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Oral history interview with Marie Brandstetter

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1999.A.0122.397 | RG Number: RG-50.477.0397

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    Oral history interview with Marie Brandstetter
    Transcript
    OK.
    Today is February 7, 2001.
    We are at the Peninsula Temple Beth El.
    And we're interviewing Marie Brandstetter.
    My name's Peter Ryan, interviewer.
    Anne Green Saldinger is doing the videotape.
    Could we begin by my asking you where and when you were born?
    I was born in Kalisz, Poland.
    And you want to know my date, too?
    In January 20, 1933.
    And where is Kalisz?
    Kalisz is-- well, it's in the part of Poland
    what used to belong to Germany a long time ago.
    So it's western Poland.
    Yes, it's between Poznan, somehow, and Lodz.
    That's the way I see it.
    I'm not exactly sure I know how to explain it.
    But it's-- you have to go on the--
    I don't know whether it's west or south.
    But that's the only way I know how to explain that.
    And how big a-- was it a city or a town?
    Yes, it was a city.
    Actually, I was born in Blaszki, in the city of little town
    Blaszki between--
    that is between Kalisz and Lodz.
    But we-- after I was born, we moved to the city of Kalisz.
    So my brother was born there, too.
    So I just forget to say that I'm born in Blaszki.
    That's a small little tiny town.
    That's where most of my families were born there,
    in that little town.
    How many were in your family?
    In my immediate family was my brother, my mother, and I.
    That's just four.
    But my mother comes from 14 children.
    And my father comes from eight boys and two girls.
    And what did your father do?
    The older brothers that were in Poland,
    they owned a bus company.
    And that bus was going from Kalisz to Lodz.
    That's what he did.
    Did he own it or did he drive also or what?
    He didn't drive it.
    No, he owned it.
    But he used to take sometimes go through
    from the office of Kalisz to the office of Lodz
    and sometimes gone for a whole day.
    And most of the time, he was on the bus helping
    whatever he needed to do there.
    And that's what I remember him doing.
    And what kind of a lodging did you have there?
    We didn't have a home, but it was an apartment-like.
    I think that was an apartment-like.
    And we lived right--
    in back of our apartment was a big river.
    And it was the river--
    oh, just skip my mind.
    I have it in my book.
    And I crossed the river.
    I can always remember seeing a jail.
    And to the right of that apartment
    I remember was a beautiful, beautiful big park that we
    spent quite a bit in Kalisz.
    You were older than your brother?
    Yes.
    I am two and a half years older than my brother.
    What were your parents' names?
    My mother's name was Ida Zelver.
    And her maiden name was Messer.
    My father's name was Chaim Zelver.
    She came from a family of 14 children.
    Yes.
    And where was she age-wise in the 14?
    Oh, that's a difficult question.
    I never could find out from all of them.
    I know that her brother that died after her,
    he was one of the oldest that survived.
    She was-- I think she-- no, I'm really not sure exactly.
    But she was not the youngest, and she was not the oldest.
    The oldest were all--
    they all perished.
    But she was one somewhere in the middle.
    And your father, he came from a family of eight?
    My father came a family of eight.
    And he was the youngest in the family--
    a family of eight boys and two girls.
    But he was the youngest of the family.
    Yes.
    There were eight boys and--
    And two girls.
    So there was a family of--
    Of 10.
    I see.
    What do you remember about your early life there?
    Well, I know that I had a happy life.
    It was a wonderful life.
    We had a very big family, very close family.
    We all used to meet on Saturdays and go to that beautiful park.
    We always get dressed up.
    And I think I was the apple of my father's eye.
    And I didn't want to have a brother
    even before he was born.
    I used to tell, I don't want a brother.
    I'm going to throw him in the ocean--
    in the river on the balcony, off the balcony,
    but was very happy after he came.
    It was a one-bedroom apartment.
    We were very happy.
    I really cannot remember anything else that wasn't not
    but happy occasions.
    My father was a very soft-spoken person, very gentle person.
    When we used to go out on Saturdays,
    he made sure that Sam's little shoe's on right,
    my pigtails would be with the right bows on it,
    and my shirt would be buttoned and all dressed would be--
    I always was dressed up like a little doll.
    Yes.
    And we always used to take a walk in the park.
    And they always took the same--
    that was the enjoyment of Saturday walking into the park.
    Now-- and I also remember when my brother was born.
    I'm two and a half years older than him.
    But I remember the day because my uncle,
    one of my mother's brothers which was
    very close with my father, he--
    my mother had my brother at home.
    And he told me that I'm going to have a little brother.
    Let's go.
    We're going to wait for your father on the corner
    and tell him the news that he was born.
    And I remember just like I would be there now.
    And I was two and a half.
    Was that exciting, to tell him the news?
    Yes.
    We were standing on the corners when he got off
    the bus to come home.
    I can even remember where he walked, the street that he
    walked to our house.
    If they would take me back and put me there on that street,
    I would go directly to the place.
    And he loved me very much.
    And he picked me up and carried me back to the house.
    And my uncle and him were walking together.
    And he was all excited about having another child.
    My uncle, that particular one, my mother's brother,
    he was the one that was one of the survivors in this family.
