Oral history interview with Fanny Federman

Oral history interview with Salvatore Benanti

Oral History

Oral history interview with Jack Bertges

Oral History

Jack Bertges describes fighting in the Battle of the Bulge under General Patton’s army as head of his platoon; traveling across the Rhine; his opinions on the German military; having no idea of the atrocities being committed against the Jewish people until they were almost in Czechoslovakia; liberating Buchenwald; his pictures of the camp (which he shows); speaking with the surviving inmates; burying Nazi soldiers; how his unit spent four months in Germany; returning to the United States in August 1945; how seeing the concentration camps eliminated all his prejudices; his life after the war; and the importance of remembering the Holocaust.

Oral history interview with Marjorie Butterfield

Oral History

Marjorie Butterfield, born in Pittsburgh, PA in 1920, describes her Presbyterian family; her training as a registered nurse at Sewickley Valley Hospital; enlisting in the army in September 1942; spending five months in Camp Pickett, VA; landing in Liverpool, England on June 6, 1944; hearing about D-Day while still traveling by ship; courses the nurses took during their training; how her unit was attached to the 3rd Army; landing on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France on July 31, 1944; setting up behind front lines in a field hospital and treating only serious casualties; how there were three platoons with six nurses per platoon and two surgical units with two doctors and two nurses; working 12 hour shifts; reading about the concentration camps before leaving the United States; moving into southern Germany, through Nuremburg to Linz, Austria in May 1945; entering Gusen concentration camp; her experiences taking care of the surviving inmates and the high number of deaths; using an interpreter to speak with the patients; how there were many Jews, Poles and other national groups in the camp; working in the camp for six weeks; eating very little because she felt guilty; the crematorium and gas chamber in the camp; speaking mainly with the female patients, many of whom were well educated; how a Jewish dentist agreed to provide blood to an SS trooper who needed a transfusion; how the people of Linz claimed not to know what was happening in the camp; going to Marienbad, Czechoslovakia (Mariánské Lázně, Czech Republic), where they set up a hospital for the armies of the occupation troops; spending 16 and a half months in Czechoslovakia; the importance of educating people about the Holocaust; not being able to talk about her experiences for over 20 years; how she gained the rank of first lieutenant during the war; reading books about the Holocaust, including The Hiding Place, The Diary of Anne Frank, and Confessions of a German Soldier; a passage from her journal (which she reads out loud); how the nurses were given German lessons; and the women she encountered in the camp.

Oral history interview with Thomas Detre

Oral History

Thomas Detre, born May 17, 1924 in Budapest, Hungary, describes his family; living in a small town outside of Budapest; learning German and Hungarian as a child; being taught in a strict Catholic order and receiving lessons from a local rabbi; his Bar Mitzvah; not experiencing discrimination until he was a teenager; how his family was protected by early antisemitic laws because his father fought in WWI; how people disregarded the German invasion of Poland and how he was unaware of the anti-Jewish laws being passed; not being able to register for certain classes because he was Jewish; auditing medical courses in Budapest; different expressions of Judaism that were practiced in Hungary; how his family was integrated into Hungarian society and disdained the more cloistered orthodox Jews; how in 1942 the Arrow Cross became more violent and destroyed more Jewish property; how his cousins were drafted into the forced labor battalions; working in a Jewish hospital in Budapest in 1943 and learning from Jewish refugees about the camps and atrocities occurring in Nazi-occupied areas; the loopholes in the antisemitic legislation; being only vaguely aware of the ghettoization of Hungarian Jews; being arrested in 1944 and sent to a work compound; escaping with 100 other inmates and being captured later; being detained and correctly diagnosing a guard, who fell ill; feigning suicide and being sent to a rehabilitation hospital as required by Hungarian law; escaping the hospital and being recaptured; being sent to a detainment hall in Óbuda, where people were either sent to a Swiss safe house or a death camp; sneaking into the group of people going to the Swiss safe house; obtaining legal papers from a cousin and living in a safe house in Budapest; living with hundreds of others in cramped conditions; how in May 1944 his entire family was deported to Auschwitz and only one uncle survived; his reflections on the reasons for decreased Nazi cruelty in the last months of the war; his contact with the Zionist underground during his months in the safe house (he mentions Raoul Wallenberg); a Yugoslav partisan he lived with in the safe house; coming down with typhoid fever in the safe house; being liberated by the Russian Army in February 1945; learning about his parents via the bulletins issued by the International Red Cross; retrieving family jewels that friends had safeguarded and selling them for food; beginning his medical training three weeks after liberation; going to Italy to get his medical degree; immigrating to the United States in 1953; not experiencing survivor’s guilt and how it was luck that kept him alive; his belief that many Americans participated in denial en masse during the war; his questions about the effectiveness of widespread education on the Holocaust; and his belief that there should be more study of the psychology and behavior of groups.

