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Crystal Night oral history interview

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1990.481.8 | RG Number: RG-50.062.0008

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    Crystal Night oral history interview
    Transcript
    This is a night when we have gathered together
    to fill our synagogue.
    Same evening where we commemorate the many synagogues
    scattered throughout Germany and Austria
    that were filled with our ancestors, our brothers,
    and our sisters, our grandparents,
    our great-grandparents perhaps.
    We commemorate the evening when they
    were no longer able to fill a synagogue such as this.
    On this evening, when we gather together for the Sabbath,
    remembering the Sabbath as a gift to us from God,
    and commemorating--
    commemorating that Sabbath upon which our grandparents,
    our great-grandparents, perhaps even some of us-- indeed,
    I know some of us--
    who are no longer able to worship in our own synagogue,
    we gather here tonight and we celebrate the Sabbath.
    We do so appropriately by blessing the Sabbath candles.
    And our service tonight begins on page 158.
    Page 158.
    As we join now together on page 158.
    "On this day we would see the world in a new light.
    On this day we would add new spirit to our lives.
    On this day, we would taste--"
    The Hawaii Holocaust Project, which is an oral history
    project dealing with people in our community
    whose lives have been affected by the Holocaust.
    These include camp survivors who live
    in our community, people who fled Europe before or after--
    or before or during the war, and the men of the 522nd Field
    Artillery Battalion.
    This is an all-Japanese-American unit who were witnesses
    to the liberation of Dachau.
    Some of those men are with us tonight.
    I see Mr. Ishii and Mr. Nakamine and Mr. Hirayama.
    We now have about 50 hours of videotaped oral history
    interviews with these people, and we
    are in the process of transcribing those interviews
    at the Center for Oral History at the University.
    Tonight, we have with us a number
    of people who actually experienced Crystal Night,
    and we have asked them to come and share
    their experiences with you.
    OK.
    Also, in addition to the people that will be on the panel
    tonight, there are two other survivors
    who are in the audience--
    Gerda Samuel-- well, actually three.
    Carla Chotzen, I believe, is here, Gerda Samuel
    and Louise Spitzer.
    And we have interviewed those people as well.
    And tonight we will have a five-member panel that--
    people who are of this community,
    survivors who lived in Germany and Austria
    during, before, and after Kristallnacht.
    And they will share their experiences with you.
    We have Otto Orenstein-- and they'll just come up
    and be sitting in the panel.
    You can come up now.
    Otto Orenstein, Hedy Marmorstein, Anne Flagg,
    Walter Chotzen, and Dr. Rudy Schmerl.
    Thank you.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    We'll have to hold it, just like that.
    You can sit over here, anywhere.
    Here.
    And then you can sit on the end.
    Thank you.
    Whoops.
    Do you want to take this over.
    Hello?
    Yes.
    This is [INAUDIBLE].
    Do you want to have it?
    Yeah.
    You want to hold this a second?
    [BACKGROUND CHATTER]
    [INAUDIBLE]
    We'll check with the video folks to see.
    I did want to thank also Greg Sorscher, who's been so very
    helpful, and Andy Mirikitani in helping us to film,
    videotape all of our production so far.
    And again, we're doing it.
    So you're all part of this one.
    OK.
    OK.
    I just-- I'm going to start this.
    Are we ready, Greg?
    It's OK?
    OK.
    All right.
    Now I know this is a little different for us tonight.
    We're used to sitting around a different table
    at the Jewish Federation Office, or perhaps
    without all of these people in the audience,
    but we've all talked together before.
    This is Dr. Schmerl's first experience with us,
    so we'll just get a little relaxed.
    And I think I'll start with Otto first.
    And as we will be able to-- whenever
    you feel like responding, you just go right ahead.
    And you say what you want to say, all right?
    First of all, I think we'll start by asking,
    when was your first awareness of Hitler and the Nazis?
    Well, I would say around 1937, because there was
    a Nazi party in Austria too.
    At that time, there were about 14 or 16 different parties.
    And the Nazi party was one of them.
    It was not a bigger party.
    It was one of the smaller ones.
    But we knew what Nazis were, and we knew what Hitler was.
    And I'd seen Mein Kampf.
    So that was the first experience for me.
    I was born in Berlin in 1930, so I
    was a small boy during the period
    that you're talking about.
    I think I knew about Nazis because I
    was the only Jew where I lived, and the German children
    chased me and beat me up, which was around 1934 or '35.
    We had a dog, a German shepherd.
    I like to think of him as a Jewish shepherd--
    [LAUGHTER]
    --whom I will always remember for coming to my rescue at one
    point.
    So it was about 1934.
    And the school I went to was the Theodor-Herzl-Schule,
    which was segregated.
    When I came to this country, I lived
    in Louisiana and I was segregated
    for a different reason--
    not so different, it turned out.
    I was just on the other side of the racial fence.
    The dog rescued me from a group of boys who were shouting Jude,
    Jude and that sort of thing.
    And that was about 1934 or '35.
    My first experience was the assassination
    of the Austrian chancellor by the then illegal Nazi party.
    It was a terrible shock.
    They came into his office, shot him.
    They were ready to take over the radio station in Vienna
    and take over the country.
    They were put down and outlawed.
    The same Nazis that perpetrated that assassination
    went underground.
    And after Hitler came, they were heroes.
    But that was our first experience,
    and the fear that we were later to feel,
    that was the shadow that it cast.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    I lived in Frankfurt when Hitler came to power.
    And on the 1st of April in 1932, there
    was a nationwide boycott, the first one,
    organized boycott against all the Jews.
    At that time, we didn't know what we expect.
    So we piled in our car and went up
    into the mountains in our summer home,
    and sat up there, waiting what was going to happen.
    There was no radio, and I couldn't
    telephone to my parents.
    We didn't know whether it was going to be pogrom
    or what it was.
    After two or three days, that Aktion
    was blown off and canceled, and we returned to our home.
    But by that time, the party was very well organized,
    and things happened around us.
    I remember, my hairdresser came to me upset
    and said he probably will never see me again,
    because his daughter, who was in the Hitler Youth,
    came home very late one night.
    And he punished her.
    And she said-- she was furious.
    And she said, I'm going to denounce you
    and you're going to pay for that.
    And the next morning, he was picked up and never heard
    of again.
    In my husband's factory a man had a sandwich we couldn't eat.
    He threw it to a dog.
    The man was picked up the next morning by Hitler's guard
    and taken off to concentration camp
    because he wasted public food.
    And things were scrapped all up around us.
    Doesn't matter what we did, we were in danger.
    We never talked at home about anything.
    We always went for long walks because our telephones,
    the radiators, everything was bugged.
    And even when we went for walks, we were very careful
    where we went.
    Well, better pass it on.
    You can use this.
    OK, whatever.
    My first shock came earlier than that.
    I was in 1929, still in high school.
    And there was a Stormtrooper parade through town.
    I lived in a small town.
    And I was shocked and amazed that one of my teachers,
    whom I respected, was walking in this parade in a Stormtrooper
    uniform.
    But the real devastating awareness of what was going on
    came in 1933.
    I worked in Berlin at that time.
    And I watched a torchlight parade
    by the Stormtroopers going Unter den Linden--
    this was the main fancy street in Berlin--
    walking.
    There were 100,000 of Stormtroopers singing
    and having the torch lights.
    And at that time I knew that my world was collapsing.
    Just going to--
    You don't have to pass that back.
    I'll talk loud enough.
    Walter, when you knew at that time that your world--
    Can't hear.
    Can't hear.
    You can't hear?
    OK.
    It's a little awkward, but--
    [BACKGROUND NOISES]
    Walter, when you knew at that time
    that your world was collapsing, you
    were already aware that something was changing,
    and this was in 1933 in Germany.
    What did you do at that time?
    Did you prepare to leave.
    Did you talk to your family?
    What happened?
    What went on?
    I was working in a business organization firm.
    And they did business with the city of Berlin,
    with the state of Prussia, and the federal--
    and the government of Germany.
    And an order came out that any company that employs Jews
    could no longer furnish merchandise
    to those public organizations.
    And I was immediately dismissed, and I went home.
    And I worked in my father's business for a while,
    till I emigrated.
    Did you attempt at that time to leave Germany?
    I wanted to get out, but of course, I
    had to first see how and when and what about it.
    It was not all clear at that time.
    I see.
    Looks like Dr. Schmerl wants to say something.
    Yes, this question, of course, is one that agonizes Americans.
    Why didn't you get out?
    It wasn't a matter of getting into your friendly neighborhood
    Volkswagen and driving across the border to Canada.
    I've recently come from Michigan, so that's on my mind.
    The Nazis were extremely clever, and very, very effective
    in robbing you of everything.
    No country wanted you if you were poor.
    Let me tell you my own story.
    This-- slightly complicated.
    You had to have $5,000 to come to this country,
    unless someone was willing to certify
    that you would not be an onerous charge on the public wheel.
    We had some distant Jewish relatives
    in Cleveland, my grandmother's cousins
    from whatever, who had done very well in this country,
    and who were not interested in sponsoring
    poor, bedraggled, German-Jewish refugees.
    However, there was another woman who
    had converted to Christianity who had married a German who
    had gotten a job as a professor at Princeton University,
    and he's the one who sent the visa.
    The question was how to get there.
