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Oral history interview with Erwin Deutscher

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1997.A.0353 | RG Number: RG-50.106.0085

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    Oral history interview with Erwin Deutscher
    Transcript
    This is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    interview with Erwin Deutscher, conducted
    by Gail Schwartz on November 9, 1997 at the Museum.
    This is tape number one, side A. Could
    you give me your full name?
    My name is Erwin Deutscher, E-R-W-I-N.
    And the Hebrew name is Reuven.
    And I live in Cincinnati, Ohio.
    Do you have a middle name?
    No.
    And your last name is Deutscher.
    Deutscher.
    D-E-U-T-S-C-H-E-R.
    Is that the name you were born with?
    From the first day on.
    And where were you born, and when were you born?
    I was born in Vienna on--
    it was a Sunday like today, on January 28, 1923.
    Let's talk now a little bit about your family.
    How long had your family been in Vienna?
    How many generations?
    Well, my father was in Austria all the time,
    but that Austria was the emperors Austria, Franz Joseph.
    So that was more North than today's Austria, yeah?
    And then later on it belonged to Poland.
    Finally, it belonged to Soviet Union.
    And now it's a part of the Ukraine.
    But the main reason he was in Austria,
    because he served in the Austrian army for eight years.
    And at the end, he was a prisoner of war in Italy,
    and he ran back to Vienna.
    Actually, he was never released.
    He just ran away from the Italian camp.
    And my mother was almost from the same area,
    but she studied in Prague for one year,
    in one of the universities then.
    And they met in Vienna and got married.
    So did her sister, who married my father's friend.
    And that's the way we lived there.
    What are your parents' names?
    Well, in Austria, they had to have a German name, too.
    So his name was Friedrich, but the Hebrew name was Ephraim.
    Ephraim Fischl, rather.
    And my mother's name was Ida all the time.
    And her maiden name?
    Her maiden name was [? Bachrach. ?]
    Did you have or do you have any siblings, any brothers
    or sisters?
    Yeah, we were four.
    3 boys and 1 girl.
    And only one brother is still alive.
    Yeah, the others are deceased.
    And what are their names?
    OK, my sister's name who followed--
    I'm the first born.
    After this is my sister, Rosie.
    And she lived in Italy.
    And this is another story, we might
    have to talk about it later.
    She was married to [? Marcello ?]
    [? Compagnano, ?] a Jewish family in Florence, Italy.
    The other one is Edmund.
    He was an American soldier during World War II
    in the Japanese theater.
    And later on, he was even fighting in Korea.
    He deceased.
    And the one who lives now in Denver, his name is Sigmund.
    And he's married there and has three children
    and two grandchildren.
    How religious was your family?
    OK, my father definitely was considered very rel--
    Orthodox.
    Although it is not the same orthodoxy
    that probably people were in Poland or that areas, yeah?
    It was a liberal orthodoxy in Vienna.
    The main reason I want to point out here
    is, we went to school on Saturdays.
    We were instructed not to write, yeah, just to sit there.
    But he never objected.
    For he couldn't even object to it, yeah?
    And in Vienna, we walked around like any other child.
    There was no special appearance that we
    were Jewish or very religious.
    We were integrated with whatever was going on there.
    So what kind of religious training did you get?
    Oh, well, at school, because at my time, at least since 1934,
    '33, you had to have a religion in Austria.
    Before, when the Social Democrats were in power,
    you could be areligious, not religious at all.
    And then they forced you to go back to your religion.
    So at school, the Catholic children
    had their religious instruction in the class.
    But the non-Catholics, Protestants, Jews,
    and a few others had to meet twice a week in another center,
    where we were instructed.
    It means they took them together from many schools,
    and we were instructed Hebrew.
    Well, basically, but it was very limited.
    So then of course in my case, I had
    to go to a Talmud Torah in addition
    to learn the Bible and so many other things.
    And more than this, I even had a private tutor at home
    to learn more Hebrew.
    Because I was the oldest, and most was concentrated on me.
    The other brothers didn't get as much Hebrew instructions
    as I got.
    And so obviously you observed holidays and so forth at home.
    Yeah.
    And did you go to synagogue?
    Well, because Saturdays we went to school,
    so the synagogue didn't exist.
    But in Vienna, at least it was a part of the youth at 3 o'clock,
    in all those synagogues in Vienna,
    they had youth services.
    Children came together for, let's say, 45 minutes,
    and the rabbi gave a speech, and there
    was a choir and so on, almost in all of those Viennese
    synagogues.
    So they were conducted on a Jewish basis.
    You can call it Orthodox, but it's not the heavy Orthodox.
    Kids came in and that's it.
    What kind of work did your father do?
    OK, we had a dairy factory.
    That means we pasteurized milk.
    The milk came in from the farm sections
    and produced butter and cheeses.
    And we had little wagons.
    They were still horse drawn at this time,
    and they delivered it in 20 or 25 liter cans to the stores.
    And that's the way it was.
    Did you live right in the city of Vienna or on the outskirts?
    OK, we had a beautiful apartment in the 3rd District.
    It was so beautiful that many of our neighbors envied us.
    And then probably I was already 12-years-old, yeah?
    They got key money to free this apartment,
    because some rich people wanted it.
    And with this money, they were able to buy a villa
    house on the other side of the Danube.
    And that's where we lived then.
    What street was your first house on?
    The first was Kardinal-Nagl-Platz--
    [COUGHING]
    Excuse me.
    And there I went to grade school.
    And later on-- over there, grade school is only four years,
    from one to--
    from the first to the fourth grade.
    And then the fifth grade was already the Gymnasium.
    And there on Shabbat I did have to walk to that school.
    It was quite a walk, but I don't think that I ever revolted
    or objected, even, yeah?
    I walked, and that's it.
    Probably close to an hour, no problem.
    So the schools that you went to had
    Jewish and non-Jewish children.
    Did you experience any anti-Semitism
    when you were quite young?
    So in the grade school, sometimes there
    was one or two Jews in that section where we lived.
    In the Gymnasium, it was almost the opposite.
    We were probably 85% of the students, the Jewish children.
    And the non-Jews were 15.
    In school itself, there was never an occurrence
    that anyone would have offended me at all-- period.
    Yeah.
    We had a certain habit in Vienna,
    they eat those rolls in the morning.
    And my mother gave me always a few rolls for the poorer ones.
    Not real poor, but those that didn't get rolls.
    I had always friends around me, and I never experienced this.
    Even the priest-- they called him a [? Katecheti-- ?]
    that's a little--
    that's a lower name as priest.
    He was not a full priest yet, but he
    was dressed like a priest.
    Always hugged me, gave me pictures and so on, yeah?
    With the teachers I had very good relationships.
    Yeah.
    So in the neighborhood that your first house was in,
    that was a mixed neighborhood of Jews and non-Jews?
    No, very few Jews in the first one.
    In the second one, there were even less.
    Yeah, where we had the house, the villa,
    there were less Jews.
    There were a few Jews.
    Later on, in Hitler's time, of course,
    we found out that there are more Jews than we thought.
    Yeah, we didn't know there were Jews.
    Yeah, so we found it out.
    I just want to remark on the first one.
    It was good, but I met years later
    in Paris a school colleague, who went with me to grade school.
    And we talked about the whole thing.
    And so apropos, he remarked, said
    you were lucky that you were not in our neighborhood
    during Hitler's time.
    Apparently there the situation was bad, yeah?
    We in the northern part of the city, where we had our house,
    we could handle it, at least to a time.
    Then of course, certain things developed.
    We'll talk about that.
    What language did you speak at home?
    Only German.
    No Yiddish, nothing at all.
    Only German-- period.
    That's it.
    And you were taking Hebrew in Hebrew school?
    Yeah.
    In Hebrew school, but there were other occurrences, too.
    If you want, I can go into details.
    It's up to you, yeah?
    We had a relative from my mother's side.
    He was a baker.
    And that was the only kosher bakery in Vienna,
    because the Viennese Jews, even the Orthodox,
    didn't pay attention of bread being kosher or not kosher.
    It was no problem.
    But anyway, they had one kosher bakery.
    And he came every Friday afternoon
    and stood over Shabbat with us.
    He was a single man, and he brought the challah
    for Shabbat.
    And after the Friday night dinner,
    he was reading or chanting rather the Torah,
    the portion of the week.
    And because he was a baker, he was very tired all the time,
    yeah?
    So he started chanting and falling asleep.
    And as soon as he slumbered at least to a point, then
    his nose touched that book, and he woke up.
    And that was going on for two or three or four years.
    I don't even remember.
    I was sitting across him and always watching
    if he continues to read from the same spot where he fell asleep.
    And so I was able to read the Torah endless, yeah?
    He probably thought I'm studying with him.
    And in actuality, I was just watching
    how he reacts when his nose touches the book, yeah?
    How political was your father?
    Not too much, no.
    He was Jewish-minded.
    Yeah, so that means most Jews belonged to Social Democrats,
    because the other one were called Christian Democrats,
    yeah?
    In politics, not.
    He was very proud of having been a soldier in the Austrian army.
    And that's another story, but I'm just saying
    this was-- and he loved Vienna.
    And the same happened to me.
    When we left, we left with a feeling not of hatred
    to the city, rather that this man Hitler
    had no right to tell me to stay here or not to stay.
    He had the power to do it, but the right he didn't.
    And so that's the reason when I sometimes to go back to Vienna,
    I don't have feelings like other people, who sometimes say I'm
    not going back to this place.
    In my case, it's almost the opposite.
    I have the same right for this.
    I was born there.
    I got the culture.
    The good thing, I accept it.
    The not so good thing or the bad thing I reject it, yeah?
    But I never felt that anyone else
    has more right to that city.
    And the same was even with my father.
    He was a good soldier during the--
    not that he really wanted it, but finally they had to--
    he had to join the army.
    Maybe we'll talk about this later.
    And his feeling for Vienna was positive rather than negative,
    yeah?
    And a Zionistic believe?
    Zionist, yeah.
    OK, I have to tell you the story about Zionism.
    I was about 10 years old, and I got a tutor to come to my home.
    His name was Horowitz.
    Yeah, the main reason we picked up those tutors was this.
    After World War I, because Austria was the capital,
    Austria was the capital of--
    Vienna was the capital of the whole of Austria, yeah?
    So those people at least felt de facto
    to have a right to study at the University of Vienna.
    And the story was this.
    They came.
    They were very learned people.
    They had bright people in the full meaning of the word.
    But on the other hand, they were poor, like a church mouse.
    No, like a synagogue mouse.
    Like synagogue mice.
    So they came.
    And for a very nominal amount of money,
    they were teaching children.
    And usually, I would say for families who had fit it--
    yeah, some people didn't pay this much attention.
    But not only that they were teaching,
    they were eating lunch with us, yeah?
    And in my section, there was another Jewish family,
    actually, the butcher, the kosher butcher.
    And his son was a little bit older.
    So we combined those things.
    That means he went to one house first and ate.
    Then he went to the other house and taught.
    And vice versa, and come back.
    And I learned a lot from him.
    So when I was 10-years-old, he somehow got very close to me
    and said, a nice young fellow like this
    should be active in a Zionist organization.
    And he connected me with the Hashomer Hadati,
    the religious Zionist organization,
    which is Bnei Akiva here now.
    And from then I was active.
    And first of all, we had a good meeting system.
    We learned a lot about Zionism.
    And we traveled a little bit in the Vienna woods and so on.
    But the other thing that made me even maybe a little bit more
    connected to that whole Zionistic activity
    was the Jewish National Fund, Keren Kayemeth Israel.
    In the afternoons, let's say twice a month, we
    got a certain section to collect the money from the boxes, yeah?
    And so we got in contact with people.
    And of course, they admired us that we
    did all this, we young fellas.
    What really happened is, you count the money
    in front of them.
    And then you say, if you had a few pennies,
    it makes a Schilling.
    And then if you really come out with four Schillings,
    they said, why don't we add a little bit?
    We have an odd number.
    And so I got one a golden pin from them.
    And I was a little bit outstanding in this movement.
    And so years later, when Hitler came,
    apropos I will jump from one to the other,
    because it cannot be told in a different-- so Josef Burg,
    who later on was in Israel the Minister of Interior, yeah,
    took 25 children from Vienna and 25 from the old Germany.
    So we were 50 children.
    We went into Israel, but this will be a different section.
    But I just want to say how that Zionism moved me.
    And I was actually the real Zionist in the family,
    because I was older, and the other ones
    were little children.
    So they just looked up to me.
    All right, well, let's move along.
    Did you have any other hobbies or sports?
    Yeah, soccer.
    Here I can tell you again with the relationship the non-Jews.
    I was a captain of three teams.
    Because we had a tournament system in Vienna.
    It was only one year, because they discontinued later
    because it disrupted the studies.
    But anyway, at that particular year, I was very young.
    I would say 12.
    I organized-- I organized three teams.
    And maybe I was the only one who organized three teams.
    Because I always thought if one team wins,
    I still want to have a chance.
    And what really happened, the first two teams
    lost the first games.
    But one team I was able to get over the third victory.
    And that let me then march on the victory march
    in that particular stadium.
    I enjoyed it.
    It was good.
    So what I want to say, all the other children
    were all Gentles.
    I don't remember a single Jew there.
    Many were better players than I was,
    but they let me lead them, yeah?
    So it was so smooth.
    I will use the same basis of talk
    later on, because the question is really,
    why didn't we leave Vienna before this, yeah,
    if it was so bad?
    It was bad maybe on one side, but it
    was good on the other side.
    So it's very hard to say why nobody
    left even a day before Hitler moved in, in March 1938, yeah?
    Let's back up a little bit back to 1933,
    when Hitler came into power.
    You were 10-years-old.
    I hadn't--
    You were 10-years-old.
    And did-- I want to talk before the Anschluss in '38.
    What did Hitler mean to you?
    What did you know?
    Were there any changes in your life?
    Granted, you were young.
    You were 10, 11, 12, 13.
    Well, I do agree that I was young,
    but because in the Jewish tradition,
    it was almost like the one who has to inherit the kingdom,
    yeah?
    I was number one in the family.
    So first of all, for errand walks, yeah, I was the one.
    And there was no question.
    Whatever was demanded from me, I was doing, even
    at that young age.
    On streetcars, riding even much before that,
    I just bought a ticket and I was riding streetcars.
    And we had a few lawyers who had to handle our business, yeah?
    I was the coordinator between the lawyers.
    So I was very involved.
    So I would say whatever my family thought about politics,
    even then, I was at least alert.
    And those friends who came in, especially Jewish friends,
    I overheard almost all the conversations.
    I have to say it.
    First of all, we thought in Germany it's bad,
    but we didn't dream that it would even be close to this.
    Because we heard sometimes about anti-Semites in Poland.
    And then we heard it in Romania.
    Yeah, which Goga was known.
    At the end, he gave up and said "Israel, you were the victor."
    Yeah, he had even to praise the Jews at the end.
    We knew there was Mussolini.
    He was a fascist, and he had generals in his army,
    Jewish generals in his army.
    So we know it's no good, but we didn't see it
    in the form of a disaster.
    Yeah, because just a few decades before,
    you know what was in Russia, and in Poland, and so on.
    Jews always were used to those things.
    And I want to tell you, at school
    we got a monthly magazine.
    I forgot the name of it, but I read it all the time.
    And it told us about the present time,
    but it went back to the Spanish Inquisition, to the Middle Age.
    When I read this, it was clear in my mind, whatever happened
    then will never happen again.
    Yeah, it didn't even go in my mind.
    Even with that Hitler.
    he hates Jews, yeah.
    That's all.
    It didn't mean--
    We didn't see him in this manner, yeah?
    Then there was something-- and that's
    the reason why I would say the Viennese Jews were even not
    prepared.
    Even not 1% would leave, or even not a handful,
    they didn't leave.
    The main thing is, this particular generation was
    so impressed by the Allies, especially England and France,
    they would never permit something like this.
    We're in the 20th century.
    There's humanity here.
    And really, when we had a factory
    there came a relative actually from my mother's side
    from Berlin.
    He came and probably told--
    first of all, when he appeared, he looked charming.
    Beautiful, yeah?
    So we knew that when he came from Germany,
    he probably doesn't like Germany anymore.
    Yeah, but not that he--
    he was driven out.
    And he really wasn't driven out.
    And for some reason, a position in our business
    did not develop for him.
    And after he was there maybe a year with us,
    he just went back.
    What year was this?
    Let's say it was--
    let's make it '34.
    '33-'34.
    '34.
    Maximum '35.
    Yeah, but I think it was '34, 1934.
