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Oral history interview with Rene Edgar Tressler

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1997.A.0412 Duplicate 1 | RG Number: RG-50.106.0061

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    Oral history interview with Rene Edgar Tressler
    Transcript
    This is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    interview with Rene Tressler conducted
    by Gail Schwartz on February 20, 1997
    in Silver Spring, Maryland.
    This is tape number one, side A.
    What is your full name?
    My name is Rene Edgar Tressler.
    And where were you born?
    I was born April 16, 1927.
    And where were you born?
    In a small southern Bohemian city of Strakonice,
    very famous by producing fezes.
    You know what a fez is?
    Fez hats?
    A fez hat, right, and motorcycles.
    And your parents' names?
    My father's name was in Czech originally
    Bedrich Tressler, translated into English,
    Frederick Tressler.
    My mother's name was Bedriska, which in English means Frieda,
    like in German.
    And did you have any-- do you have any siblings?
    Yeah, my brother is Harry Tressler.
    Now his name is [? Tarsi, ?] and he
    is five years older than I am.
    He was born the 22nd of the second month
    in 1922, nice number.
    Let's talk a little bit about your parents.
    Were they from that town?
    Is that where they were born and grew up?
    No, my father was born in Prague, which, as you know,
    is the capital city of what used to be Czechoslovakia,
    and my mother was born in Brno, which
    used to be the capital city of Moravia,
    a part of Czechoslovakia.
    And what brought them to this particular town?
    To what-- to Prague?
    What brought them-- no, you said you were--
    [? You mean to the place ?] where I was born?
    Yes.
    My father was a music professor and a musician,
    and he was teaching.
    And he had a job, which was actually only temporary
    in the town where I was born.
    So it was just accidental.
    Most of our lives--
    most of their lives they lived in Prague, and when I was born
    they were accidentally in Strakonice,
    and I was born there.
    Did you have extended family nearby or in Prague?
    We were a pretty large Jewish family in Prague, yes.
    In fact, as much as I know, there were close to 70,
    75 people in the close circle of our family, and out of which,
    about 64 died in the Holocaust.
    Out of the close family, my father--
    I must say, my parents were divorced in 1937.
    And my father married a German lady,
    and my mother married another Jewish gentleman.
    And so my father did not go to any concentration camp
    because he was so-called "covered" by his Aryan wife.
    And until the last three months I
    understand he was supposed to go into that mixed marriage camp,
    but he was walking through Prague
    with a white cane and black glasses,
    pretending that he is a blind man so they wouldn't catch him.
    And he slept every night at another friend's place,
    so he never went to any camp at all.
    And my mother, my brother, and me-- we went, naturally,
    and miraculously, all three of us--
    out of those 70 people, all three of us
    survived, my mother, my brother, and I did.
    Unfortunately, my mother died in 1987, being 85 years old.
    Let's talk a little bit more about your childhood.
    How long did you live in this smaller town?
    No, we actually did not live in Strakonice,
    I think, more than a couple of months or so after I was born.
    And then we lived in the city of the name of Teplitz,
    which is a decently large city in the northern part
    of Bohemia, and that was the place where I started
    to go to elementary school.
    Yeah, in between, we also lived in the city of Most.
    As I said, my father was traveling a lot,
    and we traveled with him to wherever his job was.
    And so in Teplitz I started to go to school,
    and then we moved to a city of Ústí.
    In Germany or probably in English, too, the name
    is Aussig.
    And from there, when Hitler occupied the so-called Sudeten
    area, the area of the border of Bohemia,
    we escaped from there, actually.
    We were warned by a friend of the family
    that they are coming, that they will occupy
    the city within the next 12 or 24 hours,
    and we had a pretty large, nice, equipped apartment
    there with lots of valuables, my father,
    being a musician, very valuable musical instruments,
    and libraries, and, naturally, furniture, and clothing,
    and everything.
    We left there because we were told,
    you better go out of the city, and it won't take long.
    You come back within a couple of weeks or so.
    They will straighten out the political situation somehow,
    Mr. Chamberlain and so forth.
    Let's back up a little bit before,
    and we'll come to that time.
    You said you were living in Aussig, and you started school.
    What kind of neighborhood did you live in?
    Was it a Jewish neighborhood or mixed?
    I think, generally, in Czechoslovakia, especially
    in Bohemia, there was no such a thing like Jewish neighborhood
    or so.
    We lived within the normal population, normal people,
    and we had, naturally, lots of Jewish friends.
    And my father and my mother went to the synagogue once a while.
    But otherwise, I must admit, the Czech Jews
    are kind of pretty assimilated, so there was no such a thing
    like a Jewish neighborhood.
    We lived in a pretty--
    not rich, but well-on-people neighborhood.
    And yeah, that's what it is.
    So you said you had friends who were Jewish and non-Jewish?
    Oh, yes, yeah.
    Did you have any unpleasant experiences
    with the non-Jewish children when you were very young?
    So being a child in that time, a very young child--
    I said elementary school, fourth, fifth grade, in Ústí,
    in Aussig.
    Yeah, I had here and there some experiences
    which one, specifically being a child,
    did not take too seriously.
    I remember I had a few kids in the class who, once in a while,
    called me names.
    Like what?
    Dirty Jew and so.
    But as I said, not being very religious and very Jewish
    brought up in that time, I actually
    didn't know what they mean by that.
    Did you tell your parents about this experience?
    Yes, I did tell my parents, and they said, just ignore them,
    and don't get in trouble.
    Don't fight, which I did anyway.
    So you did fight?
    Yes, I did, once a while.
    Actually, I want to mention a small story that
    happened since you ask.
    We were supporting a poor boy in my class
    who did not have enough--
    their parents didn't have enough means
    to give him lunch to take to school,
    so I, for a year or two, took every day extra pack
    of lunch for this boy and gave him the lunch.
    And one time I, for some reason, after about a year and a half
    or two years--
    I forgot not just his lunch.
    I forgot also my lunch at home.
    I just forgot to take it.
    And he was so angry, and in that time.
    He called me cheap, and skimpy, and dirty Jew.
    He was not Jewish?
    No, he was not Jewish, no.
    And he hit me with the pencil box in my head.
    So that was too much for me, so I beat him up.
    And that's not the end of the story.
    Afternoon, the doorbell rang, and the mother
    of the boy and the boy stand in front of the door.
    My mother was home.
    She opened the door, and she said, look, Mrs. Tressler,
    what your son did to my little boy here.
    And he had a black eye.
    And my mother said, yeah, my son told me about it,
    and did your son tell you what happened?
    And she said, no, they just had some kind of a boy's fight.
    And my mother explained exactly what happened,
    and the lady was very embarrassed
    and really apologized to my parents and to us
    for her son's behavior.
    That was just-- the parents probably we are not
    as antisemitic as that little kid,
    or the other kid, I'm sure, didn't know what antisemitic
    means, just picked it up somewhere in the street
    and called me dirty Jew just because I forgot
    to bring both our lunches.
    Did you continue to bring lunch after that for him?
    I don't think so, no.
    I don't think I didn't, no.
    What kind of school did you go to as a young child?
    That was an elementary school.
    I think it was the fourth--
    A public--
    Yeah, public school, fourth or fifth elementary grade.
    Any problems with the teachers?
    No, I don't remember having any problems concerning
    religious persecutions or so, no.
    No, I don't remember that.
    And I don't think it was a common thing in Czechoslovakia,
    no.
    Now, you said your parents went to synagogue occasionally.
    How much of a religious training did you have as a young boy?
    Religious training-- I don't think I had any.
    The only thing I remember-- my parents, specifically
    my mother, went to the synagogue at holidays,
    high Jewish holidays.
    Sometimes she dragged me with her,
    and I didn't know why I'm going there.
    No, I must admit, I did not have any strong religious
    upbringing.
    I always knew, I'm Jewish, and although, as I said,
    when I was very little I didn't know what it means.
    And then definitely my awareness of Jewishness I
    have to thank to Mr. Hitler, that through the Holocaust,
    the suffering, and the things that we lived through,
    naturally, I became a scholar of Jewish history
    and "Jewishness" in quotations.
    So no, I was not really brought up very religious.
    So your parents did not celebrate the Sabbath
    or anything like that, any holidays at home?
    Yes, on Friday evening my mother lit candles
    and said the prayers, yes, and that was one thing.
    And then the high holidays we went to the temple.
    We both had the bar mitzvah, my brother
    and I. We had bar mitzvah.
    But we were not kosher.
    We were not strict religious, and they were both working
    on Saturday and Fridays.
    But I think that was very common for Jews in Czechoslovakia.
    There were very few really orthodox or kosher Jews
    in Czechoslovakia.
    What language did you speak at home?
    We spoke Czech mostly, mostly, but when I was three years old
    I spoke fluently Czech and German,
    which I, naturally, still do.
    And thanks to-- we had a maid--
    as I said, we were pretty well on.
    We had a maid, and the maid was a German girl.
    And when she came--
    actually, she came while I was three years old.
    When she left about two years later,
    she spoke fluently Czech, and I spoke fluently German,
    being actually five years old.
    But the family language, I believe,
    would be like 80% Czech, but I must admit, like 20% German.
    Some of our relatives did not speak too well Czech
    at all, just a broken Czech, so we spoke German with them,
    some of them, not too many, though, the older
    ones, the ones from Austria-Hungary
    Empire, those very old ones, in that time very old ones, yeah.
    Did you have any other interests, like music?
    You said your father was very musical.
    Did you have such interest or talents?
    Yeah, I play the keyboard.
    I play pretty well guitar that I learned both from my father,
    naturally, and then developed a little bit.
    So I'm kind of a decent guitar player, classical guitar, not
    modern, and keyboard a little bit, too,
    but not professionally, no.
    Were you interested in sports?
    Yes, in fact, I was a professional soccer player
    after the war, after the camp, yeah.
    Yeah, but I'm talking now as a child, as a young child.
    Yeah, as a young child I was interested in sports.
    Yes, I played soccer, and hockey, and ice skating,
    and everything.
    Yeah, I did a lot of sport, opposite
    of my brother, who did not.
    He hated sports.
    It sounds like you were a very independent young child,
    or were you very quiet and withdrawn?
    How would you describe yourself?
    We're talking about before the war.
    I think I always was an extroverted child and person,
    which I am still, and actually, this is a good question
    that I am asking myself.
    And many people ask me very often, who brought you up?
    Who raised you?
    And I have no answer for that.
    Nobody because my mother and my father,
    specifically my father-- he was constantly traveling,
    and he was abroad with orchestras.
    And he was a conductor, too.
    He was conducting in different countries in Europe.
    And my mother had a very high position in a coal concern.
    That was the coal area that Teplitz, Aussig, Ústí,
    and that was Weinmann, Petschek--
    I don't know if that tells you anything-- a very, very
    rich family in Europe.
    And my mother was a executive secretary for the director
    in Ústí, in Aussig.
    And so she had a very good job, and she was rarely
    home during the day to--
    that's why I said, we had a maid,
    and sometimes I even had--
    what do you call it-- the lady just for myself
    to make sure that I'm not getting in any trouble
    and that I do my homework.
    But parents' upbringing of children--
    I am afraid there was nobody there.
    And when I was 11 years old--
    10 years old, actually, or 11--
    as I said, we went from Aussig to Prague,
    and we never came back again.
    I wanted to mention that, that all those possessions and all
    those beautiful pianos, and clothes, and furniture we
    never saw again in our lives.
    And we went to Prague, where we had
    our grandfather and some other members of the family.
    My mother married to a gentleman who was so smart.
    He just came back from America.
    Living in America 18 years, he had
    to come back a year before Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia.
    And he married Mom.
    And we didn't have an apartment in Prague
    because they were not available already in that time,
    and also it was expensive.
    We didn't have any means because we left everything there.
    Even bank accounts my parents left in Ústí, and so--
    Now, your parents divorced--
    --in '37.
    --in 1937.
    Was that hard for you, difficult to see that happen?
    I would like to say yes, but I don't think so, no.
    Actually, since my father was rarely home anyway,
    I didn't notice too much of a difference.
    In fact, when they were divorced,
    he came more often to see us than before.
    So in Prague-- that's what I want to say--
    I was living with my grandparents
    because my mother and her new husband
    had a one-room apartment in Prague,
    and there was not enough room for both of us children, too.
    So we lived with my grandparents,
    who had a large apartment in Prague,
    but they didn't care for us.
    They just fed us, and do whatever you
    want to do during the daytime.
    And then I went to the camp when I was 15,
    so I don't know who brought me up, actually, nobody.
    How close were you to your brother when you were young?
    [? When-- ?]
    I know he's five years older than you.
    Yeah, well, when we were young, I was very close to him.
    In fact, I was very close to him.
    He couldn't care less about me, actually,
    being five years older in that age.
    But I know that I copied my brother very much.
    Whatever he did, I copied, I did.
    And fortunately-- I don't know if I should say
    fortunately or unfortunately.
    He usually stopped doing things that he did
    and that I started to do after him,
    and I became pretty much successful
    where he just left it.
    Example-- sports, soccer.
    My brother was the one who took me to a soccer field once,
    and being five years younger, five years younger than him,
    and being chosen to play with a team before he was--
    that kind of embarrassed him, and he stopped.
    And I continued and became, after the war,
    a professional soccer player.
    My brother one day brought a guitar home,
    and he started to learn guitar and show me the chords
    and how to play.
    And I picked it up, and I played, and he stopped.
    I play until now.
    And there was a time--
    my brother was kind of very famous in our family
    for writing short stories, and he once
    wrote a Christmas-- a Jew wrote a Christmas story, right,
    and the whole neighborhood cried over that story.
    And I told myself, why don't people cry about my stories?
    I have to write stories, too.
    And I did, and he stopped writing,
    and I continued writing and write until these days.
    Was your family Zionist at all?
    I think our family didn't know what Zionism is in that time.
    My brother became a Zionist right
    after the occupation of Hitler.
    He befriended with a gentleman of the name Jacob Edelstein,
    which--
    I'm sure you are familiar with that name.
    And he became kind of--
    if one can even say it, became a Zionist.
    He was 18 years old, 19.
    And when Edelstein was taught to make a group
    that would go to build up Theresienstadt
    to prepare Theresienstadt for the city
    that Hitler gave to the Jews.
    And Edelstein put up a group of, I think, 21 people,
    and they went to Strakonice not knowing what's
    going to follow, naturally.
    And that group became the Board of Elders
    of the Theresienstadt, of which Edelstein was the elder.
    Good, yeah.
    OK, now when did you first start hearing
    about a man named Hitler?
    Do you know what your first memory is?
    I think I started to hear just before the Germans occupied
    the Sudeten of Bohemia, of Czechoslovakia, the point where
    we had to leave to Prague.
    And short time before that, there
    was a lot of talk about a man by the name Hitler and actually
    more about the name Henlein, if you're familiar with that name.
    He was the Gauleiter--
    I think was his title--
    of the Sudeten, the leader of the Germans
    living in Czechoslovakia and those border areas.
    And he was the organizer, the one
    who prepared the occupation, really, for Hitler,
    but we also heard about Hitler.
    And so there's also a little story, if you interested,
    about Henlein.
    Before the Germans occupied the Sudeten,
    the Germans already had marches in the city of Aussig, of Ústí.
    They marched through town with the flags of Hakenkreuz
    and still during Czechoslovakia.
    And people who sympathized with them--
    they put up flags in their windows and banners,
    and we lived on the main street in kind
    of a villa of four floors.
    And we occupied the third floor, that floor,
    and we had a large balcony around the corner.
    And the people who were above us were Germans,
    and they sympathized with Hitler and with Henlein.
    And they had the banner on the top of their--
    on their balcony, actually hanging down towards our space.
    And when the Hitlerjugend and the people marched by,
    they stopped, turned towards our building,
    raised their hand in a Nazi salute, and yelled,
    "Heil Hitler, Juden raus, Juden raus," which means "Jews out,
    Jews out."
    And they thought that the banner belongs to me.
    I was standing on the balcony.
    They thought I'm a Nazi family or whatever,
    and they were yelling at me, "Juden raus,"
    thinking that I'm one of them.
    That was just a funny situation.
    And what were you thinking of at that time?
    I really hate to say that I kind of didn't understand
    the situation, being 10, 11 years old, and I was laughing.
    I was, in that time, already thinking, look at those idiots.
    They are waving at me.
    They don't know I'm Jewish.
    And then that time I knew already
    a little bit I'm Jewish, and so that was kind
    of a sad and funny situation.
    What kind of relationship did you
    have with the people above you?
    I have no idea.
    I have no idea.
    I don't even know if our family knew them too well.
    I think-- no, I cannot say.
    I really don't know.
    I have no idea.
    I just know they were Nazis.
    That's all.
    Was it a-- what was it like to see all these troops marching
    below you?
    Were you impressed by the way they looked?
    No, I must say, I was never impressed by them,
    and I didn't take them seriously from the beginning.
    I think that saved my life during the war, too.
    I just didn't know better because, being a child,
    I just laughed.
    I didn't know what's going to come, what's going to happen.
    I thought they are just some crazy people playing around.
    Did your parents say anything or your mother
    say anything to you then?
    I think they did not really try to explain the situation to me
    too much.
    I don't think they wanted to worry me, naturally,
    but I'm sure they knew that it is a serious situation,
    otherwise we wouldn't probably run away to Prague.
    What were your feelings about having to go to Prague
    and leaving Ústí?
    Oh, actually, I was pretty happy.
    I didn't have to go to school, and I
    went to see my grandparents, which I liked pretty much.
    And I liked Prague always.
    I was impressed by the city of Prague whenever we went there,
    and we went there like four or five times a year
    and traveled a lot.
    So I liked Prague, really.
    I was happy that we moved to Prague,
    although I didn't realize at that time what that
    moving actually meant for us.
    Were you aware of refugees coming into Prague?
    Not in that time, no.
    I had no idea that we are not the only people who
    came to Prague.
    I just thought we went to Prague because it's a little bit more
    convenient for us, but I really didn't
    have the grip of the situation at all in that time.
    And now you're in Prague living with your grandparents.
    You said your mother remarried.
    Did she remarry another Jewish man?
    Was your stepfather--
    Yeah, he was Jewish.
    As I said, he just came from America,
    living here in Baltimore for 18 years.
    But he shortly left Prague again for Israel,
    in that time Palestine, naturally,
    thinking that he is just going ahead of us
    and prepared the situation for us
    and that we are going to come after him.
    But he practically went with either the last or one
    before the last possibility of leaving the area
    that the Germans occupied.
    And there was a difference of three or four
    weeks after he left that it was clear that we are not
    going to go anywhere.
    Were you upset about leaving your friends in Ústí?
    Not really, no.
    I wasn't aware of the friend situation.
    I just made pretty quickly friends in Prague
    at the school where I went again.
    So you would say you were a very sociable young child?
    I think so, yeah.
    And here I went--
    in Prague, then, they put me into the high school.
    No, actually, in the gymnasium, which
    is a college, because I was already in the sixth grade.
    And in Czechoslovakia you had a choice,
    either continue high school, and if you were a talented kid,
    you went into a gymnasium, which is equal to high school,
    only a little bit better, like college or so.
    It's a preparation for university,
    which I was preparing to do.
    I wanted to be a doctor.
    You wanted to be a medical doctor.
    Yeah, a medical doctor.
    I wanted to be a gynecologist.
    This is tape one, side B. And now you're in Prague,
    and then the next big change--
    you said you started the gymnasium,
    and what was the next big change?
    Or if you want to get to September 1, 1939--
    No, I think I want to tell you, I went to the gymnasium there,
    and they threw me out in about two or three months
    because Jews were not allowed to go to gymnasiums anymore.
    Gymnasium has nothing to do with gymnastics.
    That's just the name for higher education.
    And so they put me in a high school,
    and they threw me out from there in a few months
    because Jews were not allowed to go to regular high school
    either.
    How did you feel about that, being
    thrown out the first time and then the second time?
    That was the time where I slowly started
    to be aware of the situation and the fact that I'm Jewish
