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Oral history interview with Robert Gruber

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1992.A.0125.49 | RG Number: RG-50.233.0049

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    Oral history interview with Robert Gruber
    Transcript
    The date is June 16, 1992, and we're
    speaking with Dr. Robert Gruber in Potomac, Maryland.
    Dr. Gruber, could you please tell me your name,
    your date of birth, your place of birth,
    and anything you possibly can about your childhood?
    My name is Robert Gruber, and my date of birth
    is December 6, 1933.
    Place of birth, Kosice, Czechoslovakia.
    I remember very little from before my age of about five
    when one of my first vivid memories
    is, in fact, connected with the events of the persecutions.
    I was born in a relatively large,
    for that area of the world, city in Eastern Czechoslovakia,
    Kosice.
    And in 1938, when Hitler took over Czechoslovakia,
    Kosice was given over to the Hungarians.
    And within a very short time, the Hungarians came.
    And one of my first memories is, in fact,
    being in the main street in Kosice,
    and watching the Hungarian victory parade
    with the leader of the Hungarians, Admiral Horthy,
    on a white horse, leading a column of Hungarian soldiers
    down the main street.
    This all looked pretty glamorous to me,
    but within a couple of days, the rule
    came down that all Jews who were not
    Hungarian citizens, which our family was not,
    had to leave that area.
    The Hungarians took over within 48 hours.
    So that's one of my first memories.
    Now, one interesting thing in terms of the background
    might be that this entire section of Czechoslovakia
    did have a fair number of Jews.
    And they were pretty much all orthodox, although not--
    Hasidism was not very much--
    very popular in that area.
    It was more, I guess, the sort of intellectually orthodox
    scholastic type of orthodoxy, rather than the more emotional
    Hasidic orthodoxy.
    But things were very much different
    than they are here now.
    And during that time, arranged marriages were still
    very much in practice, so that my parents were actually
    married as a result of a get together
    that was arranged and paid for by a professional matchmaker.
    And my mother-- my father received
    a dowry, which was still traditional in those days.
    But of course, I wasn't alive then,
    so I didn't know much about it.
    But it's part of the lore that I have learned.
    Were both of your parents from that area?
    Not too far from that area, probably about--
    actually, my mother was from a town,
    somewhat smaller city town, called Michalovce--
    and I'll refer to it again later on in the story--
    which was probably about 40, 50, 60 miles from Kosice.
    My father has a much more complicated history.
    He was born in Ruthenia-- actually, eastern Ruthenia,
    and became orphaned when he was 14 years old during the time
    of the First World War, spent some very difficult years
    in Budapest, and then eventually drifted over
    to Czechoslovakia as a result of one of his older brothers
    having established himself in that area.
    And he opened up a jewelry shop really in Kosice.
    But the-- my mother did not live in Kosice then,
    but this matchmaker knew of this person in Kosice
    looking for a prospective bride, and he hooked them up
    together that way.
    And so then they--
    after they married, they did settle in Kosice at that time.
    But as I say, I remember very little of the years in Kosice.
    The-- I guess I didn't say that my initial language that I
    learned was Hungarian.
    That was my mother tongue, even though I
    was born in Czechoslovakia, because I
    was a part of Czechoslovakia, which was ethnically very
    Hungarian.
    Also, this area, not too long before,
    had been part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.
    And I think Jews, in particular, tended
    to identify more with the Hungarian people than
    with the Slovakian people.
    And so that my mother, who had gone to, of course,
    school still under the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.
    But that's what she spoke fluently and perfectly.
    So actually, as far as I know, I didn't
    learn to speak Slovakian until I began school at the age of six.
    But I don't remember having any particular difficulty learning
    it.
    So let me kind of pick up the story a little bit.
    After we got to Michalovce, because when
    we were asked to leave within 48 hours,
    the place that my parents chose to go
    was to my mother's hometown, which
    was Michalovce, which was still part of Czechoslovakia that was
    on its last legs at that point.
    And--
    Can I stop you for one second?
    Let's see.
    You got to Michalovce.
    We got to-- yeah, we got to Michalovce,
    and that's where I began to have my first memories that are
    fairly vivid and fairly clear.
    For-- initially for, I guess, the first year or so,
    we couldn't find a place to live,
    so we lived with my mother's family,
    with her sister and brother-in-law in fairly
    crowded circumstances.
    As I remember, and only very vaguely,
    I began to-- even before I started regular school,
    I had already started theater, which one usually began
    at the age of four or five.
    Let's see, what else can I remember about that time?
    Had your father found work there?
    Well, that's part of the story.
    And then one thing that will become clear
    as I tell this story is that the way we survived
    was because of a great deal of luck, really,
    and circumstances that kind of came together
    in just the right way.
    For example, my father, who was a jeweler, the man--
    jewelry manufacturer, rather than a store owner, he--
    when we moved to Slovakia, he could not--
    he wanted to open a shop there, but he
    couldn't because by that time, Czechoslovakia had broken up.
    Slovakia had become an independent fascist Republic.
    And because he was not a citizen--
    in fact, he had always been stateless.
    My father had never had citizenship in any country.
    Because he was not a citizen, he was not
    able to get a license to open a shop.
    So after a while, after struggling around for a while,
    he came up with the idea of getting
    a partner who was a citizen with whom he would jointly
    open a shop.
    And he happened to find a jeweler who
    was a Christian person, who was alcoholic and not really that
    interested in running the shop as long as he was fairly
    adequately provided for.
    So the shop that my father opened
    was really under his name, legally belonged to him.
    And what makes that important is that because of that when
    later on all Jewish businesses and stores were taken over,
    were aryanized, as it was called at that time.
    And a very good depiction of that
    is in the movie, The Shop on Main Street, the Aryanization.
    When all the stores were aryanized,
    this did not apply to my father's shop,
    because it was not a shop officially owned
    by a Jewish person.
    So my father was able during some of these difficult years
    to continue to make money, which as the story will unfold,
    became also very important for our survival.
    But this was a totally sort of combination of circumstances
    that he had not planned on.
    He planned-- he wanted to be able to open his own shop.
    But because of these circumstances,
    he wasn't able to do so.
    So then gradually, I guess, he established himself
    with this new partner.
    And we started-- let's see, '39, '40--
    by that time, as soon as I think Slovakia became--
    very shortly after they became an independent fascist
    Republic, they started passing some laws and--
    against the Jews.
    And I don't know exactly the order of them,
    but it was laws like one day, the law
    would be that no Jews could go into parks.
    So as a kid, there were parks around.
    I wasn't able to go and play in the parks.
    No Jews would be allowed to go to the movies.
    This town wasn't that big, and we had one movie.
    But still, it seemed like a very exciting, glamorous place
    to go to, but there was no way that I could go to a movie
    during that time.
    The other rule was something like no Jews in restaurants.
    And that didn't-- we hadn't gone out in a restaurant,
    didn't seem like a depriva--
    they didn't have any McDonald's that I
    would have been deprived of.
    But gives you some sense of the gradually kind
    of eating away at your freedoms that
    took place during that time.
    And I guess what I remember, and then somewhat--
    somewhat vaguely, but still pretty
    much so is the growing sense of fear and anxiety and tension
    that all of my family, and all the people around us
    about what was going to happen.
    I mean, clearly, no one expected anything good to happen.
    But perhaps at this point, no one quite
    anticipated how bad things would be, either.
    And then, I think by the time I started first grade,
    no Jews were allowed in regular public schools,
    so that essentially under the sponsorship
    of the Jewish community, there was a Jewish school
    with exclusively Jewish kids.
    And they-- I think it only went up to sixth grade.
    And one-- after a while, that's as far as the person could go
    in--
    the Jewish person could go in their education
    was sixth grade.
    So did you originally attend the public school?
    I don't-- I think by the time I was--
    I think-- let's see, I was--
    1940 I was six years old.
    By the time I would have started first grade.
    I think by that time already, there, the Jews
    were not allowed to go to public school.
    And in fact, this picture--
    because this is the second grade--
    I suppose I started in '39, '40.
    Now, I don't--
    I may have started in public school,
    but I really don't have any recollection
    of the first grade.
    But by the second grade, as you can see, in the year in 1942,
    '41, I was in an all Jew--
    this is my picture--
    I was in all Jewish school.
    In fact, at that point, they were
    segregated into boys and girls in different classes.
    You see that comment on the picture?
    Yeah, yeah.
    As a matter-- I mean, this obviously is--
    this picture is of some interest,
    because it does have--
    shows at least the teacher and the principal
    who are pictured along with the students.
    They wore yellow bands, which were at that time
    required for Jews to wear to identify themselves.
    I don't really remember most of the children
    here in this picture.
    But-- and I-- so I can't tell you who survived
    and who didn't, for sure.
    But I would guess that since about 60% to 70%
    of Slovakian Jews were killed in the Holocaust,
    it-- probably the same percentage
    is true here that about 60% or 70% of these boys that
    were killed in the Holocaust.
    Interesting-- ironically enough were
    the teacher and the principal both survived, actually.
    While I'm on the pictures, I might just
    mention the earliest picture here is
    one taken at my aunt's wedding.
    And this is my father.
    This is my mother.
    This is me, and this is my sister.
    This is my mother's sister, who was getting married.
    This is her husband, [PERSONAL NAME] husband.
    And these are two other aunts, sisters of my mother.
    All of these people were killed--
    all except our immediate family were killed in the Holocaust.
    Do you know what-- so you would have been around four years old
    there?
    In there, I'm probably a little younger than that.
    I think I'm probably about three years old,
    and my sister is about four years old.
    And I think the wedding, which took place
    in Kosice, although, my aunt was from Michalovce.
    It's interesting.
    Yeah.
    So-- and it was with this aunt and uncle
    that we lived for some period of time
    when we first moved to Michalovce.
    Now, maybe you can ask me some questions specifically
    about life there before I get into the--
    more directly into this story.
    OK.
    Did-- well, after you moved out from living with your aunt
    and uncle, did you-- you got your own place, is that how--
    Yeah, we got an apartment, a reasonable one
    by the standards of that place.
    In many ways, this whole area was really fairly primitive,
    certainly by--
    even by today's standards there.
    But certainly by American standards,
    it would have been very primitive.
    There were very few cars in that area.
    There was lots of horse drawn traffic--
    wagons and so on.
    There was even a vestige from the past
    in that there was a castle at the edge of town
    where the count--
    the local count lived.
    And when they would go by in the street,
    they would be in a horse drawn coach
    with their emblem, their insignia
    on the side of the coach.
    So there was-- it's a very agricultural area--
    there was-- at least at that time.
    Now, I've been on a return trip there a couple of years ago,
    and many of these small towns during the Communist era,
    they built a lot of polluting industries and terrible
    looking modern cinder block housing projects.
    But in those days, it was very agricultural.
    Do you remember what the town looked like at all?
    Yeah.
    There was really mostly consisted
    of one very long main street that
    stretched from the railroad station on one end,
    probably two or three miles long, to the other end where
    there was a creek.
    And beside the creek was the count's castle.
    And then there were a couple of streets parallel
    to this main street, but none nearly as
    big or prominent as the main street.
    Really, all the stores, essentially,
    were on that main street.
    On that main street, you also had the Jewish synagogue,
    which for a town of that size, which
    is about 15,000 population, was a fairly magnificent synagogue
    both inside and outside.
    But on that main street were-- it was a town hall,
    the post office--
    main post office, and all the streets,
    and a number of the street.
    And then all the stores, a number
    of the stores, probably a majority of the stores,
    were owned by Jews.
    That was typical in that area.
    Because with the exception of very few Jews,
    most Jews were not part of the landed type of work,
    so that owning businesses and professions
    were what they were engaged in.
    You mentioned, also, that the Jews from that area
    were prominently observant.
    Was your family-- did you observe the sabbath and--
    Yes.
    I think with very few exceptions,
    with the exception of some rebels who
    didn't no longer observed, most people did observe.
    I mean, there was certainly we had kosher food and everything
    that was to be--
    that was standard expectation, even
    though my parents by the standards of some
    were actually fairly modern.
    Because in that area, many women still wore wigs.
    Whereas, that was not true for my mother.
    In many households, the only language
    spoken within the household was Yiddish.
    That was not true in our household.
    Generally, we spoke Hungarian.
    Although, my parents did speak Yiddish to each other
    when they wanted to keep something secret from us.
    And we never-- my sister and I never quite learned
    that-- learned it that well, although, we picked it up some.
    But-- so by the standards of some part
    of the Jewish community, our family
    would have been called fairly modern, rather than
    traditional.
    But it certainly was expected that we
    would keep kosher, and go to Shul on Saturday morning,
    my father and I as I became older,
    and observe, essentially, all the holidays.
    Now, some of the more religious people would go to--
    every morning would go in at 6:00
    and do two or three hours of studying
    the Torah or the Talmud before going and starting
    their ordinary day.
    Was there yeshiva in the town?
    No, there was no yeshiva in town.
    But in Slovakia-- so one of the--
    I forget exactly the name of it, but in the capital
    of Slovakia, Bratislava or Pressburg,
    I think there was a very famous center, yeshiva center.
    What about Zionist activity?
    Now, that's an interesting question,
    because again, the community was so traditional at that point
    that they really, for the most part,
    had very little use for Zionist activity.
    The belief was that the day the Messiah came
    is when one would go back to Palestine and not before,
    and that there was almost something sacrilegious--
    Right.
    --about becoming a Zionist and trying
    to re-establish the State of Israel
    before the return-- before the coming of the Messiah.
    And so-- but some of the younger people did become Zionists,
    and they were looked at somewhat askance by--
    Really?
    --by the more traditional people.
    My cousin-- actually, two of-- both my cousins
    who lived in Michalovce who were somewhat-- about five or six
    years or-- actually, more like eight and 10 years older
    than I, they had both become involved in Zionism.
    And not only that, but to the consternation of their parents,
    they became involved in Hashomer Hatzair, which
    was not only Zionistic, but leftist
    and atheistic in those days.
    But that was a source of great distress and embarrassment
    to their parents that they were.
    But pretty generally, as I say, the opinion
    was that Zionism was not consonant with good Judaism
    in those days.
    I actually worked with a woman who now lives in Australia
    who is from [HEBREW].
    Oh, really?
    Was very involved, I know, in the Zionist.
    Her name was Magda Hellinger.
    For all I know, my mother probably knows her.
    I know she's very-- and her father taught in the school,
    in fact.
    My cousin taught in the Jewish school.
    I believe so, yeah.
    The name seems familiar to me.
    I mean-- although, these teachers, this one
    is Bernstein, and that's Brown.
    But it sounds like a familiar name to me.
    She would be quite a bit older than you.
    But she would probably be about--
    well, probably younger than my mother.
    But my mother would probably have known her pretty well.
    [INAUDIBLE] just wondering.
    It sounds like a familiar name.
    Yeah.
    I mean, I--
    I haven't met anyone else from that town so--
    Yeah, yeah, yeah.
    OK.
    Well, do you remember any of the-- what
    it was like to go to school?
    Yeah.
    I mean, it was--
    I suppose I remember this--
    even though it was a Jewish school, rather than
    a part of the regular school, my memory of it
    didn't have so much to do, at least initially,
    with the fact of its being a Jewish school.
    I mean, the usual stuff of looking forward to recess
    and playing soccer, doing other games during recess.
    Struggling with it to be a good boy or a bad boy in class.
    And in those days-- and certainly,
    corporal punishment was still very much part
    of education in those days.
    So the teachers would have a bamboo stick,
    and if you misbehaved in class, then you
    had to go and take your punishment
    and extend out your hand and wait for it
    to be switched and struck by the teacher with a bamboo stick.
    And it stung.
    It stung pretty badly.
    So you experienced it.
    I experienced that, yeah.
    And when he really got mad, then you'd
    have to bend over and then get a few lashes on your behind.
    And that was perfectly acceptable practice.
    There were no complaints from parents about it in those days.
    And I suppose most of them did think they
    were doing the right thing.
    But it didn't feel like it.
    I imagine.
    Was there a sense of it--
    that you knew you had to be in this school?
    Well, some, but again, I mean, it
    was part of the whole picture of gradually being deprived
    of privileges and freedoms.
    And in the first two or three years, my memory of it
    isn't clear enough to really be able to answer
    that kind of question.
    But certainly, I mean, one might say
    in some ways things were getting worse and worse.
    There was-- being in an all Jewish environment
    in school probably had its good side, too,
    in terms of being in a community with other people going
    through the same thing.
    And so there was some sense, I think, of mutual support
    from that, as well.
    But interestingly enough, and this has always astounded me,
    that through all the times during the war, even
    after there had been transports and so on, and a fair number
    of people were deported, that those
    who still remain as much as they both worried
    about their friends and relatives who had been taken,
    and as much as we all worried about what
    would happen to all of us, eventually, that we all--
    I think there was a tendency to try and maintain
    a semblance of normality as much as possible.
    And so that whether it-- whether it involved people
    getting together socially, having card parties,
    kids worrying in school about whether they got their homework
    right, whether the teacher is going to get mad at them
    or not, whether their parents are going to get
    upset with their grades, I mean, to some extent that
    still remained part of life.
    And probably that was a helpful part
    of life in creating some balance for all
    the other worrisome things.
    So I remember particularly as I, myself,
    I was sort of an average, indifferent student
    the first three or four--
    the first three grades.
    And then suddenly, I became a very, very outstanding student
    in the fourth grade and got a lot of praise for it.
    And so I remember that that meant a lot to me.
    And as-- at the same time, vaguely
    remembering also worrying about other kids being jealous of me
    and trying to put me down by mocking me and so on.
    So these were all part of life, even
    during those very difficult times.
    Well, would you like to discuss the course of events
    then of how--
    Yeah, right, and I'll be glad to.
    Well, I suppose I already mentioned these laws that
    were being gradually passed.
    And then in the beginning of 1942,
    the first transport began.
    And initially, the people who were
    subject to being transported were young people, really,
    late adolescence, and kids in their early 20s,
    both male and female, unattached, single, and so on.
    These were the first population that
    were subject to deportation.
    And so that didn't personally affect us.
    Although, one of my cousins was in that category.
    And she for-- well, not so fortunately,
    because eventually, she was killed.
    But at least during that period of time,
    she hid out and so was not caught in that room.
    But-- and as I understand, maybe my historical knowledge isn't
    totally accurate, but this group that they got from Slovakia
    were really used, these young people,
    to build some of the camps.
    And I think some of them really were involved in building
    Auschwitz during that time.
    So a few of that group actually survived
    on to the end of the war, having become Kapos, and so on.
    But most of them were killed.
    In fact, probably about 95%, 98% of the kids that
    were caught at that time were.
    Now, the next law that came out did affect us.
    The next group that was subject to deportation were men--
    single or married-- within a certain age range.
    And my father was in that age range.
    And so there was-- this was all on the up and up
    at that time, so to speak.
