Oral history interview with Sonia Brodecki

Sonia Brodecki describes how she was in three concentration camps during the Holocaust, including camps in Kindabricka, Kletendorf, and Ludwigsdorf; how in Ludwigsdorf she made ammunition and her whole body was blue-green from the powder; how she was warned on May 7, 1945 that they were going to blow up the camp, but the Russians liberated them the next day; how she had kept up her hope in the camps by envisioning her return home; how she and three friends went to Waldenburg, Germany; going home and learning her immediate family was dead; details on how she felt when she first arrived in her home city; going to the displaced persons (DP) camp in Landsberg, Germany; knitting items in the DP camp to be sent to Israel; meeting her future husband in the DP camp and their courtship; how he wrote her poems; how they married after knowing each other three months; her wedding in the camp on December 21, 1945 and how people brought baked goods and played music; their initial legal marriage in Landshut, Germany; and how the wedding was like starting over again.

Oral history interview with Boleslaw Brodecki

Oral History

Boleslaw "Bud" Brodecki describes being an inmate in Theresienstadt at the time of liberation; being wakened in the middle of the night to people screaming; how people did not know the war had ended; hollering to the prisoners that they were free; how the prisoners were numb and did not react; how the people still did not have food and many continued to die from dysentery and other illnesses; being taken care of by the Red Cross; being liberated by the Russians; being treated for louses; getting soup and clothing; registering to go to Russia because he did not want to return to Poland; going to a displaced persons camp in Landsberg, Germany; becoming a police officer in the camp; meeting his future wife in the camp; courting his wife while they were in the displaced persons camp; getting married in the camp and how 300 people attended, bringing food and instruments; how they got legally married in Landswood, Germany before the religious ceremony; having a son two years later; immigrating to the United States and having to get married a third time because of a legal technicality; additional details about the wedding in Landsberg; welcoming David Ben-Gurion to the camp; and trying to go to Palestine illegally.

Oral history interview with Jim Cacioppo

Oral History

Jim Cacioppo describes being in Linz, Austria when there was a false report of the war’s end and how there was a celebration; driving Major Tuthill to Mauthausen; arriving at the Mauthausen concentration camp; the physical condition of the prisoners; how many of the prisoners died from eating food that was too rich; seeing bodies in the quarry; how the surviving inmates were happy to see them; being shown around the gas chambers and crematoriums by the survivors; seeing piles of weapons; guarding three of the survivors who had killed a German guard; how the engineers dug graves and civilians brought wagon loads of bodies to bury; seeing the German guards imprisoned and how he wanted nothing to do with him; and the number of surviving prisoners in the camp.

Oral history interview with Helen Fagin

Oral History

Helen Fagin discusses being in her house in Radomsko, Poland when it was bombed on September 1, 1939; living in the Radomsko ghetto until the liquidation in 1942; her parents had already been sent to Treblinka; being with her two sisters until she escaped during a march to the railroad station; staying in the Warsaw ghetto and getting out with Aryan papers; being caught and released back into the ghetto; wandering in western Poland for a period of time; the arrival of the Russians; moving further east; being liberated on February 14, 1945; reuniting with her sisters after a long search and returning to their home town; feeling like they could no longer stay in Poland; not getting their possessions back from friends they had left them with; a group of young Israeli boys who had organized to help survivors and take them to Palestine; travelling through the Carpathian mountains to Czechoslovakia, then to a camp complex in Bratislava (Slovakia), and then to Austria; going to the American zone from the Russian zone; pretending to be Jewish refugees from Greece to pass over to the American zone; taking a boat on the Danube to American sector; living in the Wels displaced persons (DP) camp for a few months; going to Linz, Austria, where the DP camp was full; going to Bad Gastein, Austria administered by UNRRA in the fall of 1945; meeting a kind US soldier in Bad Gastein, Lt Kyle from Dayton Ohio, who brought her a blanket; working in the office because she spoke fluent German; being declared stateless; experiencing a period of feeling empty and depressed; learning English and becoming politicized after she heard the British would not let them into Palestine; her sister’s work at the Bad Gastein hospital; and getting a ticket to travel from Bremerhaven to New York.

