Advanced Search

Learn About The Holocaust

Special Collections

My Saved Research

Login

Register

Help

Skip to main content

Print

Oral history interview with Elizabeth Lubell

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1992.A.0125.77 | RG Number: RG-50.233.0077

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

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

results are loading

0 results found for “keyward”

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Lubell
    Transcript
    OK, we're speaking with Mrs. Elizabeth
    Lubell of Peekskill, New York.
    Mrs. Lubell, would you like to start by telling us
    a little bit about your childhood, and where were you
    born, the date of birth?
    What was your life like?
    I was born in 1920, December the 9th.
    I lived in Budapest with my parents.
    We had, I would say, middle class.
    I would say my father was a hard-working man.
    He was a traveling salesman.
    He went with a bicycle from store
    to store, from town to town.
    Sometimes he took me with us.
    I would say I had a happy childhood.
    And careless, happy life.
    Schools were very good.
    I went to elementary school and then went to regular Gymnasium.
    And then I went to a [GERMAN],, how do you say it?
    Commerce school.
    And everything went well until Hitler came to power.
    Could be jump back a little?
    OK.
    Is that all right?
    Jump back.
    Jump back any time.
    What were you like as a child?
    And did you have some interests?
    As a child?
    Yes.
    Movie stars.
    I had interest-- as a little child,
    I was always theatrically interested.
    All the school plays in school, I was always present.
    And my parents were proudly sitting there listening to me.
    And as I grew bigger and more serious on that line,
    I went more into the theatrical aspect of school plays
    and stuff like that.
    And it was very uneventful, but it abruptly changed.
    So abruptly that I had a diary, for instance, which
    I by coincidence found it.
    Because not so many documents I found from my life.
    And as I was reading the diary, today I
    was in love with this boy, tomorrow I'm with that boy.
    So I lived, really, like any teenagers.
    And all suddenly, when Hitler came to power,
    and it started to come the news, I personally
    immediately took it to my head.
    And it always went--
    the thought always was in my head
    what will be if something happens to my parents?
    I was very much attached to them.
    And I was very much Papa's girl, Papa's little girl.
    Did you have brothers and sisters?
    I had my brother, who lives in America right now.
    Almost met.
    And when Hitler came to power, it abruptly
    changed my whole lifestyle.
    When I was reading in my diaries, from that little girl,
    you can see that there was no [GERMAN]..
    How do you say that it was-- it went from one year to another.
    Continuity?
    It immediately became serious.
    There, it was a childish little girl telling
    all kinds of little stories.
    And then all suddenly, I heard this one on the radio,
    I heard that one on the radio what will happen.
    Because in 1938, it started, the whole problem.
    And then of course, when my brother left for America,
    that changed a lot in our lives and our life.
    Why did he leave?
    Did he know?
    Because in 1938, it was the first political change
    in Austria, with Schuschnigg.
    You know, there was the--
    how did you-- what was it Austria what happened,
    how do you call that?
    The Anschluss.
    The Anschluss, thank you.
    So with the Anschluss, it was already
    everybody knew that things will happen.
    And my brother had the foresight that he asked our relatives--
    my mother had a brother in America, in Kingston--
    and he asked for the affidavit.
    He got married in Poland.
    And they came to Hungary.
    And as a matter of fact, I remember the last time
    when she, my sister-in-law, called up her mother
    and said goodbye because they are
    leaving tomorrow for America.
    In that time, we didn't--
    in 1938, you know, it was the same story
    what was with the Germans.
    They said it can never happen to us.
    It was something entirely new in our life.
    Would think what would happen?
    But when that happened in 1938, my brother left.
    And with that, it started the decline in every way
    how we felt. And there was always even so that we still
    had our normal life.
    But as the weeks and months went by, more and more,
    it came the news from Germany.
    And a little bit here, a little bit there.
    And we more and more realized that we are looking forward
    for a sad time.
    Can we stay in the prewar period for a minute?
    And can I ask you about your family, the Jewish aspect
    of your family?
    Were they religious or assimilated?
    We were conservative, we kept every holiday.
    Every significant and non-significant holiday.
    We did keep a kosher home.
    We were very much Jewish-oriented.
    I had mostly, I would say 90%, Jewish friends.
    And no Gentile boyfriend.
    And we kept the holidays, we went to shul.
    So I would say I had my confirmation in Budapest, which
    I had very nice memories from.
    And I would say we kept a nice Jewish home.
    We were not Orthodox, but we were rather conservative.
    What else do you want to know about that?
    That is what we care--
    I went to Hebrew--
    I mean, it's not Hebrew school.
    Because at that time in Hungary, it was not like here.
    You have to take separate Jewish lessons if you went to school.
    And that's what I did.
    And we had our own group.
    And we had our own hall where we went.
    We kept, you know, socially and in the artistic field,
    we kept up with the Jewish place.
    And as the years went by, 1938, 1939, more and more,
    we had our own little Zionist groups, you know.
    And talked a lot about Palestine.
    And young people got together.
    But we didn't realize the real tragedy
    what was facing us that time.
    So in that case, where were you at this point, then?
    You were in business, studying at the business school?
    Yes, after I finished my business school,
    I got a job with a lawyer.
    And I, the whole years, all the way
    on-- as a matter of fact, all the way until the Germans came
    to Budapest, I was a secretary with a lawyer.
    A Gentile lawyer?
    All of them were all Gentiles.
    But the interesting part of it was
    that, toward the end in Budapest,
    we had-- before they made the ghetto,
    we had to wear the Jewish star.
    And the lawyer where I worked was not in the Jewish section.
    And when I went there, I took my star off
    so I could cross that part to go to work.
    And that lawyer where I heard was a very, very well-known
    lawyer.
    Not only because he had higher connections, but also
    he was in the religious field with nuns and priests.
    He was a very religious man.
    And one day, as I was working there,
    and somebody rang the bell, and I opened the bell,
    and I saw two of these so-called Hungarian Nazis, who were worse
    sometimes than the Germans one.
    And I thought, well, that's it.
    They will take me.
    But they came and they took my boss.
    Because he was in the religious.
    You know, they didn't like very religious people, either.
    And they took him to a concentration camp.
    And I, as a secretary, Jewish secretary whom they didn't know
    stayed there.
    So that was a rather almost humorous aspect of that case.
    So I stayed there for a couple of months without him.
    And then things got to be very dangerous.
    Then I knew the safe number of that lawyer.
    That was right before things got very serious.
    Then I opened up the safe and took out
    his lawyer's daughter's papers, knowing if I have to run away,
    I will run away with these papers.
    Which I did.
    Which I used, but that happened later on.
    Do you want to tell me how?
    Well, first of all, I have to tell you that we were--
    my father and mother was Polish origin.
    And in 1941, when the Germans were not occupying Hungary yet,
    they came out--
    they gave the order to the Hungarians
    to deport all the non-Hungarian citizens.
    And my father, in spite of that, that he
    was as a Hungarian officer in the Hungarian Army,
    and he had the Iron Cross, and all that things,
    when the order came out to deport--
    you know, there was a time in 1941
    when all the non-Hungarian citizens were deported
    from Hungary and from Budapest.
    And unfortunately, we were among them.
    And unfortunately, we were among them the
    very first day when the deportations
    started, when we didn't know yet what's going on.
    Then they came to our house and they said, pack your bag,
    we will take you to your own country.
    And you will work there.
    And you will survive after the war.
    And that was in June, 1941.
    And they came to our house, and they said, well, pack your bag
    and go.
    And how do you pack your bag when
    you lived there a lifetime?
    So we cried, and my mother cried, and I cried,
    and my fiance was there.
    So the guy who-- he was new on the job.
    And he had a certain human caring and sympathy to us.
    So he said, you know what, I will take your father.
    So I'm sure you stay here, and you'll
    have one day to pack your bag and do whatever you want.
    And that's what he did.
    And in that one day, I had a choice, and some people,
    some relatives told me, well, you are young,
    go and hide before they take you.
    But my father wrote a letter that the family
    have to stay together.
    And please come.
    And whatever will be, we will survive it together.
    So we packed our bag and we went outside.
    We lived in a house, four floors.
    And all the tenants were looking and saying goodbye to us.
    Some of them cheering, some of them jeering.
    And that's how we were deported to Poland that time.
    I say deported to Poland, which is, again, it's easy to say.
    But how we were, and what happened,
    and how we went there, and how we walked,
    or whatever happened in between, a lot
    of Hungarian so-called Polish Hungarian origin
    got killed in Kamieniec Podolski.
    That was a famous town where they-- you
    heard about Kamieniec Podolski.
    So most of them who got killed there, 40,000, they
    were all Hungarian origins.
    But knowing my parents knew Polish,
    they also hired a private buggy.
    And we had relatives in Kolomea.
    And we stayed-- we hid back from the transport.
    Because we knew that the transport is
    going to Kamieniec Podolski.
    And a lot of other people escaped, too,
    but we went with that buggy to Kolomea.
    And that's where we stayed.
    In Kolomea, that was that time yet more or less normal
    life because the ghetto was not instated.
    But of course, after a year being
    in the ghetto and losing people--
    it was over 20,000 people in Kolomea--
    and by the time I escaped with a smuggler,
    there was only a couple of hundred left.
    So that's when it was that I said goodbye to my parents.
    And of course, I never saw them again.
    And I started on the road going back
    to Hungary, which was a road to talk about a lot.
    Do you want to talk any more about the ghetto,
    though, before?
    The ghetto we lived.
    And it was a whole year.
    Before the ghetto, we lived in Kolomea yet.
    And when the ghetto came, of course, like everybody else,
    we had to move in the ghetto.
    And we also had-- they said on the tape
    that three, four families lived in the ghetto.
    Well, where we went, it was rather
    five, six families living in the ghetto.
    In a one-room place?
    In a one-room place, right.
    And then of course, some of them got killed during the time.
    So it got less and less.
    And that's when I decided, after a year being
    in Kolomea and about half a year in the ghetto
    that it's time to go.
    Was there anything while you were there
    that struck you and made--
    that stands out in your mind?
    Well, that was day was what struck me
    because I was a young person with a rather careless,
    a careful living.
    And all suddenly, you were thrust into a situation.
    We went to work in the morning because my father,
    being a military person, and the Germans also
    gave him a job as a supervisor.
    And the other Jews didn't like him
    because he was a supervisor.
    And they didn't like nobody who supervised over other Jews.
    And so we worked there for a time.
    As a matter of fact, I worked in a kitchen preparing
    dinner for German officers.
    And my job was with three other girls peeling potatoes.
    And in that time, hunger was already a big, big aspect
    of ghetto life.
    Because you know that people just died of hunger.
    So what we did, we got permission for the peels
    to take home.
    And we had the peels for whatever meal they made.
    You cooked them, I assume?
    We cooked the peels, right.
    But in order to have something on the peels,
    we peeled the potatoes in the kitchen take.
    And then we went home and we peeled the peels.
    We made it so that the peels were take.
    But then the Germans came to eat and they
    said whoever will peel like that take will have a punishment.
    So we couldn't do that.
    So from then on, we had to eat the peels
    and not peel the peels.
    The other one what I remember from the ghetto
    when we went out to work and through work,
    we got to know some other workers.
    Because this was German families who moved into Jewish houses.
    And they renovated it, redecorated it.
    And we worked on it to keep it clean until their wife
    and children came.
    And we saw the mementos of a life, you know, Jewish life.
    Sometimes we came into a house where we saw the pots and pans
    yet as they carried them out.
    And we just had to close our eyes
    and see what happened there.
    And we had to clean up and make it
    ready for the German officers.
    And I was working there once washing the floors with a pail,
    you know, a big pail of water.
    Because you were asking me to tell you
    some mementos from the ghetto.
    And until that time, you know, I knew that I
    was in danger and everything.
    But I didn't had any personal contact
    with any physical punishment.
    Excuse me.
    Cleaning the floor and almost finished it.
    He came in and he took the pail and he kicked the pail.
    And he said, this is not clean enough, to clean it again.
    So that was my first encounter with a German officer.
    And as it happened to be the German officer's wife
    who came back, she acted rather humanely to the Jewish girls.
    It happens to be that--
    I don't know whether I should mention it, everything.
    But she had some tendencies about liking girls.
    And the question was whether to use this situation
    to your advantage or not to use it to your advantage.
    But sometimes, you came to a point.
    You told me an incident before about bread.
    That sometimes you came to a point
    when the only thing was in your mind
    was-- you are 20 years old and somewhere along in the sky when
    you looked up, there is a life yet for people.
    And let's do whatever it's possible, but let's survive.
    And it happens to be that that woman helped me
    a lot to get easier job, to get more food,
    until her husband came to the picture.
    And then I lost my job.
    And then we had to go to a factory where he worked.
    Some kind of-- if I remember correctly, I don't even know,
    I think something with an iron work or something.
    And the first day when I went there,
    we were rather abused that time there.
    And then what I decided that this is a good place maybe
    to run away or something, or make connections.
    And that's what I heard the first time,
    that there is somewhere a smuggler
    along, that it is possible.
    So I stayed in that factory and I worked there.
    We went out to get back to the ghetto.
    And the ghetto was always less, and less, and less.
    And my parents were always less and less independent
    and more and more relied on me.
    So the roles reversed between parents and children.
    And are not children because it was only me.
    That it was me who directed them what to do and how.
    Like for instance, when I had to go to work with mother,
    the Germans looked up, and mother got old very suddenly
    in the ghetto.
    And it happened, it coincided with her menopause, too.
    So that was really a hard thing because she
    acted sometimes very strange.
    And I was very much afraid.
    Everything fell on her.
    And she just couldn't digest the tragedy which fell upon her.
    And I sometimes was the one who had to lead her
    and say it will be good.
    And I remember, I pinched her cheek sometimes
    so she would just survive because maybe I
    made a little bit her hair so that the Germans won't say,
    well, you are too old to work.
    So this was a couple of memories from the ghetto.
    And then of course, there was also memories
    that I met there a young man who worked in a soup kitchen.
    And you know, when you are 20 years old, no matter
    what situation, you are thrust into it,
    you always have a little bit romantic space in you
    because that keeps you alive.
    And I met a young man who was very kind to me.
    And he gave me always cake, soups, and things like that.
    So I sometimes met him.
    But he had somebody else.
    I had somebody else.
    But there, it developed some kind of rapport between us.
    And I remembered him long after that.
    That was, of course, my present husband.
    But I didn't know at that time yet.
    But when it came the time that the ghetto got
    from 20,000 to a couple of hundred, I said, that's it.
    And I discussed it with my mother the last day.
    And the last night, when I knew that I'm
    leaving in the morning, you know,
    we rather stayed away from kissing, or touching,
    or something because you changed.
    In order to survive, you have to lose your--
    certain feelings disappear from you.
    But that was the last night and mother just touched me
    so because she had her own thoughts.
    And I had my own thoughts.
    And the only thing what I remember
    that I just wanted just nobody should touch me
    and nobody should kiss me, just to push it away
    because one more touch and one more kiss,
    I'm not going to leave.
    And that was the reason.
    I never explained it to her, I hope she understood it.
    Because when she wanted to touch me, I just like pushed it away.
    And I did it in order that I should be able to leave.
    And next before I left, my father
    gave me that talisman, which I carry with me.
    And I never, never leave it.
    Wherever I go, the talisman goes with me.
    And somehow I don't--
    I'm not superstitious otherwise.
    But I truly believe that that talisman saved me
    from a lot of situations.
    And when the time will be that I have to go,
    then I have to decide which of my children will have it.
    And that was the ghetto.
    And I went away.
    And I went back to Budapest, where that time, even so
    that Hitler that was far in advancing all over,
    but it was still not the ghetto.
    Only a couple of months later.
    Yeah, what year was this?