Oral history interview with Bertram Dinman

Oral History

Bertram Dinman, born August 9, 1925 in Philadelphia, PA, describes his Jewish family; being affected somewhat but not greatly by the Depression; entering the army in January 1944; how his company was sent to Liverpool, England around the time of the Battle of the Bulge; being sent across the channel in December 1944; experiencing some antisemitism among the U.S. troops; being hospitalized for pneumonia; going with the 4th Army Division of the 3rd Army as an engineer; going through Eisenach, Germany to a small town and smelling rotting flesh; going to a small holding camp (Ohrdruf); how the troops killed the remaining German army personnel they found in the camp; the anger of the soldiers; how the troops rounded up the people living in the small town and showed them the inside of the camp; digging hundreds of graves and burying each body individually; taking inmates for medical treatment and giving them food and cigarettes; being discharged in June 1946; and his belief in Holocaust education.

Oral history interview with Harry Drucker

Oral History

Oral history interview with Hyman Federman

Oral History

Oral history interview with Irene Furst

Oral History

Oral history interview with Samuel Gottesman

Oral History

Samuel Gottesman, born in Irsava, Czechoslovakia (Irshava, Ukraine) on October 20, 1923, describes his town in the Carpathian Mountains; his family; the languages he spoke; his Orthodox father; having only Jewish friends; the peaceful co-existence of Jews and non-Jews; having to learn to speak Hungarian; how his father had to shave his beard and do forced labor; how the Arrow Cross Hungarian Nazis, were not as bad as in the larger towns; being forced to subscribe to a German-leaning newspaper published in Budapest, Hungary; how Hungarians were brought in and took over Jewish businesses; how the Jewish Hungarians had to prove they had lived in that area for three generations or face deportation to Poland; the deportation of his sister; how about 10 percent of people in Irsava were deported to Galicia, Ukraine and shot; the black market; how the Jews in Irsava were told to report to the synagogue; hiding their jewelry in their shed; how one third of the town was designated as a ghetto; being sent after a week to Mukacheve, Ukraine; the brutality of the German SS guards towards the elderly Jews; how Eichmann came to Mukacheve for an inspection; being transported to Auschwitz; his first impressions of the camp; being shaved and dunked in disinfectant; being put on a train three days later with his father and sent to Wolfsburg, Germany; performing forced labor, digging ditches and putting in foundations for buildings; being transferred to a camp in Silesia and contemplating suicide; some bombings and an air raid one night; convincing the German guards not to send him the Auschwitz because of his young age; how having his father with him kept him going; how they were sent to Gross-Rosen, where they could take showers and had access to potatoes and bread; being evacuated; going to Hannover, Germany; returning to Czechoslovakia; returning to Irsava; contacting a cousin, who was in the U.S. Army, and going to live in a home he appropriated in Augsburg, Germany, where lived with his father, sister, uncle, and three cousins; registering in a displaced persons camp near Ulm, Germany; the death of his father in 1961 and the impact it had on him; getting married and having children; and how his wife is unable to talk about her experiences at Auschwitz.

Oral history interview with Dora Iwler

Oral History

Dora Iwler (née Zuer), born in 1923 in Chodorów, Poland (Khodoriv, Ukraine), describes her family; being educated in a Catholic school; becoming aware of antisemitism in her adolescence; how her father’s fruit store was expropriated; learning Russian and going to work for the Russian government; how the Russians discriminated on wealth instead of religion; how the Nazis arrived in Chodorów in the summer of 1941 and persecuted the very religious Jews, homosexuals, and Romanies; how a large Ukrainian population of her town collaborated with the Nazis; how her father made a bunker under a kitchen cupboard for the family to hide in; the deportation of Jews, including her mother, in 1942; how her sister was shot and killed while running away from Nazi soldiers; how one of her brothers was taken away; working as a gardener for a Ukrainian family outside the city during this time; being sent to a concentration camp (Janowska) near Lwów, Poland (L'viv, Ukraine);being assigned to a wheat field; witnessing the murder of 1,000 people one day and 2,000 the next; escaping the camp and running to Lwów; working as a janitor for an elderly couple and pretending to be a Christian; being recognized and turned in by a classmate; successfully pleading with the officers not to harm the couple with whom she had been living; being taken to a jail in Lonzski; being sent to a ghetto and a 45 km death march; being helped by a train conductor during the death march and escaping; resuming her Christian alias; living with a Polish family for six months; going to Sanok, Poland after the Russians liberated Poland in January 1945; getting married in February 1945; the antisemitism in Poland after the war; fleeing to Italy with the help of Haganah representatives in Germany; staying in Italy four years; immigrating to the United States in 1949; settling in Pittsburgh, PA; how her children know her Holocaust story; still having nightmares about the Holocaust; leading a secular lifestyle; and her reflections on persecution.

