at all about this episode with this other little girl.
    When she started writing a book, she came to the United States,
    when she started writing the book in Bochnia,
    she went to these people where we live,
    Marysia and her parents, who told her
    about this other child that had been there with her.
    And she, about two years ago, contacted me
    and tried to get my side of it.
    Then she called my mother, who tried to explain
    to her what had happened.
    And that's when, I think, we got the story straight.
    So we were together like 24 hours.
    But she stayed there a little bit longer.
    And she was converted to Christianity.
    And then, she went to Israel.
    And the parents were wonderful people
    who gave her education, everything else.
    Then she went to Israel, then she came to America,
    she married a very religious Jew.
    She has two children.
    He just, the husband, died.
    And she lives now in New York.
    But she did convert.
    So at least that side of the story I had right there.
    What is her last name, her family name?
    Wineberg, Lucia Wineberg, Weisberg, I'm sorry,
    Weisberg, Lucia.
    And she lives in New York.
    And that's why we're getting the story straight,
    because she's writing a book.
    I'm not.
    When you left the ghetto, you were approximately five years--
    This was couple of days before my birthday.
    I was five while walking the mountains, crossing the border.
    What did your mother tell you why you were leaving?
    Nothing, absolutely nothing.
    Did you take anything special with you?
    No, my mother didn't even take clothing,
    because she thought that since she was taking
    was her, sewn into her underwear,
    she was taking was her gold and some diamonds, that she would,
    by the time she crosses into Hungary,
    she would be able to buy the whole world.
    So nothing.
    Were there any other young children along with you?
    There were no young children.
    But I was the only one.
    Not only that, but I had the whooping cough.
    [COUGHS] Excuse me.
    And everybody was scared of taking me.
    And then came this crazy story, whether it's true or not,
    maybe a doctor can confirm it, somebody say, don't worry,
    once you will get into the mountains,
    the whooping cough will stop.
    It turned out that they did stop,
    but whether was the mountains, or whether it was sheer luck,
    I don't know.
    How did you keep up with the group?
    You said you had to walk by night.
    I was much better than they were.
    This was the whole story--
    my mother always said that when she
    was at the bottom of a hill, and I was on the top,
    and I saw that she couldn't come,
    I would run down, pick her up and drag her up.
    So children, obviously, have more resistance than adults.
    Were you frightened?
    I don't remember that.
    Look , I was brought up in fright.
    My whole childhood was in fright.
    So what was fright?
    I mean, I'm sure that it wasn't the way my--
    I mean, that's for sure, it's not
    the way my granddaughter is being brought up.
    But what was fright?
    It was all relative.
    It was abnormal to start with.
    This was not a normal way of living, or bringing up
    children, or for anything.
    So what's normal?
    I don't know.
    But no, I don't remember any fright.
    Do you remember sleeping with the cows?
    Yeah.
    What's that like?
    I guess, again, you take a child camping,
    and what's the reaction?
    So they-- so they go camp--
    you see, these things were coming so regularly,
    so progressively, it was just a way of life.
    It didn't make any difference.
    My mother tells of a story, we were
    being hidden in a bush on our way to Romania.
    We're being hidden at night in a bush on the railroad station
    in order to wait for the train.
    So somebody had to come to pick us, put us into that bush,
    and then had to take us out to get us on the train.
    Well, my mother got frightened.
    And I was the one who was calming her, saying
    everything will be all right.
    You cannot take it by normal standards.
    There are no normal standards in this.
    Was not a normal upbringing.
    This was not a normal way of life.
    And this was not normal reaction.
    That's about it.
    That's the best that I can say about this one.
    Did you snuggle up to the cows?
    Or were they just often--
    I can't remember anything.
    They were just there.
    They were there.
    And you knew that you had to sleep there.
    When you were caught by the Czech collaborators,
    did you, as a child, know the danger of that?
    No, I remember being in a cell with my mother.
    I remember being, then, into the main hall there where there
    was making some selection, which then turned out to be a very
    poignant and interesting one.
    But again, I didn't remember.
    There was a group that had left before us in which there
    was half of a family and with us was
    the other half of the family.
    And the other group was then selected that day,
    and was sent back to Poland, and was shot.
    So with us was one half.
    I know the husband was with us.
    And I think the son was with us.
    And on the other end was the--
    but he was much older than I was, the son.
    And on the other--
    in the other group was the mother with the daughter.
    And they were all taken back.
    And they were shot, which was a normal type of a thing.
    Again, I don't know whether my mother was this calming person,
    or whether it was the way of life that was.
    Mystery, I would suspect it's a combination.
    When you got to Ouzoud in Hungary
    and you lived as a Christian, what did that mean to you?
    How much-- did you feel very Jewish before that?
    Did you know you were Jewish?
    I knew I was Jewish all the way through.
    There was no-- the funny thing was
    that my mother was playing this Catholic, wearing a cross,
    sending me to church on Sunday, and playing
    this Catholic having no knowledge of what Catholicism,
    and then not wanting to eat pork because that wasn't what
    she was used to.
    So you have these conflicts.
    I mean, this was--
    this was odd.
    The whole thing, really, sometimes sounds crazy.
    My mother also went and connected
    with the Hungarian Jews.
    There was an orthodox butcher there.
    And the Polish Jews, including my mother,
    were telling them what was happening.
    And of course, they didn't believe it.
    It was odd.
    Yes, of course I always knew that I was Jewish.
    I never said it to anybody.
    But there was never any question.
    This is a continuation of United States Holocaust Memorial
    Museum volunteer collection interview with Maryla Korn.
    This is tape number 1, side B. And you
    were talking about living--
    knowing that you were Jewish but living
    and your mother living as Christians
    and what your reaction to that was.
    I remember I was going, my mother sending me on Sunday
    to the church, wonderful.
    What was that like for you?
    I remember going.
    It didn't affect me one way or another.
    The only way, maybe, subconsciously it
    affected me, because I remember, always,
    even after the war, as very Jewish as I am,
    I mean, by any standards.
    I could go into a church and not feel
    that I was violating anybody's space
    or they were violating mine.
    It really, it doesn't--
    I worked then, later on, in Georgetown
    in the campus ministry.
    And to me, going to a mass or going to a church
    was not something that was either foreign
    or that was forbidden.
    Maybe it opens up some horizons.
    Who knows?
    Did you join in the prayers when you were a child?
    I don't remember joining in prayers.
    I know I remember knowing them a little bit,
    but not joining in prayers, no.
    What was the story or just a little bit
    of background about the accident with your leg?
    Well, barefoot, no shoes in the village.
    And we had to go and pick up the water.
    At that point, my mother, and her girlfriend, and husband,
    at the time, and the son, Bernard,
    who is now in Canada, who is two or three years older than I am.
    We all lived together.
    And the two children were sent to pick up water at the well.
    And he pushed me or whatever when I was barefoot.
    And I stepped on a piece of glass.
    And it cut me.
    And from that, came, basically, what could
    have been a serious gangrene.
    And the only thing that saved it is
    that they managed to take me to a doctor after a while.
    And he opened it up, still have the scar
    on the bottom of my foot.
    And he drained it.
    And that was it.
    So that's the story of that one.
    Until today, whenever we see each other,
    I always say to him, you push me on a bottle.
    Do you remember that time as being a very difficult time?
    No, I don't remember it as being difficult,
    because we were in this village.
    My mother was working in the fields.
    Whatever food we had was--
    and it wasn't the pressure of being in a ghetto.
    So compared to the ghetto, this was--
    it was another normal phase of living.
    Did you know about a man named Hitler at that time?
    Can't remember if I knew it.
    I knew, certainly, that they were the Germans.
    I don't know whether I knew what Hitler, per se.
    What did German-- what did the word "Germans"
    represent to you?
    Represented the horror of being scared
    and of being the ones who are doing something
    that was terribly wrong.
    But it's very difficult. This is about children.
    OK, either they lived a normal life,
    because they were hidden somewhere,
    as abnormal as it was.
    But it was a way of life.
    Remember, I was 18 months old when it all started.
    So does a 5-year-old child now know
    who is, let's say, I don't know, not that I
    want to compare it to, that is Bush,
    or Reagan, or even Clinton?
    I doubt it.
    Maybe somebody, the name--
    but it doesn't affect you.
    The name, I'm sure it was discussed royally around,
    but no, it didn't.
    Did you know you were having problems
    because you were Jewish.
    Yes, that was no question there.
    Were you angry that you were Jewish
    because you had all these problems?
    No, it never affected me until today.
    The other question which I was always
    asked, do I feel guilty that I survived?
    Excuse me, how does a 5-year-old feel guilty that they survived?
    I suspect that the older generation
    can feel guilty if they could not, like my mother,
    could not influence her parents to run away with us.
    Then you can start feeling--
    what does a child, 5-year-old child, feel guilty about?
    And then, in April '44, you went to Budapest.
    And what was that like?
    What was life like there?
    Budapest, life was about as normal
    as the abnormality could be.
    We lived in a small room with my mother.
    We went every day to the Jewish Community,
    which was established by the Joint, where there was lunch,
    which was a dinner given out.
    We were all there.
    There was a small school for the children.
    There was none of the hiding.
    There was none of the--
    if there was trauma before, there was none of that.
    That was a very, very peaceful time.
    You had said that the Joint was of infinite help to you.
    How did they get to you?
    Or how did your mother get to them?
    What was the means of connection?
    How they got to us, because I suspect
    that the escape route from Poland
    to Czechoslovakia to Hungary was established in collaboration
    with the Joint.
    As much as the people had to pay for it,
    it was established by the Joint.
    So they knew exactly who was coming through.
    Once we came out of the prison in Kosice,
    they immediately took care of us.
    So they reached out to you.
    It wasn't a question of your mother reaching out to them.
    Yes, that's right.
    They knew.
    And without them, we wouldn't have survived.
    There's just no question.
    This was a question of food.
    This was a question--
    at any time, they were the support group that
    was there, from food to any--
    remember, no money, no nothing.
    Anything was done was done by the Joint.
    Definitely the escape from Hungary to Romania
    was all Joint.
    The support in Romania was all Joint.
    They were a blessing.
    I mean, there's no question of what they did.
    You were six years old, I guess, in Bucharest.
    Did you feel very much older than that, do you think?
    I suspect our childhood was taken away from all of us.
    Of course, any experience like this
    is going to produce a very different type of a child.
    So absolutely, there is no question--
    older to what?
    What do you compare it to?
    I can compare it a little bit to my granddaughter,
    at this point.
    But what do you compare it when you have nothing to--
    but we were grown up beyond our natural age, of course.
    Did you know, then, that everybody
    didn't live like you did?
    Or did you think the whole world lived like you did?
    I don't think that you compare it.
    I don't think that you think about it.
    I mean, does anybody think, even if you take,
    now, a child somewhere, does that child
    think that he or she lives differently than somebody else?
    Describe what it was like, or if you remember,
    trying to get on this boat that, unfortunately,
    was later torpedoed.
    We were sent from Bucharest to Constanta by train.
    Then, we ended up in these warehouses
    where everybody slept on the floor.
    Then, I remember going to this boat and my mother
    being the last one to be pushed off.
    The man saying to her, it won't make it.
    Don't get hysterical.
    So we were taken back by train to Bucharest
    with my mother later saying that she thought
    that was the end of her and of us, because she
    didn't have the support.
    Then this boat was sunk.
    And a while later, a second attempt was made.
    So we went back to Constanta.
    But we never made it on a boat.
    And all of those who made that route
    ended up, of course, in Cyprus.
    But we never made it after that.
    Do you know the name of the first boat?
    It starts with an M. And you can find it,
    because it's a very well--
    I think it's called the [? Mercour. ?] OK,
    I think that that's what it is.
    Somehow, it's in the back of my mind.
    It's the [? Mercour, ?] and it is, you can find it.
    This is either late '44 or very beginning '45.
    But it's a historic.
    It's the [? Mercour, ?] that's what it is.
    Did your mother talk a lot about your father at that time?
    You had been separated from him since you were an infant.
    No, she didn't she didn't, absolutely not.
    I don't remember ever anything coming into.
    This was not a conversation.
    Did you ask about a father?
    I don't think I did.
    Everybody had abnormal circumstances.
    Either there was a husband, or there was a wife,
    or there was a child, or there was somebody.
    Who ever saw full families except those friends of ours
    who ended up in Canada?
    I mean, everything was disjointed.
    Never remember talking about him.
    At the time of liberation, what did that
    mean to a seven-year-old, almost seven-year-old.
    It's an incredible memory.
    We were in the basement of this wonderful house
    where we lived, bombs falling all over the place.
    Just one neighborhood, I remember, destroyed.
    And then, a sunshine, a day of sunshine,
    where everybody came out, and candies,
    or whatever the darn thing was that
    was flying out from those planes.
    And the scream out of everybody don't touch it
    and don't eat it, because they didn't
    know whether it was poison, wasn't poison, or whatever.
    That's the memory of this incredible bombing
    before, never heard the bombs before.
    So this was the first time, shaking of the whole thing.
    Little houses, I mean, don't get any idea,
    these were not fortresses.
    These were not even buildings.
    These were small homes where there were, maybe,
    two apartments, or whatever, three apartments.
    And then this bombing.
    And then this wonderful day.
    And then the coming in of the Russians.
    And I don't remember anybody being frightened.
    But my mother says that they were shaking,
    because to them, the memory of the Russians,
    before the war, that type of a memory, scared of the Russians
    as can be.
    And my mother decided, my uncle, by that
    time, the one who had survived, Lishek,
    came from Hungary to us to Romania,
    before going back to Poland.
    And he said, are you to stay here?
    What are you going to do?
    And she said, I'm going back to Budapest.
    I'm escape-- I'm going back away from the Russians.
    So she took me by train.
    And we went back in an uproar, in a tumult.
    I mean, just got on the train and went,
    and went from Bucharest back to Budapest.
    The Russians were there.
    But there was a much larger Jewish community,
    friends from Poland that had escaped,
    and they were all there.
    So there was a support group.
    And that's why we stayed a little bit longer, and then
    went to Czechoslovakia.
    Let's go back a little bit, when it
    was the bombing before the liberation,
    what did you do during that time?
    Lived totally a normal life.
    I remember going by streetcar or walking to the Jewish house
    where there was the school, and there was this food,
    and there were these friends that were getting together.
    Living totally, definitely, not a
    frightened life, if that's what you mean.
    I mean at the time of the bombing.
    Did you go into a bomb shelter?
    No, this was a basement of this little house.
    There were no bomb shelters.
    This was the basement.
    Every house had a basement.
    So they packed up into the basement.
    If something had fallen, we would all
    have been blown to pieces.
    Small houses, I mean, not exactly--
    no, not shelters.
    What did your mother say to you during the time of the bombing?
    I don't remember anything except being frightened,
    because that was noisy.
    That I remember.
    Did you know that you might get killed?
    Or was it just the noise?
    Well, you certainly got scared.
    I was always afraid of thunder.
    I think that that thunder was connected to this bombing.
    I mean, when after the war, when there was thunder,
    I would go under the table.
    And I would wait there for the thunder pass.
    Probably, that's the connection.
    But no, nothing else beside that.
    During these years, did you have an attachment, again,
    to something special, a toy, or doll, or something?