    This was very hard to do without any money.
    And we couldn't have done it--
    and I'm anxious to underscore this point--
    without the help of gentiles.
    I see Anne is shaking her head.
    And I think that's a really important point
    that we want to follow, unless Hedy wanted to say something.
    Among other things, to substantiate it,
    you either had to have the money or had to have a relative who--
    a friend who put up the money.
    There was a member of my family who found such a benefactor,
    but it turned out that that man was not affluent enough,
    and the money that he put up as to guarantee
    was not sufficient.
    And my uncle perished.
    We had relatives who welcomed us with open arms,
    and helped us in any which way, and gave us affidavits.
    But we were here in '36 to get all the papers ready.
    But by the time we came back in '36
    to get our immigration organized,
    a new law had come out that any factory owner who
    employed more than 130 people could not
    leave until he had trained a successor who
    would take his business over-- without pay, of course.
    And that man would be able to run the business as well
    as the Jewish owner before.
    Well, it took years to train a man.
    And our visas expired twice.
    And we couldn't get our visas, and it's a long wild story,
    until we finally got the visas renewed.
    But my father, who employed 120 people, had a much easier time.
    We employed many more.
    My husband employed many more.
    And so we had first to wait until the next man felt
    he was ready to run the business and employ all the people who
    were there.
    And that brought us to the very bitter end.
    You can hold on to that.
    Otto?
    I want to share one experience I just found about a few days ago
    from somebody who also escaped, who
    had been living in Spain since 1932,
    and in 1937 had gone to Marienbad,
    the famous spa in Czechoslovakia,
    where they came across some Jewish well-to-do people who
    were taking the cure there.
    And they were speaking to them, and said, don't--
    look, you're out now.
    Why don't you just simply keep on going instead of going back?
    But these people said, no, it's never going to happen here.
    We are safe.
    And they went back.
    And their fate can be expected.
    Yeah, Otto, I know that you were in Austria after 1938,
    after Kristallnacht.
    And you also had had experiences that
    led you to believe that you should be leaving Austria.
    And I wondered at what point you knew that you had to get out,
    and what you did, or your family did, to make sure
    that you did get out.
    Well, I experienced Kristallnacht personally.
    I'll have to go back a little bit.
    We had been living in an apartment
    in one of the districts of Vienna for about 17 years.
    And about four months after the Nazis took over in Austria,
    there was a knock at the door, and some brown-shirted Nazis
    were there and said, you have two hours
    to get out of this apartment.
    They started to open the windows,
    and put the furniture out.
    They provided a truck.
    And they sent us to a villa of a Jewish merchant
    in one of the neighboring districts, where we were
    supposed to live in the cellar.
    Fortunately, my grandmother had a very large apartment.
    There were five in the family at one time.
    And we simply moved in with her, even
    though our official residence was still out in the suburbs.
    When Kristallnacht happened, there
    was a telephone call before 8 o'clock in the morning.
    The police station in the district, which was Wahring
    called and wanted to know where my father was.
    They had gone to our official residence
    and didn't find anybody there.
    So the landlord told him where we were,
    and they called, and they made him come out
    to the police station there.
    And he left.
    And we didn't see him all day long.
    About an hour and 15 minutes later, there
    was a knock at our door.
    And there were two Gestapo men who wanted to pick up the man.
    The neighbors had told us there was a Jewish man.
    In the end, they were about to pick him up.
    My mother explained to them what had happened,
    that somebody had already beaten him to the punch.
    And they saw me around.
    So since they didn't want to leave empty handed,
    they simply picked me up in his place.
    So I was taken down to a police station.
    By the way, this was the Gestapo who picked me up.
    Then I was taken down to the police station.
    I was interviewed by the police.
    Eventually they took a few hundred people, put them
    on trucks, drove them by the burning
    synagogue-- there was one Sephardic synagogue in Vienna.
    Most of the others were Ashkenazi.
    And they drove us by there, and took us to a SS barracks
    where we enjoyed the company of some German SS troops
    for the day.
    In the evening, the German troops, who, by the way,
    were not in black but were in dark gray,
    which was the Waffen-SS uniforms, we were--
    they were replaced by some Austrian SS troops
    in the normal black uniforms.
    And they started a check up.
    And when my turn came, they asked me who I was.
    I had my student pass with me so I could prove I was still 17.
    And they let me go, fortunately.
    Otherwise, I would have ended up in the concentration camp
    at Mauthausen, where most of the people I spent
    the day with finally ended up.
    I went home.
    Needless to say, my mother was very happy to see me.
    But now she had to go out and get my father out of the police
    station in Wahring.
    She went out there, and she was able to literally talk him out
    of that place.
    So fortunately, both my father and I
    survived that particular experience.
    But things didn't get any better.
    They only got worse.
    And one day my mother saw that there was an announcement
    that all 18-year-old boys had either to join the army
    or join the labor battalions.
    So she said, you have to get out of here.
    And on December 28, 1938, I went with,
    in company of an elder man who was the husband of our maid,
    and we made our way to Cologne, Germany,
    where we tried to cross the border illegally.
    We made three attempts.
    The first two were unsuccessful for one reason or another
    [AUDIO OUT] already had my visa application approved.
    The Belgians let us stay there.
    And after a while, even the Belgians interned us,
    because World War II broke out, and I was
    traveling on a German passport.
    So I was an enemy alien.
    And finally, at the end of March 1940, my American visa arrived.
    I went first back to Antwerp, then to Paris.
    And I crossed the ocean on a French liner to New York,
    where I arrived in April the 4th of 1940.
    And a month later, the Germans were in Belgium.
    And they would have gotten me if I'd stayed around too long.
    My parents had gone to Norway, and they
    had an even closer escape because their ship was supposed
    to leave, but since they already had British troops in Norway
    at that time to defend against the expected German invasion,
    the British troops didn't let them board the ship in Oslo.
    But fortunately, they caught up with the ship in Bergen,
    and were able to leave.
    And the day after, the Germans marched into Norway.
    My younger brother had gone to school in England.
    He managed to experience some of the Blitz in London.
    But in December of 1940, he finally
    made it to America, so that by that time
    the whole family was reunited again.
    Thank you very much.
    And let's-- whatever you feel like talking about.
    We left Berlin illegally.
    And the "we" included my mother, grandmother, older sister,
    and myself.
    My father was a doctor and a veteran
    of World War I. At that point he had been a German.
    And the Nazis were relatively slow to get
    to the Jewish veterans of World War I.
    They were about the last group they got to.
    That was certainly true as long as Hindenburg was alive.
    I hope I'm not being obscure.
    You know who Hindenburg was.
    After that, even after that, there
    was enough feeling for the pre-Weimar Republic regime
    to give the Jewish veterans of World War I
    some relative degree of safety.
    And my father came to America to look for work.
    He could speak no English, but he had done
    a fair amount of publishing.
    And his field was ophthalmology.
    And he had been a private physician.
    And Johns Hopkins offered him a job in Baltimore--
    provided he would go to work at once.
    And he explained that he had a family in Berlin.
    And the Americans said, in effect, take it or leave it.
    As you see, he left it and came back to Germany,
    which was not a practical move, it turned out.
    Jews in the audience will be familiar with the complexity
    I'm about to describe.
    My mother was born in Mexico, the daughter of a Russian Jew--
    that is to say, my grandfather had
    been born in Vilna, which, in 1866, was Russia.
    It is now Poland, as you know, but then it was Russia.
    And Europeans, especially Germans,
    are fascinated by these kinds of bureaucratic biographical data.
    And they classify you-- probably still to this day--
    by this sort of information.
    And clearly you are the nationality of whatever
    geography your father or your grandmother
    or whatever happens to have been born in.
    From their point of view, of course,
    we were not any of that.
    We were a race--
    Jews, which is all right with me.
    That's the way we've been regarded for 2,000 years.
    But from everybody else's point of view,
    specifically the American point of view,
    we didn't exist as a race.
    We were Germans.
    And we could get into this country
    only under the German quota--
    27,000 a year, I believe.
    So my father left again to try to make something of a home
    and to earn some money, which was desperately needed,
    and found work in Union Hospital in Manhattan,
    where not speaking English wasn't terribly important.
    A lot of people don't speak English in New York.
    [LAUGHTER]
    I'm wondering about Hawaii, by the way.
    [LAUGHTER]
    And we left on a train in 1938, before Kristallnacht,
    for the Sudetenland, for--
    just in time for Mr. Chamberlain's famous visit
    to Hitler.
    And the night we left Sudetenland was August 31.
    And we left that night because word
    had been gotten to us that the troops were
    on the way, since Mr. Chamberlain had achieved
    "peace in our time."
    There was one other Jewish couple
    in the village, Reichenberg, where
    I was the only Jew in the whole school, and where every day
    I learned what that meant.
    And we got a wheelbarrow from somebody.
    And Mr. Ginsburg, who, with his wife,
    eventually made it to what was then Palestine,
    pushed the wheelbarrow--
    I still remember this, this was my Kristallnacht--
    to the train station where we waited until 6 o'clock
