Oral history interview with Helene Gettner

Oral history interview with Flora Mihael

Oral History

Flora Carasso Mihael, born in Thessaloniki, Greece on December 11, 1935, discusses the German occupation of Greece; the formation of a ghetto; contracting typhus; obtaining false papers; moving to Athens, Greece; being deported to Bergen-Belsen; the train failure and being transferred to Ravensbrück; the subsequent abandonment by German soldiers; being liberated by American forces; finding a safe haven in a Belgian monastery; move to France then Italy; her return to Thessaloniki and the rebuilding of her life

Oral history interview with Isaac Juris

Oral History

Oral history interview with Blanche Lubecki Juris

Oral History

Blanche Lubecki Juris, born May 12, 1914 in Eišiškes, Lithuania, discusses her childhood and education in Lithuania; attending Hebrew school; working for a dressmaker; experiencing some antisemitism; not being very religious; marrying Isaac Juris; moving to Radom, Poland with her husband at the outbreak of the war; being taken and transported east to the Jalotor labor camp by the Russians; being pregnant and giving birth at the camp’s hospital; finding out that the Germans had killed everyone in Eišiškes; her baby contracting and dying from measles; being sent by train to Kirov, Russia and then to Tashkent, Uzbekistan; being sent to Yambol (IAmbol), Bulgaria and then to Kazakhstan; her second son being born in March 1943; going to Vilnius, Lithuania post-war, and then to Łódź, Poland and Germany; staying in a displaced persons camp; being fed by the UNRRA; finding out the fate of her family members; immigrating to the United States in 1946; living in New York; telling her children about her experiences; having no desire to go back to Poland because of violence; and donating pictures of her family from Eišiškes to Jaffa.

Oral history interview with Sol Kluger

Oral History

Solomon (Sol) Kluger, born June 7, 1910, describes his life growing up in Dusseldorf, Germany with his one sister and one brother; his middle class family and his father’s business; living in an area without many Jewish neighbors, nonetheless being very observant; participating in Young Maccabee activities and traveling to Israel to play in a sporting tournament; being told to leave Germany in 1938; managing to get passage to England; living with a group of young people in a camp near Dover, England; helping the British secret service by listening to radio messages; being asked to join the British Army but declining; eventually getting a visa to the United States; living with various American relatives throughout the remainder of the war; his induction into the US Army but being honorably discharged due to medical reasons; finding his parents after the war and bringing them to the US; and getting married and having one daughter.

Oral history interview with Luisa Ada Affricano

Oral History

Oral history interview with David Bayer

Oral History

David Bayer, born on September 27, 1922 in Kozienice, Poland, describes his father, who owned a shoe factory before the war; having a comfortable childhood; his sister and brother; the German occupation of his town and being relocated to a ghetto; working on an irrigation project and being saved from deportation with his family by his project supervisor; hiding while workers were deported; being captured and sent to work in the factory in Pionki; being taken to Birkenau, where he worked in a coal mine; the animalistic behavior of the prisoners; being sent on a death march, from which he escaped; being found by Russian soldiers; making his way back to Kozieniec and staying there for a short while; traveling to Panama and then to Israel, where he immediately joined the army; and moving to the United States, where he lived for the remainder of his life.

Oral history interview with Max Berg

Oral History

Oral history interview with Henry Brauner

Oral History

Henry Brauner was born in Krakow, Poland, on May 24, 1921. Two years later his family moved to Breslau, Germany. They lived in an Orthodox community and were financially well off. In 1938 Polish citizens suddenly evacuated to the Polish border. Henry’s family lived in the Krakow ghetto. His entire family, except Henry, was deported to a concentration camp. Henry worked for the Germans as a painter and lived in a forced labor camp. He was eventually sent to Auschwitz, but was able to survive there as a painter. After liberation he ended up in a displaced persons camp in Stuttgart. He worked for the U.S. Army in a motor pool. He and his wife eventually came to America, where he ultimately owned a successful service station.

