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Oral history interview with Tilda Finzi Cohen

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1998.A.0059 | RG Number: RG-50.106.0096

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    Oral history interview with Tilda Finzi Cohen
    Transcript
    This is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    Volunteer Collection interview with Tilda Finzi Cohen,
    conducted by Gail Schwartz on April 14,
    1998 in Bethesda, Maryland.
    This is tape number 1, side A. What is your full name?
    Tilda Finzi Cohen.
    And is that the name you were born with?
    Well, no.
    The name I was born with was Mazel Tov Finzi.
    How is it that you were given that name.
    It was my grandmother's name who died many, many years before,
    which my father was only 11 years old.
    So he wanted to name his daughter
    after his deceased mother.
    And when you were a small child you were called that?
    No, I was never called that at home.
    I was always called Tilda, but I was always
    called Tilda at home.
    The only place I was called Mazel Tov
    was when I went to first grade, because that
    was on my birth certificate.
    So that was my legal name in Yugoslavia, was Mazel Tov,
    and that was a burden.
    Where were you born and when were you born?
    I was born in Split, in what was then Yugoslavia,
    July 11th, 1933.
    Let's talk a little bit about the background of your family.
    Where did your parents come from?
    What were their names?
    OK.
    My mother's name was Hannah Montilio,
    and she was born in Sarajevo.
    And my father's name was Maurice.
    So he went later on by the name of Mauricio Finzi.
    And he was also born in Sarajevo,
    but he moved to the island of Vis
    when he was extremely young, and then moved to Split.
    So basically, he had left Sarajevo
    at a very young age, maybe the age of five or six,
    and moved to the Dalmatian Coast,
    first in the island of Vis and then moved to Split.
    How far back can you trace your generations,
    and where were they living?
    I really can't.
    I don't know much about that.
    I think my parents' parents were from Sarajevo,
    and they lived there.
    One of my grandfathers, Montilio,
    was from Travnik, which is still near in Bosnia.
    But basically, that's all I know, not beyond that.
    Just my parents' parents I knew of.
    Do you have any brothers or sisters?
    No, I am an only child.
    What kind of work did your father do?
    My father owned a dry goods store in Split.
    Now, Split is a city on the Adriatic Coast?
    It is.
    It's in Dalmatia.
    It's on the Adriatic.
    And it was a very pretty, little city.
    The sea was beautiful.
    Swimming was wonderful.
    It was a very small Jewish community,
    I think about 100 families, if I'm not mistaken.
    But a very active Jewish community.
    It had a club.
    It had a very nice, little old synagogue.
    We also took our chickens to be killed there on Shabbat.
    Friday night, not on Shabbat, and before the holidays.
    We did not have kosher food.
    So I remember vividly going down.
    I was the maid, with the live chickens,
    taking the live chickens and having them killed for Friday.
    Actually for Saturday, I think.
    Friday night we didn't have meat.
    And then before the holidays, taking the chicken.
    We never had meat, beef, or something.
    It's interesting, small.
    How religious was your family?
    My father was very active.
    He went to Friday night services most of the time.
    I don't think he went to Saturday morning services.
    He had a dry goods store, so it had to be open.
    But very observant in the sense of very serious.
    We observed the holidays very, very much.
    Kosher, it was a kind of hit and miss.
    I mean, kosher meat, kosher chicken,
    because there was no kosher butcher.
    Observant in the sense of observing all the holidays.
    And my father was very knowledgeable.
    He could always conduct services any place,
    conducted them for years, even in New York.
    He was president of the Yugoslav Jews of the United States
    and conducted their services.
    What street did you live on?
    Do you remember your address in Split?
    [NON-ENGLISH]
    Number 11.
    All right, now what kind of neighborhood was it?
    Was it a mixed neighborhood, mixed Jews and non-Jews?
    Basically, there was no Jewish neighborhood
    by the time I was born, by the time my parents came to Split.
    It was basically we lived in a building.
    It was six.
    On each floor there were two apartments, large.
    And there were three floors.
    And there were no other Jews live in the building,
    but there were some Jews living in the next building.
    And there were some Jews living a block down,
    and across the street there were a couple.
    So it was a very--
    I think it was probably what was--
    would've been considered a middle to up--
    middle class-- definitely, middle class neighborhood.
    Was a lot of non Jews.
    Jews were maybe in each building--
    not in each building, maybe every other third building
    there was a family.
    Did you have an extended family of other relatives?
    In Split, I had a step-grandmother and an aunt,
    which was--
    if my father were alive, he would be very upset
    because I would say his half sister because to him it
    was his sister.
    And her name was Tilda.
    He was-- she was named after the deceased mother.
    This was a long story.
    But anyway-- and an uncle, my father's brother.
    So they all came to my mother's house for Shabbat dinner
    and for the holidays.
    Did you have cousins, also?
    I had cousins in Sarajevo and in Zagreb and in Belgrade.
    I did not-- before the war, I did not have cousins in Split.
    My mother's brothers lived in Zagreb, some in Zagreb,
    some in Sarajevo.
    So there was--
    I had cousins but not in Split at the time when
    the war started.
    Later on, they had escaped to Split.
    What language did you speak at home?
    At home, I spoke mostly Serbo-Croatian,
    and my parents spoke Ladino--
    where we-- it's called Ladino here.
    I don't know what I call it Spanish at home for me
    not to understand, of course.
    Picked it up so I could know all the secrets of the family.
    So I-- both languages were spoken at home.
    But I spoke only Serbo-Croatian.
    So your family is part of Sephardic Jewry.
    Yes.
    I'm a Sephardic Jew.
    My mother and father was Sephardic.
    Did you have any favorite holidays?
    Favorite holidays?
    It's interesting where now it's Pesach, so it's interesting.
    I don't know that--
    my favorite holiday was probably what we called [NON-ENGLISH]..
    I don't even know what it is.
    When you get all the dried fruit,
    then you walk around with the little--
    you put the dried fruit in a paper bag and you put a flag
    and you walk around the whole synagogue and all this.
    Simchat Torah?
    There was this Sim--
    it's interesting.
    It must be Simchat Torah.
    Do we dry fruit for Simchat Torah?
    Children walk around with flags.
    I know that.
    I know, but it was more--
    it was like a fall holiday with all the-- that's right.
    Now, that you-- I have not connected that.
    But we always had like a feast of dried fruits and nuts,
    and we each got our bag.
    And it was like a party, big party at the synagogue.
    Let's talk a little bit more about the Jewish community.
    What was the name of the synagogue?
    I don't remem-- I don't know that it had a particular name,
    at least I don't remember it.
    There was a one and only synagogue.
    It was in a very kind of-- you couldn't even
    notice it was a synagogue from the outside.
    It went through a very narrow entrance among stores.
    But you would then walk up some steps,
    and then there was a synagogue, a very lovely synagogue.
    Actually, was women sat upstairs.
    Men sat downstairs.
    It was a lovely little synagogue with a--
    also, garden I talked to you about,
    this [NON-ENGLISH] where you-- we used to have.
    And what's-- had its own garden like for [INAUDIBLE]..
    They used to have soccer there, too.
    But it was nothing--
    I mean, from the outside you could not see that it was-- it
    was just like a little opening and you walked in
    and it was a long, narrow street and then there were some steps.
    Do you think that was because of protection not
    to show the public that this was a synagogue?
    I would don't--
    I wasn't-- I get not the impression I had at the time.
    So it could have been.
    But I don't-- almost everything was in the old town.
    Everything was-- there were-- streets were extremely narrow.
    And so everything was like--
    unless there was a store.
    But of course, churches had big open area.
    So maybe you're right.
    In my own child's mind, I'd never conceived it--
    never perceived it that way, [INAUDIBLE]..
    Did you have a non-Jewish friends?
    We're talking about as a small child.
    Yes, I did have non-Jewish friends.
    Most of the young people that lived in the building.
    As I said, everybody was non-Jewish.
    I had one Jewish friend, though, and was a boy.
    And then I had mostly non-Jewish friends that I played with.
    What was the name of your non-Jewish--
    your Jewish friend?
    Maritza was a little girl that lived in the building and she
    was my--
    we talking now before the war.
    We're not-- we talking before 1941.
    Because after 1941, things changed.
    Did you-- yeah.
    We're talking before the war.
    Did you-- and again, you were very, very young.
    Did you have any special hobbies or enjoyable things
    you liked to do as a small child?
    Do I have any special hobbies?
    I'm trying to-- yes.
    When I went to Sarajevo, they used
    to take me to the amusement park with all the--
    please help me.
    The rides.
    The rides, yes.
    And that's what I remember.
    And my greatest hobby was the beach.
    I was-- I'm still a good swimmer, I think.
    And I learned to swim before I-- definitely
    before I learned to read.
    So going to the beach and swimming was one of my--
    and jumping into, and diving was one of my biggest hobbies.
    How would you describe your parents and their relationship
    to you when you were still young?
    Were they very protective of you?
    They were very-- I would say very protective.
    And I was being an only child.
    Very much involved what I ate and what I didn't.
    And-- I'm sorry--
    they were very caring.
    My father was-- my parents were both very nice people,
    but my father was extremely close to me
    from the time I was born.
    Were there any favorite songs that your parents
    used to sing to you when you were
    a child that you can remember?
    Yes.
    I remember song.
    I can't-- I don't have a good voice.
    My-- both parents both had very nice voices.
    But it's still the same songs that I
    sing to my grandchildren.
    Not the adult, not the-- but now we
    have a young one, very young grandchild, a nine-month-old.
    And he loves that.
    Can you sing a line or two?
    [NON-ENGLISH SINGING]
    Can you translate that?
    A little bird came, flew--
    flew-- flew to us.
    And in her beak is carrying a letter.
    And the letter there--
    he's brought a letter.
    And in the letter regards from the mother-- from my mother.
    That's lovely.
    That's lovely.
    All right.
    Now, you were born in 1933.
    So when did you start going to school?
    I started going to school when I was--
    that's a good question.
    1943, I think.
    Not before you were 10 years old?
    No.
    1940.
    OK.
    1940, I was seven.
    You didn't start going to school before seven.
    I started some nursery school, like the German nursery school,
    or something like that that was run by-- but public school I
    started in 1940.
    What is your first memory?
    It's interesting.
    I don't know if it's because I remember pictures of me
    at the beach surrounded by-- or it was always the first-- one
    of the first memories, because I spend an awful lot of time
    at the beach.
    I still love the ocean.
    I think it was at the beach, probably,
    I think, just with my family.
    And also where the--
    we used to have lunch.
    We used-- because maybe I adored it so much because it would be
    used to have one of these little [? cabana ?],, a little--
    just there-- it was just at the beach.
    Many people next door to each other where we change.
    And we were not comfortable.
    The maids were-- we never had a car.
    We never had a refrigerator.
    We had help because it was not available at that time.
    We had help, so we went to the beach.
    My mother and I and my dad used to meet us
    in this little shack.
    But everybody had the--
    and the maid used to bring lunch.
    We used to swim and then have lunch at the beach
    and stay for an hour or two, and then go home.
    How close was your house to the water?
    Did you live in the old Roman section of the city?
    No, no.
    We lived in the newer section of the city.
    And it was probably about 10 minutes walk
    from the beach at the most.
    How politically oriented was your father
    before the war-- before the war?
    Before the war, my father was very political oriented.
    As a matter of fact, I think he was in jail as a communist
    when he was 18 years old--
    17, 18.
    He was very active.
    This was before-- of course, before I was born-- before--
    I was born when he was 30.
    But he was in prison because of having been somehow
    active in the Communist Party.
    Was he very Zionistic?
    Extremely Zionistic.
    He was-- he went to the-- actually, later on,
    he went to the Congress in Vienna.
    And he was always very pro-Israel
    and he was very-- yeah, extremely.
    Go ahead.
    Did he talk to you about this when you were very young?
    About the Communist Party, no.
    But the Zionism and Israel and all that, yes, very much.
    I think that's why we ended up in the United States.
    My father was worried that if we stayed in Israel--
    in Italy that I possibly could marry somebody not Jewish.
    That was a big worry.
    And Israel was out because family was in Israel
    who had a very hard life.
    So they discouraged us from going there.
    Do you-- now, Hitler came into power in 1933.
    Do you recall-- you were only six years old when Poland
    was invaded, and even younger with Austria
    and Czechoslovakia.
    Do you have any recollections of hearing of a man named
    Hitler or anything?
    I don't have any recollection of anything like that, really.
    I mean, granted, you were a young child.
    Yeah.
    So it's understandable.
    I do not have any recollection of that.
    I-- my first recollection of Germans and Nazis and stuff was
    in nineteen--
    beginning of 1941.
    I don't even remember when Yugoslavia entered the war
    against Germany.
    I believe it was in 1941.
    And that's when my father went into the army.
    He was called into the army.
    This is March 25, 1941.
    I guess.
    So I'm just putting things in place that--
    and my father was called into the army
    and left home, and was gone for about a month in the army.
    And then Yugoslavia basically got capitulated,
    and my father was able to get back.
    But before he got back--
    I remember this vividly--
    this is-- if you think of memories that remember.
    My mother and I in the afternoon went to some friends
    who, as I told you, Jews lived all over.
    So the Jewish family lived the other side.
    Not the other side of town but maybe two or three miles away.
    And we walked.
    No public transportation was there,
    but we walked there and had dinner there,
    because there was a close friend.
    And then we started walking back home.
    And the children-- and the children-- what that word--
    and as we were walking back, the whole city
    was full of Germans in trucks, in big--
    not motorcycle-- motorcycles?
    Uh-huh.
    I mean, entering the city en masse.
    And my mother said, oh, my-- she was already-- she knew.
    She said, oh, my God.
    Oh, I hope we make it home.
    I hope we make it home.
    Of course, they didn't know we were Jewish.
    There was nothing to indicate.
    We were just walking the streets.
    But was also uncomfortable.
    She knew what was coming.
    She knew.
    And that was my first realization
    that this was bad, because the fear in her.
    And my father, of course, had not come home yet.
    We didn't know where he was.
    But the Germans only went through the city,
    and they went through during the night.
    And then in the morning, there were no Germans there anymore.
    Used it as a passage.
    Let's back up a little bit.
    Before that-- before that happened,
    you had started school already.
    I started first grade.
    In September, probably, of 1940.
    Yeah.
    Did you experience any anti-Jewish feelings?
    Did the other children know you were Jewish?
    Did any of the teachers express anything?
    They all knew that I was Jewish.
    How did they know that?
    It was obvious, and I don't know why.
    I think that it was known we celebrated different holidays.
    We didn't celebrate Christmas.
    We didn't-- but it was never considered anything.
    Like this Maritza that I told you lived under us--
    actually, they were-- they lived in the basement,
    and they were kind of taking care of the building.
    And they were very, very helpful.
    They actually got our winter coat and hid them.
    And I think we got them from them afterwards.
    So I don't think they were hiding partisans in there.
    So it was not a matter--
    they were always very open.
    So I-- from this particular, I think there were comments.
    I remember I had heard that a doctor had said some--
    something about Jews, a negative comment.
    And when my mother said he's the best doctor in town
    and I had to have surgery on my tonsils, I said,
    I'm not going to him.
    So I was a very--
    I said, I'll take a second rate doctor, but not going to him.
    He made a negative comment.
    He treated some immigrants--
    [NON-ENGLISH] we used to call them--
    from other cities badly.
    He--
    When are we talking about now?
    Well, we talking during the occupation,
    the Italian occupation, forgive me.
    OK.
    And when you were at school, again,
    before the Germans came in, did the teachers treat you equally?
    I had a-- I did not-- do not remember being treated badly.
    I really do not.
    Up to the time that the Germans came in,
    had you heard of a man called Hitler?
    And I was seven but it was--
    I was seven.
    I don't remember.
    I be honest, I don't remember hearing about Hitler.
    Now, when your father was first called up,
    what did he say to you when he had to leave?
    Do you remember that it's a painful leaving time?
    Not really.
    I know he had to go, and I don't even remember a big goodbye
    or anything.
    It's interesting.
    But I remember when he came back.
    My mother was just so thrilled because she didn't
    know was he taken prisoner.
    Because some people were taken prisoner--
    prisoner or worse by--
    the war by the Germans.
    I don't really remember.
    But I remember him--
    he's coming back.
    This was a major thing.
    Was about a week or two after the--
    that those Germans walking through the city.
    So that I remember very joyful time that he
    was alive and with us again.
    Was he able to keep his business?
    No.
    As soon as the Italians came, he had to give up the business.
    That was it.
    You couldn't own businesses.
    Children could not go to school.
    It was just a different world.
    Now, the Italians occupied Split on April 6, 1941.
    Is that what it is?
    I don't remember the date.
    I'm sorry.
    So the Germans had marched in March through--
    Marched through, only march through.
    And had I not been out that night,
    I might have and might not have been aware of that.
    Was that a frightening sight for you to see as a child?
    It was a very frightening sight, not as a Jew maybe, but just as
    a--
    there's masses of soldiers in this big camioni--
    what is the-- trucks, the military trucks.
    And all in this--
    well, they were-- just was big helmets.
    It was just the frightening at night and walking.
    It was just-- we were not walking very far,
    but it was just-- it was--
    plus, we were not used to these major trucks.
    There was no traffic.
    I didn't know anybody who owned a car.
    Did your mother explain to you what this meant?
    I don't think she really explained anything
    and we're walking.
    She just wanted to get home.
    Just stay close to me.
    Let's walk to the side.
    Don't look up to much, just walk home.
    Let's get home.
    And would you describe yourself as being very obedient
    and doing what your parents said?
    That was part of a child of that era.
    Plus, it was a part of the child of the--
    you already knew.
    You knew by the fear maybe in your parent's voice
    that you better do.
    It wasn't something that--
    there was no room for rebellion.
    Not because they didn't allow you to rebel,
    but because there was just--