Oral history interview with Suzanne Foldes

Oral History

Suzanne Foldes (née Zsuzsi Morvai), born in 1921 in Miskolc, Hungary, discusses being separated from her mother when they arrived at Auschwitz in 1944; her mother’s death in the gas chambers; doing forced labor at the end of the war at a Buchenwald kommando run by I.G. Farben; hiding in the woods with eight others when the guards began fleeing the camp; going into the nearby village (Mishgots?) and hiding in a barn; being fed and hidden by the owner of the barn; the arrival of American troops; the mayor of the town giving them places to sleep; her memories of hearing that FDR had died; being moved into a hotel; GIs visiting them in the evenings; one Jewish GI who brought candles and Challah on a Friday night; some of the group returning to Budapest, Hungary; travelling to an area of south Hungary; going to Prague, Czech Republic and getting back her citizenship; returning to Budapest; finding her aunt and reuniting with her father; traveling on a train when Russian soldiers sexually assaulted some younger women; and getting some of their belongings back from a man who had been in the military security forces and had been kind to her family.

Oral history interview with Nesse Godin

Oral History

Nesse Godin (née Galperin) discusses living from age 13 to 17 in various ghettos and concentration camps; being on a death march with about 600 women when the group was pushed into a barn, where they stayed for three weeks; being liberated by Russians on March 10, 1945; her physical condition upon liberation; being sent to a hospital in Chinow (Chynowie), Poland for six weeks; suffering from typhoid, dysentery, and frostbite; going with another Lithuanian woman to Łódź, Poland in May 1945; receiving help from various organizations; meeting a woman from her town who said she had been with Nesse’s mother in a camp near the Polish/German border; going to look for her mother; reuniting with her mother in Łódź; reuniting with her brother Yaheskiel Galperin in Feldafing displaced persons camp; meeting her husband Jack in the DP camp; spending five years in Feldafing, during which time she had two children; conditions in the DP camp; her memories of the formation of Zionist organizations in the DP camp; David Ben Gurion’s visit to the DP camp; the response after the creation of Israel; immigrating to the US; and settling in Washington, DC, where her mother’s sister had a small grocery store.

Oral history interview with Henny Gurko

Oral History

Henia (Henny) Gurko (née Durmashkin), born in 1926 in Vilnius, Lithuania, discusses being deported from the Vilnius ghetto to Kaiserwald concentration camp for two days and then to Dünawerke for nearly a year; being sent to Stutthof, Ponewesch, and Landsberg; being forced to sing at Landsberg with six other musicians in front of the SS and others; singing the Schubert Serenade in German; walking with the orchestra for miles on Sundays to other camps and giving concerts; performing forced labor in Moll, where she was made to walk up and down a man-made mountain carrying rocks and stones; being with her sister during this time; being sent on a forced march; hearing encouragement from anti-Nazi people on some of the farms they passed; arriving at a Ukrainian camp, where the men were very rough; being liberated by the Americans; the hanging of the camp’s leader; the orchestra continuing on for years after the war; being taken to St. Ottilien, a church in Eresing, Germany; going to Fürstenfeldbruck, Germany and staying there for two years; participating in the orchestra; hearing David Ben Gurion speak; Leonard Bernstein conducting the orchestra in 1948; conditions in the displaced persons (DP) camp; learning that her brother Shimshonzaev (Vladimir Durmashkin) had been killed in a camp; finding it difficult to be happy after so many losses; the orchestra performing during the Nuremberg trials in striped jackets; and singing songs from the ghettos about children, because so many of the children were killed.

Oral history interview with Irving Heymont

Oral History

Irving Heymont describes coming upon a sub-camp of Mauthausen, Gunskierken, in Austria with the United States Army 5th Infantry Regiment, K Company; visiting the camp and the conditions of the surviving inmates; not knowing about the concentration camps before seeing one; testifying to a board proceeding in Paris, France in September 1945; going to Landsberg, Germany where his unit was stationed; going to a German displaced persons camp, which was created for the survivors of Dachau’s sub-camps; the poor conditions in the camp; receiving orders from General Anslau Ralph to clean up the camp; his efforts to improve it; making the camp an all-Jewish DP camp; tensions between Jews and non-Jews; the survivors creating a camp committee, which established a hospital and schools; the nationalities of the camp’s Jews; the role of Dr. Jake Wallaisky who was part of the committee and worked for the Jewish Organization for Rehabilitation; the black market in and around the camp; preparing the camp for the winter; the crowding of the camp and the resistance of the residents to spread to another camp; his relations with the camp residents and the local Germans; holding elections in the camp; sanitation in the camp; the treatment of children in the camp; visitors to the camp, including Rabbi Abraham Klausner; the trouble caused by the camp’s truck drivers; and helping a man find his son.