Oral history interview with Herbert Joseph

Oral History

Herbert Joseph, born in January 1923, describes his Byelorussian parents, who both moved to the United States before they met; graduating from the University of Pittsburgh with a major in business; his secular-Jewish parents; being in ROTC in college; being sent to basic training in 1943; arriving in Le Havre, France; being a Second Lieutenant with his own platoon in the 80th Division; fighting in the Battle of the Bulge; how at the end of 1944 he got sick from being in foxholes and was in the hospital for three weeks; fighting in Germany; arriving in Chemnitz, Germany at a concentration camp (Sachsenburg), which they liberated; being in Austria when the war ended; receiving a battlefield promotion and a Bronze Star for heroic action; hearing antisemitic comments when he was in the military; being transferred to the military police in Starnberg, Germany in October 1945; being transferred to Landsberg, Germany; his duties at the Landsberg Prison, which involved escorting convicted SS troops to be executed; the riot in the Landsberg displaced persons camp; returning to the U.S. in July 1946; being sent to Fort Dix; the horrors of combat and dealing with his experiences; how the civilians in Landsberg claimed to be unaware of the atrocities that were going on during the war; not being able to forgive Germany; and his friends who were in camps during the war.

Oral history interview with Georg Keleti

Oral History

Oral history interview with Sara Kohane

Oral History

Sara Kohane, born in Vilna, Poland (Vilnius, Lithuania), describes her family; attending public school for Jewish children in Poland; her semi-religious parents; the violent antisemitism in her town; the invasion of Russians in 1939; how food become more scarce; how the Russians left in 1940; being 12 years old during this time; how her brother served in the Polish Army as a radio engineer; having to learn Lithuanian; hearing bombs in 1941; how her father disappeared after he was told he would be shot; how her Jewish friends began disappearing; the creation of two ghettos; being told to leave their apartment by German soldiers; how their apartment super had all her family’s paintings; getting food from the nuns, who worked at a nearby candle factory; conditions in the ghetto; hiding with her family in an attic during a roundup of Jews one night and how she was shot in the arm and left for dead; how her brother was part of the resistance; smuggling food into the ghetto; digging a tunnel out of the ghetto, which her brother used to get out and join the partisans; being marched out of the ghetto and experiencing a selection process; being taken to a cattle car and traveling to Latvia; being sent to a work camp in Riga, Latvia where she worked for a year; conditions in the camp and the psychological impact on her; working on a sugar beet farm; going back to Stutthof; being snet on a march and how her sister came down with typhus; waking up one day, seeing Russian soldiers, and being told that they were free; the beatings she remembers witnessing in the camps; and life in the camps.

Oral history interview with Edward Kosewicz

Oral History

Oral history interview with Jack La Pietra

Oral History

Jack La Pietra describes being sent to England as a part of the 9th Air Force, Tactical Air Command, supporting the 3rd Army; being a pilot for The Black Widow (Northrop P-61); being in the Battle of the Bulge during December 1944; getting to Buchenwald but having to wait for the Russians; visiting the camp with some of his squad members two days after the SS had fled; bringing his camera and being accompanied by a guide and translator, Reinhold; writing a detailed letter about the experience (which he reads and shows accompanying pictures from the camp); conditions in the camp; the crematoriums and nearby nooses; giving the inmates cigarettes and chocolate; details about Block 36, where prisoners underwent medical experimentation; the Commandant of Buchenwald, Karl Koch, and his wife, Ilse Koch; a monument made by carpenter inmates; the murder of Russian soldiers at Buchenwald; his personal philosophy and family history; how he is a liberal Catholic with sons who are Baptist ministers; his daughters, one of whom is married to the journalist, Bill Curtis; how the trip through Buchenwald had a lasting effect on his life; and using his letter as a teaching tool.

