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Oral history interview with Ruth Harvey

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1997.A.0364 | RG Number: RG-50.106.0089

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    Oral history interview with Ruth Harvey
    Transcript
    This is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    volunteer collection interview with Ruth Harvey conducted
    by Margaret Garrett on August 22, 1997 in Bethesda, Maryland.
    This interview is part of the museum's project
    to interview Holocaust survivors and witnesses who are also
    volunteers with the museum, tape number one,
    side A. Would you state your name at birth?
    My name at birth was Ruth Abel, A-B-E-L.
    And your date of birth?
    October 9, 1928.
    And place of birth.
    Berlin.
    Would you talk about your parents and your grandparents?
    I only knew my maternal grandparents.
    And they were gentle people.
    But I always thought they were a bit forbidding.
    They didn't have a great way with children.
    And their religion?
    They were Jewish.
    And your mother?
    My mother, as well, was Jewish.
    And what about your father and his parents?
    My father's father was Jewish.
    But in those days, you were German first, and then
    whatever religion you were.
    He happened to fall in love with a Christian girl
    and switched religions in order to be able to marry her.
    In order to--
    Became a Christian.
    Yeah.
    In order to be able to marry her because of her parents, or--
    Now, this is something I do not know.
    I don't know.
    So you--
    This was quite a long time ago.
    But you were just told that--
    I was told that.
    --he could not marry her unless he converted. but you don't--
    I do not--
    --know why.
    --know whether it was a must situation,
    or whether it was just something he chose to do.
    Probably, her parents might have objected.
    But I don't know any of those circumstances.
    So your father was raised Christian?
    Yes, although secularly, really--
    observing the major holidays, but nothing much in between.
    And do you know whether he was Catholic or--
    No.
    No--
    --Protestant?
    --Protestant.
    Lutheran or--
    Yes, Lutheran Protestant.
    So Protestant Lutheran.
    Yes.
    And so his family were secular Lutherans
    and were not very observant, as far as you know.
    I wish I could tell you.
    But my father was already 40 when I was born.
    His parents were long dead.
    I never knew them.
    All I knew was the stories he told me.
    And what kinds of stories did he tell you about his parents?
    Well, I mean the history of the fact
    that he never knew his mother.
    Only after she died he heard some aunt saying, the poor boy.
    And that was actually his first memory,
    because he couldn't remember his mother.
    She was the Christian.
    And his father, he was extremely close to, very, very.
    He loved him and honored and respected him.
    In fact, all during my childhood, not a day
    would pass that he wouldn't mention his papa
    in one nice way or another.
    So you had an idea of him, even though you didn't know him.
    Oh, I saw photos of him, a man with very big eyes,
    worried looking.
    He had been widowed so very early.
    He was never remarried.
    So your father was Lutheran.
    And your mother was Jewish.
    And what was your household like?
    Did your family--
    Well, my parents were not churchgoers or temple goers
    as such.
    My mother, sometimes with friends,
    might go to temple for high holy days, Jewish high holy days.
    But other than that, she never did.
    And my father simply was not a churchgoer, although he
    was a very religious man.
    When I was a teenager, I spoke to him once.
    And he didn't answer me, didn't answer me.
    And after about five minutes, he looked at me.
    And he said, I'm sorry I didn't answer you.
    I was praying.
    That was his religion.
    And it was very deep.
    But he was not a churchgoer.
    But he accomplished miracles, as you will later find out.
    I'm sure it had something to do with this relationship he
    had with a higher being.
    And were you baptized?
    I was actually baptized when I was a young child.
    No, no, I mean I wasn't a toddler or an infant.
    I was already--
    I can't remember how old I was--
    maybe five, something like that.
    And they decided that I should be baptized.
    And we went to Pastor Niemöller's church,
    but he was not there.
    Someone else baptized me with water
    from the river Spree in Berlin.
    And I remember we came home from that.
    And my mother had a close Jewish girlfriend
    who heartily disapproved.
    She said it was just terrible.
    And she told them that.
    Then she invited them in for coffee and cake to celebrate.
    So this would have been 1933 about.
    Probably, or a little later.
    I don't know whether I was--
    I cannot remember what age I was.
    I might have been older.
    Probably, they might have done it
    a little later when things were beginning to look really bad.
    '33 was still fairly early.
    I wasn't aware of what was really happening.
    But some persecution had started in 1933.
    Yes.
    You have these roving bands of Brown Shirts singing
    antisemitic songs, and torch parades,
    a little bit awesome and scary, that sort of thing.
    So you had a baptismal certificate.
    If I ever had one, I don't think I ever saw it, honestly.
    My mother must-- I don't know.
    I just don't-- I've never seen it.
    Do you think that, if you were baptized, that one existed?
    This being Germany, you can be darn sure.
    They had documentation for everything.
    Yes.
    So you went to school.
    Yes.
    To a public school?
    A public school, until a certain time period later, in the '30s.
    When Jewish children were no longer
    allowed in public school, under the logic of the Nazis,
    they had me figured out as being 3/4 Jewish.
    So I went for a time--
    only for a time, because then we left Germany--
    to a private Jewish school.
    Now, you said "they" had you figured out.
    Who were they?
    The Nazis.
    The Nazis.
    Now, how did they know that you were 3/4 Jewish?
    Well, it would be like city hall.
    So they would have traced who your grandparents were?
    Yes.
    Well, everything was documented.
    So they know exactly everyone.
    They knew my roots better than I did.
    So you had to leave the public school.
    Yes.
    Do you remember that?
    Yes.
    And what was that like for you, to have to leave the school?
    Distressing, scary.
    All of a sudden, I was taken out of my--
    although I must tell you that public school
    was no longer a pleasure.
    There was one teacher who was very antisemitic
    and was perfectly beastly to us Jewish children.
    What did the teacher do?
    Oh, it was just her sharpness and her nastiness.
    I don't remember details--
    very quick to slap faces, and things like that.
    Do you remember your face being slapped?
    Yes.
    And did you tell your parents?
    Well, it was the custom for teachers to do that.
    It wasn't-- now it would be a shocking thing.
    In those days, it was done.
    There were other Jewish children in your class?
    That is vague to me.
    I don't really remember any particularly Jewish--
    none of us children really paid attention
    to our different religions.
    We're just kids together.
    And until this day, I could not tell you who was Jewish and who
    wasn't.
    I think there probably were more non-Jewish children
    in that class.
    There may have been a handful, besides myself.
    And did you think of yourself as Jewish?
    I always thought of my-- well, thanks to the Nazis,
    I thought of myself as 3/4 Jewish and 1/4 Christian.
    And what did you think that meant, being Jewish?
    Being 3/4 of one religion and 1/4 of another religion.
    So what did Jewish in particular mean to you?
    I wish I could really explain it to you.
    Later, upon maturity, I realized much more about what it means.
    But as a child.
    As a child, it was just a religion that, for some reason,
    wasn't popular at that time in that country.
    I was just a child.
    So you had to leave the public school.
    Yes.
    Did the Jewish children in your class
    go with you to the same Jewish school?
    No.
    I remember going to this Jewish school, which
    was in a nice suburb there called Rosenthal,
    which means valley of roses.
    And not really.
    No, wait a minute.
    That may not have been there.
    But the lady, my mother's best friend
    whom I stayed with for a while, she lived in Rosenthal.
    I remember having to take a bus in the mornings
    to get to the school.
    I can't tell you to this day where it was.
    But it was a very nice school.
    And everyone there was Jewish.
    And they were all new faces to me.
    Was the curriculum very different
    from the public school?
    The one big difference was that I
    had to learn Hebrew, which was very difficult.
    And of course, I never really learned it.
    I just learned some of the symbols,
    and how to pronounce them, and how to read them.
    But that time period could not have lasted very long,
    because I didn't do that very long.
    And it must be shortly thereafter that we left.
    That means, in other words, that I didn't leave
    the German public school--
    well, I left Germany in '39, probably '38.
    That you left the public school?
    Yes.
    So you were about 10.
    I think I was nine.
    I was 10 when I left.
    Yeah.
    And what else do you remember from that time about what
    your life was like?
    Well, there was one little instance.
    I was down--
    I don't know if it was Wannsee, that great big bathing
    resort outside Berlin.
    I was at the beach, playing in the sand.
    And a little girl came over.
    And she said, may I play with you?
    And I was just about to say, yes, when she added,
    but not if you're Jewish, my mommy
    doesn't let me play with Jewish children.
    So I said, well, I am.
    Well, you can't, or something.
    And that was the end of that.
    But I remember it to this day.
    And I'm now 67 years.
    But you must admit that that is--
    others had much worse experiences.
    And even though this was a small thing,
    it was a pinprick that lasted.
    And let me see.
    What else?
    Well, you just want me to tell you
    about things that went on around me and my reactions to them?
    Sure.
    Well, there were Hitler's speeches
    on the loudspeakers in the streets.
    I would hear this male voice shouting and, of course,
    this Austrian accent.
    I never was able to understand a word that the man was shouting.
    He could have been talking another language.
    I didn't understand what he said.
    And there were all sorts of things in the newspapers, which
    of course I didn't read.
    But I heard my father and my mother
    discussing them at home in the evening.
    And he would furrow his brow and be very worried.
    And he always thought that this couldn't last.
    This was just something that would go away.
    This is your father?
    My father.
    Sorry, my father.
    And he just couldn't believe that this madness could stay.
    And they would be talking.
    There was a current joke that went around in Berlin.
    It ended with, the Jews and the bicyclists.
    And then the question was, why the bicyclist?
    And then the answer would be, why the Jews?
    And that at that time was one of the current jokes
    that was going-- it sounds better in German.
    And let me see.
    What else?
    There was just a general feeling of--
    I don't know-- something dark surrounding us.
    And of course-- should I go on about when my father left?
    Or do you want to ask me that later?
    Well, before we get to that--
    Yes.
    --what was your father's occupation?
    All right.
    He had his own export-import firm.
    And then he hired a new secretary.
    And this was my mother-to-be.
    She was his secretary for about four years.
    And it was a one-man company.
    But of course-- no, he had people that worked for him.
    They were salesmen.
    It was export-import.
    And it was doing quite nicely.
    What export-import--
    Oh, I remember he had British Yardley soap, and things
    like that, all sorts of different things.
    And everything went along well.
    My parents got married after they had known each other
    for four years.
    I was born the next year.
    By then, it was 1928.
    And his business folded.
    Times were bad, horrible.
    And he ended up scrounging around
    for all sorts of different jobs.
    Now, was the business folding--
    was that a result of persecution?
    I believe so.
    I don't know.
    I think it was the economic climate.
    I don't know if it was a depression that touched Germany
    as well.
    I'm not clear about the economic reasons.
    I just know that, before I was born,
    or while I was still an infant, this business
    was no longer supporting him.
    If his father was born Jewish, was he considered a Jew?
    You mean his father?
    No, your father's father--
    Oh, my father.
    --was born Jewish.
    So was your father considered a Jew by the Nazis?
    Yes.
    For the same reason that I was considered 3/4 Jewish,
    he was considered one half Jewish.
    Yes.
    I wondered whether that--
    He had been--
    --affected his business.
    In World War I, he had gotten the Iron Cross, second class.
    And he had been a patriotic German.
    And he was 40 when I was born.
    He had had a very happy young manhood in Berlin,
    enjoying himself, enjoying life in Germany.
    And all of this came like a bad dream.
    And he couldn't believe that it was going to last.
    So backing up a bit, there was bad economic times,
    and his business got into bad trouble.
    And so then what happened?
    Oh, he scrounged around.
    He sold vacuum cleaners.
    He was a wine salesman.
    You see, his great gift to salesmanship.
    His nickname was Fridl.
    They used to joke, Fridl could sell refrigerators to Eskimos.
    He really could.
    So he kept us afloat with that.
    And my mother, when I was older, she went and got herself a job
    at something called the Palästina Amt,
    the Office for Palestine, a Jewish organization near where
    we lived.
    And she had a regular office job there, secretarial.
    And she had that job, actually, until we left.
    Oh, but before she got that, she tried everything.
    I'm going to jump ahead and say, when my dad left--
    OK.
    --she took on a job as a housekeeper for a very nice,
    well-to-do Jewish family.
    And it was really nice, because there
    was a young woman there whom she became very good friends with.
    Her grandfather, the young woman's grandfather
    and her mother, who seemed to be a little bit retarded
    or had some kind of emotional problems--
    her grandfather was a marvelous old gentleman.
    And they adopted me as the child of the house and spoiled me.
    And my mother did cleaning and cooking.
    And it was something she had never done before.
    But she was really great, very adaptable and hard working,
    just to keep us going.
    So she was doing this to support you.
    Yes.
    And also, we started out in a lovely apartment
    when I was four.
    Then we went to a slightly less wonderful argument,
