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Oral history interview with Walter Chotzen

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1990.481.7 | RG Number: RG-50.062.0007

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    Oral history interview with Walter Chotzen
    Transcript
    OK.
    Right now?
    Wait a minute.
    Are you ready?
    Yeah.
    It's rolling.
    OK.
    The tape isn't rolling here.
    Are we rolling?
    We have a--
    OK, now--
    Wait, wait, wait.
    How can we be rolling?
    I don't have my audio thing on.
    Is this OK?
    [SIDE CONVERSATIONS]
    Oops, you know what happened?
    OK.
    Say everything now.
    All right.
    This is December 29, 1987.
    And I'm here with Walter Chotzen.
    And we're in Honolulu, Hawaii.
    And Walter, I'm just going to start.
    When I go through the interviewing,
    a little bit of it, what I'm going to do
    is ask you a few questions just for the record, for the data.
    And then we'll go on from there and get
    into some of the stories.
    First of all, what's your name and address?
    I'm Walter Chotzen.
    Living at--
    And when were you born and where were you born?
    I was born on May 17, 1911, in Ziegenhals, Germany,
    goat's neck translated.
    Goat's neck, Germany.
    A small town on the Czechoslovakian border
    and the Sudeten mountains.
    OK.
    And are you married, Walter?
    Yes, I am.
    Is it possible for us to get closer, Wayne?
    I don't like this angle.
    Can I get closer?
    Walter can scoot up or--
    Walter, do you want to scoot up a little?
    OK.
    Ready to be a mama.
    She's ready.
    Everything's rolling.
    Ready?
    One second.
    Keep your papers quiet as you go.
    OK?
    OK.
    Today is December 29, 1987.
    And I'm here with Walter Chotzen.
    I'm Judy Weightman.
    And we're in Honolulu, Hawaii at the Flagg residence.
    And Walter, when were you born and where were you born?
    I was born May 17, 1911 in Ziegenhals, Germany
    on the Czechoslovakian border, a small town,
    a town of about 10,000 people at the Czechoslovakian border
    in the Sudeten mountains.
    And could you tell me a little bit about your family?
    Yes.
    My father was already, I think about 57 or some
    when I was born.
    I had two older sisters.
    And one was 10 years older.
    And she's still alive, fortunately.
    And the other one died at a rather young age.
    She was six years older than I am.
    But she died in Sweden.
    And you have a sister 10 years older than you?
    A sister, yeah, she's still alive.
    And she's in New York.
    In New York.
    New York, right.
    Right.
    How do you Know I know all, see all, tell all.
    [LAUGHTER]
    Bonnie told me.
    I wanted to ask you several questions
    that I really know the answers to, I know.
    But I'm going to ask you for the record.
    And are you married, Walter?
    Yes, I certainly am, successfully so.
    I have eight children.
    Eight children and your wife is Carla.
    Carla, and she's a professional photographer.
    And we've been married for 43 years.
    I didn't realize that.
    43.
    And can you tell me a little bit about your family growing up
    in Germany?
    And a town of 10,000, were there many Jewish people there?
    There were about 12 to 15 Jewish families in town.
    And most of them, there were a few small retail merchants,
    but quite a number of manufacturers.
    My father was one of them.
    My father manufactured wooden articles
    that go into breweries and paper mills.
    Bungs, B-U-N-G-S, most people don't know what it is.
    I never heard of it.
    But it's sort of like a cork, but of wood.
    The beer barrels were closed with those things
    in those days.
    And he also manufactured brewery pitch, which
    was sprayed into beer casks.
    And then he had also a wholesale brewery supply business.
    And there's quite a few interesting things
    that happened after Hitler came to power.
    I became a junior partner.
    I was-- shall I talk about this now?
    Is this the time to talk about this?
    Yeah, whenever you feel like it.
    Yes.
    First, I hated school.
    I was not a very good student.
    I was sent to the University of Berlin.
    And I was supposed to become an engineer or then maybe
    a graduate merchant, of course.
    And I found that these courses were so ridiculously
    theoretical.
    And I came from a school which was very basic, where
    things like chemistry were very much explained to us.
    So when I came to the university and there was a chemistry
    professor who came out with his assistant,
    and he wrote formulas rapidly on the blackboard and another man
    did experiments, when I watched the experiments,
    I missed the formulas.
    I missed what he was talking about or the other way around.
    And I got very angry.
    And I quit after, I think, one or two semesters.
    And through connections of my mother,
    I got into a very interesting business firm, a manufacturing
    of office supplies.
    They manufactured desks and chairs.
    They did all the printing.
    And they sold bookkeeping systems.
    So it was a very varied manufacturing.
    And I became an apprentice there.
    And after two years, they hired me as an employee.
    And then Hitler came.
    This was in Berlin?
    In Berlin, yeah, in Berlin.
    And Hitler came.
    And my firm was selling merchandise
    to the city of Berlin, to the state of Prussia,
    and to the federal government of Germany.
    And they said if you employ Jews,
    you can't sell us anything, although the firm was actually
    Jewish.
    But the firm was what they called [GERMAN]..
    They changed.
    The Jewish owner went out and through some dealing,
    the former manager became the acting director.
    How they did all these details, I don't know.
    But it became an Aryan firm.
    How old were you, about, at this time, Walter?
    20, 21, something like that.
    And so I was discharged, of course, in order
    to have the few-- there were no other Jewish employees, hardly,
    I believe, besides the owner.
    And I went back to my father's business in my hometown.
    My father, as I said, my father was
    in a manufacturing business.
    And my father was a very powerful person.
    And it was very difficult to work there.
    And I wasn't very happy.
    Also, there was hardly anybody to associate with.
    You were shunned by most of the people--
    Why was that?
    --after a few years.
    Because you were a Jew, and it was dangerous for the Gentiles
    to associate with Jews.
    And I had friends, all my friends
    were Gentile, mostly Protestants, strangely enough,
    although my hometown was largely Catholic.
    But the Protestants were in a small minority
    and therefore they were a little bit more accessible
    to associate with Jews, even before Hitler came to power.
    So most of my friends, my main friends, two of them,
    were Protestants.
    And after Hitler came to power, they
    were just embarrassed to show that they wanted
    to associate with the Jews.
    So in the streets, they would go the other way
    when they saw me coming or something like this.
    So except one, he was very loyal to me.
    He came to me one day and said that I could help him out
    financially.
    He had stolen the money for the Hitler Youth group
    that he was heading and would I please bail him out.
    Oh, no.
    And I said, no, thank you.
    [GASPS]
    That was after he had been shunning you?
    Well, he wasn't quite as radical shunning as some of the others.
    But he did also try to keep away until he needed very
    badly to get in touch with me.
    Then he knew me.
    So it was a very unpleasant situation.
    There were, for example, I was wanting to dance.
    And I wanted to go out.
    And I went out, for example, I remember
    one evening I went to a dance.
    And my hometown, I should interrupt here,
    was not only an industrial town, there
    were quite a few factories, a large pulp mill, and a paper
    mill, a cotton mill, a cigarette, cigar box factory,
    my father's factory, a shirt factory.
    There were quite a few Jewish manufacturers in that town.
    And so part of the town was a resort town.
    Not a high class resort, but a resort for insurance companies,
    and so forth.
    They had sanitariums and places like that.
    They called them cure places, sparse, and so forth.
    Yeah.
    And so part of the town was very pretty.
    It was in the mountains, the small mountains there.
    It was the foothills of the Sudeten mountains.
    And it was very attractive, a very attractive area.
    So I wanted to dance.
    I went in one of those dance places, hotels
    where they had dance floor.
    And I wanted to dance there with some of my fellow students.
    And of course, nobody wanted to dance with me.
    I couldn't go.
    I sat there, you see, and it was just very, very bad.
    And interesting, as from a business point, my father
    sent me out to give me some variety
    because I was sitting in the small town.
    And I couldn't go anyplace.
    The only place we could go and be reasonably free
    was going across the Czechoslovakian border.
    And there the Sudeten Germans were just as anti-Semitic
    or more so.
    But they needed the money.
    This was sort of a resort area.
    And of course, the Czechs were very liberal.
    And the Czechs were running the country.
    The Sudeten Germans were a minority there.
    They hated the Czechs.
    But the Czechs were running the country.
    And they were liberal, available.