Oral history interview with George Lauer

Oral History

Oral history interview with Edward Levant

Oral History

Edward Levant, born in June of 1915 in Pittsburgh, PA, describes his Russian father and Austria-Hungarian mother parents, who came to the United States in 1910; how his family was Jewish but they were not very religious; experiencing antisemitism when his family lived in Ambler, PA; graduating from dental school in 1939; seeing the changes in Europe and the migration of Jews to the U.S.; joining the army and being placed on limited service because of his eyesight; being sent to Carlisle Barracks near Harrisburg for a "basic training" program for medical personnel; going to Liverpool, England on the S.S. America; going to Le Havre, France; landing in Normandy, France on D-Day with the 474th anti-automatic weapons; going to Verviers, Belgium via box car in December 1944 and the retreat of his unit after encountering a German offensive; how his unit was at the Ludendorff-Brücke in Remagen, Germany; going to Nordhausen, Germany; going to Dora concentration camp; conditions in the camp and speaking to the inmates; how his commanding officer wanted German civilians to dig trenches in which the bodies could be buried; experiencing open and latent antisemitism within the army; continuing on to Mansfeld, Germany; being changed to another unit; returning to the U.S. in December 1945 as an independent replacement; the importance of sharing Holocaust stories; and his thoughts on Israel.

Oral history interview with Albert Lewin and Fritz Othenheimer

Oral History

Fritz Othenheimer describes his long lineage of German ancestors; living in Constance (Konstanz), Germany; how his parents owned a small menswear store; the rise of Hitler; the anti-Jewish laws passed; how father had to sell his store; how his parents took in a Jewish family from Austria in 1938 and helped them cross the border into Switzerland; how his family helped more families and he and his siblings took the people across the border because as children they would be less suspicious; his father’s friendship with a lieutenant of the criminal department and how this man helped get more Jews across the border; how on Kristallnacht all the synagogues were blown up and the Jewish men were taken to concentration camps; how his father was arrested and taken to Dachau and released a month later; immigrating to the United States in May 1939; how his family did not cross the border into Switzerland because they were scared of being sent to work camps there; and how he did not find out about the gas chambers used by Nazis until he was in the U.S. Army and going through Germany after the liberation. Albert Lewin, born in Berlin, Germany in 1925, describes how when he was 16 years old his private school was closed and he was sent to a forced labor camp in Berlin; being sent to Auschwitz when he was 18 years old; going through the selection process; working as a mechanic in the tailor shop that repaired German uniforms; getting a number and a triangle tattooed on his arm; finding out later that 26 of his relatives were killed in 1943, including his grandparents, parents, and brothers; being transferred to Warsaw, Poland in 1943, where he was a runner for the German government headquarters; having to pull the gold teeth from dead prisoners in the morning and managing to steal a few, which he later traded for food; helping a man escape so he could tell the Russians to stop bombarding the camp; how the Germans found out about his role in the escape and tortured him by hanging him from his ears to make him talk; how he did not give up any information and managed to stay alive; being transported to Dachau and being sent on a death march for three days; being sent to Mühldorf; escaping from a transport train that was bombed in May 1945 and staying in a farmer’s house for a few days; his memories of the captain from Columbus, Ohio who liberated him; spending time in a hospital; immigrating to the United States in 1947; not speaking about his experiences until recently; and a note he wrote about Kristallnacht.

Oral history interview with James Lynch

Oral History

Oral history interview with Henry Marinelli

Oral History

Henry Marinelli, born February 9, 1923 in Pittsburgh, PA, describes his catholic family; doing odd jobs during the Depression; how in 1939 when he was 16 years old the only information he received was from the newsreels at theaters; his focus on his education; being drafted in 1942; being in the 12th Armored Division; teaching his Italian parents English; going to Bristol, England on October 1, 1944; how his division set up a make-shift camp near a glider base four months after D-Day; how the men in his division were excited to fight; how his division relieved the 4th Armored Division; how they fought in several German towns; not leaving the front line from November 1944 to April 1945; how he had dreams of combat for many years after; being in a tank with four other men with a 105 Howitzer; the purpose of the German 88 tank gun; not being aware of concentration camps before coming upon labor camps; his response to the conditions; a picture he has of the bodies the Germans had burned; visiting Dachau after the war; only being in Landsberg for a few hours; going through German towns such as Munich and Berchtesgaden as well as the Brenner Pass, Austria; how his experience gave him more compassion for people; his views on American youth; and his advice on life.