    in the morning for the train to Prague.
    The troops arrived in the Sudetenland at 9:00.
    And that was how close it was for us.
    Eventually, we got-- obviously, we
    got out of Prague, and through Holland, and onto a ship,
    and came to this country.
    The only barbed-wire fence I've ever been behind,
    as a result of that, was the barbed-wire fence
    at Ellis Island.
    Something had gone wrong with my mother's passport.
    And somebody had classified something wrong.
    No computers at the time.
    Sleepy bureaucrats.
    And so that was held up again.
    It wasn't any terrible experience.
    I was under 10, and I could stay with my family.
    And that was how we got out.
    People have asked me too, how come
    you didn't anticipate this or do something about it?
    In Austria, it happened in '38.
    In Germany, Jews had been living under Hitler.
    And we always said, it's not going to happen here.
    It's that false optimism.
    When Hitler marched in, the atrocities started overnight.
    They had practiced five years in Germany,
    and they had perfected.
    So they did not waste any time.
    So the first thought was, get the children out.
    And my family wrote to relatives in America
    if they could send me, and so did my cousins, who
    had also children my age.
    And they decided to send us away,
    and hopefully that they could hang in and eventually join us.
    America, in its infinite compassion,
    had set up a quota system.
    And people who were not born in Austria, Germany, Russia,
    but parts of the former Austrian empire that
    were now different countries, they could not come.
    So a lot of people who just missed the boat by the quota.
    It was also a question of cash versus human lives.
    You could come on a capitalist affidavit
    regardless of the quota.
    Or people could go to Cuba, provided
    someone here put up a bond.
    It took a long time to get the money together for the bond,
    for the rest of my family.
    And by that time, the war had broken out--
    Pearl Harbor.
    So the rest of my life I have to live
    with the guilt of being the survivor.
    Since this is the 50th anniversary of Crystal Night,
    I think maybe I would like to tell you
    what Crystal Night was like.
    We had given up our big apartment
    and had moved to our summer home up in the Taunus Mountains,
    the mountains near Frankfurt.
    But it became cool, and we subleased a small apartment
    from some friends who had just left for America.
    On the day of the Crystal Night, in the morning on November 9,
    I went to class early in the morning.
    I took my bike downtown, and I was
    at the classroom at 8 o'clock.
    There were several students from Darmstadt
    and from some other cities around Frankfurt who came
    in and were terribly upset.
    Their fathers had been taken out of bed
    in the middle of the night.
    They didn't know where to.
    Their houses were plundered.
    And they just got on the train to get
    to their classes to get away.
    And on the way to class, they saw in Frankfurt
    every second store ransacked.
    And the class rang around.
    And he was throwing stones into the Jewish homes.
    And the temples were afire.
    When I heard that the temples were on fire,
    I realized that my child had the temple in nursery school.
    We had started a nursery school in our temple.
    Well, I jumped on my bike, dashed home, took my car,
    and dashed to the temple.
    The [GERMAN] Temple was a tremendous big temple,
    at least as big as the Temple Emanu-El in New York.
    There were two reform temples in Germany.
    The rabbi just told you about one,
    and that was the other one.
    A beautiful edifice.
    As I turned the street in, everything was smoky,
    and I saw flames coming out of the windows.
    The curtains were drawn in the houses all around.
    There were no-- nobody was in the street.
    When I drove up on the temple, there were no fire engines
    or anything.
    I saw Eli Lantos, the nursery school teacher,
    huddled under a tree trying to make the children sing and do
    games with them.
    She couldn't leave the children.
    She managed to get them all out of the temple.
    I packed as many children as I could into my car
    and brought them to the different homes.
    Anybody who wasn't out early in the street
    wouldn't have noticed anything.
    So I had to tell the parents what was going on,
    and left the children, and dashed home.
    When I came home, my cook told me--
    said, my French governess, my old French governess,
    had come over early in the morning to pick up my husband
    to take him to her house.
    She still had a French passport, so she
    assumed that her house would not be ransacked.
    A woman who was living across the hall from us--
    we only lived there for a week, so I didn't
    know the people very well--
    were sitting in front of her door, babbling and babbling.
    And I took her into our small apartment.
    She repeated her husband's name hundreds and hundreds of times.
    She was completely out of her mind.
    Her husband, who was taken in the middle of the night.
    I put my two children to bed, gave each one
    a sleeping powder--
    I didn't want them to hear what was going on--
    and jumped in my car.
    No, I jumped on my bike.
    And I went over to my parents' home.
    My parents had rented an apartment in Frankfurt
    beside their home in Aschaffenburg
    in order to go to something like the ulpan school for English.
    I got up there, and I found my mother shaking,
    and my dad hiding on a porch behind a big old-fashioned
    icebox.
    The Gestapo had been-- it was four apartments,
    four flights high--
    had been in the apartment house to pull out all the Jewish men.
    The men on the fourth floor, they had so much fun with him,
    they kicked him down the stairs, and kept on kicking him.
    He rolled past my parents' front door, another flight down.
    And that is how my dad got saved--
    by pure chance.
    So after I was sure that my parents were all right,
    I dashed down the street, and I saw a big lorry
    where they pulled Jewish people, and with bayonets
    and with the butt of the rifles, pushed me into a big lorry.
    They only could stand up.
    Many of them wearing pajamas, and had no time
    even to put a coat on.
    And then that lorry left.
    I have to say something.
    Those people who did this were usually from out of town,
    because the neighbors would not go and kill the Jews,
    or do something with Jews.
    Somebody who grew up with me wouldn't come to my home
    or to my parents' home.
    So they had to bring neighbor--
    town people in to do that.
    So I asked one of the men, where are you
    going to take all those people?
    And he told me where to.
    So I dashed to the next bakery and filled my basket, my bike
    basket, and I had a knapsack, with bread and stuff,
    and dashed over to the Festhalle,
    which was the biggest community groups there.
    And the people were all standing there
    in line, hundreds and hundreds of Jewish men.
    And I tossed the bread over the fence.
    Later on, they told me that was, for two or three
    days, the only thing they had to eat,
    whatever they would pick up.
    Then I went back to my father, who
    was very upset, because he heard that in our hometown,
    the temple was burning too.
    And all the family heirlooms, religious heirlooms
    from the 15th century to now were
    in our temple in Aschaffenburg.
    So I took the next train there and tried
    to get there to take out things.
    The Jews in Europe--
    I don't know where else--
    kept their family history on the wimpels which
    are tied around the Torah.
    Every time a male child was born and was a year old,
    it would be part of temple, and that wimpel
    would be put around the Torah, and later on
    preserved in the temple as a family history.
    Well, my dad wanted to have all those wimpels,
    and it was very important to him,
    and his [NON-ENGLISH] and so forth.
    Well, I dashed to the temple.
    Some school friends saw me and said, you can't go in there.
    That's idiotic to save something.
    The temple was high in flames.
    I went to the--
    a family-- my aunt who lived nearby, and they said,
    just get back to your family as long as you can.
    Well, I went back.
    And the pictures were terrible because women were absolutely
    screaming, looking out the windows and screaming.
    Many of them had absolutely lost their mind.
    When I came back, I was asked to go right away
    to our rabbi's house.
    We were very friendly with our youth rabbi.
    I had very wild arguments with him,
    because he had preached from the bema
    to people who let their children go with Youth Aliyah to Israel.
    And I said, how can you do that to people?
    How can you separate families?
    Well, that day, I realized that he was right.
    Well, I came to his house, and his wife
    was absolutely beyond herself.
    She just heard news that her father
    had been burned alive in a temple
    in a small town near Nuremberg.
    Her family had lived there for since the generations.
    The people from out of town again--
    they gave them enough beer to make them drunk--
    came there, blocked the windows, closed the door,
    and set the whole table on fire.
    Later on, in that village, several people,
    non-Jewish people, lost their mind
    because they just couldn't believe what was going on.
    We were told that the people in the temple,
    whilst they were burned, were singing Psalms and the Kol
    Nidre.
    And I can never hear the Kol Nidre
    without thinking of that thing.
    I didn't see my husband for at least two weeks.
    My governess kept him hidden.
    And he then went in the woods and tried
    to hide himself there.
    When I came back, the Nazi troops came into our apartment,
    bashed in the front door, came in, and smashed the pictures,
    ripped everything out of the buffet, all the glass
    and everything, took the camera and pulled out the films,
    sliced the bed sheets and the feather pillows.
    Everything was flying with feathers.
    And one thing, they found my cassette
    with my father's military papers, my grandfather's
    military papers, and my great-grandfather's [GERMAN],,
    which was an honor in Germany, being able to travel.
    And they took all those things away, [GERMAN] and everything.
    And I felt very bad about that because that
    could have proved how long we were there,
    and it might have helped us.
    Well, enough of that.
    [LAUGHS]
    I pass.
    I really-- I was very fortunate I got out,
    and my immediate family was saved.
    Most of my cousins, aunts, and relatives perished.
    But in comparison to Anne's adventures, mine are very mild.
    So I was extremely fortunate, and I will pass.
    Linda, you want to answer too?
    One of the questions that I'm curious about
    is the German popular reaction to Crystal Night.