    I was there a whole year in the ghetto, from 1941 to 1942.
    And I have to tell you one incident there
    because that is an--
    I try not to go into little details but that is.
    No, it's OK.
    It's fine.
    But this detail was so remarkable
    that I have to mention it.
    After about 25 or 26 days, the 20th day, they caught us.
    I think, did I mention it or I didn't mention it?
    No.
    Or I told you that before.
    So we were walking at night to reach Hungary from Poland
    to there.
    I mean, it was a long road, but I cannot go into every aspect
    in it.
    But in any case, we were walking at night
    and sleeping at day time.
    And that was just about the last day before.
    We saw already the Hungarian border.
    Then when somebody probably who noticed
    us told it to the German guards, and they came up with-- we
    were 10 of us who were escaping from the ghetto.
    And they came up, the German guard, and the shot everybody
    on sight.
    And I ran away that time.
    And it was laying there a big tree,
    you know, eaten, knocked from the moss.
    You know, hollow inside.
    That is a lot of fate was in my life,
    but I have to strongly believe that there must be something,
    somebody, somewhere, who prepared that tree for me there
    where I went in that tree, in that hollow tree was laying.
    And I was laying.
    And I was in the tree.
    And I just heard the shooting, and crying, and saying, no, no,
    no until everything was got quiet
    and I walked out from the tree.
    And what I saw was only dead people.
    And I started to walk because I think that time,
    that that's from that day on, I was not quite right.
    And I think I was singing or something.
    And I said, I'm going back to mama, and how wonderful it is.
    And I stumbled by accident over the smuggler
    who was also escaping.
    But not only that he was getting shot, and escaping,
    and I found him, but everybody had a little knapsack.
    You know, a little knapsack where we had things.
    And he, in a big hurry, instead of taking his knapsack,
    he took my knapsack, and I am the one who survived.
    So there is little incident what I sometimes
    wonder how that worked out.
    And so I found him, but he was injured,
    and he said he cannot do nothing.
    And he gave me his pocket knife.
    And in his thigh he was-- they probably was the shot.
    They shot at my back and it went into his thigh,
    near the genital areas.
    And he gave me that little knife,
    and he said that I have to take that bullet out, which I did.
    And he was there for the night.
    And then he said, write me that letter
    that you are here so I can get my money.
    I won't get too much, in any case.
    Because from the 10 of you, you are the only one survived.
    So that's what the paper what I showed you that I wrote him.
    And that was from the woods.
    This was the Hungarian woods, in Korosmezo.
    That's how.
    Could you spell that?
    Korosmezo.
    Yeah, you can write it for me.
    Where shall-- but how will I know?
    Here, I write down here.
    Koros-- this is a border town.
    Korosmezo.
    Ko-ros-me-zo.
    This is a border town.
    And from there, when I am in Korosmezo,
    I am already in Hungary.
    So he said that--
    he covered me over with leaves and he said, I don't feel good.
    So he left me with my knapsack what
    I had a little sweater on it.
    It was cold in the woods already.
    And he gave me an onion, by the way.
    Which was very good.
    And he went away.
    And he said he will come for me.
    He will whistle a certain way so I know.
    Because that was.
    So it was in the woods, but people could still go there.
    And he said, when you hear that whistle then
    tell that this is you.
    So and he went away.
    And he left me there 4 and 1/2--
    four days and one night, I was in the woods by myself.
    So I was really--
    can you imagine a 20-year-old girl in the woods, you know,
    rain or not rain on anything?
    And there was one incident where something moved.
    I probably moved.
    And a peasant came there who was taking lambs to eat, to graze,
    or whatever you call it.
    And he heard.
    And he come straight, he came straight where I am.
    And I was just there huddling there, covered
    with certain leaves there.
    And I heard the steps closer and closer.
    And the only thing what he did, he peed.
    And he peed on me.
    And I was just standing there.
    And well, that was one of the incidents.
    And then people ask me, so what did you eat for four days?
    I mean, well, you have to eat for four days, which
    is not necessarily so.
    But I had that one onion.
    And then blueberries grew that time.
    So when I felt safe enough in the night, then I went around
    and I ate some blueberries.
    But the fourth night, I dreamed about my fiance in Hungary
    at that time.
    And it was a beautiful wedding and everything.
    And when I got up, and I was in the situation, you know,
    in whatever I was in there, and I looked up, I said, this is--
    I can't.
    There was a limit what I could endure.
    And I said, well, I just don't care anymore nothing
    when I heard the whistle.
    So little coincidences.
    And he did come.
    And I told him, where were you?
    I couldn't talk so good to him because he
    didn't talk Hungarian, I didn't talk so good Polish.
    But he said he was sick, and I believe it.
    I'm not such a good surgeon.
    So he came for me the fifth day.
    And he took me to a place where I had to walk up on the top
    because even so I was in Hungary,
    I think my husband explained it, when they catch you there,
    then they immediately send you back to Germany.
    So everybody was afraid to hide you.
    So I was up there in some kind of an attic,
    waiting for further instruction to go deeper into Hungary.
    The deeper you got into Hungary, the safer
    you were that they won't give you over to the Germans.
    This was in 1942.
    And as I was walking down the steps--
    because he told me to come down, now
    is we are ready we have a car and we
    will go to the next town, which is Maramarossziget.
    And as I walked down, I saw a figure
    on the bottom of the steps.
    And I didn't recognize quite.
    And people didn't recognize me.
    But when I wrote that letter, you know, what I gave?
    My fiance, he himself came all the way to the border town
    to bring the town, and that was him standing downstairs.
    Well, I don't go into the feelings and sentimental
    aspects of it.
    I'll leave that to your imagination.
    But it was something to behold.
    And his life was, of course, that time in danger.
    Because if they would catch him, he
    would also be-- even so he was a Hungarian citizen.
    But what I wanted to tell you, what I don't want to leave out.
    As we wanted to go to Maramarossziget.
    With that car.
    And from Maramarossziget, you already are in Hungary,
    you can go with the trains, cars, buses,
    whatever you want to.
    But until that time, you were in danger.
    And there was a long row in car before the bridge.
    When you passed the bridge, you were already on my destination.
    There was a long line of cars.
    And on the beginning of the car, the chauffeur
    looked out, the one that was paid.
    And he said, we are in trouble because they're
    checking the cars.
    And when I heard that they're checking the cars,
    my first instinct was to jump out.
    Because if they see me, the way I looked, full with lice.
    I was full with lice, by the way.
    My head was full of lice.
    I was dirty, I was bleeding, I had wounds,
    I had all kinds of things there from the woods.
    And if they catch him, he would pay his life for it.
    So I wanted to jump out from the car.
    And if that's the way it has to be.
    And he was holding me back.
    And all suddenly, a soldier comes to our car.
    Mind you, there was a long line of cars
    there before us, crossing the bridge.
    And he doesn't even look in the back.
    And this was such a remarkable incident
    that I will never forget it.
    And he doesn't looks in the back.
    He just goes to the chauffeur, and he says, you know,
    I lost my key.
    I can't even remember what he said.
    That the license, or my key, or if
    he said something to the chauffeur,
    would you please drive me to Korosmezo?
    And the chauffeur said, of course.
    He was an officer of the Hungarian Army.
    And the chauffeur said, of course.
    And he came in and sat next to the chauffeur.
    And as we walked by, you know, the cars,
    and as we reached the point where the guy checked
    everybody's car, they just looked in
    and saw a Hungarian officer.
    And they just saluted.
    Then we went by.
    So to this day, to this day, number one,
    I don't forget the incident.
    And number two, I don't believe in supernatural.
    I cannot quite believe it, but there is a tiny little doubt
    in me whether this was not some kind of an angel sometimes.
    Because why would?
    I mean it is a coincidence to be mentioned.
    Oh, yes, indeed.
    You know, you had mentioned earlier
    when we were talking that you were
    some type of an encounter with Wallenberg?
    Yeah.
    Well, that came later.
    Yes.
    Because when I came--
    then I came back to Hungary.
    And in Hungary, as I said, that time
    was from 1941, from 1942 in the ghetto.
    And that time, Germany still didn't occupy Hungary.
    And was no ghetto yet.
    It was my aunt there.
    And she asked me what it was.
    And what she didn't believe I ate potato peels and stuff
    like that.
    But as we closed into the year, more and more
    Germans came to Hungary, until finally
    on the main street of Hungary, the Germans marched in.
    And that was the end.
    Hungary was occupied by Germany.
    And you know Horthy, Horthy was there.
    So he went away with his white horse and stuff like that.
    But he tried, as a matter of fact, to save the Jews.
    But he was too weak to do anything on that respect.
    And then the Germans came in.
    And then of course, Germans took over
    like they took over the other countries.
    And then it came the ghetto.
    And knowing what the ghetto is because I
    had a little bit of experience before.
    So I said, I am not going to go in the ghetto.
    And as I said, I worked with that lawyer,
    and I had these papers from this lawyer's daughter,
    what I stole from the safe.
    And I said, I'm not.
    And my aunt said, well, come with us and everything.
    She said, by the way, that time, she said, now I
    know what you told me what went on in the ghetto.
    I can believe it now more.
    And as the year went by, she believed me,
    unfortunately, more and more.
    She was a very lovely lady, very nice aunt what I had.
    So they all went to ghetto, and I
    went with the Catholic papers.
    Do you know where the Balaton is?
    That's a lake, Balaton Lake.
    I was working with my friend, with a Hungarian friend
    of mine, as a maid and a nurse.
    One week, I was the maid and she was the nurse.
    And one week, I was the nurse and she was the maid.
    And we worked there a month with my papers what I had.
    And she had other papers.
    As Catholic, we went to church, and I
    learned to pray, and all stuff, and with the children.
    And one day, a policeman comes to our house
    and checks our papers.
    And checked her paper and checked my paper.
    And just said, OK.
    We will check it out, and we'll come for you in the morning.
    And I knew that they will check out my papers.
    This was an aristocrat, what I worked.
    He had a fund, you know, that lawyers.
    So I knew that they will know it that this are--
    that I am not the daughter from that aristocratic man.
    So I said to my friend, Monica, I said,
    you know what, they will know that we have papers,
    let's run away.
    And we went out to the railroad in the night.
    I had four children there.
    And the parents were somewhere else.
    So I tucked them in.
    And I hoped nothing will happen to the children.
    And we went through the window.
    And we went to the railroad station.
    And at the railroad station, we met
    the same guy who came that day for us for our papers.
    And that was the end of our freedom.
    They caught both of us.
    And that's how we went from camp to camp
    to camp to camp that I was that time.
    That was in 1943.
    So two years.
    These were all Hungarian work camps?
    These were all Hungarian work camps.
    Only that one Organization [? Dot, ?] which
    was near the Austrian border.
    And I ran away from most of them,
    by the way, because I had the experience already.
    I cannot go every aspect of camp life, it will take too long.
    But if you want something to know, I can tell you.
    I had many, many incidents.
    Which one or two stands out?
    The one which stays is Wallenberg,
    the one what stands out.
    We were in-- that was, I think it was at Sarvar.
    You see, my memory is failing me, too.
    What Wallenberg did, he had a truck.
    And he had a list of names.
    Right.
    And he went to these camps.
    Because from these camps, you know, like for instance,
    in Sarvar, where we were, there was a camp when the war was
    full written, goodbye, goodbye.
    Because from Sarvar, they went to the German concentration
    camps.
    This was a collective camp, where they collected people.
    When they had enough, you know.
    Because they didn't take just from the people.
    That didn't pay.
    When they were more, then they took them away.
    So this was a camp where from there on, there
    was only one way.
    So Wallenberg with his truck and his men went to these camps
    with a list.
    At that time, they still acknowledged, you
    know, Wallenberg's authority.
    So he came to the camp, and we were all standing there,
    and the German guard-- not the German, the Hungarian guard
    came with him.
    And he said, this list what I am reading, all stand forward.
    Because this is under the Swiss Schutz protection.
    And he had that list.
    And I was in the Swiss house, that's how he knowing my name.
    I think I mentioned to you that I was there.
    So he comes and reads the list.
    And people stand forward.
    And then he comes near me.
    And I remember his face and everything.
    We called him the angel of the Jews
    because he saved so many Jews.
    He stand before me and he says, are you Margit so-and-so.
    And I was a little, I guess I was stupid.
    Because I didn't wanted to say nothing
    because I went after the rules.
    So I am not that.
    And the girl next kicked me and said, so why don't you
    say that you are Margit so-and-so?
    I said, yes, yes, I am Margit so-and-so.
    He says, well, why don't you step forward?
    He tells me, Wallenberg.
    Why does it take so long to recognize your name?
    And I stood forward.
    And they took us in the bus, and they took us back to Budapest.
    And that was one encounter I had with Wallenberg in person.
    And I went back to Budapest.
    And now, I didn't had again papers.
    So the other things what I had from my father, you know,
    they wore these gold watches.
    A pocket watch, right.
    It was a chain.
    And I had that chain.
    I had that gold chain.
    And I sewed it in in my-- not my girdle, I didn't wear a girdle,
    but what holds the stockings.
    How do you call that?
    Garter belt.
    Garter belt.
    Right.
    And I sewed that of the garter belt around it.
    And for that garter belt, I bought the papers
    what I still have home.
    This is the papers what I showed you.
    And with that papers, I lived in one of the Christian--
    I never went to the ghetto.
    I rented a house.
    And Budapest was very, very hard bombed.
    And of course, between bombing and the Germans coming to where
    we went in the basement--
    how do you call that?
    The bomb shelters.
    The bomb shelters.
    We were-- between that and that, I sometimes
    walked on the streets.
    The bombs were falling, the dead people were around me.
    But I felt safer there than in the bomb shelter.
    Because the more it bombed, the more and more Germans came.
    They had nothing better to do.
    And the more and more came to the shelter,
    and took out people, and took them out to the Danube.
    And the Danube was floating with thousands of dead people.
    As a matter of fact, I will tell you.
    Remind me if I forget it because I
    have to tell you a very important incident
    after the war with that.
    Remind me for that.
    So now, what did I tell you before?
    The Danube was--
    Oh, yes.
    So January 18th, we were liberated by the Russians.
    And January 16th, they still came,
    the Germans, looking for Jews.
    And one of them, when they came in
    and I was there in the shelter--
    I couldn't walk anymore on the street
    because it was just really 100%.
    Because the bombs were falling like anything.
    And there, I made an acquaintance.
    You see, I must to tell you one other aspects here.
    What I don't like to go into that.
    But it may be sometimes embarrassing.
    But I said, after the ghetto that I came back, I said,
    I have to survive.
    Standing or laying, but I will survive.
    Was no morality left in me.
    Even so I was brought up in a house where if I wasn't home
    by 8 o'clock, my father was walking before the house,
    you know.
    And there was one guy who said, well--
    I think, I am almost sure that he knew I was Jewish.
    But he somehow got a liking to me.
    And he said that if I am nice, he will be nice.
    And said, I will be as nice as you want me to be.
    And when the guy came to check--
    because they checked the papers who is Jewish,
    who is not Jewish.
    And there was another family there.
    A woman, a husband, a woman and her husband, and a son.
    A nice, fat, beautiful-looking Jewish boy.
    And she was with papers, and I was with papers.
    And somehow, one Jew recognized the other one,
    somehow by feeling, or by look, or by eyes.
    There was some kind of rapport that one Jew
    knew the other Jew.
    But one aspect of this, which is maybe nobody told you.
    Or maybe they did.
    There was an aspect to it.
    When one Jew was caught, then they
    had the tendency, unfortunately, if I was caught,
    then you should be caught, too.
    I don't going to cite psychological reasoning.
    But may be there is a reasoning what there is an answer to it.
    And then the German guy came, when
    that Nazi came to check the papers,
    they saw the boy was standing beside me.
    Oh, it runs out?
    Yes.
    Oh, yes, so in any case, so as I said, they came, these Nazis.
    The Hungarian Nazis, what they called
    it's the Nyilaskeresz, that was the Hungarian name.
    They were sometimes more brutal and more perverse
    than the Germans, if you can be more.
    You said Linka, Linka guard?
    Nyilas, Nyilasok.
    No, Linkas was in Romania.
    This was the Nyilasok, yes.
    Sorry, OK.
    Now I'm confused.
    So when he came to this couple, what I
    told you, that mother, and father, and son,
    and take their papers, and they did not accept their papers.
    And they took them out.
    And of course, as I told you at that time,
    there was no-- there was such a big bombardment
    that they didn't had time to take them to the Danube.