    One of the few?
    One of the few just--
    but he went to Russia.
    So they stayed in a camp in Russia.
    Now, did you go to school at all in that time?
    Yes, I was in a preschool.
    They used to call those--
    in Europe, they call those kindergarten.
    But it was a preschool.
    It's--
    Before formal school.
    Before formal school.
    Right.
    Was your family Orthodox?
    No.
    No.
    My grandpa-- I never met my grandpa.
    My grandpa from my mother's side was a shammas in the temple.
    And I just received from them a picture.
    The same cousin that gave me my other pictures,
    he sent me a picture of my grandpa--
    which I've never seen either-- is from my father's side.
    I never did ask him what he does.
    It never entered my mind to say, what did you do?
    So I don't know what he did.
    How far away was your father's business from where you lived?
    In the same city.
    In the same city.
    And if one of the buses would come by,
    they would all gather in front of the office.
    I have pictures of many in front of the office.
    And they might have had an office in Lodz,
    too, because this is where their destination was.
    So I don't know much about Lodz.
    But I do know that this--
    So really between those two cities.
    Only between those two cities.
    Only between--
    On the way-- sometimes I remember he was taking me.
    That's all before the war.
    He would take me along--
    and I'd love to go with him on the bus--
    and drop me off in Blaszki where I
    was born, where a lot of our family
    lived, and picked me up on the way back,
    because I even remember how that city looked.
    It was one stop and one stop only at the time.
    And he would drop me off.
    And my family would be there picking me up.
    And I spend with the cousins a day.
    And then on the way back home, he'd pick me up.
    That's how that route ran.
    So you were about five years old when the war started?
    1933, I was a little over five, almost five and a half.
    Five and a half.
    Was there much of a Jewish community in--
    Very big Jewish community.
    Yes, Kalisz had a very big Jewish community.
    I have a book on that.
    My aunt sent me--
    now, in my older years, somebody sends me that.
    And somebody sends me this from Kalisz, too.
    And then when I was in Yad Vashem, I read up on Kalisz--
    very big Jewish community.
    Now, you weren't Orthodox.
    But you were religious?
    I don't think I would call it that we were.
    I don't know.
    My grandma was.
    My mother's mother was.
    My mother's sisters and my mother's-- and my mother,
    they always believed.
    They're very good believers.
    And they traditionally lighted the candles on Sabbath.
    But I don't think my father, my father himself,
    was the kind that would go to the temple every Saturday
    or Friday night or whatever.
    No.
    Later on in the years, my mother married another man that
    was very religious like that.
    But we--
    Your father wasn't very religious.
    No, I don't think so.
    And did some of the brothers and sisters
    live in the same community?
    All of them.
    In that particular apartment complex,
    my mother had one sister and one brother living
    in the same complex.
    And my aunt went back here after the war.
    Actually, she went back in 1990 again.
    And that place, that particular apartment where we lived,
    it was taken down.
    And there was an office put into it-- so next to the park.
    But three brothers and sisters, they
    lived together in it, two sisters and one brother
    in that particular apartment complex.
    Do you have any memories of the outbreak of the war?
    Yes, I have--
    I just remember almost everything about it.
    I know that my father went to work.
    I do remember one thing, though, before the war broke out.
    I used to love to sleep with them in bed.
    And my father was a smoker.
    And he would lay in the dark in the bed.
    And I would lay next to him.
    And he would like to listen to the radio, what
    goes on, because everybody kind of expected a war.
    They hoped it wouldn't happen.
    And I remember he would lay there, listen to the last--
    9 o'clock would be the last news.
    And one night, I remember him saying.
    He says, this is all very well, he says.
    I'm translating it from Yiddish.
    But this is not going to help the situation.
    I hope there's not going to be a war,
    but there's not much chance of not being one.
    And I remember as a child, it just lays in my head
    that he took his cigarette, put it out, and went to sleep.
    I used to be a spoiled little one.
    I liked to go in between them and sleep,
    until they put me in the bed across the room.
    When did that happen?
    All the time when I was little.
    Oh, I see.
    My brother was-- he was staying in his crib.
    But me, I always--
    well, also, I had a bedwetting problem.
    So as soon as I would wet the bed
    and I fall asleep my own place, and they
    would have to change it.
    So they let me stay for a while.
    And that really contributed a lot of problems in my life
    later on during the war.
    Really, I was punished for that and so forth.
    But this is later on.
    If you liked to sleep between them,
    that gave you an incentive to wet the bed, didn't it?
    No.
    I would wet my own bed.
    And that's when I used to come in.
    I would say, I don't want to-- yeah.
    If you wet your own bed, then you got to sleep with them.
    Maybe.
    Maybe.
    Who knows?
    Not analyst-- I couldn't say anything about that.
    Tell me what you remember about the outbreak of the war.
    One morning in 1938, September--
    I remember September the first, I think--
    my father went to work.
    My mother said goodbye to him.
    And then the next thing, she turned on the radio.
    And she heard that Hitler invaded Poland.
    It was unbelievable.
    Everybody was-- she was talking to everybody.
    And everybody was scared to death.
    My husband's going to go to the war.