    the fear was implicit in their voice, I think.
    That's what I perceive of it.
    Now, did you go to school right after that?
    The Italians came in about two weeks later.
    The Italians came about two weeks later.
    They opened the schools with Italian teachers.
    Now, we were annexed to Italy.
    Now, the Serbo-Croatian language did not
    exist anymore in the schools.
    Classes were in Italian.
    Everything was Italian.
    Up to that point, did you just know the one language
    or did you know other languages?
    I knew the Ladino, the Spanish.
    I was familiar with that.
    I had not known Italian.
    My father spoke it.
    Because he did business-- we went to--
    I don't know, but he spoke Italian always.
    In Split, many people spoke Italian, the older generation.
    I did not.
    And it arrived [INAUDIBLE].
    There were Italian teacher, the administration is Italian,
    everything is Italian in the school.
    And I did go to school.
    Was this the same school?
    Same school, same classroom, different teacher
    and different language.
    Was this frightening to you, upsetting or challenging?
    I think was more challenging than upsetting.
    And I had an advantage.
    I spoke Ladino.
    I spoke Spanish.
    Most of the people were real Croatians, who--
    of the city.
    I was the only Jewish child in the class.
    And I was the only one that spoke Ladino, which made
    Italian very understandable.
    You were almost eight years old, a few months
    before your eighth--
    I was almost eight, yeah, almost eight years old.
    And by this time, I could communicate with the teacher.
    I understood everything.
    I don't know how.
    I still don't know how.
    And I was the one that was--
    I think she spoke Serbo-Croatian,
    but she was not allowed to.
    Now, how normal was your life right after this?
    It was fairly normal.
    The only abnormal thing was that all the people from Sarajevo,
    from Belgrade, and from Zagreb, started coming
    in droves with false papers.
    By that, I mean, my father's brother--
    two brothers, my mother's sisters, my mother's brothers.
    So our home became from having these three people and the maid
    living in there.
    We had to get rid of the maid because they were not allowed
    to have a maid [INAUDIBLE].
    And--
    What other restrictions?
    You said your father lost his business.
    Lost his business.
    You were not allowed to have a maid.
    Not allowed to have a maid.
    Not allowed, but-- well, this took place
    within six months or a year.
    Not allowed to go to school.
    I'm not allowed to congregate any place basic like.
    I don't know what else, really.
    OK.
    Well, let's go through this gradually.
    So these relatives started coming.
    What did that mean to you as a child?
    Did you understand why they were coming?
    Yeah.
    Immediately, I knew they were escaping the Germans people.
    By that time, I think my young cousin,
    the one that was taken to Jasenovac,
    they knew that he had been killed.
    He was-- somehow they just shot him there.
    They didn't send him.
    And his family came-- his mother, his father,
    and his sister.
    Did your parents tell you that that happened?
    I think I sensed it.
    I knew it.
    It was just-- the mother was crying.
    It was just--
    I don't think secrets were-- there were no secrets.
    And there were secrets-- this was said in Ladino
    and my parents didn't know that I spoke it.
    So I was aware of everything.
    I was aware when my mother used to collect
    clothes for the partisans.
    I was-- it's interesting how much you knew without knowing,
    without being told.
    Do you remember being very frightened
    in this beginning time?
    No, I don't remember being frightened.
    I really don't.
    Would you ask your parents questions-- as I said,
    you're almost eight years old--
    why the change, why you had to have Italian teachers?
    It was almost-- and it's interesting.
    I never ask those questions.
    It's almost like I understood without being told.
    The city was occupied Ital--
    by the Italian.
    The fascists were there.
    Everything legal was in Italian, even the signs
    as I showed you in this book were in Italian.
    So the city was just under a different role.
    So this was it.
    And learn Italian, and that was it.
    And now as you said gradually changes were made.
    And how did that affect you as a child?
    The big change that affected me mostly was--
    and I don't recall when it happened.
    The only thing I remember is that I
    wore a fur coat, a white fur coat when it happened, that I
    was thrown out of school.
    So I don't think was in April or--
    they came, you said, in April?
    So I must've finished that school year and did fine,
    did very well.
    And the teacher loved me and-- because I
    spoke the lingo, the language.
    And then school started again.
    Maybe it was second grade.
    And I was-- then your mood was the same class and I had,
    I think, the same teacher that I had started with.
    You stayed with the same teacher for years then, for four years.
    And it was very cold, started getting cold.
    And I was in school one day, the teacher said to me--
    I realized something was going on.
    I was not told what was going--
    they were-- the whole family was sitting and having coffee late.
    There was nothing to do.
    I went to school, came home for lunch, and went back.
    And there was some kind of strange feeling in the house.
    And I don't know what it was.
    I didn't know what it was.
    But I went to school.
    And I have the feeling that was in the afternoon session.
    They had two sessions--
    morning and afternoon.
    We didn't go.
    And they call-- the teacher said to me,
    would you please go and get your father?
    I said, I didn't do anything wrong.
    And she says, oh, no, you didn't, absolutely not.
    She says, but I just need to talk to him.
    Would you go get him?
    And when I got home, father was not the least bit surprised.
    He says, why don't you stay home.
    Don't go back.
    I insisted-- insisted that I wanted to go back.
    And I went back with him.
    And of course, my father spoke Italian.
    And she told him--
    that's what he said, how sorry she
    was that she had to do this.
    Because I was the only one that understood her
    after I spoke Ladino, so I had picked up Italian.
    And I already had made such progress in Italian.
    And so they won--
    she-- he said, well, I know you can't keep her.
    You want me to take her home?
    And she said, let her finish the day.
    And she says, she'll go home with the other.
    And then when she gets home, tell her.
    And so I was not aware of anything.
    Went home and I was told you're not-- can't go back to school.
    That was it.
    Did they give you a reason why you couldn't go back?
    Oh, none of the Jewish kids could go.
    They did give me the reason.
    None of the Jewish children could go.
    And at eight years old, school is normality.
    So what did that mean to you?
    It is normality.
    And I was always a very good student.
    It was very meaningful for me.
    I was-- there--
    I've always been--
    I always was a good student, Italy and States.
    I mean, I was always good student.
    And it was very hard.
    But immediately, my father said, don't worry,
    we'll form a school.
    There'll be a school.
    Your Uncle Solomon will teach it.
    And this is the engineer [INAUDIBLE]..
    We'll get teachers.
    We'll do it near the synagogue.
    We'll get a room.
    We'll do it in different people's houses.
    Don't worry.
    There'll be a school.
    That's what was happening in my house
    when I was leaving for school in the afternoon.
    That was happening.
    They already knew it was happening.
    So it was being organized.
    They already were planning for it.
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum Volunteer Collection interview
    with Tilda Finzi Cohen.
    This is tape number one, side B. And we're
    talking about the Fall of 1941.
    You had just been told by your teacher--
    or by your father that you were not
    able to continue on to school.
    And you had mentioned something about a white-- little white
    fur coat.
    Can you say something more about that?
    White little fur coat, which just, I guess,
    a coat that one of my uncles must have sent me for a gift.
    My mother had quite a few brothers that were not married
    and I was spoiled by them.
    So the little fur coat they sent, I think, before the end--
    before the beginning of the war, or just
    maybe 1940 or something.
    This little fur white coat that looked like a--
    like spun candy or something.
    But it was very cold.
    The-- Split didn't have a lot of snow,
    but it was a very cold city because of the wind.
    The wind they called bura, which was
    a very strong wind that came from the sea and it
    kind of penetrating.
    Of course, there was no transportation-- buses,
    but we didn't take this.
    So they sent me this little fur coat.
    And that was my coat, was very--
    and as a matter of fact, a few weeks
    after I was thrown out of school, the organization
    of the school took--
    to organize the Jewish school took a field--
    probably a month or six weeks.
    But after a few weeks, my non-Jewish little schoolmates
    who I still saw in the neighborhood started saying,
    why didn't you come back to school like--
    I said, I can't.
    Well, why don't you come?
    They won't allow me to come back to school.
    I'm Jewish.
    I can't come.
    And I still played with them in the neighborhood,
    in the garden-- in the back of the house, which
    was a garden type of thing.
    So what they ask the teacher, why can't Tilda
    come back to school?
    She didn't want to explain.
    She says, she didn't come back.
    Can she come back?
    Can we tell her to come back?
    They said, of course.
    And they kept telling me the teacher
    said you could come back.
    I told that to my father.
    And my father say, honey, that is not true.
    It is not true.
    [INAUDIBLE] only like an eight-year-old
    only spoiled, only child, a little spoiled.
    I threw an absolute fit.
    And I said I was going.
    Then my father said, no, honey.
    Finally, he said, OK, I'll take you, which was--
    many people blame him for it.
    Who I-- to whom I have told this story.
    He took me and went with me.
    I think it was in the afternoon.
    Somehow, there were two sessions.
    School started from [INAUDIBLE] early afternoon.
    And they were outside at some kind of an assembly.
    And my father went to talk to the teacher.
    And I came with my book--
    book bag and everything.
    And she says, no, I made a mistake.
    I shouldn't have told the children to tell her
    she could come back.
    I just found it easier, or something to that effect.
    She was very apologetic and apologized.
    And I was standing in the background
    because my father was talking, and I
    remember she shook her head.
    That's all I remember.
    And went back home.
    I think I cried.
    I'm sure I cried--
    I remember something.
    And it's kind of sad.
    I was a very strong-willed child,
    and my father and mother didn't know how to deal with this.
    That rejection was worst, I think.
    But I guess we all could have done things better.
    But we do the best we can.
    Within a few weeks, the Jewish school started.
    And it was fun.
    Number one, there were older boys.
    I was eight or something.
    There were two or three grades thrown together
    and a big table, almost like this one,
    and just above someplace, above some store.
    And there were-- they used to call
    it-- used to be a storage space and maga--
    but they cleaned it up, put a bathroom in there,
    put some lights, and it was OK.
    It was this whole group of Jewish children
    that were in different classes, in different--
    boys and girls were for the first time
    together, because I was in an all girls school.
    I mean, schools were all girls or all boys.
    So here we were thrown together.
    And there were no back--
    school-- in schools, you have what, where you sit?
    Desks.
    Desks.
    OK.
    Bunk here, I was thinking.
    OK.
    You have desks.
    We were not sitting at the desks.
    We were sitting in a very large table, very large, very long
    and narrow table on both sides.
    One grade was one side, and one grade and the other.
    We learned still.
    We still learned.
    And we had very good teachers, because these
    were the people that had lost their jobs teaching,
    the Jewish teachers that had lost their job.
    So we had professors teaching.
    By professors, I meant people that
    taught in high school, people that taught--
    had taught at the University that had escaped.
    So the teachers were marvelous, very, very good teacher.
    And we-- I went there for two years.
    And at the end of each year, school
    year, we gave exams to the-- in Italian.
    Now, we are being taught in Italian, you must [INAUDIBLE],,
    because we were given exams in Italian.
    And we were actually giving--
    being promoted and given exams, and given grades
    by the Italian government.
    He ever wanted--
    The government recognized this school.
    It was recognized in some respect--
    we couldn't-- but they did--
    and if you ever want to read a book about this,
    read the book The Garden of the Finzi-Continis written
    in Italian, but of course, in English.
    This book speaks of the same thing.
    Actually, speaks of the way the Italians treated the Jews.
    So we went to the end of the school year and gave exams.
    And of course, because many of us
    were Sephardic and spoke Ladino, we were--
    we did wonderfully in Italian, and we picked it up
    immediately.
    There were people like my uncle who taught,
    but he had studied at the University of Milan.
    And his name?
    My-- Solomon Finzi.
    And he was an engineer, PhD engineer,
    who had studied in Milan and came back
    to Yugoslavia to practice.
    And he was an engineer in Belgrade, but he was--
    he had escaped to Split from Belgrade and he couldn't work.
    So he taught because his Italian was perfect.
    He had studied in university there for five years.
    And I think-- I thought it was perfect.
    I don't know.
    How many students were at the school in the beginning?
    Well, the two grades.
    We met in different places, in different houses.
    I had this--
    I was in second or third grade, or third and fourth grade,
    something.
    And then basically, we had elementary school
    for four years, then middle school, then high school.
    So basically, these three groups met in different places.
    So there were no Jewish children who
    could go to the regular school all
    the way through high school.
    No, no.
    No, absolutely not.
    So they-- some met in my uncle's apartment.
    They had escaped so they had empty rooms in the apartment.
    So they form classrooms.
    And in different people's houses, there were classrooms.
    But they did you have to have the permission
    of the Italian authorities to do that.
    When you were out in the street and you
    saw Italian military people, what was that sight for you
    as a child?
    Was it frightening?
    It wasn't really frightening.
    It wasn't frightening if they were not wearing black shirts.
    If they were wearing-- if they were a fascist,
    it was frightening.
    If they're not, they were just soldiers.
    It was not frightening.
    As a matter of fact, we had what they
    called coprifuoco, which is--
    well, you cannot go out at night.
    What is it?
    Curfew.
    Curfew.
    Forgive me.
    Speaking of this, the English is escaping me.
    Normally, doesn't.
    I speak English, I think, quite well.
    But it's funny, words--
    so we had a curfew.
    And my mother got very ill.
    We didn't have telephones.
    She was having a gallbladder attack.
    And below us an Italian officer had
    rented a room from a family, a non-Jewish family,
    because he was in the military.
    And he had rented a room with a balcony.
    And he was on the balcony smoking a cigarette
    and was about 1:00 in the morning.
    And my father could not go out to get a doctor at that time,
    and didn't because he would be shot on sight.
    Not because he is Jewish, because just because there
    was a curfew.
    So he, of course, spoke Italian.
    So from the upper floor, he addressed this gentleman.
    And he said, would you excuse me, please,
    but I need a doctor.
    My wife is very ill.
    And how could--
    I know-- could you go to the police station
    just a block down and ask them to call a doctor or something?
    And he said, but I am a physician and I'll be right up.
    Course, there was a mezuzah though, he knew we were Jewish.
    But he was very lonely.
    Nobody spoke Italian to him.
    And he came and took care of my mother.
    And from then on, used to come up to visit and how my mother
    was and how my mother wasn't.
    But it was very dangerous because then you could--
    the Yugoslavian people who were pro communist and pro partisan,
    you didn't want the association to be made.
    So it was a very--
    but he was a wonderful gentleman who took care, gave
    her medicine, and actually--
    so basically, I was not fearful then.
    And sometimes when I went to the beach-- the beach--
    there was one beach that was rough beach where you
    didn't-- wasn't a fancy beach where we could go, as well.
    I still went swimming.
    We're talking about 9-year-olds who went swimming to the beach
    alone, met friends.
    I used to walk through a bridge, and the Germans--
    German-- Italian soldier were standing guard.
    Not a black shirt now.
    And he would stop me and he wanted to speak Italian.
    He would address me in Italian.
    By that time, I spoke Italian.
    I don't know how, but I'd been going to school.
    And he would show me pictures of his family and his daughter.
    And it was like we had made friends, this--
    somebody on guard over bridge.
    So, no, I was not--
    I was never fearful of the Italians.
    Some fascist, black shirt, I was a little fearful.
    What did that mean to you?
    It meant-- well, it actually meant a lot
    because the fascist is the ones that initially
    had beaten the Jews coming out of synagogue on a Friday night,
    and took all the sacred books and burned them on the Piazza.
    And basically, this is what it meant.
    You had to-- and beaten the older men that had been
    [INAUDIBLE].
    My father stopped going to synagogue.
    He was-- but the older men continued going.
    And they would be-- as they were coming out,
    they were beating them.
    It was this--
    Is this the beating of June 1942?
    Probably.
    It was in the summer or [INAUDIBLE]..
    OK.
    It was-- and we were sitting and all at once,
    we started seeing the chairs of the synagogue being transported
    out on trucks.
    By that, I mean, seeing them on trucks
    and my father recognized it.
    He was from-- so we knew something had happened.
    And they burned all the sacred books.
    And here, I happen to have a picture where there was such
    a black mark on the Piazza.
    And Jews never walk through here--
    never, never walked.
    But they would walk around after that.
    Never on that again.
    Yeah, that was it.
    That was in the summer.
    I remember being hot-- warm.
    And some of the orthodox older men, and they all
    got beaten very badly.
    And then everything from the synagogue was burned that was--
    the sacred books were burned.
    But some of the furniture.
    I remember chairs being seen.
    You are nine years old.
    What does that do to a nine-year-old
    to hear about that, see that?
    Well, the fear of the fascist, because the fascist,
    we always distinguished between the Italian and the fascist.
    There was always a distinction in our minds.
    The fascists were the ones that beat the Jews, imprison them,
    came to pick up my uncle who lived with us,
    and took him to prison for no reason.
    This was normal.
    Actually, was a badge of honor--
    does that make sense--
    to be in prison.
    What does it feel like to have an uncle in prison?
    My father, my mother were afraid to bring him food.
    So who got chosen to go to the prison and bring food?
    It was safest to send a nine-year-old
    to go to the jail.
    You see, the jail-- the people in jail did not get food there.
    The families used to have to bring food.
    So who got chosen?
    The little girl was safe to send to the jail
    to bring food to my uncle.
    And I still spoke Italian so I spoke
    to them Italian and they would open actually where they were.
    And I could see him through the window.
    And I would wave to him.
    They would have never done that for an adult.
    This is the uncle that was teaching Solomon?
    No, that was my uncle Chaim [PERSONAL NAME]
    who died during the war.
    He died with the partisans.
    He then got out of jail, went in the mountains with us,
    and died fighting with the partisans.
    What was the name of the physician that