    So they shot them all, too, mother, father, and son.
    I found that out later.
    I didn't know that they were shot right before the house.
    But that was not the end of the story.
    As they walked out, they looked at me.
    And I knew that in that moment, in that--
    how do they say that in English?
    There comes a moment of--
    Moment of truth.
    Moment of truth.
    In that moment of truth, I didn't know, will they tell me?
    Well, if they take me, she's Jewish, too.
    Or they will say that or they will not say that.
    But in order to save that moment of truth--
    you see, everybody had a blanket or a quilt.
    Or we called it different, not quilt.
    And in that moment, when they took them out,
    I thought, I have to-- you see, that time, I
    escaped from so many things already
    that I had a little bit of experience.
    And I was far from that naive already, what I was before.
    I said to the guy, who was standing beside me,
    I said, oh, these people, these Jews--
    I used the word--
    they had a very nice blanket, and I don't have one.
    Can I have it?
    It startled the guy who checked my paper.
    Because you know, before I even gave him my papers,
    the other guy said, well, you don't have to check her out.
    She will have the new blanket from the Jew,
    and I will check her out.
    And he didn't even had my papers in his hand.
    Because my papers was even so.
    I have it with me.
    And they were not--
    I was a prostitute according to that kind of papers I had.
    And I certainly acted sometimes accordingly.
    So that's another story, again.
    But in any case, they went away, and they took them out,
    and they shot them.
    Now, I have to interject here now a scene.
    These people whom they shot before the house,
    she had a brother.
    And after the war, when we were still in that house,
    the brother came to pick up whatever they had.
    And then they said, I heard that there was somebody here,
    some shiksa here who said, who took away my dead brothers whom
    they shot before the house, the [INAUDIBLE]..
    I want to confront that woman.
    And I was still-- because that time was still
    not safe to go out.
    But even so that the Russians took already over,
    the Germans sometimes came back and forth.
    So it was not safe yet to give yourself away.
    And I never did it.
    Some people did it.
    They gave themselves away.
    And then the Germans came back, that was the end of them.
    I never-- I still didn't.
    Because I knew that they come.
    Budapest is two parts, Buda and Pest.
    And in Buda was the Germans and Pest was the Russians.
    And they went back and forth.
    And it took two, three weeks until finally, the Russians
    took over.
    So he wanted to confront me that who is that who took her?
    And to tell me certain things.
    And when he came there and was confronted me.
    And it was even so that time that the Russians were there
    already, and I was still afraid.
    I said, just don't make too much commotion.
    I did that to save my life.
    I'm Jewish, too.
    We talked there sometimes.
    And he said, well, in that case, I understand it.
    So that was the after effect of that case.
    So in any case, we were there in that shelter
    all the way until January 18th in the night.
    One Russian guy comes down.
    You see, I talk about the Russians
    so much because the Russians are the ones who liberated us.
    If not the Russians, I'm not here.
    This is 1945 already?
    This is-- no, that is 19--
    '45.
    '45, January 18th.
    So my war lasted from 1941 to 1945.
    So I was 4 and 1/2 years wherever.
    So when the first Russians came in.
    And mind you, I was still with Catholic papers there.
    When the first Russians came in, somehow, you know--
    in any case, that they saw already with the bombardment
    is just catching these parents and everything.
    I am quite sure that I was mentally really not right.
    And understandably so.
    So I was really, really on the end of my line.
    I couldn't take too much more anymore.
    And when I saw the first Russian,
    I sat there with other young people around there,
    wherever we were living in the shelter.
    And that was in the basement, of course, and half of it
    was bombed and everything.
    And I wanted to run to that Russian
    and kiss him from top to toe.
    And I'm free, I'm free.
    You know, in the movies?
    And they were holding me back.
    And they said, don't you know what the Russians are doing?
    They did a lot of raping, you know that.
    And they didn't care whether their 18-year-old or 88 years
    old.
    They didn't care.
    But the difference it was that the first fighting
    group who fights for a city is always
    the elite of the military.
    And they do not do any raping.
    They are not the one who does it.
    The occupying troops are the one who does it.
    When all kind of when it was free.
    Free robbery, free raping, you could do everything.
    But the first elite group didn't do too much raping.
    But I wanted to go out.
    And then the girl next to me, he said,
    what are you so happy about to see the Russian wasn't--
    what, you know, she started.
    Because she really didn't know who I am.
    She just knew hi, my name is [HUNGARIAN]..
    So he was holding me back and I didn't go.
    But the second day-- because there
    came more and more Russians to the basement looking for men,
    you know, who was hiding also.
    And that young man who stood beside me.
    And he said-- you know, that was up on the floor,
    it was a department store.
    And in the department store, they had honey left.
    And food was a big thing that time.
    And he comes to me, and he says, before yet the Russians came,
    he said, you know what?
    There is a big, big container of honey there.
    We will go up there, and I will give you a lot of honey.
    And honey, this was gold at that time.
    And that was already after that incident with the Germans,
    so I said, now, I don't need him anymore.
    But as he said, you know what, I will give you the honey.
    I saved your life.
    But he knew already that the Russians are on the corner.
    But when it comes to it, will you save mine?
    Oh, how can I save it?
    He said, you know how you can save it.
    So he knew who I was.
    Because he wouldn't ask me that question then
    whether I can save your life or not.
    So when the Russians came in, when they were already
    in looking for Hungarian soldiers or non-Jews,
    you know, he came to me, and he said,
    help me to get out of here.
    I helped you, you help me.
    And I did help him to escape.
    Whether I did it right or wrong, but I did it.
    And he did escape.
    I don't know what happened.
    Well, in any case, then the Russians came in.
    And then of course, I don't know whether you
    know about the aspect to how the Russians behaved.
    I mean, it was soup kitchens again.
    And it was again standing in the line.
    It was all the ruins.
    And I had nobody.
    I just walked on the streets, you know,
    and sawing people coming out from the ghetto.
    And everybody said, oh, Jancika, [HUNGARIAN],, Jurika, and I
    went there, and I had nobody.
    Because everybody died.
    So I said, well, I will look for my aunt.
    You know, that aunt who didn't believe me?
    They were in the ghetto.
    And they were the rich aunts in the family
    because they had a house in Hungary.
    And that was like having a house in New York that time.
    So they had some six, seven rooms.
    And that was an awful lot of room in Hungary.
    Here, people who works can have four rooms, too, it's nothing.
    So in any case, they did survive.
    And I did go to them.
    And it was a big, beautiful reunion.
    Of course, they took away their house,
    and they took away their apartment,
    and they gave them the room where the maid used to live.
    And there, where the maid used to live,
    there I was living for them for a while
    until they got another room attached to it.
    They got back their own room.
    Not the house, just the room.
    Because the Russians, of course, won't give them back the house.
    And what was life, you will ask me, after the bombardment,
    after the Russians came in?
    It was a tough life.
    It was, first of all, the first days were--
    the first week, rather, after the war.
    It was also interesting.
    You know, we lived on the fourth floor
    when we didn't go to the shelter.
    And after the so-called fighting,
    I went up on the fourth floor, looked out the window,
    because I was more or less like free.
    Because after five years, you felt, well, mommy, I survived.
    And I was rather careless that time.
    And I went, and I looked out the window
    because I wanted to see what is a war.
    You see, this is not a war like here.
    They drop an atomic bomb, and everybody's boom, finished.
    There, they are fighting, you know, corner to corner.
    And I went up on the window, and I looked down.
    I saw this one is Germans, and this one is Russian,
    they are shooting.
    And I look out of the window.
    So they shot up.
    And they almost shot my head off.
    So I got well, because I didn't know better.
    Right.
    So I went back until things subsided.
    That time, houses were closed yet,
    and Russians were standing all over.
    And slowly, slowly, life got back to it.
    You couldn't buy nothing.
    And as I said, I was secretary of a lawyer.
    And I had to make something.
    Money didn't mean anything, and I had nothing anymore to sell.
    The only thing it is to work and get food for it.
    And the lawyer where I worked, whom I worked before once,
    he took me back.
    You know, some people came to advise us,
    and they gave him eggs, and bread, or pork fat,
    or whatever.
    They gave him, he gave me part of it
    as a payment to the secretary.
    Until things can get back to more or less--
    I couldn't call it normal because this
    was far from normal.
    I met one day a friend of our father and mother who did
    survive, her family didn't survive.
    But her house, her room was bombed.
    And she lived in a small room.
    And her living room got a full hit from the bomb.
    And it had a hole in the middle.
    And so I lived in the little room but in that house.
    And she was very attached to me because I was young,
    and I walked.
    You see, Budapest has many, many beautiful, beautiful bridges,
    which were all bombed, all the bridges.
    So people went through the Danube back to Buda
    to get potatoes or flowers.
    So I sometimes brought it back.
    So she was attached to me because she
    knew that being young, I will bring something also.
    And by the way, that time, there was another incident
    what maybe I will tell you certain main aspects of it.
    That there was a couple of days after things settled down,
    there was a so-called free looting.
    Free looting.
    So people went with big bags in these big department stores.
    And whatever they found, they put it in the bag,
    and they took it home.
    It was free loot.
    The Russians stood there and told you so take it, take it.
    If you went out empty-handed, they
    sent you back to take something.
    So I'm living there in that house,
    where above it was a department store.
    And in this department store, I thought I will go looting, too.
    Why not?
    The other people go.
    But I didn't prepare myself with the proper looting.
    I didn't have the bag, I didn't have the knife,
    I didn't have the scissor.
    So I was not quite made for this looting business.
    And there was a big, giant man there cutting
    materials and everything.
    And I was just there.
    If they make me, I was some 85 or 90 pounds.
    If they gave me a push, you know, I would just fall down.
    And they said, if you want to live, you better go away.
    But I wanted to loot.
    So I went down where the food was.
    And there in the food, people went also
    and took the silverware and whatever it is.
    And finally, one guy lifted me up
    and put me on a bag of flour.
    And he said, you'll stay here if you want to be alive.
    Because they were strong people.
    And I was just the wind could blow me away that time.
    And I was still in there.
    And people took everything.
    And I stood there on the bag of flour
    until everything was looted out.
    And I stood there with the bag of flour.
    Of course, I couldn't take the bag of flour.
    And that was full with pickles, and jams, and everything,
    and on me.
    But I still was sitting on a bag of flour.
    So what did I do?
    I had one and only dress, and I took the flour,
    and I put it in my heel like this, in there.
    And I went all the way, walked that way to my landlady.
    And I said, here, we have flour, we make bread from it.
    Which we took out the glass, and we did make bread from it.
    But after a while, it was not humorous anymore
    with the soup kitchens and everything.
    And that got to--
    I lived that time, I went away from my aunt,
    and I lived in a friends of mine.
    The same friend who was together with me in the camp.
    I went to that house, and I lived, and you know,
    there was-- they call it belated reaction.
    When you know you survived, when you
    know well five years went away, you survived alone,
    but you survived.
    And then after that, when you know
    that it comes that psychological for what, and for whom,
    and for why?
    And that was on the fourth floor where I lived that time.
    And it was in December.
    And I was just alone, just I came to a point
    that I need help, which I, of course, didn't get.
    Psychological help.
    So I opened the window and I went on the windowsill.
    And I thought, well, many people did that, by the way.
    I was not the only one.
    And I said, well, let's finish it up.
    And my landlady, who was a very nice lady,
    she came into the room, and she says,
    Elizabeth, you must be crazy.
    You are opening the window and the whole heat what
    I put up here, it goes away.
    I mean, I don't heat here that you open here the windows.
    And I am standing on the window ledge, jumping.
    And I got very mad.
    And I went there.
    And I got so mad that I went to her and I started to hit her.
    And I hit her and I hit her, and she kneeled down beside me.
    And she said, oh, Elizabeth.
    Don't do that, don't do that.
    She did that and said that just to bring me back
    from the ledge.
    It was a nice lady.
    So after that, I said, well, OK, let's start living.
    And I went to the soup kitchen and I asked for a job
    in the soup kitchen.
    And in there, there's so many incidents.
    So many incidents happened there during the war, after the war,
    during the bombing, in the ghetto,
    where it is interesting.
    But as I told it to Henry, you cannot go into every aspects.
    OK, well you can tell any ones that you would like to.
    Well, what is really standing out, I told you with the--
    so one day, when I went to home to my landlady,
    I met-- you see, I was working with the lawyer.
    And in that law office, I met a young Jewish man
    who also survived the war.
    And who met me in that soup kitchen.
    He went not for soups because he was that time
    in the black market business.
    And he started to make-- that time, people
    made only money because there was no businesses, nothing,
    there was only black markets.
    And he started the black market business very successfully.
    And he always had an eye on me, but I was not too interested.
    But after the war, when he gave me a proposition,
    he said, you know what, I mean, what is that?
    You work in the soup kitchen.
    I have money.
    You will come and live with me.
    And we will see what we will do.
    I probably would have become what papers I had before.
    And I said, OK.
    And I went to my landlady and I had, as I said,
    one dress, which I watched.
    It was full with flowers.
    And I said to her, well, I have a date with that man.
    And he was standing down with the car.
    I lived on the second floor that time.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    And I told it to my landlady, he's waiting.
    And my landlady said, OK, well-- because she wanted something
    from it, too.
    And I opened the window and I said,
    I'm coming down five minutes.
    As I said, I had one dress.
    And I went down to go on a road what could end like Madame X
    or who knows what.
    I don't know what would have become.
    But as I walked down the steps going
    to the guy who was waiting for me at the house before the car,
    a Russian soldier comes up the steps.
    And I see a Russian soldier, and I run.
    Because I had incidents with a Russian soldier, which
    I didn't tell you.
    Which I wrote about it, if you are interested,
    a jar of pickles were--
    you know, the Russians did there plenty.
    So when I saw a Russian, I run.
    This was my experience.
    And the Russian guy tells me, well, Elizabeth,
    don't you recognize me?
    And I didn't recognize him because he
    was a Partisan uniform with a red star.
    To me, that was Russian.
    So then I looked at him and then I saw.
    And I went back with him to my landlady.
    And landlady opened the house and the door and said,
    are you crazy bringing a Russian here?
    Because she knew.
    Said, he's not a Russian, he's not a Russian, he's Jewish.
    And I know him from the ghetto.
    And then he said, but he's waiting downstairs
    with the car.
    And I said, but you know, it's interesting.
    And I don't want to be sentimental about it.
    And we are old enough not to be.
    But you know, five years I fought for my life,
    and in the minute he came into my life,
    I said, well, that's it for me.
    That's it.
    Now take over.
    And he did.
    And that was how we met.
    Now what do you ask me now?
    What do you want to know more?
    I think you should probably do it.
    I think.
    And then of course, we waited.
    And then we went to Vienna.
    And from Vienna, we went to the consulate.
    And the consulate said, the quota is closed.
    And then all suddenly, my brother
    kept sending me affidavits and everything.
    And meanwhile, I got pregnant, too.
    And we thought we settled down in Vienna like many other Jews.
    But then one day, the consulate writes me a letter,
    the Polish quota is open.
    So the Polish quota is open, let's go to America.
    Well, you mentioned something about a trip to Israel.
    That was just to visit?
    The trip to Israel was before, when we knew already
    that we come to America.
    And we had brothers that time in Israel.
    So we went to Israel.
    As a matter of fact, Barbara, our daughter, the first move
    that she made was in Israel.
    So that was the trip before we go.
    But one thing I want to tell you more in the tape
    because that was also a nice incident.
    We came with the Mauritania.
    And when you're nearing the Statue of Liberty,
    the captain, and especially at that time--
    by the way, we were one of the last
    who didn't go to Ellis Island.
    Before us, they still went to Ellis Island.
    When we came, it was not Ellis Island anymore.
    So there were two incidents what I want to tell you.