    Most of us, our experience is looking at popular films.
    We really don't know very much about what happened.
    Was if-- I think for many people,
    the Holocaust film may be their only experience
    with knowing anything about that, until the episode
    yesterday, where this night has become
    a real issue in the news.
    What was your own experience, any of you
    who wanted to talk about that?
    The Germans were behind closed doors and drawn--
    drawn drapes.
    And I don't think they realized until much, much later,
    until they saw the streets, what was really going on.
    Some of the Germans were very, very courageous.
    I had a friend in high school who was with a high command--
    how you call?
    The highest medical staff in the army?
    Yes, it was.
    What is the name?
    Of what?
    Of the army.
    The highest medical staff.
    In America?
    No, anywhere.
    Surgeon general?
    Yeah, surgeon general.
    He was with the surgeon general.
    And he called me that evening.
    And he said, Anne, what can I do for you?
    And I said, hang up.
    You risk your career.
    He was a man who actually risked his career and tried to help.
    And of course I hanged up on him.
    And some people really tried to go out of their way and help.
    And later on, many years later, when I came back,
    I found out that people who pretended to be Nazis actually
    had--
    had saved people.
    I met a friend.
    I thought he was a real big Nazi already in school.
    Well, I found out later on that he
    had actually an underground railroad out of Heidelberg
    to get people out.
    And I found many of those stories.
    Of course, there were other stories
    took, where people were terrible.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    There are two kinds of reactions I
    found in my limited experience.
    First of all, it came as a terrible shock
    that the principal of the school I went to was an illegal Nazi.
    At the day of the Kristallnacht, we
    had a lot of non-Jewish friends, also customers in our store.
    Some were very sympathetic, and they were horrified.
    But I also saw some of the neighbors
    that we had known all our lives, walking the streets,
    plundering, and carrying their plunder openly and very
    gleefully.
    So it was both kinds.
    It was the good and the bad.
    I just got the word already from the rabbi
    that we do not have much time left.
    So I hope we don't have to wait another 50 years to-- we
    can continue another time, because the stories there's
    so much more.
    I know there are many more stories to tell.
    I've heard some of them.
    And every time I hear more--
    I think I would like to ask something before we close,
    and that would be whether you have any thoughts,
    and it's not any thoughts alone--
    as to what the American Jewish community, the American gentile
    community, the world community can learn from this experience
    so it will not happen again, what we could do differently?
    How would we know?
    Yeah.
    --will be OK.
    Anyone wants to answer?
    Yes.
    My emphasis would be on living people, not dead ones.
    And this is bigger than Jews.
    And it does concern, it seems to me, Jews in particular,
    because we have more to remember, perhaps,
    than other people.
    12,000 Haitians, for example, have
    asked to be admitted to the United States as refugees.
    Two have been admitted, both of them with bullets in them.
    It seems to me that the Jewish community should not
    be silent about that.
    I'm not sure that Jews should be silent about South Africa,
    where the majority of the population,
    in effect, is in the same kind of hellish prison
    that I remember in Germany.
    So you have your own examples.
    Those are some of mine.
    Well, I think one of the most tragic aspects
    of the whole situation was that, in reality, a lot more European
    Jews could have been saved specifically
    by America and American Jews.
    And as we heard from some of the other stories,
    even family members did not have enough heart and interest
    to save them.
    My own case, we were saved by some Christian women in Hawaii.
    That's how I happened to end up over here.
    But I will say that the HIAS was very helpful in making sure
    that those Jews that could get out,
    and who didn't have the money to pay for the transportation,
    took care of that aspect.
    And I know when I first arrived over here,
    I stayed at the Stephen Wise house
    in New York for free for a few weeks.
    So there were certainly a lot of help.
    But unfortunately, it wasn't enough,
    and I feel it could have been more.
    Thank you.
    I think Walter, [INAUDIBLE].
    We, especially as Jews, and especially those Jews that
    had the experience that we've been talking about here,
    have to be particularly alert and aware of what is going on,
    even what is going on in our politics, in our body politics.
    And if we feel that our country is doing wrong,
    we should speak out.
    The saying, "My country, right or wrong," is an evil concept.
    And you have to be alert and fight
    any oppression and any injustice wherever we find it.
    And Anne, did you--
    I learned one big lesson.
    I was there when the Polish Jews came back, were sent back
    to Germany.
    And I was called very early in the morning,
    at 4 o'clock in the morning.
    Could I be with my car at the East Station in Frankfurt?
    I recognized the voice of our--
    of a good friend of ours, and I jumped into my car,
    and took whatever food I had, and blankets,
    and was on the East Station.
    I had no idea what had happened there.
    I didn't even know why I had to go to the East Station.
    There I was informed that the Polish Jews all
    had been rounded up within half an hour
    and taken out of their beds as they were,
    without being able to pack anything,
    put into big, big cars, which are used for animals, usually,
    and brought to the border.
    There, on the border, they were not
    accepted, as the rabbi just told us.
    They had to sit there without any sanitation,
    without any food.
    They tried in the ground to find some leftover potatoes.
    And many starved to death.
    Grynszpan found out in Paris that his parents
    both had died of starvation and cold on the border.
    When I was called to the station,
    I had no idea of that whole thing.
    It had happened a whole week before,
    and I was pretty much oriented about everything.
    I was in the middle of the Jewish community.
    Everything went so quiet that we had no idea.
    Well, finally, my turn came.
    There were about 30 or 40 cars.
    We all had dimmed lights.
    Finally, my car came up to the front,
    and I took six people in there.
    I cannot tell you--
    I can't describe their condition.
    Not only were they starved--
    I had some bread with me.
    Their smell, they had no water for a whole week.
    It was unbelievable.
    They looked for their family members
    who might have been frozen to death.
    I didn't know who was there.
    Well, I drove them back to their different apartments
    where their canaries had died, where the dog had died.
    I mean, they just were taken out.
    And what I want to say is living in Frankfurt, being
    in the middle of the community, I
    had no idea what was going on.
    We have to be very alert what's going on around us,
    and help before it takes that dimension.
    Thank you, very much.
    And I think what else you said was that you made a choice
    not to be a bystander as well, and to go there
    and to do something about it when you did find out.
    Thank you all so very much for participating with us tonight.
    Thank you.
    [APPLAUSE]
    Thank you, Linda and Judy and all of our panel members.
    If I could ask you, before you return to your seats,
    if you could just remain standing for one moment
    because I'd like to help you--
    I'd like to ask you if you would please
    help us dedicate a memorial in memory of the 6 million
    on this evening.
    But first, I'd like to draw our congregation's attention,
    please, to page 573.
    Page 573.
    This will be fine, yeah.
    If we could join together in reading this.
    "In the presence of eyes which witnessed the slaughter, which
    saw the oppression the heart could not bear,
    and as witness, the heart that once taught compassion
    until the days come to pass, that crushed human feeling,
    I have taken an oath to remember it all, to remember,
    not once to forget, forget not one thing
    to the last generation, when degradation
    shall cease to the last, to its ending, when
    the rod of instruction shall have come to conclusion.
    An oath-- not in vain, passed over the night of the terror.
    An oath-- no morning shall see me at the fleshpots again.
    An oath-- lest from this, we learned nothing."
    We continue now as we dedicate our memorial to the 6 million.
    This, I confess, is a temporary plaque,
    as the full-sized one has, unfortunately,
    not yet arrived from the mainland.
    But we're fortunate enough to secure a temporary one which
    will be symbolic of the event.
    And this plaque will remain lit at all times.
    Just as our ner tamid, our everlasting light,
    is always lit, so too will this plaque
    within our sanctuary as a reminder
    for our entire community here in Honolulu.
    We began with silence.
    Silence of death, silence of life,
    silence after destruction.
    Silence before creation.
    There are times when songs called darkness fills light.
    The [? mark ?] becomes a constellation of faith
    against the unrelieved lack of space and balance.
    There are no words to reach beyond the end point.
    No messages.
    [INAUDIBLE] silence.
    The silence of Job, the silence of 6 million,
    the silence of memory.
    Let us remember them as we leave our silences in the silence
    becomes a prayer which links us to the past.
    Watching that darkness, we cannot [INAUDIBLE]..
    The anguish which is never, which love
    and light [INAUDIBLE].
    Silence.
    Only silence waiting for our reply to all of them, waiting.
    3 million and 300,000 Jews lived in Poland before the war.
    3 million died.
    2,850,000 Jews lived in Russia.
    More than a million died.
    1.5 million Jews live in the Balkans and Slavic countries.
    More than a million died.
    Germany, Austria, and France, [INAUDIBLE] had 650,000 Jews.
    Half of them died.
    [INAUDIBLE] private accommodations, and synagogues
    now stand empty.
    Our brothers and sisters were murdered everywhere,
    [INAUDIBLE].
    They died in cities and towns and villages and fields.
    They died in the night [INAUDIBLE]..
    They died [INAUDIBLE].
    They died by fire and water, by poison and gun.
    They died alone.
    But we will not forget them.
    They did alone.
    We will remember them forever, and in silence.
    [ORGAN MUSIC]
    [NON-ENGLISH SINGING]