    helped your mother [INAUDIBLE]?
    I'm sorry, I don't remember.
    Don't know.
    And were-- did your parents let you go out on the street
    alone during the day?
    I always went out.
    I-- from what I remember.
    First, I went with the maid every place,
    and then I went every place alone.
    Even after the Italian occupation.
    Yeah.
    There was no-- they would never hurt a child.
    You don't understand.
    We're not talking about--
    even the Jewish child, they would never hurt a child.
    That's not part of the Italian mentality.
    They were always very kind to children.
    Strange.
    So you-- tell me a little bit more
    about the trip to the prison bringing your uncle food.
    It was nothing.
    It's just whatever time--
    You did it more than once.
    Daily basis, once a day, midday.
    It used to be this little holders that
    had little pots, one on top of another and the holder.
    And I would take the holder with the food, and I would come--
    of course, I spoke Italian.
    This was a tremendous advan--
    you can't-- and I would arrive there.
    And they would say hello to-- the prison
    guards say hello to me.
    And they would yell sometimes.
    Sometimes I would just give them the thing.
    And I would, I think, wait for the--
    so he could bring me back the pots,
    or I would pick them up the next day.
    I don't-- that part I don't remember.
    But then he says, do you want to see him?
    He says, I'll call him to the window.
    It was an inside courtyard--
    an inside courtyard.
    So they will open this door and then
    we yell for him to come at the window of the cells
    so he could see me.
    I would wave.
    So basically, I had made friends with the jailers.
    And I came everyday and brought him food,
    because my father and mother were afraid to go.
    It was-- they knew that nobody would hurt--
    it was a-- it's strange that it was a safe place for a child
    in that time--
    at that time.
    You had said that other relatives
    had been coming to Split.
    Were any of them living with you?
    The house was full of people.
    Yes, they lived there.
    Some of them rented private rooms in the building--
    in the building.
    People that were willing to make some extra money.
    But I think every room in our house, which was
    a three, four, five room house.
    But every room was taken.
    You're talking about an apartment.
    It's an apartment, yeah, forgive me.
    Every room was taken up with people.
    And five people, four people in a room.
    So you had to share your room.
    Oh, we have to share everything.
    Share the food, share the house.
    Did you like that or did you resent it?
    I don't think I resented it.
    I was an only child and loved this houseful of people.
    Didn't mind it, no.
    I don't remember minding it.
    I remember being a lot of work for my mother.
    But the women helped and they all did the cooking.
    Was there enough food?
    Food?
    There was bread and there was some food.
    There were vegetables.
    Meat was probably scarce.
    There was probably fish.
    We didn't have butter, and I adored butter, and still do.
    And there was kind of a--
    I don't remember being hungry, but I'm sure my father was.
    Because he always-- if there was something that I liked,
    or something, he always gave it to me.
    So I think he lost weight--
    excuse me-- but I don't remember being hungry at all.
    Being hungry for things, like butter, or something like that.
    But don't remember being hungry.
    Were you aware, or did--
    or did you know, or did your parents talk about what was
    happening in the rest of your--
    in '41, '42?
    It was a great deal.
    They liberated the city.
    They took-- Germans were going, and it was--
    the Germans were advancing.
    The fear was great.
    Already, I was aware that the fear was great.
    The Germans are advancing in this front.
    The fronts, on the Russian front, this front,
    and the big talk at that point was the Americans
    and the British were already in Sicily.
    They were already in southern Italy.
    They are in southern Italy.
    They going to cross the Adriatic,
    and we are going to be liberated.
    Not until-- it didn't happen.
    But there was a great deal of hope
    that the Allies would come, because they were already
    set in Italy.
    It just takes a boat ride to invade.
    They didn't do it.
    They never did it, actually.
    Was not part of their plan.
    So they were-- we were always talking
    at the Russian front and the African front,
    I mean, these things were part of the everyday conversation.
    Everybody was listening to some kind
    of secret radios, shortwave, I don't know what they had.
    Were radios forbidden?
    Oh, yeah, it was all very forbidden.
    And so there was our secrets, many secrets.
    And the secret was other secrets--
    collecting clothes, collecting money
    for the partisans, [? Tito's ?] partisans, many of my--
    my cousin, actually who died fighting
    was the parti-- another Tilda Finzi.
    My uncle Beppo Finzi, Joseph Finzi's daughter,
    another Tilda Finzi.
    They all named their children after the dead mother,
    all the brothers, my father's brother.
    And she joined the Communist Party
    when she was about 15 or 16 doing--
    it's the-- it wasn't the Communist Party.
    It was just the people that fought against the occupation.
    And she, unfortunately, was one of--
    threw some kind of petrol on one of the commanders of the city.
    She was an attractive young woman,
    and she walked by and threw petrol.
    Because it was an anti-fascist movement.
    And immediately the next day, she didn't get caught.
    She was not caught, but she escaped and went
    to the part-- went to the mountains
    and was in the partisans.
    She was the only daughter of my uncle, Beppo Finzi.
    And she died fighting with the partisans.
    Now, what was your father doing once he
    helped to start this school?
    Was he involved in resistance?
    In the what?
    Was he involved with school?
    Was he involved with resistance?
    What was he doing?
    I think because of him--
    his being known to have been Communist in his very youth,
    he was 18.
    He was coping-- keeping a very low profile, maybe collecting--
    food collecting.
    But he was keeping an extremely low profile.
    As a matter of fact, they jailed my Uncle Beppo
    for telling him that he was a communist in 1918, 1919.
    He had not been.
    He knew that who they were looking for was my father.
    And he says, no, I was here but he never mentioned.
    So my father was never--
    my uncle-- but he was ill with something
    so he was put in the hospital.
    And he managed to survive.
    Unfortunately, started and she died
    fighting with the partisans.
    And so your father, you said, kept a low profile.
    What did he do to pass the time of day?
    What he passed the time of day, I
    guess, went from store visited his--
    he had many non-Jewish friends who
    owned stores, went to theirs.
    A very interesting story, though, which I don't know.
    He was very well thought of.
    So there was an Italian family that
    lived in Split who had a store.
    And my father also used to kind of sell retail and sell--
    how do you say--
    Wholesale?
    --wholesale.
    Forgot those words already.
    And there was a Jewish--
    an Italian man, non-Jewish, who had a store--
    lingerie.
    And was interesting because he went to Italy on a buying trip
    with his wife, this man.
    And had teenage--
    20-year-old children or something
    in the late teens, early 20s.
    And the boat was torpedoed and both of them died.
    So came the fascist--
    Italian fascist came to help them sell the store.
    The children had to sell out the store, liquidate the store.
    So they said, do you know anybody
    who your father respected who could do this for you?
    He says, sure, I do, Mr. Finzi [INAUDIBLE]..
    But he said, he's Jewish.
    But that's the only man in this city
    that my father would trust with something like this.
    So my father after having given up his business,
    had to go and liquidate this store for the fascist,
    because these young children wanted my father.
    So it was an interest-- it's kind
    of an interesting situation.
    But that's-- so he--
    I remember him working for them for almost six
    months liquidating this store that he
    used to sell merchandise to.
    Did your parents talk about to you
    what was happening on the other parts of the continent,
    like what was happening in Poland, or did they know?
    I don't think they really knew.
    They knew by the time there were concentration camps.
    They never mentioned that they--
    I don't think they--
    as I said, they spoke in Ladino many of these things.
    And I would hear about it.
    I knew a lot, but not by virtue--
    also, you didn't tell your children
    in case they start questioning the children.
    You did not want them to know what the families see--
    the family thing.
    When you were-- and you were continuing to go
    to school during this time.
    What school-- what did you talk about with your friends
    in your free time?
    Did you talk about--
    Normal things that kids talked about.
    Who liked whom, was he cute, was he not?
    Did he pass you a note?
    I [? assure you ?] we didn't talk about serious things
    at all.
    Plus, the teachers were not allowed.
    See, they-- you were--
    you can compromise yourself if you tell the children anything,
    if they--
    so you basically-- but we were devilish.
    We were-- I remember I was the devil.
    I always remember this because from one teacher to the next,
    like we had a Hebrew teacher that came who was the rabbi.
    Well, I said, you know what?
    Let's turn the lights off so he'll let us go home.
    He says, well, we can't turn--
    I said, well, let's get this-- he was--
    he was late.
    So we put a chair on top of the table and we climbed on top
    and unscrewed all the bulbs.
    And when he walked in, there was no light.
    So he sent us home.
    So we had fun.
    Don't-- we had--
    it wasn't one of these oppressive type of thing, no.
    It was-- and the rabbi came to give us our Hebrew lesson
    after the regular teacher left.
    You see, they left us alone also.
    It was-- it's a different--
    and we unscrewed all the bulbs.
    And did your family feel free to celebrate Jewish holidays
    during this time?
    At home, yes, I think we did.
    I think we did celebrate the Jewish holidays.
    Not I think, I know.
    The cooking-- might have been very little food,
    but we did celebrate.
    We did say all the prayers, yeah.
    But did not go to the synagogue?
    You said it had--
    There was no synagogue.
    What street was the synagogue located on?
    On the same street as this bookstore,
    and I don't remember, sorry.
    So events went on without anything
    too frightening until when?
    Nothing particular.
    People were taken to prison.
    They were beaten in prison.
    But if it didn't affect you personally, you kind of left--
    well, there were events that took place.
    There was a lot of resistance movement within the city.
    So we had major curfews that started at 5:00
    and all of this, the feeling.
    But as far as Jewishness, was not really--
    the fear was there.
    You could, I think par--
    you could feel the fear of the parents what was going to be.
    Somehow we all, I think I--
    what was going to be, especially around September when
    the Italians first Tito--
    first Mussolini was taken out of power.
    He lost it.
    Then Italy capitulated.
    And now we're talking about September '43.
    Yes.
    Because up to September '43--
    '43-- except for all these things we couldn't go here.
    We couldn't go there.
    We couldn't--
    Did you have any identifying papers or anything
    to show that you were Jewish?
    By the way, this is something every Italian,
    every Yugoslavian had to have identity paper.
    And of course, any papers that we carried was marked as Jews.
    This was definitely.
    We did not wear any badges or anything of that sort,
    do I need the--
    [NON-ENGLISH], no, we did not.
    Did you yourself have your own set of papers?
    I think I was probably on my parents.
    I did not carry them.
    I don't remember carrying papers, no.
    And you said you did go out on the streets by yourself.
    Yes, I went out on the streets by myself.
    Went to school by myself, walked back.
    This is my city, my town.
    It was-- it was not a big-- but it was--
    yeah, I felt quite independent.
    And now it's September '43.
    September '43, Italy capitulates.
    That means there's arms all over thrown on the streets.
    There-- the Italians are fleeing.
    They are going up to the mountains
    to join the partisans.
    My father says, we have to leave.
    We have to leave.
    We know that southern Italy is occupied by the Italians.
    So he collects all the money he can,
    everything, and they tried to hire a boat
    to leave for southern Italy.
    It didn't work.
    We pack.
    We go down to the pier.
    The boat never was allowed to leave.
    Somehow, there was something that happened.
    I don't know what.
    Nobody left.
    Or maybe one boat left.
    We were not in that first boat.
    The second boat never took off--
    never left.
    What was your reaction when your parents
    said, that you're going to leave your town that you grew up in?
    Well, they were talking the Germans are coming.
    And so the Germans are coming, so it's bad.
    We had to leave.
    I mean, I knew from being thrown out from school,
    I knew what to--
    it was just going to be much worst.
    So you did not question your parents?
    You didn't question.
    Question was not part of--
    there was no time for questions.
    But also you knew it was pow--
    I mean, you could feel it in the air that was major.
    We had to escape.
    Some people cho-- and some people chose not to,
    interesting.
    They couldn't go.
    But I was a grown--
    grown child.
    Somehow I was a child that was an independent child.
    And I could hear everything as if I knew we had to leave.
    You are 10 years old.
    Did you feel much older than what
    we think of a typical ten--
    Oh, yeah.
    I don't know what a 10-year-old is now.
    I was very, very, very adult 10-year-old, very adult
    10-year-old.
    And then now--
    Do you think that was because of what you were experiencing
    or your personality?
    I don't know.
    It's hard to say.
    I think it's what we experienced.
    It was just the--
    I don't think was my personality.
    It was just that I was thrown into a situation.
    And then now-- it was admired.
    It was considered-- to be this way,
    it was considered something positive for the times.
    Because my Uncle Solomon Finzi, the engineer,
    he had a son that was a year or two younger than I.
    And with him, they didn't--
    the husband, my uncle, went into the partisan--
    went to the partisans with us.
    He didn't.
    He stayed with his mother.
    His mother couldn't-- that he could handle being
    in the mountains.
    And unfortunately, my cousin Sasha Finzi and his mother
    [PERSONAL NAME] that died in concentration camp.
    His father-- so I always felt like--
    I felt guilty somewhat about that,
    because I always consider Sasha, oh, he's such a baby.
    His mother used to hold him by his hand.
    And I was an independent kind of-- but this was my city.
    He was from Belgrade.
    I grew up in this city.
    I knew everybody and everything.
    So what were your thoughts?
    You just said, this is my city, and now I have to leave it.
    Yeah.
    Well, you leave it.
    You just-- my father said we have to leave.
    I said, well--
    I remember going up to the mountains,
    but I knew that in the mountains,
    the partisans was my uncle, was my cousin or--
    I mean, this was a positive thing.
    Tito was very good.
    So we carried blankets, carried a few things, very few.
    Was this right after you had gone down
    and the boat didn't come?
    A couple of days later.
    Didn't-- couldn't get off.
    Everything was packed to go.
    We thought we were bringing a lot, no.
    Now, we are walking.
    There's no war-- walking up the mountains
    and walking for about a day or two.
    Stopping, putting blankets down and sleeping.
    And we going up the mountains.
    Who was in your group?
    My uncle across the street who was--
    wanted to see his daughter.
    An aunt, Beppo, my uncle Beppo Finz--
    Beppo Finzi, my Aunt Sida, some of my--
    some of-- nobody my age, actually.
    But it was all relatives.
    No, were friends-- friends, people that lived around us.
    About how big a group was it?
    Oh, it was, I think, hundreds of people.
    We're not all Jews that were leaving.
    Everybody was going up to the mountains
    because Germans are coming.
    Anybody that had been remotely a sympathi--
    people-- oh, very interesting.
    I told you about my father closing up the shop
    with those Italians.
    There they were-- the son and the daughter who were now
    maybe a couple of years older or a year older,
    they were going up the mountains.
    They weren't going to stay for the Germans.
    People were fearful of Germans.
    It was a whole group.
    It wasn't anything Jewish.
    It was almost like droves of people
    were walking up the mountain.
    Did you take-- what did you take personally with you
    from your home in Split?
    I personally don't remember taking anything
    except a blanket and maybe a couple of clothes.
    Did you have a favorite doll or favorite toy?
    I had a doll--
    I had dolls.
    I had a buggy, a fancy buggy doll.
    It didn't ever occur--
    it just didn't even come to mind to take it.
    You had to take things that were--
    for survival.
    You even knew that as a 10-year-old.
    Yes.
    Oh, by all means.
    Now, my mother, interestingly enough,
    Sandy showed it, the Seder plate,
    took her Mezuzah from the house, removed it, and took
    one spoon of her silver.
    And Sandy had to stay there a couple nights a few nights ago.
    Sandy said, what would you take?
    And I said-- she asked me--
    I said, I know what my mother took.
    She took one spoon as part of her house, and she took one--
    her Mezuzah.
    [? And ?] Sandy has, and all beat up by now.
    I think she just has a part of it.
    And that's all we took-- and blankets.
    And we held onto those blankets till my mother died.
    Those were the blankets from home.
    They were all moth eaten.
    They were wool heavy blankets.
    But we-- those blankets we slept on.
    And we took a few extra things, because my--
    like clothing and-- because my father was walking.
    So he was a strong man.
    So we would walk, and we walked for two days
    and made it up to the mountains someplace.
    And--
    Your mother's health by now is good.
    She had recuperated from the gallbladder.
    Oh, yeah, yeah.
    She had had gallbladder, yeah.
    My mother was fine.
    My father was fine.
    We got to this small village.
    The name of the village?
    No?
    It was up in the mountains someplace.
    And--
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum Volunteer Collection interview
    with Tilda Finzi Cohen.
    This is tape number two, side A. And you
    had been talking before about leaving Split, going up
    into the mountains.
    And just to backtrack a little bit, you slept outside.
    What was that like?
    Well, it was September.
    We had the blankets.
    I slept-- my mother, my father, and I slept there.
    And it was kind of almost like camping out.
    Had you ever slept outside before?
    I had never slept outside before.
    I never had camped out before.
    So it was interesting.
    It was kind of--
    I don't remember being afraid.
    That is the interesting part.
    Now, the fear came when my father left.
    OK.
    Now, you're at the village.
    At the village.
    And they collect the partisans and I
    was seeing all the men have to go to fight.
    They have to be militarized and trained, and we got to take--
    and we said goodbye to my father, and my uncle, the one
    that I used to take food to jail, Uncle Chaim.
    And one of my grandsons is-- has his middle name.
    And we said goodbye and they left for the front.
    I don't know for where, but--
    and mother and I were left there alone.
    Mostly women were left there.
    Did you say anything special to your father,
    or did he say anything special to you when he left?
    Don't remember.
    I don't think so.
    I think maybe may God bless you, something my father said to me.
    No, it wasn't anything.
    There was no-- and they--
    he left.
    And about a week later, we were up there kind of managing,
    living, sleeping outside with a lot of other women and children
    and getting food.
    And it was OK.
    I mean, it was--
    What did you do during the day?
    Play with the kids, just play with the children.
    These are non-Jews and Jews mixed together?
    Definitely.
    Definitely.
    Because people had escaped.
    They were escaping the Germans.
    So, yeah, it was--