    It was chaos.
    I remember it was chaos.
    I didn't get a word.
    I didn't get any attention that day,
    because also there was somebody at the door
    and delivering a telegram, I think,
    telling that my father has been drafted to the Polish army.
    And unfortunately, he was the only one, only
    one of all the families.
    From my mother's side, from my father's side,
    he was the only one because he was
    the youngest of all the families at the time.
    He was--
    Do you know how old he was then?
    Yes.
    I don't know how old he was then, but I could add it.
    But he was born in 1905.
    No, my mother was born in 1908.
    He was born in 1905.
    Yes.
    Anyway, he went to work.
    And my mother was-- she started crying because she heard
    that he was the only one that was going
    to be taken into the army.
    She cried all day long.
    And I couldn't figure this at the time
    out, this whole situation.
    I was five and a half, almost.
    And she couldn't wait for him to come home and tell him.
    She wishes he wouldn't come home.
    She kept saying, I wish he wouldn't come home
    so he can run away--
    at least save himself.
    But when he came home and she told him and she told him,
    you know what?
    They don't even have records of you.
    I'm sure you're not even registered.
    Let's just take the children and run away.
    Let's save ourselves, because the news was very bad.
    And he said, no.
    He says, I can't do it.
    I need to go serve in the army.
    But she pleaded with him and pleaded with him.
    He had two days to get ready.
    And I'll never forget the day he finally left.
    She cried.
    I cried.
    And I kept telling him, don't go.
    And now, he said, I want you to take the children.
    And I want you to save the children.
    And I want you to run.
    And wherever you can, hide until this is over.
    He says, it won't be long.
    It will be over.
    That's all they ever hoped.
    It will be over.
    And he would not give in on this situation
    to tell what mother suggested, to run off.
    And they would never know the difference
    because that's what everybody did
    if they didn't want to serve in this army,
    knowing they're going to get killed, anyway.
    Well, my father left.
    And she said she's not going to budge out of the house.
    She wouldn't budge from the house until he came back.
    Well, two days later after he left,
    two days later, he was still laying out in a field.
    They were all the people that came to register
    and be put with uniforms.
    The war was going on.
    How long did it take for Poland to be taken?
    It wasn't that long.
    He came home.
    And they didn't even know he was gone.
    So she says, now, let's do it.
    Let's do it.
    He came home.
    He shaved.
    He took a shower.
    And he went back, because he was afraid.
    He kept saying to her, if the Germans are not
    going to get us, then somebody's going
    to get me from the Polish army.
    And I'll be dead one way or the other if I don't do what they--
    he was not brave in this situation.
    So he went back.
    And she told him, I'm not moving from this house, she says.
    And this is how it was.
    We stayed there until 1940.
    But a lot of things happened in between.
    He saw the bombed-out city.
    We went to Lodz.
    We ran to Lodz.
    We took the family bus and all the family we could put in.
    We ran to Lodz.
    Then they bombed--
    Voluntarily?
    Yes, voluntarily.
    We took one of our buses and put the family, as many
    of the family we could get in--
    ran to Lodz.
    This is after the war is over?
    No, this is still during the war,
    while they were bombing our city, while my father was
    in the army already.
    And then we came to Lodz-- didn't have where to stay.
    And they started coming there bad.
    So all the family, we just went right back home.
    When we came home, that's when we
    found everything shattered and bombed,
    but not as bad in our city as it was in Lodz.
    But on the way driving home from Lodz on the buses, we saw--
    that was only, what, maybe a week or so later.
    We saw all these soldiers walking like tired and broken
    down and shattered and all these horses laying on the roads.
    They didn't have highways in those days,
    just horses, the horses that they
    were shot during the fight.
    And there was walking by a battalion of soldiers.
    We found out later on that one of them was my father.
    We were afraid to open the door.
    But he was afraid to--
    he didn't know who was inside, because we were hiding.
    Everything was-- the windows on the bus
    were kind of covered so they wouldn't see who's
    inside if it were Germans.
    And later when we corresponded, which comes very much later--
    when we were in Russia, we corresponded with him.
    We found out that he saw the bus that day.
    But he could have run off there.
    And again, he didn't take a chance with this thing.
    He came back.
    We were ready.
    Well, that's the time he saw us.
    And where they were going, I don't know.
    I cannot tell you.
    But I do know they looked like they just went
    through a very heavy battle.
    And inside the bus, I do remember somebody saying
    from the family, I hope--
    I wonder if Chaim is between these soldiers.
    I wonder if Chaim is between the soldiers.
    But nobody would open up.
    They covered these windows in the bus.
    Only the bus driver got to see how to drive.
    Nobody else could see out much, unless you peeked out.
    Well, this is when we came back to Poland.
    And again, my mother stayed on and waited.
    But there was one sister of hers which is still alive today.
    She was 18, almost 18, then, Sophie.
    She was also blonde, just like myself
    and my mother and my brother.
    And we were the only ones from the family left in town.
    And she kept telling, we have to go.
    We have to go.
    But my mother says, no, I'm going to sit here
    until Chaim comes home.
    All the other people had left from the family?
    Everybody had left from the families.