    No, to my mother.
    Wouldn't let go of her, physically and emotionally,
    wouldn't let go.
    Was a security blanket.
    So liberation meant candy falling from the sky.
    What else did it mean to you?
    Nothing else, absolutely nothing,
    nothing else at that point.
    Interestingly enough, the scare--
    if there was scare, if one can go into psychological analysis,
    if there was scare, that scare was a normal part of living.
    This was not a consciousness.
    This was a child.
    This was not a conscious way.
    And maybe my mother's, and the presence there, maybe, that
    was, again, more than just a security blanket.
    I have-- I mean, I am sure that they
    can start writing all kinds of books, as long as they
    don't start going into it more than it was.
    I think there was basically nothing there,
    except a character build up, a different, probably,
    a different development type of thing.
    My daughter, who is a very bright lawyer, says to me now,
    mom, I was thinking, you have a way of surviving instinct
    in you is so strong.
    And that has to go back to this childhood
    where you build up these walls.
    And these walls are these protective walls.
    Now, they are not walls for emotion.
    But they are definitely walls of survival.
    So that build a character.
    But there is not anything else in there that I can imagine,
    except if somebody really wants to write books
    about child psychology.
    When your mother went back to Poland to check on the family,
    and you were put in this children's
    home for a temporary time, was that very traumatic?
    Very traumatic.
    To be separated from your mother for the first time.
    My mother did not understand it.
    This is something that is absolutely fascinating to me.
    There was a Jewish home in Budapest established
    for children like myself and for children
    who were orphans, who were then starting
    to come out from all sides.
    OK, my mother decided that that wasn't good enough
    for her daughter.
    She had to put me into this fancy Hungarian home, which
    was called [FRENCH],, in good, old French.
    And it was on the hills of Budapest.
    And it was this fancy, fancy thing.
    Except that this fancy thing was too
    fancy for a child who had had no discipline, who had had--
    what discipline?
    I mean, who was disciplining me?
    I mean, I was rolling with the punches, as they say.
    OK, whatever had to be done was done.
    I mean, this is where the maturity of this child came in.
    Also, extremely attached to mother.
    Plus, those children in the Jewish home
    had the same background, a little bit, that I had,
    not these kids where she put me.
    So she thought she was doing me this big favor.
    And I was absolutely miserable, everything else, for all
    that duration that I was there.
    When she came to pick me up, I must have given her
    a horrendous time, because--
    and I must tell you, until today, now, unfortunately,
    she cannot speak.
    But whenever I was going back, whenever I was talking to her,
    I always said to her, how could you?
    How didn't you think that you don't
    put a child into these type of circumstances?
    Because this was not a normal child.
    No, it was not a normal childhood.
    And her reaction was I did what I thought was the best.
    I wanted to put you into this wonderful home.
    So I messed it up.
    But that, oh, yes, that has a very strong impact on me.
    There's no question.
    How long was she gone for?
    It wasn't a question of how long she was gone.
    She lived in Budapest in this one room.
    And she was going back and forth to Poland.
    This wasn't a one time episode.
    And I remember this almost like close to a school year.
    And then she-- look, she went back to Poland
    to see if anybody survived.
    She knew that my grandparents had not survived.
    How did she know that?
    She knew it immediately, she told me,
    after she had reached Krakow--
    after she had reached--
    when we left Bochnia, she says by the time
    she only she reached Budapest, she already
    knew that Bochnia ghetto had been liquidated.
    So she knew about that.
    Circumstances, she learned after the war.
    But she went back to see whether everybody survived.
    Then she went back to Yuzik.
    And she got money from him.
    He was the only miracle on Earth.
    Everybody said to her, forget it.
    They kill the Jews when they go back there.
    And she says, Yuzik will be fine.
    And Yuzik gave her a lot of money for that time.
    Yuzik also gave her some--
    there is a memento that I just brought back.
    I was cleaning up my parents' home,
    because I don't know how much longer my father will
    be in the apartment.
    I brought things that meant something.
    My mother has a level of Chinese porcelain table
    that I have here that was given to her
    when she was a little girl, four, five years old
    by my grandfather who loved to collect antiques.
    And it was-- either it was part of a set of children toys,
    or whatever, it's a wonderful piece.
    And this Yuzik gave her after the war,
    because he had it at home.
    And it had survived.
    So she brought that back.
    But she went coming back and forth.
    She knew she wasn't coming--
    I asked her once, why didn't we go back to Poland?
    And she said, because going back to Poland
    meant going to a country covered with blood.
    And so she had absolutely no intention,
    no matter what my father was going to do,
    she wasn't going to go back there.
    He had the choice of either staying there or joining us.
    But she wasn't going back to be, definitely
    not because he was there.
    This was-- she was a very strong woman, very strong woman.
    Messed up life, but a very strong woman.
    How did your unhappiness manifest itself
    in this children's home?
    How did you act it out?
    I was impossible.
    The other thing which I remember,
    which is absolutely crazy, there were no bathrooms.
    There were these night pots under some beds.
    And somebody must have decided that they were
    going to put me into trouble.
    So every night, they would turn over this pot.
    Well, who got punished?
    The one under whose bed it was.
    That one never climbed out of bed.
    So I was miserable.
    I was just-- I remember being miserable there, not
    having anybody that could understand
    the need of this child.
    This was a traumatized 6, 7-year-old child.
    Now, you're asking me whether I was--
    whether I was changed by the war, by the experiences,
    of course we were.
    In a very different way, probably,
    as long as I was with my mother, that was one type of thing.
    But then you pull this child away,
    and there must be some incredible trauma
    going in there.
    So wasn't exactly the easiest one.
    But I remember the day that I was told
    she was coming to pick me up.
    I jumped to my cubby, and took everything out,
    and prepared it to go.
    Did she come and visit you, though, through the year?
    No, she didn't come to visit me.
    I understand that she came to see me.
    But she wasn't-- she did not come to talk to me.
    Except, I think once, and I very often ask her why, even, this.
    And she said, because everybody was saying
    it's easier for the children.
    Question mark.
    So did she write to you?
    Or did you--
    No, I knew-- look, I don't know.
    You see, this whole episode is, again, a very blurred one.
    It's an interesting part, which, I think-- look,
    she was going through some trauma.
    There's no question.
    She must have been going through some kind of a hell of a time
    at that point on her own.
    Young woman, OK, suddenly, and there's this whole destruction.
    What were your thoughts about your father, then?
    Nothing, absolutely no thoughts.
    Don't even try, because there isn't any.
    There was no thought.
    Did you have any picture of him?
    No, he had an only picture of us which
    were taken in 1939 that he carried through to Russia
    and then brought back.
    Nope, didn't have any idea, and didn't ask, and didn't matter.
    Don't forget, there were all the losses.
    There were all of these people that
    meant so much, my grandmother, my grandfather, my--
    we lived, with us lived my grandfather's sister
    and his daughter-- and her daughter.
    OK, they died together with my grandmother.
    Those were the losses.
    The loss was not somebody that didn't exist in my memory, just
    not there.
    Did you go to school while you were in this orphanage?
    Yes, my one normal school year in Hungary.
    Absolutely, and did very well in Hungarian.
    How were you-- was language difficult?
    Incredible, I spoke always Polish at home
    with my mother and my grandparents.
    I learned Hungarian like--
    my mother said, overnight, when we were the first time.
    Went to Romania, overnight, forgot Hungarian
    and learned Romanian.
    Supposedly went out to play and said something to my mother
    in Hungarian.
    Came back, and she said something to me,
    and it was blank.
    It had gone.
    So there was Romanian.
    Came back to Hungary, forgot Romanian,
    although I understand it, because I speak fluent French,
    and learned Hungarian.
    And did wonderfully well in school.
    Always spoke German, somehow, by osmosis, always spoke that.
    When did your mother speak to her family?
    Did she speak Yiddish?
    Nope, always Polish.
    We always spoke Polish.
    Now, in 1951, you went to Israel.
    In 1951-- in 1946, we went from Budapest, from Hungary,
    to Czechoslovakia, not knowing which way we were going.
    It turned out that my mother's aunt,
    from my grandmother's sister had survived in Belgium
    with her husband.
    Her only son had been killed.
    And she lived, at that point, in Brussels.
    How they got connected, I have no idea.
    That's where we went in the winter of '46
    and stayed in Belgium.
    And my mother did very well, businesswise, any other way.
    And then, in 1947, I went to visit my father
    for the first time.
    Tell me about that.
    Stranger in my life.
    I knew he was my father.
    There was also my aunt, his sister, and her husband,
    and then there was already a baby.
    They all, by the way, live, now, in New York.
    My uncle died.
    But my aunt and my cousin are in New York.
    And there was also my younger uncle, who
    had survived also in New York.
    All physicians and all in this country.
    But they came much later here.
    And so I went there.
    I visited with him.
    He was an intruder into my life.
    I mean, if my--
    I think it would have been much easier on all of us,
    if this had been a stepfather, he
    would have taken a different attitude to this child,
    because it wasn't his.
    So he would have been either more careful or more whatever.
    This one was a very loving person
    whom I didn't want in my life, because he thought
    he could act as my father.
    And I didn't need a father.
    I had a mother who had been everything.
    So who needed this person coming into the life
    of this 9-year-old?
    I mean, there you have all the personality
    conflicts that come in.
    My mother was everything for me.
    And suddenly-- and my father is, until today,
    an extraordinarily difficult man,
    who thinks he lives in the 17th century and everybody owes
    him--
    he's the father figure.
    Well, it isn't exactly so.
    He wasn't there.
    He was no father figure.
    And he tried to be the father figure.
    So try that one for a very confusing time
    in everybody's life, I think.
    Anyway, he went in '51 to Israel.
    And we joined him.
    Oh, you went to join him in Israel.
    We went to join him, thinking we would stay in Israel.
    And my mother took one look.
    This was, historically, the Tzena,
    the worst time in Israel.
    We went in July, wonderful time to go.
    I mean, the heat, and the sand, and the dirt, and the no food.
    What did Israel mean to you at that age, you were 13?
    It didn't mean anything to me, because my parents were,
    not my mother, nor my father were any big Zionist.
    To them, Israel was always the sands.
    The [? Haludsniks ?] went there.
    It wasn't their way of life.
    It wasn't their mentality.
    It was wonderful to have it.
    She had wanted to go there in '44.
    But this was no '44.
    She was doing very well.
    We were living very nicely in Belgium,
    going skiing, going summer vacationing.
    My mother took me skiing in the winter of '47, OK.
    I mean, we were a normal type of a life,
    whatever normal meant at the time, was being established.
    And she came to Israel and she said, I survived one war.
    I'm not staying here.
    And so she took me back to Belgium.
    And my father, at that time, was working already in Israel.
    And she said to him, I'm not staying.
    So we went back to Belgium.
    Did he stay in Israel?
    He stayed in Israel until he could make it to Belgium
    now that he realized that my mother wasn't going to do
    anything about being there.
    How long did you stay there in Israel?
    A couple, I think, two months.
    And then we came back to Belgium.
    And he joined us.
    And I was going to school.
    I was having totally normal life.
    When I came to Belgium, I was already in second grade.
    But because of, again, a new language, French, compared
    to, a year earlier, Hungarian, I was somehow
    between first and second grade.
    I lost-- I didn't lose that much.
    But I lost.
    I graduated from high school, I was 19, rather than 17, 18.
    I went through the normal schooling.
    We lived in Brussels.
    My mother was doing economically very well, quite a business
    woman, quite a businesswoman.
    And so we lived a normal life.
    He could not stay in Belgium, because he was not
    a business man.
    He was not a diamondtier.
    He had difficulty getting permission to stay.
    Belgium had a very difficult thing,
    he could have joined a wife and daughter.
    But he did not get his papers to stay in Belgium.
    Ended up, anyway, in 1953, as soon as he came in,
    ended up in Germany in Frankfurt,
    where my uncle from Vienna had established a business,
    thinking that instead of being in Vienna,
    he would move to Germany, because he
    had a heart condition.
    And he wanted to go to Baden Leisure Center.
    Couldn't do it.
    It wasn't doing him any good.
    So he went back to Vienna.
    And my father took over that business
    that was part my uncle part my mother.
    And so he stayed in Germany.
    And this is where they are until today,
    because after I got married, in '61, my mother had,
    as I called it, no more excuses.
    And she joined him in Germany.
    You said your mother took you skiing in 1947.
    How does one go from one kind of life, difficult wartime,
    to then going skiing in such a short time?
    I guess being young, I guess, being in a normal type of a--
    you see, forgetting something, it still was not normal.
    It was still-- everybody around us were Holocaust survivors.
    Everybody started to redo their life.
    A lot of second marriages from young people
    who had lost their first families.
    A lot of new babies born in '46, '45, '46.
    A life that takes over, I guess it's
    a survival, animal survival that was in there.
    How did the Jews that came to America, how
    come that they started leading lives as if--
    not as if nothing had happened, but went
    on living much more normal lives, by the way,
    than we lived in Europe.
    I am totally convinced that the ones who
    came to America in the '46 ended up
    leading much more normal lives.
    Some of them went bonkers.
    I don't have a single friend in Belgium whose parents survive.
    OK, get that one, because that one is interesting.
    That one of the parents, or both parents, or whoever, very few
    had both parents that had survived.
    OK, except if they went in Russia.
    That there was no nervous breakdown somewhere.
    There wasn't one.
    OK, some more seriously, some less seriously.
    They were all affected.
    And I think that the ones that came to America, from what I
    see, were much less affected.
    They had to incorporate into this normal society.
    Europe was not normal.
    And it's normal until today.
    You went back to Israel from 1959 to 1961?
    How did that come about?
    Because by that time, I was 21 years old, very strong
    feeling toward Israel.
    How did that come about?
    Lot Jewish organizations in Belgium,
    first to open the akiva, then to the general Zionist.
    Even though your parents were not Zionists.
    But they were-- my mother was deep-- my mother is deeply,
    deeply, deeply Jewish.
    It was one thing going to Israel and living in a kibbutz.
    And it was another to have the feeling, totally
    two different entities in here we're talking about.
    I mean, I went to a kibbutz when I was in '59.
    And I looked at this, and I said, get me out of here.
    Although I was in a Jewish organization
    when that was the mentality, I knew
    this was not my cup of tea.
    This isn't-- I mean, maybe this collectivism.
    I don't know what it is.
    I mean, I wasn't even trying to think.
    I went there with very strong feeling.
    We have wonderful friends and family that were there.
    People that-- my mother had a friend from childhood,
    she was my aunt Ruth.
    She had passed through Romania with her family
    while we were there.
    And they met in this Jewish kitchen
    when they were serving dinner.
    This was my family.
    My family was not blood related.
    I wasn't brought up with them.
    They were the people who had been with me
    and who had been part of my surrounding in a way.
    So I went there.
    And I had the best time of my life.
    This was the happiest time of my life.
    I always regretted that I didn't--
    that I didn't stay in Israel.
    Because first of all, I went to Tel Aviv,
    where everybody surrounding me were what is called
    the wealthy Tel Aviv society.
    Some who were there from before the war
    and had done very, very well.
    And others had done very well already after the war.
    This was the golden youth.
    For the first time, remember something, I'm 21 years old.
    The boys did not survive the war in Europe.
    It's the girls that survived.
    If there was a group, it was mostly girls.
    The boys were either, they were going into the diamond business
    and had no education, or there were people much older
    than I was.