    though, I think we were in a small Jewish group, kind
    of a small Jewish group from Split.
    We were kind of taking care of each other.
    The women were taking care of each other.
    Was there a leader of this group?
    I don't remember this, the leader.
    Now, the command of that small town
    was under the command of a cousin of my father, Jachel
    Finzi, who was a big commander, and he had escaped.
    He had escaped from Split year-- a couple of years before
    and was up in the partisans.
    And he was commander.
    And actually, I think he even took--
    he was going to Split and foolishly
    enough-- can you believe it, he has gone back to Split.
    And foolishly enough, he asked my mother
    if she wanted to pick up some things from the house.
    And she left me there alone.
    She went back to Split.
    For a couple of hours, because he was going by car.
    He was a big officer.
    But the other-- on the other hand, there were so many,
    many--
    they could have shot that car.
    And my mother would have been shot.
    And I was left--
    but my mother came back that evening and brought, I think,
    sweaters and coat just because she felt like, OK, this is--
    she came back that evening.
    And about a week later, I don't know how or why,
    and if the cousin Jachel Finzi had anything to do with that,
    my father came back.
    They said that he was too old.
    Was 1943, my father was 43 years old.
    They said he was a little too old for being in the mountains
    and so forth.
    My uncle, of course, Chaim stayed.
    He was younger.
    And of course, we never saw him again.
    He died fighting with the partisans.
    Did your father talk about what he did in those few weeks?
    They said they trained him-- they
    were training them, the military training.
    That's all.
    He didn't-- by the week, I think, a week and a half.
    Because by this time--
    and--
    Had you been in contact with him after he left?
    No.
    No, no, no.
    They were up in the mountains.
    There were no telephones, nothing, no.
    We didn't know where he went, what--
    How did your mother handle that?
    Now, she was very upset.
    That's when my mother was very sad
    and cry, was very, very fearful what
    was going to happen to us, what was going to happen to him.
    The separation was very hard.
    How did that affect you?
    You become the parent, that's what you become, really.
    You start taking care of your parents, your mother.
    Somehow you have to be the one that
    makes her feel better and [? safer ?]..
    My father came back within a week or so to--
    something.
    I don't understand-- I don't remember the time sequence.
    But from the time we left home till the time we went to Italy.
    And then they started saying that the Germans were
    coming after--
    we have to move further.
    Then it was the decision was made that all the Jews--
    Tito made the decision.
    And did my cousin--
    did my father's cousin have anything to do with that?
    I don't know.
    But either-- oh, by the way, this commander,
    my father went back to Yugoslavia
    a year before he died in '78, visited with this cousin who
    had become a big professor.
    He was an architect of the University of Sarajevo.
    And I have this beautiful handmade bag
    that he gave to my father for me.
    And it's hanging in my living room.
    So it has-- but I don't know if he
    had anything to do at the time that he was hiding in Split.
    Before he went into the partisans,
    my parents had helped him with food, with clothing, and so--
    but it was a natural thing to do.
    What were your thoughts about Tito?
    Very positive.
    He was-- he saved the Jews.
    Yeah, he-- here he-- some of them he wanted to fight,
    but they wanted to fight with him.
    And so here he took all the Jews-- just the Jews--
    and said, we're going to transfer him to--
    transfer the Jews to the islands near the-- in Dalma--
    on the Dalmatian Coast and try to get them as far away
    from the Germans as possible.
    Then it was decided that the men were going to walk--
    the men and the strong women were
    going to walk through the mountains back to the coast
    up north or south of Split.
    I guess, north.
    But-- so that we could catch the little boats at night
    and start going from one island to the next.
    The women and children were going to go by trucks, camion.
    And so my dad, we said goodbye, OK.
    He's going to walk and we are going to go by--
    and we could take some of our things,
    so that gave us more things.
    We were carrying the things.
    He was walking.
    Took blankets, took this, took that.
    The few things, I mean, maybe a valise or two
    in a small luggage since my mother had gone down by car,
    remember, was--
    and we went down.
    And now we're going to the coast.
    We went down the mountains from where we were, back
    on the road towards Split.
    And now we're going to go towards the coast up.
    And they got the message somehow that the Germans
    were advancing.
    So they dropped us all off, took the tracks towards Split,
    and said to us to walk the other direction away from Split.
    And they were going to get some of their people.
    There were-- they were afraid of going
    to be caught by the Germans.
    When you say they were going, and they told you to--
    The partisans, partisans told us, OK?
    This is the end, walk towards the-- you're
    going to get there, just keep on walking maybe
    three or four hours, you'll get there.
    This is the group of women and children.
    Yes.
    And they dumped us there, left us there,
    and they were going towards the city trying
    to pick up some of their soldiers,
    some of the people in the city they
    were, because the city was being invaded
    or they were occupied by the Germans.
    They didn't expect it quite to happen so fast.
    So we started walking.
    Of course, we couldn't carry because my dad
    didn't carry anything.
    So there we were dump-- we dumped things,
    and we arrived only with the blankets and very few things.
    In the meantime, my poor father arrived
    there expecting us to be there.
    We were not.
    Because they were the walkers.
    They walked through the mountain.
    And he was-- so as we are walking,
    and walking, and walking, we see this man walking towards us
    after three or four hours.
    He was walking, looking for us, feeling that we had
    to come from that direction.
    He knew the direction.
    Of course, we had dumped many-- but things were not important.
    That was not important.
    We were very happy to be reunited.
    Even to a 10-year-old, things were not important?
    Excuse me?
    Even to a 10-year-old?
    Absolutely.
    It didn't even occur.
    It just-- it was not even-- it's a strange thing,
    no, absolutely not.
    How did you know that as a 10-year-old?
    Somehow, I knew we were-- the Germans
    were coming in behind us.
    I mean, we didn't want to get caught.
    So we wanted to walk faster.
    And things-- we couldn't, absolutely.
    Did you stay close to your mother?
    Definitely stayed close to my mother.
    But all the groups stayed close to each other walking, I think.
    Some of the older women walking more slowly.
    We were walking a little faster.
    But we were also worried about my father,
    because how worried will he be?
    It's always how worried will he be for us?
    It's an interesting thing.
    Were women helping other women?
    I think they were encouraging, not helping.
    You couldn't carry someone else's things,
    because you couldn't carry your own things.
    But I think we were encouraging.
    If somebody got tired and sat down,
    you said, come on, get up.
    We got to-- better go.
    You don't want to stay behind.
    Come on.
    In that case, we were carrying each other--
    yeah, we were helping each other.
    Did people share food?
    I don't remember of food at all.
    I don't remember being hungry.
    I don't remember food at all during the trip.
    I don't remember that.
    I think we didn't have--
    we didn't probably have food.
    But we were just walking.
    It was not more than three hours or four.
    And when we got to the village where the--
    there where we-- my father then met us and we walked.
    There was food.
    There were coffee shops.
    I mean, by coffee shop, I mean, restaurant, little places.
    Is this on the coast?
    On the coast.
    And then we had to wait.
    What was the name of the village, do you know?
    I don't.
    All these places you were there just--
    it was just one of these little, tiny [INAUDIBLE]..
    And we had to wait till night time
    so that we could take this little boat
    to go to one of the islands.
    And it was night and I had had--
    we just got on this damn boat, a little rowboat or something
    like that, and rode.
    I don't know for how many hours, but probably
    as soon as it turned dark we went.
    And then got there about 12:00, 1:00 in the morning, 2:00
    in the morning.
    I don't remember.
    You said your father caught up with you.
    Yes.
    Did you ever think he would not?
    Well, basically, we felt my father
    and my aunt and uncle who walked were--
    they were much safer than we were.
    They were in partisan territory.
    We were kind of going down, because I think
    we were not worried about him.
    I think he was the one who was worried about us.
    He realized either we were caught, something happened.
    Because we should have been there by the time he arrived.
    Because they were walking.
    Was an eight hour-- it was a seven, eight hour walk.
    But then they started early in the morning.
    They expected us to be there and waiting for them.
    This was-- and then I think started my mother had not
    wanted to go by.
    She wanted to go walk, but he was worried about me,
    a 10-year-old walking again.
    But we went to one of the islands,
    and basically, things then at the islands, we were.
    Did you help row?
    Oh, no, it wasn't a row.
    It was like maybe a small motorboat.
    It felt like a real boat with a motor.
    And there were a few boats, and we all
    got to one of the islands, and then
    we were put up in one of the schools.
    The partisans had occupied this.
    And we were put up in some schools.
    And there was a big place to eat, one of these mess halls.
    And I slept in the school rooms and just--
    and our blankets.
    And then the next night, we were transferred to another small
    island, I think Brač B-R. the Island of Brač.
    And I remember having Rosh Hashanah in one
    of these islands.
    And I was telling Sandy last night,
    we were talking about something.
    Maybe-- I remember that we-- my mother
    prepared something and took it to a bakery, bakery ovens.
    You could put it in the oven in the bakery and bake something.
    And some of the restaurant, like-- it was a small town.
    We just ate outside in the restaurant outdoors.
    But ate our food because it was Rosh Hashanah.
    It's-- we still--
    the feeling was there.
    And I don't know, we spent maybe a week there.
    And it was like the vacation islands now.
    It's on the sea.
    It was fun.
    It was fun.
    It was-- we were afraid, but the Germans would come.
    Then again--
    Did you have freedom of movement?
    Complete freedom.
    Well, you didn't want to move because in case they said let's
    take you to another island.
    Freedom of movement, the partisans were--
    we were-- we could do anything.
    We-- I mean, the partisans gave you freedom we didn't have.
    Did you feel that they were your real protectors?
    Yes.
    I really felt that they were protected.
    So much so I had some knee problem and one night
    I started crying that my knees hurt from-- somehow,
    something-- my knees hurt terribly.
    I don't know.
    I was crying.
    I don't think so with the growing pains
    or was it something to do with my tonsils
    that the operation took place a little too late.
    Because I didn't-- it was--
    oh, and Sandy asked me why didn't I have--
    where did I have my operation?
    I said, in the doctor's office.
    He says, Ma, they took your tonsils off
    in the doctor's office?
    I said, yeah, Jews were not my--
    I said, well, Jews weren't allowed in the hospital.
    Didn't for-- they forgotten that.
    Now, when was that?
    That was probably 19--
    early 1943.
    But some of this infection had gone into my joints,
    it was a type of rheumatic fever, I think.
    So much my knees were hurting and my--
    and I remember arriving in one of the islands and one night.
    And one of the partisans was taking us
    to the school, one of the school.
    And I started crying.
    And he says, [NON-ENGLISH]?
    Why is this little one crying?
    And my mother says, her knees are hurting.
    Her knees are hurting.
    And he says, she shouldn't sleep at that school.
    Let me go and check if somebody has a room.
    So he knocked on somebody's house
    that he knew, says, do you have a room for a couple,
    the little girl is sick.
    And we stayed there for four or five, six nights--
    I don't remember-- in a beautiful room,
    a beautiful garden.
    That beautiful room-- I mean, relatively beautiful room.
    And so they were definitely our protectors.
    Tito's partisans were definitely our protector.
    And then the last trip was to the Island
    of Vis in the middle of the Adriatic--
    not middle, practically middle of the Adriatic.
    And we were there for--
    don't remember how many days.
    The whole thing from September 11 till October something.
    Because for Yom Kippur--
    what-- oh, tell me how many days?
    10 days?
    Oh, my God, so it was very quick.
    We were on one island already for Rosh Hashanah.
    Or on the second island maybe for Rosh Hashanah.
    So in Vis we couldn't been very long
    because we arrived in Bari, Italy a day before,
    or two days before Yom Kippur.
    So it wasn't-- and then--
    How did you-- how did you get to Bari?
    OK.
    The Italia-- the, I think the Allies had sent the ship over
    to Vis to bring the wounded, the--
    Tito's partisan's wounded people wounded
    and with the frozen limb.
    I mean, all the--
    they were taking them to allied hospitals in Bari.
    Bari was already established.
    So what happened--
    Bari is a refugee camp on the Adriatic Coast of Italy.
    Bari is-- Bari is a city, not a--
    I meant a city in which the camp was established.
    Yeah.
    They were camps, refugee camps.
    But basically, Bari was a city in the big port, major port.
    And the Allies had landed there, or gotten there.
    And basically, they were sending a ship over to Vis
    to bring the pris-- not the prisoners, the wounded people,
    the partisan soldiers wounded that-- so they could
    be treated in allied hospital.
    And at that point, somehow the decision
    came that the bottom of the boat were--
    was going to be filled with these Jewish people
    and sent to Bari.
    Do you know who made that decision?
    No.
    I think some of the partisan leadership
    made the decision that they didn't
    want to deal with the Jews being caught,
    the ones that had escaped.
    And they were going to send them to Italy to the Allies.
    So they filled the boat with as many wounded,
    and we flew a Red Cross flag floating out--
    what is it-- sail.
    It was a Red Cross flag so that we couldn't be on top deck
    ever except at night, because they couldn't
    see there were people there.
    They were just-- it was almost like a hospital ship.
    But we could come out at night and so--
    but we had to be under.
    Do you know about how many people were on that boat?
    I'd say about 40, 50.
    I don't really.
    Total.
    Total.
    No, no, no.
    I'm talking about Jewish people.
    Oh, no, no.
    I don't never saw the pris-- prisoners were
    in a completely-- not prisoners, the wounded
    were in a completely different area.
    They work like a hospital.
    And we were just under whatever-- what is it called,
    the underneath the ship?
    God, I don't know what it is.
    Anyway, whatever it is.
    But we could come out at night.
    When it was dark.
    When it was dark so that if somebody was flying a plane,
    the Germans were flying plane, they
    were hoping that they would not bomb or something a Red
    Cross, a hospital ship.
    Now, what was your state of mind at this point?
    I really don't know what my state of mind.
    I don't-- the state of mind was there were kids there.
    We used to play.
    There was food.
    We weren't particularly hungry or anything.
    It was not good food, but it was something.
    And again, you stayed with your parents.
    Both my parents were with me.
    I was with both my parents.
    And it was-- we're coming to a new--
    was an overnight trip, I think, or day, something-- day
    and a night or something like-- it wasn't very long.
    The ship was going very small.
    OK.
    Another thing, the motor was-- they
    had-- they were sending it to Italy
    because the motor was having problems.
    So they were sending the wounded, the motor,
    I mean, everybody was sick.
    And--
    Would you describe yourself at that time
    as being an optimistic child?
    It's very interesting you should ask that, because I mean,
    considered always a pessimist.
    Everybody in my family thinks I'm a pess--
    I always look at the dark side of things.
    I wonder why.
    It seems like you've adjusted to these changes as a young child
    as you were going through them.
    Yes, I adjust to changes easily.
    I learn languages easily.
    I-- and all this.
    But I always look--
    I really don't remember.
    Just being together with my parents, my mother and father,
    meant so much.
    Just being-- because there were a lot of people
    there without their spouses.
    So that already families had been fragmented
    in different directions.
    To me, having my mother and father--
    being an only child, my mother and father were my world.
    So I didn't--
    Were there other children there without any parents?
    No, there were no children-- it was--
    without-- there were many children with one parent.
    Some parents had been taken to concentration camp
    from other cities.
    You see, from Sarajevo, the mother and the child
    had escaped.
    Some had gone-- younger people than my parents had been
    taken--
    had stayed in the army fighting with the partisans,
    with the Tito's partisans so that--
    so I really don't remember as being--
    I was not sad.
    I was glad to be leaving someplace
    where the Allies were.
    Can't believe what we thought of the Americans and the Allies.
    It was like these were the saviors.
    They were going to come and save us in Split if they ever came.
    So we were going to them.
    I mean, we were going to be fine.
    And we arrived in Bari, landed in Bari.
    And there were-- the first time I ever saw a Black person.
    And they were there handing out corned beef cans,
    handing out chocolates as we-- and the boat to us.
    As you're getting off, you mean.
    No, almost-- they had to--
    no, they were somehow reaching up, throwing these things.
    It was like we were--
    and--
    These are allied soldiers.
    Allied soldiers, mostly Americans.
    Did you know any English at that point?
    No, none whatsoever, not a word.
    And took us to the-- some school.
    It's always the school because schools get closed during war.
    So the schools are used for different purposes.
    So here we go to a school.
    They give us straw to sleep on.
    We have our blankets, though.
    And-- but then the cots came.
    They gave us cots, and we slept in schools.
    The food was like army type of food, or whatever.
    But it was fine.
    We were--
    Are you still wearing the same clothes over and over again?
    Very few clothes, probably maybe a couple of pairs of underwear.
    The clothes were basically the same.
    Maybe had a change of blouse.
    Then my mother encountered somebody from Split who said,
    the pajama, I remember.
    And she says, the pajama top, do you want a pajama for her?
    My mother said, pajama for her, the pajama top can be a blouse.
    So already people were coming and we were sharing clothes.
    And somehow things were--
    we were in a strange city, but there were a lot of refugees.
    We ran into people we had known from Yugoslavia,
    people that had come--
    remember that first boat that left
    and that we didn't make the second, couldn't get on.
    There were people there and we started sharing.
    I think they land--
    loaned my father some money.
    Maybe very little, but just a little.
    And we were starting kind of--
    I think my father even didn't want to be in a camp.
    So we would be halfway in a camp.
    And it was interesting.
    It was just not the danger, it was a strange place.
    I mean, there was always--
    I wonder where my parents got privacy.
    I wonder.
    But I always shared a room with them.
    And I remember one night, one afternoon--
    this maybe shouldn't be said, but I think it should.
    One of the friends said, you know what?
    I'm going to take all the kids to the movies.