Oral history interview with Robert Mendler

Oral History

Robert Mendler, born on July 6, 1925 in Novitar, Poland (60 km from Kraków, Poland), describes his Orthodox Jewish family; finishing seventh grade before the war started; his many non-Jewish friends; the numerous Zionist organizations in his town; how his father did not believe Jewish emigration from Poland was necessary at the time; the pogrom in his village in 1936 organized by Polish farmers; being segregated in the classroom and having to sit in the back; living in fear; how his father went to the Russian side without telling the family; the creation of a ghetto in Novitar; being forced to wear white armbands with the Star of David; working on a super highway and a lumberyard; how they paid gentiles to bring them food covertly during the night; how the Nazis turned their synagogue into a warehouse and later into a movie theater; conditions in the ghetto; how the killing of Jews started in 1940 and the process of murdering Jews; the spread of information in the ghetto via word of mouth; the Jewish police force in the ghetto, which did not work with the Nazis; the deportation of Jews from the ghetto; the deportation of his mother and sister and the murder of his father; being sent to a concentration camp in Czarny Dunajec, Poland, where he stayed for nine months; how he is the only person in his family who survived the Holocaust; the Czarny Dunajec camp’s commander, Miller, and his aggressive dogs; killing one of the dogs, burying its body, and exhuming it periodically to eat the meat; being moved to a camp in Krakow (Płaszów); the commander of the camp, Geth, who rode on a white horse around the camp, randomly shooting Jews standing at attention; being in good health; digging up skulls while working and removing the gold teeth, with which he would trade to the Ukrainian guards for bread; still having violent memories of the Holocaust at night; being sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau; building roads and cleaning canals at Birkenau; wearing a red triangle with a yellow bar, indicating to everyone that he was a Polish Jew; staying at Auschwitz until January 18, 1945; being sent to Gleiwitz, then experiencing a 10 day journey to Berlin, Germany in an open boxcar; how Czechs threw them bread from bridges during the trip; reverting to cannibalism on the dead bodies with the other passengers because they lacked real food; being sent to a camp at Pocking (subcamp of Flossenbürg); being 75 pounds when he was liberated; immigrating to the United States; seeing a member of the Gestapo on the journey to the U.S. and the man’s arrest for pretending to be a displaced person; why he thinks he survived; not being a religious now; and his distrust of Germans.

Oral history interview with William J. Moran

Oral History

William J. Moran, born on September 5, 1917, describes his catholic family; his high school education; the poor conditions his family lived in during the Depression; moving to a home with a Jewish landlord, Abe Joseph, whom he liked very much; attending the University of Pittsburgh; being drafted into the army in October 1941 when he was 24 years old; training at Fort Bragg, CA; going to Casablanca, Morocco in 1942; the campaign in Kasserine (Qașrayn), Tunisia; being under the British Army; his experiences in combat; the conditions in Tunisia; being in North Africa from 1942 to 1943; their biggest battle in Trolina; being sent to England and only being 140 pounds; being in a secret outfit; how the troops had a difficult time in combat because they had to carry food and equipment and sleep outside in the cold; the many mines they encountered during their journey; his thoughts on Eisenhower as well as the German general Günther Blumentritt; the campaign outside of Germany and losing friends in battle; the Ardennes campaign; going to Hallstadt, Germany, and killing two deer on the way, which they gave to an escaped concentration camp refugee; going to Nordhausen, Germany and not knowing there was a concentration camp there; his disbelief that the local Germans did not know the camp was there; his shock at seeing the camp (he reads a letter he wrote in April 1945 to the United Jewish Federation concerning this experience); seeing the surviving inmates; making the civilians of Nordhausen remove the dead bodies from the camp; having anxiety attacks after the war; and his feelings towards antisemitism and Jews.