    Do you remember him talking about any restrictions
    against Jews in Germany at that time?
    Not very-- not intensively.
    He just mentioned it here and there.
    But what I want to say, he took me always along,
    because I knew the city very well.
    So he wanted to see the city.
    When he went to a movie, at least
    I remember one movie, The Good Earth by--
    Pearl Buck.
    By Pearl Buck.
    And it was played by--
    well, I know by whom it was played.
    It was an American movie.
    He took me around.
    Then we found another relative or acquaintance of him.
    So we went visiting.
    Those people even asked him how he feels in Deutschers' house.
    And he said, listen, I knew that Erwin is here.
    And I don't mind to say it, I don't like it at all.
    Yeah, he couldn't fit himself in.
    And then he went back.
    And I'm really sorry that we never discussed
    what's going to happen.
    At that time, I would say even before '38,
    as much as Germany was miserable,
    I don't think a destruction like this was even considered, yeah?
    We know that individuals went to concentration camps.
    That's a different story.
    But I am telling, this was not accept--
    we didn't even dream about something like that.
    What were your thoughts about the 1936 Olympics?
    You were 13-years-old.
    I saw it in the movies.
    I liked the movie.
    Like anyone else, it was beautiful.
    By the way, there were a few Jewish performers, too,
    in the 1936, yeah?
    I didn't-- well, later on, I will tell you how people
    accepted Hitler, what they were thinking about him, yeah?
    But what did Hitler mean to you as a 13-year-old boy?
    Nothing.
    Yeah, nothing.
    As a 13-year-old.
    We had a-- maybe even before I was 13, yeah?
    I saw they had illegal--
    illegal announcement on the wall sometimes.
    I read it and came back, and I mentioned it
    to our housekeeper.
    And for some reason, instead of Hitler said "Hilter."
    And she corrected me, his name is "Hitler," yeah.
    And they smiled.
    And there was even one friend, I think his family
    was Nazi from years ago.
    But I was his friend.
    I went to his home.
    He went to my home.
    It was very unique.
    Even when he made an anti-Jewish remark,
    he talked more about those Polish Jews
    who talked funny or something like this, but never
    a full attack.
    Uh-huh.
    And--
    Did you respond to any of those remarks?
    It wasn't needed.
    But on the other hand, if one would be against me,
    I would be strong enough to tell him.
    You know, it was just--
    it was the slight jokes.
    They were they can be told--
    it wasn't fully offensive, yeah?
    The slang was sometimes used.
    Yes, I remember in the Talmud Torah when I went,
    there was a young fella.
    His name was Paul Muni.
    No, wait a minute.
    I mixed it up.
    Paul Muni was who played in The Good Earth.
    That young fella, his name was [? Bucksbaum, ?] a Jewish boy.
    But he did not--
    he was not a good student.
    He came, and sometimes he didn't come.
    Where I came to every lesson, yeah?
    That guy, that little kid had fun
    to be on the other side of the street
    and call across the street "Jew boy, Jew boy."
    He was a Jew himself, yeah?
    So those things-- kids do many things, yeah?
    On the other hand, I said that Nazi--
    from the Nazi family, his grandmother,
    oh, did she like when I came in, and she said, why don't you
    do like Erwin and so and so.
    You know, those jokes were not very offensive,
    but you could realize that there was a difference between Jews
    and non-Jews.
    And we lived like this.
    We didn't even feel bad, because I never
    felt inferior to be a Jew.
    I didn't even feel--
    even in the most miserable times of Hitler, yeah,
    I never wanted to be one of them,
    where they got everything that they'd never had before.
    I just said, leave me alone.
    That's all.
    Would you describe yourself when you
    were that age as very daring, very strong, independent?
    Yeah.
    I definitely was independent.
    Even from my parents.
    They just let me do--
    even in the synagogue.
    They wouldn't never say go.
    If I went, it's OK.
    If I didn't go, it was OK, too.
    On Shabbat, my father sometimes--
    most of the times, rather, he would
    want me to tell him what I learned during this week,
    during the past week on my Hebrew studies.
    Yeah, he wanted to have--
    and sometimes he remarked a few things, but never aggressively.
    Did you have a close relationship with your parents?
    Very, yeah.
    We did everything together.
    Yeah, actually, I wrote about this a lot,
    because that's what really started it.
    Did they talk to you about Hitler?
    No.
    I have to say that until Hitler came in,
    they didn't dream about it.
    That's far away.
    Well, let's get to that point.
    You're talking about the Anschluss.
    OK.
    What are your first recollections?
    OK, I want to tell you, on February 28--
    1938.
    1938.
    There we realized that Schuschnigg,
    the chancellor of Vienna--
    of Austria, had to go to Berchtesgaden
    to have a discussion with Hitler.
    And he forced him to take two Nazis into the government,
    and I think to let the Nazi movement be more open.
    And we accepted this as a compromise,
    because the newspapers brought it in a way
    that Schuschnigg knew how to handle that case.
    And in reality, the very next elections
    were scheduled for March the 13th, yeah?
    And of course, Hitler came in on March the 11th in the evening
    to disturb this thing.
    And we thought after those elections,
    nobody can do something.
    But I have to go back here a minute.
    In 1934, the Nazis killed the chancellor of Austria, Dolfuss.
    And of course, afterwards, right away after Schuschnigg
    got the position.
    And we did know that Mussolini didn't like Hitler
    as his neighbor, yeah?
    They did something together.
    And of course, we considered for some reason
    that Mussolini is stronger than Hitler.
    For some-- in '34, he could tell him get off.
    And for some reason, he gave in.
    And really Hitler later on thanked him officially,
    that he helped him on this, yeah?
    But when Mussolini said no, we thought that will be it, yeah?
    He will let him go so far, just hang up.
    And even with this, at least in my circles,
    we did not think more than either he doesn't want the--
    Hitler doesn't want the Jews, or we'll give him restrictions.
    To this point, we didn't accept.
    We just didn't.
    Because in this particular week, between February the 28th
    to March the 11th, we had a friend, Etinger,
    I met him later on in New York.
    He somehow mentioned that people say that development in Germany
    shall be considered, yeah?
    And of course I played--
    I went to the Gymnasium, fifth grade gymnasium.
    It's like here ninth grade.
    I thought I'm already--
    I can analyze the whole world, yeah?
    I just brushed it off, let it go.
    And they all agreed with me, yeah?
    I just want to make one more point on this particular March
    the 11th, when Hitler moved into Austria.
    He came from the West into--
    at this-- as much as I know, maybe there were others, too,
    but Schuschnigg called one of the richest Jews in Vienna.
    His name was Krupnik.
    He told him right away get out.
    And he took a train to get out.
    And don't look back.
    Just get out, yeah?
    He took a train to Italy, left everything behind him.
    We know only about this occurrence.
    It's not a scientific--
    You knew about it at the time?
    Yeah.
    We found it out almost the same day.
    Yeah, by the way, I want to tell you,
    when Schuschnigg had the meeting with Hitler,
    he had a radio appeal to the people, he talked to the people
    about Austria, about the achievement.
    Yeah, Hitler before this Schuschnigg
    start bragging about Germany, what it
    has done in those five years.
    And Schuschnigg on his radio speech,
    he said whatever Austria did, well,
    isn't it nice for a little country like this what we did?
    And we were so proud of his expressions, yeah?
    And we were confident, yeah?
    And I have to tell you that I see that even Schuschnigg
    might have been surprised.
    Because he was jailed later on.
    They arrested him and so on.
    So he would have gone to the Vatican
    or somewhere else, just leave it alone.
    He just didn't leave.
    And you know, there were rumors that they
    might take him to the concentration camps or not.
    I don't know.
    Although I met Schuschnigg in St. Louis,
    but I never talked about this.
    I just want to say, there might be certain Austrian leaders
    who were not fully aware that it shall happen.
    Today, when you go in Austria and you see the old timers,
    they say they smelled it would happen.
    So I cannot talk about this anymore more in details,
    because I don't know much more.
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum interview with Erwin Deutscher.
    This is tape number one, side B. Before we go on
    about the Anschluss, I just wanted
    to ask you a little bit about your bar mitzvah,
    which would have been in 1936.
    Was there any difficulty with that, any problems?
    No, my bar mitzvah was very charming.
    At that time, I had a special teacher.
    And here to my regret, I have to say that later on my father
    met him in Dachau, and he didn't make it.
    What was his name?
    Schnabel.
    His first name I forgot, but his name was Schnabel.
    Very religious.
    He ate a lot of garlic, but I smelled it.
    What's the difference?
    And he taught me that bar mitzvah.
    The bar mitzvah was in rather a shtiebel, not a real synagogue.
    And instead of having those big dinners,
    my mother just made cakes and strudels and so on,
    and they ate it.
    And that was actually all.
    And that Schnabel, that teacher trained me
    to give a certain speech after the Haftorah and so on.
    And for some, reason I think the last few sentence
    I choked a little bit.
    And the whole congregation, especially women,
    everyone started to cry.
    So when I met later on one in Tel Aviv, he said, "oh,
    I remember your bar mitzvah.
    We call cried."
    But it was charming.
    And you have to know, the bar mitzvah was--
    also it was winter, and we crossed the Danube, walking,
    yeah.
    Didn't mean anything.
    I just did it.
    And it was the story of the Exodus from Egypt.
    It's the Beshalach.
    It's called Beshalach.
    And so we have the song on the Red Sea.
    But the Haftorah is the song of the water.
    So that whole thing went together,
    and it was outstanding, yeah?
    And the Tuesday before that particular Shabbat
    was my birthday.
    So I took my bike just across the river,
    and I had to go put on my tvilum first.
    And the weather didn't mean a thing, yeah?
    It was in the winter, in January, yeah?
    And to pass the Danube with the--
    actually, the Danube bridge is about one kilometer.
    That includes the overflowing section of the river, yeah?
    And the wind was probably biting very strong.
    It didn't mean anything.
    I went everything-- every morning to the synagogue,
    and then right away to school later on.
    No problem.
    That was going on.
    Did you invite any of your non-Jewish friends
    to your bar mitzvah?
    No, no.
    It was not custom.
    At home, I got some gifts from them, but to the synagogue,
    it was a shtiebel.
    They wouldn't have fitted.
    I don't think so.
    They wouldn't have enjoyed it.
    But of course, we liked it, yeah.
    But yeah, no there was no non-Jewish friends.
    You are right.
    OK, let's now move up to March 11th, night
    the night of March 11, 1938.
    What are your particular personal recollections?
    In the afternoon, late afternoon,
    we heard the story, that Hitler moved in from the West side
    of Austria.
    How did you hear?
    Radio.
    On the radio, it was announced.
    I don't think we heard it.
    And just the neighbors came in.
    Yeah.
    Very friendly.
    And then, of course--
    The non-Jewish neighbors?
    Non-Jewish neighbors came in very friendly and said,
    "but you know, nothing will happen to Jews like you.
    You're the good Jews" and so on.
    So my father was very excited.
    My mother didn't take it so serious, yeah?
    And I remember when he made kiddush Friday night,
    I wouldn't say that he cried, but his eyes were wet, yeah?
    And we knew there's a new section.
    But good you asked me about that particular day.
    Many came into us.
    Many, many Gentiles came in and soothed us.
    One said even, "don't worry.
    In my basement, I still have the Red flag,
    and we'll have to wave it again."
    this man's name was Frank.
    His family name was Frank.
    He was the son-in-law of Mrs. [? Hof, ?] who had some cows.
    The milk was not for us, but not far away she had some cows.
    And they were always good with us, good friends.
    He came and gave my father to understand not to worry.
    Would you describe your family as upper class?
    Pardon?
    Would you describe your family as upper class?
    No.
    A little.
    I would say a little bit above the average,
    but I wouldn't make it upper class.
    No, no.
    But average, good average, yeah?
    We always used common sense, and we did well.
    There were times where we did better than in Hitler--
    than before Hitler.
    There was a very good time.
    I would say at that time, it was a little bit
    under not really rich side, but well-to-do side.
    Then it was normal.
    Later on, it was normal.
    We never had problems financially.
    And I knew everything that was going on.
    I knew every time how much money we had in the bank
    and how it works around, yeah?
    So it was OK.
    It was normal.
    So you are now 15-years-old.
    What were your thoughts when you heard that Hitler
    had come into Austria?
    When Hitler was coming?
    That was very interesting.
    I knew that something else is supposed to happen, yeah?
    We are not going to stay there for good, yeah?
    How did you know that?
    Now, we wanted more from life than just
    to be tolerated, yeah?
    No, we definitely looked for something.
    Of course later on, we understood
    it's even worse than we expected, yeah?
    The main thing is still not the killing.
    We couldn't have contact with anything.
    We didn't know what the future is.
    The Jewish leaders couldn't see anything, yeah?
    So we were-- but we hoped that the other nations will give us
    a break.
    That was definitely discussed in our family, the other nations.
    Let's go back now to March 12 and March 13.
    I continued to go to school.
    I continued to go to school until the end of the--
    at the end, I was the only Jew there.
    And I want to tell you--
    Let's talk about March 12 and March 13.
    March 12?
    Or March 13th, when he came in.
    Well, we knew that Schuschnigg's system is out.
    Hitler is in and will take over.
    I tell you--
    Did you see Hitler when he came into Vienna?
    Yeah, once.
    I was on the Ringstrasse.
    About this, I want to tell you a little bit more
    about how I saw Hitler and Hess and all this, yeah?
    But OK, the strongest impression from the 12th, 13th,
    and so on of March was that across--
    we were on a lake.
    It was a lake in the City across the lake,
    there were large buildings.
    And the buildings had those Nazi flags from up down
    five, six, or even more.
    I don't remember.
    So every morning you got up, you had to see those flags, yeah?
    What was your thoughts to see a flag?
    You're a teenager.
    That's us-- that we are.
    That's not us-- actually, that's not us.
    That's a different world.
    We cannot be incorporated with them,
    and we don't even want to be.
    We have to get out.
    How did you know that?
    I saw the future.
    And I had a strong feeling, this is not for us.
    Yeah, that's what I want to say.
    Was it frightening to see these spikes when
    you woke up in the morning?
    In a certain way.
    In a certain way, I can't even say it was frightening.
    But I want to tell you, I was still
    a little bit foolish at that.
    Because I walked on the street, and I saw three young SA men
    walking in those goose steps.
    Because they were just trained to do it this way.
    And I was standing on the side--
    on the sidewalk, and just smiling, almost scoffing, yeah?
    "Stupid kids.
    You're walking."
    So you know, my whole reaction was different.
    They were stupid, yeah?
    So something was not accepted by me.
    I just didn't see the [INAUDIBLE]..
    At school, especially to those children I brought rolls
    and so on, they were still nice to me, but I remember one guy,
    his name was Haber.
    He came to me in a very friendly manner and said, "do you know?
    It's really better now."
    That's what he said.
    "It's better."
    Yeah, and he already got the invitation to go--
    to go to the Altreich.
    That means to Germany.
    Took a bunch of children to show them what's going on.
    And then he came back after two weeks.
    "Great.
    Everything is fine."
    How did you feel when he said that to you?
    What?
    No, I still wasn't afraid.
    No, no.
    Because he talked nice to me.
    Then-- well, you know like in any class,
    there are some children, they're a little bit
    outstanding in their scholastic level, yeah?
    Well, I was in that group, too.
    And there was another fellow.
    His name I forgot, but I see him always in front of my eyes.
    We didn't do too much together in the past.
    Yeah, we were students, but I was not very close to him.
    Was he Jewish?
    No, not.
    I'm talking then there was only left one Jew.
    The others didn't come anymore.
    When did the others leave?
    Just almost immediately.
    I don't remember.
    There were not too many.
    But yeah, I want to tell you, when
    we moved from the apartment to the villa,
    then again we were one or two Jews.
    One or two Jews were there, yeah?
    You follow me?
    Others didn't come.
    I think in the whole school no Jew came.
    I just came.
    I didn't feel uncomfortable.
    Or I didn't lose my confidence.
    Let's have it that way.
    You're saying the Jewish children
    left after the Anschluss, after Hitler came in?
    I would say so, yeah, yeah.
    I didn't pay that much attention,
    but I didn't see them anymore.
    And the Jewish-- how would we say?
    The Jewish lectures we have, we had twice a week,
    they discontinued.
    Just didn't happen anymore.
    Well, did you have any Jewish teachers?
    No, no.
    Only the one who had to teach us religion was Jewish.
    Did you notice any change in the way
    the non-Jewish teachers treated you once Hitler came in?
    That's exactly what I want to say.
    First, yeah.
    In Vienna at that time, at the beginning of the morning
    school class started with a Paternoster.
    They had to say--
    they had to say the prayer.
    In the middle of the wall, there was a crucifix.
    Yeah, like they have it in churches almost.
    Yeah.
    And so I once came to the school.
    Next to the crucifix, they put Hitler's picture.
    Then they put that crucifix away,
    and Hitler's picture only was there.
    And after they said the prayer, they
    had to say "Heil Hitler" with their hands.