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Five individuals who lived in Germany and Austria before, during, or after Kristallnacht discuss their experiences. The interviewees describe the Nazi Party in Austria; growing up in Berlin, Germany and being persecuted for being Jewish; life in Frankfurt, Germany, where there were boycotts against Jewish stores; a parade of storm troopers (Sturmabteilung); a torchlight parade in 1933 on Under Der Linden in Berlin where 100,000 storm troopers marched singing; how the Nazis took most of their possessions; seeing a synagogue burning in Austria during Kristallnacht; how they all left Europe; and their thoughts on preventing the Holocaust from happening again.
    Date
    interview:  1988 November 10
    Credit Line
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, acquired from the Hawaii Holocaust Project

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Genre/Form
    Songs and music.
    Extent
    1 videocassette (U-Matic) : sound, color ; 3/4 in..

    Rights & Restrictions

    Conditions on Access
    There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
    Conditions on Use
    Restrictions on use. See collections release form for details regarding restrictions.

    Keywords & Subjects

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    The video entitled "Crystal Night" is part of a project of Holocaust survivors and concentration camp liberator interviews currently living in Hawaii. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum received a copy of the video in March 1990.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:10:10
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn511076

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    Also in Oral History interviews of the Hawaii Holocaust Project

    Contains 34 oral history interviews with Holocaust survivors and concentration camp liberators all currently living in Hawaii

    Date: 1987-1991

    AJA Photos

    AJA Photos

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Michael Akamine

    Oral history interview with Michael Akamine

    Oral History

    Michael Akamine, born August 15, 1922, describes his parents; moving to Oahu, Hawaii when he was six years old; graduating high school in 1942; working for the as a carpenter and construction worker; working on a poultry farm when Pearl Harbor was bombed; how his parents were from Okinawa, Japan; volunteering for the U.S. Army in 1943; going to Camp Shelby; not knowing anyone who went to a relocation camp; being a battery agent in the 522nd; how his father had told him about the Dachau concentration camp; going to Dachau and the conditions in the camp; meeting up with his friends from the army every year; how he has not talked about his experience before this interview; and why he decided to volunteer in the army.

    Oral history interview with Stanley Akita

    Oral history interview with Stanley Akita

    Oral History

    Stanley Akita, born in 1923 in Hawaii, going to Honolulu to vocational school; how he volunteered for the 442nd; going to training at Camp Shelby; being picked to join the 100th and being sent to Southern France; being captured by Germans and asked why a Japanese man was fighting with the Americans; being sent to Koma, Strassburg, Stuttgard, and the prison, Starlite 70; being forced to clean the streets of Munich; bribing guards for food with cigarettes; being liberated by American troops; and being taken to Königsberg, Germany (Kaliningrad, Russia) then France and Boston.

    442nd Banquet

    442nd Banquet

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Tana Basa

    Oral history interview with Tana Basa

    Oral History

    Tana Basa (née Hecht), born April 18, 1940 in Berlin, Germany, shows pictures of her family from before the war. She discusses her father’s role as a cantor during WWI; how her first memory was of Theresienstadt; staying in the camp until the end of the war in a single room; having all her hair cut; being hungry a lot; having her leg in traction; her mother’s death; how two of her sisters went to Auschwitz and one sister went to Bergen-Belsen; how her father hid her under the tub when the guards came for her; how her father got a Jewish doctor to take her to a tuberculosis sanatorium, where she stayed until they were liberated; how she reunited with her two sisters, who went to Bergen-Belsen; the death of her aunt and uncle; being in a displaced persons camp; how her father remarried and she and one of her sisters were put in a German Jewish orphanage, where she stayed for five years until her father took her back; and immigrating to the United States with her father when she was 11 years old.

    Oral history interview with Carla Chotzen

    Oral history interview with Carla Chotzen

    Oral History

    Carla Chotzen, born in Weimar, Germany in 1924, describes her family; going to England; moving to Berlin, Germany in 1935; going to school in Berlin and getting kicked out soon after; going to a Jewish school and then Switzerland; how her father had read Mein Kampf and knew that they would have to leave Germany; how her father left them in Switzerland and met her mother in Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic); immigrating to the United States when she was 11 and stayed with her grandparents in Buffalo, NY while her parents were in England; going to the University of Rochester; and working for the American Jewish Committee in New York; the fate of her extended family.

    Oral history interview with Walter Chotzen

    Oral history interview with Walter Chotzen

    Oral History

    Walter Chotzen, born May 17, 1911 in Ziegenhalt, Germany (Glucholazy, Poland), describes the small town where he was born; attending the University of Berlin and quitting after a few semesters; working for a manufacturing business, where he was fired once Hitler came to power; working for his father; being socially shunned for being Jewish; being called up by the draft board; smuggling money past the border into Czechoslovakia and being questioned by the Gestapo about this activity; how his father sold his factory in 1938; going to Holland; how his parents hid in Berlin for a year then fled to Sweden; how he lived in Seattle during this time; his family history; his education in Germany; the antisemitism before the war; his experiences in Berlin between 1933 and 1935; going to a Nazi Party parade on Unter der Linden; the fate of his extended family; how he became socialist as Hitler became stronger; his thoughts on the internment camps in the U.S. for Japanese Americans; and his thoughts on the liberation of Dachau by Japanese-American troops.

    Oral history interview with Anne Flagg

    Oral history interview with Anne Flagg

    Oral History

    Anne Flagg (née Flagenheimer), born September 17, 1910 in Germany, describes how Hitler invaded the Rhineland when her children were infants; her father’s factory; how Jews were forbidden from going to concerts or to the opera; how the synagogue was burned during Kristallnacht; how the Nazis destroyed their house and the French governess saved her husband; the first pogrom in 1934; how some of her relatives got out of Germany; how she went to their summer home in February 1938; how she went to Stuttgart to get visas and how they did not have passports; finally getting passports; how the train she was on to Holland, the Netherlands was searched by the Gestapo and they stole her watch; meeting her husband in Holland; taking a ship to the United States; how her parents got out soon after; how the maid saved their silver and the bookkeeper took accounts receivable and buried it and collected for her parents for later; how her friend rescued many Jews by posing as a Nazi; visiting Germany in 1952; life after WWI; how the Nazis stole their possessions; the fates of her aunts and uncles; and how she believes the Holocaust could happen again.

    Oral history interview with Royce Higa

    Oral history interview with Royce Higa

    Oral History

    Royce Higa, born in 1920 in Honolulu, Hawaii, describes leaving school early to work; working as a dishwasher in Okinawa, Japan; being Japanese and the difference between Akin and Japanese; organizing a labor movement at age 16; graduating from the University of Michigan; becoming the director of a tuberculosis organization; joining the army in 1945; his brother’s death in Italy; training at Camp Shelby; getting the measles and suffering depression; going to Germany where he was a forward observer; crossing the Rhine River and not meeting any resistance; seeing a death march from Dachau and how they did not know at the time that they were Jewish prisoners; going to Augsburg, Germany; meeting a Lithuanian Jew and helping him find his family; getting his master’s degree in public health after the war; his life in politics; seeing the attack on Pearl Harbor, which were close to his home; and the Japanese who were loaded on to ships and taken to the mainland.

    Oral history interview with Fred Hirayama

    Oral history interview with Fred Hirayama

    Oral History

    Fred Hirayama, born in Hawaii, describes living on a plantation; volunteering for the army; the discrimination his brother experienced as a Japanese American; how his parents were proud of him for serving; how no one in his family was sent to a relocation center; going to Camp Shelby and never experiencing any discrimination; serving in the 522nd in France and Germany; his experiences with the concentration camps; going to Dachau where he saw the atrocities, gas chambers, and the inmates; returning to Germany in 1984; his memories of the Pearl Harbor attack; and some pictures he has of the state of Texas honoring the 442nd regiment.

    Oral history interview with Hazel Ishii

    Oral history interview with Hazel Ishii

    Oral History

    Hazel Ishii, born December 15, 1917, describes her Japanese parents and how she identifies as American; being in Maui, Hawaii during the attack on Pear Harbor; not having experienced any prejudice; how conditions changed for Japanese Americans after the war; a friend’s experience in a Japanese American internment camp; her daughter’s pursuit of archeology and Hebrew studies; and her family’s efforts to remember the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Susumu Ishii

    Oral history interview with Susumu Ishii

    Oral History

    Susumu Ishii, born on January 2, 1918 in Hawaii, describes being a second generation Japanese American; being 24 years old when the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred; being drafted a few months before the Pearl Harbor attack; how the commander told the Japanese Americans that they could not be trusted; how he identified as an American; attending a Japanese school; training at Camp Shelby and in Wisconsin; visiting a friend at a Japanese American relocation camp and his view on the camps; not experiencing any discrimination when he was in Mississippi but witnessing discrimination against black Americans; attending annual Holocaust memorial services; his daughter’s pursuit of Hebrew studies; and his view that those who were relocated to camps in the U.S. should be compensated.

    Oral history interview with Stanley Kaneshiro

    Oral history interview with Stanley Kaneshiro

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Richard Kuba

    Oral history interview with Richard Kuba

    Oral History

    Richard Kuba, born in March 1921 in Kailua, Hawaii, describes being a first generation Japanese American; living in Kailua when Pearl Harbor was attacked; volunteering to serve in March 1943; his non-Japanese friends and their views of the Japanese; how he heard nothing against Americans in the Japanese community; being stationed at Fort Shelby (probably Camp Shelby) in the infantry; being a radio operator when he went overseas; being in combat; feeling like his battalion was treated differently because they were Japanese Americans; his views on Hitler; how he did not know anything about the concentration camps other than what he read in the papers; and his first contact with the liberated prisoners.