    They all left.
    Wherever they went, I don't know at the time.
    But they were all--
    they left the town so they would not
    be prosecuted from the Germans.
    Well, but we just didn't sit home waiting for dad.
    My mother stayed on that corner which
    I mentioned to you before.
    She stayed there with us in one hand,
    my brother in the other hand, 24 hours a night--
    I mean a day.
    Waiting for your father?
    Waiting for my father to get off that and come back home,
    until my brother got very sick.
    He had the mumps.
    And in those days, mumps, I understand they got infected.
    They got infected and had to be operated so the pus would
    be taken out and whatever.
    And nobody-- she was afraid to go to anybody.
    She took a chance.
    She went to this one doctor.
    He said he'll do it.
    He was not Jewish, but he said he'll do it.
    But she has to promise to take the child right that night out
    of here and out of town so the Germans won't find out,
    because we didn't look Jewish.
    That's why we could stay.
    Nobody bothered us.
    The people in the town knew, though, didn't they?
    Yeah, the people in the town, the Polish people in the town,
    knew.
    But at that time, I suppose they still
    didn't tell on each other.
    But there were no Jews in town left.
    And we--
    And the doctor was not supposed to treat--
    A Jewish person.
    Right.
    And he knew that we were Jewish.
    So he made mom promise that she'll
    take us right out of town, out, so he
    doesn't get caught on that.
    Well, she did.
    We didn't take much.
    I only had about five dresses or six dresses, seven petticoats
    underneath.
    And she even took a chalice.
    And she took some silver dollars that she pinned it
    between our legs.
    And she put all these dresses on me and all these petticoats
    because I could walk.
    My brother, after surgery, he couldn't.
    And my aunt was with us.
    And she took things.
    But I remember that particular thing that she took,
    what she carried beside my brother, was a chalice.
    She had a--
    I'm sure I pronounce it right.
    It's a [HEBREW],, what you drink wine out of.
    She got for her wedding--
    how do you say it?
    A--
    Chalice.
    Chalice.
    There you go.
    And she wanted to hold on to this thing
    because her parents gave her that for her wedding.
    That meant something to her.
    It meant something to her.
    But it came in handy later on.
    Now, the aunt, the aunt is the sister of your mother?
    Mother.
    That was my mother's next-to-youngest sister.
    The youngest sister was already gone.
    That comes later.
    This one didn't have a boyfriend or anything,
    so she stayed with us.
    And all the time, she stayed with us.
    When we came-- when we went at night, we caught--
    my mother said, we're going to catch a train.
    Wherever it's going, we're going out that way.
    We don't know.
    We can't ask where it's going.
    There are soldiers all over the train station.
    We're going to get on this train and sit down.
    And wherever the train takes-- if it takes you
    to Warsaw, fine.
    If it doesn't take you to Warsaw, wherever it will go,
    we take.
    We can't stand on this train station with him being--
    She didn't really have a destination in mind.
    No.
    But she just wanted out of the town.
    She was scared.
    Now, when you say there were soldiers on the platform,
    were they German soldiers or Polish?
    All German soldiers.
    No, all German soldiers.
    So the Germans had already occupied the city?
    Yes, they already occupied the city.
    Yes.
    And--
    Did you know if they had begun to pick up Jewish people?
    Yes, because when we were sitting
    in-- when we were staying in town,
    we saw them throwing down pamphlets, propaganda.
    We saw them throwing candies in people.
    And the candies would be poisonous.
    My mother wouldn't let me touch anything.
    That's-- holding Sam on one side and me on the other side,
    that was her life.
    And my aunt was right there with us.
    But we left and we got on this train.
    It happened to be-- we didn't know where the train was going.
    But it was going to Warsaw.
    And the whole train--
    it seemed to us at that time that the whole train
    was full of Gestapo and German soldiers.
    And we didn't speak Yiddish.
    At that time, I couldn't speak Yiddish.
    My mother only spoke Polish to us.
    And my and only spoke Polish, which was fortunate there, too.
    And now, my mother needs to change
    my brother's dressing because he told her within so many hours,
    you better take it because--
    so it won't get infected again, to clean it.
    And she started taking off his bandages
    when one of these soldiers walked up to us.
    And he said-- he took my brother,
    picked him up, and started walking away.
    And my mother is just--
    she just was beside herself.
    She didn't know what to say.
    And my aunt kept telling her, don't say anything.
    But I ran after the soldier.
    Give me back my brother.
    I want my brother back.
    In Polish, I was talking to him.
    And he didn't turn around.
    And I followed him all the way wherever he was going.
    And that's when he went into another car,
    set my brother down on a bench somewhere there, like a table,
    and started changing his dressing--
    changed his whole dressing, picked him back up.
    And I'm screaming there constantly.
    I want my brother back.
    I want my brother back.
    And I'm just there with him.
    He took my hand, my brother on his arm,
    and brought him right back to my mom's--
    put him on my mom's knee, on her leg.
    It was unbelievable.
    She says, I can't believe it.
    I can't believe it that they didn't know we were Jewish.
    It's like a miracle, this whole thing.
    I didn't have to do anything.
