Oral history interview with Ernst L. Presseisen

Oral history interview with Per Anger

Oral History

Per Anger, a Swedish diplomat, describes being assigned to the Swedish Legation in Budapest, Hungary as Secretary for Trade in late 1942; the growing antisemitism in Hungary during that time; the Legation’s response to Jewish pleas for help when Germany invaded Hungary in March 1944 as well as Raoul Wallenberg’s additional efforts upon his arrival in July 1944, a position resulting from negotiations between the American War Refugee Board, World Jewish Congress, and American Embassy in Stockholm, Sweden; the many ways in which Sweden was involved in helping Jews in Hungary and why they were involved; his last meeting with Wallenberg just before his disappearance on January 17, 1945; the terrors of the Russian occupation; returning home with the other diplomats in April 1945; his attempts to enlist Sweden’s help in finding Wallenberg and the accounts of eye-witnesses who had had contact with Wallenberg in Soviet prisons; his suspicion that the Soviets suspected Wallenberg of being a spy because of his contacts with Iver Olsen of the War Refugee Board; and authoring the book “With Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest” (published in 1981).

Oral history interview with Margaret Beer

Oral History

Margaret Beer (née Weiss), born in 1911 in Sziget, Hungary (Sighet, Romania), describes the German invasion of Hungary; S.S. troops being moved into many Jewish homes, including hers; how the troops with the help of Hungarian authorities identified prominent Jews who were forced to form a Jewish council; the Germans confiscating Jewish businesses and personal property; ghettoization; how the Jews were helped by non-Jewish Hungarians, who smuggled food into the ghetto; the evacuation of all Jewish patients from the local hospital; the formation of a Jewish police force; the evacuation of the Jews from the ghetto and the transports to Auschwitz; life in Auschwitz including the initial selection, showers, barracks, Appells, work conditions, food allotment, wash barracks, and her selection by Mengele; transported to Gelsenkirchen, Germany in July 1944 to work in the Krupp armament industry; the working conditions and Allied bombings; being transferred to Sömmerda in Thuringia, Germany in September 1944 to work in another ammunition factory; being evacuated from the camp in April 1945 when the Allies got closer; escaping during the march and eventually finding housing in a German village until liberation at the end of April 1945; receiving help from Russian POW’s and later American liberators; and her skills as a dressmaker helping sustain her until May 1946 when she could join her brother in Philadelphia, PA.

Oral history interview with Hans Braun

Oral History

Hans Braun, born in Hannover, Germany in 1923, describes his family, who were German Sinti (Romanies); being part of a small carnival and traveling around Germany during the summer and living in Bernau in the winter; Nazi persecution beginning in 1939 and having to wear a patch with the letter “Z”; being forced with his father to work for the German army in the armament industry in 1941; being suspected of sabotage after accidentally breaking a machine and escaping arrest by fleeing to his grandfather’s home in Berlin, Germany; being pursued by the Gestapo and going into hiding first with friends in Berlin then with an uncle in Eger and finally with Sintis in Luxemburg who gave him false papers; being arrested and jailed when he returned home but escaping; his subsequent arrests and escapes using disguises and false papers; his final capture and being put on a transport to Auschwitz with other Sinti families; being put into the Birkenau Romani camp where he was reunited with his family; conditions in the Romani camp; his work loading and unloading the dead at the crematorium; being beaten by guards; his entire family dying one by one by either typhus and/or starvation; getting typhus and being experimented on in the hospital barracks; how Dr. Mengele tortured children and used them for his medical experiments; being sent to Flossenbürg labor camp, where he was beaten; being sent on a death march with surviving inmates for four days and nights just before liberation; escaping with two other men and hiding in a village which was defended by the SS; and being liberated by American troops.

Oral history interview with Eva Burns

Oral History

Eva Burns (née Gerstl), born in 1924 in Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), describes her father, who was a pediatrician, and her mother, who was a concert pianist; living a mostly secular life with some intermarriages in her mother's family; how the German takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1939 drastically affected their lives; her brother being sent to Kladno and the rest of the family to Theresienstadt; receiving help from non-Jews; being deported to Theresienstadt on November 17, 1942; how Theresienstadt was a "show" camp with books, a coffee house, and concerts; being part of a chorus preparing Verdi's Requiem and observing religious activities and humor; being transported to Auschwitz in May 1944 and six weeks later to Christianstadt, a women's labor camp; helping to sabotage grenades in the ammunition factory; the cruelty of the women SS guards; escaping from a death march in February 1945; assuming a German identification and working in the Sudetenland; how in the spring of 1945 she went to Prague, where she worked for the family of an SS officer serving at the front; revealing her Czech identity in May 1945; getting married in November 1947 in Prague; and immigrating to the United States in June 1948.

Oral history interview with Susan Faulkner

Oral History

Susan Faulkner (née Neulaender), born in 1921 in Berlin, Germany, describes her father, who was a banker; being raised in an assimilated Jewish family; still having Jewish religious instruction in her public school during the first year under the Nazi regime; being favorably influenced by the ordained female rabbi, Regina Jonas; experiencing antisemitism and traumatic discrimination at school after 1933; the brief relaxation of anti-Jewish measures in Berlin during the 1936 Olympic Games; attending a private Jewish school for a year; having a brief, unhappy experience in a Zionist agricultural school in Silesia in 1936; working for relatives in Gleiwitz in Silesia (Gliwice, Poland), where she felt more protected in a traditional Jewish community than she had felt in Berlin; returning to Berlin and working in Alltrue emigration processing agency; her memories of Kristallnacht in November 1938 and witnessing the destruction of Jewish property, the burning of the Fasanenstrasse Synagogue as onlookers cheered, and the beating of an elderly Jewish man; how her father fled to Belgium, was later caught in Marseilles, and died in Auschwitz; traveling with her mother and sister to Guatemala in 1938 on a German ship; their fourth class passage and how they were treated with disdain by the crew; reaching the United States two years later; getting married in 1942 to an Austrian refugee who converted to Protestantism; beginning her college studies in 1958 with restitution money from Germany and earning a Ph.D. in English; becoming a teacher; her need to bear witness to the Holocaust; her psychological problems associated with survivor guilt; and her painful attempts to identify as a Jew, including compulsive writing of pro-Jewish and pro-Israel letters to editors.

Oral history interview with Rose Fine

Oral History

Rose Fine (née Hollender) born in Ozorków, Poland in 1917, describes her Orthodox Jewish family; her father, who was a shochet; the living conditions during the German occupation before and after the establishment of the Ozorków Ghetto in 1941; the health conditions in the ghetto; deportations; her work in the ghetto hospital, where children were put to starve to death; the behavior of the Volksdeutsche in Ozorków; her mother’s deportation to Chelmno, Poland, where she was gassed to death; witnessing the deportation of the old and infirm in chloroform-filled Panzer trucks in March 1941; seeing the public hanging of 10 Jews; being transferred to the Łódź Ghetto in 1942 where she worked for Mrs. Rumkowski until she was deported to Auschwitz in August 1944; going through a selection and sent to the Freiberg, Germany airplane factory; being transferred later to Mauthausen in Austria, where she was liberated by the Americans in the spring of 1945; the birth of a baby girl (both mother and baby survived) just prior to liberation; receiving help from a German farmer; staying briefly in Łódź and Gdansk; life in Gdansk, where she got married; living with her husband for four years in Munich, Germany, where they belonged to Rabbi Lazerowski’s synagogue and she attended the ORT school; immigrating to the US in 1949 with the help of the Joint Distribution Committee; and the story of the hiding of a Torah by a non-Jew in Ozorków and how he gave it to a survivor from Ozorków to take to Atlanta, Georgia.

Oral history interview with Dora Freilich

Oral History

Dora Golubowitz Freilich, born December 25, 1926 in Pruzany, Poland, near Bialystok, describes her pre-war life, including her schooling, relations with non-Jewish Poles, Jewish community life, and youth groups; the Russian occupation from 1939 to 1941, including the expropriation of her family’s business; the German invasion and her family being forced to move into the Pruzany ghetto in June 1941; the living conditions, cultural activities, labor units, Judenrat (Jewish council), and contact with Jewish partisans in the ghetto; how a non-Jewish ex-employee of her father hid her baby sister but later the family asked him to return the child; the evacuation of the ghetto in January 1943 and her family’s transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau; witnessing Mengele’s sadistic games with prisoners and her awareness of the medical experiments (which she describes in great detail); sadistic behavior by guards, including the shooting of her sister for sport; conditions at Birkenau, including slave labor, types of prisoners, orchestra, death process, and relations among inmates; how older girls tried to help the younger ones and the coping strategies they used to survive; the sabotage of a crematorium in October 1944 and the public hanging of four girls held responsible; the escape, capture, and execution of Mala Zimetbaum; life in the camp in January 1945 and the death march to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she stayed for three months; being transferred to Malchow; escaping with 11 girls into the forest; being liberated by Russian soldiers in May 1945; the treatment by Russians, which ranged from kindness to brutality; their return to Pruzany after a three month journey, during which she experienced both antisemitism and help from non-Jews; going on to Łódź, Poland; their failed attempt to go to Palestine; getting married; going to Feldafing displaced persons camp in 1946; immigrating to the United States in March 1949; survivor’s guilt; and how the Holocaust and the loss of her family still affects both her and her daughter.

Oral history interview with Elizabeth Fuchs

Oral History

Baroness Elizabeth Kemény-Fuchs, the Austrian-born young wife of the Hungarian Foreign Minister Gábor Kemény, describes being shocked by the October 1944 persecutions of Jews under the Arrow Cross government; being approached by Wallenberg and being ready to help him, mainly by persuading her husband to help issue protective passports for Jews and also prevailing upon the German Ambassador Veesenmayer to issue needed visas, all at considerable risk to herself; how the stress of this, of the official duties, and of a difficult pregnancy caused her to go for a brief visit to her mother in South Tyrol, Austria; how because of the baby’s birth and the Soviet siege of Budapest, she never could return there; her critiques of a film made about Wallenberg and her role, describing his actual activities, his special qualities, and his misjudgment regarding the Soviets' motivations; aid given to Jews by Weiss diplomats and by Angelo Rotta, the papal nuncio; how her own involvement was solely humanitarian and that she is neither of Jewish descent nor was ever Wallenberg's mistress; her insistence that her husband was not a Nazi and how he helped save many Jews; her belief that collective guilt led to his arrest, condemnation, and execution; her own post-war struggles; and her feelings that more could have been done, especially by Swedes, to free Wallenberg and her belief that he should remain "a very bright example" in an ever more selfish world.

Oral history interview with Alexandra Gorko

Oral History

Alexandra Gorko (née Paley) born in Kiev, Russia (Ukraine) in 1916, describes her family returning to Łódź, Poland in 1922 to escape communism; getting married to a non-Jewish Polish Judge and reserve officer who was killed after the German invasion; her life after the German invasion and the establishment of the Łódź Ghetto; receiving help from non-Jewish neighbors; her work as the supervisor and nurse in one of the ghetto hospitals; the betrayal and deportation of 13 young men to Chelmno in January 1942 for building and using an illegal radio; being transported to Auschwitz in August 1944; the transport, selection, and “Appells” (roll calls); her refusal to follow Mengele’s orders to inject pregnant women with a gasoline-type solution and her subsequent beatings; being transported to Ravensbrück then Muhlhausen ammunition factory in the fall of 1944; being sent in February 1945 to Bergen-Belsen and conditions there; her work in an ammunition factory; being liberated in April 1945; the Swedish Red Cross moving Jews who were ill to Sweden; strategies for coping; and immigrating with her second husband to the United States in July 1948.

Oral history interview with Anatole Gorko

Oral History

Anatole Gorko, born in Łódź, Poland on June 28, 1907, describes his well-to-do Zionist family; working in his father’s spinning factory until 1939, when Germany invaded Poland; fighting in the Polish Army for three weeks; being taken to a prisoner-of-war camp for a few weeks; living with his family in the center of the Łódź Ghetto and life there; working as head cashier for the ghetto stores until August 1944; being deported with his family, including his wife and child, to Auschwitz in cattle cars; being selected with his brother-in-law for work while the rest of the family perished; remaining in Auschwitz for one month, then pretending to be a mechanic and being selected for a camp in Sudetenland, where after two weeks of training he worked on V2 rockets; his sabotage and persuading other workers, including German mechanics, to sabotage the work; working there from September 1944 until May 1945 when the Russians liberated the area; making his way back to Łódź, where he remarried; becoming head of the textile production for Communist Poland, but deciding to leave; smuggling himself and his wife to Munich, Germany, and waiting from 1946 to 1948 to obtain necessary papers to resettle in the United States; and his adjustment to the US.

Oral history interview with Suzanne Gross

Oral History

Suzanne Gross (née Sarah Pertofsky), born in Paris, France in 1931, describes her parents, who were born in Belz (Ukraine) and immigrated to France around 1924; her parents’ parlor in Paris, which was closed by the Germans after the invasion of Paris; the round up of Jews and separation of families; how non-native born Jews were rounded up before Jews who were considered French; being made to feel she was not really French before the war, especially after she started school; having to wear her Yellow Star to school; her father going underground and working at first on a farm, then joining the Jewish French partisans; antisemitism within the French partisans; her father working later in a steel factory; her mother being hidden by neighbors for three months; being sent to a farm in Normandy with five or six other children by the French Jewish Scouts (Eclaireurs Israelites de France), who had an underground network to hide Jewish children; working on various farms under harsh conditions; being hidden in a convent school, where she pretended to be Catholic; reuniting with her parents in Paris; how her parents lived clandestinely on and off in their boarded up shop; the family receiving money from a resistance movement in the steel factory where her father worked; the concierge helping by selling items knitted by her mother; the imprisonment of many Jews at Drancy; how families searched for arrested relatives from afar; giving a detailed account of her emotional responses to the childhood trauma she experienced and to surviving the Holocaust; and her family immigrating to the United States in 1946.

Oral history interview with Isadore Hollander

Oral History

Isadore Hollander, born 1920 in Paris, France, describes moving to Bendin (Bedzin), Poland with his Polish parents and older sister in 1923; the pre-war Jewish community; his father’s death and living from ages 11 to 15 in an orphanage, which operated according to Janusz Korczak guidelines; his mother’s re-marriage; joining a Zionist youth group; the growing antisemitism in Poland; the German invasion in September 1939 and running from town to town to avoid forced labor, until he was captured and sent to work in a coal mine in Javorzno near Krakow, Poland; escaping to Russian-occupied Poland and living in Lvov (L'viv, Ukraine) at the beginning of 1940; avoiding imprisonment for “illegal” business by registering for work in Russia; being assigned to Stalino coal mine in the Donbas region; escaping to Rovno (Rivne, Ukraine) and his religious life there from the winter of 1940 to June 1941; the establishment of the Rovno ghetto and escaping from slave labor with help from former Polish soldiers; living with 10 other Jews in near by forests until 1943; having minimal contact with Polish partisans due to mutual suspicion; serving in the Polish Army; witnessing the German-evacuated Majdanek; his life as a Polish soldier including revenge he and other Jewish soldiers took on Volkdeutsche Poles; returning at the end of the war to Bendin and meeting his future wife; their escape from Poland and life in Deggendorf displaced persons camp in Bavaria, Germany; and immigrating to the United States and settling in Philadelphia, PA in 1947.

Oral history interview with Mina Kalter

Oral History

Mina Kalter (née Basseches), born in 1921 in Przeworsk, Poland, describes being raised in a religious family; her father, who was a traveling merchant, and her mother, who worked in retail fabrics; how both her parents were active in Zionist organizations and charitable endeavors and on good terms with their Christian neighbors until 1939; the extensive work of the Kehillah in helping those in need; life after the German invasion of Poland in 1939; the bombing and desecration of the synagogue; forced labor and the confiscation of Jewish property; all Jews being forced into a ghetto; the lack of help from former Christian friends; conditions in the ghetto; smuggling her small brother to the home of a loyal former family housekeeper; escaping from a work detail in March 1941; crossing the River San to Soviet-controlled Poland, where she was helped by a Russian Jewish family prior to being resettled in a small town near Lvov (L’viv, Ukraine); life under Soviet rule in Poland; being exiled to Siberia because she refused to accept Soviet citizenship; the transport to the labor camp, where she lived for four years, until May 1945; her clandestine trip outside the Siberian camp to obtain potatoes for planting; receiving permission by mail to return to Poland in March 1945; working her way across Siberia toward Poland with her husband in June 1945, where she experienced antisemitism; receiving help from the Joint Distribution Committee in Szczecin, Poland that her two brothers were alive and joining them in a displaced persons camp in Berlin, Germany in August 1945; the living conditions with her new born baby; staying in another camp near Landsberg, Germany in 1948; immigrating with her family to the United States in 1950; her adjustment to life in the US; her children’s awareness of their parents’ background and their commitment to Judaism; and her hope that her testimony will remind future generations of the horrors of the Hitler years.

Oral history interview with Inge Karo

Oral History

Inge Karo (née Heiman), born in 1926 in Essen, Germany, describes her father, who was a part owner of a business; her parents’ active participation in the Jewish community and belonging to a conservative synagogue; being part of a non-Zionist youth organization and educated in a school for Jewish children until the schools were closed by the Nazis; the effects of the Nuremberg laws; the effects of Kristallnacht in 1938 on the Jewish community of Essen and her family; the confiscation of her family’s home; being affected by the pervasive Nazi propaganda and persecution; her family’s attempts to escape from Germany to the United States; immigrating with her family to the US in December 1939; and life in the United States as a refugee, including her experiences in public school.

Oral history interview with Genia Klapholz

Oral History

Genia Klapholz (née Flachs), born in 1912 in Wisnicz, Poland, describes being raised in a religious family; the ghettoization of the town during WWII; witnessing the murder of her baby niece by a German soldier; escaping with her younger sister and paying a woman in a neighboring village to hide them for eight days; having to return to Wisnicz; being transported to the Bochnia ghetto, where they worked in a uniform factory for one year, enduring terrible conditions; moving next to the Szebnie transit camp, where they saw Jews from Tarnow burned alive; her Yiddish poem, “In Memory of My Sister, Serl, of Camp Szebnie” (she reads it during the interview; note that it and another poem, “The Death March from Auschwitz” are included with the transcripts); working for three months as a cleaning woman in a factory at Szebnie; being deported to Auschwitz in 1942, which she describes in detail; the brutal treatment during her two years in Birkenau; working in the ammunition factory, from which four young women smuggled gunpowder for the attempted explosion of the crematoria and witnessing their hanging after they were caught; a particular delousing incident, during which she had to stand in the snow, naked for hours; her foot operation, performed without anesthesia; being forced to leave Auschwitz on a death march in January 1945; escaping with two other women and finding shelter with a Polish woman and her family in Silesia; how this family was recognized as one of the “Righteous among the Nations” by Yad Vashem in 1991; being liberated by the Russians on March 28, 1945 and returning to Krakow, Poland in search of her family; living in displaced persons camps in Ainring, Regensburg, and Landsberg, where she met and married Henry Klapholz; immigrating with her husband and baby son in 1948 to the United States; buying a farm in Vineland, NJ; and moving to Philadelphia, PA in 1955.

Oral history interview with Kurt Kupferberg

Oral History

Kurt Kupferberg, born in September 1907 in Berlin, Germany, describes his observant, middle-class family, who were originally from Galicia; how after World War I his family’s citizenship was changed to Polish; being part of the mass deportation to Zbaszyn, Poland in 1938; how a Nazi policeman had warned them to leave Germany earlier; his return to Germany in 1939; his deportation to and experiences in Sachsenhausen in 1939, Dachau in 1940, and Buchenwald in 1941; the selections and medical experimentation performed on him in Buchenwald; suffering from typhus following an injection; how as Allies approached Buchenwald, non-Jewish political prisoners sheltered Jews from the S.S.; liberation from Buchenwald; marrying a survivor in Berlin in 1946; and immigrating with his wife and baby to the United States in 1947.

Oral history interview with Herbert Lindemeyer

Oral History

Herbert Lindemeyer, born in Minden, Germany in 1922, describes his father, who owned a pharmacy; antisemitism after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor; the boycott of Jewish stores in April 1933 and the Nuremberg Laws of 1935; his parents’ discussions of whether to emigrate; Kristallnacht and his father’s incarceration in Buchenwald for a month and the confiscation of his pharmacy by the Nazis; immigrating to England in August 1939 through the help of a British Quaker woman; his internment with thousands of German and Austrian refugees in June 1940 on the Isle of Man; being allowed to leave the internment camp in December 1941; working in a defense job in Manchester, England; getting married in January 1944 to a woman who had traveled to England on the Kindertransport; joining the American Army in October 1945 for an assignment in Germany as an interpreter and mail censor; tracking Werner Von Braun; returning to Minden, where the new owner of his father’s pharmacy had kept papers which helped Herbert obtain restitution; and immigrating to the US in 1948.

Oral history interview with Manya Perel

Oral History

Manya Perel (née Frydman), born in 1924 in Radom, Poland, describes being the youngest of 10 children in a traditional Jewish family; her father’s bakery; her education and Jewish life in Radom; antisemitism and the Przytyk pogrom in 1936; German invasion in 1939; the persecutions and the deportation of younger males to Belzec labor camp in 1941; the establishment of a ghetto in Radom; the collaboration of Volksdeutsche and Ukrainians in brutalities and some help by Jewish police; the “resettlement” of Radom Jews to Treblinka in August 1942 while younger, able-bodied persons were retained for forced labor in factories near Radom; her efforts to hide her five-year-old niece in the barracks of a Majdanek subcamp; being transferred to Majdanek, then Płaszów, and then Auschwitz; conditions in the camps; the harsher conditions in Gundelsdorf in Oberfranken, Germany, where slave laborers were taken as the Russian Army approached; experiencing near starvation in early 1945 during their evacuation to camps Ravensbrück and Rechlin; nearly dying of typhus after liberation; returning to Radom to search for family and finding continued antisemitism there; going to Stuttgart with the help of UNRRA and the Joint Distribution Committee; immigrating to Montreal, Canada in 1948; and moving to Philadelphia, PA in 1958.

Oral history interview with Anne Weidemann-Russell

Oral History

Anne Dore Weidemann-Russell, a non-Jew born in Brandenburg, Germany in 1926, describes going to school from 1933 to 1945 in Brandenburg; her father telling her about the experiences of Germans opposed to Hitler; her uncle being sent to Sachsenhausen; hearing about a Jehovah’s Witness who was imprisoned and later killed for his beliefs; a neighbor who had been a Nazi sympathizer and had a mental breakdown after executing Jews as a soldier on the Eastern Front; Kristallnacht and life in Brandenburg under the Nazis; her father, who was a civil servant, losing his position in 1933 because he was a Social Democrat and belonged to the Socialist Party (SPD); her father’s reasons for opposing the Nazi regime; how her father avoided using the “Heil Hitler” salute and secretly listened to the BBC (British Broadcasting Company); learning to be careful in public because of her father’s beliefs; the local police taking her father into protective custody in July 1944 during a roundup of men suspected of involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler; the behavior of local Nazis near the end of the war; and attending Humbold University in East Berlin and the Free University in West Berlin after the war.