    So when we were on the boat, and we
    were nearing the Statue of Liberty,
    and the captain of the boat was reading there,
    you know, give me your tired, your poor.
    And we're standing, Andy and I, and he had his story to tell.
    And I had my story.
    And I was pregnant.
    And we went to America.
    And we were holding hands.
    And looking at the Statue of Liberty.
    And I said, well, we made it.
    That's the end of the story.
    OK, we're speaking with Mrs. Elizabeth
    Lubell of Peekskill, New York.
    Mrs. Lubell, would you like to start
    by telling us a little bit about your childhood?
    And where were you born, the date of birth?
    What was your life like?
    I was born in 1920, December the 9th.
    I lived in Budapest with my parents.
    We had, I would say, middle class, I would say.
    My father was a hard-working man.
    He was a traveling salesman.
    He went with a bicycle from store
    to store, from town to town.
    Sometimes he took me with us.
    I would say I had a happy childhood and careless, happy
    life.
    Schools were very good.
    I went to elementary school and then went to regular gymnasium.
    And then I went to a [GERMAN].
    How do you say it?
    Commerce school.
    And everything went well until Hitler came to power.
    Then we--
    Can we jump back a little?
    Is that all right?
    Jump back.
    Jump back any time.
    What were you like as a child?
    And did you have some interests?
    As a child?
    Yes.
    [LAUGHS] Movie stars.
    [LAUGHTER]
    I had interest as a little as a little child,
    I was always theatrically interested.
    All the school plays in school, I was always present.
    And my parents were proudly sitting there listening to me.
    And as I grew bigger and more serious on that line,
    I went more into the theatrical aspect of school plays
    and stuff like that.
    And it was very uneventful.
    But it changed so abruptly that--
    I had a diary, for instance, which
    I, by coincidence, found it.
    Because not so many documents I found from my life.
    And as I was reading the diary, today I
    was in love with this boy.
    Tomorrow, with that boy.
    So I lived really like any teenagers.
    And all suddenly when Hitler came to power
    and started to come the news, I personally
    immediately took it to my head.
    And it always went--
    to the thought always was in my head
    what will be if something happens to my parents?
    I was very much attached to them.
    And I was very much my papa's girl, papa's little girl.
    Did you have brothers and sisters?
    I had my brother, who lives in America right now.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    And when Hitler came to power, it abruptly
    changed my whole lifestyle.
    When I was reading in my diaries from that little girl,
    you can see that there was no [GERMAN]..
    How do you say that?
    It went from one year to another--
    Continuity?
    It immediately became serious.
    There, it was a childish little girl telling
    all kinds of little stories.
    And all suddenly, "I heard this one on the radio.
    I hear that one on the radio.
    What will happen?"
    Because in 1938, it started the whole problem.
    And then of course when my brother left for America, that
    changed a lot in our lives and our life
    became more [INAUDIBLE].
    Why did he leave?
    Did he know?
    Because in 1938, it was the first political change
    in Austria with Schuschnigg.
    You know, there was the--
    what was it in Austria, what happened?
    How do you call that?
    The--
    The Anschluss.
    The Anschluss, thank you.
    So with the Anschluss, it was already--
    everybody knew that things will happen.
    And my brother I had the foresight
    that he asked our relatives-- my mother
    had a brother in America, in Kingston.
    And he asked for the affidavit.
    He got married in Poland.
    They came to Hungary.
    And as a matter of fact, I remember the last time
    when she, my sister-in-law, called up her mother
    said goodbye because they are leaving tomorrow for America.
    And that time, we didn't-- well, in 1938,
    it was the same story what was with the Germans.
    They said it can never happen to us.
    It was something entirely new in our life.
    Who would think, would think what would happen?
    But when that happened in 1938, my brother left.
    And with that, with was that it started
    the decline in every way, how we felt. And there was always,
    even so that we still had our normal life,
    but as the weeks and months went by, more and more
    it came, the news from Germany.
    And a little bit here, a little bit there.
    And we more and more realized that we are looking forward
    for a sad time.
    Can we stay in the pre-war period
    for a minute and can I ask you about your family,
    the Jewish aspect of your family?
    How-- were they religious or assimilated?
    We were conservative.
    We kept every holiday, every significant and insignificant
    holiday.
    We did keep a kosher home.
    We were very much Jewish oriented.
    I had mostly--
    I would say 90% Jewish friends.
    And not, no gentile boyfriend.
    And we kept the holidays.
    We went to shul.
    So I would say--
    I had my confirmation in Budapest,
    which I had very nice memories from.
    And I would say we kept a nice Jewish home.
    We were not Orthodox, but we were rather conservative.
    What else do you want to know about that aspect?
    In that aspect, we--
    I went to--
    I mean, it's not Hebrew school because that time in Hungary
    it was not like here.
    You had to take separate Jewish lessons if you went to school.
    And that's what I did.
    And we had our own group.
    And we had our own hall where we went.
    We kept-- you know, socially and in the artistic field,
    we kept up with the Jewish place.
    And as the years went by--
    1938, 1939 --more and more we had our own little Zionist
    groups and talked a lot about Palestine.
    And young people got together.
    But we didn't realize the real tragedy what
    was facing us at that time.
    So in that case, do you care-- where were you at this point?
    You were in business, studying at the business school?
    I guess.
    After I finished my business school,
    I got a job as a lawyer.
    And the whole years, all the way on--
    as a matter of fact, all the way until the Germans came
    to Budapest, I was a secretary with a lawyer.
    A gentile lawyer?
    They were all gentiles.
    But the interesting part of it was
    that toward the end in Budapest, we had--
    before they made the ghetto, we had to wear the Jewish star.
    And the lawyer that I worked was not in the Jewish section.
    And when I went there I took my star off
    so I could cross that part to go to work.
    And that lawyer where I worked was a very, very well-known
    lawyer.
    Not only because he had higher connections, but also
    he was in the religious field with nuns and priests.
    He was a very religious man.
    And one day as I was working there and somebody
    rang the bell.
    And I opened the bell, and I saw two
    of these so-called Hungarian Nazis, who were worse
    sometimes than the German ones.
    And I thought, well, that's it.
    They will take me.
    But they came and they took my boss.
    Because he was in the religious--
    you know, they didn't like very religious people either.
    And they took him to a concentration camp.
    And I, as a secretary, Jewish secretary whom
    they didn't know, stayed there.
    So that was a rather almost humorous aspect of that case.
    So I stayed there for a couple of months without him.
    And then things got to be very dangerous.
    Then, I knew the safe number of that lawyer.
    That was right before things got very serious.
    Then I opened up the safe and took out
    the lawyer's daughter's papers, knowing if I have to run away,
    I will run away with these papers, which I did.
    Which I used, but that happened later on.
    You want to tell me how?
    Well, first of all, I have to tell you that we were--
    my father and mother was Polish origin.
    And in 1941 when the Germans were not occupying Hungary yet,
    they came out, they gave the order to the Hungarians
    to deport all the non-Hungarian citizens.
    And my father, in spite of that, that he
    was as a Hungarian officer in the Hungarian and he
    had the Iron Cross and all that things.
    When the order came out to deport--
    you know there was a time in 1941 when
    all the non-Hungarian citizens were deported
    from Hungary and from Budapest.
    Unfortunately, we were among them.
    And unfortunately, we were among them the
    very first day when the deportation started.
    When we didn't know yet what's going on.
    Then they came to our house.
    And they said, pack your bag.
    We will take you to your own country.
    And you will work there and you'll survive after the war.
    And that was in June 1941.
    And they came to our house.
    And they said, well, pack your back and go.
    And how do you pack your bag when
    you lived there a lifetime?
    So we cried.
    And my mother cried and I cried.
    And my fiancee was there.
    So the guy who-- he was new on the job and he
    had a certain human caring and sympathy to us.
    So he said, you know what?
    I will take your father.
    So I'm sure you stay here and you'll
    have one day to pack your bag and do whatever you want.
    And that's what he did.
    And in that one day, I had the choice.
    And some people, some relatives told me, well, you are young.
    Go and hide before they take you.
    But my father wrote a letter that the family
    have to stay together.
    And please come.
    And whatever will be, we will survive it together.
    So we packed our bag and we went outside.
    We lived in a house, four floors.
    And all the tenants were looking and saying goodbye to us.
    Some of them cheering.
    Some of them jeering.
    And that's how we were deported to Poland that time.
    I say deported to Poland, which is, again, easy to say.
    But how we were and what happened and how we went there
    and how we walked or whatever happened in between,
    a lot of Hungarian, so-called Polish Hungarian origin
    got killed in Kamianets-Podilskyi.
    That was a famous town where--
    you heard about Kamianets-Podilskyi.
    So most of them who got killed there, 40,000, they
    were all Hungarian origins.
    But knowing my parents knew Polish,
    they also hired a private buggy.
    And we had relatives in Kolomyia.
    And we stayed-- we hid the back from the transport.
    Because we knew that the transport is
    going to Kamianets-Podilskyi.
    And a lot of other people escaped too.
    But we went with that buggy to Kolomyia
    and that's where we stayed.
    In Kolomyia, that was that time yet
    more-or-less normal life because the ghetto was not [INAUDIBLE]..
    But of course, after a year of being in the ghetto and losing
    people--
    it was over 20,000 people in Kolomyia.
    And by the time I escaped with a smuggler,
    there was only a couple of hundred left.
    So that's when it was that I said goodbye to my parents.
    And of course, I never saw them again.
    And I started on the road going back
    to Hungary, which was a road to talk about a lot.
    Do you want to talk any more about the ghetto though before?
    The ghetto, we lived--
    it was a whole year.
    Before the ghetto, we lived in Kolomyia yet.
    And when the ghetto came, of course, like everybody else
    we had to move in the ghetto.
    And we also had-- they said on the tape
    that three or four families lived in the ghetto.
    Well, where we went it was rather
    five, six families living in the ghetto.
    In a one room place?
    In a one room place, right.
    And then, of course, some of them
    got killed during the time, so it got less and less.
    And that's when I decided, after a year of being
    in Kolomyia and about half a year in the ghetto,
    that it's time to go.
    Was there anything while you were
    there that struck you and stands out in your mind?
    Well, it was every day was what struck me.
    Because I was a young person with a rather careless, careful
    living and all of a sudden you're thrust into a situation.
    We went to work in the morning because my father,
    being a military person, and the Germans also
    gave him a job as a supervisor.
    And the other Jews didn't like him
    because he was a supervisor.
    And they didn't like nobody who supervised over other Jews.
    And so we worked there for a time.
    As a matter of fact, I worked in a kitchen preparing
    dinner for German officers.
    And my job was, with three other girls, peeling potatoes.
    And at that time, hunger was already a big, big aspect
    of ghetto life because you know that people just
    died of hunger.
    So what we did, we got permission for the peels
    to take home.
    And we had the peels with whatever meal they made.
    You cooked them?
    We cooked the peels, right.
    But in order to have something on the peels,
    we peeled the potatoes in the kitchen take.
    And then we went home and we peeled the piece.
    Oh, I see.
    That we made it so that the peels would take.
    But then the Germans came to eat and they
    said that whatever will be like that take will
    have a punishment.
    So we couldn't do that.
    So from then on, we had to eat the peels
    and not peel the peels.
    The other one, what I remember from the ghetto
    when we went out to work and through work,
    we got to know some other workers.
    Because this was German families who moved into Jewish houses.
    And they renovated it and decorated it.
    And we worked on it to keep it clean until their wife
    and children came.
    And we saw the mementos of a life--
    you know, Jewish life.
    Sometimes we came into a house where we saw the pots and pans
    yet as they carried them out.
    And we just had to close our eyes
    and see what happened there.
    And we had to clean up and make it
    ready for the German officers.
    And I was working there once washing the floors
    with a pail-- you know, a big pail of water.
    Because you were asking me to tell you
    some mementos from the ghetto.
    Yes, yes.
    So the German-- and until that time,
    you know, I knew that I was in danger and everything.
    But I didn't have any personal contact
    with any physical punishment.
    [COUGHS] Excuse me a second.
    --cleaning the floor and almost finished it.
    He came in and he took the pail.
    And he kicked the pail.
    And he said this is not clean enough, to clean it again.
    So that was my first encounter with a German officer.
    And as it happened to be, the German officer's wife
    who came back, she acted rather humanely to the Jewish girls.
    It happens to be that--
    I don't know whether I should mention it.
    But she had some tendencies, liking girls.
    And the question was whether to use this situation
    to your advantage or not to use it to your advantage.
    But sometimes it came to a point--
    you told me an incident before about bread.
    Sometimes you came to a point when
    the only thing in your mind was you are 20 years old,
    and somewhere along in the sky when you looked up,
    there is a life yet for people.
    Let's do whatever is possible, but let's survive.
    And it happens to be that woman helped me a lot to get
    easier job, to get more food.
    Until her husband came to the picture and then I lost my job.
    And then we had to go to a factory where he worked.
    Some kind of-- if I remember correctly, I don't know.
    I think something was an iron work or something.
    And the first day when I went there,
    we were rather abused that time there.
    And then, but I decided that this
    is a good place maybe to run away or something
    or make connections.
    And that's what I heard the first time,
    that there is some where a smuggler [? ring. ?]
    That it is possible.
    So I stayed in that factory and I worked there.
    We went out to ghetto, back to the ghetto.
    And the ghetto was always less and less and less.
    And my parents were always less and less independent
    and more and more relied on me.
    So the roles reversed between parents and children.
    Not children, because it was only me.
    That it was me who directed them what to do
    and how I'd like-- for instance, when I
    had to go to work with mother.
    The Germans looked up and mother got old very suddenly
    in the ghetto.
    Where, as it happened, it coincided with her menopause
    too.
    So that was really a hard thing because she
    acted sometimes very strange and I was very much afraid.
    Everything fell on her and she just
    couldn't digest the tragedy which fell upon her.
    And I sometimes was the one who had to lead her
    and say it will be good.
    And I remember I pinched her cheeks sometimes
    so she could survive, because maybe I
    made a little bit her hair so that the Germans won't
    say you are too old to work.
    So this was a couple of memories from the ghetto.
    And then of course there was also
    memories where I met a young man who worked in a soup kitchen.
    And you know, when you are 20 years old
    you no matter what situation you have thrust into,
    you always have a little bit romantic space in you
    because that keeps you alive.
    And I met a young man who was very kind to me.
    And he gave me always thick soups and things like that.
    So I sometimes met him.
    But he had somebody else, I had somebody else.
    But there developed some kind of rapport between us.
    And I remembered him long after that.
    That was, of course, my present husband.
    But I didn't know at that time yet.
    But when it came the time that the ghetto got
    from 20,000 to a couple of hundred I said, that's it.
    And I discussed it with my mother the last day.
    And the last night when I knew that I'm
    leaving in the morning--
    you know, we rather stayed away from kissing or touching
    or something because you change.
    In order to survive, you have to lose your--
    certain feelings disappear from you.
    But that was the last night.
    And mother just touched me, because she
    had her own thoughts and I had my own thoughts.
    And the only thing what I remember that I just
    wanted to just nobody should touch me
    and nobody should kiss me.
    Just to push it away because one more touch and one more kiss,
    I'm not going to leave.
    And that was the reason.
    I didn't-- I never explained it to her.
    I hope she understood it.
    Because then she wanted to touch me, I just like--
    I pushed it away.
    And I did it in order that I should be able to leave.
    And the next, before I left, my father
    gave me that talisman which I carried with me.
    And I never, never leave it.
    Wherever I go, that talisman goes with me.
    And somehow, I don't--
    I'm not superstitious otherwise.
    But I truly believe that that talisman has saved me
    from a lot of situations.
    And when the time will be that I have to go,
    then I have to decide which of my children will have it.
    And that was the ghetto.
    And I went away.
    And I went back to Budapest, where at that time,
    even so that Hitler hurrying, advancing and all over.
    But it was still not--
    it was still not the ghetto.