    and finally ended up in a furnished room.
    Things were really, really bad.
    We were poor.
    So going back to your father leaving,
    how did that come about?
    All right.
    This was still before Kristallnacht.
    But things were bad.
    And he was struggling.
    And one day, a letter came from city hall
    to present himself there the next day with his passport.
    And he knew something was up.
    He was very intelligent and aware,
    even though he couldn't believe that this would last.
    But he knew that things were getting dangerous.
    What did he think that was all about?
    Oh, I'll tell you.
    At that time, my mother was already employed
    at the Palästina Amt.
    I don't know.
    I get confused.
    He called here at work.
    And he said, Edith, come home and help me pack.
    Tonight, I have to leave Germany.
    And he explained that they wanted him to present himself
    with his passport at city hall.
    He knew what that meant.
    They were going to put a J in it for Jew,
    which would mean that his travel would be severely curtailed,
    if not made impossible.
    And he decided he going to flee that night, get out of there.
    Before they put a--
    Absolutely.
    --J on his passport.
    Yes.
    And so how did he leave?
    Well, I think he went to his great-aunt, Matilda,
    and borrowed some-- she was the Christian part of the family,
    and quite well-off.
    And she lent him some money.
    And I think he took a train to--
    somehow, he found-- there was two places he went to.
    He was in Amsterdam.
    And he was in London trying to find a stepping stone.
    I'm a little confused where he went first.
    And then, eventually, he ended up briefly in New York
    to gain a foothold.
    But in order to enter legally into the United States,
    he needed a quote number, visa.
    And so in those days, people in that position
    would either go to Canada.
    Some ended up in China, in Shanghai.
    And he opted-- or maybe it was the only choice
    he had-- to go to Havana, Cuba, to wait for this.
    So that's what happened.
    In the meantime, we had a year without him.
    And I must tell you, he was a marvelous cook.
    He was a great cook.
    And he had made a bouillabaisse this last day.
    And I remember, after he had left--
    he had left in the evening.
    And I don't quite know what mode of transportation.
    He must have taken a train to Hamburg
    to take the boat over to England,
    or something like that.
    There we were, with his soup that he had left.
    And I remember my mother and I eating that soup.
    And the tears were just rolling down our cheeks.
    And for many, many, many years, I couldn't stand bouillabaisse.
    I just couldn't stand it.
    Then, much later on, I developed a real liking for it,
    because we were together again.
    But that was something.
    It was a terrible shock to him him gone all of a sudden.
    But he saved himself.
    And he saved us by that action.
    So when he left, you had some awareness
    of what was happening.
    Oh, a great deal of it.
    In fact, fear was our constant companion,
    because then we had Kristallnacht.
    November 9, wasn't it?
    1938, I believe.
    And my mother was a real Berliner.
    There's an expression in Berlin.
    If somebody comes at you all excited,
    you say, [GERMAN],, which means, oh, so where's the fire?
    So at 4 O'clock in the morning, or at 4:30 or 5:00,
    there's a pounding at the door.
    My mother gets up out of her sleep--
    this is some time after my father left,
    I don't know how long--
    all grumpy.
    And she goes to the door and opens it.
    And she said, so where's the fire?
    And the person knocking on the door
    said, the temple across the street
    is on fire, the Jewish temple.
    This was Fasanenstrasse.
    The corner had Hotel Kempinski at it.
    That was the last address we had in Berlin.
    And kitty corner from across the street
    was a Jewish synagogue, which is now,
    by the way, the Jewish Community Center.
    I saw it in 1978.
    They did something very smart.
    They saved the front of this temple.
    It had been a beautiful building.
    They saved a doorway, and made a modern building
    for the Jewish Community Center, and put the doorway there.
    It was a striking and very beautiful thing.
    It was a strange feeling to go back after so many years
    and see that.
    But anyway, to get back to that horrible night or morning,
    my mother must have gone out the door to take a peek at it.
    I don't remember.
    She left me upstairs in bed.
    Or maybe I slept through all this.
    I don't know.
    And I remember-- she stayed home that day.
    And I remember saying, oh, how nice.
    You don't have to go to work.
    You're staying with me.
    And I remember her sad smile.
    And she said, but what a reason.
    I was too young to understand the horrible things that
    were going on around me.
    And another really nightmare moment was--
    we, at this time, lived in a furnished room.
    And I, in fact, slept on a cot in the kitchen.
    It was a nice, big, old Berlin apartment.
    And the lady who lived there was a wonderful old lady.
    Her name was Mrs. Moses.
    I think her first name was Martha.
    I'm not sure.
    She had a retarded daughter, a little shriveled lady,
    must have been in her 40s or 50s.
    Scared me terribly, because I didn't know about retardation.
    But she was kindness itself, very old and tired looking.
    And she was very good to my mother and myself.
    She had some other tenants there, too.
    She had her son living in the apartment above her.
    And I think it was the day after the fire,
    or very shortly thereabouts, that there
    was talk of Jewish men being searched
    for by hordes of SA men.
    Those were the Brown Shirts.
    And there was a brass door sign next to the apartment door
    outside the front door.
    And it said Moses on it.
    That was her name.
    And some very smart person across the way
    said, if I were you, I would unscrew those screws
    and take that sign off.
    It's a very Jewish name.
    They're bound to come to you.
    And my mother, who was a real feisty Berliner always
    said, oh, that's not necessary.
    She didn't want to do that.
    But reason prevailed, and they did it.
    And it's a darn good thing, because later on, we heard
    these boots on the stairs.
    My mother and I were inside the pantry with her arms
    around me, shaking like aspen leaves.
    We heard those pounding boots coming up the stairs.
    And we heard somebody say, oh, don't ring there,
    there's no Jews there.
    And they went on.
    I believe they got her son, either that time, or later.
    I don't know.
    She and her daughter must have ended up dead.
    It was just dreadful.
    Anyhow, that is a moment that is probably
    the most frightening moment of my life.
    Then we crept out of the pantry.
    The Nazis had gone.
    And then shortly thereafter it must've
    been that word came that we should go to--
    from my father who had, at this point, reached Havana.
    And he said, he wrote, go to Hamburg.
    Go to the Cuban consulate.
    And get all your documentation.
    And soon, I'll be able to send for you.
    And so my mother and I took an early morning train--
    it was still dark--
    from Berlin to Hamburg.
    Now, this was right away, the next day?
    Or--
    As a child, your sense of time is really nonexistent.
    It's fueled by events.
    I simply cannot tell.
    It must have been shortly thereafter, I'm sure.
    So there we were.
    I thought it was the greatest treat in the world
    to sit in a dining car, a little--
    no, white tablecloths, with silver, and waiters.
    And I remember eating a soft boiled egg
    and looking out the train window.
    I took my enjoyment where I found it.
    I thought that was great.
    But then we trudged through Hamburg.
    And we went to the consulate.
    Everything was fine.
    It was lunchtime.
    And I was getting hungry.
    And my mother-- everywhere she saw, at restaurants, it said,
    Jews unwanted, forbidden to Jews.
    And she was a mother first.
    And she decided that, heck with all this.
    She had a young child here.
    And she was going to see to it that that child got some lunch.
    And so we just walked into one of those restaurants and ate.
    And of course, it didn't mean much to me.
    But you can imagine her feeling.
    And then, shortly after that, I was able to leave the school.
    And the happy word came that--
    Pardon me.
    Did you go back to Berlin?
    Or did you stay in Hamburg?
    Oh, yeah, this was just a trip to get documentation--
    I see.
    --from the Cuban consulate.
    And then shortly--
    So you went right back to Berlin.
    We went right back to Berlin.
    And then--
    How long was the trip from Berlin to Hamburg?
    You ask me something I don't know.
    I could look at the map here.
    How far is Hamburg from Berlin?
    Maybe-- let's see, Hamburg.
    So you did it in a day?
    Oh, Yes.
    OK.
    Oh, yes.
    It was several hours.
    So you didn't have to stay overnight in Hamburg.
    I don't remember that.
    It must have just been a day trip.
    Yes.
    So then the wonderful word came that we would be able to leave.
    Do you want to ask me anything else?
    Or should I go on into that now?
    Word came.
    And my mother got ready and prepared everything.
    Now I have to go back in childhood memories.
    Before I continue with this, let me go back.
    When we started moving from one nice apartment,
    to one less nice, to one less nice, to a furnished room,
    I remember a lovely place we had.
    Geisenheimer Strasse was the place.
    It was outside of Berlin.
    And it was a little apartment with a balcony.
    But it was on the ground floor.
    And I remember, at that time, I was four years old.
    And I was just starting having this impulse to draw pictures.
    And so I remember sitting at a little table on a little chair
    on this balcony.
    It had a hedge around it to separate it from the road.
    And I would sit there with paper and pencil,
    and scribble and scribble, happy as could be.
    I remember that clearly, the first apartment I remember.
    In fact, my first memory was waking up from a sleep.
    And my parents were in the next room packing.
    And we were going to Denmark the next day for a little trip.
    That was my very first memory.
    I was three then, or something.
    So that was a happy time when you were a very small child--
    Oh, yes.
    --before all the trouble starting.
    My parents were my world.
    I had no siblings.
    And they were always absolutely wonderful parents.
    We had a happy relationship, trouble free.
    But why did I go into that?
    Oh, later on, when I came back with my mother in '78,
    we visited this apartment, because that
    was the only place that held happy memories for me.
    It was raining cats and dogs.
    And the apartment, the whole neighborhood,
    was now filled with Turkish labor immigrants.
    You've read about the Turks.
    And they were having a very hard time
    in foreigner-hating Germany.
    And there were these Turks in that apartment.
    And we couldn't make ourselves understood
    that we used to live here, that we wanted to see.
    It was a blank.
    And it was raining.
    I feel heartbroken.
    I don't know why, but I felt so sad.
    Anyway, that was--
    I'm digressing here.
    I went back into the past.
    Now, this-- but why did I do that?
    Now, what was I trying to tell you?
    You started to talk about leaving Germany.
    And then you--
    Yes.
    And then you went back to your early childhood happiness.
    Oh, yes.
    Now, leaving that neighborhood, we
    had to leave that apartment because we just simply
    didn't have any more money.
    And that's when the furnished room life started.
    No, I think there was one more apartment high under the roof,
    which wasn't too bad.
    But then came the furnished room.
    But anyway, the day that we had to leave Geisenheimer Strasse,
    there was a neighborhood Punch and Judy show.
    In German, it's called Kasperle Theatre.
    And all the neighborhood children
    were getting ready to sit and watch it, and I had to leave.
    I had to drive away with my parents.
    That very time, I felt so bereft.
    So that was a sad thing.
    So it was, in many ways, difficult
    for you to leave your home.
    Well, that home, yes.
    But then later, leaving Fasanenstrasse to go on a boat
    to Cuba was unbelievable happiness.
    I was not sorry to leave that Germany.
    So talk about that leaving.
    All right.
    I was never one for dolls, but I had a lot of stuff toys.
    Particularly, I loved a white stuffed cat,
    beautiful little white stuffed cat
    with green glass eyes, a little pink nose and mustache.
    I loved it.
    And for some reason, with all the excitement
    of packing and getting ready to leave, that got left behind.
    And I don't know whether we were in a taxi to the train,
    or in the train, or what.
    All of a sudden, I remembered.
    And I said, oh, Mutti, I forgot the cat.
    Can we back and get it?
    And she said, no, oh, no.
    Can you imagine, in her mind, going back
    and getting snapped up?
    Of course not.
    But to this day, I have regrets about that stuffed cat.
    But other than that--
    Let's stop here--
    Oh.
    --because we have to turn over the tape.
    Yes.
    Good.
    [AUDIO OUT]
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum volunteer collection
    interview with Ruth Harvey, take number one, side B.
    When we stopped, you were talking
    about leaving your animal behind--
    Well, it was not a living animal.
    --your stuffed animal--
    It was a stuffed animal.
    --and how upsetting that was for you to forget that.
    And then you were telling me about a painting
    that you did, which you now have in front of you.
    And the title of the painting is--
    Childhood Memories.
    It is so strange.
    My art teacher suggested a subject,
    because I was at a standstill.
    She said, why don't you paint your childhood memories?
    And it unleashed a torrent in me.
    And it had a very odd result.
    I had been planning a trip through the Rhine country,
    picturesque German towns along the river.
    When I got through painting this painting,
    I had gotten so closely back into my childhood self
    that I was totally unable to go to Germany.
    And I changed my travel plans and went to Greece instead.
    So you had a lot of very strong feelings.
    Oh, my lord, yes.
    And it was catharsis.
    It just came out.
    To do the painting?
    As I did the painting.
    Yes.
    Could you describe some of the things in the painting?
    Yes, I'll be happy to.
    Down here, you see this cornucopia
    with colorful objects spilled out of it.
    This is in the lower right hand.
    The lower right.
    I'm going to go from the lower right hand.
    Now, in Germany, when children reached school age,
    their loving families would present them
    with these cardboard cornucopias filled with candy.
    This is a German tradition for your first day of school.
    I remember mine was just somewhere.
    I have a photo of myself with that in my arms.
    It was this big.
    And it was filled with candy.
    And what this here symbolizes-- it's
    lying on the ground with all these colors spilled out of it.