Oral history interview with Renia Britstone

Oral History

Oral history interview with Sally Chase

Oral History

Sally Silberstein Chase, born in Radom, Poland on November 20, 1928, discusses her pre-war life in Radom; being the youngest of eight children; the German invasion of the Soviet Union; the Radom ghetto; killings by mobile killing squads; working in German army warehouses; the deportation of her parents and brother to Treblinka; the massacre in Tarnipol (Ternopil'), Ukraine and murder of her youngest brother; being deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau; her tattoo and its subsequent removal in Israel; Dr. Mengele in the camp infirmary; being transferred to Gebhardsdorf (sub-camp of Gross-Rosen) to work in an airplane parts factory as a welder; her liberation by the Russians; returning to Radom with her sisters; reuniting with her only surviving brother, Jack, in Dachau; immigrating to the United States in 1947; living with her sister in Brooklyn, NY; and working in an insurance agency.

Oral history interview with Eva Ehrlich

Oral History

Eva Ehrlich (née Hevesi), born in 1924 in Budapest, Hungary, discusses the thriving Jewish community in Budapest before the war; her grandfather who was the Chief Rabbi of Hungary; her father succeeding her grandfather; how when war began, little changed, except Jews had to go to labor camps on the Russian front instead of into the military; the German occupation of Hungary; Eichmann’s headquarters in the mountains of Buda, Hungary; how Eichmann summoned Jewish community leaders and told them what to expect; her father going several times to Eichmann’s headquarters, but never talking about it; the formation of the Judenrat; the decry that Jews had to wear the yellow star; how in 1944 all Jews in country towns were deported and all Jewish businesses, property, and jewelry were confiscated; the Arrow Cross, who were “worse than the Nazis;” how she and her mother purchased false identification papers; her father going into hiding, but being turned in by a collaborating rabbi; being turned in with her mother, but remaining safe with some narrow escapes; her family’s reunion around the time the Russians invaded; the death of her fiancée; seeing people eating meat from dead horses in the streets; finding piles of frozen corpses at the synagogue; meeting a Hungarian in the US Army and moving with him to the US in 1947; how her father officiated at their wedding in New York City, NY; working for the Library of Congress; meeting her second husband; and learning to appreciate her good life in the US, not taking anything for granted.

Oral history interview with Hayden Estey

Oral History

Hayden Estey, born in Billerica, MA on August 16, 1913, discusses graduating from Harvard in 1936 as part of the ROTC; being commissioned a second lieutenant in the army; being a foreign correspondent in France for Time Life; joining the US Army after the war began and being assigned to the 11th Armored Division; landing in Normandy in December 1944; being sent to Bastogne, Belgium as part of the relief force for the 101st Airborne, which was under attack in the Battle of the Bulge; being under small arms fire from the Mauthausen railroad station before the troops reached the camp; entering Mauthausen; no one having any knowledge that it was an extermination camp; meeting a Navy lieutenant who had been imprisoned after parachuting into Austria; being escorted by the lieutenant through the camp; becoming the public relations officer for the First Infantry; going home with the 12th Armored Division; and his feelings that most of the Germans did not know about the camps.

Oral history interview with Rose Feld

Oral History

Rose Feld, born July 15, 1932 in Katowice, Poland, discusses growing up in an Orthodox Jewish family; living in a mixed community of Poles and Germans; being at her grandparents’ farm in Frysztak, Poland when the war started and staying there; the establishment of a ghetto, where they lived from 1940 to 1942; the creation of the Judenrat; being ordered to gather at the market and separate into groups for deportation; the mass executions in the forest, including one in which several of her relatives were killed; her father’s creation of a hiding place in a cellar for 15 people; staying there until her uncle, who was also in hiding, came and told them of recent deportations; bribing a policeman who stopped them on their way to a hiding place in a farm; hiding in the forest and at several farmers’ houses; building forest bunkers where she and her family lived for 19 months; emerging after hearing shooting between German and Russian forces; being picked up by a Russian convoy and taken to Rzeszów, Poland; returning to her hometown when Poland was liberated; obtaining false papers to leave for Bratislava, Slovakia; hiring a guide to take her family behind Russian lines into Budapest, Hungary, where they entered the American zone; living in a displaced persons camp in Salzburg, Austria until 1948, when they immigrated to New York, NY; finishing high school; and marrying another survivor and having children.