    Oral history interview with Borys Kusne

    Oral history interview with Borys Kusne

    Oral History

    Borys Kusne, born in Vilna (Vilnius), Lithuania on August 17, 1918, describes growing up in a middle class Jewish family; the antisemitism in Vilnius; being the only Jew at his college in 1938; being inducted into the Polish army in 1939; how both the Russians and Germans were taking Polish prisoners of war; walking back home; the Nazi invasion in 1941; the new rules established for Jews; working at the railroad then moving to the ghetto and working in a hospital; being in the ghetto until 1942, when he was deported to Estonia to a liquidation camp; never seeing his mother again; conditions in the camp; and marching all night and leaving the group for the forest.

    Oral history interview with Hedy Marmorstein

    Oral history interview with Hedy Marmorstein

    Oral History

    Hedy Marmorstein, born in Vienna, Austria November 18, 1921, describes her parents; going to school until she was 16; finishing high school in New York; leaving Vienna in December 1938; her Jewish education; how they accepted antisemitism as a part of life; experiencing antisemitism in school and protesting; her non-Jewish friends; being sponsored by her father’s nephew to come to the United States; corresponding with her parents until the attack on Pearl Harbor; learning later that her parents were deported to Riga, Latvia (Kaiserwald concentration camp); how when she arrived in the U.S., Americans did not realize how sinister Hitler was; her experiences during Kristallnacht; antisemitism in the U.S.; how her experiences have affected her life; living in Hawaii versus New York; her views on the internment of Japanese Americans; how when she left Austria some of her possessions were destroyed and strip-searched in France; returning to Austria in 1959; and being in an Austrian club.

    Oral history interview with Katsugo Miho

    Oral history interview with Katsugo Miho

    Oral History

    Katsugo Miho, born in Maui, Hawaii, describes his Japanese parents; graduating high school in 1940 and beginning his university studies in 1941; being a member of the ROTC; volunteering for the army on December 7, 1941; being part of the Hawaiian Territorial Guard; how they were gathered in a school one morning and told that all Japanese Americans would be discharged because an American officer did not like the idea of Japanese Americans serving for the U.S. Army; working as a carpenter’s helper at the airfield; volunteering for the army in 1943 with his brother; going to Schofield and Camp Shelby; being in the artillery while his brother was in the medical section; how his father was picked up as an enemy alien in 1941, taken to a prison, then shipped to Sand Island, Honolulu, and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Alabama; the death of his brother in a bus accident when he visited their father; training until April 1944; visiting camps (possibly Japanese American internment camps); going to France and losing many men while trying to rescue a lost battalion from Texas; joining with the 7th Army and the 3rd Army; fighting battles in the German cities of Mannheim, Frankfurt, and Heidelberg; seeing civilians with yellow stars on their clothes in Aachen, Germany; and witnessing a death march from Dachau and not knowing at the time that they were Jewish prisoners.

    Oral history interview with Yuzuru Morita

    Oral history interview with Yuzuru Morita

    Oral History

    Yuzuru Morita, born in Hawaii on May 8, 1917, describes his Japanese American parents; being age 24 and in the army when Pearl Harbor was attacked; working on a sugar plantation and factory, where there were Japanese, Filipino, Portuguese, Korean, and Chinese men working together; being assigned to the 395th Battalion at Diamond Head; handling all the outgoing military goods for the army; being at home during the attack on Pearl Harbor and having to get back to the base; his response to seeing Japanese flags on the attacking airplanes; staying in the army throughout the war and becoming a sergeant; how both of his brothers entered the army when the 442nd was formed; going to Camp Shelby; not encountering any racial prejudice, but how Japanese-American soldiers had their allegiance continually doubted; his daily duties in the camp; becoming part of the 527th Artillery; how his brothers also fought and survived the war; how his parents were proud of them for fighting; going to Germany and Italy; how German soldiers surrendered to them; seeing Jewish prisoners for the first time at Dachau and how he did not even know it was called Dachau until 1988 because no one ever talked about it; going to Bavaria, Germany after the war, where they remained as occupational troops; how his service in the army was appreciated by people when he returned to the U.S. and how he did not experience any racial prejudice; and his outlook on life.

    Oral history interview with Neil Nagareda

    Oral history interview with Neil Nagareda

    Oral History

    Neil Nagareda, born May 2, 1924 on Hawaii Island, Hawaii, describes living on a plantation with a mixture of Filipino, Portuguese, Japanese, and Spanish families; how there were no anti-Japanese feelings; hearing that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor; how his parents were from Hiroshima , Japan; joining the army in 1943; being trained at Camp Shelby; how he was supposed to go to Camp Jerome but missed going; how his unit went to Europe; having no idea about the concentration camps when they came across Dachau; the conditions of the Jewish inmates; meeting up with the 522nd; how there were no orders as to what they should do at the camp nor with the prisoners; being a communications unit; leaving Germany in December 1945; the racism he experienced in Camp Shelby, Hattiesburg, MS, and New York; not talking very much about his war experiences; and his advice to his children.

    Oral history interview with Barton Nagata

    Oral history interview with Barton Nagata

    Oral History

    Barton Nagata, born in Maui, Hawaii, describes his family; going to Grinnell College in Iowa; being drafted in 1942 and sent to Arkansas for basic training; asking to be transferred to the 442nd Battalion; being sent to Camp Shelby attached to the headquarters battery as a clerk; working in radio and in the foreign observatory team; seeing some action in Italy with the infantry; being Colonel Harrington's radio operator; his education at Grinnell College, where he did not experience any discrimination; being on guard duty when he was not needed as a radio operator on the Riviera in France; being detached from his unit and made a MP, guarding German prisoners and AWOL American prisoners near Nice, France; liberating French prisoners in Germany; seeing a death march near Munich, Germany, not realizing the prisoners were Jews, and giving them some food; going to Dachau; speaking about his experiences when he was a high school history teacher; the importance of education to prevent racism; being an active protestant; going to a British university; and telling his children about his experiences.

    Oral history interview with Armin Nagel

    Oral history interview with Armin Nagel

    Oral History

    Armin Nagel, born June 1920 in Breznov (possibly Brașov), Romania, describes his early life; learning Hungarian and attending Hebrew school; moving near the border of Romania; moving to Bucharest, Romania with his siblings; finishing high school in 1938; working as a photographer; working as a dentist’s assistant until 1940; how the Romanian Nazis became active in 1939; how his brother, who was a printer, secretly printed material against the Nazis; being mistaken as his brother and taken to a train to go to a concentration camp; going with 2,000 other Jews and non-Jews to Terazu, a work camp; conditions in the camp and making teeth out of bones to aid eating; how in 1942 all the Jews in the camp were taken to Varnecka (possibly Varnikai, Lithuania); learning later that experiments were being conducted at the camp, where prisoners were given poison in the food; how, as a dental assistant, he was able to smuggle medicines to the prisoners; being able to survive because he ate with the dentist; being in the camp from May 1941 to August 1944; being taken to another camp in Groslovo (Velyka Mykhaĭlivka, Ukraine), where he worked as a dental assistant for one year; walking 80 miles towards Romania and ending up in Tagena; how his brothers survived and went to Israel; joining his mother in Bucharest, where he worked and went to school for engineering; immigrating eventually to the United States and settling in Honolulu, Hawaii; and the number of Jewish Romanians who left for Israel.

    Oral history interview with Hideo Nakamine

    Oral history interview with Hideo Nakamine

    Oral History

    Hideo Nakamine, born in Paauilo, Hawaii and raised in Honokaa, HI, describes being in Honolulu, HI with his brother when Pearl Harbor was attacked; enlisting and joining the 442nd; going to Camp Shelby for training; being put into the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion; fighting in Italy and France and going into Germany at the end of the war; how the first camp he saw was in Bad Tölz, Germany; seeing approximately 5,000 prisoners being marched away from Dachau and how the German soldiers scattered when they saw the U.S. troops; how some of the soldiers gave food to the prisoners and how they had been ordered not to give food to anyone because they needed their rations; going through other German death camp areas in Horgau, Augsburg, and Munich; visiting the museum at Dachau during the 40th reunion; going to a gathering of Holocaust survivors in Philadelphia, PA in 1985; how his parents had been driven off the plantation where they worked for being of Japanese descent; and his views on freedom and prejudice.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Obayashi

    Oral history interview with Joseph Obayashi

    Oral History

    Joseph Obayashi, born on April 18, 1924 in Maui, Hawaii, describes growing up in a community called Whalo; how his father grew pineapples; how he felt that Japanese Americans were not discriminated against even after the attack on Pearl Harbor; enlisting into the 442nd; how he trusted the U.S. government when they relocated Japanese Americans to camps; training at Camp Shelby; being in the 3rd and 5th Divisions during the war; being shot down when he was in the 3rd Division; the captain of the 442nd, Captain Fiberman, and his squadron commander, James Harrison; landing in Italy in 1944; how his job was to carry a radio on his back to help with the intelligence of the 1st Division; how the 442nd and 100th (rifle company) never drew back; going through France then Germany; hearing rumors about the concentration camps; seeing a concentration camp and prisoners eating a dead horse; meeting former inmates in Germany in 1984; encountering inmates in other areas of Germany in 1945; and his outlook on life.