    And there, you have these disproportionate marriages
    of people 10, 15 years older, because there was not--
    I call it the pool of young men.
    OK, there was much more a pool of young women
    that were coming into age.
    I had, basically, nobody to date that I
    felt that's what I wanted to have around me.
    Some of my friends started going to school.
    But they were my age.
    These were babies.
    There were no-- there was no way that I
    was going to find somebody that, subconsciously,
    that I wanted to marry, that I wanted to go out.
    Israel was another ball game.
    There was this incredible world that opened up
    with these wonderful young men that were studying already
    in America, that were coming back for vacation to their home
    from MIT and everywhere else.
    It was another world.
    That's why a lot of Belgian Jews, or Polish,
    got married in England.
    Because there, there was this group of young men
    where you could marry.
    But then, there was British Jews,
    which is not exactly, again, what the Polish Jews were--
    our mentality was used.
    Do you know what I'm saying?
    This is where-- so Israel was this wonderful, wonderful--
    I had the time of my life.
    I went to ulpan, started learning Hebrew.
    And then my mother decided that she was getting me back home.
    So she got me back in the summer.
    It was very hot.
    And I was very happy to go back home, except I
    thought it was for two months.
    And once I got to Belgium, my mother said, forget it.
    You're not going back.
    So I went and I worked in--
    I spoke English at the time, already.
    I had been to England for one summer
    and learned all the languages, also,
    in school for all these things.
    So I was fluent in English.
    I had no problem.
    And I went, I worked for Shell company as a secretary.
    Made money, put it away, bought a ticket,
    and went back to Israel.
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum volunteer collection
    interview with Maryla Korn.
    This is tape number 2, side A. And we were talking about
    your being in Israel and how much you loved being there.
    Absolutely.
    I think it was one of the best times in Israel.
    The country was in the sense of 1951.
    There was everything you could get if you had the money.
    And it was a normal society.
    I found it had everything--
    it was my first normal type of a life.
    I lived with friend of ours who had this wonderful apartment
    in the middle of Tel Aviv.
    They were a very well-known family in Israel.
    It was normalcy-- normalcy in every possible respect,
    plus I was exploring.
    I met wonderful people.
    The Golden Youth of Tel Aviv was good, bad, or indifferent, OK?
    This wasn't the Dolce Vita of Italy,
    but they were living it up.
    There were interesting people.
    They had education.
    They had a background.
    There was a solidity.
    And they were not the traumatized characters
    in some way that I had had in Belgium surrounding me,
    because these were children of people who had
    come to Palestine long before.
    So it was a wonderful time, really, of my life.
    And so then after I came back to Belgium,
    I always knew that this was not it.
    As much as I had my friends there--
    and in Belgium I did date somebody that I care very
    much about-- but somehow somewhere,
    I was saying to myself, this is not what I want in life.
    We were never Belgian citizens because we could never
    become Belgian citizens.
    Every six months, we had to prolong our permission to stay.
    Nobody was going to kick us out, but the fact
    was we were refugees.
    And so I felt at home in Israel and went back definitely
    the minute I could.
    And I always said to my mother, I will not stay here.
    I went would--
    You will not stay in Belgium.
    In Belgium.
    I went back and met--
    this was after Passover, because I went Passover
    with my aunt and uncle to Nice, and then I
    thought it was my last hooray.
    And then I went to Israel.
    Sometimes-- and it was May, or sometimes I think around May--
    went to Israel, and at that time said, OK, the play's over.
    Now the game is over.
    Now there is no more playing around,
    and having this wonderful time, and getting money from Europe.
    And I have to take it seriously now.
    If I'm going to stay here, I better
    take a very serious course in Hebrew.
    I better get myself into a different frame of mind.
    It's not that I didn't have it before--
    I had very strong values and very strong what's
    right, what's wrong, but I had had a good time
    the first time in Israel.
    I was really having a wonderful time.
    I was partying, and I was going out, and wonderful.
    And now I realize, wait a minute, this is not it.
    So I went very seriously toward [? Pan ?] Akiva.
    I had a room with an old lady in Tel Aviv where
    I'd come back for the weekends.
    I did not want to stay with my family
    and be overprotected again.
    I wanted to strike it out on my own and see how it works--
    still was getting money-- strike on my own,
    still was getting money from mom and dad from Europe,
    don't kid yourself.
    But I was taking my studying very seriously.
    And I got involved with a group of people,
    although they were connected to the first group,
    but it was stabilizing itself already.
    They were already getting married.
    A very strong friendship came out--
    one woman was really considered my sister.
    And it came from that group.
    I started dating a young doctor that, unfortunately, had lost
    his wife and had a little baby.
    He had lost his wife when she was giving birth
    to the second child, which I had met the first time when
    I was in Israel.
    So this young couple that I had met, then when I came back
    the second time, he was alone.
    And so I knew this little boy, except that my parents
    thought it was the most horrible thing that could happen.
    What on earth did this 22, 23-year-old need,
    even if he is a doctor, which is wonderful--
    and a Jewish doctor--
    who on earth needs this type of--
    I wasn't taking it to--
    anyway.
    I was really putting my roots down.
    And I was very happy.
    And I belonged there.
    I still feel very strongly, this is the one place in my life
    where I will always belong.
    Anyway, my parents, the summer that I went to Israel,
    went to Badgastein in Austria for a vacation.
    And my father took a walk.
    And on the street, he met a lady that he had not seen since 1939
    from Kolbuszowa.
    And her name was Sonia Korn.
    And she was in America, and she was coming back from Israel
    and going to Badgastein for vacation.
    And they recognized each other after all of these years.
    And they knew they had survived, but they didn't see each other.
    And she was in America with her son and was at that point
    already remarried, because my father-in-law had
    died in '47 in Switzerland after coming from Russia.
    And she has a son.
    Oh my god, and this one has a daughter-- oh my god.
    She is in America, and this one is there.
    So to make a long story short, they
    decided it was a good idea.
    Well, it might have been a good idea, except one was in Israel,
    one was in America, and a very independent one in Israel.
    So my mother wrote to me-- first, she called me at Ulpan
    and she told me that they had met.
    And I said, very nice-- wonderful.
    Well, can he write to you?
    I said, you must be kidding all of you guys.
    But you know what?
    They're dating the doctor, right.
    You must be kidding, but he is in America.
    I am in Israel.
    Boy, is this a safe one-- just get off my back.
    And if he wants to write, welcome.
    OK, never thinking anything more than that.
    Say do me a favor.
    He wrote.
    And I thought it was the most hysterical thing ever,
    because he was writing from here,
    he was writing in French, because when they came back
    from Russia, they were in Poland, and in France,
    and then America.
    That's their story.
    And to make a long story short, I thought it was ridiculous.
    But there were my parents bombarding me with this.
    And my whole family in Israel, very happy about my going out
    with this wonderful doctor, but not very
    happy with my going with this wonderful doctor, OK?
    They were saying, this is a responsibility.
    What do you need this?
    OK.
    Anyway, to make a long story short,
    I decided that I needed some space to figure that one out--
    not necessarily to break it off, but to figure it out,
    because it started to click that this was a package.
    And so somehow David, future husband,
    decided that he was going to come for Pesach to Belgium,
    and I was going to come back.
    And I left all my clothing, all my stuff, everything in Israel,
    because, come on, you must be joking.
    And to me, America was always this crazy country--
    the crazy Americans.
    My mother had had the opportunity of coming
    to America with me in '51, and I said to her--
    I remember saying to her-- where are you going?
    What do you need these crazy Americans walking around
    with these long pleather jackets, OK?
    It was, again, another world--
    who needed this?
    Anyway, he came to Belgium.
    I arrived two weeks before him.
    My mother knew exactly where I stood, because I had my return
    ticket to Israel.
    And I kept saying to her, I know this whole thing doesn't
    make much sense, but I will figure it out.
    They never say to me, don't marry him.
    They always said, look what you're getting yourself into,
    OK?
    Or is that what you want?
    Is that what you need?
    You can have children of your own.
    But again, I'm wondering sometimes-- to me,
    maybe this child represented me as a child when I was younger.
    It wasn't strange to me to have this little boy around.
    Anyway, David came.
    And to make a long story short, about 10 days later,
    we decided we were going to get married--
    or at least I was going to come to America.
    And he went back, and I came here in May,
    and we got married in June.
    That's my trip to America.
    And as I said to everybody, I did not come up as a refugee.
    I did not come off the boat, although I
    came by ship I came in totally different circumstances.
    And I came here, and we knew that we couldn't
    get married in Belgium because then the laws were
    very strange.
    If we had gotten married in Belgium,
    I wouldn't have been able to come to the United States
    for six months to a year.
    But if we married here, nobody asks anything.
    And two days later or whatever, I had my green card.
    And that one was totally kosher.
    It was fine.
    Were your parents able to come to your wedding here?
    Yes, my parents came to my wedding.
    At that point already, my father's sister, her husband,
    and daughter who had come from Poland in '56 to Israel
    had emigrated to America.
    They were already in New York.
    And what is interesting is that my husband's family
    and my father's family were totally intermingled.
    The children went to school together.
    The two families were competitors.
    My husband's family, the Korns, and my grandfather
    were almost in the same business.
    And they were competitors.
    They knew each other.
    Everybody knew everybody.
    When the two families get together,
    it's like one big family because they
    knew each other from childhood.
    They were all from that little--
    except my mother-- they were all from that little town.
    Before we get into your life in the United States,
    you said you had gone to Israel.
    Was it hard to leave your mother?
    But you were a young adult by that time.
    I was a young adult. The first time I
    went, no, it was already a different type of--
    look, I was already a grown up.
    And I knew that my mother represented everything to me,
    but it wasn't this clinging type of a relationship.
    She was, and she is until today paralyzed speechless.
    She's still my security blanket, OK?
    But it wasn't one of, I couldn't survive without having--
    I'm a very independent person.
    Now, what came first, I have no idea.
    But I never understood how come she let me go to America.
    And I don't understand how I left.
    This was not Israel.
    This was not Israel.
    Israel is three hours away.
    Israel is where my soul is.
    This was foreign.
    This was far away.
    This was over the Atlantic, not over the Mediterranean.
    I have questions why she ever allowed it,
    and why did I ever do it at that point,
    especially that I wanted to go back to Israel.
    So who knows?
    Did you go back to Israel to get your stuff?
    No.
    That one was sent that time.
    It was sent.
    I knew the minute I landed in Belgium
    that it was not going to work out
    with the doctor and the child.
    That suddenly, I had seven days on the ship,
    I came back by ship, I had the time to think.
    I had the time, probably, to internalize the whole thing
    and say, no, this is not right.
    But then what is right?
    And that's where it stopped.
    By the way, years later, he remarried.
    He had two or three children with his wife.
    And then he died in a tragic accident--
    killed by a crazy patient of his who came in into the hospital
    and shot him.
    So who knows, right?
    Where did you settle in the United States?
    My husband was then teaching and taking his PhD courses
    in Georgetown.
    And so the day after we were married, we came to Washington.
    He was here.
    He was commuting between Washington and Norfolk,
    where he was teaching at the university.
    He is a Russian scholar.
    His name?
    David Korn.
    And so David was at that time, leave of absence from Norfolk
    to finish his PhD here where he had started it.
    He had done his bachelor's here, his master's here,
    and he was starting his PhD.
    He had already taken some courses.
    So he was taking off this one year,
    he had a fellowship to go to Harvard, to go to Penn,
    or to come here.
    And he decided that this is where he was going to do it.
    He knew everybody here.
    So this is where we came.
    So you have lived in Washington ever since.
    Ever since I came to America basically.
    And then what did your husband do after that?
    David was a university professor--
    At Georgetown?
    Georgetown, and then he became chairman
    of the German Russian department in Howard University,
    where he stayed until 1986.
    He branched out-- the most diversified man
    that I have ever known.
    Not only was he a university professor,
    but he was in the government.
    He is a Republican, and he was with Nixon,
    and he was with Reagan.
    He was special assistant to Secretary Haig.
    And he was in the Health Education and Welfare
    Department.
    Several times he was in the re-election committees--
    one of Nixon's and the other one of Reagan and of Bush--
    Reagan and then Bush in charge of minorities.
    In Bush's, it was a minority, in Reagan's also was in there.
    And then he went into business.
    And so he had a lot of real estate here.
    So he was pretty much in all direction very much here.
    He was the founder in Washington through the Jewish community
    council--
    the establish [INAUDIBLE] of the Save the Russian
    Jews, and was a chairman for all the years.
    He was the first one who established it here.
    He was on the board of the Jewish Community Council--
    and of the social service agency.
    And extraordinarily involved years ago--
    maybe you're too young, I don't know--
    there was a time when one had to pay for Soviet Jews
    to come out.
    It was David who in the middle of the night discovered this.
    And that was given to the newspapers.
    He was extraordinarily involved in this.
    He had survived in Russia, and he always
    felt that he wasn't allowing to happen
    what happened to us to happen to the Soviet Jews--
    that what Roosevelt did, he wasn't
    going to allow if he had anything to do.
    And one of the men who most supported this whole thing
    was Nixon.
    There were I don't know how many thousands of telephones
    every night out of our home for years paid by the White House
    I mean the White House was paying for this-- was allowing
    it underline.
    He worked from the White House under Nixon,
    allowing all of this activity going on.
    There is a picture that hangs here that if you
    like seeing it later--
    one of the rallies where Bush, who
    was then in the United Nations, came with Isaak Frank
    to the big rally--
    very much involved in this.
    So our lives-- first, I was a little bit in shock
    when I came here.
    First of all, there was nobody--
    no member of the family lived here,
    everybody lived in New York--
    very isolated.
    So our friends that we acquired through the years
    became our family, more than the family that was in New York.
    David's mother was in New York-- by that time,
    his stepfather had died.
    My aunts and uncles were there, but they were there
    busy with their own life.
    His family-- sure, we went there,
    but it was here that we really established very much
    the routes.
    And I started going to the university,
    and then I got pregnant, and then there was one child,
    and there was another.
    And other times, different times, really, I
    gave up going to school.
    Then I went back in the 1970s and I finished the University
    in Georgetown.
    And in the meantime, I had been working part-time either
    as a substitute in public schools, or private schools,
    or I was working as a translator,
    or I was working as a tour guide in Washington
    in all these languages.
    So I pretty much did everything.
    But the family never came home.
    None of the children ever came home with me not being at home.
    Nobody carried a key to come home.
    I really felt very strongly that this family
    had to be the space--
    maybe overreacting to my own childhood, who knows?
    God forbid they did not have their dinner on the table.
    And when I think about it, it's sometimes asinine,
    because you give up your own thing, because that dinner has
    to be on the table, excuse me--
    as if pizza hadn't been good enough,
    or McDonald's, or whatever.
    But it had to be there.
    It had to be this perfectly set up household.
    And David was very busy with everything else.
    I tried to be as helpful as I was.
    But it was really his thing.
    The Soviet Jewry was his thing with all my support.