    And I think of that as my spoiled childhood.
    Spoiled childhood?
    Yes.
    Spilled, spoiled.
    Yes.
    What do you mean, spoiled childhood?
    Well, instead of having a normal childhood,
    going through the normal schools and the normal way,
    it took all sorts of odd twists, and turns, and humiliations,
    and scares, and that sort of thing.
    OK.
    And what else in the painting is especially important to you?
    Well, you see there a little girl
    with her arms outstretched, floating after a white toy cat.
    That's the story I told before.
    To this day, I'm searching for that.
    Over here, then you speak into the microphone.
    Thank you.
    Yes.
    So that is there.
    To the right of it is the Punch and Judy show.
    If you look at it very closely, there's
    a devil with a pitchfork and horns.
    He's all red.
    And there's Kasperle-- or Punch, as he is called in English--
    with his stick, and his pointy cap, and his red nose.
    And later on, when I was all filled anew with fury
    at what had happened, I somehow thought of the Punch
    as a typical stupid German, and the devil--
    namely, Hitler or Goebbels--
    leading him on.
    I thought of that later with an adult mind fairly recently.
    As a child, I just thought of it as Punch and Judy.
    But somehow, it fits into that painting for that reason.
    Now, to the left of this, you see a black rectangle
    with a white bulb on the top.
    And you see two shapes--
    a large female shape, and a small female
    shape-- clutching each other.
    And that was my mother and I in the pantry clutching each other
    in deadly fear.
    Behind it, you see gray steps going up
    and a large red swastika behind it.
    That was the sound we heard of the Nazi boots on the stairs.
    Now, if there's anything else in here
    that you want to ask me about--
    Well, is there anything else that is
    particularly emotional for you?
    Well, all right, emotional-- it's both good and bad.
    Here, you see a gray ship going through the ocean, bravely
    headed in a new direction.
    And that was the German ship, the Orinoco.
    And my mother and I were lucky to get tickets on that.
    We were in fourth class, steerage.
    We were down below in a huge room
    shared with many other women.
    I think there were 40 of them, and lower bunks, and upper.
    My mother and I, of course, were together.
    And I think it was a lower bunk.
    And what she had done--
    brave lady.
    We had a wonderful oil painting.
    It's right over there.
    It's a self portrait of a great-great-grandfather of mine
    who had artistic talent.
    And he did this painting of himself
    in the earlier part of the 19th century.
    So she took it out of the frame, because this
    was the one true antique that we had of great sentimental value,
    a self portrait of an ancestor.
    And she rolled it up.
    And we slept with it between us in a cardboard roll.
    That was the one thing she managed to get out.
    Now it's hanging there.
    Anyhow, that was a pretty unpleasant trip,
    I mean the sleeping conditions.
    The food wasn't too bad.
    It was simple, but good.
    And I, as a child, enjoyed everything.
    The adults, of course, were worried sick.
    And I'm comfortable.
    Now, you were on a German ship.
    Yes.
    With a German--
    In fact, there's something in there
    I'm going to tell you about.
    Yes, It was the first--
    OK, this here, what you see here, is the--
    Now, you're talking about the painting
    here, the upper right hand corner of the painting.
    I'm still in the middle here.
    There's a black-and-white tile floor.
    There are tables with white tablecloths,
    an elegant French door, palm trees, or palm bushes
    in pots, a very elegant salon.
    Well, there was a lady on the ship who was
    a very well-to-do Jewish lady.
    And she was traveling first class.
    My mother and she were acquainted.
    And one day, she invited us up to first class for tea.
    Now, we had been for quite some time down in the hold.
    And here I am, a little girl.
    And when we went up there, I heard violin music playing,
    and waiters scurrying by with trays.
    And I saw all this luxury.
    And it made a very deep impression on me.
    It really did.
    The next picture you see is a man, my father,
    wearing his blue bow tie, white shirt, and gray pants
    with his arms raised in the air.
    And he's standing under a palm tree
    and bidding us welcome, a very welcoming figure.
    And were we ever happy to see him.
    And then it goes on.
    The painting swirls up to the right above.
    And there's little girls floating around.
    Those were the little girls I became friends
    with once we settled in Cuba.
    And they were very lovely.
    And of course, I didn't speak Spanish.
    And they didn't speak German.
    But I managed to learn both Spanish and English,
    at least starting to, while I had that year and a half
    in Havana.
    And the end of the painting, at the upper right,
    you see these white towers, skyscrapers.
    You see the stars in the sky turning into the stars
    in the American flag.
    And this was the land of our dreams,
    which I didn't know yet.
    And I saw these miraculous skyscrapers up there.
    And we had to get there.
    And that was the idealized version of it.
    That pretty well describes everything.
    Oh, that's a very interesting painting
    Thank you.
    Can we go back and fill in some of the details of your trip?
    You and your mother were in the taxicab going to the train.
    Or whatever conveyance.
    Yes.
    And then you got to the train station in Berlin.
    All that is-- no, I don't remember those things.
    You don't.
    No.
    I just remember-- I had never had a terribly good memory.
    Well, you were just--
    I just remember--
    --also a small child.
    --the emotional parts or the dramatic parts.
    How I get somewhere, how long it took,
    this is all gray area, something I honestly don't know.
    At that time, I was about nine years old.
    Yeah.
    Do you remember on the ship, the Orinoco-- it was a German ship.
    And I think you had said it sailed from Hamburg?
    Yes, to Havana.
    Oh, and we stopped in Antwerp once.
    All I remember there are houses with blue tiles.
    We stopped there shortly.
    Do you remember on the ship whether you were treated
    differently being Jewish?
    The German crew for the fourth class were very decent.
    Nobody ever was rude or nasty.
    They were very decent.
    And in fact, my father always had high regard for the German
    Navy, men who were at sea.
    He had wanted to become a naval officer.
    But his astigmatism kept him from that.
    No.
    There was not one instance of any kind
    of rudeness or mistreatment.
    There were other very interesting Jewish people
    who were--
    professional people, who were also down there in steerage.
    And we enjoyed each other's company.
    And I have a photo of that little girl with a scarf
    and a little sailor doll-- must have brought on board--
    looking as happy as could be.
    Were most of the other passengers Jewish?
    The people down at that level certainly were.
    So the trip was as you described it before.
    Do you remember anything else about the ship?
    Just a terrific contrast between our steerage
    and that first class salon with the violin music.
    It was unbelievable.
    I stood there thunderstruck.
    I thought I was dreaming it all.
    Yes.
    And of course, I enjoyed seeing the gray North Atlantic.
    I had never been at the sea before.
    No, I was at Wannsee, which is a huge lake.
    I had never been by the ocean.
    I loved it.
    I thought it was just wonderful.
    I've loved it ever since.
    So you arrived in Havana.
    Yes.
    I have a huge story to tell about my father.
    It shows you what kind of a man he was.
    First of all, he boarded the ship with the pilot.
    Somehow, he wrangle that, greeted us right on deck.
    It was heaven.
    It was so wonderful.
    I had always adored my papi.
    And it was just sheer heaven to be with him again.
    And I'm pretty sure my mother felt the same.
    And then, of course, he couldn't take us right off,
    because there was a Cuban version of Ellis Island called
    Triscornia.
    I think it means "three horns" in Spanish, but I'm not sure.
    And again, with a child's different look at things,
    I thought it was fantastic.
    It was this ancient garden with palm trees.
    I'd never seen palm trees before.
    And they were so wonderful, I thought.
    And we had really unpleasant conditions.
    There were no mattresses.
    We slept right on the metallic springboards
    with a sheet over it.
    But it was the tropics.
    It was very hot.
    And it wasn't too uncomfortable to me.
    The only thing I remember eating there
    was sweet black coffee and red beans.
    I don't remember anything else.
    I thought it was great.
    I enjoyed it.
    And my father got us out of there within two or three days.
    You and your mother stayed there--
    Yes.
    --not your father.
    Yes.
    Yes.
    He had already made living arrangements.
    So he came to get us much quicker than we
    had anticipated.
    Other people were still there.
    I remember saying goodbye to them, and out of sight, out
    of mind.
    I don't even remember anyone particularly.
    So my father confronted my mother.
    And he said, Edith, you have to be very brave.
    Now, you can imagine that I couldn't
    get something very good.
    We don't have any money.
    And you have to be brave.
    It's a bit of a slum, but at least we're together.
    And she said, oh, Fridl, it doesn't matter.
    We're together.
    It's so wonderful.
    We all happily drove to whatever horrible place awaited us.
    Well, he had had his little joke,
    because he had rented half of a two-family house,
    typical Cuban, with gorgeous tile floor, lovely veranda,
    rented furniture.
    We had rocking chairs.
    The one thing I remember inside was a tray with tall glasses
    from Woolworth's with big, red dots on them and a decanter.
    And these were the tropics.
    It looked so good, so inviting.
    And the house inside was cool with these wonderful old tile
    floors.
    Well, we couldn't believe it.
    He totally tricked us.
    We were so happy.
    We didn't know what to think.
    He had his little joke.
    He was so happy, too, to have his family again.
    And I must tell you-- and this is where
    my guilt complex comes in.
    While others were having this great sorrow
    and this great pain in Europe, and they
    were going to ghettos and concentration camps,
    we were having this little ideal lasting over a year or so
    of pure happiness.
    Of course, my father had money worries.
    But the important thing is we were together,
    and we were safe.
    In Cuba at that time, long before Castro,
    it was a wonderful place to be.
    Now, were there particular people back in Germany
    that you were concerned about?
    My grandparents, who were our only close relatives,
    they had gone to South Africa through the help
    of my mother's younger brother.
    He was five years younger than she.
    He, in his youth, had been a Communist idealistic.
    And he saw the writing on the wall in the early '30s.
    And he lit out from Germany.
    And he went to South Africa, established himself
    as a businessman, and became quite well-off.
    He's dead now.
    And he got his parents out.
    They lived there peacefully.
    Did they leave Germany before you and your mother?
    I wish I could tell you for certain.
    Probably.
    Probably.
    I was not close to them.
    They were good people.
    But they didn't have a knack with children.
    And it was the same with my mother.
    They were her parents, but they were not really close.
    She appreciated them, but there was no closeness.
    So I'm not quite certain.
    They must have lived before we did.
    Were there-
    Yes, they must have, because there
    wasn't much later after 1939.
    Yes.
    Were there any people back in Germany that you or--
    There was the Christian side of the family whom we, ourselves,
    didn't know too well.
    My father was the contact there.
    They were doing all right.
    I don't know what they suffered under the Nazis.
    But they were not in any imminent danger.
    My mother-- my father's mother's maiden name was Vogt, V-O-G-T.
    Or maybe it was V-O-I-G-T. I'm not sure.
    But it was pronounced Vogt, which in German means abbot.
    So they were the Christian side.
    And Aunt Matilda, the great-aunt,
    she had married an Abel, so she was Christian.
    But the man she married came from a Jewish family.
    So anyway, there was one aunt much later.
    In fact, just about two years ago,
    I learned that my very glamorous older great-aunt-- she
    was my grandmother's sister.
    Her name was Ida, Eda.
    And she had married a wealthy--
    she was Jewish, and she had married a Jewish gentleman.
    And I learned recently that she had ended up in Theresienstadt.
    I had not know this before, and I was very, very sad.
    I wasn't close to her either.
    But she was an elegant lady, very unhappily married.
    And I remember the stained glass window in her dining room
    when we visited.
    They had one of those phenomenal Berlin apartments.
    But being an only child, we did have some relatives in Dresden
    who were non-Jewish.
    The boys went into the army.
    I think they both died.
    They were an odd family.
    Do you want to hear another childhood memory--
    Sure.
    --when I was in Dresden?
    Two come to mind, neither one of them pleasant.
    Now, I don't think you have mentioned
    why you were in Dresden or when you were in Dresden.
    This was obvious.
    This was when my father was between jobs.
    He was struggling.
    And he wanted to put his wife and child someplace.
    So he decided to leave us with his relatives in Dresden.
    So we went there.
    The lady was an eccentric.
    She had about 13 cats or more and this a big, old rambling
    country house in Dresden.
    She had two sons.
    I remember one of was called Rainer.
    And I can't remember the other one.
    They were much bigger boys.
    I was just a little kid.
    And they played to tricks on me.
    They gave me something that looked just like honey.
    And they said, this is good, Ruth.
    Why don't you eat it?
    I was such an ignoramus.
    I ate it.
    And it was laundry soap.
    To this day, I can remember the taste.
    It was so awful.
    The other thing they did, which did not endear them to me--
    they would put me in a potato sack
    and move me around the garden, just drag me.
    That wasn't too good.
    I was scared to death of them, not having any siblings,
    particularly brothers.
    And the other thing is I developed a typical childhood
    cold.
    And some German families had some peculiar ideas
    of how to raise children.
    This woman's idea of curing me was to tie me, hand and foot,
    in bed and put a lot of blankets on me
    to sweat it out of my system.
    Well, my mother was horrified.
    She felt like she was very vulnerable.
    She was there because she didn't have a penny to her name.
    Her husband was struggling in Berlin
    to find a job and a place to live.
    All she had were these people.
    She didn't want to offend the lady.
    But she didn't want to desert me either.