    Only a couple of months later--
    What year was this?
    I was there a whole year in the ghetto, from 1941 to 1942.
    And I have to tell you one incident there.
    Because that is an--
    I try not to go into little details.
    No, it's OK.
    But this detail is so remarkable that I have to mention it.
    After about 25 or 26 days--
    the 20th day they caught us.
    I think-- did I mention it?
    Or I didn't mention it.
    No.
    Or I told you that before.
    So we were walking at night to reach Hungary from Poland
    to [INAUDIBLE].
    I mean, it was a long road, but I cannot go into every aspect
    in it.
    But in any case, we were walking at night
    and sleeping in the daytime.
    And that was just about the last day
    before we saw already the Hungarian border.
    When we-- somebody probably who noticed us
    talking to the German guards.
    And they came off this--
    we were 10 of us who were escaping from the ghetto.
    And they came up, the German guard,
    and they shot everybody on sight.
    And I ran away that time.
    And it was laying there, a big tree, you know,
    eaten up from the moss, hollow inside.
    There is a lot of fate was in my life
    that I have to strongly believe that there must be something,
    somebody, somewhere who prepared that tree for me there
    where I went in that tree.
    In that hollow tree was laying and I was laying.
    And I was in the tree.
    And I just heard the shouting and crying
    and said, no, no, no until everything got quiet.
    And I walked out from the tree and what I saw
    was only dead people.
    And I started to walk.
    Because I think that time, that from that day on,
    I was not quite right.
    And I think I was singing or something.
    And I said, I'm going back to mama and how wonderful it is.
    And I stumbled by accident over the smuggler
    who was also escaping.
    But not only that, he was getting
    he was getting shot and escaping and I found him.
    But everybody had the little knapsack.
    You know, a little knapsack where we had things.
    And he, in a big hurry, instead of taking his knapsack,
    he took my knapsack.
    And I'm the one who survived.
    So those little incidents what I sometimes
    wonder how that worked out.
    And so I found him, but he was injured.
    And he said he cannot do nothing.
    And he gave me his pocket knife in his thigh
    He was-- they probably, as they shot, they shot at my back
    and it went into his thigh near the genital areas.
    And he gave that little knife.
    And he said that I have to take that bullet out, which I did.
    And he was there for the night.
    And then he said write me that letter
    that you are here so I can get my money.
    I won't get too much in any case because from the 10 of you,
    you are the only one survived.
    So that's what the paper, what I showed you, that I wrote.
    And that was from the woods.
    This was the Hungarian woods in Korosmezo.
    Could you spell that?
    Korosmezo.
    Yeah, you can write it for me.
    Where shall-- well, how will I know?
    Here, I write down here.
    This is a border town.
    Korosmezo.
    This is a border town.
    And from there-- when I am in Korosmezo,
    I am already in Hungary.
    So he said that--
    he covered me also with leaves and he said I don't feel good.
    So he left me with my knapsack.
    But I had a little sweater on.
    And it was cold in the woods already.
    And he said-- and he gave me an onion,
    by the way, which was very good.
    And he went away.
    And he said he will come for me.
    He will whistle a certain way so I know.
    Because that was-- so it was in the woods,
    but people could still go there.
    And he said when you hear that whistle, then
    tell that this is you.
    So and he went away.
    And he left me there four and half--
    four days and one night I was in the woods by myself.
    So I was really--
    can you imagine a 20-year-old girl in the woods, you know,
    rain or not rain or anything?
    And there was one incident where something moved.
    I probably moved.
    And the peasant came there who was taking lambs to eat,
    to graze or whatever you call it.
    And he heard and he come straight,
    he came straight where I am.
    And I was just at heart length to there,
    covered with leaves there.
    And I heard the steps closer and closer.
    And the only what he did, he peed.
    And he peed on me.
    And I was just standing there.
    And that was one of the incidents.
    And then people ask me, so what did you eat for four days?
    I mean, you have to eat for four days, which
    is not necessarily so.
    But I had that one onion and then blueberries grew that time
    in the--
    so then I felt safe enough in the night then I went around me
    and I ate some blueberries.
    But the fourth night, I dreamed about my fiancee in Hungary
    at that time.
    And it was a beautiful wedding and everything.
    And when I got up and I was in the situation in whatever I
    was in there, and I looked up I said this is--
    I can't.
    There was a limit what I could endure.
    And I said, well, I just don't care anymore, nothing,
    when I heard the whistle.
    So little coincidences.
    And he did come.
    And I told him, where were you?
    I couldn't talk so good to him because he
    didn't talk Hungarian, I didn't so good Polish.
    But he said he was sick.
    I mean, I believe it.
    I'm not such a good surgeon.
    So he came for me the fifth day.
    And he took me to a place that I had to walk up on the top
    because I was ill.
    So I was in Hungary.
    I think my husband explained it, when they catch you there,
    then they immediately send you back to Germany.
    So everybody was afraid to give--
    well, to hide you.
    Right.
    So I was up there in some kind of an attic
    waiting for further instructions to go deeper into Hungary.
    The deeper you got into Hungary, the safer
    you were that the Germans, that they won't give you over
    to the Germans.
    This was in 1942.
    And as I was walking down the steps because he
    told me to come down now.
    We are ready.
    We have a car and we will go to the next town, which
    is [INAUDIBLE].
    And as I walk down, I saw a figure
    on the bottom of the steps.
    And I didn't recognize quite and he probably
    didn't recognize me.
    But when I wrote that letter--
    you know what I gave?
    My fiancee, he himself came all the way to the border town
    to bring that town.
    And that was him standing downstairs.
    Well, I don't go into the feelings and sentimental
    aspects of it.
    I leave that to your imagination.
    [LAUGHS]
    But it was something to behold.
    And his life was, of course, that time in danger.
    Because if they would catch him, he would also--
    even though he was a Hungarian citizen.
    But what I wanted to tell you, what I
    don't want to leave out--
    as we wanted to go to [INAUDIBLE] get [INAUDIBLE]..
    And from [INAUDIBLE],, you already are in Hungary.
    You can go with the trains, cars, buses,
    whatever you want to.
    But until that time, you were in danger.
    And there was a long row of cars before the bridge.
    When you passed the bridge, you were already on my destination.
    There was a long line of cars.
    And on the beginning of the car, the chauffeur
    looked out, the one that was paid.
    And he said, we are in trouble because they're
    checking the cars.
    And when I heard that they're checking the cars,
    my first instinct was to jump out.
    Because if they see me the way I looked, full with lice.
    I was full with lice, by the way.
    My head was full with lice.
    I was dirty.
    I was bleeding.
    I had wounds.
    I had all kinds of things from the woods.
    And if they catch him, they will-- he
    will pay with his life for it.
    So I wanted to jump out from the car.
    And if that's the way it has to be and he was holding me back.
    And suddenly a soldier comes to our car.
    Mind you, there was a long line of cars
    there before us crossing the bridge.
    And he doesn't even look in the back.
    And this was such a remarkable incident
    that I will never forget it.
    And he doesn't look in the back.
    He just goes to the chauffeur and he says, you know,
    I lost my key.
    I can't even remember what he said--
    license or my key or if he said something to the chauffeur.
    Would you please drive me to Korosmezo?
    And the chauffeur said, of course.
    He was an officer of the Hungarian army.
    And the chauffeur said of course.
    And he came in and sat next to the chauffeur.
    And as we walked by the cars, and as we reached the point
    where the guy checked everybody's car,
    they just looked in and saw a Hungarian officer.
    And they just saluted and we went by.
    So to this day, to this day, number one,
    I don't forget the incident.
    And number two, I don't believe in supernatural.
    I cannot quite believe it.
    But there is a tiny little doubt in me
    whether this was not some kind of an angel sent down.
    Because why would-- I mean, it is a coincidence
    to be mentioned.
    Oh, yes.
    Indeed.
    You know you had mentioned earlier
    when we were talking that you had some type of an encounter
    with Wallenberg.
    Yeah.
    Well, that came later.
    Yes, because when I came--
    then I came back to Hungary.
    And in Hungary, as I said, that time was--
    I was from 1941 from 1942 in the ghetto.
    And that time, Germany still didn't occupy Hungary.
    It was no ghetto yet.
    It was my aunt there.
    And she asked me what it was.
    And she didn't believe I ate potato peels
    and stuff like that.
    But as we closed into the year, more and more Germans
    came to Hungary.
    Until finally, on the Main Street of Hungary,
    the Germans marched in.
    And that was the end.
    Hungary was occupied by German.
    And you know Horthy.
    Horthy was the-- so he went away with his white horse and stuff
    like that.
    But he tried, as a matter of fact, to save the Jews.
    But he was too weak to do anything in that respect.
    And then the Germans came in.
    And then, of course, German took over
    like they took over the other countries.
    And then came the ghetto.
    And knowing what the ghetto is because I
    had a little bit of experience before, so I said,
    I am not going to go in the ghetto.
    And as I said, I worked with that lawyer
    and I had these papers from this lawyer's daughter,
    what I stole from the safe.
    And I said I'm not.
    And my aunt said, well, come with us and everything.
    She said, by the way, that time, she said, now I
    know what you told me what went on in the ghetto.
    I can believe it now more.
    And as the year went by, she believed me,
    unfortunately, more and more.
    She was a very lovely lady, very nice aunt what I had.
    So they all went to ghetto and I went with the Catholic papers.
    Do you know where the Balaton is?
    Yes.
    That's a lake.
    Balaton Lake, I was working with my friend,
    with a Hungarian friend of mine, as a maid and a nurse.
    One week I was the maid and she was the nurse,
    and one week I was a nurse and she was the maid.
    We work there months with my papers that I had.
    And she had other papers.
    It was Catholic.
    We went to church.
    And I learned to pray and all stuff with the children.
    And one day, a policeman comes to our house
    and checks our papers.
    Checked her paper and checked my paper.
    And just said, OK.
    We will check it out and we'll come for you in the morning.
    And I knew that they will check out my papers.
    This was an aristocrat where I worked.
    He had a phone, you know?
    Yeah, sure.
    That lawyer.
    So I knew that they will know that I am not
    the daughter from that aristocratic man.
    So I said to my friend, Monica, I said, you know what?
    They will know that we have papers.
    Let's run away.
    And we went out to the railroad in the night.
    I had four children there and the parents
    were somewhere else.
    So I tucked them in.
    And I hope nothing will happen to the children.
    And we went through the window.
    And we went to the railroad station.
    And at the railroad station, we met
    the same guy who came that day for us for our papers.
    That was the end of our freedom.
    They caught both of us.
    And that's how we went from camp to camp to camp to camp.
    And I was, that time--
    that was in 1943.
    So two years.
    These were all Hungarian work camps?
    These were all Hungarian work camps.
    Only that one, [INAUDIBLE],, which
    was near the Austrian border.
    And I ran away from most of them, by the way.
    Because I had the experience already.
    This, I cannot go to every aspect of camp life.
    It would take too long.
    But if you want something to know, I can tell you.
    I had many, many incidents.
    Which one or two stands out?
    The one with Wallenberg.
    The one that stands out.
    Were were in-- that was, I think it was [INAUDIBLE]..
    You see, my memory is failing me too.
    What Wallenberg did, he had a truck
    and he had a list of names.
    And he went to these camps.
    Because from these camps-- you know, like
    for instance [INAUDIBLE],, where we were,
    there was a camp when the war was [? full ?] written
    "goodbye, goodbye."
    Because from [INAUDIBLE],, they went
    to the German concentration camps.
    This was a collective camp where they collected people
    when they had enough.
    You know?
    Because they didn't take just a hundred people that they would
    [? pay. ?] When there were more, then they took them away.
    So this was a camp where from there on there
    was only one way.
    So Wallenberg, with his truck and his men,
    went to these camps with a list.
    At that time, they still acknowledged
    Wallenberg's authority.
    So he came to the camp and we were all standing there.
    And the German-- not the German, the Hungarian guard
    came with him.
    And he said, this list, what I am reading, all stand forward.
    Because this is under the Swiss, Swiss [? Schutz ?] protection.
    And he had that list.
    And I was in the Swiss house.
    That's how he knows my name.
    I think I mentioned it to you that I was there.
    So he comes and reads the list.
    And people stand forward.
    And then he comes near me.
    And I remember his face and everything.
    We called him the "Angel of the Jews"
    because he saved so many Jews.
    He stand before me and he says, are Margaret so-and-so.
    And I was little--
    I guess I was stupid because I didn't want to say nothing
    because I went after the rules.
    So I am not that.
    And the girl next kicked me.
    And said, so why don't you say that you are Maraget so-and-so.
    I said, yes, yes.
    I am Margaret so-and-so.
    Well, why don't you step forward?
    He tells me, Wallenberg.
    Why does it take so long to recognize your name?
    And I stood forward and they took us in the bus
    and they took us back to Budapest.
    And that was one encounter what I
    had with Wallenberg in person.
    And I went back to Budapest.
    And now I didn't have, again, papers.
    So the other things were what I had from my father,
    they were all these gold watches.
    A pocket watch.
    There was a chain.
    And I had that chain, I had that gold chain.
    And I sewed it in--
    not my girdle.
    I didn't wear a girdle.
    But what holds the stockings on.
    What do you call that?
    Garter belt.
    Garter belt.
    Right.
    And I sewed that of the garter belt around it.
    And for that garter belt I bought the papers,
    what I still have home.
    This is the papers, what I showed you.
    And with that papers, I left in one of the Christian--
    I never went to the ghetto.
    I rented the house.
    And Budapest was very, very hard bombed.
    And of course, between bombing and the Germans coming
    to where went in the basement.
    How do you call that?
    The bomb shelter.
    The bomb shelters we were.
    Between that and that, I sometimes
    walked on the streets.
    The bombs were falling.
    The dead people were around me.
    But I felt safer there than in the bomb shelter.
    Because the more it bombed, the more and more Germans came.
    They had nothing better to do.
    And the more and more came to the shelter.
    And took out people.
    And took them out to the Danube.
    And the Danube was floating with thousands of dead people.
    As a matter of fact, I will tell you-- remind me if I forget it.
    Because I have to tell you a very important incident
    after the war.
    Remind me for that.
    So now what did I tell you before?
    The Danube was--
    Oh, yes.
    So January 18, we were liberated by the Russians.
    And January 16, they still came, the Germans looking for Jews.
    And one of them, when they came and I was there in the shelter.
    I couldn't walk anymore on the street because it was just
    really [INAUDIBLE].
    Because the bombs were falling like anything.
    And there I made an [? acquaintance. ?]
    You see, I must to tell you one other aspect here.
    What I don't like to go into that,
    but it may be sometimes embarrassing.
    But I said after the ghetto that I came
    back, I said I have to survive.
    Standing or laying, but I will survive.
    There was no morality left in me.
    Even so, I was brought up in a house where if I wasn't home
    by 8:00, my father was walking before the house, you know?
    And there was one guy who said, well--
    I think, I am almost sure that he knew I was Jewish.
    But he somehow got a liking to me.
    And he said that if I am nice, he will be nice.
    And I said I will be as nice as you want me to be.
    And when the guy came to check--
    because they check the papers, who is Jewish,
    who is not Jewish.
    And there was another family there.
    A woman, a husband-- a woman and her husband and the son.
    A nice, fat, beautiful-looking Jewish boy.
    And she was with papers and I was with papers.
    And somehow one Jew recognized the other one.
    Somehow by feeling or by look or by eyes.
    There was some kind of rapport that one
    knew when the other Jew.
    But one aspect of this, which is--
    maybe nobody told you or maybe they did.
    There was an aspect to it when one Jew was caught,
    then they had the tendency, unfortunately, if I was caught,
    then you should be caught too.
    I don't go into psychological reasoning.
    But maybe there is a reasoning.
    There is an answer to it.
    And when the German guy came, when
    the Nazi came to check the papers,
    they saw the boy was standing beside me.
    It runs out?
    Can we--
    Oh, yes.
    So as I said, they came, these Nazis, the Hungarian Nazis,
    what they call the Nyilas Garaz--
    that was the Hungarian name--
    they were sometimes more brutal and more perverse
    than the Germans, if you can be more.
    The Minka?
    Nyilas.
    Nyilas.
    No, Minkas was in Romania.
    This was the Nyilas.
    So when he came to that to this couple what I told you,
    that mother and father and son, and take their papers
    and they did not accept their papers.
    And they took them out, and of course as I told at that time,
    there was such a big bombardment That they didn't have time
    to take them to the Danube, so they shot them
    all, the mother father and son.