Oral history interview with Isaac Gendelman

Oral History

Isaac Gendleman, born November 17, 1925, describes his life growing up in Rokitno, Poland (Rokytne, Ukraine) in the 1930s; being the only member of his family of seven to survive the Holocaust; his upbringing and life, which involved strict religious practices in a town where much antisemitism existed; the Russian occupation of his town and the improvement of life under Russian control; the scarcity of food in the ghetto; being rounded up by the Nazis for deportation but escaping into the forest; living in the forest for nearly two years, eating potatoes mostly and moving frequently to avoid capture; living in the Bindermichl displaced persons camp in Linz, Austria for three years; immigrating to the United States and settling in Washington, DC, where he lived with an aunt; marrying and having a family; and remaining in contact with a friend who was with him in the forest.

Oral history interview with Rivka Muscovitz Glatz

Oral History

Rivka Muscovitz Glatz, born in Debrecen, Hungary on October 16, 1937, discusses moving to Cluj-Napoca, Romania; her early family life; being forced to wear Jewish stars on her clothing; father being taken to a forced labor camp by Hungarians in 1943; living on the income earned by her mother's knitting in 1944; being taken to a brick factory; being taken to Budapest, Hungary, and put in a large school yard; being transferred to Bergen-Belsen; having chicken pox and being separated from her mother; conditions in the camp; being placed on a train and sent to Switzerland, where she remained for eight months (end of 1944 and beginning of 1945); reuniting with her mother; being placed on a ship, "Via Doran," to go to Palestine; being separated from her mother and brother; becoming reacquainted with her mother and brother; life in Israel; and immigrating to the United States with her husband.

Oral history interview with Joseph Gordon

Oral History

Oral history interview with Hanna Green

Oral History

Hanna Green describes being a 19 years old and newly married at the beginning of the war; going to Łódź, Poland; going later to Warsaw, Poland; being sent to a Siberian labor camp; having two children in the camp; returning to Poland with her family after the war; moving into Germany in order to reach the American occupied zone; getting passports to the United States and eventually settling there; surviving mostly because of her own initiative and strength; and retrieving family photographs and effects from a Nazi-controlled area that were instrumental in crossing the German-Russian border.

Oral history interview with Zachary Greenbaum

Oral History

Zachary Greenbaum, born on May 10, 1917, describes his life in Strachovitza (Starachowice), Poland growing up after World War I; being frail and sick as a child; his recovery and involvement in the local Zionist youth organization; his enlistment in the Polish Army; learning of the German-Soviet non-aggression treaty; his desertion of the Polish Army; going to Łódź, Poland; being put on a transport to Siberia but jumping off the train; working and living in the ghetto in Vilna, Poland (Vilnius, Lithuania); the local Judenrat leader, Jacob Gens; working for the Gestapo as a shoe-shine man; his liberation by the Russians; learning of the fates of his family at Auschwitz; life in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp; meeting Eleanor Roosevelt in the displaced persons camp; and immigrating to the United States and obtaining citizenship.

Oral history interview with Fritz Gluckstein

Oral History

Fritz Gluckstein, born on January 24, 1927 in Berlin, Germany, discusses his father's work as a judge; the Nazi rise to power; his non-Jewish mother; his father being a decorated veteran of World War I; being forced to go to an exclusively Jewish school; witnessing Kristallnacht; the implementation of anti-Jewish measures; rationing of food; wearing the yellow star; deportations from Germany; forced labor in Gestapo headquarters in Berlin; seeing Eichmann and Gunther at Gestapo headquarters; forced labor in a factory; confusion over who qualified as a Jew; Christians sheltering Jews; the Allied victory and the division of Berlin into zones; immigrating to the United States; settling in St. Paul, MN and attending university; joining the US Army; and working in veterinary medicine.