    And I wonder why he was taking all the children to the movies.
    What-- he was taking all the children
    were going to the movies.
    He was going to sacri--
    I'm taking all the children to the movie.
    And we all went to the movies, about four or five of us,
    children younger than I, and I--
    about three or four.
    And we are in the middle of the movie,
    and there is a horrendous noise.
    A bomb fell.
    They were bombing the city.
    Then from the movie, we went to a shelter.
    And it was the kind of thing that you
    think back now when there was the all clear,
    we walk into the street and everything is glass.
    You walking-- all the windows had
    been broken of all the houses, all the buildings.
    And my poor mother is waiting for us to come home.
    And my father-- it's just--
    and I was worried that I was sure
    that my parents were not alive.
    I felt like I was 10 years old.
    And-- but they were fine, and I was fine.
    And we started living in Bari.
    It was--
    Was this explosion when the Germans dropped the bombs
    and there was-- on ships in the harbor
    and the poison gas exploded?
    This was-- I was there for the poison gas.
    This was later-- this was, I think,
    this was more like in '43, the end of '43,
    probably at the end of '43.
    Was when--
    And the bomb, the gas, the--
    what kind of gas?
    The poison gas.
    The poison gas.
    There was name for it.
    That was, I think, in '44.
    You have it differently?
    It's listed as December '43 when--
    OK.
    Might have been-- it listed as December '43?
    Yeah.
    December 2, 1943.
    But this was another explosion.
    This was-- this was just a bombing.
    Let's talk a little bit about--
    so when you first got to Bari, were you
    moved around, or did you just-- were you taken to one place
    and you stayed?
    Well, we were taken to a school.
    We were free to do anything we wanted to do, anything--
    I mean, within the city.
    There was no--
    So there wasn't-- it wasn't a refugee camp with a boundary.
    There was a refugee camp that you could go to, because you
    couldn't support yourself.
    The refugee camp was not that you had to go.
    It was a camp that if you didn't have money, you went there
    and you were given food and shelter, and maybe
    some clothes.
    But my father had ran into some friends who loan--
    lend him some money that he-- whenever he--
    lended in the sense of give.
    And it was the kind of thing that we actually--
    So you lived in the town of Bari,
    not within the refugee camp limits.
    Yeah, for a while.
    Then later things got a little bit more--
    but basically, we always had a place to live.
    He rented a one room in somebody's house.
    And we lived with this woman whose husband was a prisoner
    of war, non-Jewish, and--
    for a few months.
    Then the bombs got very bad.
    They started bombing and we got fearful,
    and we went to a small village around Bari
    and rented a room with a few other families.
    And then rented a house.
    Actually, a house with three or four other families.
    And we were just hiding--
    not hiding-- basically, hiding from the bombs, not hiding.
    And my father used to go in the City of Bari every day
    and work on the black market selling that little gold,
    selling cigarettes, selling something
    to make money to support us.
    How did you react to the bombs?
    That's-- I think for many, many years,
    I was very afraid of loud noises and thunder.
    I think till my children were born,
    I was afraid of-- very fearful of thunder.
    I still maybe now--
    no, no longer do I react.
    But I think I'm on beta blockers to keep my blood pressure down
    so I'm a little calmer.
    But I think I am--
    I am still fearful.
    They always say, calm down, my family, calm down, ma.
    Don't overreact.
    What did you do as a child when you-- if you heard bombs?
    What did I do as a child when I heard bombs?
    Did you run to your parents?
    Were there shelters?
    What happened?
    We went in-- we always went to shelters.
    And I think stayed very quiet.
    You-- I think it mostly internalized this,
    the fear is internalized.
    You don't want your parents to worry about you.
    It's this constant concern for your parents
    not to be worried about you and always
    making them feel comfortable.
    Everybody was trying to make the other person feel comfortable.
    That's what I remember.
    I don't remember screaming or anything like that.
    Where were the shelters?
    Oh, they were usually underneath the houses,
    and inside the buildings there were shelters.
    But that's why we left Bari because it
    was somewhat uncomfortable.
    And I think the fear was that we had survived the war.
    Almost-- we felt we were liberated.
    The war was-- and for all intents and purposes--
    over for us.
    And we wanted now not to be bombed by the Germans.
    What did you do on a typical day?
    Typical day, play, help my mother cook,
    and stuff like that.
    Any-- in one, it's very interesting.
    In one of the houses we rented, there were books
    and I started--
    I missed school.
    I started looking at grammar books, learning Italian better.
    So much so that I am such a fanatic about grammar.
    I even find the mistake in the published letter
    from the Holocaust Museum.
    They didn't use the subjunctive and I reacted to it violently.
    So I started to actually concentrate.
    I found grammar books and started very interested
    in grammar.
    I don't know why.
    Were you picking up any English?
    Not yet, not at that time.
    But then now, I remember this thing is later
    what you're talking about.
    I remember it as a year almost later
    what you talk about where there was a mustard gas explosion.
    But I remembered because we were back near Bari,
    and I was already going to a house school.
    Somebody was-- the schools were not open,
    but I was going to a house school.
    A teacher who was running a school from her house and
    had like two grades, not Jewish, nothing.
    And I started going taking these private lessons.
    And my mother was paying for the school.
    Schools were not open.
    And again, then gave an exam.
    They were just to--
    and I was admitted to the middle school.
    I started going middle--
    but that's when I remembered the mustard gas explosion
    with so many dead bodies.
    And I even at some point wondered
    if some of the health problems that my family had
    were not-- because my father was in the city.
    It was like a black rain.
    It was horrible.
    My mother was-- and help me with my train of thought.
    I'm lost.
    Well, the Germans had bombed some ships in the harbor
    and that's where this poison gas all over.
    There were a lot of dead bodies cover-- they were just
    taking them by trucks.
    You could see was arms and legs.
    And I was at this woman's school in the city.
    Now, there is no transportation.
    I was supposed to take a tram home to my mother.
    I don't know where my father is.
    And somehow, the trams were not running.
    Everything was-- it was a big--
    I walked home by myself.
    And I was what, 11 12?
    How does a child adjust to seeing a sight like that,
    of bodies all over the place?
    It wasn't all over the place.
    It was in these trucks passing by.
    I didn't even know they were dead.
    But I knew they were dead because they
    were on top of each other.
    Was arms-- and I thought all these people were wounded.
    But I didn't know.
    I didn't-- we do--
    we did feel that everything was covered in black rain,
    we called it.
    So did your family stay in Bari then?
    Yeah, we stayed on.
    Because some people left because of the poison in the air.
    No, we stay.
    We actually were not in the city.
    We were not living in the city.
    We were living maybe five miles away.
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum Volunteer Collection interview
    with Tilda Finzi Cohen.
    This is tape number two, side B. Let's
    talk about your experience in Spring of 1944 with Passover.
    I think maybe we'll backtrack just a little.
    While we were in Bari, before the bomb, during that period,
    I think, when one of the bombs fell,
    my father ran into someone who was Israel,
    a British soldier, appeared to be
    a British soldier, who started questioning him, asking him--
    questioning him in the sense, where are you from?
    I think maybe my father appeared Jewish to him.
    And he said he was an Israeli that was in the language.
    He was from the Ukraine originally,
    so they had the language more or less
    in common, which was Ukrainian and Serbo-Croatian
    is somewhat similar.
    They could communicate.
    In my father spoke some German, and this man spoke some German.
    So this became kind of a--
    Chaim was his name.
    We never could locate him when we went to Israel.
    But we don't know what happened because he was sent
    to the front, or something.
    But he was very good to us.
    Army clothes that we made, and this
    is how we got the contact with the Israelis.
    And then we were in a small town,
    in one of the small towns in Bitetto, near Bari.
    And there was a whole contingent of Israeli.
    There were actually map maker.
    They made maps for the--
    for the-- OK.
    And they were having a seder.
    So they wanted the youngest child that could read.
    They had to say--
    ask the fourth question in Hebrew.
    So why they chose me, I was the one who could read--
    not Hebrew-- could read.
    And they were going to teach it to me.
    And so every day for a week or two or three,
    I was going to this big army school--
    they had taken over a school--
    where they would-- the head of this thing
    was teaching me "ma nishtana ha-la."
    And then I was put on a chair, on a table,
    and had to say this "ma nishtana" now because now,
    all the Israeli soldiers from the whole area
    came to this seder.
    Because this was a whole--
    some were dispersed, few here, few there.
    This was the map contingent, the map making.
    I don't know.
    It was a whole group of Israeli soldiers with a British Army.
    I was going to say, this is the Palestinian brigade
    of the British army that you're talking about.
    Now, did you say this was in the town or in Bari?
    No, this was in an outskirt, because they were, I think,
    in a small town, Bitetto.
    And so we became friends with all these--
    the Jews and these--
    and of course, we were invited to the seder.
    And I had to say for--
    I felt like there were hundreds of people, probably
    there were, maybe there were hundred or--
    but there was a big, many tables.
    Because all the other Israelis said there was very positive.
    So immediately, we were already in the Jewish
    and we were in contact with the Israeli soldiers and--
    well, the British soldiers, which are
    part of the Israeli brigade.
    So it was wonderful.
    And whenever the children like the other night
    managed, it just-- it feels like I
    am taken back many, many, many years
    when I was maybe 12 years old.
    It's a wonderful story, yeah.
    So then you were in this town.
    And what about schooling, or what did you do during the day?
    No, mostly helped in the house.
    I helped my mother cook, help clean.
    Unfortunate, had very little schooling
    in the sense of really formal schooling.
    And in three different languages.
    Something that it's kind of sad.
    And-- but I don't think it's particularly
    noticeable at times.
    But self-taught, I did go to the--
    I went to college here in the United States.
    What about the high holidays, the previous-- you
    had gotten to Bari just before Yom Kippur.
    Do you remember that first Yom Kippur in Bari?
    I remember vividly this first Yom Kippur.
    The first Yom Kippur, we had finally gotten into--
    my father had rented something, but it wasn't a room.
    It was a big hall where they had a regular double sized
    bed, big bed.
    And with one of these--
    what do you put--
    if you want to separate a room?
    Screen.
    A screen.
    With the screens around the bed.
    And we had to start our fast.
    But there was no place to go.
    We didn't know where to go.
    But remember, the soldiers had given us the corned beef
    sandwich.
    I don't know if it was kosher or not, but we started--
    somehow they had handed some matzo from some place.
    So we started our fast in this bed.
    Behind the screen was a can of corned beef and matzo.
    And we didn't know--
    we didn't even question it, but we did start to fast.
    And we fasted the whole-- my parents fasted the whole day.
    I don't think I did.
    And you had matzo at the time of Yom Kippur?
    Not matzo.
    What am I saying?
    Forgive me.
    It must have been some bread.
    Now, see-- yes, OK.
    No, it must have been something, but I remember eating
    the corned beef-- can of corned beef that you didn't need a can
    opener, because--
    The key that opened it.
    And some bread probably.
    Wasn't matzo, it was--
    Did you have matzo at the time of Passover
    in '44 with a Palestinian brigade?
    Oh, definite-- that was probably-- oh,
    yeah, this was a regular Swiss soup and everything.
    Matzo was-- it was a definite.
    I mean, they had the whole thing.
    It was-- it was [INAUDIBLE].
    I mean, it was complete Passover, yeah.
    And so life went on for you in this manner
    of helping your mother.
    Yes.
    I'm helping my mother.
    And somehow we were staying in a house where there were books.
    I don't understand.
    The wife was a teacher or something.
    And we were renting this place.
    And they had left the books.
    And I was just reading a lot and trying to actually learn
    Italian, the grammar.
    How a 12-year-old does this, I don't know.
    But I'm known as knowing that Italian grandmother.
    I mean, it's one of these things.
    And then I took an exam to put me
    in what they consider first year of high school, which was--
    Now, is the war still going on in Europe, or has the war--
    I'm not-- basically, the end of '44, and things
    had normalized by then.
    It hasn't ended, but the schools are
    being given back to the people.
    So the schools are opening and they--
    whoever wants to come and get-- take an exam to make up,
    see if they learned anything through this year.
    And I basically am behind.
    I am 12, I think.
    1944, nineteen-- I was born 1930--
    11 something.
    And by 19-- by maybe 1945, I gave this exam
    where said that I finished the four years of school.
    So I was one year behind.
    And went to what's considered scuola media, middle school,
    or kind of where I started going to school regularly.
    Well, tell me what it was like when the war was over
    in Europe in the spring of '45.
    What was it like?
    All the refugee-- all the people that had escaped
    started coming back.
    It was-- some people didn't, but how
    we connected with the family, I don't understand.
    That's what I still question.
    They all came to--
    they knew Bari was the center where people are,
    so everybody came to Bari.
    And here my mother found a brother.
    The brother was with his sister and his daughter and his wife.
    And they came to Bari.
    Another-- who else came?
    Trying to think.
    It's funny.
    Yeah, somewhere-- yeah, OK, so they didn't come to Bari,
    they went straight back to Yugoslavia.
    Another brother and my father's brother
    from Yugoslavia, who was in the army who
    lost his wife and his child, he came.
    But he came only on business.
    He was already in the Yugoslavian government.
    So things are starting-- started to normalize.
    And the fam--
    Was there any celebration when the war was over?
    I don't think so.
    I don't remember any celebration.
    I really don't.
    Because now, we realize the camp--
    people are starting coming back from the camps
    that we heard about all the atrocity.
    How many and everybody who had been hoping that somebody
    would come back never came back.
    So there was no celebration that I remember at all, no.
    I think there was a lot of sadness
    because we were realizing what had happened.
    We didn't-- we were coping against hope, I think,
    that some of the people would come back,
    like my mother had an older sister that had died during
    childbirth and left two children,
    and always felt guilty that somehow she didn't save these
    children.
    And of course, they never came back.
    And so those are the kind of thing--
    I don't remember celebrating.
    I remember more of kind of getting--
    the parents getting-- having a few drinks
    and eating before when the hope was still there.
    People would congregate, have wine, and cook.
    And I mean, the hope was still there.
    But then there were also some people
    that came back from concentration camp whose
    wives had found other men.
    And this was a very painful thing.
    And we had friends like that.
    The wives-- it was a very difficult time, very painful.
    That's all I remem--
    I mean, there was no great enthusia--
    I don't remember this.
    It's just the end of the war.
    Did you stay in Bari after the war was over?
    We stayed in Bari.
    And actually, things normalize.
    My father couldn't find a job.
    Why did you stay in Bari?
    Why didn't he want to go back to Yugoslavia?
    Oh, well, the situation in Yugoslavia was bad.
    My uncle and aunt and cousin that had kind of-- the other
    sister that had come from the northern part of Italy,
    my uncles Solomon Montilio, and [? Sari, and ?] [? Kai, ?]
    and [? Lea, ?] they went back to Yugoslavia directly from Bari.
    And they wrote us and said the situation was very difficult.
    Don't come.
    You're well off where you are.
    Stay where you are.
    Don't come.
    Did you want to go back to Yugoslavia, your hometown?
    By this time-- by this time, I had been in Italy.
    I spoke Italian fluently.
    No desire.
    I was a teenager, 13.
    I was very good in school.
    I-- this was I belong.
    I found-- no, no desire at all.
    Did you feel Italian or Yugoslavian?
    You see, the Ustases the whole thing I had never--
    I still do.
    Croatians are like-- so I was not that thrilled.
    I think I wanted to go to Israel.
    But then I felt more Jewish than Yugo--
    I didn't feel Yugoslavian.
    And we were considering going to Israel.
    Some of the families from Yugoslavia went to Israel.
    And they were having a very difficult-- very difficult
    time, initially, working as maids, college grad,
    university grad working.
    So they suggest, don't come.
    Stay where you are.
    Stay where you are.
    So we stayed in Italy as long as we could.
    And stayed in Bari until 1948.
    My father still worked on the black market dealing in dollars
    and gold and stuff like that.
    And--
    And you went to school.
    Did you do anything else?
    I went to public school.
    I had a Jewish group that met in the--
    A Jewish youth group?
    Jewish Youth group.
    We met in that little building or something occasionally.
    Had actually Jewish friends, a group of Jewish friends
    and non-Jewish friends.
    Not mixed.
    I had a Jewish-- group of Jewish friends
    and a group of non-Jewish friends from school.
    And did a lot of Jewish things--
    Purim and just-- like there was a Jewish congregation.
    There is no Jewish congregation now.
    There was no Jewish congregation before 1943.
    But in that-- because there were so many Jews in Bari.
    And then towards 1946, '47, '48, the city started--
    the Jews started leaving.
    They were-- the refugees started leaving.
    The Italians, who had been refugees,
    they come from-- can come from the north.
    They went back north.
    So basically, the city became--
    as far as Jewishly, my parents wanted more.
    But I went there to this middle school for three years
    and really learned Italian and did very well.
    Especially, in school.
    And then went to the--
    we moved to Milan.
    Why to Milan?
    Why Milan, specifically?
    I think there was many Jews there marry Yugoslavians there,
    Jewish Yugoslavian.
    We always talking about Jewish at this point.
    Now, the Jewish thing.
    And this was a difficult period for me.
    Milan, it's interesting, because now I'm
    starting to feel I want--
    my parents want to put me in day school.
    Now, I have to deal with learning Hebrew.
    Jewish day school.
    Jewish day school.
    And they already been--
    and the war has just ended three years before.
    So some of the students are really good,
    plus I am now competing with smart Jews,
    and with Italians who are not so smart.
    And was a very-- and I got sick with--
    it was just a bunch of things.
    It's not--
    It's the middle of adolescence, also.
    You're 15 and a half, 16, yeah.
    Yes, yes, yes.
    And I developed pains in my stomach,
    have emergency appendectomy.
    I mean, the whole thing.
    So I lose time in school and I'm behind in school,
    and I'm behind in Hebrew.
    And I just couldn't-- this is the first time I failed
    in my life.
    It was a very painful thing.