    I found that out later.
    I didn't know that they were shot right before the house.
    But that was not the end of the story.
    As they walked out, they looked at me.
    And I knew that in that moment, in that how
    do they say that in English?
    That comes a moment of--
    Moment of truth.
    A moment of truth.
    In that moment of truth, I didn't
    know will they tell me if they take me she's Jewish too.
    Or they will say that or they will not say that,
    but in order to save that moment of truth--
    You see everybody had the blanket or a quilt
    or we called it different.
    And in that moment when they took them out I thought,
    I have to--
    You see, that time I escaped from so many things
    already that I had a little bit of experience
    and I was far from that naive already what I was before.
    I said to the guy who was standing beside me,
    I said, these people, these Jews--
    I used the word--
    they had a very nice blanket and I don't have one,
    can I have it?
    Startled, the guy who checked my paper, before I even gave him
    my papers the other guy said, well, you
    don't have to check her out.
    She will have the new blanket from the Jew
    and I will check her out.
    And he didn't even had my papers in his hand
    because my papers was even so I have it with me
    and they were not--
    I was a prostitute according to that kind of papers I had.
    And I certainly acted sometimes accordingly.
    So that's another story again that in any case they went away
    and they took them out and they shot them.
    Now I have to interject here now a scene.
    These people whom they shot before the house,
    she had a brother.
    And after the war, when we were still in that house,
    the brother came to pick up whatever they had.
    And then he said, I heard that there was somebody here,
    some shiksa here who took away my dead brothers whom
    they shot before the house.
    I want to confront that woman.
    And I was still-- because that time was still
    not safe to go out.
    But even so that the Russians took already over,
    the Germans sometimes came back and forth,
    so it was not safe yet to give yourself away.
    And I never did that.
    Some people did it.
    They gave themselves away and then the Germans came back.
    That was the end of them.
    I still didn't because I knew that they come.
    Budapest is two parts--
    Buda and Pest.
    And in Buda was the Germans in Pest was the Russians.
    And they went back and forth and it took two,
    three weeks until finally the Russians took over.
    So he wanted to confront me that who is that who took her
    and to tell me certain things.
    And when he came there and confronted me,
    and it was even so the time that the Russians were there already
    and I was still afraid, I said, just
    don't make too much commotion.
    I did that to save my life.
    I'm Jewish too.
    We talked there some time and he says, well, in that case
    I understand it.
    So that was the aftereffect of that case.
    So in any case, we were there in that shelter
    all the way until January 18.
    In the night, one the Russian guy comes down.
    You see there I talk about the Russians
    so much because the Russians are the ones who liberated us.
    Not the Russians, I'm not here.
    This is 1945 already.
    That is 1945, January 18.
    So my war lasted from 1941 till 1945.
    So I was 4 and 1/2 years wherever.
    So when the first Russians came in-- and mind you,
    I was still with Catholic papers there.
    When the first Russians came in, somehow you
    know I, in any case, [INAUDIBLE] already with the bombardment is
    just catching the parents and everything,
    I am quite sure that I was mentally really not right,
    and understandably so.
    So I was really, really on the end of my line.
    I couldn't take too much more anymore.
    And when I saw the first Russian I
    sat there with other young people around everywhere,
    wherever we were living in the shelter.
    That was in the basement, of course, and half of it
    was bombed and everything.
    And I wanted to run to that Russian
    and kiss him from top to toe.
    I'm free!
    I'm free!
    You know the movies?
    And they were holding me back and they said, don't you
    know what the Russians are doing?
    They did a lot of raping, you know that.
    And they didn't care about whether they rape
    18-year-old or 88 years old.
    They didn't care.
    But the difference it was that the first fighting group who
    fights for a city is always the elite of the military
    and they do not do any raping.
    They are not the one who does it.
    The occupying troops are the one who does it when all kind of it
    was free.
    Free robbery, free raping.
    You could do everything.
    But the first elite group didn't do too much raping.
    But I wanted to go out, and then the girl next to me
    said, what are you so happy about to see the Russian?
    Wasn't that-- She started because she really
    didn't know who I am.
    She just knew, hi, my name is [[Jotko Maria ?].
    So she was holding me back and I didn't go.
    But the second day, because then they
    came more and more Russians to the basement looking
    for men who were hiding also.
    And that young man who stood beside me and he said--
    You know that was up on the floor it was a department store
    and they had in the department store they had honey left.
    Food was a big thing that time.
    And he comes to me and he says, before yet the Russians came,
    he said, you know what?
    There is a big, big container of honey there.
    We will go up there and I will give you a lot of honey.
    And honey, that was gold at that time.
    And that was already after that incident with the Germans.
    So I said, no I don't need it anymore.
    But as he said, you know what?
    I will give you the honey.
    I saved your life.
    But he knew already that the Russians are on the corner.
    But when it comes to it, will you save mine?
    Well, how can I say what he said?
    You know how you can save it.
    So he knew who I was because he wouldn't ask me
    that question that whether I can save your life or not.
    So when the Russians came in, when they were already
    in looking for Hungarian soldiers or non-Jews,
    he came to me and he said, help me to get out of here.
    I helped you, you help me.
    And I did help him to escape.
    Whether I did it right or wrong but I did it and he did escape.
    I don't know what happened.
    Well, in any case then the Russians
    came in and then of course it started--
    I don't know whether you know about the aspect of how
    the Russians behaved.
    I mean it was soup kitchens again
    and it was again standing in the line.
    It was all the ruins.
    And I had nobody.
    I just walked on the streets, you know, and saw people
    coming out from the ghetto.
    And everybody said, oh [? Yancika ?]..
    [? Elzika ?] [? Pistika ?] [? Jurika ?] And I went there
    and I had nobody because everybody died.
    So I said, well, I will look for my aunt.
    You know that aunt who didn't believe?
    They were in the ghetto and they were the rich aunts
    in the family because they had a house in Hungary,
    and that was like having a house in New York at that time.
    So they had some six, seven rooms,
    and that was an awful lot of room in Hungary.
    Here you know people who work and can have
    four rooms too it's nothing.
    So in any case they did survive.
    And I did go to them.
    And it was a big, beautiful reunion.
    Of course they took away their house
    and they took away their apartment
    and they gave them the room where the maid used to live.
    And there where the maid used to live,
    there I was living with them for a while
    until they got another room attached to--
    They got back their own room.
    Not the house, just a room, because the Russians of course
    won't give them back the house.
    And what was life, you will ask me, after the bombardment,
    after the Russians came in?
    It was a tough life.
    It was, first of all, the first days were--
    the first week, rather-- after the war
    it was also interesting.
    You know we lived on the fourth floor
    when we didn't go to the shelter.
    And after the so-called , fighting I went up
    on the fourth floor and looked out the window,
    because I was more or less like freer because after five years
    you felt, well, Mommy, I survived.
    And I was rather careless that time
    and I went and I looked out the window
    because I wanted to see what is a war.
    You see this is not a war like here they drop an atomic bomb
    and everybody's boom finished.
    There they are fighting corner to corner.
    And I went up on the window and I looked down
    I saw this one is Germans and this one is Russian.
    They are shooting.
    And I look out of the window, so they shot up
    and they almost shot my head off.
    So I got, well, because I didn't know better.
    So I went back until things subsided.
    That time houses were closed yet and Russians
    were standing all over.
    And slowly, slowly life got back to it everything.
    You couldn't buy nothing.
    And as I said, I was secretary for a lawyer and I
    had to make something to--
    Money didn't mean anything and I had nothing anymore to sell.
    The only thing it is to work and get food for it.
    And the lawyer where I worked, whom I worked before once,
    he took me back.
    Some people came to get advice and they gave him
    eggs and bread or pork fat or whatever they gave him
    he gave me part of it as a payment to the secretary
    until--
    Things didn't get back to more or less
    I couldn't call it normal because this
    was far from normal.
    Until I met one day, a friend of our father and mother who did
    survive.
    Her family didn't survive, but her house, her room was bombed
    and she lived in a small room.
    And her living room got the full hit from the bomb
    and it had the hole in the middle.
    And so I lived in the little room in that house.
    And she was very attached to me because I was young
    and I worked.
    Budapest has many, many beautiful, beautiful bridges
    which were all bombed, all the bridges.
    So people went through the Danube back to Buda
    to get potatoes or flowers.
    So I sometimes brought it back so she
    was attached to me because she knew
    that being young I will bring something also.
    And by the way, that time there was another incident
    what maybe I will tell you certain main aspects of it.
    There was a couple of days after things settled down.
    There was a so-called free looting.
    So people went with big bags in these big department stores
    and whatever they found they put it in the bag
    and they took it home.
    It was free loot.
    The Russians stood there and told you to take it.
    If you went out empty handed, they
    sent you back to take something.
    So I live there in that house where above it
    was a department store.
    And in this department store.
    I thought I will go looting too.
    Why not, other people do?
    But I didn't prepare myself for the proper looting.
    I didn't have a bag, I didn't have a knife,
    I didn't have the scissor, so I was not quite
    made for this looting business.
    And there was big, giant men that
    are cutting materials and everything.
    And I was just there.
    If they make me, I was some 85, 90 pounds.
    If they gave me a push I would just fall down.
    And they said, if you want to live, you better go away.
    But I want to loot, so I went down where the food was.
    And there in the food people went also
    and took the silverware and whatever it is.
    And finally, one guy lifted me up
    and put me on a bag of flour.
    And he said, you stay here if you want to be alive.
    Because they were strong people and I was just
    the wind could blow me away that time.
    And I was seeing that people took everything
    and I stood there on the bag of flour
    until everything was looted out.
    And I stood there with the bag of flour.
    Of course, I couldn't take the bag of flour
    and that was full with pickles and jams and everything
    and on me.
    But I still was sitting on a bag of flour.
    So what did I do?
    I had one and only dress, and I took the flour
    and I put it in here like this in there.
    And I went all the way walked that way to my landlady
    and I said, here we have flour we make bread
    from it, which we took out the glass
    and we did make bread from it.
    But after a while it was not humorous anymore
    with the soup kitchens and everything.
    And I left that time.
    I went away from my aunt and I lived
    in a friend of mine, the same friend who was together
    with me in the camp.
    I went to that house and I lived.
    And there was they call it belated reactions when
    you know you survived, when you know five years went away
    and you survived, alone, but you survived.
    And then after that when you know
    that it comes that psychological for what and for whom
    and for why?
    And that was on the fourth floor where I lived that time.
    And it was in December.
    And I was just alone.
    I came to the point that I needed
    help, which I, of course, didn't get psychological help.
    So I opened the window and I went on the windowsill.
    And I thought, well--
    Many people did that, by the way.
    I was not the only one.
    And I said, well, let's finish it up.
    And my landlady, who was a very nice lady,
    she came into the room, and she says,
    Elizabeth, you must be crazy.
    You are opening the window and the whole heat what
    I put up here it goes away.
    I mean, I don't heat here that you open here the windows.
    And I am standing on the window ledge, jumping.
    And I got very mad.
    And I got so mad that I went to her and I started to hit her.
    And I hit her and I hit her and she knelt down beside me
    and said, oh, Elizabeth, don't do that.
    Don't do that.
    She did that and said that just to bring me back
    from the ledge.
    She was a nice lady.
    So after that I said, well, OK.
    Let's start living.
    And I went to the soup kitchen and I asked for a job
    in the soup kitchen.
    And in there there are so many incidents.
    So many incidents happened there during the war, after the war,
    during the bombing, in the ghetto where it is interesting
    but as I told it to Henry, you cannot go into every aspect.
    Well, you can tell any ones that you would like.
    Well, what is really standing out I told you with the--
    So one day when I went home to my landlady I met--
    You see, I was working with a lawyer.
    And in that law office, I met a young Jewish man
    who also survived the war and who
    met me in that soup kitchen.
    He went not for soups, because he
    was at that time in the black market business.
    And he started to make--
    That time people made only money because there was no business.
    There's nothing.
    That was only black markets, and he started the black market
    business very successfully.
    And he always had an eye on me, but I was not too interested.
    But after the war when he gave me a proposition,
    he said, you know what?
    I mean what is that?
    You work in the soup kitchen.
    I have money.
    You will come and live with me and we
    will see what we will do.
    I probably would have become what papers I had before.
    And I said, OK.
    And I went to my landlady and I had, as I said,
    one dress which I washed was full of flour.
    And I said to her, well, I have a date with that man.
    And he was standing down with the car.
    I lived on the second floor that time.
    And I told my landlady he's waiting,
    and my landlady said OK because she wanted something
    from me too.
    And I opened the window and I said,
    I'm coming down five minutes.
    As I said, I had one dress.
    And I went down to go on the road
    what could end like Madame X or who knows what.
    I don't know what would have become.
    But as I walked down the steps going
    to the guy who was waiting for me on the house before the car,
    a Russian soldier comes up the steps.
    And I see a Russian soldier I run because I had incidents
    with a Russian soldier which I didn't tell you
    which I wrote about it if you are interested,
    a jar of pickles, where you know the Russians did their plenty.
    So when I saw Russian I run.
    This was my experience.
    And the Russian guy tells me, well, Elizabeth.
    Don't you recognize me?
    And I didn't recognize him because he
    was in a partisan uniform with a red star.
    To me that was Russian.
    So then I looked at him and then I saw.
    And I went back with him to my landlady,
    and landlady opened the door and said,
    are you crazy bringing a Russian here?
    I said, he's not a Russian, he's not a Russian.
    He's Jewish and I know him from the ghetto.
    And then she said, but he's waiting downstairs
    with the car.
    And I said--
    But you know it's interesting, and I
    don't want to be sentimental about it,
    and we are old enough not to be, but five years I
    fought for my life.
    And in the minute he came into my life,
    I said, well, that's it for me.
    Now take over.
    And he did.
    And that was how we met.
    No more do you ask me now.
    What do you want to know more?
    I think that should probably do it.
    And then of course we dated and then we went to Vienna.
    And from Vienna we went to the consulate.
    And the consulate said the quota is closed.
    And then suddenly my brother kept sending me
    affidavits and everything.
    And meanwhile I got pregnant and we
    thought we'd settle down in Vienna like many other Jews.
    But then one day the consulate writes me a letter,
    the Polish quota is open.
    So the Polish quota is open.
    Let's go to America.
    You mentioned something about a trip to Israel.
    That was just to visit.
    The trip to Israel was before when we knew already
    that we come to America.
    And we had brothers that time in Israel
    so we went to Israel As a matter of- Barbara,
    our daughter, the first move what she made was in Israel.
    So that was the trip before we go.
    But one thing I want to tell you more in the tape
    because that was also a nice incident.
    We came with the Mauretania.
    And when you're nearing the Statue of Liberty,
    the captain, and especially at that time--
    By the way, we were one of the last
    who didn't go to Ellis Island.
    Before us, they still went to Ellis Island.
    When we came it was not Ellis Island anymore.
    So there were two incidents what I want to tell you.
    So when we were on the boat and we
    were nearing the Statue of Liberty,
    and the captain of the boat was reading that,
    "Give me your tired, your poor," and we
    were standing, Henry and I, and he had his story to tell
    and I had my story.
    And I was pregnant and we went to America
    and we were holding hands, and we
    were looking at the Statue of Liberty
    and I said, well, we made it.
    That's the end of the story.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    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.
    Interviewee
    Elizabeth Lubell
    Interviewer
    Sharon Tash
    Date
    interview:  1992 April 10

