Advanced Search

Learn About The Holocaust

Special Collections

My Saved Research

Login

Register

Help

Skip to main content

Print

Oral history interview with George Hill Leonard

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 2001.32 | RG Number: RG-50.106.0136

Search this record's additional resources, such as finding aids, documents, or transcripts.

No results match this search term.
Check spelling and try again.

results are loading

0 results found for “keyward”

    Oral history interview with George Hill Leonard
    Transcript
    This is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    volunteer collection interview with George Leonard conducted
    by Esther Finder on January 10, 2001 in Rockville, Maryland.
    This is tape one side A. Thank you
    for doing an interview with me today.
    Let's start out by having you tell me
    when and where you were born.
    I was born in Malden, Massachusetts,
    on December 24, 1921.
    Is that where you grew up?
    I very rapidly got moved to Dorchester, which at the time
    was a tremendously in flux quasi slum of Boston.
    And I pretty much grew up in Dorchester
    until the army came along.
    Can you tell me a little bit more
    about this community other than the few words that you
    used to describe it so far?
    Dorchester was and maybe still is the largest burrow
    or in-city suburb of Boston.
    And it had originally been famous for being
    a seaport with the Puritans or Pilgrims
    or Lord knows what all, and lots of Indians around there.
    And as the community grew, it had its upper middle class
    and upper class and straight middle class areas.
    When I lived there, it was in such flux
    that it depended upon the block you were in, just
    like parts of Manhattan.
    And it went from when I was a little tiny kid, predominantly
    English background, to Irish, to then Mediterranean groups
    and Jews around the fringes.
    And by the time I left, say, in 1941,
    '42, it was a sad, sad community, not because
    of the influx of groups, but because
    of what was happening to the infrastructure
    and so on and so forth-- overcrowded,
    and the houses were dilapidated, et cetera.
    You're probably familiar with the three-decker houses
    in Boston.
    There were economic problems.
    Of course, it was the Depression, which
    impinged upon the whole thing.
    And there were economic problems with people.
    There were sociological groups against groups.
    The Irish were-- in my family, even
    though I have a quarter Irish from my real father, who
    had died four or five years after I was born.
    Even though I had quarter Irish, my mother and others
    in the community, the English community,
    were as rigid against Irish almost as they were the Jews.
    Nobody knew why.
    In fact, I didn't really know, for example, a Jew
    until I was very mature--
    mature child, I mean.
    But I played with Irish kids all the time.
    And my entire background was formed
    by playing with a wide variety of people--
    playing with a wide variety of children.
    Can you tell me what your parents did for a living?
    You mentioned you lost your father when you were young.
    I assume from that there was a remarriage
    and you had a second father?
    My real father died as a result of mustard gas
    in his lungs that caught up with him
    years and years after the First World War.
    I never really knew my real father at all.
    Most of the time he was in the veterans hospital
    in his final years.
    My mother married a pharmacist managing the Edward Everett
    Square Pharmacy in Dorchester.
    And after they had been married a couple of years,
    he went into Eli Lilly and became one of their detail men.
    And he ate and not drank himself to death,
    because he only drank beer, but he let himself go to pot.
    And before long, he died of a massive coronary
    in 1939, just on the verge of becoming New England
    manager of Eli Lilly.
    He brought with him to the marriage two girls,
    and my mother had two boys, and between them they
    had two children of their own.
    It was quite a conglomeration.
    I spent most of my younger years, from 12 to 17,
    lusting after my stepsister--
    the younger one.
    That's about it.
    Where did you go to school and what
    were your favorite subjects?
    You're talking about undergraduate?
    I mean, yeah--
    Elementary.
    Elementary, et cetera.
    Went to a little Quincy Street school for primary grades.
    There were only three rooms--
    the kind of a place that was really--
    you just couldn't believe it.
    They did away with it, of course, a few years later.
    And then I went to the Mather School from the fourth on up.
    The Mather School was on Meeting House Hill.
    It still is there.
    I visited about two years ago and was astounded.
    Now, the Mather School was the first general public school
    in the country.
    And they changed the building of course.
    The building I went to was built in probably the late 1800s.
    I'm not sure.
    It was a very strict, authoritarian, punishing
    environment.
    At the same time, it was known as a good school system where
    you learn by rote, at least, even
    if it wasn't any other way.
    We moved in my later teens to Roslindale,
    which was an up step, and everyone
    breathed a sigh of relief.
    And then we moved from there to West Roxbury,
    which was at the outer fringe of Boston
    on the Dedham-Norwood-Needham-Newton
    border out there.
    And this was even better, but that was just about the time
    my stepfather died, and my mother went back
    to her penurious way of living.
    I think I've said about the whole bit there.
    When you were growing up, what did you
    think you want it to be as an adult?
    A writer.
    What kind of writing did you want to do?
    I had fiction in mind, but after my government career
    when I retired, nonfiction proved
    to be my biggest boon, although I've done a couple of novels
    for publication.
    And right now, I'm doing a non-fiction book
    which is my whole reason for living the past 20 or 30 years.
    Would you care to talk about that for just a moment?
    Just a quick word.
    About 23 years ago, I was taken into a meditation
    group in Gaithersburg by some very sophisticated people.
    And I learned a lot in it.
    I learned a lot about basic Kabbalism,
    Sufism, and the Masonic rites, and lots of others
    that have been pulled--
    the mystic tradition.
    And they never went for gobbledygook,
    or what might be called just pure crap today.
    You go to the new age sections of the bookstores
    and libraries, and it's all crapped up with junk--
    stuff that a sensible person could never really digest.
    So at any rate, this was meditation
    from the point of view of letting your subconscious meet
    the--
    getting in touch with your higher self, et cetera, et
    cetera.
    So I went from one stage to another
    and felt that someday, I would pull together what I recognized
    as being the best--
    the most important strains in all of these traditions
    going back thousands and thousands
    of years, put it together in my own book,
    and I've just started that book.
    Did you come from a religiously observant family?
    My mother sent us-- made sure that we
    started in the congregational church
    when we were practically babies.
    Me and my siblings went to Sunday school
    and went to the Boy Scouts in the church later on.
    We did everything, but my mother never participated and neither
    did my stepfather.
    I was never particularly religious.
    Indeed, when I hit college, I did what most of us do--
    we lost our organized religious feelings--
    any that were left.
    And we formulated either our new ones
    or became pure agnostics, et cetera, et cetera.
    So I suppose I leaned toward being a total agnostic
    by the time I was in the army.
    But then, by the time I reached the army--
    but then I had some experiences in the army which threw me
    right back again into a world in which I knew--
    knew in quotes-- that there was, after all, a central source
    and lots going on in the universe, et cetera,
    that most of us didn't recognize,
    and that you're left to infer and to get on faith by being
    in touch with certain things.
    If you want, when this is over and you have five minutes,
    I'll tell you about an amazing experience or two
    I had particularly in the army that's
    irrelevant to the Holocaust.
    On a lighter note, when you were a child,
    what did you do for fun?
    Oh, boy.
    I was a typical kid from the point
    of view of playing marbles and Relievio and all the games.
    And it was an environment which was totally different
    from today's kids.
    There was no supervision of them playing.
    Nobody had play dates or anything like that.
    It was a question of you went out with the kids,
    and that was it.
    And your mother called you for supper and so forth.
    We learned to play all sorts of games together.
    We learned to roam all over greater Boston in packs
    with the kids.
    And we went to Franklin Park and the Arnold Arboretum in Boston
    and had favorite places to go.
    And in the summer, we knew where there were good swimming holes
    in certain small creeks that flowed through
    the Charles River, the upper Charles River,
    and Mother's Brook and West Roxbury and so forth.
    I became interested in writing in high school
    and did a lot of that fiddling around myself,
    and knew I wanted to be a writer.
    But skipping ahead quickly, the army changed me
    into one of these silly attitudes about,
    oh, I got to do something in a government way
    and change the world.
    And so I went and studied government and economics
    in school and went into government first.
    So I had a pretty good career in the public health service
    as an economist, planner, administrative person.
    And when I retired from that, I immediately
    picked up the writing again, although I
    sold a novel while I was in the public health service.
    What was the name of the novel?
    Are you ready for this?
    It was called Sexmax.
    It was a Brave New World type in which
    every single need that people had was satisfied
    by the government.
    And one of the mainstreams was that the women who
    were widowed at age 50 and 60 were
    able to apply to the government for assignment of a young man
    to them.
    And the young men were drafted for this purpose.
    Rather than being drafted to kill,
    they were drafted to make themselves useful.
    To make love and not war.
    What languages did you speak when you were a teenager?
    Just English?
    Languages?
    Just purely English.
    Studied French and Latin in high school.
    Did you witness much antisemitism
    when you were growing up?
    In spades.
    Do you have some examples?
    Examples don't immediately come to mind.
    It was so all-prevalent.
    Just words and looks and feelings
    on the parts of people who had pretty limited
    lives and didn't know where to put their frustrations.
    And you heard slights all the time, all the time.
    And indeed, when I met my wife--
    and I had come back from the army
    and met my wife, who was Jewish--
    Jewish family-- my mother, I suppose,
    did the best she could to be pleasant and like Phyllis.
    And there were times when it worked out fine.
    But generally speaking, particularly
    in the early stages, I got subtle chaff from my mother.
    I got less-than-subtle chaff from Phyllis's family.
    You know all the stories there.
    What do you remember hearing or reading about Hitler's rise
    to power and events in Germany?
    I assume you mean before I went into the army?
    Before the war.
    Very, very little.
    We recognized as being a threat to Europe peace,
    and everyone held their breath from that point of view
    in the late '30s.
    But it's Hitler's antipathy or singling out the Jews
    was a relatively new thing when I came into the army.
    I don't even remember hearing about Kristallnacht,
    for example, although probably I did, and it went right
    over my head.
    What was happening in your life in 1939 and 1940?
    I graduated from high school and went to a Sunday school teacher
    training at Durham, New Hampshire, the college town.
    And I said, my god, this is college?
    This is great.
    This is for me.
    Nobody in my family had ever mentioned it.
    So I started the low way.
    The only way I could do it was Boston University at night.
    I did that for a year, and then went
    to Suffolk University days, working two part-time jobs.
    And I'm starting to get emotional already.
    I guess my emotionalism is based more
    upon old memories in general than it
    is the combat and Mauthausen that I thought.
    I'm not sure.
    At any rate, I went to Suffolk days
    and worked two part-time jobs.
    And one of the jobs I had had my first year,
    when I was going to BU nights, was interesting,
    because my mother immediately sent me
    to her brother George, who was treasurer of the State Street
    Trust back in the days when banks were banks.
    You know what I mean?
    [INAUDIBLE]
    Huh?
    [INAUDIBLE]
    Big, big organizations, and being treasurer was something.
    Today, they have these little branches around,
    and everybody's an assistant treasurer.
    There are no secretaries and administrative assistants
    anymore.
    They're administrators.
    At any rate, she sent me to George,
    and I went into his walnut-paneled office,
    and he referred me to Esterbrook and Company,
    which is a very classy, upscale--
    the upscale stock brokerage on State Street,
    just right there off of Washington on State.
    And I became a board runner with messages
    around and so on and so forth.
    And I came across antisemitism there personally,
    because I remember an old-- a very nice woman--
    nice woman that I liked.
    And all of a sudden, I'm on the edge of a conversation,
    and she's saying something to the other woman.
    And she's saying something about,
    shh, you'd better be quiet, you don't know who is these days.
    And I realized from something else that
    came out a minute later that they were talking about me
    being possibly Jewish, and they'd better not
    go on with their probably insulting statements
    or touching statements, anyway.
    So that hit home.
    That hit home.
    I didn't, of course, react at all.
    And my step father-- bless his heart-- was with a guy--
    I'm going back years now beforehand--
    was a guy who was very rough around the edges
    and had lots and lots of problems.
    But bless his heart, he did lots of things for me.
    He gave me a male figure when I needed it.
    Even though I didn't have a close relationship with him,
    there was that male figure.
    And he bought one year a big, big saw and so forth--
    electric apparatus down in the cellar.
    And a friend of his was a Jewish pharmacist named Yarosh.
    And he was one of the first-- this was back
    when I was younger.
    And he was one of the first mature Jewish men
    I'd ever seen.
    And I was so impressed back then with the delicacy
    of his features and his eyes and everything.
    The man was absolutely impressive as all hell.
    And i remember, we crowded around the door
    to look downstairs in the cellar to see what a Jew looked like.
    And as I remember him-- and I do have a memory of his face--
    he was a good example--
    and I don't know where you're coming from.
    It makes no difference to me as far as what I'm about to say.
    He was a good example of having one leg back
    in the greatness of the Jews thousands of years ago.
    I don't mean that they're not great today.
    I mean that they were once even more impressive.
    They came out of situations in Europe
    and Central Asia that is not in our history books--
    not in history books at all.
    And so as I say, I was very impressed with it.
    And then I became impressed with my stepfather,
    that he would have a friend like this.
    So you were finishing high school
    and starting college around the times
    that Austria was being annexed and Hitler
    was beginning to expand.
    I was wondering if you can remember how that was treated
    by the United States media or if it
    was discussed in any of your classes at school or anything
    like that.
    Do you have any recollection at all of those events?
    I don't recall it being discussed in school,
    because I don't think they figured
    they were prepared for it.
    And I never took a course on current events or anything
    like that.
    If they did say anything, it was offhand, and then I forget.
    Do you want me to turn up the heat?
    The papers reported pretty straightly--
    annexation and Chamberlain doing this and so on and so forth.
    And I remember that the personal feelings
    on my part, on my mother's part, and most people
    that I heard talk about it were always personal.
    We were afraid of being caught up in another war, particularly
    those who had--
    people all around me had one leg back in the First World War.
    And they were deathly afraid of this.
    My mother broke into tears many, many times about,
    oh, I don't want to see you boys go off
    and die like my husband did, your father did,
    et cetera, et cetera.
    So there was that.
    The Jewish theme was not played up in the papers
    particularly at all.
    Austria certainly wasn't.
    Poland-- no.
    Kristallnacht, as I said, I forget about.
    I don't really have a memory of that.
    Maybe I was too young.
    When was that? '33?
    '32-'33, which meant I was 10, 11 years old.
    And let's see-- you were about three years old, weren't you?
    At any rate, I think I've shot my bolt on that subject.
    I want to stress again the personal nature--
    people saw things through their own skin and their own eyes,
    which is true in the war, which is true everywhere,
    which is true now.
    I'm trying to understand if you're telling me that you
    were not particularly alarmed.
    Other than the possibility of American
    involvement when it came to the invasion of Poland,
    for example, in the onset of the war,
    am I understanding you correctly?
    Was that pretty much the extent of the reaction of yourself
    and the people around you, that when Hitler invaded Poland,
    the main concern was that America
    would become involved possibly?
    I would have to say that that was the leading feeling.
    I don't think that anyone was, in my circles
    or in my family or anything, for Hitler at all.
    I don't mean that.
    I mean they recognized him as being a monomaniac and war
    lover and so forth.
    But people pretty well personalized it.
    I just can't overemphasize that at all.
    It was a personal thing.
    I was afraid.
    I didn't want my young life interrupted
    with that sort of stuff.
    And my mother was deathly afraid of it, crying again.
    And--
    You mentioned the reaction toward Hitler.
    What about the reactions in this country regarding
    Stalin, because Hitler and Stalin had
    signed a non-aggression pact?
    Did that set up any red flags as far as you can remember?
    I remember it as being thought of as a stab in the back
    and two dictators getting together.
    I think that there was more feeling over those years
    anyway.
    Proceeding is against Russia probably because of propaganda
    on the part of some people and so on, and partly