    Of course, I didn't say.
    Nobody bothered me, yeah?
    I just want to say how it was.
    Then the son of a--
    How did you know not to say "Heil Hitler"?
    It wasn't for me.
    I don't know if I was instructed.
    I just didn't say.
    You're right.
    I wasn't instructed not to say it.
    But I know it wasn't for me.
    It's like I didn't say the Paternoster.
    I was just standing, and then I sat down.
    That's all, yeah?
    But anyway, I want to tell you about this particular case.
    In--
    Doesn't that take a lot of inner strength to be the only child?
    You are 15-years-old only, and not
    to do something that everybody else is doing?
    I was proud.
    I was proud.
    Nobody could say that he's better than I am.
    I think I even have a little bit left today.
    No, I could not be convinced that I
    am a secondary person at all.
    It didn't go in my head.
    But listen, I want to tell you what
    happened in that particular class at school.
    I'm so sorry I forgot the teacher's name.
    In the inner city, there was a dentist
    who had a son, who got the parrot sickness.
    Do you know what I'm talking?
    I have-- I have the--
    it was almost fatal.
    But the main thing, it was so contagious
    that he had to be separated entirely.
    And it was already in Hitler's time.
    I asked our science teacher about the sickness.
    A few days later, he came and announced
    thanks to Erwin's inquiry, I started this case,
    and he gave us more than an hour a lecture on that sickness.
    So I felt good again.
    Yeah, we can say.
    The director of the school, which
    we call here the principal, called me in his class--
    in his office, and talked to me very gently,
    that I don't have to be afraid.
    Nothing is going to happen to me.
    A few days later, he wasn't there a principal.
    So that means another teacher.
    And his name was Schwede, and he was definitely a Nazi,
    even before.
    He always praised Mussolini.
    But what he meant was Hitler, yeah.
    Schwede, he took over.
    He took over.
    He didn't do-- he didn't pay--
    he didn't pay any attention to me, like I wasn't there, yeah?
    And he knew me well.
    And that previous principal gave me, I think,
    a few little mementos as a gift, but they kicked him out
    immediately.
    I don't even know what his background was.
    Maybe he was partially Jewish or not.
    I wouldn't know it, but I'm just saying that.
    So I personally went to the school until I left Austria.
    The same year, of course, in '38.
    My brothers, they walked across the river to a Jewish school.
    Didn't mind, either.
    They had a good time.
    That's it, yeah.
    Did anything happen immediately with your father's business
    once Hitler came into Austria?
    Stopped immediately.
    The business was gone.
    And immediately.
    Closed, end.
    Nothing.
    How did you react to that?
    We knew that we had to get out.
    And we didn't even object.
    We just wanted to get out.
    So it's not for us anymore.
    Let's get going.
    And if you want--
    so the plans were this.
    First of all, my mother's father was the chief rabbi
    in Oklahoma City, the orthodox chief rabbi.
    Rabbi [? Bachrach. ?] Isaac Joseph [? Bachrach. ?]
    He was very well known, especially
    his sons, which were from the second marriage.
    When did he come to the United States?
    1898.
    My mother was a little baby.
    They never followed him.
    You know what happened there.
    And then he married here again.
    Everything went great.
    One son was a very famous surgeon.
    He even handled the Roosevelt family.
    And the other one was the head of the Penns--
    Pittsburgh Utility Company.
    Yeah, bigshots.
    Then there was one son, he didn't develop that strong.
    But I did meet my grandfather later on, in 1951.
    Anyway, we got papers, and we thought we had it made.
    When did you get papers?
    Immediately, a month later.
    Yeah.
    This is April?
    Yeah.
    But the American Consulate said, there's a quota waiting list.
    We didn't understand that whole thing.
    And we made a few mistakes, too.
    Because if we would have developed--
    if we would have known more and delivered the papers
    to the consulate a few days earlier,
    we'd have a lower number.
    We didn't understand all those things.
    Yeah, we were just floating around there.
    And then I would have to tell you how things develop.
    If you wanted to hear it even now, yeah?
    So once we were home, at home, and the SS--
    SA men came in and picked up my father.
    When was this?
    I would say in April.
    Just about after Pesach.
    yeah, in April.
    And we didn't know where, what, yeah?
    And then later in the afternoon he
    came back a little bit depressed.
    So we asked what was going on.
    They collected a bunch of Jews--
    [COUGHING] excuse me-- and made a fun march of them.
    Gave them all kind of hats and just a broom in their hands,
    and they had to march through the city.
    And he was very embarrassed, because he was an officer
    in the Austrian army.
    Why would they do this to him, yeah?
    But he said, "you know, one thing
    I can at least comfort myself.
    I was in the middle, and nobody saw me."
    Anyway, after the end, my father went to that SS man--
    to the SA man.
    Always the same mistake.
    He went to the SA man.
    He said, "how can you do this to me?
    I was a front fighter for the Austrian army,
    and you humiliate me this way?"
    And that SA man gave him a bunch of chocolate for the children
    and said, take it home and shut up.
    Because that chocolate was stolen from the Jewish stores,
    yeah?
    So he gave him a bunch, said take it home for your kids.
    That was--
    What kind of hats did the men have to wear?
    Pardon?
    What kind of hats did the men have to wear?
    Whatever they gave them.
    I didn't see it in person.
    He came home and told us they made fun of them, yeah?
    But I want to say--
    to tell you something.
    That man who came in our house on the 11th of March, yeah,
    and told us he had--
    Frank was his name.
    He had a red flag in his basement.
    So my father told me that that fun march, the fun march
    went through a factory, a beer factory and a yeast factory.
    Old factories.
    Was over 100 years old, [INAUDIBLE] factory.
    And that Frank was in an SA uniform
    having a bunch of teenage Jewish girls
    cleaning those windows that were more than 100 years dirty.
    You know, it's the same Frank he told us when he came home.
    He was disappointed and depressed in a way.
    And interesting, a few hours later, this neighbor came again
    and said, "oh, wasn't that a shame they took you out?"
    My father thought nobody's seeing him.
    And they came.
    It was a unique relationship in our neighborhood.
    That can be told later.
    Something else happened.
    bar mitzvah on, I had a beautiful bike.
    It was a [? puch-- ?] a half-runner.
    Yeah, that means for mountains and all this.
    It was a marvelous bike I had, yeah.
    And we bought it.
    My parents bought it from someplace.
    And I was always riding on it.
    And so during Hitler's time, I was riding, too.
    Suddenly a man stopped me and said, "you know,
    that bike wasn't fully paid.
    You owe me some money on this."
    And he started fooling around with me.
    He wants some money.
    I didn't even know anything.
    And again, I was not so frightened as later on, yeah.
    Far away, my father saw that occurrence.
    He ran to him.
    He took him on his neck, and said
    "you leave him alone fast."
    So meanwhile, people surrounded us,
    saw that whole thing happen.
    And we came to a conclusion, the best
    would be to go to the police station and let them handle it.
    So we went all there.
    And the head of the police station
    said, I guarantee for the Deutscher family.
    Yeah, they're great, and there's nothing to worry about.
    And if they say they paid you, they paid you.
    Suddenly, an SA man came in Again
    and they gave that officer to understand, yeah,
    now we are here and not you.
    So that officer told my father, give him a few mark
    and let him go, and that's the way it was.
    Still probably a few months later,
    or after the Kristallnacht, it would have
    been a different result, yeah?
    And yeah, the main thing that happened,
    as soon as our business just stopped,
    yeah, people owed us money.
    But we owed money to those that delivered the milk to us
    for pasteurizing.
    And again, I was the ambassador of the family.
    So they sent me to the courthouse
    with a bunch of notes to tell them, people owe us this,
    and we would like to pay our creditors.
    And I came there, and a man was sitting
    in a beautiful office, all mahogany,
    and all kind of Nazi items hanging around, yeah.
    It looks like who knows what, something in Nuremberg.
    I sit there.
    But he let me sit down very comfortably.
    And he told me, look, there is a new regime in this country,
    but justice is still observed.
    And I gave him all those to collect and to pay,
    all the notes we had.
    And I ran home immediately and told my parents,
    mission accomplished.
    Everything is fine.
    Yeah, I had so much confidence out of this.
    I thought this will be settled.
    And we still had a little bit money,
    and I withdrew it slowly from the bank,
    that they shouldn't see that it was drawn at once.
    And we had Austrian Schillings to change to German Marks.
    They cheated us once in a while a little bit,
    but we still could survive.
    In the garden of our villa, we had a little--
    I wouldn't call it shed.
    No, a little house.
    A wooden house.
    And we rented this house to a Gentile woman, an old woman.
    This woman paid until my parents left the same day.
    The Nazis told her she doesn't have to pay us.
    She said I'm going to pay them.
    For some reason, we were lucky.
    It's just unbelievable how this thing--
    And yeah, my mother went--
    during the same period, I would say April, or the end of April,
    yeah, to some of our debtors to collect money.
    Mrs. Fuchs what's her name.
    And again, she promised my mother pretty soon
    to give them some money.
    And mother was happy.
    Everything is fine.
    A few hours later, the Nazis came and picked her up.
    We didn't know a thing.
    And for two or three days, we didn't
    know what happened to her.
    Finally, there was a Jewish lawyer, which we never
    knew that he was Jewish.
    At least he had some connections.
    He could find out where they were--
    where my mother was.
    And he even composed a letter.
    He said, he--
    Your mother was taken away?
    Yeah, she was taken away.
    From-- could you repeat that?
    Because that woman probably said something against her, yeah.
    Were you home when your mother was taken away?
    We were all home.
    And what was that like for you?
    Can you describe that--
    Sad.
    --situation when that happened?
    It was shocking.
    But--
    Who came to take her?
    A Nazi uniformed man, a man came picking her up.
    She will be interrogated, something like this, they said.
    We still hoped she will be back in a couple hours or something.
    Did she said anything special to you
    or did you say anything special to her?
    She still hoped that everything would be OK.
    Especially with-- we had already papers to the United States.
    What are they going to do with us, yeah?
    They didn't let her go.
    So anyway, this man composed a letter,
    but he didn't want it on his stationery.
    He didn't want to be involved, this lawyer, yeah?
    We mailed it in.
    At least we found contact where she was.
    And I just want to tell you--
    Where was she?
    In the district magistrate--
    no, the district Kommissariat, they called it.
    Where the police-- the head police quarter of the district.
    And we children, all four--
    which children, all four, were able to get in there, yeah?
    How?
    OK, first of all, we said, our mother is in.
    We want to see her.
    So they let us in.
    Then when we went out, we saw a lady.
    She was Mrs. Bauer.
    And we pulled her in and said, why don't you
    go in and tell that we are a good family and doing
    everything right?
    And I was able to put her in.
    And she at least made more contact for us
    to see my mother.
    But there was something--
    Where was your father?
    My father was at home.
    He didn't come with you?
    No.
    No, because he thought the children will
    have an easier time to get in there,
    four children, small, yeah?
    So yeah, and by the way, this Mrs. Bauer and her husband,
    they were good friends of ours, yeah?
    He looked like Schubert.
    And he liked when we called him Schubert, yeah?
    Very good friends.
    And she told us that he's now a Nazi, and he's divorcing her,
    yeah.
    So we felt sorry for her, and she helped us.
    Whatever it is.
    And my sister--
    I didn't know this.
    She's a year and a half younger than I am.
    She had candies in her pocket, because non-Jewish kids
    gave her some, because she's going to her mother.
    So we went In and right away, probably
    girls can do this much better.
    She jumped on my mother and cried and cried
    and stuffed in here those sweets in, yeah?
    I found it out much later.
    It was very dramatic.
    And the policemen were standing on the side, just looked at us.
    Yeah, you cannot put two and two together how sometimes things
    were.
    And anyway, we couldn't get her out.
    We couldn't get my mother out.
    Then they moved her to a central jail.
    They called it Landesgericht.
    That was a real jail, in the full meaning of the word.
    We still played around with the letters and sometimes,
    always children.
    Yeah, my father didn't even try.
    He wouldn't make any good.
    Nothing.
    Meanwhile, I got a notice from the Hashomer
    that I have been selected to go to Israel,
    and that Yosef Burg will take me.
    So I told my father, "how can I go to Israel?
    My mother isn't here."
    He said, "you go ahead with the papers.
    We'll talk some other time."
    And then came a lady, a non-Jewish lady.
    She was with my mother in the concen--
    in the jail.
    She said, don't worry about your mother.
    She's a strong woman.
    She will know how to get out of here.
    And really a few days later, the door opened, and she came in.
    Yeah, she was there about two months, something, yeah?
    Like this, no explanation.
    There was a rumor that when she visited Mrs. Fuchs,
    Mrs. Fuchs right away called the Nazi Party
    and told them that my mother said
    that Hitler is not a problem.
    Will be here just a short time and will just fade away.
    And that's why she was picked up?
    Yeah, and she said, of course, she didn't say it, yeah?
    God knows whatever happened in those few minutes when they
    were together, because she pro--
    that Mrs. Fuchs promised her some money, yeah?
    Who knows?
    So anyway, this was I would say July when she came back, yeah?
    Maybe a little--
    So by that time, you had finished the school year
    by July.
    And so what were you doing in the summer?
    The summer I had to prepare for my trip to Israel.
    All kinds of stuff.
    Yeah, papers endless.
    Yeah, and they sent me always--
    yeah, you know the Nazis took over the Rothschild palace
    in Vienna.
    And that was the immigration office.
    So I did almost everything myself.
    Yeah, but finally they demanded that my father
    shall come and sign papers that he doesn't owe any taxes.
    No tax.
    I told him this.
    He was scared.
    He said, how can I sign a paper?
    What do I know?
    But I have money, yeah?
    They will figure out the taxes.
    Anyway, I pulled them always with me.
    And the guy who was in charge of this
    was Eichmann, Adolf Eichmann.
    And I pulled him like this after me.
    I already had my passport.
    And he saw that my father didn't move, and he starts screaming.
    Don't you want him to leave?
    Sign that lousy paper and let him go.
    And the odd thing, I don't want to defend Eichmann,
    but I want just to say what the stage at that time was.
    There were Jewish girls handling the paperwork,
    a lot of Jewish girls, yeah?
    I don't know if he told them jokes or not,
    they smiled once a while when he talked to them.
    So I cannot explain the whole thing, yeah?
    But he was there, and he handled the end stage of my case.
    This is at the central office for Jewish immigration.
    That was in the Rothschild palace, yeah?
    How did you know it was Eichmann?
    Pardon?
    Oh.
    How did you know that it was Eichmann.
    They said it's Eichmann.
    Yeah, he wasn't that great at that time,
    but they call him Eichmann, yeah?
    And then later on when I saw the picture, I saw it's him, yeah?
    But at the same-- at that time, I
    didn't expect that they are killers.
    You understand?
    That didn't go in my head, yeah?
    But do you know when I was in this Rothschild palace,
    it was beautiful like a museum?
    You think I didn't walk around and look on all the pictures?
    Yes, well, if I'm already there, why shouldn't I have the fun?
    So the staff was--
    the working staff were Jewish?
    Some, some, some.
    Some of the girls were Jewish, but there were
    a lot of uniforms there, yeah?
    I don't understand why I had so much energy just to see--
    I think I went to all the floors and looked around.
    What did Eichmann look like to you?
    He was young.
    He was only 32.
    I didn't make a big fuss.
    One like the others, yeah?
    The only thing, I want to get out.
    And I know to continue in Vienna didn't make sense, anyway.
    So that was that.
    But then I had to go to the city hall.
    I don't know.
    It's a beautiful building, the city hall in Vienna,
    a special building called the Rathaus.
    And I had to get papers settled.
    Whatever it is, I forgot even the exact papers.
    And there was an elevator.
    Actually, it was an entirely different elevator.
    They still have some in Vienna at the university.
    They call them Paternoster.
    You have to crawl in, and it goes by itself, always around.
    I don't think you ever saw something
    like this in the United States.
    You go in, and then you get off.
    If you missed the floor, you had to go all around.
    Anyway, there was a big sign, "Jews are forbidden to use it."
    I think I used that elevator for 20 minutes, easy.
    I just crawled in and out, in and out, yeah?
    I just wanted it this way.
    What do you attribute this--
    Pardon?
    What do you attribute your daring to?
    I was-- first of all, wherever I was, that was mine, yeah?
    The city was mine, everything.
    He's pulling me out.
    That's it.
    And then I found out that Hitler was coming on the Ringstrasse.
    I was standing there.
    I was watching like all the others.
    And of course they were saying "Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler."
    I just was standing.
    Nobody bothered me.
    You know, we didn't have any signs at that time, yeah?
    Then one guy came to me and said, "why don't you
    say Heil Hitler?"
    That guy was not a Nazi.
    He was a homosexual.
    He started fooling around.
    I said, you get out of here fast.
    Yeah, I even told him to get out of my eyesight, yeah?
    Didn't say a word.