    And our house was an open I call it railroad station.
    One came in, and the other one came out.
    All the Russians came through.
    He was bringing them to speak to the community, et cetera--
    so very much involved with Israel--
    very much involved with Israel, politically
    and in any other form, David especially--
    I mean from Golda Meir to everybody else,
    very much so, again, through the Soviet Jewry,
    through anything else that he was doing.
    And then I went back to school and decided
    to finish it, because my husband was pushing me-- do it,
    do it, do it, do it.
    And so I graduated in '79 from Georgetown,
    went to work teaching French--
    What'd you major in?
    French and Hebrew.
    And then I came upon something that I think really
    was the most wonderful part of my life personally
    and beyond the family.
    I found an ad in the newspaper that Georgetown, the campus
    ministry, the Jewish chaplaincy was
    looking for a program director.
    So I went over there, and Rabbi White, who is still there,
    was my teacher when I was in Georgetown.
    And we were so connected to Georgetown
    with David and myself, et cetera-- anyway,
    I got a job as program director.
    And I stayed there for 13 years.
    I thoroughly enjoyed it--
    the setting, the university, the kids,
    and everything that went with it.
    My family at that point, my children
    had graduated from college already.
    Once they were gone, it was an empty nest.
    So it came in just at the right time.
    I started working there in January of '82.
    Joe had gone to college in '80.
    Monique was going to go in '83.
    So it was the perfect setup.
    And David was still involved very much at that time.
    He was Secretary Haig's special assistant.
    I had my time.
    I could do my own thing, but still very much in the sense
    that dinner had still to be on the table.
    It still was there.
    Maybe that's the downfall of my personal thing.
    I got them used to it.
    I was used to it, whatever comes first.
    OK?
    And so I worked there--
    absolutely the perfect time, until basically everything
    started.
    And what started falling apart is pretty much
    that my husband got sick, other priorities
    took over-- other family priorities.
    Anyway, I decided overnight--
    I was saying to my kids at this point--
    Joe had gotten married a month earlier-- of course,
    November of '94, our daughter was going through her
    [INAUDIBLE] and graduated and was a lawyer--
    had gone through her own personal uproars, et cetera.
    And David got sick, and I just felt that I was choking.
    It was just impossible.
    I could not concentrate on this.
    And overnight, as much as I had told them for the past six
    months, I think I'm giving it up, I think I'm--
    and everybody was joking saying, mom, you're
    going to die on the job at age 99, OK?
    One day we went to New York, and I came back--
    this was after Thanksgiving-- and I turned to David
    and I said, I am leaving in June.
    I'm going to finish the academic year.
    And he turned to me and he said, if you're going to do this,
    why don't you do it now before December,
    and let's go to Florida where we had an apartment.
    Let's go there and let's just call it quits.
    But don't postpone it the six months or whatever.
    So I sat down, I wrote a letter-- nobody still believed
    me I was going to do it.
    I wrote the letter resignation, took it over to Georgetown,
    put it in Harold's cubicle and in our boss's cubicle,
    and two days later, walked out--
    the best decision in my life, because there
    comes a time when you have to say,
    enough is enough is enough.
    And I really felt I had given something of myself--
    very much involved-- but I had given something.
    It had given me a lot--
    probably given me a lot than maybe I have even given it.
    But it was time to switch gears.
    What were your duties there?
    Oh, I was program director for the Jewish Chaplaincy.
    They don't have a Hillel.
    It's all paid by the universities.
    So the Jewish chaplaincy is part of campus ministry.
    It's part of the university.
    And it was establishing the programs,
    running the Jewish house that is there.
    It was aversified.
    Because at the beginning, we had all these Israeli connections.
    So I was pulling them all in to give talks at the university,
    at which time I also lost interest.
    And it gets a bit repetitive.
    And I wanted to do something else.
    And so what was it?
    I became treasurer of WTO, which I don't know what this is--
    Women Treasurer's Organization.
    I had been President of Young WTO in Belgium
    when I was 18 years old.
    So this was just normal.
    And everybody's laughing because it's probably for life
    that I am the treasurer.
    Involved with this just gives me enough--
    became involved immediately with the Holocaust Museum.
    We'll talk about that.
    The minute I was leaving, I knew that this
    is what I wanted to do to whatever extent
    I was going to do it.
    You had said that you gave a lot to your position,
    but it also gave a lot to you.
    What did it give to you?
    I worked with the young people.
    It gave me a self-confidence.
    I also honestly believe that no matter how
    financially everybody is fine, it
    gives you a certain something to yourself
    that you are the one who brings in the check.
    The other thing what it did is they
    told my family, you are the first,
    but you are not any more--
    there is a job that has to be, and it has to be done.
    So it gave me this little bit of this distance where
    I wasn't any more Maryla, and mom,
    and everybody else, in which I find that, unfortunately
    or fortunately, it has reversed to exactly to that,
    because suddenly mom is available.
    And so mom's time is everybody's time.
    And Maryla's time is also my time.
    So I think if you have an outside job--
    see, my husband never thinks that being a volunteer
    is a job.
    That's a hobby that comes far, far beyond anything else, OK?
    So that gave me this freedom of saying, wait a minute, no.
    Tonight or today-- and I was getting up in the morning,
    and they knew where I was.
    So it gave me that--
    not that I needed any more independence--
    I always felt always very independent,
    and self-sufficient, and capable,
    but this gave me almost this permission
    of not being just the mother and a wife, et cetera.
    Your folks are still alive.
    Yes.
    My father is 91, and my mother is 89.
    And although she had had a very hard last 30
    years, both physically, emotionally,
    mentally in every respect, unfortunately in March,
    she had a stroke, and she is in the Jewish home in Frankfurt
    paralyzed and speechless, but her mind
    is still working very much so.
    But you can't communicate anything.
    And my father probably was getting senile before,
    and now for sure he is getting senile.
    There's no question.
    But he refuses to go to the old age home,
    so there is a problem there.
    And then it's a problem from all sides.
    You had alluded earlier about what,
    because of your experiences, what kind of young person
    you were.
    Do you feel that if you hadn't gone through those experiences,
    that you would be a different person than you are today?
    Of course, there's no question.
    There's absolutely no question.
    I had a conversation with a very close friend of mine
    because she said--
    my granddaughter, we had her over, and they were here--
    and she said, she adores you.
    It's interesting that somebody who
    was not nurtured in a normal way was even capable of--
    you if you do something by example, then
    she was no example in that sense.
    There was no way of, this is right for a child,
    this is wrong for a child.
    So when I was bringing my two kids,
    it's a miracle that they are the wonderful people that they are,
    because I didn't have a brother or sister being one.
    My husband is an only child.
    He is a Holocaust survivor with a different path
    because he was with his parents--
    but still, no normal childhood.
    I certainly didn't have a normal childhood.
    How on earth did we even manage halfway
    to put together a normal household
    or have certain things that we did
    that was in a normal pattern?
    Yes, but it definitely did.
    There is no question in my mind--
    anybody who survived has marked them in a way--
    whatever way that is, or whatever their experiences
    after the war--
    there's no question that these children were marked, that they
    will carry it, and that we have, again,
    after us, we brought up a generation of children that
    are different from the norm.
    My kids were born in Washington.
    My son, more than my daughter-- but again, she also reacted.
    She reacted by pulling back, OK?
    And to her, it's not as if it's of no interest,
    but it's a pullback.
    My son, incredibly involved with every Jewish organization--
    UJA [NON-ENGLISH] any Jewish organization,
    anything that it's there and at high level--
    we're talking high level in UJA.
    That's him interested, went back to Poland,
    wanted to know his roots, wanted to know--
    see the other thing was to show the children their roots.
    We did not come from nowhere.
    I was once flabbergasted.
    Remember, I came to Washington '61.
    Nobody talked about the Holocaust.
    American Jews were as close to the subject as anything
    you got.
    We were the strange ones.
    1961, it sounds crazy--
    and I'm not talking about some pockets
    in Silver Spring or somewhere where
    the Holocaust survivors were, I'm talking the American Jews.
    This was a no subject.
    That was the strange person who had survived
    the Holocaust, this odd person.
    These children were brought up in a society which was normal.
    I remember going to friends of ours for Pesach
    and being basically jealous.
    They had a family.
    We had no man's land--
    not even a cemetery to go to.
    It brings back all kinds of incredible--
    there was no cemetery.
    There was no place to go and cry on mothers, or fathers,
    or grandfathers' tomb, OK?
    Whether it's good, bad, or indifferent,
    that's an individual thing, but it's not there.
    The first person that died around me was my mother in '79.
    I must tell you, I am as frightened
    as any of these type of things, because people,
    when they are my age, they have had
    grandparents, aunts, uncles, probably parents that
    have already died.
    And so I'm not saying they're used to it, but they have who?
    Nothing.
    For the first time, we have a grave,
    and that grave is my mother-in-law.
    So when she died, we made a big thing about it.
    We brought her from New York to be buried in Washington.
    And so what happened?
    I went looking all over the place,
    because I wanted a cemetery with tombstones
    so we could put the names of her family
    from both sides that had died.
    An American very seldom goes through that type.
    So of course it did influence.
    It influences every minute of one's life.
    It influences how one feels, how one thinks.
    And again, it's not totally always conscious.
    But it is there.
    And if anybody tells you that they don't think about it
    or it didn't influence their life,
    I think that they deny it--
    just maybe they don't want to talk about it,
    that's another story.
    You said that for a long time when you heard thunder,
    you would hide under the table.
    Are there any other sounds that remind
    you of your childhood or sites?
    No, just don't go and see movies about the Holocaust.
    I have absolutely no need for those,
    nor do I have any particular desire for this.
    I just don't want to see it.
    It's there, and it's a reality.
    And I think that those who never saw it,
    I can't put myself through that trauma.
    You had mentioned earlier about your mother
    working in the factory making shopping bags,
    and that you had mentioned to me before the interview
    about similar--
    you want to talk a little bit about that.
    Well, Birkenau was very close to Krakow.
    And this factory had something to do
    with was household goods-- these shopping bags.
    My mother saw him once coming in there while she was working,
    and what she said to me-- this was already just about a year
    or two ago--
    after the movie came out, she said,
    because Schindler ended up in Frankfurt
    and saw my parents there.
    So she saw him after the war--
    had very different feeling about him than all of this praising
    and what have you.
    And her reaction was he came in this gorgeous chunk of a man.
    He also seemed to have had some connection, supposedly, first
    of all, to a couple that lived in Bosnia.
    He came to visit there quite often.
    And the other one there were rumors--
    and this, again, leave it to the historians--
    that he had some connection to that escape route
    to Hungary, which I heard a couple of years back.
    Anything is possible.
    It was from that same area.
    But my mother never knew, being from Krakow,
    that that factory was doing what it was doing during the war.
    And after the war when he appeared in Frankfurt,
    the Jewish community really distanced itself a little bit.
    You have all kinds of stories--
    I was just watching his biography--
    the ones that survive under him, you
    hear about the ones that praise him,
    but you don't hear about the ones that
    had something negative to say.
    So I think this is a wonderful thing that he did.
    A friend of ours who was saved by him
    said, since when was a 16-year-old
    supposed to be interned and made a slave laborer?
    So I'm glad that he saved my life,
    but why was I there to start with?
    And so you can take it from whichever side you take it.
    She says, since when was I supposed to be
    a slave laborer at age 16?
    That was the only connection that we
    had to this Schindler thing that I thought was of some interest.
    He had somewhere crossed our lives maybe on the peripheries.
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum Volunteer Collection
    Interview with Maryla Korn.
    This is tape number 2, side B. What are your thoughts
    about Germany today?
    Unfortunately, I have to go there quite
    often since my parents are still alive and living there.
    I don't think I will ever put foot there again after they
    are gone.
    I am not in the business of forgiving.
    I don't think from my perspective there's anything--
    look, if my children feel that strongly about Germany,
    so let no person tell me that the people, the Germans who
    were there during the war and then had their children,
    that they didn't influence their children and grandchildren.
    So maybe they try to say whatever they
    are saying, that they have--
    of course, they wouldn't maybe be given the opportunity
    of changing, of doing it again.
    And so they think whatever they think at this point.
    As far as I'm concerned, it's not
    a question of collective guilt. I
    don't think that the young ones are responsible for what
    the older ones did, but I don't think that their mentalities
    have changed.
    And again, I go there very often.
    I have a very different perspective.
    Every time I come there, I shiver
    by the time I land up at the Frankfurt airport,
    and I find it debilitating.
    I wouldn't have a German friend, and I go there
    because I have to go there.
    And as far as I'm concerned, they cannot be forgiven,
    and it cannot be forgotten, and it cannot be forgiven,
    and it cannot be understood, and it cannot be explained.
    And I said years ago something that horrified some people,
    but that's fine with me too.
    I said that as far as I was concerned,
    I had nothing against the Japanese,
    Truman did the wrong thing.
    He should have shot one on Germany and Poland
    and put it altogether.
    And I really meant it in that way,
    because I don't think that those crimes can
    be explained, understood in any form forgiven.
    So when I hear German, even at the Holocaust Museum,
    I jump, I must admit.
    I don't have it in me to say whatever it takes to--
    I don't know.
    I've never talked about it with anybody else.
    There is a certain hatred among Polish Jews to Poland.
    But interestingly enough, what I find
    is that German Jews don't feel the same way
    against the German.
    To me, the Polish phenomena is a phenomena by itself,
    but they wouldn't have had done it--
    OK, they collaborated, they did it--
    if the Germans had not put the machinery in place.
    So whom do you blame first?
    As far as I'm concerned, it's one or the other,
    and it's all pretty much the same.
    I don't consider Poland my homeland.
    And you asked me what I think about the Germans--
    the same thing-- there is no way that this can be forgiven
    or whatever the term it is.
    Look, they finished off our family
    to an extent that is irreplaceable.
    They finished off--
    I'm thinking my kids would have had now--
    forget about first cousins, maybe we
    would have remained for only children.
    They're with 10 uncles on one side.
    My mother-in-law lost seven brothers and sisters--
    we're talking numbers.
    If each one of those kids had had two,
    can you imagine what would have gone on?
    There was a family.
    They annihilated everything going down the generations.
    They didn't just kill six million, they finished off--
    and I always keep saying the same thing--
    in the turns of numbers, six millions in the humanity
    doesn't mean [INAUDIBLE].
    Six millions, OK, so?
    How many die here?
    How many die there?
    But in terms of what they killed,
    the intellect, the history, the philosophy, the theology--
    all of these Yeshiva that are springing up,
    they have lost a hole in there where there were no teachers.
    Every so often, you have this yeshiva that
    jumps out [INAUDIBLE] somebody.
    The fact is that the knowledge had disappeared.
    What they killed was something--
    I don't think that one recoups.
    I don't know whether my children recoup
    from not having this family.
    I certainly didn't.
    My husband certainly didn't.
    So to us, they certainly went beyond this.
    We're lucky our parents survived,
    but they were traumatized in their own way.
    Everybody went their own way.
    Who would have been in America if this hadn't happened?
    We'd all have been in Europe, good, bad, or indifferent,