    for very real reasons about what Stalin was doing.
    Although just like Hitler, the real stories
    of what would happen as a result of Stalin's influence
    and Hitler's influence didn't come out until
    much later, much later.
    When the time came for--
    when we were in the war, I think that fear of Russia--
    this was before the stuff about the camps ad become obvious--
    the fear of Russia was greater than the fear of Germany.
    Definitely-- a fear of Russia.
    During the period of time between the beginning
    of the war in September of '39 and Pearl Harbor,
    how did the war in Europe impact your personal life experience?
    Again, personal-- I had my own agenda,
    which was to get college and to be a writer
    and to have some kind of a life in addition
    to that, when all young men would want and engage in,
    et cetera, et cetera, going places, et cetera.
    For a long time in that period, I
    was social chairman of the young group at church.
    And so I threw dances that joined five churches
    in the West Roxbury Roslindale area in a group,
    and we invited them to the dances and so on and so forth.
    And we had trips from on the Provincetown steel pier
    ship and other events that we planned.
    I was caught up in these things.
    These things were, in the long run, more important to me,
    except for the fear of the headlines.
    I hate to sound shallow, but that was it.
    When you look back on your life before American involvement
    in the war, is there anything else
    that stands out in your mind about your life
    before World War II and the United States'
    involvement in World War II?
    Anything else?
    I can't think of anything that's worth putting out now.
    Minutia, but my life consisted of the things I said.
    And I didn't really snap to until some events
    during the war and afterward made
    a different person out of me--
    really, a different person.
    Not just more maturity, but changed me
    within the context of who I am--
    whatever I mean by that.
    All right, we're going to pause, and I'm going to flip the tape.
    The state's Holocaust Memorial Museum
    volunteer collection interview with George Leonard.
    This is tape number one, side B. When
    did you first learn about the attack on Pearl Harbor?
    Most people can say that they remember it quite vividly.
    When did you hear about Pearl?
    I remember the occasion very, very vividly,
    because I had been working that afternoon
    in the church mimeographing a newsletter to all
    the young people around.
    So I got hold of the news around two
    or three o'clock our time in the afternoon.
    And right away again, personal--
    what's going to happen to me?
    What's going to happen to me and my friends?
    What's going to happen to America?
    And a sidelight on this is that the one person I was closest to
    during the whole combat experience, Captain
    [? Kirkabou, ?] had been an enlisted non-commissioned
    officer at Pearl Harbor in the regular army.
    And he was a man without education
    and without any softening effects
    that you usually get in civilization.
    But he turned out to be not only a magnificent officer
    in combat, but a great guy who was--
    I don't-- do you want-- is it all right if I tell you about
    a scene in Mauthausen with him now,
    or should I let that go to later?
    Leave it for later.
    OK.
    We'll get to your experiences in Mauthausen with him later.
    But when you heard about Pearl Harbor, what
    was its immediate impact on your life?
    Impact in my life was--
    immediate impact was nothing except personal fear
    and wonderment, et cetera.
    The more long-range, that is in the ensuing months,
    and I don't recall exactly when, I
    enlisted in the enlisted reserve and expected them to take me up
    right away.
    But they said they have the right
    to do what they wanted to do with the enlisted reserve
    people, so they said, stay at Suffolk for a while, at least
    until you finish the year.
    So I finished the year, and then I wrote to them.
    And I said, here, here, come take me.
    I'm through.
    And they ignored me, and they ignored me
    until the fall of that year, which was 1942.
    When they did take you, what was your basic training
    and your initiation into the military?
    What was that experience like?
    It was pretty strong.
    I stayed at Fort Devens for a while, being bored,
    but then they sent me down to Fort McClellan, Alabama,
    which had been written about by Walter Winchell as being
    a hellhole of America, and had the usual basic training there
    in the cold mud, which in the long run was--
    I wouldn't want to do it again, but it was good for me,
    damn good.
    How long was your basic training?
    Started out at six weeks, but I think it went to closer to 12
    by the time they finished.
    From there, they shipped me to the sixth motorized division
    in the California desert, which was training to go to Japan,
    the islands, et cetera.
    All the training was motivated toward that.
    And I had been with them for a while
    in the desert, eating sand and so forth, and all of a sudden,
    a Jeep came up one day with a lieutenant and a sergeant
    in it.
    And the sergeant jumped out and said, are you George Leonard?
    And I said, yeah.
    And he said, you were ordered to go
    at oh-something o'clock tomorrow morning to Stanford University.
    This was almost the first I had heard
    of army specialized training.
    Do you know about it?
    Which was a program to train young men particularly
    for a long war.
    They feared that they were going to be light on officers
    and occupiers later on, and so they got this mammoth program
    of giving you a full semester of basic engineering
    or there were other--
    there was medicine, for example, with some lucky to get in it--
    basic engineering in three months.
    So I was there in the program.
    I went from Stanford to University of California
    at Berkeley, where I had the training.
    Stanford was only for a couple of weeks.
    And nine months, three full semesters,
    and then all of a sudden, they disbanded the program totally
    and sent us to--
    most of us in that particular unit
    in California-- to the 11th Armored Division, which
    was in Camp Cooke, California.
    I must say that one of the most important aspects
    of the training was not only the physics, math, and calculus,
    and stuff like that, and chemistry,
    but it was a course that they had,
    and most people just overlooked it completely,
    and they overlook it today.
    They don't really know what it must have been for.
    It was a course designed to teach us
    the sociology, psychology, geography,
    et cetera of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, all
    those Asian republics.
    And the purpose could only have been,
    well, these armored divisions are
    going to go on into Central Asia and take it all over.
    Then the rest of the story, of course,
    there is that in the fall of that year,
    we were shipped to England.
    And when the Bulge started, we were--
    Battle of the Bulge-- we were shipped across the channel.
    Tell me about the trip from the States over to Europe
    and then into the actual theater of war.
    When did you leave?
    We left for England sometime in the summer of '44,
    stayed in England until something like late November,
    and were shipped across the channel when
    the Battle of the Bulge occurred.
    The trip over on the boat was not a nice experience at all.
    I mean, we were down on the hull of the ship and the air was bad
    and the food was bad and everything.
    The only important thing that happened to me
    was that I asked one of the sergeants
    how you bet in shooting craps, and he told me
    to always bet against the dice.
    And I misunderstood, and I bet with the dice,
    and I won something like $1,000 and gave it
    to the first sergeant to keeping the company safe
    or for something or other like that.
    When I got to England, I sent about three quarters of it
    back to my mother, and then used the rest of it
    on splurges in London.
    When you arrived in England, what
    was your rank and your duties and your responsibilities?
    When I arrived in England, I was a private first class--
    a rifleman.
    I guess the military occupation specialty was 750--
    I forget.
    Rifleman with a subheading of machine gun.
    That was it.
    As a rifleman, I'd become expert in stripping down a rifle,
    putting it back together, cleaning it,
    et cetera, et cetera.
    Who was your commanding officer, and who were some
    of the members of your unit?
    Commanding officer was a guy named--
    don't recall his name now, but he's
    the one who, going up the hill after we first got
    bombarded by Tiger tanks in Belgium--
    he was the one that got the bullet right through the head.
    And the first lieutenant of the company,
    Lieutenant [? Kirkabou, ?] became immediately the captain.
    And when he couldn't find Labadie, the sociopath,
    he yelled for me to get him in the command half track
    and be his company runner.
    What does it mean to be the company runner?
    What exactly is that?
    Company runner-- it's a variety of functions--
    predominantly to stay close to the captain
    and maintain communications with the platoon lieutenants,
    or in our case, the platoon lieutenants
    get killed off too quickly.
    They were platoon sergeants--
    and to keep contact through walkie talkie type.
    And in the half track on the move,
    to get from division headquarters
    by radio, the code for the next day's march--
    translate that code, make sure that the captain got it,
    and advise him as the company moved forward--
    advising meaning the road signs, in many cases,
    were all bollixed up on purpose and things like that.
    And you had to use some ingenuity or sense
    to know which way you were going, things like that.
    And this was particularly important for us,
    because our company and battalion turned out
    to be the point, pretty much, of the division.
    And the division turned out to be the point of Patton's Third
    Army.
    The exception to that was when the 4th Armored,
    which was the most magnificent Armored Division in Europe--
    I have to give them credit.
    They had been through France and Italy and France
    and everything.
    The 4th Armored was superb.
    They were on a tangent with us like that moving forward.
    But other times, we were the point like that,
    and the foot infantry would be coming sometimes
    50 miles behind mopping up towns that we had bypassed,
    et cetera, et cetera.
    We just went like wildfire sometimes.
    And it was a hair raising experience,
    but at the same time, it was exhilarating,
    et cetera, et cetera.
    When you say the point, let me make sure I'm understanding.
    You're saying that you were the first to arrive?
    The point, meaning the division.
    The division might move ahead like an arrow,
    and the point would be responsible for meeting
    the enemy and dealing with it first.
    And the most dangerous job in the whole army,
    practically, was to be reconnaissance.
    And our combat command--
    there were two combatant commands in the reserve--
    combat A and B--
    our combat command had its own reconnaissance,
    which meant guys that would sometimes
    go forward not just in armored vehicles, but in Jeeps--
    we called them peeps--
    and go until they met the enemy.
    And more than once, we'd be going
    along a road as the point of the army,
    and find a wrecked Jeep with bodies on the road.
    You see how dangerous that job was?
    When they discovered the enemy, they'd usually
    be dead, that sort of thing.
    I met a few of these guys--
    the ones that lived.
    Phyllis and I met them.
    She came with me to the first reunion I've ever been to.
    Never went to an army--
    11th Armored Division reunion.
    We went to Reno last August, and it was very interesting.
    Were there any Jews in your unit?
    What?
    Any Jews in your unit?
    Yes, ma'am.
    I didn't know any of these guys and almost any in the reunion,
    because the ones I knew in my company had been killed off
    or were dead by then.
    But there were a few from recon and a few from the tanks
    and a few from artillery and so forth there.
    And the guy that befriended Phyllis and me, him
    and his wife--
    he was Jewish, and he had been an officer back then.
    And the officer-- and I think his name was Abrams--
    who commanded the 21st Armored Infantry
    Battalion when the whole battalion moved together--
    he'd get out in front of the tank--
    a Jewish officer, a colonel--
    and stand up in the turret and a gung ho guy.
    Let's go like this.
    He was magnificent.
    I can't praise him too much.
    There was a guy named Jacobson who
    had been my first sergeant in the States
    when I first joined the 11th.
    Jacobson-- he owned a taxi company in Albany.
    And he was a five striper, which was the typical rank
    for the platoon sergeants.
    There'd be lieutenant over them.
    Five stripes for-- he was a five striper.
    And he used to do things for me, and I wondered why.
    And it went on like this.
    He was favoritism galore.
    And something happened, and he said to me, you're not Jewish?
    he said.
    I thought you was a Heb.
    He really thought I was Jewish, which
    is why he had caught on to me.
    I must add that when the army specialized training
    guys flooded into the division and filled up the empty slots,
    that there were a lot of Jewish boys in that group.
    I wouldn't say a significant number,
    but there were quite a few.
    And they helped 11.
    Some of the notes I've made, as a matter of fact,
    show that our company consisted of three or four major groups.
    One is the old, hard-bitten, grizzled guy who had been with
    them since Camp Polk, Louisiana--
    was usually in his mid-upper 20s, sometimes early 30s.
    Tough-- I'm generalizing-- tough, et cetera.
    Another group consisted of the ASTP that came in,
    like me, who tended to be certainly
    more intellectual and capable, because you had
    to have a certain grade in the army general classification
    test in order to get into it, which is the only criteria they
    had for me when they came out in the desert and said,
    you're going to Stanford tomorrow morning.
    It was the AGCT test result. That was all.
    At any rate, there were those two groups
    plus the third group-- by the time the war ended,
    all of the kids that had come in from replacement depots
    and so forth, replacing the ones that got killed and wounded.
    So you had some major factions there
    which colored how Mauthausen was dealt with.
    Now, if you were in one faction, you
    tended to have one feeling--
    this is a big generality, a really big generality,
    but you can make some safe generalities.
    And so at any rate, if you were ASTP,
    army specialized training, you tended
    to have a greater understanding of what was going on
    with the camps, and you tended to be more oriented
    toward doing something consciously instead of trying
    to get out of something, et cetera.
    Did you witness any antisemitism in the army?
    Do you mean that personally, or--
    Did you see it?
    Did I see it?
    Yeah, but not much, nothing much.
    Coming back on the boat--
    I was shipped because I had a lot of points
    through a Bronze Star and a Purple
    Heart and a few other things.
    And I had more points than most in my division,
    and they shipped me to the 79th Infantry Division
    in Kitzingen, which was ready to go home.
    And coming back on that boat, I met and worked
    with a lot of guys who were Jewish, because at that point,
    they shoved me into a clerical situation
    because of a minimum of college I had had and so forth.
    And the 79th needed that, for some reason.
    And I found Jewish guys galore.
    And they were good-naturedly dealt with among that class,
    the clerical class.
    And good friends, and I never really saw antisemitism
    among those groups.
    I remember playing bridge with them
    on the deck, stripped to our waist,
    coming back in December, because of the warmth, because of the--
    what are the Zephyr breezes called
    coming up from the Caribbean at that time of year?
    I'll think of it in a minute.
    Before you got to England and then into the fighting,
    what did you know about the treatment of the Jews
    under Hitler?
    Before the fighting, very little.
    We've been told in army films, orientation films, something
    about it.
    We had been told that there was antisemitism
    and that they were losing their rights, things like that,
    and there had been uprisings like in Kristallnacht.
    I did find out about it then.
    But the camps were not really talked about or even
    much known.
    I'm sure that some people knew about it,
    but it didn't reach us.
    It didn't reach us.
    Now, I'm going to ask you to go through your combat experiences
    from when you got into the fighting.
    If you could please walk me through the steps
    that you took across Europe and some of the battles
    that you were engaged in.
    Well, the baptism of fire, I've mentioned it consisted of our--
    Company C was leading the division that day.
    And we hit the crossroads where the German Tiger
    tanks were zeroed in.
    And zeroing in, of course, is a process
    whereby they keep on shooting and a spotter
    with field glasses tells them with where they're landing.
    Go 20 yards to the right.
    Go third-- blah, blah, blah.
    So they zeroed in that point, and we came across there.
    They gave us all hell.
    And half tracks were getting hit, and so on and so forth.
    And I jumped out of the track, went over here
    into one of the early holes that had been made by the 88,
    and stayed down there with my face down.
    And when I came up something like 20 minutes later,
    that was the most horrible experience, of course,
    I had ever been in-- that one right there.
    I was to hit worse experiences than that,
    but that was it to that date.
    When I came up, the guy--
    one of the track drivers, a lovely, lovely guy
    who had loaned me his suitcase when
    I went home on furlough just before the company shipped
    out--
    he was up against a track with his head
    bashed in from a shell.
    Things like that.
    But we didn't have time for anything
    except jump in the track, a track that's functioning,
    and get out of there, and go on.
    And that was when we came up a hill and the real captain
    got a bullet through his head going up that hill.
    And then when going down another hill, the smoke screen, the one
    I told you about, and John Doles came in the picture.
    For four days and four nights, it
    was a question of going from one scene like that to another,
    and all night long staying up, grabbing naps
    with someone else, staying awake, that type of thing.
    And cold, cold, cold--
    this cold seeps in you when you live with it.
    And all you've got is some C-rations mostly,
    which is wrapped stuff.
    And after four days and four nights,
    they pulled us back and sent us to a place in Belgium
    where there were houses standing and it was relatively peaceful.
    And we just went around and sifted through the houses,
    taking rooms where we could.