    So I wanted to tell you that my father, in order
    to give me a little more variety,
    sent me on business trips.
    And that was after Hitler came to power.
    He had quite a few large customers
    that had come to buy from him through ads in the trade
    papers, paid journals.
    They knew he was Jewish?
    Nobody knew that he was Jewish till I came around.
    Because if you didn't say Heil, Hitler when you went in
    and when you went out, they knew that you were Jewish.
    So I couldn't say Heil Hitler.
    And I wouldn't say Heil Hitler.
    So I came in said good morning, good evening, and went out.
    They knew we were Jewish.
    And they quit buying.
    So wherever I went, the people, the customers
    that had been buying from us quit
    buying because they found out that we were Jewish.
    So my father lost his business.
    So it was not very successful, my business trip.
    And some of the agony in Dresden, a beautiful city,
    there was one hotel in which Jews could still stay.
    They would let Jews stay.
    And in this hotel, I went in the evening to drink, have a beer
    or whatever.
    There were some Gentile young people
    sitting at a large table, perhaps seven, six, or seven,
    or eight people.
    And they were very friendly looking, very nice looking.
    And I was so desperate for company, to talk to someone,
    be able to speak, that I just ordered the whole round
    of drinks for them.
    And they took it.
    They didn't reject it.
    But they ignored it completely.
    Nobody spoke to me.
    Not one single person spoke to me.
    So I got drunk that night.
    And I was just miserable, absolutely miserable.
    And this was sort of the pattern.
    And I don't know.
    It was the story that I recorded about being
    called for the draft.
    Is that already in the record?
    No, no.
    Should I repeat this?
    Yeah, anything.
    One story we probably should repeat, because you talked
    a part of it on the tape, but we didn't
    have anything on the video, remember, on that, either,
    just on the audio.
    But the battery with the car?
    Yes, I did want that, too.
    OK.
    Go ahead.
    Because we don't really have any of this on tape.
    I see.
    Well, although Jews were not allowed
    to serve in the armed forces, they
    had to register for the draft.
    And when my year was called up, we
    were told to go to a dance hall outside of town,
    a very shabby place and be there at a certain time.
    And when I came there, there were, of course,
    being a small town, most of my friends
    that I had gone to school with.
    They were all there.
    And everybody ignored me.
    There was nobody.
    One young man whispered to me when walking by me, hi, Walt,
    hope you're OK, or something like this.
    This was in German, of course.
    So then finally, we were all called into the examination
    room, a large, large room.
    And we had to be stripped totally naked.
    And I was the only circumcised man in the whole bunch.
    And the doctor, the Nazi officer came in a military uniform,
    with a swastika band on his arm, and very military and sharp.
    And the one when I was called up to be
    in the middle of the circle, everybody
    was standing around in a circle naked.
    And I was in the middle.
    And I stumbled when I had to make my knee bends.
    So he made some very nasty remarks about those flat-footed
    heroes that he was--
    we have one of those.
    And the people just loved, they howled with laughter,
    much more than-- it wasn't all that funny to them, either.
    But they wanted to show their patriotism.
    And I wanted to evaporate into the air.
    It was just one of the most miserable experiences
    that I ever have gone through.
    What did you do, Walter, when--
    There was nothing to do.
    And you don't cry.
    You just bite your teeth.
    And you take the stuff.
    And you walk out.
    And you never forget it.
    Actually, I did push it down so far that I only remembered it
    after I was in a counseling session once.
    Then came something similar, it appeared to me
    in sort of a semisleep stage, and I couldn't figure out
    what it was.
    And then this thing came up and I remembered everything
    about this.
    Did those people ever say anything to you afterwards?
    I mean, did they ever apologize?
    There was no afterwards.
    I was gone before Hitler got into the worst part of it then.
    So even when you went outside and they were away
    from that Nazi, they still did not say anything.
    No, no, no, no, no.
    Nobody said anything.
    Nobody talked to me.
    There was nobody there to talk to me.
    They all ignored me.
    So I want to tell a little bit about the financial situation.
    So my father found that his business
    was going down and down.
    And he wanted to get out of Germany.
    And that was already arranged through my brother-in-law,
    who was a doctor in New York.
    And so-- hi.
    It was arranged that I would go to America.
    And my parents had finally decided.
    First my father said, you should get married, we should stay,
    everything will change, it will get better again.
    No soup is eaten as hot as it is cooked was one of the sayings.
    And so nobody really believed what was going to happen
    was possible.
    So in any case, first of all, when
    he came to sell the factory--
    first of all, we had to find out how
    to get money out of Germany.
    That was one thing.
    When was this, about, Walter?
    Do you remember?
    That was '35, '36.
    So you were thinking, even that early, that you had to get out.
    When I came back home, the winter of '33, '35.
    Yeah, something like that, '37.
    I left Germany in '38.
    So it was '36, '37.
    And of course, legally, you couldn't take any money out
    of Germany at all.
    And so I came up with an idea.
    That since we lived on the border,
    and we were able to cross the border
    as often as we wanted to, as border, we were not restricted.
    We had sort of a border pass.
    And we had a little car.
    And so I came up with the idea to use a pill,
    what you call an ampoule, is that the word you use?
    A pill.
    A little pill container, glass container that had pills in it,
    a round glass with a cork.
    They had corks in it.
    And I cut up some lead pipe, which you can up with a knife
    or somehow.
    It's very soft metal.
    And I made heavy chips to make that heavy.
    And I poured automobile oil into the--
    no, no, I didn't do that.
    I wove the money into the glass thing, the paper money.
    And then I corked it up.
    And then I threw it into a spare can of oil.
    So it stayed on the bottom.
    So even if you shook it, the oil would keep it
    from making any noise.
    Once even at the border, the border patrol
    asked to show him the oil.
    And he looked at it.
    And he shook it.
    And it didn't shake.
    That must have been really scary.
    Oh, it was terribly scary.
    So I did this.
    And then I went--
    on the border, you had to be very careful.
    You wouldn't want any of the Sudeten German people
    to know what you were doing.
    But we had relatives in Czechoslovakia, in Prague.
    And we had a good friend, a Jewish doctor
    in this small town that I went to.
    And he would mail this money to Prague for us.
    And then our Prague relatives kept it in a savings account.
    And then when Hitler marched into Prague, it was gone,
    you know.
    It was all lost.
    So all that money was lost.
    But in any case, when I had this money in the oil can,
    I would go to the woods there, drive into the forest,
    and pour the money out, pour the oil out over my hands
    till the ampule came out into my hand.
    And then I wrapped it in some paper and took it to our friend
    and handed him the money.
    And that was the way I handled it.
    And it was a relatively safe way of doing it.
    No one ever caught you?
    No one ever caught me.
    No, except that one morning, after I
    had applied for the American visa, one morning at 7 o'clock,
    which was earlier than we usually--
    just about the time I got up, but my parents' didn't.
    There came a call on the phone.
    I went to the phone.
    And it was said this is the Gestapo.
    And we want to have you come with your auto papers,
    with your automobile papers to the police station
    and be there at 8 o'clock in the morning.
    And so I was there 8 o'clock in the morning.
    And I was scared.
    Thank you.
    [BACKGROUND NOISES]
    OK, Walter.
    You were saying that they called you into the [PLACE NAME]..
    Yes.
    They called me in.
    They took me to a villa that they
    were occupying in this town quite a ways
    out in a very nice area.
    And they set me down.
    And they didn't say anything why they called me.
    They came in.
    They entered my car.
    And I drove them out where they wanted to go.
    Who were these people?
    Two private-- the Gestapo police guys, secret
    state police is the translated word, name.
    And they said to me we know that you smuggled money out
    of Germany.
    They said we know that.
    And we have proof.
    So I knew that this was life and death if I say yes, I admit it.
    That was the end of me.
    I knew that.
    So I took a deep breath and I looked at them
    and I said, no, I've never done that.
    And so they said, we have papers to prove this.
    And they pulled out of a briefcase some documents
    and said you have been on this and this date,
    you crossed the border at a certain place.
    And I knew I was off, because I'd never crossed the border
    at the place they said.
    They were just trying, because some
    of our workers in the factory lived on the Czechoslovakian
    side and crossed the border there.
    So they thought that maybe through these workers
    I shoved money out.
    In any case, they gave the wrong border.
    I was able to pull out my car documents, my border documents,
    and there was no border crossing on that place.