Oral history interview with John Holmes

Oral History

John Holmes, of Chicago, IL, describes coming upon a labor camp with his unit after fighting in the Hartz mountain sector; conditions of the surviving inmates; the German’s abandonment of the camp; his role as a tank commander; exchanging fire with German soldiers while saving the 14th Reconnaissance Platoon; hearing that German troops were scared of black American soldiers; delivering a letter for a woman he met in the camp to her sister in Illinois; being ordered not to feed the inmates; the impact of the experience on his life; and his combat experience.

Oral history interview with Joseph Kahoe

Oral History

Joseph Kahoe describes being with the United States 761st Tank Battalion in Austria when he and his unit saw individuals coming out of a prison camp; being the liaison officer between his company and the regimental headquarters; the conditions of the inmates and being warned not to feed them by his superiors; only seeing male inmates; and being the commandant of the Polish displaced persons camp near Nuremberg, Germany.

Oral history interview with Henry Kanner

Oral History

Henry Kanner discusses being in Auschwitz working in the laundry when he was 15 or 16 years old; the death of his family members in the Belzec gas chambers; being taken in January 1945 on a death march; conditions during the march, including the extreme cold and the deaths of many of the prisoners; killing a pig on the second day and eating it raw with other prisoners; being put in an open-air train car; arriving at Mauthausen; encountering a prisoner who had once worked for Henry’s father; the man saving Henry’s life by changing his information in the registry and telling him to pose as a Polish Catholic; noticing the SS officers either disappearing or changing into regular Wehrmacht uniforms in May 1945; three American soldiers who were shot down, beaten, and thrown into the gas chambers; the day of liberation; the capture of many of the German guards; leaving the camp on foot with another boy; walking to Linz, Austria; going to Passau, Germany, where they were captured by German farmers and escaping before being shot by the farmers; staying in a displaced persons (DP) camp in Passau (possibly Pocking DP camp); going to a DP camp in Nurnberg, Germany; working in the office with a US Army captain, who was a representative of UNRRA; conditions in the DP camp; details on the emigration of people from the camp; immigrating to the US, where he had relative; getting married and having three sons; and feeling lucky as well as guilty to have survived.

Oral history interview with Abraham Klausner

Oral History

Rabbi Abraham J. Klausner discusses being attached to the 116 Evacuation Hospital during WWII; entering Dachau concentration camp in May 1945; arriving at night, and seeing the devastation in the morning; the efforts they all made to bring the survivors back to life; helping to organize lists to name survivors as well as their places and dates of birth; how people were helped to get to Italy where they could get on ships to Palestine; finding Hungarian women survivors in a displaced persons (DP) camp in the Alps; learning how former inmates hid prayer books while living in the camps; finding a Polish Hebrew library in Munich, Germany that had been confiscated by the Nazis and taking a few books at a time and distributing them to people; finding the Klausenburg rebbe in Dachau, nursing him back to health, and bringing him to Feldafing DP camp; seeing Jewish and non-Jewish survivors in the DP camps; the administration of the camps; the DP camps Feldafing and Landsberg am Lech; the issues with the mixed nationalities in the camps; segregation in the camps; the lack of freedom in the camps; the compulsion people felt to find their family members; a center that was set up in Munich where people could search for family on lists; the efforts to reconnect children with their parents; finding a printer in Landsberg and getting books published and distributed; helping to establish a newspaper in Feldafing along with journalist Shalatin Levy from Kovno (Kaunas, Lithuania); meeting with David Ben Gurion in Munich, and taking him to St. Ottilien hospital, Landsberg, and Feldafing; and working near Dachau for several years with the US Army.

Oral history interview with John Komski

Oral History

John Komski discusses being taken to Dachau concentration camp from camp Hersbruck and staying there for 20 days; being made to shower, but not being given anything to wear except a blanket; being in an area separated from the rest of the camp; finding on April 29, 1945 that the camp gates were open to the rest of the camp; finding clothes and standing for 2-3 hours for roll call, but no SS came; how the fighting began in the afternoon and then there was silence; some prisoners running to the gates, and some getting guns; a US soldier who came into the area and commanded that the guards surrender or be shot; how thousands of prisoners gathered and many had flags of different countries; seeing a glorious sunset with dark clouds in the east; some people lighting fires and cooking food; many of the former inmates dying from eating too much; being moved to a displaced persons (DP) camp; not being allowed to leave the DP camp; being very sick and moved to an American hospital; going to a DP camp outside of Munich in June 1945; UNRRA officials forcing people to be repatriated to their native countries; going to Garmisch, Germany; meeting an artist who was a former prisoner of Auschwitz, and receiving help from him; meeting his future wife; drawing and painting scenes from the concentration camps; and immigrating to the US.