    and that I don't have the same rights as the others,
    and that kind of started to bother me slightly.
    But as I said, I was a happy kid,
    and I didn't take anything too seriously.
    And they put me in a so-called "Jewish" school, which
    was a Jewish high school in Prague,
    and I was very happy there.
    I had a lot of friends there and lots of fun there,
    and we played a lot of sports, and soccer, and things.
    And actually, I noticed that in that school nobody
    calls me dirty Jew anymore, which was nice.
    In the first two schools, when you were called that,
    that was by the other students or by the teachers?
    By the other students and later even by the teachers, too.
    Just before they always threw me out,
    they said, we don't want any dirty Jews here,
    so go somewhere else.
    When you then went to the Jewish school,
    did you feel safe going to and from school on the streets?
    On the street, yeah.
    On the street, I cannot say that I would feel unsafe in Prague,
    no.
    I don't think on the street people care
    to recognize if somebody is Jewish or not.
    There were not that many German children
    coming with the occupiers, with the army
    and with the SS people when they finally occupied even Prague.
    And so on the street I don't think I
    had any problems like that, no.
    Naturally, there were problems later in the press,
    and the radios, and--
    So are we now talking about March 1939,
    when Prague was occupied?
    Right.
    And was there anything specific about the beginning
    of the occupation that you can recall?
    Not really.
    I just were aware of it, slightly
    became aware that it is a political situation, that it is
    a probably worldwide situation.
    I heard the word "war" mentioning more often
    and got interested what it would mean, a war, and so far.
    And then I got aware of the fact that the Germans, who
    occupied Czechoslovakia, do also not like very much Jews,
    and then later I learn that they want
    to somehow separate the Jews.
    And naturally, even later I found
    that people were sent by transports to different places.
    That time I already understood the situation pretty well
    for my age, I'm sure, that being--
    I'm talking now '41, when the first transports from Prague
    or from Czechoslovakia went directly to Lodz,
    to Poland, out of which just a handful of people survived.
    So it's after March '39.
    You're a student in the school, and life went on normally,
    in a sense.
    You're in the Jewish school.
    Yeah, even the Jewish school after a while got closed.
    When was that?
    I think it was in 1941, beginning
    of 1941, the middle of '41.
    I wouldn't know exactly.
    But in that time, they even closed the Jewish school,
    and so I didn't really have anything to do,
    except we were--
    the only thing the Germans allowed us to do--
    I'm talking about the youth, the kids.
    There was a sports club in Prague, a very famous one.
    The name is Hagibor, and I don't know--
    really, we don't understand it until now.
    They allowed that sport stadium to be
    in the hands of the Jewish community in Prague,
    and the Jewish kids and even adults
    were allowed to go there, and play, and play sports,
    and exercise, and so far.
    Fredy Hirsch, who we mentioned before
    as a leader in Auschwitz and Blechhammer,
    the children's barrack--
    he was also the leader put in charge of that sports stadium
    during the Hitler-occupied time before he
    himself went to the camp, naturally.
    And so I knew him very, very well, extremely well, really.
    And so we went there, and we played soccer.
    And we had a gorgeous soccer team, of which--
    the photograph you can see over there.
    Too bad it's just around here.
    You see over there on the wall is
    that photograph, those 11 kids.
    I'm the one in the middle, and that's
    just before we went to the camps.
    It's too bad it's just tape because next to it
    there is a photograph of--
    this soccer team is 11 children and the age of 14, 15, 16
    or so.
    And I'm in the middle there, and there
    are-- five children survived the concentration camp,
    and six died.
    And I'm in the middle, right in the middle there.
    And next to it is a photograph of 11 children again,
    but that is a few days after the war, liberated in Buchenwald.
    That photograph I discovered a couple of years
    ago when I visited Buchenwald from here now,
    and I paged in a guidebook of Buchenwald.
    There's a museum there.
    And suddenly I opened the page, and I find this photograph
    there and said, that's me in the middle right there, 11 boys.
    In the middle, exactly like the soccer team, is me.
    Unfortunately, I don't know any of the names of those 11
    people, where I do remember and have in my mind and heart
    all those 11 names of the kids there.
    Can you tell us their names?
    Better not.
    OK.
    Do you have any recollections of September 1939,
    when Germany invaded Poland?
    Poland?
    Hearing about it?
    Yeah, I heard about it.
    I couldn't tell you now, honestly,
    if I really noticed it too much or if I was very aware of it.
    I just knew that the war started.
    That war that was talked about for such a long time
    finally started.
    But fortunately for me, although I
    wanted to know what does actually war look like, what
    is it, I never learned that in Prague
    because Prague was never bombarded,
    or there was never fights during the occupation.
    Only after the war and the last few days of the war
    were in Prague.
    I don't know if you're familiar with that.
    The war ended May 9, and the last fights of May 9
    were in Prague.
    But I was not there in that time.
    After the Germans invaded Prague-- and you said
    you switched schools and all that--
    were there any other restrictions for you
    personally?
    Yes, naturally.
    There were restrictions for Jews--
    Such as?
    Pardon?
    Such as?
    Yeah, such as we were not allowed to use trams.
    In the beginning, we were allowed
    to use the last car and the last platform
    of the last car of a tram.
    Then later weekends we were not allowed at all
    to use the trams or any kind of transportation
    in Prague, which also brings me to that problem.
    When the youth, the kids went to play in the sports
    field on Saturday and Sundays in Hagibor,
    it was very far out south of Prague,
    and we had to walk because we were not allowed
    to use any transportation.
    And it was about, I would say, a 3-to-4-miles walk, maybe five,
    which for kids is a long walk back and forth just to play
    soccer.
    Also, even it was made more difficult because across Prague
    was the so-called "Golden Road," and we were not allowed--
    which is the main road.
    And we were not allowed to cross that main road during Saturday
    and Sundays, Jews, and also, we had
    already the star on our chest, which
    made us very recognizable.
    So there was one place we could cross this road.
    There was a tunnel, an underpass where the National Theater is,
    which is very far out of the direct line
    towards where we were going.
    So we had to go like a mile to the west and then a mile
    to the east again and north to the sports field.
    So it made it even more than the distance that I said,
    but we enjoyed it because we knew
    we were going to have a good time in Hagibor
    at the sports place, the kids.
    What was it like to wear a star?
    Again, I think we children were not that much troubled by it
    as probably our parents and the adults were.
    We even played such games, like we had a hand bag,
    and we put it over the star so nobody could
    see it, which was not legal.
    It was illegal.
    We even get dared sometimes to go into the tram
    and covered the star with a bag or something.
    And luckily enough I was never caught,
    and I don't even know anybody who was caught.
    But I know the stories that some people were caught and punished
    severely for that.
    Was this star sewn on your clothing or pinned?
    The star was supposed to be sewn on our clothes, but being
    a very inventive race, we put them on--
    I don't know how do you call it-- the clips--
    you clip it on.
    What do you call those things, the metal--
    it has two parts, one you saw on the clothes and one--
    A snap, like a snap.
    Snap, right, right, right, snap, snaps.
    So we put the star on snaps, and we put it up or down
    whenever we wanted to.
    But that was a dangerous game, really,
    that we shouldn't have played.
    And again, when you had to wear the star,
    did you talk this over with your mother at all or your brother?
    No, just one day I was told we have to wear the star,
    and that was it.
    And we wore the star.
    As I said, I think we did not realize
    the importance and the seriosity of the situation, children
    being 13, 14, 15 years old.
    What do we know?
    We just made fun out of everything.
    Only later I realized how serious it really was.
    You said that you had a bar mitzvah.
    Yes.
    Can you describe that?
    I even have a invitation card for my bar mitzvah
    somewhere here still saved.
    It's the only one that I had.
    I was a member--
    and I'm coming to another story.
    I don't know if you want to hear it.
    It's also a part of one story that I am using in my writings
    in my book.
    It's a story about a singing choir, a Jewish singing
    choir which is described in literature of Terezin
    and art of Terezin over there.
    It's mentioned there, that choir, led by a Professor
    [? Wachtel ?],, musician, who did not survive either.
    And the plan was to create a singing
    corps of Jewish children that should be something
    like the Wiener Sangerknaben and the corps
    was supposed to go on a tour through Europe
    and stay in some of the Western countries
    unoccupied countries I mean-- not to come back
    to the occupied area and therefore saving
    the lives of some 50 children.
    Unfortunately, we were very good.
    We were extremely good, in fact, by professionals,
    Jewish and non-Jewish.
    We were considered equal to the Wiener Sangerknaben.
    And we had a [? tour ?] planned already,
    and there was a manager who got some money.
    And they sent him out to Switzerland
    to prepare the road for us, and the hotels, and all
    those things, like an agent, a manager.
    And he got, I understand, something like a million
    dollars, and he left.
    And nobody ever heard of him again.
    And 50 children died in the concentration camp.
    I am the only one who survived, the only one.
    And that is one of those things that--
    what was your question?
    I'd asked you about your bar mitzvah.
    Bar mitzvah, right.
    Why I'm talking about that?
    Because my bar mitzvah was held together
    with another member of this choir and in the choir uniform.
    I mentioned the short pants.
    And it was held in a synagogue in Prague in the Dušní street,
    which later became a carpet museum,
    and I think it still is some kind of a museum now.
    And it was one of the very pretty synagogues in Prague.
    There were many of them in Prague,
    and that's where I had my bar mitzvah, yeah.
    And I was saying the prayers and all those things.
    I didn't know what I'm talking about,
    which I, until now, still do sometimes.
    I mean in Hebrew, and I didn't know what it means at all.
    And I still don't know.
    I still don't know Hebrew.
    We're talking about 1940--
    That was 1940.
    --and your city being occupied.
    Right, yes.
    That was all during, actually-- yeah, '40 or '41.
    Yeah, anyway, it was occupied already by the Germans, yes.
    It was already not Czechoslovakia anymore.
    It was Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
    since the Slovaks separated themselves.
    They stayed a separate country, yeah.
    But there was no restriction on your having
    this religious observance?
    Strangely enough, no.
    There were still synagogues open for high holy days, at least
    some of the synagogues, and there were still
    bar mitzvahs performed, even during the first year
    of occupation, yes.
    Were you wearing your yellow star?
    I am thinking about it.
    I don't think so.
    No, I don't think we had stars at the bar mitzvah
    in the temple, no.
    Was there any kind of celebration?
    We had a celebration in that choir.
    Within that choir there was kind of a big celebration.
    We had a lunch, and in that time there was already
    restricted rations of food.
    And so there was not that much available anymore but much more
    than later on, naturally.
    Were there any curfews then?
    Yeah, there was those curfews that I was talking about.
    We were not allowed to go out on Saturday, Sundays.
    We were not allowed to use the transportations
    except the rear platforms and so lots of--
    I don't know at that time or a little bit later--
    there were rations, and there were ration tickets.
    But the Jews didn't get any rations, not at all,
    so we had to organize just to get any way we could,
    black market.
    And so I didn't do it, naturally,
    but I just heard about it.
    My parents and my grandparents were involved in that,
    naturally.
    Did you talk to your grandparents
    about the changing conditions?
    To be honest, no, I didn't talk too much to my grandparents
    at all.
    As I said, I just came in the evening and talked for a while,
    not about political situation, so no.
    And also, I didn't mention, actually,
    that later at the grandparents' place
    I was staying only for about a year or a year and a half.
    Then later we had an apartment.
    My mom finds somehow an apartment,
    which strangely enough was a apartment
    in a very modern building.
    That building belonged to the religious group of the Czech
    Brothers, the so-called Hussites,
    and it was a gorgeous building where
    downstairs, on the first two floors, was a church.
    And above that, five or six floors,
    were very modern apartments, which-- we had one of those.
    Now what's the next big change that you noticed in your life?
    The next big point of that time was the fact
    that my brother, who was working in that Zionist organization,
    was choosing to go, as I said, with Edelstein
    to Theresienstadt.
    The year before, there were already transports going,
    those that went directly to Poland, as I mentioned before,
    and that--
    Did you see any of the people leaving?
    Oh, yes, yeah, yeah.
    In fact-- you were asking what I was doing--
    since we didn't go to school anymore,
    we were ordered to help those people who
    went to transports, to carry their possessions
    and put them in cars and wagons to the place where they were
    gathering before they took them in the train
    in the camps, which-- we didn't know that they are going
    in camps in that time.
    We were told that they are changing
    the living places of the Jews in different cities only.
    We didn't have any idea about concentration camp
    or any kind of incarceration or something.
    Who told you to carry the luggage,
    the Jewish organization or the Germans?
    Yeah, the Jewish Community Center
    was the organizer of that group that
    helped those people to carry their luggages
    because sometimes there were old people that couldn't carry it,
    so we had to help them to carry it to the gathering place.
    Did you know any of these people personally?
    Oh, yes.
    Yes, very much so.
    Yeah, I knew very many of them, and in fact--
    but we are jumping here a little bit--
    later they threw us out from that nice apartment
    from the Czech Brother Church building,
    and they put us in a very old quarter of Prague,
    into a very, very old building, an old apartment,
    and together with another family.
    So there were three bedrooms there, but we were--
    let me see-- about seven people, eight people living there,
    maybe 10.
    It was a pretty [? big ?] family.
    And that family left long before we did to the camp.
    The owners of the apartment?
    No, the people who lived there.
    They left, so we then later had, for a while,
    that apartment for ourselves.
    But it was kind of empty anyway.
    And so I knew those people very well, yeah.
    Was that hard for you to say goodbye to them?
    It was kind of hard to say goodbye.
    It was like saying goodbye to anybody
    who changes his living place, moves to another city
    or something.
    As I said, we were not aware, and specifically the children
    were not aware that there's some kind of a tragedy brewing
    there.
    And we just said, oh, yeah, they were just moving out
    somewhere else, although we knew they had to move out,
    they were ordered to move out.
    But we still did not have any idea what is coming.
    And you continued to go to the sports center?
    Yes, right.
    We went to that sports center to the last minute,
    just before they sent us to Theresienstadt in, as I said,
    November 1942.
    And my brother went in 1941, as I said,
    and we went with my mother in 1942.
    When your brother went off in 1941--
    '41.
    Yeah, in 1941.
    How was that for your mother?
    I think it was not very easy.
    I remember the discussions she had with him
    not to join that group because it was kind of volunteering.
    Actually, my brother did not have to go.
    Edelstein chose a group.
    He was told to build a group and to go
    there to prepare the situation, although they, I'm sure,
    didn't know what situation it was.
    And my brother said, yeah, he wants to go,
    and most of those people were really from that Zionist group.
    And they went.
    In fact, they went with a private passenger train,
    without any guards whatsoever.
    In fact, as I understand, they arrived in Theresienstadt.
    Nobody knew what to do with them, why they came,
    and so then later the German authorities
    there started to understand the situation.
    And they kind of put them in the camp,
    in this city, which was a fortress city,
    and then since then that was it.
    They never came out again until they went to the--
    Now, did you say that he was with 50 young men?
    Is that--
    About 20, I think, 20 or 21 men.
    In fact, if you're interested, I can
    find-- the transport is here also listed.
    The book I have here is a listing
    of all Jews from Czechoslovakia that went to the concentration
    camps, and if they lived or if they survived,
    and which transport they went, where they went,
    Theresienstadt, Lodz, Auschwitz.
    Everything is listed in here, very, very good statistics
    here.
    Did life change a lot for you after your brother left?
    For me, personally, no, except I missed my brother, naturally,
    for a year.
    But for me, personally, no, it did not change too much really.
    You're 14 years old, and you're living with your mother.
    And what else are you doing with your time
    besides helping to carry the belongings of people?
    When there was a transport, which wasn't every day,
    naturally-- it was once in a while,
    sometimes more, sometimes less transports going.
    Then the only thing I did was spent my time in Hagibor
    at the sports place.
    That's all we did, the youth, because there
    was no more school.
    Did you have a sense of isolation feeling Jewish?
    In that time, we already understood, we Jewish children,
    that we are being isolated from the Christian children,
    from the Christian public, too, the whole family.
    And so yeah, we started to understand that,
    although we still thought it's just a temporary arrangement
    somehow.
    We were actually told by our relatives and parents
    not to worry, that this is just a temporary thing
    because it's a war, and when the war ends,
    everything will come back to normal way again.
    This is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    interview with Rene Tressler conducted
    by Gail Schwartz on February 20th, 1997,
    in Silver Spring, Maryland.
    This is tape number two, side A. Is there anything
    else you wanted to add about your brother's transport, what
    date it took place on and so forth?
    OK, my brother, as I had mentioned before,
    left with the Edelstein group to prepare the city,
    and that was on the 4th of November, 1941.
    The transport name was ST for Stab, which means the leaders.
    And that transport became--
    the people of that transport became the member
    of the so-called Aeltestenrat, which means the Board of Elders
    of Theresienstadt.
    Any specific names you wanted to mention who were in that group?
    There is only 23 names here.
    There was Fredy Hirsch was a member of that group,
    as we mentioned his name before.
    He was the leader of the youth Hagibor.
    And I mean, the things that he was in charge of Hagibor
    where the children were allowed to spend their free time,
    as I mentioned before.
    And Freddy Hirsch, actually, already in that
    time was a very popular person, and even more
    known, and popular, and famous, actually,
    became in Auschwitz, Birkenau, where
    he was the leader of the children's block.
    And there's another story about him
    that we maybe come to later--
    how he died.
    Did you say goodbye to him when he left?
    Left for where?
    When he went.
    To Theresienstadt?
    Yeah, we all said goodbye to him.
    Somebody else took over to organize the games
    in Hagibor place.
    And he left.
    I knew he is leaving with my brother in the same group,
    although most of the Prague Jews did not
    have any idea what that group is about,
    but I knew since my brother was a member of it, right?
    Did you have any contact--
    correspondence-- with your brother once he left?
    No, none whatsoever until we got there ourselves.
    We didn't know if he is even alive
    and where he is, how he is, nothing, no.
    Now, was your father coming to see you at this time?
    No, my father, as I mentioned before,
    was married to the German girl, and I once in a while
    came to see him in his apartment in Prague,
    but, otherwise, we had not regular contact with him, no.
    Naturally, my father knew that my brother is leaving.
    And obviously, my brother came to say goodbye to him,
    but that was it.
    Did you have any relationship with your stepmother?
    No, just kind of a friendly relationship,
    yeah, but nothing specific.
    Did you get to know her family--
    her German family?
    Yes, I knew her German family already from before
    the occupation because as a child,
    while they were in divorce with my mother in '37 still living
    in Ústí, naturally, I went like for school vacations to visit
    my father.
    And he already lived at her parent's place
    in the city of the name Hummeldorf,
    and in German or in English, Komotau, which was not very far
    away from where we lived in Aussig-- about 60 miles or so,
    70 miles maybe.
    So your father was accepted by his German in-laws?
    Yes, I'm not really sure of that.
    I feel that he must have been since he lived together
    with them in the same village and same place, yeah.
    Is there anything you want to add
    about the year between the time that your brother left
    and the time that you and your mother left?
    Any other.
    The time my brother left and what?
    And then the time that you and your mother
    left between 1941 and '42.
    There's a bunch of happenings, a bunch of stories
    there, which I am thinking which one I should tell you about.
    Maybe it would be interesting, and, again, I hate to say that,
    but, naturally, it is a part of one of the story of my book
    too.
    The story about a Obersturmbannfuhrer
    whom I named in the book Obersturmbannfuhrer
    [? Fertzer, ?] but I don't think that was his name.
    And, in fact, I forgot his name.
    And when we lived in that nice modern apartment
    in the Czech brother's building church, one day, he came to us.