    And I said, I have never gone across that border.
    And they said, well, I guess we'll give you the OK
    to go to America, they said.
    And they let you go then?
    They let me go.
    And they said we will approve of your application
    for a passport.
    This was right before you were leaving, then, to get out.
    Several months, probably, I suspect.
    What do you think they wanted to do?
    I mean, did they want to keep you there, or did they want--
    Well, if they would have found out
    that I was smuggling money out of Germany,
    I would have gone to a concentration camp
    or I would have been eliminated even before that.
    I would have gone in lawsuit and capital crime and executed.
    I don't know.
    I'm quite sure.
    I'm quite positive of that.
    How did they treat you when they let you go?
    Then they were courteous, cold, but courteous.
    They were not even rough with me.
    I was never manhandled, never was I
    hit or beaten or in any way manhandled,
    especially not by official people.
    Did you ever see anyone who was?
    I know people who were, yes.
    Yes, in my hometown, there was a manufacturer
    who was blackmailed to pay money into some very right wing
    organization.
    And he refused.
    And they beat him up.
    He was beaten up very badly.
    But in my area, the Catholics weren't quite as Nazi,
    and so on.
    We didn't have a great deal of trouble.
    Even at the Crystal Night, there was no trouble in our town,
    I don't think.
    I have never heard of it.
    I may have been already gone.
    I don't know when that actually was.
    Oh, no, I was still in Germany, I believe.
    But I know that there was no problem in our hometown.
    When your father lost the factory, when was that?
    That was quite interesting.
    I would guess about 1938 or so, it also
    goes to show how corrupt the people were,
    the Nazis had took it upon themselves to determine
    how much my father was allowed to sell
    his factory for so that they could sell it cheaply
    to some of their cohorts.
    And so in order to overcome this,
    we found a party member, a Nazi party member,
    whom we paid to bribe some of the people
    in this big city who were in charge of determining the price
    to boost it up.
    And he was not a Nazi, but he was a member of the Nazi party.
    He wore the swastika on his button.
    And he also later on brought some money to Holland for me,
    which he hid under his--
    built into his car.
    And he was a Nazi member.
    In other words, they were all to be bought.
    Everybody could be bought in those days.
    It wasn't because he was a friend of yours
    that he did this?
    Well, he was our insurance man, my father's insurance man.
    So he did quite a lot of business with my father.
    But he was not a Nazi.
    And he brought that under danger of his life
    when he got that money into Holland.
    I was already in Holland, coming to America.
    And he met me there and brought this money
    [? for what's set ?] to be timed.
    But so my father found one of his clients, a very wealthy
    landowner, who wanted to give our factory as a gift
    to his daughter, to the bridegroom,
    to the fiance of his daughter, a very nice, charming, young
    German man, and from a very well-known industrial family
    who bought the factory.
    And the official price was still very low.
    But my father arranged that under the table,
    this father-in-law of this future owner
    paid quite a substantial sum in cash.
    And he actually did pay it?
    He did.
    Oh, yes, he did pay it.
    And in order to get it out of Germany--
    my brother-in-law and my sister lived in Sweden at the time
    already.
    They had already left Germany.
    So photographic equipment, my brother-in-law
    had a photographic shop.
    Photographic equipment was very valuable.
    German photograph equipment is high quality.
    So somebody was found in Berlin who
    would see to it that shipments of these photographic equipment
    were, thank God, got out of Germany somehow.
    And that was, of course, all very expensive.
    You had to bribe everybody, and so forth.
    And three shipments, they were $30,000,
    were put into three shipments of photographic equipment
    of which only one arrived.
    The first one arrived.
    The other two never arrived.
    You never found out what--
    We never found what happened, no.
    So most of that money was gone.
    So there were just a few hundred dollars
    left for my parents, which they finally
    sent to me in Rotterdam.
    And in fact, when I arrived in Rotterdam,
    I would have gotten about $600.
    But suddenly, the market was devaluated.
    And what I got was $400.
    And that's all the money I brought to America.
    Wow.
    Right.
    So therefore, my parents--
    I had nothing.
    I had just a camera, which I sold.
    And what else can I--
    Well, I wanted to know your--
    I'm going to [? change ?] this a little bit.
    When your parents were there and you left,
    what were your feelings about that?
    Well, it was very, very sad.
    I saw them standing at the station, waving goodbye.
    And then I was gone.
    And I didn't know whether I'll ever see them again.
    That was very hard, very difficult because we
    were a very, very close family.
    And I also felt that I was the one who wanted to support them
    when I got over.
    And of course, I didn't know how or when and where.
    Fortunately, they came.
    They went to Sweden about a year later.
    And they were in hiding, more or less, in Berlin.
    They didn't register.
    Everybody in Germany has to register, wherever you are.
    Whether you're in a hotel or whether you're
    in a private home, you have to always register.
    But they did not.
    They stayed in Berlin until their visa came through.
    And so they went to Sweden first.
    And they stayed in Sweden, I believe, I got in '38.
    And they came in about a year and a half.
    They stayed with my sister in Sweden.
    And then they came to Japan, because the war was already
    going on in the Western Front.
    They couldn't take a boat from Holland
    or from Germany or anyplace.
    But they went via Russia with the Siberian railroad
    to Vladivostok and from Vladivostok
    to Japan, and then from Japan with a ship to Seattle.
    And I lived in Seattle at the time.
    How did you keep in touch through all of that?
    Well, through Sweden, between Seattle and Sweden,
    there was no problem to write to each other.
    But my parents expected that I would
    live in a tent in the suburbs because I was working for $15
    a week in those days.
    However, I mean, I knew that they were coming.
    I knew I had to find a living, a decent living.
    And I had a friend who had been a lawyer in the neighborhood
    of my hometown.
    He was our family lawyer and who had lost his law practice,
    of course, like all lawyers did under Hitler.
    And became first a legal advisor,
    and made still-- a very bright young man.
    And then he went to America.
    He went to Texas and became a representative
    for a dress manufacturer in New York and did extremely well.
    And he suggested, he had found out that Washington, Oregon--
    and I lived in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho,
    and Montana was one territory, about three times the size
    of Germany, that was available because
    the previous manufacturer's agent had
    done a very bad job there.
    So it had not been worked for a couple of years.
    And he said I should go to New York and see the manager there
    and he told me exactly what to say,
    how much I should ask for as a weekly allowance, and so forth.
    So in any case, I went to New York.
    They were on strike, the company.
    And the manager was very, very busy.
    And so he said, do you think you can sell dresses?
    And I said oh, of course, I can sell anything, I said.
    You see.
    And so he said, how much do you want a week.
    And I told him I want $55 a week allowance.
    This was a lot of money in those days.
    And he says have you got a car.
    I knew that I could get a car.
    I had arranged that through my father and a cousin
    he had in Detroit.
    And so I went, yes, I have a car arranged.
    All right.
    So I had the job.
    I came home.
    Two days later, my parents came.
    They thought I would live in a tent outside of town.
    But I had rented a very nice apartment.
    I had a car.
    [LAUGHTER]
    I just awaited them at the dock.
    It was a very moving reunion for me.
    It was very, very moving.
    What did you say to each other?
    Oh, I cried like a baby.
    I didn't say anything.
    It took quite a while.
    Did you think you'd ever see them again?
    Oh, yes.
    I had the hope.
    I also knew that they were safe, they were in Sweden.
    This is when they were in Sweden already.
    Yes, before that, it didn't take very long from my departure
    to theirs.
    I think I got word from them.
    I wasn't too worried about them.
    I was worried for a while.
    And we didn't know what was happening
    to people at the time, where they disappeared to
    and why they disappeared, and so forth.
    So I wasn't that worried about them.
    And I knew that they had a visa.
    They were working on a visa to go to America via Sweden,
    or something like that.
    It was arranged.
    And what about your brother and sister?
    I don't have any brother.
    Your sisters?
    And my two sisters, yeah.
    Your brother-in-law with--
    Yeah, the younger sister, the sister that
    is six years older than I was in Sweden.
    Her husband and she moved from Berlin.
    They lived in Berlin to Sweden.
    And they stayed in Sweden?
    They stayed in Sweden.
    Their son is still in Sweden.
    And the eldest sister was married to a physician
    who lived in New York.
    That's how we got out of Germany.
    He gave us the affidavits, the whole family.