    Just didn't.
    And then I was once on the same Ringstrasse just see Hess
    when he passed.
    And it was the same.
    I just was there, yeah, a kid.
    When you saw Hitler, what were your impressions?
    Nothing.
    I just think everybody's crazy to scream
    so loud to one man, yeah?
    It doesn't make sense.
    It didn't go in my head.
    And there was one of our neighbors,
    he got a black uniform, but it was not an SS.
    I think he had to do with the artillery.
    They had black uniforms, too.
    And they said when he died, he was killed in the field.
    When he died, he said "I'm dying in the name of Hitler"
    and just said "Heil Hitler."
    And I just had to laugh, yeah?
    How can a person die for one man, yeah?
    So my reaction was always that I'm ahead of them.
    That's all, yeah?
    I had maybe a supreme feeling.
    It's hard to say exactly what it is.
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum interview with Erwin Deutscher.
    This is tape number two, side A. And we had gotten up
    to this summer time of 1938.
    And you had already gone with your father
    to the Central Office of Jewish Emigration and got your papers.
    Let me just interject a little bit,
    which I didn't mention before.
    You know that I was a member of the HaShomer HaDati.
    And one Saturday was one meeting there.
    Our leaders were definitely pleasant people,
    outstanding leaders.
    And one was Dr. Weinstein.
    And the other one--
    oh, yeah, I'll remember it in a few minutes.
    These were Viennese Jews?
    Viennese Jews who are leading this.
    And everything was so tranquil.
    And we wanted to be prepared for the trip we are
    supposed to make these 25 kids.
    Suddenly, a few Nazis broke in, came in--
    wild, broke a few furnitures and some.
    That, we didn't expect.
    Is this while you were there?
    Yeah.
    That, we didn't expect.
    They were just informing us what to expect in Israel, and so on.
    At that time, it was Palestine, of course.
    And the leaders talked to the Nazis.
    Whatever you want, we are going to do.
    We are just informing those children what to do in Israel.
    And we were, what?
    We couldn't understand that something like this can happen.
    We were all sad, choked--
    not so much for ourselves, that they insult our leaders, who
    were great people in the city.
    And we just couldn't even see that there
    will be an end to this.
    They were wild.
    They are like animals.
    For some reason, they left.
    And we were happy about this.
    And they told us, go home.
    We will instruct you not in the central place anymore.
    We will find.
    And they didn't use--
    first of all, many people didn't have phones.
    That wasn't so common.
    And for some reason, they contact each one.
    And I was so happy that both of those leaders survived.
    One was in Haifa, and the other one in London.
    Yeah, they came on.
    But this was a shock.
    I went home.
    Had you seen any other examples of physical assault
    on the streets or in buildings up to that time?
    Direct assaults, which we heard in history,
    no, but a few unique things.
    The Jews were cleaning the streets with a toothbrush.
    Did you see that?
    I saw it.
    But I moved away.
    I didn't stand there.
    Why not?
    It could be that either I was scared,
    or I was ashamed to see something like this.
    They told them to get dressed.
    And the women went for a coat, and the best coat.
    I would say I was rather embarrassed more than even
    frightened.
    I didn't want to see it.
    It was sad.
    You see your own best people.
    And they're in a fur coat with a toothbrush cleaning the signs,
    the [NON-ENGLISH],, written with the lacquer signs.
    Vote for this.
    So I never stood.
    And then, on the other hand, you would
    see the stupidity of those people that
    were standing on the side and laughing, which
    was just unbelievable.
    Well, what?
    Do you enjoy when people are in such agony, embarrassment?
    But--
    Did you feel threatened?
    No.
    No.
    No.
    I thought they just take advantage of us.
    A small, little story I have to tell you on this. , Actually,
    it will be two.
    I had to go again to this [PLACE NAME]
    Palace about my papers.
    Back to the emigration office.
    Yes, the emigration office.
    And it is common that students would always stand in
    a streetcar, not sitting.
    They would not sit inside.
    They would stand on the corners of the train.
    And there were a few students there
    a little bit older than I was.
    Of course, they had no idea that I was a Jew.
    They didn't even pay attention that I was there.
    So they had no idea what I was or what I--
    So they mentioned that it's better now than it was before.
    Things are better organized.
    And there's a better future.
    And one young student--
    they call them [? Buckfish. ?] That means,
    if they're between 15 to 17 years old they call them
    [? Buckfish, ?] because that's where the girls develop.
    And she said, it's really better.
    But why do they have to mistreat the Jews
    in such an embarrassing manner?
    And then they started to pay attention to what was going on.
    So then they came to a conclusion
    and said, well, if the fuhrer would know this,
    he would not permit to do it.
    That's just the low class of it.
    Of course, then we found that it's almost the opposite.
    The low class were better than the fuhrer himself.
    Yeah, they said, but the fuhrer has class.
    That he was able to hypnotize a nation, which
    was supposed to be a somewhat cultured nation, a nation
    one of the--
    well, I would say the British and French had a good name.
    But the Germans had a name with their whole conscience.
    And the Jews were involved in their cultures.
    I heard then once, in Hitler's time, once they were saying,
    the Jews can never be good in the German language,
    because those are foreigners.
    When they speak, there's always some slang in it.
    Did you still feel very Austrian at this point--
    No.
    --when Hitler was in power?
    The only thing I feel is--
    I'm talking about at that time.
    Yeah.
    Even today, he had no right to kick me out.
    And I can do what I want to do.
    I like to do--
    I was born there.
    What is beautiful in the city, I like to enjoy.
    What is not so beautiful, I brush it away.
    Even today, I feel very comfortable there,
    because that guy even who was left there--
    he had not more rights and more wisdom than I had, nothing.
    And really, they tried sometimes to impress me
    that I am the great one, and they are nothing,
    they themself.
    So you are now 15 and a half years old.
    And it's the summer time.
    And you've got your papers to go to Palestine.
    And both your parents are home--
    Yeah.
    - With you?
    Both.
    That's an additional story.
    By the way, I wanted to--
    as religious as my father was-- and that
    was the last day of Simchat Torah when I left,
    in the evening.
    He let me go to the bank and pick up two and a half
    Palestinian pounds.
    They had Palestinian pounds.
    I was surprised.
    I give him mark, and they gave me the Palestinian pounds.
    And that was another story, what happened.
    But he let me do it.
    So you continued your life until you left in the fall.
    Did you do anything special in September?
    Well, first I went to school.
    And there was, too--
    Did you start school in the fall?
    No.
    No, because I was leaving already.
    Even there--
    What were your thoughts then, 15 and a half,
    leaving your parents and your siblings?
    That cannot be answered in one second.
    There's too much involved, because the powers that
    worked on me were not only the sentimental
    powers of being a son of parents or a brother of siblings.
    Zionism had a strong impact, because I
    want to build a country.
    And when we went to my full departure
    on the southern station, the terminal station
    to go to Italy, from the streetcar to the station,
    we had to walk a couple of blocks.
    And there came an old woman-- an elderly woman, let's say.
    And she-- oh, you poor Jew boy, they drive you out
    of this country.
    I said, heck, you stay with that idiot.
    I'm going to my country, and I want to be a free person.
    And of course, if I would have said this a few weeks later,
    then someone would have heard.
    It would be different.
    But at that time, I just almost liked to express myself.
    Did you look older than 15 and a half?
    No.
    No.
    No.
    No.
    No.
    No.
    I don't think I looked older than the others.
    NO.
    So you went with this group of 25?
    Yeah.
    What about your family?
    They went with me, too.
    That's what I'm now saying.
    They went with me to the terminal.
    Do you know, before we left, we danced the Hora,
    because we are going into the right [INAUDIBLE]..
    The atmosphere was great.
    Nobody disturbed it.
    They let us dance there.
    And then we moved into the car.
    Do you know, as sad as it was, we were happy children.
    That's just unbelievable.
    You had said, by that time, you said goodbye to your parents.
    Of course.
    Did they say anything special to you?
    Well, of course, the mother expressed and all this.
    This, I don't forget what my father said.
    He said, be a Jew.
    You see, for them, the whole country knew it is Jewish.
    So that means do the commandments, like this.
    And by the way, I had a grandfather
    in [PLACE NAME],, which is Poland.
    He wrote me a card, because I wrote to him all the times.
    I started when I was six years old.
    So I wrote in Hebrew letters German.
    It wasn't Yiddish, because I didn't know.
    And he wrote me not to go to Palestine,
    because in Palestine it's very hard to be a religious Jew,
    and wait until my papers come to the United States.
    I just want to say how things were.
    Of course, my father, he would have crawled to Israel
    if he could have gone.
    Israel was more important to him than the United States,
    also to my mother, because it was her father whom she never
    had seen.
    That was her dream.
    And not only the dream of seeing her father--
    the New world was just in her head.
    That's the way it was.
    So now you're on the train with these 25 children.
    Did you know them well before you left?
    Some.
    I knew some of them.
    I even have a few--
    one picture left from that period.
    Were these boys and girls?
    And what ages?
    No, only boys, because we went to a boys' school.
    What ages were they?
    The same age.
    Most of them were a little bit older.
    I would say a year older, or something like this.
    And who were the leaders?
    The leader-- well, we went to the group.
    That whole transport was organized by, or at least
    handled by Joseph Burg, who was for many years
    a member of the Israel cabinet.
    I met him in Jerusalem just a few years ago.
    He's still there.
    He's 86 years old, or something like this.
    He was very active.
    That guy didn't think too much about Hitler
    either, because a year later, he was back in Czechoslovakia
    and tried to pull him out there.
    He thought he can do all those things.
    They were a certain individual.
    But you know about the relationship
    after the departure with my parents.
    There's a whole story, because--
    you want--
    Well, let's follow along on your journey.
    So you went from Vienna to?
    Trieste.
    From Vienna, I went to Trieste.
    Because we left at 10 O'clock in the morning,
    we arrived at 10 O'clock at night.
    Other children fell asleep.
    I had a little calendar book.
    I wrote on every station, looked out, and this.
    And one man had two sons.
    They went to Israel.
    And he begged me to take a golden pin with me.
    I said, why not?
    And on the border, the Nazis, already in black uniforms,
    started to examine me where everything is.
    The pin was here.
    He just didn't see it.
    He didn't pay attention.
    I brought it to Israel.
    But I was up until the first--
    until we arrived in Trieste.
    Didn't sleep a second, wrote down every note.
    And then what happened in Trieste?
    In Trieste, as soon as I left the train--
    and first, we saw--
    it was the Mediterranean.
    But to us, it was an ocean, as we saw open, white.
    It was new.
    We saw that big ship that was waiting for us.
    But the main thing--
    you felt you could eat it.
    We felt freedom.
    People were smiling, freedom.
    And I recognized that freedom.
    The interesting thing is--
    How did you recognize it?
    That all that [INAUDIBLE] is behind me.
    And I was more concentrated on myself than probably
    on my family.
    And I jump a little bit ahead.
    But then we'll have to go back again.
    When I was in Israel just a few days, I wrote my parents.
    I wrote my father.
    I wrote to him.
    You wouldn't believe it.
    I am so free.
    And it's so good.
    But I am homesick.
    And then that's the only letter I
    got for him, because after this, he was in Dachau.
    They took-- on the Kristallnacht.
    He said, you wouldn't believe it.
    Every night, when I fell asleep, I
    had to cry first, because I knew you were leaving us.
    And that was going for two months.
    So until I comprehended the whole thing,
    he had got that feeling-- so free, everything is fine.
    And now I'm getting homesick.
    What do you want, go back?
    This is hard to explain for people who cannot grasp all
    those things.
    All kind of powers work together.
    Of course, in Israel--
    we will have to talk about this later.
    Israel preoccupied us so much, because we had the unrest.
    OK, now you get on the boat in Trieste.
    Yeah.
    And what was the voyage like?
    The voyage was great.
    It was very great.
    Only there was one Arab Nazi, which is [INAUDIBLE],,
    because we were on a Italian ship, on the Galilea.
    What day was this?
    No, wait.
    Monday, we arrived.
    So I think it was Wednesday.
    Wednesday.
    No, what date.
    What date?
    OK, the 18th.
    I left the 18th of October.
    We went on the trains.
    On the 19th, we boarded the ship.
    We embarked on the ship.
    And for some reason, we stopped at that Arab.
    So many people, they just talked to me.
    And he said, as long as there are Jews in Palestine,
    and as long as--
    the full words, I want to say.
    As long as there are Jews in Palestine,
    and as long as there are Arabs in Palestine,
    there will never be peace.
    And of course, I react with indifference.
    I listen.
    You are talking to people who know what they want.
    But anyway, I felt very comfortable.
    Did you take anything special with you, anything sentimental?
    Did your parents give you anything?
    Well, by the way, some of the Jewish businesses,
    they had to close.
    They gave us material we would need in Palestine, like a--
    how do you call those nets?
    Mosquito nets and special boots.
    We got this.
    Did you take anything sentimental with you?
    I had my [INAUDIBLE].
    And of course, I had that [INAUDIBLE],,
    and all this Hebrew stuff.
    And that's it.
    I didn't want to take too much away from them.
    Let them have it.
    Did you take photographs?
    We didn't.
    I have only one picture.
    That's all.
    It was the passport picture.
    That's all I have.
    And the passport is gone.
    So I have it, the membership of HaShomer HaDati.
    It's the only one I have left, and then
    that little picture in Trieste, which I enlarged.
    And now it's a great thing I have at home.
    Is this a picture of the group?
    It's the original group, the nucleus of the group.
    That means the HaShomer HaDati from before, not the new one,
    [INAUDIBLE].
    Interesting, each of those individuals, one was--
    listen, they were all famous later on in the army,
    and after this.
    But this is a different story.
    We'll talk about that.
    So you arrive.
    How long was your voyage to Palestine?
    Four days.
    Five days, actually.
    It was five.
    What did you do on board ship?
    Oh.
    We had our meetings.
    They gave us even films.
    Every day, we had American films, Zarah Leander,
    all that stuff, [INAUDIBLE].
    It didn't even interest us much, because we
    were looking forward.
    Always, we were talking about the past and about the future.
    We didn't talk about our home so much.
    It's about the Zionist movement.
    How big a group of children were there?
    Well, this, the close group, was 25 Viennese.
    There were others, too.
    Even the Palestinian doors were close, too.
    And that's a big story.
    It goes on.
    But--
    So you come to Palestine.
    And what was your first impression?
    By the way, I did not tell you that I
    had an aunt in Palestine.
    And that was-- that happened in [INAUDIBLE]..
    In 1932, the second murder case--
    that means murder for money--
    was my uncle.
    They killed him.
    He had a little factory--
    a shop, rather-- to make brushes.
    And the brushes were made from animal hair.
    For some reason, there was a dispute between one
    who supplied them, the hairs.
    Actually, I think they stole the hairs from the slaughterhouses.
    They brought him.
    They killed him.
    And--
    Where was this?
    In Vienna.
    And the newspapers, because life insurance was almost not--
    not, common, at least--
    collected some money for the widow with her two children.
    And after years, somehow she got an entrance--
    and that was, I'm talking, 1932 or '33.
    They went to Israel.
    She couldn't help us either to get papers, and so on.
    Yes, I know she was there.
    But when we arrived, she didn't even come to the boat.
    It was very unique.
    Everybody was afraid to move around.
    It's not like Israel today.
    But anyway, I came.
    And when we--
    What was it like to put your foot down on soil?
    That's exactly what I'm trying to tell you.
    When we arrived, we came to stay overnight.
    They called it [NON-ENGLISH].
    That means, to an emigration house.
    We still were happy.
    And we saw a few Viennese there.
    They already were in the auxiliary police,
    and helped a little bit, or bragged
    a little bit, whatever, as if they know
    whatever is going on there.
    And we slept there overnight.
    The main thing immediately was how you were served food.
    First of all, there was a little smell
    in those kind of dining rooms.
    They didn't have linen cover on the table, whatever materials
    were so easier to clean.
    It had a little smell.
    It was already different.
    It was like a commune.
    It was OK.
    We were young, what does it matter, this.
    And then, because I haven't even told you where we were going,
    we were going to Mikveh Israel, the outstanding agricultural
    school in Israel.
    It was something supreme, actually.
    The school was great.
    And it had a system like in England,
    10 children in one room.
    And this was only boys there.
    But it was a great school.
    At that time, it was very prestigious, too.
    And we did appreciate all this.
    But the first few days--
    homesick.
    I think the Viennese showed it strong, their homesickness.
    They showed it stronger than those
    that came from Germany, because the Germans were already