    I did not pass two of the subjects,
    and I had to go in September.
    This is the painful thing.
    It is funny.
    It was one of those things that just destroyed.
    Somehow I was-- thought of myself as being able to do
    every--
    You had also lived through very demanding times before then.
    Well, this-- I was like the best student in class.
    And you-- you're the big shot in class all the time.
    And all at once, you're behind, and it's very painful.
    And I changed schools.
    Left to keep the day school.
    And did wonderfully again in regular--
    but I couldn't deal with the school program.
    Because I had so much catching up to do.
    And--
    It was something your parents understood.
    Oh, yeah.
    There was no-- no forceful.
    I mean, it's basically-- it's funny, I directed my own life.
    They allowed me this.
    I came to the States.
    Then 1950, the decision was made that we would come
    to the States, as I told you.
    My father want to make sure I was 17, that I would not
    marry a non-Jewish boy, because I was already dating somebody
    from Med school who was not.
    A young man that was going to Med school who was not.
    At that time, you dated guys that were
    five years, six years older.
    They liked young girls.
    He was very serious.
    He was not Jewish.
    And my father decided it's time to go to the United States.
    So we-- and every-- many people were leaving.
    Milan was a good experience.
    I made friends.
    I had friends, but it was painful.
    The school was not--
    it was very demanding.
    I was not prepared.
    The southern schools, just like here, the southern school
    was not as good.
    I was-- they had already been functioning there
    for three years.
    The Hebrew school was very--
    the day school was very demanding.
    And came to the States.
    What did you think about that, coming to the United States
    when your parents presented you with that?
    By the way, I must admit, in Bari already, during the war,
    my mother got a private teacher for me to learn English.
    Because she knew that maybe in the future--
    Everybody had to speak English at this point.
    The future was English.
    So I had a private tutor that came on twice
    a week with an hour to teach me English.
    Were you able to pick that up?
    I guess I did, but I didn't know at the time that I did.
    It was painful.
    It was painful in the sense I hated
    the teach-- normal things.
    But I did, I took my lessons faithfully.
    And I continued always with my private English.
    That's partly why when I came to the States, I spoke not well,
    but I spoke.
    I understood a little.
    What was your thoughts when your parents told you,
    you would be coming to the United States?
    Here, you're moving, again, this is a child has moved and moved
    and moved.
    OK.
    It's a new language.
    I know a little bit.
    I've been prepared in that way.
    Some of my friends had already left--
    some for Venezuela, some to Argentina.
    Some of my Jewish friends, the ones from Yugoslavia
    are the ones, yeah.
    My Italian Jewish friends were staying.
    It was--
    To an adolescent, friends are very important.
    And here you say friends went to all different parts
    of the world.
    Did that depress you?
    Did that-- did you miss them?
    It was part of life.
    It was-- it was just part of life.
    But when I-- we come to the States and I knew
    there were a few people here.
    So I was thinking, well, there is [INAUDIBLE],, there's this,
    there's that.
    I'll manage.
    And as soon as I arrived, we were still
    put off the ship in a school.
    What ship did you come on?
    On the Vulcania.
    And it was not there-- again, my father
    didn't know I was starting a new world was a transport ship.
    No, he booked passage.
    He was going to come as a gentleman, he said.
    A little bit of money he had saved a few.
    He's going to come as a gentleman.
    Oh, I'm so sorry, Gail.
    I scratched you.
    I'm sorry.
    And we came and--
    but HIAS met us at the boat.
    What was your first sight in the United States?
    I think the Statue of Liberty as you come in.
    And then they met us, HIAS met us.
    Did that mean anything to you seeing the Statue of Liberty?
    To be honest, no.
    If-- I could be dishonest, but I'm going to be honest.
    Not a thing.
    By that time, I was 17.
    I had had a ball on the crossover.
    I swam, I picked up American guys.
    I danced.
    I had a ball.
    America seemed like a good place because the crossing
    was wonderful.
    People were paying attention to me.
    And I was-- I already had picked up
    somebody who was teaching me English on the boat.
    17-year-old, yeah, it was that kind of thing.
    And-- but I arrived and the--
    HIAS took us to a school on Hudson Street, just horrible.
    And men and women sleeping separately.
    And my father said, this is not for us.
    We're going to try to find a room someplace.
    One-- back to one room--
    one room, the three of us.
    Did your parents speak English?
    No, not at all.
    So you were their translator.
    I am now the head of the family.
    But I am the one that does all the trans--
    is in charge of transactions, is in charge of doctors.
    But my uncle and aunt had come earlier,
    and they living on Broom Street.
    God, why?
    On Broom Street in lower--
    lower Manhattan.
    Lower East Side.
    Lower East Side.
    Thank you.
    But under them lives an old boyfriend from Yugoslavia
    from Italy, very exciting.
    I mean, he's there.
    The world is a perfect place.
    And my first weekend he says, let's go to a movie.
    So it wasn't all bad.
    And we were good friends and a little more maybe--
    definitely.
    And somehow I had to practice.
    This was too much of what I wanted.
    And I went to high school.
    I registered.
    HIAS felt I had to go to work.
    I was 17.
    I said, I'll go to work.
    So I went to high school and finished high school
    within a year and a half.
    So I was 18 and a half when I finished high school.
    And did well.
    And you're still living with your parents.
    I'm still living with my parents, of course,
    on West side.
    So I'm just--
    104th Street, West side, they rent an apartment
    and I helped them set it up, go to the Salvation Army--
    Salvation Army furniture.
    But it was OK.
    What was your father doing?
    My father is not working.
    HIAS is supporting us with minimum.
    But I am working.
    I'm going to high school and I'm working as a waitress from 3:00
    in the afternoon-- no, from 3:00 in the afternoon
    to 7:00 or 8:00 at night, and then
    going home, helping, and giving all my money.
    It was a lot of money at the time, was making $30 a week.
    It was a lot of money because tips were big.
    Was your mother working?
    No, she couldn't find anything.
    So it was like--
    and my father couldn't do anything.
    No English, no this, no that.
    But I was the one that was--
    HIAS was helping a little, and I was bringing in the $30 a week.
    Think the rent was about $60.
    And-- but I was going to high school, regular high school.
    Not nighttime, daytime.
    But I was working as a waitress and I did fine.
    And then I graduated from high school.
    Did you want to go to college?
    Yeah.
    I applied to Hunter, got admitted,
    only with the requirement that I take extra courses--
    an extra repair course in English.
    Graduated fifth in my class.
    Had to-- have to boast.
    May I, please?
    Absolutely.
    Absolutely.
    I had the highest ratings in math
    that anybody ever had in that high school--
    99 or something.
    And my teacher adored me.
    I was teaching for Italian.
    Which high school was this?
    High School of Commerce.
    But I went to the honor high school, Lincoln Park High
    School, and graduated fifth in my class.
    Got the only scholarship they gave.
    When you were in high school and talking
    to the American teenagers, did you
    tell them about what you had gone through?
    Never.
    Why not?
    I don't think nobody wanted to hear it.
    I didn't feel that was part of--
    but I had, again--
    again, I had to go groups.
    I had my group that had come from Europe,
    which I saw on a regular basis.
    And I had a group from high school.
    The other kids, like this [INAUDIBLE]
    who was my boyfriend, he unfortunately
    died about 20 years, 15 years ago.
    He got his engineering degree and everything.
    He did fabulously.
    Went into business and everything.
    But he was working and going to school at night.
    So I was in two different worlds.
    I was in a world of these kids that worked during the day,
    went to school at night.
    And I was in the high school world and college world.
    So--
    Did you-- with your friends from Europe,
    did you talk to them about what you all
    experienced during the war?
    I don't think-- we all experienced it together.
    We wanted to look forward, look ahead, not to look behind.
    I don't think we ever did.
    We maybe spoke Italian sometimes,
    sometimes Serbo-Croatian.
    We even started speaking in English,
    which was very interesting.
    We were going to become part of this world.
    Did the American teenagers ask you questions
    about your background?
    They were very-- some of them were interested.
    I don't think too much.
    But I had made some friends.
    I can't say that I had stayed--
    have stayed in touch with any in my high school.
    Did your parents talk about the war years
    after the war was over?
    It was always before and after.
    Before the war, and after the war.
    They talk about what happened during the war?
    They would say, oh, he died.
    It was always he-- unfortunately, he died.
    Here they did talk about it, but I don't think we suffered.
    I wanted to say we didn't suffer enough.
    We didn't suffer the way the people that
    were in concentration camp.
    So it's-- I don't think we always kind of didn't-- we were
    not the ones that suffered at all, except for the losses,
    my mother lost brothers and cousins--
    brothers, mostly.
    And-- but New York was a good place.
    I was working and I was going to--
    then I graduated, went to college.
    Did you live at home when you were going to college?
    I always lived at home.
    I went to Hunter--
    I always-- I never left home.
    Please, I was helping at home, helping support the family.
    By this time, my father got a job in the mailroom
    as a mailroom clerk.
    And they discovered that he was very smart.
    He became the supervisor of the mailroom.
    By then could speak English.
    Some.
    He never spoke English very well.
    Till the day they died, I was the translator, the go-between.
    Even when they were ill, I always had to fly to New York
    to be there.
    And-- but I went--
    What did you study at college?
    Basically, I was interested in math, what--
    I was taking math and languages, feeling
    that I could do something.
    I met my husband two years later.
    Was he in college at the time, also?
    He was actually in grad school in Pittsburgh.
    How did you meet?
    Well, one of my high school-- one of my college friends,
    who by college, I had made friends.
    Iris Feigen was a friend of mine who invited me to a party
    at her house.
    And her mother somehow fell in love with me
    and wanted me to meet her son.
    There wasn't him.
    Boyd Feigen, she wanted me to meet her son.
    And her son try to--
    he was just not my type.
    He was a very nice man.
    She said, OK, you don't want to meet my--
    you don't want to take out-- go out with my son.
    My nephew's coming to town.
    Says, you have to come to dinner.
    So they invited me to dinner.
    That was my husband.
    And I met him in July.
    I didn't want to go.
    I had an exam.
    But anyway, that's how life is.
    And by January, we were married.
    He was 27.
    He was much older--
    seven, eight years older.
    He did not want to wait.
    That was a mistake.
    I never finished college.
    Oh, so you--
    OK.
    So you got married.
    And then where did you-- you moved--
    We lived in Pittsburgh.
    He finished grad school.
    And he started working.
    And we lived in Pittsburgh, then went to Denver for a year.
    Then my husband became the Executive Director Jewish
    Family Services.
    He is a social worker in Atlanta, Georgia.
    And we moved there.
    And the children were born-- two in Pittsburgh
    and one in Atlanta.
    And you have three children.
    We have three daughters.
    And they all, thank God, doing well.
    I'd like to ask you some questions--
    not historical questions.
    Please do.
    But do you feel that you would be a different person
    if you hadn't gone through the experiences
    that you had as a child?
    It's a very interesting question, Gail.
    That is wonderful.
    Because I told Sandy that I had read
    an article that some gay people who
    said if you could take a pill, would you take a pill
    and not be gay?
    And they said, I would.
    And most people said, I don't think I would,
    because I wouldn't be the same person.
    Now, tell me what questions do you ask me?
    Do you think you would have been a different person
    today if you hadn't been-- if you hadn't
    gone through what you did?
    Very different.
    I don't know if I would want to be that person.
    That is the interesting part.
    I am kind of proud of speaking three or four languages.
    I'm kind of proud that when I come here and seeing
    this husband, Elliot, has all these Europeans
    people, all these people from all over the world,
    that I fit in so easily.
    So would I?
    Well, I would have been a very different person, yes, I think.
    I don't know would I've been--
    would I have been happier?
    Probably.
    Would I want that?
    I don't know.
    But I would have been very different.
    Do you feel that you lost part of your childhood?
    I definitely lost most of my child--
    I didn't have a childhood.
    That's why when my children were young and teenagers,
    they always said they don't know why my house was always
    open to many kids.
    They could come in at 1:00 in the morning and knock on the--
    knock on the children's windows, the boys--
    and they were always the Jewish kids, the [INAUDIBLE],,
    and the house was always open to them.
    I think because I lived--
    which is not good--
    I lived my childhood through them, my teenage years.
    The-- it's--
    I-- there was--
    I loved having all these kids around the house
    because it was--
    I could live vicariously in the freedom--
    in the children's lives.
    When your children were younger than that, pre-teenage--
    eight, nine, 10-- when things started
    to get difficult for you when you were 8, 9, and 10 years
    old, did that-- and they reached that age,
    did that bring those difficult times back to you?
    Do you understand what I'm saying?
    Oh, I know exactly.
    Did it-- I always heard of this is somebody who had been abused
    that this is with time that when the children--
    I don't really think so.
    I was so intent--
    I was really so intent.
    Maybe you're right.
    I was intent in having them do well in school.
    This was my obsession.
    Because you felt it got you through the difficult times?
    Somehow, I wanted them to do--
    I don't know why, but I wanted them to do well in school.
    They always said, what would I have done if my children had
    not been bright?
    How would I have handled that?
    And they-- I pushed hard, probably too hard.
    That's the only-- I think, that's the mistakes that
    were made, yeah, I pushed.
    And I see [PERSONAL NAME] rushing around home
    and I think to myself, is this what I created?
    This what-- would these my expectation?
    But I think--
    I've lost my train of thought.
    I'm sorry.
    That's OK.
    Are there any sites today, or sounds, that remind
    you of the wartime years, something
    that triggers you to think back 50 years ago?
    Anything-- I told you yesterday, the cot in this fancy,
    very fancy one of these books, they were these cuts--
    200, I said.
    I started laughing.
    But I mean, they were small things.
    Butter, I told you about, I adored butter.
    And I'd die for butter.
    And I feel still--
    I see butter, I want to smear it--
    butter is something that we didn't have.
    Is this the kind of things?
    Of course, my cholesterol's 300 so I can't have butter.
    But what kind of memories trigger little things?
    Little things transport me in a different world.
    Words sometime, a word that I hear,
    or something I cannot think in English and I'm immediately
    transported into another world.
    You never quite-- it transported back into the war years
    very easily if you see a separation of families.
    And in TV, families are reunited somehow.
    That brings me back immediately somehow.
    Or my husband dealt a great deal with new Americans,
    refugees from Russia from here.
    And people used to say, you would
    be wonderful to help them, teach them English.
    I teach English, too.
    And I have tried.
    It is so painful.
    It brings me back right into that first few days, the pain.
    I see them and I see the pain of a new country of no language,
    of--
    see, I forgotten the pain.
    But I am immediately thrown back into learning about a culture,
    teaching my mother that the butter dish does not--
    you don't put the butter--
    remember the cover of the butter dish?
    You have butter and you cover it.
    And my mother bought a butter dish and put the butter in it
    and left it uncovered, upward.
    And all these kinds of things that we really didn't--
    or my father and I walking sort of the street
    and eating grapefruit.
    Every time I think of grapefruit,
    peeling a grapefruit like an orange and eating it,
    people looking at us.
    Nobody I did-- now, people are eating grape--
    so all these trigger memories.
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum Volunteer Collection Interview
    with Tilda Finzi Cohen.
    This is tape number 3, side A. And we
    were talking about what brings you back to the wartime years.
    And you had this thought about working with newcomers now.
    I can't-- I can't--
    I just cannot--
    I wish I could.
    I can't do it.
    It just brings me back to being a refugee again, the pain,
    of the relocation, of the parents, children,
    where the children become the parents.
    The whole thing is very painful.
    And I can't.
    I wish I could.
    I cannot do it.
    I can't.
    I don't know why.
    And I just find it I can't relive that.
    Once is enough.
    What about your feelings about being Jewish
    because of what you went through, did it change?
    Or what are your thoughts about that?
    There was never--
    I was always felt very Jewish, always brought Judaism into--
    I don't-- being Jewish--
    I never went to synagogue much.
    I still go rarely.
    My husband goes every Shabbat.
    And he's a regular churchgoer.
    I don't, but definitely do not feel that--
    I don't feel that being Jewish brought pain.
    Yes.
    But I would not have wanted to be anything else.
    It's strange.
    It was very important to me that my children married Jew.
    Extremely important.
    I don't know--
    I think, I would have handled it if they hadn't.
    But all three-- you know, Jewishness is very important.
    How did you convey this importance to your children?
    How did I convey this?
    Mostly by observing the holidays I think, ,
    making sure they went to Hebrew school, Hebrew high school.
    Israel was always part of it, you know.
    My cousins from Israel visited.
    I think was always part--
    my mother and father were very Jewish.
    Father was present at Yugoslav Jewish group
    in the United States.
    The national group?
    Yes.
    And he never had an education.
    He was with all these attorneys and stuff,
    but he was president.
    And he did not have money.
    So he was quite well thought of.
    Yeah, he was the president of the Yugoslav Jews
    in the United States.
    It's mostly concentrated in New York.
    But it was-- you know, now it has disbanded.
    They're all gone.
    He was extremely active.
    And he had groves planted in his honor in Israel.
    So he was always very-- so I think it was always conveyed.
    Jewishness was very kind always a part of our life, always.
    Well, the Finzi family is a well-known name.
    Is he a part of a branch of the large Finzi family?
    I don't know.
    I really don't know.
    Not in Italy-- you mean, he was a branch
    of the Yugoslavian family.
    The Italians, I don't think of the Italian family.
    But the Yugoslavian family, yeah.
    Talking about Yugoslavia, so much has happened there.
    What are your thoughts when you--
    Well, that is a very difficult question,
    because my views are not popular, very unpopular.
    I have a very hard time with Croatians.
    Number one, I did some translations.
    Some people ask me to translate some letters.
    And they were talking, the Croatians were talking,
    somebody who wrote this letter, probably not for all of them,