    He got out in '35, I believe, already.
    Yeah.
    OK.
    And so through him, we got into America.
    But he died about 10 years ago, something
    like that, 12 years ago.
    But my sister is still alive, that one.
    Do you want to tell us a little bit about your grandparents?
    And how long was your family in Germany?
    I have a Hebrew book at home, a commentary to the Shulchan
    Aruch.
    And that is in handwritten [INAUDIBLE] marks in it.
    And it says translated, this Holy Book was brought
    by my father, the honorable Samson Hudson from the holy
    city of Chotzen in Bohemia to the holy city of [NON-ENGLISH],,
    which was a town by the German name was Zültz, Zültz.
    And so the story is that this ancestor of mine,
    and he was my father's great-great-grandfather,
    came from this town, which was exactly spelled the way--
    I have a postcard with that same name,
    so the picture of that town.
    Which is your name?
    It's my name, yeah.
    Came into Zültz, probably because he
    wanted a more Jewish life.
    There are lots of Jews in this little town.
    And then the family moved to this town 16 kilometers,
    about 12 miles from my hometown, a little bigger city
    where there were several Jewish families.
    And they were peddlers.
    They started to peddle, that is piece goods and notions,
    things like that, ribbons and things like that.
    And they went with the packs on their back and probably
    a horse, I suspect.
    But one of the two, one of them, a friend of my ancestor
    made it very big.
    They became huge factories.
    They started out the same way, but our family
    was unfortunately more in the books and he was in the money.
    And so he became very big.
    They had huge factories.
    They employed thousands of people all over the world.
    They were the foremost damask weavers in the world.
    Oh.
    And in this little town, and when I left,
    of course, that was taken away from them just as
    much as from us, the family.
    So then my father's father moved from that town
    into our hometown, where I was born, and started a thread
    factory.
    And my father said he made the worst thread that
    anybody In Germany ever made.
    And for some reason, he got a big head for some reason.
    Because that was about in 1870, when Germany had beaten France
    and there was a great deal of resurgence
    of success in business and finance,
    and financial adventure, and so forth in Germany.
    So my grandfather built a beautiful villa
    and a beautiful, big, large factory
    and went bankrupt almost instantly.
    So my father had to pull hot potatoes out of the fire.
    And he did that.
    But he changed the business from the thread, finally.
    I still remember, as a little boy,
    going into a large hall where women were spinning thread.
    I still remember that very vaguely.
    But later on, those became all woodworking machines.
    And my father was loaned money by the Gentile people in town.
    There were some very fine people in this town that helped him.
    To start the business up again?
    To start anew, to change his business and start it up again.
    So your family was actually in Germany about five generations?
    Yeah, at least.
    Myself, my father, my grandfather, his father,
    five generations.
    You have that pretty well figured out, yeah.
    And what about your mother's family?
    My mother's family was an interesting story, too.
    I don't know much about beyond my grandfather.
    But my grandfather lived in a very small town in the country
    where there were a lot of wealthy landholders,
    many of them aristocrats, barons this and that, and so forth.
    And he had a liquor manufacturing plant that's
    very small and also a tavern, or something
    like that, liquor room where people could come and drink,
    and so forth.
    And he made a lot of money and became very wealthy.
    And the land young landowners who came
    borrowed money from him.
    And he was so flattered that these fine, high class
    aristocrats were borrowing money from him that he
    gave all his money to these guys and lost almost everything
    and hanged himself.
    Oh, no.
    Yes.
    They moved to the big city.
    He thought he had [INAUDIBLE] didn't need to work anymore.
    And nobody paid him back, except one guy
    came and paid for his cousin or something
    30,000 marks, which was enough to send one of the sons
    to college to become a lawyer and my mother to art school.
    She was an artist.
    My mother was a painter.
    And I still have quite a few painters
    and pictures are at the house.
    But she went then, married my father,
    and went to the little town.
    In our hometown, she gave up painting
    for some strange reason.
    I don't know why.
    But she worked and she helped out in the office.
    Did you have a synagogue in your town?
    No.
    We had what we called a prayer room, just a prayer room.
    I became bar mitzvahed by--
    the rabbi came to our town.
    And then bar mitzvah was in the county seat,
    which they had a synagogue.
    And I was bar mitzvahed there.
    What about when you were going through early school,
    elementary school and high school?
    Was the religious school required
    during that period of time?
    No, although we learned, I learned some Hebrew.
    But it was a pretty painful experience.
    And I had to start out--
    I started out at the girls' school
    because that was the only private school
    that they could send me.
    They didn't want to send me to a public school,
    I guess that was [INAUDIBLE].
    But then, later on, the director of the public school,
    the school principal of the public school
    opened up a pre-college, or what do you
    call it, pre-high school, a pre-high school school,
    in the first grades of high school.
    And he was an alcoholic and a terrible guy.
    And he was beating us up terribly.
    We were beaten terribly.
    We never went to school without having our pants
    upholstered in the back with some pillows
    or something like that.
    Did you tell your parents?
    Oh, sure.
    My father took me finally out when I came home
    with a blue eye, with a swollen eye because one of the guys
    had pushed me, or one of the teachers
    had pushed me against the door post.
    I admit that I wasn't a good student.
    And I was not the most pliable of the students they had there
    probably.
    And so I utilized that to complain bitterly.
    And he took me out of that school
    and put me into the hands of a private tutor
    so that I could go to the high school in the next city.
    We had to go every morning, take the train.
    I had to transfer once.
    And it took about an hour to go the 17 kilometers, which
    is about 12 miles, something like that, from one town
    to another.
    Wow.
    And you did that every day?
    Every day to go for one year.
    But we used to drink on the train.
    We smoked, of course, and everything like this.
    And so finally, a school opened up
    in my hometown, a high school.
    That high school that was especially
    sort of a democratic type of thing.
    They wanted to have public school students
    to be able to go to college.
    So they started this particular type school.
    It was a very nice school, very modern, and very, very lovely.
    And so I enjoyed going there.
    And I finally graduated there.
    Did you have non-Jewish friends at that school, then, too?
    All.
    Oh, always, only.
    Because you only had a few?
    I was the only Jew in school.
    Right.
    So even though there were 10 or 12 Jewish families?
    Yeah, there may have been a few more.
    I can't say this for sure.
    But very few Jewish children your age.
    Yes.
    So was there, in the early years,
    before the Nazis, before Hitler, was there
    any overt anti-Semitism that you knew?
    Yes.
    Yes.
    First of all, as a kid, I remember
    kids would run after me, Jew boy, Jew boy, little kids.
    And I would come home and ask why they do that, and so on.
    Because I had to walk to go through a fairly
    cheap neighborhood to get into my school.
    And our place was on the other end of town.
    And so they were very poor people.
    And also, I noticed, I became aware of later,
    of course, that there was a social separation.
    A certain class of people, my father, the men
    would go and have beer and do bowling on Sundays.
    But the families would not intermingle very much
    with some of the wealthier, high, so-called first class
    families in town.
    There was definitely a break.
    There were some.
    My father had some doctor friends, the people who had--
    and you talk about anti-Semitism,
    my father was very friendly with a doctor,
    with a physician who was a very bright, very warm man.
    And they talked about--
    what do they call this-- the Testament,
    where they claim the Russians came from Russia and Poland,
    where they claim that the Jews, they were--
    The elders of Zion?
    Yes, that the Jews were--
    Thought it was the elders of Zion.
    Well, something like that, the Jews were killing, on Pesach,
    they were killing Gentile children.
    And eating the blood.
    And my father read this somewhere
    and mentioned to his Christian doctor friend
    how outrageous it was.
    And he said oh, he said, I believe
    that some fanatic people would do that, he said.
    There are some fanatic Jews which will do that, he said.
    See, this is the type of mentality.
    In Berlin when you were older?
    Oh, yeah.
    How they changed--
    How they were all kind of caricatures.
    Yeah.
    Everybody was taught how to recognize a Jewish--
    Yeah, that's very good.
    OK.
    Let's hear that one.
    OK.
    Awesome.
    Ask him-- what's the question that needs to precipitate that?
    I'll just ask about some of the things,
    and he discuss what happened in Berlin.
    Yeah.
    But the humiliation of not being able to earn a living you
    said an accountant.
    You were paid a pittance and then you were finally--
    Let go.