Oral history interview with Hanna Seckel

Oral History

Hanna Seckel (née Dubova), born in Kolin, Czechoslovakia, describes growing up in Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic); her father, who was a doctor; being involved in the Zionist youth movement; attending a French school until the German occupation in 1939 when the schools were closed and restrictions were imposed on Jews; being 14 years old in 1939 when she went to Denmark on a transport of children from Hashomer Hatzair, sponsored by the Danish League of Peace and Freedom; her life and work in Denmark; working at two farms under harsh conditions; the farms in Gørløse and Naestved; learning through letters from her family about the worsening conditions for Jews in Prague; her parents writing of their immanent deportation to Auschwitz in 1942 and her attempted suicide; the Danish underground called “Radishes”; working as a chambermaid at a Danish boarding school in exchange for her tuition; suffering from her lack of money and being an outsider; how her goal was to get to Palestine; quitting school in 1943 and working as a maid for a family in Naestved; how some refugee children reached Palestine, some were caught, and some were sent back to their original countries by Denmark; being rescued by the Danish underground and the trip to Sweden hidden in a fishing boat; the chief rabbi of Copenhagen, Rabbi Melchior, who was part of the group; being received warmly by Swedish fishermen; the Red Cross handing out supplies and the Swedish police processing them; working as a maid for room and board; working as a maid in exchange for tuition to schools of nursing in Norrköping and Södertälje; losing all contact with her former friends while she was in Uppsala, Sweden; receiving her nursing certificate and working in an insane asylum; returning to Denmark in 1945 because she heard that she was entitled to Danish citizenship, which was not true; working in Copenhagen in a restitution office for Danish Jews; returning to Prague in 1946; living with relatives and earning a degree from Charles University (Univerzita Karlova); returning to Denmark on a Nansen Pass in 1947; going to Sweden and working as a translator in a factory owned by the Noble family; and immigrating to the United States under the Czech quota in 1950.

Oral history interview with Philip Solomon

Oral History

Philip Solomon describes serving in the United States Army as part of the 101st Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron (Mechanized), which liberated the Landsberg concentration camp on April 28, 1945; his unit’s arrival in Germany in February/March 1945 and their military mission; their lack of knowledge of concentration camps or the scale of mass murder; how their first indication of Nazi horrors occurred after crossing the Rhine, heading east, when his unit captured small towns, liberating displaced persons from forced labor camps (mostly Eastern Europeans); his second indication came when liberating several prisoner of war camps; the ominous experience of finding sealed railroad cars on a siding filled with dead concentration camp victims; his unit stopping on April 28, 1945 near the city Landsberg, Germany waiting for a bridge to be repaired and unaware of the camp 1000 yards away; how a shift in the wind eventually alerted them to the smell and sight of smoke from the camp, where retreating S.S. had just massacred the inmates; his unit finding about 20 starving and ill survivors; the conditions of the camp and his feelings upon seeing the massive piles of bodies, hangings, and other atrocities; how his unit had no food or medical and could only radio for help; being commanded to leave Landsberg after 20 minutes in order to seize and hold a causeway near Munich, Germany; the reactions of the prisoners to liberation and the response of the young soldiers to the experience of witnessing atrocities in the midst of war; his own complex and gradually evolving psychological reaction to the experience; his concern about genocides since World War II; and his faith and pride in his Jewish heritage.

Oral history interview with Harold Stern

Oral History

Harold Stern, born August 31, 1921 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, describes being the only child of middle-class Jewish parents; his father, who came from an Orthodox background, and his mother, who was raised in a non-observant home; belonging to a large liberal congregation, the Westend Synagogue in Frankfurt; the educational system and antisemitism before and after 1933; the Kultusgemeinde, his Jewish education, and his upbringing; his studies at the Philanthropin (a Jewish secondary school), which he attended in 1935 due to increased antisemitic experiences at the public gymnasium; his mother continuing the family business after his father’s death in 1930, but having to give it up in 1937 as a result of the Nuremberg Laws; the “aryanization” of a shoe manufacturing company and other businesses; having an early quota number; how his attempts to immigrate with his mother to the United States were thwarted because their affidavits were not accepted by the American Consulate in Stuttgart; leaving in March 1939 for England through the aid of family friends in England and Bloomsbury House, while his mother remained in Frankfurt; life in London, working as a factory trainee; residing among the British (non-Jewish) working class until June 1940 when he was picked up and interned in Huyton, a camp near Liverpool with other German Jewish refugees; volunteering in July 1940 for transport on the Dunera, a ship supposedly bound for Canada but re-routed to Australia; the desperate conditions at sea, the harsh treatment by British soldiers, and the refugees’ behavior during the 10 week voyage; being transferred from Sidney to a barbed-wire enclosed compound in the Outback, in Hay, New South Wales; the internal camp leadership that emerged and the development of cultural and educational activities; help given by the Australian Christian Student Movement (under Margaret Holmes), the Jewish Welfare Board, and the Jewish people of Melbourne; moving to a camp in Tatura, Victoria that had better conditions; joining the Australian Army after 20 months of internment; being part of the 8th Employment Company, where he did transport of munitions; being discharged in 1946 or 1947, after serving four and a half years in the army; keeping contact with his mother and knowing that she reached the US in late 1941; the fate of his mother’s brother and sister; immigrating to the US in 1947 under the German quota; and moving to Philadelphia, PA in 1959.

Oral history interview with Ellen Tarlow

Oral History

Ellen Tarlow (née Meinberg), born in 1927 in Gütersloh, Westphalia, Germany, describes how her family had lived in Gütersloh since the 17th century; her father Paul Meinberg, who was an importer of cattle and was decorated with the Iron Cross in WWI; her early childhood in public school and then a Lyceum for girls; feeling antisemitism for the first time at the age of eight and being expelled from school in 1938; studying Hebrew and the Bible once a week; Nazi atrocities during and after Kristallnacht, including social ostracism, the burning of their home and synagogue, her father’s deportation to Buchenwald; her father fleeing from Buchenwald; finding shelter with her remaining family in a local cloister then fleeing to Bielefeld, Germany; their life in a Judenhaus in Gütersloh and the continued attempts to educate the children there; HIAS helping her family many times; receiving aid from several Germans in Gütersloh; a failed attempt to immigrate to Haiti; her family leaving Germany for the United States via Lisbon, Portugal, on the SS Mouzinho in August 1941; the journey from Berlin, Germany to Lisbon in a sealed train and staying in Lisbon in a group home run by HIAS; how refugees organized to cope with primitive conditions on the ship; arriving in Staten Island, NY and going through immigration processing; her life in New York in a group home for refugees sponsored by HIAS; her family’s adjustment to life in the United States and the survivor’s guilt she feels; and her return to Germany by invitation in 1985 accompanied by her husband and daughter.

Oral history interview with Erica van Adelsberg

Oral History

Erica Van Adelsberg (née Herz), born in Munich, Germany in 1928, describes her assimilated, liberal Jewish family; leaving Germany with her parents and younger brother in 1932 to live in Aerdenhoudt, Holland; living comfortably and the decency of the Dutch people; how in 1940 after the German occupation, her family was designated as being stateless; being forced to move and conditions worsening; being sent to Westerbork internment camp in 1942; continuing her education and being trained as a laboratory technician at age 14; becoming part of a Zionist youth group, which heightened her Jewish identity in contrast to her parents' assimilated orientation; life in the camp, including her friend's wedding as well as the weekly transports to Auschwitz; being sent with her family on February 15, 1944 to Bergen-Belsen; the camp routine and her work in a plastic pipe factory; the cruelty of the Polish Kapos; contracting with para-typhoid for several weeks with no medication; the family being transported by train in April 1945 with about 600 others for two weeks; enduring bombings by Allied planes; being liberated by two Russian soldiers on horseback in Trbitz, near Leipzig, Germany; the Russians setting up a hospital and caring for the survivors, many of whom succumbed to typhoid fever; how six weeks later the Americans took her family back to Holland, where her brother became the first to celebrate a bar mitzvah after the war; going to the United States in 1946; and attending a Quaker school.

Oral history interview with Sidney Willig

Oral History

Sidney Willig, born in New York City, NY in 1919, describes being raised in an Orthodox family; attending public school and training as a soccer player and boxer; antisemitism in the US in the 1920s and 1930s, including discrimination while searching for employment; being rejected from the Navy; antisemitic incidents in the Air Force; being a navigator in the Air Force during World War II; being shot down over the Netherlands; receiving from Dutch families and the Dutch underground from November 1944 to April 1945; his decision to continue wearing his dog tags, which displayed the Ten Commandments, until his liberation; his thoughts on the vast network of Nazi influence, because on his return to New York the Vichy consular officer in Washington, DC requested from him the names of those who had helped him in Holland; returning to New York and continuing his college studies at St. John’s, studying law on the advice of his valued teacher John Dandro; and his views on the reasons Jews have survived over the centuries.

Oral history interview with Sally Abrams

Oral History

Sally Abrams, born in Łódź, Poland in 1916, describes the pre-war Jewish community in Łódź and the first antisemitic restrictions; her family participating when the local Kehilla helped the Polish Jews who were expelled from Germany; the occupation of Poland in September 1939 and the beginning of the persecutions, killings, and dispossession of property; life in the ghetto, roundups, and selections, especially of children; Rumkowski; surviving with her family in the Łódź Ghetto until 1944 when they were sent to Bergen-Belsen and later to Auschwitz; avoiding the gas chambers twice but her mother, child, and husband perished; working in the woods at Unterlitz (Unterlüss) during the winter of 1944; working in an ammunition factory; surviving a death march to Gross-Rosen; being sent to an unnamed camp near Bergen-Belsen towards the end of the war in 1945; being liberated by the Allied forces; being stricken with typhus and evacuated to Sweden with the help of Count Folke Bernadotte; a visit by King Gustav of Sweden while she was in a hospital there; studying nursing in Sweden and getting married again in 1946; her two sons being born in Sweden; and immigrating to the United States in 1951.

Oral history interview with Gerald Adler

Oral History

Gerald Adler, born June 27, 1925 in Elmshorn, Germany, describes growing up in a middle-class Orthodox Jewish family; moving to Berlin, Germany, where he attended school until 1938; his father losing his job after Hitler came to power; the effects of the Nuremberg laws on German Jews; Kristallnacht and his father being arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen; his father’s release after two months when his wife secured passage to Trinidad; working on Hachsharah farms near Hamburg, Germany from 1939 to 1941; rejoining his family in Berlin; how in 1943 their immigration to Trinidad was stopped and his family was deported to Theresienstadt; his work in the camp; working at Wulkow concentration camp in the forest; prayer and religion in the camp; being returned to Theresienstadt; being liberated and going to a displaced persons camp in Germany; and arriving in the United States on May 21, 1946.

Oral history interview with Myer Adler

Oral History

Myer Adler, born September 2, 1914 in Rudnik, Austria (Rudnik nad Sanem, Poland), describes his pre-war life; attending several yeshivot in nearby small towns and developing his artistic talent along with religious studies; becoming less religiously observant; working in 1938 as a bookkeeper in Krakow, Poland after graduation from a private business school; the German invasion on September 1, 1939 and returning to Rudnik with his mother; witnessing organized and individual brutality by German soldiers and Polish civilians against Jews; being forced with other Jews across the San River to Ulanow (Ulaniv, Ukraine); the formation of a Jewish militia to protect Jews from local Poles; local Jews helping the refugees; spending the next six years in Russia and his experiences in great detail; living in Grodek (Horodok, Ukraine) until the summer of 1940; hiding in the woods with other young men to avoid being sent to the coal mines; giving himself up and being deported to Siberia with his family and others who refused Russian citizenship; living in Sinuga and Bodaybo (Siberian villages) until 1944, when he was shipped to the territory of Engelstown to work in a government owned farm; his coping skills in various jobs: laborer, stevedore and farm worker; living conditions, the black market, relations with Russian bureaucrats, the behavior of Russian exiles towards Jews, and the attempts to practice the Jewish religion; getting married in September 1945; being repatriated to Poland; going to Kraków in April 1946 with his wife; the continued antisemitism and violence by local Poles; receiving help from the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC); going illegally through Czechoslovakia in August 1946 with his pregnant wife to a transit camp in Vienna, Austria; being helped by the Haganah; going to Germany; life in the displaced persons camp in Ulm, Germany, where he stayed for three years; the Bleidorn a displaced persons camp for children, also in Ulm, where he located his niece and two nephews; immigrating with his wife and two sons to the United States in 1949; his life in the US; and several instances of help from Jews during his early years in Philadelphia, PA.

Oral history interview with Roy Allen

Oral History

Roy Allen describes being an American pilot with the 457th Bomb group, 8th Air Force during World War II; being shot down over France and rescued by the French underground; being given a French identity and hiding in Jouy-le-Châtel and in Paris; being betrayed by a Belgian girl and captured by the Gestapo on August 1, 1944; being charged as a spy and not a prisoner of war; being imprisoned in Fresnes Penitentiary in Paris for one week and then sent to Buchenwald; the instructions US pilots were given before each mission and his experiences with the French underground; his arrival and processing at Buchenwald; the starvation and primitive living conditions in the camp; seeing the crematorium and witnessing the killing of prisoners by injection and by drowning in vats of ice water; the manufacturing of the V-2 rockets at Buchenwald; his interrogation at the prison in Fresnes, which established his status as military personnel; being transferred to Stalag Luft 3 at Sagan (Żagań, Poland) and treated as a prisoner of war; his treatment in Stalag 3 versus conditions in Buchenwald; being marched to Moosburg; being liberated by Patton’s 14th Armored division; and why he feels that World War II was justified.

Oral history interview with Chayale Ash-Fuhrman

Oral History

Chayale Ash-Fuhrman (née Averbuch), born in 1920 in Kishinev, Bessarabia, Romania (Chisinau, Moldova), describes life in Kishinev; her education in public school and private Jewish school; her parents’ troupe of Yiddish actors which she was part of until she turned professional at age 15; details on the Yiddish theater group; the Romanian government restrictions in the inter-war period and the effects of the Russian occupation of Bessarabia in 1940; how the Moldavian Yiddish State Theatre could function only under strict Communist guidelines; being evacuated in June 1941 with the theater group and other civilians to Ukraine with Russian help; being forced to stop in a kolkhoz (cooperative village) in K'harkov (Kharkiv, Ukraine) to help with the harvest; the refugees living under primitive conditions and encountering antisemitism from the villagers; being sent in November 1941 to Kuibyshev (Samara, Russia) then to Tashkent, Uzbekistan to pick cotton in another cooperative; the difficulties of adapting to the Russian way of getting along; relations with the locals and the onset of hatred for Jews; her father dying of dysentery in 1942; using her training from professional school and joining a sewing cooperative to get more bread; trying to practice their religion; working as a clerk in a steel mill in Begovat (Bekobod, Uzbekistan); getting married in 1943 to a man who was working as a mechanic at the mill; returning to Poland in 1945 with her husband in an exchange program for Polish citizens; settling in a displaced persons camp in Silesia; working as an emigration secretary for "Poale Zion" and the various strategies Jewish refugees used to leave Russia; how in 1948 she went with her husband and her mother to Vienna, Austria; being placed in a displaced persons camp in Linz, Austria, where Chayale gave birth to a daughter; UNRRA and the Joint Distribution Committee helping them go to Jaffa, Israel with false papers on an Italian ship, Campidoglio, in August 1948; her husband joining the army; early immigrant life in Israel under wartime conditions; founding the Haifa Yiddish Operetta Theatre in 1949; moving later to Tel Aviv; performing in London, England and touring South Africa with an all Israeli ensemble; her divorce in 1953; marrying her second husband, an actor from Romania, in New York, NY in 1959 and staying in the United States; and her feelings about the Holocaust and its effects on the children of survivors.

Oral history interview with Eva Bentley

Oral History

Eva Bentley (née Wahrman), born in Budapest, Hungary, describes her Jewish family with a 500-year history in Hungary; antisemitic incidents with a teacher and her fellow students at public school; the stressful experience of attending an elite, experimental Jewish Gymnasium; the hardships of living under the Horthy regime, the Szalasi and Arrow Cross persecutions; the abuses during the Russian occupation; how after the German occupation in 1944 Eva and her family had to move into a “yellow star” house; her stepfather being deported to a labor camp; her experiences during an SS massacre, when she was shot and her mother was bayoneted; surviving in a primitive Jewish hospital facility; a number of instances of aid by non-Jews given by clergy and Hungarian police, who saved her and her family; how a Christian uncle saved her aunt and 29 other Jews in hiding; liberation by the Russians; getting married; and immigrating with her husband to the United States in 1956.

Oral history interview with Lory Grunberger Cahn

Oral History

Lory Cahn, born May 17, 1925 in Breslau, Germany (Wroclaw, Poland), describes growing up in a religious home; her father, who was a lawyer; her younger brother, who was sent to England in the 1930s and joined the British Army and remained in England permanently; how her schooling stopped after Kristallnacht in 1938; her family's failed attempts to immigrate to Argentina; her father being able to buy his way into Theresienstadt and Lory was allowed to stay with her parents when the family was deported in the spring of 1941; the roundup of Jews and the transport by cattle car; life in Theresienstadt; being treated for meningitis with medicine provided by the Red Cross; being sent in 1943 to Auschwitz after a two week trip in a cattle car; surviving the selection; the living and working conditions for female prisoners and the Auschwitz orchestra; the overcrowding of Auschwitz; witnessing many brutal acts; being sent in 1944 to Mauthausen after ten days in Buchenwald; a brutal trip, guarded by SS, to Kurzbach labor camp in Silesia; the pointless labor and starvation; the death march to Gross-Rosen in the fall of 1944 (which only 30 of the 150 in her group survived); being taken to Bergen-Belsen and conditions there; cannibalism; surviving bitter cold, typhus, and starvation; being liberated by British troops April 15, 1945; chaotic conditions in Bergen-Belsen and attempts to rehabilitate the survivors after liberation; many prisoners dying from eating regular food; learning of her mother’s death and that her father was still alive in Theresienstadt; going to Bavaria, in the American zone, with friends; the American Jewish soldiers looking after them; reuniting with her father in Bavaria in April 1946; spending some time in a displaced persons camp in Germany; going to the United States on April 17, 1947 and marrying one of the soldiers she had met in Bavaria; and her father remaining in Germany.

Oral history interview with Nino deProphetis

Oral History

Nino deProphetis describes serving with the US Army in Europe from November 1944 to December 1945; being the commanding officer of the 81st Armored Medical Battalion, part of the 11th Armored Division of General Patton’s Third Army; leading a contingent of 30 men to Mauthausen concentration camp after the Nazis had left in April 1945; his entry into the camp and seeing the bodies of thousands of inmates; seeing two gas chambers; how his unit was only equipped to treat battle casualties and was quickly reinforced with troops that brought an abundance of food; the subsequent deaths of surviving prisoners by overfeeding; the terrible malnutrition and gastrointestinal disease of most prisoners; the immediate disposal of dead bodies into a trench; General Patton’s orders for local citizens to exhume the bodies of former inmates and rebury them in individual graves; supervising the evacuation of patients for the following two weeks until he was transferred to the Gmunden area, near Salzburg; being placed in charge, as Burgermeister, of Attersee; and remaining with the Army of Occupation for six months, in charge of all battalion vehicles until his return to the US.

Oral history interview with Marian Filar

Oral History

Marian Filar, born in 1917 in Warsaw, Poland, describes being a member of a musical and religious Jewish family; being a child prodigy and a noted concert pianist and teacher; his father, who was a manufacturer; his grandfather, who was a rabbi; studying at the Warsaw and Lemberg conservatories and graduating from Gymnasium in Warsaw; fleeing to Lemberg (L'viv, Ukraine) in September 1939 following the German invasion; graduating from the Lemberg Conservatory in December 1941 and joining his family in the Warsaw Ghetto; working with a labor group taken outside the ghetto to a railroad workplace in Warsaw West; the severe beatings by S.S. guards and his rescue by a Polish railway man; his solo performance and other symphony concerts in the ghetto by Jewish musicians, often playing music by forbidden composers; deportations from the ghetto in 1942 and 1943, including his parents and siblings; being deported to Majdanek in May 1943 after the ghetto uprising; being beaten and enduring starvation; volunteering for a labor camp in Skarzysko-Kamiena, where he received aid from a fellow worker who was Polish; being moved to Buchenwald in August 1944 and housed in a tent camp with Leon Blum, Deladier, and other prominent politicians and clerics; being moved next by train to Schlieben, near Leipzig, to work in a bazooka factory; a Polish kitchen maid giving him extra food; how his piano playing impressed the German civilian camp supervisor and he was transferred to an easy job to protect his hands; being sent with other prisoners by train to Bautzen and then on a death march to Nixdorf (Mikulášovice) in Czechoslovakia; being liberated and performing in concerts through Western Europe and touring Israel, playing with the Israeli Philharmonic during the war in 1956; immigrating in 1950 to the United States, where he played with many American orchestras; heading the piano department at Settlement Music School in Philadelphia, PA; joining the faculty at Temple University; retiring and teaching privately; and judging international piano competitions.

Oral history interview with Herbert Finder

Oral History

Herbert Finder, born in Vienna, Austria on April 22, 1929, describes his Polish father, who was an Austrian citizen, and his German mother; antisemitic acts he experienced in school; the Anschluss and his family’s flight to Breda, Belgium; attending a Jewish school in Antwerp, Belgium; receiving American visas in April 1940 but lacking the funds to travel and being trapped by the German invasion; his father being sent to a camp near Toulouse, France; fleeing with his mother and uncle to Southern France; living with a Jewish farmer, who took in many refugees, for two years; his father joining them after his release; living on a farm in Duvernay; his mother returning to Antwerp to salvage their visas and her deportation in September 1942; learning that she had been killed; remaining on the farm with his father until they were arrested as foreigners in August 1942 by French police; being sent to a camp in Viviers then to Drancy; being shipped east on the 28th convoy to work at Oberschlesien osten, near Katowice, Poland on September 4, 1942; remaining with his father at the labor camp of Tarnoviche (Tarnosky Gura); how the internal affairs of the camp were run by Polish Jews who reported to the Germans; being sent with other inmates in the spring of 1943 to Sosnowiec; being transferred in November 1943 to Birkenau, where they were tattooed and suffered brutal conditions; seeing the crematoria; being moved to Auschwitz for one night and then to the Warsaw Ghetto to clear rubble until July 1944; the ghetto, where non-Jewish German prisoners were in charge; prisoners trading for food with Poles; a typhus epidemic killing many; working in a burial detail that burned corpses of the victims who were shot in Paviak (Pawiak Prison); how as Russians approached in July 1944 the prisoners began a three-day forced march to Łódź, Poland then went to Dachau in sealed cattle cars without food or water; his father recuperating from an injury while Herbert was sent to Allach, a camp where Jews and non-Jews built an underground factory; his father joining him after three weeks; being put on flat cars in April 1945 and after two days the German guards disappeared and the prisoners were liberated by Americans on April 30th; how in May 1945, he and his father went to Antwerp via Stuttgart and France; their survival strategies and faith in God; going to the United States in December 1946; living in New York City, NY until 1950; and settling in Vineland, NJ.