    that the Nazis were not-- the Nazis
    did not do what the Serbs did, you know,
    the horrible things the Serbs did.
    Probably it's true.
    But I just find that they are using the name for the money.
    It's kuna.
    It's the same name that Ustasa used, under the Ustasa regime.
    So basically their flag I think is the same.
    I could be a mistaken.
    But it's a definite kind of--
    the Ustasa were worse than the Nazis, much worse,
    because they knew who the Jews were.
    The Nazis couldn't quite know who the Jews were, who ident--
    you know, they were the helpers.
    They were worse, the Ustasa were much worse than even the Nazis.
    Did you have any direct confrontation with them
    or do your parents?
    No.
    The only time-- it's that period in between before the Italians
    came, some Ustasas came to our door
    to put the Ustasa flag on the windows welcoming
    the Germans or something.
    And--
    Did your family keep that flag up?
    No, we didn't put it up.
    I mean, they came--
    no, no, they came to put it out of the window.
    We said we didn't have one.
    So it wasn't any--
    but it was just the whole regime--
    the Ustasa were-- I mean they were
    the ones that like killed my cousin in Jasenovac,
    rather than the Nazis.
    So that I have a great problem with the Croatians.
    They really gave away a lot of Jews.
    And the Serbs-- well, Greek Orthodox, their religion
    was a little more accepting of Jews.
    You know, all this is religious based, I'm sure you know.
    My personal feeling, you know, the Croatians after 50 years
    got what they needed to get.
    It's very horrible.
    It's really not fair what I feel.
    I keep my feelings to myself.
    Do you feel in any way that Yugoslavia is your homeland?
    Or do you feel very American?
    What are your thoughts about Yugoslavia,
    the former Yugoslavia?
    The former Yugoslavia.
    I was born in Split.
    Dalmatia is my--
    Split is my city, OK.
    That, not the country, is the city.
    Italy belongs to me emotionally.
    I grew up there.
    You know, from 10 to 17 are the formative years.
    I feel very comfortable, more comfortable than in English
    in some respect than Italian.
    I'm very comfortable with Italian.
    I've been teaching it all these years.
    I have Italian friends.
    So that's where my sp--
    How do I feel now?
    I don't feel American.
    That's one of the problems.
    I don't think you ever really and truly feel
    like you're an American.
    Some people start singing little songs to children.
    I don't know the children's songs.
    I just have never, you know--
    so it's always--
    I tell my grandchildren, the first song they know,
    it's my Italian song, Batti Le Manine.
    But it's so interesting my nine-month-old adores it.
    When I left I had to tape it, because that's all he does
    is wait for me.
    And when he sees me, he goes, Nonna--
    he looks at me as the-- and my grandchildren call me Nonna
    and all that, but--
    Which is Italian for grandmother.
    Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
    But Nona was the Spanish, the Latino word.
    So it's a mixture, you know.
    But basically, if you had a life like mine,
    you are not part of any country.
    And that is the sad part.
    You don't really feel you belong.
    And then people don't--
    you probably detect the accent.
    Many people don't too much.
    You know, they kind of--
    she speaks a little weirdly, or whatever.
    But they don't realize it.
    But you're really not--
    you're a displaced person for the rest
    of your life in some respects.
    And then you have these American children
    who are so American that I can't even--
    yet Sandy has found her way into the European crowd because
    of her husband who's with the IMF.
    So Sandy-- but the other, my youngest one
    that was born in Atlanta, she's a Southern little girl,
    you know.
    Do you feel then feel like sometimes that you're
    two different people, the young person you were--
    Oh, yes.
    I'm so glad you brought that up.
    I feel like they were two Tildas.
    It split, you know.
    There was one before she came to the States
    and the one came after.
    And there are two people, two lives, completely separate,
    completely.
    I mean, it's just different-- and I had this experience.
    I was in Israel this December, past December,
    and got together with my cousin, who I hadn't seen.
    She had visited maybe twice in the last 50 years.
    She'd come to the States.
    I was in Israel once.
    I spent some time.
    But here it is, she is my cousin whose brother got killed in--
    and when we got together, we spoke
    so-- it was just like we were two different people.
    Even she was different.
    It was like we were transported back
    to Split when she used to come on vacation from Zagreb.
    And she was my big cousin who used to take me everywhere.
    We went every place.
    We went swimming.
    And it was like we were back to being young kids.
    And we were speaking the language.
    Yeah, definitely, two or three--
    two definitely, two different people.
    Have you gone back to visit--
    I have not gone back to Yugoslavia.
    I was back in Italy a couple of times and went to Milan.
    And it was kind of sad.
    Somehow-- I didn't even contact any of--
    one of my friend died.
    But it was sad, because somehow you're
    a stranger in some place.
    But this happens here too.
    I think if you move away and go back,
    you're a stranger in the old city.
    And so we went to Florence, which I had not been to.
    Went to Rome, which I had visited.
    That was fine.
    Milan was difficult because I kind of saw myself.
    Did you go back to Bari.
    Never been back to Bari.
    That's where I wanted to go back.
    That's where I wanted to go back.
    Everybody advised me against it.
    It was very high crime.
    But I think next time I'm going anyway.
    But you said you didn't go back to Yugoslavia.
    No, I've never been back.
    My parents have--
    Do you have any desire to?
    Split.
    I don't want to say Yugoslavia.
    I want to go back to split.
    My parents went back a couple of years before they died,
    probably 1978 or something.
    And they found it extremely painful.
    So it was very difficult.
    But I'd like to go back to see the sea.
    Just to see the sea and see the city.
    But see the sea and just kind of go up
    in the mountain-- not the mountain.
    Back to where the cemetery is.
    But just go up there.
    I think I'd like to put kind of--
    it's probably going to be much smaller or not as
    beautiful and all that.
    Does water bring back your childhood to you,
    when you're near a body of water?
    Yeah, you picked that up very well.
    Yeah, I'm a different person, my husband always
    says, if I'm near the ocean.
    Not water.
    Body of water.
    Not a river and stuff.
    Though last night we went, yesterday afternoon,
    close by a river.
    But the river was moving fast.
    So it had this--
    Motion--
    Motion of the-- who do you say?
    But actually--
    The current?
    Waves, waves, the ocean waves, the waves that make noise.
    But I am a different person, because that's
    where-- if I'm near the ocean and I
    hear the waves and the smell of the sea,
    I am immediately happy.
    I guess that brings me back to Split when I was a little girl
    and the beach was my oyster actually.
    I just loved to swim.
    I still do.
    Yeah, the ocean has a great deal.
    What are your thoughts about Germans and Germany?
    It's very interesting.
    I have a very hard time--
    I teach English at Berlitz and Lingua and all the language
    schools.
    And German students always request
    me, businessmen, executives.
    I have a very hard time teaching them.
    But still my personality being so grammatically correct
    and this and that appeals to them.
    I have a hard time.
    So I have lately requested, please, no more Germans
    students.
    I have a hard time.
    I still have a hard time.
    And they must sense it too, because I've
    had some women students and they try to shower me with gifts.
    And I just--
    I don't understand-- maybe--
    These are Germans students, German adult students.
    Who are learning English.
    Yes.
    Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
    And so I don't--
    but I think something about my personality
    when I teach appeals to them.
    Or maybe the guilt, I don't know,
    appeals to them because of the structured--
    when I teach I'm very--
    I don't know.
    But it's funny.
    As a matter of fact, three weeks ago, I said, who is it?
    From Ziemanns.
    I said, German.
    I said, skip me, give me somebody else,
    give me somebody from South America, you know,
    because we work intensely with students for two or three
    weeks.
    And then they go on.
    Is this a one on one type--
    One on one.
    So you develop a very-- you see what's happening here
    within a few hours.
    So if you work this many hours on a daily basis with somebody,
    you know, I'd just rather not.
    Have you ever visited Germany?
    No.
    But-- and I was very angry--
    when we decided to go to Israel on a bat mitzvah
    trip for our granddaughter, the rabbi booked through Germany,
    through Frankfurt.
    And we flew Lufthansa.
    One of the stewardess picked up my grandson.
    And I became-- but she was really--
    she picked on the rabbi, because there were no kosher meals.
    They forgot to bring kosher meals.
    And we were flying a long trip from Frankfurt to--
    they had vegetarian.
    And then they-- it became a very big--
    it was new year's day we were flying.
    Make a big-- and then she picked on my grandson
    that he was playing a game.
    And this was-- oh, I became violent.
    I have never become--
    I really became violent.
    And the rabbi's daughter became violent.
    I think both of us get this reaction.
    And the poor rabbi said please, we
    got to fly with these people.
    We are on the plane--
    so I've never been to Germany and don't want to.
    I'm sorry, but this is really--
    violence.
    You were a young child during wartime years.
    Do you feel that that was an advantage, because you really
    weren't aware of what could possibly have happened to you?
    In other words, that your parents
    were adults and knew more of the danger.
    A child doesn't know--
    I was not aware of the danger.
    I was aware that there was something to fear.
    But I was not aware of what I was fearing, you know.
    It was communicated to me, the danger
    was communicated to me, maybe not verbally.
    But I still felt--
    I couldn't-- the horrors that I saw afterwards, you know,
    like the Holocaust Museum, something here, I did not--
    You know being in the Holocaust museum,
    I much more identified with the children exhibit,
    because that was my--
    That's who you were.
    That's who I was, exactly.
    I'm much more hiding and being in these small places
    with a lot of people.
    You know, because in our small apartment,
    everybody descended on us.
    The dark-- you know, no lights, the whole thing.
    So it's--
    When your children were growing up,
    did you talk openly about what happened to you during the war
    time?
    No, I did not.
    It wasn't popular then.
    I hate to say this.
    People say people avoided talking.
    I don't think we avoided talking.
    I really think since the Holocaust Museum was built,
    I think--
    I'm sorry-- now, I realize that basically it wasn't popular.
    And maybe I'm rationalizing.
    I did talk.
    I would get depressed.
    It's funny, I don't anymore.
    I would get depressed.
    And then all these things-- why did I survive and the others
    didn't?
    And was it really worthwhile?
    It was one of these--
    oh, God, the driving machine.
    I'm sorry, there was somebody on the telci.
    That's OK.
    OK.
    So did I really--
    please ask me the question.
    I lost it.
    I don't like to talk about it.
    I was asking you whether you talked with your children
    about what you had gone through.
    I mentioned occasionally.
    And-- oh, please, please, please, please,
    don't let me forget to mention one person.
    It's funny, there's a saying in Spanish, [SPANISH],,
    which means if you forget anything, you forget the gold.
    If you have a piece of jewelry--
    I in Split had of a young boyfriend.
    We were born a few months apart.
    And we lived close by.
    As you know, I left when I was 10.
    But this was like this blond child was absolutely beautiful.
    And we were always kind of pitched together.
    When they saw us, everybody said, oh, Tilda,
    where is Mosco?
    Oh, Mosco, where is Tilda?
    His last name was the same as mine, Finzi.
    Finzi was a very popular name.
    And he was like somebody that you
    think as a child who you are going
    to end up with, this was somebody that it
    was kind of predestined.
    Unfortunately, he was killed in concentration camp.
    And occasionally-- occasionally, when I think I used to get
    depressed--
    he was born 1933, same year.
    He was taken to camp in March.
    This was the dates here, on March 11, 1944, to Jasenovac.
    And he never survived, never came back.
    I had heard that he had written postcards asking
    to send them food and the Jewish people that he knew as a child.
    But I don't know.
    And occasionally, years ago when I used to get depressed,
    I used to cry for him.
    And this was-- again, I had forgotten him.
    I forgot to talk about him.
    No, I did.
    That's it.
    But I almost-- and in my book, there's a dot beside his name.
    And what was the question?
    I'd forgotten.
    Sorry.
    We were just talking about what you had talked about.
    In this book, you said there was a notice--
    Here's a notice with the Italian--
    but it's interesting, this precedes--
    no, this-- first, notice the Italian put up,
    I don't know, at the beach.
    Can you translate it?
    Yes.
    [SPEAKING ITALIAN],, which means, attention, entrance to Jews
    is prohibited.
    This is to the beach.
    To the beach.
    It was many places, but it was--
    When you would see that, would you obey it?
    Oh, definitely, otherwise if they caught you, my God.
    No, you obeyed everything.
    So you are not rebellious in the sense of--
    Of going to this beach?
    Oh, no.
    I went to separate--
    this was a fancy beach that--
    I've always gotten to fancy--
    with this little cots and everything.
    We went to a beach that was just jump from the stones
    and go swimming.
    The sea was still the same.
    And I had my friends.
    But, you know, Jewish friends that went.
    This is all a 10-year-old, I can't believe,
    going to the beach alone and swimming in the ocean,
    you know, in the sea.
    It was just--
    You were even aware of the danger of not obeying a sign.
    Oh, yes, definitely.
    I mean there was no--
    OK, there was no--
    OK, now here is a sign.
    Can you translate?
    Yes.
    And this was probably--
    I don't know when the sign was posted.
    Yeah, it was in 1943.
    But what it says--
    I would assume is sometimes after September 20,
    I would assume it to have been posted.
    And here, I'm going to--
    to the population of Split.
    [NON-ENGLISH]
    Oh, maybe you don't want a civica.
    All Jews without regard to their religion--
    Jews without regard to their religion--
    or citizenship must report by September 28
    the latest at 12 noon at the command, at the German command,
    in front of the Hotel Ambassador.
    Who doesn't report will be hung.
    With all citizens of Split who hide Jews--
    who hide converted Jews or non-converted Jew,
    all who do not report that they see Jews will be treated just
    as the Jews are.
    And the owners of houses, which houses
    mean buildings in this case, must remove all Jewish print
    material and all communist print material,
    all things pertaining to Judaism from their premises
    immediately.
    And it's commandant mestre, which
    is the commander of the town.
    And this was a sign that was posted.
    I don't know.
    I would assume all over the city, all over the city,
    because they had to report to me.
    And you had left already for the mountains.
    We had left September 11.
    Remember, my mother's 11th wedding anniversary,
    and I was 10 years old.
    And my mother had gone back.
    So my mother was there, remember, for a few hours.
    But she'd gone back, I think, around September 18 or 17.
    I don't know when.
    This is September 28--
    28th already.
    But wait a minute, they must report no later than,
    so this must have been posted a few days before.
    I don't know how many.
    And this is pictures which will eventually give to the museum.
    Why is it that some people like you
    and your family left for the mountains and others did not?
    That's an excellent question too,
    because people who did not feel strong enough, like my aunt who
    was a little bit spoiled on that,
    my soul, her soul, forgive me, couldn't handle hard walking,
    was afraid of her little son.
    She was afraid of what is going to be in the mountains,
    they stay.
    Some people couldn't leave their homes.
    They felt that their homes were so important to them.
    Some people were naive and thought nothing would happen.
    So they were different people for different reasons that
    didn't.
    Some people were old that I understood--
    but some old people left too and walked.
    I don't know, my father had this we had to leave.
    it was like you couldn't--
    I mean, there was not a--
    and maybe that's why when you, say how did you feel,
    there was no question.
    It was just we were leaving.
    I mean it was a definite thing.
    He even had some money in my step grandmother's house,
    apartment, in another part of the city, not far.
    He did not want to go get-- of course, that's what saved her,
    because she was hidden.
    Somebody hid her.
    And she used all that money to survive.
    And she survive the war.
    They picked her up towards the end and put her in jail.
    And she was a tough cookie, that step--
    I called her my nonna.
    She was a tough cookie, spit on them.
    I mean treated them like-- and she survived the war
    and ended up in Israel, and I saw her
    in Israel many years ago.
    What are your thoughts about Israel?
    In what sense?
    What it means to you?
    What does Israel mean to you?
    It means a great deal.
    It's a safe place.
    And I think maybe I ask that question,
    maybe there's some guilt for not having gone there,
    for having come to the States.
    It wasn't my--
    I did not--
    17, I was not grown up enough when I came.
    I think there's some guilt for having come to the--
    taking the easy way out, the soft life.
    It wasn't soft, but relatively soft.
    How I feel about Israel now?
    I don't know.
    You know, I think my opinion now is I was just there.
    And it seems like there's so much materialism.
    But that's a completely, you know, era,
    but I feel it's where I should have been,
    where I probably would have felt more comfortable.
    Why I don't know.
    I'm perfectly comfortable.
    I fit in.
    I feel at times I don't fit in.
    But I fit in.
    I know I do, you know.
    But somehow I think maybe more family,
    there is more family there.
    There was more family.
    Go ahead, you had another question.
    Is there any message you'd want to give to your grandchildren
    about, lessons that you have because
    of what you went through.
    That I have to think about.
    Oh, God.
    I'm sorry.
    I'm having a hard time with that one.
    Basically, it's the same, being dependent.
    Prepare yourself for life well.
    Not study hard, prepare yourself.
    Be prepared.
    I always insisted that my daughters, go to school,
    get a college, go to grad school, go to this, go to that.
    Be independent.
    Why independence?
    I guess independence.
    Just be independent.
    Be able to think for yourself.
    The big thing is have an open mind and think for yourself.
    Don't allow people to influence your thinking.
    They always say, I fight for everything.
    I'm a big-- sometimes I stick my head down,
    but it's painful for me.
    It's painful for the others, but then they come around.
    So this is the big message is basically think for yourself.
    And form your own opinions.
    And be true to yourself.
    Is there anything you'd want to add before we finish?
    I don't think so.
    I don't know.
    No, I don't think so.
    I love my family.
    I love my children and my grandchildren.
    And I'm very proud of all of them.
    I'm sorry.
    Well, thank you very much for doing the interview.
    Oh, please, thank you.
    You were wonderful.
    This concludes the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    Volunteer Collection Interview with Tilda Finzi Cohen.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    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.
    Interviewee
    Tilda F. Cohen
    Interviewer
    Gail Schwartz
    Date
    interview:  1998 April 14