    And we had a very delightful experience
    there with a mother and her daughter
    and a husband who were very sweet to us.
    And life became almost normal for a couple of days--
    three days.
    And then they shipped us off again,
    and this was just as hair-raising as the first--
    just as hair-raising.
    And there was one example where one of these jerky type higher
    officers came up from behind and said,
    we're going to attack in half tracks, which nobody had ever
    heard of.
    And the half tracks went in staggered situation
    over the brow of a hill, this one there,
    and then the next one come up, the next one come up.
    And Tiger tanks were off in the woods about 200 yards away.
    And they started-- and I was on the fifth track,
    the headquarters track, which had started out
    as the first one.
    But the three or four on the left had gone a little faster,
    and now they were one, two, three, and more.
    And the Tiger tank started picking them off.
    And I watched as the guy, our half track driver,
    put it in reverse quickly, as quick as he could.
    In the meantime, some of our guys
    are either dead, wounded, or being taken prisoner.
    And I watched a German motion to a couple of guys
    from the next track who had jumped out
    not to go that direction, but to go that direction with them.
    And that was a hair-raising experience.
    We lost permanently two or three tracks, I think.
    Couldn't be started again or the treads were ruined.
    And had to go on lower--
    what do you call it?
    No, I think we took from reserve.
    We took some half tracks from reserve.
    You always have a combat command A, combat command B,
    and a combat command in reserve.
    So we took two or three of their tracks.
    From there, we went toward the Siegfried Line
    after many, many days more mopping up.
    And we mopped up in one town--
    I think it Chenogne in Belgium, just beyond Bastogne, or just
    south of Bastogne.
    By this time, the guys who had been holed up there and kept
    by the Germans were all freed and the situation was normal.
    We took this town and stayed in it at night.
    And at about 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning,
    horrible firing occurs, and we run upstairs and look out.
    And in the darkness, we see the tracer bullets going over
    our heads.
    Tracer are the lit-up bullets--
    coming from up there, and the Germans are counterattacking.
    And boy, oh boy, did we get out of there.
    And as we went out, the 101st Airborne Division paratroopers
    are coming up in the darkness on either side of the street,
    trying to retake the town.
    And they retook it, but then we found out later
    that they had been brutalized and driven out again.
    So we went on toward the Siegfried Line
    after all of these experiences.
    And this is all a clear cut situation
    of just pure combat, no example of coming across civilians
    in distress, like in camps or anything like that at all.
    It's just pure combat.
    And we come in to [? Herscheid, ?]
    Germany, and we bunk up in houses.
    And I'm delivering messages for the captain.
    And it's pitch dark at night, and I'm delivering messages
    through the woody area, and I come across a single file
    of men with no helmets on.
    And you could barely see in the darkness like this--
    barely see-- starlight or something.
    And I go up to the rear one and touch him
    on the shoulder to ask him whether he's company C or what.
    And it turns out to be a German patrol.
    And I absolutely defecated in my pants,
    practically, and dived off the side of the road
    into the woods.
    And there was all kinds of shooting.
    And I kept on going like this, like this, like this,
    and came across a series of houses.
    Went into a house and found that it
    was the headquarters that night of an infantry division which
    was alongside of us.
    And they--
    I'm sorry, I have to interrupt you,
    because we're about to run out of tape.
    Just one moment.
    The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Volunteer
    Collection interview with George Leonard.
    This is tape 2, side A. And you have been telling me
    about encountering a German patrol
    and then making your way away from them.
    The Americans I contacted were not my own division or company,
    and they would not believe that I was an American because there
    had been many, many, many Germans, particularly
    back a few miles.
    And the experience of the Bulge, many Germans
    who had been found in American uniforms
    and speaking perfect English and confusing the situation
    terribly, and were responsible probably
    for many American deaths.
    Any rate, to make a long story short, they wouldn't believe me
    and they asked me questions over and over again,
    and they weren't satisfied with that.
    So I said, well, take me back to my captain
    and he'll identify me.
    Well, they did and Captain [? Kirkabeau ?] identified me.
    The next morning, we kicked off at around 4 or 5 o'clock
    in the morning in the darkness without any pre-bombardment.
    No artillery, no nothing.
    Just quietly.
    No vehicles, no nothing toward the Siegfried Line, the hill.
    And it was a terrible, terrible experience
    because they had booby trapped the entire side
    of the hill we were walking up in the darkness.
    And the booby traps were called bouncing Bettys.
    The bouncing Bettys, when you tripped a wire,
    would bounce up about three or four feet high and go off.
    And there were cries of medic, medic, medic,
    and so on and so forth.
    And gradually, we kept on going through.
    Miraculously, I didn't trip any wires nice
    had no problem in that regard.
    And finally, we got to the side of the hill
    that we were going to dig in on.
    And there were lots of prisoners being sent back at that point
    to get to the rear, just down the road,
    with their hands on head.
    Nobody had the time to usher them or anything.
    And the Germans we found there were particularly
    glad to be out of it.
    They weren't going to make any trouble.
    They were wrecked pillboxes on the Siegfried Line.
    They were wrecked because the Air Force
    had bombed them repeatedly.
    And the company took up a wrecked pillbox
    as its headquarters, and one for medical cases, wounded.
    And we dug in, started to dig in, and shale rock.
    And when dawn came, there were still
    guys that weren't anywhere near dug in
    yet because of the hardness and shale,
    and it was cold and miserable.
    The side of the hill that we were on
    was a defilade position, meaning that as you
    go to it toward the top of the hill,
    you could see over the surrounding countryside,
    but we were down and back of that, which
    means a defilade position.
    And the 88s, most of them, the 88 Our artillery--
    it was not artillery.
    It's a tank gun shells used by the Germans--
    would mostly go over the top of the hill and away, down back.
    But enough of them landed right alongside side of the hill,
    there whereby we were constantly getting bombarded,
    constantly having casualties.
    And the captain was getting increasingly
    furious over not having tank support
    or anything at that point.
    Radioed back, and the tanks did not
    want to come up because they were
    afraid of getting lambasted with the German equivalent
    of the bazooka, which was a very strong anti-tank shell.
    The bazooka looked like one of those big musical instruments,
    a long, hollow tube, and it rested on two men shoulders
    in order to fire.
    At any rate, Captain [? Kirkabeau ?]
    was so angry that he said that he
    was going to go back and fight with the battalion headquarters
    over not having proper--
    this was after two or three days, by the way,
    after two or three days of taking constant mortar
    and fire, what we call Screaming Mimi fire, which
    I keep motioning with my hands.
    I'm sorry.
    Screaming Mimi fire, which is a particular rocket,
    which made a weird sound as it came down.
    And General 88 and small arms fire a machine gun fire,
    and Germans creeping on their stomach up toward us.
    At any rate, he told me to make sure
    that I got to all of the platoon sergeants and lieutenants,
    and tell them--
    and he gave me specific instructions
    to each one about what they were supposed to do--
    and to tell them that he would be back up later after fighting
    with the commander of the battalion
    to get some tank support and other support.
    So I started going from hole to hole.
    I had reached the third platoon hole with one
    to go when a mortar fire came in and small arms fire
    at the same time.
    And I jumped into the hole, practically
    breaking the leg of a sergeant that was in there,
    and started telling him about the instructions.
    It was daylight at that point.
    And he turned me around and he said,
    you've got blood on the back of your jacket.
    I said, well, I don't feel anything.
    He said, well, let me look.
    And he looked and he said, well, you've
    got some sort of a penetrating wound there.
    And he said you've, got shrapnel bits over parts of your skin,
    which I didn't feel either.
    So he said, well, you better go to the aid station, which
    is the wrecked pillbox about 50 yards over there.
    So I said, OK, I will, but I got to get this fourth message
    to the last platoon and it's on the way.
    Oh, no problem.
    It's on the way.
    So I did it, got to finally reach the aid station.
    The aid station had a Jeep coming up
    with two other guys in it, and they stuck me on the back
    and they took off for a rear town,
    where I got hot food and everything.
    It was great again.
    The doctor said something about-- well,
    he said it's a penetrating wound,
    but we don't want to take any chances with it.
    And they picked out some of the shrapnel bits that
    were here and there, and it was no big deal at all.
    And I found out later that the sergeant
    I'd been talking to in the third platoon
    had put me for the Silver Star with the words,
    "without regard for"--
    I'm laughing here, not crying--
    "without regard for my life," et cetera, et cetera.
    I did this, that, and the other thing, which I candidly
    say was not really true.
    I felt a little bit better when the awards committee--
    I found out later, when we were in Australia
    at the end of the war, the awards committee
    felt that they had not enough--
    what do you call it?
    Corroboration.
    Corroboration is exactly the right word.
    Corroboration, so they knocked it down to a Bronze Star,
    and I was happy anyway.
    So I was off the line for seven weeks.
    And when I came back, the division,
    our battalion, anyway, was in the German city of Worms.
    Worms, W-O-R-M-S, on the Rhine.
    And we stayed there two or three days
    and then kicked off again for Frankfurt, Darmstadt,
    and other points.
    At that point, it became a different war.
    It was not a question of slogging
    horrible, horrible battles, in which it was practically--
    I never experienced man to man fighting, thank God,
    but it was the closest thing to that, where you actually
    saw the Germans and you were getting fired on,
    and it was really wicked.
    Now it became a question of getting out on the highway
    and stopping and having a run and gun fight
    and getting shells, and so forth,
    but you weren't holed up for three or four days in a row
    in miserable weather, and things like that.
    We went up, as I remember, to Erfurt, Gotha, those cities,
    in the northern part of just above Bavaria.
    And all of a sudden, we had some opposition there
    in each one of those places.
    And then we turned quickly down a little bit
    over toward the Czech border, and then
    down to Graff and [? Mor, ?] and so forth,
    and ultimately Passau, German city,
    before we went into Austria.
    The fear was always great.
    We had problems at night of counter attacks.
    We were counterattacked in Oberhof
    and in the [? Thoringenvald. ?] And the counterattacks
    are fearful because you never know where they're coming from
    or never know in what way they, what
    form they're going to take.
    And I had an experience in Oberhof,
    not only the experience of my guide mentor,
    John Doles, tapping me on the heel
    and helping me come through it.
    But we were there two days, and on the second morning,
    I heard from the--
    most of our squads were all around the town, ringing
    in the town, protecting the tanks,
    protecting against counterattacks.
    The captain and I were holed up in a house, where
    we heard about a house nearby where 30 or 40 German kids had
    been sent to get them away from the Ruhr
    and other bombing centers, Dresden and Ruhr,
    places like that.
    Just like in England.
    They sent the English kids to places in the country.
    And so it seemed logical.
    The captain supported the idea of filling my helmet
    with C-rations, chocolate, things like that.
    And I went over and knocked on the door,
    and this very hostile, stiff, young lady answered.
    And I told her who I was.
    She was like a governess to this group.
    And she said, come in.
    So I went in, dumped the chocolate on the table.
    And the kids were brought in and they all stood around,
    and she said something to them, a signal.
    And they all said, Heil Hitler, with their hands raised.
    And I just turned and walked out,
    and that was the end of that.
    So there was still feeling on their part,
    on some of their part, particularly
    some of the younger people.
    We went into a town north of Passau,
    where the captain and I and the driver and the big radio
    operator, Lucas Sevich, were billeted.
    And usually, we were told, in no uncertain terms,
    to kick the people out regardless.
    Just get rid of them.
    No civilians in the house with you.
    But there were five or six young women,
    who later it came out that they were either the wives
    or mistresses of SS officers, high ranking SS officers,
    who had been brought down from northern areas.
    And one of them was a Dutch young woman,
    beautiful, absolutely gorgeous.
    So the captain said, well, they can sleep in the attic.
    So then we made up plans for guard duty,
    and I had the first shift of two hours.
    By then it was about midnight.
    Two hours, 12:00 to 2:00.
    And I'm on guard duty and everyone else is sleeping.
    And the Dutch girl tiptoes downstairs and tries
    to inveigled me to come up.
    And I am absolutely--
    I tell this anecdote to show the fear
    and frozen this that you can go through.
    Even if I had been willing to, I wouldn't
    have been capable of even making love with her or anything
    by having sex, and I just dismissed her and told her
    to get her neck back upstairs.
    Then we went down to Passau.
    And by then, all along the road, we
    were getting signs of the Holocaust.
    We were getting stripen clad people on the road,
    begging, climbing all over the half-track, looking for food.
    We gave them what we had, which, as I said before,
    was not a good idea because of their real needs.
    You have to be careful, of course, with people who
    have been starved or something.
    But these people were not starved like the ones
    in the concentration camp.
    These were ones who were real work camps.
    They were generally healthier, but just plain hungry
    because they had flowed out of their camps
    with the coming of the Americans,
    and the SS were starting to save their skins and leave.
    It got worse and worse and worse.
    I mean, more and more were on the road,
    and orders came that we would not, under any circumstances,
    let them come in the track.
    We were not to give them food because there already
    had been word passed back to echelons to bring up
    extra kitchens and bring our best nurses.
    I've got to say, and I'll say this later again,
    as a group, the most magnificent group I came across,
    if you've got it categorized by group and make generalizations,
    were the American nurses.
    Several miles west of Mauthausen,
    somewhere in between Passau and Mauthausen,
    word came by radio that Mauthausen existed.
    They described what they could of the camp,
    that is, many, many, many thousands
    were in there they knew and it had
    the reputation of being one of the three worst death camps.
    The 41st cavalry and reconnaissance groups
    in our division, with some moving armored vehicles
    and the usual Jeeps and everything,
    had come across some SS men leaving.
    Saw them a few miles away.
    They engaged in a running gunfight,
    and they took loads of prisoners.
    The prisoners were sent back in some way.
    I forget how they were dealt with.
    At any rate, the reconnaissance wanted
    to make sure that we understood that the camp was
    there exactly where it was, and the fact that the SS seemed
    to have left.
    We got the word because, again, we're
    point of the whole division.
    And I don't know why our battalion was
    the point of the whole division so much, but it was.
    We were told to regroup down the road a ways from Mauthausen
    and make a military presence, and go in there
    and restore order.
    The 41st cavalry, and others up there on the scene,
    had said that they couldn't do anything.
    They weren't equipped to do it.
    And all they could do was go on and protect the area
    like reconnaissance, reconnoiter,
    like they'd been doing.
    So our job was to go up there and bring order and bring those
    who had been spilled out from the camp back into the camp,
    release the immediate environs.
    So we did it, and there was three tanks
    in front of the half-tracks.
    OK, we're back.
    We had a brief interruption when someone came to your door.
    You were talking about the three tanks in front of a half-track
    and then the door stopped.
    When the division got word of the presence of Mauthausen,
    the orders were being given us by radio from battalion.
    The tracks and tanks behind us were all
    stopped along the road, and Captain [? Kirkabeau ?]
    made sure that two or three tanks
    came up ahead of the half-tracks and that all of the men
    dismounted from the tracks.
    And they were ordered to march up to the camp,
    holding their rifles at port arms,
    to make sure that everyone understood
    that it was a military situation and that the Russian explosion
    in the camp, which we had heard about, was to be quelled.
    In other words, the Russian prisoners in the camp
    were taking over things and then exploding
    and being authoritarian, et cetera, et cetera.
    So all these considerations, plus the possibility
    that there were some SS or other guards left behind,
    had to be planned for and dealt with.
    I want to skip this for one second.
    I go back to tell about something that happened
    between Passau and Mauthausen.
    The captain and I were holed up in a house with no other person
    present.
    The driver was taking care of his half-tracks in place,
    and so on and so forth.
    Well, we were alone, and a knock came at the door, one
    that we least expected.
    Because although we had a firefight the day before,
    we did not dream that there was anyone, any of the enemy,
    within two or three miles at least.
    It turned out to be a middle ranking SS
    officer and his aide.