Oral history interview with Arthur F. Peternel

Oral History

Arthur Peternel, born in 1915, describes his Yugoslavian parents and nine siblings; being raised Roman Catholic; his father’s involvement with the coal miner’s union and the local government; attending public school in Wilcox, PA; being 24 when the war started and joining the army; being assigned duties with a construction battalion; being transferred to the Air Force as a construction engineer; designing and constructing airfields; volunteering in the ground force as a combat engineer; going to basic training in Louisiana, Air Force training in Santa Rosa and March Field, CA, and officers candidate school at Fort Belvoir, VA; getting information from the radio and newspapers; how his first cousins in Slovenia were executed for resisting the Nazis; landing in Europe in 1943; his unit’s daring activity in Cassino, Italy, which won them a presidential citation; his role as a combat engineer, serving the 5th and 7th Army; receiving amphibious invasion training south of Naples; being in charge of underwater demolition; the route the 7th Army took through France; landing in Saint-Raphaël, France, where they encountered resistance; arriving in Germany during the winter of 1944-1945; the Jewish sergeants in his unit and the Holocaust experiences of their family in Europe; coming across Dachau a day after it was liberated; photographs he has from when he entered the camp (he shows this images during the recording); conditions in the camp; seeing the prison guards who had been killed by the inmates; the crematorium; seeing piles of bodies and clothing as well as urns of ashes; speaking with a local German girl who thought the camp was for prisoners-of-war; his shock and horror at the concentration camp; and his view of the role of the U.S. in the world.

Oral history interview with James Priest

Oral History

James Priest, born in Steubenville, OH on August 16, 1920, describes his family; being drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942; being sent to Fort Benning, GA; being sent to Scotland on July 1, 1944; being in a medical detachment in Europe; landing on Utah Beach, Normandy, France on August 13, 1944; driving an ambulance with the 104th Infantry Division; arriving at Nordhausen on April 13, 1945 as a part of the 114th Infantry Regiment; the other men in his unit, including Jacob Danish and David Kenny; the conditions in Nordhausen; not believing that Gerneral Patton visited Nordhausen; seeing deserted mental hospitals in Europe during the war; returning to the U.S. in December 1945; how he was in the medical detachment because he worked in a funeral home before the war; feeling that the US troops were not trained on how to react to being prisoners of war or other atrocities; and his regrets.

Oral history interview with Fred Roth

Oral History

Fred Roth, born in Jersey City, NJ on October 8, 1921, describes attending an Orthodox temple with his family; enlisting in the army in 1942; his altruistic Austrian parents; having a lot of non-Jewish friends as a child; attending a Jesuit university in New Jersey; his family’s efforts to send money to relatives in Berlin, Germany so they could leave and hosting relatives when they emigrated; his strong relationship with his father; joining the aviation cadets in California; qualifying as a twin engine bomber pilot and receiving his training on B-25s (Mitchell bombers) and B-26s (Marauder bombers); graduating in September 1943 from the Air Force; being sent to Europe in June 1944 a week after D-Day; flying supplies into France for Patton's troops; being shot down during Operation Market Garden in September 1944; his resentment toward Field Marshal Montgomery for his failure during the operation; being shot at while they attempted crossing the English Channel; his memories of the bullets hitting his place, which sounded like a typewriter; landing in the ocean with his engines cut off and at a very low speed; the survival of the all four men in his plane; escaping to their raft and being blown toward Holland, Netherlands; surrendering to the Germans; keeping a diary along with his crew on any pieces of paper they could find; being interrogated thoroughly by the Germans, but only giving his name, rank, and serial number; being sent to Dulog Lauf, where there was a school that had been converted into a camp; being separated by military rank; being sent in October 1944 with his crew to Stalag Luft I in Barth, Germany, where he was put into the Jewish sector of the camp; being liberated by the Russians on May 1, 1945; celebrating with the Yiddish-speaking Russians; liberating a small nearby labor camp; conditions in the labor camp, where half the inmates had died; being discharged on October 28, 1945; his emaciated condition upon liberation; and his strong faith and belief in the state of Israel.