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    1 sound cassette (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

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Sharon Tash, of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ID Card Project, conducted the interview with Elizabeth Lubell in Peekskill, NY on April 10, 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 08:23:54
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn509160

    Additional Resources

    Transcripts (4)
    Time Coded Notes (3)

    Download & Licensing

    In-Person Research

    Contact Us

    Also in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ID Card Project

    Oral history interview with Miru Alcana

    Oral History

    Miru Alcana, born on the Island of Rhodes, Greece in 1915, describes her life in Rhodes before the war; the implementation of anti-Jewish laws; her deportation from Rhodes to Haidari (Chaidari), near Athens and then to Auschwitz; her experiences first in Auschwitz, then working in a munitions factory near Buchenwald and then her arrival in Theresienstadt (Terezin) immediately after its liberation; her attempts to save lives in the hospital at Terezin; her move to Bologna, Italy to seek assistance from the Jewish community there; and problems with reparations and the effect the losses she suffered during the Holocaust had on her physically and emotionally.

    Oral history interview with Inge Auerbacher

    Oral History

    Inge Auerbacher discusses her prewar life in Kippenheim, Germany, where her orthodox Jewish family lived peacefully with Christians; her memories of Kristallnacht; the transports of Jews beginning in 1941, the 1942 deportation of her entire family to Theresienstadt; the “clean-up” of Theresienstadt done for the benefit of the Red Cross Commission and for a propaganda film; her liberation on May 8, 1945; arriving in the United States in 1946 aboard the Marine Perch; her work as a chemist with renowned scientist, Meyer Friedman; and her life’s work lecturing about the Holocaust and being a voice against bigotry.

    Oral history interview with Helen Balsam

    Oral History

    Helen Balsam, born December 16, 1927 in Bedzin, Poland, discusses her childhood in Poland during World War II; witnessing the destruction and burning of homes and synagogues early in the war; her father’s registration for the Polish Army; early resistance against Germany; her father’s capture in Russia and internment in various labor camps; her family’s placement in a ghetto; her family’s internment in Auschwitz; the hardships she experienced during her internment in a labor camp in Hirschberg (Jelenia Gora), Poland; working in a textile factory; her reunion with her father in Hirschberg; her experiences being transported to multiple camps near the end of the war; her experiences walking through “the roads of death” in Austria; her traumatic experiences in the labor camp, Gunskirchen; her liberation from the labor camp by the American Army; her stay at the German soldiers’ camp, Hirschegg; her long-term hospitalization after the war; and marrying a Christian man from the Hirschegg camp.

    Oral history interview with Irving Balsam

    Oral History

    Irving Balsam, born October 17, 1924 in Praszka, Poland, describes experiencing antisemitism as a schoolboy; his family’s religious observances; the German invasion; his membership in the Hitler Youth as a means of surviving, until he was discovered as a Jew; his deportation as one of the first 80 schoolboys deported from his home town; his time in several concentration and slave labor camps, including one near Poznan; being sent to Auschwitz in 1943; being transferred to Lagisza concentration camp; his liberation by the American Army on May 5, 1945; immigrating to the United States in December 1948; giving testimony at war crimes trials; and his personal convictions on why he survived.

    Oral history interview with Harry Bass

    Oral History

    Harry Bass, born July 7, 1919 in Bialystok, Poland, discusses his childhood in Bialystok; his mother and father and five siblings; speaking Yiddish at home; graduating from high school; the Russian occupation of Bialystok; antisemitism and the boycott of Jewish properties; working in the kitchen of a Russian textile factory; the German occupation of Poland in 1941; his memories of the Germans killing Jews by throwing them into burning synagogues; living with his family in the Bialystok ghetto until its liquidation in January 1943; being taken to Pruzany with his mother, sister, and two brothers; the trek to the Linowo (Linova, Belarus) train station eight kilometers away; the cattle car journey to Auschwitz; delousing and washing after his arrival in the camp; receiving an identification number; the death of his mother and two youngest brothers in Auschwitz; the Sonderkommando revolt in Auschwitz; working in the camps; his liberation in Germany in May 1945 following a death march; sailing on a ship, named the Capricorn, on the Elbe to Noishta-Limbeck; and working for the Board of Education in Germany after the end of the war.

    Oral history interview with Abraham Bergman

    Oral History

    Abraham Bergman, born June 15, 1924, in Krasnik, Poland, describes his prewar life in Lublin; his experiences with violent antisemitism; the German occupation of his town; his work at menial jobs assigned by the Judenrat; the first deportations in 1941; how, by September 1942, the town was “Jedenrein,” cleansed of Jews; the “Judenkarde,” the legal document which allowed Jews to remain; his transport to Budzyn labor camp; the Ukrainian and SS guards in the camp; doing forced labor for the German company Henklewerk; and being transported to Majdenek in 1944 where he became the foreman of a group of shoemakers.

    Oral history interview with Hans Bergman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Alice Bogart

    Oral History

    Alice Bogart (née Winternitz), born May 7, 1926, discusses her childhood in Prague, Czech Republic; her parents and her brother, Peter Winternitz; restrictions placed on Jews after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia; her and her brother’s involvement with the Zionist youth group, “Helping Hands;” going to the countryside to help farmers as unpaid laborers; how her brother was sent on one of the first two small transports, Arbeit Kolona 1 and 2, to build Terezin; how she and her parents joined her brother at Terezin in July 1942; the death of her parents and brother in Terezin in March 1943; doing forced labor at Terezin during the rest of the war; being sick with typhoid when Russian troops liberated the camp 1945; returning to Prague, where she continued to recuperate; and how after eventually managing to contact her uncle in New York; and going to the United States in July 1946.

    Oral history interview with George Brieger

    Oral History

    George Brieger describes his familly’s experience during the Holocaust; his father Anno Brieger, who was born in Nyathalas, Hungary in 1925; his mother and grandmother who came from Munkatch; his grandfather Adolph Brieger; his family’s prewar life in Nyiregyhaza; changes as Hungary took control of Nyireghaza in 1938; the ghettoization of their town; his father and grandfather’s deportation to Auschwitz; his grandfather’s liberation by the Russians and subsequent deportation to Siberia, where he perished; his father and uncle’s forced march to Bergen-Belsen from which they were eventually liberated by the British and then relocated to Sweden; his father’s arrival in the United States in 1977; and how his father remained the only survivor of his five siblings, his parents, and grandparents.