    So the announcements were made publicly
    that at such and such a time, these people
    would be expected to report for relocation or deportation
    to labor camps in the eastern territories.
    And this was all done by the Slovakian authorities.
    This was not done by Germans.
    Was there any type of a Jewish council in this community?
    Yes, there was a Jewish council, and throughout this period
    of time, there was a Jewish council,
    I think, both locally and statewide
    in Slovakia that tried to intervene
    on behalf of the community.
    And there will be a couple of instances
    where I'll mention they actually were effective in securing
    something.
    But I don't know whether at that point
    they were particularly effective.
    I'm not sure.
    I just don't know enough about that.
    So then, I mean, again, an excellent example
    of how chance played a tremendous role in survival.
    The way my father was going to avoid
    this particular deportation was that he
    and the Jewish journeymen of his were
    going to hide out in his shop.
    And presumably, since this shop was legally
    a Christian establishment, they would not come and look for him
    there.
    This shop actually happened to be
    practically adjoining the apartment where we lived.
    There was just a wall that separated our apartment
    from the shop.
    And this I have a memory--
    not a very vivid one, but a memory
    for it is that my father and this journeyman of his
    were going to spend the evening in our apartment playing cards.
    And with the plan that later on for some reason or other,
    they didn't expect the raid to begin until late at night.
    That later on they would then move to the shop
    and hide out there.
    But my mother had a headache, and after they played there
    for about half an hour, she said, I want to go bed.
    Why don't you go to the shop now?
    And so they did.
    And within about 15 minutes, the police, the gendarmes,
    were at the door looking for my father.
    And they looked all around the apartment, under the beds,
    in the closets, and anywhere.
    And of course, they didn't find him
    because he was already in the shop.
    But had my mother not had a headache,
    he would have been taken.
    And if he had been taken, I doubt
    very much that any of the rest of us would have survived.
    So there was a whole series of things like that.
    They didn't assault the rest of the family because he was--
    No, because they, themselves, they grilled my mother, well,
    where is he?
    And my mother said, I don't know.
    He just went off somewhere.
    And so I think it's a little humid here.
    Can I-- I'm going to--
    The next thing, and this was, I guess, around April, May.
    I guess, April, early May of 1942,
    came the new law that all families, unless exempted,
    would be subject to deportation.
    And the law was very specific about--
    and it was presented this for our own good
    to teach us the virtues of labor.
    And the law was very specific about luggage,
    how much per person, and so on and so forth.
    And this was to be--
    everybody was to report some time in advance.
    I think two weeks from the time that the law was announced.
    And so that was a big thing about what people-- how
    were going to people-- how were people going to react to this.
    And most of them, I would say, really saw
    no option but to comply.
    And you have to remember that this
    was the time in the war when an Allied victory seemed very far
    away.
    Right.
    So that there seemed little prospect
    of finding any hiding place that would last for years.
    So most people resigned themselves to just complying
    with the law, including a number of my immediate relatives
    in the same town, including the aunt and uncle
    that I mentioned before.
    And they had a little daughter at that point
    that was about three years old.
    Can I ask you, what did you have any knowledge of the camps?
    At that point, we didn't have any knowledge
    at all of the camps.
    But-- and I suppose people's reactions to this challenge
    vary to some extent according to their ideas
    and attitudes about people, life, and their own character,
    really.
    So that for example, in the case of my parents,
    my mother, in particular, she tended
    to be mistrustful, which turned out
    to be a very good thing-- very, very good way to be.
    So that although she had no idea, certainly,
    at that point about any kind of systematic extermination,
    but she was very clear that these camps would
    at the very least pose a tremendous danger
    to my sister and me.
    That at the very least, we would be
    subject to either dying of disease or of starvation.
    And she was determined, therefore, that no matter what,
    no matter how, she wasn't going to go along with this law.
    And that had something to do with her character,
    with her ideas about things.
    Whereas, her sister reacted different.
    There was, what else can one do except to go along with it.
    Now, at that point, there were a fair number
    of people who did have exemptions,
    official exemptions, who were not subject to deportation
    at that time.
    And the whole history of this thing, you
    have to remember, again, that we-- this area
    was not under direct German control.
    And the areas that were under direct German control, there
    were never any exemptions with regard to Jews.
    But in this case, there were, and there
    continued to be over time.
    Not necessarily-- I don't know what dictated.
    Certainly, the more influential you
    were, the wealthier you were, the more likely
    you were to have an exemption.
    I'm sure bribing played a role in that, and so on.
    Now, during this time, my parents
    did not have any way to secure an exemption.
    And there were different orders of exemptions.
    There was a yellow exemption, because it
    was on yellow paper, which is kind of the plebeian exemption.
    That wasn't so great.
    And it went all the way on to the presidential exemption,
    which only a relatively few people had.
    And they were most secure during that time.
    And so the only option that my parents had at that time
    was to try and cross into Hungary illegally.
    And this became one avenue that other people also
    tried to take advantage of.
    And very soon, there was a traffic
    in illegal parties crossing the border into Hungary.
    Because during that time, even though the Hungarians
    when they had come in, kicked us out officially,
    Jews were not being--
    Hungarian Jews were not being deported in 1942.
    And they were not really even that directly
    threatened during that time.
    So my parents arranged to join a group that
    had its guide as leader, and it was a business proposition.
    This person got paid so much per person in the party.
    And like our group, I think, consisted of about 13
    people, two or three different families.
    And the actual way we went across was during the night,
    through open fields and swamps, and so on.
    During the day after the first night, we hid out and rested.
    And then the second night, we completed our journey across
    the border to the outskirts of a nearest Hungarian city or town,
    which was Ungvár.
    Now, it's part of Ukraine.
    It's called Uzhhorod.
    But at any rate--
    and by prearrangement, we were--
    when we got to the outskirts of this town around 3:00 or 4:00
    in the morning after, really, a long--
    and I certainly remember very vividly that crossing
    into Hungary and going--
    the dark, through the fields.
    At one point, we ran into a band of gypsies.
    And they-- we heard them saying, there go the Jews running.
    And then there was a panic that these gypsies
    would go into the next town and tell on the group.
    But apparently, that didn't happen.
    So as I say, I remember--
    I mean, I remember, for example, you walked on these fields
    on what seemed like only long grass.
    And suddenly, you were knee deep in water,
    because it was apparently swampy ground underneath.
    And it was getting cold and it seemed to go on forever.
    We finally got to this place, which was a sort of farmhouse
    at the edge of town with a barn.
    And by prearrangement with the owner of this farm
    house and barn, we were put up for the rest
    of the night in the barn, sort of on the straw in the barn
    and we fell asleep because we were all
    very tired at that point.
    And the next thing we know is we hear a Hungarian policeman
    saying, good morning, ladies and gentlemen.
    Will you please accompany me to the police station?
    And so he, in fact, herded us through the streets of Ungvár.
    The men were all handcuffed.
    And took us into prison.
    And for the next week, we remained there in jail
    in Ungvár.
    I personally was in a jail cell with my father and another man.
    My sister was with my mother and one or two other women.
    Now, during that week--
    apparently--
    I have to flip the tape over.
    During the week-- and the reason, apparently,
    they kept us there for a week rather than returning us
    immediately to Slovakia was--
    we learned later on--
    that they were actually thinking seriously
    of shooting the whole party as an example to others,
    because so many people were making this illegal crossing
    during that time.
    And again, another example of how chance worked in our favor,
    really, not immediately apparent.
    But what happened was that during the time we were there,
    my father got the idea that since Ruthenia, where
    he had been born, had also become part of Hungary
    by then, that he decided to come forward to the police captain
    and show him his birth certificate
    and claim the fact that he is Hungarian
    and he should be allowed to remain in Hungary.
    Well, the police captain took his birth certificate,
    tore it into pieces, slapped him on the face,
    and pushed him back into the jail cell.
    Where were we?
    So that-- and I'll pick up that thread
    of the story a little later on.
    Honey, can you take--
    And so-- and they-- and the other thing
    that we learned, and I don't know how true this
    is, that obviously, somebody had turned us in,
    because the policemen knew exactly where to come.
    And the best guess was that we were actually
    turned in by the owner of the farmhouse and barn,
    and that his motivation probably was
    that he expected that everybody would have valuables with them.
    Because you didn't undertake that kind of a journey
    into a new life without trying to convert all
    that you had into negotiable valuables,
    like gold, diamonds, dollars, and stuff like that.
    And that the minute the policeman showed up,
    it would all be stashed in the hay, which is exactly what,
    say for example, my father did, who
    did have several pounds of gold and diamonds, and so on,
    being a jeweler.
    And this man had the gall to come and visit us in jail.
    And when my father said, well, can you find that stuff
    and put it away somewhere for safekeeping?
    He said he had looked, he didn't see anything.
    And yet later on, he was seen by others
    to be selling off their stuff to jewelry stores.
    So at any rate, they finally did decide
    to send us back to [INAUDIBLE].
    Can I-- do you remember what it was like to be in this jail?
    Yeah, I remember.
    It was very, very scary and strange.
    But one thing I think that's important to remember
    that the fact that-- and that's true for the entire story.
    The fact that I was always with my parents,
    that gave me a feeling of security
    and some kind of having some kind of blind faith
    that somehow they'll find a way to protect me or save me,
    probably kept me from being as frightened
    and as overwhelmed as being in these kinds of situations
    where I might have been.
    With a couple of exceptions where I suddenly
    would sense that maybe they don't know what the hell to do.
    What's going to happen with us.
    So anyway, interestingly, we were given a choice--
    the party was given the choice whether to go back on foot,
    or be taken back by bus.
    And I remember as a kid, I wanted a bus ride.
    I was a little kid in those days and one
    didn't get to travel much, and I had all these adventurous ideas
    about travel.
    And I felt very disappointed, but the adults,
    without exception, chose to walk back,
    rather than to take the bus.
    Because their thinking was, the longer
    we take to get back to the hell that is waiting
    for us, the better off we are.
    So we were kind of walk back to the border, handed over
    to the Slovakian police, who then shepherded us back,
    finally, to the town where we started out from.
    And there, we were immediately, of course, put in jail again.
    And this time, I was put in a larger cell,
    but this time with about a dozen women and their children,
    and all lying on a plank alongside one end of the cell
    so that it was practically-- we were practically
    piled up on top of each other.
    Were these Jewish women?
    They were all Jewish women and children.
    And those who perhaps had also been caught,
    but most of them just part of the continuing
    processing of the Jews who were going to be
    deported to the camps.
    And the other thing I remember is that the only toilet
    facility was-- it was a room next to this
    so that you have to ask the guard to let you go to.
    And essentially, you urinated on the floor,
    which is where everything was all piled up.
    Now, a couple of days--
    and I guess the way these things went,
    and I'm not sure who was jailed before being taken.
    I think some people were directly taken,
    and I think most people who were in the jail
    were people who either had been hiding
    and were caught and put in jail before they
    were going to be transported.
    Because I remember we were there for a few days.
    And the first day we were visited
    by my aunt and her three-year-old daughter.
    And they were about to go directly, I guess,
    into the transports maybe that day or the next day.
    And that I remember very well, and I remember
    how, I guess, to reassure their child, who
    was a very cute little girl, they
    told her that they were all going to Palestine.
    And she was talking very enthusiastically
    about how they were going to go to Palestine.
    Anyway, after a few days in that jail,
    our turn came to be taken to the trains.
    And once again, we were part of, essentially,
    a herd of people that were shepherded by the gendarmes,
    or the sort of local Slovakian SS guard.
    And we were taken--
    and this was one of the times where I--
    yeah, one thing again from a child's point of view,
    as that morning came when this whole party in that cell
    were all to go on to the trains, my mother went into hysterics
    and kept yelling and screaming about how she can't stand
    the idea of having her children starve or so,
    and she doesn't want to go.
    And I remember as a child feeling mostly very
    self-conscious and embarrassed that my mother was making
    such a big scene during that.
    And I was wishing like she would be quiet.
    And the other women said, it's all right,
    it will be all right.
    The first place they took us was actually to a school.
    You want to shut that off?
    And it was a very busy place as new parties
    and Jews were being brought in.
    And this was the final act before going on to the railroad
    station to get on the trains.
    You got your number, and from that point
    on, you were no longer a person with a name.
    You were a person with a number and a tag
    that you had around your neck.
    And just before our turn came to get our numbers,
    an official came in and said, anybody
    who can prove that they're a foreign extraction,
    or foreign citizens, please come and see me.
    And at that point, of course, the issue
    came up again that my father was born
    in Ruthenia, which was at that point part of Hungary.
    Of course, he had had such a bad experience the last time
    he tried to take advantage of that fact
    that he was somewhat hesitant to approach
    this official about it.
    But my mother said, what do you have to lose now?
    And here is, again, where chance comes into play.
    The reason he had a--
    he had the original was torn up by the police
    captain in Hungary, but the reason he had a duplicate
    was because he-- they had actually
    tried to get out of Czechoslovakia as early as 1936
    when the time started to get bad.
    It was very hard to get out of Czechoslovakia,
    much harder than it was to get out of Germany,
    particularly, to the United States,
    which is where he wanted to go because his brother had--
    was here.
    But even though he got an affidavit in 1936,
    the quota was so discriminatory against Slavic countries
    because of the great emigration from the Slavic areas,
    so that it was practically virtually
    impossible to come to America for someone
    from Czechoslovakia, where it was not
    discriminatory against Germans.
    That's why so many Germans who elected to come to America.
    German Jews actually did come as late as '38 or '39.
    So at any rate-- but in order to go through the process,
    he had to get--
    have two copies of his birth certificate.
    So he made a trip to his hometown
    sometime in 1937 or '38, and he did
    have two copies of his birth certificate at his disposal.
    And if he hadn't, I wouldn't be here.
    And so anyway, he showed this man
    his copy of the birth certificate.
    And the man said, all right, why don't you
    and your family wait along with maybe one or two other people.
    And so we were waiting there for,
    I think, an hour or two hours.
    In the meantime, people were being just shepherded through.
    And looked out the window and there
    was a whole convoy of people being
    led in the direction of the railroad station.
    And then a couple of hours later, he comes back
    and he says, all those people that I
    had asked to stay inside and wait,
    please come and follow me.
    And he went to the front door and he said,
    you're free to go home.
    Now-- and here again, the combination of chance
    and circumstance, because apparently,
    that was the first day when people who had--
    were not citizens of foreign countries were exempt.
    Prior to that time, only people who
    were citizens with a valid passport from another country
    were exempt from deportation.
    So that probably the fact that we did
    go to-- try to go to Hungary, that we did go there,
    the fact, even, that they kept us for a week in the jail
    there rather than returning us immediately,
    and delayed the whole process, saved our lives during that.
    Even, perhaps, if it was true that they were thinking
    of shooting us in Hungary, that helped
    to save us during that moment.
    So then we had to get-- we went back to our apartment, which
    had all been officially sealed, and then my father
    had to go to the police station to have
    an official come and unseal the apartment, and so on.
    And so we got back, and for the next few weeks,
    I started going back to school.
    And of course, that was--
    many fewer kids were in that school at that point,
    and had only been there a few weeks before.
    Because in this first wave of deportation,
    a great many of the Jews were deported during that time,
    and probably a very small percentage survived.
    Because most of them were taken to the extermination camps
    directly--
    Sobibor, Treblinka, I think, and Majdanek.
    And we did get postcards.
    And as I say, most of my relatives
    were taken during those transports.
    And in fact, between relatives both in Slovakia,
    an uncle in Germany, an uncle in Poland,
    and their respective families, of about 25 relatives-- uncles,
    aunts, cousins--
    there was only one person that survived
    besides our immediate family.
    So for a few weeks, as far as we knew, things were OK.
    Then one Saturday morning, there is a knock on our door,
    and the police are there.
    And they name each of our names.
    I don't know-- remember The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
    [INAUDIBLE] remember at the end where the police comes in
    and calls out everybody's name?
    Yeah, that's exactly the way it was.
    The police called each of our names,
    including my sister's and mine, and said, please pack up
    and get ready to come to [INAUDIBLE]..
    And then what followed was almost a comedy routine.
    These were Slovakian fascist Gardas, not very sophisticated.
    My mother said she can't go, she's sick.
    She can't get out of bed.
    My father says to them, look, I'm a manager of this shop,
    of this Christian shop right next door.
    If you take me, are you willing to be responsible for all
    the contents in that shop?
    And besides which, my father-- this is all a mistake.
    And I can go to the officials right now
    and have it fixed up right away.
    So these policemen decided the following--
    they had other business to transact,
    other Jews to pick up.
    They were going to-- if my father gave them
    his word of honor, they would let him--
    that he wouldn't try to escape, they would let him go and see
    whether he could get some official intervention
    on his behalf.
    But they would keep coming back during the day
    to make sure that my mother and my sister and I
    were not trying to escape.
    And so the minute they walk out, my mother turns to my father
    and says, we've got to run.
    And my father, I say with a bit of shame,
    but I gave my word of honor.
    How can I escape?
    And so he went off to see what he could do,
    whether he could get some intervention from the officials
    that he knew.
    But my mother, regardless of what he had said,
    kept trying to see if we could escape.
    And-- but every time-- and she was still in bed.
    She was officially sick, you see, too sick to move.
    Every time she tried to get dressed
    so that he and the two of us, the two of us children
    could take off together, the police would be back
    and so she immediately had to take her-- all of her clothes
    off and put her nightgown back on and get under the covers.
    And so that was the kind of comedy routine aspect
    of this day.
    And in the meantime, my father found
    that he couldn't get any help from any officials.
    But he talked to some other people and other Jewish people
    on the street, told them his situation, and they all talk--
    told him he was crazy to worry about word of honor.
    And by then, he got word back to us
    that we should run if we can.
    And then he was going to meet us at some designated
    place at the end of the day.
    Eventually, what happened was my mother
    simply put a raincoat on and ran across the street
    to Jewish people who were at that point
    exempt where she stayed for the rest of the day.
    And one of, again, my father's journeyman,
    took my sister and me across town to the place
    where everybody was supposed to converge
    at the end of the day, which was the home of the parents of one
    of my father's apprentices.
    And these are--
    The journeyman was Jewish but the apprentice
    was a Christian friend, Gentile friend.
    So there were some further adventures,
    but I won't go into detail.
    But we all finally did get together that evening
    in that place, in that home.
    And as a little Jewish kid, first time