Oral history interview with Bernice Fishman

Oral History

Bernice Fishman (née Bronia Grandens), born in Vronki, Poland in 1934; her father, who owned a clothing store; fleeing with her mother to her mother's parents in Staszow in 1939; the establishment of the Staszow Ghetto in 1940; Jewish children being educated clandestinely; being sent with her brother to live with a Polish farmer before the ghetto was evacuated; her grandmother joining them later; her grandfather and her father being sent to the Skarzysko concentration camp; her mother being hidden by a neighbor; leaving with her brother and grandmother to go to a town that was supposed to be a sanctuary for Jews; being caught by the Polish police and imprisoned for a week; being told daily they would be shot; her parents bribing somebody to get them out of prison; being hidden with her brother, aunt, and uncle by a succession of Poles in Ogrodzenie; posing as Catholics; feeling hungry often and her fear of being discovered; her four year old brother dying because they were afraid to take him to a doctor; getting sick and walking to a Catholic hospital, where she received care; being reunited with her parents in 1945; her family renting an apartment in Kielce that they shared with four other Jewish families; her mother giving birth to a girl; how her family managed to survive despite the constant fear of Polish antisemitism; how while she was hiding with the Kuchatays, she had to pose as a Catholic, go to confession, and receive communion, but never forgot she was Jewish; how after the war Mrs. Kuchatay found the family and threatened to sue unless Bernice converted legally; her family fleeing to Bytom, Poland with the help of Bernice's uncle who was in the Russian Army; the Kielce pogrom after they left; being smuggled into Czechoslovakia; going to a displaced persons camp near Stuttgart, Germany; attending a school for Jewish children where classes were conducted in Hebrew; her father obtaining an apartment in a house owned by a former member of the Nazi party; the different behavior of Poles, Russians, Czechs, and Germans toward Jews; and her family immigrating to the United States in 1950, sponsored by Bernice's cousin who was an American citizen.

Oral history interview with Karessa (Kay) Foldvary

Oral History

Karessa Foldvary describes serving as a nurse in the US Army during World War II; working in field and evacuation hospitals (54th Field Hospital temporarily then 116th Evacuation Hospital) in France and Germany from November 1944 until spring 1945; how beginning May 2, 1945, she moved with the American Seventh Army to Dachau Concentration camp several days after liberation; the emaciation of the thousands of living male prisoners; seeing the dead bodies of women and children piled outside the crematorium; a typhus epidemic and the use of DDT powder on prisoners; details of conditions in the boxcars that transported prisoners from Auschwitz to Dachau; loss of American property resulting from thievery by demented prisoners; viewing and photographing 16 wagonloads of dead bodies; the neighboring German farmers, who were forced by the American military to load and drive the wagons into München (Munich) to show the local population what occurred at Dachau; and the hostility from some Germans in Limburg and relations with others in that city, with whom American nurses bartered soap and cigarettes for laundry service.

Oral history interview with Henry Froehlich

Oral History

Henry Froehlich (formerly Hans Arnold Froehlich), born in 1922 in Rottweil, Germany, describes how in 1935, the Nazi boycott forced his father to close his shoe store; having to leave school and the family moved to Stuttgart; how the family’s life changed; Kristallnacht and his efforts to warn Jews to flee and how he avoided arrest; his father’s arrest and imprisonment in Dachau; his father being killed in Dachau after one month; the family paying 500 Marks to claim his father’s body; working for the Oberrat (the Jewish community office in Stuttgart that processed immigration) for two years; his activities and contacts with the American Consulate, Gestapo, and S.D. (Sicherheitsdienst German Security Service); immigrating with his younger brother and mother to the US in 1940; how his older brother, who was crippled since birth, had been placed in a Catholic home for crippled children and there is some evidence he was killed in a Nazi euthanasia program; working in a CCC program in Berlin, NH until he was suspected of being a German spy; reuniting with his family in Philadelphia, PA; getting married and having two children; and becoming a successful businessman.

Oral history interview with Rita Harmelin

Oral History

Rita Harmelin (née Brauner), born June 17, 1925 in Bucharest, Romania, describes her Polish-born parents, who returned to Poland in 1931; the family moving to the oil town Boryslaw (now Boryslav, Ukraine); her secular and religious education and interactions with local Poles and Ukrainians; life under the Russian occupation beginning in September 1939; the German invasion of Boryslaw in June 1941; the efforts of local Ukrainians to save Jews; the successive waves of pogroms encouraged by Germans and carried out by local Poles and Ukrainians; a Jewish quarter or ghetto that was established in Boryslaw; the periodic roundups leading to deportation; how Berthold Beitz, a director in the local petrol industry, and Mr. Siegemund rescued many Jews, including Rita from the deportations several times; the gradual increase in restrictions; many Jews working in the Boryslaw petrol industry; the establishment of a forced labor camp in 1943 for the Jewish workers guarded by Ukrainian volunteers; escape attempts by workers; going into hiding with her future husband, Rolek, and 11 others in the home of a local Ukrainian from March to August 7, 1944 when Russian troops arrived and re-occupied Boryslaw; the deportation of her parents before they could accept an offer to hide in a Polish woman's house; her mother’s death in Auschwitz and her father’s survival; how the Jews from Boryslaw being transported to Płaszów, Poland but the final transport in July 1944 went directly to Auschwitz; why resistance was difficult; the attitude of the Polish underground (Armia Krajowa) and most Ukrainians toward Jews; her post-war experiences; returning to Poland; searching for and reuniting with her father in Austria in 1945; smuggling herself in and out of Poland; immigrating with her father to Australia on January 9, 1949 and reuniting with her husband, whom she had married in Austria; her guilt as a survivor and telling her children about her past; life as a Jew in Australia; and examples of acts of humanity and compassion by individual non-Jews (Polish, Ukrainian, and German).

Oral history interview with Ruth (Renee) Hartz

Oral History

Ruth (Renee) Hartz (née Kapp), born in 1937 in Palestine to German-Jewish parents, describes moving with her family to Paris, France in 1938; the family having affidavits for the United States and their emigration being disrupted by the American consulate; the invasion of France in 1940 and being sent with other non-French to Colombers, a sports stadium outside of Paris; her father avoiding deportation by joining the French Foreign Legion in Morocco; fleeing with her mother to Normandy with help from the French Resistance; having false papers and hiding on a farm; going to Toulouse and Arthes near Albi in the French Free Zone, where her father reunited with them in 1942; the kindness of people in the small towns toward the persecuted; the willingness of the French police and bureaucracy to collaborate with the Nazis; experiencing hunger and painful separation from her parents when she was hidden in a Sorèze convent; reuniting with her family after one year; being helped with food and hiding by two generations of a Catholic family, with whom they remain in contact; her family moving to Paris after the war; experiencing antisemitism in school and later at the Sorbonne; finding protection hiding her Jewishness as she had during the war; joining the Jewish scouts (Les Éclaireurs) and WIZO, which reinforced her Jewish identity; immigrating to the US in 1958; and her biography titled Your Name is Renee by Stacy Oretzmeyer (published in 1994 by Biddle Publishing Co.).

Oral history interview with Samuel Makower

Oral History

Samuel Makower, born January 6, 1922 in Przasnysz, Poland, describes attending a cheder and public school; fleeing after the German invasion on September 1, 1939 with his family to Warsaw and then to Bialystok, Poland; life under the Russian occupation; being offered contracts to work in the Ural Mountains; the harsh climatic conditions and the deprivations of wartime; receiving aid from the Russian people, among whom they lived; his family moving to Minsk, Belarus in 1941 and being trapped one month later when the Germans invaded and established a ghetto; the killings by Germans and Ukrainians; how his family survived by creating hiding places under the floor and within a false wall; her two-year-old niece being sheltered in a Russian orphanage with the aid of a German soldier; escaping with his sister and brother-in-law to join Russian partisans who accepted Jews; partisan life; obtaining food and ammunition from civilians; how they blew up trains and railroads and took some German soldiers as prisoners; a Jewish partisan, “Uncle Vanya”, who sheltered many Jews in the forest; liberation by the Russian Army; helping his surviving family and moving to Stettin (Szczecin, Poland); how at the request of a Zionist group, he secured a train to move 200 Jewish children to Krakow, Poland; entering the University of Berlin and earning a Ph.D. in chemistry; following part of his family to Israel; being unable to find employment in Israel; and immigrating to the United States in 1956.

Oral history interview with Zenek Maor

Oral History

Zenick Maor, born August 9, 1923, in Wloclawek, Poland, describes his religious, Jewish family; his father, who was a factory owner; his family living comfortably until the German occupation; pre-war life, including his Hashomer Hatzair activities; the German restrictions and brutalities in Wloclawek; his father’s arrest and detainment for ransom; his family fleeing to Warsaw in January 1940; working at the age of 16 in various forced labor brigades, including the Okecie airfield in Warsaw; life in the Warsaw ghetto, including the Jewish police and the Hashomer Hatzair network of underground schools; his family encouraging him to escape the ghetto in 1942 because of the lack of food; being sent to various labor camps; the difficult work conditions; his ongoing belief in his own survival; the reasons that people could not escape from labor camps or from Auschwitz; his arrival at Auschwitz in the summer of 1943; his initial belief in the slogan “Work Makes You Free”; being selected to be killed with the other children and avoiding it; life in the camp, including the daily routine, work, treatment by Kapos, and latrine communication between prisoners; the death march from January 17, 1945 to May 10, 1945; being liberated by the Russian Army; returning to Poland and learning that no one from his family survived; and immigrating to Palestine in April 1947.

Oral history interview with Edith Millman

Oral History

Edith Millman (née Greifinger), born in 1924 in Bielsko (Bielitz), Poland, describes her father, who was an executive for Standard Oil Company; her family moving in 1937 to Warsaw, Poland; being injured during the bombardment of the city in September 1939 when bombs hit the building in which they lived; the persecution of Jews beginning immediately after the occupation; the horrendous conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto, into which they were forced to move in November 1940; her studies in small, clandestine groups organized by teachers in the ghetto; working at the Schultz factory until the end of 1942 when she escaped from the ghetto; getting forged papers from gentiles and passing as an Aryan; working as a translator for the German railroad; stealing railroad identification cards, food stamps, and coal in order to help others; her fear of being discovered and her close escapes; speaking German and pretending to be an ethnic German, which helped her to throw off blackmailers; losing many relatives; being liberated by the Russians in August 1944; studying medicine in Lublin, Poland, and in Marburg an der Lahn, Germany; going to the University of Kentucky in Lexington, KY in December 1947 on a B'nai B'rith Hillel scholarship; and her parents arriving in the US in 1949.

Oral history interview with Moshe Moskowitz

Oral History

Moshe Moskowitz, born in 1922 in Lespitz-Baya, Romania, describes his merchant family which was traditional but not deeply religious; studying in a Jewish school, then in a vocational school; planning to go to Palestine; joining a Zionist youth group and working in an agricultural community; the German occupation and the Jews being transferred from the villages to the large cities and forced labor camps; his Zionist youth group becoming active in the resistance; taking on an Aryan identity; how meetings were often attended by emissaries from England and the US; the diplomatic courier who carried letters from the resistance and betrayed them; the arrest of underground members and their deportation to camps in Transnistria; his group smuggling children out of camps, giving them false identities, and setting up cultural activities until they could be processed to go to Palestine on illegal immigration on ships; how in 1944 British-trained parachutists from Palestine landed in Romania and Moshe’s Zionist Group was among those who gave them identity papers, living quarters, and maps to help them reach Bucharest; helping prisoners-of-war in Brasov with money, clothing, and medicine; rushing to the American and British zones after liberation to take Jewish prisoners out of the range of German bombings; being in charge of the funds for such operations through the Landsmanshutey; and how groups who were involved in saving children maintained connections in Israel.

Oral history interview with Willie Nowak

Oral History

Willei Nowak, born August 1, 1908 in Berlin, Germany, describes his family of liberal, Austrian Jews; his father, who owned a tobacco factory in Berlin; graduating from a gymnasium in Berlin; selling pharmaceuticals in Brunn, Czechoslovakia (Brno, Czech Republic) from 1935 to 1937; returning to Berlin and finding he had lost his German citizenship; Kristallnacht in 1938 and witnessing the burning of the Fasanenstrasse Synagogue, where he had celebrated his bar mitzvah; immigrating to Shanghai, China in 1938 with his fiancée and the two children of his first marriage; the refugee camp in the Japanese district; the support from the Joint Distribution Committee and the Russian Jewish community for a hospital; the kosher soup kitchen and the services of a rabbi; working as a musician in bars and night clubs; being in charge of Jewish guards in the refugee camp; interactions between Chinese and Japanese individuals and himself; his wife, Elsa, working in an underwear factory owned by Austrian Jews who sold to Japanese buyers; and his family immigrating to the United States in January 1948 on a collective affidavit for Shanghai refugees.

Oral history interview with Steffi Schwarcz

Oral History

Steffi Birnbaum Schwarcz, born March 17, 1928 in Berlin, Germany, describes being sent to England on March 15, 1939 as part of the Kindertransport with her younger sister and 11 other children; the group being sponsored by Dr. Schlesinger, an English Jew; her early life, Kristallnacht, and the general atmosphere in Berlin; leaving her parents; the journey to England; the children being put up in a hostel in Shepherds Hill, Highgate (a neighborhood in London); the children being evacuated and dispersed in September 1939; being sent with her sister to the home of a young Christian couple in Cuffley, Middlesex; the respectful attitude of the foster parents; being sent with her sister in January 1940 by the Jewish Refugee Committee to the Kingsley Boarding School in Cornwall, which was run by the Church of England; the pressure to convert put on the Jewish children by the headmistress of the school; a local woman intervening on behalf of Jewish children in the boarding school; how she enabled them to remain Jewish, observe the Jewish holidays in her home, and to get a Jewish education; how the Jewish girls older than 16 were sent to the Isle of Man as enemy aliens; the long-term emotional effects of the Nazi era and the stay in English boarding schools on herself and her sister; and her current life, living in Israel with her husband and daughter.

Oral history interview with Lillian Steinig

Oral History

Lillian Edelstein Steinig, born January 23, 1923 in Stryj, Poland (Stryĭ, Ukraine), describes her father, who was a merchant and farmer until the Russian occupation in 1939; her father being forced to give up his large farm to the Soviet authority; her family moving to the city, where her father worked in a lumber yard; attending a strict Russian school with her younger brother until 1941 when the Germans occupied Stryj and relocated Jews; Jewish attempts to hide and the 1942 round up of Jews, including her father and brother; how her father and brother jumped from a moving cattle car and returned home; receiving aid from non-Jewish Poles, who gave her false identification papers and hid her brother and parents; a Polish family in Przedborz sheltering her until 1945; her trip through the Russian zone at the war's end for a reunion with her family, who moved briefly to Krakow; Antisemitic outbreaks in Krakow; being forced to flee to a displaced persons camp in Austria in 1946; working in Linz, Austria with her brother in Simon Wiesenthal's Jewish Identification Center; the family immigrating to the United States in January 1949 aboard the SS Marina; and joining relatives in Philadelphia, PA.

Oral history interview with Anna Sultanik

Oral History

Anna Sultanik (née Tiger), born May 20, 1929 in Krakow, Poland, describes being the older of two children; her father, Dr. Tiger, a physician; her mother, Sara Meth Tiger; her pre-war memories including her close-knit family’s sheltering of German-Jewish refugees, who were en route to the United States; the sudden changes in her happy and secure, life when the Germans occupied Krakow in September 1939; her father’s escape; the confiscation of the family’s most valuable possessions; being forced to share their apartment with five other families when the ghetto was established; being subjected to involuntary participation in medical experiments; beginning to work in Płaszów work camp in March 1940; her mother volunteering to join her 6-year-old brother in a deportation transport; her work in a stone quarry; Amon Goeth, the camp commander; her narrow escapes from death after being forced to dig her own grave; being hidden from the camp hospital evacuation by her parents’ friends; working as a tailor’s apprentice until Płaszów was evacuated in 1944; the march to Auschwitz and her one-week stay there, followed by a prolonged cattle-car trip to Bergen-Belsen; staying for a year stay in Bergen-Belsen until liberation by the British on April 15, 1945; the immediate tragic aftermath of liberation from the overfeeding of prisoners; her two-year stay in a displaced persons camp in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany; her efforts to find her father; getting married in 1948; immigrating to the US with sponsorship of a family who had received pre-war shelter from her family; and her eventual reunion with her father shortly before his death in Israel in 1967.

Oral history interview with Gabriela Truly

Oral History

Gabriella Braun Truly, born January 7, 1916 in Levoča, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia), describes her family history in Levoča; her five siblings and being active in Zionist groups; the restrictions placed on Jews in 1939; her father’s tinsmithing shop, which was taken over by the government in 1940; being rounded up 1942 with 1000 single girls aged 14-40 from surrounding areas; being sent in the first transport to Auschwitz; the dehumanizing intake process and the difficult life in the camps; the deaths of her sister and young nephew; self-preservation and caring only for yourself; the incidents when she aided others and others aided her; being moved to Birkenau in 1942 and suffering from typhus, diarrhea, and a badly infected foot; being hospitalized in Auschwitz in February 1943; the various jobs and their level of difficulty; being aided by a hairdresser named Monsi in getting a job, first knitting for commandant Hoess then filing in the personnel building; being told permits to go to Israel had mysteriously come to Auschwitz, but nothing happened; being taken January 18, 1944 on a three day death march and then near Ravensbrück, where she saw her mother for the last time; being taken to Malchow, where she later met up with the younger sister of her sister-in-law; going to Crivitz, Germany and witnessing Russian soldiers sexually assault women; the survival of some of her immediate family; going to Prague, Czech Republic, where in 1948 she left for New York, NY to live with one of her brothers; getting married to an American-born Jew; and remaining in New York.

Oral history interview with Agnes Mandl Adachi

Oral History

Agnes Adachi (née Mandl), born in 1918 in Budapest, Hungary, describes being the only child in a minimally observant Jewish family; attending a Reformed Church school, where she received some Hebrew instruction; being baptized by a Reformed Church pastor to save her from deportation in 1943; her father being taken away by the Hungarian Arrow Cross and his Christian partner in a textile store appropriating the business; being given asylum in the Swedish Embassy together with many other refugees; helping to distribute Schutzpasses with Raoul Wallenberg; Wallenberg’s wit and daring in dealing with the Arrow Cross and German officers; crediting the Swiss Red Cross as well as the Swedish Red Cross for their aid; being in Sweden in 1945 after the war ended; working with Count Bernadotte as a teacher of refugees; and her memoir, “Child of the Winds: My Mission with Raoul Wallenberg” (Chicago: Adams Press, 1989).

Oral history interview with Dr. Henry Altschuler

Oral History

Dr. Henry Altschuler, born March 28, 1923 in Jaroslaw, Poland, describes being educated at both Cheder and public school, where he experienced some antisemitism; Jewish life in pre-war Poland and resistance to local pogroms; his flight to Rovno (Rivne, Ukraine) with his father because a policemen warned him to escape the invading Germans; briefly returning to Jaroslaw and escaping to Hrubieszów, Poland; life in the Russian-occupied zone and after the German invasion in June 1941; being interned in Jaktorow concentration camp from 1941 to 1942; his mother helping to get him out but being caught and rearrested later; being moved with his family into the Lubazuw ghetto; his family perishing; escaping and going into hiding with a Polish family until he was caught and sent to a work camp in Lemberg; escaping but getting caught again and put into a death cell at Locki prison with two former “Kommando 1008” Jews; witnessing many murders; receiving a reprieve before being executed and being transferred to the Lemberg labor camp, where all incoming Jews were executed and he was almost beaten to death; being in Płaszów camp for six months; being liberated by Russians in 1945 and returning to Lemberg; immigrating to the United States from Germany in September 1949; the lasting emotional and physical effects of his experiences; and the Poles and Ukrainians who collaborated with Nazi as well as those who helped with Jewish resistance efforts.

Oral history interview with Tibor Baranski

Oral History

Tibor Baranski, born June 11, 1922 in Budapest, Hungary and honored as a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, describes being educated in a Hungarian gymnasium; being aware of rising antisemitism by 1938; studying for the priesthood in Veszprem in 1940 and in Kassa (Kosice, Slovakia) in 1943; learning of the Nazi extermination plans through church channels; returning to Budapest on October 20, 1944 as the Russian Army drew near; his participation in several rescues of Jews from October to December 1944 at the request of Angelo Rotta, the papal nuncio, who acted as a representative of the Vatican under orders of Pope Pius XII; rescuing Jews from a transit camp to safe houses in Budapest; working with representatives from neutral nations and the Red Cross to stop deportations from Hegyeshalom, Hungary, using protective letters (Schutzpass) and safe houses to shelter almost 6000 Jews; being nearly executed several times; the efforts to hide Jews by Christian groups and individuals; the rescue efforts of Elizabeth Kemeny Fuchs (RG-50.462*0008), Per Anger (RG-50.462*0001), Raoul Wallenberg, Prince Esterhazy, Father Hummel, and a number of priests and nuns; his encounter with Wallenberg and his arrest; being arrested by the Russians December 30, 1944 and sent on a death march from Budapest to Szekszard; being saved by a Russian soldier and returning to Budapest; working with an underground movement opposed to communist rule and being arrested by the Russians again in November 1948; postwar life in Hungary under communist rule; Hungarian-German relations; Miklos Horthy’s attitude towards Jews and Nazis; the German occupation of Hungary; the role of the Vatican in great detail based on his contacts; entering the United States in 1961; and becoming a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.

Oral history interview with Hertha Beese

Oral History

Hertha Scholz Beese, born in Berlin, Germany on September 10, 1902, describes her non-Jewish, German family; her parents, who were active in the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and trade unions; attending schools in Berlin before World War I with Jews and Catholics; being forced to participate in Protestant religious instruction of the Landeskirche (the regional church) because she was not baptized; how in 1933 she and other SPD members lost their jobs; the Nazi persecution of socialists and communists as well as Jews; her resistance group in Berlin; hiding people until they could cross the mountains into Switzerland; sheltering Jews and non-Jews in her home; her brother being beaten by SA storm troopers before the war; life in Berchtesgaden, Germany and observing the resentment of local residents toward the SS and the exploitation of German laborers; her refusal to fly the Nazi flag, her children’s refusal to join the Hitler Youth, and the devious means she used to avoid serving in the Luftschutz; having to work in the Arbeitsdienst from 1943 to 1945 as a teacher in the Spreewald area; working illegally as a bookkeeper for Jewish cattle dealers who were SPD members that joined the Nazi party to avoid deportation; a local farmer hiding several Jewish Berliners she brought to him; becoming the vice-chair of the Brandenburg SPD in 1945; chairing an anti-fascist commission in Potsdam, Germany; being the deputy mayor of Reinickendorf from 1948 to 1965; being honored with the Golden Rose of Paris for aid to French prisoners of war; and being declared an “Elder Statesman” of Berlin.

Oral history interview with Eva Cutler

Oral History

Eva Frederich Cutler, born in 1925 in Budapest, Hungary, describes being the second child of a cultured, assimilated Jewish family; her family’s change from being unaware of existing Hungarian antisemitism and of Nazi persecutions of Jews elsewhere to experiencing government imposed restrictions; her family’s attempts to emigrate and their continuing disbelief of the persecution of Jews; the varied attitudes of Hungarians under the German occupation; receiving help from some non-Jews, including a German administrator; the induction of her brother into a work brigade; her father being taken away; being herded out of Budapest along with many other young Jewish women in the fall of 1944; the horrendous conditions and brutality during the death march to Bergen-Belsen; witnessing a mass execution of men; a German army officer helping her to walk so she could keep going; how some townspeople offered food to the marchers and others abused them; her brief encounter with Wallenberg at the Austrian border, where he saved those who had Swiss or Swedish protective passes; arriving at Bergen-Belsen in January 1945 after enduring a prolonged cattle car ride; how survivors suffered from continued deprivation and illness there and also had to cope with hostility from Polish and Czech Jews who were already there; liberation in April 1945; learning that her parents survived in Budapest and her brother was presumed dead; being sent to Sweden for recovery and rehabilitation by the Red Cross; the excellent medical care and kindness she experienced in Sweden; going to the United States in 1946; her parents going to the US via Canada after Eva attained US citizenship; returning to Hungary after 37 years; and her belief in the brotherhood of man.