    Oral history interview with Maria Brieger

    Oral History

    Maria Brieger (née Deutsch), born December 19, 1931, discusses her childhood in Budapest, Hungary; her extended family; speaking German at home; studying Hebrew and English at school; attending an orthodox Jewish school and then gymnasium; antisemitism in Hungary; the start of the German occupation of Hungary on March 19, 1944; her father’s store getting taken over by Prime Minister Miklos Kallay’s brother; Raoul Wallenberg organizing fake Red Cross homes in Budapest; caring for children in a home; recovering from an illness brought on by dirt and lice; the death of her mother and father; the liberation of Budapest by Russian forces on January 18, 1945; living with her maternal grandmother after the war; her husband, who was liberated from Bergen-Belsen; living in Nyiregyhaza, Hungary for 25 years; and the Communist government takeover of her family’s store in 1952.

    Oral history interview with Claude Brunswic

    Oral History

    Claude Brunswic (born Kurt Braunschweig), born ca. 1921 in Heidelberg, Germany, describes his life in Germany before the war; his father’s medical practice; the lack of antisemitism in Heidelberg before the war; the German army arriving in Heidelberg in January 1933 and the subsequent persecution of the Jews; his family’s decision to leave Germany and move to The Hague, Holland; his membership in the Hachshara in The Hague; his father’s acquisition of French nationality due to his French grandfather; the family’s move to France in 1936; working as a cabinetmaker at the piano factory, Pleyel; enlisting in the French Army in the fall of 1939; being transferred to the Maginot Line, where he was captured by Germans in 1940; being sent from Bacharach and to Trier as a prisoner of war; doing forced labor in Laufeld; experiencing forced marches until liberation in January of 1945; his demobilization and reunion with his parents after the war; being employed for the United States Relief and Rehabilitation Administration as a messing officer; and his immigration with his wife to the United States in January 1946.

    Oral history interview with Rose Brunswic

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Renee Carasso

    Oral History

    Renee Carasso, born August 15, 1919 in Preveza, Greece, describes her happy childhood; her father’s textile store; attending school in Iōannina, Greece; the Jewish community in her town; her siblings; playing mandolin; the German invasion of Greece; the restrictions placed on Jews; Germans billeting in their home and bringing prostitutes with them; being deported with her family on March 25, 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau; her three brothers being selected to work in the crematorium; the uprising in Birkenau; her various jobs in the camp; being transferred to Ravensbrück and Malchow; having to work at night on parts for pistols; her friendships in the camps; religion in the camps; her physical condition in the camps; liberation; going with other Greek Jews to a displaced persons camp run by UNRRA; finding her sister; living in a city near Berlin, Germany; returning to Greece with her sister in 1945; getting married; going to the United States; and settling in Baltimore, MD.

    Oral history interview with Magda Cox

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Jacek Dabrowski

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Paula Dash

    Oral History

    Paula Dash (née Garfinkel), born in 1920 in Łódź, Poland, describes life in Łódź; the beginning of the war and the German invasion; the roundup of Jews and deportations; having to turn in their valuables and wear the star of David; being moved into the ghetto and living in one room with her family; rations in the ghetto; the death of her father from starvation in 1942; the deportation of her sister and brother; the atrocities in the ghetto; learning of the mass killings; a Kinder Aktion in the camp when the Nazis rounded up and killed all the children they could find; being sent with her mother and youngest brother in August 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau; being shaved upon entering the camp but not receiving a tattoo; the emotional torture the guards subjected the inmates to; the heavy bombardment to the camp and being crammed into a barrack with hundreds of other people; life in Bergen-Belsen; seeing piles of corpses and the mass graves; being sent briefly to work cleaning bombed out houses in Bremen, Germany, where she found a towel that she managed to keep in the camp; witnessing cannibalism; contracting typhus; receiving help from her friends in the camp; being liberated by the British in April 1945; and her immigration to the United States in 1951.

    Oral history interview with Ani Davidovics

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Juliusz Deczkowski

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Aron Derman

    Oral History

    Aron Derman (né Dereczynski), born on May 5, 1922 in Slonim, Poland (Belarus), describes his life before the war; his parents who were shopkeepers; his experiences with antisemitism before the war; his involvement in the Zionist movement and membership in the Hashomer Hatzair; the boycott of local Jewish businesses towards the end of the 1930s; being on a date in Oftryn when the war began; the arrival of Russian soldiers; his journey to Vilna (Vilnius, Lithuania) in hopes of immigrating to Palestine that came to no avail; the ghettoization of Slonim; the liquidation of half the ghetto and his escape from the round-up; his escape from a German “Aktion”; his decision to leave the ghetto and travel to Grodno; being sent to Auschwitz, escaping the train, getting caught, and being sent back to the ghetto; hiding in the Grodno ghetto and hopping a train headed to Vilna with several friends (including his future wife Lisa Nussbaum); joining the FPO; leaving the ghetto and going to the Narocz forest; joining the Nakamah partisan group, which was disbanded; being in the Kalininski partisans and his activities; being liberated by the Russians; getting married in Rome, Italy in 1947; immigrating to the United States in 1947; and his life after the war in Chicago, IL.

    Oral history interview with Henry Drobiarz

    Oral History

    Henry Drobiarz, born in Sosnowiec, Poland, describes growing up in Kozlow, Poland; attending public school and cheder; his siblings; his family’s religious practices as Orthodox Jews; apprenticing as a tinsmith with his uncle in Sosnowiec; the German invasion and continuing to work as a tinsmith; being sent to Krakow, Poland in 1940; staying in town to work as a tinsmith as other Jews were sent to Slomniki in 1942; hiding with his parents in Kozlow during roundups; the separation of his family to various places; working in Krakow-Jerozolimska (Płaszów) concentration camp; being sent to Mielec concentration camp; his work making airplane parts in the camp; working in Sandomierz concentration camp; being taken to Wieliczka concentration camp in June 22, 1944; being sent to Flossenbürg concentration camp and the terror experienced by the inmates when they thought they were going to be gassed; working in a quarry; being transferred to Leitwezil, Czechoslovakia (possibly Litomerice, Czech Republic) to a carbide mine for six weeks; being sent to Dachau concentration camp for three days then Augsburg to work in a Messerschmitt factory; daily life in Augsburg; being transferred in December 1944 to Leonberg concentration camp; being taken to Kaufering concentration camp for three weeks; being taken to Allach concentration camp; being liberated on May 1, 1945; going to the nearby town; going to Munich, Germany; working for the US Army for a few months; meeting his future wife; going to the United States in December 1949; living in New York, NY; and his life after the war.

    Oral history interview with Maria Efes

    Oral History

    Maria Efes, born on July 15, 1909 in Kopys', Belarus, describes living in Orsha, Belarus; going to Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) in 1924; graduating from the Gertson institute in 1933; working as a speech therapist in a Russian-occupied area of Finland; her parents’ backgrounds; her siblings; being a child psychologist in the 1930s; her studies on school children in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), Russia; going to Crimea, Ukraine in 1936; being a graduate student, studying foreign languages; the German invasion in 1941; her sister’s experience during the German invasion; the bombings; the experiences of her siblings during the war; taking a group of children to Siberia in September 1942; working at a children’s house in Siberia for two years; returning to Leningrad when the war ended; and her husband. [Note that the interviewee describes her early life approximately half-way through the interview.]

    Oral history interview concerning Abraham Ellenbogen and Hanna Ellenbogen

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Selma Engel

    Oral History

    Selma Engel discusses her early childhood and family life in Zwolle, Holland; her three older brothers; attending Dutch public school and Hebrew afternoon school; how her parents ran a kosher hotel; the death of her father in 1941; how in 1942, the Germans threw the family out of their hotel and placed them in a small house with no electricity or bathroom; saying goodbye to her mother and brothers and going into hiding in July 1942; being sent to Sobibor the following year when her mother was sent to Poland; two of her brothers being sent to a work camp, while the third remained in hiding; how at the beginning of the war and in 1945 their hotel was used as a place to hide German Jews who were smuggled to Belgium; her observation that all small towns in Holland have memorials to the Jews who were killed during the war.

    Oral history interview with Lonia Fishman

    Oral History

    Lonia Fishman (née Goldman, born on May 3, 1920 in Wegrow, Poland) and her husband, Sevek Fishman, discuss Lonia’s childhood and her family; attending public school and a Hebrew school; making and selling quilts in Warsaw, Poland with her sister; her family’s move to Warsaw; getting married; the German invasion; how some Jews committed suicide; Sevek’s experience getting shot in the ghetto; stocking up on supplies with the family; the resolve of the family to remain together and not separate; Sevek’s mother; the Jewish police in the ghetto; Sevek witnessing his father being shot to death; and her sister Edith Goldman.

    Oral history interview with Sevek Fishman

    Oral History

    Sevek Fishman, born on July 14, 1918 in Kaluszyn, Poland, describes his childhood and attending a Jewish school; religious observations in his family; apprenticing as a tailor; the Jewish community; the German invasion; antisemitic propaganda; the roundups; going to the Warsaw ghetto with his whole family; smuggling in food for his family; his work removing corpses from the ghetto streets; his work for Organisation Todt; being sent briefly to a small camp; hiding with his wife during another roundup in the neighboring suburb Wegrów, Poland; escaping from the ghetto; people hiding out in the woods outside Warsaw; hiding in a hole in the floor of a house with his wife for 18 months; being liberated by Jewish soldiers and sent to a field hospital; and his reflections on the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Jack Frenkel and Henry Frenkel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Irene Freund

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with John Friedmann

    Oral History

    John Friedmann, born on born October 19, 1913 in Vrbove, Czechoslovakia (now in Slovakia), describes growing up in Vienna, Austria; his apprenticeship as a salesman in a linoleum business; the German annexation of Austria; being arrested and sent to a jail in Linz, Austria in August 1938; being taken by cattle car to Dachau concentration camp; the work and various prisoners in the camp; being sent to Weimar before being transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp; his work in the camp; hangings in the camp; his mother’s attempts to write to the camp officials and get John out; being released and returning to Vienna; Kristallnacht in November 1938; going to Shanghai, China in December 1938; his mother joining him in Shanghai; working as a supervisor for the trash dumps; working for the Shanghai Bus Company; having to live in the ghetto; working for Citroën Motors; getting a job in the Toyota Company, which allowed him a pass to leave the ghetto; the arrival of American troops and being hired as a foreman in the ATC (Air Transport Command); flying to Alaska with a Jewish organization in 1949; going to Vancouver then Toronto; working for Austin Motor Company; getting married in 1950; and moving to California in December 1950.

    Oral history interview with Irene Frisch

    Oral History

    Irene Frisch (b. Bienstock), born in 1931 in Dohobyz, Poland (Drohobych, Ukraine), describes her life in pre-war Poland; her parents; her father’s occupation as a businessman; her family’s housekeeper, Frania Osobokowa, who helped save her life; the beginning of the war and ghettoization of Dohobyz; the harsh conditions her family endured while in the ghetto; Frania’s willingness to house and feed her, her mother, and her sister during the war; the murder and persecution of Jews after the liquidation of the ghetto; her survival in hiding and liberation by the Russian Army; antisemitism in Poland after the war; her miraculous reunion with her father on a train; her experience with antisemitism in high school and her struggles with her principal; her family’s decision to immigrate to Israel and the painful goodbye with Frania; her emigration from Israel to the United States in 1961; her life in the United States; and her lasting relationship with Frania.

    Oral history interview with Andrzej Garczynski

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Bozenna Gilbride

    Oral History

    Bozenna Gilbride, née Urbonowicz, discusses her childhood in Wolyn, Poland (present day Volhynia, Ukraine); her Christian farming parents; how her father hid Jews in a shed on his farm early in World War II; escaping after Ukrainians burned her family’s farm and their village; immigrating to Germany, unaware of what was happening there; working in a factory making leather goods for German soldiers; working in a slave labor camp in Chemnitz; contracting TB; how her mother was suspected of being in the Polish underground and was sent to Ravensbrück, where she was sterilized; how her mother was sent to Gross-Rosen; her feelings about being separated from her mother; the arrival of American troops; the behavior of German citizens; living in a displaced persons camp in Leipzig from 1945 until the beginning of 1947; immigrating to the United States; and her mother’s difficulty in obtaining a visa to join the family in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Marian Gnyp

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Alma Goldberg

    Oral History

    Alma Goldberg (née Bressler), born on March 22, 1930 in Czernowitz, Bukovina (Chernivtsi, Ukraine), describes her younger sister (Lydia Bressler Goldring); her father’s import business; her religiously traditional family; attending soccer games with her father; attending a Romanian school and learning Hebrew from a private teacher at home; experiencing antisemitism from other children; living in an integrated neighborhood; hiding during the pogroms committed by Romanians, Ukrainians, and Cossacks; going with her family to Bucharest, Romania; the bombardments in Bucharest; having to leave a cinema once because of the bombing; attending school in Bucharest; sending family heirlooms to relatives in Israel and hiding other possessions; going to Switzerland with her family then Milan, Italy; going with her family to Cuba in 1948; attending business school and being a secretary, using six languages; living in Havana; moving to the United States; and her life in the US.

    Oral history interview with Charles Goldberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Helen Goldkind

    Oral History

    Helen Goldkind discusses her grandmother, who was 80 years old when she was taken to Auschwitz; her childhood in Volosyanka (Ukraine); her extended family, most of whom were deported to Auschwitz; growing up as one of seven children; the Hungarian occupation of her town in 1939; her limited access to education; speaking Czech and Yiddish; restrictions under Hungarian rule; how her parents were forced to close their store; her brothers’ deportation to a Hungarian labor camp; the arrival of German forces in her town between 1942 and 1943; the establishment of a ghetto in a brick factory in Uhzgorod; being forced to move into the ghetto in 1943, where she lived for a few months; her deportation to Auschwitz; the commotion and confusion she experienced during her arrival at Auschwitz; the deaths of family members; staying together with her sister in the camps; being sent to Bergen-Belsen with her sister; and how her sister aided in her survival.

    Oral history interview with Philip Goldstein

    Oral History

    Philip Goldstein, born in 1922, discusses his childhood in Radom, Poland; his secular and religious education in Poland; joining the youth Zionist movement; participating in Hashomer Hatzair in Radom; the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and his family’s house arrest; forced labor; being marched to many towns in Poland including Belzec, Lublin, Annapol, and Krasnik; seeing his family for the last time in 1942; his deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau with his brother; life in the camp; contracting typhus; walking from Auschwitz to Birkenau; living conditions in Birkenau; mass killings in Birkenau; building the gas chambers and crematoriums; the uprising in Birkenau in October 1944; returning to Auschwitz; evacuating Auschwitz-Birkenau; being forced to march to Gross-Rosen; rumors about war’s end; being liberated by U.S. troops; his relatives who survived; living in a displaced persons camp; immigrating to New York in 1945; and his family and life in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Sally Goldstein

    Oral History

    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 Robert Gruber

    Oral History

    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.

    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 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

    View All 146 Items in the Collection