    So I was lying there, sweating and pleading for her
    to release me, and she was sitting there crying.
    But she didn't have the nerve to untie me.
    This was a very unpleasant memory.
    And remember, this was not done by a Nazi.
    This was done by what was considered a good German parent
    figure--
    not my mother, but this lady who was related to my father
    by marriage.
    It was her husband who was a cousin of his.
    And so my memories of Dresden--
    and it was also ghastly winter weather, and depressing.
    And I was cold, most of--
    it was just simply a horrible memory.
    So that was a difficult time for you.
    But let me throw in how Germans think
    children should be raised.
    I told you how close my father was to his father.
    And his father was a darling man who had
    been widowed much too young.
    He was well-off.
    They had a lovely house.
    And he had my father woken every morning
    by a housekeeper coming in and putting
    ice cold sheets around him to wake him up and toughen him up.
    Can you imagine a little boy, half orphan,
    from waking up in the morning and being wrapped up
    in these icy sheets?
    Well, this was the German way of bringing children up.
    I'm so glad that my own parents didn't have those ideas.
    I just wanted to throw that in.
    OK.
    Well, let's move ahead to Cuba.
    You said that you were very happy--
    Oh, it was unbelievable.
    --with your family there for about a year.
    Did you go to school in Cuba?
    Yes, I did.
    And this is a very interesting thing.
    I went to a place called Miss Phillip's School.
    And it was a private school.
    My father had done some fundraising
    for the American Joint committee, who
    helped many Jewish refugees.
    And they were giving him an allowance.
    That's how we managed to live.
    And I don't know what the financial arrangements
    were for me to attend school.
    But I went to this lovely American Miss Phillip's School
    in Havana.
    It's a lovely tropical building in a nice part of town.
    And I was learning both Spanish and English.
    And I--
    So the school was conducted in English?
    There was a Miss [? Sema. ?] I think
    it was English and Spanish.
    Yes, it was.
    I had an American teacher, Miss Martha Jane Pruitt--
    no, Martha Jane Jones.
    She married a Mr. Pruitt later.
    She was a darling young girl.
    And I remember there was an older
    teacher with white hair, Mrs. Flora [? Sema. ?]
    And she must have been Spanish speaking.
    But I managed, with all these limitations in language,
    to be the second best in my class.
    And I got a silver medal.
    I still have it.
    And the gold medal was earned by another refugee boy
    I remember a nice, plump Jewish boy with a marvelous
    sense of humor.
    And he got the first one, which was gold.
    So these refugee children weren't really outdistancing
    the local kids.
    Were there many refugee children in the school?
    No, but there were many refugees in Havana.
    Yes.
    And at home, did your family still speak German?
    Yes.
    That's probably why I am now working
    in the historical division doing translations,
    because my fundamental German is very deep-seated.
    And I have not really forgotten it,
    because even in this country, until my parents' deaths--
    my mother died in 1984, my father much earlier--
    we would intermingle English and German.
    So German has, for you, the memories
    of being with your mother and with your father and being--
    Yes.
    I know some very embittered people
    who had suffered greatly in camps
    who, when they came to America, refused to speak German.
    And I respect that.
    And I understand it.
    But that's a different situation.
    Well, maybe we can talk more about that later.
    Yes.
    What else about Cuba?
    I thought the Cuban people were so different from anything
    I had seen before.
    I remember pale faced, northern Germans,
    or very Jewish Germans.
    And I was always cold in Germany, it seems to me.
    And everything seemed to be gray.
    Berlin seemed to be gray.
    And all of a sudden, I was on this golden island.
    There were royal palm trees.
    I thought I'd never seen anything so beautiful.
    The sunsets, these tropical skies
    were something I'd never experienced before.
    The music, the people--
    they were very warm and charming and, at that time, happy.
    And did you feel any special treatment as a Jew?
    They couldn't have been nicer to us.
    They were so good, and hospitable, and welcoming.
    So how did you happen to leave Cuba?
    Oh, that was because our quota number came up.
    I see.
    We had done our wait.
    I was heartbroken.
    I remember the day we sailed away.
    My parents had locked me into the cabin,
    because I had been asleep when they left,
    and they didn't want me to be in any danger.
    And I remember waking up as the ship was sailing away.
    And I was looking at the Malecon it's that great stretch of road
    that's the first thing you see when you go to Havana Harbor--
    and the lights twinkling like a pearl necklace.
    And I wanted to go on deck.
    And I couldn't.
    The door was locked.
    And I remember standing in that porthole
    and sobbing, because I didn't want
    to leave Cuba, the people I knew, my girlfriends.
    I was distraught.
    So you did make friends in Cube.
    In fact, just a few months ago, I
    visited one of them, who is now lady my age in her late 60s
    living in Florida.
    That was my dear friend Hilda, whom I met then.
    She was then a very beautiful little girl
    with her own problems.
    Her parents had divorced.
    But she was a well, upper-crust Cuban.
    I mean a very well--
    they were wealthy.
    So she was not a refugee.
    She was an only child, like myself.
    And I fascinated her, because I was a refugee.
    So we became friends.
    And it's a lifelong friendship.
    So it was hard for you to say goodbye to Hilda
    and your friends.
    It was agonizing.
    Yes.
    And why did your parents want to come to the US
    instead of staying in Cuba?
    Oh, because there was no future for us in Cuba.
    It was a marvelous resting--
    stopping off place, better than we ever hoped for or expected.
    But it was not a place to remain.
    There was no way he could make a living or anything.
    We were set to become Americans.
    And did your family have contacts in the United States?
    Well, he had connections with this Joint Committee.
    And he quickly found work.
    But it was a terrible struggle.
    I once wrote an essay about my father,
    and I gave it to my children, in which I
    explained how it was for him.
    Here he was, at this point in his 50s.
    And he looked for any kind of job-- salesman.
    He worked at the Savoy Plaza Hotel
    in the basement as janitorial work.
    And here he was, once a well-set-up gentlemen
    with his little fortune.
    And here he was, now practically a janitor.
    And guys half his age would refer to him as, hey, Al.
    And it was a great come down, or I don't know.
    But he was very gallant about the whole thing.
    He got used to it.
    He struggled with it.
    He put up with it.
    He fought.
    And he finally ended up creating his own position
    with a German-language newspaper, Stats Sanctunk und
    Herald, and Knight Ridder paper.
    And he found a job in their advertising department.
    And with his contacts back in Germany
    and his knowledge of German, he became the advertising director
    for the ads from Germany, big industry ads.
    And I wanted to explain how it was possible
    for him to go back to Germany on business trips
    after all that had happened.
    And this was, of course, after the war when Germany
    was being built up again.
    He knew the high commissioner.
    And he had contacts from business before.
    And he managed to get some fabulous ads for the paper.
    And he did this twice a year for seven years
    until he died of lung cancer.
    And the way that he could do this, as I explained before,
    is that he had had 40, almost up to--
    no, more than 40, mid 40s.
    He had had a good life in Germany.
    This was a nightmare that came upon him in middle age.
    And he had to adjust to it.
    He had to understand that it wasn't
    going to go away, that he had to get away from there.
    He had not been in the camps.
    He had not had the experience.
    And so he was able to come back and deal
    with the post-war Germans.
    He was not eaten up by hatred or revulsion
    like so many rightfully were.
    And so he could do this.
    Can we back up a bit to your arrival in New York?
    Do you remember that?
    Oh, yes.
    He had a good friend in New York.
    His name was Eric Goodall.
    For a while, he was a political cartoonist.
    And the very first night, he took us around in his car,
    I remember, drove us through Little Italy
    where all the lights were lit--
    oh, first the skyscrapers down Fifth Avenue.
    And I was a little child.
    It was an open convertible.
    And I laid back, and just looked up
    at the skyscrapers, and the bright lights, and Little
    Italy, and all over.
    And I remember falling asleep, leaning back
    with my mouth open.
    That's my first night in New York.
    My father, as we were going down Broadway on that first day,
    stopped at 77th Street in Broadway.
    At the corner, there was a hotel called the Benjamin Franklin.
    I looked recently, and the building is still there.
    But it's no longer the Benjamin Franklin.
    It's been rebuilt something else.
    It was a residential hotel.
    And he rented us a nice, large room with kitchen privileges
    for that first night.
    And we lived there for some months.
    And so our arrival in New York was very pleasant.
    I had my parents with me.
    And my father had his good friend there,
    and getting acquainted with New York.
    And then I went to public school.
    And that, of course, was a little frightening.
    But I got used to it.
    So you were about 12.
    11, I think.
    11.
    OK.
    Wait.
    We arrived in 1940.
    I was born in '28.
    12.
    And how was your English by this time?
    Oh, it's so funny.
    I remember being in public school.
    And I asked, what is a bra?
    And this girl laughed and said, imagine Ruthie Abel not knowing
    what bra means.
    I didn't know that it was a brassiere.
    I was still too young for that.
    But the girls were talking about it.
    And there were words I just didn't know yet.
    And I had to learn them.
    And eventually, I realized that I
    was beginning to think in English,
    and that I had really gotten good at it.
    But it took a few years-- not too long, because I was young.
    My mother, although she had a very good knowledge
    of the structure of the language,
    had an accent that is so thick you could cut it with a knife.
    She never mastered the TH's.
    Was she home during the day?
    She worked.
    She did.
    I was a latchkey child for quite awhile.
    And what did she do?
    Secretarial, mostly.
    She was a very good secretary.
    In those days, secretary was not a dirty word.
    Now it is.
    So she was out with the public and had to use her English--
    Yes.
    Oh, yes.
    --every day.
    But she also managed to work for many refugees firms
    where they all spoke German.
    Once she said to me, it's a shame
    I never get a chance to practice my English.
    How am I ever going to improve?
    So she used German at work a lot of the time.
    Different jobs, yes.
    Yeah.
    So you went through school in New York.
    Yes.
    What schools did you go to in New York?
    It was a public school in a neighborhood there.
    And I was just getting adjusted to the American way of life.
    How was it making friends?
    I made a few good ones, not too many, kindred spirits.
    And in fact, one of them, Vera, was a refugee.
    In fact, she's in Chicago now.
    For many years, she taught art at the University of Chicago.
    And her father came from Danzig, a Russian background--
    lovely girl, became very good friends.
    And then there was a darling Irish American, Jill McConnell.
    She became my best friend.
    She was from the neighborhood.
    In fact, she's the one who gave me my middle name.
    Which was?
    Andrea.
    What happened was, after five years,
    my parents had the opportunity to get their citizenship.
    In fact, we went and swore the oath.
    And then we had a big dinner afterwards and celebrated.
    I, as their child, automatically became a citizen.
    And I was told that, when you become a citizen,
    you can have a choice at what name you want.
    Well, I had always been upset at the fact
    that I had one name only, and that was only one syllable,
    Ruth.
    It just wasn't-- yeah, that's how it was pronounced
    in German, "Groot."
    I didn't like it.
    It wasn't enough for me.
    I didn't feel like just "Groot," or Ruth.
    And so she and I took a walk on Riverside Drive,
    because I told her I wanted to get a middle name.
    I had realized that every American I
    knew had a middle name.
    But I only had one, and that was only one syllable.
    So I said, Jill, help me find a name.
    So we walked.
    And we started with the A's, naturally.
    And we didn't get very far, because when she said Andrea,
    I said, say that again.
    And she said, Andrea.
    And I said, I like it.
    What did you like about Andrea?
    The sound, the soft three-syllable sound.
    And so I became Ruth Andrea Abel.
    Did it have any national connotations for you?
    I mean, was it definitely--
    No, I always went by sound rather than rule.
    Later, I learned that it meant something like, gift to God,
    or something.
    I'm not sure.
    I have to look that up again.
    And of course, Ruth Andrea became Randy.
    That was my nickname for many years.
    Now that I work at the Holocaust Museum,
    I feel Randy isn't right.
    So I go with Ruth.
    Were you named after anyone in particular?
    Well, that's the strange thing.
    My parents, when they were waiting for me,
    apparently never had discussions about names the way
    my husband and I did.
    And here's my dear mother, recuperating
    from having had me in bed.
    And my dad hotfoots it to city hall
    and says he wants me named Ruth.
    He had never even consulted her.
    She wanted to call me Ellen.
    But then she thought Ellen Abel doesn't sound good,
    so she hesitated.
    So he comes back with a fait accompli.
    Here I was, Ruth.
    I didn't like it.
    She didn't like it.
    But there it was.
    Do you know why he selected Ruth?
    I wish I knew.
    It would be interesting, wouldn't it?
    I haven't a clue.
    I don't think he ever had a girlfriend named--
    he used to have many girlfriends before he got married.
    In fact, he was married before.
    And he never mentioned Ruth.
    Well, we're almost at the end of this tape.
    So let's stop and turn it over.
    OK.
    This is a continuation of United States Holocaust Memorial
    Museum Volunteer Collection interview
    with Ruth Harvey conducted by Margaret Garrett on August 22,
    1997 in Bethesda, Maryland.
    Tape number two side A. During the break
    you were talking about your father's first marriage.
    Yes, he has always been a stage-door Johnny,
    a man about town.
    He really was.
    He once had a violent love affair