Oral history interview with Gabriel Drimer

Oral History

Gabriel Drimer, born May 2, 1922 in Dubova, Czechoslovakia, describes his family’s bakery; studying at the yeshiva in Bratislava, Slovakia; apprenticing to learn tailoring and design; belonging to B'nai Akiva, an Orthodox Zionist organization; how anti-Jewish measures, confiscations, and deportations were instituted after the Hungarian army invaded in 1940 and relations between Jews and non-Jews changed; witnessing mass murder of Jews, including his relatives, in Kamenets-Podolski (Ukraine) in 1941; stopping the deportation of his family because of his good relations with the local police; visiting his family in the Taitch ghetto in October 1943 while he was in a labor camp; the death of most his family in Auschwitz; the death of one brother on the Russian front and another brother while working with the resistance; the captain in charge of the labor camp saving all the prisoners until the Russians could liberate them; how a Ukrainian officer tried to kill Gabriel, but a Russian officer intervened; Russian officers who befriended the survivors; working with the Russian military secret police rounding up Nazis; returning to Bratislava; how he opened his old store, greatly expanded his business, fed survivors passing through, and met and married his wife; training for two months with other Jews to join the Haganah and leaving in 1948 for Israel; serving in the army; being a sergeant in the police force; establishing a business and organizing an association of 40 farms; his life and the changing conditions in Israel; going to the United States in 1955; and his business in New York.

Oral history interview with (D.S.) Anonymous

Oral History

D. S., son of a Jewish banker and a Protestant mother and born in Berlin, Germany in 1928, describes staying in Berlin until 1948; his family’s history, his education, and how their life as Jews changed and became increasingly restricted after 1935; non-Jewish relatives broke off contact until after the war ended; Kristallnacht; the confiscation of his father’s business and property; his father being arrested and detained for one week at Rosenstrasse; participating in the Rosenstrasse protest; his family being forced to move into rooms shared with two other families; the Jewish schools closing and working for the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland for several months until the entire staff was deported in vans; being spared because of his non-Jewish mother and his belief that this is why his father survived; his bar mitzvah in 1941; he and his father being assigned to a labor camp in Berlin in 1942; resisting the Germans through sabotage while in the labor unit and as a member of a small resistance group composed of young men from mixed marriages; life during the Battle of Berlin; life during the Russian occupation; completing his education in a German high school; his desire to leave Germany and going to the United States in 1948; being helped by HIAS; his parents remaining in Germany, but his mother joining him after his father’s death; his personal encounters with Germans during the war and receiving some help from non-Jews; and his feelings about Germans and his determination to fight antisemitism.

Oral history interview with Malvina Eisner

Oral History

Malvina Gerlich Eisner, born in Svidnika, Czechoslovakia, on August 24, 1924, describes her father, who was a grocer; being the second of nine children; the death of all of her siblings and her parents during the war; going to live with her grandparents when she was six years old to attend school in Bardéjov, Slovakia; hiding with three cousins to escape the first roundup in 1942; hiding the woods and then in her grandparents’ apartment after their deportation; being reported along with her friends in June 1942; being arrested and taken to Auschwitz and then Birkenau, where she stayed until October 1944; conditions in Auschwitz-Birkenau, including the brutal roll calls and selections; working as part of kommandos (work groups) removing corpses, delivering food to the sick blocks, and picking up trash; avoiding a selection purely by chance; getting very sick and surviving because the other girls fed her and covered for her; Passover observance and a Seder at Auschwitz; transports arriving from Hungary constantly; her group being taken to a camp in Hindenburg, run by the S.S. in the fall of 1944; the inmates being evacuated on foot and in box cars to Bergen-Belsen; being liberated by the British Army on April 15, 1945; feeling proud that she and the other girls preserved their humanity; and the names of her siblings and close family members who were murdered.

Oral history interview with Betti Frank

Oral History

Betti Frank, born February 20, 1924 into a merchant family in Zutphen, Holland, describes her life before the German invasion of Holland and the invasion itself on May 10, 1940; the Dutch expelling the German-Jewish refugees before the Nazis occupied the town; the Nazis rounding up Jewish men and sending them to Mauthausen; Dutch collaborators informing on her father, who was arrested by Dutch police; her father’s death in Mauthausen; being arrested with her mother and her brother by Dutch police; her brother being sent to Westerbork then to Auschwitz, where he was killed; being taken with her mother to a building owned by the Jewish community (Kehillah), which had been converted into a hospital for older Jews; how all the Jews who did not live in Amsterdam were shipped to Vught concentration camp; turning down a chance to escape with false papers to stay with her mother; the terror tactics used to subdue them and the conditions in Vught; the separate children’s camp and having contact with non-Jewish prisoners; joining a group of Chalutzim; her mother working as a nurse; the Philips company starting a Kommando, manufacturing radio lamps; the SS sending all the workers to Westerbork or Auschwitz; being sent back to Vught by the Wehrmacht because their work was important to the war effort; being transported in June 1944 to Auschwitz at night so that Philips couldn’t stop the deportation; arriving at Auschwitz June 6, 1944 and the processing and conditions; being treated with horrendous cruelty by the Kapos; the Philips workers being taken to a labor camp at Reichenbach (Langenbielau); being taken with 150 survivors to Lanowice concentration camp to work for Philips; the workers being taken on a death march to Trautenau, Sudetenland (Trutnov, Czech Republic) in February 1945; being sent to Porta, Westphalia to work for Philips under brutal conditions along with non-Jewish women; being taken to work in a saltmine near Magdeburg, Germany then to a small camp near Hamburg, Germany to dig trenches near the front; suffering under horrible conditions; an exchange arranged by the Red Cross and Count Folke Bernadotte, which resulted in the group being taken to Malmo, Sweden and to a camp in Goteborg, Sweden; recuperating and returning to Holland briefly; and going to Israel.

Oral history interview with Lilly Friedman

Oral History

Lilly Friedman, born in Zarica, Czechoslovakia, describe her father, who taught Hebrew; her Jewish life; her relations with non-Jews changing after the Hungarian occupation in 1939; being rounded up by the Nazis in 1944 with her family and sent to Auschwitz; arriving in Auschwitz, the selections, and brutal murders of infants; being taken after three days to Płaszów, Poland with a group of girls for forced hard labor under brutal conditions; returning to Auschwitz in September 1944; how as transports arrived, women and children were taken straight to the crematoriums; being put in charge of 400 of the healthiest girls who were selected to work as weavers in a factory in Neustadt; the evacuation of the camp as the front came closer; the girls being transported to Mauthausen and then marched to Bergen-Belsen; the transport to Mauthausen by train under Allied bombardment, the casualties and their attempts to help each other; the terrible conditions in Bergen-Belsen and how the girls helped each other to survive; being liberated by the English Army in April 15, 1945; slowly regaining her health; meeting and marrying another survivor; going to the United States in March 1948; her daughter, Miriam, adds her insights about growing up as a child of survivors; and the impact the Holocaust still has on her and her sisters.

Oral history interview with Ari Fuhrman

Oral History

Ari Fuhrman, born in Czernowitz, Bukovina, Romania (Chernivtsi, Ukraine), describes his father, who was a tailor; his family living briefly in Vienna, Austria then returning to Czernowitz instead of going to Palestine; his family life, religious observance, and education; the communist and Zionist movements and the cultural life of Jews in Czernowitz; being apprenticed as a dental mechanic in 1938; Germany invading Czernowitz together with the Romanian Army after a brief Russian occupation; the massacres of Jews beginning; the creation of a ghetto until most Jews had been deported; being deported with 80 family members to Transnistria in October 1941 by sealed train; the journey and how Romanians brutalized and robbed the deportees; escaping with his family during a stop in Mogilev (Mahiliou, Belarus); living and working in the Mogilev ghetto; life in the ghetto, including cultural activities, religious observance, illness, starvation, and the strategies his family used to survive; how in 1943 the Jewish Federation of Bucharest tried to rescue Jewish orphans and the American Joint Distribution Committee sent aid; the Jewish police having to provide a certain number of Jews each day for transports; conditions just before and after liberation by the Russians, when partisans briefly controlled the area; being reunited with his parents in Czernowitz until, as part of an exchange between Russia and Romania, he was sent to Timisoara, Romania in 1946; staying for 11 years, working as a dentist, and joining Mishmar, a Zionist organization; registering to go to Palestine and not receiving permission to leave until 1959; joining the State Theater of Bucharest and later the Teatron Haolim (Theatre of the Newcomers) in Israel; and being reunited with his parents after immigrating to the United States in 1960.

Oral history interview with Ephraim Glaser

Oral History

Ephraim Glaser, born in 1922 in Cluj, Transylvania, Romania, describes his father, who was an Orthodox shochet, mohel and chazzan; a pogrom that took place in the courtyard of his family’s home when he was five years old; the changes that occurred when the Hungarian occupation began in 1940, including beatings and exclusion of Jews from public schools; attending cheder and yeshiva until 1943, when he was taken to a forced labor camp; escaping in 1944 because of his Aryan appearance and ability to speak German; posing as a Hungarian Christian and joining a German Army unit as a translator; being suspected as a Bolshevist and running away; finding refuge in a factory, whose owner, a baron, hid him in an unused oven; how his sister and her family hid in a Czechoslovakian monastery, but were deceived, returned to their home in August 1941, and sent on the last transport to Auschwitz; how his brother-in-law, an opera singer and cantor in Bratislava, was shot while singing for the Germans; fleeing to Miskolc in the Russian zone and being liberated at the end of 1944; the plundering of the Russians on the local population; returning to Cluj and being active in the Zionist underground movement, Bricha and transporting Jews illegally to Palestine; being accused of being a fascist by former friends who had become communists; going to Palestine and working on a kibbutz; the difficulties encountered among kibbutz members who stigmatized survivors like himself as being cowards who willingly submitted to their own slaughter; remaining silent for many years, not even telling his children about his experiences until later in his life; and how his silence and then finally talking about the Holocaust affected his children.

Oral history interview with Malvina Herzfeld

Oral History

Malvina Herzfeld, born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1914, describes living in Tsobut, Danzig from 1924 to 1936; moving to Holland, where she married Martin Sternfeld, a German lawyer, in December 1937; the German invasion of Holland in May 1940; the establishment of Westerbork transit camp for German Jewish refugees; her husband’s arrest by the SS during a roundup of Jewish men in 1941 and deportation a camp in Holland and then to Mauthausen concentration camp; receiving her husband’s death certificate in September 1941; working for the Jewish Council; being arrested and released; being helped and hidden by a non-Jewish Dutch neighbor; agreeing to work with the Dutch underground, led by Walter Suskind; how her group saved Jewish children, who had been taken from their parents during the transports; working as a courier to the Hague and Westerbork and trying to rescue Jewish boys when she was arrested by the SS, put into solitary confinement, and tortured; not talking and being sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she encountered Hans Totman, a Jewish war criminal who worked for the Germans; her arrival and the selection process; the living and working conditions in Birkenau; working as a secretary for the Oberscharfurer at Budy together with an other Jewish girl; how they narrowly escaped being sent to the crematorium for stealing food; the liquidation of Auschwitz in January 1945 and being sent on a death march to Bergen-Belsen, where she stayed until April 1945 during a typhoid epidemic; being liberated by British troops; the punishment of the guards, the hanging of the camp commanders, and the post-liberation conditions; how the British took survivors to a military camp until displaced persons camps were established; working for the British army as a translator and having a brief reunion with her brother, who served in the British Army; not getting permission to join her brother in England; being sent to Holland and quarantined; staying in Holland until 1947 and her attempts to find out what happened to her family and her husband; locating friends from the underground; how she located the Jewish girl from Budy after the war; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

Oral history interview with Liesl Loeb

Oral History

Liesl Joseph Loeb, born on June 17, 1928 in Rheydt, Rhineland, Germany, describes being a passenger on the St. Louis along with her father, Josef Joseph, an attorney, and her mother, Lilly Salmon Joseph; sailing on May 13, 1939 from Hamburg toward Havana, Cuba with 937 Jewish refugees on board; her family background and life leading up to Kristallnacht, during which she hid in her own home while Nazis were vandalizing it; the months leading up to embarkation and conditions which had to be met before leaving Germany and immigrating to Cuba; her family’s plan to be in Cuba until their quota number was called for the United States; the trip and its complications from a child’s perspective; her father’s sense of duty as the chairman of the passenger committee and the commitment and devotion of all its members; the desperate situation of the hapless passengers to whom no country offered a haven; spending 40 days at sea and the rescue efforts of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and the countries that offered refuge to the passengers; her family landing in England and their life as World War II began; the destiny of most of the passengers; attending school as an “evacuee” and the internment of her father on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien; arriving in New York, NY on September 10, 1940; and her graduation from high school and her immediate marriage after.

Oral history interview with Vera Otelsberg

Oral History

Vera Otelsberg (née Neuman), born in 1924 in Bielitz (Bielsko-Biala), Poland, describes her wealthy family; her father, who was an industrialist and owned several factories and a mill; her mother, who died when Vera was a young child; being brought up by a nanny; how her family was not religious and only attending synagogue on High Holidays; how shortly before the outbreak of World War II, she escaped to Warsaw with her older sister’s family; her sister’s family leaving for South America in 1940 while Vera stayed in the Warsaw Ghetto; getting some money through a relative on the Aryan side of Warsaw; working at the Toebbens Factory; escaping from the ghetto and living on the outside on false papers; working as a maid in a German household; listening to the radio illegally and translating the reports into Polish for an underground paper; life in Sochaczew, Poland before and during the retreat of the Germans and the killing of German soldiers by the advancing Russians; returning home when Bielitz was liberated with help from Russian Jewish officers; her father’s death in Lemberg and her nanny’s death in a camp; getting married and having a daughter; moving in 1957 to Montevideo, Uruguay; and the several instances of help she received from Poles and Germans.

Oral history interview with Mirjam Pinkhof

Oral History

Mirjam Pinkhof (née Waterman), born May 12, 1916 in Loosdrecht, Netherlands, describes her father, who was an idealistic socialist and left Amsterdam, where he worked in the diamond trade, to found an agricultural training center on a farm in Loosdrecht in the 1920s; how her mother once belonged to an agricultural commune named “Walden”; attending the modernist school at Bilthoven, where one of her teachers was Joop Westerweel, who became a Christian rescuer of Jews; starting a private school on her parents’ farm in 1940; working until 1943 with Jews and non-Jews in the resistance movement led by Westerweel, Joachim Simon (Schuschu), and Menachem Pinkhof, whom she married in 1945; sending youths from Zionist training centers across Europe to Palestine; getting her parents freed from Westerbork through her bribe of diamonds in 1943; being imprisoned in 1944 at Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen; the deprivation in the camps and on the evacuation train, where she was kept for two weeks in the spring of 1945; Russians liberating the train in June 1945 at Trobitz, Germany; being in displaced persons camps in Luxembourg and Eindhoven, Netherlands; her husband’s work with Aliyah Bet and a Jewish Brigade group to send illegal immigrants to Palestine; the Pinkhof family obtaining legal British certificates for entry into Palestine; and settling in Haifa in 1946.

Oral history interview with Samuel Sherron

Oral History

Samuel Sherron, born March 27, 1932 in Skuodas, Lithuania, describes living in Schweksna; his father, who was a merchant; being educated in both public school and a Cheder; life under the Russian occupation from 1940 until the German invasion; the roundup and torture of local Jews by SS troops and Lithuanians; the eyewitness accounts of the murder of all remaining Jews, mostly women and children; being taken with his father to a labor camp in Heydekrug, Germany (Silute, Lithuania) in 1941; experiencing beatings, atrocities, and frequent selections; the shooting of selected inmates; being sent in 1943 at the age of 11 to Auschwitz-Birkenau; surviving the initial selection; inmates being forced to build tracks so transports could go directly to the crematoria; conditions at Auschwitz, the Appels (roll calls), the constant hunger, and an encounter he had with Dr. Mengele; witnessing sadism and torture; Lithuanian and Ukrainian guards killing Jewish prisoners; being sent with 5000 non-Polish Jewish volunteers to Pawiak prison to build barracks and crematoria in what had been the Warsaw Ghetto; how in the summer of 1944, most of the prisoners from “Camp Warsaw” were evacuated on a death march to Kutno (Poland), then by cattle train to Dachau, with a group of Greek Jews; the eyewitness accounts of mass murders of Jews by Einsatzgruppen under Operation Barbarossa; going to a labor camp in Muhldorf, Germany to do construction work for the Luftwaffe; being put on cattle trains guarded by SS in April 1945 and the intervention of the mayor of Pocking, Bavaria, who kept the Luftwaffe from killing the inmates; being liberated along with his father by America troops in Seeshaupt on April 28, 1945; and being transferred to Munich, Germany after some medical treatment.

Oral history interview with Walter Silberstein

Oral History

Walter Silberstein, born November 9, 1902 in Stargard, Germany (Poland), describes being the son of the only rabbi serving around Stargard; studying engineering and economics in Berlin and Leipzig; nearly completed his doctorate when his University of Leipzig professors were fired for their political views in 1933; returning to Berlin in 1934 after a brief business venture in Prague, Czech Republic; living with his parents until July 1939 when he left for Shanghai, China without a visa; his voyage on a German luxury liner and the shock of arriving in the Hongkew district of Shanghai during a cholera epidemic; the character of the native and newcomer Jewish communities and the political subdivisions of Shanghai; his parents arriving in 1940 with Japanese visas; his father serving as rabbi to the refugee community; their life after the December 1941 occupation by the Japanese; serving with other Jews, Russians, and Chinese in the Pao Chia as air-raid wardens and ghetto guards in the summer of 1945; leading a contented life between the American liberation on September 6, 1945 and the Communist takeover in 1949; leaving in 1950 with his mother and returning to Germany; living in displaced persons camps at Rhön and Föhrenwald; and arriving in the United States on October 29, 1951.

Oral history interview with Nathan Snyder

Oral History

Nathan Snyder, born on May 21, 1926 in Unter Stanestie, Rumania (now Staneshti, Ukraine), describes the Jewish community Unter Stanestie, religious observance, and the Zionist movements; his education in cheder and public school, including the gymnasium in Czernowitz (Chernivtsi, Ukraine); experiencing antisemitism in school from the Iron Cross movement; the effects of the Russian occupation and the deportation of Jews; the German Army approaching and the local Ukrainians rounding up and murdering Jews and plundering their homes; how survivors were forced to march to Czernowitz and herded into a ghetto with Jews from other towns; the living conditions, frequent transports to Transnistria, forced labor, and some attempts at underground resistance; his adolescent experiences, including taking excursions outside the ghetto, passing as a Volksdeutsche, and having hazardous encounters with SS; the turmoil as the Russians advanced and Rumanian authorities fled and the Germans started killing Jews; risking his life to get supplies from a warehouse before the Germans blew it up; being liberated by the Russians and joining a civilian militia formed by Jewish youths to patrol Czernowitz until the Russian militia took over; life after the Russian occupation; serving in the Russian Army in a demolition squad clearing minefields; how his commanding officer was a Jew posing as a Cossack; the chaotic conditions near the end of the war; going absent without leave and hiding for four months; crossing the border with false papers; joining the Betar and serving as a Madriach under Yehuda Avriel using a false name; his group helping others to make Aliyah to Palestine illegally; and how he avoided capture as a deserter as the Communists gained control.

Oral history interview with Aaron Stolzman

Oral History

Aaron Stolzman, born on December 28, 1925 in Dobrzyn, Poland, describes his father, who was a grocer and an officer in the Polish Army; his father’s death while fighting the Germans; his life before 1939; the local Jewish community and his family taking in Polish Jews who were expelled from Germany in 1938; the effects of the German occupation; being evicted by their German neighbors and fleeing to the Mlawa ghetto, where they stayed for about six months; witnessing German atrocities; joining an underground organization in the ghetto; leaving the ghetto with false papers and a new identity; going to work for a Polish farmer and then for the German army, posing as a Pole; connecting with a resistance group that lived in underground bunkers in the forest; how in September 1942 Germans destroyed their bunkers and he was taken to Auschwitz, where he stayed until 1945; how he and 200 young boys actually built Auschwitz; working on several other Kommandos building ammunition factories and underground transformers; living and working conditions in Auschwitz, where most prisoners only survived a week or two; knowing about the gas chambers and crematoriums; his escape attempt with the help of a Polish civilian and the terrible punishment the Germans inflicted on him; why escape was impossible; being put into Block 11, which few prisoners survived; being tortured and interrogated; being sent on a death march in 1945 to Gross-Rosen with prisoners from Buna and Birkenau; being sent to Dachau by freight train under horrible conditions; how the men who survived the trip were put into a barracks with prisoners who had typhoid; working on a Kommando at Muhldorf building underground hangars for the German air force; how he learned to survive; the evacuation of the camp by train and the Germans tried to murder the prisoners; how a Wehrmacht soldier, under direct orders from Heinrich Himmler to shoot them all, stalled the train until the US Army arrived; some Jews taking revenge on the German guards; liberation by the American Third Army; the establishment of Feldafind displaced persons camp and the post-liberation conditions; attempts by the Polish government to persuade Polish Jews to return; going to the United States on December 20, 1947; and the loss of the majority of his family.

Oral history interview with Elsa Turteltaub

Oral History

Elsa Turteltaub (née Waldner), born October 24, 1916 in Teschen (Cieszyn), Poland, describes attending private Catholic schools with her brother and sister, although her parents kept a kosher home and attended a conservative synagogue on holidays; completing a commercial high school course; being active in Hanoar Hatzioni; the German invasion in September 1939; her parents losing their restaurant; being forced with her sister to clean German army barracks; escaping in December 1939 to Slovakia, where she joined a hachshara in Zilina; being sent to Auschwitz in March 1942 in one of the first Slovakian transports; being forced into hard labor in the sand pits, despite being ill with typhus; being transferred to the registry office, where she issued death certificates requested by relatives of Auschwitz inmates; how by 1943 only gentiles’ requests were answered; the causes of death given were fictitious and created by the office staff and if ashes of the deceased were requested, staff filled sacks with any ashes found in the crematorium; the living conditions for those girls living in a building with SS women, which were much better than elsewhere; being evacuated to Ravensbrück, then to Malchow, and finally to Trewitz in East Germany; being liberated by Russians on May 3, 1945; getting married in 1946; giving birth to a son in 1948 in Katowitz, Poland; living with her family in Israel from 1950 to 1955; immigrating to the United States in 1955; and the inclusion of her story in “Secretaries of Death” (translated by Lore Shelley, New York: Shengold Publishers, Inc., 1986).

Oral history interview with Marian Turzanski

Oral History

Marian Turzanski, born January 18, 1934 in Zupanie, Poland, describes being one of four sons in a family of Catholic land owners; his family’s good relations with the few Jews in his village, one of whom once hid in the Turzanski home; the German invasion; how the hostile Ukrainians threatened to kill Marian’s father and a friendly Ukrainian intervened, urging the family to flee; going to Hungary, where they moved frequently and settled in Keszthely; attending a school for Polish children; how his parents left their baptismal papers in Poland, to be used by Samuel Goldreich, the Jew they once sheltered; life in Hungary after the German occupation, including the terrorization by the Arrow Cross and German soldiers, the ghettoization of Jews and Poles, and the deportation of Jews and gypsies; his father’s activity in the underground, together with Hungarian Jews and other Christians; how he and his brothers became messengers; the family’s deportation to Germany in sealed cattle cars in December 31, 1944 to Wilhelmshaven work camp near Berlin; the contrasts in conditions there with conditions at other camps, including Strassof, Bayreuth, and Neumarkt; the brutal treatment by Ukrainians at Neumarkt; being liberated by Americans in 1945 and living in displaced persons camps at Neumarkt, Hochenfels, Annsbach and Wildflecken; being in the former German barracks at Heilbronn, Ludvigsburg, and Bremerhafen; and going to the United States August 1949.