    I don't know.
    He was recommended by some organization that
    took care of the German officials who
    came to Prague with the occupation army
    to accommodate them, you know?
    And that office, which was kind of very still friendly and nice
    in that time, called my mother once that I understood later,
    and prepared her for one man who would like
    to discuss lodging with her.
    She had no idea what's it all about.
    And he came.
    He was a man in civil clothes.
    And he was trying to persuade my mother to let him our apartment
    and to move to another apartment that he would provide for us.
    And he was explaining that there is some provisions
    that we would have to leave modern apartments anyway--
    the Jews, sooner or later in a forceful way--
    and this way we could choose, and we could do it,
    you know, nice and friendly.
    And so we moved, although, actually, we
    had no other choice.
    And also, when he was talking to my mother later since
    my mother still didn't understand his authority
    from which he is trying to do this kind of exchange,
    so finally, he snapped his heels and said
    I am Obersturmbannfuhrer So-and-so here
    in Prague with the occupation authorities, and that was it.
    And SS Obersturmbannfuhrer, in that time,
    we didn't know too much what it means.
    Unfortunately, we learned soon enough.
    And we moved to the old place, as I told you,
    with that other family.
    And he, when they were negotiating,
    so-called, he was telling my mother
    that those people in that other apartment
    will stay there only for a couple months
    or so for a short time, and then we
    will have the whole apartment for ourselves.
    And so that he kept his word there.
    That whole family was sent with one of the first transports
    to Lublin--
    to Lodz, actually, in Poland.
    And none of them returned naturally.
    So that we didn't know in that time.
    And so we stayed there and also the men--
    the SS men one day came back to visit us.
    I mean, to visit us?
    He just showed up.
    And that is kind of a more or less sad and funny story.
    He fell in love with my mother.
    And my mother kind of rejected him, naturally.
    And that was already at the time when my brother
    was in Theresienstadt.
    And so my mother, when he became too fresh,
    she punched him in the face, and he left completely
    with his black SS uniform.
    And a few weeks later, we were going to Theresienstadt.
    And that was the result of that I think because, otherwise, we
    would have stayed in Prague for much longer time
    if not through the whole war.
    Because there was--
    I hate to say that but it was the truth-- the people who
    went with that special transport with Edelstein,
    their family was supposed to be also protected in Prague
    as long as, you know, probably forever.
    But in that case, they just sent us too.
    But I also learned that all other people sooner or later
    went anyway.
    Were you ever physically accosted on the street?
    No, I think you asked me that before.
    No, I was never physically hurt or attacked
    on the street in Prague, no.
    I understand in other occupied countries
    that was the case very often.
    In Prague, I must admit--
    or I mean not admit.
    I must say although there were a lot of antisemites
    within the Czech nation--
    people-- but I believe they were the mildest ones
    of all the occupied countries.
    Like I know in Poland, they had terrific problems
    with physical beatings and so on the street.
    And I don't recall any of such cases in Prague, no.
    OK, you said that a few weeks after this incident
    with this man, your family was notified.
    How were you notified?
    Oh, as everybody else.
    You got they came like a man with postman's bag,
    and he took out a piece of paper, gave it to you,
    you had to sign it, and that paper
    said you have to come to the gathering place
    for the purpose of being transported to another place,
    all right?
    Were you home when this came?
    Yes, I was, right.
    Because they came at night.
    They always came at night around midnight.
    I don't know why.
    How did you feel when you got that?
    I remember my mother was very unhappy, although, on one hand,
    she hoped that we would be sent to the same place
    as my brother was, although we didn't know.
    And she was very unhappy, but she was also happy
    that she's going to see her son again.
    And then she was unhappy because she knew that I'm
    going to have to go too.
    And she would have rather spared me
    from that kind of experience, although she
    didn't know what kind of experience
    it's going to be either.
    And so we went, as I said, with the transport
    Cc in November '42.
    November 20th, 1942.
    Right.
    And we were in Theresienstadt, right.
    And how many people were on that transport?
    A thousand, yeah.
    And you are 15 years old now.
    I am 15 years old now.
    And the transport were--
    I'm sorry, that was November, not December, right?
    Did I say November?
    You said November.
    20th of November.
    And there was a thousand people there out of which 843 died.
    I'm knowing it because I'm reading it
    right now from the Theresienstadt memorial book.
    And 154 were liberated--
    three, they didn't know what happened to them.
    But naturally, out of those 154, I
    doubt too many will be still living in these days.
    This is a number from 1945, and, obviously, there
    is just out of 154, I don't really know,
    but I think maybe five or so.
    Let's talk about the journey, or let's talk
    about first, getting--
    so you got this notice to come.
    And where did you go?
    We went in Prague at a place where
    there used to be world fairs--
    fairs, business fairs and so.
    And they gathered us there.
    We stayed there actually for two nights
    before the transport went.
    And then they took us.
    How did you sleep?
    On the floor, some mattresses, some blankets,
    and things on a wooden floor.
    It was an indoor place.
    What did you take with you from home?
    We were allowed to take a couple bags each one.
    So that's what we had, my mother and I.
    What did you take with you?
    I wouldn't really remember that.
    [LAUGHS] I think just some clothes, and yeah.
    Anything special that you wanted to take with you-- personal?
    Not really, no.
    No special books or anything like that?
    No, I don't-- not that I recall really, no.
    We just went to Terezín, and we got--
    my mother got a place to stay.
    Well, wait, before we get there.
    You're still-- you're at this gathering place.
    And you're there for two nights.
    What did you do during the day?
    I think we just gathered wherever, whatever kids there
    were-- a few kids-- and played around, fooled around,
    or details, I wouldn't really remember that now.
    But I know we had--
    they gave us some food there.
    And it was not very restricted, except we were not
    allowed to go out anymore.
    And the German guards, what was their treatment of you?
    I think the guards were kind of invisible.
    They were outside at the gates and so.
    So inside the rooms, I don't remember.
    I don't recall there would be any guards inside or so.
    And the sanitary facilities?
    Yeah, I think there were some toilets there.
    And then how did you get--
    [INAUDIBLE] [? washroom. ?]
    How did you get to Theresienstadt?
    By train, yeah.
    They took us to the train that was
    the railroad-- a small railroad station of Prague.
    And I think the name of the railroad station was Bubenec,
    and they took us there.
    I really don't recall whether we walked or they took us
    in a truck or something.
    I think we walked to there, yeah.
    And they put us on a train.
    Were people very concerned?
    Did you sense an atmosphere of fear or what?
    Don't forget, you're speaking about a 14, 15-year-old kid,
    right?
    And me, specifically, I never took anything very seriously,
    as I said.
    I still don't, and what is coming, is coming, you know?
    If I can do-- if I can change this, I try to change this.
    If I cannot change this, then I will not break my head with
    that.
    And I think I was that way as a child too,
    and, actually, I looked forward to see my brother.
    I didn't know where we are going.
    I just thought it's just another city.
    We're going to get some apartment, small apartment
    or something, and that will be it.
    But unfortunately, that was not it.
    So they took us to Theresienstadt.
    And Theresienstadt, for the first day,
    we stood in one special big hall which
    was called [? Schloiska ?] I don't
    think there's a translation for that for English.
    And it's a big room, big hall where
    nobody was allowed to go out.
    Nobody was allowed to come in.
    And where we were laying down on the floor--
    on the wooden floor--
    and they were kind of organizing where each one will go to stay.
    And they took most of our luggage.
    They stalled, and never gave it to us, you know.
    Each one got only a couple things.
    And then after two days, they just
    sent us to our [? ubications, ?] you know?
    Our places where we would stay.
    Now, fortunately, as I said before, my brother organized
    for my mother a place to stay in the same building
    as he had his place, you know?
    The Board of Elders each had his own room,
    although small room, and so no bathroom, no toilet--
    just a small room.
    They didn't have to share.
    And my mom was in that same building.
    And she shared a large room together
    with other mothers of members of the board.
    So they had in compare with others, I must admit,
    they had a very, very nice place to stay.
    I mean, just in compare with the other people.
    And I was put in a children's home-- youth home--
    where I shared a room, a small room
    with eight other children, and that was it.
    Was it hard to be separated from your mother?
    No, we were free to move around in Theresienstadt.
    That was just where I slept.
    I could go visit my mother and my brother any time
    I wanted to in Theresienstadt.
    And inside the city it was open, the movement,
    only you couldn't go out of the city, you know?
    And naturally, most people's living quarters were not
    as good as mine, or my brother's, or my mother's.
    They were very, very bad, like, let's say a room like this,
    there were 25 people sleeping in those high beds, right?
    And no hygiene facilities, nothing.
    And so Theresienstadt, I must tell you
    this, although I am sure everybody
    who knows something about the Holocaust history
    is familiar with that, Theresienstadt as such,
    was not really a concentration camp as we learned later,
    as we knew like Buchenwald, Dachau, Auschwitz, Blechhammer.
    Theresienstadt was really more like a ghetto,
    and that's what they'd call it.
    And so although we are living there,
    we thought we are in the worst place in the world,
    but later we learned that it was like paradise in Theresienstadt
    in compare with other concentration camps.
    And the reason for that was that, actually,
    Theresienstadt was just a preparation camp--
    a gathering camp-- to be for people
    to be sent further up and to Auschwitz from Theresienstadt.
    Everybody from Theresienstadt who went out of Theresienstadt,
    went to Auschwitz, you know?
    Like, there were some exceptions,
    but most of the people went to Auschwitz.
    So now you're there, what did you do?
    What was a typical day like?
    Oh so in Theresienstadt, all people
    had some kind of occupation, some kind of work,
    and as I said, in Theresienstadt,
    the Germans tried to make it an exemplar place that they can
    show to the International Red Cross people,
    and so it was a showcase really for them.
    And they allowed us to do things,
    which you couldn't dream about in other camps in Europe.
    So, for example, there was theater there
    in Theresienstadt, which is described in literature.
    And there was orchestras there, and concerts there,
    and there was also a large soccer league there.
    And since there were people in Theresienstadt
    from all over Europe, not just from Czechoslovakia, right?
    And within those people, Jews were very good soccer players.
    And there were people who played at home
    for their national teams--
    I mean, great professionals well-known all over the world.
    And I was 15 years old, not even 16.
    I was the youngest soccer player of the professional level
    there of all the people.
    What happened, the teams were divided according
    to workplaces, although the people who
    played for the soccer team usually never worked.
    The workplaces were led by Germans--
    by SS men or by German professionals, experts
    for the certain field of work--
    and I played and was supposed to work as an electrician
    for the team of electricians.
    And they had their own building where
    they had their labs, their laboratories, their workplaces.
    You know, they were needed, electricians
    in that whole city.
    There were, I don't know how many,
    probably 100 electricians there.
    And the man who led the whole thing-- the German guy,
    you know--
    took care of the soccer team too.
    We had the best uniforms.
    We had the best soccer shoes.
    And in Prague, the professional teams
    couldn't get soccer shoes.
    So we had the newest one, the best ones because the Germans
    got them for us, you know?
    And it was such a game between them--
    the SS people and the Germans--
    that "my team is better than your team," you know?
    And so they provided us, so we could really
    perform like horses.
    And they also gave us special rations where every game or so,
    I got a roll of salami like this long--
    half a yard long--
    a couple loaves of bread, a square of margarine-- you know,
    the butter substitute.
    Other people would have this for a month.
    So we got supplied by them pretty well.
    How did you feel getting more food than others?
    I don't think I really broke my heart over that.
    I knew it happens, but it happened in the normal life
    too that some people have more than others, right?
    And being 15 years old, you don't think about it too much,
    but that was the fact.
    And so that was the entertainment there and.
    What else did you do besides play soccer?
    For one time, I was kind of bored
    and in winter, specifically, so my brother
    arranged for me to work in the dental laboratory--
    I mean, a laboratory where they there were repairing--
    what do you call it?
    Dental.
    Dental plates?
    Plates, right, dental plates for old people.
    They came there, broke their plates, they'd bring it in,
    and we were repairing them.
    That was the only work that we did.
    And so, officially, when somebody asked me
    because we were not allowed to say, what are you doing?
    I'm a soccer player.
    That's nonsense, you know, you cannot do that.
    So you I said I'm a dentist, [LAUGHS] which
    it wasn't true either, but it sounded better.
    And I once in a while went to that laboratory
    and worked there repairing those dental plates.
    And that's all I did in Theresienstadt, otherwise,
    I really didn't do anything in Theresienstadt.
    How much contact did you have with your brother?
    As I said, I could see him any time I want to.
    In fact, I went probably went to visit my brother and my mother,
    as I said they lived in the same garrison,
    and I went to see them probably every day.
    Did your brother talk about what he was doing
    or any decisions he had to make?
    No, no, not at all, not at all, no.
    I know he was a member of the Aeltestenrat
    or the Board of Elders, but how and what, no.
    He never talked about it.
    And OK, go ahead.
    Did you have a 16th birthday there?
    I'm just thinking if I had my 16-- yeah,
    I think I had my 16th birthday in Theresienstadt, right, yeah.
    Did you do anything special?
    Not really, no.
    Maybe my mother made me a [? birth ?] cake probably
    that was a specialty in Theresienstadt.
    You know you save bread, and then
    you dip it in coffee substitute, and you put in the margarine
    that you ration that you got, and mix it up with a little bit
    sugar from the ration too.
    You know, we had rations there, pretty bad ones, very small
    ones, but still a thousand times better than other concentration
    camps, you know?
    What did the 15 and 16-year-old boys talk about?
    Soccer, girls, and I still do that.
    Did you have any relationship with the girls there?
    Oh yeah, yeah, I had some.
    What was the social situation like for young teenagers
    like you?
    I mean, I had some friends there.
    I had some girlfriends, you know?
    Girlfriends-- 16-year-old boy, right?
    And I had a group of girls that were excited about my playing
    in that big very important team, right?
    They came to see the game.
    There were games that were played in a yard of garrison.
    That name was Dresden by the city of Dresden, right?
    And there was a women's building-- women's garrison.
    And then the yard, that was a large place where
    we played the soccer games.
    And the building had three floors,
    and around the yard were like balconies, you know?
    I don't know how to explain that.
    From the balconies, you went into the rooms, right?
    It was like a courtyard?
    Courtyard, no, but in the floors, right?
    Yeah.
    Yeah, right.
    And there were people standing there
    like in a stadium in the stands watching the games.
    They were 5-6,000 people at the game, yeah.
    That was that.
    Did you take any classes, any schooling?
    In Theresienstadt?
    Yeah, any?
    No.
    No, [INAUDIBLE] people who weren't teaching.
    Were there any classes given?
    No, there was no classes, no teaching, no school center
    in Theresienstadt.
    The only thing was for, I think, for younger kids--
    for the real children kids--
    there was a building there.
    It's the building where now in Theresienstadt
    is the Theresienstadt Holocaust Museum.
    That building had little children,
    and they had some teachers there who taught them.
    But I don't think.
    But there was nothing for the older children?
    No, no.
    And what about cultural activities?
    You said you were musical, so did you take part in anything
    there?
    There were concerts there.
    There was even a coffee shop where there was music played.
    And once or twice, you had to have tickets to go there,
    you know?
    I got the ticket to go to that [INAUDIBLE]..
    How did you get the tickets?
    I think through the electrician guys too.
    And you went there.
    You got a cup of coffee-- of substitute coffee,
    and you're sitting there like in a coffee shop, big shot,
    and listening to the music.
    In two hours they kicked you out and some other people get in,
    [? you know. ?]
    This is tape two, side B, and we were
    talking about Theresienstadt.
    Yeah, we were talking about the fun there, right?
    Yeah, we had there were concerts there.
    Sometimes there were theaters.
    Everything on a very, very primitive base, very
    primitively done, you know?
    The stages, the paintings, the outfits, and the costumes,
    and the instruments, everything was very, very primitive,
    but for us, it was something.
    Did you do any singing?
    No, not in Theresienstadt, no.
    I didn't do-- as I said, I didn't really
    do anything else but date girls and play soccer.
    That was all I did in Theresienstadt
    and visited my mother, and my brother.
    And I also, and I forgot to mention
    my grandmother was there, my grandfather.
    These are your mother's parents?
    My mother's parents.
    And my mother's sister was there.
    They all wound up in the gas chamber in Auschwitz.
    Did they come with you on that same transport?
    No, they actually they came later than I did here, I think.
    I believe so.
    I'm not really sure now.
    But they left with the--
    oh, actually, my grandfather died in Theresienstadt.
    He had some prostate problems, and they couldn't
    operate there, so he died.
    And my mother's sister, Erika, and my mother's step-mother,
    actually--
    because her mother died long before--
    they went to Auschwitz with that transport
    that came to Auschwitz three months before our transport.
    And they were a part of that infamous, famous family
    camp in Auschwitz, Birkenau.
    And they were, unfortunately, also in that transport, as I
    said, three months before us.
    Therefore, their six months passed three months
    before our time, and after three months,
    everybody had the sign on this card
    in Auschwitz SB6, which meant Sonderbehandlung
    in sechs Monaten, which means special treatment in six
    months, which meant gas chamber.
    And that whole transport, including
    Fredy Hirsch, who went there before us,
    and including lots of relatives and friends, were gassed.
    And three months later, we were supposed to--
    I think we are jumping ahead now.
    Yeah, Yeah, let's stay [INAUDIBLE]..
    Theresienstadt, there's not much more to say except the time
    when I left for Auschwitz really.
    That is a great--
    I mean, great-- a big sad story.
    We were definitely have to be covered by our brother.
    And all members of the Board of Elders of Theresienstadt
    were covered--
    the whole family was covered whenever
    they came to Theresienstadt, they would not have to leave.
    I mean, whole family, only close family-- brother, sister,
    mother, father, OK?
    Not grandfather or so.
    And we were pretty safe there.
    I kind of thought that I'm going to spend the rest
    of the war in Theresienstadt.
    In that time, we already felt it's
    kind of getting to go to an end, and we.
    The war is ending.
    Not end, but we knew that Hitler is not going to win.
    Because we had been talking about that before.
    What did you know about what was happening
    in other parts of Europe?
    In Theresienstadt, specifically, the adults
    were very well-informed.
    I think that the Czech--
    what do you call it?
    The guards, the Czech guards who were there,
    they brought a lot of information into the camp.
    They also brought a lot of material into the camp.
    Some of them, I would think as much as I heard--
    I was not in touch with them-- but as much as I heard later,
    they behaved pretty well, the Czech guards,
    so-called Chetniks.
    And they also brought material to Theresienstadt,
    food and also letters, packages, naturally, all illegal.
    And they practically risked their own life to doing so,
    but they did so.
    Most of them did.
    There were some who were pigs, but most of them
    were very nice people I was told.
    Did you talk to the German guards?
    Not in Theresienstadt, except the ones
    that had their soccer teams.
    That came always to the game, naturally,
    and they had a special place where
    they were with their guards there,
    and they have festive uniforms.
    It was a big day when they played--
    their team played, you know?
    And I am sure I heard, at least, that they were having
    bets between each other, those German guys-- the SS people--
    and so.
    As the months went on, did you have any change
    in your feeling towards seeing Germans in uniforms,
    army uniforms, SS uniforms?
    Yes, as the time went on, my feelings
    were worse, and worse, and more harsher, and more
    harsher, and more scary than every day
    before because I saw what they are
    capable of doing with the progress of time, not so much
    in Theresienstadt as later on naturally.
    Did you see any physical maltreatment in Theresienstadt?
    In Theresienstadt, I must admit I did not see any,
    although I heard about some.
    Yeah, there was some physical maltreatment,