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Genre/Form
    Music.
    Extent
    3 sound cassettes (74 min.).

    Rights & Restrictions

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

    Keywords & Subjects

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Gail Schwartz, on behalf of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History Branch, conducted the interview with Tilda Finzi Cohen on April 14, 1998.
    Funding Note
    The cataloging of this oral history interview has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:12:25
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn506689

    Additional Resources

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

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    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 Zwi Golombek

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Samuel B. Hagner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Werner E. Michel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Guta Jacobson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helen Luksenburg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with William Luksenburg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rose Weisfeld

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth E. Greifer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Nesse Godin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Maryla Korn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michel Margosis

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lena Jurand

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Wallace Witkowski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Peter Masters

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Lena Gitter

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jacob Wiener

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Noah Roitman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Richard W. Peterson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Riane Gruss

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Regina Spiegel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Charles Stein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hannah Kalman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Morris Rosen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sam Spiegel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Gutter

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henry Greenbaum

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Alper

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michael Lin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hannah Kalman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Dorrit L. Ostberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alice Eberstarkova Masters

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Martin Weiss

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Leonard Gordon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fritz Gluckstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Brigitte Freidin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Kristine Belfoure

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Hill Leonard

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Kurt Roberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alfred Schnog

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Taucher

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helen Goldkind

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Inge Katzenstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Werner Katzenstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Goldman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Paulette Stessin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Margitta Cooper

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erika Eckstut

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tole Johannes Madna

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henri Dupuy

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Halina Peabody

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marcel Bercau

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rolph Hammel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Norbert V. Hilsberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alfred Munzer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Maria Mandel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Yvonne Mignot de Royere

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Susan Berlin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with John Bucur

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lore Schneider

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frank Liebermann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marianne Liebermann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thea S. Rips

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Andrew Glass

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Renate Fischer Chernoff

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eli Dortort

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hilda Seftor

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Felix Nicinski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Brombart

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gunter Haimann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alfred Lakritz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rita Rubinstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anita Etzyon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Melvin Galun

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Magdalena Farkas Berkovics

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sol Mackler

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Theresia Bauer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Carolina Taitz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helen Schwartz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irene Silver

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Herman Taube

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Regine Ginsberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ursula Guttstadt McKinney

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Rappaport

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Edith Langer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marianne Milkman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Phillip Abraham

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Arnstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gertrude Scarlett Epstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Matilde Neuwirt

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Susanne K. Bennet

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marianne Roberts

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Harry Markowicz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Julie A. Keefer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erica Laufer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Barbara Goldberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Liselotte Epstein Ivry

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hans Ziegler

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Vera Levine

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Guenter Lewy

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Malvy Solomon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elia Miranski and Genia Miranski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Maria Kordalewski

    Oral History

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

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