Oral history interview with Victor Russo

Oral history interview with Sylvia Feld

Oral History

Sylvia Feld, born on May 25, 1923, discusses her childhood in Złoczew, Poland; being the fifth of ten children; her parents Avrom and Sarah Lipcyc, and their work running a leather shop; living a very comfortable, observant life; her father building a small synagogue in the town as well as a school on their property for all of the young Jewish children (it was called a Beis Yaakov); the Nazi invasion in 1939; going with several of her siblings as well as her mother and father to the nearby town of Zdunska Wola, where two of her older sisters lived; going with a sister and one of her brothers to stay with their grandmother in Szadek, Poland; returning with her family to Zdunska Wola and living in the ghetto until 1942; being sent with two of her sisters to the Łódź ghetto; the liquidation of the ghetto in 1944; being sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau; being sent to Stutthof and then to Dresden; being sent with her sister Nancy on a forced march to Theresienstadt after the bombing of Dresden; escaping during the march and hiding with Nancy on a farm near Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary), Czech Republic; and being liberated by the US Army. (This summary was adapted from the interview’s record on the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education.)

Oral history interview with Jack Fruchtengarten

Oral History

Jack Fruchtengarten, born on August 28, 1924 in Opole Lubelskie, Poland, discusses being one of five children in an observant family; being educated through seventh grade, and attending cheder for a Jewish education; the Nazi invasion of Poland; fleeing with his brother towards the Russian border (they were the only survivors of their extended family in Poland); being separated from his brother (both made it to Russia); being imprisoned and sentenced to five years in a work camp in Siberia with thousands of other Polish refugees, both Jewish and non-Jewish; receiving assistance from many people because of his age; learning some tailoring skills, and managing to survive until the Poles were released from Russian prisons and forced to sign up for military service; choosing to join the Polish Army and taking a multi-month train trip to the Black Sea, where he was supposed to find the army; going to Palestine and then England; working in the Air Force intelligence from 1942 until the end of the war; writing letters to relatives in the United States and in Argentina; receiving support from an aunt and uncle in Portland, Oregon and immigrating to the US at the age of 25; his life in the US; attending school; opening his own clothing store (called the Golden Beau in 1965); getting married in 1971; his son Zachary; divorcing in 1988; and retiring in 1993. (This summary was adapted from the interview’s record on the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education.)

Oral history interview with Leslie Aigner

Oral History

Leslie “Les” Aigner (né Ladislav Aigner), born in 1929 in Nové Zámky, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic), discusses being one of three children; his family’s move in the early 1940s to Csepel, Hungary on the outskirts of Budapest in the hope of escaping oppressive Nazi discrimination against Jews; his father being sent in 1943 to a slave labor camp; being forced with his mother and eight-year-old sister to live in the Budapest ghetto in 1944; being deported with his family to Auschwitz, where his mother and sister were sent directly to the gas chambers; spending five months in Auschwitz in late 1944 before being shipped to Landsberg, Germany, to a subcamp of Dachau, where he was forced to perform hard labor; being relocated to the Kaufering concentration camp before finally being sent to Dachau on the “death train” which was thus named because it arrived with more dead passengers than living; being severely underweight; being liberated from Dachau by American troops on April 29, 1945; being treated for over a month; returning home to find that most of his family members had been murdered in the Holocaust; reuniting with his older sister and his father in Budapest; finishing trade school and working as a machinist; getting married to his wife Eva in 1956; the Hungarian Revoluntion and escaping Hungary with his father, step-mother, and wife; and immigrating to the United States.

Oral history interview with Eline Hoekstra-Dresden

Oral History

Eline Hoekstra Dresden, born on January 4, 1923 in the Hague, Netherlands, discusses being the youngest of four Jewish children; her family’s move to Utrecht when she was two years old; her parents taking in two Jewish refugee children from Germany; the German invasion of the Netherlands; the German authorities forcing the two refugee children to leave Eline’s family; graduating from high school in 1940; being expelled from college in 1941 because of the anti-Jewish measures; the seizure of her family’s home; giving birth to her son Daniel in 1942; hiding Daniel with a non-Jewish family; being deported with her parents in April 1943 to an internment camp called De Schaffelaar in Barneveld, Netherlands; the mass deportation of inmates to Westerbork transit camp; enduring squalor, disease, hard and dehumanizing labor, and starvation alongside her parents at Westerbork until the camp was liberated by Canadian troops on April 12, 1945; reuniting with her son; and migrating to Oregon in 1958.

Oral history interview with Miriam Greenstein

Oral History

Oral history interview with Diana Golden

Oral History

Oral history interview with Leonore Weston

Oral History