    especially before I came to Theresienstadt.
    I understand there were some hangings there,
    some punishments and so.
    But during the time I was there, I
    would not know about anything like that.
    I heard there was a police there.
    I knew that.
    The ghetto [NON-ENGLISH],, and the German policed sometimes
    the camp too inside.
    And I know if somebody quasi did something he shouldn't have
    done, they put him in jail.
    And sometimes you'll hear about big affairs-- something this
    and this happened-- but, personally, I
    was not involved in any, and I did not
    know anybody who would have been involved in those things,
    but, again, that is because my age so.
    So here you think you're being protected
    because of your brother.
    Right.
    And then what happens?
    What happened is the Edelstein group
    we're responsible for the transports going to Auschwitz,
    which we didn't know where it's going in that time,
    naturally-- going out of Theresienstadt.
    Did you have contact with Edelstein?
    Me, personally?
    I saw him a few times with my brother in my brother's place
    or my brother's office in the garrison
    where the Board of Elders was lodged
    and where they had the offices.
    Yes, I saw him many times, yeah.
    What was your impression?
    But I did not speak directly to him, not in a lengthy way.
    Maybe once or twice when I was with my brother,
    he petted my head and called me famous.
    Yeah, I think once he said something
    like I am more famous than he is in Theresienstadt or something
    like that.
    Because of the soccer?
    Yeah, right, but I'm more popular
    than he is because the elders were not very popular people
    there, although they tried to do their best.
    And actually, after the war, and all
    the literature shows that they really
    were trying to help the people.
    In fact, so what happened is they
    were making the administrative work for those transport.
    They were told that and that many people has to go--
    this and this kind of people have to go--
    and they made lists, naturally.
    And they went-- the transport went out from Theresienstadt,
    later we learned to Auschwitz, right?
    What they probably, I think, I believe that Edelstein
    and the group, they knew what's happening further up there.
    Did they come up with names?
    Yeah.
    That group.
    What did your brother say about having to do that?
    I don't think I talk about it with him.
    I just know that's what I want to come to that what they did
    is they put people who died in Theresienstadt, that they
    put them on the transport list.
    So each transport left with about 40,
    50, whatever amount people less than it should have to.
    And the Germans were not in that case,
    you know, they loaded the trains inside Theresienstadt
    in the middle of Theresienstadt really.
    There was a rail there going straight into the city.
    And the Germans did not really, strangely enough,
    have so much control there.
    So they just loaded the people, and sometimes they count,
    and sometimes they didn't.
    They had a list, and they were supposed to check the list.
    So what are they going to do if they miss somebody?
    They are not going to unload the whole train to find a person.
    They probably checked it, you know?
    There were lower-rank assessment there checking those lists,
    and so they didn't care that much.
    So and that went very nicely, this system, until the--
    and that is, again, I'm sorry to say
    that this is one of the big stories that I wrote--
    until one day the commander of the Theresienstadt,
    I think Seidl was it, found a very strange name
    on the list of which he knew that the man was
    a member of a roofing commando--
    of a roofing workgroup that roofed
    the roof of the commendatore in Theresienstadt.
    And it was some kind of a very, very unusual name.
    And he found this name on the transport list,
    and he knew that men died.
    So he went after that.
    And so he found one and two and 10 and 1,500s,
    and that was a big melee there.
    And they immediately jailed Edelstein,
    and he was commanded to his jail for a while.
    And then they arrested several people of the elders--
    not my brother, fortunately.
    And the next thing what happened they put us,
    all the Board, and all Edelstein, and everybody,
    and the families, they put them in the transport to Auschwitz.
    And that's how we wound up outside of Theresienstadt which
    we hoped would never happen.
    But that was the reason.
    And so they saved a lot of lives,
    but they spent their own, specifically, Edelstein.
    He was shot in Auschwitz, you know?
    But the whole family-- his whole family,
    his children, and his wife, they were all
    shot in the crematorium right at the time when we were supposed
    to leave Auschwitz after those six months, which we really
    did, but they did not.
    They shot them, and they were also
    killing most of the members of this group here, you see?
    They were mostly shot to death.
    And that was the end of Theresienstadt for me.
    Now, what month?
    When was this?
    I want to be very correct and tell you.
    I went to-- let me see--
    18th of December 1943, I went to Auschwitz from Theresienstadt.
    Reasons that
    Let's talk about that.
    All of us did.
    Yeah, let's talk about the journey from Theresienstadt.
    The journey was, I think, about four or four days or so,
    five days maybe.
    I wouldn't know exactly.
    That journey is one of the first horror situations
    that I recall.
    And the horror I was in the cattle cars
    were loaded with people that we were hardly
    able to sit down on the floor.
    There was no seats or anything actually.
    And there was one bucket for increments, you know.
    And there was one little window with bars.
    And even the bars were waved through with barbed wire,
    you know?
    And so very little air, no food whatsoever, no water,
    nothing during the whole trip.
    And that was pretty difficult, and also a few people
    died in every car the day before we get there, right?
    Which family members were you with in that car?
    I was with my brother and with my mom in the car, yeah.
    How was she holding up?
    Actually, I think my mother was always
    a very courageous, a very strong woman,
    not that I would be a crying baby,
    but once in a while in that age, I leaned upon my mother,
    and so she always find a way to make
    me feel better, and easier, and said don't worry.
    It will be all right.
    We'll just get through this, and then we are fine.
    And that through this, with several through this's,
    you know, and, but we [INAUDIBLE]
    she kept her word too.
    We were fine.
    And with your brother in the car also?
    Yeah, right.
    And did the three of you stay together, close physical
    proximity?
    Until they took us to the B2b camp,
    we went through the procedure getting the tattoo on the hand,
    on the arms, you know, which I still naturally have here.
    Well, but let's just before that, you're in the journey,
    were people helping each other?
    What was the feeling inside the car?
    Inside the car, there was nothing much you
    could help anybody, you know?
    The only thing is you could pass the buck.
    And when it was overflowing, you tried to pull it out
    where there was some crevice in the cart
    so it wouldn't stink too much in there, and that was it.
    There was no food, no nothing.
    There was no other help.
    There were actually sick people there too,
    and nobody could help them.
    Some of them died during the trip, and that was that.
    What was it like for you as a 16-year-old boy
    to see dead bodies and have to stay in the car?
    Yeah, as I said, that was my first horror experience.
    Before that, it was difficult and unusual, and tough,
    but not really--
    I haven't seen people falling and dying, and being hungry,
    and not having a toilet, and not having water to drink, to wash,
    or anything.
    That was the first situation I became
    familiar with in that time, and that was actually
    pretty strenuous for a 15, 16-year-old kid, yeah.
    Were you allowed out of the car at all?
    No, not at all.
    During the whole trip, the car did never open.
    Although there were stops, we don't even
    know where it stopped, you know?
    Did you know where you were going?
    No, we had no idea where we were going--
    no idea.
    Some people saw, once in a while,
    a name on a railroad station that we passed through,
    and they were guessing and saying we're going here,
    we're going there, but nobody cared really
    where we're going, as long as they didn't let us out.
    And then when they let us out, we immediately
    learned this is no recreational place.
    This is concentration camp Auschwitz.
    Did you know what Auschwitz meant at that point--
    No, not at all.
    --when you arrived?
    But if you took one look, you kind of knew a lot already.
    What was your first impressions when the car stopped?
    What do you first remember when it first stopped?
    My first thought was I hope I won't be here too
    long I hope they will take us somewhere else, although I
    didn't know what it is, how it is, nothing.
    [INAUDIBLE] on the ramp there, and there were--
    we were one of the transports, one of the few transports
    who did not go through a selection.
    You know, the selection, you know
    normally when a transport came to Auschwitz,
    Dr. Mengele selected the old and sick,
    put them in the gas chamber right away,
    the others put in some kind of a camp or so.
    Our transport was the only transport
    that was not selection.
    That was the only transport who had their own civilian clothes
    from Theresienstadt.
    We did not get striped clothes.
    They took away all our possessions
    whatever we took with us from Theresienstadt,
    but what we had on us, they left us.
    So the doors open.
    What was your first impression?
    Oh, they started to beat us with the rifle butts,
    and yelling, and crying.
    And we saw sometimes they were throwing out
    the dead ones from the carts.
    And that was the first--
    how can you describe an impression like this
    in first time of your life--
    16-year-old life, right?
    But it was terrible.
    But, again, my mom said, [? child, ?] look,
    they just died.
    They're old.
    They are sick.
    That happens.
    And let's go, right?
    Don't look.
    I'm sure she knew a little bit more than I did.
    And they, as I said, they took us,
    they kind of shoveled us a little bit
    with the rifle butts.
    Here and there somebody got a hit over his head.
    And they took us to a shower.
    This is everybody in your car?
    Pardon?
    Everybody in your car stayed together?
    No, no, no, no, no, once you go out of the car,
    there was a bunch, you know?
    The whole bunch of the transport started
    to march towards the one building, which
    we didn't know what it is.
    It was a shower building.
    It said shower.
    And fortunately enough, it was really shower, all right?
    Later, if I knew, I would never go there.
    I would rather let him kill me right there
    instead of going there.
    But we didn't know better then.
    And we went, and we really got to shower.
    We got our clothes back, and we got the tattoo.
    And during that process, they beat us over the head
    with sticks-- the Kapos, you know, and the Germans.
    And so I knew it's no fun.
    What is your tattoo number?
    My number is 170955.
    1-7-0-9-5-5, you see here?
    You will see my number--
    you will notice my number is a little bit larger than normally
    other people's number.
    The reason for that is because I was 15-16 and I still grew,
    and the number grew with me.
    Where an adult person, 18, didn't grow anymore,
    the number stayed the same size, so that's the reason.
    How did you feel getting a tattoo?
    I felt terrible really.
    I know to say that is just the understatement.
    But this was the smallest worry that I had in the time.
    I said, all right.
    Give me a number.
    Leave me go, OK?
    Let's see where we are going to live.
    What are we going to do?
    That was more important than the number.
    I said, OK, some statistic they have to have,
    they put the number on you, all right.
    Was it painful?
    Not too.
    It was just kind of sticking, but it was not too bad, no.
    The thing was we went in a row always,
    you know, men in one row, one after another.
    And once in a while they hit somebody
    when the one in front of him didn't walk too fast.
    My brother, poor guy, he always went in front of me,
    and he was a little bit taller than I.
    And when somebody swung the stick or something,
    my brother got hit and I didn't.
    And I think he did it on purpose.
    He kind of protected me a little bit, you know?
    Is his number one away?
    His number
    is one number lower than mine, yes, 54.
    He was in front of me.
    And my mother's were different because women
    were separated in a separate shower
    room and separate numbers too.
    And so then they took us, we walked
    to that camp, which later we found out to be the B2b camp.
    And also later, we find that that
    is the only camp where men and women were together
    in the whole Auschwitz area.
    I mean, I'm saying camp assuming that you
    know what I'm talking about.
    Auschwitz was one giant big--
    I mean, Auschwitz, Birkenau--
    one giant big [INAUDIBLE] camp, but inside that camp
    where small camps divided where always 2,000, 3,000,
    4,000 people were lodged in.
    And there were always camps of two rows of barracks,
    except, as I mentioned before, I don't think outside--
    I think outside the tape.
    The A camp was only one line of barracks,
    and that was such a transitional camp
    where nobody stayed for a long time.
    Usually, they just put people there either transport them out
    or put them in a gas chamber, which was the case in our camp.
    So our camp became the so-called "family" log or family camp,
    B2b, where, as I mentioned before, Fredy Hirsch organized.
    He was such a courageous man.
    He, being German himself, you know, from Berlin and German
    Jew who came later to Czechoslovakia hoping
    he would escape from Germany.
    And so he didn't speak too well Czech.
    He spoke brilliantly German, you know.
    His whole education was German.
    And he was such a type, such athletic type of man,
    and a little bit, I would say, a military man, you know.
    He also advocated since we still were in Prague and Hagibor,
    for us to exercise, and to learn discipline,
    and to be physically fit, and mentally fit.
    And that was his way of teaching us, you know, which we hated.
    But we found out later that it was pretty good for us,
    and that he was doing the right thing.
    Because we wanted to play soccer,
    and he couldn't stand it.
    He just exercised and so, and scouting, and discipline,
    and military, and marching.
    And so anyway, he, in Auschwitz, got the courage
    to talk back to the Germans, which was unheard of
    and, I mean, crazy thing to do.
    But he did it, and he succeeded with that.
    And he managed to get a special barrack for the kids,
    for example, from the Germans.
    And he managed to get special ration for the children,
    you know.
    And all kind of privileges he managed
    to get from them because he spoke to them as they spoke
    to him, in a military way.
    And they very much like that, you know.
    That impressed the Germans really.
    And maybe the fact that they knew he is German,
    and he speaks their language, and behaves
    in their manner and so.
    So you arrive with your mother and your brother
    to this family camp in Birkenau, B2b.
    Right.
    And where did you stay?
    Did you stay with your brother and your mother?
    I stayed with my brother, and there were--
    the barracks were separated.
    There were women separated and men separate.
    We're still within the family camp at this point.
    Yes, yeah, in the family camp.
    It's family camp, but the sleeping areas--
    because I cannot say living quarters.
    They were not living quarters.
    They were the old horse--
    what do you call it?
    Stalls and there were those the leveled sleeping places,
    and there were in one barrack, I think, about 1,500 people.
    I don't know how many.
    A lot of people anyway.
    And it was not comfortable in any case.
    And so I was with my brother, and my mother
    was in another barrack.
    With the other women, you mean.
    With the other women Yeah many barracks of women
    many barracks of men right and very soon after I arrived we
    I started to work in that children's barracks
    that Fredy got for the children.
    And don't forget, they were there already,
    that transport of Fredy Hirsch and so-- a week and three
    months later.
    Did he remember you?
    Oh, yeah, surely, naturally.
    All of us knew each other very well, most of us I mean.
    What was the age range for the children
    in the children's barrack?
    What?
    Again?
    What was the age range for the children
    in the children's barrack?
    In the children's barrack, as I said,
    was just a barrack where the children came during the day.
    They did not sleep there.
    And I think the allowed age was 16--
    up to 16.
    Anybody over 16 was considered an adult, right?
    But since Fredy knew me, and since I was just close, over 16
    only, he wanted to spare us--
    kids of my age--
    from the normal adult life there, which
    was very, very difficult and horrifying really.
    And so he let me, like, work in the children's barrack,
    although the only thing I did was
    that I was carrying the barrels with the children's
    soup at lunchtime back and forth from the kitchen.
    And that's all that I really had to do there,
    and the rest of the day I was just joining
    the kids like everybody else.
    Now, that we were preparing children's theater
    plays in a very primitive way--
    Fredy did that.
    And in fact, I remember in that time,
    I was translating since things were mostly writings
    and whatever we had, literature, books,
    whatever the Germans allowed us to have in the children block
    were German naturally.
    And we wanted to make a Czech play.
    I think it was Snow White or something,
    and I translated the German book into Czech.
    [LAUGHS] That was probably my first translating job.
    And we played that little play, very short, and very primitive,
    you know?
    And what were the little children--
    the smaller children's--
    what was it like for them?
    I don't know if they even were aware of the situation.
    They were so young.
    Some of them were I think four years
    old, five years, seven, 10.
    I don't think they were aware of what's
    actually happening there.
    I really couldn't even guess and imagine
    what their thoughts were.
    But, as I said, thanks to Fredy, they managed their life
    in a pretty decent--
    not decent-- in a better way than they
    would have to in a regular camp and as an adult.
    Who were the other so-called teachers there,
    the other adults working with the children?
    There were usually teachers from Theresienstadt
    from the children building and young people of 20,
    30 years old or so who had the ability, naturally,
    to take care of little children, yeah.
    Did you know what was happening in the rest of Birkenau?
    Did you know about crematoriums?
    We knew.
    We learned pretty soon that there are crematoriums,
    naturally, because you could see the flames flicking out
    of the chimneys.
    The chimneys of the crematorium were just
    very close by really--
    not very far-- and nothing was very far really.
    And so we could see that.
    And we heard probably from the first day
    that there is something like a gas chamber there,
    but we choose not to believe it really.
    This is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    interview with Rene Tressler, conducted
    by Gail Schwartz on February 20, 1997,
    in Silver Spring, Maryland.
    This is tape number 3, side A. And we
    were talking about the family camp in Birkenau, B2b.
    What was a daily routine like for you?
    I believe, for me--
    you mean for the children or for me?
    Well, no.
    Well, for both.
    For you and then for the children.
    For me, it practically was the same routine
    like the other children, except that I was,
    as I said before, carrying those barrels
    with the soup for the kids, of which I did not
    get any portions because I was considered adult
    and got my portion in adult barracks--
    the lousy watery stuff, you know.
    So in that barrack--
    in the children's barrack--
    for me, the routine was actually the same as
    for the other children.
    We were trying to do some singing group, some theater
    group, some reading groups.
    Fredy also got some allowance of books--
    children's books, fairy tales, and things like that,
    which usually was in German.
    The Germans supplied-- actually supplied,
    they allowed to take it out of the possessions
    that we all brought with us.
    Some books and some things came always
    in the luggages, which they confiscated.
    And during the stay there, they're
    allowed to have those books brought into the camp--
    some of them, a few.
    I know there was--
    About how many?
    Do you know?
    Oh, there was a little library there, which we called library.
    I think there were about 50 books there, or so.
    And as I said, usually just fairy tales, picture books,
    and things like that.
    Any particular books that you remember?
    The only thing, as I said, that I remember,
    we were trying to do the--
    I think it was Snow White or some fairy tale.
    I really couldn't say exactly.
    And there was that book.
    And since I spoke German at that time already, fluently,
    and Czech, I was the one who translated
    that from the German into Czech so we
    could make a little scene, a fairy tale scene.
    So did you teach the children too?
    No, no, no, I did not teach at all.
    No, I was just one of the kids there, of the older kids,
    you know.
    We were divided into age groups, naturally.
    And each of the group had its own teacher provided.
    And so I was in the group of the eldest ones.
    And the 16-year-olds, or up to 14-, 16-year-olds
    About how many were in your group?
    Oh, I wouldn't be really able to count.
    I think, oh, probably, 20, 25, or so in that group.
    I wouldn't even know exactly how many kids were there
    in that children's block.
    Could have been around 200, 300, maybe 400.
    I really wouldn't know.
    This is block 31 of the children's block.
    Right.
    And so I lived the normal life of any other child there.
    And--
    Were there roll calls for the children, for you?
    I don't think so.
    But I had to stay roll call with the adults every morning.
    And after the roll call, I went to the children's block
    for work, you know.
    Tell me about the roll call the roll calls.
    That's something really very hard to describe
    because every barrack, every block,
    had to come out of the barrack, stand in front of the barrack,
    in line, and wait until being counted by the SS men.
    You know, they had sheets of numbers and names
    and I don't know what.
    And they were trying to figure out
    by counting the rows of prisoners if by any chance
    is somebody missing there.
    And then they had to count the ones that died.
    And the ones that are in a sick barrack and things like that.
    Sometimes it took hours.
    Sometimes it took the whole day if they couldn't find somebody.
    They couldn't get the number right.
    And we were standing out there in attention, actually,
    winter, summer, snow, hot, doesn't matter, rain.
    And the clothes--
    I think it's not necessary to describe what we wear,