    in preparation camps before.
    You see, in Germany, that whole thing started slow.
    And we got that whole thing at once.
    And I think, in the first few years,
    the Jews had a much better chance
    to leave the country than in the coming years.
    But to put your foot down on the soil for the first time,
    was that a special--
    It was a thrill in the full meaning.
    And you know, when you come on in Haifa,
    it's a beautiful city.
    And you see the Carmel Mountains immediately.
    And then, of course, Jews are all around.
    You don't even have to think about everything.
    And we really were dreaming about building a country,
    not only just coming there as refugees, and so on.
    So You go to this agricultural settlement in Israel.
    Two years, I was there in that school.
    And that was outstanding.
    The level of learning was great.
    The atmosphere was great.
    Of course, we were in a religious compound.
    We were almost different than the regular students--
    well, although we worked together.
    There were so many famous people in that school.
    The chief-- how do you call it?
    The chief rabbi-- no, we don't.
    In the military, the chief--
    Chaplin.
    Chief Chaplin slept in the--
    I was four years with him together.
    And then Haim Bar-Lev, who was the head
    of the military's system, and many--
    the two sons of the future President, [INAUDIBLE],,
    we were all together.
    [PERSONAL NAME] was with me together.
    We were students together, two years.
    The whole atmosphere was very elevated.
    And there was no such thing that there was even
    not a single student who didn't study.
    And we didn't have to be pressed for anything.
    That was natural.
    And we did everything together.
    And we had to go.
    I would say, two weeks after, we arrived on Shmeerah to watch
    [INAUDIBLE] already arrive.
    I was 15 years old, 16.
    And we were very active in all this--
    exercising, working, studying, studying Judaism.
    The food was very unique, but we liked it.
    The first time I ate olives, they were bitter.
    And then, later on, I loved them--
    halva, and all this.
    It's a new world.
    We loved it.
    Did you know what was happening?
    Now you left in October.
    That's a totally different story.
    Did you know about Kristallnacht?
    My mother-- you're talking about Vienna, what happened there.
    My mother should have been a member either of the Secret
    Service or whatever it is.
    She sent me a letter.
    And there were a few lines left over.
    She said, well, I left those lines for your father, for Dad.
    I left a few lines.
    Oh, he just left, and didn't add.
    Next time, she wrote, he went to get some food downtown
    to the markets.
    Again, he didn't write.
    And then she-- oh, he had some meetings in the consular.
    And she pulled me for two and a half months.
    And for some reason, I didn't follow.
    Then she writes back, he just came back from Dachau.
    And of course, later on, he was in Buchenwald, too.
    But I'm just-- that's the way she--
    Meanwhile, I had a few guys--
    or at least one I definitely know.
    But he was informed by his mother that, from Dachau,
    they sent his urn home.
    That's the ashes.
    And--
    So your father was picked up after Kristallnacht.
    The same.
    They took him in the stadium.
    And he was picked up.
    First, he was taken in the stadium in Vienna.
    And they were picked up.
    Then later on, of course, he told me who was with him.
    But he was stubborn.
    Let's say, he--
    Did you know about Kristallnacht when you were in Palestine?
    But I didn't know that my father was in it.
    But you knew about what had happened.
    They were cracking a few synagogues.
    How do you know?
    It was not so clear as it really was.
    Kristallnacht-- so they have damaged a few stores.
    On the other hand, I know that they had papers to America.
    So somehow, it would have to go through, whatever,
    to grandfather.
    But as soon as he left Dachau, he
    was 45 kilograms, about 90 pounds.
    So the American consular tells him, you have to recover.
    And then, because he said--
    he told me, you will not be able to stand
    ocean trip in this condition.
    So when he recovered--
    he was discharged from Dachau in January.
    1939.
    1939.
    And in June, they picked him up for Buchenwald.
    And again, my mother didn't tell me.
    And then, after September '39, I had no contact at all.
    So I didn't know what happened.
    I didn't know if they survived, if they lived, whatever it is.
    Later on, the stories--
    well, then really the stories started
    there, which was great agony.
    You heard Hitler marches into Poland September, 1939.
    And what was your reaction being in Palestine?
    That time it already started to penetrate
    that we're in real troubles.
    And then, later on when we found out about more concentration
    camps, we saw it very badly.
    But until the full destruction came,
    that took a little bit longer to even penetrate.
    And we still had hopes this will be, and this will be.
    But then we saw that the doors were locked.
    You couldn't get Jews out.
    I got other relatives.
    They came on illegal transports.
    They went to Danube town, and so on.
    So many came at the doors of Palestine.
    Some were taken to one of the islands,
    to the British islands, and then later on some to Cyprus.
    Your father was taken away to Buchenwald when,
    and for how long?
    Until, again, January '40, in 1940.
    But I didn't know anything about this.
    That was already an entirely different story,
    that Buchenwald business.
    Anyway, in January 1940, the commandant of Buchenwald
    approached him and said, they're working for you in the United
    States to get you out of here.
    And my father reacted--
    oh, yeah.
    And he said, well, we're going to relieve you soon.
    And for some reason, he felt so confident to talk
    to that commandant.
    He said, why do you hate the Jews so much?
    He says, 'cause they're bad people.
    So my father told him, all of them?
    Don't we have a handful of good people, some of them?
    He said, well, very few.
    Then he said, tell me, and Germans, are they good people?
    Yes, definitely, he said.
    Don't you have a few crooks?
    And meanwhile, the commandant knew
    what was going on in his head.
    So at that day, when my father was relieved,
    they had 1 meter snow in Buchenwald.
    And 11 Aryans were released, non-Jews.
    And he was the only Jew relieved.
    So he called the Aryans.
    And he told them, that Jew will have to march out
    with you on the gate.
    And they were marching, they called it, in goose lines, one
    after the other.
    And what happens when you go in snow?
    When the first one gets tired, he goes on the side
    and goes in at the last one so that it's easier to walk.
    And he told him, that Jew is always going to be the last.
    And he protected him, I just want to say.
    So as soon as those Aryans came to the gate of Buchenwald,
    they just let him lay in the snow.
    Apparently, that guy knew that will happen.
    So they came in as--
    wagon, like this.
    They just threw him in that wagon and drove him to the--
    maybe because he had to go to America.
    I don't know.
    He drove him to the terminal.
    And at the terminal, my father stands there.
    And the detective came to him.
    What are you doing here?
    And he said, well, you know what I'm doing here,
    because, you know, his beard.
    Oh, they just released you from over there?
    Yes.
    So why are you standing here?
    I'm hungry, very hungry.
    So the detective looked at him and said, why don't you
    go in that restaurant?
    Go in and get something.
    He said, don't you see the sign?
    It says, Jews and dogs, their entrance forbidden.
    Oh, OK, I'll buy you something.
    He says, I don't have any money.
    So the detective bought him some food.
    He swallowed it.
    Then he went to buy his tickets.
    And that girl looked at him and said, you're very hungry,
    aren't you?
    She slipped her sandwich to him.
    He said, kosher, he's not going to eat it.
    He ate everything.
    And he still was standing there.
    And then the detective-- why are you standing?
    Why don't you go?
    He says, don't you know?
    The Jews can only go on the train
    who stops in every station, the local, not the free.
    Oh.
    So he put him on a--
    that detective put him on a military transport.
    And he said there were soldiers also.
    He said not a single soldier paid attention to him.
    And they were drinking beer.
    And everyone-- he said he had a thirst for that yeast.
    Every drop that was left, he said, ugly or not,
    his body demanded it.
    So then he arrived in Vienna at night.
    And in Vienna, the last streetcar has a blue light.
    That means you don't have to wait.
    He comes, and he saw that last one,
    that last streetcar passing.
    So he walked home, and far, to cross the river, walked home.
    So he came up between 2 and 3 O'clock at home.
    And we had those spiked wooden fence.
    Do you know what I'm-- green, spiked woods.
    He climbed over this.
    And he knocked on the door.
    And my mother didn't want to-- she didn't recognize his face,
    didn't want to go in, didn't let him in.
    And my sister said, that's Dad.
    Let him in, [INAUDIBLE].
    Finally, they let him in.
    He came in like in a marathon run.
    He fell down.
    You understand?
    He could make it up to there, down.
    They picked him up in the bed.
    And then they started feeding him for days, and so on.
    He had, too-- he have something very unique.
    The next day, my mother went to a store
    and wanted to buy some food.
    In the store, there was a woman.
    She's screaming, you dirty Jews.
    Do you come in my store?
    You filthy here, everything here.
    And the other customers--
    at that time, it was little grocery stores.
    The other customers knew him.
    She was so embarrassed.
    And then that woman gave here a sign.
    She said, well, you come later on.
    We'll have some junk, what's left over.
    But you have to pay for it.
    This is at 4 O'clock, or something like this.
    And when she came to the store, there
    were two packages, good food.
    And she didn't even take any money.
    Can you put two and two together?
    God knows.
    But their luck was that neighborhood was a little bit
    different.
    They had a Jewish doctor.
    He was on a bike.
    We didn't know that he was Jewish.
    That doctor did so much good for them, maybe.
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum interview with Erwin Deutscher.
    This is tape number two, side B. And you've already
    mentioned previously that you had arrived in Palestine.
    You had been two years at this agricultural school, Mikveh
    Israel.
    And you had told us of your father returning
    from Buchenwald.
    So let's pick up from that point.
    In order to tell you the next step, for Mikveh Israel
    to the yeshiva actually that I went,
    I have to tell you how it happened.
    Let's just say the time.
    This is 1940.
    Do you remember what month when you finished Mikveh Israel?
    It was the fall, 1940.
    And at that time, the unrest in Israel came to a still stand.
    As soon as World War II started September 1939,
    for some reason, the Arabs immediately
    stopped attacking us.
    So we had a grand tour.
    As a reward to the studies in Mikveh Israel,
    they organized for the grand tour, a lot [AUDIO OUT]
    marching in the land itself.
    And between the Netanya section and the Hadera section,
    on a hill, we saw a beautiful building--
    first of all, a large building with a cupola,
    and then a arrangement of small rooms from the side.
    We inquired what it is.
    And they told us it is the agricultural yeshiva.
    Mizrahi started this.
    However, because World War II stopped the flow of money
    for those kind of expenses, Bnai Akiva, through Rabbi Neria,
    just saw those empty buildings.
    And he had about 13 people.
    And they started to open yeshiva Bnai Akiva.
    When we passed by, the main thing that went in our mind
    was what to do after that school.
    So we were between 17 and 19 years old.
    I, personally, was the youngest of this group.
    And as much as they encouraged us to go to a kibbutz or start
    working, we were yearning to get more education.
    Money didn't exist, not a little.
    We just didn't have anything.
    For some reason, we were five [INAUDIBLE]
    when we passed by after our excursion in Israel.
    And they pushed me.
    Let's get here and see what can be done.
    So we met Rabbi Neria.
    We told him the whole story.
    He was excited about us.
    But on the other hand, we didn't have any money.
    The yeshiva itself had almost nothing.
    And I am even not talking for food and tuition.
    What happens if one of us five gets sick?
    Who is going to take care?
    What are we going to do when the others get a few weeks
    vacation, and we had nowhere to go?
    Anyway, finally they took us.
    And they made arrangements that, rather to be regular students,
    we are the managers of the agricultural fields there.
    So we actually were already called managers.
    We had to work half a day, and have a day to study.
    But we had to study as good as the others.
    So that means we went up very early, got up very early,
    and studied in the evenings.
    And we just had to be ready for those classes
    as all the other students, a few.
    Then, meanwhile, the situation got quite bad-- first
    of all, Stalingrad and El Alamein.
    And the Haganah prepared us, at least mentally,
    that in case the Germans should be able to cross into Egypt--
    and if they would go to Egypt, they would have us entirely.
    So the Haganah had some plan.
    It wasn't fully known.
    But the women and the children would
    have to go to Southeast Asia, mainly to India.
    And the menfolks would have to hide in the mountains
    and fight against them.
    Well, here, you see, we were in the yeshiva itself.
    We were already active for the Haganah.
    But luck came very fast.
    And El Alamein was actually the beginning of the end
    when they pushed the Germans back.
    So there was relief.
    So I studied there two years.
    Some of the other fellows continued
    to go to higher schools in Jerusalem.
    But I got more entangled with the Haganah business.
    So the war defense was more serious to me.
    And this Rabbi Neria, he had a brother who came sometimes
    on Shabbat visiting us.
    And he came in full mounted police uniform.
    He was the head of that group.
    It started, actually, through General [PERSONAL NAME]..
    He was the friend of Israel.
    And once, after my two years, I just
    went visiting Rabbi Neria's brother.
    His name was [? Benjamin ?] [? Mankin. ?] And I just talked
    to him.
    What do you think about my joining this force, and so on?
    And he grabbed me first.
    Oh, we're waiting for you, for the kind of you.
    And he said--
    [COUGHS] excuse me--
    they just have a riding school starting in a few weeks.
    Come.
    And that was very fast.
    And I was a member of the--
    it was called [NON-ENGLISH],, Mounted Police Settlement
    Force--
    Settlement Police, rather.
    After a while, they pulled me into the Haganah headquarters.
    So I was a mounted police, and still
    had to go to the headquarters.
    And all the others is history.
    I just was involved there.
    So maybe a point I have to make-- now what
    I found out about my parents.
    But it was at that time I just didn't know
    what was going on with them.
    It's very interesting.
    I was thinking about them many times, quite often.
    But you have to know that we were
    so busy that our daily life had to be performed.
    And once in a while, I could get sad and think about this.
    For some reason, I don't think I fully
    expected them to be a casualty of that misery.
    I don't know.
    Maybe people think positive all the time.
    But I definitely [INAUDIBLE].
    So once I was on a maneuver in Tel Mond in the same section.
    And we had those new machine guns.
    They were full machine guns, not submachine guns.
    And Harold came running with a piece of paper right away.
    You got a telegram.
    You got a telegram.
    And it was a Red Cross telegram.
    It was already--
    I think it was in '43, 1943.
    It was a Red Cross telegram.
    And it had 24, 25 words.
    It was handled through the Spanish Red Cross.
    That means from the Italian to the Spanish Red Cross.
    And they told me they were in the Apennine Mountains there.
    From the telegram itself, I just found out that they were alive.
    They, with my sister, were alive.
    And no indication if they were in prison or privately hidden,
    and so on.
    But anyway, that was the only thing
    I received until the end of the war.
    The other details, I got later.
    But I have to tell you something else before I
    go into the other details.
    I mentioned to you before that there were two brothers, Edmund
    and Siegmund.
    They were lucky.
    In 1939-- it could be because of my grandfather
    in Oklahoma City, or not.
    In 1939, May 1939, they got a special arrangement
    to go to the United States.
    And they were in a children's system, probably a school year.
    And they had a pretty good time there.
    Of course, the older one, Edmund,
    was pretty soon drafted to the army for Second World--
    well, it was a little bit later.
    I am going a little bit too fast on this--
    because as soon as he arrived in the United States,
    he had his Bar Mitzvah.
    So his parents couldn't even be there.
    So I just want to say that those two went to Pennsylvania
    and were there two years in school.
    And then they went to my grandfather in Oklahoma City.
    But because it was the second marriage,
    it was not the same as it would be.
    So he then placed them in Chicago.
    And then, of course, World War II started.
    And Eddie had to go to the army.
    So this was settled.
    Now let's go back to my parents.
    As soon as the British conquered up to the middle part of Italy,
    they were able to get a ship to the United States.
    There were 1,100 people that Roosevelt
    let come into this country.
    I forgot the name of the ship, but I
    have it written down somewhere.
    The war was still going on.
    There were still mines there for some reason.
    They took him.
    And of course, they had to go to Las Vegas and New York.
    There were 1,100 people that were interned then.
    But the interesting thing was, meanwhile,
    I found out how my parents--
    what happened to my parents from the time
    I didn't receive anything from Vienna.
    So here I found out the story that my father
    was in Buchenwald later on.
    But he was relieved.
    And suddenly, they got tickets to go to the United States
    on the Rex.
    That was supposed to leave.
    The boat, Rex, a very large ship,
    it was supposed to leave from Genoa.
    When they went to Genoa, there was a constant postponement
    of the departure of the Rex because, it
    was very clear Mussolini knew that he
    will sooner or later enter the war,
    because he wanted to enter France.
    And he wouldn't let that ship out of his sight.
    And they didn't want to announce that it the trip