    really I was in a Christian home,
    there were crosses all over the walls
    and I didn't know quite what to make of that.
    But we were there for a day, two days and pretty soon,
    these people whose house it was were
    getting all nervous and uneasy.
    And clearly, that wasn't a place where we could--
    there was no hiding place, really.
    There was no-- there wasn't a place
    we could stay for very long.
    Then what happened was the--
    my parents got word through the apprentice whose
    parents' house we were at that the chief of police
    had come to my father's shop and told my father's partner
    that he would like to speak to Gruber and him.
    And that if my father's partner knew where Gruber was to let
    him know that he really wants to talk to my father.
    So my parents got that message, and they
    had to make a decision whether to accept this invitation
    or ignore it.
    And I imagine they had a pretty hard time making a decision.
    But the alternative-- I mean, there
    was an implied promise that there
    may be a deal in the making.
    But-- and the alternative, namely of trying to stay there,
    was really impossible for any length of time.
    So then my parents decided, yes, that my father
    would go with his partner and see the chief of police.
    And I do remember that day when my father left early
    in the morning, and it was hours and hours
    and we heard nothing about him or from him.
    And obviously, we were scared stiff about what
    happened to him.
    Finally, he showed up.
    And what had happened was this--
    that he got there with his--
    with his partner.
    He was made to wait a couple of hours.
    Finally, the chief of police saw both of them.
    And he asked my father's partner,
    do you need this Jew, Gruber, for your shop?
    And my father's partner said, yes, it's
    important to have somebody who can manage these things,
    and so on and so forth.
    And then the police--
    the police said, but of course, you
    can't have any objection if I can find a Gentile who
    can do the same job.
    And my father's partner said, I guess not.
    And so, OK, let me call the Ministry of Labor in Bratislava
    to see if I can find you a Gentile person to take over
    the management of this shop.
    And so while my father was there,
    he called up the Ministry of Labor, asked ask them question.
    Took a while for the answer to come back,
    and finally, the answer was no, that there
    was no qualified Gentile jeweler to come and take over the shop.
    So he-- the chief of police gave my father
    a temporary exemption.
    And on the strength of this, we came--
    we all came out of our hiding and went back to our apartment.
    And the-- but apparently, that wasn't a final chapter on this.
    A few weeks later, there was--
    apparently, the town council, or whatever
    it was that had both the-- the town functionaries decided case
    by case, made the final decision about whether this
    or that person would be exempt.
    And apparently, when-- what we heard later on
    was that when our case came up, actually, most of them
    wanted to send us off.
    But it was the president of the Chamber of Commerce
    said that if they send my father off,
    he would resign as president of the Chamber of Commerce.
    Now, the reason for that was this--
    as you may or may not know, in time of the Czechoslovakian
    Republic, really most of the industry was in the Czech part,
    not the Slovakian parts.
    So the Slovakian's very underdeveloped in terms
    of industry and even trades, very skilled trades.
    So that there were not very many master jewelers.
    And I talked to him [INAUDIBLE] This all goes all the way back
    to the Guild system.
    To become a jeweler, you had to be
    an apprentice for a few years, and then
    a journeyman for another couple of years
    until you became a master jeweler.
    My father's shop had four Gentile apprentices.
    So that these were four future Gentile Slovak master
    jewelers who this president of the Chamber of Commerce felt
    were sorely needed because there were so few.
    And the-- his idea was that if my father were sent,
    the shop would collapse, because he knew that really my father,
    even though officially belonged to his partner,
    that it was he who was making it run.
    And so his opinion prevailed and we did get a more firm
    kind of exemption.
    Now, one never knew during that time
    how long an exemption like this would last.
    Just as after the first time when we were let go,
    six weeks later, we were-- they were
    ready to send us off again.
    And there were different groups of people
    who had been exempt for a period of time,
    and suddenly, the rules changed.
    For example, for some period of time,
    American citizens were exempt.
    And there were some American citizens,
    people who had immigrated before the war, who then returned home
    after securing an American citizenship.
    And suddenly, the grapevine had it that, true-- and with--
    they were correct that the Americans said that exemption
    was going to drop.
    And word got out enough in advance
    that most of the people involved were able to hide.
    So the next day, the announcement came,
    this is all a mistake.
    American citizens are still exempt
    and continue to forever be exempt.
    And a couple of days later when everybody had come out
    of hiding, they were able to get most of them and deport them.
    And so various groups--
    so you never knew what was going to happen next.
    At some point, a new law came into effect
    that the families in which at least one member had
    converted to Christianity prior to 1938 would be exempt.
    And the idea of making it prior to 1938 was with the idea
    that this would be opportunistic and it had to be sincere.
    And of course, who converted prior to 1938?
    Very few, if any people.
    But necessity is the mother of invention,
    and pretty soon that whole trade developed
    around false conversion papers.
    Now, these were real in the sense
    that priests were involved in giving them-- actually selling
    them to Jews.
    And they would make these out where one person in the family
    had supposedly converted prior to 1938.
    And they-- as witnesses, they would put down
    names of people who had died in the meantime
    so they could never be challenged.
    And as I say, a whole trade developed and--
    but the funny thing is, this is in terms
    of the kind of community it was, that a lot of-- and we still
    had a lot of trouble about making that decision,
    even though it was a fake conversion.
    But the tradition that one thing you do not do
    is deny the name of the Lord was so
    strong in many of these families that a lot of families
    had trouble with it.
    And strangely enough, a child would
    be picked to be the one who had converted
    because the parents would refuse to have
    that blemish on their record.
    In our case, my father didn't have any problem about that.
    He volunteered to be the one.
    But somehow, I remember, even though it was only my father,
    my family still felt that we all should act like we meant it.
    And so for a while, my sister and I
    were taught the catechism by somebody.
    Now-- but then after a certain period of time,
    the transports stopped.
    And I don't-- again, I don't know how much you know that
    history, but this was one of the few instances where, in fact,
    the papacy did intervene on behalf of the Jews.
    What happened was, this was after the two,
    actually Slovakian Jews, escape from Auschwitz.
    I forget their names.
    But-- and they brought back very detailed information
    about just exactly what was going--
    what was going on in Auschwitz.
    And they were actually then smuggled--
    they came back to Czechoslovakia,
    was smuggled by the Jewish officials to Switzerland,
    and gave that information to the United States officials,
    actually, at that point.
    But also, to the papal delegates so that by that point,
    everything was known because of that particular report.
    And as a result of that knowledge,
    the papal nuncio did put a lot of pressure
    on the Slovakian government to stop the transport.
    And this was within the power of the Slovakian government,
    just as it had been a Slovakian government initiative
    to get the transports going in the first place.
    And this was a very Catholic area.
    And in fact, the Slovakian Führer was a priest when Signor
    Tiso was the Slovakian Führer.
    So because of that pressure, the transports
    did-- were stopped for some period of time.
    But of course, one never knew when they would resume.
    And you asked before, did people know and when did people know?
    We did get postcards from that first wave of people, including
    our relatives, who either from Majdanek or Sobibor,
    I forget, with messages like, everything is wonderful.
    And so-- and they were made to write these postcards just
    after arrival.
    And the usual communication did get transmitted
    to the community there, namely a coded message
    that at least let people know things are really bad.
    And it might have been something like,
    Uncle Al went to visit Aunt Ethel yesterday
    and we expect to visit her very soon ourselves.
    And she is dead.
    So that knowledge-- but the details,
    I think, in terms of gas chambers and so on
    were not known.
    So the next chapter was this--
    even though at that point things were relatively calm,
    and because there was a cessation of the transports.
    And here again, for some period of time,
    those people who were left tried as much as
    possible to restore a normal type of life, as much
    normal as possible.
    But the big question mark was, things are just bound
    to get worse, particularly, as the war winds down,
    comes to its final stages.
    And how will one get through that?
    So for a while, a new idea sort of
    became popular in the remaining Jewish community there.
    Namely, that at the very least, what you need to do
    is to get your children to a boarding school in Hungary,
    to Jewish boarding schools in Hungary,
    so if things start being bad here,
    it'd be much easier for parents that are not encumbered
    by their children to make a quick escape themselves out
    of Slovakia and join their children in Hungary.
    And by that time, it was possible for money
    to obtain very good papers that gave you
    a legal Hungarian passport so that one
    could make that trip legally.
    And at some point, my parents got caught up in the same idea.
    And so at one point, my mother took my sister
    and me to a town--
    a city in Hungary, Miskolc, where
    there was a Jewish boarding school in which there already
    were a number of the kids from Michalovce
    that had been placed there.
    And what I remember is that, again, initially, I
    found the whole idea very exciting.
    And I had read in books about boys
    in boarding school, and so on and so forth.
    And so when we got there, my mother
    did put me in this boarding school.
    What month and year is this, do you know?
    This is about February of 1944.
    So she put me in the board-- in this boarding school.
    And what I remember is that immediately I
    felt tremendous homesick and I was very unhappy and very sad
    about looking ahead to having to stay there.
    And because of all this, I do remember
    trying to put a lot of pressure on my mother
    to change her mind.
    And I was a precocious maturity, I talked to her about
    how we're going to be separated by a border,
    and this is wartime, and one never
    knows what's going to happen, and so on.
    And so she ended up really feeling
    very conflicted about the decision
    that she had made to place me in that school.
    And she decided to delay, really,
    the whole thing of my sister.
    My sister needed a tonsillectomy so what she decided to do
    was to go to Budapest and have my sister have
    her tonsillectomy there.
    While my sister was recuperating in Budapest,
    she still was very troubled about her decision.
    Although, one of her principal worries
    was whether I might be subject to bombing attacks,
    because there were some important industries
    in Miskolc, and people were talking about possible bombing
    there.
    But she also-- she was staying at a hotel
    where there was a Jewish concierge.
    And she got to talking to him, and he gave her
    another source of anxiety, because he said,
    you think it's going to be all that safe here.
    And my mother asked, what do you mean?
    And he said, well, I've seen a lot of German officers lately
    come here.
    And I don't know what's happening,
    or what's going to happen.
    So there was another source of concern for her.
    She got so worried about it, she wrote my father
    in some coded way that she was thinking
    about changing the plans.
    And my father sent her a telegram saying,
    act according to our original decision.
    And she was unwilling to take it upon herself to change that.
    But she was looking for someone who
    she knew was in Budapest from our hometown who was planning
    to go back very soon to Michalovce,
    and wanted personally to let him know about all her concerns
    and--
    so that he could talk to my father.
    She looked all over Budapest for him, couldn't find him.
    On the last afternoon of this man staying in Budapest,
    she happened to run into him at a restaurant.
    Again, pure chance.
    So she told him all about that and how she worried--
    would be terribly worried, et cetera, et cetera.
    And he got back, talked to my father,
    and my father at that point, I guess,
    got so worried that if something did happen,
    he would have to bear the brunt of that.
    So he wired my mother to bring me home.
    And I remember that day very well,
    one of the happiest days of my life at that point when--
    totally when I had sort of begun to resign myself
    to staying where I really still very much didn't want to stay,
    that the director of the school came to me one day and said,
    you're going to Budapest to join your mother,
    and arranged to have someone accompany me, take me
    to Budapest, and join my mother and came home.
    When he brought us home, people in Michalovce
    said-- thought my mother was crazy.
    She was a totally pathologically,
    overprotective mother.
    And how could she have done this?
    I remember running into the father of one of the boys who
    was there in that school who, when I was there,
    told me how very unhappy he was there and how very much
    he wanted to go home.
    And I talked to--
    his father asked me about his son,
    and I told him that he really was very unhappy
    and very much wanted to come back.
    And the father said, well, he doesn't
    know what's best for him.
    Well, as everyone knows, really, within two or three weeks,
    the big turn around in Hungary took place.
    Germans did come in much more directly controlling
    the situation, and the deportation
    of the Jews from Hungary began.
    You out of tape?
    And you're-- actually, we're running out, yeah.
    Maybe I should switch it now.
    OK.
    So then within a couple of weeks, and particularly in--
    most of the Hungarian Jews who survived
    were Jews from Budapest and the provinces.
    The deportation of Jews was much, much--
    it was really very, very extensive.
    And most of the people in the provinces didn't survive.
    And this was in the province of Miskolc.
    So very quickly, the school was seized by the local fascists
    and the Germans.
    And most of the kids from that school
    were sent directly to Auschwitz and killed, including that boy
    whose father I talked to.
    And of course, when that happened,
    suddenly my mother had--
    become from-- turned from a crazy woman
    into a great sage who had the foresight
    to make the right decision.
    Then what-- so that was--
    that phase finished.
    Then later on, I guess in beginning spring or maybe
    mid-spring of 1944, I remember I was at a soccer game,
    watching a soccer game with a couple of friends of mine,
    when the sister of one of these friends
    came and told us that we better go home,
    that they're going to be taking the Jews again.
    And I got home, and my parents had already
    heard about that, too.
    But it was not an official announcement.
    By this time, the grapevine was pretty good,
    so that story-- a story like that got out before they
    intended it to get out.
    And so then the question became is what are we going to do
    and where are we going to hide?
    And my parents, I do remember that fairly clearly,
    talking and trying to think of all the possible alternatives,
    and deciding finally to approach the president
    of the Chamber of Commerce who had been so much farther--
    my father's behalf earlier.
    And so they approached him about whether we
    could hide out on his property.
    And he said, OK.
    And in fact, he had a one or two other families
    that he had already arranged to hide.
    Now, where did the hide us?
    In the pigsty-- literally, in a pigsty, and on the ground.
    And so we stayed there with rats all over the place,
    and we stayed there for two or three days and nights.
    And by that time, the--
    my parents were getting word from this man
    that he was getting nervous about this whole business,
    and he wasn't sure how long he could keep us.
    And then the next day, he told us
    a new development had taken place.
    The whole thing has been called off and everybody can come out,
    and that a deal had been struck with the Jewish leadership that
    instead of the Jews being deported,
    that the Jews from that section of Slovakia, Eastern Slovakia,
    would be required to move to the west.
    So for a while, there's a question, do you believe him?
    Do you trust him?
    Because trickery had been--
    or do you-- or do you trust the announcement?
    Was it that set up so that people
    would come out of hiding?
    And then they would catch them all.
    But they decided to come out, and most people
    decided to come out, and turned out to be true.
    And this was an instance where some
    of the top Jewish leadership did negotiate about the situation.
    And the reason they decided at that point
    to try and deport the Jews from that area
    was because the Russian front was approaching.
    And so the unreliable Jews had to be gotten rid of.
    And also, this was a time when the transports from Hungary
    were going through Slovakia to Auschwitz.
    So it seemed like a convenient time
    to hook up a few cars to those trains.
    But the deal was made, and it was true,
    and everybody had to move to western part of Slovakia,
    except people who had certain exemptions, even
    then, like doctors and dentists, pharmacists.
    They could remain and be exempt.
    I say-- I mention that because in fact what happened was that
    later on, those exemptions were no longer valid,
    and most of those people really did not survive because they
    were so isolated and really hadn't learned--
    they had been exempt all the way through
    and they hadn't learned the art of survival.
    So our family moved to a town in western Slovakia,
    which is called Nitra.
    And the reason they chose that was
    because that's where my father's Gentile partner came from.
    That's where his family still live,
    and he wanted to go back there.
    So not only us then, but the part-- and in fact,
    all the apprentices move together with the shop,
    because the training still depended on continuing
    their apprenticeship.
    And so we all moved to Nitra.
    And after a while, we got a place to live.
    And this will be-- this is an important part of the story.
    My parents found a place to live,
    but in this kind of a complex, sort
    of a little housing complex, that had a--
    was walled off from the street with a gate through the wall.
    Inside, there was a couple of yards.
    And on one end of the yard there was a detached very small
    house, which is where we lived.
    Across from the yard was a larger house,
    one section of which there was a big room where
    the four apprentices that came with my father lived.
    Adjoining them was where a railway conductor's
    and his family live.
    And the apprentices arranged for board
    by this railway conductor's wife.
    And around the corner and then the other side
    of this railway conductor's family was a machine tool shop.
    And this was all within one enclosed complex.
    Now, the whole place was owned by a woman whose husband
    had been a Communist during the first Czechoslovakian Republic.
    And he was afraid of persecution for being a Communist.
    So when they built this house, they specifically
    built it with a hiding place that might be used potentially
    by him.
    The hiding place was a space that
    within the structure of the house
    that you could get into from the apprentice's room.
    There was a kind of a closet that was set into the wall,
    really, more like a armoire or something like that,
    set into the wall.
    And you open it up and it seemed to end
    where it ended in the back.
    But actually, it was a false door
    that if you pushed it aside, you got into this space, which
    was the hiding space.
    Now, in terms of size, it--
    I suppose I should use feet, maybe you can translate it.
    It was about as wide as from here
    to maybe the other side of your chair that you're sitting on.
    That's as wide as it was.
    In terms of length, it was, say, from this wall
    down to about the end of the rug there.
    So it was a relatively small space.
    It had no access to the outside.
    The walls were damp with moisture.
    At any rate-- but when my parents got this place,
    this woman who rented it out and have owned it,
    who didn't live there, told them about this hiding place.
    And apparently, that railway conductor's family
    and his family also knew about this hiding place.
    So then what happened was this--
    after we'd lived there for a little while,
    somebody came and told my parents
    that they had heard one of the big shots
    in the local fascist guard, obviously drunk,
    he started yelling and screaming in the marketplace
    about how the day will soon come when he will come to our--
    this whole complex and get all of the Jews and communists out.
    And when my parents heard this story,
    they immediately realized they had to do something about this.
    Like you could not afford to have an important person
    like that out gunning for you.
    So my father went to see him with his partner
    and put the idea of somehow buying his goodwill, so
    gifts or bribe.
    And the man wouldn't hear anything of it.
    And apparently, what was clear was
    that he had some grudge against the woman who
    owned this place, that he had--
    he felt she had cheated him out some years before or something,
    and he was still holding a bitter grudge against her.
    So when my father's partner came back,
    my mother, who was sort of canny in these ways said to my father
    that he ought to go back by himself,
    that the reason the man didn't take a bribe
    was that he didn't want a witness there.
    And so my father did go back.
    And my father was very charming and engaging, and by--
    and listened to his complaints about this woman.
    And said, yes, you're absolutely right.
    And then offered him a couple of rings.
    And by the time my father left, he