    And the aide said that the SS officer had
    the tattered remains of an SS division out in the woods
    and they wanted to surrender to the Americans.
    We knew from radio reports that the Russians
    were coming some miles to the east
    and that they weren't far away.
    And we knew, putting two and two together,
    that the SS divisions and others were
    being squeezed in the middle and they wanted to surrender to us.
    The captain said, OK, surrender.
    And the man said, the middle ranking German officer
    said, very stiffly, that under no circumstances
    could he surrender to an American officer of less
    than equivalent or superior rank.
    And the captain struck him very hard in the face
    and knocked him down and told him
    to get his ass back to the woods where his men were.
    We found out later that probably they had
    been picked up by the Russians.
    Going on ahead to the military presence
    that we were asked to give, going into Mauthausen,
    the men walked in military formation
    up the road to Mauthausen.
    The captain and I jumped on the first tank.
    He asked me to join him.
    And we had been used to sitting on moving tanks anyway,
    going through the forests of Belgium,
    and so on and so forth.
    When we reached the general area of the camp,
    we saw that the situation was rather almost hopeless, as far
    as restoring immediate order, because so many
    had burst out of the camp.
    They were all over the place.
    And we saw dozens and dozens of badly clad individuals
    with these striped uniforms, et cetera, stumbling about.
    We saw them dying, dying on the road actually.
    And the gates were already opened, the big swastika
    above the gate, big soaring gate, and everybody
    clustered around us.
    And the captain tried to make sure
    that they understood that they were
    to back off and give us room.
    And he singled out somebody that clearly spoke English and asked
    him to relay orders that we were there to help them only.
    We were there to help them only.
    This was stressed over and over again.
    The captain gave orders to the one lieutenant that was left,
    and the platoon sergeants, as to what they were to do.
    And he said, come with me, and we took off running.
    He led the way through every single cubicle and space
    around there.
    We went first to the oven, and the oven door was open,
    and the bodies were like cordwood inside.
    We went to a woman's sick ward, to a men's ward,
    where they smiled weakly at us from bunks, and waved.
    Some of them waved.
    We went out into the main enclosure
    and began listening to people.
    And the captain wanted to see some more,
    so he asked an English-speaking person
    what else he should immediately see in order
    to get a grasp of what the camp was like.
    And the English-speaking person said, I'll take you.
    And I don't recall what it was after the men's
    ward and the woman's sick ward, the general sleeping
    ward, and the eating places.
    High smells everywhere.
    I mean, the odors were absolutely terrific.
    It was what I had come to recognize,
    going through Europe, as the smell of death.
    Even though that was a figment of my imagination,
    because although death was where I was in Europe,
    the smells only became associated
    with the smell of death because they were there also.
    For example, the gunfire, the smoke from burning buildings,
    these things.
    At any rate, we kept on running around,
    running around, running around.
    The captain was the most inquisitive person
    that I had found anywhere in my company or division.
    He wanted to know, and he wanted to
    with a great feeling of empathy, because he cried.
    The reason I am taken by surprise by this
    is because he was a guy with no education, particularly, who
    would come up the hard way in the Army Command.
    But he was a very neat guy.
    When this two-hour period was over--
    I say two hours because some of it's blank in my mind.
    I don't remember everything.
    I really don't.
    I was absolutely so stunned that I can remember the highlights
    and that's all.
    I do recall that he was bellowing into a radio
    when a half-track came up with a command radio,
    bellowing about making sure that enough
    kitchens in the area and medical groups in the area.
    But he had been assured already that this
    had been put in process, but he wanted to make sure.
    And he suggested to me that I go down into the town.
    Oh, OK, a very important step.
    He gathered, quickly, a couple of the technical sergeants
    of platoons and asked them to get up a group,
    picking from each patrol, to go into the town
    with rifles and bayonets fixed and order all healthy civilians
    to come up with shovels and other equipment
    of that nature--
    spades, shovels, pitchforks, et cetera.
    The idea was to show, first of all, everyone
    in the town what had taken place next to them,
    if they did not know it.
    Most of them did.
    The other thing was to get some work done
    because bodies had to be buried, et cetera, et cetera.
    He immediately started them on a vast, vast burial spot
    out on the grounds.
    By this time, battalion had come up.
    Battalion approved of what he was doing.
    As a matter of fact, they emphasized it.
    And more people were brought up from the town,
    able-bodied people, women, older children, men on up to age 80
    or 90, et cetera.
    Some of them, of course, showing their--
    Let me just stop the tape.
    I'm out right now.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    Yeah.
    This is a continuation of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum Volunteer Collection
    interview with George Leonard.
    This is tape 2, side B. And you were
    talking about bringing civilians in for the burials,
    and I would like you to please continue along those lines.
    The captain suggested to me that I go down into the town
    and find billets for them.
    And another matter he wanted to take care of was they had--
    this was later in the day.
    I'm skipping ahead a little bit.
    Later in the day, they found out that there
    were what was being called werewolves,
    which Nazi fanatics were up in the hills making trouble.
    And it came to light, I guess, during the day
    because some stray shots had come into the town, snipers.
    So another duty, another task he wanted to accomplish
    was to get a group to go up and dig them out, which he did.
    My part in that was simply to get some of the guys
    to agree to go up.
    No matter how horrible the war had been for us,
    you always get some who are willing to take on more.
    Not through some sort of a selflessness,
    but because it was their nature.
    They were needed for this job, and they did
    a good job of digging them out.
    Within days, there were no problems
    of outside interference from werewolves.
    I went down into the town.
    There was a street, a dead ending,
    at the bottom of the slight hill, which we could clearly
    see from the grounds of the camp.
    And I went to that street--
    I'm going to skip ahead to getting a house first
    before I go to the first house.
    I got a house for us, the third house.
    It was a dentist and his family who lived there,
    and I told him to get out fast.
    And then I went to the first house--
    I'd gone there first, actually--
    to discover that five young ladies were in it,
    and they were obviously camp prisoners, inmates,
    who had broken out early in the game,
    probably when the SS officers first left.
    And they had taken over a house that some of the SS officers
    had lived in with their families,
    for one family or two, I'm not sure what.
    At any rate, the five girls consisted of,
    in my writings I've said three Czech.
    I think it was two Czech and one French.
    Two Czech, one French, one German-Jewess, and one Dutch.
    Ellen Luz-- Luz, Lus--
    had been sent to a camp, with her husband to another camp.
    Had been sent there because they were running messages
    in the German police dog mouth, trying
    to salvage some of the Jews.
    The French girl was a very, very advanced person.
    I liked her, and so did the American major
    that I brought in.
    Two Czech girls, and Gazella.
    Gazella.
    Gazella was the German-Jewess.
    She was 15 years old.
    Had been in the camp for something
    like three to four years, and had
    been repeatedly saved from the gas chamber
    by Ellen, the Dutch girl.
    She had resolved early that--
    I found this out from one of the others--
    that she resolved early that she would do everything
    in our power to pull Gazella through.
    I have no right to cast illusions here, suspicions,
    but I want to make it clear that what ran through my mind
    soon after I got to know them was that there
    must have been some kapo--
    K-A-P-O-- stamp on at least one of them.
    Probably Ellen, but I don't know.
    The kapos were the ones who did jobs for the SS.
    They were prisoners who did jobs for the SS
    and had authority and lived better than the others.
    I think, in the long run, that although I was capable--
    and I want to put it right up front, I don't mind saying--
    I'm perfectly capable of having an intimate relationship
    with one or more of them.
    I avoided it almost totally because of fears, not
    only health fears, but fears of what I said.
    I did not want to have anything to do
    with anyone who was a kapo.
    The next day, there were some people
    in the town who started to give us stories
    about there's an SS man still here
    and there, and blah, blah, blah.
    And I was part of a small team.
    There were two or three of us that
    entered the house in response to one woman's complaint,
    that there was an SS man living there.
    And the young man was in there, hardly 19 or 20,
    and denied it utterly.
    And the woman who hat ratted on him
    went into the house and upstairs and brought down
    a Nazi uniform, et cetera, et cetera.
    So it became almost a clear cut case.
    The American Company C pretty much had sway in the town.
    There was no other company from the battalion or division
    living immediately in the town.
    We were the occupiers there, and we
    had our mess, our kitchen on the waterfront of the Danube
    in the heart of the town.
    It was a delightful spot.
    We enjoyed it.
    Every so often a boat would come in
    and the Americans would take it over.
    Of course, outright thievery was going
    on all the time under the guise that because they're the enemy,
    it doesn't count as thievery.
    A boat came down the Danube loaded.
    The hull was loaded with 120 bass accordions,
    and it didn't take them long to put all the accordions up
    on the dock and pass them out to anyone who wanted one, any
    of the soldiers who wanted one.
    I mean, soldiers were passing it out to the soldiers.
    Certain things stand out my mind,
    hit me emotionally, tremendously.
    The young German, the Austrian people,
    were much more harmed by and affected by
    and astounded by the hill, what went on on the hill,
    than the adults.
    I suspect that maybe some of the adults
    tried to keep word from the young people,
    I mean the teenagers, although I don't really
    see how it was very possible.
    I think maybe they were kidding themselves.
    But to make a long story short, there
    was a small handful of teenagers,
    led by Trudy, who was a very intelligent,
    delightful young lady, who they just sobbed and sobbed
    for days, and said they were never
    going to have anything to do with their families again.
    Trudy and two other girls took up living in a rat-infested--
    I say that, I'm probably exaggerating--
    empty house or building on the Danube,
    but they lived apart from their families.
    I think she ultimately went with an American soldier
    back to the States, but I'm not sure.
    I didn't see the other, but I just
    saw the claims of the statements of the two
    involved, the girl and the guy.
    I would like to talk about the American nurses, [INAUDIBLE]..
    The American nurses were fantastically empathetic
    and hard-working group.
    I'd see them for days and days and days
    on end working their heads off to accomplish what they could
    to save those who were teetering on dying
    and to improve those who were just plain ill and starved.
    I got to know many up there.
    I used to go up in my spare time to talk to people.
    I talked to a harbor master from the Danube up in Hungary.
    I talked to many people.
    A Polish man gave me his cigarette case,
    which had his girlfriend's names stenciled--
    not stenciled, but in metallic raised letters
    all over the case.
    And I knew it meant a lot to him,
    but I felt that he really wanted me to have it,
    and I still have it.
    When I first saw the girls in the camp
    at that house, the five girls, I tried
    to get a medical person down, but they said,
    are you out of your mind?
    I mean, look at what we're faced with up here.
    So I knew that it was a hopeless situation for the first couple
    of days, but gradually I got an American major, physician,
    to come down on a theory that it wasn't very far
    and that it needed medical state,
    that it should be an outpost of the camp.
    I had put a makeshift thing up, saying
    that this is an outpost of the camp by order of Captain
    [? Kirkabeau. ?] The major finally came down,
    and after talking to the young ladies and making arrangements,
    he agreed with it and put his own name on the sign.
    He said I did the wrong thing by giving them food, which I knew,
    in retrospect, I had.
    But they were better off than most anyway.
    And he called for a hot meal to be sent out to the house
    daily to them, and made other arrangements.
    I think he took up with the French girl later himself.
    In all honesty and practicality, I
    have to say that people have these things on their mind
    all the time and it never leaves.
    I have some specific questions that I would like to ask you.
    I'll give you a moment to compose yourself.
    I'll let you clean up some of the details from some
    of the things you've already told me.
    Please tell me the date and the time of day
    when you entered Mauthausen.
    I'd like to have the date on that.
    I think it was May 5th, which was the--
    good Lord.
    I'm going to check this for you.
    Not right now because it would take me time to find it.
    I think it was May 5th, which was right around the corner
    from the end of the war.
    As far as the time of day was concerned,
    I think it was mid-morning.
    Do you have any knowledge of how many prisoners were liberated
    in the camp at that time?
    The TO strength of the camp was something
    like 20,000 to 30,000.
    Many had died.
    There had been a big push to have the ovens going full-time
    before we came.
    Many ran out into the countryside and died.
    but probably, there had to have been, above 20,000.
    But I could check that more conveniently and easily.
    Do you want me to?
    You said the TO strength?
    Table of organization.
    [INAUDIBLE] It's what was expected.
    TO means table of organization.
    Like the TO strength of a division
    was something like 14,000.
    At the end of the war, it was something like 3,000 or 4,000
    of the original numbers.
    Would you please describe for me the people that were there?
    When you came in, was it just men?
    Was it just adults?
    Can you give me an idea of the people that were imprisoned?
    There were large numbers of all sexes.
    I say all sexes because the Germans
    regarded the homosexuals as being among the worst.
    So there was this homosexual contingency.
    There were loads and loads of men and women,
    even younger ones as witness, Gazella.
    And they were factions galore, ethnically.
    One of the largest and overpowering factions
    were the Russian prisoners of war.
    For some reason or other, they had
    used Mauthausen to stash an awful lot of these prisoners.
    And I was party to observing-- and sometimes helping out
    in a very minor way, such as giving directions and that type
    of thing--
    the large number of groups that came in to help
    and to repatriate.
    The Ukrainians, the Russians, the Poles, et cetera,
    all sent in repatriation teams.
    I saw them everywhere.
    I remember speaking to a young lady who
    was reading a book in the square of Vocklabruck,
    a town several miles away, where I had an Austrian girlfriend
    later in the game.
    And this young lady, I said to her, you're Ruski?
    And she got furious.
    She said, no.
    She said, I'm Ukrainish.
    I realized then that there was a split,
    that the Ukrainians did not consider themselves
    as Russians.
    The Russian prisoners had taken over much
    of the camp much of the time late in the game,
    and the other prisoners were cowed by them.
    One of the most moving sights I've ever seen in my life
    was in back of the house that Captain [? Kirkabeau ?]
    and I were billeted in, on the street that dead ended right up
    there at the camp grounds fringe,
    there was a gravel road going from the camp
    down to the railroad station into the town.
    And the time came when the Russians were moving out,
    the first contingency, the Russian prisoners.
    Captain [? Kirkabeau ?] and I stood
    on the back grass of the dentist's house
    we were in, looking down on the gravel road where the prisoners
    were marching down.
    They came down, marching in formation,
    singing at the top of their lungs, lustily.
    It was very, very moving.
    And the captain beside me was very moved, too.
    It was his idea that we watch.
    He became even more moved when he saw some of the groups
    that he sympathized more with, because there
    was great prejudice at that time against the Russians,
    just as there was against the German military
    and German officials.
    The feelings that the American soldiers had toward Germany
    changed totally along toward Passau and into Mauthausen.
    And most of the members of our company,
    save for a few ultra egocentric guys,
    were very, very, very consumed with hatred for the SS
    and very sympathetic with the people that they saw,
    the people who were hurt by it.
    Were there any children in the camp?
    By children, I assume you mean like under pre-teen.
    There were from hearsay, but I never saw them.
    Did you personally witness any acts of revenge or retaliation
    from the inmates to any individuals and Germans
    who might still be around, or even the camp itself?
    Did you see any acts of violence or hostility
    on the part of the people who had been prisoners?
    Several days following the liberation.
    It was the situation on tenterhooks,
    ready to burst out.
    And yes, I saw isolated examples.
    And on the second or third day, a minor--
    not a minor, but an under commandant
    of the camp, whose name I don't remember,
    had been caught by the prisoners,
    and his head was put on a pole.
    I didn't see him beheaded, but I saw the head.
    I saw striking and I saw mauling and I saw crowds
    around one individual.
    And I'd call, quickly get some of my fellow GIs
    to get them to pry apart the group
    and see to it that it stopped.
    Yes, that happened quite frequently.
    That happened quite frequently.