    Well, this was one of--
    I think it was like a miracle, because if they
    would have found out, we would have not been--
    he couldn't have done these things.
    We arrived in Warsaw.
    That's when we were already on the road.
    We arrived in Warsaw.
    We could not get off that train.
    The soldiers were not allowed to get off.
    We were not allowed to get off because they were transporting
    Jews already like cattle.
    And there was crying, and there was screaming.
    And there was screaming from those little windows
    like you see in the cattle car.
    And it was absolutely chaos on there.
    And we could just look out the window and do nothing.
    And the soldiers were not allowed
    to get off, because the transports were
    going as fast as they were filling these Jews up in there.
    So you can see it was already quite late.
    It was already late in 1940 when we were there.
    And they didn't let us off.
    And it was terrible to see this.
    And I didn't understand much at the time.
    When I think back--
    you see, all this came back to me later on in my life.
    It was there, but I remember it just like out of a movie,
    that these people were screaming.
    And the Germans were screaming, schnell, mach schnell,
    mach schnell.
    You dirty Jew, they were calling.
    I can't think of it.
    I speak German.
    I can think of any, because it gets me very excited when
    I talk about this.
    But nighttime came and everything went quiet.
    When the dark came, everything went quiet.
    There were no more trains.
    They all left.
    They let us off the train.
    The soldiers got off, and then we got off.
    And now, my mother says, I don't know what to do.
    She says to my--
    and I don't know where.
    It was dark.
    Warsaw was bombed.
    So we don't know what street or where to go.
    She says, I really don't know.
    So she just started walking with us.
    She was holding on to--
    they would change off, my aunt and my brother.
    And I would walk with them along.
    It was dark.
    We heard this buggy with a horse tramping and heard the noise.
    So my aunt says, let me do the talking.
    She stopped him, this man with that horse and buggy.
    And she said to him, this is my sister.
    And one child is sick, and the other one can't walk.
    And we don't know where we are at the moment.
    Do you think you could tell us where
    we can go at least find some shelter overnight,
    my sick nephew and all that?
    Excuse me.
    And he said, OK.
    He knew that we were Jewish.
    I know.
    My aunt-- later on, we talked about it.
    He knew that we were Jewish, because usually Poles don't
    walk around in the middle of the night to get--
    and we had no choice.
    So he took us.
    And he drove us up to a hotel.
    And that hotel when we walked in--
    and he said to us, good luck.
    We knew that we were betrayed right there, because we walked
    in and they were singing and having
    a good time at the bar, soldiers,
    all German soldiers and some Gestapo, too,
    with the higher rank.
    We walked in like--
    my mother, my aunt and my holding onto my--
    my aunt was holding on to me, my mother
    holding on to my brother.
    And we walked in.
    And this one soldier comes out of the bar.
    It's like yesterday.
    He comes in.
    He says, what can we do for you?
    And my mother says, I need some shelter for these children.
    She says, it's dark outside and I don't know
    where I am, all done in Polish.
    And he tried-- and he's German.
    But I think my mother must have understood because Yiddish
    and German are so close.
    So anyway, she answered him in Polish.
    He took out some candies from his pocket.
    And he gave one to me, and then he gave one to my brother.
    And my brother just kept holding it.
    He didn't want-- he was not well yet.
    And my aunt kept pinching me.
    Don't eat it, because we knew already
    what candies can do these days.
    And maybe he knows we are Jewish.
    We never took a chance on--
    she never took a chance with her children, my mother.
    That's the wonderful person she was.
    And my aunt, too, when she was--
    well, actually, my aunt now, I think of her as my other mother
    because she was only a few years older than me.
    But that's how I think of her.
    And she says, don't eat this because it might be poison.
    But he didn't want to go away.
    He just stood there and stirred and stirred and stirred.
    And we were just standing there.
    And it was just my mother having that child in her hand
    was heavy.
    And we didn't get anywhere.
    So my aunt took my brother's candy and she ate it.
    And then she says, go ahead.
    Eat it.
    We can't help it.
    He won't go away.
    So we ate it.
    It turned out to be OK.
    Now, he says to us, I will call somebody
    to find you someplace to stay overnight.
    But you make sure you're out there in the morning.
    And my mother said, yes.
    So he called the clerk over from somewhere and says,
    find these people someplace to stay overnight.
    And the place that they gave us was like a closet.
    I have a walk-in closet now looks just like that.
    In the same hotel?
    In the same hotel.
    It was pitch dark out there.
    We didn't even know if we were on a street.
    Everything was bombed out so we didn't
    know what street we're on.
    And he told us--
    told them to take care of us and give them something to eat.
    They look like they need something to eat.
    And this is what they did.
    My mother-- and the rest of the night, she didn't go to sleep.
    My brother and I went to sleep.
    But I understand the rest of the night was very, very quiet.
    But before we went to sleep, she was telling me,
    you better go to sleep because we
    have to leave here very early.
    It's going to be dark when we leave here.
    And we're going to go-- a lot of walking to do.
    But it was daylight.
    And it was wintertime, though.
    And it was quiet in the hotel, no more singing--
    was everything quiet.
    Any idea what month this was?