    will not occur.
    But they did announce their postponement.
    The interesting thing there--
    when the Italian Jews, especially from Florence,
    found out some refugees from Vienna, they helped them.
    That means the Jews helped them.
    But not long after this, the situation for the Italian Jews
    got bad, too.
    And when my parents saw that the ship is not going to leave
    and Italy enters into the war, they
    were hiding in the Apennine mountains.
    And after a while, those Jews in Italy, they helped them,
    needed a little bit of support from them.
    So there was the [? Campanana ?] family.
    And their son was, I would say, a year older than I was.
    And he and my sister, they fell in love.
    And they met all the times.
    And then, when that ship had to depart from Naples,
    six hours before the departure my sister told my parents,
    I am not going with you, I'm going to stay with Marcello.
    So they fast tried to find a rabbi.
    And they were very young, of course.
    And their marriage was consummated.
    And it was a beautiful life.
    She developed to be a beauty in the full meaning of the word.
    And they had a very beautiful life, two daughters.
    But that whole thing is history.
    But I just want to say how many things were unplanned entirely.
    Was there any particular influence
    that your grandfather had to get your parents out?
    No.
    No.
    No, I don't think it was, because he already
    committed himself in the beginning with the papers
    and sent them tickets.
    The only thing I have to tell you
    is the tickets that were sent before
    for the Rex wouldn't have been valid for the second ship.
    So he sent, a second time, tickets.
    And that was it.
    Let's move back now to your story in Palestine.
    Can you just maybe just briefly tell us
    some of the activities you were involved with in the Haganah?
    OK.
    Like I told you before, I was a member of the mounted police
    force.
    But I was transferred, which was just a few miles away from us.
    Actually, I wouldn't call it transferred.
    I was engaged with the headquarter of the Haganah
    in Even Yehuda.
    Just a little picture of the structure of the Haganah--
    Israel was partitioned, Haganah was, in three major part.
    And that part was called Galil.
    Let's say, a territory you can call it, if you want to.
    It was called the Upper Galil, the Central Galil,
    and the Southern Galil.
    Jerusalem, as a city, had a status
    of galil because of the importance.
    Tel Aviv was called [INAUDIBLE].
    That was a much lower ranking galil.
    Every galil was partitioned in smaller districts.
    They were called nafa.
    And the nafa were partitioned into settlement groups--
    and then, of course, the settlement itself.
    I was the-- they call it [? secretary ?] [INAUDIBLE]..
    But actually, I was number four in the nafa, nafa [? Heifa ?]..
    That's a central nafa.
    In addition to have to handle the administration there,
    I have to tell you about the hidden weapon we had.
    Every village had some weapon.
    And they had one, or two, or sometimes
    even three people who were in charge of this,
    because if one wouldn't be there, then
    somebody else knows.
    The weapon had to be hidden in all kind of manners.
    First of all, it shouldn't rust.
    So it was in the soil.
    It shouldn't rust.
    And then Israel had all kind of weapons--
    Czechoslovakian, English, Americans, and even
    German weapons.
    So they had to be separated and the ammunition separated.
    So in each section, there were responsible people.
    But I, for the center, I was responsible for all
    the weapons.
    So we had to--
    even the head of the nafa did not
    know as much as I did about those.
    And the British, meanwhile, found out
    that I had something to do with this.
    But they couldn't prove it.
    So they were after me, especially
    because I was a member of the police force.
    So they had power after me.
    I had to court martials.
    One for the weapon, but they couldn't prove anything,
    so I was freed.
    And the other one, we had a portable radio.
    That means children went to the pharmacy.
    At 2 O'clock, there will be a short announcement
    on this radio.
    And we usually had an announcement from 10,
    to 20, to maybe 30 minutes.
    As soon as this happened, that whole thing was taken apart.
    And again, they tried to get me on this.
    I wasn't even afraid that something would happen to me,
    because it was a death sentence, and I knew
    it was not going to happen.
    And the British, in this respect, were very unique.
    If it could not be 100% proven, they just broke it up,
    said it's not.
    So that's the way it was.
    Then, in '46, I got--
    and this would be too long to say it in full details.
    I got a mission to Europe.
    OK, we'll talk about '46 in a minute.
    When did you meet your wife?
    In the army.
    OK, so that was--
    What year was that?
    In 1948.
    In '47, when they announced the partition of Palestine
    in November '47, when it was announced,
    we already got active in the Haganah to do certain things.
    So you met your wife after--
    After this.
    OK.
    So World War II is now over.
    Over.
    And what was your feelings and your reaction
    when you heard that the war was over?
    When the war was over--
    just a short time before it was over, I was always dreaming.
    How could a world be peacefully?
    And when it happened, it was almost like a dream came true.
    But meanwhile, we found out the bitterness
    that happened in Europe.
    And I think, at that time, we understood it even more than
    at the time when it really happened,
    because we saw the open wounds.
    The real shock came that we saw that the British locked
    the doors for Palestine.
    And even those people who came on boats--
    they were not even called boats--
    they wouldn't be in, and they were chasing them.
    There was great sadness.
    But we have seen that things have to change.
    And it did change, of course.
    And that's it.
    And finally, when the partition was declared,
    I was in Netanya at that time.
    And the first bus from Netanya to Jerusalem was ambushed.
    And five people were killed.
    And two of the five were very close friends of mine
    I met just today, the same day, before they left the bus.
    But we knew what was happening.
    In the beginning--
    Let's back up a little bit.
    Here, you were born in Vienna.
    You were able to come out.
    When you heard after the war was over the even more
    terrible things that had happened,
    do you think it made a difference
    that you had come from Vienna?
    No.
    At that time, Vienna was--
    That you had come from Europe, I meant, that you
    had been able to escape.
    Well, all those surrounded me had almost the same background.
    So first of all, a lot of Viennese
    were German even more, and even from other countries already.
    Romanians came in a little bit.
    And so we were together.
    By the way, even a few Italians came to my school.
    And that was interesting too, of course.
    Many of them were fascists.
    They were fascists before.
    Their fathers were high officers in the army.
    So Vienna-- at that point, to be an important factor,
    I cannot say.
    I don't mean especially Vienna.
    I meant the fact that you had been in Europe
    and were able to get out as opposed to someone
    who was not born in Europe.
    Do you think you had a different reaction than someone else?
    At that time, I think more than the reaction of Europe
    and anything else was Israel.
    I was very concentrated on this.
    I felt definitely privileged, not only that I was saved.
    I was privileged to be a part of this most historic time.
    Probably, in hundreds of years, they will again come.
    I felt almost this, that I was doing something very special.
    And I enjoyed it.
    And I loved it.
    And I was proud of it.
    And then, at that time, after this,
    I volunteered to form missions to break through to Jerusalem
    in [NON-ENGLISH],, like the Arab's [NON-ENGLISH]..
    Are we talking about the War of Independence now?
    Yeah, the War of Independence.
    And we had four missions.
    We couldn't fully break through.
    Even my vehicle was damaged.
    And we had to pull back.
    But we had a [NON-ENGLISH],, who pressed.
    And they went up on that hill.
    And they killed the Arab leader.
    He was called [? Abdul-Kader ?] Husseini.
    That's the father of that Husseini who's now in Jerusalem
    trying to make the peace.
    So when he was killed, that whole thing fell apart.
    And actually, we could connect ourselves with Jerusalem.
    But meanwhile, something else happened.
    When the Haganah has seen this, we
    might have a problem to bring food to Jerusalem.
    So they took old men.
    Many of them were Yemenites.
    And they had little stone baskets.
    They were carrying that stone and building a Burma street,
    a Burma road south of that one.
    It's traumatic, but we couldn't have been without Jerusalem.
    It was done.
    Whoever was there, it was a thrill in a certain way.
    It was a sad thrill.
    But that's what we called it.
    Even the songs said, [NON-ENGLISH]..
    That means, sadness and glory together.
    And it worked this way.
    In northern Tel Aviv, there was a German section.
    It was called Sarona.
    But because the Germans had some Nazi activity during World War
    II, the British evacuated them.
    So as soon as the Jews--
    that means that the Israeli took care of the whole section that
    was taken for governments, for government buildings.
    But on the slope to the road, we had our tents.
    And from there, we went to Jerusalem
    To fight for Jerusalem.
    As soon as our mission was over, I just
    was resting in one of those tents.
    And a quartermaster came to me and said,
    would you be willing to go in something very special?
    I said, what do you have in mind?
    Well, we have to create a certain section
    to rebuild those vehicles, to rebuild
    the vehicles we have taken from the British,
    and we have bought the old, vehicles, mainly Command cars.
    That was Dodge Command cars and Jeeps.
    What happened when they bought it from Southern France,
    they caused a certain sabotage.
    They made holes in the motors and stuffed it
    with some material so, if we would start this,
    it wouldn't work.
    All this had to be repaired.
    And I accepted this.
    And I was in charge of the administration.
    And that other guy, his name was [PERSONAL NAME],,
    he was in charge of the mechanical works.
    And I think it was one of the major operation for the army,
    because we didn't have work shops here to prepare all this.
    And we needed cars and vehicles all the times.
    And even Moshe Dayan came once to me.
    He said, try to get me a few vehicles out of the regular.
    And we gave him a few.
    Later on, they caught that they were not painted
    according to the standards.
    So we were warned not to do this anymore.
    But anyway, this is what happened.
    So once, I sit in my office.
    And in the-- when I came in the office, actually.
    That's the way it was.
    There was one of the supervisor of the garages
    who had to inspect all the vehicles.
    He came with a young lady, a charming young lady.
    And I didn't expect anything.
    But he came in and had that Israeli approach.
    You know what I'm saying.
    Oh, you ruin.
    Ha, you can do everything.
    Yeah, whatever, anything you want to.
    What do you mean?
    He said, well, this young lady, she's the only daughter,
    has a mother only.
    And for here, it would be good if she
    doesn't have to go out to the other camps
    and just be in the area of Tel Aviv.
    I said, no problem.
    So I picked up the phone, and I called.
    And that central station, whatever it was told me,
    you cannot do it anymore, because now we are state.
    And it has to go to regulations.
    She has to go to a army training course.
    And we'll send her wherever we think we'll send her.
    I told this to the young lady.
    I said, that's all I could do.
    I tried.
    So the next morning, she was sitting there.
    And I said, didn't I tell you yesterday
    that I am just helpless?
    I cannot do anything.
    And she said, look, I was told that if you really
    want to do something, you will find a way to do it.
    So I didn't know what to do.
    I had, outside, a little pick-up truck.
    It was a standard, that they call it,
    or the British pick-up.
    And I went with her to the women's training place
    in [PLACE NAME] where the British used
    to train their soldiers.
    Now they called it, in Hebrew, [HEBREW]..
    I came there.
    And I didn't see any officer.
    That whole thing was not really developed yet.
    So I thought, I'm not going to let them fool me.
    But meanwhile, we got hungry.
    First of all, I didn't have any money.
    And even if I had money, there was no restaurant about this.
    So we looked around.
    And we saw sabras.
    Those are the prickled pears.
    Now, how do you get sabras?
    Not on your fingers.
    Anyway, we started eating sabras.
    We had it full on our lips.
    At that time, Jaffa was just conquered.
    But I had an entrance card.
    So I went to Jaffa.
    We roamed around in a city without inhabitants
    and, like young people, finally we
    realized it's better to go to my base.
    How long can I fool around?
    So we went there, probably came just before closing time.
    I picked up that phone.
    And I said, listen, whatever you tell me is not going to work.
    She is already working, and that's the way it is.
    And if you cause me some problems,
    I know how to talk to the headquarters.
    And four months later, we were married.
    That's it.
    That's as far as it goes.
    Then you stayed in Israel for how long?
    Then the reason--
    I have to stay here the real, true fact.
    At that time, marriage was not in my plans,
    because I wanted first to visit my parents,
    and then come back and marry.
    But everything went fast.
    The American consulate, in the beginning,
    when I asked for a visa to visit to the United States,
    they says no, because I'm a son to parents, I will stay there.
    So I have to work on a emigration visa.
    I couldn't care less what kind of visa as they'll let me in.
    Then, when the emigration visa was activated,
    they told me I have to wait for my quota waiting list.
    And then I said, well, let's go back to visiting.
    I just need a visa.
    He said, no, after you have applied for emigration you
    cannot have a visa.
    So we waited.
    Meanwhile, a child was born.
    And we got an apartment.
    And for some reason, I wrote a letter to Truman,
    to President Truman.
    And after a while, I didn't even expect an answer.
    After three or four months, I got a reply.
    And they said, this is not a department
    that handles emigration.
    That all goes to embassies and consulates.
    I said, well, so I didn't make it.
    Just a few weeks later, I got a letter from the consulate
    that I was allowed to come.
    So we went to the United States to visit my parents,
    whom I haven't seen in 13 years.
    What was it like for you to see them?
    The main thing, first of all, my father
    got a-- he was always religious.
    But he got even more religious.
    And we would arrive Friday afternoon.
    He said, if it's very late, stay in New York.
    I was just puzzled that he couldn't overcome this.
    But anyway, we saw a plane leaving for Cincinnati
    a few hours before our flight was scheduled.
    I asked the captain, would you take us?
    He said, yes, come in.
    It was a little more casual.
    It was at that time called Idlewild Airport.
    I came.
    It was very cheerful.
    And the greatest cheer I saw--
    they looked fairly young.
    And they looked as if they're already recovered from this.
    The only thing-- the sentimentality was strong.
    Well, first, we decided let's stay with them a while.
    I haven't seen them in so long.
    Then, after a while, we said, well, I have to do something.
    I started working.
    I didn't want to be involved with their business.
    It wouldn't fit me.
    But I just wanted a temporary job.
    Then we said, oh, it would be good
    if we have a refrigerator, because in Israel he
    couldn't have all those things.
    Let's work for this.
    And all this is history.
    Longer and longer we were.
    I think, at that time already, my parents
    needed me just to be around them.
    That was their reward for their whole suffering.
    And I think the family found itself in there.
    And another child was born, and many years later another child.
    I have then to say something about the United States.
    It has a certain magnet professionally, culturally.
    And you can develop yourself at any age in all kind of studies.
    University is open until you're 99 years old.
    What's the difference?
    It was amazing.
    Things went much faster.
    And then my brothers came.
    So we hung around a little bit longer and a little bit longer
    until the leverage changed, and it was more
    America than Israel.
    It's very hard to say what I feel,
    because Israel is still a part of me, and it's going to be.
    Even the children went later on studying.
    When I go back to Austria, first we
    had to go back to settle certain estate problems.
    And then I always had that feeling--
    and I still have it, and I think I will always have it--
    that, when I left Austria, it was involuntary.
    And the one who caused it had no right to do anything to me
    this way or the other way.
    And that's the reason I react different than some people.
    But there are others, too.
    They have my line.
    This is actually the way it was.
    There were, of course, many other little things in between.
    Where was your wife born?
    My wife was actually born in [? Wolyn. ?]
    And as a three-year-old child, she came with her parents
    to Israel.
    But her life is Israeli from the beginning,
    because she was a little tiny girl when they came there.
    What year did she come to Palestine?
    I would say 1930.
    She was two years old, or something like this.
    Her family was very charming.
    I think, almost from the first day on, I was accepted there.
    So if, for any reason I didn't come, why didn't you come here?
    But you know, there was a war going on, too.
    I was right away in that.
    In the United States, what kind of work did you do?
    You said you did not want to join your father.
    No, because he had a restaurant.
    That wasn't for me.
    And this is an entirely different story,
    because Rabbi Silver pulled them to Cincinnati
    to open a kosher restaurant.
    That would have never fitted me.
    This is Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver?
    No, that is Eliezer Silver, the orthodox rabbi
    who was the head of all the orthodox in the United States
    and Canada.
    But I want to tell you, because I just wanted to have
    a temporary job, I started as a shipping clerk, which wasn't--
    the bosses were too bossy.
    And I couldn't tolerate this.
    But somehow, Metropolitan Life was after me.
    And they promised me great things.
    I couldn't believe it.
    It was so great.
    Why don't people stand in line to get it?