    It wasn't just the Russians that there were problems with,
    but it was with the prisoners, kapos, that developed hatreds.
    And there was much of this.
    That's one of the reasons I think that those girls took
    that house, but I have no right to say
    that that's true because I don't know it to be true.
    Is it all right to say that?
    OK.
    Did you, by any chance, happen to witness
    the prisoners taking down the Nazi symbol
    from the camp, the swastika?
    I guess it was over the gate.
    Did you happen to witness that?
    Not close, no.
    I saw it right after it happened, but not close.
    No.
    You had been telling me before about the burials and civilians
    being brought in to help.
    Were you there for the actual burials?
    Right after our men had gone from house
    to house bringing up as many as possible,
    I went up to see what was developing.
    I wanted to give a report to the captain.
    And yes, I saw it beginning, and I saw some of the adults.
    I saw a couple of women getting sick and ill.
    Everyone I saw was pitching in through either fear
    or compassion, one or the other.
    Probably a lot of fear, mostly fear, mixed in.
    I think a lot of them were afraid of what
    would happen to them if they didn't play ball.
    So yeah, I saw them working.
    With these burials, were the bodies prepared in any way?
    Did anybody speak over the graves?
    Can you give me an idea of the actual process
    of burying the bodies?
    There were no great formalities, but I
    did see at least two examples of individuals
    speaking a foreign language over the group.
    That's as far as I can go on that.
    I don't believe that we had any chaplains up there
    at that time, but I'm not sure.
    And were these graves marked in any way, the burials?
    Were the graves marked?
    They weren't marked individually because they were mass graves.
    And yes, the answer is that the mass grave is marked.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    We're going to pause.
    We're just going to pause for one minute
    and let you take a break.
    OK, we're back now after a brief break.
    I had asked you about the burials.
    Did you see any evidence of the mass graves that
    were left there by the Germans before your arrival
    in the camp?
    I had like a camera.
    I remember taking some pictures, which
    most, if not all but one or two, have somehow disappeared.
    I did see lots of graves, but I have
    difficulty now distinguishing in my mind the vast grave that I
    knew was dug by the townspeople, and other smaller ones.
    I remember seeing a grave with hundreds and hundreds
    and hundreds of bone-white, chalk-white skeletons,
    just tossed in.
    I don't remember, frankly--
    I'm inadequate on that-- whether this
    was what we discovered when we went there
    or whether it was the later.
    I can't help you.
    You mentioned that you took photos.
    Were there any official photographs or moving pictures
    that were taken, that you are aware of,
    to document what you were finding when you came in?
    Yes, in the 11th Armored Division files,
    there are quite a few of these.
    I did not go out of my way one at this last reunion,
    the only one I've ever attempted to take any away with me.
    I remember sending home some pictures that
    had been taken by official groups
    while I was there in Mauthausen.
    And as I said, I also had taken a few of my own.
    I recall some pictures of graves that probably
    had been dug for the ones killed in the ovens
    before we got there, but I can't swear to that.
    I can't at all.
    The whole thing is a blur in my mind now.
    I think that I did not try to process this information
    to keep it.
    So emotionally staggering was it.
    Could you remember if you found--
    you individually or the group of you--
    if you found any records or photos left by the Nazis?
    I have to apologize and go back to your previous question,
    and say that the gas chamber was the best evidence of a grave.
    Not a permanent grave, but one that
    existed before we got there.
    So if you're looking for evidence
    that existed before we got there, that nobody could have
    tampered with, the captain and I were the first ones
    in that gas chamber of any American alive, any outsider.
    Because the 41st cavalry did not go in and do these things.
    They were engaged in firefights outside.
    Again, were there any records or photos left by the Nazis
    that you're aware were at the camp?
    Because Mauthausen, there were other camps around
    and that was often a place for records to be kept.
    Do you remember if any were found,
    or were you aware of any that were found?
    No.
    OK, I think I'm to take this opportunity to pause and change
    tapes.
    So let's not go any further now.
    The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum volunteer
    collection interview with George Leonard, and this
    is tape three, side A.
    When you were physically in the camp,
    did you have an opportunity to see
    the parachutist cliff or the death steps
    or that part of the camp that has become notorious?
    The parachutist cliffs doesn't ring a bell,
    and I feel inadequate--
    the so-called death steps, sure, I saw them many times,
    and I was familiar with them, although if you
    were to ask me right now what quadrant
    of the outside of the camp they were in,
    I wouldn't be able to answer.
    Yeah, I saw them, and I saw people
    scrambling over them because of the historic importance.
    And later in the game, I saw photographers
    from all sorts of news groups and so forth
    taking pictures, but not parachutist cliffs.
    I just don't remember it.
    I remember the road going in the direction of the--
    well, I remember that the railroad
    station where the freight cars came in
    and they'd be taken up to the camp--
    if you want to steer me here, you can do so.
    Just whatever you were--
    remember whatever came to mind.
    But if something more comes to mind, you can add it anytime.
    That's fine.
    I wanted to get back to something
    that you had alluded to earlier in the interview,
    and you had talked about the Russians that
    were prisoners being very active and being in charge.
    How did the different ethnic groups within the camp
    get along during the period of time
    when the Americans were administering the camp?
    During the time that--
    Yeah, while you were there.
    There were squabbles constantly, and the importance
    of the American presence was shown in that.
    The camp gradually, as two or three weeks rolled by,
    became quieter.
    And people went about their business
    more to accomplish jobs and so forth.
    And you had people in the camp, the healthy ones,
    were buckling down to communicating and solidifying
    friendships with their own groups and others.
    And I think that the only major antipathies
    that I remember clearly and was a witness to
    were the kapos being set upon by the ordinary inmates
    and the Russians against the rest of them--
    the Russians against the rest of them
    primarily because they wanted to be boss.
    They were the biggest group, et cetera.
    And the Russians hated the Jews.
    There was that, too.
    And you had enough of a preponderance
    in the rest of it.
    Like I said, probably 75% to 95% of the remainder,
    outside of the criminals and the Russians, were Jewish.
    That's my estimate.
    I talked with vast numbers of them
    and looked over vast numbers of them.
    And I was experienced in coming to the conclusion that this
    was primarily, outside of the Russians,
    a death camp for Jews.
    And I'm on good ground here when I
    say that not many people know it, or they don't care
    to know it, but Hitler was a profound dabbler in the occult.
    Did you know that?
    And he had someone advising him.
    It was a pure nut, I think.
    And in this occult, he dabbled with this rather
    silly, unsupported information about Jews.
    And I really shouldn't carry it any further
    than that because what I just said,
    I know, but I don't want to say anything I don't really know.
    Another thing that you had mentioned before, very briefly,
    in passing, was that you looked around and you took it in,
    but you didn't process it yet.
    My next question has two parts.
    How long were you physically in that area?
    And how did you begin to process during the time
    that you were there in the camp, in the area around Mauthausen?
    I think it was in late July that we were moved to--
    mid-late-July, we were moved to Spital am Pyhrn
    in the mountains, which, by the way,
    was a delightful experience.
    So we had something like five to seven weeks, I dare say,
    in the Mauthausen area.
    I got to add a statement about Spital.
    We were billeted in Spital with a rushing mountain river
    at the eastern edge of us.
    And just to the other side of that eastern edge
    were the Russians.
    So there was a reason for that, too--
    first of all, to prevent the Russians from coming down in.
    And secondly, maybe we were going
    to use that as a venue ourselves to go out and go east.
    But there it was.
    I remember I used to be a damn fool.
    I did some awfully foolish things.
    I used to go all alone onto the road,
    going into their territory, and just take long
    walks talking with any Russian soldier who
    could speak English.
    And I found them to be amiable and ignorant-- ignorant
    in the ordinary sense of the word,
    meaning not well versed in things.
    And I used to hate them.
    For one thing, they'd throw hand grenades in the river,
    and the trout would come belly up.
    And I love trout.
    And you just don't do that to trout.
    During the five to seven weeks that you were in Mauthausen,
    how did you begin to process what you had found in the camp?
    You said you just took it in and you didn't process it
    when you first arrived, but you were there for weeks and weeks.
    How did you begin to deal with the reality of what
    you had found?
    I started taking notes.
    And I don't have them anymore, I'm sure.
    I took voluminous notes that I have.
    Even if I could find them, I don't even
    think I could read them.
    They were taken in such a bad handwriting which I have.
    The teachers changed me when I was in kindergarten,
    the left to the right.
    And when I was in Kitzingen, I really took up the idea of--
    Kitzingen was in the 79th Infantry
    Division on my way home.
    And I had a few weeks there, and I had access
    to a typewriter in an office.
    And I used to go in three hours a day and try to--
    once I started a novel.
    Another time I started a non-fiction book.
    And I couldn't take it even back then.
    Gradually, I just drew off from it.
    But in answer to your question, I
    processed it by trying to write about it
    and collect it in my mind and so forth.
    And it just didn't work.
    And I tried two or three times over the years to write a novel
    or a non-fiction book on the subject, and I can handle--
    maybe not like some of the finest writers,
    but I can handle fiction and nonfiction
    well enough so that I should have been able to.
    But emotionally, I couldn't do it.
    I just had to duck off.
    You can't avoid processing, because your mind takes over.
    Your mind-- your subconscious mind and your conscious mind--
    are working all the time.
    And you think about things, and you think and think and think.
    I had another way to process, and that is I
    got tied up with a girl from Vienna,
    a schoolteacher named Bertha [? Bittel. ?] And she--
    Phyllis knows about her, so there's no problem.
    And Bertha [? Bittel ?] was a product of a Nazi childhood.
    But she asked questions and wanted to know,
    and it was the fact that she of her background that
    led me not to get serious enough to make plans with her.
    But at any rate, she wanted to know.
    She'd ask me questions about it, about the Holocaust,
    about Jews.
    Is it really true that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?
    And I'd say, Bertha, and we'd talk about it.
    So she spoke good English because one of her subjects
    was teaching English.
    And I'll tell you something amusing about that.
    May I?
    I used to go to Vocklabruck to see
    her, which is a beautiful town on a little river,
    not too far away.
    And there was a supply truck that
    left our town, particularly of Spital, when I was there,
    to go into Vocklabruck.
    So I used to hitch rides with them
    and see her because I had always-- first of all,
    I went with them to do a job and I met her
    on the bank of the Vocklabruck River.
    From then on, I used to hitch rides with them
    and get a ride to see her.
    And just before I was about to ship out,
    I knew that I was going to-- no, before that,
    I knew I was going to--
    well, I wanted to see her, and I had no truck.
    And I took a jeep, and I overestimated
    my sense of worth and power in the company and took the jeep
    and went to see her and have a great weekend.
    I got back, and the first sergeant,
    who was not a friend of mine and who
    had been behind the whole war and then came up
    at the end of the war, said, I'm going
    to see that you get shipped out to a group that's
    going to Japan.
    So I went to the captain.
    I said, are you going to let this
    happen after we dug foxholes together and everything?
    Certainly not, he says.
    Tell the sergeant to give you two days' extra duty
    and let it go.
    So I did that.
    But then the outfit I would have been shipped to Japan
    went home when the war ended, and they all
    got discharged weeks earlier--
    just a little sidelight.
    I was hoping you could also speak a little bit
    about the reactions, not just of yourself,
    but of the other Americans that were there, the other GIs,
    especially if there were any Jewish GIs.
    Did you have any conversations among yourselves
    in the face of what you found at Mauthausen?
    I don't recall specific conversations
    because it just wasn't done.
    Even if you worked side by side with somebody,
    looking at a bad situation, there might be a quick passing
    statement, and that was all.
    You just went ahead and worked.
    I can tell you, though, according to the factions
    I was telling you about that were split
    up entirely, a lot of the ASTP guys were more empathetic,
    and--
    army specialized training, the colleges--
    more empathetic and feeling, and knowing how
    this fit into the world, et cetera, et cetera.
    One of the most selfish lot I found
    was the new young kids coming in who would just come in
    from replacement depots.
    And they hadn't seen much, if any, combat.
    And I didn't know them because I was with the captain, mostly,
    and they'd be replacing someone in the third platoon, blah,
    blah, blah.
    And I wouldn't even get to see them much.
    If I went to the third platoon, it
    was to talk to the sergeant or the lieutenant.
    But in Mauthausen, I saw a few of them.
    And one of them was a guy who found an SS horse.
    And all that was on his mind--
    nothing to do with the camp, nothing to--
    he could have been anywhere.
    He could have been in Maine or Vermont.
    He just lived the horse, and he was a very self-centered guy.
    And another one, the same type, lived in a house next to me,
    and he was a young man who was a fatuous jerk who
    would say things to the dentist's daughter like, Hilda,
    Hilda, I'm a Catholic, too.
    You know what I mean?
    No understanding of the fact that these daughters
    and the family lived there right in the shadow of Mauthausen,
    and the father probably worked on SS teeth
    and so on and so forth and probably pried gold out
    of the Jews' teeth, for all I know.
    But there was no realization of anything like this
    at all, this kind of a mindset.
    And there was a lot of that mindset among the young fellows
    coming in.
    Let me see if I have another group there
    that I want to talk about--
    replacements, ASTP, the original cadre, and the sociopaths.
    I've already talked about that.
    I told you about the guy who came up to the line them
    up and shot prisoners whenever he could,
    [? Wachter, ?] didn't I?
    And I told you about [? Labede, ?]
    who was a sociopath.
    I hate to use that word over and over again, but it fits them.
    Aside from the things that were given to you
    by some of the people there, did you take any artifacts,
    or did-- not just you personally, but did
    the other GIs, did they take any artifacts or anything
    like that?
    And the other part of the same question was--
    From the camp, you mean?
    From the camp.
    There was nothing from the camp to take, really.
    I was given a present by a Pole, a cigarette thing.
    But I don't imagine that there was much of that that went on.
    Who had much personal--
    you know?
    Did you happen to see the American flag
    that some of the women had made for the Americans?
    No, it was a surprise to me.
    Did you-- you never saw it?
    No, that was a surprise to me.
    You told me about it or I saw it written or something.
    Oh, when you gave me your notes, yeah.
    In a totally different vein, were you
    aware of the subcamps, the other camps around Mauthausen,
    and did you see any of them?
    Yeah, I was aware of quite a few of them.
    And I went to Gusen once and found out
    that it was a predominantly a work camp, although they did
    not have it nice, of course.
    But it was a work camp, and the end result there was not death
    unless they didn't behave and work, in which case
    they might have got shot in the head or the back or something.
    There were other camps around, work camps
    were of a lighter nature than that and Bertha
    and I used to walk around to one particular camp
    because there were a lot of Poles in it
    who had accordions and other musical instruments.
    And they used to have dances in the evening,
    and it became quite a joyous place to go.
    Bertha and I used to dance a little bit there.
    I don't think I can say anything more about the surrounding
    camps except to say that they're just like you read.
    Did any military brass or investigative teams
    come and visit the camp that you're aware of?
    Galore.
    In the ensuing days and weeks, every sort of group imaginable
    came in.
    I saw and talked with Red Cross groups.
    I saw and talked with other kinds of voluntary groups
    giving food and help.
    I saw a commission from SHAEF headquarters,
    Eisenhower's quarters, come in.
    I never had a chance to talk to them, of course.
    Then, of course, there were all the repatriation teams
    from the different countries.
    The camp became very quiet after a few days--
    after a few weeks because, when you moved out,
    a few vast contingencies--
    you would get down to the nub of the still-existing serious
    cases.
    And I'm trying to think of the second group that
    moved out after the Russians.
    I think there were some Polish nationals in that group, too.
    There weren't necessarily Jews.
    And there were some groups who were--
    there was a small group there who had fought
    and the Russian army but who were Jews.
    And they took it on the chin in the camp.
    When you say they took it on the chin, you mean during the war
    or after, during the period that the Americans were