Oral history interview with Lillian Wishnefsky

Oral History

Lillian (Lili) Wishnefsky (née Kupferberg), born in Sosnowiec, Poland in December 1929, describes her father, who was a merchant and her mother a professional pianist; attending public school until the fourth grade, which was the year when Germany invaded Poland (September 1939); the formation of the Sosnowiec Ghetto in 1941 and the confiscation of her father’s factory; her clandestine education; life in the ghetto and the deportations; living for one and a half years in the ghetto before her family was moved to the Srodula Ghetto; her mother obtaining false papers; being hidden by Christians; the Nazis taking her father in the middle of the night, murdering her grandparents, and deporting her; going to a transit camp then Auschwitz (Birkenau), where she was assigned to forced labor; how her barracks were located across from the gas chambers; being sent after one and a half years on a death march to Ravensbrück; being part of a prisoner exchange arranged by President Roosevelt and traveling to Sweden via Denmark; her experiences on a Danish farm and being moved to Stockholm, which was precipitated by a Swedish publishing company’s interest in her diary; and her move to the US in November 1945.

Oral history interview with Jack Zaifman

Oral History

Jack Zaifman, born in Radom, Poland on March 2, 1925 into an Orthodox Jewish family, describes his father, who was a merchant; attending public school and cheder until age 14; the savagery of the German bombing and invasion of Radom in September 1939; escaping from a round-up of Jews; bicycling to Wolanow and living for a year with a Jewish family until the small town was liquidated; being taken for slave labor at a nearby camp manned by Gestapo, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian guards; working as a tailor for the German Army; witnessing the massacre of 350 Jews and having to dig trenches to bury the dead; being ill with typhoid fever, when a righteous German soldier took him to the Radom Ghetto hospital; being sent to Blizyn labor camp, near the German border, where he was betrayed by a Jewish Kapo and severely beaten by guards when he tried to help another prisoner; how among the 3000 survivors (out of 10,000) of Blizyn, he was shipped to Auschwitz, where he sorted the clothing of the dead; being moved to Dachau, where he endured brutal labor, carrying cement; being sent on a death march from Dachau in April 1945; being liberated by Americans and taken to a hospital at Wolfratshausen, weighing 70 pounds; the Feldafing displaced persons camp, where he met and married his wife; moving to the United States in April 1949; and beginning to speak in high schools and colleges about his experience in 1977.

Oral history interview with Roger Bryan

Oral History

Roger Bryan (formerly Rudolf Britzmann), born in Berlin, Germany on June 14, 1921, describe his father, a physician and a decorated German army veteran, who was arrested on trumped-up charges in the mid 1930s; his father’s death in Moabit prison under suspicious circumstances; his school years, which included a few antisemitic experiences; how his family coped after his father’s death; his struggle to get out of Germany, and how he managed to emigrate to London, England with help from both Jews and non-Jews in 1939 just before World War II started; working in London until he was classified as an enemy alien, incarcerated, and deported to Adelaide, Australia on the HMT Dunera; the terrible conditions on board and being mistreatment by the British during the trip; the journey to a detention camp in Hay, New South Wales, and how Australians treated the detainees; his jobs in the camp and the many activities and programs started by the prisoners; joining and serving in the Pioneer Corps (a non-combatant unit of the British Army) to get out of the internment camp; serving in the GHQ Second Echelon prisoner of war section of the British Army in London and in camps for German prisoners of war in Louvain, Belgium and the former Neuengamme concentration camp; being transferred to Nuremberg to work as an interpreter/translator during the war crime trials; leaving the service and living in Glasgow, Scotland with his wife, whom he married in 1943; starting a family and a photography business; and moving to the United States in 1953.

Oral history interview with Julius Eingorn

Oral History

Dr. Julius Eingorn describes serving with the 79th Infantry Division, Third Army in a special 12 unit dispensary that liberated Ohrdruf in April 1945; how there were no survivors; what he saw there, including evidence of primitive cremations and the prisoners marched out of Ohrdruf and killed just before liberation; General Eisenhower’s orders that all service men had to tour the camp; how in May 1945 his unit entered an unnamed labor camp near either Weida or Werdau; talking to many of the 150 surviving Jewish Hungarian girls in Yiddish; hearing their stories about the selections and life in the camp; stopping at a German hospital for Polish and Russian prisoners and discovering that out of 1500 patients only 400 survived; his unit’s liberation of British prisoners of war; encountering streams of German refugees fleeing the Russian Army; accepting the surrender of whole German divisions; interviewing many people around Ohrdruf who all felt no guilt and pleaded total ignorance of what happened there; and his reflections on what he saw during the war and the need for constant vigilance to prevent another Holocaust.

Oral history interview with Michael Finkelstein

Oral History

Michael Finkelstein, born in Radom, Poland in 1928, describes being educated in both cheder and public schools; the anti-Jewish measures and restrictions after the German invasion of Poland in 1939; the several instances of German-Polish cooperation in persecuting Jews; moving with his family into the ghetto in 1940; supporting themselves by smuggling; witnessing the selections and mass deportations while in the ghetto; working as a slave laborer in various factories; working as a slave laborer in Pionki from 1942 to 1943; being deported with his family to Auschwitz in 1943; the struggle to survive; how he managed to obtain food by working as a cook; how people could become block foremen; seeing Dr. Mengele making selections; seeing the flames from the ovens and smelling burning flesh of victims; getting on a transport with his father in 1943 to work in a coal mine in Upper Silesia, Poland; what gave him the strength to survive; being on a death march from the coal mine to Mauthausen in the winter of 1944; the cruel treatment of prisoners during the death march; being transported with his father to Ebensee death camp in Austria; the several attempts at resistance and why resistance was difficult; he and his father getting sick and his father’s death; the hospital in the camp; events before, during, and after the liberation by American tank units in May 1945; the revenge by some of the non-Jewish prisoners; the condition of the survivors, which the Americans were not prepared to deal with; being treated in an American Field hospital; joining a group of child survivors the Jewish Brigade of the British Army smuggled to Palestine via Italy; getting to Italy but no further; how after four years in a displaced persons camp in Italy, which was supported by UNRRA; going to the United States in 1949; and life in America and his reunion with his sister who also survived.

Oral history interview with Nathan Form

Oral History

Nathan Form, born in Kroscienko, Poland on February 28, 1922, being educated in Polish and Hebrew schools; working in his family’s leather factory after 1935; heeding the warning from a Polish policeman to flee and unsuccessfully trying to leave with his family in September 1939; surviving during the German occupation, operating a clandestine leather factory, and barely escaping execution by the Gestapo; working as a slave laborer locally, then in a Gestapo camp near Rabka, Kraków; the facilities for German SS and stormtroopers; the atrocities committed by Ukrainian soldiers; the killing of a Jewish family by the SS at the Rabka camp in 1942; the bravery of a Jewish girl, and how his testimony in a German court helped convict SS Sturmführer Wilhelm Rosenbaum after the war; witnessing mass killings of Jews by German soldiers in Płaszów, after the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto; being a prisoner in Gross-Rosen concentration camp in the spring of 1943, then in a labor camp in Wüstegiersdorf, Germany (Gluszyca, Poland), guarded by the Wehrmacht; his work digging bunkers; the camp closing in January 1945 and being sent on a forced death march to Camp Ebensee, via Mauthausen, to dig tunnels; the brutal conditions, savage beatings, Appells (roll calls), and how he managed to survive while his friend perished; how Germans used various means, including trickery and extermination barracks, just before liberation to kill as many prisoners as possible; conditions in the camp pre and post liberation on May 6, 1945 by Eisenhower’s Eighth Army; how he got treatment for a friend in a German hospital, helped by a Jewish officer who threatened the German staff; the Red Cross caring for survivors; being smuggled with other by the Jewish Brigade to Italy; being in Santo Deszeria, Italy from 1945 to 1947; his life in Paris, France; arriving in the United States on October 29, 1951; how the Holocaust affected him and why he was reluctant to talk about his suffering even to his children; and his reasons for sharing his story now.

Oral history interview with Helmut Frank

Oral History

Helmut Frank, born April 15, 1912 in Wiesbaden, Germany, discusses his early interest in Judaism; his pre-war Jewish life including religious education, relations with Gentiles, and the sporadic antisemitism; his education at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, Germany from 1931 to 1937; studying at Berlin University and earning his Ph.D. from the University of Bonn in 1935; his impression of Leo Baeck and his role in the Reichsvertretung; why many Jews still felt they could survive in Germany; being ordained in 1937 and appointed as a rabbi in Worms, Germany; the history of the Worms synagogue; witnessing Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938, which included the burning of his synagogue, damage to his apartment, and a lack of reaction by the fire department; being arrested along with other Jews and being forced to clean the debris in the streets then transported to Buchenwald; life in the camp, including the brutality, the organization of camp life, the lack of medical treatment, the effects of incarceration on prisoners physical and mental health, and religious observance by the inmates; how the Nazis warned released prisoners never to talk about Buchenwald; working in a labor squad and being released after his parents got him a visa for China; returning to Worms, where he opened a House of Prayer and a school with permission from the German authorities; the extent of the damage in Worms and the continued persecution of the Jewish community; leaving for the United States in August 1939; the immigration process; and the postwar conditions in Worms and the restoration of the Worms synagogue in 1961.

Oral history interview with Judy Freeman

Oral History

Judy Freeman, born on March 2, 1929 in Uzgorod in the Hungarian part of Czechoslovakia (now Uzhhorod, Ukraine), on March 2, 1929, describes her father, who was a baker; being educated in public school; the changes in Jewish life after the German occupation in August 1944; how Jews were herded into two temporary ghettos and then transported to Auschwitz in cattle cars; being separated from her family during a selection, processed, and taken to Jewish Lager C in Birkenau with 1000 young Jewish girls; the daily routine, roll calls, selections, and terrible conditions at Birkenau; devising several survival skills to keep her sanity and promised herself she would live to tell about her experiences; being sent to a gas chamber once and surviving; being selected to go to Guben, a small labor camp near Berlin, to work in an electronics component factory in November 1944; the attempts at sabotage by the slave laborers; the death march from Guben to Bergen-Belsen in January 1945; the horrible conditions and treatment of prisoners; the brutality by a Blockälteste at Bergen-Belsen; losing her will to live for the first time even though some hoarded jewelry saved her life at Bergen-Belsen during a typhus epidemic; being liberated by the British Army on April 15, 1945; the actions taken by Brigadier-General Grimm Hughes and British liberators vis-a-vis the survivors and the Germans; being hospitalized after liberation; returning to her hometown and smuggled into Munich, Germany with her new husband, who was also a survivor; living and working in two displaced persons camps, Gabersee and Wasserburg, for almost two years; arriving in the United States on September 21, 1947; receiving help from HIAS; and how they built a life and started a family, after a difficult beginning in New York.

Oral history interview with Nina Frisch

Oral History

Nina Frisch, born July 25, 1935 in Stanislawa, Poland (Stanislav, Ukraine), describes being raised in an Orthodox family; being moved into a ghetto with her family when she was six years old; hiding in nearby woods in 1943, surviving on hazelnuts, periodically running from German troops; how her mother was shot to death and buried in the woods; being hidden with her father by Staszek Jaczkowski, who was a Polish man honored by Yad Vashem for saving 31 Jews; staying in a bunker in the cellar of Staszek’s house from September 1943 to July 1944, along with many other Jews; being liberated by the Russians; how the Jewish families hiding in this bunker survived, established daily routines, and tried to keep some degree of normalcy; Staszek treating the group very humanely and trying to establish an escape route for them after it became extremely dangerous to stay in the bunker; going with her father to the United States in May 1949 because they could not go to Israel; how she came to terms with surviving when so many others were killed; why she is willing to talk about her experiences; and her feelings on Germans.

Oral history interview with Werner Glass

Oral History

Werner Glass, born in 1927, describes being the youngest child of a Berlin pediatrician; immigrating to Shanghai, China in 1933 with his family and governess; his father, who was a founder of the Shanghai Doctors Association and practiced medicine in the family’s apartment in the International Settlement; living a comfortable life, with many Chinese servants; attending German and English schools, technical college, and a French-Jewish university; the student resistance to Japanese occupation; how in 1938 his father’s passport was not renewed and the family became stateless; the influx of German refugees, including his grandparents, which led to the formation of the Jüdische Gemeinde; refugee support from the “Joint” and the Sephardic community; his religious education and his bar mitzvah in 1940; participating in a Jewish Boy Scout troop; how after Pearl Harbor enemy nationals were interned in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp and a ghetto was established in Hongkou for all post-1937 refugees, both Jews and non-Jews; how his family, as stateless immigrants who arrived in 1933, were unaffected; being dispossessed in 1942 by a Japanese officer and moved into one room in a hotel occupied by Chinese and Russian prostitutes; the difficult living conditions; the Japanese rules of conduct and penalties for infractions; immigrating to the United States in 1947, sponsored by his sister Helga, who married a Jewish-American soldier; completing his graduate studies in chemical engineering at Syracuse University; and getting married and having several sons.

Oral history interview with Raoul Harmelin

Oral History

Raoul Harmelin, born September 11, 1924 in Boryslaw, Poland (Boryslav, Ukraine), describes being the only son of a doctor; receiving both a secular and a Jewish education; his pre-war life in Boryslaw; life under the Russian occupation; life under the Germans after June 1941, including the pogroms, anti-Jewish measures, attitude of the local population, and formation of forced labor battalions organized by the Judenrat (Jewish council); a series of Aktions (roundups and mass murders of Jews) from November 1941 to 1943, and the murder of 600 Jews in Doly; how some Aktions were conducted by a German Vernichtung Kommando under General Katzman; how Polish and Ukrainian locals, Austrians in the Schutz Polizei, and Reiterzugpolizei, the Polish Kriminalpolizei, and Jews in the Ordnungsdienst all helped to round up Jews; the transfer of Jews to a camp at Ulica Janowska in Lwow (L'viv, Ukraine) or forced labor in local industry; how most Jews were transported to and murdered in camp Belzec; escaping from a roundup and witnessing the murder of an infant and a young girl; his father continuing to work because Jewish doctors were needed to treat the citizens of Boryslaw; hiding with his mother with the help of one of his patients; the creation of a ghetto, which was liquidated after a forced labor camp for Jews was opened in 1943; how Jews who could not hide were murdered or worked as slave laborers in the Zwangsarbeitslager in Boryslaw; working in connection with the war effort and having some degree of protection; getting news from London via radio and from an underground paper published by the Armia Krajowa (Polish Home Army); how an Ukrainian acquaintance hid 13 Jews, including Raoul and his parents from March 13, 1944 to August 8, 1944, when the Russians came back; his postwar life under the Russian occupation, including two arrests and escape to Breslau (Wroclaw, Poland); deciding with his parents to leave Poland after a pogrom in Kielce; staying in Paris, France, aided by HIAS; going to Sidney, Australia in November 1947; bringing his new wife and her parents to Australia later; his life in and adjustment to Australia after a very difficult beginning; his relatives on both sides of his family who were killed or survived; and the actions of non-Jews during the Holocaust.

Oral history interview with Milton Harrison

Oral History

Milton Harrison describes being a 19 year old First Sergeant in the Medical Detachment of the US Army’s 9th Armored Infantry Battalion of the 6th Armored Division; hearing in 1945 about German atrocities; how on April 11, 1945 on the way from Mühlhausen, Germany towards the Saale River his unit encountered Russian prisoners of war who had escaped from Buchenwald; learning about the camp and that most of the SS had already left; how a tank under the command of Captain Kiefer with a total of four Americans was dispatched to investigate; following shortly after with a small group of 28 men; finding on the way an unguarded "Little Buchenwald", a camp for mostly Jewish children between 10 and 14 years old who had worked at hard labor; reaching the main camp and seeing that the ovens were still hot; inspecting the camp and being shown a lampshade made from human skin and rows of bottles containing human parts; how the inmates did not receive any medical or other help for several days; how on April 12 the Haffen SS attacked Buchenwald with small arms and mortar and the participation of 44th Infantry Battalions in overwhelming the SS on April 14; medical assistance arriving on April 14; General Groh and General Patton touring the camp and being horrified; how the inhabitants of Weimar were ordered to bury the dead; and his role as one of the historical officers of the Buchenwald Information Committee of the 6th Armored Division Association.

Oral history interview with Rachel Hochhauser

Oral History

Rachel Hochhauser (née Sweden), born July 2, 1928 in Krzywice, Poland, describes being the only child of a religious family; her grandfather, who was rabbi and shochet of the Shtetl; her grandmother and parents, who operated a general store; her religious education and comfortable life before WWII; the friendly relations with their Polish and Russian neighbors until September 3, 1939; the restrictive occupation under the Russians; the persecution by Germans and local collaborators in summer of 1941; her father’s murder; hiding with her mother and other relatives after warnings from non-Jews, including the police Kommandant for whom she worked; hiding on several farms from April 1942 until 1944; being protected for 20 months by a Catholic farmer's wife, Anna Kobinska, with whom Rachel continued to correspond after the war; being forced to move for the final time and going in to a partisan-occupied area; the privations of living in a swamp during the winter of 1943-1944; having a log bunker built for them in the woods in exchange for 20 rubles of gold; sheltering with ten people until spring 1944; how the Russian Blitzkrieg and deserting Germans drove the group to return to their homes in Krzywice, where her family was welcomed home by neighbors; her family’s adoption of an orphan girl found in their house; moving westward to the displaced persons camp at Föhrenwald; her education there in the DP camp at an ORT school; and immigrating to the United States in April 1951.

Oral history interview with Simone Horowitz

Oral History

Simone Zuckermann Horowitz, born in Paris, France on June 10, 1926, describes her Polish-born parents who became French citizens; the ways her family’s life changed after the Nazi occupation; how she and her younger sister managed after her father fled to Southern France and her mother was arrested; learning after the war that her father was shot in Montluc prison on July 8, 1944 because he worked for the Resistance; how she and her sister lived in separate homes for Jewish children; joining the Jewish Scouts and delivering false papers for the underground; being arrested during a roundup of children from Jewish homes; being imprisoned at Drancy on July 21, 1944 and transported to Birkenau in cattle cars; surviving a selection; the processing of the new arrivals; conditions at Birkenau, including the frequent Appels (roll calls), meager diet, constant talk of food, and more selections; getting strength from her determination to find her father after the war; how the camp was emptied in stages; being marched out of the camp with a group of girls in January 1945 and being abandoned; how they survived; walking back to Auschwitz later in 1945 and connecting with a group of French survivors; conditions in Auschwitz post-liberation; being repatriated by the French Red Cross and arriving at Marseilles, France, May 1, 1945 after stopovers in Krakow, Poland and Odessa, Ukraine; returning to Paris in September 1945 after living briefly in an orphanage and with relatives; resuming her education; entering the United States on a student visa in the fall of 1948 to join her American relatives; completing her education and meeting her husband; and how her reluctance to talk about the Holocaust to her children affected their relationship.

Oral history interview with Lola Krause

Oral History

Lola Krause, born March 1, 1916 in Vitebsk, Belarus, describes her father, who was a successful movie photographer, and her mother, who was an accomplished pianist from Latvia; growing up as a non-observant Soviet Jew; studying music with her mother; learning German from her governess and attending public school in Vitebsk; being rejected by the local Soviet college because of her father’s upper-class status; moving to Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), Russia to study engineering; working in film and scientific instrument factories; getting married in 1938 and having a son in 1939; the siege of Leningrad; the German bombardment; conditions in the city, including the diseases, lack of food, and loss of all public services; her husband’s death from starvation; her weight dropping to 60 pounds and how, at three years of age, her son weighed only seven-and-a-half pounds; how her factory was relocated to Samarkand (Temirtau), Kazakhstan in 1941 and she traveled with her son in a cattle car for six weeks, stopping in Tashkent, Uzbekistan; meeting up in Tashkent with her uncle, a doctor, who insisted that her fragile child remain with him in the hospital; her son joining her a year-and-a-half later in Samarkand, where she worked until 1946; getting married again and moving illegally across European borders, living in Jewish Agency camps in Wroclaw, Poland and at Wasseralfingen, near Stuttgart, Germany; having another son; surviving on food packages from American relatives; immigrating in 1949 to the United States; their adjustment to life in the US; settling in Bradley Beach, NJ and in Philadelphia, PA; working in factories and establishing their own cleaning business; selling her valuable bracelet to buy a piano; suffering ridicule from poor neighbors because she believed children had to learn to play an instrument; sending her sons to Hebrew school and observing Jewish holidays; and how visiting Israel in 1972 further heightened her Jewish consciousness.

Oral history interview with Fred Kulick

Oral History

Fred Kulick describes serving with the 336th Engineer Combat Battalion (Amphibious), United States Ninth Army; being near Gardelegen, Germany, in the Saar Valley, when his unit found between 100 and 200 corpses of slave laborers who had been locked in a barn and burned to death; their commander, Lt. Colonel Paul Bennett, ordering German civilians to give the victims a decent burial; the recording of the atrocity in the battalion records; sending photographs of the victims’ bodies to Yad Vashem in Israel; why he believes German citizens knew about the atrocities and the camps but were unable to admit it; having a brief encounter with a group of starving American prisoners of war in Schleswig Holstein; and his battalion’s activities in Europe from the German surrender until he returned to the Unites States.

Oral history interview with Malvina Lebovic

Oral History

Malvina Lebovic, born in 1920 in Kal'nyk, near Munkac, Czechoslovakia (now Mukacheve, Ukraine); being the oldest of nine children; her father, who was a butcher; how her family was very poor and life was difficult; her father organizing a school for Jewish children because of antisemitism in the local school; how in 1934 her family moved to Karlovy (Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic) hoping for a better life; moving back to Kalni in 1938 after the Anschluss in Austria; the occupation of the Hungarians soon after they moved back; the persecution of Jews; her father and brother being taken to labor camps; how Jews were frequently beaten and food was scarce; the German occupation and the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz in cattle cars; conditions during the journey and arriving at Auschwitz; her mother and younger brother being immediately taken to the gas chambers; living with her two sisters in a barrack then transferred later first to Stutthof and then to Baumgard for hard labor; living in tents and sleeping on straw; contracting typhus along with her two sisters shortly before liberation by the Russians in March 1945; returning to Kalni; getting married and eventually making their way to Israel; and going to the United States after her daughter contracted polio.