    in that little place or in another big place.
    The children were getting education,
    and they weren't going out.
    So that's my feeling about Germany.
    If I don't see it again, I won't cry.
    You said before on the tape that you lost your childhood.
    Are you angry that you did and other people your age
    were living here in this country?
    No.
    No, but I lost my childhood.
    I'm not jealous that they had theirs.
    But my daughter-in-law said something very interesting
    to me--
    I said, I'm bored in Florida.
    So she says, take it as a summer camp.
    Do all the fun things in a summer camp.
    And I looked at her and I said, I love you too--
    what summer camp?
    I have never been to a summer camp.
    In order to enjoy a summer camp at age 60,
    you have to know what it was at age 10.
    So.
    Did you really talk things over with your children
    as they were growing up-- going into the difficulties
    and your thoughts that you experienced?
    They were never shielded from that,
    good, bad, or indifferent.
    We were not a family that did not talk.
    We always did, both my husband--
    he had memories from Poland, because he was five--
    to his experiences in Russia.
    There was no shielding.
    It's a question of how deep one went.
    By the way, my kids have never seen--
    they have it, but they haven't seen the Shoah tapes
    I gave it to them--
    Shoah interview tape.
    I said whenever you are ready, there
    you have the whole story is there
    for both my husband and myself.
    I said, this is it.
    I don't know whether they have ever seen it.
    But they certainly are marked by it, there's no question.
    In what way?
    They were brought up differently.
    Parents had different concerns-- maybe overpowering, maybe
    all kinds of things.
    To me, I always said to them, I survived
    so that you could be around.
    So you can't just throw this to the wolves.
    You can't say, I'm like any other American kid
    where the parent says, you want to inter-marry?
    Be my guest.
    OK, whatever.
    I said, doesn't fly.
    They did not die so that you can do it at this point.
    It had its marks.
    It really had its marks.
    It wasn't just talk.
    When something happened, I reacted in a way
    that our rabbi said to me, Maryla,
    I have been a rabbi 40 years, I have never seen a parent
    reacting this way.
    Such as.
    Such as at one point our daughter did spring on us,
    and she got married to a non-Jew.
    And I said to her, this door is always open to you,
    but he doesn't come into my home whatever happens.
    We almost lost her.
    The fact is that I was right that this whole relationship
    was crazy, and she got divorced.
    But it took our guts out.
    My husband was suicidal, and then he got sick--
    wonderful, so the whole package came together.
    But I wasn't playing any games here.
    And so everybody who came here-- and this went on for two years.
    It destroyed us.
    It destroyed our son.
    It destroyed absolutely everybody in the process.
    They kept saying, why such a--
    I said, because if I give in with her, I give in on myself,
    and I give in on Joe.
    I give him who is not married the permission
    of doing the same thing.
    And then what was this all for?
    So you do have reactions that maybe somebody else doesn't--
    good, bad, or indifferent--
    called it principles.
    Love is a principle.
    Somebody can say to me, but at least she would be there.
    OK, so she would be there, but she was lost
    to what to me was a reason.
    My reaction always is, if I survived,
    there must have been some kind of a reason for this, OK?
    So no guilt feeling for survival, but what is this?
    Were you very protective of the children when they were little?
    Yes, very much so.
    And there is an episode that I think maybe
    even shows how far subconsciously
    some of these things--
    there was a movie in 1965 that came out
    that was the "Shop on the Main Street," Ida Kaminska.
    And I was pregnant with Monique, and I
    went to see this movie with my husband,
    surprise, surprise-- that and "The Pound Broker," the two
    movies.
    After that, I never went again--
    certainly not documentary.
    And I almost went into shock seeing
    the "Shop on the Main Street."
    Somehow, Ida Kaminska represented my grandmother.
    And I remember coming home and running to Joe's room--
    the middle of the night, please--
    grabbing this child, and seeing a trip
    on the train with these mothers and with their children.
    That was pretty much when it almost came consciously.
    Before that, I lived with it around me, but that was 1965.
    And that was total conscious.
    When it was over, I said, whoa, this was a movie,
    and this was brought out at me.
    Do you feel that you're two different persons--
    someone on the outside living in today's
    world and someone different on the inside
    for what you went through?
    No, I don't think so.
    I don't think so.
    I think I always--
    maybe because I married a Polish Jew,
    and it was in that same family--
    no.
    I feel I am me, good, bad, or indifferent--
    maybe reacting a little bit differently, maybe
    having different values and different needs.
    I don't know too many crazy grandmothers
    who go from Florida by plane in the morning
    to pick up a baby to bring her the next morning to Florida
    to have her 10 days, and then take her back in the morning,
    and take a plane back to Florida the same day
    so that the baby is with us today.
    You have reactions-- it's not that other grandmothers don't
    want their grandchildren there, but I
    don't know too many who would be doing this hopping around,
    especially in one day back and forth just so
    that the baby would be there.
    They maybe would be happy to have their children
    and grandchildren come.
    But what I'm saying, you have sometimes different reactions.
    And you don't know if it's you, it's your personality,
    or whether it's something that comes out from the back.
    You know what I'm saying?
    It's very difficult to decide what
    is the influence from there.
    I am a very strongly emotional Jew--
    very much so.
    But I'm not an Orthodox Jew.
    I have orthodox beliefs.
    I have very strong beliefs.
    And yesterday we got some bad news with my husband,
    so I said, you know what?
    God, he's the only one up there who can answer.
    And he looked at me and he says, here goes Maryla.
    And I said, either you believe or you don't.
    And everything has some kind-- maybe a meaning.
    Somebody said, how do you feel now?
    And I said, I feel like saying to God, get off my back
    a little bit.
    OK, but it's halfway done in jest.
    Fine.
    But I need this.
    Judaism to me is something that's central to my life.
    Because of what you went through.
    I think so-- beside the fact that my mother
    is emotionally very Jewish.
    But yes, I am convinced that it has something to do with it.
    But then how much are we product of the past?
    I like to collect tchotchkes.
    So my mother once came in and she says, no wonder.
    I wouldn't have believed her.
    She says, this is your grandfather,
    he used to drive my mother crazy,
    he would bring all of these things home.
    Now, come on, I wasn't influenced by my grandfather
    picking up tchotchkes all over the place, but I am that.
    So is this by osmosis genomes?
    How much do we know what is what marked us?
    But my childhood marked me, I have no doubt.
    It has to-- and not always in a negative way.
    You have to be much stronger, I think.
    You didn't have this peaceful thing.
    It created a character.
    It gave strength to a character, whatever it
    is-- good, bad, or indifferent.
    It doesn't mean that I don't get frightened.
    But I do take things, I think, very differently
    from a lot of people.
    And I take them more at heart than many people do.
    Such as?
    I have a friend who was dying of cancer--
    very dear friend.
    Her husband says to me, Maryla, you
    do the best that you can in life,
    and that's all you can do.
    And my reaction is, I have, unfortunately, a husband--
    don't know how long I will have him.
    I don't do this.
    I fight.
    I don't just say, OK, so there is this doctor, he says that.
    I do fight with it, and I do have problems,
    and I don't think that doing my best is good enough.
    And I think part of this, it is this fighter, survivor,
    whatever this whole thing is--
    whatever it is.
    I think that you have to give to the Jewish Community,
    not necessarily giving them money, which
    is thrown around mercilessly in all directions and not
    always the right ones--
    and think if you give your time, it's
    much more important than whether the UJA or somebody puts up
    a plaque that you gave them $1 million.
    Let those for whom the $1 million, or the $10,000,
    or whatever is the way they want to do it,
    that's OK, because it's needed too.
    But I find that the people who give of their time,
    of their knowledge, of their support to a Jewish community--
    be the synagogue, be the old age home, being whatever--
    I think that this is what's needed.
    You have to have this connection.
    You can't just be taking from it.
    Or you can't just go twice a year or three times a year
    to the synagogue and think that you have done your thing.
    Do you think your political views are because of what
    you experienced as a child?
    I am a total mixture of conservative,
    ultra conservative, liberal, and ultra liberal.
    I vote Republican except in the last elections.
    And now look what we have--
    not that the Republican couldn't do the same thing,
    don't misunderstand, OK?
    That's not the issue.
    But where I'm saying, I voted always the conservative route.
    I don't believe that the state owes me anything.
    I don't think that the country owes me anything.
    And I think that you have to stand on your own feet.
    Now, is that part of upbringing?
    Probably.
    My political views--
    I don't know how much that shapes it, again,
    because you have these ultra liberals,
    and Holocaust survivors, and you have the others.
    I don't think that you have to give people handouts.
    Now, is this my Jewish approach, or is this my political thing?
    I don't want to sound cruel, but after a woman
    has had two children at age 14 and 15 or whatever,
    I would do something to her so that she doesn't produce
    a third, fourth, and 10th.
    I don't think I'm there to support that type of a thing.
    I think people can work.
    If they don't have any work, then
    let the state pay them and let them clean the streets,
    but let them have the self-respect
    that they do something, and not that they
    get this getting type of thing.
    So how much is this of my Jewish beliefs that you help somebody
    to better himself or herself compared
    to any other feelings in this?
    I have no idea.
    But I think I'm an incredible mixture--
    depends for what.
    If somebody gets raped, then they better get an abortion
    if that's what they choose to.
    Who on earth wants to penalize a woman?
    So that's my one side, OK?
    What about the Civil Rights movement?
    Were you involved with that-- because of what you--
    Absolutely not.
    Absolutely not.
    My husband worked at that time in Howard University,
    Black institution--
    absolutely not.
    It didn't touch me, because I believed--
    You were discriminated against as a child.
    But I came to this country in '61, where I still saw
    bathrooms on the way to Norfolk, where we visited--
    because my basic thing is, what are they talking about?
    Everybody's equal.
    So what is all of this?
    At the same time, everybody has the right
    of living in their own place, in their own home,
    in their own whatever, and not be
    imposed by some laws or something-- this is my person.
    You will excuse me, but that's somebody
    at the door downstairs.
    What were your responses during the Eichmann trial in Israel?
    He was caught.
    He was tried.
    And that's fine.
    And Israel should not be dumped all of those--
    controlling Demjanjuk later on should not be dumped there.
    But he was needed in order to bring the consciousness,
    awareness of what had happened.
    And I think that episode woke up the public, the world
    a little bit more to the reality.
    It needed to be done.
    Was that a painful time for you?
    Not anymore, no.
    It was just one more.
    Look, there were so many trials, there
    were so many other things.
    I think I was almost following more the Mengele
    than I was Eichmann.
    I followed Eichmann, but it was a trial.
    And I think that Mengele's story brought up
    some other things in me--
    the experiments on the children, et cetera.
    And so that one in some way was much more--
    I wouldn't say it's scary, but troubling.
    And these things had to be done.
    They haven't been done enough.
    At this point I think is basically looking
    for a pin in a haystack.
    And they are all dying out, and that's a chapter that ends.
    What bothers me more than anything else is that--
    I really said it when I was hit with one of the first episode
    at the university level of the denials--
    this was the first I was hit with that.
    And by the way, one of the reasons
    I resigned from Georgetown was because when
    the second bunch of advertisements came,
    I really reacted very violently to it.
    Because the first one was handled well by the university,
    the second one was published.
    And my boss was away, who is a priest,
    and Harold White was away at a conference,
    and I was hit with that thing.
    And I reacted.
    And when my boss came back, I had
    to explain to him why I had raised such a hullabaloo all
    the way through, and called in university professors
    to do something about it-- which, by the way, they did.
    We were one of the universities [? the guys ?]
    were sanctions and was sent to the Holocaust Museum
    to visit after they said, well, I wasn't sure that it existed,
    so freedom of speech, whatever.
    And my reaction was, never did I think in my life--
    let's put it this way--
    when I thought about the Holocaust,
    I thought it would end up being two paragraphs in a history
    book.
    But I never thought I would live to see denials,
    not in my lifetime-- not with what is available.
    This is not the Turkish story.
    This is something that's on tape that's there--
    although the Turks say that they all died of influenza.
    And there is enough there to trap citizens to show that it
    wasn't.
    So therefore, I just thought that this would not happen.
    But by the way, going back, when my boss came back,
    he says, why did you react like this?
    Because I called up the university professor,
    and I said, would you please get off your seat
    and do something about it?
    Anyway, when asked, I turned to him--
    a wonderful priest, wonderful man--
    and he said, why did you react so strongly?
    And I looked at him in his eyes and I said, you know what, Bob?
    If your grandparents, aunts, and uncles
    had gone up in smoke like mine did,
    maybe you too would have reacted or overreacted.
    And something died in me--
    and I realized that immediately--
    when it came to working in that environment.
    Now, it didn't take terribly long-- took a year for this
    to settle.
    But that was one of those decisive times when I said,
    I can't do it.
    So maybe I overreacted.
    Maybe it is not the way to do it.
    But that was my reaction.
    So that's pretty much where I think
    these trials were needed--
    just like two days ago-- we were talking yesterday.
    The one who awakened in me a literature about the Holocaust
    was Elie Wiesel in French was Le Jour et Le Nuit the two books.
    Until then, it was part of my life, but it wasn't in there.
    And by the way, that of the judges
    who heard the appeal of Eichmann was my husband's cousin
    in Israel.
    So we were connected to it in that way.
    When you pick up the newspaper or see on the television things
    that happened over the years in Rwanda
    or the former Yugoslavia, do you who is on the run yourself
    relate to any of this?
    I feel sorry.
    But I'm starting to believe that there is a part of me that
    became amnesticized.
    And the one and only thing that matters
    is Jews and Jewish people.
    When something happens in Israel, I jump.
    When the plane crashed in Halifax,
    I looked for Jewish names--
    good, bad, indifferent.
    Maybe people don't even say it, but that's where I am at.
    I am not there to save the world,
    as much as I would like to.
    That's the connection.
    And I'm sure that this has something
    to do with the Holocaust, OK?
    Maybe the older generations--
    Again, I don't know how many people express it,
    or how many feel it, or maybe somebody becomes--
    maybe this is why being a child, I was marked by this.
    This is what matters to me.
    Connected maybe back again to the same thing--
    we did survive.
    We survived for some reason.
    And I really don't make any apologies for it.
    I found it very interesting-- we were in Israel one day,
    and there were some young people collecting some money
    for I think it was somewhere in Africa.
    And I said, it's wonderful, because they
    have the consciousness.
    But maybe I did not have the luxury of that type.
    So that's where it is.
    Are you more comfortable around other people who are survivors?
    Absolutely.
    No question.
    First of all, I'm not comfortable among non-Jews,
    even as friends.
    We always had somebody when my husband was connected to,
    but they were not friends, they were acquaintances.
    Our close friends are exclusively--
    and even I will go further--
    our friends are exclusively non-American Jews except with
    very few exceptions--
    two, three couples, the rest, we are all Europeans--
    whether it's from South Africa, or South America, or whatever,
    but we are not American Jews.
    Yeah, very much so--
    it's very interesting--
    Why is that?
    Because you feel more comfortable,
    because you don't have to explain,
    because there is a certain connection.
    My husband has a wonderful friend--
    they were together in Russia.
    She lives in Canada.
    She just was here last weekend.
    There's a connection there.
    I was talking with her yesterday.