    was as friendly as he could be towards my father.
    Now, that's supposed to be important because he
    appears again in the scene.
    The other thing that's important is this.
    And here again, my father-- my mother
    was really very determined survivor.
    And what happened was when we moved to western Slovakia,
    of course, all Jews who had moved over there
    were required to register.
    And there would be a very severe penalty
    for those failing to register.
    Now, my parents had learned already
    from the previous experience that certainly the police
    followed the registration list, and then they
    went to pick up the Jews.
    So my mother was determined that we were not
    going to register, period.
    But there was such a pressure from everybody to go along,
    not to cause trouble, that one day there
    was this area where a lot of-- there
    was a Jewish soup kitchen and school, and so on.
    And that's where the registration took place.
    There was-- one day my mother saw my father in line
    to register, and she made a big stink.
    And he finally stepped out of the line
    and we didn't register.
    Which probably also helped, because what happened
    was that--
    again, this is part of history.
    There was this-- the Slovak resistance suddenly erupted,
    and the Germans marched and came in
    and took a much more direct role in the governing
    of the country.
    And also came to fight off the resistance,
    because suddenly, the resistance was--
    had taken over a fairly big chunk of territory,
    but not the town where we were.
    And-- so but people knew things were going to get bad.
    Now, the first day that my sister and I
    were supposed to start up in school, September of 1944,
    we were late for school.
    Suddenly, my father comes back, having already left
    to go to work, and in a panic.
    He'd apparently stopped off at the barber.
    Barber started lathering his face
    and then told him about the Jews-- they're taking the Jews.
    And my father said, take the soap, lather up.
    He came right back.
    But, hey, if we hadn't heard about this police big shot
    being after us, he would have been there at 6:00 that morning
    to get us and-- if my father hadn't
    succeeded in winning him over.
    And if we had registered, they probably
    would have been there fairly early, too.
    In fact, they never came to pick us up officially,
    because we were not on the registration list.
    So-- but when we-- my father come back, what to do,
    where to go.
    And for some reason, I guess my parents really didn't quite
    trust--
    although, this railway conductor not long
    before I told my father, Henry, don't worry,
    tribal council will hide you.
    They, I guess, didn't trust it because their decision was
    that we would go to the house of my father's partner's parents.
    And they had a house on the other side of town,
    on the outskirts, with some orchards and so on.
    So again, we broke up into three groups.
    My sister and I and my father along and my mother
    along to make the journey across the town.
    And I do remember that because everywhere you saw police cars
    and they were picking up Jews everywhere.
    One time, it seemed to me, at least,
    like the policemen in the car looked at us for a while
    before he decided to go on.
    We finally all got there, and they put us--
    these people agreed to hide us, and they put us
    in an open kind of shed in their orchard.
    And that night was miserable.
    It was cold, and we kept hearing noise of people going--
    obviously, being in the woods and coming closer and closer
    and branches crackling.
    Finally, totally panicked by it, made them--
    these people take us inside.
    We heard later on that there had been thieves in the orchard
    all night, and that's what we were hearing.
    We stayed there for a couple of days--
    two or three days.
    And then these people said, we can't keep you anymore.
    We're afraid of what will happen to us.
    We've got an idea for you--
    place to hide.
    We know of this place.
    They're in an attic.
    There are 24 people.
    I'm sure they'll take you, too.
    And here again, my parents, particularly my mother's
    response is, I'm not going there.
    If you know about this place and you have no business knowing
    about that hiding place, that place
    isn't going to be good for very long at all.
    And in fact, it wasn't.
    Within a week or two it was raided and everybody--
    so then my parents said, can we stay for-- until dark?
    No, you have to leave right away.
    And so we had to make-- we made the trek back to our place,
    again, in the three groups, and again, still
    police all over the place.
    We got back, and at that point, this was a Saturday afternoon,
    and my parents did approach the railway conductor
    and said, look, we want to hide out in this hiding place.
    And he his family had to be involved
    because we had to be fed, aside from the fact
    that we knew about the place.
    And so he said, no way.
    And there was pleading back and forth,
    but he was adamant-- no way.
    And then at some point, he goes off
    for a walk with his seven-year-old daughter.
    And this was one time where I really
    did feel everything was lost and my parents just had
    no idea what they were doing.
    And we're waiting at any time for a knock
    to come on the gate, and that was it.
    At some point, we hear a knock on the door, which is the gate
    hadn't opened and we pretty sure it wasn't the police,
    and it was one of the apprentices.
    And he told us, why don't you come into that hiding place?
    We'll hide you.
    So of course, we went.
    Then it became a matter as the other apprentices
    made their appearance of testing each one of them out to see
    how they felt. They all agreed.
    Of course, they were all offered generous weekly subsidies
    while they were there.
    I mean, like making about four times as much
    as they were at their job.
    Then the question was to approach the railway
    conductors real nice about it while he was out on his walk.
    Because without her being in on it,
    there was no way that-- that wasn't going to work, either.
    And she was offered a generous compensation for it,
    probably more-- much more money than her husband
    was making with the railway.
    And again, this was important.
    My father had the shop all this time and able
    to make the money.
    And I think he was-- they were smart to offer
    the money in installments, because at the same time,
    there were some people who asked people to hide them
    for all the money they had.
    The people took the money and called the police.
    Right.
    Right.
    Yeah.
    So then-- but-- and partly, they agreed, I think.
    I mean, probably they did feel for us
    and so on, and there was certainly
    some charitable feeling involved.
    But also at that point, there was still the sense
    that maybe it'll be all over, that the partisans might
    actually win, and the whole thing would be
    over after a couple of weeks.
    So we were there, we were in that hiding place
    without ever budging from that place for two full months.
    We were mostly all lying down to be
    able to fit in to that place.
    The woman would bring us the food in the laundry basket
    and so on that--
    and of course, it wasn't kosher food.
    It was pretty good that first day,
    and it was OK to eat it because you have to.
    And then in terms of our elimination functions,
    we had the chamber pot and used that all day.
    And then in the evening, one of the apprentices
    would get rid of the waste.
    And so they stayed for two full months.
    We didn't budge out of there.
    And then I became sick with fever and-- with high fever,
    and my parents started worrying about that.
    And I remember that very well, because there
    was a lot of anxiety.
    And I remember sweating like a pig
    at some point and thinking that was-- that meant
    I was really going to die.
    I didn't know that meant my fever was breaking.
    And it was after they had sent one of the apprentices
    out to get some kind of anti-fever medication.
    But the fear was, if you call any doctor,
    you couldn't be sure he would turn you in.
    Now, the fact that after all-- after that,
    my parents decided that it was not very healthy to just stay
    in that place.
    So we moved over into the apprentice's room.
    And a couple of them, I guess, moved somewhere else
    in the complex.
    A couple of them were staying with us
    in that room with the idea that if necessary in time of crisis,
    we could run into the hiding place.
    And for the next period of time-- and now,
    this was after--
    this-- I mean, the total time we were in that hiding
    was nine months.
    But during-- there was a period of time
    there where we would then, particularly if the railway
    conductor and the fact that he was away most of the time,
    because he made it possible to maintain this arrangement.
    I see.
    But we kept hearing stories from the apprentices
    about how this hiding place was exposed.
    These people were taken.
    Those people were taken.
    And one never-- every day that could happen with us.
    At some point, one of the boys-- in fact, the boy who
    asked us to come in, there were stories coming up
    that pretty soon the Germans were
    going to conscript able-bodied Gentile
    Slovakians for labor in Germany to help with the war effort.
    And he certainly didn't want that.
    So he wanted to be able to use the hiding place for himself,
    if necessary.
    So he asked us to leave.
    And at that point, my parents said to him, OK, George, we'll
    go, but you know very well they're
    going to catch us very quickly.
    And I'm sure they'll ask us, where were you?
    And we'll tell them.
    I mean, aside of course, from the possible punishment
    for hiding, which really never--
    there was always threatened, but I never
    heard of anybody who really got shot or anything like that
    for hiding Jews.
    But the hiding place was no good.
    If the officials knew, it wouldn't be any good for him,
    so there was no reason for him then to pay off and his asking.
    That in itself-- and for a while then, occasionally at night,
    we would actually go out in the yard for a walk.
    And I remember the first time the fresh air.
    I hadn't seen for months.
    But then one day, the German army moved into that complex.
    They took over the place where we had lived.
    And there was a leather shop they made there.
    They took over the machine tool shop,
    and had some other kind of shop.
    And the whole yard was patrolled by a German sentry
    all the time.
    So there was no way, obviously, we
    could ever go out of that room.
    And that room had a kind of a porch between itself
    and the yard, but you could see through the windows.
    You could--
    There-- was there any light?
    That's what I was going to ask.
    Very little light in that room, because what
    you had was certainly no light in the hiding place
    at all other than from a candle, and no electric light.
    And then there was room which was relatively dark,
    because there was, in fact, a porch--
    not a screen porch, it was a glass enclosed porch
    beyond that.
    And there was a little window between the room and the glass
    enclosed porch, as well as, I think,
    some glass on the door that let--
    but you could see through the window.
    You could see the German sentry out there.
    And one time in the evening, one of the apprentices
    was on his way from the other conductor's house
    from his meal back to the place, and the German sentry said,
    halt. And he got panicked and kept running
    towards the room where we were.
    Finally, stopped at the door step.
    But he could have walked right in.
    So then what happened was that--
    then the next crisis was the woman
    who owned the place suddenly showed up
    and she found out we were there.
    And she said that she had to sell the place.
    That she had accumulated big debts, and the only way
    she could get out of it was that she had to sell the place.
    And in fact, she did.
    And the new owners were supposed to take over
    1st of April of 1945.
    So-- but then around November of '44, December,
    we began to hear the artillery, the Russian artillery.
    But really, the front stalled for the winter about 35 miles,
    40 miles from where we were.
    And then one day, there were sirens and planes
    all over the place, and a big bombing attack took place.
    Before that, there had been air raids of American flying
    fortresses that kept flying over to Viennese Neustadt
    to bomb the armaments factories there.
    And we've gotten used to the fact
    that nothing ever happened there.
    But this time was different-- low flying planes
    and suddenly we were being bombed.
    And there was no basement we could go to,
    and windows were all broken.
    And-- but that was the start of the Russian offense that--
    where the front had been stalled for all of that time.
    And then the question was-- and at that point,
    this is what happened.
    We can no longer hide from the railway conductor
    that we were--
    and of course, with the war about to be over,
    he had no more objection to our being there because--
    one of the things, the propaganda, German propaganda
    was very--
    would have you believe that when they came in,
    whatever Jews were left would become kings.
    And anybody who had anything to do against them
    would be severely punished.
    And I guess it was to keep the motivation on their side,
    because a lot of people were in some way implicated,
    even though, I think, people had taken over Jewish property
    and so on and so forth.
    So-- but by that point, everybody
    was looking to have a good deed on their side.
    So we were-- so at some point, particularly
    after the second night when the front started,
    it was shelling all night.
    Big flares of light and big explosion,
    and there was nowhere to hide.
    So at some point, my parents decided to go.
    And the other people, the railway conductor
    and the other apprentices went to the railway conductor's
    new house, which had a basement, which
    is about a mile or so away.
    And at some point, we decided to join them.
    But when we got there, then we started hearing stories
    that the Germans were going to come by and collect men, again,
    for work.
    But they would have found us there.
    There was-- that's no hiding place.
    So my parents decided we had to go back to the original place.
    And that-- by that point, one of the apprentices
    became the one that my parents really
    became very much to trust and rely upon.
    And he said, wherever you go, I will go with you.
    And he came back with us and was taking
    some chance because there was a curfew,
    and just any patrol that stopped us could have shot us just
    for having a curfew violation.
    Anyway-- but then after another couple of days because
    of the heavy shelling and so on, and total lack of protection
    there, we decided to go back again to the other place.
    And then for the next two days, there was bombing and shelling
    and so on.
    And finally, there was silence one morning.
    And looked out and there were the Russian soldier.
    And a little-- and the liberation of that
    took place on March 31.
    I remember the April 1--
    Yeah.
    --deadline?
    Just as a little postscript, sort of presaging things
    to come, when we were liberated that day
    and came out into the open, my parents
    felt what if there is a counterattack and we were not--
    and Germans temporarily retake this place?
    So they wanted to find some way of moving
    further back behind the lines.
    Having believed all of this German propaganda about how
    when the Russians came in, they were so wonderful to the Jews,
    my father set out to the Russian headquarters
    to find out if it's possible to be transported
    back further behind the line.
    He runs into a couple of Russian soldiers
    and asks, where is the headquarters?
    And they ask him, who are you?
    Why are you asking?
    And my father says, well, I'm Jewish, expecting then
    to be treated royally.
    And that one of the soldiers, they were both pretty drunk,
    points his automatic gun at him and said, you're Jewish?
    I'm going to kill you.
    And could easily have done that on the first day
    after the-- yeah.
    Oh, God.
    And his buddy said, ah, let him go.
    My father no longer looked for the headquarters but came back.
    We kept our fingers crossed, and of course, there
    was no counteroffensive because this was really
    the beginning of the final very quick retreat and defeat
    of the others.
    It's a wild story.
    Yeah, that is a wild story.
    Are there you do have a couple of pictures of relatives.
    Are there any relatives that you'd
    like to talk about that we could possibly include
    in our project, do you think?
    Well, there's only-- I mean, none of them-- as I said,
    there's only one survivor.
    Right.
    I mean, of the ones who perished.
    Would you know enough about any of them to discuss?
    Well, I can say little things about them.
    The one cousin who did survive, his parents and sister were--
    both died.
    And I do remember his parents.
    His father was very, very good person.
    They had a pastry shop that I used to go to and finagle
    little dips of pastry.
    And my aunt used to make ice cream every morning
    the old fashioned way.
    And it was-- as I remember it to be the most delicious ice cream
    that I had ever--
    that I had ever had.
    My cousin, their daughter, who was that point about 17 or 18,
    who I mentioned before who had hid out during that,
    she was very much wanted to survive
    but tried very hard not to be taken.
    But I don't remember the exact circumstances,
    but she did get taken.
    These relatives I mentioned before the-- my mother's
    younger sister, whose wedding picture you saw,
    she was a very pretty woman.
    And their daughter I mentioned, who was very, very cute.
    And I at one point, she and I played a fair amount together.
    And she kept talking about how she wanted to marry me,
    like girls of that age would.
    What was her name?
    Eva, called her Evicka.
    And of course, she's--
    those were the relatives that I was closest to their age.
    Certainly tragic.
    Yeah.
    Are there any of the incidents or episodes,
    images stand out in your mind from this period
    that you didn't discuss that you might want to include
    as part of the interview?
    I can't think of any right--
    Also, did you want to discuss a little bit about what happened
    to your family after the war?
    Yeah, I'll be glad to.
    I mean, the thing that--
    I mean, as soon as the war was over, of course,
    my parents once again wanted to come to America and so
    that-- as soon as possible.
    We obtained an affidavit, again, from--
    through my father's brother who was living in Minneapolis.
    And things were very difficult there after the war.
    Very few Jews were left, but antisemitism was still
    very, very strong.
    And there was little question in the minds of my family,
    anyway, that we wanted to get out
    of there as soon as possible.
    But again, because of there still
    being that discriminatory at that time, immigration
    law in the US against Slovak Eastern European country,
    we had to wait a long time.
    By this time, I had begun going to a gymnasium
    in the public state gymnasium where
    I was one of two Jewish boys out of about 40 Jews--
    40 regular student.
    And our main teacher was clearly very antisemitic.
    And she would take--
    she you would have, essentially, this other Jewish boy and me
    take turns by being the scapegoat.
    And then that was to some extent true with some of the boys.
    I had one friend who like I'd befriended, and--
    a boy.
    And when we had an argument, like boys will have,
    what he had to say to me was that I always
    thought you were a different Jew,
    but I guess you're like all the rest.
    And this was after all of this had happened.
    Did they have any knowledge or sense of what--
    Yeah, I think they did.
    And one could occasionally hear from someone,
    they didn't finish the job.
    And my father began a jewelry shop, again,
    and actually that was quite successful for the next two
    or three years.
    Now, then we were still there when the communist coup d'etat
    took place in February of 1948.
    And certainly, there was a lot of things--
    I did become, I must say also, quite active in the Zionist
    organization there.
    The-- and by that, it was Bnei Akiva that I belonged to.
    And attitude had changed towards Zionism because
    of the experience of the war.
    Although, when we finally left, I,
    having been a fervent Zionist at that point, really felt
    it was a betrayal to come to America,
    rather than go to Palestine.
    My father didn't think Palestine would survive,
    or the Jewish community there in Palestine wouldn't survive.
    Anyway, after about-- within a month or two
    after the Communist took over, our number came up.
    And I don't know whether there was
    a quota had become accelerated because
    of the Communist takeover, and this was a few months
    before they clamped down on legal immigration
    from Czechoslovakia.
    So during that, there was that window of opportunity
    and we essentially left legally from Czechoslovakia,
    I think, in about April '48.
    And the other thing, I mean, the post-war years,
    I mean, I remember for some there was-- after you survive
    yourself, there was people kept clinging to the hope
    that their relatives would one day come back.
    And for many years, particularly around holidays,
    there would be a lot of remembering and weeping
    about all the loss.
    Well, if there's anything else that you'd like to add,
    I want to thank you very much.
    You're welcome.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Robert Gruber, born on December 6, 1933 in Kosice, Czechoslovakia (now in Slovakia), describes having few memories before 1938; the Hungarian occupation and watching the Hungarian victory parade; his parents and their backgrounds; going to his mother’s hometown, Michalovce, Slovakia; the anti-Jewish laws; attending a Jewish school; the views of his relatives on Zionism; the deportations beginning in 1942; the Jewish council; how luck and chance influenced one’s survival; his parents hiring a smuggler to get them to Uzhhorod, Ukraine; being detained in a prison in Uzhhorod for a week with his family; being returned to Slovakia; going into hiding; the prevalence of false conversion papers; passing as Christians; living in a boarding school in Miskolc, Hungary for a year; going to Budapest, Hungary with his sister when she needed a tonsillectomy; his mother removing he and his sister from the boarding school soon before all the students were deported; hiding in a pigsty with his family for a few days; moving west to Nitra, Slovakia; the hiding place close to their apartment; avoiding a roundup; getting sick and having a severe fever; liberation of the town; the family members who perished and those who survived; attending gymnasium after the war; the communists' coup d’état in 1948; and going to the United States with his family in 1948.
    Interviewee
    Robert Gruber
    Interviewer
    Sharon Tash
    Date
    interview:  1992 June 16