Oral history interview with Abe Salem

Oral History

Abe Salem, born in Warsaw, Poland on December 3, 1919, discusses being the oldest of seven siblings in a strictly Orthodox family; attending religious schools; his father’s leather accessories shop; the lack of socialization between Jews and non-Jews and the common antisemitism; daily life; how the Jewish community took care of their own; one instance of antisemitism, during which a Polish soldier thought him too arrogant and smacked him; being politically active in the Jewish community; following Vladimir Jabotinsky’s movement and later the Chalutz (HeHalutz) movement; hearing Jabotinsky speak to a crowd of some 8,000 Jews in Warsaw in 1938 and the response of the crowd; hearing a speech by Wolfgang Wiesel, who told the Jews in 1938 to buy guns and take up target practice; speaking to Wiesel in 1943; social conditions in Poland for the Jews; how after the war broke out the Chalutz leaders fled to the free city of Vilna (Vilnius, Lithuania); keeping informed by listening to German radio; trying to leave Poland by registering for permission to emigrate; helping to organize young adults but experiencing resistance; conditions after the bombings; the Chevra Kaddisha; being thrown out of a building by a German soldier; fleeing to Vilna; going between Vilna and Warsaw three times; being captured by Russians; being sent to a labor camp until 1942; being released; getting a false birth certificate; being caught with false papers and escaping; going to Tashkent, Uzbekistan; stealing food from a woman on a train; getting a job in a bakery; learning about the fate of his family in 1946; going to Breslau (Wroclaw , Poland) after the war to find Jewish children for the Chalutz organization; smuggling the children to Palestine with help from the Jewish Joint and the Jewish Brigade; meeting his wife in 1945; staying in Germany from 1946 to 1949; being brought to the United States by the Joint; settling in Evansville, IN; and his life after the war.

Oral history interview with Jack Sittsamer

Oral History

Jack Sittsamer, born in Mielec, Poland in December 1924, describes his Orthodox Jewish family; attending Catholic School and Cheder; having many non-Jewish friends; the Nazi invasion, during which the synagogue was burned and there was a roundup of Jews who were then murdered in a slaughterhouse; being made to do forced labor with his family; a selection process in March 1942, during which the weak and old were killed and the others were marched to the airport; being selected to be a worker; the deportation of his mother and siblings and the murder of his father; suffering from typhoid fever for three weeks, which he cannot remember but being taken care of by an inmate; working in a factory until June 1944; being moved to Wieliczka for a week then shipped to Auschwitz; being classified as productive workers and refused by Auschwitz; being sent to Flossenbürg; seeing the piles of shoes upon arrival and realizing it was a death camp; being showered, deloused, and given numbers and suits; going through another selection and being sent to Leitmeritz (Litoměřice), where the Luftwaffe was in control; working on the tunnels for an underground factory; being sent with 400 other prisoners to Mauthausen; the guards in Leitmeritz versus those in Mauthausen; being sent to Gusen II after two weeks; working 12 hour shifts in a factory, going to work sick often; being liberated on May 5th, 1945, at which point he weighed 80 pounds; staying with a woman in Linz, Austria; being helped by Austrians; going to Salzburg, Austria; staying in a refugee camp for a month; staying in a tent city in Bologna, Italy; going to Germany; living with a friend in Eggenfelden, Germany until 1949; registering to go to Australia; immigrating to the United States in 1949 after deciding not to go to Australia; being the only survivor in his family; losing a lot of faith; and how he may have to give a testimony at the trial for a commandant from the Mielec camp.

Oral history interview with Pauline Staman and Rose Weingarten

Oral History

Rose Weingarten (née Berkowitz), born on September 27, 1918, in Velky-Bockov, Czechoslovakia (Velykyĭ Bychkiv, Ukraine), describes the Jewish population in her town; her father, who was a storekeeper, and her mother; speaking Yiddish at home and Hungarian and Russian outside the home; her nine siblings; being in an Orthodox Jewish family; the importance of education in her family; how they kept informed by reading newspapers from Prague, Czech Republic; the lack of antisemitism before the war; her non-Jewish friends; how at one point Ukrainians came in and began to foment antisemitism; her father’s belief that the war wouldn’t come; the beginning of deportations in 1939, starting with individuals without a long ancestry in Czechoslovakia; being scared, but her father’s insistence that they stay put; a neighbor who joined the SS; the economic downturn in 1943; the deportation and murder of family members who lived elsewhere; having to sell the family business in 1943; experiencing antisemitism; being sent to a ghetto in Mátészalka, Hungary in April 1944; conditions in the ghetto and remaining there only a few weeks; the torture of individuals who tried to escape; being sent on cattle cars in April 1944 to Auschwitz; conditions on the train; arriving at the camp and having their heads shaved; her parents and their two grandchildren being selected for the gas chamber; being with two sisters and a sister-in-law in barracks 14 section C, from which they could see people going to the gas chambers; digging ditches; being in Auschwitz until December 1944; her feeling that she wouldn't have survived without her sisters; at one point being told that their barracks was going to be sent to a new camp and hiding with her sisters to avoid this transport; daily life in the camp; being beaten by a female guard for bringing an abandoned bowl of soup to her barrack; the pain of roll calls; the atrocities in the camp, including infanticide and people being burned alive; being sent to Lenzing, Austria in December 1944; working in a munitions factory, sorting refuse; being liberated in May 1945 by the Americans; being sent to a youth home called Jugendheim; being sent to Prague; getting married in 1945; immigrating to the United States in 1947; and the importance of family to her. Pauline Staman (née Berkowitz), born in 1929, describes working for the SS female guards in Lenzig in from 1944 to 1945; her efforts to bring the refuse of the SS women's meals to feed her sisters; how the SS women took her for treatment when she got a bad infection in her hand; and immigrating to Israel and later to the U.S.