    She said, why didn't you call?
    I said, bad news, why didn't you call?
    I said, I didn't call you on purpose.
    I didn't want to call.
    So she says, if you don't tell me,
    where are you going to turn?
    And I said, you're right.
    But I find that there is a different level of friendship
    when it comes--
    maybe American society is a little bit superficial.
    Whatever it is, but it's not mine.
    I ended a couple of years ago, we were in Israel.
    And it was in Tel Aviv.
    And I came out of the hotel with my husband.
    And after about 15 minutes of walking down Ben Yehuda,
    I said to him, I feel I'm at home.
    And I feel that these are my brothers and sisters.
    So he turns to me and says, OK, but do they
    think that you are their sister?
    And we started laughing.
    I don't know, but I don't care.
    That's basically where it comes.
    And it's going to be if I have to have my friends,
    my real friends at home, and go out with them and be connected,
    I do find that I have a better connection.
    Somehow, I don't know whether that's the right word,
    but I have a strange feeling sometimes that we care more--
    whatever it is.
    Care more about what?
    Care more about each other.
    We care more about what happens to each other.
    It's not like this polite, oh, everything
    is OK type of a thing, you know what I'm saying?
    Oh, it's wonderful seeing you-- hope to see you whatever.
    It's not that.
    It's a much more tight friendship--
    good, bad, or indifferent, because sometime you
    can play on your nerves too.
    But I think that that's what it is.
    As you get older, do you think about your early childhood
    more--
    about what you went through?
    Sometimes on occasions when something happens--
    when something-- yeah, absolutely.
    I find that the older I got, and the more I
    was thinking about it, and the more things were
    happening in my life, and the more I was thinking about--
    now if I get into panic, boy, do I
    have some reasons to get into panic here from all sides.
    I must tell you, I much less was panicking about my parents,
    because they have lived their life, and it gets to be normal.
    So somewhere your brain starts worrying.
    When I see David-- and I really got into panic last night.
    Can't show it to him, can't say anything.
    And then what comes back is but you know that you're
    going to be all right.
    And I know I will be all right, not
    because that's the way people do it, but because I know myself.
    I know I will be all right.
    There's the hump, and let's see what it does.
    And let's see where it comes.
    But it's interesting.
    Then my other reaction is, but you're going to be all right.
    Is that part of that?
    Is that not part of it.
    I have no idea.
    Maybe because I survived so many times that, OK.
    Do you ever dream about your experiences as a child?
    No.
    No, absolutely not.
    The only time I told you was after that movie.
    No, absolutely not, which I find sometimes very interesting.
    Besides the thunder, are there any other sounds
    that recall your childhood.
    Oh, yes, very much so--
    the German ambulance, police, have the same signal
    that the Gestapo had--
    it's there, it's ringing.
    Interestingly enough, years ago--
    you see, the first time that I went
    to visit my parents in Germany was in 1964.
    It was our baby.
    It was Joe at the time.
    And I was sitting on a living room chair, and I sat down,
    and I ended up sitting on the floor.
    And my parents were in the room and my father said,
    what happened to you?
    And I looked all over-- what happened?
    And my mother who stood there started shaking her head,
    she says, I know what happened.
    And what happened was a very interesting thing.
    I had heard that sound outside, and something in me
    obviously reacted after so many years,
    and I slid down from that chair.
    That's a sound make, any time I hear it now,
    I say, you bastards.
    So that was another sound, which to me was absolutely incredible
    when I realized that this is what had shaken me
    out of sitting there on this living room sofa was a chair.
    Are there any odors that bring back, let's say, the ghetto?
    No, absolutely nothing-- no, absolutely nothing.
    What language do you think in?
    That's interesting.
    When I count, I count in French.
    Very often, depending on the circumstances--
    if we are with our family, we still speak Polish,
    and we will react in Polish.
    Otherwise, it's very much French and English at this point.
    What do you speak to your husband in?
    Now English.
    We used to speak French.
    It didn't work with the children.
    We gave it up and we spoke English--
    and Polish every so often.
    Do you get reparations?
    Yes.
    How do you feel about that?
    Never enough.
    It's money spent for those who needed to live on.
    It's too little but better than nothing.
    And for any of us who are getting it, it's play money.
    This should give you pleasure.
    Otherwise--
    What do you use it for?
    I use it for whatever I feel like doing--
    from buying things for my children,
    for buying for myself, for all my charity,
    the deduction, for whatever it is.
    I have absolutely no attachment to it,
    except there will never be enough.
    Why?
    For what they did.
    Because they took away health.
    They didn't give it out of [INAUDIBLE]..
    They took away because health was affected
    in some way or another.
    Also they can never replace--
    we would have had an extraordinarily comfortable
    life.
    I was the oldest grandchild of this extraordinarily wealthy
    man--
    lived in a village.
    But grandfather was extraordinarily wealthy.
    This crazy guy went--
    Honestly don't believe that they can ever pay enough.
    My grandfather in September of 1939
    bought for blocks in Krakow--
    this is my paternal grandfather--
    and put down hundreds and hundreds of thousands
    of dollars in cash.
    If he had taken that to Switzerland,
    he would have been much better off.
    But he thought that since he was born in Poland,
    he would die in Poland, which is exactly what happened.
    I don't think that they will ever be able.
    And if this helps the shrinking number of survivors--
    how many children did they have?
    OK, the rest is falling by the wayside.
    If this is what helped them to put their lives together,
    it certainly did.
    Israel here may be proportionately less--
    although we have a case in the family where
    it really makes a difference between poverty and making it.
    Why not?
    They took it away.
    Not only did they take life away,
    they took everything else away.
    So where are we?
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum volunteer collection
    interview with Maryla Korn.
    This is tape number 3, side A, and we're talking
    about receiving reparations.
    I don't think that ever--
    first of all, nobody can ever repay or take away the pain
    or take away whatever or repair.
    As much as it's called reparations,
    I don't think anybody can repair.
    This is not a question of repairing,
    but there were many people in Israel who would have
    not managed financially who--
    that made a difference.
    It certainly is going to make now
    a difference with all of the East Europeans
    who are going to be getting it, who suffered and should have--
    because they were behind the Iron Curtain then.
    And I don't think that there is ever really
    a way of doing it right.
    It's just-- it's one way of helping,
    and thank God that it was there to help
    and that it was established.
    But I have no charity.
    I have absolutely no feeling of--
    And anyways I told you, either forgiveness
    or for thinking that this makes it OK.
    This makes it only right in a certain way.
    It's not a reparation.
    It's not a reparation.
    It's not taking away somebody's goods, land, or something--
    a farm, a house, or something-- and then repaying for that.
    This is destroyed lives.
    Now how do you repay for destroyed lives?
    So that's fine with me.
    They should continue paying.
    Now it should not be--
    I'm just curious what will happen with the Swiss money,
    and I am I'm a little bit concerned
    that the Swiss money plus other moneys
    are going to go now to fix the thousands of abandoned
    cemeteries and Jewish schools and synagogues in Poland
    that the Polish government didn't know what to do with
    and they have now, quote unquote,
    as far as I'm concerned dumped it on the Jewish community
    and now fix it.
    So what?
    Is this money going-- instead of helping people
    so that they could end out their life in dignity
    and in some kind of a financial security,
    it's probably going to go to take
    care of some cemeteries that have been abandoned in Poland
    and nobody cares anymore except maybe one survivor.
    One family member was somebody buried there.
    So here we go probably spending very, very good money
    on something that will prove to be a total fiasco.
    Do you feel Polish in any way?
    Polish!
    No way.
    The only thing that I really felt very strongly
    is that my children had to see from where they came.
    That's a self-respect.
    We did not come out of nowhere.
    We were-- an American friend of mine--
    just maybe one of more reasons why we have good European
    friends because nobody would ask us question like that--
    she said I did not know that there
    were well off Jews in Poland.
    Well, excuse me.
    You have to explain to them to somebody
    who knows you're from a background does not know any--
    We're sitting at a family bar mitzvah a while back,
    and my husband's cousin who knew my grandparents very
    well turned to his wife and he said between Krakow and Warsaw,
    the wealthiest Jews was Maryla's grandfather.
    Well, I couldn't care less whether he was the wealthiest
    Jew or not, but the fact was that it was connected
    to something that this was not this poor little Jew
    shoemaker somewhere in a shtetl, but it was somebody who had--
    and whose children were starting to go
    to the university, et cetera.
    And that was of the importance of knowing from where you come.
    But not Poland.
    No way.
    No way.
    Though you were born there?
    I was born there.
    Sheer accident.
    Unfortunately, I wasn't born in Geneva
    or in Lausanne in New York.
    But that's all that there is to it.
    Yes, my father's family went back straight line
    in that little town, village from which they came up
    to 1780 almost Mayflower.
    But, again, it's-- no it's not.
    It's a country that gave too much grief.
    Yesterday, I was translating at the museum some stuff by a Pole
    who wrote it.
    And I was shaking my head.
    He's giving excuses.
    And I understand from where he comes,
    but they are excuses because we know that some people did
    save some others.
    So saying if you hit a Jew, you and your family were in danger.
    Well, it's true, but still--
    and then-- of course, he give an explanation
    that it was easier to save women and girls than men and children
    for visible reasons.
    And I said, yep, right.
    Let's now talk about the museum.
    What was your first encounter with the museum
    before you worked as a volunteer?
    In other words, how did you hear about it?
    Long, long before when it started to be put together.
    I really had mixed feelings.
    My reaction was it had no business being put
    in the middle of Washington.
    It should be put in the middle of Warsaw or Berlin.
    That was the initial reaction.
    Then we were quite involved through one way or another.
    Family gave a lot of money, some of those millions that
    come from the family, not us here but our family in New
    Jersey.
    And friends started getting involved,
    and my husband was politically involved.
    That was the beginning was Carter and then Reagan.
    I was involved also because I had some good friends that
    were working there.
    And so we had a connection in that respect.
    But I was very critical of it.
    I thought this was turning out to be ridiculous,
    especially when they started talking about who should be
    represented there and who shouldn't be represented
    and this whole thing.
    And I said here we go again, one of those Jewish stuff.
    And it really basically brings me
    to what's going on now is a crisis in Poland
    because that brings up then what are they going to be doing.
    And I kept saying there is Yad Vashem, but, of course,
    to me now, Yad Vashem represents a monument, a memorial, or this
    is a museum, educational.
    So now I have the differentiation.
    At this point, I have very different feelings about it.
    I think it serves a wonderful purpose.
    I-- but I think it as much as at the beginning
    I believe that there were people involved there that cared.
    I think now it's becoming a little bit
    too much a institution where most of the people who
    work there--
    I have to explain to them what I am doing with those tapes
    that I am translating, translating,
    and transliterating and doing--
    excuse me.
    I have to explain to them how on Earth are they going
    to take this and get it in--
    [? let's say ?] from me in English and know
    what's of importance in there.
    These are memoirs.
    Some memoirs talk about clothing.
    Some talk about food.
    Some talk about [INAUDIBLE].
    How do they have the feeling of what's of importance in there
    and what is not.
    Who is supervising this work that I am doing?
    See I'm [INAUDIBLE] the tapes.
    These are memoirs of Polish Jews that were gotten from Poland.
    Now I go-- and it's in Polish.
    So I write out words of importance.
    Well-- and I'm not saying me, but anybody
    who worked on that thing has to know
    of what is of a value to this or what is just blah, blah, blah,
    blah by a 16-year-old, which I had a couple of weeks ago,
    her life.
    But her life was important.
    But what is important in all of this?
    What do you take--
    what do you think is important?
    Then if I think it's important, who's
    supervising my job, taking out what's important?
    Maybe that isn't what they were looking for.
    Maybe they were looking and I missed something.
    And I think there's a lack of supervision
    because these people that work there
    are young professionals who come from this is a librarian
    and this is this and this is that.
    That's upstairs in the archives.
    They have no clue except from a professional point of view,
    but the professional-- there is-- here
    there is still memories, emotions, and everything.
    There was one story, the story of a man who went--
    this is the best research if anybody
    wants to tap into what hunger does to you.
    This is the story.
    This is the story, the depression and the hunger.
    Somebody can read this who is not connected to that time
    and say [INAUDIBLE] What is this?
    What this is is the history of hunger
    and how hunger brings on depression.
    And that's where I have difficulties.
    I think the museum is becoming too political.
    I don't think it's anybody's business
    whether Arafat is brought in by the State Department
    or isn't brought by the State Department.
    And it shouldn't be an in fight in the house,
    and it shouldn't have people fired by this.
    And everybody there is an expert.
    And it doesn't-- it--
    I think it's-- it--
    it's becoming an institution, and it's losing its soul,
    personal feelings.
    And the more the survivors will disappear
    and the less of a soul there will
    be because the people working down there, the volunteers--
    not talking about me and the archives
    and some others in the archives.
    We are doing translations, and we are doing the paper stuff.
    But I'm talking about the people down there.
    Some things are so insensitive, so lack
    of respect or lack of understanding,
    so taken for given, doesn't work that way.
    I don't know.
    I have very mixed feeling.
    It's a wonderful institution.
    It does its job.
    Upstairs, scholars are working.
    There is an extending library.
    There is an extending archives.
    At the-- half of the stuff disappears
    somewhere and nobody knows where it is.
    Well, maybe 100 years, it will reappear.
    But the fact is it's there.
    It's expanding.
    It's going to be a research place.
    It's going to be--
    and it is-- the lectures.
    But there's something lacking in humanity
    that I find more and more.
    And I'm happy where I am working upstairs.
    I wouldn't want to be downstairs.
    First of all, I don't want to be downstairs and respond
    to questions about the Holocaust.
    I really find this very difficult, very
    difficult. Because you can't stop talking
    and it brings out your own emotions no matter what.
    Upstairs-- at this point, they are joking.
    They saying so you came here to relax because they know pretty
    much what I have at home.
    And I said, in some way, yes.
    I do my thing, and I go home.
    When I can't take it anymore after three, four hours,
    five hours, then I go home.
    But I hope that it will maintain or that it will have--
    the only way that I can think of is in Yiddish.
    [SPEAKING YIDDISH],, that it's going to keep it because just
    to be a museum, so what is going to happen in 100 years?
    So in 100 years, they won't be able to change exhibits,
    and there won't be new exhibits anymore
    because there's new material.
    thank God that is coming.
    New material, yes, but it has its time limit.
    And then what will happen?
    And then what will happen?
    When did you start working here?
    The minute I left Georgetown.
    I immediately work.
    A very good acquaintance of mine, Babe Abramowitz,
    was working there long from before as a volunteer,
    and then she became part of the staff.
    And she was in charge of fundraising
    the big fundraisers, and she knew
    that if I went to some of our family
    that had given a couple of millions
    that I could probably get from that society that grew up
    a little bit more.
    So she brought me in very excited
    except that she had had a stroke and she was on her way out.
    And the young woman who works--
    worked with her and is now working
    there is either unbalanced--
    and I really mean it--
    or unwilling to sever.
    And at this point, I avoid her like the plague
    because I came in there to work on the--