    what we wore.
    Just thin prisoners stripe, or either the thin prisoner's
    clothes or--
    actually, in that time, I'm sorry, no, in that time,
    we had our clothes from the Theresienstadt.
    But we had only what they left to us, what we had on us--
    shirt, jacket, pants.
    I'm thinking now, I don't think anybody of us had a coat.
    No, I don't think we had a coat.
    And so it was really not very good dress.
    The shoes usually went already because the ground in a camp
    was mud.
    And the mud was there winter, summer, all the time.
    And you go in that mud, sometimes
    you lose your shoe there.
    And sometimes you break your sole and things like that.
    So the clothes was really very quickly used up,
    and the shoes too.
    And so that's what we had to stand in every morning there,
    until they figured out if the count is correct.
    That was so-called Appell.
    They called it Appell.
    And when it was done, then I went to the children barrack
    and stayed there the rest of the day.
    What about the sanitary conditions?
    There was one barrack in which there were washbasins.
    Actually, one long metal--
    what you call it.
    Such a--
    Trough?
    Pardon?
    Trough?
    Yeah, something like that.
    And there were a few faucets there, of which some of them
    were working.
    But ice cold water, naturally.
    Not very filtered water.
    Sometimes the water was coming out brown and black,
    and you definitely couldn't drink it most of the time.
    So the only drinking you could do was the morning so-called
    coffee they served us-- they let us have--
    that came with a big barrel.
    And each prisoner got one big--
    what you call it-- this big spoon full of that watery
    coffee substitute, which, naturally,
    I don't have to mention was not even--
    had no taste, was terrible.
    But we drank it because we had no other water to drink,
    really.
    Because the water from the faucet was, most of the time,
    not drinkable at all.
    How was your health at this point?
    Personally, my health was, compared with others,
    very good all the time, actually.
    Until the last day of concentration camp,
    I was always better on than other prisoners.
    And I think it's because of my physical upbringing,
    my sportsmanship, and so I think I was physically much
    better than most people were.
    Did you feel very Jewish by now?
    By now you couldn't help but feel Jewish because you knew
    the whole camp is Jewish--
    you know, Jews only.
    And by then, we knew that Hitler is
    trying to destroy the Jewish race of the world.
    He wants to get rid of us.
    Were you angry that you were Jewish
    and this was happening to you?
    Was I blaming the fact that I was Jewish?
    No, no, I don't think so-- no, never.
    I didn't even think of it, why it happened.
    It was the fact I was Jewish.
    I had to go through it.
    That was it.
    No, I didn't.
    I was not angry at the fact that I was Jewish.
    I did not try to blame my parents or somebody
    that he made me Jewish, no.
    That was a given fact.
    And during the time of concentration camps,
    you didn't really philosophize in that way at all.
    You just knew you were in the mud and that's it.
    You have to try to get out.
    Why are you in the mud?
    You didn't waste your time thinking about it.
    What did you and the other 16-year-old boys,
    at that point, talk about?
    I think we talk in the barrack-- in the children's barrack,
    you mean.
    I think we talked about things that we
    would talk in Prague about, or in Theresienstadt about.
    The same thing-- about sports, about soccer,
    about girls in our age.
    That's it, yeah.
    What else can one--
    you can only talk about things that you know, right?
    You cannot talk about something you don't know,
    you have never experienced.
    So we were 16-year-old kids.
    We knew things that a 16-year-old kid knows.
    And that's what we talked about.
    And what we knew was sports and girls.
    Did you talk about what you saw surrounding you
    in Auschwitz-Birkenau?
    Again?
    Did you talk about what you saw around you?
    Yes, naturally, we did.
    We did talk about it, because you couldn't ignore what
    you saw, even from far away.
    Specifically, we talked, surprisingly enough,
    in a joking matter, we talked about gas chambers.
    We talked about crematorium.
    We said, oh, we are going to fly through the chimney anyway,
    and things like that.
    We didn't mean it.
    We just wanted to joke about it in that time.
    And we also didn't believe it that much.
    We thought it's maybe not even true that there's
    a gas chamber there.
    Maybe the crematoriums are only because people die, obviously,
    and they have to burn them.
    But the amount--
    How did you know that they were crematoria?
    Oh, that was no secret.
    Everybody knew that.
    They were so close you could see them.
    You could see, sometimes, cars with dead people
    loaded, going towards the crematorium.
    And so you knew it's not a bakery, I mean, you know.
    Did it upset you to see so many dead people?
    We were not too happy about it, obviously.
    There was a certain point of fear in our souls.
    And a certain point of hope that we will never get close to it.
    But we knew about it, in that time already.
    Specifically, at the end of--
    specifically, after being in B2b for a longer time already,
    a couple of months or so.
    So we knew its crematorium.
    And we just hoped it's not for us.
    That's for other people, you know.
    We also knew, or heard about, that there are transports
    coming and they go straight in the gas chamber.
    And we just said, oh, that's just the Kapos are making
    fun of us, they're just teasing us,
    and they just want to scare us.
    But inside us, we knew it's true.
    And so we were just hoping we will never
    learn the facts about it.
    Were there Kapos in the family camp?
    Kapos?
    In the family camp.
    Yes, right, yeah, there was--
    Who were they?
    I remember only one by name.
    His name was Fisher.
    And he was a little hunchback man
    who, I think there was something about him.
    He was a hangman or something in some place.
    But I really don't remember that anymore too well.
    I think there's some literature about him too, somewhere.
    What was his first name?
    I wouldn't remember that.
    I know he was Kapo Fisher.
    And that's all I remember.
    But I really don't know too much about him.
    And there were other couples going through,
    which names we didn't know.
    They usually were Polish guys or German prisoners
    who had some business to come into the camp
    and out and in and--
    So you stayed in within the family camp limits?
    Pardon me?
    You stayed within the family camp, within B2b.
    Right.
    We never left that camp, that B2b camp.
    Never left it, no.
    Until the end, then.
    Until the end?
    Yeah.
    What was your contact with girls your age?
    Well, there were girls of my age in the children's barrack,
    naturally.
    And--
    Did you notice a difference in the way
    the young women, the young--
    the girls reacted to this situation than the boys?
    I don't think I noticed any difference.
    I don't even think there was a difference, really.
    We were all in one boat.
    We were all in one same situation,
    trying to do the same thing just to survive.
    I believe that's what the girl's feelings were, at least.
    Detail I wouldn't really know because I'm not a girl.
    And they would not tell us in that time, you know,
    what their feelings are, really.
    But I think it was just the same difference between boy and girl
    as it would be in normal life.
    Physically, I imagine, they must have probably have problems,
    but we did not.
    I wouldn't know the difference between girls--
    Did you feel very old then?
    Did you feel older than 16?
    I did not feel old.
    I felt experienced.
    And so did five-, six-year-old children.
    I am sure [? they's ?] mind worked in a different way
    than the mind of a regular child outside in civil life.
    Because even those five-, six-, seven-year-old knew
    there's a crematorium nearby.
    And they also heard about the gas chambers.
    And they tried to be adult about it.
    How would I say?
    They tried to be heroic about it.
    They tried to say, that concerns me as well as my father
    over there.
    So we were more experienced.
    We were not older, no.
    Did you have any social opportunity
    to be with a young woman?
    Not in-- no, not in B2b, no.
    And I didn't even care for that, what it is you have in mind,
    I think.
    No, we didn't really care for physical contact with women.
    Or even just-- what about just talking to a young girl
    by yourself?
    Was that something that you had any desire to do?
    You see, like in Theresienstadt, each boy
    had to have a girlfriend, like in civil life.
    In Auschwitz, I think that was not the case, no.
    That was not the case.
    We didn't think in that terms in Auschwitz.
    Obviously, the adults were helping the children
    in the children's barracks.
    No, the old.
    I meant the teachers.
    Only those who were teachers there, yeah.
    The teachers.
    Did you notice how adults--
    if the adults were helping each other?
    That is a very difficult question.
    But to be very honest, and not to try
    to make it better than it was.
    I think, in a concentration camp everybody was for himself,
    trying to do the best for himself he can,
    not caring for the other person, no.
    I'm sure of that.
    Although it is said that some camps had
    groups that helped each other.
    I never found any of such groups,
    and never found any people that I would--
    that, systematically, would help each other.
    So, naturally, there were cases.
    One person helped another person in some way.
    But it would be organized or systematic or something, no.
    I believe-- and that was actually the credo of everybody
    in a concentration camp--
    you got to do the best for yourself.
    You are for yourself.
    Nobody will help you.
    And if you don't help yourself, you die.
    And you can't just try to care for somebody else for the price
    of not caring for yourselves.
    First of all, you have to care for yourselves, yeah.
    Was there any talk of resistance?
    Not in Auschwitz, no.
    Well, there was talk, yes, but not organized, again.
    Like, when we come further down to the way
    when I left Auschwitz, I will tell you
    about a certain quasi-organized way we planned.
    But no, I don't think there was an organized situation
    anywhere in Auschwitz.
    Now you said Fredy Hirsch's group
    came three months before yours.
    So what happened three months after you arrived in Auschwitz?
    OK, three months after we were together in B2b,
    there were told that the first transport--
    the first half of B2b, family camp--
    is going to go to another camp in Heydebreck.
    I don't even know if Heydebreck exists.
    I don't think it does.
    Heydebreck was supposed to be the place
    they would be moved to-- that first transport-- for work.
    But we soon enough learned that they separated them
    from our camp.
    They put them in the A camp, where there's only
    that one row of barracks.
    And soon we knew what's going to happen.
    And that happened.
    One day-- one night--
    they loaded them on trucks and they disappeared.
    And we learned that they were gassed,
    the whole transport was gassed--
    or half of our camp--
    children, adults, everything.
    Half were gassed.
    And Fredy too, that's another story of Fredy.
    He was-- he committed suicide.
    He never got to the gas chamber.
    He had a friend there who wanted to help him.
    I don't want to go into details again.
    That's a part of my writings.
    And he refused to be helped, to be taken out of the transport,
    because, he said, if I go, my children have to go to,
    which was impossible, the children couldn't go.
    So he decided he is not going to take the offer
    to go out of the transport.
    And he, in some way, somebody helped him, gave him veronal.
    That's just a poison, you know.
    And he took that and died.
    We know that for sure.
    You are 16 years old and you hear this news
    about him and the other people.
    What-- how did you respond?
    We were horrified, obviously.
    And even the 16-year-old knew already
    what's going on, naturally.
    But again, we were not 100% sure that they
    went to a gas chamber.
    And, actually, it was our own doing that we were not sure.
    We just didn't want to be sure.
    Although tens of people came into the camp, out and in,
    those different commanders, and so--
    the Kapos.
    And they told us, the adults.
    Later, I learned details about that.
    We were told-- later we learned, not told--
    we learned later that this group of people, when they took them
    to the gas chamber, were singing the Czech national anthem.
    And the Hatikva.
    And they were killed.
    That's it.
    And we learned that later, naturally.
    But during the time when we were there,
    we didn't know anything on that.
    Although they were telling us details,
    we just didn't want to even hear them.
    Because it would have, obviously-- not
    would have, it did-- affect our own morality,
    our own feelings, our own philosophy, everything.
    We didn't want to get into a worse mental state
    than we were already anyway.
    So, therefore, we choose not to believe it.
    At least, the kids and the people as I was, you know.
    And then later, three months after that, those next three
    months were not very interesting.
    Very interesting, nothing that--
    Did the children's barracks continue without him?
    The children's barrack continued under the leadership of--
    his name was, I think, Hans [? Brommer. ?]
    He still lives, also, in Israel, in kibbutz with my brother.
    And then another one, [? Cep ?] something.
    I forgot now the name.
    And they kind of kept the children's barrack
    as long as it was possible to keep it.
    And you kept doing the same thing in the next three months.
    Yes, I kept doing the same thing.
    And then after three months, it was our time
    to leave, our transport.
    Was there a Passover Seder in--
    No, nothing like that.
    Nothing like that in Auschwitz.
    In the children's--
    No, not that I would know.
    Or in the family camp?
    Not that I would remember or know of, no.
    Maybe I didn't pay attention to it.
    But no, I wouldn't know about it.
    Maybe there was something, some little group somewhere.
    But I wouldn't know that.
    I wouldn't also join that.
    So after those three months, there
    started to be rumors that we are going to leave.
    And so that was a slight panic.
    And actually because we knew it's six months, it's our time.
    But in the same time, we also knew, even before,
    that Hitler is slowly losing the grip on the war.
    And that he will need people working in the factories
    so he can send the German from the factories to the front,
    as soldiers.
    And that was something that was going,
    the rumor, very seriously around.
    And also, I think we heard about some group of people
    leaving Auschwitz.
    And so, although we didn't see them, but we heard about it.
    We thought it's a possibility that they really
    want to send us out again.
    We wanted to believe that.
    So what happened was, one day they
    said we're going to make transports out of Auschwitz.
    First, a men's adult transport, men who are capable of working.
    Which sounded interesting because they really
    choose only men like of a working age, between 18 and 40,
    50.
    The younger stayed and older stayed.
    So we said, that would be really tricky
    if they send those people to the gas chamber
    and leave the old and sick and the kids here.
    Although everything was possible, you know.
    They knew all kinds of tricks.
    Also, at that time-- so they built
    a transport of man, which, my brother was in that transport.
    And we saw them going to the next camp
    there across the railroad.
    And we saw them because the railroad ramp was by our camp--
    like, by any camp, actually.
    And we saw them embarking the train.
    So we said, that's fine.
    I mean, I don't think they ever took anybody
    by train to the gas chamber.
    So it was impossible really.
    And the transport left.
    My brother left.
    Next day, they built a women's transport--
    also, again, working-age women.
    My mother left.
    And we saw them across the railroad at the woman's camp.
    And my mother waved at me.
    And we knew she's fine and she's there.
    And we saw them already in striped suits.
    They changed them suits.
    And we also saw them embarking the train and leaving.
    So in the camp was children, old people, sick people.
    Me too.
    So then the next day they came and said there
    is going to be a selection.
    They need a small group of a hundred or so people
    to take to a working camp.
    And they're going to select capable people from that group.
    So we all played adult and strong.
    We had to undress and show our muscles, you know.
    They really selected-- left, right, left, right.
    So I was lucky enough.
    They picked me.
    And they picked me together with, I
    think it was about 60 kids around our age,
    and a couple adults.
    And they put us on a truck, on a canvas-covered truck.
    And I know when they loaded us into the truck--
    and now I'm back to that, what I wanted
    to tell you, the story of organized resistance.
    And we, kind of-- between us, while the Germans were not
    listening, we said, if that truck
    goes to the left, that means we go to gas chamber.
    Because the gate to out of Auschwitz is on the right.
    So if we go to the left, we're going to jump the guard
    and do what we can to kill as many as we can.
    And if it's one or two managed to run away through the gates
    or through the wires, fine.
    If not, we rather die being shot than go to the gas chamber.
    And we were sure we'd do that.
    Unfortunately, what happened, the Germans--
    the guard in the truck, who was sitting
    on the end of the truck with his gun--
    pulled the canvas down, so we couldn't know where we going.
    And there were puddles in the road there--
    what you call it-- holes in the road.
    And the truck was trying to go around those holes,
    because he would be in danger to break a wheel or so.
    It was so bad, that road there.
    And so we lost directions.
    We didn't know were we going right, were we going left.
    We have no idea where we are, where we going.
    And unfortunately, one kid lost his nerves
    and jumped out and got shot.
    And in that moment, when we saw the kid is dead
    and shot because he was full of bullets, in that moment,
    we saw we are passing the gate out of Auschwitz.
    So we were out.
    And we went and came to Blechammer.
    This is tape 3, side B. And you had just
    related the story about leaving Auschwitz and on the truck.
    What was it like to leave Auschwitz,
    once you realized you were going through the gate?
    It was a sad and a tragic moment and, for us,
    a happy moment too.
    If there are such things like happy moments
    in concentration camp in that time.
    But we really saw, thanks to that poor guy who got shot,
    the guard put the canvas up again-- the rear canvas--
    and we could see that we are passing the main gate
    of Auschwitz, outside.
    And they took us on that one truck
    all the way up to the camp of Blechammer, which is not
    very far away from Auschwitz.
    I would guess maybe 80 miles or so.
    And there we stayed in Blechammer.
    That was a working camp, and only a men's camp.
    Although there was a woman's camp too,
    but in a different section.
    In that section where I was, were just men.
    And that was--
    At this point, when you were leaving Auschwitz,
    you did not know where your mother was going.
    No, we had no idea where my mother or my brother went.
    We also had no idea where we were going.
    We just knew that Auschwitz is getting further and further
    from our view.
    And that was the happy note of the whole song.
    And so we-- as I said, that was a work camp.
    We marched every morning, the whole camp,
    to a working place of the name Oberschlesische Hydriewerke,
    which was a giant planned factory producing
    artificial fuel for the war machines, naturally.
    And that factory was bombed very frequently, almost every day.
    And some of my friends died there because of the bombing.
    And some of the friends I made from some
    of the people of the camp died there.
    You had been in Auschwitz for six months then.
    Yes, right.
    So this is now summer of '44?
    This is now June or July of '44, right.
    And so we worked in that factory, actually worked.
    Our group, the group I was in, was digging ditches for pipe.
    So for-- what you call it--
    just for pipings.
    All kind of different pipings, you know, digits.
    And so that's what we did there.
    And the food there was just slightly better than Auschwitz,
    again.
    Generally, we thought in the beginning
    that it's better than Auschwitz.
    We had-- the lodging were better.
    The barracks were smaller.
    They had wooden floors.
    The beds were only in two levels.
    And very clean, very nice.
    The barracks had windows, which all in Auschwitz did not exist.
    There was a washroom there with water flowing, clean water.
    So we felt like we really have a better place now.
    But we worked.
    And very hard, naturally.
    And then we learned very soon that every Sunday when
    there was a off day-- because some Sundays they let us work,
    too.
    But some Sundays was off day.
    And every Sunday of such, there were hangings.
    They had selected five people.
    There was a gallow there, in the middle of that counting place
    and marshalling place.
    And every Sunday, they found five people to hang.
    And that's what they did.
    And there was a hangman there.
    I call him Pierre in my writing.
    He was a Frenchman.
    He was in the French resistance.
    And he was caught--
    not Jewish.
    He was in the French resistance.
    He was caught with the French partisans in some mountain
    area.
    And he was a medical doctor, a physician.
    The story was, long before we came there, actually,
    that they were looking for a hangman.
    I don't know what happened to the old hangman.
    But they were looking for the hangman.
    And they tried out several hangmen.
    And they did such a lousy job that even the German
    SS couldn't watch that, how bad it was.
    So finally, they found this guy.
    And they said, you are a doctor.
    If you can heal people, you can kill them too.
    So that's what happened.
    He became a hangman.
    And there was a--
    what do you call, where the sick people were-- the--
    Infirmary.
    Infirmary, right.
    Infirmary where a Czech doctor was in charge.
    His name was Hirsch.
    Was he Jewish?
    I don't think he was Jewish.
    I'm actually not sure about that.
    Although the Jewish-- the name would indicate that he was.
    But in that camp it was difficult to recognize
    because we all had the same clothes.
    And we had no the insignias on the chest anymore.
    And everybody came from somewhere else.
    You were wearing a uniform by this time, not your--
    Pardon?
    You were wearing a uniform?
    Yes, right, the striped uniform.
    And we really didn't know where who was from,
    and so except those few guys who came with me.
    And it was a camp collected from all kinds
    of different other camps, you know--
    Jews and non-Jews.
    How many young men came with you from--
    I think the truck load was about close
    to 60, something between 50 and 60.