    Oral history interview with Otto Orenstein

    Oral history interview with Otto Orenstein

    Oral History

    Otto Orenstein, born in Vienna, Austria on July 16, 1921, describes his parents and their ancestry; his education in Vienna; not experiencing any antisemitism when he was young; how his family observed some holidays but was not very religious; leaving Vienna on December 28, 1938 for Cologne, Germany; making it across the Belgian border; how some Belgian farmers smuggled them to Brussels, Belgium and gave them money for railroad tickets; arriving in Antwerp, Belgium, where a relative lived; getting a visa to the United States, and arriving in the U.S. in April 1940; how the rest of his immediate family arrived in the following few months; how in July 1927 there had been riots at the Ministry Building in Vienna; his memories of political events and backlashes in 1932, 1934, and 1938; being a member of the Austrian boy scouts and being kicked out for being Jewish; his memories of the Anschluss and seeing Himmler and Goering; conditions during the Nazi occupation; getting kicked out of the apartment where his family had lived for 30 years and going to live with his grandmother; how his uncle committed suicide; getting rounded up with other Jews on November 11, 1938 and taken to an SS barracks; seeing a Portuguese temple burning; how he was let go because he was only 17 years old; his journey to Antwerp and his difficulty crossing the border; going to a detention camp in Belgium September 1939 until his visa came in March 1940; how his parents left from Norway; going to Honolulu with his family in July 1940 and how his parents had brought artifacts from Norway and were featured on the front page of the Honolulu Advertiser on July 16, 1940; how when he first arrived in New York he stayed at Stephen Weiss’s house, which was a temporary shelter for refugees; how his family was interned on Sand Island, HI as enemy aliens; how his mother ended up being the leader of the women’s side of the camp; the things he brought with him (birth certificate, train ticket from Brussels to Antwerp, student card, and passport); how he has talked to his family about his experiences; not experiencing any antisemitism in Honolulu; and some of his memories from 1938. The interviewee also shows a picture of his birth certificate and his student card.

    Oral history interview with members of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion

    Oral history interview with members of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion

    Oral History

    Members of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion discuss their experiences as Japanese Americans when Pearl Harbor was attacked; deciding to join the army; the anti-Japanese sentiment in the press and the reactions of their peers; being evacuated from the west coast and waiting for Japanese American detainment camps to be built; people they knew whom were detained; the experiences of their families before the war; how many of their possessions were taken by the federal government; training at Camp Shelby; the status of family members as enemy aliens; Holocaust denial and Holocaust education; going to the military camp in Arkansas (possibly Camp Jerome); the confiscation of their diaries; their views on reparations for the Americans who were detained during WWII; their activities on the Western Front, including the detachment of the 522nd, how the artillery was often ahead of the infantry, and going through many towns; arriving at Dachau; seeing the prisoners and Reverend Martin Niemöller; not staying long at the camp; being ordered not to feed the camp survivors because they could not eat the food; passing a camp outside of Munich, Germany while they were scouting; seeing two dead horses and later seeing a group of prisoners gathered around eating them; feeding the survivors at their camp and speaking to some of them; seeing the gas chambers, crematoriums, and shooting sites at the camp; going to the displaced person camps and attending a wedding at one of them; going to a survivors' meeting in Philadelphia, PA; the irony of being a persecuted minority in America then helping a minority during the war; and the presence of prejudice organizations in the U.S.

    Panel discussion with Holocaust survivors and members of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion

    Panel discussion with Holocaust survivors and members of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion

    Oral History

    Holocaust survivors and members of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion discuss the internment of enemy aliens in the United States after the Pearl Harbor attack; learning about the concentration camps in Europe; the experience of being a Japanese American after the bombing of Pearl Harbor; the experiences of Sarah Rozenberg, who lived in the Warsaw ghetto, was sent to the Majdanek concentration camp on April 23, 1943, worked in the ammunition factory, and was liberated by the Russian Army on January 15, 1945; Rozenberg’s experiences with the Germans and the brutality of the Jewish police as well as the underground activities in the Warsaw ghetto; and Holocaust education.

    Jewish/552nd Panel

    Jewish/552nd Panel

    Oral History

    Punchbowl Memorial

    Punchbowl Memorial

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sarah Rozenberg

    Oral history interview with Sarah Rozenberg

    Oral History

    Yom HaShoah

    Yom HaShoah

    Oral History

    The recording includes a service for Yom HaShoah during which Mayor Frank Fasi of Honolulu, HI; Chuck Freedman, director of communications in the office of the Hawaiian governor; Jacob Liebermann of the Jewish Federation of Honolulu; Gerald Clay, president of the Jewish Federation of Honolulu; and Judy Weightman honor the millions of Jews who died in the Holocaust and thank those who helped save Jews and work to fight present-day Holocaust denial. The recording also includes a musical performance.

    Oral history interview with Gerda Samuel

    Oral history interview with Gerda Samuel

    Oral History

    Gerda Samuel, born in Hamburg, Germany in 1921, describes her father, who was a printer; attending a Jewish school for girls in 1931; how her father was taken by the SS in 1934 and she never saw him again; being sent to the ghetto; conditions in the ghetto; being sent to England in 1938; being adopted by a Jewish family in Belfast, Northern Ireland; never seeing her mother or aunt again; being raped by the son of her adopted family; joining the British Army in 1941; not hearing about the concentration camps until after the war; going to London, England to work as a waitress after she left the army; moving to Singapore in 1948; immigrating to the United States in 1952; her conversion to Catholicism; antisemitism in Hawaii; and her memories of the Depression.

    Oral history interview with John Sato

    Oral history interview with John Sato

    Oral History

    John Sato, born in the state of Washington in 1921, describes experiencing some discrimination as Japanese American when he went to a university in 1939; how his family was evacuated from their farm; living in the Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho; conditions in the camp; volunteering for the army; going to Camp Shelby; being in the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion; joining the air force intelligence; visiting his family in the camp; being transferred to the Hawaii Air Force Base for nine months; being sent to Guam; going on a bomb trip to Japan with scientists; and his life after the war.

    Oral history interview with Rudolf Schmerl

    Oral history interview with Rudolf Schmerl

    Oral History

    Rudolf Schmerl, born in August 1930 outside of Berlin, Germany, describes his family; moving to Berlin in 1935; his family history; experiencing antisemitism as a child from his peers; his view of Germans; wanting to leave Germany and having difficulty; how Germany defined his family as stateless; how his father went to the United States in1938 to work as a doctor; going with his mother and grandmother on a train illegally to Czechoslovakia; being beaten at his new school; going to Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic) on August 31, 1938; getting measles on the ship heading to the United States; being detained on Ellis Island; living in Harlem, NY; how his grandmother never became a U.S. citizen; leaving New York in 1941 for Louisiana; seeing racism in New Orleans; moving to Toledo, OH, and seeing the segregation; the fates of his relatives in Germany; and the lessons of the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Jedidah Shashai

    Oral history interview with Jedidah Shashai

    Oral History

    Jedidah Shashai, born in Vienna, Austria on May 19, 1924, describes growing up in poverty in Vienna; having no Jewish school education; experiencing antisemitism; her father’s death when she was 12 years old; how the Nazis took many of their possessions; the uniforms of the women Nazis; how she had no connection with Judaism; wanting to be part of the mainstream and not being accepted; how the Nazis took her family’s business; how she went to Belgium and her sister and mother went to England; antisemitism in newspapers; wanting to go to Hawaii; getting out in a transport of children and feeling guilty because she was not a child; going to Belgium first then England; staying with different families in Belgium; being placed in a small village in England in 1939 by the Rotary and experiencing antisemitism; not experiencing antisemitism in Hawaii; and her approach to life.

    Oral history interview with Don Shimazu

    Oral history interview with Don Shimazu

    Oral History

    Don Shimazu, born in Punei, Maui, Hawaii, describes his role as a staff sergeant in charge of the 522nd Battalion survey section, with the responsibility for accurately locating targets; growing up on a plantation on Maui, where there was a subtle discrimination against all minorities; beginning ROTC at the university in September 1941; his memories of the attack on Pearl Harbor; experiencing some animosity for being Japanese immediately after the attack; how he had been schooled in the Japanese samurai tradition, which taught him to have loyalty to his country (the U.S.) first and how this tradition led to the success of the 442nd and 522nd; enlisting and the disbanding of his first unit; becoming a carpenter’s apprentice; learning about the Japanese internment camps; volunteering for the army on March 24, 1943; going to Camp Shelby; being made second in command of his cadre; how his division was known for being the most accurate artillery division; his combat experiences in Italy in the towns of Grosseto, Livorno, Castellano, Pisa, and Florence; going to Marseille, France; joining the 7th Army and traveling through the French Riviera, Dijon, and Lyon; crossing a minefield without realizing it; saving the lost battalion (131st Field Artillery, 2nd Battalion); staying in Southern France until March 1945; serving with various battalions, including the 63rd, 45th, 44th, and the 101st to assist in the Allied crossing of the Rhine; travelling through Mannheim, Germany and the Siegfried Line; entering Dachau; being told not to feed the camp survivors as they would be unable to cope with the soldier’s food; going to Munich, Germany; returning to Dachau in 1984; the similarities and differences between the German and American internment camps; his memories of the concentration camps in Germany; and ways to prevent the Holocaust from happening again.