    so that I could do something, whether it was lecturing--
    which I did sometimes in the schools--
    or whether it was doing something that was--
    or fundraising.
    And the first thing that she did--
    I came in there, it was winter, and all the snowbirds
    were in Florida.
    So I was sitting at the desk downstairs,
    and I was getting quite a lot of money
    from the people who were stopping by.
    I'm not the only one.
    Everybody else manages to get there very nice [INAUDIBLE]..
    And she came by one day, and she says we don't need you here,
    don't want you here.
    And by the way, unless you give the donation first,
    you have no business being here.
    So I said to her thank you very much, and that was the last.
    And this type of a behavior--
    and she's still there.
    You see her constantly.
    And at this point whenever I see her,
    I very nicely turn around and do this.
    What I'm saying to you, I did not encounter upstairs
    that because it's a much more--
    I call it more rarefied and more--
    it's different thing.
    You do the translations [INAUDIBLE]..
    And they are wonderful, and they are caring.
    But I do have the concern of who is supervising what I am doing.
    You know what I'm saying?
    So you're primarily doing translating and--
    Translating, absolutely.
    Yeah.
    Of Polish Jewish memoirs?
    Polish-- Polish, German, and French.
    Memoirs of people.
    Memoirs or whatever comes that needs--
    yeah or donations that need to be--
    Has your working at the museum affected your life?
    I feel that I am contributing something,
    that I'm doing something.
    It's part of me.
    After my generation after me, that's it.
    And I think, yes, I'm doing, and my kids know that I'm doing it.
    So, yes.
    Oh, yes, it has.
    I think in some ways it enriches your life.
    Look, you know what you're doing,
    and you know that there is a limited amount of-- now
    do I believe that some of these things should be not volunteer
    but paid staff?
    Yes, by all means.
    I take sometimes home stuff, so my husband says to me
    how long did you spend on this.
    I said, oh, it took me about two hours.
    These are not bad at $150 an hour.
    But that's exactly what it is.
    Another institution would not rely so heavily--
    Either they take advantage of it or maybe we
    take advantage of it.
    But I have no problem doing it.
    I will do it as long as I can do it.
    Has what you learned upstairs affected
    your memories of the Holocaust or enlarged them?
    Enlarged, very much enlarged.
    I did some things about a Jewish hospital in Berlin,
    totally flabbergasting.
    There are sometimes stories that are totally flabbergasting,
    events that are flabbergasting, things that you learn.
    Yes, of course.
    Like what?
    Like this Jewish hospital staffed
    by Jews all the way through war.
    On the way to Auschwitz, they were bringing in people
    to cure them or give them treatment for cancer
    or other things, and then they were
    sending them to research that.
    Now never knew about this, certainly not
    mentioned in the book of Jews who survived in Berlin.
    Oddly enough, there it was.
    So you do learn every so often or you find something
    that is odd, that is strange.
    And then you say to--
    like yesterday, I didn't finish yet.
    I'm working on this memoirs of this Pole, non-Jewish,
    about Sobibor.
    There was a fact--
    there was a factory that was there at the beginning
    of the war [INAUDIBLE] where Jews were working--
    were being paid, minimal but were being paid,
    were given a lousy lunch but were fed,
    and were sent home to this little town
    seven, eight kilometers away to stay overnight
    until they started building the camp
    and then nobody could get out from that.
    So, yes, of course, you learn.
    You always learn.
    You read some things as silly or as profound as it is
    and you suddenly going to always learn something.
    What does that do for you?
    Sometimes it infuriates me even more, gets me angry.
    Gets me angry.
    Sad, angry.
    Sometimes you have a good cry.
    Sometimes you have a good laugh.
    There was a funny story a couple of years
    ago after the Schindler movie was shown.
    There was an article interview with Mrs. Schindler,
    and she said--
    I was sitting-- no, I'm sitting at the table
    next to a gentleman who's working
    on his papers, an elderly gentleman.
    Didn't recognize him.
    Should have then.
    And she says this son of a bitch.
    This no good womanizer.
    He did it all for money.
    This, that, something.
    It's also-- she contradicts [INAUDIBLE] in her book,
    but anyway that's the article.
    And I start reading this, and I start giggling.
    Now there's one thing that you don't hear in that place
    and that's laugh.
    You don't hear laugh.
    You don't have giggling.
    Nothing.
    You can hear all kinds of sounds or silence,
    but it's an interesting place, no laugh ever or no happy voice
    ever upstairs.
    It's frightening in some way.
    And he looks at me with this almost angry look on his face.
    What is she giggling?
    And I cannot stop laughing because I figure the scorned
    wife, here we go.
    He went to Argentina with two of his mistresses and his wife.
    Come on.
    What did they expect from her?
    But they're making big hero out of him, and she's saying, hey.
    And I-- this took me a couple of minutes,
    and I keep him seeing as I progress in this article.
    So I turned to him, and I say, sir,
    I know you're looking at me with this funny look.
    Would you please like to hear this,
    or would you like to read it?
    So he says-- and he's working seriously there--
    he says what is it?
    I said this is the interview with Mrs. Schindler saying
    son of a bitch.
    He starts laughing, and he says, yeah, I
    know about this article.
    I said it's almost funny.
    It is funny in the context--
    That type of things do happen, but this is not
    a place where you either--
    and slowly you start to engage conversations
    with the people who do the same work who are sitting around
    you.
    So there gets to be this--
    but it's a very strange camaraderie.
    This is not-- because we are not sitting doing nothing.
    We are all concentrate.
    Help each other if there's a language or something.
    Like I had the German guy sitting across from me
    who spoke German.
    I went to him, and I said look what does this word mean.
    It's not in the dictionary.
    Doesn't make any sense.
    So there is some connection there,
    but it's not a camaraderie type of a place.
    But everybody does it, and some of them come in every day.
    There is a non-Jewish lady there every day.
    Marian is on her job five hours a day.
    So it's going somewhere.
    And I know it's doing a lot of good.
    You go downstairs, and you see the young kids
    that are coming in.
    And it's not anymore to Jewish groups that have gone.
    And you say to yourself I don't know what they learned from it
    but something will stick in their minds.
    If you have-- well, your friends who are survivors,
    do you encourage them to come and work at the museum?
    Whoever comes to Washington, I give them
    tickets to go and see it.
    No, I meant friends--
    no--
    Non-Polish, non-survivors.
    No, friends of yours here who are survivors,
    do you encourage them to come and volunteer at the museum?
    Some cannot even take it as much as going and seeing
    the exhibit.
    You have all kinds of reactions in there.
    I don't have too many friends who
    are going to volunteer there interestingly enough.
    A lot of our friends are still involved in working.
    We are still this generation.
    What you have, there are a lot of volunteers
    are the older ones.
    But I haven't heard anybody saying
    I'm going to go and give my time for it.
    They all think it's wonderful that I am going--
    Do you encourage them?
    No.
    I think everybody has to do their own thing.
    Some people do it at UJA, which is not my shtick,
    and some people do this.
    And I think I can do much more this way.
    At least with my languages, I do some good.
    And I know what I'm doing, which is even--
    I know-- when I read something, I know what's of importance
    and what is of no importance or lesser importance let's put it
    this way because absolutely everything.
    There was a story two or three years ago,
    it's better than Anne Frank and more mature.
    And they know that the museum exists,
    so they know I'm doing it.
    Nobody's asking too many questions.
    And I don't think that people--
    look, if they don't have the skills of translating,
    they find it very depressing going down there and working
    on that.
    So that's pretty much it.
    What is your relationship with--
    well, you did talk a little bit about this,
    your relationship with the other volunteers there
    who are survivors.
    I know them because I know them for years.
    With those, it's-- the ones that I know for a long time,
    that's fine.
    It was the others--
    It was the volunteers who are survivors?
    Yes, very little connection with any.
    You come, you do your thing, and then
    you go except I suspect downstairs
    down there they work because they don't work on something.
    They work at a desk or whatever, so they talk and they have--
    and I'm sure that they have much more connection.
    I don't have upstairs any connection.
    Not the-- there's nothing there.
    There is a-- today--
    no, it's tomorrow.
    Tomorrow's the 10th-- there is a meeting
    of the volunteers, the survivors,
    but I can't go because I have a meeting with Vito.
    So what's more important to me?
    Well, I'm doing my thing at the Holocaust Museum,
    but to me my involvement with Vito is the treasurer
    and that is something that I did I put as a priority.
    So when I have the two things, which one do I go to?
    Well, I go to the one--
    I go to that one.
    It's more relaxing.
    It's more-- it doesn't concentrate exclusively-- you
    can't be totally surrounded by the experiences.
    You have yourself already as a Holocaust survivor.
    You can't be constantly surrounded by this.
    You'd go nuts.
    So like tomorrow, I'm going to my Vito meeting.
    I'm not going to my Holocaust meeting.
    But you've gone to the other survivor volunteer meetings?
    No, I haven't because first of all because there's
    an older generation.
    They will monopolize.
    I know it by experience they will monopolize it anyway.
    They will do what they want to do.
    So my reaction is just like the commemoration every year,
    let the--
    Herman Taube and the others do it their own way.
    Let them have the respect of doing it.
    Then we'll have our time.
    When they are gone, somebody will have to take it over.
    Let them do it.
    It's their shtick.
    Let it do.
    Let them do it.
    So do you go to these meetings run by Marty Goldman at all?
    No.
    No.
    I really honestly believe I'm letting them do their own.
    Let them do it their own.
    I don't think it would make any difference.
    I come there, I want to do my productive work if you want to.
    And then I come home, and that's it.
    What are your impressions of the museum's
    non-survivor volunteers?
    No idea.
    No contact.
    No idea.
    I think they're doing their job, they want to do their job,
    and that's wonderful.
    [PHONE RINGING]
    And I was asking whether these non-survivor staff
    you had alluded a little bit to it,
    did you want to say any more whether they're
    jury staff or non-Jewish staff.
    I think they are professionals, but that does not mean bad.
    And I'm sure that they do the things that
    have to be done professionally whether it's tapes
    or whether it's something else or whatever.
    But I question how much anything that-- for example, I do
    is supervised.
    That was my question and how much then the one who does it
    knows what the heck they doing, and that I don't know.
    I have no idea.
    But I think that they would be very well served by having more
    paid staff being the survivors.
    I think that would be better served
    at this point of the game.
    Why?
    Because they have the knowledge.
    Because at least they have the insight, which these don't.
    That's all that there is.
    Nothing else.
    No-- I'm not looking for a job, but that's
    exactly how I feel and have felt this way for a long time.
    You had said that the Daniel Story exhibit is something
    that you can certainly relate to.
    Are there any other parts of the museum
    with which you identify--
    Extraordinarily well done.
    The whole thing is well done.
    Of course, you do.
    It's well done.
    It's well presented.
    It's taken to the maximum with sensitivity
    and well, well, well done.
    There's not an iota of criticism about this.
    On the contrary, I think they have done a wonderful job
    in this exhibit.
    Whether they do a wonderful job with the speakers
    that they bring in, that's another question.
    The last couple of days, there are some speakers
    that they brought in, this is incredible,
    and I'm sure that they're paying them very healthy money.
    One of them, a guy who worked with the KGB and now he's
    coming to talk about fascism in Russia.
    Well, where are we going with this?
    But that's, again, this is maybe too much money
    spent in some ways that they consider right.
    And I do have a lot of questions how it's being spent.
    And, again, this is a question of sensitivity.
    Comes from the guts.
    Again, are the survivors all right with what they saying?
    No.
    But they have their background with their criticism
    or with their approval.
    My reaction is I'm not in there to criticize them
    or to approve them.
    I just do honestly believe that there
    needs to be more on the staff--
    on the paid staff, not the good doing in between.
    I come in whenever I feel like it.
    That's not serious work.
    There if I were paid-- if somebody else was paid,
    they would come in.
    They would put in the [INAUDIBLE]..
    It would move faster.
    Nobody says that it has to take a year to decipher a tape.
    But if they had more paid staff, there
    are some from all kinds of countries that were survivors.
    It would be much smoother at this point.
    That's all I am saying.
    Have you suggested that?
    No.
    Why not?
    To whom?
    You can talk to the wall there.
    And then you see what's happening politically there,
    and then you realize that one or two people are--
    my husband went to Poland two year-- a year
    and a half ago from the American government,
    from the White House, from the AID.
    He was going to Poland.
    He was speaking to the top people there.
    He came in, and he said can I be of some help.
    Now this guy is taking care of Poland.
    Two guys are taking care of Poland.
    Without naming names, two guys are taking care of Poland.
    Wonderful.
    It's their little territory.
    So that's what I'm saying.
    No, I'm not passing judgment at this point.
    I think it's a wonderful institution.
    It's wonderfully put together.
    And hopefully it will go forward.
    Do you belong to any groups of child survivors?
    No, child survivors.
    I belong to the Holocaust survivors in Washington.
    See child survivors is a very strange--
    there's one group from Baltimore, Connected Baltimore,
    or it's Washington, and then there are the Hidden Children.
    I don't fall into any of this.
    Children-- child survivors I do to be very honest too much
    school.
    There's such a-- that's such a heavy stuff there.
    You go-- I went to one meeting.
    It's so heavy.
    I don't want to do it.
    It's unfair to myself, to everybody else.
    Do you speak to or have you spoken to school groups?
    Yes.
    Long ago.
    What level?
    High school.
    High school level.
    When I was in substituting in Maryland in the 19--
    late '70s, early '90s--
    early '80s.
    I'm not doing it anymore.
    Really comes a time everything takes over.
    And I find it very difficult to talk to--
    about it.
    Strange enough but I do find it very difficult.
    That's me.
    Is there any message you want to leave to your granddaughter?
    [SNIFFLING]
    I guess there is one.
    I'm glad that we lived to see her.
    And that's pretty much it.
    We're expecting another one.
    That's it.
    That's maybe the whole meaning for anything else.
    Parents are going to normal.
    But OK.
    And she's named after her wonderful grandmother,
    David's mother, and her other grandmother
    but this grandmother.
    And I think that's continuity.
    That's what I was saying from the beginning
    and that it had to have a meaning.
    This is the meaning.
    When she walks around and said she wants a kippah I said OK.
    That's what I said.
    You see that's why I don't want to talk to groups because I
    do get emotional about it.
    Maybe not about what basically happened to me, but I
    think the loss--
    the loss of everybody who was there who could help.
    And it's inimaginable, people going up in smoke,
    people being herded into gas chambers, people this and that.
    Come on.
    My only [INAUDIBLE] who gave you the right to do this.
    That's why maybe I don't have any-- you see,
    it all brings back-- this is maybe
    why I don't have any sympathy or any feelings about Blacks
    going and protesting.
    Sure there were killings and there were
    everything else but come on.
    Then you think what's of importance.
    Well, it's not comparing one horror to another,
    but I feel terrible.
    Japanese were interned.
    Wonderful, they were interned.
    And somebody else says, but it's terrible.
    Yes, it's terrible but compared to what.
    So maybe I-- it's not that I'm insensitive,
    but I'm coming from a very different--
    it wasn't right, but it was war.
    OK but nobody shot you and in such horrible ways.
    Anyway so that's my--
    that's my story.
    Anything else you wanted to add?
    No, not really.
    You did a wonderful job.
    It's a long one.
    Well, thank you very much for doing the interview.
    You're welcome.
    This concludes the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    interview with Maryla Korn.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    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.
    Interviewee
    Ms. Maryla O. Korn
    Interviewer
    Gail Schwartz
    Date
    interview:  1998 September 09