    administering it?
    I can't speak about during the war.
    I can only speculate.
    But after the Americans came in, there were two problems.
    The main problem there was that after liberation, they could be
    and in some cases were victims of Russian authoritarianism
    and hatred.
    What happened before we came in with those Jewish Russian
    prisoners, I only heard, and I can speculate
    that they were treated badly.
    And some of them were thrown over into the Jewish category
    and not Russian Jewish.
    Two questions have come to my mind.
    You mentioned relief organizations
    that came to help besides the Red Cross.
    Can you remember specifically any other organizations
    that came?
    It was one big group with a big name in America.
    And I don't recall whether the Ford Foundation existed
    then or not or one of those others,
    but it was an American group.
    Did the Ford Foundation exist then?
    I'm not sure.
    I'm sorry.
    There was an American, privately-funded foundation
    that was there.
    There were Jewish groups there.
    There were--
    Did any other nation send--
    besides repatriation groups, did any other nation
    send any assistance to the Americans
    in the administration of this camp,
    to the best of your knowledge?
    My first answer is I didn't see any evidence of it.
    The second answer is that there was small amounts of help
    from Switzerland.
    And you know about the Hafliger case, don't you?
    Didn't I tell you about that?
    Some Swiss named Hafliger with the Swiss Red Cross, some weeks
    before the war ended, had been sent by the Swiss Red Cross
    with seven or nine trucks, Hafliger heading it up,
    to go to Mauthausen and do what he could to, quote--
    and I have the exact quote upstairs--
    do what he could to ameliorate the situation, et cetera.
    It became a ridiculous situation.
    Nobody expected what would happen at all.
    But the commandant tried to surrender
    the camp to Hafliger and then Hafliger
    had some weird ideas of--
    I guess it got to him-- his own ideas
    of being a big leader there or something.
    And the commandant swore up and down
    that he'd give up the camp if only
    he'd get grace after the war ended because the war was
    approaching an end, et cetera.
    None of that worked out, and I think that Hafliger crept away
    with his tail between his legs.
    But it was a weird situation and a beautiful situation
    for someone who has a lot of energy
    and a good writer to dig it out and come out
    with a best-selling book, non-fiction.
    I'm serious.
    It would really go.
    Was the liberation of Mauthausen uncovered
    by reporters for Stars and Stripes
    or any other publication that you were aware of?
    Stars and Stripes, certainly.
    Someplace upstairs, I've got some stuff on it,
    but they're usually superficial and just
    revert to the same old stuff of another death camp,
    et cetera, has--
    although one of them did make the point
    that it was among the worst that they had seen,
    but I don't recall who said that.
    During your time in Europe, with the fighting and everything
    else, how easy or how difficult was it
    for you to get your hands on an issue of Stars and Stripes?
    During the war-- during our coming across,
    we got our hands on nothing.
    We were 50 miles ahead of any civilization
    that was close to us most of the time.
    When we had a week break in Belgium, some of the stuff
    came to us, but then we were fairly close to civilization.
    In Worms, a little bit, but from Worms on, it was a blank.
    No mail came up, no nothing.
    Did I tell you about that guy I was going to tell you about?
    I started, a few minutes ago, to tell you
    about a young man who was in army specialized training
    with me-- a very bright guy and normal in every respect,
    a decent soldier, et cetera.
    But I couldn't understand him, and I'll tell you why.
    In the anecdote I told before about coming down the hill
    with the smoke bomb in back of us, in front of us,
    so that we were pretty well hidden,
    when I got to the bottom of the hill, still untouched,
    I sank down behind a hedgerow.
    And there is this guy, whom we'll call Andy, beside me,
    sitting back to the farmhouse.
    And I'm looking at the farmhouse through the hedgerow,
    and a lieutenant from my company is very foolishly
    running up to a window, and he's getting a burp gun
    right in the throat, and he turns around and faces us.
    And blood is spurting out, and Andy
    is sitting, calmly, in the middle of everything,
    opening a C-ration can and eating it.
    And I just couldn't believe it.
    This falls into the category of what I don't know.
    How many persons were still at Mauthausen?
    How many survivors were still at Mauthausen
    by the time you were sent away to your next stop?
    I'll have to guess.
    And I'm going to emphasize again that this
    is a speculative guess, an educated guess based
    upon subtracting so many from the Russian prisoner category,
    so many from those who kept on dying, so many
    of those who were repatriated in other directions.
    The Poles had been in, for example,
    and the Ukrainians had been in, repatriating.
    I dare say that it must have been down to 4,000 to 6,000
    by the time I left.
    Is there anything about your experience
    with the liberation of Mauthausen
    that we haven't covered that still stands out in your mind
    that you'd like to discuss before we
    go on to the next topic?
    I'm sure that 10 minutes after you leave this house,
    I'll think of 60 things, but the answer is no.
    After you left and you went to your next post
    that you've told me about already,
    how much longer did you stay in Europe
    before being sent back to the States?
    I spent until something like the last week in November
    in the 79th division in Kitzingen.
    And suddenly, I was put in a jeep
    with a driver who was going to Marseille.
    And in one fell swoop, he drove in rather cold weather,
    in an open jeep, 60, 70 miles an hour,
    from Kitzingen down to Marseille.
    When I stepped out of that jeep, I was absolutely frozen stiff.
    I couldn't move a thing.
    Did you ever experience anything like that?
    So we boarded the ship in Marseille,
    and I was home by December 15 and discharged
    within a couple of days.
    I'm going to pause now and fix the tape.
    We're just about done.
    During that period-- this is not relevant, but--
    Oh, let me change the tape.
    Just one moment.
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    volunteer collection interview with George Leonard,
    and this is tape three, side B. And you
    wanted to add a postscript to your comments
    about being discharged.
    I wanted to tell you what Mauthausen did for me besides,
    I think, making a better person out of me in many respects.
    As soon as I came home, shortly after December 15,
    I started applying for colleges.
    I applied to Northeastern and Boston University in Suffolk.
    And all three turned me down.
    with the word that we're so mobbed with applications
    from new returning vets that we can't fit you in.
    I could understand it anyway because my stepfather had
    died in my senior year of high school,
    and I sort of fell apart.
    And I got some grades that I had never been capable of before.
    Before that, I had been an excellent student.
    To make a long story short, that I immediately
    applied to Harvard, and the guy called me.
    He says, write an essay.
    I don't know why that affects me about your experiences.
    And I did, and I was immediately accepted.
    So that's what Mauthausen did for me.
    Do you, by any chance, still have that essay?
    I never had it.
    I didn't make a copy of it.
    I did not make a copy of it, and I never got a copy back.
    By the way, it was primarily about the administration
    of Mauthausen.
    And I went into all sorts of group human relational
    theories, from the functions of the executive, which
    I had been reading.
    And I'm sure you read about that, read about that.
    And by the way, it was by someone
    who had had experience in Tulelake
    with the Japanese, which they didn't feel guilty about back
    then, but they do, of course, now.
    But there were certain administrative policies
    that had been brought to light about getting along
    with large groups and functioning with large groups,
    such as hearing, airing out, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
    And I put all this stuff in there, and Harvard loved it.
    When you were discharged, what was your rank,
    and what medals and honors had you received?
    I had been promised a rating by the captain and by others
    toward the end of the war, particularly after my--
    what do you call it-- was going through my Bronze Star medal.
    And they said that they'd give me
    an honorary squad with a rating of staff sergeant or higher.
    The captain said this.
    And then I took the jeep, and the first sergeant
    said that, well, he'd go along with two days,
    what do you call it, but under no circumstances
    would he back a sergeancy after that.
    So I was on my way home, practically anyway,
    and I just shrugged and said, to heck with it.
    My honors were the Combat Infantryman Award, three battle
    stars, a unit citation--
    I think, given by the French or the Belgians, I forget which--
    the Bronze Star medal, and the Purple Heart.
    When you arrived home, what did you
    tell your family and your friends about your experiences
    over in Europe, specifically about the liberation
    of Mauthausen?
    I answered questions, but that's--
    and then very limited.
    I didn't talk much at all.
    I just had the feeling, and I went around
    like this for a long, long time, that nobody could possibly
    understand anything I said.
    They were so far from it.
    When you came home, did you have any flashbacks or nightmares
    of experiencing that?
    No, I had no--
    I did not suffer from any problems like that at all.
    I did suffer from one thing, a jumpiness, which
    I put in one thing I wrote.
    I couldn't study.
    And I used to go take some books, Harvard books, that I
    was supposed to be reading or studying,
    and get on a streetcar in Boston and ride forever around,
    buying newspapers in one station,
    discarding it, buying another newspaper in another station,
    doing like that.
    And that was one of the best things that
    happened to me because I met Phyllis at a streetcar stop
    at Coolidge Corner in Brookline.
    And Phyllis is-- you referred to Phyllis several times--
    would you please tell me who Phyllis is?
    My wife.
    She's my wife, yeah, coming from a very Jewish family.
    You had mentioned very much earlier
    in the interview about your aspirations
    when you were a child and how the war changed
    them a little bit.
    When you came home from combat, what
    aspirations-- what did you want to do with your life?
    My first one was to be a diplomat.
    I changed that along the way, and I
    don't recall what changed me.
    I'll tell you about another.
    I wanted to be a diplomat, and I changed along
    the way to wanting to be a functionary in a government
    agency.
    Let me tell you something after that.
    Yeah, let me ask you a few other questions
    that we can put on the record.
    Did you follow the Nuremberg trials?
    Yeah.
    And along those same lines, with respect
    to following the Nuremberg trials,
    did you feel that justice was done?
    It was done, but not enough, yeah.
    In other words, I thought that there were probably
    some fringe people there that should
    have got more than they got.
    I don't recall their names right now.
    But generally speaking, if I had to say was I satisfied or not,
    I'd have to say I was satisfied.
    Did you follow the Eichmann trial,
    and did you think that was just?
    I know I followed it.
    Yeah, yes, I thought it was just.
    What have you told your family about the things
    that you've told me today?
    How much of this does your family know, your friends,
    or how much of this do you talk about?
    This family or my family back from my childhood?
    Both.
    My family back-- my brothers and sisters and my mother,
    et cetera, there was no use.
    They had made a polite attempt at listening,
    that sort of thing, and blah, blah, blah.
    Phyllis, of course, has been a very, very great supporter.
    And my kids got caught up in--
    from a childish point of view, seeing the box of a Nazi dagger
    and all of the stuff, the artifacts I brought back,
    and that sort of thing.
    And they were caught up.
    And when I sold my first novel, I
    got a $2,000 advance, which was a big deal back in 1963 or '65.
    And we took the $2,000 and put it
    in a trip with round-trip trip airfare to Amsterdam
    and a fully-equipped microbus with camping
    equipment and everything for five people
    with a tent that zipped on the side and all the stuff.
    And we took that for three weeks and went around Europe.
    And I found myself following the route of the 11th.
    The kids were excited at it, particularly Jeff, my oldest
    son, particularly.
    He was, like, 14 at the time, I guess.
    And we went to Bastogne.
    And everyone laughed at seeing the Nuts hot dog stand, "Nuts"
    being what McAuliffe had said to the Germans.
    When asked to surrender, he said "nuts," a thing like that.
    Do you speak publicly about your experiences,
    and have you ever been interviewed before?
    No.
    And why have you decided to do an interview right now?
    I didn't decide.
    It crept up.
    It crept up.
    I didn't, any one day, say, hey, I'm going to do an interview.
    All of a sudden, Dan said to me that he
    had turned my name into the Holocaust Museum
    as being someone who had been there and helped
    liberate a concentration camp.
    Who's Dan?
    Lednicer, Dan Lednicer.
    He's a very fantastically intelligent man, a Jew,
    fervently Jewish, but not religiously so.
    And I know you know what I mean by that, culturally, et cetera.
    And he just shows brilliance.
    He was a chemist--
    is a chemist.
    And he has turned out three or four tomes that thick--
    and they publish them as fast as they get them from him--
    on chemistry, chemical solvents and compounds,
    and so on and so forth.
    I just can't conceive of anyone doing what he does
    and remembers it all up here.
    Dan is a brilliant guy, and he was
    over here a few weeks ago having dinner with us, him and a girl.
    We didn't talk about this at all,
    but I did tell him that you guys had called
    and were going to interview.
    When I was called about the interview,
    which I didn't expect or know about, particularly--
    I just knew that I was giving testimony of some sort
    to the what do you call it--
    I shrugged and I thought, well, it's
    a good chance for me to see what I know and don't know
    and remember or don't remember.
    And it's a good chance to see if I
    can get through this because I haven't
    been able to in the past.
    Have you had interviews with others?
    Liberators?
    What would you say is the lasting impact
    that your experiences had on your life?
    The most lasting impact?
    The most lasting impact has to do with understanding
    what man is capable of.
    And that amazes the heck out of me,
    and I don't know how to process that.
    I don't know what else to say.
    How do you react when you hear Holocaust deniers?
    How do you react when you hear Holocaust deniers?
    It does upset me, of course.
    I don't know what to do about it.
    I don't think that anyone can do much about it.
    If you fight it, you're wrong.
    If you don't fight it, you're wrong.
    There will be-- again, we're talking
    about the extent to which people can
    be incredibly stupid or bestial or whatnot,
    and this is another example.
    There is one bit of unfinished business
    I wanted to make sure I tied up before we conclude.
    You said that you had a seven-week recovery
    period after you were injured.
    Can you put that in a time frame?
    When were you--
    I was wounded February 7.
    I came back to the company toward the end of March.
    And I want to put it on the record that--
    I don't know why, but during that time,
    the company went through one of the most horrible experiences
    that they had gone through to date,
    and that was crossing the Kahl River.
    I have a picture of the makeshift bridge over the Kahl
    River upstairs.
    And the reason this was so bad was
    that they were exposed, crossing it, wading it
    with rifle held up and taking fire with no cease at all.
    And that's when my first sergeant that I liked
    got the bullet through the hand.
    And my being off the line during that period
    was, I hate to say this, but a godsend.
    Would you be willing to share with me the names of the novels
    that you've written?
    The first one I named Horn of Plenty,
    but Warner Books changed it to Sexmax
    because it was a business of helping everyone
    through government.
    The government filled in what any person
    was lacking in this novel.
    The other another one was Alien, which I had named originally
    The Flying Saucer Murders, which I and my wife liked better.
    But Playboy Press decided to make
    it Alien to build on the reputation
    that the other Alien had had.
    Then I wrote a book called Somebody Else Is
    On the Moon, which gave me the greatest monetary return
    and name and everything else.
    It was published in five different languages
    and made a French book club, and I was a Japanese fan
    club and everything else.
    And I'm still living through the reverberations of that.
    I decided, after that book, to go into meditation
    and find out what life was really all about.
    And that's where I am now.
    Is there anything else that we haven't discussed
    that you would like to add before we
    conclude the interview today?
    Is there anything that we haven't covered?
    I realize, after I leave, you'll come up with 10 things.
    But is there anything that comes to your mind
    right now that we haven't covered
    that you'd like to include?
    Yeah.
    I'm going to be personal and speculative,
    and I'm talking about--
    the Holocaust was, in the final analysis, a Jewish story.
    You don't deny that, do you, first and foremost?
    And I'm thinking that, from a genetic and a practical point
    of view, comma--
    because I am aware of the magnificence
    of the Jewish stock, comma--
    I'm thinking of the need which should have started earlier
    of breaking out the Jewish gene pool
    and having that good blood spread around.
    I'm serious about this.
    Phyllis knows how I feel.
    Yeah, I believe that.
    I would like to thank you for doing the interview with me
    today, and I know it was difficult
    for you, and I personally, and as a part of the museum.
    We appreciate it.
    Thank you very much.
    My daughter got married, and I know you were in the wedding.
    This concludes the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    interview with George Leonard.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    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.
    Interviewee
    George H. Leonard
    Interviewer
    Esther Finder
    Date
    interview:  2001 January 10