Oral history interview with Pat Lynch

Oral History

Pat Lynch discusses being an American nurse attached to the 123rd Field Evacuation Unit during WWII; being near a subcamp of Dachau; how the nurses did not go into Buchenwald because the conditions there were too terrible; going into the camp and being shocked by how horribly sick the survivors were, with typhus and TB; Germans from the area who were conscripted to work in the kitchens and laundries of the various DP camps; the young Hitler youth who marched in cemeteries; moving from tents to real buildings in the summer of 1945; praying often to St. Jude about the conditions; seeing a big difference in some of the survivors between March and August as they regained some strength and bodyweight; seeing a lot of Russian children in the summer; treating some pregnant women; being told that the women officers in the camps were often more cruel than the men; and her long working days during that time, which prevented her from speaking more with the patients.

Oral history interview with William McWorkman

Oral History

William McWorkman discusses being with the 12th Armored Division during WWII; going through Weilheim, Oberau, Innsbruck and south to Bringer Pass; entering into Landsberg concentration camp; seeing hundreds of dead prisoners; interacting with the former prisoners; the arrival of the 493rd Field Artillery Battalion; being told not to get too close to the prisoners because of typhus; giving the former prisoners clothing and food, but not too much food; the battalion surgeon who said not to overfeed them or they would die; the attempt to triage the survivors; General Allen, commander of the 12th division, entering the camp and later ordering all males in nearby village to walk through the camp; and his regret that they did not spend more time comforting the living.

Oral history interview with James Moncrief

Oral History

James Moncrief discusses being a Lt. Colonel during WWII; working as a staff officer in general headquarters when the 11th Army overran Buchenwald; leaving supplies and a medical company at the camp; being sent to the camp by Captain Bennett; conditions in the camp; the crematoria; and the US soldiers’ awareness of the camps.

Oral history interview with Judah Nadich

Oral History

Rabbi Judah Nadich discusses being a chaplain in the US Army during WWII; being stationed in Paris, France, where among other activities, he helped 600 Jewish survivors go from Germany to illegal ships in Marseilles to get to Palestine; being asked to be the liaison officer to General Eisenhower to coordinate efforts to help the Jewish survivors in August 1945; being stationed in Frankfurt; the Jewish survivors in the American zone and the displaced persons camps (DP camps); differences between the DP camps; the unforeseen problems in the DP camps; inspecting the DP camps in August-September 1945; food and medicine in the DP camps; the running of the camps by UNRRA ,the Joint, and the military; immigration of the refugees; and visiting camps with David Ben Gurion.

Oral history interview with George Salton

Oral History

George Salton discusses being a prisoner of the Nazis; being liberated from camp Wöbbelin in the spring of 1945 and his memories of that day; the prisoners’ fears that the Germans would return; a soldier who shared his rations with George; his attempts to contact his relatives, including his brother; going to the British zone in Lübeck; staying in the Neustadt displaced persons camp (DP camp); the different refugees in the camp; being sponsored by his relatives for immigration to the United States; living in Deggendorf, Germany until his paper to the US came through in 1947; and seeing German teenagers in Deggendorf before he emigrated and his feelings envy, pain, and loneliness, knowing he would never have normal teenage years.

Oral history interview with Richard Seibel

Oral History

Colonel Richard R. Seibel, US Army veteran and participant in WWII, discusses being on a patrol when he came across the concentration camp Mauthausen; his lack of knowledge about concentration camps before seeing Mauthausen; reporting back to General Daiger who asked him to take supreme command of camp; the two Americans in the camp, one of whom was Lt Jack Taylor of the OSS; his memories of the camp; seeing corpses piled up; the unrest in the camp and division between the inmates; a former prisoner, Premislav Dobius, who was the interpreter for army; how the Jewish survivors wanted to be separated by their religion, not by nationality as the others were; members of a Swiss Zionist organization who arrived demanding the Jewish survivors be given their own space; the prevalence of typhus and TB; the deaths of hundreds of people after liberation; 400 Wehrmacht soldiers who were brought in to repair the sewage and water system; the conditions of women prisoners; the camp’s former SS commander Franz Ziereis who was absent from the camp before liberation; and the capture of Ziereis.