    I think it was sometimes February or--
    it was cold still, February or March, still wintertime,
    because whatever comes up next--
    1940.
    1940.
    1940.
    Yes.
    The war was almost--
    was over with Poland.
    They already had captured Poland.
    From there that morning, she woke us up.
    We got dressed.
    We were still with those heavy petticoats
    and the heavy everything still on us.
    So it kept us warm.
    And we were going.
    And she said that we're going to go
    until we find somebody-- she said to find somebody
    to tell us what we can do.
    Well, they knew my aunt was young.
    They knew they're very close to the River Bug.
    And the River Bug-- across the Bug,
    if you can get yourself across, the other side is Russia.
    So actually--
    She knew that.
    Yeah, she knew that.
    My aunt knew that.
    So we know that Russia is divided between--
    at that time when we were going--
    I haven't been back to Poland and I don't care to--
    we didn't have too far to go to get to some sort of a border
    there and to get to that River Bug.
    And from there, we always hoped that somebody will be there
    to take us across to Russia, because the Germans were
    in back of us.
    And the Bolsheviks were in front of us.
    At the time, I didn't know one from the other.
    But later on in life, I realized that's what it was.
    And she says, we're going to go--
    as much as we can walk, we're going
    to walk towards whatever that border is.
    And it was daylight almost when we started walking.
    It was cold, but we walked.
    And they changed off of holding my brother and then--
    Could he walk?
    Or he had to be carried still?
    No.
    No, I can't remember.
    We might have been, but I can't--
    just somehow, I can't remember that part.
    All I know, the next thing--
    maybe because I stayed that night at that hotel,
    we were also scared.
    And we got up so early, it was dark that I cannot put this
    together.
    But I do know the next thing I know from my memory,
    I recall that I was at the border at the Bug,
    at the River Bug.
    And there were 13 other people besides us,
    13 altogether people, that wanted to cross.
    And my mother went up.
    And she says, look, I've got two kids.
    And I want to cross, too, because I
    don't want to stay behind.
    I don't want to be left behind here.
    So they said, we'll try to get you on this little rowing boat.
    And that's what we did.
    We got on that boat.
    And as soon as they-- it was very dangerous
    because there were too many people on that little boat.
    But they crammed us in as much as we can.
    And they started rowing.
    And I fell in the water.
    And that's when I knew it was good in winter, too.
    I started screaming, help me, help me.
    And my mother started screaming, help my child.
    And people would close their mouth.
    And they would try to get me.
    But they couldn't, because I was coming up and down.
    And I couldn't swim.
    And with all these clothes, I was in the water.
    It was so heavy.
    All I can remember-- screaming, mama, help me, help me.
    And she kept screaming, too.
    Well, the next thing I knew, somebody pulled me out.
    When they pulled me out and put me next to my mom,
    I was just frozen, absolutely frozen.
    And my mother's mouth was held so she couldn't scream,
    because they were afraid that they shouldn't hear us
    back there.
    And the Bolsheviks didn't let us in.
    The Russians really didn't want anybody, especially
    if you were with a man.
    If a man was behind you, another man, they would not let in.
    Women and children, they didn't bother so much.
    That's--
    Why not the men?
    Do you know?
    I don't know why not the men.
    I cannot explain it to you because I'll tell you why.
    I'm saying this because when we got off
    that boat, off that little boat, rowing boat,
    everybody went in different directions.
    Nobody knew where they were going.
    It was already a little warmer.
    The sun was already shining.
    We had to dry off.
    And my mother had to take all this one at a time off
    and get me dry.
    And then we rested a little bit.
    And we started walking.
    My mother says, I don't know.
    I'm going to walk this direction.
    Looks-- that's where I'm going to walk.
    And my aunt-- and her, she was young, too.
    That's where we started walking.
    Well, way in back of us, there were two men walking.
    And these Bolsheviks in front of us started--
    we could see them shooting, not trying to hit us,
    but shooting at us.
    And my mother just-- she can't believe it that they were
    so mean--
    here you are coming away from one mean person into Russia--
    that they would kill women and children just walking.
    And it was going on for about 15,
    20 minutes like that when she sat him down on the ground
    and told me to sit down to rest.
    And she looked behind.
    And there are two men, oh, I don't
    know, maybe 1,000 yards away.
    But they were walking.
    As much as we were walking, they were keeping their distance.
    That's who they were shooting at.
    They didn't want them to cross the border.
    How did the Russians know that there are not Germans?
    They wouldn't just let anybody.
    But women and children, they did.
    My mother waited until they came up close.
    And my mother says, what are you doing?
    They're not shooting me and the children.
    They're trying to get you out of the way.
    Please go someplace else.
    You're going to jeopardize two children and two women
    here just because you want to trail us.
    They didn't want to do it, but they stayed behind.
    And we started walking again.
    I remember my mother arguing with them.
    And they stayed behind.
    They stopped shooting.
    There was no shooting.
    We walked and walked the rest of the day that day.
    It was another day that it's unbelievable in my life.
    We came not too far--
    we were not too far from the town of Kovel.
    Kovel is White Russia, Belorussia.
    And that's-- we walked.