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    2 sound cassettes (90 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

    Personal Name
    Gruber, Robert, 1933-

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Sharon Tash, of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ID Card Project, conducted the interview with Robert Gruber in Potomac, MD on June 16, 1992.
    Funding Note
    The cataloging of this oral history interview has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:23:44
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    Oral history interview with Monique Goodrich

    Oral History

    Monique Goodrich (née Jackson), born on October 29, 1937 in Paris, France, describes her Russian father and Polish mother, who were both orphans of World War I; spending most of the war years in Saint-Laurent-de-Neste, France; her family’s escape to the Pyrenees at the beginning of the war; receiving help from people in the town; speaking Basque; her brother’s birth in 1941; Germans coming into the town and rounding up people; sensing the danger but not understanding it fully as a child; instinctively knowing as a hidden child that she shouldn’t call attention to herself; living for a while in an orphanage in a convent when she was four; the regimented life in the orphanage; the severe rationing; living on a farm apart from her family; her mother getting false identity papers from the policeman who was helping her; her father’s garden; her father going to Spain and living in Miranda de Ebro concentration camp; smugglers in the area; the resistance in Saint-Laurent-de-Neste; her mother’s despair when she learned of her sister’s deportation; being in Paris during the liberation; her father coming back from Spain; being sent to the countryside; living in Paris for six years before going to the United States; attending school in the US; feeling that she knew more about the Catholic religion than Judaism; making more time for Judaism in her life; and her appreciation for all the things the people in Saint-Laurent-de-Neste did for Jews during the war.

    Radio broadcast about Karl Gorath

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Edit Gredinger

    Oral History

    Edit Gredinger (née Grinsphun), born on March 2, 1922 in Kishinev (Chisinau, Moldova), describes her parents and little brother; living well on their own land; her father farming and working for the railroad; being sent at the age of 11 to Tigina (Bender, Moldova) for gymnasium; graduating in 1940; not being allowed to discuss the war nor read newspapers while she was at school; the rise of fascism in 1938 and the subsequent pogroms; not being affected by the pogroms; studying at the Teacher Institute in Kishinev; the Russian occupation; going to Bulboka to get her parents so they could evacuate together; traveling east with her parents and brother; going to Pervomaysk, Ukraine; being caught by the Germans and assembled in a church in Bogopol (Bohopil); being separated from her family and taken with other people to work; the murder of her mother, father, and brother; escaping with a friend across the frozen river; hiding in pigpens; passing as a Romanian Christian; being sent to a ghetto camp in Otmechatka; the hard labor she performed in the camp; getting married in 1942 to Matvey Gredinger (RG-50.233*0042); working on a farm with her husband; her husband being sent to other places for two years; her husband’s return in 1944; having her daughter in the camp; returning to Moldova; and the communal grave at Pervomaysk.

    Oral history interview with Matvey Gredinger

    Oral History

    Matvey Gredinger, born June 2, 1921 in Moldavia, discusses his prewar family life; his home town in which 500 Jewish families lived; studying Hebrew and the Jewish religion; antisemitic groups at school; visiting in parents in Versoka, Romania in 1940; the murder of his parents in Versoka by the Germans; being shot in the neck in his home along with his father; marching through Moldova until reaching Soroka a week later; being marched to a concentration camp in Vertajan (Vertiujeni, Moldova)at the end of September 1941 with over 20,000 prisoners; how mostly Romanians guarded the prison with some Germans; being forced to carry rocks to build a road; his fellow prisoners who were Romanian, Moravian, and Ukrainian Jews and political prisoners; his liberation by the Russians in April 1944; his arrest by the Russians in 1947 and his time in Siberia; and his arrival in the United States in March 1990.

    Oral history interview with Bernard Green

    Oral History

    Bernard Green, born March 6, 1911 in Rozwadow, Poland, discusses his family members, several of whom survived the Holocaust with false papers; attending a private Jewish school and completing three years of college for engineering; his awareness of antisemitism when he was unable to finish his education; working for Germans in a factory; being recruited into the Polish Army from 1934 to 1937; being stationed in Lvov (L'viv, Ukraine); attending school in the army; running the canteen in the army for two years; the head of his outfit who was a Jewish mayor; events following the German occupation of Rozwadow; the camp in Pisznica, Poland; and his return to Rozwadow after the war.

    Oral history interview with Sabina Green

    Oral History

    Sabina Green (née Low), born on March 23, 1922 in Ulanow, Poland, describes her childhood; her parents; her two brothers and sister; her parents taking in a young Jewish boy from Frankfurt, Germany; attending public school and Jewish school; the Jewish organizations in Ulanow; the German invasion in 1939; doing forced labor; the looting committed by local non-Jews; the Judenrat (Jewish council) choosing people for work details; her brother’s deportation to a work camp in 1941; visiting her brother at the camp and bringing him food; her brother’s release from the camp; the murder of her uncle and his family; being ordered to go to Saklikov; getting false papers with the name Zofya Jamowa; going with her future husband to Stryj, Poland (now Stryĭ, Ukraine); the death of her sister and younger brother; passing as a non-Jew and attending mass; witnessing the destruction of the whole Jewish community in Stryj in 1943; the massacre of the Jews in Stryj; how the Polish people in Stryj helped the Jews; visiting Ulanow after the war and finding no survivors in her family; leaving Poland in 1957 and going to Israel; going to the United States in 1960; and living in Brooklyn, NY.

    Oral history interview with Henry Greenbaum

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Blanka Gross

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Elias Grossman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Gerald Grossman

    Oral History

    Gerald Grossman, born on December 20, 1923 in Rovno, Poland (Rivne, Ukraine), describes his Jewish parents; his three brothers and one sister; his father’s work as a tailor; attending public school and cheder; attending a specialized ORT school in 1936; speaking Yiddish at home and Ukrainian and Polish elsewhere; the relations between Jews and non-Jews in Rovno; belonging to a religious Zionist organization; discussions in the 1930s about Hitler and the Nazis in Germany; the beginning of the war and the Russian occupation in 1939; living with his family in the nearby town of Abarro; continuing his education in a Russian-controlled school; going to a railroad school in Zdolbunów (Zdolbuniv, Ukraine); graduating in 1941 and working as a locomotive engineer in Kamionka Strumilowa (Kam'ianka Buz'ka, Ukraine); the German invasion in June 1941; traveling by train east during the bombardment; returning to Rovno; being sent to Russia as part of a special reserve transport group for the military; going to Harkov (Kharkiv, Ukraine) in 1941; living in Zagorsk (Sergiev Posad), Russia circa 1942, working on the railroad near Moscow; deserting his railroad job with four Ukrainian men and going to east; the harsh winter and his experiences in Gorki (Nizhniĭ Novgorod), Russia; going through Kuibyshev (Samara), Russia to Tashkent, Uzbekistan; being afflicted with lice and typhoid; living in Tashkent for about nine months working as a machinist; throwing away all his documents and pictures that would identify his real name for fear of being discovered as a deserter; going to Cuzar with his uncle to sign up with the Polish Army to fight the Germans from the English side; being rejected because he was Jewish; going by the name Grisorus; returning to Poland and going to Krakow; not knowing what happened to any of his family; and his efforts to help other survivors find family members.