    with a young actress named Ellen Victor,
    and he was so jealous of her.
    He was all set to shoot her.
    He was a very passionate young man.
    Well, he got over that.
    But he did marry an artist as his first wife.
    She was prima ballerina of the Berlin opera.
    Her name was Elizabeth Grub.
    She was non-Jewish, and she was a very good dancer.
    They were married about four years.
    And then she ran off with the stage designer, a Greek stage
    designer.
    And then he was a divorced man, and I
    think it was a very good thing when my mother-to-be walked
    into his life as his secretary.
    So he had no children from his first marriage?
    No. and she later married some titled German
    and barely escaped with her life when
    the Russians overran their estate that they lived on.
    Barely escaped.
    She later died.
    I met her once.
    She was a very charming lady.
    OK, let's go back to New York, and you
    went to high school where?
    I went to the High School of Music and Art,
    which had always been a fond project of Mayor La Guardia's,
    Fiorello La Guardia.
    And you could only go in there by passing certain tests,
    and I'm happy to say I passed them.
    And there were two categories in those days.
    Now it's the High School for the Performing Arts.
    But in those days it was just Music and Art.
    I belonged with the artists.
    It was a regular high school, but they
    were these two different things that we concentrated on,
    a career for music or a career as an artist in addition
    to high school subjects.
    So you graduated from high school in what year?
    I think maybe '48?
    I was always one year behind because of my
    having been a refugee.
    I believe I graduated in '48 if I'm not mistaken.
    And then what happened?
    Well, I went to Cooper Union for a time.
    I did not graduate from there.
    I was-- that's another thing.
    You had to take an exam to get into that.
    I passed that for the day courses.
    And then my parents took me aside and said, Ruthie,
    there just isn't the money there.
    You just going to have to take a daytime job
    and go to night school.
    Well, I was very upset about that.
    All my friends who were able to go to Cooper Union
    were going in the daytime, and it was very hard
    for me to work at jobs, sales jobs.
    The worst job I ever had as a very young person--
    oh, this was ghastly--
    was in some horrible neighborhood downtown
    where we spray painted little monkey masks.
    You know the little faces of little monkeys?
    We spray painted them.
    Every time I sneezed I'd get out a different rainbow color.
    It was unhealthy and unpleasant.
    It was, I would say, factory work.
    It was just ghastly.
    Well, I did-- the jobs I got in those days were not very good.
    And it was a great strain to work that and then
    go to night school.
    And after a while I just dropped out.
    And much to my regret really.
    And then I eventually, after many lesser and less enjoyable
    jobs, I found a lovely secretarial job
    with Paramount Theaters in the Paramount Building
    in Times Square where I stayed for four years,
    and I really enjoyed it.
    I was ordering candy for the theater chains
    and doing secretarial--
    Candy was bigger with them than the films were.
    They got more revenue from that.
    And I stayed with them--
    oh, I must tell you how I got the job at the State Department
    in Washington.
    Would you like to hear how I got that?
    Well, now, were you in New York when you
    got the State Department job?
    Yes, I'll tell you how.
    OK.
    My parents went for a vacation to Nassau.
    And it was February, and I was alone in the apartment
    and feeling a little woebegone.
    Things were not going terribly smoothly in my life.
    And late at night I had the radio on
    and I heard an announcer say, would you
    like a career in the Foreign Service?
    If so, apply for the State Department
    at Center Street downtown and get your form.
    Well, I took off from work the very next day
    and took the subway all the way down the Center Street
    near Wall Street and applied for form 57 for employment
    with the State Department in quintuplicate.
    Why were you interested in applying for the job?
    New York was not a healthy environment for me.
    I had been there 16 years, and I was not flourishing.
    Things were not happening well for me,
    and I felt that I needed a change of life--
    lifestyle, surroundings, everything.
    What was not happening that you wanted to?
    I met a lot of people who I thought were rather neurotic.
    There was something unhealthy about life in New York.
    If you were not well cushioned by money,
    if you had to struggle, it could be
    downright depressing at times.
    And I felt that I was young enough
    and I owed it to myself to go someplace else
    and try something new.
    So the very next day I got the form.
    My parents were still on vacation.
    Every night after work I would lie
    on the floor on the carpet on my stomach
    and fill out some more of this huge, positively endless form
    in quintuplicate.
    You had to go back to your very first beginnings of life,
    everybody you ever knew.
    You had to get references and schools.
    It took a week to fill it out conscientiously.
    I did that, and I listed references here and there
    and whatnot.
    And I mailed it off, and this was February.
    And I forgot about it.
    In May, I'm sitting in my office at the Paramount Theaters
    when the phone rang, and it was Washington offering me a job.
    Well, my father was so pleased because he had always
    had a high regard for diplomats, the diplomats life,
    and here was his little Ruthie entering, true,
    at the very bottom, but still it was the State Department.
    He couldn't have been more pleased.
    So I gave up my job at Paramount and traveled to Washington.
    Now, you had been living still in your parents' home?
    Well, at first in their home, and then
    I managed to get a room in the same building above them.
    But I left all that quite happily
    and settled in Mount Pleasant and worked
    for the State Department for about four years.
    Did you know anyone in Washington?
    I had had a boyfriend who had lived in Washington on and off.
    He was a flight engineer.
    And I had visited him once, and the first thing
    I saw from Union Station was the Capitol and trees everywhere
    I looked.
    I fell hook, line, and sinker.
    I fell in love with Washington, and I wanted to live here.
    So when the State Department job came
    I thought this is wonderful.
    This is a wonderful way to get where I wanted to go.
    So you came down by yourself and you found housing by yourself?
    Yes, my father treated me to my first night's hotel room.
    And then at the State Department I went to the registry
    for housing, and they found me a pleasant place
    on Mount Pleasant.
    Yes, it was nice.
    A group home with lots of other young women.
    And that job worked out pretty well for you?
    Oh, indeed I had a wonderful--
    I loved working for these.
    The odd thing is I wanted to go as a foreign secretary,
    and they offered me such a hideous assignment
    that I simply just switched to domestic because I
    thought I'd be happier than--
    what this country?
    It was landlocked, and I can't think of the name right now.
    But it was the least appealing country in Latin America.
    No ocean, no nothing.
    And I thought to myself, to lose two years of my life
    in this boondocks, that didn't seem right.
    And so I simply--
    and in those days you can get a second choice.
    And so I switched to domestic, and I
    worked on the Latin American division
    with my previous knowledge of Spanish.
    And I had a very good time as a single girl in Washington.
    I enjoyed myself.
    Then I met my husband-to-be, and that starts
    another chapter in my life.
    And how did you meet him?
    Very romantic.
    In those days the Park-Sheraton Hotel
    had a magnificent Olympic-size pool.
    Now it's been paved over as a parking lot.
    Can you imagine?
    But in those days it was a very refreshing,
    beautiful blue-green water.
    And one Labor Day-- it was Labor Day 1957.
    It was very hot.
    My girlfriend and I decided to go
    to that pool for a nice swim.
    And so we went, and that's how I met my husband.
    At the pool?
    He was sitting next to me.
    Mm-hmm.
    And what was he doing?
    Well, this is so strange.
    He said he was also in the foreign service.
    And what he couldn't tell me in those days
    but what I can tell now because he's been dead since 1972
    he was with the CIA.
    Only he didn't tell me that, of course.
    He just-- we exchanged telephone numbers, and he said,
    if you call me and I'm not there,
    just leave a message because that's the way it is.
    I didn't know that, so he called me and he missed me,
    so I called him and he wasn't there.
    And I wasn't going to leave a message, so I just hung up.
    This way we never would have gotten together.
    But finally he got me at home because I'd only
    given him my office number.
    My boss took pity on him and he said,
    I'll give you her home phone number.
    God bless him.
    And then we saw each other every day for about nine months.
    And then he was assigned to Athens, Greece.
    And that's when he asked me to share his life there with him.
    And we got married, and we went to Athens
    and lived happily there for five years.
    And two of my three children were born there.
    Now, when did you learn he was with the CIA?
    He told me after much hemming and hawing months and months
    later.
    Before you get married?
    He had to because I was--
    oh, let me see.
    No, I was aware of what he was doing
    before we talked marriage, yes.
    So before you talked marriage you
    knew that he was with the CIA.
    Yes.
    Was he Jewish?
    Oh, no.
    He was-- he came from Milwaukee of Polish and Welsh stock.
    The Welsh or English part would have been Protestant--
    Unitarian.
    And the other part was Polish Catholic.
    His mother was Catholic.
    She came from Polish peasants, maybe third generation.
    And his father was first generation who--
    they came over from England and went into real estate
    in Milwaukee.
    And what religion was he?
    Well, like his-- well, he was not Catholic like his mother.
    He was like his father.
    Could you stop it for me?
    Yeah, sure.
    I'm trying to-- [AUDIO DROPS] Unitarian.
    It was congregational.
    Oh, would you say that again?
    That tape didn't start when you spoke.
    So would you just repeat that.
    Yes, I had said Unitarian, but I misspoke.
    He's congregationalist, In fact, our three children
    were baptized at Plymouth Church in Milwaukee
    on different home leaves when we came back to visit his folks.
    And he had them christened right there.
    Now, did you consider yourself at that point Jewish, not
    Jewish?
    This is the story of my life.
    I've never figured out exactly what I am.
    I certainly feel more Jewish than anything else.
    And yet I am not really a practicing Jew.
    I don't follow the high holidays or the customs
    because I was raised so differently.
    And so there is sort of a conflict within me
    as to what exactly--
    where do I belong.
    So your children were christened in
    the congregationalist church.
    Yes.
    Now, they're fully aware that my background is Jewish,
    that some of their blood is Jewish, and they know all this.
    And they are simply--
    all three of them, I have tried to get
    them to go to Sunday school or have given them bibles,
    and they're just--
    they're wonderful, they've got good characters,
    but they're non-religious totally.
    And I couldn't get anywhere with them.
    Why did you try to get them to go to Sunday school?
    Because we were in the Foreign Service overseas.
    There was a lot of people going to church.
    It was a social thing for the people to get together.
    Their children went to Sunday school,
    and I thought it'd be kind of good for them
    to learn the stories of the Bible, you know?
    But I couldn't get them.
    They didn't want to.
    And in your home did you celebrate Christmas and--
    Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, and birthdays.
    That was about it.
    Mm-hmm.
    So you were in Athens with your husband for five years.
    Yes, five years.
    And you had two children there.
    Well, two were born there, yes.
    The third was born in Fairfax Hospital later.
    How do you think the--
    having been a refugee and that entire experience,
    how do you think that affected your life when you went back
    overseas to Athens?
    This is interesting that you should ask this
    because the Greeks, down back into history,
    have always been known to honor the stranger,
    to give hospitality to the stranger, to the visitor.
    Xenos, a stranger.
    They couldn't have been more hospitable or welcoming.
    It's in their blood.
    And I compare that to the German character
    of mistrusting instinctively the foreign element,
    the alien right away.
    And I thought to myself, what a shame
    that the people have to be so different.
    So the Greeks were hospitable.
    How about other people in the foreign service and in the CIA?
    Did you feel--
    Well, those were the days when there
    was a very idealistic bunch of people
    there like my husband and his friends.
    Very good sort of people and true patriots
    and risking their lives.
    And we had a very high opinion of the people we worked with.
    In fact, I didn't realize-- you know,
    in those days I didn't think about liberal or conservative,
    Democrat or Republican.
    In those days, in the '50s, there
    were so many moderates on both sides that they sort of melded.
    It wasn't really until the '80s and '90s
    that you see this really ugly tooth and nail
    attitude between the Democrats and the Republicans, the ultra
    conservatives, and liberal has become a dirty word.
    This is something that didn't exist then.
    Did you feel there was any discrimination
    about you being Jewish?
    I must say no.
    So you were in Athens for five--
    However-- excuse me for interrupting--
    had there been anything like that I would not have hidden.
    I would have spoken out.
    But I was fortunate in that that never came up.
    Do you think that's because of your previous experience
    that you would have been more likely to speak up?
    Oh, definitely.
    Of course, yes.
    And what about having children?
    Was that for you, do you think, a different experience because
    of your previous life in Germany?
    I would not wed these two ideas together.
    It was something entirely different.
    A totally different trip, and nothing
    to do with religion or past or anything.
    It was something new, a new world that I was going into.
    Yes.
    And so that was--
    Oh, it was the best thing I ever did or went through and gave
    meaning to my life.
    I mean, this is what I had been born for.
    And raising the-- and then later when my husband died fairly
    early we had only been married 14 years,
    leaving me with three children.
    And their ages were at the time 11, 10, and 8.
    And fortunately the government provided pensions