Oral history interview with Irving Horn

Oral History

Irving Horn (né Esahar Hershenhorn), born on February 25, 1927 in Radom, Poland, discusses the German invasion of Poland and the implementation of anti-Jewish measures; the formation of a clandestine school in the ghetto; his father's work as a tanner; his clandestine bar mitzvah in the ghetto; the establishment of a Judenrat; food shortages and disease in the ghetto; smuggling and the Jewish police in the ghetto; deportations to Treblinka and the loss of his sister; forced labor in a weapons factory; Polish gentile attitudes towards Jews; his deportation to Auschwitz and transfer to a forced labor factory in Vaihingen an der Enz, Germany (Wiesengrund concentration camp); his flogging and solitary confinement by camp guards; his transfer to Dachau; his liberation and finding his brother; learning of the murder of his father; studying to be a civil engineer; immigrating to the United States in January 1948; attending the City School of New York; fighting in the Korean War; and his witness testimony at the trial of Jacob Holtz in 1989.

Oral history interview with Armand Lakner

Oral History

Dr. Armand Lakner, born on May 3, 1922, discusses his life in Cluj, Romania and then Bucharest, Romania in the 1920s and 1930s; being recruited by the Hungarian Army to go to a forced labor camp near Transylvania; building a German airport; being taken with other forced laborers to Mauthausen for several months; marching to another camp called Gelsenkirchen near Oberosterreich before liberation; being totally unaware of what was happening in the war; his liberation by American troops on May 4, 1945; reuniting with his family and returning to Bucharest where half of his family still lived; entering into the Polytechnic Institute in Bucharest and attaining a PhD in physical sciences; and meeting his wife in 1947.

Oral history interview with Estelle Laughlin

Oral History

Estelle Laughlin, born in July 1929 in Warsaw, Poland, discusses being raised in a middle class family of four in Warsaw, Poland in the 1930s; how her family was forced to move into the Warsaw Ghetto; the underground bunkers of the ghetto; when her family was put on a cattle train and sent to Majdanek; how her father was separated from the women of their family and died in a gas chamber; working in a different labor camp (the ammunition factory in Skarzysko) than her mother; and manufacturing ammunition until they were liberated by the Russian Army in 1945.

Oral history interview with Irving Milchberg

Oral History

Irving Milchberg, born in Warsaw, Poland on September 15, 1927, describes his large, very comfortable family; the German occupation and his father being barred from his wholesale housewares business; his father digging ditches for anti-tank holes and working in a lumberyard; the Germans confiscating all furniture in their apartment and beating his father and uncle while they carried the furniture downstairs; relocating to the ghetto; leaving the ghetto illegally numerous times, stealing food and selling it outside the ghetto; being caught often and beaten; signs being posted, listing people who had to report to the square on July 22, 1942; the killing squads; seeing his father being shot to death; being outside the ghetto during a liquidation and hiding in an attic; joining with other orphans in the ghetto; being a runner in the ghetto and carrying explosives in May 1943; becoming a runner for the Polish army underground in November 1943; hiding a seven year old in May 1944; being liberated from the ghetto and being the only member of his entire family to survive; going to a displaced persons camp and attending an ORT trade school; returning to Poland; going to Canada in 1948; living in Nova Scotia, Toronto, and Niagara Falls; becoming a watchmaker; and getting married and having two children.

Oral history interview with Calvin Netzer

Oral History

Calvin Netzer, born on October 10, 1924 in Mielec, Poland, discusses his two brothers; his father's vegetable business; attending public school and Hebrew school; experiencing antisemitism; the German invasion; the German soldiers rounding up people into the Mikvah and setting it on fire; forced menial labor for the town's Jewish population; his escape to his aunt's country farm and being captured by the Germans; being taken to Skarzysko-Kamienna in a packed cattle truck and being forced to dig anti-tank trenches; being transferred to Czestochowa and working on the railroad; being taught how to repair engines and locomotives; being sent by truck to Buchenwald and learning of his father's murder; being forced on a death march from Buchenwald; his liberation by British and American forces; the survival of 26 of the original 3000 on the death march; his life in Legalechffelt displaced persons camp near Bad Reichenow, Germany; his immigration to the United States; living in Washington, DC with his uncle; and the importance of oral testimonies for everyone.