Oral history interview with Luba Margulies

Oral History

Luba Margulies (née Kozusman), born in 1915, in Novogrod (possibly Novhorod-Sivers'kyi, Ukraine), describes being four years old when her parents were killed during a pogrom; her grandparents taking her and her siblings to Ostrog, Poland (now Ostroh, Ukraine); attending school; her involvement with Zionist organizations; working in a Jewish hospital for three years in Lemberg (possibly L'viv, Ukraine); the antisemitism in the city, especially after Jozef Pilsudski’s death in 1935; finishing her midwifery education in 1939; being in Ostrog when the war began; getting married in 1940; moving to Ternopil', Ukraine; life during the Russian occupation; the German occupation; the shooting of Jews in Ternopil'; the formation of the ghetto in Ternopil'; the Jewish police and Judenrat (Jewish council); making a hiding place in their basement; doing forced labor; receiving help from non-Jews; the liquidation of the ghetto in 1942; being pregnant and helping to build the railroad station as part of her forced labor; being taken by the Germans to clean bunkers that were filled with dead people; the death of her baby; suffering from typhus; a poem her husband wrote (it’s included in the transcript in Yiddish and in English); hiding in the woods with her husband; staying with a non-Jew in February 1944; going to Zbarazh, Ukraine; the liberation of Ternopil'; going to Brzezany, Ukraine, where her daughter was born in February 1945; moving to Walbrzych, Poland; going to a displaced persons (DP) camp in Wetzlar, Germany; her husband teaching mechanics at the ORT school; going to the United States in October 1949; and her work at a dental company.

Oral history interview with William McCormick

Oral History

William McCormick describes being a sergeant in the 15th Reconnaissance Group, attached to Seventh Army Headquarters; entering Dachau one day after the initial liberation and staying for two days; giving a very powerful description of the physical and mental condition of the survivors; seeing bodies in boxcars and in piles on the ground and human ashes in boxes near the crematorium; how the Nazis killed thousands of prisoners the week before liberation; his reaction as well as that of others in his unit; and the lasting effect that what he saw in Dachau had on him.

Oral history interview with Bernard Mednicki

Oral History

Bernard Mednicki, born in 1910 in Brussels, Belgium, describes being the youngest of four children in an Orthodox Russian Jewish family from Kishinev (Chisinau, Moldova); his father serving in the Russian Army until the 1903 pogrom, when he deserted and moved his family to the west; attending a cheder and public school in Brussels, where he experienced some antisemitism; being apprenticed to an orthopedic technician; becoming a Belgian citizen in 1928 and being married in 1931; how in 1933 he became active in the anti-fascist Socialist Party and anti-fascist resistance; the German invasion on May 12, 1940; fleeing with his wife and children to Paris, France, assuming Christian identities; traveling through southern France and reuniting with his family in Riom; the travails of fellow refugees; his work with the French resistance during 1941-1942 in Clermont-Ferrand, France; his sabotage activities with the Maquis in the mountains near Volvic, France; smuggling goods and other survival techniques to obtain food for resistance families; traveling with his wife and children to Paris, aided by American soldiers; returning to Brussels in 1946; finding his sister’s three children, who were hidden during the war in a convent and a monastery; arriving in the United States with his wife and children in 1947; and his memoir (Never be afraid: A Jew in the Maquis, published posthumously in 1997).

Oral history interview with Sybil Niemöller

Oral History

Sybil Niemöller (nee von Sell), born in 1923 in Potsdam, Germany, describes growing up in a Gentile, aristocratic Prussian family; her grandfathers, who were Prussian generals; how after World War I her father was appointed by Kaiser Wilhelm to be his financial advisor and administrator; growing up in Berlin-Dahlem, where she had several Jewish friends; how her parents were strongly anti-Nazi; her family attending the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), which was led by their friend Pastor Niemöller; how this church was founded as counterpart against the Christian German Church which had embraced Nazi ideology; being prevented from graduating from high school because she did not belong to the Hitler Youth; becoming an actress; how during the war her parents sheltered several Jews, disguised as seamstresses and gardeners; the involvement of two of her cousins, Werner von Haeften (who was adjuvant to Count von Stauffenberg) and Hans Bernt von Haeften, in the attempt on Hitler’s life in 1944 and were executed; being arrested with her father and interrogated at that time, but released; arriving in the United States in 1952 and becoming a US citizen in 1957; getting married to Pastor Martin Niemöller and accompanying him on his lecture tours; settling in Wiesbaden, Germany; and her husband’s suffering as “Hitler’s special prisoner” when he was incarcerated in Sachsenhausen and later in Dachau.

Oral history interview with Max Roisman

Oral History

Max Roisman, born July 25, 1913 in Warsaw, Poland, describes how in 1939, before the German invasion of Poland, he and his wife left Warsaw to go to Russia; stopping at the border and remaining in Slawatycza, Poland, where he worked with a local tailor for German SS border guards; being warned by an SS officer and hiding with his wife in a nearby town; going to Wohyn, Poland, posing as a gentile; using a sewing machine smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto and working as a tailor with a non-Jewish partner until he was ordered to work for the Germans as a tailor in Suchowola, an open labor camp; how on May 3, 1943 the camp was liquidated and workers were evacuated to Majdanek; signing up with his wife and brother-in-law to go to Auschwitz, unaware of the nature of the camp; being sent to Buna to work as a slave laborer for I.G. Farben Industry, then on a forced march to Gleiwitz, where they boarded a train to Oranienburg (a satellite camp of Sachsenhausen) to work in a brick factory; working as a tailor for the commandant of the camp, Major Heydrich, and being put in charge of four other tailors; obtaining food and clothing for other inmates and himself by trading stolen supplies; being wounded in April 1945 during an air raid; receiving excellent medical care due to the intervention of the camp commandant; hiding when the camp was evacuated and the German military ran away; the remaining survivors organizing to get food and water until the Russians liberated the camp; conditions at Oranienburg; receiving help from the Russians and traveling east across the border; being separated from his wife; being sheltered by a Polish family that had hidden him once before; reuniting with his wife; living in his wife’s hometown; moving to Reichenbach, Germany, where he opened a shop; living briefly in Israel; returning to Austria and working as a tailor for USEC; and immigrating to the United States with his wife and children in January 1956.

Oral history interview with Sophie Roth

Oral History

Sophie Roth, born in Zloczow, Poland, describes being one of four children in a religious family; the German bombing and invasion in 1939 and the killing of doctors and teachers by Germans, aided by Poles and Ukrainians; working in forced labor camps in Lazczow and Kosice until 1942 when she was shot and lost a leg; how a Polish teenager, whom she tutored, traveled to Lemberg to obtain a prosthesis for her; hiding in a fish barrel and then in a Polish peasant’s stable with her family, in exchange for money, jewelry, and the deed to their house; suffering from near-starvation and suffocating subliminal existence under a manure pile with nine other people; being forced to leave; her family finding shelter in an unheated basement of a Polish teacher, Elena Sczychovska, and her husband, who was the local police commandant; hiding with 14 people during the last year of the war; the hostility of neighbors when her family returned to their home; getting married in 1947 to a Hebrew teacher who lost his religious faith and his entire family; remaining a believer, attributing her survival to God’s miracles; the birth of her daughter in Paris, France in 1952; immigrating with aid from HIAS and the Jewish Family Service in Philadelphia; and her poems about horrendous Holocaust memories (she reads some of them during the recording).

Oral history interview with Ida Rudley

Oral History

Ida Rudley, born April 22, 1922 in Vienna, Austria, describes growing up in a middle class family; encountering antisemitism even before Hitler annexed Austria; her life changing after the Anschluss in 1938 as anti-Jewish measures took effect; how it was almost impossible for Jews to leave Austria; receiving help from several non-Jews, including an encounter with a German officer who took an interest in her while she and her mother were trying to escape from Austria; being smuggled across the border to Yugoslavia in 1941 and living in Zagreb (now in Croatia) illegally, always on the run, sheltered by both Jews and non-Jews; being warned that the Gestapo was looking for them; turning themselves in to the Gestapo, armed with enough pills to commit suicide, and managing to talk their way out of detention; using forged papers and accompanying a group of German-Jewish orphans bound for Palestine to the Italian part of Yugoslavia; living briefly in Ljubljana, Slovenia; being sent to a concentration camp in Ferramonti, Italy; the other prisoners, including Greek, Italian, and Yugoslavian Partisans as well as Jews; how the Italians ran the camp in a very humane fashion and even told Jews where to hide from the retreating German troops; getting married by a rabbi in the concentration camp and having a civil ceremony later, after liberation by the Jewish Brigade of the British Army in 1943; staying briefly in a transit camp in Cinecitta, run by UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration); and going with her husband and her mother to the United States on a military ship in 1947.

Oral history interview with Sylvia Schneider

Oral History

Sylvia Schneider, born May 4, 1928, describes being raised in an Orthodox Jewish family; her father, who was a language teacher and was born in Belgium of Russian ancestry; her mother, who was from Poland; having a happy childhood; how around 1935 her sister Ruth was beaten by Hitler youth; her sister’s death in 1943 from a brain aneurysm while studying nursing in England; being deported on October 28, 1938 with Ruth and their mother, along with many others with Polish passports to Zbayyun; the freezing living conditions in 1938-1939 in the no man's land between the German and Polish borders; her family joining an aunt in Krakow, Poland in May 1939; going to Otwock, near Warsaw for she and her sister to await a Kindertransport ship to England; parting from their mother and experiencing unhappy stays in private homes and a children's hostel; the several caring women who befriended her; immigrating in 1947 to the United States; getting married and having a daughter; giving up her Orthodox religious faith when she learned that her mother was gassed at Auschwitz and her father died in another camp; and continuing to identify herself as a traditional Jew.

Oral history interview with Sara Schwimmer

Oral History

Sarah Schwimmer, born in Jihlava, Czechoslovakia in 1926, describes being one of fifteen children in an observant Jewish family; her father, who was a blacksmith in a largely Jewish community; the Hungarians confiscated her father’s business in 1939; going to Budapest, Hungary with an older sister; working as a seamstress; how her sister, a beautician, tried unsuccessfully to obtain a passport from Wallenberg; joining Dror, or Deror, the Zionists underground movement; being taken with other women in September 1944 on a death march to Hegyeshalom, Hungary on the German border; how only a third of the people survived the 10 day march without food, water, or shelter; being transported by train to Buchenwald as well as Ravensbrück, Burgare, and Turkheim; experiencing hunger and loss of spirit, yet maintaining the will to survive; being liberated by a regiment of black American soldiers on April 28, 1945; walking with other women through Russian, French, and English zones to reach Marseilles for passage to Israel; living in Israel for 13 years; and marrying a man she knew in the concentration camps.

Oral history interview with Fred Walters

Oral History

Frederick A. Walters describes being a Jewish soldier, serving in the 474th Infantry Regiment of the US Army; being aware of the existence of concentration camps from the Stars and Stripes and Armed Forces Radio Network but did not think he would ever witness them; entering Buchenwald in April 1945; being shocked to see the dead in the camp and the appalling conditions of approximately 150 surviving prisoners; how his regiment was not responsible for the care of the survivors but gave them army rations until food until medical care arrived; his memory of a man who gave prisoners money and may have been Edward R. Morrow; the shock of his regiment in witnessing the realities of the camp and how they had refused to believe published and broadcasted reports; how no official or unofficial meetings were held to discuss their reactions and no regimental history documents the experience; the denial of the Weimar townspeople to having knowledge of camp activities; being shipped to Norway to handle the surrender of German army units; finding that German soldiers denied knowledge of camps and did not believe his eyewitness testimony; the presence of the same disbelief in the US upon his return; and his thoughts on sharing his experience for the first time since the war.

Oral history interview with Philip Bonner

Oral History

Philip Bonner describes being in the 159th Engineer Batallion, 3rd and 9th Army; participating in combat in Normandy, Brittany, the Battle of the Bulge, and Germany; the atrocities committed by Germans against French resistance fighters; arriving in Buchenwald on April 17, 1945 several hours after its liberation; conditions at Buchenwald and seeing piles of bodies, evidence of mass cremations, and semi-starved survivors; the reaction of the survivors to the liberators and the harmful effect of giving survivors their rations; his other war experiences, including encounters with German soldiers and civilians; his unit building a camp in Antwerp, Belgium housing German prisoners of war; his thoughts about the causes of Hitler’s rise to power and Germany’s role in World War II and the Holocaust; and his hope that his testimony will help to prevent future Holocausts.

Oral history interview with Herbert Broh

Oral History

Herbert Broh, born in Berlin, Germany in 1930, relates several experiences of abusive antisemitism by his friends and his teacher as well as his impressions of Kristallnacht; his family leaving Germany for Shanghai, China in April of 1939 to join family members already living on Seward Road in the Hongkew section of Shanghai, under Japanese occupation; being enrolled in the Kadoorie School and later a cheder; his Jewish education at the cheder and the Yeshiva Katana as well as the effect of his growing Orthodoxy on his life and his family; his family’s living conditions and life in Shanghai; being very happy there and being only dimly aware that other refugees had a more difficult existence; his father’s work for a Chinese factory managed by the Japanese; his mother’s work as a cook at the Komor Kindergarten; how after Pearl Harbor his family was evacuated to the Kadoorie School; the interactions between the Japanese and refugees; the events during and after the Japanese capitulation and the arrival of Chinese Nationalist and later American troops; witnessing the departure of the entire Mirrer Yeshiva to Canada in 1946; going with his family to the United States in 1947; his life in the US and his feelings about his years in Shanghai; and being a cantor in Sun City, California.

Oral history interview with Philip DiGiorgio

Oral History

Philip DiGiorgio describes serving in E Company, 232nd Regiment, 42nd Division of the Seventh Army during World War II; some of his combat experiences and the heavy losses his division took; entering Dachau in April, 1945 shortly after it was liberated, under orders to clear all the buildings and tunnels and then to move on; seeing some survivors and a few guards who tried to blend in with them, a lampshade made out of human skin, and many so-called "Forty and Eights" (cattle cars stacked with bodies ready for cremation); how what he saw at Dachau profoundly affected him, renewed his will to fight, and increased his religious observance; and being moved to testify because of his perception of widespread disbelief about the Holocaust.

Oral history interview with Sylvia Ebner

Oral History

Sylvia Ebner, born September 10, 1929, in Bodrogkisfalud, Hungary, describes her education, relations with non-Jews, and learning to cope with children who stoned her on her way to school; the German invasion in March 1944; how the persecution and anti-Jewish measures increased; being taken with her family to the Satoraljaujhely ghetto with Jews from several other towns; the looting of their house as soon as they walked out; several incidents of extreme brutality by Germans; being transported to Auschwitz in cattle cars and their dehumanization; her parents managing to observe Shabbat and her father trying to prepare Sylvia to cope with what she had to face; arriving at Auschwitz in May 1944 and going through processing and selections; the gassing of her mother and other relatives in trucks; being marched to Birkenau; the horrible conditions, the smell from the crematorium, and how they tried to survive; working as a slave laborer in Brzézinka also known as “Canada”, sorting belongings taken from Jews; risking her life to smuggle food to her cousin; how the starving girls were offered food on fast days such as Tisha B’ Av but refused to eat because the food was not kosher; getting scarlet fever and being hospitalized in a Revier (sick quarters) for six weeks; surviving seven selections; seeing Dr. Mengele operate without any anesthesia; seeing a Christian woman kill her newborn baby to save him from Mengele’s experiments; how the Germans drained large amounts of blood from girls who survived typhus or scarlet fever to make serums; recovering and working as a slave laborer; doing heavy-duty work; being transferred to a factory in Ober Hohenelbe, Sudeten, Germany (Hořejší Vrchlabí, Czech Republic); how the German woman in charge risked her life to find food for the prisoners; being liberated by Russian troops on May 1, 1945; returning to Hungary and receiving aid from the Joint Distribution Committee; and escaping from Hungary and immigrating to Canada.

Oral history interview with Samuel Flor

Oral History

Samuel Flor, born in Chernovitz (Chernivtsi, Ukraine), describes experiencing antisemitism, his education, and his career as a composer, musician, and a professor at the university in Chernovitz; life in Chernovitz first under Russian and then under German occupation; why it was impossible to leave and how he and his wife, Gertrude, tried to escape in June 1941 but failed; being part of a brutal roundup of Jewish men and having to bury Jewish men who were machine-gunned to death by Germans near the River Prut; how in October 1941 all Jews had to move into a ghetto; being deported to the Ukraine under terrible conditions, including periodic whippings by both German and Romanian soldiers; a particularly cruel incident involving Jews from Mogilev, Belarus, which involved a forced circular death march and several atrocities committed by Ukrainian peasants; working as a slave laborer in a Chernovitz stone quarry and in Tulchin in a hospital; speaking with Sonderführer Fritz von Rohde about the killing Jews; how the Germans retreated and Mr. and Mrs. Flor hid with about 66 other people in a hole they had dug previously for more than three days until March 15, 1944; how the 300 Jewish survivors tried to cope once the Russian Army came; returning to Chernovitz; how his apartment had been nationalized so he and his wife joined the Czech Army; immigrating to Barranquilla, Colombia and then to the United States; and continuing his musical career.

Oral history interview with Daniel Goldsmith

Oral History

Daniel Goldsmith, born in Antwerp, Belgium on December 11, 1931 to Polish parents; being raised Orthodox and being educated at a Yeshiva; living in Antwerp under German occupation and suffering under the ever-increasing anti-Jewish measures; his father being transported to a labor camp in France in August 1942 and never hearing from him again; his mother, Ruchel Goldschmidt, who was in contact with the Belgian underground and managed to get some money, safeguard their possessions, and find a hiding place just before and while the Germans raided their neighborhood and ransacked Jewish-owned houses; the Belgians who pointed out Jewish residents; the several instances when Belgians cooperated with the Germans; examples of aid given by non-Jewish Belgians, especially Father André (who was recognized as a “Righteous Gentile”) and other Catholic clergy and nuns; his mother’s work with the underground; being placed with his sister in a convent, then with Christian families after their mother found out the Germans would enter the convent to look for Jewish children; being in a succession of orphanages in Weelde and Mechelen, run by Father Cornelius, from 1943 to 1944, while his sister lived with another Christian family; getting false baptismal papers, changing his name, and living as a Catholic; refusing to convert to Catholicism; how in May 1944 the Germans imprisoned all circumcised boys in the orphanage, then transported them on cattle cars with Jewish children; escaping with several other boys from the moving train and managing to contact a priest who placed each of them in hiding with a different Christian family; how Monsieur and Madame Botier hid Daniel and were kind to him and worked to reunite him with his mother after liberation in September 1944; various placements post liberation, especially in Aische En Refail, Belgium; a French committee that collected hidden Jewish children for Aliyah Bet; his mother receiving an injury during an air raid and not being able to take care of her children at that time; how difficult and painful it was for all parties, especially his sister, when his mother wanted to reclaim her daughter from the Christian family that sheltered her for three years; going to the United States in April 1948 with his mother and his sister; being sponsored by his father’s family; his family’s life shortly after they arrived in the US; and his own life from that time to the present.

Oral history interview with Helene Goodman

Oral History

Helene Goodman (formerly Henia Flint), born in Łódź, Poland in 1913, describes studying piano at the Warsaw Conservatory posing as a non-Jew, and receiving her diploma in 1935; how the German invasion affected Polish Jews; having to move with her family in 1939 to the Łódź ghetto; her father’s death after the Kriminal Polizei (KRIPO) beat him; witnessing Polish-German cooperation and the murder of Jewish orphans in the ghetto; being transported with her mother to Auschwitz in August 1944 when the ghetto was liquidated; surviving a selection while her mother did not; being forced to play the piano at the camp commander’s birthday party; how the commander stabbed her when she was too frightened to play and her wounds were not treated; being put on a transport by a Jewish supervisor and going to Hainichen, Saxony, Germany; working as a slave laborer at Framowerke, an ammunition factory; the living and working conditions and how starvation affected her; the cruelty of the SS supervisor Gertrude Becker; sabotaging the output of her machine; hearing rumors that food was medicated to stop the workers’ menstrual cycle; going on a death march at the end of April 1945, guarded by SS officers who took off their uniforms and fled once they arrived at Theresienstadt; being liberated by the Russian Army on May 9, 1945; being treated by Russian women doctors; American soldiers taking her to a quarantine camp at Landsberg am Lech, Germany, where she tried to recover from the physical and emotional after effects of her experiences; getting married to her first husband, Jacob Gottlieb; living in Regensberg, Germany until they went to the United States; and her personal reflections on the Holocaust.

Oral history interview with Gertrude Hallo

Oral History

Gertrude Hallo describes her friendship with Franz Rosenzweig and her husband’s association and personal relationship with Rosenzweig starting in 1910; taking dictation from Rosenzweig through his final illness when he could only move part of one little finger; why Rosenzweig decided not to convert to Christianity and instead devoted his life to personal Jewish learning and to improving Jewish education for children and adults; her belief that one should focus on the man and his life, not on his philosophical system and his theological teachings; Rosenzweig’s life, work, major accomplishments, publications, and some of the well-known persons who studied with him; how he was able to live and to teach after he was stricken with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; Rosenzweig keeping up an enormous correspondence and continued to write, publish, and translate Hebrew books into German until his death in December 1929; her belief that the historical background in Germany, the Jewish youth movement, Zionism, and the beginning of the racist Teutonic movement explain why young Jews had to fight for their Jewish identity in Germany in the 1920s; the Freikorps, the Kapp Putsch, and the economic, social, and political situation in Germany leading up to the rise of Hitler; Jewish participation in German art and culture and her own early experiences of antisemitism; her husband’s death shortly before Hitler came to power; her memories of the time just before and after Hitler’s rise to power; and the basis of Hitler’s charisma and success.

Oral history interview with Pearl Herling

Oral History

Pearl Herling, born in Budapest, Hungary on August 24, 1924, describes the antisemitism and discrimination against Jews that always present in Hungary, especially in higher education, and its peak in 1938; the increasingly harsh restrictions against Hungarian Jews between 1940 and 1944; how after June 6, 1944, Hungarian Nazis persecuted Jews and established ghettos and labor battalions; how many men in her family were affected and her father disappeared and never came back; moving with her family into a “Yellow Star House” in Budapest; never wearing the mandatory yellow star; how she managed to survive, avoid transport to a labor camp, and posed as a Gentile using false papers she typed herself; an incident during which she bluffed and managed to get herself and all the people in her building into one of the safe houses established by Swiss and Swedish nationals and obtained Schutzpasses; joining her sister, just before the building was raided, at a labor camp in Kelenföld (neighborhood in XI. Kerület, Budapest) that was run by Hungarian Nazis; how she, her sister, and her sister’s two young children avoided a roundup, then got papers classifying them as refugees in Russian-occupied Hungary; her mother and other family members surviving under the protection of the head of a German labor camp; how she all her surviving family members barely survived in Budapest under horrible conditions and still posed as non-Jews, using false papers; the effects of starvation and her attempts to get food for her family; a special transport of Hungarian Jews from Bergen-Belsen to Switzerland and a failed attempt to exchange Jews for trucks; witnessing a death march from Buda; her certainty that Raoul Wallenberg’s rescue efforts enabled her family to survive; getting married to her second husband while both were posing as non-Jews and how difficult it was for him to get his son back from a Catholic family that sheltered him; her experiences in Hungary under the Russian occupation while running two businesses; the Communists wanting to arrest her husband and Russian smugglers smuggled him into Vienna, Austria and purely by chance he ended up in the American sector, which made it possible for them to get to the United States later; escaping from Budapest with her sedated infant after several failed attempts; entering Vienna using papers identifying her as an Israeli citizen; her husband’s seven-year-old son, who was separated from her at this time and had to escape by himself; what happened during other attempts to escape, how she kept her sanity when she was arrested, tormented, and finally managed to talk her way out of detention; living with her husband in Vienna for two years and experiencing discrimination; and how she progressed from not wanting to give up her Jewishness despite severe antisemitism, to renouncing her faith, and finally trying to make her peace with God.