    so we didn't suffer hardship.
    But still, I was the one to raise these three.
    And this is interesting.
    Maybe my past experiences in dealing with hardships
    gave me the strength to endure this terrible shock
    of losing him so young and being in charge of three young lives.
    And I must say, they had such good character.
    it was so easy to raise them.
    I thoroughly enjoyed being a parent.
    And I must say, they didn't give me much grief at all.
    They were good kids.
    I raised them instinctually.
    All of us do.
    I mean, there's no handbook for being a parent.
    And it came out well.
    You have boys?
    I have two boys and the girl is in the middle.
    Now of course they're men and a young woman.
    Jenny just moved to Brooklyn to follow
    her man who got a job there, and she
    is a clinical social worker.
    She just got her master's last year, a year ago.
    And Michael is an honors--
    the oldest boy.
    He's an honors professor in Milwaukee
    at the University of Wisconsin.
    What is his field?
    He's teaching an honors course.
    An honors course, OK.
    Which will be up next year, and then he
    has to struggle to get another job.
    It's not easy.
    So an honors course would cover a number of different subjects?
    Yes, arts, politics.
    And those things are only for three years.
    So when that's over--
    the present problem with teaching and professors
    not having tenure, he'd be lucky if he gets another teaching
    position.
    Although he's very good and the students love him.
    And my youngest is working here in Washington.
    He's got a nice job.
    He just got married recently.
    And nice young couple, very happy with life.
    So I can gratefully say that--
    I would say the most creative thing
    and the most constructive thing in my life
    would be raising these three children having gotten them
    in the first place born healthy, and I'm very, very grateful
    about that.
    And that's what helped me through my widowhood,
    having them to take care of.
    Did you work after your husband died?
    Oh, yes.
    I remember that I had worked--
    I had a little part-time job at an insurance company
    when Johnny was still working for the agency here.
    And then he left.
    And a month after he left I got the death notice.
    And struggled a little bit longer at that job.
    And then they replaced me with somebody
    who'd been there before.
    And like a homing pigeon I fled to the agency
    that he'd worked for and told them my story,
    and they gave me a part-time job,
    which I kept for eight years while raising the children.
    I couldn't take a full-time job.
    I had a part-time job.
    I was home when they came home from school.
    And then I switched to full-time for a few more years
    when they were bigger, and then I took early retirement.
    Now I'm retired, and it's amazing
    how full one's days can be although retired.
    And so have your friends been some refugees, not refugees?
    Well, there's still Vera, although she's far away.
    I've had friends from all over.
    Refugees and Native Americans and Cubans and, oh yes.
    I just take people as they come.
    I don't have groups, you know.
    So you haven't felt limited to having other refugees who have
    similar experiences to yours?
    That is a feeling I had in New York
    when I was a teenager by 13 or so.
    And those days, all those poor, frightened,
    sick people who had survived Nazi Germany had all
    come to Manhattan, had all settled on the West side.
    And I remember how terribly depressing
    it was as a young teenager to see these poor, old, pale, gray
    shadows of themselves walking around Broadway,
    each one a tragic story.
    There were so many of them.
    I remember the feeling I had at the time of how tragic this was
    and how I wanted to get away from it.
    So that was part of your wanting to come to Washington?
    Well, by the time--
    yes, you know, by the time that I was ready to leave,
    those people were still there.
    Oddly enough, many, many decades later I went back.
    They were all gone, and their offspring was doing well,
    and the places had been--
    bad neighborhoods had been made wonderful.
    And New York was totally different,
    a completely different stage set.
    All those poor, poor shadows had vanished.
    And you saw nice young people jogging along, healthy,
    and it was just like it was when I went to Germany and I said,
    this is a brand new country.
    New York was a brand new country decades after I left it.
    But at the time when we were all refugees there together
    I found it very, very sad.
    But when you came to Washington you
    did not have that feeling of all refugees together?
    Oh, no.
    In fact, you know, New Yorkers had this unhappy reputation
    for not being terribly polite.
    Well, I thought everyone in Washington
    seemed so healthy and so pleasant,
    and I really enjoyed the people here.
    I liked it very--
    I mean, I must admit, I had gotten fed up with New York.
    And considered this place a place to get my health back,
    and I did.
    And you went back to Germany when?
    With my-- oh.
    After I became widowed in '72, my mother and I
    managed to plan to go back to Germany.
    I think it was '76 or '78.
    I don't remember which.
    And the sad thing about my husband is he died in Vietnam,
    and when he left here we had decided
    that when he had finished his tour, which was supposed
    to be 18 months, we would meet in Germany
    and I would show it to him.
    He was going to come straight from Vietnam.
    I was going to go straight from Washington.
    We were going to meet there, and I told you
    we're going to paint the town red.
    And I was so looking forward to that.
    He was in Vietnam with the CIA?
    Yes.
    And how did he die?
    Well, there's several versions about it,
    which I don't know that I want to go into.
    One is that he died in a swimming pool
    and the other one is a different version
    that somebody got to him from North Korea.
    And so not knowing the full truth, it's best not to--
    I mean, I don't know.
    I'll never know the truth.
    So I can't really tell you.
    But anyway, the idea being that when he had finished this tour
    we were going to reunite and I was
    going to show him my hometown.
    So you can imagine the state of mind
    I was in when I went years later with my mother.
    I remember being very unhappy and very unpleasant
    and very crabby.
    And I apologized to her.
    I said, Mutti, I'm sorry, but I'm just so sad.
    I pictured this so differently.
    And she said, apologies are not necessary, my dear.
    I fully understand.
    But then after I'd gotten there I
    discovered that everything was so different from what
    I remembered.
    And people were pleasant.
    And this was before the return of the skinheads.
    At this point I thought, oh my, this is marvelous.
    The new Germans are great.
    This is a democracy.
    How nice.
    And it was only later when I was back home a few years later
    and I read about these outrages against the Turkish laborers
    and the skinheads setting houses on fire
    and just being generally nasty to the alien labor forces
    that they had.
    And skinheads with swastikas and whatnot.
    And I get so fed up and so disgusted, you know.
    So as you can see, I've always had a roller coaster
    feeling about Germany.
    It'll always be with me.
    My daughter said, maybe you should see a therapist.
    And I-- I don't know.
    I just don't know.
    Should I or shouldn't I?
    I don't know.
    She thinks I should.
    Let's talk about your experience with the Holocaust Museum.
    Yes.
    It's funny, people had always told me
    through the years, Randy, why don't you
    be a docent maybe at the Smithsonian or something.
    And I'd say, yeah, yeah.
    I didn't really want to.
    I had no desire to.
    They thought you needed an interest
    or you had too much time?
    Yeah, besides I'm garrulous and I like people.
    They thought it'd be terrific.
    And I said that nothing tugged at me.
    And then I read an article in the "Washington Post"
    about the new Holocaust Museum and the idea that I adored.
    In those days they still had those past machines
    where you would take one of those ID cards or pamphlets
    from the machine and you would read--
    people who had been through the Holocaust and you'd
    read their story.
    And in those days you would have to go to a different floor
    and get the second page.
    You couldn't just read the whole thing.
    As you went from floor to floor, the fate of this person
    unfolded.
    They got rid of those machines because they
    were used to death.
    They died.
    They got rid of them.
    They were always breaking down.
    Now you get the whole little passbook,
    and unless you control yourself and wait,
    you can read the whole thing while waiting for the elevator.
    The idea being that you didn't know then would this person
    make it or would they perish.
    And that was rather dramatic.
    I thought the idea was phenomenal, you know.
    And then I read that they were looking for volunteers.
    And all of a sudden it was like boing.
    All of a sudden I was interested.
    My heart was in this.
    This was something that I felt I could
    do so well with my background.
    And so I wrote a letter, and they replied,
    and I came for an interview.
    And I was accepted.
    I was thrilled.
    I love the museum.
    I love what they're doing.
    And I enjoy being a volunteer.
    And were it not for my bad ankle and knee,
    I would be there much more often than I am.
    But fortunately they have an opening for me
    here in the oral history department,
    and I'm very happy translating and checking
    through these documents.
    You said that you love the museum and what they're doing.
    What is it that you love about the museum?
    It's a learning museum.
    It teaches people, often to young people
    who otherwise might be totally unaware of the Holocaust,
    that there was such a thing and that those flakes who
    keep claiming that it never happened are flakes
    and that this really did happen.
    There's enough evidence in this Museum to show that.
    I love that that somebody took the trouble to build it.
    And I love the architect who went to the camps
    and got the idea for the architecture
    directly from the camps, James Ingo Freed.
    And I love what he did.
    It's a magnificent building.
    And the strange thing is when I applied
    I said, please don't put me near scenes of horror.
    I don't want to see them.
    Put me anywhere.
    Well, sure enough, they did just the opposite,
    and I found myself walking through the permanent exhibit.
    But I learned to live with it.
    What was your first assignment there?
    To be a walker through the different floors
    of the permanent exhibit, make sure everything
    was going along well.
    You know, as you come out of the elevator
    you see a horrible thing on the fourth floor up
    against the wall with all the corpses.
    I mean, this is what I had tried to avoid.
    But somehow they got me into that.
    But--
    Did you ever ask to be transferred?
    No, once I was there I decided that having seen it
    once I could live with it and do the job that they
    wanted me to do.
    And of course, there's many others.
    You're not constantly walking through the permanent exhibit.
    There's many other areas.
    So I do it.
    And unfortunately, because of my bad foot now
    I don't go as often.
    I intend to go perhaps once a month on a weekend when
    they need people.
    Keep my foot in, so to speak but concentrate more
    on oral histories of translations.
    You said that when you read about the need for volunteers
    something leapt--
    Oh, my heart just jumped.
    I said to myself, god, if anybody can show the public,
    it's me.
    And I think any one of those volunteers
    must have had that same zing when they read about this.
    Don't you think?
    And can you say more about that feeling that you would
    be able to show the public--
    I had a feeling that my life-- remember now
    that I was a middle aged retired woman
    without a husband in her life, children grown up,
    life a little empty.
    And all of a sudden here is something that totally engaged
    me, my mind and my heart.
    And I said, this is what I was put here for.
    I must say I was in this guilt complex
    because I didn't suffer as much as the others.
    I said, this is maybe how I can atone for that.
    I can tell people what these people went through
    and where they ended up.
    And I can be more dramatic perhaps
    than somebody who wasn't as close to the subject, you know?
    And I had the feeling that this museum
    gave more meaning to my life.
    We have to turn over the tape then we can talk more about it.
    Yes.
    When we stopped you were talking about your work
    at the museum giving meaning to your life.
    Can you say more about that?
    Yes, first of all, when I was an only child and shy
    I didn't know that I really loved people.
    But as I got more mature and more worldly
    I discovered that I really like people very much,
    and it's wonderful working with the public.
    You meet so many different people,
    different outlooks on life.
    I'm able to use by two foreign languages on them.
    When I speak Spanish to some bewildered family
    from Argentina their faces just light up,
    and I can convey to them the things they
    want to know about the museum.
    And when Germans come to visit--
    And this is a strange thing.
    I've seen young German people come in,
    and they have the strangest expressions on their faces.
    Maybe I read more into it because of my background.
    But maybe not.
    There's a mixture-- sort of fear and shame and more.
    It's a combination of impressions.
    Like if I look at the young faces,
    they know what their country has done,
    and I'm sure they feel terrible about it.
    And they feel embarrassed and guilty but eager to see this
    and afraid to see it.
    It's a fascinating expression.
    I've seen it various times.
    And I try to put them at ease.
    I mean, they didn't cause this.
    How do you do that?
    Try to put them at ease?
    I speak their language to them.
    I look at them kindly.
    I'm gentle with them.
    But I say how happy I am that they're here.
    Then I emphasize-- but you of all people,
    you have to know this.
    And that's all I say, and they nod, you know?
    And I have a feeling I'm getting my point across.
    Do you think any of the visitors pick up
    that you were a refugee?
    Oh, this is interesting because one of those minutes
    suggestions was--
    the minutes from the meeting of the survivors--
    that the survivors ought to have special badges saying survivor.
    Some people want that.
    Others, myself included, do not think it's such a great idea.
    But whenever I think it's appropriate
    to a particular group of people given the situation,
    I'll mention.
    There's one place, my favorite in the whole museum,
    and that's Remember the Children, Daniel's House.
    That is my favorite exhibit because that is partly
    my youth growing up in Germany.
    Many of the things in that exhibit--
    it's like walking through a series of stage sets--