    And so they were hanging people there.
    And--
    How did they decide who was to be hanged?
    They found illegal stuff on them-- so-called illegal.
    Like, for example, I remember one boy of our group
    who was not hanged.
    He was beaten on a bench with a stick.
    And he was selected because he--
    when we came back from work and his--
    we had wooden-soled shoes with canvas top.
    And there were strings in there.
    You know, the--
    Laces?
    Laces.
    But the laces usually got broke very quickly.
    There was not good material, And we didn't get a new one.
    So we used whatever we could find.
    And this boy found a isolated thin red wire in the factory
    on the ground somewhere, a piece of it, you know.
    He didn't steal it in any way.
    He just found it on the ground.
    And he put it in said laces.
    And he came back and they were so red and shiny.
    So they caught him.
    And he got 30 hits with a stick, which was very little--
    very, very little.
    People got 50, 100 sticks hits, and lived through it.
    Unfortunately, something happened with this boy's heart,
    I think.
    And he died on the table there.
    And then there was--
    the time came when the Russians were pushing the front near,
    you know.
    Were you ever beaten in there?
    Not systematically, no.
    I got hit here and there.
    A punch in the nose, a punch with a stick.
    Why?
    Oh, for no reasons at all.
    Just for skipping one step by marching somewhere,
    or something like that.
    And we also had one SS man in that camp was a specialist.
    They punished us too with exercise.
    We came back from work and he--
    a group he didn't like for some reason.
    And, unfortunately, I was in that group.
    And he made us exercise for about five hours at night.
    All the way through the night, jumping up and down.
    And all those gymnastic things in the mud.
    How did you keep going during that time?
    Keep going?
    Like everybody else, you had to keep going.
    That's all.
    I mean, there is no special philosophy, how to stay alive
    or how to survive.
    You just did the best at the moment
    that you thought would be for you to behave like.
    And that was it.
    There was no plan.
    There was no system.
    It was just to try to survive that particular minute,
    that particular day.
    And that's what I did.
    And what we all did, I think.
    Were you thinking of your mother or your brother
    while you were there?
    Oh sure, naturally, you know.
    Especially in my age, surely I was
    thinking of my father and my family and everybody.
    What happened to them, where they are?
    So I didn't-- except a few, the ones who died in the Auschwitz
    gas chamber, I did not really know what happened with anybody
    other than them.
    Were you forced to watch the hangings?
    Yes, right.
    That was on the marshalling yard every Sunday.
    The whole camp had to come stand there like for the counting.
    And they brought those guys.
    They usually already separated them
    in some way in a special jail in the camp.
    And they brought them already shackled,
    the chains and everything.
    And they put them up there on the bench,
    and nooses, and just hung them.
    He read the-- what do you call it--
    the decision of the court--
    which was, there was no court--
    for the German Reich and for behaving in a manner
    that is not legal in the German Reich.
    And that's it.
    And so they hung them.
    And that French guy, that doctor who was the hangman,
    he hung them.
    And he also had to--
    there was a little crematorium there.
    Very small, probably the size of this room.
    And I was in Blechammer three years ago with my wife,
    just looking for the camp.
    First of all, it was very difficult to find the camp.
    And as I was driving to Europe--
    I had a car rented and drove.
    We went to all those camps.
    And I went to Auschwitz.
    And from Auschwitz, I went to Blechammer.
    And it was the nearest one.
    That was my doloroso trip.
    We went to Auschwitz, to Blechammer, to Weimar,
    to Buchenwald--
    except Theresienstadt.
    Theresienstadt-- I went then, when I went to Prague,
    I went to Theresienstadt.
    So I saw all those camps.
    Anyway, we were driving and it was very late.
    And I was asking people in Poland
    how to get to that Blechammer camp.
    Nobody even knew what Blechammer is.
    And so finally, I found the name of the factory.
    It's not obviously [INAUDIBLE] is Blachownia.
    So finally, they directed us towards that area.
    And in one moment it was like a fairy tale.
    My wife-- it was getting dark and we
    were on the road, not very good road,
    in the middle of the forest.
    And then, far away, I saw chimneys of a factory.
    And I said-- by the formation of those chimneys,
    I said-- that's the factory.
    I worked in.
    And that was it.
    But the camp we still couldn't find.
    And then I stopped.
    It was almost getting dusk.
    And we were stopped in the middle,
    not knowing where to go.
    And suddenly-- and it's, until today,
    absolutely unbelievable--
    suddenly, in front of our car, a man on a bicycle stood.
    I don't know how he got there.
    If he passed us by while we were standing or what.
    I don't know.
    And I said-- partially Polish, partially Czech--
    if he knows where the camp is or was where the people worked
    in the Blachownia.
    And I said, Blechammer.
    And he said, yeah, it's right here.
    And I turned around, and on a tree,
    of one of the trees of that forest where we're standing at,
    was a little rusty metal plate which said on the top,
    something used to be camp buh-buh-buh nothing.
    You couldn't read it anymore.
    It was so rusty, so worn out.
    And he said, it's right here.
    I said, yeah, but it's just a sign.
    And he said just go through the woods there.
    There's a little pathway.
    You go there and you come a couple of hundred yards,
    you come to that camp.
    It was dark.
    I was scared to walk there.
    I turned-- the car was small.
    I turned the car around.
    And while I was turning the car around,
    I wanted to say thank you.
    And the guy was gone.
    Gone.
    If I would be there myself, I wouldn't believe it.
    I thought I made it up.
    My wife was there.
    She said, where's this guy.
    I said, I don't know.
    He was standing here.
    I was like, I don't know, if I would
    be a very religious man, which I'm not,
    I would say somebody from above directed me.
    Why, I don't know-- why he wanted
    to see that I see it again.
    I drove the car around and I went
    into that little wooden part.
    That part was just about wide enough
    so I wouldn't scratch the car.
    No road, really, just broken grass
    and broken branches and things.
    And after about 100 meters, I came to our gate--
    to a ruin of a gate.
    Metal and steel and cement, all just fallen about.
    If I wouldn't know, I would never
    recognize what it used to be.
    But immediately, when I saw those ruins I said, that's it.
    That's the entrance to the camp.
    And that was it.
    And we went in.
    The fence was not there anymore.
    But the stands were there for the wire.
    So we went in there, drove in.
    There was a nice place there with a little monument on it.
    So, actually, it was kept by somebody,
    but nobody knew how to get there.
    And why I'm telling you this story--
    that little crematorium of the size of this room
    was still there.
    And it's still there and I have photographs and films of it.
    It's still there.
    That was also not just a crematorium.
    It was meant for people who die in the camp.
    Not too big, you know, just a few dead
    at a time he could burn there.
    That henchmen-- that hangman, the doctor--
    had also a little room there where he lived, where he slept.
    And he also burned and served the crematorium.
    And he also-- there was, in the fence
    there was a little gate with a reflector with a tower
    with a watchman on the top.
    And that doctor, that hangman, was allowed,
    every time he burned people, to drag it out with a two-wheeler
    through that little gate.
    That watchman would open the gate.
    And he would go out the camp through this gate.
    And there was a hole digged out, a big hole there,
    where he always put the ashes of those dead people
    into that hole, and went back again.
    The watchman closed the gate again.
    And that's a part of my leading story
    of the book that has lots of other things
    in there, like the boy whom I am talking about
    escaped with the help of this hangman and the doctor
    because he was supposed to be hanged.
    But that's complicated.
    I don't want to go into that.
    So anyway, those two guys hope this boy to escape.
    He escaped and the German didn't notice it,
    because he was supposed to be hung and dead and burned.
    And so he escaped.
    And, in the woods, he was found by a girl
    who was the daughter of the forest man, or the forester.
    And he had a shack there in the woods.
    And they spent time in those woods.
    They were together.
    And she took care of him.
    And she also was taking care of a little farm, of a pig farm.
    Which was delivering the pigs to the German army, the food,
    you know.
    And some food, some pigs got lost there
    because those two kids used that within a couple of months.
    And then they decided to run away
    because they were after her.
    And so they decided to run away.
    And they jumped a train that was carrying the fuel out
    of the factory, to the front.
    And they wanted to jump on the train.
    And they did that.
    But, unfortunately, as I said, there
    were air raids on the factory and also the surrounding area.
    And while they were jumping the train, there was an air raid.
    And the air raid hit the train.
    And the boy was capable and still lucky enough
    to jump off the train.
    But the girl exploded with the fuel tank.
    But the boy was found and sent to the--
    because he was unconscious, naturally.
    And he was sent to the camp because even German people went
    to the camp to see the doctor there,
    because the famous Czech doctor, he was so famous,
    known to be very good in taking care of people
    that even civilians--
    Germans and SS men-- came to him to take care of their illnesses
    and problems.
    So there were also dead--
    or injured, actually-- people, railroad
    guards from that train.
    And they loaded all of the unconscious people on a train
    and quickly took them to the doctor in the camp there,
    not knowing that this one guy is one
    of those who was in the camp before and escaped.
    And he was found out after a while, naturally,
    and was supposed to be hung again.
    But in that time, the Russians were pushing the front
    very quickly.
    And before they managed to hang this boy,
    they liquidated the camp.
    And that was when the camp went on the so-called march
    of death-- death march.
    The March took about 10 days or 11 days,
    and wound up in Gross-Rosen.
    Well, let's talk about that march.
    OK.
    OK.
    The march, I also describe it, is, just quickly, 4,000 people
    left the camp of Blechammer.
    Out of which, about 60 or 70 arrived in Buchenwald,
    for different reasons.
    First of all, they started to-- they had not enough
    guards to watch the march.
    And the guards had to march too.
    So they started to shoot the people for all kind of reasons.
    You know, you stop, bind your laces or need to go bathroom,
    they shot you right away.
    You step one step behind, they shot you.
    Or sometimes they just randomly shot.
    So they let people lay down and they kick them
    into the side of the road.
    And after a while, they were not too many anymore.
    And there were so few prisoners that the guards
    could divide in two.
    And one half of the guards would march with the prisoners,
    and one half would be taken by truck, by car,
    to the next station.
    And then they would switch again.
    So they made it comfortable for them.
    We're talking January, '45, now?
    February-- end of January, February, right.
    February, '45.
    And so then they march in this way, no food, only once.
    They got a ship--
    When you say "they," you're talking about yourself.
    Yes, right.
    I mean the-- yeah, the group, I mean-- the prisoners.
    Me too, right.
    We marched and we got food only once, as I remember.
    And that was a situation where, close to Prudnik,
    in Poland and Silesia, where they brought so little food
    that there was not enough for everybody.
    And so there was a big group of people who didn't get any food.
    There was not enough.
    So they told them, you stay here.
    It was winter, freezing, snow like this.
    In the thin clothes, we slept in the snow.
    The only thing that we could drink
    was the snow, the melted snow in the hands, or so.
    And no food.
    So finally they brought that bread.
    It was not enough for everybody.
    So they said about I don't know how many hundreds of people,
    stay here.
    We bring you a new load of bread and we march after them.
    Only when we marched away, we heard the shooting very soon
    afterwards.
    And then we learned that they shot all of them.
    And it's-- I think it's historically in the--
    there's a book about Blechammer somewhere.
    And it describes that situation.
    I think I have an excerpt here somewhere.
    So where it says about a Prudnik massacre, too.
    Did you stay with any friends on the march?
    Did you stay with the same people?
    Yeah, how did you know?
    I didn't.
    I have one very good Polish guy who was, in Blechammer,
    a provision distributor.
    In fact, he worked in a kitchen.
    And he distributed the food over the camp--
    the bread and the coffee, the soups and everything.
    He came to the barracks with the barrel and the bread.
    And he marched with me.
    Was he your age or older?
    No, he was much older.
    He was probably in his 30s, maybe 40s.
    And he kind of played father to me, protected me all the trip.
    I wanted to do all kind of things
    and he kicked me and punched me and dragged me.
    What did you want to do?
    I wanted to rest.
    I wanted to go into the woods.
    I wanted to wait for the other bread
    because I didn't have enough.
    So he had some bread in his apron
    that he took from the kitchen with him.
    And he shared it with me.
    He said, no way, you cannot stay there.
    And he dragged me away and he punched me, he kicked me.
    And then we learned that those people got killed there.
    What was his name?
    [? Swintig ?] was the name that we called him.
    But I don't know his last name, really.
    But [? Swintig, ?] we called him.
    And so this guy--
    we marched all the way up to Gross-Rosen.
    Do you have to stop?
    OK.
    Oh.
    And in Gross-Rosen.
    I think we were probably still a little bit around a thousand
    people arriving in Gross-Rosen.
    And then a couple days--
    About how long did the march take?
    Do you remember?
    I think 11, 12 days, or so.
    I really wouldn't know, exactly.
    But--
    And the only time you stopped was at night to sleep?
    To sleep.
    Once they let us sleep in a barn.
    Or twice they let us sleep in some barn, in some farmer's
    barn with straw and so.
    And once we got the bread food.
    Once they brought us some--
    I think it was, like, hot soup.
    But it really wasn't soup.
    And that was all.
    During the whole 10 or 11 days, that was the whole food we got.
    The only thing that saved us, actually, was the snow
    that we could drink.
    And so in Gross-Rosen they fed us there as normally
    as every other prisoner, actually.
    And three days later, we got some provisions.
    And they took us to the railroad station.
    So you stayed in Gross-Rosen for three days.
    Three days, yeah.
    What else did you do there while you--
    Nothing.
    In fact, they locked us in one barrack
    because they didn't want us to interfere
    with the regular prisoners, because they
    didn't want to count us.
    Because they didn't even know how many we are supposed to be.
    So they actually locked us in the barrack.
    And then when we were ready to leave, they let us out.
    But they gave us the regular prisoner food and so.
    Because if somebody would interfere
    with the count of the regular occupants,
    it would be a mess for the SS.
    So they did that.
    And so we get to the train.
    And the train from Gross-Rosen went and in day or so, too,
    and we came at night.
    I think it was the 13th or 14th of February.
    And the train stopped in Dresden, out of all the places.
    And I think you know what happened.
    The whole-- the night of they stopped the train
    there, Dresden was leveled with the ground of the Earth,
    was erased from the maps.
    And that was the night.
    And we were sitting on trains on an open wagon.
    And out of those thousand or whatever we were,
    there was only about 100 left.
    That was it.
    The last was died from the bombardment.
    Oh, the prisoners died from the bombing.
    Right, yep.
    And then after the bombing, there were--
    What did the bombing look like to you?
    Oh, incredible.
    I mean when we came there, it was a nice, nice railroad
    station and railroad yard, with several lines of rails--
    guards and rails-- train rails, I mean.
    And when the bombardment-- in the morning, when we looked,
    there was no rails.
    There was just piles of metal, piles of soil.
    And here parts of wagons, of railroad trains, cars.
    The only car that was not touched
    was the car I was on it.
    But even there, people were hit by falling debris
    and died from that.
    And I was-- when I woke up in the morning,
    I know I wasn't sleeping, I was just unconscious.
    Because a railroad wooden--
    what you call it--
    Trestle?
    --trestle hit me.
    And I woke up in the morning and the trestle
    was leaning on the sidewall of that wagon.
    And the other end of the trestle--
    you know, they're heavy, big like this--
    was implanted and it's in [? Swintig ?] body.
    And he was dead.
    And I was just underneath, saved by his body, by the trestle.
    And so they took us on a bus, because there was no train.
    There was nothing.
    And they somehow guarded us.
    I don't even know how.
    They tried to gather all German--
    no German-- prisoners, no prisoners
    from the railroad track area in front
    of the what used to be the railroad station,
    was just ruins, just pile of bricks left.
    And there was like a plaza, a little bit left over.
    And they all shifted us over there--
    civilians, prisoners, everything.
    And then they picked us by our clothes, naturally.
    Prisoners were not too many.
    And they put us on an old, halfway broken-down bus.
    And the guy who was [INAUDIBLE] responsible for the transport
    took us, with a bus, to Buchenwald.
    This is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    interview with Rene Tressler, conducted
    by Gail Schwartz on February 20th, 1997
    in Silver Spring, Maryland.
    This is tape number four, side A.
    And you had been talking about surviving
    the bombing in Dresden and then continuing on.
    Yeah, they put us under the old, broken bus
    and took us through complicated, partially interesting
    circumstances.
    But I don't think we'll go through that.
    They took us to Buchenwald.
    And in Buchenwald, they put us into--
    How many people are we talking about now?
    We're talking not even 100, I believe.
    I'm really not-- I didn't make any statistic,
    didn't count them.
    It was a big bus, but it was loaded.
    But I don't think it was more than 100 people there.
    And your physical condition at this point?
    My personal physical condition in that time
    was naturally much worse than it was to begin with.
    But I was still pretty good condition, pretty good shape.
    I haven't lost as much weight as other people did.
    I was not yet really bone and skin.
    That I was only two months later,
    that suddenly I broke down then.
    But until then I was still capable
    of marching, capable of moving well.
    And that was it.
    So in Buchenwald, they put us into a Jewish old wooden camp.
    Buchenwald was brick and cement barracks.
    And in the middle of the Buchenwald camp
    was another camp, just fenced off with barbed wire, not
    electric barbed wire.
    And in that camp, that was the so-called old camp.
    There were wooden barracks and there was only Jews there.
    And that's where I went.
    That's where I was for the next two months or so.
    You're still wearing your striped uniform from before?
    Still wearing my striped uniform, right, yeah.
    And didn't work there at all.
    They didn't use us for any work.
    Although outside people in a regular camp,
    I think they did have work Kommandos.
    And not us.
    And then there was a situation before the end.
    They were trying to liquidate the camp.
    And they were trying to put all the Jews on the truck
    and somehow carry them somewhere away.
    They did manage a few to take away
    and shuttered them, as I learned later somewhere outside.
    But most of that time, it was such a disorganized time
    already.
    And some of the people helped us a little bit
    not to enter those trucks, not to go into those transports
    that we were supposed to go.
    So I went on a truck about five times
    and five times just jumped out of it again.
    And they were very--
    What did they say to you to get you to jump off?
    The Germans were so few in the time, the guards.
    And they were so disorganized, so panicky,
    because they knew that's the end, right?
    And they just yelled at me and I ran away.
    That was it.
    And they got at me again.
    And about five times I jumped out of that truck.
    On the end, I didn't go anywhere.
    I stayed.
    Who yelled at you to get off the truck?
    German guards, SS men, you know.
    But they didn't want to run after me
    because they needed to watch those who they are still
    on the trunk--
    on the truck.
    Otherwise everybody would jump away.
    So that was it.
    I did not go.
    And I learned later that most of those people got killed.
    Because they just wanted to liquidate
    the camp, which they didn't manage.
    And later, the day before we were liberated,
    I remember an interesting story.
    There was a little airplane flying over the camp, like--
    what you call those-- researching
    the area for the military.
    And we put a little SOS sign on the ground
    of that marshaling yard from rocks and white clouds
    or whatever we could find.
    And we remember that the plane was
    kind of waving his wings that he understands,
    that he knows the situation.
    And then soon afterwards, I think the same day or maybe
    the next day, 3:00 afternoon, the American army
    came into the camp.
    Yeah, 3:16.
    I know it because the time is still
    standing on the clock of the tower of Buchenwald
    until these days.
    You know, that was--
    I assume that's what the story is.
    It was electric clock, powered in the same way
    as the electric fence was powered.
    And when the Americans came, the first thing they did
    was disconnect the power.
    Therefore, the clock stopped at 3:16.
    And that's how it is today.
    When you go to see Buchenwald, it's still stopped at 3:16.
    Did you feel liberated when you saw the Americans?
    In fact, it continues, again, here
    in this writing afterwards.
    Because I spent another month, more than a month in Buchenwald
    liberated already.
    Because Buchenwald was liberated April 11, where Prague was
    liberated May 9.
    You know.
    And we went-- before they organized the trips for us
    to go home was I came home May 19.
    But my question was-- when you saw the Americans