    He told that part, Bon.
    We heard that, yeah.
    That part we heard.
    But we didn't hear about how they were
    taught to recognize Jewish--
    I wouldn't say as that was quite satisfactory yet.
    Until the end.
    Do you want to say anything else?
    Well, he does have more that I know about.
    Oh, you do.
    [LAUGHTER]
    This is fascinating to me.
    Did you learn anything?
    Yes.
    Just getting history of our family.
    Oh, we're rolling.
    Goodnight.
    Thanks, sweetheart.
    Bye, bye.
    OK.
    [SIDE CONVERSATIONS]
    OK?
    Walter?
    Roll your video, your audio.
    OK.
    Bye, bye.
    Bye.
    Bye.
    OK.
    All right.
    Are we OK?
    On?
    OK, Walter, could you tell me a little bit about Fritz?
    I understand there's a story about Fritz?
    My father's younger brother was Fritz.
    He was a psychiatrist and the head of the mental institution
    in Breslau, Germany, which was a big city, 700,000,
    very big city, and a city with a large Jewish population.
    And shortly before Hitler came, he married.
    He had been an officer, a medical officer
    in the First World War.
    And he married his nurse.
    But already at a ripe age, she was already in her late 40s
    and he was in his 50s already.
    And he married her.
    And she was a Nazi.
    She came from an officer's family.
    She was a very right wing person.
    Perhaps she was not an anti-Semite,
    of course, because she married him.
    But she was definitely very right wing.
    And when Hitler came to power, she just was very happy.
    And she would sit at home and listen
    to all these Nazi broadcasts and the elections and jubilant.
    And of course, it was very hard on my uncle.
    And what's worse, my uncle was sued under Hitler,
    in the Hitler period, was sued by a patient.
    He supposedly had taken a spinal tap without permission.
    So he had to go to court.
    And the judge was very anti-Semitic and very hostile
    to my uncle.
    And my uncle said, if that happens again,
    I will not go through with it.
    Because the court hearings, court procedures
    were so painful to him.
    And sure enough, the patient appealed and went
    to a higher court.
    And my uncle had to go through the whole thing again,
    through the whole same thing again.
    And one day I got a phone call during the day.
    I was at home.
    And my aunt, his wife, was on the phone
    and said that he had hanged himself in their home.
    So I had to tell my father that his brother had hanged himself.
    And that was terrible.
    Oh, no.
    So I just took him in my arms and told him
    that his brother had just gone.
    And my father cried like a baby.
    And so that was one affair that was anything but pretty.
    Am I speaking so softly?
    Maybe to get into your--
    We're hearing.
    We're hearing.
    We're picking up.
    Yeah.
    So that was something.
    Well, what did his wife think about that?
    Did she continue to be a Nazi?
    Well, perhaps it's exaggerated to think that she was a Nazi.
    Of course, she was an intelligent, very educated
    person who would, of course, not have
    anything to do with, if she would have known about it,
    the concentration camps, the maltreatments, and so on.
    But she was a typical patriotic, right wing German, you see.
    Who thought what?
    [INAUDIBLE],, she had already been married,
    I believe, to an officer and her daughter
    and her whole family were officers.
    And she was berated badly, and she told us once,
    for marrying a Jew, by her family.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    Yeah.
    How did she reconcile the anti-Semitism of Hitler
    and all of these things that were going on?
    It's hard to say for me how she would.
    Perhaps told him that she wasn't feeling that way.
    But maybe this isn't all so bad, or maybe
    that's one of his weak spots, she might have told him.
    I really don't know.
    How did she act to you?
    Well, she'd be very friendly.
    Even after, when we were in America,
    we wrote to her, and so on.
    And she wrote back.
    And she was a very cheerful lady, weighed about 200
    pounds, or more than that.
    What did she do during the war?
    During the Second War?
    I don't know what she did.
    She probably did some kind of a job.
    She was already an older woman.
    She stayed?
    Oh, yes, of course she stayed.
    She had no reason to leave Germany.
    Her husband was gone, my uncle.
    There was no point for her to leave.
    I was just thinking what else I could report to you.
    Oh, yeah, I wanted to say that Bonnie mentioned this,
    living in Berlin.
    Berlin was one of the most free and lovely and loose cities
    that you can imagine.
    I mean, everything went.
    You saw homosexuals dressed as women walking the streets.
    Nobody paid much attention.
    It was just Berlin, you know.
    And Berlin, of course, had the largest Jewish population,
    an extremely large number of Jewish people, I think 250,000,
    or something like that, lived in Berlin.
    But you never heard any anti-Semitic talk
    or any signs in Berlin, at least not obviously.
    But after Hitler came to power, rapidly
    you heard people talking in the streets about the Jews.
    And they had a way of really, it was, like, an infection.
    And they had this Streicher, Julius Streicher.
    I don't know whether you heard about him.
    He published a Nazi paper in Nuremberg.
    And he had cartoon types of Jews that he would always show,
    exaggerated Jewish types.
    So that taught the average German how to recognize a Jew.
    It was very, very clever.
    So that you were really recognized immediately
    when you walked the streets as a Jew and were bullied.
    People would say-- I remember once I was in a through train
    from Breslau to Berlin.
    And I stood in the hallway and looked out of the window.
    And there was another guy there.
    And the guy would say just out of the blue sky,
    you goddamn Jew.
    Why don't you go to Palestine?
    This kind of thing happened, you know?
    This you had to take in your stride.
    Did you reply to any of these people?
    Oh, if you did, you probably were beaten up.
    I mean, it was very bad.
    And in one case, I remember when I
    was at the University of Berlin, there was a college dance.
    And I danced.
    There was a very crowded dance floor.
    And I noticed that somebody was stepping on my feet
    continuously while I was dancing.
    And sure enough, there was a guy who was looking at me
    and stepping on my feet while I was dancing.
    So in a German gentleman manner, or the way
    the Germans behaved, I put the girl back to her place.
    And I went over to him and says can I talk to you.
    Would you come out with me, please?
    And he came out.
    And he says, I want an apology for you.
    Oh yes?
    He said you want get a kick in the throat,
    he said, You god damned Jew.
    So just because I was dancing with what they would
    call an Aryan girl, you know?
    There was one thing.
    And then another thing, I walked the street dressed up.
    I was a clerk, clerical work.
    So I wore a suit and a tie.
    And there was a street sweeper who pushed a cart, a street
    sweeper.
    And he walked by.
    And I felt that that man is worse off than I am, basically.
    And he said to me, you goddamn Jew, he said to me.
    And I felt so badly.
    And I went over to him and I said to him,
    what have you got against me?
    You want to know, he said.
    And he took me by the tie.
    And he tied my tie so what he choked.
    And so I would have been beaten up, you know.
    I was not a very powerful character.
    I wasn't very strong.
    So I couldn't do anything there.
    That was another thing.
    So those were symptoms that were quite, quite--
    And this was fairly early on?
    Yeah, that was three, four years in, '33, '36,
    '35, in those days.
    When did you apply for your visa and passport?
    I can't remember, probably about a year before I left.
    So that was quite interesting.
    In order to get the visa, it was advisable, to speed it up,
    to go to Berlin, to the American consulate in Berlin.
    So I went to Berlin to the American consulate.
    But when I came in, there was a huge hall there, a front hall.
    It was packed.
    Like sardines, people stood in there waiting,
    have time to wait.
    And the chances to get into the office were virtually zero.
    I think you would have to stay there for months.
    But fortunately, I have a fairly good sense for language,
    for accents.
    So an American came by.
    And I said, excuse me, sir.
    Could I talk to you?
    And he stopped and looked at me.
    Because he thought for a moment I
    may have been American or British or something like this,
    because they were all Germans there, German-Jewish people.
    Come with me, he said.
    And I got my visa just because I stopped
    him right in his tracks.
    Oh.
    And the visa was mailed to Sweden.
    But it was mailed quite promptly.
    Everything was arranged right there and then
    and without any waiting.
    And that was for your own?
    That was for myself, yeah.
    My parents handled theirs some different way.
    I don't know exactly.
    I wasn't there.
    And you had your passport already?
    I had the German passport.
    Yeah.
    They had that.
    And so all I had to get was the American visa.
    And that takes a certain amount of time.
    Did you have a J on your passport, too?
    Do you remember?
    I don't think so, not in those days yet.