    remind me of my own childhood, although it
    didn't have the terrible ending pictured there
    like the ghetto and the camps.
    I left before then.
    But very often when I have a nice family
    who brought their children I'll put the emphasis--
    I'll look at the children and I'll say,
    that's just like my childhood was.
    I grew up under those circumstances.
    And then I say, but I didn't have the sad ending.
    But I say this makes me remember my own childhood there.
    And the children look at me with big eyes.
    It's very useful to be able to do
    that convincingly because it's the truth, you know.
    And I do that when I like a given group
    and I want to add to their knowledge.
    I don't feel that I want to go around with a badge that
    says survivor though, you know?
    I wouldn't do that.
    Was there anything else on this subject
    that you wanted to know?
    Oh, my interaction with people.
    Yes.
    Once this sweetest little old peasant woman
    from some East European country talking Yiddish came.
    She had misplaced some objects, lost something
    that your granddaughter had given her.
    And it had been found in the lost and found,
    and I got it for her and handed it to her.
    And she didn't speak the language.
    She grabbed my hand and kissed it.
    And I thought that was the sweetest, most touching thing.
    And I was smiling the rest of the day.
    Embarrassed, but also touched.
    You meet so many different people.
    Sometimes you see a lady, middle aged, totally overcome.
    There was one where she'd come out of the Hall of Remembrance,
    and she was just standing there and her shoulders were shaking.
    She was leaning against the column, her face to the column.
    And I just gently--
    I know we're not supposed to touch the public,
    but sometimes the human touch is sort of instinctive.
    And I just gently patted her shoulder and stood by her,
    and she calmed down.
    You had the feeling that you are an ambassador
    between the museum and the public,
    and you try to be a good influence
    and help and represent the museum and all that.
    Many other stories.
    How has it been working with the other volunteers there?
    Well, I met the nicest bunch.
    First I went on Wednesday afternoons.
    And then Larry asked if they were anybody there
    who would be willing to work on weekends
    because that's when they really need help.
    So I decided, sure, if that's what's wanted.
    And I worked on Saturdays.
    First in the afternoons and in the morning
    every second Saturday.
    And that worked out very well.
    As I said, everything was fine until I got my trouble
    with the knee and the ankle, which I hope
    will improve so I can do more.
    But I found it very challenging and very nice.
    There's always the odd pill in every crowd.
    There was one that was particularly odd,
    but she's no longer there I'm happy to say.
    And on the whole I found them very pleasant.
    Not everybody is pleasant, but most of them are.
    And some of them have stories to tell, again,
    which makes me feel guilty because I didn't go
    through what they went through.
    It's always that conflict.
    So you mean the other volunteers?
    The volunteers, yes.
    Survivors that have stories to tell.
    And how does that come up?
    Well, I know that Nesse Godin for one, she's legendary.
    When we had our training she was the speaker.
    She told us about when she was a young girl.
    I think she was 15 and she was in one of the worst camps.
    And told of life in camp.
    And you know, ever since then whenever
    I see her I throw my arms around her and hug her.
    And compared to her I feel guilty.
    It's not my fault, mind you.
    I know that.
    But the interesting thing is I discussed this
    with another volunteer, and she looked at me and she said,
    you have the same feeling?
    She said, I thought I was the only one.
    And I said, oh, thank god.
    There's more.
    And it's a common feeling for those of us
    who have not had the utmost pain that the others did.
    So have you had more contact with survivors
    and other refugees through your work at the museum
    than you had before as far as an opportunity to talk about this?
    Oh yes.
    Opportunity arose there which I didn't have before.
    Uh-huh, and has that been helpful to you to have a chance
    to talk about some of these things?
    Absolutely, I mean, it's fascinating.
    There's some such dear people.
    I look at them, and I listen to their past
    as very young people in the camp.
    And I say to myself, how can this man be
    so pleasant and so normal after what he went through, you know?
    Are those things that you didn't think about before?
    Well, those are things which I thought about before but had
    not being confronted with in the flesh.
    And you meet these people actually,
    and you wonder about the human spirit,
    how much it can take and stay normal.
    So overall would you say it's been more upsetting for you
    or it's been more helpful to you to have the volunteer
    experience?
    Oh, it's been heartwarming.
    It has filled an empty place.
    I wanted to do something important, something necessary.
    I was feeling too comfortable here, a little isolated with
    not terribly much to do.
    And I think that for the rest of my life
    until I'm no longer able to, I want
    to be involved with this museum.
    I just love it.
    And you started as a volunteer when?
    At the very beginning when they were first open.
    I was there before they opened the museum
    to the public, the day before.
    Here's another little story.
    I went with my very nice, mature daughter, Jenny.
    And we went to the museum, and she went, you know,
    where those boxes are where adults look down
    at a series of clips below--
    pictures and film clips about the really horrendous things
    that you don't want kids to see.
    Nazi experiments and that, beatings and that sort
    of thing.
    It's kind of sad how many people are always
    eager to look down at that.
    Jenny came up to me and she said, Mom, she said,
    don't ever look at those.
    And I knew exactly what she meant
    because I'm the type if I see an animal being treated cruelly,
    I can't get over it.
    And you see some of these things, it sears your soul.
    You can't forget.
    She did me a big favor.
    And I've been working there since the beginning,
    and I have never gone and looked at those things.
    Never.
    And she warned me.
    I'm very grateful to her.
    Had I looked at that, I probably couldn't
    continue working at the museum.
    You have to shield yourself against the utter horror.
    There's limits to what you can take.
    In fact, I'm going to travel to Eastern
    Europe in the late fall.
    And on the way there'd be a chance to go to the camps.
    And I'm not going to go.
    I don't think I can face it.
    It's enough that I go through a permanent exhibit.
    It's not because I don't care but maybe
    because I care too much that I don't want to go.
    So now you are working less with visitor services,
    and you're spending some time doing translations.
    See this purple folder?
    It's full of a document which was on videotape in German.
    First I took it down word by word in German, 39 pages of it.
    And now I'm translating it from the German to English.
    Unfortunately I'm not ready yet for word processors and things
    like that.
    I understand the museum might give courses on that.
    I'd like that.
    I'm doing it by hand.
    It would be lovely if I could just sort of take it off
    like this.
    So you do this in longhand?
    Oh yes, that's why it's taking a little longer.
    And do you go down to the museum to do this?
    When it's done I'll go down.
    In the meantime--
    No, but--
    --once I have a sufficient amount
    I'll mail it to Miss Rubin.
    Amy Rubin.
    I work for her.
    She's a lovely girl, and I want to have her know
    that I've been working on this.
    It's taking quite a while.
    No, I wanted to understand the process.
    The museum lends you the video.
    I could do it all there in the library.
    But I've chosen to do it at home.
    It makes no difference.
    OK, so you put the video--
    I take that information from the video at the library,
    of course, with their machines.
    And then when I have the document I go home
    and I translate it.
    I see.
    And what is that like for you?
    Fascinating.
    For instance, I'll tell you, there
    is this wonderful video out.
    It's called Weapons of the Spirit,
    and it's about the wonderful French Huguenot mountain
    village of Le Chambon.
    And they're legendary for the aid
    that they gave to Jewish refugees.
    They're famous for it.
    In fact, if you'd like me to lend you this, it's wonderful.
    It's called Weapons of the Spirit.
    And it's this very stirring, which I've always been so moved
    by, that this particular translation
    is of a man who was a French Swiss who worked at Le Chambon
    during the war helping numerous children, caring for them,
    nourishing them, helping them escape,
    and how the village of Le Chambon worked with him.
    And it was a very famous priest, Father Trocme.
    He's legendary.
    And he's mentioned in this manuscript.
    So I have been so thrilled to be working with this material
    because even before I knew of the museum
    I was touched by the story of Le Chambon
    and how they helped the Jews there.
    They were all Huguenots, not Catholics.
    So working--
    It's very thrilling material.
    First I did the story of his wife,
    and now I'm doing his story.
    And it's absolutely thrilling work.
    And it shows you the heroism the people are capable of.
    This is a particularly-- this is not a story only of suffering
    and victimization, but it's what one man with goodwill
    can do to prevent horrors from happening,
    and together-- he always emphasizes in this report
    that he didn't do it by himself.
    He had the help of the village people
    and of the priests and many others.
    But he had this gift of networking, which is a gift.
    And he used it to full advantage to save many lives.
    You can imagine how honored I am to be working with his story.
    You said some minutes ago that working with the museum
    is heartwarming for you.
    Could you say how that is?
    Well, maybe that's the wrong phrase.
    I just have the feeling that it engages my heart, my emotions.
    I'm fully committed to bring out the best
    that this museum has to offer and to share it
    with the public.
    I have had no dealings with creating it or furnishing
    it or anything.
    But what I am able to do is be in between the Museum
    and the public and convey to them some
    of what the Museum is about.
    And I feel that I'm uniquely qualified to do that.
    And that is satisfying.
    And what do you think is the best that the museum has
    to offer?
    What is it that you want to convey?
    It teaches the world about the Holocaust.
    That is its purpose.
    And sometimes I look through the book
    that visitors who leave data on their thoughts about it,
    and it's marvelous, wonderful what they have to say about it.
    You get the occasional oddball who'll say something horrible,
    but fortunately they are few and far between.
    The majority of people are absolutely enthralled by it.
    What kinds of things do you remember people saying.
    How wonderful for you to be here and show
    the world, or this sort of thing must never happen again,
    and may God prevent this from happening again,
    and thank you so much for showing
    gratitude and astonishment.
    And you know, it's just fascinating.
    But I don't know what people know
    that they can go up to the second floor
    and look through these books of what others say about--
    at the end of the exhibition it crosses
    the Hall of Remembrance.
    And then when you go through the little corridor
    there are these big books that you can write in.
    And it shows you that the public really does appreciate it.
    Do you feel that your work is appreciated?
    Definitely.
    I've had numerous-- we have one little gimmick that's
    very satisfying.
    Each one of us receives every month 10 tickets.
    Now, you know the tickets are free,
    but you have to wait in line for a long time.
    And it's very convenient to be handed a ticket.
    Now, I don't always have 10 family members
    or intimate friends that I give these tickets to,
    so I keep them on my person when I'm at the museum.
    And when that hour finally arrives
    when there's no more tickets and I
    see some desperate young visitor from a far off country,
    I'm so happy to slip her a ticket or him.
    And ooh, right after the Oklahoma bombing
    I had the attorney general of Oklahoma.
    He was in the news just the other day.
    I forget his name right now.
    It's Rasmussen or something.
    Very nice man.
    And he looked at me.
    I had no idea who he was.
    And he said, oh, what a shame.
    He said, I can't get any ticket, and I'm only here for the day.
    I said, where are you from?
    He said, Oklahoma.
    He said, I'm the attorney general.
    No, he didn't say that then.
    He just said he was from Oklahoma.
    I liked the way he looked, and he
    seemed like a nice human being.
    And so I reached into my pocket and I said,
    here, let me give you this little pass.
    I'd hate for you to be here for nothing.
    And he thanked me so much and dashed off.
    Hours later he found me where I was collecting
    tickets or something.
    And he said, I want to thank you so much for making it possible
    for me to see.
    He said, I'm the attorney general of Oklahoma.
    And I said, oh my god.
    I said, your poor state.
    I'm so sorry for what you had to go through.
    And it was just like instant friendship.
    We'll never see each other again,
    but I don't think we'll ever forget each other.
    And it's that sort of human story that is so enriching,
    you know?
    And many other instances that I can't all
    remember of a direct contact with another life.
    Brief, but you don't forget it.
    I just-- I can't remember.
    But you know what I mean.
    Different various instances remain in the mind.
    What else would you like to talk about?
    Well, OK, let me say that I appreciate
    that the museum gives us folks a chance to voice
    our experiences from where we came from and here we are
    and how it felt and how it was.
    This is a wonderful thing that you're letting us do,
    and it's always nice to have a voice and to be counted
    and to be heard from.
    And I appreciate that, and I want
    to repeat that I really love the museum.
    And I'm terribly glad it came to this city.
    And I think that's all, don't you?
    Well, you've told us quite a lot,
    and your story has been very important.
    Thank you very much for sharing your testimony.
    Thank you very much.
    And you're very welcome.
    This concludes the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    Volunteer Collection interview with Ruth Harvey.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    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.
    Interviewee
    Ms. Ruth Harvey
    Interviewer
    Margaret Garrett
    Date
    interview:  1997 August 22
    Geography
    creation: Bethesda (Md.)