    Oral history interview with Eugenia Grudzinska

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Laura Gruenbaum

    Oral History

    Laura Gruenbaum (née Ellenbogen), born in 1911 in Rozwadów, Poland, discusses her brother Abraham Ellenbogen and her sister Hanna Ellenbogen; the family’s six-room house built outside of Rozwadów about two years before World War I; Abraham’s education in Czechowice and Krakow; his move to Prague to attend medical school; his return to Poland to attend law school in Krakow; his thriving general law practice at the family home outside of Rozwadów for two years before the Germans invaded Poland; Hanna and Abraham’s travel to Russian-controlled Lvov (L'viv, Ukraine) after the German invasion of Poland; her family’s eviction from their house by the Germans; finding her siblings in Lvov where they lived together until she and her parents were sent to Russia; being separated from Abraham and Hanna; and her attempt after the war to find out what happened to Abraham.

    Oral history interview with Lutz Haase

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Irving Hass

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Margot Heuman

    Oral History

    Margot Heuman, born on February 17, 1928 in Hellenthal, Germany, describes her pleasant childhood in Lippstadt, Germany, where her family moved in 1932; her family’s large home; attending public school and Hebrew school; her family’s religious observations; living briefly with her grandparents in Euskirchen, Germany; moving with her family to Bielefeld, Germany around 1937; her memories of the day Jews were no longer allowed to attend school in 1938; having to wear a Jewish star; the restrictions placed on Jews; the deportations of other Jews, including many of her friends; her grandfather’s death from starvation; being deported with her family to Theresienstadt on June 29, 1942; life in the ghetto/camp; the theatrical and musical performances; the Zionists in Theresienstadt; meeting her very good friend Dita in Theresienstadt; her father’s work for the post office in Theresienstadt; being deported with her family to Auschwitz in May 1944 after her father was caught stealing; the journey to Auschwitz; witnessing the murder of an infant when they arrived at the camp; being placed with her family in Birkenau; being tattooed with a number; her friend Dita arriving after a month; the death of her grandmother; the pain of hunger in the camp; roll calls, during which the prisoners stood naked outside; being sent to a labor camp in Hamburg, Germany with Dita; living in a warehouse on the harbor (probably Hamburg-Geilenberg); digging ditches; her friendship with Dita in the camp and sharing everything with her; the bombings at the camp; being sent to Neugraben concentration camp and the conditions there; a German soldier who gave her his lunch every day because she reminded him of his daughter; being physically abused a few times in the camps; being transferred in February 1945 to Tiefstack and the terrible conditions there; their mixed feelings about the bombings; being sent to Bergen-Belsen in March 1945; being liberated by the British on April 15, 1945; being very ill upon liberation and her will to live; going to Sweden, while Dita went to England; living with Marta Dandenell in Stockholm for over a year; attending private schools; corresponding with Dita; the loss of most of her family; going to the United States, where she had uncles; her dislike for New York when she arrived; working in an advertising agency as a systems analyst; getting married; and feeling obligated to have many children to replace her lost family.

    Oral history interview with William Himmelfarb

    Oral History

    William Himmelfarb, born on July 19, 1927 in Koprzywnica, Poland, describes his siblings; his parents; speaking Yiddish at home; attending school; the German invasion in 1939; living with three other families in their house; doing forced labor; the Judenrat (Jewish council); the restrictions placed on Jews; the formation of ghettos; being taken with others to Skarzysko-Kamienna; his work in the camp; hearing that the Jews in Koprzywnica were annihilated; suffering from typhoid; his kind supervisor; the dangers of working with ammunition; being taken by cattle train to Czestochowa; being placed on trains soon after and sent through Leipzeig, Germany to Buchenwald; arriving in the camp on July 18, 1944; the processing of prisoners; the Kapos; working in a quarry; being sent to Schlieben; working in a factory for anti-tank grenades; an explosion in the factory and how he still doesn’t know if it was due to sabotage or an accident; rebuilding the factory that had been destroyed; the difficult conditions in the camp; being sent out of the camp by cattle cars in April 1945 towards Theresienstadt; being abandoned by the guards during an air raid of their train; getting to Theresienstadt, where he received medical care in the hospital; being liberated by the Russians; going to Prague, Czech Republic then Windermere, England; being sent by the British government with other Jewish youths from city to city; staying in a boys’ home with 15 other boys in Winchester; living in England for five years; going to the United States in 1950; serving during the Korean War; getting married in 1951; and never returning to Poland.

    Oral history interview with Irene Hizme and Rene Slotkin

    Oral History

    Twins, Rene Slotkin (born Rene Guttman [Gutman]) and Irene Hizme (born Renatta [Renate] Guttman), describe their stories and memories, starting from their birth on December 21, 1937 in Teplice-Sanov, Czechoslovakia (Teplice, Czech Republic), and continuing through their early lives in Prague; their father, Herbert Guttman, who was arrested as a political prisoner in December 1941 and eventually sent to Auschwitz, where he died; being deported with their mother, Ita, to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and then later to Auschwitz, where the family was separated and where their mother perished; their experiences in Auschwitz, where they were kept separate and subjected to Mengele’s medical experiments on twins; their reunion several years after liberation, thanks in part to an article in Life Magazine that contained a profile of Irene; Operation Rescue Children which brought Irene to the United States; her adoption by the Slotkins; the Slotkins’ search for Rene, eventually finding him living in Czechoslovakia; and Rene’s adoption by the Slotkin family who brought him to the United States in 1950.

    Oral history interview with Irving Horn

    Oral History

    Irving Horn (né Isachar Herszenhorn), born in February 1927 in Radom, Poland, describes experiencing significant antisemitism as a child; the integration of schools when he was seven years old; how he and the only other Jewish boy at his new school were severely beaten by some of their schoolmates; the war breaking out and his father losing his job; his brother being accused of spying and temporarily jailed; attending a secret Jewish school for two years until Radom became a ghetto; the ghetto in Glinice; how upon the liquidation of the Radom ghetto, he and his father volunteered to work on the Waschnik estate; surviving encounters with the SS; working in a weapons factory, where he encountered Jacob Holz, a ruthless security guard against whom Irving later testified; how around July 25, 1944 he marched to Tomaszów because the Russians were approaching Radom; being deported by train to Auschwitz; being chosen with his father and two brothers to do work in Vaihingen an der Enz near Stuttgart; being sent by a guard to work on the Nazi Secretary of State’s sister-in-law’s estate for two weeks, where he received food and regained his strength; being sent to Camp Unterriexingen, Kochendorf, and finally to Dachau; being in Tyrol, Austria at the end of the war but being taken back to Germany and almost shot into a ravine; how before the killing was to take place, the SS men changed into civilian clothes and left; ending up in a military hospital in Mittenwald, Germany due to severe hunger; spending several years in a displaced persons camp in Stuttgart; immigrating to the United States in 1948; and being in the US Army between 1950 and 1952.

    Oral history interview with Molly Ingster

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Katalin Karpati

    Oral History

    Katalin Karpati, born in 1912 in Újpest, Hungary, discusses growing up in a large, modern house in a gentile neighborhood; her father Izidor Dicker, who was the director of a lumber factory in Újpest, and her mother, who was well-educated and helped her husband with his business; how her family was not religious; marrying her first husband Lajos Nagy, a wealthy businessman who owned a store and mines; how Lajos received a degree in diplomacy from the University of the East in the late 1920s but was unable to find work due to anti-Jewish laws; how in 1940, all Jewish men in the village were sent to a labor camp, but Lajos received a medical exemption and was permitted to relocate to a family villa in Újpest; the birth of their first child Shandor Michael in January 1944; how on April 23, 1944, Lajos was taken to forced labor in Felsőgalla, where he died in an air raid; being sent with her son to live in the ghetto; their deportation to Auschwitz; how six-month old Shandor Michael was killed immediately upon arrival; her second husband, Joseph Karpati; how in May 1944, 25 members of the Karpati family were taken from Buj to Auschwitz, where they were killed; how her current husband Joseph and his brother spent four years in forced labor, but survived the war; and how two of her nieces survived and settled in Israel.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Kirzhner

    Oral History

    Joseph Kirzhner, born January 7, 1916 in Odessa, Ukraine, discusses his four brothers; his father who was killed fighting in war; his mother who also perished; his experience driving tanks in the Russian Army; being captured after fighting in Nikolaiev (Mykolayiv), Ukraine and becoming a prisoner of war in 1942; being sent to a concentration camp; his transfer to three or four concentration camps, partly because he tried to escape several times (twice from Auschwitz); how, after being caught, Kapos used sticks to beat his bare feet, and then made him walk until his feet bled; undergoing surgical experiments in Auschwitz; his memory of constant beatings, wire all around, and German soldiers trying to shoot inmates as the liberating Russian Army approached; his liberation in April 1945; his hospitalization and surgery following liberation; his return to service in the Russian Army; his immigration with his wife to the United States in 1978; and persistent health problems in the years following the war.

    Oral history interview with Michael Kishel

    Oral History

    Michael Kishel (né Majlech Kisielnicki), born in Kaluszyn, Poland, describes his family; his childhood; growing up Orthodox; his great-grandparents who had a bakery; completing grade school at age 14 and attending trade school in Warsaw, Poland for six months; working in the family business and saw his friends in the evening; attending camp in the summers with other teenagers; going to the Russian border for a short time and the German occupation of Poland shortly after his return; the formation of a Judenrat (Jewish council), which his father was part of; living in an open ghetto; being on the sanitary committee to prevent typhus; getting papers, along with his brother, to live on the Aryan side of Warsaw; moving in with their cousins in the ghetto; being deported on a cattle car to Treblinka; jumping out of the train and returning to their cousins; hiding in a basemenrt when the Germans came; being deported to Majdanek; going to a hospital and recuperating after being sick; being deported to Auschwitz, where he remained for two years; being beaten numerous times; being transferred to various subcamps, including the coal mines (Waldenburg subcamp); being evacuated on January 18, 1945; being on the road until they were liberated in May 1945; returning to Kaluszyn; immigrating to the United States in 1948; getting married in 1949; settling in Queens, NY; working in the export business with his brother until they retired in 1988; and his belief that his father helped him survive.

    Oral history interview with Ingrid Kisliuk

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Gertrude Kupfer

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Walter Lachman

    Oral History

    Walter Lachman (b. Wolfgang Louis Lachman), born May 26, 1928, discusses his family background and comfortable childhood in Berlin, Germany; his grandfather’s service in WWI as a master sergeant; his father’s service in the German army and participation in the Spartacus movement; his early school days during which he would sing the German anthem and National Socialist anthem; changes in Germany in 1935 and 1936; the banning of Jewish children from public schools; attending Jewish school in the backyard of an old synagogue; Jewish doctors and attorneys who were no longer allowed to practice their professions; broader restrictions placed on Jews in Germany; his father’s gentile customers who stopped shopping at the family’s business; his experiences with antisemitism and daily harassment from non-Jewish children; his memory of Kristallnacht, during which his father’s business was vandalized; his small Bar Mitzvah in an orthodox synagogue in 1941; his mother’s death from Leukemia; his father’s death from tuberculosis; his last memories of Berlin; being taken by open truck to a railroad yard; his journey east by freight car which took seven to eight days; the conditions in the freight car; his arrival in Riga, Latvia in several feet of snow; his relocation to the Riga ghetto with his grandmother; daily conditions in the ghetto; the murder of his grandmother who was gassed along with other older people inside a truck; the formation of the Council of Elders; the ghetto’s hospital where abortions were performed; the ghetto’s small synagogue; becoming a messenger for the Council of Elders; being sent to Pleskau (Pskov), Russia to cut down trees; the liquidation of the ghetto and his relocation to Kaiserwald concentration camp; working in a factory in Riga where he repaired uniforms for the German Army; harassment from the factory’s guards; conditions in the factory from which there were several failed escape attempts and subsequent hangings; being punished after he was caught attempting to steal shoes; pro-German and anti-Russian sentiment among Latvians; being forced to work 12 hour shifts while unloading ammunition at Riga harbor without protection from the elements or Russian air raids; being taken to Libau (now called Liepaja), a port on the Baltic Sea, to load and unload ships and dismantle tin roofs to send back to Germany; bombings from the Russians; evacuating Liepaja and being taken back to Germany in a freight boat; his confinement in a crowded jail in Hamburg, Germany for three to four weeks with little food; being forced to collect shell fragments from A.A. guns; his relocation to Bergen-Belsen; contracting typhus; the abandonment of Bergen-Belsen by German guards as British forces approached; his liberation by the British on April 15, 1945; how the British used German guards to bury the dead and then burned down the camp; medical care from the British Red Cross; working for the British Red Cross as an interpreter until late 1945; working for the United Nations in Munich, Germany; sailing to the United States on the S.S. Marlin; living in New York and Massachusetts; working as a stock boy; advancing in sales and becoming the president of several successful department stores before his retirement; and returning to Bergen-Belsen in the 1990s and seeing young German citizens who were interested in what happened there.

    Oral history interview with Aaron Laro

    Oral History

    Aaron Laro, born March 23, 1919 in Zdzieciol, Poland (now Dziatlava, Belarus), describes the prevalence of antisemitism in Poland; the signs posted in 1937 demanding a boycott of Jewish-owned shops; the beginning of the war; the confiscation of Jewish property, including the Laro’s six-room house; working with others to hid weapons in the woods; the creation of a ghetto in January 1942 in Novogrudek (Navahrudak, Belarus), and Jews being forced to move there and wear the yellow Star of David; two massacres in Navahrudak, including one in April 1942 when 800 people were killed; escaping from the ghetto and joining partisans in the woods; being a machinist and repairing tanks and other vehicles they found; finding Jewish families hiding in the woods; the attitude of the Russian Army towards Jews; making a detonator that derailed a train going to Vilna (Vilnius, Lithuania) and helping to derail three more trains; being incorporated into the Russian Army; fighting in numerous battles; being wounded and still having a bullet near his heart, a piece of shrapnel in his head, and a leg injury; spending a month in a hospital recuperating from a bullet wound; being made a sergeant; deserting from the Russian Army in the autumn of 1944; immigrating to the United States in June 1947 with the woman who had been with him throughout their time in the woods; getting married; and his thoughts on the actions he took during the war.

    Oral history interview with Anthony Lazar

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Lillian Lazar

    Oral History

    Lillian Lazar (née Guzenfiter), born in Warsaw, Poland on June 16, 1924, discusses her family life in Poland prior to World War II; rebelling against wearing the yellow star and being beaten by Polish children; being sent with her parents to a small ghetto in Prosta; her father’s acquisition of papers listing him as Aryan; working in the ghetto’s factory that made German military uniforms; working 12 hour days for one bowl of soup, which she shared with her mother; her mother’s weak health from starvation and subsequent death from German gunfire; how most of her family died in the ghetto from starvation; memories of her grandfather when the Germans surrounded the ghetto; witnessing a German soldier shoot a mother with a baby in her arms; her attempt to defend herself when the Germans surrounded the factory; being sent with the remaining few hundred factory workers in cattle cars to Majdanek; being beaten at Majdanek; escaping by hiding in a large sewage pipe; boarding a train going to Skarzysko (Skarzysko Kamienna), where she worked making bullets for rifles; performing sabotage by approving several bushels of bad bullets; her liberation by Russian forces in January 1945; Russian soldiers’ harsh treatment of women, including sexual assault; marrying a man she had known in the ghetto, traveling to Italy; and immigrating to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Fanny Lebovits

    Oral History

    Fanny Lebovits (born circa 1923) describes the backgrounds of her father (Herman Judelowitz born in Aizpute, Latvia) and her mother (Sarah Gamper Elterman born circa 1899); her father’s efforts as a liberation fighter for Latvia and his capture by the Germans during WWI; growing up in Liepāja, Latvia; speaking German, Yiddish, and Latvian at home; antisemitism in Latvia; attending a Jewish school; being raised by her parents as a Zionist; attending school in Riga, Latvia when the Russians came in 1940; the deportations of wealthy Latvians to Siberia before the Germans arrived in 1941; working in a hospital; the death of her father in the forest with other Jews; the Latvians who collaborated with the Germans; the creation of the ghetto in 1942; conditions in the ghetto; being send with her family to Riga-Kaiserwald camp in October 1943; and being separated from her younger sister and mother [note that the remainder of the interview concerns the interviewee’s family’s background].