    I also wasn't called Israel.
    My father was called Israel, had to change his name.
    His name was Otto.
    And he had to be called Israel.
    My mother's name was Elizabeth.
    And she had to be called Sarah.
    And that was in the passport.
    And that happened right after you left, maybe?
    Shortly after I left, yeah.
    Theirs were still changed.
    Yeah.
    And can you remember, Walter, the first evidence
    that you had of anti-Semitism and Nazism being in Germany?
    Well, I told you when I was a kid
    that they would cry Jew boy after me, and so forth.
    But I was thinking more in terms of when the Nazis were
    coming, when the Nazi party--
    Well, I was in Berlin.
    And when Hitler was elected, it was a very painful thing
    for me.
    I was in a furnished room, rooming house
    with furnished rooms.
    And next door were Nazis.
    And they were jubilating.
    Over the radio came these election results.
    And they were just frantic with joy about the election.
    And then I went with my boss's secretary,
    who was a good friend of mine.
    We went to one of the buildings on Unter den Linden, which
    is the famous street in Berlin.
    And we watched the parade.
    And I've never seen anything like this.
    And I cried.
    The tears were down.
    Because there were hundreds of thousand
    Brownshirts marching there with flares.
    And I knew that that was the end.
    You knew it then?
    Yes, I knew it then.
    That was a terrible, terrible, terrible thing for me
    to see, really.
    But you went back to your--
    Well, I had to go back, went back home
    and stayed there as long as till I got my visa and my papers.
    And so that was that.
    That was that and here you are.
    I was very fortunate all the way through.
    I was never really physically hurt.
    And I had really lots of breaks in many ways.
    Some of the people were telling about the stories
    on the train and the problems that they had
    with the Nazis on the train.
    Well, I mentioned one of them.
    Yeah.
    I didn't have any major ones.
    Nothing else, then?
    Yeah.
    Well, let me just ask you a few more questions.
    We didn't get through the names, the full name of your father
    and your mother.
    This is for documentation we need it.
    My father's name was Otto.
    And he was born in 1864.
    And his father was born in 1822.
    And his mother was born in 1832.
    Wow.
    What are their names?
    Your grandfather's?
    Grandfather name was Wilhelm, William, Wilhelm.
    And the grandmother was Rosalie.
    And that is on my father's side.
    My mother was born in 18--
    she was 15 years younger, so '64, '79, 1879.
    And her name was Elizabeth, as I said.
    And her mother's name was Seraphine.
    And I forgot what her father's name was.
    My mother died fairly early at age 69 or 68, 68,
    something like that, of cancer.
    My father died at age 86.
    And he enjoyed America.
    He was just so happy to be over here.
    He came over here when he was 76 or 78.
    Didn't speak a word of English.
    And immediately the business started to pedal some--
    it was wartime--
    some ceramics.
    Walked around with some samples that
    weighed 20 pounds apiece or something like this, some junk
    figures, whatever he could pick up in New York
    and brought over.
    And loved it.
    Unfortunately, he broke a hip and the surgeon
    was drunk that operated on him.
    And it had to be reoperated again.
    And that was more than he could handle.
    So he had a stroke about a year later.
    Oh.
    And then your mother's family was-- what was your--
    My mother's family was exterminated.
    There was a story.
    With us in my hometown lived my mother's younger brother.
    He was, I think, younger than she, also.
    And he was a bachelor.
    And when we left, he felt he didn't want to be a burden.
    He was already in his high 50s, early 60s when the time came.
    And he didn't want to be a burden to the family.
    He had no specialties.
    He was a bank official before.
    And he didn't want to come along.
    And he persuaded them not to push.
    So my mother felt very guilty that she didn't
    persuade him to come out.
    But he was harbored by a Gentile girlfriend
    that he had when he was young.
    That girlfriend and her husband took him
    in under danger of their lives.
    In other words, there were some beautiful people there
    that did a great deal.
    But then he got so sick that he had to be hospitalized.
    There was nothing he could do.
    So she got him poison and he poisoned--
    that's how he killed himself.
    She helped him to kill himself.
    They knew then about the concentration camps
    and everything at that point?
    Yes.
    They knew what the fate would be.
    That's why she was hiding him.
    And his older brother, the lawyer, I
    told you that there was money coming in.
    And the older brother, the lawyer and his wife,
    were taken to a concentration-- were exterminated.
    And so were all my relatives, Czechoslovakian relatives,
    cousins.
    And in fact, we ran into a story,
    I have it at home, that a cousin of mine was in Latvia,
    I believe, in a concentration camp.
    He was a doctor.
    And he was harassed by the commandant.
    And he got so angry that he kicked him.
    And the commandant pulled out his pistol
    and killed him, shot him.
    And I have this in writing, the name and everything.
    How did you find out about all of the family that
    were exterminated?
    Well, how I got a hold of this particular article,
    I don't know.
    Somebody sent that to me.
    I suspect that there were some people who got out of it
    and that they reported this, told the story on them.
    And this was what side of the family, the mother's side?
    This was my father's side of the family.
    My grandfather had, just like we, eight children,
    five daughters and three sons.
    And they were mostly married into Czechoslovakia, which was
    Austria in those days, Austria.
    And they were highly desirable.
    The German-Jewish girls were educated and good housewives,
    good wives.
    And so the people from Austria came over and looked for brides
    and picked out.
    So out of the five daughters, four of them
    lived in Austria, and then one in Czechoslovakia.
    And they all-- oh, they all perished.
    Some of them were quite aged.
    Some of them died before Hitler came to power.
    So I think that's about all I can think of.
    Well, these are some other questions
    that I wanted to talk about just in terms of--
    we're taping.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    Sorry.
    OK.
    What were you going to do?
    What were you telling me to stop from?
    Just while you were figuring out what you wanted to ask,
    so we're rolling now.
    OK.
    Go ahead.
    Walter, I'd asked you if you belonged
    to any political or cultural clubs,
    or what political experiences you've had in Germany.
    From a Jewish point of view, my father
    was a member of the German Citizens of Jewish Faith,
    which was not Zionist.
    It was nationalist, if you want to call it that.
    And I was not involved with that.
    I can tell you a little bit about my religious situation.
    I hated services.
    In order to get the minyan in my hometown, they needed 10.
    To be minyan, they had to hunt me up.
    I was hiding in the woods on the holidays.
    They had to chase after me to get me in.
    Because it was a room twice the size of this.
    And it stank.
    And it was hot.
    And it was just awful.
    And I could read a little bit, but I couldn't
    understand what I was reading.
    And it wouldn't have made any difference,
    because the translations are not very meaningful to me, either.
    So I got really turned off on services.
    And I have no feeling for it.
    When I came to America, I was taken in by Orthodox people.
    And they received me warmly, lovingly.
    And it was very moving to me.
    But still, the religious part was very meaningless to me.
    So in Germany, we were liberal, or middle of the road.
    What you would call Democratic here, middle class,
    liberal Democrats.
    My father, too, my father was quite liberal,
    very charitable, a wonderful man.
    But he never joined any party or anything like this,
    I don't think.
    But as Hitler became more stronger,
    I became more socialist and had some good talks
    with the workers and got quite close to their aims.
    The workers were very often socialists also, not Nazis.
    The Nazis were more the lower middle class,
    upper middle class, and so forth.
    But in our area, I shouldn't speak generalize.
    Of course, it must have been the workers.
    But mostly in those days, Germany was, of course,
    in a terrible shape.
    65 million people and about, I think,
    something like 7 or 8 million unemployed.
    Which means since women didn't work,
    which means just about every second or third person
    was unemployed.
    Wow.
    So you have to realize they were in terrible shape
    because they [INAUDIBLE] by the Allies after the First World
    War.
    But I'm not excusing it.
    There is no excuse.
    OK.
    And thank you for that, Walter.
    And I just wanted to know whether you wanted
    to talk a little bit about what you think
    the general view of American Jews
    is to that Holocaust experience.
    Have you talked to any other Jewish people about that?
    This is a little bit tangential.
    That's OK.
    Yeah.
    I had the experience that the well-to-do Jews, the temple
    Jews were very, very cautious, very
    scared about the influx of us German Jews, very cautious.
    The Orthodox Jews received us with open arms.
    Although we came from the other side,
    we came from more or less, I would say,
    I never knew much about reform and conservative.
    But our services were conservative.