    for the first time.
    I will get to it.
    There was a tank that came into the gate
    and a Black soldier jumped down from that tank.
    And you know, we embrace somehow.
    And then this guy became friends with me.
    And unfortunately, when he embraced me, I fainted.
    And I fainted because I really didn't
    have any strength anymore.
    And in that moment, I really was bone and skin only and wasted.
    Used up, really.
    So they put me in a makeshift hospital the Americans made
    right away there.
    And the doctors took care of me.
    That was April 11.
    And I fainted and I woke up in a nice, white bed with doctors
    and nurses around me.
    You're 18 years old now?
    And let me get to it.
    It's hard.
    And I said-- and they said, you are fine now, you're fine now.
    And I said, what do you mean I'm fine now?
    So I fainted a little bit, so?
    I'm fine, sure I'm fine.
    They said, yeah, you fainted for five days.
    I said, what are you talking about, it's 11th of April, no?
    I said, no, it's the 16th.
    I said, thank you, that's my birthday.
    I was 18 exactly on that day.
    That's the end of it.
    And then they took care of me a little more.
    And I had befriended this man, the Black man.
    And his name was Sammy.
    And I never write about that.
    But just for you, he looked exactly like Sammy Davis.
    You remember Sammy Davis the singer?
    Not that I liked him too much, but he really--
    when I came to America, I noticed--
    I never thought of this man anymore, you know.
    But then when I saw him on TV, the first time here,
    I said, my god, that's him.
    Only it couldn't be him because it was 20 years later,
    you know, he would have been an old man.
    And so then I spent a few more days in Buchenwald
    because they were not ready to transport me.
    And then they made a bus and sent me to Prague.
    You had mentioned something before about a tree
    in Buchenwald.
    Oh, yeah, you want to hear that.
    OK, just very briefly I make that.
    OK.
    There is a song that I was singing
    as a soloist in that choir before the transports
    to the concentration camps in Prague.
    By the name-- the name of the choir was [? Jubal. ?]
    And the director of it was Professor [? Wachtel ?]..
    And I was singing that solo of the song [GERMAN]..
    You understand?
    And I sang it with a very high, almost girlish voice,
    being a kid, 13, 12 years old or so.
    And I came to Buchenwald.
    Buchenwald, as you know, is laying
    on a mount of Ettersberg, which is a suburb of Weimar,
    where Mr.
    Goethe?
    Goethe had his home.
    And Schiller, too.
    And Mr. Goethe rode a horse up to that park of Ettersberg
    and sat underneath a oak tree.
    And while he was writing Faust, which he did for 60 years--
    and I always say, if he can write 60 years Faust,
    why I cannot write this one in 70, right?
    And so he relaxed there for relaxation.
    He wrote this song, [INAUDIBLE],, because there was a briar,
    you know, and roses, briar rose, white roses, and grass,
    and green, and trees.
    And he was sitting there under that oak tree,
    and wrote these words for this song that I sang before.
    And when I came to Buchenwald, I found
    that tree there in the middle of the camp of Buchenwald
    was the only tree standing.
    They didn't dare to cut it down.
    Although it fell because of a storm later.
    And so that was the tree.
    And when you go today to Buchenwald,
    you will find the clock on the tower standing on 3:16.
    And you will find the stamp of that tree still standing there
    in the middle of the Buchenwald area, where now a museum is,
    with a sign which says this used to be the Goethe's tree.
    So you are recuperating in the American hospital
    after liberation.
    Now, as I said, after my birthday, then I was fine.
    They threw me out.
    I mean, fine.
    I could stand on my own feet at least for a while.
    Not for long, though.
    Because really, when I came home,
    even while it was more than a month, when I walked on--
    How did you get back from Buchenwald to Prague?
    They took us by bus.
    They took a bus of Czech guys, Czech people,
    and took us to Prague on May 19.
    Was there any other young man like you that went
    through all of this with you?
    Not specifically with me, but I'm sure
    there's other young men or man.
    There was nobody from home that followed along with you
    during all these years?
    Oh, yes, there were.
    There were a few even boys who were
    in that group that arrived in--
    all the way down to Buchenwald.
    Unfortunately, I don't really remember those names anymore.
    I know there was the Mr. Verber was there.
    In fact, when I was in Buchenwald three years ago,
    they gave me a list of people who came with that group.
    I meant, you know, friends from Prague that--
    that's what I meant.
    Not really, no.
    Though all those people who were really
    from Prague through Theresienstadt,
    and so I don't think anybody survived this trip, no.
    I know about one man who was in Blechhammer, or two.
    They're living in Israel.
    I can't remember their name now.
    Yeah, Walter Bressler, for example.
    His name is Walter Bressler.
    He went through this with me.
    But I think he didn't go to Buchenwald.
    He just went to Blechhammer with me.
    But all the way to Buchenwald, nobody that I would really
    know from Prague, no.
    I know there were some Czech people there.
    But nobody of those that I knew in Prague, no.
    And most of them were older than I was, definitely.
    So you're now back, coming to Prague.
    Yeah, I came to Prague.
    And they told me to find somebody of my relatives.
    And so they said I can stay in a Y for the night
    if I don't know where to go.
    And so as long as I want to, there was a YMCA every day.
    And I really went through YMCA, slept there.
    Next day, I went, and they told me to go to a building.
    They called it already Repatriation Office.
    You know, the Czechs have quickly names for offices,
    they're like that.
    And I went to that building, Repatriation Office,
    and it was a building which had a courtyard with a wall.
    And the building was kind of an old building,
    was halfway destroyed.
    But not because of the war, I think because of the age.
    And that wall was big, like a football field.
    And under the wall were little tickets
    written of people looking for other people.
    So they were looking for Mr. So-and-so, who
    was supposed to be in Theresienstadt
    or supposed to be in Buchenwald, and so.
    And his father, his mother, or his daughter
    is looking for him, please come, too.
    Because there was no telephone then.
    And when I saw that wall, I said, I mean, it's crazy.
    How can anybody find anyone in here?
    It's impossible.
    My father had a peculiar handwriting.
    He never used anything else but green ink.
    I have a hand script here-- he was a musician
    and he wrote music, you know.
    I have it here, this one [INAUDIBLE]..
    It's also written in green ink, naturally.
    He would never use anything else.
    And I was looking there, and literally not knowing
    what to do.
    And suddenly I look in the corner.
    There was something green there.
    I said, my god.
    So I came to it and it says Harry Tressler,
    please come to address.
    Harry, because Harry was the elder one.
    My father didn't even hope in one [? iota ?]
    that I would survive.
    He heard that some kind of a Tressler arrived in Prague.
    And he thought, definitely, it's my brother.
    Because then they knew already what's happening.
    And he knew children would not be able to survive that.
    So I saw that.
    And I went to the address.
    That's where my father was.
    And that's why I lived my next 20
    years, in that same apartment.
    It was a nice apartment in the middle of Prague.
    And my father, with his wife still, they
    moved back to Komotau, to the place
    where their parents used to be.
    And they had some possessions there,
    some farms and some buildings.
    Do you have to close?
    And so they moved there and left the apartment to me.
    So then my mother came.
    My mother came from Bergen-Belsen.
    And she came about three months after me,
    because she worked in the American army kitchen
    as a manager.
    And they liked her so much, they didn't want to let her go.
    I even have here thank you notes from the army,
    from the American Army, to my mother for her work there.
    So then she finally came home.
    But my brother, never.
    And we didn't know about him until in fall, late fall, they
    sent us to some recreation to out of Prague,
    to some mountain resort place, you know, to get better,
    get well.
    Yeah, before we went, my mother ordered a little plaque.
    We have a family grave in the cemetery in Prague, you know,
    where my mother is also buried now.
    And there, she made a plaque to put
    on the grave for my brother's name
    that he died in the Holocaust in a concentration camp.
    So we went to this resort place.
    And a friend of mine who played with me
    on this soccer team over there.
    He's right there, the last one, the little guy,
    who also survived.
    Who now lives in Norfolk.
    Who is the main reason why I am in America.
    He came to Prague during the communist times
    to visit as an American citizen and arranged for me to escape.
    Helped me, at least, to escape from Prague.
    And that's why I'm here.
    So he, also, but he is not a very wise person.
    He's not something that you would
    say his wisdom is overflowing the barrel.
    And so he called to this resort and asked for my mother
    and said, I am here in a sanatorium.
    And your son is here.
    Harry is here.
    He's sick, but he's fine.
    He's here, too.
    Mom said, let's go.
    Go home.
    So I, don't be crazy, it's nonsense.
    You know John.
    He doesn't know what he's talking about.
    Who knows whom he met there, some Harry or something.
    And you would think it's my brother.
    No.
    Don't go.
    Just stay here.
    He's in a hospital.
    Anyway, if it's him, don't go.
    No, my mother took the train and went to Prague.
    In the evening, she called the resort, called me
    through the phone, said yeah, your brother's here.
    He had tuberculosis, he was very sick.
    But he was fine.
    Then the journalistic organization in Prague
    sent him to Switzerland for healing, you know.
    And he still was working after the war
    in the Palestinian office in his journalistic organization.
    And then in '48, he went to Israel, married already
    with a kid.
    And straight into Kibbutz HaHotrim, where
    he lives until these days.
    He is sick, though, but he's still alive.
    And your health?
    You recuperated?
    I recuperated pretty well, pretty easily.
    How much did you weigh by the end of the war?
    That was what I wanted to come to.
    When we came and the bus landed in Prague in Wenceslas Square,
    I wanted to go on the sidewalk.
    I had to go where a lamppost was to pull myself up
    to the sidewalk.
    I couldn't make the step up, I was so weak.
    And then when I walked, I walked,
    you know, just step by step, just shoveling my feet forward.
    But I felt not too bad.
    And I recuperated very quickly.
    Very quickly.
    And I became, as I said, a sportsman again,
    and a professional soccer player, everything.
    Writer.
    Took some university courses of journalistics and writings.
    You were able to go into university right away,
    even though you would missed all those years of school?
    Oh yes, right, I had to make a test of knowledge,
    of high school knowledge.
    And I went through a course, actually,
    where I learned about a couple of months
    all the stuff that I had to know.
    And that was it, yeah.
    And then the communists came.
    And they just--
    I don't know if you want to hear that.
    And I lived 20 years under communism.
    I escaped from Czechoslovakia, from communism
    in Czechoslovakia.
    And in 1965, escaped, really escaped.
    And since then I live in America.
    So I lived under fascistic Hitler regime.
    I lived under democratic Czechoslovakia
    before the Hitler regime.
    I lived through 20 years in a communist regime.
    And now I live 32 years in a capitalistic regime in America.
    Had you considered right after the war--
    but you were quite young--
    to leave Czechoslovakia?
    I was considering it, yes.
    But I couldn't manage.
    It was very difficult. In fact, I had such problems,
    like I was a writer always.
    And I was writing and publishing here and then.
    But they always came to me, the communist officials,
    and said, Mr. Tressler--
    Comrade Tressler, actually.
    They said, what is your job?
    What are you working?
    I said, I'm not working.
    I'm a writer, I write.
    I published here, published there.
    Short stories and things, not about camp.
    Love stories I wrote, then poetry I wrote.
    And one time, a few years, I made crossword puzzles.
    I mean, not solve them, I created them for papers,
    for magazines.
    And that's how I made my living.
    But they always came and they said, are you
    a member of the Writers Guild?
    I said, how can I be a member of the Writers Guild
    when I'm not in the Communist Party?
    Because you can't be a member of the Writers
    Guild if you're not a member of the Communist Party.
    And so no, no, no, you're not a writer, you have to go to work.
    And they put me to work somewhere.
    And I always worked for a couple months or half a year
    somewhere.
    Building some brick walls or working on a railroad, building
    tunnels and building bridges.
    For a while only always.
    And then I disappeared and they forgot about me.
    And then they again remembered me after a while.
    And so I was working in mines.
    For nine months, I was in a mine.
    There was a big explosion.
    I have a blue coal line here on my forehead.
    And I was supposed to be there for 12 months.
    And nine months, I went home again.
    And that was it.
    And after the war, they told-- when the communists came,
    they said, you, such a young guy,
    you went through all those things, concentration camp.
    You should join the Communist Party.
    And I said, because I was in the Holocaust,
    because I was in a concentration camp,
    because of those sufferings, I will not
    join the Communist Party.
    And that was my answer.
    Not very wise, but that's what I did.
    Any experiences of antisemitism after the war?
    Slight.
    I must admit, not too heavy ones, really.
    But the communists were not really
    very sympathetic towards Jews.
    They tried to minimize the suffering
    as much as they could.
    As well as they tried to minimize everything
    they didn't like, right?
    They were trying to tell the world that Czechoslovakia
    was liberated by the Soviet Army, which is not true.
    It was liberated all the way, the whole West part--
    the main city of the West, Pilsen, for example,
    was liberated by the American army.
    You go there today to personally see all the signs,
    thank you, American Army.
    Yeah, so, they were not sympathetic to the Jews, no.
    They were not daring to officially do
    anything against them, but they were not sympathetic, no.
    What was it like just to come back
    to Prague right after the war?
    You were so different.
    You left as a child and you came back as a young man.
    I was still a child, really.
    I was still a child.
    You know, I was--
    Even at 18.
    --not even three years, really.
    But those three years were more than three years.
    I left Prague.
    I was 15 and some half or so.
    And I came back exactly 18 and one month, right?
    So much happened in those three years.
    Which is actually a time of childhood,
    right, for normal people.
    That's my childhood.
    Now you ask me, who brought you up?
    Who brought me up?
    Concentration camp brought me up.
    And so the feeling was just be a free person.
    To have gone through that and now start my own life.
    And trying not to cry about the past.
    And that's my philosophy until these days.
    There is lots of people who went through similar things
    that I went through.
    They spent their whole life, I dare to say sometimes,
    they even waste the time of their whole life,
    by crying about the spilled beans, what happened.
    I don't make it any lighter by not crying over it.
    But I lost so much life and so much time during the Holocaust
    time that I don't want to waste and lose any more.
    That doesn't mean that I want to forget it.
    Opposite.
    I spent my life writing about it, practically, you know.
    But not to feel sorry for myself.
    That was my motto and still is.
    You said you had, obviously, lost part of your childhood.
    Yeah.
    Do you feel that you ever got some of that back?
    I don't know.
    I like to think that I'm still a child.
    I'm still young and still thinking youthfully.
    And I never lost my childhood.
    There are such people, they are kids forever.
    And I think I'm one of those.
    Yeah.
    Are there any sights, or smells, or sounds today that bring back
    some experiences that you had during the war?
    That kind of trigger what you--
    Oh, I don't think there's passing one day
    that I would not remember something out
    of the Holocaust time.
    As I said, I'm writing about it, you know,
    so I constantly think about it.
    But I would say in a not negative way,
    positive, useful way.
    And naturally, it was not a happy time.
    And what was the question?
    I was going to say, are there any particular--
    Oh, yeah.
    --sounds, sights.
    Is there anything that triggers?
    I tell you, I have no nightmares.
    I never had nightmares.
    Although I did dream once in a while about concentration camp.
    But not the way that you say, oh, that's a nightmare or so.
    And I think it's my positive mind.
    Even when I was dreaming about the camp, about Auschwitz,
    I was dreaming that that's just a dream.
    I will wake up and be at home at my bed.
    Even in my bad dreams, I try to be positive.
    And that's what my view is.
    There are certain times, certain pictures,
    certain situations that remind me of the Holocaust time.
    Yes, surely.
    This is tape four, side B. And you
    were saying there are certain pictures or some times that
    remind you of the Holocaust.
    I really don't think there are particular things that
    would remind me of it.
    Maybe if you turn your head and you look at my library here,
    you will see the artist of Theresien,
    you will see the Buchenwald report,
    you will see the 2,194 days of World War II.
    You will see several books of Holocaust literature.
    Naturally, whenever I look up, it reminds me of those times.
    Sometimes-- I am the cook here in this family,
    my wife doesn't know where the kitchen is.
    Well, sometimes when I don't do a dish
    well enough as I want to, I say that tastes
    like in concentration camp.
    And I'm trying to enlighten and joke about it.
    No, there are not particular things that
    remind me of the camp, really.
    No.
    Sometimes when I watch movies, Schindler's List, for example,
    naturally, it reminds me situations
    in which I was myself.
    Not that I would have liked Schindler's List too much.
    But yeah, some movies remind me of the situation
    that I was in myself.
    Lately, they are not that many movies anymore.
    After the war, there were so many movies
    about concentration camps.
    And so naturally, whenever I see something like this,
    it reminds me of the situation that I was in.
    But not in a kind of crying, sad way.
    Sometimes, when I talk about a certain situation--
    and it's usually mostly the lyrical, the sentimental
    situation, more like than the situation of suffering,
    that makes me cry inside.
    Or sometimes even outside.
    And that's that, yeah.
    Did you ever consider having your number removed?
    No.
    Never, never.
    No.
    Never in my life.
    I wouldn't even think of it.
    Why not?
    Why yes?
    I mean, it's a part of what I went through, right?
    It's like I want to remove what I went through.
    I don't want to remove it.
    There are certain people who--
    I don't criticize them, but they probably
    have a reason why they don't want to acknowledge
    that they are Jewish.
    Or they don't want to even acknowledge they were in camps.
    I have a friend.
    I have a friend who lives--
    I hope he still lives in America.
    He's older than I am.
    And he lives somewhere in the Midwest.
    And I hear, I understand his children do not
    know that he was Jewish, that he's Jewish,
    that he was in a camp.
    They don't know it.
    He doesn't want to talk about it.
    He doesn't want them to know.
    He's ashamed of it.
    No, that's wrong.
    He's not ashamed of it, I'm sure.
    I'm sure he does it because he is afraid
    that his children would have to go through a situation
    that he went through.
    That's probably the reason.
    But it's a certain fear.
    And I think, I believe by having this kind of fear,
    that you could succumb to such a situation again
    all your relatives or your children.
    You actually acknowledge that you didn't win that fight.
    OK.
    And I think I won that fight.
    I just don't want to acknowledge that.
    And I think I will never come to a situation
    where I would not admit--
    or not even not admit it, not be proud of what I went through.
    But I understand some people.
    As I said, I don't want to criticize them.
    They just are afraid.
    They don't want to do that.
    But I feel sorry for them.
    Because as I said, I feel they didn't win that fight.
    They kind of let the upper hand to those
    who wanted to destroy us.
    Did your feelings about being Jewish change in any way
    because of what you went through because you were Jewish?
    No.
    I am Jewish.
    Many times, we get to the discussion
    why I'm not going to the synagogue, why
    I'm not religious.
    I'm a traditional Jew, not a religious Jew.
    I know the rabbis don't want to hear that.
    And I kind of acknowledge that I am maybe wrong saying so.
    But this is my feeling.
    And I cannot say anything else if it's not true.
    This is the truth.
    I am a Jew.
    And I am a traditional Jew.
    I was born a Jew.
    And there's nothing I can do about it, even if I wanted to.
    And I don't want to.
    And I'm really proud of what I went through.
    Not that I would have wished not to do that,
    not to have gone through it.
    I wish the times would be so I would
    become the gynecologist doctor in Usti
    and never know what Hitler, Nazism, or racism,
    or Holocaust means.
    But since that didn't happen, since we
    did go through those times, to deny them
    and not to be true to them, as I said,
    you would lose your fight.
    I don't want to do that.
    You said you're married.
    Yeah.
    Is your wife a survivor?
    No.
    My wife is not Jewish.
    She's Evangelic.
    Yeah.
    And did you get married in Czechoslovakia?
    Yes.
    Yeah, we got married in 1953 at the night of Stalin's death.
    Well, is there anything else that you would
    like to add to your remarks?
    I just did, I think.
    I just did, I think.
    Yeah.
    No, not really any more.
    If you have any more questions, I'd be happy to answer them.
    Well, thank you very much for doing this interview.
    You're very welcome.
    This concludes the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    interview with Rene Tressler.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    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.
    Interviewee
    Rene Tressler
    Interviewer
    Gail Schwartz
    Date
    interview:  1997 February 20
    Geography
    creation: Silver Spring (Md.)