    Oral history interview with Emmi Lehner

    Oral History

    Emmi Lehner, an Austrian-born Catholic born March 7, 1913, discusses her childhood in Vienna before the war; her sister Helene who became mentally ill in her late teenage years and spent most of her time in different hospitals until she was most likely killed by the Nazis after the Anschluss; her family’s experiences during World War I; leaving Austria with her Jewish husband for England in April 1940; and settling in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Isabella Leitner

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Lilly Levinson

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Johanna Liebmann

    Oral History

    Hanna Liebmann (née Hirsh), born November 28, 1924, discusses her childhood in Karlsruhe, Germany; attending public school, where Jews were harassed; being forced in 1936 to transfer to the Jewish school which was shared with mentally-challenged students; the damage to her home and burning of her synagogue on Kristallnacht; her arrest in 1940 along with her mother, three aunts, and grandmother at the home they shared; spending three days on a train and arriving at Oloron Sainte-Marie, France; being sent with her family to the Gurs camp; the tremendous cultural life at Gurs despite knee-deep mud and raging dysentery; working in the camp’s office, where she met her future husband; food from the Swiss Red Cross; being sent in September 1941 by a social worker to the village Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, where young people were helped to survive; hiding with villagers when Germans came to Le Chambon; escaping, alone, to Switzerland; living with an aunt’s the family; nearly having a nervous breakdown; traveling to Geneva where she reconnected with her future husband and worked as a maid; having a daughter and remaining in Switzerland until 1948 when the Swiss declined to let them stay; and immigrating to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Max Liebmann

    Oral History

    Max Liebmann, born on September 3, 1921 in Mannheim, Germany, describes growing up in a comfortable household that was not particularly religious; beginning to play the cello when he was eight years old and having hopes of going to a conservatory in Zurich or Jerusalem; attending public school until 1937 when he left due to the harassment he experienced as a Jew; attending a private school from early 1938 until Kristallnacht; his mother, who was trained as a concert pianist, and his father, who was in the textile business; how his father was forced to give up his business in 1938 and moved to Greece to build a business there; moving with his mother to live with his grandmother; his father’s illegal move to Nice, France, where he remained until the end of the war; the outbreak of the war and being called to perform harvesting work in East Germany; returning to Mannheim in late autumn 1939; volunteering for emigration offices in Berlin and working there until his deportation on October 22, 1940 to Gurs internment camp; being separated from his mother at the camp; remaining in Gurs for 20 months, working in the office of the camp block; being given a pass that allowed him to move about the camp more easily because he played the cello; seeing his mother and his new girlfriend daily; the closing of his block and moving into the camp hospital, where he ran the office; being removed from the camp at the end of June 1942 by the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants to a farm outside of Lyon run by the Boy Scouts of France; saying goodbye to his mother before he left; being dispersed from the farm when they learned that a raid was planned; being hidden on another farm for about three and a half weeks with the help of Mireille Philip; being given false papers and trekking with others over the mountains into Switzerland; being arrested by the Swiss patrol and told that they would be escorted back to France; escaping capture with another man and returning to Switzerland; being interned in Switzerland; and remaining in Switzerland for five and a half years until he was able to immigrate to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Margaret Lipton

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Arlette de Long

    Oral History

    Arlette de Long, born in 1937 in Brocourt in Picardy, France, describes living under the German occupation; her mother’s Russian immigrant status; receiving a baptismal certificate from a priest; being raised as Christian but also being vaguely aware of her true Jewish identity; how the house was taken and the family moved in with a widow until the end of the war; her memories of Americans arriving with two tanks and Germans immediately being made prisoners; moving to Paris, France around age 11; becoming a practicing Jew; her memories of driving to Brittany, France before the German invasion and hiding from bombings with her grandmother; living for a year in London, England and working as an interpreter after the war; moving to the United States; her daughter; experiencing survivor guilt and nightmares; her Jewish identity and lack of faith in God; and her thoughts on Israel.

    Oral history interview with Alexandra Lorenz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Lubell

    Oral History

    Elizabeth Lubell, born December 9, 1920 in Budapest, Hungary, discusses her childhood in Budapest, where she was not aware of antisemitism; Hitler’s rise to power; the large Jewish community in Budapest; being forced to wear the Star of David; her deportation to Poland in 1941; her father’s background as a military officer for which he earned the Iron Cross; the murder of 40,000 Jews in Kamieniec Padolski; living in the ghetto of Kolomjya, Poland; escaping from the ghetto and returning to Budapest; hiding in the woods from the Germans; using Catholic documents to pass through the area safely; her capture and transfer to the camp at Sarvar; being saved by Raoul Wallenberg who placed her under Swiss protection; liberation by the Russians; continued attacks by Germans after liberation; traveling to Israel to visit her brother; and immigrating to the United States on the RMS Mauretania.

    Oral history interview with Henry Lubell

    Oral History

    Henry Lubell, born in 1911 in Dombrova, Gornicza (Dabrowa Gornicza), Poland, describes his family of eight; his family’s move in 1916 to Rawicz and later to Katowice; his father, who worked as a hazan (cantor) and shochet (mohel or kosher butcher); how his family kept kosher, but was not religious; not experiencing antisemitism before World War II; how on the first day of the war, the family sent the mother and two sisters to Kielce, farther from the German border; walking with his father eastward with other refugees until a Jewish peasant gave them a ride in his horse-drawn buggy; living with his wife and his parents in a ghetto (unclear which one) with about 25,000 inhabitants; the clearing of the ghetto of all but a few hundred people after inhabitants were marched to a train station for deportation; seeing a Jewish woman hand her baby to a Polish woman as they left the ghetto; his memories of 70 to 100 people being shoved and beaten into cattle cars; how he loosened a wooden bar from the window, and he and several others jumped from the train; hiding with about 20 men and women in the woods with partisans; being sent by the partisans on sabotage missions, including putting bombs under train tracks; “liberating himself”; and going to Budapest, Hungary to look for his wife, whom he found and rejoined.

    Oral history interview with Trude Ludwig

    Oral History

    Trude Ludwig (nee Gertrud Grunbaum), born on March 26, 1917 in Vienna, Austria, describes her Catholic mother and Jewish father; being baptized and reared as a Protestant; the high level of antisemitism in Vienna even before the rise of Hitler; attending a children’s conservator in Vienna along with her younger brother Otto; dancing and acting in the theater by the age of seven; her stage name which was Trude Hermann; how her career took her to Italy in September 1937 and her mother’s warnings immediately after the Anschluss to remain in Italy; her mother, who managed to get to Prague, then to Paris, and eventually to the United States; her father, who was in Switzerland on business, and later went to Paris; helping her brother get a transit visa by writing him a letter saying she was very sick and needed him to visit her; her brother, who eventually to Paris, where he studied under pianist Claudio Arrau; Otto receiving help from the violinist Fritz Kreisler, who got Otto a student visa for the U.S. in 1939; Otto’s studies in New York City with Arthur Schnabel, until he joined the U.S. Army in 1944 and served in Germany; being visited by her brother in post-war 1945, and his death a month later in an accident; her life during the war; the expiration of her Austrian passport and managing to get a German passport without the “J” mark that would have officially identified her as Jewish (she credits a “nice guy” officer in Germany’s consulate in Rome for granting a non-Jewish passport despite her Jewish last name); how she did not see antisemitism in Italy, and did not think she was in danger; going into hiding in 1944, just ten days before American troops arrived on June 4, 1944; returning to theater work, and then becoming an interpreter for the Americans until 1948; immigrating to Argentina with her non-Jewish German husband, who had been a POW of the Americans, and their child; and receiving a visa in 1951 to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Nathan Magier

    Oral History

    Nathan Magier, born in Bedzin, Poland on May 4, 1925, describes living with his mother, father, and two brothers when the Germans invaded; the several days of bombings; his brother being sent to a camp and never seeing him again; being put to work on various labor projects before being sent to the nearby Komyunki ghetto; being separated from his father in the ghetto and never seeing him again; hiding during the deportations in a wall with his mother; being sent in 1943 first to Birkenau and then to Auschwitz; working as a tailor in Birkenau; being put to work outside the camp while he was imprisoned in Auschwitz; escaping from Auschwitz and joining the underground resistance; being wounded; joining the Russian Army, but deserting and being arrested for his desertion; getting married in Italy, and going to Montreal, Canada in 1951; going to the United States in 1955; and living in Lake Hiawatha, New Jersey.

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malnik

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Helena Manaster

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Judith Mandel

    Oral History

    Judith Kalman Mandel describes growing up in Hatvan, Hungary, where her family identified as Hungarians who happened to be Jewish; the German occupation of Hungary beginning in March 1944; Jews having to wear the Jewish star; being spit on by other children; being moved with other Jews into a ghetto; being forced to march with 50 other Jews in the middle of a gutter, kissing the ground filled with horse-dung, while civilians in the town watched and cheered; being beaten by Hungarian police; destroying their valuables before they could be confiscated; her mother’s refusal to be separated from her child; being sent to Auschwitz and arriving on June 15, 1944; being separated from her mother; conditions in the barrack; never stealing from fellow inmates; being sent after three weeks to Płaszów concentration camp in Krakow, Poland, where she worked moving large gravestones; the Gestapo constantly beating and torturing people; the use of dogs to punish people; seeing children burned alive; surviving typhoid fever and being helped by a friend who sneaked her out of the hospital; surviving blood poisoning and pleurisy; being beaten so many times that she often thought about killing herself; one of her friends who grabbed the fence and electrocuted herself; reciting poetry and singing for food; being sent back to Auschwitz on a three day journey with no water; being under 50 pounds when American troops liberated her train on May 1, 1945 at Seeshaupt, Germany; being taken to Munich, then to Dachau; being found by a friend, Dr. Gatheish Gabol, and taken to Partenkirchen, Germany to a hospital for a week; being in an UNRA camp until September 1945; finding out that her mother, grandmother, and cousins perished; returning to Hungary and finding her father, who had been liberated in January; getting married and immigrating to the United States; and her belief that her survival was due to luck.

    Oral history interview with Lily Margules

    Oral History

    Lily Margules discusses her family’s experiences during the Holocaust; the three layers of Jewish society in her village of Vilna (Vilnius, Lithuania); learning Yiddish in the ghetto; her mother's death from cancer in 1939; moving from Vilna to Soły (Salos), Lithuania; the 1943 liquidation of the ghetto in Soły; being sent with her sister to the labor camp Dünawerke; her father’s deportation to the Kaiserwald concentration camp; surviving the labor camp with her sister and staying at a displaced persons camp in Italy after the war; how her uncle secured papers for Lily and her sister that stated they were Protestants; immigrating to Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1948; marrying and raising two sons; and immigrating to the United States in 1956.

    Oral history interview with Manon Marliac

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Margit Meissner

    Oral History

    Margit Meissner, born in Innsbruck, Austria in 1922, discusses her childhood in Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic); her mother’s wish to have her children baptized; her parents’ differing views about being Jewish and the difficulties it caused the family; how, before World War II began, her mother often invited impoverished refugees from Germany and Poland or Russia to their house for lunch; her father’s job as a banker; living in a large house with many servants and a governesses; her father’s death of natural causes before World War II; being sent in 1938 to the outskirts of Paris, France to live with a French family; being baptized in France as a Lutheran, but always identifying as a Jew; attending dress design school; how her mother eventually joined her in France; her mother’s arrest and deportation to Gurs; living in Paris when the Germans advanced; how, as an Austrian citizen, she was declared an enemy alien and was forbidden to leave Paris; defying this order and riding a bicycle to Étampes, north of Lyon; spending the night with fellow refugees at a school, which was bombed two hours after she left; obtaining a train ticket to Brittany to join friends; how her train was diverted to Bordeaux, near Gurs, and she was reunited with her mother; getting arrested as she walked with her mother over a mountain to get to Spain; how friends in Barcelona helped get them out of jail and into Portugal; becoming a dressmaker to refugees in Portugal; immigrating to the United States with her mother in April 1941; how she, her mother, and all three brothers survived the war; working two jobs in the U.S., dressmaking and assisting the U.S. Office of War Information; and being part of the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

    Oral history interview with Ellen Mendel

    Oral History

    Ellen Mendel, born in Essen, Germany in 1935, discusses her comfortable childhood with her parents, Ernst and Jella Hocher Mendel; how her grandfather, great-uncle, and father were all physicians; her father’s preparations for her family’s immigration to the United States; living in Brussels, Belgium from 1939 to 1940 while they waited for visas for the United States; how the boat on which they emigrated, the Van Dank, was torpedoed and sunk on its return trip; how her maternal grandparents, Eva and Ferdinand Holchherr, were killed at Sobibor; how other family members were killed at Auschwitz and Theresianstadt; her aunt Ella Holchherr, who survived the Holocaust; her aunt and uncle, Erica and Franz Josef, who fled Holland by disguising themselves as French peasants; and her occupation as a teacher and then a guidance counselor in the New York City schools for 32 years.

    Oral history interview with Arthur Menke

    Oral History

    Arthur Menke, born on February 23, 1927 in Hamburg, Germany, describes how Jews were starting to suffer from persecution around 1935, and had severe restrictions after 1938; being forced with his family, like other Jews, to move from their nice neighborhood; being forced to wear the Jewish Star of David; being prohibited from sitting on benches, going to movies, or shopping in regular stores; events during Kristallnacht and how his father’s small factory (which made rubber signs) was not destroyed because the Germans did not realize he was Jewish; the arrest of his father, who was a World War I veteran, and his imprisonment in a concentration camp near Berlin for six weeks; the return of his father who was hardly recognizable after his time in the camp; the Nazi takeover of the family’s factory and bank account; working as a laborer, packing shoes in a factory; his mother, who wanted the family to leave Germany and how they waited too late in the 1930s to leave; being deported in 1940 with about 1,000 other Jews to Minsk, Belarus; his memories of the journey; being forced to walk in the snow to a school in the Minsk ghetto; seeing dead bodies inside the building; the murders of his mother, father, and sister; and daily life in the ghetto. [There is a break in the audio for around 15 seconds at 31:30]

    Oral history interview with Semyon Menyuk

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Leon Merrick

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Abe Morgenstern

    Oral History

    Abraham Morgenstern, born in 1923, discusses his Russian Jewish parents and family life in Lublin, Poland; attending Polish public school and a Jewish school; graduating from business school at 16 years old, just before war broke out in 1939; the Russian invasion of Poland and feeling that they were protected under the occupation; the German invasion of Poland; how German forces shot 99 percent of Lublin’s best educated, professional Jews; how two ghettos were established in April 1942 during which he and his family moved into one of them; the lack of food in the ghetto; the death of his father and sister during the first of four actions; how no Jews from his town were taken to concentration camps, but instead, shot in the woods and buried in mass graves; reporting to the Judenrat for work assignments but eventually just staying home; digging a hole with eight other ghetto residents and hiding there until Russian troops liberated the area; immigrating to Italy with his mother after the war; planning to go to Palestine where relatives lived, but ultimately immigrating to the United States; and how only about 200 of Lublin’s estimated 10,000 Jews survived the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Betty Migdol

    Oral History

    Betty Migdol, born December 19, 1927, describes her childhood in Ruscova, Romania; her large family’s Hasidic orthodox life; her memories of the Hungarian invasion; her brother’s conscription into forced labor; how her life changed with the 1943 German invasion; her sister’s experiences passing as non-Jewish in Budapest; her deportation to a nearby town where she was put in a ghetto; Jewish relations with Ukrainian neighbors; wearing the Star of David badge; her deportation and life in Auschwitz; her separation from her family; her memories of fasting in Auschwitz during Yom Kippur; her deportation to the Weisswasser labor camp in Czechoslovakia in October 1944; conditions in the work camp run by the Wermacht; liberation by Russian forces on May 9, 1944; her experiences being smuggled into the American zone in Germany; life in displaced persons camp; and her return to Ruscova in 1984.