    Oral history interview with Ignace Speiser

    Oral history interview with Ignace Speiser

    Oral History

    Ignace (né Yitzhak) Speiser, born January 5, 1908 in Warsaw, Poland, describes his second wife; studying in Paris, France after WWI; learning to play the mandolin and the violin; going to the consortium in Warsaw; being age 21 when he attended the Ecole de Musique in Paris; officially leaving Warsaw in 1931; his siblings and his parents; trying to leave France for the United States in 1939 but being prevented by the beginning of the war; being taken by the Germans from Toulouse, France in 1943; being sent to a concentration camp in Danzig (Gdańsk), Poland; being asked to play his violin; how the inmates dug a tunnel, which was discovered; how all the imamates were deported to Auschwitz; being on the train with his friend, a cantor, who sang one symphony the whole ride; how people jumped off the train; how his wife was still in Toulouse; being separated from the others at Auschwitz because he was a musician; playing Ernest Bloch’s Baal Sham; going to Fürstengrube to work in a coal mine, but being separated as a musician with his opera singer friend; being beaten once; being in Birkenau for a few weeks; how a dentist would bring him food and ask him to play Mozart; having a birthday party in 1945; how he had been in Auschwitz for two years and Fürstengrube for one year; giving concerts once or twice a week in Fürstengrube; how after awhile he was not afraid of dying; selection processes; being removed from Auschwitz in January 1945 at which point they were walking and on the train; going to a place near Lübeck, Germany and being taken by the Red Cross to Sweden; the conditions on the train and the deaths during the journey; and his tattoo.

    Oral history interview with Louise Spitzer

    Oral history interview with Louise Spitzer

    Oral History

    Louise Spitzer, born December 6, 1916, in Vienna, Austria, describes her parents and childhood; going to Brussels, Belgium to perfect her French and graduating from hotel management school in 1938; life in Vienna and the intermingling of Jews and the Christians; how she had no antisemitic experiences in her childhood; wearing a three arrows patch to present herself as socialist in protest of Nazism; the death of her father; having boarders in their home beginning in 1938; being picked up by the Nazis to clean the synagogue; how the Nazis took all their linens and silverware, she went to the Nazi headquarters to demand it back, and they gave it back; going to work as a servant and later a nanny for a family in London, England; leaving on November 10, 1938; the deportation of her uncle to Dachau and the death of her mother in 1939; being beaten at the German border; staying with the English family’s children in Wales when the war broke out; returning to London to work in a secret factory until the end of the war; volunteering to help the Americans because she spoke German and being stationed in Germany in the censorship division; visiting her aunt and uncle in Vienna after they were released from Dachau; her interactions with the Russians upon her return to Germany; applying to go to the United States after she received British citizenship; leaving the army in 1948 and immigrating to the U.S.; working for American Express and Sabena; receiving some money from the Austrian government for confiscated belongings; and her views on antisemitism and Holocaust denial.

    Oral history interview with Richard Strauss

    Oral history interview with Richard Strauss

    Oral History

    Richard Strauss, born in Mainz, Germany in 1924, describes growing up in Germany and Italy; working for most of his life in the hotel food industry; attending a German public school; hearing antisemitism on occasion from his classmates; how his father was active in the Social Democratic party and was warned to leave on the night of the 1933 election, which he did; the camps near his town where dissidents were taken; how laws preventing Jews from attending high school began in 1935; his uncle’s wine exporting business, which he was allowed to continue operating despite the limits on Jewish businesses; his parents’ divorce; being socially shunned by non-Jewish friends in 1935; being sent to Besel, Switzerland to his father when their business was being reviewed; being placed in a boarding school in Italy from 1935 to 1938; returning to his mother in August 1938 when Mussolini enacted antisemitic laws; how his father went to Cuba and then Australia in 1940; how his mother’s attitude about remaining in Germany changed after Kristallnacht; how shop keepers would allow them to purchase items even though they had signs up banning Jewish customers; being hidden by a family friend who was a member of the Nazi Party, in a park the night of Kristallnacht; seeing the destruction of the city the next morning; how the thugs who committed the atrocities were brought in from another city; taking in homeless families because their home was intact; being on the English Rotary Club’s transport that got children out of Germany; going to Portsmouth, England and working as a window dresser’s apprentice; how his mother left Germany in November 1941 and went from Portugal to the United States; being interned on the Isle of Mann; being sent to Glasgow, Scotland and then transported to Australia; the conditions on the ship and the maltreatment of the refugees; being placed in an internment camp in Australia; sending a postcard to family friends in Australia, where his father also happened to be; being given the choice to return to England or join the Australian Army, and choosing the latter; joining in 1942 and becoming an interpreter at the rank of sergeant; guarding prisoners of war captured in North Africa that were interned in Australia; getting out of the army in 1947 and immigrating to the U.S. in December 1947; getting an apprenticeship at the Biltmore Hotel; going to California, Utah, Hawaii, and New York; his experiences guarding Italian and German prisoners and not telling them he was Jewish; witnessing some antisemitism in the U.S.; and his reflections on the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Billy Taylor

    Oral history interview with Billy Taylor

    Oral History

    Billy Taylor, born October 15, 1912 in Oklahoma, describes growing up on a farm in a suburb of Oklahoma City; attending the University of Oklahoma and studying petroleum engineering; joining the ROTC, working with the horse-drawn artillery; receiving his lieutenant's commission in 1935; working for the conservation corps in Oregon; getting married in 1938 and going to Texas; joining the armed forces in March 1941; going to Fort Sill to be an instructor; going to the 155 Howitzer Battalion; briefly being the captain of an Arkansas unit of the National Guard; being selected for secret duty at Camp Shelby, training Japanese American soldiers; how the men were loyal and they wanted to prove it; going to Italy; forming units at the University of Naples; going to combat north of Rome; his duties as well as the technical and logistical details of their campaign; going to Florence; how the unit was sent to Marseille, France but he got sick and was sent to the hospital; hitching a ride to Marseille a month later; experiencing their worst fighting in the Vosges Mountains; being assigned to rescue a battalion (131st Field Artillery, 2nd Battalion) in October 1944; emptying a brothel of women, who had been collaborating with the Germans; details about the rescue of the lost battalion and sustaining great casualties; the split of the 442nd and the 522nd; crossing the Rhine River at Worms, Germany; taking Mannheim, Germany; coming across a training camp for German youth and a compound of imported food; being northwest of Munich and Dachau and supporting the 101 Airborne; going to the Dachau concentration camp, which had been emptied of many prisoners; going to a meeting of units to discuss what they should do with the corpses; not staying at the camp for very long; the smell of the camp; heading south and finding a group of former Dachau prisoners in a village where they had been abandoned by the SS; seeing the survivors eating dead horses; the physical condition of the prisoners and their orders to not feed them; forming a camp for these people and sending many back to Poland; how the Russians were rough with the refugees; going north of Munich to search for SS troops; remaining in the reserve until 1954; receiving the Croix de Guerre from the French; working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs; how he is part Cherokee; how he never questioned the loyalty of his men in WWII but that at the beginning there was censoring of individual mail and some men were taken out of the unit; and his feelings about Dachau.

    Oral history interview with Ted Tsukiyama

    Oral history interview with Ted Tsukiyama

    Oral History

    Ted Tsukiyama describes the shock of the Pearl Harbor attacks, especially by Japanese Americans; being in the first ROTC unit to enter the war; being assigned to St. Louis to find paratroopers; becoming part of the territorial guard; never having a problem being Japanese American; being honorably discharged because of his Japanese heritage; going back to school; volunteering in a labor battalion, building defenses and serving for 11 months; how a few months later Japanese Americans were allowed in the armed forces; how his wife grew up in California and was put into a camp; being given intelligence training in Minnesota; being sent to Northern Burma Jungle as an intelligence translator for the Air Force; spending over a year, until end of war, in Northern Burma; going back to Hawaii; how he feels that the war experience countered prejudice towards Japanese Americans; and becoming a lawyer in labor relations.

    Oral history interview with Harold Ueoka

    Oral history interview with Harold Ueoka

    Oral History

    Harold Ueoka, born in Lawai, Hawaii in 1919, describes his Japanese parents; serving with the 526th Artillery Battalion; working in Honolulu before the Pearl Harbor attacks; how there was no real discrimination before war, except for his summer job working for a plantation; volunteering for the army when the war started; his memories of the Pearl Harbor attack; being head of the baseball team and how four of his teammates decided to join the army; how he felt that if he did not volunteer he would shame the people in Hawaii; how when his unit was in Europe, his destination was Hitler's home; seeing the crematoriums at Dachau and the places where people were shot; and how during the war he heard from other soldiers what was going on in the camps.

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