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    3 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

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History Branch conducted the interview with George Hill Leonard on January 10, 2001. The interview was transferred to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in February 2001.
    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 08:12:39
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn508460

    Additional Resources

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

    Download & Licensing

    In-Person Research

    Contact Us

    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 Rene Edgar Tressler

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Stefan Wohl

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Yehuda Adam

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Arlette de Long

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Adam

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Herbert Bitter

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rachel Goldfarb

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tania Rozmaryn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frank Ephraim

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Peter Phillips

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Ichiuji

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Horowitz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hermann Kosak

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Dolly Bestandig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Goldie Gendelman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rhoda Kuflik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Hess

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jutta Levy

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Wolfgang Mueller

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Klari Rudnai

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jill Pauly

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jack Reuben

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Bayer

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Tilda Finzi Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Zwi Golombek

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Samuel B. Hagner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Werner E. Michel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Guta Jacobson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helen Luksenburg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with William Luksenburg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rose Weisfeld

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth E. Greifer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Nesse Godin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Maryla Korn

    Oral History

    Maryla Korn (née Orgel), born on June 10, 1938 in Kraków, Poland, discusses going with her mother first to Wieliczka and then to Bochnia between late 1940 and early 1941; hiding with a peasant family but crying so much that she was returned to her mother; going to a ghetto in Bochnia at the end of 1941; her mother working outside the ghetto in a factory; taking messages outside the ghetto and bringing back food; leaving the ghetto in June 1943 and separating from her mother; carrying diamonds and money, but no luggage and bribing Germans and the Judenrat; traveling by truck to the border then by foot at night; being guided by paid partisans; her grandfather being shot at Bochnia cemetery, her grandmother being taken to Auschwitz, and her uncle being taken to Belzec in the summer of 1942; being by Czech collaborators in Kosice, Slovakia; being released and proceeding to Hungary with help from the Joint; being caught and sent to a prison in Budapest and the Joint getting her out; going to Usod, Hungary in the fall of 1943 and staying there until April 1944 under name of Orglowska; living as a Christian; being treated for gangrene in her leg; the roundup of Hungarian Jews in April 1944; her mother stealing passes and going to Budapest; staying with a Jewish Polish friend and then going to Bucharest, Romania with help from the Joint; almost boarding two different ships in Constanta, Romania going to Palestine, one of which (the Merkur) sank and the other ended up in Cyprus; being liberated by the Russians in the spring of 1945; going to Budapest and staying in a children’s home while her mother went back to Poland to check on family; her mother setting up a business in Vienna, Austria with an uncle; her father returning traumatized from the war; going to Brussels, Belgium in the winter of 1946-1947; going to Israel in 1951; living in both Israel and Brussels until immigrating to the United states in May 1961; getting married in June 1961 to David Korn, who is also a survivor; visiting her parents in Germany; and her work translating for USHMM.

    Oral history interview with Michel Margosis

    Oral History

    Michel Margosis, born in Brussels, Belgium on September 2, 1928, discusses immigrating to the United States in 1943; being taken in by father’s cousin in Brooklyn, then to foster home; his parents coming to the US in 1946; graduating from high school in 1947; graduating with honors from Brooklyn College in 1951; enlisting in the army and being sent to Germany as an interpreter but requesting to be transferred; becoming a medic near Verdun; feeling very American, but did not speak about his childhood with other soldiers; his feeling about Germany; working at USHMM with the Speakers Bureau and translating materials; speaking about his past; and being featured in the book “The Triumphant Spirit” by Nicholas del Calzo.

    Oral history interview with Lena Jurand

    Oral History

    Lena Jurand (Salzberg), born in Przemysl, Poland on September 13, 1917, discusses being an only child, educated in a Catholic school then at a music conservatory; meeting her husband Julian Jurand in 1931 and getting married in May 1940; living in the Russian part of town; her father being chosen for the Judenrat when the Germans took over; Jews having to give up jewelry and wear a star; the ghetto being formed in July 1942; moving with parents and in-laws from Lvov; working in a factory disinfecting uniforms; her father being taken away and how she went to the Gestapo headquarters and saved him from deportation to Auschwitz; meeting a Polish woman in the factory who offered to hide her and Julian; hiding for 22 months in room off of kitchen in a woman’s apartment; being liberated by Russians in August 1944; living in an apartment with her husband and cousins; living in Munich, Germany with UNRRA staff of the Neu Freimann DP Camp; teaching music to child survivors in camp for one year; moving to Genoa, Italy, where Julian practiced medicine; visiting her uncle for six months in New York, NY; going to the United States in 1951; living in New Jersey, where Julian worked in state hospital as a psychiatrist; and Julian becoming the clinical director at St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, D.C.

    Oral history interview with Wallace Witkowski

    Oral History

    Wallace A. Witkowski, born January 12, 1928 in Kielce, Poland, discusses his escape from Poland on a ship to Goteborg, Sweden in 1948; going to the United States; how his sister was caught by the communists and imprisoned; his struggle to find his father who had immigrated to the United States earlier; settling in Detroit, Michigan and adjusting to American life; how his mother and sister arrived in the U.S. later; attending high school and then Wayne State University; getting married in 1951; working as a radio disc jockey using the on-air name Jan Alexander; earning a law degree; working in Washington, DC and traveling between the United States and Poland; working for the Federal Trade Commission; living and working in Micronesia; his thoughts on religion and how the Holocaust affected him; his identity as a Catholic; his work as a translator; and his work with the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission.

    Oral history interview with Peter Masters

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Lena Gitter

    Oral History

    Lena Gitter (née Lieba Rosenblatt), born in 1905 in Vienna, Austria, discusses her life after the Holocaust; immigrating to the US in July 1938 with her husband and small daughter; her husband who worked as a physician; feeling guilty for many years about having escaped Vienna before the Holocaust; her long involvement with the Montessori schools both in Vienna and the United States; the Montessori method; working with people in Mississippi under Johnson’s War on Poverty program; the death of her husband in 1974; her plan to donate her collection of early childhood education materials to a library in Vienna; working under several Presidents of the United States.

    Oral history interview with Jacob Wiener

    Oral History

    Jacob Wiener (né Koppel G. Zwienicki), born March 25, 1917 in Bremen, Germany, discusses his experiences in the United States after World War II; the reaction to the war by the American media; his wife’s experience on the Kindertransport; his memories of watching Nazi war crime trials on television; his thoughts on Israel and Palestine; the Eichmann trial; how he was involved with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum from its founding; Holocaust education in American schools; antisemitism in the United States; and how he founded a school for mentally disabled children in the 1950s.

    Oral history interview with Noah Roitman

    Oral History

    Noah Roitman, born in Baranowicze, Poland (Baranavichy, Belarus) on January 10, 1923, discusses his religious upbringing and schooling; being very athletic; receiving warnings from his Christian friends in November 1938; his town being under Soviet rule in 1939; people being deported and his house being burned down; the German invasion on June 27, 1941; the formation of a ghetto on December 12, 1941; wearing the yellow star and working in arms factory; joining the resistance group of Mome Kopelovitz; the first action in the ghetto in March 1942; joining the partisans led by Pougatchov in the forest in August 1942; his activities sabotaging trains and bringing others out of ghetto (saving approximately 80 people); being sent to Pinsk, Belarus in late 1943; joining a group led by Major Igor, attacking trains; being ordered into Russian Army in Slutsk, Belarus in December 1943; fighting Germans and seeing Warsaw destroyed; being wounded by a sniper outside of Berlin, Germany; running a canteen for the Russian Army at the end of the war; returning to Poland; helping Jews get to Czechoslovakia; being captured and jailed, but escaping to Łódź, Poland; meeting his wife; traveling through Germany and France to get to Israel; being detained in Cyprus for 3 to 4 months; having a construction business in Israel; and immigrating to the United States in October 1963.

    Oral history interview with Richard W. Peterson

    Oral History

    Richard W. Peterson, born September 29, 1925 in Iowa, discusses his family’s Danish background; growing up in a Baptist family; first learning about the war in Europe and his family’s concern for Denmark; antisemitism in Iowa; hearing about the attack on Pearl Harbor; his involvement with ROTC and Boy Scouts; attending Drake University; joining the Army Specialized Training Reserve Program (ASTRP); reporting to Fort Crook for the reserve program and then to Camp Dodge in Iowa; being sworn into the U.S. Army; training at Camp Livingston in Louisiana with the 86th Blackhawk division; being assigned to A Company, 342nd Infantry; being sent to Le Havre, France; traveling through France, the Netherlands, and Germany; fighting in a battle in Attendorn, Germany; entering what appeared to be a factory in Attendorn and seeing starving people there; the reaction of his comrades to seeing the prisoners; the liberation of Auschwitz; being sent to the Philippines from September 1945 to March 1946; finishing his degree at the University of Iowa; graduating from law school in 1951; getting married; his father’s appointment to the Iowa Supreme Court; how he was a United States Magistrate Judge; his three children; and how he feels about American current events, politics, and world news.