Oral history interview with Milton Shurr

Oral History

Milton Shurr, US Army veteran and participant in WWII, discusses being part of a displaced persons team (DP2 unit) attached to the 1st Army beginning in the fall of 1944; being in Verviers, Belgium; his previous work as the head of a Jewish community counsel in Oklahoma City; the approximately 500 displaced persons; contracting hepatitis; rejoining the regiment in April 1945 in Wetzlar, Germany; going to Buchenwald; seeing barracks with two-story bunks and 6 people in each slot, buildings full of clothes and shoes, and piles of bodies; disinfecting survivors with DDT; the high rate of death for survivors; one of his colleagues who spoke German and acted as an interpreter, and how this affected the officer’s mental health; his work with administrative tasks; Allied prisoners being sent home; the desire for many survivors from eastern countries to not return home; the work of the Red Cross to reunite families; being told by the Joint to take care of about 2000 children; being in Buchenwald until the area of Thuringia was turned over to the Russians; and paying the Poles in the DP camp with cigarettes to run trucks.

Oral history interview with Alfred Sundquist

Oral History

Dr. Alfred B. Sundquist, a major and physician with the XVIII Airborne during WWII, discusses being stationed a few miles from Ludwigslust, Germany; being instructed to go to a small concentration camp (Wöbbelin) and report back; arriving in a jeep, and seeing that the Germans had already left; conditions at the camp, which took up a few acres and had no crematoria and a couple of barracks; seeing corpses piled up and prisoners with striped uniforms who were too weak to get up; seeing the physical results of starvation in the former prisoners, including the loss of teeth and swollen legs; seeing evidence of cannibalism; writing a report recommending survivors be sent to apartments in Ludwigslust; many survivors dying from complications from starvation; the 82nd Airborne connecting to the 18th Airborne; the civilian Germans from the town being made to dig graves and attend funerals for the camp’s victims; taking pictures of the camp (he donated these pictures to USHMM); his thoughts on the local Germans of Ludwigslust; and his thoughts on Hitler’s mental health.

Oral history interview with Fela Warschau

Oral History

Fela Warschau discusses being in a labor camp outside Hamburg at end of March 1945; being forced to clean streets after the city was bombed; being taken by train to Bergen-Belsen; the conditions in the camp; staying together with two friends and her sister; sharing a single potato amongst themselves for several days; liberation; survivors being disinfected and given different clothes; staying in Bergen-Belsen for two months; German doctors and nurses who were brought to the camp to work; her feelings of satisfaction seeing Germans being forced to help bury the dead; finding two of their cousins; hearing that her father had died at Auschwitz; going to Feldafing displaced persons camp; life in the DP camp; signing up for ORT courses; the tendency for survivors to marry each other; getting married in 1946; the differences between the American and British leaders of the DP camps; the children in the DP camp; and her thoughts on emigration.

Oral history interview with Irene Weber

Oral History

Irene Weber discusses being liberated from a prison in Czechoslovakia at the end of WWII; the Russians who liberated the prison; being deloused and sent to a hospital; being given a change of clothes and a little money; her decision to not return to Poland; staying in an apartment with a friend; registering as a Czech citizen; going to Prague in an attempt to leave the country after the communists took over; going to the American Zone of Germany; staying in Landsberg am Lech displaced persons camp; the crowded conditions in the DP camp; living in Rosenheim, Germany; working on a farm to pay rent; attending an ORT school for nursing in Föhrenwald; graduating and then working in a hospital in the DP camp in Pokcing where she cared for survivors; continuing to live in Rosenheim and taking the train to get to her job; and receiving assistance from UNRRA and the Joint even while she was working as a nurse.

Oral history interview with Nick White

Oral History

Nick White discusses being with the VI Corps, part of 7th Army, when he saw Dachau for the first time on April 29, 1945; going to the camp with his colleague Englehardt, who was a photographer and took pictures of the camp; seeing a trench in the camp filled with dead SS soldiers killed by American infantry which had been in the camp before them; being overrun by the survivors who were joyous to see them; giving out caramels and k-rations to the survivors; conditions in the barracks; a large room that led from the gas chambers where several thousand bodies were stacked up; the high rate of mortality for the survivors after liberation; finding 39 boxcars with corpses inside; and his incomprehension of the inhumanity they found.

Oral history interview with Alan Zimm

Oral History

Alan Zinn discusses being sent from Buchenwald in January 1945 to Dora concentration camp; conditions in the camp; seeing American planes at end of March going to bomb Nordhausen; being taken by train for six days to Bergen-Belsen; the Russian POWs who set up a tribunal in the camp after liberation and executed about 50 SS guards; being liberated on March 29, 1945; the delousing of the inmates; the deaths of many survivors from typhus and other diseases; returning to Łódź, Poland in June 1945; meeting his future wife in Łódź; going with his wife and her two sisters to the displaced persons camp in Landsburg, Germany; reuniting with his brother; and immigrating to the United States.