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    2 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
    Harvey, Ruth, 1928-

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Margaret Garrett, a volunteer for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History branch conducted this interview on August 22, 1997 in Bethesda, MD. The interview was transferred to the Archives on August 22, 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 08:12:22
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn507586

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    Time Coded Notes (2)

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    Oral history interview with Esthy Adler

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tana Gelfer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Maria Devinki

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jerome Stasson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Adriana Pacifici

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ernest Kolben

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henry Kolber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Greifer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anna Wollner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Kate Wacz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erwin Forley

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ernie Marx

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Doris Rauch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Elman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gerald Rosenstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ivan Becker

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Romana Koplewicz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Koplewicz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irving Schaffer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Klein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Pisik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Rosicka

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Salomon Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Suzanne Foldes

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tibor Vince

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elias Piorko

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Hildesheim

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Peter Masters

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Wolke

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ionel Ghelman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irimia Solomon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lotte Salus

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irena Kirkland

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hans Hirsch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Milton Shurr

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ludwig Jacob

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Barbara Artman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fritz Schonbach

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Charles Barber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tibor Borsos

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Robert Kertesz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Kahn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Susan Warsinger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Arnold Weiss

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sia Hertsberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Chava Frajhof

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Israel Frajhof

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Edward Novakoff

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Celia Feldschuh

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Nicole Yancey

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jaffa Munk

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frances Hirshfeld

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Moris Gluckman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Margie Rosenthal

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Emma Mogilensky

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Isaiah Henig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ida Henig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marcel Drimer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michael Silberstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joan Schwab

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erwin Deutscher

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Pick

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hedi Pope

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bella Simon Pasternak

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marion Friedman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Strassburger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jadwiga Dziekonski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with 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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