Oral history interview with Halina Peabody

Oral History

Halina Peabody, born on December 12, 1932 in Kraków, Poland, describes her life in Zalishchyky, Ukraine (a town on the frontier of Romania) with her father, mother, and baby sister in the 1930s; her parents, who were a part of the Jewish intelligentsia class; speaking excellent Polish and never speaking Yiddish at home; the war beginning and the Russians taking her father to Siberia; moving to a farm house with her mother and sister; purchasing false papers and moving to Jaroslaw, Poland, where her mother worked as a maid while the girls went to school and mass; how she and her family were saved because they “looked Polish” with blonde hair and green eyes; her mother’s work for the German Army to avoid suspicion; having to have an operation on her hand because a grenade had hit it; not remembering the liberation because she was in the hospital recovering from her injury; immigrating to England with her family; immigrating to Israel after eleven years in England; immigrating to the United States on her own; the difficulties of her life after the war; and the relationships she has made and kept with her family since the end of the war.

Oral history interview with Charles Press

Oral History

Charles Press, born on May 30, 1920 in Harrisburg, PA, describes joining the US Army in July of 1943; being sent to Camp Edwards, MA and being in the 572nd Anti-Aircraft Battalion; serving in Europe and after the war was assigned to the Flossenbürg concentration camp with the 90th Infantry Division; how he had never heard about concentration camps; the emaciated conditions of the few survivors and the conditions they lived in; trying to help the survivors and going to services with them; his job guarding SS troops, who he described as arrogant and without remorse; how he never discussed what he saw, but asked questions of others about their reactions to the Holocaust; and how even in his later years, he still cannot describe his own reactions, although he is eager to talk about the Holocaust.

Oral history interview with Susan Taube

Oral History

Susan Taube, born in Vacha, Germany, on January 9, 1926, discusses her family life; pre-war antisemitism; going to Frankfurt, Germany to attend a Jewish school until the end of 1939; attending school in Berlin, Germany; working in an old age home cleaning and cooking; wearing the yellow star in 1941; working for a children's home in 1941; working in a U-boat factory in the fall of 1941; being sent to the Riga ghetto in Latvia; walking to Kaiserwald in July 1944; being taken to Stutthof; being taken to Sophienwalde; returning to Stutthof; her liberation by the Russians; meeting her future husband; traveling to Berlin; moving into a displaced persons camp; traveling to Hessen, Germany (in the town Osterwieck); and immigrating in 1947 to the United States, where she reunited with her father.

Oral history interview with Eva Reed

Oral History

Eva Reed (née Chava Tannenbaum), born on December 14, 1909 in Pulawy, Poland, describes her father, who had a successful lumber business; her four siblings; having to move to Warsaw, Poland after World War I due to a Russian order; being educated at the gymnasium and completing dental school; marrying a doctor in 1934; completing residencies in orthodontia and dental prosthetics and opening a general practice in 1936; giving birth two months before the beginning of the war; going to Bialystok, Poland, leaving her parents behind because they refused to leave; obtaining the required Russian passport for residency; moving to Stolin, Belarus in the spring of 1940, where her husband secured a position as a surgeon; deciding to flee, leaving their son behind with a woman they knew; the placement of their son in a prison ward and his murder; being hidden by a series of peasants until they were accepted by the partisans in the forest; her husband’s role as a surgeon for the partisans; being ordered out of the woods in 1942; her husband’s assignment to the Russian railroad army; living for a time in Lublin, Poland until liberation; going to Russian-occupied Germany; going to Israel illegally after their second son was born; obtaining visas for the United States; arriving in November 1959 after a long wait in Paris, France; and living in New York.