    Oral history interview with Riane Gruss

    Oral History

    Riane Gruss (née Wohl), born on August 18, 1932 in Vienna, Austria, describes her father, who was a banker in Kraków, Poland and an industrialist in Vienna, and how her parents lived half a year in each place; she and her siblings being raised by a governess in Vienna; being in Kraków on September 1, 1939; going to Jaroslav, where there was bombing, then to Zloczow and to Kolomyja; her father and brother being captured at the border and her brother’s release; returning to Zloczow; being sent to Siberia by the Russians in July 1940; her younger brother getting scarlet fever; arriving in August 1940 near Yakutsk and Aldan and going to a labor camp; conditions in the camp; the hard physical labor for adults; how in April 1941 the NKVD said mothers and children could leave; their New York relatives getting them Bolivian passports; leaving in May and meeting her father in Lvov (L'viv, Ukraine); going to a farm in country for four months after the German invasion on June 22, 1941; her family following her uncle Joseph Stieglitz to Munkacs, Hungary (Mukacheve, Ukraine); getting Polish Christian papers; going to Budapest, Hungary; going to Szeged, Hungary, where her father had to be hospitalized; the children being hidden in the fall of 1944 in a caretaker’s house in Buda, Hungary; escaping when the Russians arrived and reuniting with her parents; going with her family to Mako, Hungary for four weeks then to Vienna; her parents returning to Kraków; going with a smuggler to Brno, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic) and then joining her parents in Kraków; going with her family to Stockholm, Sweden; going to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in October 1946; going to New York, in February 1951; and getting married in December 195 and having two children.

    Oral history interview with Regina Spiegel

    Oral History

    Regina Spiegel, (née Gutman) born May 12, 1926 in Radom, Poland, discusses her post-war experiences starting with her liberation; traveling with 3,000 other female prisoners by train from Elsnig, Germany to Dachau, Germany; how the train stopped on the way to Dachau because the railway line had been bombed; how the train itself was bombed by the Allies while stopped on the tracks; being able to escape during the bombing; traveling with 15 other women by horse and buggy to Poland; sleeping in German homes while traveling to Poland; avoiding large groups of Russian soldiers; promising her mother and her boyfriend that if they were separated during the war, they would meet in Radom, Poland; how she and her friends boarded a train in Poznań, Poland without any money; meeting a man on the train with whom she had been imprisoned in Pionki, Poland; returning to Radom where she was told that returning Jews were being killed; returning to the Radom Ghetto, where many displaced persons were gathering; writing her name on a list of displaced persons in the Radom Ghetto; traveling from Radom to Kozienice to reunite with her boyfriend, Sam; leaving Poland with Sam and traveling by train to Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic); traveling with the Joint Distribution Committee from Prague to Pilsen, Czech Republic and then to Germany; staying with Sam in the displaced persons camp Föhrenwald; her marriage to Sam in 1946; moving to Stuttgart, Germany, where she learned to be a seamstress through ORT classes; her involvement with the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York; her religious beliefs and how they changed throughout the war; moving to Washington, DC; how she and Sam learned to speak English; working as a seamstress before giving birth to a daughter in August 1951; her thoughts on the Yugoslavian conflict; her work with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum during its early development; her activity with the Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Friends of Greater Washington; returning with Sam to Auschwitz in 1975; speaking publically about the Holocaust; receiving an award from the United Jewish Appeal; and how she and Sam take groups of 16 to 18 year olds to Poland and Israel through the B'nai B'rith Youth Organization.

    Oral history interview with Charles Stein

    Oral History

    Charles Stein (né Karl Robert Stein), born in Vienna, Austria, on November 28, 1919, describes his childhood; attending medical school at the University of Vienna; immigrating to the United States and arriving on December 18, 1939; his draft into the army on October 7, 1941; discovering that his parents had gone into the Łódź ghetto; training at Camp Ritchie in Maryland; going to Normandy, France with the 9th Infantry Division as the commander of a prisoner-of-war interrogation team; helping to liberate Nordhausen and interrogating its Ukrainian guards; becoming an Army captain and then the chief of the translation section in the Office of Military History at the Pentagon; serving in Korea and Tokyo for five years; marrying an Air Force lieutenant in Tokyo; returning to the US and settling in Washington, DC; working for the Air Force Intelligence and for the State Department until his retirement in 1978; serving as a foreign service officer and being responsible for the resettlement of refugees in Europe; and writing about his experiences during the war.

    Oral history interview with Hannah Kalman

    Oral History

    Hannah Kalman (née Hannah Finer Kalmanowicz), born in 1912 in Opoczno, Poland and describes her family; moving to Łódź, Poland when she was 12 and joining a Zionist organization; meeting her husband in the Zionist organization and getting married in 1937; moving into the Łódź ghetto in 1939; living with her son, sister, and nephew in a small room with bad conditions; being deported with her family on one of the last transports out of the Łódź ghetto; never seeing her son and nephew again after their arrival at Auschwitz; her transport to Waldeslust, Germany, where she did hard labor; going on a death march to Bergen-Belsen; conditions in the camp; being liberated with her sister on April 15, 1945; the death of her sister two months after liberation; traveling around Poland looking for relatives; reuniting with her husband later in Poland; moving to Germany and having a son; immigrating to the United States; settling in Scranton, Pennsylvania; having a daughter; and living in Israel for a short time but ultimately settling in the United States for medical treatment.

    Oral history interview with Morris Rosen

    Oral History

    Morris Rosen, born on November 10, 1922 in Częstochowa, Poland, describes his family; being forced to paint rooms for German troops during the war; his deportation to Theresienstadt; being forced on a death march to Buchenwald; receiving help from the Red Cross after the war; traveling around Poland and Germany trying to find his sister; his time spent in displaced persons camps; his memories of the Nuremberg Trials; immigrating to the United States and settling in New York; the mental stress with which he dealt after the war; attending the international law program at Columbia; moving to Baltimore, Maryland in November, 1949; getting married in 1953; collecting items from the World War Two era; and his reflections on the state of antisemitism in today’s world.

    Oral history interview with Sam Spiegel

    Oral History

    Sam Spiegel, born in Kozienice, Poland on August 23, 1922, describes his family and childhood; being forced into a ghetto; his father’s involvement in the underground movement; working for the Judenrat and getting papers to leave the ghetto and get extra food; his deportation to Auschwitz in 1942; meeting his future wife in the camp; the Ukrainian camp guards; conditions in the camp and how inmates helped each other; going on a death march as the Allies neared Auschwitz; returning home and experiencing antisemitism; spending time in displaced persons camps; working for the United Nations Relief Organization and the Joint Distribution Committee after the war; getting married; immigrating to the United States; and returning to Europe to visit the concentration camps.

    Oral history interview with Fred Gutter

    Oral History

    Fred Gutter, born on December 25, 1926 in Sanok, Poland, describes his family and childhood; his memories of celebrating the Jewish holidays and Sabbath services; attending a high school and experiencing antisemitism; increasing persecution against Jews in the 1930s; moving to Lwów because of the difficulties his family faced; his family’s capture by Russian troops and living under Russian control; being released by the Russians at the end of the war and briefly returning to Sanok; staying in several displaced persons camps; reuniting with his father after the war; receiving aid from the Joint Distribution Committee; spending some time in Palestine and fighting in the 1948 war; immigrating to the United States in 1959; and his feelings about American politics.

    Oral history interview with Henry Greenbaum

    Oral History

    Henry Greenbaum, born on April 1, 1928 in Starachowice, Poland, describes his family and childhood; his memories of his family celebrating the Jewish holidays; being too young to understand the persecution that was happening around him; his family deciding that one of his sisters should immigrate to the United States in 1937; the establishment of a ghetto in Starachowice; his deportation to a labor camp in October 1942; attempting to escape but getting severely wounded and having to stay in the camp; his transfers to Auschwitz and then Flossenbürg; going on a death march from Flossenbürg; his liberation by the U.S. Army on April 25, 1945; spending time in a displaced persons camp after the war until his sister in America could send papers for him and his brother; immigrating to the United States in June 1946; adjusting to life in America and finding a job at a department store; settling in the Washington metro area; and interacting with other Holocaust survivors who live in his community.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Alper

    Oral History

    Ruth Alper, born on February 18, 1932 in Germany, describes her family and childhood; experiencing little antisemitism as a child; her memories of Kristallnacht; receiving an affidavit from family in Detroit, MI in 1939 to immigrate to the United States; arriving in Cuba and staying there until 1941, when she and her family moved to Miami, FL; the small Jewish community in Havana, Cuba; listening to the progress of the war on the radio; experiencing antisemitism in Miami; her recollections of the response of the American Jewish community experiencing the war from abroad; and creating a new life for herself in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Michael Lin

    Oral History

    Michael Lin, born in Riga, Latvia on September 14, 1936, describes his family and childhood; the Jewish community of Riga; the beginning of the war in 1941 and his family being forced to leave their home to settle in Yaroslavl (IAroslavl' ), Russia; catching malaria and developing pneumonia in 1941 but not being able to get medication; moving to another small village in Russia, where he remained until 1944 when his family moved farther east; having to shave his head to avoid getting lice; his father’s draft into the Russian Army; the end of the war and preparing to return to Riga; his experiences with antisemitism in Russia; beginning school after the war in Latvia; his draft into the Russian Army in September 1955; attending school in Moscow after he left the army; immigrating to Israel in 1969 with his wife and children; immigrating to the United States a few years later; and his reflections on sharing his memories of the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Hannah Kalman

    Oral History

    Chana Kalman, born on January 20, 1912 in Opoczno, Poland, describes her family and childhood; her experiences with antisemitism; moving to Łódź, Poland when she was eighteen years old; participating in a Zionist organization with several other young people; working during the day and attending a Hebrew school at night; getting married shortly before the death of her father in 1937; giving birth to a child on January 25, 1939; moving into the Łódź ghetto in 1940 and struggling to find food for herself and her son; the liquidation of the ghetto in August 1944; her deportation to Auschwitz with her sister and being forced around by SS men; her transfer to Bergen-Belsen shortly before her liberation; finding out about the death of her husband and child; getting remarried in 1946 and having a son and a daughter; remaining in Germany as a displaced person until 1950, when she immigrated to the United States; settling in Scranton, Pennsylvania; spending some time in Israel once her children had grown up; and her reflections on life in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Dorrit L. Ostberg

    Oral History

    Dorrit Liane Ostberg, born in Vienna, Austria on September 29, 1929, describes her family; her father fleeing to Paris, France after the Germans entered Austria; escaping to Paris with her mother and sister but discovering that her father had fled to Yugoslavia; arriving in Yugoslavia several months later; obtaining Yugoslavian citizenship and living in Slavonski-Brod and Zagreb (both in present day Croatia); fleeing to Crikvenica, Croatia after Croatian guards arrested her father; her family’s deportation to an Italian internment camp on Rab; attending school until she contracted hepatitis and had to stay in a hospital for four months; her liberation in September 1943; her family fleeing on a fishing boat to Italy and living openly as Jews in Bari, Italy with two Italian women; immigrating to Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York in July 1944; attending junior high school; moving to New York City after the war ended; attending university and becoming a math teacher; getting married three times and having one son; and her religious feelings.

    Oral history interview with Alice Eberstarkova Masters

    Oral History

    Alice Eberstarkova Masters, born in Trstená, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia) in 1925, describes her youth; her experiences with antisemitism before the war; immigrating to England in 1939 on a Kindertransport; working as a secretary for the Czech government-in-exile in London during the war; following the BBC broadcasts of the war’s progress; the end of the war and discovering that her parents had died in Auschwitz; her reflections on the Nuremberg Trials; participating in Zionist and Jewish organizations while in England; immigrating to the United States in March 1948; working for the International Monetary Fund; losing her religious faith; getting married and starting a family after the war; and telling her children and grandchildren about her experiences during the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Martin Weiss

    Oral History

    Martin Weiss, born in Polana, Czechoslovakia (possibly present day Veľká Poľana, Slovakia) on January 28, 1929, describes his post-war experiences living in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic with his sister; receiving papers to immigrate to the United States in 1946 and living with a distant cousin; working at a butcher’s shop, so he could support himself; opening his own meat store later in life; eventually deciding to volunteer at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; and not participating much in his faith anymore.

    Oral history interview with Leonard Gordon

    Oral History

    Leonard Gordon, born on June 8, 1925 in Tilsit, Germany (Sovetsk, Russia), describes growing up in Siauliai, Lithuania; his family; attending Jewish grade school and high school; the German invasion of Lithuania in 1941; trying to escape to Russia but instead having to return home and go into the Siauliai ghetto; his family’s transport to Stutthof in 1944; being transported with his father and brother to Dachau, where they worked at Mühldorf; building the German underground airport, Messerschmitt; his father’s proposal that the three of them commit suicide; hearing about the invasion of Normandy; the liberation of Dachau in May 1945; staying in a displaced persons camp in Feldafing and planning to move to Israel; traveling to Italy and studying to be a radio technician; immigrating to the United States; becoming an electrical engineer and serving in the United States Navy; and rediscovering religion after the death of his wife.

    Oral history interview with Fritz Gluckstein

    Oral History

    Fritz Gluckstein, born January 24, 1927 in Berlin, Germany, describes the end of the war in Berlin; the food and housing shortages; cleaning up rubble from bombings with his father; the difficulties of re-starting his education after the war; immigrating to the United States in January 1948 and settling in the Minneapolis and St. Paul area; becoming a veterinarian; and volunteering for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Oral history interview with Brigitte Freidin

    Oral History

    Brigitte Freidin, born in Augsburg, Germany on June 3, 1930, describes her family and childhood; her memories of Kristallnacht; her father being arrested and sent to Dachau after Kristallnacht; her father’s release and her parents’ decision to try to immigrate to the United States; traveling to England while waiting for permission to go to the U.S.; immigrating to the U.S. in 1941; staying with relatives who were taking in refugees in Washington, DC; losing touch with much of her family left in Europe and then discovering that many had died; participating in American student clubs during the war; working as a salesgirl when she was fourteen years old to help support her family; getting married and starting a family; and speaking about her personal experiences during the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Eva Kristine Belfoure

    Oral History

    Eva Kristine Belfoure, born on October 1, 1924 in Kraków, Poland, describes growing up in a Roman Catholic home; having many Orthodox Jewish friends in her childhood; teaching Catholic prayers to an elderly Jewish lady who was hidden in her home during the war; exchanging goods and delivering messages in the ghetto; being arrested in January 1942 and being taken to the Nordhausen concentration camp, where she worked in various labor camps; her deportation to the Rathsfeld firm, where she worked as a kitchen aide and remained until liberation; doing translation work in a field hospital in Nordhausen after the war; going to the displaced persons camps in Dora, Heilbronn, and Darmstadt; attending the university in Frankfurt after receiving aid from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency; immigrating to the United States in June 1950 and marrying a sailor in 1953; teaching languages in Baltimore County for twenty-five years; and translating for the Red Cross and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Oral history interview with 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.

    View All 264 Items in the Collection