    But they promised me a certain amount to earn.
    And actually, the first year I earned three times as much
    as they promised.
    And I was promoted faster in management, and then
    in upper management.
    I didn't dream about this.
    It just went.
    And then I studied full time, sometime 15 hours a week.
    And I could work it out.
    And I got active in B'nai B'rith and was the president
    a few years there.
    That means a large president.
    And the same with the ZOAs, Zionist Organization
    of America.
    I think I even deserve a pension,
    so many years have I been president there.
    That's it then.
    The family grew beautiful.
    They started a little bit in Israel.
    We gave them a good Jewish education.
    And everything else is history, I would say.
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum interview with Erwin Deutscher.
    This is tape number three, side A.
    And now let's talk a little bit about your thoughts
    and feelings about what you went through.
    When your children were the age that you
    were when you had to leave Vienna and leave your family,
    did that bring back any memories for you
    or affect you in any way?
    Well, here I have to say the way I always felt.
    I knew that I am a part of this generation that
    has suffered so much.
    On the other hand, I was one of the lucky ones.
    Not only did I, myself, was able to survive--
    the immediate family.
    The broader family is a different story,
    because we just didn't have contact anymore
    with my father's siblings, especially with my father.
    On my mother's side, it was different because
    of the American situation.
    So over there was, probably, everything lost.
    I know that my grandfather from my father's side--
    he was 86 years old when he died.
    He died in '39 just a short time before the war.
    But all the others perished.
    So I have to take into consideration those people.
    They suffered without having a chance to create new families,
    and so on.
    So I knew their sadness.
    In our home, I brought up the situation.
    I heard sometimes that survivors did not mention too much
    about their past.
    It's either because of my nature,
    or I saw it really had to happen.
    I was pretty open on what it is.
    Maybe certain details didn't come out,
    as I expressed now in my writings.
    But they knew clearly what was going on.
    And here, because you had the chance to meet my daughter,
    you see how she's involved.
    And the other daughter's even interviewing
    people in the Spielberg action.
    And Michael, my son, went even to Israel a few times alone.
    Apropos, the girl studied at the University of Cincinnati,
    one one year, one two years, and were even
    in a kibbutz for a short time.
    Their Hebrew-- they can communicate somewhat.
    They don't speak what we call good Hebrew.
    But they can communicate.
    So the house was Jewish.
    On the other hand, I had plenty contact with non-Jews.
    So today, of course, we are trying
    to reflect why it happened.
    My personal philosophy-- as much as it
    would have been nice to skip this chapter,
    I still have to say it.
    I want to say that the Nazis, the anti-Semites,
    could not have done what they did if it would not have been
    carried on for a couple thousand years,
    the path of Christianity.
    They failed very badly.
    And if you already bring it up, let me tell you
    what happened once on a trip from Cincinnati to Washington,
    because I was flying first class.
    Next to me was a short man, sitting,
    and getting a lot of attention from the stewardess
    in the plane.
    I was a little bit surprised that one person
    would get more attention than the other one
    in the same class.
    I found out that it was the archbishop of Cincinnati,
    Archbishop Arthur.
    And for some reason, he started talking to me
    and telling me his functions in Washington,
    that he has to educate young priests,
    and what problems he has with them.
    And after that story went on, I mentioned to him
    that I'm on the other side of the fence.
    I don't belong to that same group.
    He said, well, I had a feeling like this.
    But I got encouraged by his easy approach to me.
    So I asked him--
    I probably did say, Your Excellence, whatever it is--
    could I ask you a couple of questions?
    And he said, shoot.
    And I brought up the major question that we have.
    If Jesus Christ had to die, why do you--
    and the man plural, not him himself.
    Why do you accuse the Jews of having killed him?
    That was his function to be killed.
    In the beginning, he tried to interject
    that maybe the Romans did it.
    But let's say, if the accusation is as the people understand,
    let's say that the Jews did it.
    So what did they do wrong?
    It had to happen to him.
    He did not reply to this question.
    But he said, didn't you say that you have a couple questions?
    Then I said very plainly, tell me,
    how can a god, how can divinity, be killed?
    He just glanced at me, didn't answer, didn't say a word.
    He just lifted my elbow.
    And that was the end of the conversation.
    There's no question that that had to be--
    that whole subject has to be clarified.
    And people have to start understanding it,
    because any religion--
    Christian, Jews, Mohammedans, Muslims, what they
    call themselves, or others.
    If God created the world, he created those,
    and those, and the others, all were.
    Why would God create one group to kill the other group?
    If he really wanted to do it, why shouldn't he do it himself?
    Well, this is the philosophy I have after this.
    The only thing that I am probably dealing
    different than many others--
    I was always proud.
    I was always strong that what I am thinking
    is a healthy outlook.
    And I never let others depress me, or diminish my standing,
    or whatever it would be.
    I have never felt one second in my life
    that history, or whatever, has endowed me with the wrong path,
    with the wrong way, with the wrong philosophy.
    I like what it is.
    I'm not proud that we have to suffer all the times.
    But I am proud of the nucleus of our being.
    And--
    Do you think that you are the way you are because of what you
    went through as a young boy?
    I didn't tell you too much from my childhood.
    There was not an anti-Semite in the classrooms
    I participated that he would have
    enough nerves to attack me.
    So I think I had the strength already then.
    Yeah.
    Yeah, I would say maybe it strengthened later.
    And of course, look, my knowledge in Hebrew
    and my participation in Israel, it cannot be evaluated.
    It can't be, because it's so great.
    And it gives me so much purpose of life,
    so much purpose to transfer to the next generation,
    and the next generation that I stand on strong feet.
    If I would not have made it, I would not have made it.
    I even had this discussion once with my father.
    Is this survivor more privileged by God than the not survivor?
    We cannot say this.
    So for some reason, I'm here.
    It's not only with the Nazis.
    I have to tell you, the War of liberation
    had a few casualties, too.
    And I was involved with them.
    So I didn't get it.
    The others did-- friends even, real close friends, even
    one relative.
    He came, too.
    So that's the way it was.
    And I have even seen in those fights, where I was involved,
    the one who died wouldn't have to be always the real hero.
    Sometimes, the hero survived, and the not-so-hero died.
    There's no rule on this.
    Or opposite, too, of course.
    Some people were very aggressive and had to die, too.
    But survivors were good heroes, too, sometimes.
    They did a good job.
    When the Eichmann trial took place--
    and you had said before that you had met him--
    what were some of the things that were going
    through your head at the time?
    I want to tell you, when I met Eichmann,
    I didn't think too much about it.
    It's just another Nazi in that uniform.
    And for some reason, because I had a certain way
    to pull my father, he reacted.
    Maybe to 99% of the other people,
    he wouldn't even pay attention.
    They only thing that, for some reason, came up then
    was, when I saw Eichmann talking with those Jewish girls who
    helped him--
    this, I couldn't put two and two together.
    He was a very unique individual.
    I found out that, for example, an Israeli policeman
    didn't do a correct things, even to separate him,
    or something like this.
    He reminded him he has to do it this way.
    It's a typical Nazi who has always to get command
    from up to the lower ranks.
    And he was a lieutenant colonel.
    That was his rank again.
    So he was used to get command.
    But he was cruel.
    If he was born cruel or not, this I don't know.
    I did even hear that he knew some Hebrew.
    If this is true, then who knows?
    But of course, I was relieved that he was caught,
    not only because this one particular Nazi was caught.
    It should show to the people that some
    have to get it for us.
    I know that so many were able to escape all their punishment.
    And it's sad, too.
    And maybe there were some people even crueler than Eichmann.
    But it's good that it happened.
    And I did not feel bad that he got the punishment from Israel
    as he did, although it would not have
    made any difference if, for some reason,
    they would have just jailed him.
    It would be the same punishment.
    Did you feel any connection to him because you had met him?
    No.
    I just want to add here--
    at least that was said--
    that Hitler himself, his greatest fear
    was that he could be caught alive,
    and they would put him in a cage like an ape, a naked ape.
    And people would view on him.
    And if this is true or not, I don't know.
    I heard this story.
    So they were afraid more, I think,
    from jailing than for being killed.
    That's my understanding.
    So the short killing is probably not always the greatest
    punishment on a person anyway.
    But anyway, that's the way it happened.
    And that is the end of it.
    Do you feel Austrian, or Israeli, or American?
    How do you feel about that?
    Yeah, the question should--
    well, Austria, we really can put aside.
    I was born in Austria.
    I like to run around in that city
    sometimes for all kind of other reasons,
    because it connects the past with the present.
    The Israeli in me is in.
    There's no question.
    Why I am in the United States?
    I try to make it clear to a point.
    That was not fully planned.
    But on the other hand, I don't feel guilty
    that I left Israel, because life sometimes comes out this way.
    And nothing is new in this.
    We had great Jews outside Israel.
    And we had great Jews in Israel.
    If you really want to know, to go into history
    in Babylonian, which was outside of Israel,
    was a glorious period.
    And so it was in Spain.
    Of course, you can say, in the 20th century,
    because it's a rebuild of Israel,
    the connection should be different.
    But we have a different world now than it was
    just a few hundred years ago.
    The world is, to a certain point at least, is one unit.
    And that's the way it happens.
    Do you feel that your commitment to Judaism is different,
    or affected in any way, because of what you went through
    because you were Jewish?
    I see.
    I would say, no.
    But on Judaism, I have to tell you something very unique--
    that sometimes people try to continue their Judaism in order
    to keep the continuity.
    This is not the right outlook, because when I go back
    to parents, grandparents, and even before,
    their behavior as Jews was not so
    much for continuity's Judaism.
    It was, that's the way it had to be done.
    And that's what they did.
    When they observe the rules, it's just for that reason,
    and not just because to keep Judaism forever
    as a continuity.
    So I do it just the way I feel doing it.
    I cannot do more, because then it wouldn't be me.
    And if I do less, then it would be negligent.
    So I just leave it the way it is,
    the way I can understand it.
    We have a few explanations.
    Habakkuk, one of our prophets, he brings it in this manner.
    [HEBREW]
    That means, the just shall live by his fate.
    By the way, they had something similar in the New
    Testament that says, the just by faith shall live.
    But our says, the just shall live by his faith.
    Apparently, he shall live the way he develops his faith,
    and the way he can accept it.
    And I like that sentence very much.
    It could be that some of the very Orthodox ones
    would not want me to have it expressed in the same manner.
    But I think we are entitled to interpret our thoughts the way
    we want to.
    You said you had continued your education when
    you came to the United States.
    When was that?
    Oh, constantly.
    Constantly, as soon as I entered the business world here.
    First of all, I studied economics.
    And I got a CLU, if this means something.
    And then I get a master.
    And then I go a PhD, just during my work time.
    What did you get your PhD in?
    In Hebrew letters.
    And where did you get your degree?
    Hebrew Union College.
    So--
    And why did you go to get your PhD in Hebrew letters?
    That's an interesting story.
    I was 55 years old.
    And the company wanted to transfer me to Pennsylvania
    to a higher position.
    But I didn't want to leave any more
    Cincinnati, because to connect with my family, I told them,
    if I leave Cincinnati, I go to Israel.
    I'm not going to Pennsylvania, to Philadelphia.
    That's where they wanted.
    For some reason, I had a very large deal
    with the University of Cincinnati.
    And that professor was--
    well, I probably don't--
    he was from Scandinavian parenthood.
    And that deal didn't develop.
    And I saw that he had a--
    he was feeling very uncomfortable letting me know
    that whatever was planned cannot be consummated.
    And in order for him not to feel so bad, I said,
    don't worry about me.
    I'm doing very well.
    And I have no special desires to have anything else.
    And I am not envying anything.
    Just feel comfortable that it didn't work.
    And when I left his office and turned back,
    I said, well, I still do envy some people.
    And he said, what do you envy so much?
    I said, the academic world.
    And he called the Hebrew Union College.
    And that's what happened.
    Did you-- do you belong to any organizations?
    Or do you keep up with other people who are survivors?
    Well, B'nai B'rith, for some reason,
    is not as active as they used to be, at least not my age group.
    Some are already gone.
    And ZOA is even less.
    So I don't.
    The only thing is, with the synagogue, I'm involved with.
    And others are just health groups that I participate in.
    That's all.
    Do you feel any connection when you meet somebody
    else who came from Europe?
    Oh, yeah.
    We have friends.
    We have plenty of friends.
    Yeah, all kind.
    But I want to tell you, we have some Chinese friends, too.
    And we feel very comfortable with them--
    and non-Jews, too.
    So I cannot say that I'm just hanging with that one group.
    That's definitely not.
    But what I meant is, when you meet someone
    who was born in Europe in that time span,
    do you feel any kind of relationship with that person?
    I would say it's almost the--
    they have reached my stage, too.
    It's a part of life.
    We accepted it.
    And that's the way it is.
    And we try to be good citizens, as far as we go.
    And we participate for Israel a lot.
    But I have never missed an election in the United States
    either.
    And I do appreciate it.
    I sometimes say what is wrong here and what is good here.
    In this way, I express myself.
    You see, I am already nine years-- more,
    almost 10 years retired.
    And they now invited me to a convention in Vienna.
    So I'm involved with them.
    And they try to invite me as often as possible.
    What kind of convention in Vienna?
    It's from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.
    Not only this.
    The last time we had a regional meeting--
    the [INAUDIBLE],, if that would be.
    Who knows what?
    So I have a connection with them, too.
    But I would say I'm a regular citizen.
    And I'm involved in whatever has to be involved.
    And I skip what I don't want to see.
    And that's it.
    Even sports-- we bike a little bit, or horse riding--
    is still going on even though I am closing pretty close to 75.
    So that's the way it is.
    Is there anything else you wanted to add before we finish?
    I would say that the story, it was told as true as possible.
    I don't think that it stretched too much.
    It might not be everything.
    But sometimes, people would say, too much.
    Then I would have to explain more other things.
    But it's a whole story.
    It's a life story.
    Of course, in retrospect, I can smile
    that everything came out good.
    But I know that others cannot.
    And it's sad again and again.
    The Christians didn't do the right things.
    And in Europe, in the 20th century,
    to develop such a stupid hatred still doesn't even make sense.
    And then that America did not have more sense
    to help to pull the people out-- that they could have put them
    to Alaska, or wherever, or in South America, South Africa.
    Everyone would have benefited from this.
    The world has failed.
    There's also the German--
    the Hitler crime was great.
    But we cannot say that the Poles didn't fail,
    and many other nations, including the United States,
    and so on.
    I think that's all I had.
    What inspired you to write down your life story?
    First of all, the children are one.
    But as soon as I start writing, UC jumped on me.
    And I had pictures all hanging around.
    Do it.
    Do it.
    And one more thing.
    When I started the Hebrew Union College, the writings other
    had, I wasn't too satisfied.
    It wasn't covering-- it did not cover
    what should have been covered.
    It was to concentrate, either on the bad things only.
    And I didn't like it, because I wouldn't
    sell even my childhood for anything else,
    because it was good.
    It had a few bumps, of course.
    But it was good.
    And the relationship with my parents that I have
    was outstanding, because I see what others sometimes write.
    And I'm a little bit sorry that I did not
    think about that subject when my father was alive,
    because he really would have broadened
    that whole thing to a point.
    But I have to be satisfied with what I am doing.
    And I am even satisfied to have a chance to have met you.
    It was very charming.
    Really, I cannot say any more.
    I could not have met a better interviewer.
    Maybe I have to say sometimes to others, too.
    But in your case, it was charming.
    There's no question.
    Thank you.
    Well, thank you very much for doing the interview.
    [BOTH TALKING]
    I mean it.
    This concludes the interview of Erwin Deutscher.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    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.
    Interviewee
    Erwin Deutscher
    Interviewer
    Gail Schwartz
    Date
    interview:  1997 November 09