Oral history interview with Bertram Kornfeld

Oral History

Bertram Kornfeld, born in Vienna, Austria in 1925, describes his immigration to the United States in 1938; joining the US Army in February 1944; serving in the 423rd Battalion of the 106th Infantry Division; being captured by German soldiers in Belgium, near Malmedy with his crew during the Battle of the Bulge; being forced to march with many other prisoners for several days to a railroad, where they were crowded into cattle cars; being taken to Koblenz, where the locked cars were left overnight in a railroad yard and being narrowly missed by RAF bombers; arriving at Stalag 4-B, located between Leipzig and Dresden, Germany, in December 1944; the bitter cold, the callous disregard of sick and dying prisoners, and the lack of food and water during the transport; his liberation in April 1945, at which point he had lost 50 pounds; how the Germans observed the Geneva Convention in regard to American and British prisoners, but brutally mistreated the Russians; how the Russian liberators of his camp were drunken and slaughtered the remaining Germans, but befriended the prisoners by baking bread for them; fleeing with some friends and meeting American soldiers in Leipzig; being given rich food, which sickened them and required a brief hospitalization; returning to the US; and being discharged in December 1945.

Oral history interview with Alex Krasheninnikow

Oral History

Alex Krasheninnikow, born in Kiev, USSR (now Kiev, Ukraine) in 1934, describes his father, who was a scientist, and his mother, who was an artist; how his parents were Jews but he had no religious education; having a happy childhood; living in a large collective apartment shared with four Soviet families; the German invasion in 1941; being hidden with his family in the attic of Vassily and Ina Baranovski in Darnitsa, Ukraine; exchanging their gold jewelry for food and shelter until November 1943 when their hideout was discovered and their protectors were shot; being sent with his parents by freight car to Brätz (Brójce) concentration camp near Schwiebus, Germany (Świebodzin, Poland); how the guards beat them with clubs and separated men from women; the food shortages, cold barracks, and arduous road building labor; the daily gymnastic regime of forced running for hours; being liberated by the Russian Army in January 1945 and reuniting with his family; returning to Kiev; moving in July 1950 to Munich, Germany illegally; immigrating in December 1950 to Philadelphia, PA, where Alex became a court interpreter; and his study of the accounts in Russian publications that number the Babi Yar killings during 1941-1943 with various figures, from 30,000 to 100,000.

Oral history interview with Dora Langsam

Oral History

Dora Langsam, born in Brzeziny, Poland on January 1, 1925, describes her Jewish family and keeping kosher; her father, who was a business man and fought with Trumpeldor; her brother serving in the Polish Army; the conditions for Jews after the German invasion in September 1939; how one of her brothers died trying to protect their father from the Germans and one of her sisters with her newborn baby was taken during a selection; staying with the rest of her family in the Brzeziny ghetto from 1940 to the spring of 1942 when the ghetto was closed and the Jewish population was transported to the Łódź ghetto; how her mother and brother were taken away during selections; working with her father in a factory as slave laborers; the conditions in the Łódź ghetto; the liquidation of the ghetto in the summer of 1944; being transported with her father and a sister to Auschwitz; being separated from her father; living with her sister in barracks, supervised by a brutal Czech Kapo; enduring daily Appells (roll calls), selections, hunger, and cold; trying to rescue her sister during a selection and how they both were saved from certain death at the last second by an air raid; being transported with her sister to a labor camp in Neukölln to work in an ammunition factory owned by Krupp; being transferred in 1945 to Ravensbrück, where they received food packages from the American Red Cross; how she and her sister did not get sick like most of the girls because they didn’t eat the non-kosher food; going with her sister on April 24, 1945 to Padborg, Denmark on a convoy organized by Folke Bernadotteakademin; going on to Copenhagen and Malmö, Sweden; how being treated like human beings deeply affected them; the quarantines in Lund then Visingsö (now Jönköpings kommun); working in a sanatorium during the day and attending school at night; staying in Sweden for eight years; getting married her to a survivor from Poland; having a son and a daughter while she was in Sweden; going to the United States on July 6, 1953 with help from HIAS because her husband wanted to raise his children in a free country; and her sister, who still lives in Sweden and is also married to a Holocaust survivor.

Oral history interview with L.I. Anonymous

Oral History

L.I., born November 1923, describes living in Bucharest, Romania before, during, and after World War II; her family history and her experiences growing up in Bucharest; her education at Catholic, public, and medical schools; several instances of discrimination against herself and other Jewish students; the increasing antisemitism and restrictions against Jews, even those who converted, and their effect on the Jewish community and her own life; her father losing his job; going to Onescu, a Jewish medical school staffed by Jewish teachers, and interning at Jewish hospitals; how both she and her father worked at forced labor; conditions in the Jewish community; the random killing of Jews and the brutality of the Iron Guard; how many Jewish institutions continued to function; how after the war her family got back their house, which had been confiscated in December 1941; completing her medical education; conditions for Jewish students, who were allowed to attend schools but were not fully accepted; not being allowed to leave Romania once she became a doctor; how she and her husband were able to leave as part of an exchange program in 1978; and going to the United States in 1979.

Oral history interview with Anonymous Liberator

Oral History

The interviewee describes being a captain in the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) of the US Army during World War II; entering Dachau concentration camp in April 1945 a few days after liberation to interrogate Nazis who stayed behind because they wanted to be questioned by Americans instead of Russians; being taken on a tour of Dachau; hearing accounts of atrocities inflicted on the prisoners; what he learned during the interrogation; how the experience of seeing Dachau affected him and the other men in his unit; reporting to his commanding officer in Munich, Germany; being assigned to a displaced persons camp at Coburg, Germany; the poor conditions at the camp, nightly searches, and the treatment of survivors; a riot at the camp in 1946; why he feels that the displaced persons could have been treated more humanely; and how his experiences affect him still.

Oral history interview with Jacques Lipetz

Oral History

Jacques Lipetz, born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1932, describes being educated at a Jewish school; his family’s flight through France to Marseille in May 1940; going with his mother and two brothers to Lisbon, Portugal via Spain and his father went via Morocco; sailing to New York, NY in 1941 but not staying because their quota number had not come up yet; booking passage to the Philippines and landing in Manila in May or June 1941; their life as Belgian subjects under Japanese occupation; attending a private school run by the Christian Brothers and his religious education as a Sephardic Jew in a congregation dominated by Ashkenazic German Jews; antisemitic persecution by Filipino students; Japanese cultural attitudes and their treatment of foreigners and natives; how the Japanese brought civilian Jewish internees to High Holiday services; how a Japanese officer helped his brother get his scooter back from a German Nazi family; conditions in Manila towards the end of the war and liberation by Americans; Jewish chaplains holding a Passover Seder for the Jewish community at the Manila racetrack; going with his family to the United States in late 1945; and receiving a permanent visa five years later.

Oral history interview with Yehuda Mandell

Oral History

Yehuda Mandel, born in Csepe, Hungary on March 3, 1904, describes being raised in an Orthodox Jewish family; Jewish life in Csepe before and after World War I; relations with non-Jews and his education; the occupation of his town by various countries, until Csepe became part of Czechoslovakia; serving in the Czech Army from 1924 to 1926; being a cantor in Vienna, Austria in 1928 and then in Novisad, Yugoslavia (now in Serbia) from 1928 to 1934; being in Riga, Latvia from 1934 to 1936; serving as a cantor in Budapest, Hungary in 1935 at the Rombach Temple while also serving as a chaplain in the Hungarian Army; being offered a position in London, England, but choosing to remain in Hungary; Jewish life and congregational life in each location; the anti-Jewish feelings in Austria and the implementation of anti-Jewish laws in 1939; a mass grave where Jews were killed and buried in Kamenetr-Podolsk; being in various labor battalions; escaping and returning to Budapest in November 1944; staying in a house protected by the Swiss consulate; serving as a messenger in “Eilbotenausweis”; participating in rescuing 300 Jews from a prison and making illegal trips to Czechoslovakia; his experiences with Russian occupiers and the desecration and reconstruction of Rombach Temple; his wife and children, who were in Bergen-Belsen as part of a Sondergruppe organized by Dr. Kasztner; his illegal passage to Palestine in May 1946, aided by the Haganah; reuniting with his family in Kibbutz Shar Hamakkim; serving as a cantor in Haifa until he moved to the United States in 1948; and becoming a cantor at Bet Juda in Philadelphia, PA in 1950.

Oral history interview with Armand Mednick

Oral History

Armand Mednick, born in 1933 in Brussels, Belgium, describes being called “Avrum” by his Yiddish-speaking parents; growing up in a close family in Brussels; growing up feeling ostracized in a non-Jewish neighborhood and experiencing antisemitism that was influenced by the fascist Rex Party; contracting tuberculosis and being hospitalized at age six until May 1940, when his father, an active political leftist, fled with his family to France; his father being drafted into the French Army and deserted; being placed in a sanitarium at Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne Mountains under the new name “Armand”; his father, mother, and baby sister hiding nearby in Volvic, where they passed as Christians; recovering and joining his family; attending Catholic school; how at home there was some Jewish observance; his memories of walking for seven miles with his father to attend a clandestine seder; his father joining the French resistance in 1944 and the family returning in 1945 to Brussels; celebrating his bar mitzvah; his family moving to Philadelphia, PA in 1947; how the Buchenwald death lists confirmed that most of their extended family of 55 relatives were killed; becoming a potter and teacher; and producing a series of clay reliefs with symbolic Holocaust images, in an attempt to exorcise his painful childhood memories.

Oral history interview with Albert Miller

Oral History

Albert Miller describes being a sergeant in the 303rd Bomb Group, 358th Squadron of the US First Air Force, stationed in England in 1944; his missions in France; serving his 35th mission on November 21, 1944 as a radio operator gunman when his B17 bomber was shot down near Frankfurt, Germany; landing at Oberursel and facing rock-throwing civilians until German soldiers took him to a Luftwaffe prison for interrogation; refusing to divulge military information; enduring 11 days of solitary confinement then being taken with other prisoners of war in crowded passenger train compartments to Stalag Luft IV at Gross Tychow (now Tychowo, Poland); how as a non-commissioned officer, he did not have to work and could join classes, play ball, and write songs for theatricals; the meager camp diet, which was supplemented by Red Cross packages; being transported in January 1945 by freight train to Barth and the indignities of standing with over 50 men in a cattle car for four days and five nights; the various guards at Stalag 1, some of whom were friendly and others were vicious; POWs salvaging potato peelings from German officers’ garbage; receiving encouragement from BBC news, which they heard on hidden radios and from a Red Cross visit; being liberated by the Russians on May 1, 1945; observing the deteriorated condition of survivors emerging from a concentration camp nearby in Barth; leaving Stalag 1 on May 13; and returning to the United States on June 20, 1945 on the SS General Butner.

Oral history interview with Mayer Relles

Oral History

Rabbi Mayer Relles, born on June 2, 1908 in Skala, Poland (now Skalat, Ukraine), describes his family and childhood; living in Italy from 1933 to 1944; studying at a university and a rabbinical college in Rome; managing to remain in Italy as a student; Mussolini’s treatment of Jews and his changing attitude towards Hitler; the anti-Jewish laws established in 1938; his arrest and brief internment in June 1940 first in Campagna then in Ferramonti; being treated extremely well by the Italians; trying to flee in December 1943 after police warned Jews they would be arrested; being arrested near the Swiss border and detained by the police in Como then at a barracks in Camerlata in Northern Italy; his escape to Milan; staying at various safe houses and living in a rest home under a false name; using papers that gave him a new identity; receiving help by individual Italians, nuns, and a committee that worked to rescue Jews; how he survived and details on his escape to Switzerland in April 1944, during which he was part of a group rescue organized by a Mrs. Comelli; the many instances of help from non-Jews and the kind treatment from Italians during this period; and arriving in the United States from Switzerland on November 8, 1951.

Oral history interview with Ina Rothschild and Elsa Jaeckel

Oral History

Ina Rothschild describes her life, education, and work in Germany after World War I; life through Hitler’s rise to power; experiencing changes in Jewish life after 1933 and the effects of certain events on the Jewish community and Jewish interactions with gentiles; Elsa Jaeckel’s husband, who was a gentile, refusing to divorce her and suffering the consequences; many instances of aid and acts of kindness by gentiles; Mrs. Rothschild and her husband running a Jewish orphanage in Esslingen am Neckar from 1933 to 1942 when they were deported; how the orphanage was ransacked on November 9, 1938; her husband being beaten, arrested, and then released to care for the displaced orphans; what happened to the children in their care; Mrs. Jaeckel having to work for the Gestapo with 600 other Jewish women who had gentile husbands; conditions for couples in mixed marriages and living through air raids in Frankfurt; avoiding the transport to Theresianstadt because her husband bribed a former SA man to let her hide in his house; hiding in the attic until the Americans arrived in 1945; the Rothschilds returning to Stuttgart after the closing of the orphanage and their lives, including her work in an old age home and her attempts to care for Jewish children; how many of the children, especially those with disabilities, were deported and killed at Ravensbrück; the Rothschilds being deported to an old age home in Theresienstadt on August 22, 1942; the journey and their arrival at Theresienstadt; the brutal treatment and living conditions in the camp and the improvement after the International Red Cross supervised the institution; seeing Reinhard Heydrich shoot Jewish prisoners; Mrs. Rothschild’s work as a nurse and her husband’s death in July 1944; how many inmates killed themselves; Mrs. Rothschild’s attempts to care for newborn babies; volunteering to care for 50 young Dutch children with typhoid fever together with a Jewish doctor; the children surviving and being adopted after the war; being transported to Switzerland with 600 people in February 1945; and their immigrations to the United States (Mrs. Jaeckel arrived in 1957 and Mrs. Rothschild arrived in 1947).

Oral history interview with Sonja Samson

Oral History

Sonja Samson, born in Aurich, Germany in 1931, into an assimilated but observant Jewish family; living with her grandparents for a year in Luxembourg circa 1936 until she joined her parents, who had moved to France; her family history and her childhood; her speculations on why her parents stayed in France instead of immigrating to the United States; her father volunteering for the French Army and his internment in 1939; staying briefly with her parents in the commune of Gurs then living in Garlin until August 26, 1942 when they were rounded up by French police and sent to Gurs; being transported to Rivesaltes in September 1942; her parents’ deportation and her mother managing to keep Sonja from going on the transport with the help of Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE); never seeing her parents again and still profoundly resenting this separation; conditions in the two camps and her life and schooling in the villages of Garlin and Gurs; staying in a convent and then an orphanage at Palavas-les-Flots with other Jewish children, under the auspices of the Union Générale des Israélites de France (UGIF) and the OSE; staying with distant relatives who were in hiding; staying in a boarding school in Chambéry, constantly on guard; a failed attempt to cross the border into Switzerland; working as a maid at an inn that was a substation of the Armeé Secréte (the French underground); inventing a new identity for herself as a non-Jewish war orphan and participating in Catholic rites to avoid discovery; becoming a messenger for the underground; how her presence of mind foiled a plot by the so-called "Butcher of Grenoble" to blow up the underground’s headquarters just after liberation in August 1944; her post-war life at the Chambéry boarding school, with her cousins; her search for her parents and being an active member of Hashomer Hatzair in Paris; how she learned what she needed in order to survive; how the loss of her parents affects her to this day; the changes to her outlook on religion, Jewishness, and Zionism as she matured; going to the United States from Sweden on the Gripsholm as a war-orphan in 1947; the difficult adjustment to life in the US; how she managed to get the higher education she wanted; and her post-war trips to Israel.

Oral history interview with Jon Sauber

Oral History

Jon (formerly György) Sauber, born August 14, 1926 in Budapest, Hungary, describes living with his family in Rakoskeresztur (now VII. Kerület in Budapest) until 1936 when they moved back to Budapest; life after 1943, including the food shortages, persecution of Jews, and the wearing of the yellow star; the deportations beginning; non-Jewish Hungarians bringing his family some food; his mother’s store being taken over by two Christian “partners”; attending school with non-Jewish students, having religious instruction, and attending the Dohany Temple; experiencing a few instances of discrimination as a student; being drafted in 1944 into a forced labor unit that went to the Russian front; being wounded and put on a Red Cross train, but not receiving medical treatment; being transferred to a deportation train for Hungarian Jews; conditions on the train and his arrival and processing at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp; conditions at Bergen-Belsen before and after liberation; his activities in the camp, including removing hair and gold teeth from corpses; how he managed to survive; witnessing brutal treatment of inmates; the Germans fleeing just before the camp was liberated by Allied troops; the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRAA) caring for the survivors; returning to Budapest and reuniting with his father; the deportation and deaths of his mother and sister; resuming his education; going to a displaced persons camp in Germany, run by UNRAA, and to a camp in Bamberg with a group planning to go to Palestine; immigrating to Saskatoon, Canada with a group of Jewish orphans sponsored by the Canadian Jewish Congress in January 1946; being helped by the Jewish community; bringing his father and stepmother to Canada; still feeling haunted by his experiences and trying to cope with the loss of most of his family; and moments that have brought him some peace.

Oral history interview with Hanna Silver

Oral History

Hanna Silver (née Bornowski), born on February 14, 1910 in Berlin, Germany, describes living and working in Berlin with her mother during the Nazi period, World War II, and the allied occupation; her mother’s death during an air raid and burial in a mass grave; life in Berlin during and after World War II, during which they were deprived of the bare necessities of life; living in Berlin during WWII without posing as an Aryan, due to her determination, some luck, and help and protection from her neighbors and other non-Jews; how a German policeman helped her to get an identification card not stamped with a "J"; the effect of air raids on the general population, the total devastation in Berlin and how she and other survivors tried to cope during days and nights spent in air raid shelters, completely cut off from the outside world; heinous acts committed by Germans against their own people near the end of the war; how she felt after the final air raid, and still managed to go on after her mother was gone; how she felt when her home and everything she owned was gone; life in Berlin under joint occupation by Allied forces; the behavior of Russian troops, including an interesting vignette of why the people in her building were not molested by the Russians; being in the American sector and speaking English; working for the Red Cross as a photographer and having her own shop; getting married to an American officer she met during this time; the names and fates of relatives who were killed or survived; why she was able to cope and how her experiences in Berlin affected her outlook on life; and her attempts to pay back America through her volunteer work.

Oral history interview with Lisa Tyre

Oral History

Lisa Tyre, born February 1, 1929 in Vienna, Austria, describes growing up in an assimilated Jewish family; her father, who was an attorney and served in the Austrian army during World War I; her family not experiencing antisemitism until March 1938; the escalating effects of anti-Jewish measures and activities on her parents and herself and witnessing two instances of brutality against Jews; her father being interrogated and beaten by the Gestapo in the summer of 1938; her father receiving help from a Nazi officer, who arranged for his safe return and helped the family obtain exit visas; leaving with her family for England in September 1938 and receiving help from the Sassoon family; moving to Christ Church, New Zealand six months later; going with her family to the United States in November 1946 under the Czech quota and staying for two weeks in the Congress House (a shelter for refugees run by the American Jewish Congress); the difficult emigration process and her family’s life and adjustment problems in England, New Zealand, and the US; her rejection of Judaism and her distrust of organized religion because of some of her experiences in New Zealand and the Congress House; and her bitterness to the loss of over 50 relatives during the Holocaust.

Oral history interview with Harry Zaslow

Oral History

Harry Zaslow describes serving in the 283rd Field Artillery Battalion during World War II; his unit's activities on various fronts while attached to the French First Army and then the American First Army; participating in the Battle of the Bulge; how he had never heard about any German atrocities even after he joined the US Army; his unit being asked to go to a camp in April 1945; arriving in Dachau about three or four hours after the Germans either fled or were driven out of the camp; how no Allied forces had taken command yet; his shock and confusion when, as a 19-year-old boy, he saw box cars filled with corpses just outside of Dachau; staying in the camp for two hours; seeing the crematoria going full blast, still burning bodies; seeing rooms with bodies, some of which appeared to have been killed very recently; how non-German SS troops were guarded, but not killed, by some remaining inmates; the effects his experiences in Dachau had on him; and two vignettes about one positive and one negative experience as a Jewish soldier in the US Army.

Oral history interview with D. Anonymous

Oral History

D. Anonymous, born on August 8, 1923 in Minsk, Belarus, discusses volunteering for the Soviet Army; going to western Ukraine, Poland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia; the atrocities he witnessed; being discharged from the army in 1946; and immigrating to the United States in 1979.

Oral history interview with E. E. Anonymous

Oral History

E. E. Anonymous, born on October 25, 1922 in Łódź, Poland, discusses life during the war and being in a displaced persons camp in Barletta, Italy.

Oral history interview with G. B. Anonymous

Oral History

G. B. Anonymous was born on April 23, 1922 in Vienna, Austria.

Oral history interview with K. R. Anonymous

Oral History

K. R. Anonymous, born on March 31, 1922 in Tarnopol, Poland (now Ternopil', Ukraine), discusses life before the war; being part of HaNoar HaTzioni; the Soviet occupation; attempting to flee and being imprisoned in the Kupfser Ostrov (phonetic) region in northern Russia; being in northern Russia until 1941; being in a kolkhoz near Devochki Gorki, Russia in 1941; rejecting the NKVD’s request to spy on friends; fleeing the area and going to Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan without papers; living in Alma-Ata from 1942 to 1945; returning home without papers in 1945; going to Łódź, Poland and also Germany; working for Hashomer Hatzair in 1947-1948; immigrating to Palestine in 1948; and later immigrating to the United States.

Oral history interview with L. K. Anonymous

Oral History

L. K. Anonymous, born on May 5, 1923 in Zlobin, Belarus, discusses being in the Soviet Army from 1941 to December 1945.

Oral history interview with M. C. Anonymous

Oral History

M. C. Anonymous, born in December 1906 in Stettin, Germany (now Szczecin, Poland), discusses the anti-Jewish laws after 1933; fleeing to England in January 1939; working as a domestic; and working with German orphans for the Jewish Refugee Committee 1942.

Oral history interview with M. M. Anonymous

Oral History

M. M. Anonymous, born in September 1896 in Dülmen, Germany, discusses fleeing Germany in 1939; working as a domestic in England for two years; and immigrating to the United States in 1941.

Oral history interview with M.M.2 Anonymous

Oral History

M. M.2 Anonymous, born in 1900 in Mannheim, Germany, discusses fleeing to Italy in 1937 with her husband and with the help of Italian friends; and arriving in the United States in 1939, passing through France and Cuba (1938) on the way.

Oral history interview with Z. E. Anonymous

Oral History

Z. E. Anonymous, born on September 22, 1919 in Lahoisk (Lahoysk), Belarus, discusses being in the Soviet Army from May 1939 to 1945; his work in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) and Moscow, serving as a technical advisor specializing in radio and defense against air attacks; and being aware of the mass murders in Europe but not personally observing any action by the Einsatzgruppen.

Oral history interview with Eva Abraham

Oral History

Eva Abraham, born on May 22, 1927 in Hamburg, Germany, discusses going on a Kindertransport to England in December 1938; being in England until 1951; and living in Israel, Brazil, and Berlin, Germany.

Oral history interview with Harry Abrams

Oral History

Harry Abrams discusses being in the United States 1st Army as a combat correspondent and witnessing the liberation of Buchenwald.

Oral history interview with Lorna G. Adelman

Oral History

Lorna G. Adelman discusses being in Wiesbaden, Germany after the war and assisting refugees in the Zeilsheim displaced persons camp.