    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, a volunteer for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History branch, conducted this interview. The interview was transferred to the Archives on September 9, 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 08:12:28
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn506686

    Additional Resources

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

    Download & Licensing

    In-Person Research

    Contact Us

    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

    Oral history interview with Marie Schwartzman

    Oral History

    Marie Schwartzman discusses her early life in Paris, France; her large Polish family; her father’s arrest and imprisonment in Drancy; becoming the head of the family due to her mother’s illness; hiding house for three months; being arrested and sent to Drancy in October 1942; being deported to Auschwitz; living conditions in the camp; working in the crematorium sorting clothes; being marched to Ravensbrück in January 1945; living conditions in Prchin-Malkov camp; liberation by the Americans; turning in a German officer who was arrested; returning to Paris and Grenoble; immigrating to the United States in 1949; and marrying an American soldier.

    Oral history interview with Nathan Kalman

    Oral History

    Nathan Kalman (b. Natan Kalmonowitz) discusses his early life in Łódź, Poland; joining a Zionist organization in 1930; living on a kibbutz in Krakow for a year; marrying in 1939; the beginning of the German occupation; his mother’s work smuggling food; moving into the ghetto; the deaths of his mother, father, and son; being deported to Auschwitz in cattle cars; keeping a photo of his family in his shoe; conditions in Auschwitz; being moved to Gurlitz; working in an ammunition factory; liberation; remarrying; immigrating to the United States; and living in Israel from 1969-1989.

    Oral history interview with Esthy Adler

    Oral History

    Esthy Adler discusses not knowing her real name or when and where she was born, noting that many of her childhood memories are vague; her papers that say she was born in Kaliningrad, Russia, where she thinks her parents had a summer home; staying with her mother’s sister in a compound where there were frequent bombings; her mother’s death during their stay; her father’s remarriage, despite the family’s disapproval; how the Germans found her, her father, and stepmother; the last time she saw her father; how she, her aunt, cousins, and stepmother were relocated to another compound where they slept on cots in places similar to bunkers; seeing a man digging a ditch and holding a machine gun; being lined up and fired upon, but surviving; finding her way back to the barrack where she found her stepmother and another woman; being loaded onto a cattle car and taken to another location (possibly Treblinka); escaping into the forest with her stepmother via a hole and tunnel dug by another woman; living with a partisan group that consisted of Polish-Ukrainian prisoners of war and Russian deserters; the death of her stepmother by machine gun fire in the winter of 1942; being shot; becoming ill from drinking poisoned water and being nursed back to health by a peasant; living with a woman named Margot who got her a job in a factory sewing pants; leaving her job after a man paid for her to go to a private school; living with the Katz family; becoming legally independent after she turned 18; attending graduate school and being accepted into a program where she was trained as a paralegal; meeting her future husband Jim Adler at the University of Heidelberg in 1954; and immigrating to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Tana Gelfer

    Oral History

    Tana Gelfer, born October 7, 1939 in Berlin, Germany, discusses her parents Herman George Reichman and Johanna Kahn and her family background in Gelsenkirchen, Germany; how her father lost his banking job after the Nazi party came to power; her father’s arrest on December 27, 1942; never finding out what happened to her father; her deportation with her mother to Theresienstadt; living conditions in Theresienstadt; sharing a bunk with her mother; how her mother worked in the fields harvesting crops and sorted through prisoners’ belongings; being hospitalized frequently; how a woman in the camp, Minnie Simon, gave birth to a son in secret; how Minnie Simon, her husband Fritz, and their child all survived; being made to watch, along with other small children, the cruel treatment of men who were brought into the camp from trains; her and her mother’s liberation by Russian forces; living with her grandmother in Berlin; immigrating to the United States; marrying and raising a family; and how her mother helped sponsor several people emigrate from Germany to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Maria Devinki

    Oral History

    Maria Devinki, born June 1, 1920 in Hannover, Germany, discusses her family’s move to central Poland; her parents’ successful business there; the Nazi invasion of Poland; how Jews were forced to live in a ghetto; having to give up her large house; her father’s deportation to Treblinka where he perished; marrying her fiancé and being hidden with family members by a Polish farmer in small underground space; traveling with her husband to Regensburg, Germany to wait for U.S. visas; and settling in Kansas City, MO.

    Oral history interview with Jerome Stasson

    Oral History

    Jerome Stasson (b. Jerome Stashevsky) discusses his early life in Detroit, Michigan; coming from a family of Polish immigrants; being drafted into the U.S. army in 1943; following General Patton to Germany from England; liberating Buchenwald; his first impressions of the camp; speaking Yiddish to the survivors; destroying the letters he sent home to his family due to their distress; and his memories of the smell of the camp.

    Oral history interview with Adriana Pacifici

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ernest Kolben

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henry Kolber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Greifer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anna Wollner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Kate Wacz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erwin Forley

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ernie Marx

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Doris Rauch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Elman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gerald Rosenstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ivan Becker

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Romana Koplewicz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Koplewicz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irving Schaffer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Klein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Pisik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Rosicka

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Salomon Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Suzanne Foldes

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tibor Vince

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elias Piorko

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Hildesheim

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Peter Masters

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Wolke

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ionel Ghelman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irimia Solomon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lotte Salus

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irena Kirkland

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hans Hirsch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Milton Shurr

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ludwig Jacob

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Barbara Artman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fritz Schonbach

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Charles Barber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tibor Borsos

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Robert Kertesz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Kahn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Susan Warsinger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Arnold Weiss

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sia Hertsberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Chava Frajhof

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Israel Frajhof

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Edward Novakoff

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Celia Feldschuh

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Nicole Yancey

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jaffa Munk

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frances Hirshfeld

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Moris Gluckman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Margie Rosenthal

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Emma Mogilensky

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Isaiah Henig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ida Henig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marcel Drimer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michael Silberstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joan Schwab

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erwin Deutscher

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Pick

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hedi Pope

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bella Simon Pasternak

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marion Friedman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Strassburger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jadwiga Dziekonski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Harvey

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thomas B. Gardiner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Roberta Jones

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Christine Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hugh Jenkins

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rene Edgar Tressler

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Stefan Wohl

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Yehuda Adam

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Arlette de Long

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Adam

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Herbert Bitter

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rachel Goldfarb

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tania Rozmaryn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frank Ephraim

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Peter Phillips

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Ichiuji

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Horowitz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hermann Kosak

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Dolly Bestandig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Goldie Gendelman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rhoda Kuflik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Hess

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jutta Levy

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with 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 Samuel B. Hagner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Werner E. Michel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Guta Jacobson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helen Luksenburg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with William Luksenburg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rose Weisfeld

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth E. Greifer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Nesse Godin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with 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.

    View All 264 Items in the Collection