    But our attitude towards Judaism was more
    between the Conservative and the Reform.
    And so there, they were the people
    that really were very distrustful of us, just as we
    were, I should mention this, as we were of the Polish
    Jews that came into my home--
    Go ahead.
    Walter, could you just tell us a little
    about what the reaction was when the Polish Jews came
    to your town in Lithuania?
    Well, I remember one definite scene.
    And my father told me, which was sort of humorous.
    There was a call, he got a call from the jail.
    My father was fairly respected.
    He was a member of the city council, and so forth.
    So he got a call from the jail there was a man who
    wanted to talk to him.
    And so there was a Jew from Poland,
    evidently, who spoke with a very strong German accent,
    said that he was a prisoner who had come.
    Nebbe, he said, I'm Nebbe, the [GERMAN],,
    the prisoner [GERMAN], he said.
    This sounded a little funny in German.
    And he wanted the help of my father.
    So my father got him immediately out of prison.
    And what turned out was that he was
    collecting money for the victims of the Cossack pogroms
    in Poland.
    And so my father made a deal with him.
    He gave him money.
    And he also gave him some little money to take out of-- no, no,
    in order to get the money that my father gave
    this man secretly out of Germany, the man used a rubber
    tube.
    Put the money in a rubber tube and shoved it up his rectum--
    by greasing the tube so that he could get it in
    and shoved it up his rectum.
    And that was the way he got the money out of Germany.
    But interesting was that we were embarrassed about these people.
    We didn't feel any kinship at all.
    Because they looked differently, they wore long beards.
    We had never seen had never seen anything like that, before,
    anybody.
    These large Black hats, just like the Lubavitchers.
    And why were we embarrassed?
    We felt that the goyims, the Gentiles
    would think that this is another Jew.
    Look what kind of people these are.
    We were afraid.
    And I had the feeling when we came to America that the temple
    group saw us just about the same way, not exactly that way,
    but still.
    We were invited for dinner in Spokane.
    I came first to Spokane by Gary [PERSONAL NAME]
    by some nice lovely, wealthy family.
    But there was no intercourse socially at all.
    We were just once invited and asked about our life,
    and so forth.
    But it was the Orthodox that took care of us,
    saw to it that we had a place to live
    and that we had a place to eat when we came over.
    And another thing, when I came to Seattle,
    there was a question of whether the German
    Jews who were not citizens had some spies among them.
    And it was a B'nai B'rith who voted
    that we should be shipped to the inland,
    that there was too much of a danger
    that there were spies that could start trouble with Japan.
    And we should be shipped further to the East.
    I was taken, photographed in Seattle Times,
    in the Seattle Times on the front page,
    carrying my radio, a German radio to the police.
    Because they thought since they didn't know exactly
    the mechanism, that there might be a shortwave enemy type
    equipment built into that radio.
    That was photographed with me carrying that radio.
    It was a German radio.
    It was an ordinary, fairly fancy radio.
    And the B'nai B'rith, you said?
    The B'nai B'rith voted to have the German immigrants who
    weren't citizens shipped to the East, transferred.
    That was against the wishes of those who were--
    Oh, absolutely.
    I never joined the B'nai B'rith out of that.
    Well, have you had any experiences
    with talking with non-Jews about the Holocaust?
    I'm sure I had.
    But it's very hard to remember that particularly.
    I even talked with Germans.
    We have quite a few Germans now, real Germans coming to us
    because we were a member of the service organization
    that hosts to traveling people who are
    members of this organization.
    And what happened with that?
    And I talked to them about that.
    Of course, most of them are young
    and haven't even [INAUDIBLE].
    And we had just a woman visiting a couple of weeks ago who said
    that her father was a Nazi.
    And she hated him.
    And she thought he loved everything that went on.
    So she was very open about it.
    But she thought it was horrible.
    And she always was very uncomfortable
    although she was a small child.
    Do you feel uncomfortable at all with any Germans
    that you meet that are perhaps of that generation, that
    didn't do any--
    I've been to Germany only once since, really
    staying in Germany.
    We stayed in Frankfurt.
    And I felt reasonably comfortable.
    We even went out--
    in Frankfurt, they don't have wine,
    but they drink apple cider, alcoholic apple cider.
    And I went to one of those cider taverns
    where we really sit like herrings.
    And I always thought, well, it could be that somebody
    makes a crack or something.
    But nothing like that happened.
    It was very jovial and very friendly.
    However, on an earlier trip, we were in Switzerland.
    And we were in a train.
    And a drunken German went through the aisle
    in front of the compartment and hollered
    and made a lot of noise.
    And I just tensed up.
    It just all came back to me, the whole thing, so the feeling
    of dread and fear and fright.
    Even now.
    This was a few years ago.
    But even now, it could happen.
    Yes, I think so.
    Walter, you're relatively politically
    astute and intellectually astute, that's for sure.
    What do you think about-- in this country, do
    you think it could happen here?
    I'm going to make a very cynical statement.
    We have the Negroes ahead of us.
    I see.
    You feel that the government treats the Blacks--
    that we treat the Blacks in the same way that--
    Well, not exactly.
    But I think if it came to any racial violence,
    the poor Negroes would be the first ones to get it, I think.
    And then we might be next.
    But this is very cynical.
    And I don't think this is really in the offing, absolutely not.
    I really feel very strongly that that is not.
    I mean, I don't agree with the people
    who say you have to be a positive, active participating
    Jew.
    Because the Jews will be the only ones
    that will stand by you if they come after you.
    I'm citing something verbally from a very well-known person
    here.
    Yes.
    And I don't agree with that.
    There are plenty of people here that would still stand up.
    I think the German example is still pretty much awake
    among some of the intellectuals here.
    And I don't think, strangely enough, the radical right here
    is actually not anti-Semitic.
    I agree with you.
    There are the neo-Nazis that are, but the fundamentalists--
    Oh, yeah, the neo-Nazis are a bunch [CROSS TALK]..
    Didn't amount to anything.
    But the fundamentalists really are
    almost pro-Jewish in some ways, at least pro-Israel.
    Right.
    So it is a little different at this time.
    And if you had, maybe, something that you wanted
    to say to other people here about the experiences
    and what we can do differently to ever prevent that,
    is there anything you would like to tell us?
    Well, the basic reason for Hitler
    and the unbelievable upheaval was,
    of course, the economic deprivation
    of the German people, which was caused after the First World
    War.
    I'm not condoning the fact.
    I'm glad they lost it.
    But that's what happened.
    And so I think that we all have to be for social equality
    and social rights.
    And when I read that more and more people are without homes,
    homeless, and the poverty level is going up and up and up,
    that is very frightening and terrible, absolutely terrible.
    And for a rich country like this,
    it's disgraceful and shameful.
    And you're saying, I think what I'm
    hearing is that the way to prevent this from happening
    is to believe in human rights, to believe
    in the dignity of the human.
    And act accordingly.
    And act accordingly.
    And so everybody is afraid to raise taxes.
    Nobody wants to come right out and raise
    taxes to see to it that we have a decent social picture
    in the country.
    And putting it into armaments is not going to help anybody.
    So this is my feeling.
    Thank you, Walter, so very much.
    Yeah, what I was going to say-- pardon?
    Internment camp stuff?
    Yeah.
    Walter, you're aware of the other part of our project
    that we're doing with the Japanese and some
    of those Japanese that liberated Dachau.
    And then we've also been talking about, during these interviews,
    the internment camps the Japanese internment
    in this country.
    Do you have any comments about that?
    Well, I think that it was very wrong and, of course,
    very prejudiced.
    And I think that they ought to get compensation,
    at least some signs that we feel sorry for what happened.
    That everybody, I mean, after all,
    it's the taxpayers who have to come up with this.
    The reparations?
    The reparations, yeah, at least as a token
    to apologize to them.
    Yes, I feel that very strongly.
    Did you know any Japanese in Seattle when you were there?
    Hmm.
    I think, yes.
    First our milkman, now he has an import business
    on University Avenue.
    So yes, he was Japanese, I believe.
    I believe he was Japanese.
    Did you know about the internment camps
    when you were in Seattle?
    You didn't know about that?
    I knew about this when I was in Seattle, yeah.
    But it didn't happen until I was--
    well, yes, in Seattle, sure.
    During the war.