    Oral history interview with Israel Milkow

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Emanuel Munzer

    Oral History

    Emanuel Munzer, born February 26, 1920 in Berlin, Germany; discusses living in a neighborhood of mixed population in the district of Schöneberg; his memories of Hitler’s rise to power; living under an assumed name in a sublet in Berlin; being placed with his grandmother in 1934 when his parents fled to France; living in a Jewish orphanage from 1934 until early 1937; never having to wear the yellow Star of David badge; joining his father and stepmother in France in 1937; attending a training institute for mechanics in Paris; working for Hispano-Suiza in Paris in 1938; being classified as an enemy alien in 1939 and taken to harvest sugar beets in the Touraine; conditions of work; joining the French Foreign Legion in 1940; the disbanding of the Legion by the Germans in 1941; forced work on a German railroad project; his father’s payment to free him from labor; living in Nice where there was a large Jewish population; being sent to Auschwitz in cattle cars on Convey 69 from Drancy in March 1944; the death of his parents in the gas chambers in Auschwitz; working for Siemans Works as a mechanic and living on site; his transfer to the Siemans Arbeitslager in Berlin, the location of the main factory; his relocation to Buchenwald after Russians forces were close to Auschwitz; Allied bombing raids; his relocation to Oranienburg when the labor camp was destroyed by bombing; being treated well by Russians who discovered him and other forced laborers in the forest when they were marched from the camp; recovering in a hospital in the British zone; returning to France; and immigrating to the United States in 1947 after his uncle furnished an affidavit.

    Oral history interview with Sylvia Murawski

    Oral History

    Sylvia Murawski, born July 10, 1928, describes growing up in Warsaw, Poland with her well-known and well-to-do, assimilated parents; the bombardment of Warsaw in September 1939; the beginning of deportations to the ghetto; moving with her family into the ghetto; the term “szmugiel” (smuggling between the Aryan population of Warsaw and the Jews in the ghetto); leaving the ghetto on August 16, 1942; living in hiding with her parents for two years in Milanowek with the Sokolowski family; the emotional effect of living in hiding for so long; and how she eventual finished school, completed a law degree, and got married.

    Oral history interview with Eugene Miller

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Pola Nirenska

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Nathan Offen

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Miki Pear

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Eva Peker

    Oral History

    Eva Peker, born March 18, 1921, discusses her childhood and family life in prewar Vertuzhaniye, Saroka district, Romania (now Vertiujeni, Moldova); her large town in which there were about 500 families, including Jews and Russians; moving with her family in 1936 to Visoka, where there were fewer Jews; learning to become a seamstress; marrying in 1940; the presence of Russians before the war began; witnessing some of the richer townspeople being sent to Siberia; her husband being taken to the front in 1941 when she was pregnant; Romanians coming to her village and taking her family to the Village Council from which they never returned home; walking three days with her family of eight with no food or water to a ghetto in Soroka; leaving there with about 1,000 others who were marched from village to village; how those who could not walk were shot; reaching the forest Kosauts and staying there for six weeks; the living conditions in the tents in the forest; the death of her newborn; being marched to a work camp in Torkanivka, Ukraine, where they worked on a beet farm; being taken out of the camp by friends of her parents; liberation by the Russians in 1945; going back to Soroka after liberation; taking courses in bookkeeping and being employed in government work; never finding out what happened to her husband; working for 30 years in a textile factory in Chernovitz; and immigrating to the United States in 1980.

    Oral history interview with Catherine Polak

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Jack Polak

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Janina Prot

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Fred Raymes

    Oral History

    Fred Raymes, born February 6, 1929 in Hoffenheim, Germany, describes experiencing serious antisemitism in school and in the neighborhood; changes after war broke out; his forced exodus from Germany and eventual arrival in Vichy France, in Gurs; being taken by the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, Children’s Aid Society (OSE) in December 1941 to an orphanage in Aspet, France, run by Swedish Quakers; being sent during the winter of 1943, first to a school in Toulouse and then to a children’s home in Montsec, France; and going to the United States in December 1946.

    Oral history interview with Moses Rechnitz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Zofia Reginiewicz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Liane Reif-Lehrer

    Oral History

    Liane Reif-Lehrer, born in 1934, describes living in Vienna, Austria after her Polish father’s medical training was completed; her father’s home-based dentistry practice and their well-to-do life in a 14-room apartment; her mother, Klara Gottfried, who was born in Poland; political changes that began in 1933, resulting in her father having to close his practice in 1938; her father’s suicide; her memories of Kristallnacht; escaping to France with her mother and brother, and living with other refugees in Limoges, including two girls who were her closest friends: Ruth Isner Kissinger and Bella Isner Uhlfelder; her mother’s deteriorating personality and eventual diagnosis with Alzheimer’s; and the voyage to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Reiser

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Berta Rivkina

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Henry Robertson

    Oral History

    Henry Roberston (né Heinz Rosenberg), born September 15, 1921, in Gottingen, Germany, describes his prewar life in Germany; the devastation that occurred during Kristallnacht; his brother’s transport to Sachsenhausen; his family’s deportation in November 1941 to the Minsk ghetto; the liquidation of the Minsk ghetto and his last time seeing his wife and parents; his transfer to a series of camps, including Treblinka, Płaszów, Wielicza, Flossenbürg, Sachsenhausen, Bergen-Belsen, and Bremen from which he was liberated on April 15, 1945; numerous postwar ailments from which he suffered; his transport to Sweden to recuperate; and his immigration to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Coenraad Rood

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Izy Rosenblat

    Oral History

    Izy Rosenblat, born January 8, 1914 in Warsaw, Poland, discusses his family life before the Holocaust; his two brothers Eli and Herschel; his family’s move to Radom; at nine years old becoming a tailor apprentice to his future father-in-law, Yanka Fishman; courting his wife Hanna Taube, born in Radom in 1917, for 13 years; being forced to pay for protection against antisemitism in school; opening his own shop and becoming registered as a master tailor; being deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where Mengele did the selection; being transferred to another camp where he worked as a tailor; his memories of German disorganization; his liberation by the French on April 5, 1945; living for a short period on a farm; being taken to Dusseldorf and then to Stuttgart to a displaced persons camp; and arriving in the United States in 1950.

    Oral history interview with Pal Rozsa

    Oral History

    Pal Rozsa, January 20, 1925, discusses his memories of early pre-war life in Budapest, Hungary; his family life; his father who was a freemason and language teacher; how his family celebrated high holidays and Sabbath despite being non-religious; his oldest sister’s activities in the Communist movement, which led to her arrest; his sister’s contraction death from TB; his inability to attend university in 1943 because of laws restricting enrollment; his memories of the German invasion on March 19, 1944; his memories of forced labor beginning in June 1944 in Northern Transylvania; his work on a railroad with other Jews, Romanians, and Serbs in the camp; liberation by Romanian and Russian forces on October 19, 1944; his return to Budapest; the Arrow Cross takeover; the death of family members during and after the Holocaust; and his time in university after the war.

    Oral history interview with Eva Roth

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Marsha Rozenblit

    Oral History

    Marsha Rozenblit discusses her father Mendel Rozenblit (born November 3, 1907 in Lukow, Poland): his life in prewar Poland; his father Avraham Rozenblit, mother Masha Markusfeld Rozenblit, and five brothers and one sister; his family’s religious observances; his two children with his first two wives; his time in the Warsaw ghetto from which he escaped during the uprising in April 1943; his arrest and internment in Auschwitz; his experience on a death march from Auschwitz to Dachau from which he was liberated in April 1945 by American forces; his work for the UN Relief and Restitution Agency; his immigration to the United States in December 1947; his marriage and birth of his daughter Marsha Rozenblit; his trauma from losing his first two children and the atrocities he experienced during the Holocaust; and his emotional struggles post-war.

    Oral history interview with Eva Rozsa

    Oral History

    Eva Rozsa (née Muhlrad), born October 13, 1924 in Ujpest, then a suburb of Budapest, Hungary, describes her pleasant family life until anti-Jewish laws and restrictions were in place in 1939; the German occupation of Hungary; drastic changes in living conditions and being deported on the last transport to Auschwitz; the revolt of the Sonderkommando, the crematoria workmen; her mother being sent to Bergen-Belsen then to work in a light bulb factory; being assigned to work in potato fields where she became very ill; remaining at the camp when the forced march began and subsequently being liberated by the Russians on October 27; being ill with tuberculosis and being taken to Cracow, Poland, where she spent ten months recovering; enormous difficulties in getting home to Hungary because she had neither money nor official papers; and finishing university in Hungary in 1955.

    Oral history interview with Sophie Salerno

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Norman Salsitz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Charlene Perlmutter Schiff

    Oral History

    Charlene Schiff (née Sulamit Perlmutter), born December 16, 1929 in Horochow, Poland (now Horokhiv, Ukraine), describes a secure and happy prewar life in a large Jewish community governed by the kehillah (Kehilla); her family members who were town leaders; the Russian occupation of Eastern Poland; the German invasion in June 1941; the ghettoization of her town and the desperate living conditions therein; her mother’s arrangement for her and her sister to escape the ghetto and hide in farm houses across the river; the disappearance of her mother; the rejection of an agreement by the farmer, leaving her abandoned and alone; her attempts to find her mother while hiding in the woods; her eventual discovery by Russian troops; her hospitalization; her time in various displaced persons camps in Germany; her education at the University of Heidelberg; her immigration to the United States in 1948; living with her aunt in Columbus, OH; and her life post-war.

    Oral history interview with Michael Scislowski

    Oral History

    Michael M. Scislowski, born September 30, 1922, in Siedlce, Poland, describes his life in prewar Poland; his school years in Siedlce and in Wilaka (now in Lithuania) until September 1, 1939 when the war began; his attempts to escape the Soviets; learning English; his membership in the ZWZ (Zwiazek Walki Zbrojnej), the underground group that preceded the AK (Armia Krajowa); his arrest on March 19, 1943; his time in the Poliak prison; his transport by cattle car to Auschwitz; his forced march to Dachau after time in Flossenbürg; his liberation on April 24, 1945 by Patton’s Third Army on the third day of the march; witnessing medical experiments that were conducted in Block 10 of Auschwitz; working for the US Army from 1945 to 1950 serving the Labor Service Company; and immigrating to the United States in 1950.

    Oral history interview with Ida Segal

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Rubin Segal

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Lewis Shabasson

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Irene Shapiro

    Oral History

    Irene Shapiro (née Hass), born in 1925 in Berezhany, Ukraine, describes her life in Gludjan until 1938 when her family moved to Bialystok; Russian propaganda; her strong Zionist beliefs; the Russian occupation of Bialystok, which became part of Soviet Byelorussia; the ghettoization of Bialystok during the second German occupation; her involvement with the Jewish underground; her time in Treblinka, Lublin, Majdanek (where her father was killed), Blitzen, and in May 1944, Auschwitz Birkenau; how she survived in the camps; her liberation; her immigration to the United States in 1946; and her work with American and British forces after the war.

    Oral history interview with Flora Mendelowitz Singer

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Dr. Laszlo Sokoly

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Peter Somogyi

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Harold Spear

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Vera Sprecher and Robert Sprecher

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Morris Steiman

    Oral History

    Morris Steiman, born August 5, 1918 in Bodzanow, Poland, describes being the youngest of 14 children in an Orthodox family; fighting with Polish boys on his way to school; antisemitism in Poland; speaking Yiddish and Polish at home; attending Yeshiva in Tutusk for two years; being in Tutusk during the German invasion; being taken out of school to dig ditches; not being allowed in the street; being forced to wear a yellow Star of David badge in the fall of 1939; working in a tailor shop for a German until being relocated to a ghetto with approximately 1,200 people; receiving help from some Poles while in the ghetto; deportations but no killing during the first year in the ghetto; being taken to Dzaldowo, and the brutality of a camp there (Soldau concentration camp); and then to a ghetto in Chestochowa; reuniting with his family in Yaldodov, where there was another ghetto; getting married in 1941; being in the ghetto synagogue when the ghetto was liquidated on Yom Kippur of 1941; his transfer to a smaller ghetto; an unsuccessful escape attempt; the ghetto’s liquidation and being taken to work in an ammunition factory in 1943 with his wife; being taken to waiting trains just before liberation; arriving in the United States on March 3, 1947 with his wife; his post-war life including the birth of his daughter and grandchildren.

    Oral history interview with Matylda Szymaniak

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Florence Tabrys

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Harry Tabrys

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Walter Taranowicz

    Oral History

    Walter Taranowicz, born July 22, 1918 in New York City discusses his parents who were Polish-born Catholics; his father’s American citizenship; how during the Great Depression his father took the family to a ranch they owned in Lublin, Poland; his father’s return to the United States for work and subsequent inability to return to Poland; attending Polish schools in the 1930s; planning to get an European education then returning to the US to become an engineer; the outbreak of war in Poland; the arrival of the Russians and loss of the family farm; the family’s attempt to reach the American Consulate in Warsaw, Poland; staying on the German side of the border; his mother and sister’s deportation to Siberia in 1941; his arrest on January 13, 1940 because the Nazis thought he was an American spy; his brutal treatment by the Nazis; being taken with 5,000 Polish men on trucks to Auschwitz; building Birkenau; working as a cabinet maker, making soldier beds, rifle racks, tables, and benches for German army supplies; volunteering in 1942 to transfer with 4,000 others to Mauthausen, where he worked as a cabinet maker with the camp architect; his liberation on May 5th, 1945 by American forces; being taken to Regensburg, Germany to recover; becoming an interpreter in Italy and being stationed in Verona then Milan for seven months; his transfer to the US in the fall of 1945 on the Marine Falcon; the liberation of his mother and sister from a work camp in Siberia; working as a cabinet maker in New York; marrying his wife Sabina; and details about her life.

    Oral history interview with George Topas

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Jack Trompettor

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Edward Unkiewicz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Solomon Urbach

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Moishe Weiner

    Oral History

    Moise Weiner, born in May 24, 1927 in Vakhnivka, Ukraine, discusses his prewar life in Vakhnivka; attending Ukrainian school instead of the Jewish school; his memories of people’s reaction when Molotov announced war with Germany; escaping on a train with his sister; managing to escape when the Germans attacked the train; making their way to Orsk in the Urals; working different jobs until he was called into the army in 1945; the Russian Civil War and pogroms of that time; how his brothers and sister became Communists during the war; becoming a writer after the war; translating novels by Jewish authors from Yiddish into Russian; and living as a Refusenik for ten years.

    Oral history interview with Paul Wos

    Oral History

    Paul Wos, born December 22, 1920 in Warsaw, Poland, describes his life in prewar Starowka; his Catholic family; his membership in the Polish Army; his experience helping Jewish families hide during the German occupation; his membership in the resistance movement; the Warsaw ghetto uprising; his family’s deportation as political prisoners; the family’s relocation to several concentration camps until they were finally taken to Flossenbürg; conditions at Flossenbürg; his feelings that he owes his survival to his friend Jan Shienitski and to the power of prayer; and his immigration to the United States in 1961 with his wife and two children.

    Oral history interview with David Yegher

    Oral History

    David Yegher (né Jegher), born in December 22, 1920 in Rona de Jos, Romania, describes his life in Romania before World War II; early institutionalized antisemitism throughout Europe; his displacement in a ghetto in Slotyna, Czechoslovakia (now Solotvyno, Ukraine); transporting goods from nearby towns to Jewish families in the ghetto; his experiences in Auschwitz and Gleiwitz and subsequent hardships in the labor camps; being liberated by the British Army; his post-war hospitalization; immigrating to the United States; his encounter with the American Nazi Party; and the importance of trying to overcome contemporary antisemitism.

    Oral history interview with Eva Young

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Frances Zatz

    Oral History

    Frances Zatz, born in May 4, 1932 in Warsaw, Poland, describes her early childhood in Poland before World War II; the siege of Warsaw by German troops; the outbreak of the war; the building of the Warsaw ghetto and subsequent hardships there; her mother smuggling ammunitions into the ghetto; plans for the Jewish uprising; being smuggled out of the ghetto and living with a Christian family; her reunion with her mother and sister after the Warsaw uprising; working in the factories making uniforms for German soldiers; her time in a German detention camp; being liberated by the Russians; moving to Berlin, Germany after the war; and eventually immigrating to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Trude Ludwig

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Magda Rein Cox

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Eva Roth

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Gertrude Zoberman Kupfer

    Oral History

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