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Oral history interview with Nathan Form

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1997.A.0441.79 | RG Number: RG-50.462.0079

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    Oral history interview with Nathan Form

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    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.
    Interviewee
    Nathan Form
    Date
    interview:  1985 April 22
    Credit Line
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of the Gratz College Holocaust Oral History Archive

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    2 sound cassettes (60 min.).

    Rights & Restrictions

    Conditions on Access
    There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
    Conditions on Use
    No restrictions on use

    Keywords & Subjects

    Administrative Notes

    Provenance
    The Gratz College Holocaust Oral History Archive conducted the interview with Nathan Form in Philadelphia, Pa., on April 22, 1985. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum received the tapes of the interview from Gratz College on October 17, 2000.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:36:23
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn508720

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