    And then by that time, my mother started asking in Polish
    to these people--
    Polish and White Russian's very close in the language, Russian,
    too, for that matter--
    where can I go and take my children to rest?
    She says, I just came across the border.
    So they would tell her, there's this town, Kovel.
    You walk as much as you can.
    If you get there, you have some way to-- you'll
    see there's so many of you Polish people there.
    There's a temple that's packed with people--
    big, big, huge temple.
    And that's what we headed for.
    And we stayed there.
    When we got there, we had a bench like a pew
    like you call whatever it's called now.
    To me, it was a bench.
    And she made my brother lay down and myself.
    And this was our territory for three weeks,
    a little more than three weeks.
    We could find some food there.
    My aunt meanwhile took some stuff and went back to Poland.
    She went back to Poland, believe it or not.
    Why?
    She was young-- because she wanted
    to convince the rest of the family, if she could find them,
    to come also to Russia because nobody's going to survive.
    And she found them.
    She found them.
    She found everyone, including-- the only one that wasn't there
    was my father.
    He was trying to cross Bug again.
    Every time-- he tried to cross three times.
    And each time, he was shot.
    And the last time, he was very badly wounded.
    So he went back to the family, tried to get to us,
    because he knew that we went across.
    I don't know how they knew.
    But I think with these people coming in--
    I'll tell you why, because in that particular town,
    the whole town was full of refugees from Poland.
    And everybody knew everybody.
    So when they go back, I saw this family.
    My aunt went back, tried to persuade
    the rest of her family.
    They kept saying, no, we're not going to go.
    Grandmother, her sisters, her brothers-in-law, her brothers,
    nobody wanted to budge.
    The children-- they all had children.
    Every one of those in the families
    had children, some of them teenagers, some of them little
    ones.
    Do you know where she found them?
    She found them in--
    she told me.
    I think I have it somewhere in my book the name of--
    I think she found them near Lodz ghetto
    before the ghetto was made into a ghetto, somewhere
    nearby right there.
    And she maybe was--
    I'm not sure exactly where she found them.
    But all she-- she came back telling my mother
    that they wouldn't budge.
    And she already knew what we went through.
    She came back to stay with my mother and us.
    She promised my mother that she'll try to come back.
    And she did.
    She came back almost three weeks later.
    But in these three weeks, while we were sitting there
    doing nothing and millions--
    to me, it was millions in those days.
    It probably was thousands.
    But to me, it was millions as a child.
    People were arriving.
    And they all settled in that town--
    no place to settle but either in temple or whether we went
    someplace else.
    That, I don't know.
    And between all these people, she found her brother--
    my mother--
    with his girlfriend and her sister with her boyfriend.
    And they were the youngest of the family.
    Those two were the youngest of the family.
    But they were very close as brother and sister.
    And she said to them, nuh-uh, I found you, she says.
    You're not going to live like this, she says.
    I'm your mother now.
    I'm going to marry you off.
    So that's when the--
    Chalice--
    Chalice came in hand.
    She sold it.
    There was the biggest wedding you've ever seen,
    not just of those two, of the brother and sister,
    but also of other couples.
    They made a huge chuppah.
    They found a rabbi.
    And that's what-- they made a wedding that night.
    And my sister-- my mother's sister,
    the one that went across the border back, came back one day
    after that wedding.
    And she married them off.
    And she felt, now, I'm going to rest
    at ease knowing that you two are married, because whether they
    were religious or not, that's how
    they believed in those days.
    Those brother and sister are the ones
    that got saved, because they also came to Russia.
    Those brother and sister lived all their lives after the war
    in Israel.
    And they're gone, too.
    The cousins-- the children are there.
    But it made my mother feel very good.
    But that's all we could stay.
    As soon as my mother came back, we
    heard that Hitler's coming in.
    He's invading on Russia.
    So we have to move further.
    And we started running again.
    That's when we really--
    During that three weeks that you were in this town,
    do you remember the Russians bothering you or harassing you?
    No, I don't remember anything because at that time,
    I was already between Poles again, between people again.
    I do know we didn't have much food.
    It was very difficult of everything,
    because they couldn't feed-- because everything
    was taken away from them, too.
    But in White Russia, I don't remember any prosecuting us
    at the time when we were there.
    So that part, I don't know.
    But I do know that my mother always held on to us
    so we couldn't get lost, so nobody could take us away.
    Was your brother getting better by this time?
    Yes, he was getting better.
    As a matter of fact, he was almost healed.
    It was an infection that really needed to be--
    the pus taken out.
    And he was healed.
    That's when my mother and aunt decided we would have to run.
    But my uncle that got married and my other end that got
    married, they just took off with themselves together.
    We knew that they're going to be OK.
    They couldn't travel with us because there were men in this.
    We felt that as women, we'll do better.
    My mother always felt as women, we'll do better on our own
    than having men with us, which turned out we
    just-- that's exactly what turned out to be,
    because once you found yourself a space in Russia
    and you would settle down and you could find some food
    and whatever, they would take the men into the Russian army.
    They want them to become citizens.
    They could have used every man on the front.
    They lost.
    And that's how the man, the Polish man,
    would hide out, too.
    Not so much the women-- they could care less--
    but the men.