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Genre/Form
    Oral histories.
    Extent
    4 sound cassettes (60 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
    Tressler, Rene Edgar.

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Gail Schwartz, a volunteer for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History branch conducted this interview on February 20, 1997 in Silver Spring, MD. The interview was transferred to the Archives on February 20, 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 08:12:13
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn507587

    Additional Resources

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    Summary (English)
    Time Coded Notes (5)

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    Also in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum oral history volunteer collection

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

    Date: 1993

    Oral history interview with Marie Schwartzman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Nathan Kalman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Esthy Adler

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tana Gelfer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Maria Devinki

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jerome Stasson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Adriana Pacifici

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ernest Kolben

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henry Kolber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Greifer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anna Wollner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Kate Wacz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erwin Forley

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ernie Marx

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Doris Rauch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Elman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gerald Rosenstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ivan Becker

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Romana Koplewicz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Koplewicz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irving Schaffer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Klein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Pisik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Rosicka

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Salomon Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Suzanne Foldes

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tibor Vince

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elias Piorko

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Hildesheim

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Peter Masters

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Wolke

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ionel Ghelman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irimia Solomon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lotte Salus

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irena Kirkland

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hans Hirsch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Milton Shurr

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ludwig Jacob

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Barbara Artman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fritz Schonbach

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Charles Barber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tibor Borsos

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Robert Kertesz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Kahn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Susan Warsinger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Arnold Weiss

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sia Hertsberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Chava Frajhof

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Israel Frajhof

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Edward Novakoff

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Celia Feldschuh

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Nicole Yancey

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jaffa Munk

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frances Hirshfeld

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Moris Gluckman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Margie Rosenthal

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Emma Mogilensky

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Isaiah Henig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ida Henig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marcel Drimer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michael Silberstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joan Schwab

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erwin Deutscher

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Pick

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hedi Pope

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bella Simon Pasternak

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marion Friedman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Strassburger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jadwiga Dziekonski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Harvey

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thomas B. Gardiner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Roberta Jones

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Christine Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hugh Jenkins

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with 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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