    I was working for a very, very shrewd and sharp boss,
    a man who had come also to this country with nothing
    and had lost everything and started to make it again.
    And when the Japanese were shipped out to internment camps
    which, of course, I knew about, he came home with beautiful
    vases for $0.25 and $0.50 apiece that he had picked up from
    these people, some people that were moving.
    Oh, yes.
    I knew about that.
    And I felt it was shameful.
    Yeah.
    Although I didn't feel very strongly about their innocence.
    I thought what they were doing, they knew, the Americans.
    You see, as a immigrant, I was not that aware.
    I had only been a couple years in the country.
    I thought that they knew what they
    were doing when they shipped them,
    and they must have found spies there or something.
    So you thought, you assumed that they were everybody--
    Well, I assumed that the government, and I
    was very much pro-government in those days
    because my life was saved by the American government.
    Roosevelt was the president.
    And I thought everything was hunky dory, you know?
    I believed the Rosenberg story at the time.
    It was long years later that I found out
    that that may have been a very, very terrible mistake.
    Because I got quite involved.
    I made a great change in my political outlook
    in those years, after I had been here about--
    actually, after my army service.
    Because I was for three years in the army.
    I didn't know that, Walter.
    In the American army, yeah.
    When did you go into that?
    I got in on February of '43.
    And I got out two years and eight months later,
    so '45, in October of '45, I think.
    Did you go overseas?
    No, because of my back.
    I had a curvature of the spine.
    They wouldn't let me go overseas.
    I've got a question.
    How much time?
    What would you think was different in the climates,
    political climates or emotional climates,
    like, say the difference between Germany and America,
    where, say, in Germany, where they
    had started to have internment camps and such?
    Some people here were quite adamant,
    let's say, ship them out.
    Or that atmosphere was in America.
    But they didn't go as far.
    What do you think was going on in Germany
    that made it go that far?
    Why did it went that far?
    Wayne was saying that because here, we
    did the internment of the Japanese, a group that
    was discriminated against.
    And we just took the whole pile and decided
    to put them in the camps.
    And in Germany, in the beginning,
    it was the internment of the Jews.
    It became extermination.
    And how did it get to that point of extermination?
    Well, I listened to the lectures of this professor that
    gave these lectures here.
    I forgot his name.
    Dr. Bauer?
    Yeah, Bauer.
    Yehuda Bauer.
    Yes, Dr. Bauer.
    And he said it gradually developed.
    They didn't know what to do with the Jews.
    They couldn't send them anyplace.
    Nobody wanted them.
    There were no countries that were
    willing to accept any Jews.
    And they wanted to get rid of them.
    And they didn't want to feed them, either, I suspect.
    And they gradually came up first with some extermination.
    And then they decided that they were just
    going to knock them out and eliminate them.
    I mean, that's the way Dr. Bauer explained it.
    And it makes good sense to me.
    I heard that.
    At the beginning it may not have been planned that way.
    They thought they could push them out.
    So do you think that that could have happened here, say
    was it those same circumstances?
    I mean, could we, in the United States, then?
    Because like you say, the Rosenbergs or something.
    I mean, people really get pumped up.
    Absolutely.
    I will tell you from my business.
    I was in business in Seattle.
    And after a few years, some things
    came in from the behind the Iron Curtain.
    And I remember that I once showed a woman
    in the store some merchandise.
    Yes, where does it come from?
    From Hungary.
    Those goddamn communists!
    How can you buy anything?
    And she started to rant and rave.
    This kind of stuff, everybody, sure.
    And if things would have gone badly here,
    if the Japanese would have come in here,
    you would have had a lot of problems.
    You can be sure of that, probably murders and mayhem
    and all kinds of stuff.
    And you have, still, I mean, they still
    knock off some yellow-skinned individuals in Detroit.
    Remember, one guy was killed in the street
    because the guy claims he took his job away from him.
    Wasn't even a Japanese, happened to be a Chinese.
    And that cost him three years' probation and $3,000.
    That was the guy's wedding night or his bachelor party.
    Yeah, I read that, too.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    So I mean, people are all the same, really.
    We are very fortunate here.
    I think I thought when I came to America that the dogs were
    more friendly.
    I really mean it.
    The dogs were not as vicious.
    In Germany, I felt the dogs were very vicious.
    You had to be very, very careful.
    Over here, I found the dogs are really quite friendly.
    Probably because they get better fed and better treated.
    And people are more relaxed with them.
    I don't know.
    That's an interesting point, Walter.
    Because I think that's been true in the past.
    And now we're having all these pit bull type of dogs.
    Do you think-- I mean, is there-- really?
    And in the same time, we have a lot of other problems
    that are going on in the country and certainly
    economic problems.
    That's for sure, with the devaluations all around.
    Yeah, I mean, how any man who can think straight
    can say that we're going to lower taxes
    and increase the defense budget and not get into trouble.
    I mean, I can't understand what kind of theory
    you can come up with that makes any sense.
    That's true.
    Well, he's an actor.
    Yeah, exactly.
    Well, Walter, is there anything else
    that you would like to leave for posterity on what we should do?
    Or maybe talk about why you wanted
    to do the project, why you consented to do and take
    part in this?
    Although I said that I was not a member of the B'nai B'rith,
    I see that we have to be vigilant
    and that I appreciate what they're doing in that area.
    And it's very important that we are vigilant.
    That we are not only vigilant about our Jewish situation,
    but that we're vigilant about justice and fair treatment
    of our people in this country.
    And that's all I have to say.
    Thank you so much.
    [CROSS TALK]
    Andy's got a question.
    Andy, you got a question?
    Yes.
    Have you heard I suppose you have
    heard of the liberation of Dachau
    and other concentration camps in Germany by the 522nd battalion.
    It's very moving to me.
    Could you express--
    When I think of it, I drove by Dachau in a car from Munich
    to Paris about four or five years ago.
    And I saw the big sign Dachau.
    And I started to break down.
    I just cried and cried and cried.
    I couldn't hold it.
    And to think when I see the concentration pictures,
    we had some series on educational television
    when the Americans came in and rescued these people,
    that's when I break down.
    For some reason, the relief for the rescue
    is overwhelms me completely.
    Thinking of the situation that these people were in,
    and then there comes light and love and rescue.
    This is just--
    Which people are you talking about?
    I'm talking about some of the concentration camps
    that we were shown when the Americans came in and liberated
    them, liberated the remaining people in there.
    And which Americans are you talking about?
    Well, I don't know which battalions, or which it was.
    I'm thinking of Poland in this case, of Dachau.
    But I read about Dachau.
    Judy?
    Yes?
    Try not to break in when he's talking.
    OK.
    I wanted to just to have him say--
    if you could say the part about relating
    with the Japanese-Americans that we're
    doing the project with who liberated Dachau, just
    a comment on time.
    It's a beautiful thing that you're doing that.
    But I have really no further comment on that.
    Walter, I didn't mean that part of it.
    She's trying to get you [CROSS TALK]..
    We wanted to say--
    So if you say it, because we're going to use your voice.
    We're only using your voice.
    So they don't know who you're talking about,
    who we're talking about.
    Oh, I see.
    You want me to talk about the liberation of Dachau
    by the Japanese or the Japanese military troops?
    Well, I know that they were all wonderful heroes in Italy.
    They did fantastic jobs.
    And that they had a chance to liberate some other minority
    was a very beautiful thing.
    But the whole thing is just very moving to me,
    just deeply moving.
    Thank you, Walter, very much.
    That's wonderful.
    [CLAPPING]
    That's all.
    We just had to have that word.
    Thank you very much.
    Thank you, Walter.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    Thank you.
    Very interesting.
    And thank you, Lynn.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    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.
    Interviewee
    Walter Chotzen
    Interviewer
    Judy Weightman
    Date
    interview:  1987 December 29
    Credit Line
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, acquired from the Hawaii Holocaust Project

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    2 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

    Personal Name
    Chotzen, Walter, 1911-

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Judy Weightman, of the Hawaii Holocaust Project, conducted the interview with Walter Chotzen on December 29, 1987 as part of a project to interview Holocaust survivors and concentration camp liberators currently living in Hawaii. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum received a copy of the interview in March 1990.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:10:10
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn511084

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    Date: 1987-1991

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    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.

    Crystal Night oral history interview

    Crystal Night oral history interview

    Oral History

    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.

    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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