    Physical Details

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

    Rights & Restrictions

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

    Keywords & Subjects

    Personal Name
    Deutscher, Erwin.

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Gail Schwartz, a volunteer for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History branch conducted this interview on November 9, 1997 in Cincinnati, OH. The interview was transferred to the Archives on November 9, 1997.
    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 08:12:21
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn507582

    Additional Resources

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

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    Also in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum oral history volunteer collection

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

    Date: 1993

    Oral history interview with Marie Schwartzman

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    Oral history interview with Esthy Adler

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    Oral history interview with Tana Gelfer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Maria Devinki

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jerome Stasson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Adriana Pacifici

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ernest Kolben

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henry Kolber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Greifer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anna Wollner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Kate Wacz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erwin Forley

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ernie Marx

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Doris Rauch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Elman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gerald Rosenstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ivan Becker

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Romana Koplewicz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Koplewicz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irving Schaffer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Klein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Pisik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Rosicka

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Salomon Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Suzanne Foldes

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tibor Vince

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elias Piorko

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Hildesheim

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Peter Masters

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Wolke

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ionel Ghelman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irimia Solomon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lotte Salus

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irena Kirkland

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hans Hirsch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Milton Shurr

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ludwig Jacob

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Barbara Artman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fritz Schonbach

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Charles Barber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tibor Borsos

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Robert Kertesz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Kahn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Susan Warsinger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Arnold Weiss

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sia Hertsberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Chava Frajhof

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Israel Frajhof

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Edward Novakoff

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Celia Feldschuh

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Nicole Yancey

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jaffa Munk

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frances Hirshfeld

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Moris Gluckman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Margie Rosenthal

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Emma Mogilensky

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Isaiah Henig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ida Henig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marcel Drimer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michael Silberstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joan Schwab

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Pick

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hedi Pope

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bella Simon Pasternak

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marion Friedman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Strassburger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jadwiga Dziekonski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Harvey

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thomas B. Gardiner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Roberta Jones

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Christine Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hugh Jenkins

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rene Edgar Tressler

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Stefan Wohl

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Yehuda Adam

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Arlette de Long

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Adam

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Herbert Bitter

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rachel Goldfarb

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tania Rozmaryn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frank Ephraim

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Peter Phillips

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Ichiuji

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Horowitz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hermann Kosak

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Dolly Bestandig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Goldie Gendelman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rhoda Kuflik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Hess

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jutta Levy

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Wolfgang Mueller

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Klari Rudnai

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jill Pauly

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jack Reuben

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Bayer

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Tilda Finzi Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Zwi Golombek

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Samuel B. Hagner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Werner E. Michel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Guta Jacobson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helen Luksenburg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with William Luksenburg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rose Weisfeld

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth E. Greifer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Nesse Godin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with 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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