Oral history interview with Mark Stern

Oral History

Mark Stern, born on June 5, 1923 in Gorlice, Poland, describes his family; moving to Kraków, Poland; being raised Orthodox, though they were partially assimilated and lived in the non-Jewish section of the city; his good Jewish education; first experiencing antisemitism in 1937; how his father sent his brother to Palestine for his university education; hosting two of his aunts after Germany began its expulsion of Jews; the family’s unsuccessful plan to leave in 1941; conditions in Kraków after September 1939; his father’s escape and never seeing him again; taking responsibility for his family; how their bank accounts were closed and all of their valuables were taken by the German Army; the Germans taking over their business; moving with his family to live with his grandmother in the Gorlice ghetto; forced labor in Gorlice; the death of his grandmother; being selected with his sister and mother to leave in 1942, but trading his stamp collection to spare their deportation; his mother’s deportation despite his efforts; the deportation of his girlfriend and sister on the next transport and never seeing them again; remaining and working in the Hobag (Holzbau A.G.) labor camp making pre-fabricated housing for the German Army; the brutal conditions in the camp and the violence from German shepherds; being sent to Mielec camp, making parts for German airplanes; getting sick but not being killed; being an inspector of parts and assisting the underground with sabotage; being caught once but saved by his supervisor; prisoners’ talk of escape and the hanging of the leaders when the plan was discovered; hearing the shooting from the front lines of the war; being sent to Płaszów; going through a selection after several weeks; the terrible conditions during the journey to Germany and how half the passengers died; arriving in Flossenbürg and being completely dehumanized; thinking of his grandmother in order to remain strong; witnessing inmates commit suicide on the electric fences; working in an airplane factory; the relations between the prisoners and how everyone took advantage of the Jews, who were in the minority; being approached by a homosexual Kapo; being evacuated via train in April 1945 and the bombing of the train by American forces; going on a death march to Schwandorf, Germany, which lasted 10 days; being liberated by Americans right before the prisoners were going to be executed; how the Americans kept going and threw them food; being confused about his origins when he went to an American Red Cross station; going to Hamburg, Germany and drinking all day; deciding to go to Palestine to see his brother; meeting his wife in a displaced persons camp; staying in Italy from 1945 to 1947; learning labor skills at a kibbutz; immigrating to the United States in 1947; experiencing survivor’s guilt; and being the President of the Survivors Organization of Pittsburgh, PA.

Oral history interview with Irene Sulzman

Oral History

Irene Sulzman, born in Łódź, Poland on July 13, 1928, describes her middle class, non-practicing Jewish family; her pre-war life; antisemitism in Polish literature; having no Jewish education until she went to the ghetto; her parents’ view of Hitler; the shortage of food; not being allowed to attend school; the German treatment of Jews in Łódź; the creation of the ghetto in 1940; her mother’s desire for the family to stay together; conditions in the ghetto; having her tonsils removed in the ghetto without anesthesia; learning English; growing vegetables in the ghetto; the Jewish policemen and her parents’ view of Chaim Rumkowski; the psychological breakdown of Jews in the ghetto; rumors, the threat of deportation, and the black market; being deported to Auschwitz; arriving at the camp and going through a selection process; the loss of one of her sisters; roll calls; being sent to Bergen-Belsen for several weeks; volunteering to go to Buchenwald; the female SS German guards in Buchenwald; being chosen with her mother and sister to maintain the barracks; being sent on a death march in April or May of 1945; being liberated by the Americans; her feelings about the Germans and Americans at that time; going to Frankfurt, Germany; working in General Eisenhower's headquarters as a translator; finding her father; being slightly ashamed of having an intact family; meeting Eleanor Roosevelt; immigrating to the United States; her first husband and getting divorced; her current husband, who is also Polish-American; being open with her children about her experience; her children and life after the war; and her thoughts on being Jewish in the US.

Oral history interview with David Zimmerman

Oral History

Oral history interview with Arnold Zweig

Oral History