Oral history interview with Paul Adler

Oral History

Paul Adler, born on July 10, 1922 in Skalat, Poland (now Ukraine), discusses the Soviet and German occupations of Poland; being in the Polish Army; witnessing atrocities and mass killings during the war; doing forced labor; escaping and being hidden by Poles; being turned into the Germans by Ukrainian policemen; working as a prisoner for the German Schutzpolizei; immigrating to Israel in 1957; and immigrating to the United States in 1969.

Oral history interview with Trudy Adler

Oral History

Trudy Adler was born on November 17, 1911 in Tubingen, Germany. [Note that the recording includes a silent portion from timestamp 00:31:15 to 00:33:20.]

Oral history interview with Lili Altschuler

Oral History

Lili Altschuler, born on September 30, 1928 in Łódź, Poland, discusses life before the war; the German occupation of Poland; fleeing to Opatow and living there from 1939 to 1941; the violence against Jews by Volksdeutsche; her father paying their way into the HASAG munitions factory at Skarzysko-Kamienna from 1942 to 1944 (for father, mother and Lili); being moved by the Germans to the HASAG Czestochowa camp; being liberated along with her mother by the Soviets in January 1945; her father and other family members being sent to other camps; returning with her mother to Łódź, where they stayed until 1946; going to Germany with the help of Jewish organizations; being in Stuttgart from 1946 to 1948; and immigrating to the United States in 1948.

Oral history interview with Tsivia Arov and Hershel Arov

Oral History

Tsivia Arov (born Tsivia Hoffman in 1906 in Lahoisk, Belarus) and Hershel Arov (born in 1904), discuss Hershel being in the Soviet Army during the war; Tsivia their children leaving Kiev in a mass exodus and ending up near Moscow, Russia; her work as a teacher; their reunion in Kiev, Ukraine; and going to Budapest, Hungary after the war.

Oral history interview with Miro Auferber

Oral History

Miro Auferber, born on November 22, 1913 in Osijek, Croatia, discusses being a reserve officer in the Yugoslav Army in April 1941; being captured by the Ustasha and sent as a slave laborer to Gospic, where he harvested crops; being sent to Jasenovac, where he worked at a steam power plant in June 1941; his pregnant wife being killed by the Ustasha; the atrocities the Ustasha committed against Serbs and Jews; doing slave labor at a leather factory from 1942 to 1945; resisting the liquidation of Jasenovac along with 250 other workers (eight survived in 1945); joining the partisans, the Yugoslav People’s Army; returning to Osijek; being arrested and released; and immigrating to Israel in 1948.

Oral history interview with Hasia Aufschauer

Oral History

Hasia Aufschauer (née Chaya Sara Honikman), born on January 7, 1923 in Łódź, Poland, discusses experiencing and witnessing German atrocities to Jews and the Polish Intelligentsia; the German occupation of Poland; going from Myszków to Czestochowa; hiding and smuggling from town to town between 1940 and 1941 to provide for her parents; doing forced labor; being deported from Sosnowice to Parschnitz (Poříčí) in 1942; her brother who was in the partisans; being liberated from Parschnitz by the Soviets in 1945; staying in the Weiden displaced persons camp from 1946 to 1949; and immigrating to the United States in 1949.

Oral history interview with Simon Aufschauer

Oral History

Simon Aufschauer, born on February 15, 1915 in Zolkiew, Poland (now Zhovkva, Ukraine), discusses being a member of Betar; being in the Polish Army; the German invasion and being taken as a prisoner of war; escaping; returning to Lvov (now L’viv, Ukraine); working as a furrier; being drafted into the Russian Army and fleeing; the German occupation of Soviet territories; the murder of 2,000 Jews from the Lvov Ghetto in April 1942; his mother being deported to Belzec; being deported to Janowska in 1941; being sent to Płaszów in 1943; being transferred to Gross-Rosen in 1944; being in Reichenbach (Langenbielau) when the camp was liberated by the Soviets on May 8, 1945; religious observance in the camps; the crematoriums in the camps; meeting his wife in a displaced persons (DP) camp; getting married in August 1945; and immigrating to the United States.

Oral history interview with Ilse Awin

Oral History

Ilse Awin (née Mechlowitz), born on December 31, 1925 in Munich, Germany, discusses the anti-Jewish laws and antisemitism in Germany in the mid-1930s; Kristallnacht; fleeing to Shanghai, China with her parents via the Victoria (ship) in August 1939; immigrating to Canada in 1949; and her husband Leo Awin.

Oral history interview with Ilse Awin

Oral History

Ilse Awin (née Mechlowitz), born on December 31, 1925 in Munich, Germany, discusses the anti-Jewish laws and antisemitism in Germany in the mid-1930s; Kristallnacht; fleeing to Shanghai, China with her parents via the Victoria (ship) in August 1939; immigrating to Canada in 1949; and her husband Leo Awin.

Oral history interview with Leo Awin

Oral History

Leo Awin, born in 1919 in Vienna, Austria, discusses life in Vienna before the war; the Anschluss; fleeing to Shanghai, China via Italy in May 1939; immigrating to Canada in 1949; and his wife Ilse Awin.

Oral history interview with Rita Ayzeenshtat

Oral History

Rita Ayzeenshtat, born on November 12, 1912 in Kiev, Ukraine, discusses experiencing antisemitism in the USSR; her husband who was in the Soviet Army and killed in action; working in the Urals; her son’s illnesses; having a difficult life; returning to Moscow in 1945; and immigrating to the United States.

Oral history interview with Yosif Azvolinsky

Oral History

Yosif Azvolinsky, born on May 7, 1912, discusses working in Kiev, Ukraine; being in a transportation unit in the Red Army near Moscow, Russia; and immigrating to the United States in 1981.

Oral history interview with Adam Baldinger

Oral History

Adam Baldinger, born on September 15, 1919 in Krakow, Poland, discusses moving to Antwerp, Belgium with his parents in 1926; fleeing to France in 1940; travelling away from the Germans through France (Hazebrouck, Royan, Perpignan), Spain, and Portugal; and going to Brazil via a ship that over taken by the British.

Oral history interview with Gerald Balfour

Oral History

Gerald Arthur James Balfour, 4th Earl of Balfour (born on December 23, 1925) discusses life in Scotland during the war; his family estate being used for children refugees who were arriving by Kindertransports from Europe; the children being trained for life in Palestine; and the history of the Balfour family.

Oral history interview with Alexander Banin

Oral History

Alexander Banin, born on June 16, 1919 in Zhashkov (Zhashkiv), Ukraine, discusses being in the Soviet military; returning to Kiev, Ukraine after the war; and immigrating to the United States in 1981.

Oral history interview with Dorothea Bartha

Oral History

Dorothea Bartha (née Hirsch), born in 1925 in Grottkau, Germany (now Grodków, Poland), discusses growing up in pre-war Germany; her religious life, education, and relations with non-Jews; the consequences of the anti-Jewish restrictions on her family; her mother aiding a friend, who was a Catholic nun, while she was interned in a camp; and immigrating to the United States in November 1939.

Oral history interview with Harry Bass

Oral History

Harry Bass, born on October 10, 1920 in Bialystok, Poland, discusses hiding during the war; being in the Bialystok Ghetto; being sent to Auschwitz; attempting to escape the camp; working in the Strafkommando (this was a punishment detail); being forced on a death march to Gleiwitz in January 1945; being in Mauthausen until April 1945; being put on a ship on the Elbe in April 1945 and the ship being torpedoed by the British; being liberated by the British in May 1945 from the ship; recuperating in Neustadt in Holstein, Germany; reuniting with some of his family members; living in Munich, Germany from 1945 to 1949; and immigrating to the United States in 1949.

Oral history interview with Ursula Becher

Oral History

Ursula Becher (née Hilsch), born on March 17, 1924 in Berlin, Germany, discusses her experiences with antisemitism and the anti-Jewish laws in Germany before the war; her failed attempt to escape alone to Holland as a child; fleeing with her family to Shanghai (Hongkou District) via Naples, Italy; her mother dying of infection in Shanghai; her cultural and religious life in Hongkou; and immigrating to Australia in 1949.

Oral history interview with Gustav J. Beck

Oral History

Gustav J. Beck, born on May 7, 1920 in Vienna, Austria, discusses the Anschluss and fleeing to the United States in 1938.

Oral history interview with David Belaga

Oral History

David Belaga, born on December 15, 1914 in Russia near Kirov, discusses serving in the Soviet Army; the murder of his family members; returning to Kharkov, Ukraine; and immigrating to the United States.

Oral history interview with Ervin Belik

Oral History

Ervin Belik, born on June 2, 1918 in Mistek, Czechoslovakia (now Frýdek-Místek, Czech Republic), discusses going to Poland; being in the resistance movement; being part of the Czech Army in Poland from May 1939 to May 1945; his various assignments in Tarnopol, Ukraine and Palestine (via Alexandria) to fight French Nazi-collaborators; living in the Soviet Union from 1945 to 1949; and immigrating to Israel in 1949.

Oral history interview with Zalman Belkin

Oral History

Zalman Belkin, born on December 12, 1906 in Dubrovno, Russia (now Belarus), discusses being in the Soviet military; his family being killed in Bialystok, Poland during war; becoming a major; living in Moscow, Russia after the war; and immigrating to the United States.

Oral history interview with Michael Belovetsky

Oral History

Michael Belovetsky, born on April 2, 1925 in Kiev, Ukraine, discusses being mobilized to Stalingrad (Volgograd), Russia; his sister and mother perishing at Babi Yar; enlisting in the Red Army as a radio specialist; traveling through Belarus, Poland, and Lithuania; going to Manchuria and North Korea; finding out after the war of the execution of Yiddish writers between 1948 and 1953.

Oral history interview with Anna Berenholz

Oral History

Anna Berenholz (née Bohorochaner), born on June 28, 1924 in Jasiňa, Czechoslovakia (now Yasinia, Ukraine), discusses her pre-war life in Czechoslovakia; being held in a Hungarian military prison in Uzhgorod, Ukraine accused of being a communist; working for a family in Budapest; living in a Swedish house in Budapest; assisting young children who were making Aliyah to Palestine; and immigrating to the United States 1950.

Oral history interview with Anna Berenholz

Oral History

Anna Berenholz (née Bohorochaner), born on June 28, 1924 in Jasiňa, Czechoslovakia (now Yasinia, Ukraine), discusses her life in Budapest, Hungary during the war; her experiences with Raoul Wallenberg; and the underground movement in Budapest.

Oral history interview with Anna Berenholz

Oral History

Anna Berenholz (née Bohorochaner), born on June 28, 1924 in Jasiňa, Czechoslovakia (now Yasinia, Ukraine), discusses her pre-war life in Czechoslovakia; being held in a Hungarian military prison in Uzhgorod, Ukraine accused of being a communist; working for a family in Budapest; living in a Swedish house in Budapest; assisting young children who were making Aliyah to Palestine; and immigrating to the United States 1950.

Oral history interview with Michael Berezwick

Oral History

Michael Berezwick, born in Alexandrovka, Ukraine, discusses being in the US Army, C Battery, 158th Battalion, 45th Division; seeing Dachau after the liberation on April 29, 1945; being involved in artillery a quarter mile away when they were told about the camp; going with a few other soldiers to the camp for half an hour; and seeing the survivors.

Oral history interview with Willie Berg

Oral History

Willie Berg, born on December 10, 1926 in Berlin, Germany, discusses his experiences with antisemitism in pre-war Germany; leaving on Kristallnacht; the difficult and physically invasive border checks done by the German guards and his Polish mother having difficulties with the guards; sailing from Genoa, Italy on the “SS Conte Biancamano”; going to Shanghai, China; conditions in the Hongkou District of Shanghai and the black market there; life during the Japanese occupation; the Shanghai Jewish School; receiving help from HIAS; the difficulty leaving Shanghai after the war; leaving just before Chinese Cultural Revolution; arriving in Israel 1949 and serving in the army; and immigrating to the United States in 1954.

Oral history interview with Warner J. Bergh

Oral History

Warner J. Bergh, born on August 14, 1923 in the neighborhood Schöneberg in Berlin, Germany, discusses his early life in a Jewish section of Berlin; being the child of a middle class, assimilated family; his father being sent to Sachsenhausen in 1938 and his release after he was told to leave the country; sailing from Italy with his family on the "Conte Verde" in September 1938 and going to Shanghai; life in the Hongkou District of Shanghai; life during the Japanese occupation and his mother being beaten once; and immigrating to the United States in January 1949 with the assistance of the Joint.

Oral testimony of Harry Bibring

Oral History

Harry Bibring, born on December 26, 1925 in Vienna, Austria, discusses his pre-war life in Vienna; the anti-Jewish laws; Kristallnacht; going on a Kindertransport in March 1938 to England; his parents never escaping successfully; his father’s death; and the deportation of his mother to Theresienstadt circa 1943.

Oral history interview with Konrad Bieber

Oral History

Konrad Bieber, born on March 24, 1916 in Berlin, Germany, discusses living in Paris, France; hiding during the war near Montauban; being part of the resistance movement; and being imprisoned in the prisoner-of-war camp Frontstalag 181.

Oral history interview with Charlotte Bing

Oral History

Charlotte Bing, born in 1918 in Bielsko (Bielsko-Biala), Poland, discusses his life before the war; the German invasion; fleeing from Wadowice to Krakow; being sent to the Płaszów ghetto; being deported to Majdanek; her work details translating and laying rail lines; conditions in the camp; being liberated by the Soviets; the post-war threat from antisemitic Polish people; going through Czechoslovakia to Germany; and immigrating to the United States.

Oral history interview with Jacob Birenbaum

Oral History

Dr. Jacob Birenbaum was born on December 18, 1936 in Warsaw, Poland.

Oral history interview with Miriam Birnbaum

Oral History

Miriam Birnbaum was born on November 22, 1929 in Morodziej, Poland.

Oral history interview with Hyman Blady

Oral History

Hyman Blady, born on February 11, 1920 in Warsaw, Poland, discusses being the child of a Zionist family; being in the HaShomer HaTzair; living in the Warsaw ghetto; receiving aid from a non-Jewish friend; escaping from the ghetto for a time, hiding and passing as an Aryan; returning the ghetto to care for his younger brother when their mother died; the liquidation of the ghetto in 1942; hiding in the ghetto with his brother until they were eventually found and sent to the Bobruisk camp; being sent to numerous camps, including Majdanek, Blizyn, Płaszów, Mauthausen, and Gusen II; working in an airplane factory in Gusen in 1944 and being sent on a death march to Gunskirchen; liberation; recuperating in Wels; living in Föhrenwald displaced persons camp from 1945 to 1949; and immigrating to the United States.

Oral history interview with Elizabeth Bleiman

Oral History

Elizabeth Bleiman (née Zuckerman), born on July 10, 1921 in Ófehértó, Hungary, discusses life before the war; being deported to the Kisvarda ghetto; being sent to Auschwitz with her family June or July 1944; the journey on the train; arriving in Auschwitz; the selections and the conditions in the camp; moving to Stutthof for hard labor in a women's battalion; being sent on a forced march to Danzig; being liberated by the Soviets in February 1945; being hospitalized for two months; the confused conditions returning to Debrecen; staying in a displaced persons camp in Germany; and immigrating to the United States in 1949.

Oral history interview with Boris Bleyman

Oral History

Boris Bleyman, born on April 21, 1910 in Višķi, Latvia, discusses living in Riga, Latvia; the beginning of WWII; the Riga ghetto; the murder of his family by the Germans; being sent to a camp in King's Forest near Gdansk, Poland; working as shoemaker; experiencing beatings; witnessing German atrocities; the Red Army; his life after the war; and his immigration to the United States.

Oral history interview with Caroline Blumenthal

Oral History

Caroline Blumenthal (née Schoenfeld), born in September 1900 in Cologne, Germany, discusses her family; having good relations with the non-Jewish population; attending public school until 1914; learning to be a secretary at a trade school; getting married in 1920; the birth of her daughter in 1924; getting divorced in 1931; the increase of antisemitism beginning in 1931; running a dairy store until SS boycott restrictions forced her to close in 1933; working as a typist for the Federal Association of Jewish War Veterans, part of the Judische Gemeinde in Cologne until the building was destroyed on Kristallnacht; the destruction during Kristallnacht, November 10, 1938, when synagogues and Jewish stores were burned and Jews were put into concentration camps for weeks; getting married in 1939 to a decorated WWI veteran; the deteriorating conditions in Cologne during the bombing by the British; the deportation of her family to Theresienstadt, along with 50 other families from Cologne, in September 1942; her work in the camp’s bakery; the deplorable conditions in Theresienstadt; the deportations to Auschwitz; a visit by the International Red Cross to the camp in 1944, for which the camp was temporarily cleaned and supplied with food and music; the secret wedding for her daughter, Ruth, in Theresienstadt and the deportation of Ruth’s new husband; the deportation of Ruth later to Auschwitz, where she did harsh factory work (she was later sent to Mauthausen from which she was liberated by the Americans); the Soviet liberation of Theresienstadt in May 1945; continuing to work in the bakery for about five months; emaciated survivors of concentration camps arriving in Theresienstadt and the exemplary help provided to them by Russian doctors and nurses; Russian soldiers raping younger women in the camp; spending nine months with her husband at Deggendorf, an all-Jewish Displaced Persons camp; going to Funkkaserne, a transit station near Munich, before going to Bremen; and immigrating with her husband to the United States on June 18, 1946.

Oral history interview with Samuel Blyakher

Oral History

Oral history interview with Fred Booker

Oral History

Fred Booker, born on August 22, 1910 in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), discusses being arrested and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp in November 1938; his release on the condition he leave the country; immigrating to England with his first wife; traveling by German ship to Shanghai, China via the Suez Canal in April 1939; life in Hongkew; the difficult living conditions; struggling to earn a living; receiving assistance from the by American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint); his religious life; marrying Inge Booker in 1942; and immigrating to the United States under collective quota for German Jews arranged by the Joint in March 1948.

Oral history interview with Inge Booker

Oral History

Inge Booker (née Brann), born on January 30, 1923 in Berlin, Germany, discusses the Nuremberg laws; being forced to attend a Jewish school in 1935; Kristallnacht; travelling by ship to Shanghai, China via Bremerhaven, Barcelona, Genoa, and the Suez Canal in July 1939; life in Hongkew; the difficult living conditions; struggling to earn a living; her religious life; Kanoh Ghoya, who was a Japanese official who was in charge of issuing the ghetto passes; marrying Fred Booker in 1942; and immigrating to the United States in March 1948.

Oral history interview with Yefim Bosin

Oral History

Oral history interview with Herbert Bowman

Oral History

Herbert Bowman, born on October 20, 1914 in Berne, Switzerland, discusses living in Berlin, Germany beginning in 1933; moving to Vienna, Austria in 1935; moving to Poland in 1938; immigrating to Bolivia; marrying Margaret Bowman in 1944; and immigrating to the United States in 1946.

Oral history interview with Margaret Bowman

Oral History

Oral history interview with Bernie Bratt

Oral History

Bernie Bratt, born on February 13, 1923 in Kromolow, Poland, discusses antisemitism in Kromolow; the German invasion in 1939; labor at Sackenhoym concentration camp in 1941; transferring to Auenrode and several other concentration camps; slave labor installing Venetian blinds in August 1944; his accident with electrical wires; camp evacuation and forced march in January 1945; transferring to Buchenwald, then Berga, then Theresienstadt concentration camps; liberation while at Theresienstadt concentration camp; returning to Kromolow; leaving Poland to avoid conscription into the Polish Army; arriving in Munich, Germany to see his brother and sister in October 1945; immigrating to Israel; and immigrating to the United States in November 1956.

Oral history interview with Abram Braunstein

Oral History

Abram Braunstein, born on February 14, 1917 in Maniewicze, Poland (now Manevychi, Ukraine), discusses the changes in his town after the arrival of the Soviet Army in 1939; his conscription into the Soviet Army in 1940; becoming a noncommissioned officer; receiving a care package from his family; outbreak of the war; the execution of a Soviet soldier; transferring to a mobile military hospital; spending the winter 1941 in a bunker near Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg, Russia); working at Lake Ladoga; working in a kitchen in late 1942 or 1943; stealing a machine gun; a mission to cut off a railroad line; an assignment transporting laundry; training with mortars; being wounded in an offensive and taken to Leningrad; transferring to a special hospital near Stalingrad (now Volgograd, Russia); returning home to Maniewicze in late fall of 1944; the end of the war; travelling through Hungary; entering Austria at Graz; living in a displaced person camp near the Italian border; and immigrating to the United States in 1949.

Oral history interview with Ernest C. Brock

Oral History

Ernest C. Brock, born on April 18, 1903 in Frankfurt, Germany, discusses antisemitism in Germany; being sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1938 and experiencing German atrocities; his release; and leaving for England to await a visa to the United States.

Oral history interview with Alfred Brosan

Oral History

Alfred Brosan, born on July 20, 1923 in Rodaun, Austria, discusses growing up in Vienna, Austria; fleeing Austria with his parents two weeks after Kristallnacht for Shanghai, China; traveling via Trans-Siberian Railroad from Berlin, Germany to Shanghai; arriving in Shanghai December 1938; his family travelling via boat from Genoa, Italy to Shanghai; his father opening a business; the Japanese occupation; living in the Hongkew Ghetto; his father being forced from his business; and immigrating to the United States in 1949 on the USS General M. C. Meigs just before Communists took control.

Oral history interview with David Buchsbaum

Oral History

Oral history interview with Rosa Zygmund Burk

Oral History

Oral history interview with Tamara Buxton

Oral History

Tamara Buxton, born on November 1, 1922 in Zhitomir, Soviet Union (now Zhytomyr, Ukraine), discusses being the child of a World War I German prisoner of war and a Volksdeutsche mother; going to an orphanage at age 14; details of the Soviet preparation for the German invasion; digging trenches; her imprisonment by the Nazis for refusing to speak German; helping Jewish friends; her gradual return to Germany with other displaced persons; and immigrating first to England then the United States.

Oral history interview with Walter Cahn

Oral History

Oral history interview with Sigmund Caim

Oral History

Oral history interview with Ola Cehelsky

Oral History

Oral history interview with Mary Cittrons

Oral History

Oral history interview with Stephanie Clearfield

Oral History

Oral history interview with Malka Cohen

Oral History

Oral history interview with Yakov Cohen

Oral History

Yakov Cohen, born on March 25, 1916 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now in Serbia), discusses his family; his four brothers and one sister; his father who was a tailor; getting married in 1937 and having a daughter; the lack of antisemitism before the German occupation; being shocked by the German-Soviet non-aggression pact in 1939; serving in the Yugoslavian army 1935-1936 as an engineering officer; being mobilized in April 1941; the roundup of Jews; having to wear an arm band; doing forced labor along with his brothers and father; removing corpses from rubble; being in Auschwitz concentration camp in 1945; being liberated by the Red Army; reuniting with one of his brothers and a cousin; his postwar life in Backo Petrovo Selo, Serbia; getting remarried; immigrating to Israel in 1948; and his views on Judaism and Israel.

Oral history interview with Yehudit Cohen

Oral History

Oral history interview with Joan Conner

Oral History

Joan Conner, born on February 25, 1937 in possibly Germany (interviewee unsure), discusses hiding in the forest; being in concentration camps somewhere in Germany; being trucked to Switzerland by the Red Cross; aid by non-Jews; and being taken to adoptive parents in Illinois, United States around 1941.

Oral history interview with John B. Coulston

Oral History

Oral history interview with Richard Crane

Oral History

Oral history interview with Albert Cuker

Oral History

Oral history interview with Freda Cwanger

Oral History

Oral history interview with Anna Czerwinski

Oral History