Oral history interview with Leon Ginsburg

Oral History

Leon Ginsburg, born on June 12, 1932 in Maciejów, Poland, describes his family owning a dry goods store and living in a middle-class Jewish neighborhood; his father dying before the war; the Nazis killing his mother, sister, and brother; the Russian occupation in 1939 and the German invasion in 1941; how he narrowly escaped the Ukrainians and Nazis on many occasions; filming German atrocities, including the mass shooting of Jews; watching Germans forcing Jews to throw holy books onto a fire outside a synagogue and photographing it for propaganda; his family in Lyuboml, Ukraine; the winter of 1941-1942; hiding in his grandparents’ attic in Lyuboml; the mass murder of Jews in Lyuboml; hiding in attics, a cemetery, a drainage pipe, and a barn; hiding with a Polish family in Chelm who gave him a Polish name; his aunt finding him after liberation and going to Lask, Poland; returning to Lyuboml then going to Berlin, Germany; living in a displaced persons camp; going to the United States in 1946 with a group of orphans; living in New York, NY with his great-aunt; earning an engineering degree; getting married and having three children; developing a successful business in the US; returning to Maciejów to erect three monuments for the 4,500 people who were killed; being proud of his Jewish identity; and how his philosophies on Judaism have changed.

Oral history interview with Arlette de Long

Oral History

Arlette de Long (née Bergman), born on June 15, 1937 in Brocourt in the Somme, France, describes her parents who were the town’s only two doctors; the significance of living close to the English Channel; her father having to leave to fight the Germans in 1940; moving to Paris in 1947 and finding out that her family was Jewish when she was 10 years old; being baptized and attending Catholic school even while her father attended synagogue; living in the Paris suburbs until she was eighteen; going to the United States in 1962; learning English and marrying a Methodist; and not identifying with her Jewish heritage until she was much older and had children herself.

Oral history interview with Martin Weiss

Oral History

Oral history interview with Abram Enzel

Oral History

Abram Enzel, born in Czestochowa, Poland on June 18, 1916, describes his family composed of his parents and his four siblings; antisemitic incidents in his city beginning in 1938; how his family avoided being shot on September 5, 1939, “Bloody Sunday”; working in slave labor camps later that fall; the deportations to Treblinka that began from his city on the Yom Kippur of 1942; being the only person in his family not “selected”; working in the HASAG munitions factory until December 1944; being sent to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp and having to walk six to seven miles daily from the camp; a cruel Kapo in the camp; going on a death march in early 1945 and arriving at Dachau on April 27, 1945; spending some time in the Feldafing displaced persons camp in Germany; moving to Lübeck, Germany; arriving in the United States on April 9, 1951; and settling in Pittsburgh, PA, where he worked, married, and had one son.

Oral history interview with Hanni Krispin

Oral History

Hanni Krispin, born in March 23, 1924 in Memel (Klaipeda), Lithuania, discusses growing up in a Zionist family active in Jewish organizations; being aware of antisemitism in Memel in the 1930s; moving to Kaunas, Lithuania in 1938 to attend a Jewish school; trying to immigrate to Palestine; how the Russian occupation of Kaunas in June 1940 ended any plans to move to Palestine; seeing the Germans arrive on June 21, 1941; her parents disagreeing over whether to flee with the Russians; Lithuanian violence a few days before the official German occupation; being taken with her family to the school, where her father was taken away; being taken to the municipal prison for a week and released for unknown reasons; the sexual assault of some of the prisoners; returning to her house; the shooting of Jews at the Seventh Fort; living and working in the Kaunas ghetto; conditions in the ghetto; the October 28, 1941, “Gross Aktion”; the various underground groups and leaders, including Dr. Elkes and Avram Wilamet; being involved in underground activities; hearing about other ghettos being liquidated and helping to build bunkers; being found and forcibly removed on July 13, 1944; being transferred to Stutthof and then to Malkin with her mother; digging large trenches; escaping from the crematoria lines many times; being part of a medical experiment; being moved to a tanker; being rescued from the ship at the end of the war; staying in Kiel, Germany and Celle, Germany; getting married to another Holocaust survivor; and eventually settling in Palestine.

Oral history interview with Hanni Krispin

Oral History

Hanni Krispin, born on March 23, 1924 in Memel (Klaipeda), Lithuania, describes her family moving to Kovno, Poland (Kaunas, Lithuania); her family being very conservative and observant; the Russian occupation of Lithuania; remaining active in Zionist youth groups; the Nazi invasion and the Russians fleeing; Lithuanian forces arresting her family; her father being taken away and never seeing him again; being imprisoned with her mother for a few weeks; being forced into the Kovno ghetto; being deported in July 1944 with her mother along with other women to German work camps; and feeling fortunate to have survived.