    And they wanted us to become citizens, too,
    even during running, because one year out of running,
    we stayed nine months in the Ural Mountains.
    And that's where I started school, in Russian school.
    But to make the story, we have run away
    from-- we went further.
    And that's how we started spending our time at--
    Now, when you say "run away," how did you run?
    Well, we walked.
    We walked to-- always, we walked to the direction
    where a train would stop.
    They always had cattle trains going by.
    And they would always stop to fill up with whatever
    they filled up-- water.
    I remember seeing water being filled up.
    And there were always hundreds of thousands
    of people on those tracks sitting there.
    But they would let you get on the train?
    They would let us get on.
    The tracks-- the cattle cars were always empty going.
    But they would not leave empty once they stop.
    People would push themselves to get off.
    Wherever it was going, people were
    going in whatever direction.
    We got on one of those, too.
    And that's another episode that happened to be that night.
    Everybody was pushing and they--
    clumsy me.
    They pushed me underneath the railroad, underneath the--
    my mother couldn't find.
    She was screaming.
    My aunt was screaming.
    My brother was crying.
    And everybody was screaming, pushing themselves
    into the car.
    And we wanted to get on there.
    But my aunt couldn't get on until she finds me.
    She pulled me away seconds--
    seconds before that train took off.
    And people were hanging on every place.
    And my mother said, there is somewhere-- somewhere
    an angel over our head.
    This is the second episode that happened-- actually,
    the third, including the one in the hotel.
    And since then on, I think I heard my mother say "angel."
    Even so, I couldn't believe--
    I don't know whether we believed in angels or whatever.
    I kept thinking that I have an angel.
    Me, I have an angel over my head.
    And I love angels.
    But we had to wait until the next one came along.
    And we got on there.
    We didn't know where it was going.
    We turned out in a place.
    That's where it stopped.
    I can't remember the name, but I know it didn't look too bad.
    My mother said, if we can establish ourselves here, find
    some work, and hang out for the war here until the war is over
    and go back to Poland, we'll stay.
    And this is where we stayed maybe two weeks.
    And all of a sudden, during one night-- we found shelter.
    Excuse me.
    Overnight one night on a Friday night--
    I'll never forget-- the Russians liked to do this to the Jews,
    anyway, the Communists at the time.
    They like to do it on their Sabbath
    or on a Saturday or a Friday night.
    They came and started knocking at all these doors.
    I hear the biggest commotion.
    Get up, get up, you're being evacuated.
    Get up.
    Everybody was sleeping.
    It was about 12:00 or 11 o'clock at night at the time.
    And everybody didn't know what's going on.
    And that's when they took us on buses.
    We traveled two days on--
    not buses, on trucks, trucks filled
    with people towards the train and took us to Siberia.
    That's where they transported us all, whoever they
    could round up, to Siberia.
    By rounding up, I think--
    when I look back at these things, by rounding up,
    there were never any men on these places
    where we used to stay because all the men would
    be hiding out.
    And then we came to Siberia.
    It was cold.
    My mother got a--
    a barrack must have been a block long, big, big barrack.
    Empty-- everybody was on the floor.
    That's where our domain was, on the floor.
    Everybody had their little corner.
    Cold-- by that time, we really didn't have any clothes anymore
    much to worry about.
    And the shoes--
    What happened to your dresses?
    Oh, my mother had to-- for the two weeks and the three weeks
    where she wasn't--
    the three weeks or whatever we were in Kovel and then
    the two weeks where we went into the next,
    she traded each one for some food.
    She traded for food or for some of-- mostly,
    I remember she traded for flour so she can make some [POLISH],,
    how you say-- macaroni and make her own noodles
    and stuff like that to give the children to eat.
    So you were getting food.
    Food was not so bad.
    We had once a day food, for sure.
    But you were getting colder.
    But now, when we got to this big barrack,
    things were getting worse.
    But everybody-- my mother was fortunate, too.
    She got into where--
    she got a job there.
    She was the head of letting everybody shower.
    But they all had to take their turn every day.
    And that's where she was.
    And if I wanted to warm up in Siberia,
    I would get into the shower, because that's
    one good thing it was in that big, big barrack.
    They had hot water?
    They had hot water.
    Yes.
    But we didn't want to stay there because it
    was no life, absolutely.
    Sleeping on the ground with 5,000 or 10,000 other people
    in the same place, we needed to go further
    to situate ourselves.
    So my mother decided to take one night with my aunt to take us
    and told us, in the morning, we're leaving.
    We're going to go during the night,
    and we're going to run away.
    Put some warm rags on our legs over the shoes at the time.
    And we started out with snow up to I don't know where.
    You were walking?
    We were walking.
    And she did find out where to walk,
    because she wanted to know, where do we walk?
    Towards the railroad tracks.
    And we were always-- when we get to a railroad track,
    we know we can get on one of those trains
    because they always stop.
    There's a mass of people.
    They used to stop really for either taking on coal
    or taking on water again.
    And this is where you go to--
    when you used to run to a railroad track over there,
    you always see millions of people
    standing on the tracks trying to do the same thing.
    That's how we got transportation.
    Would there be any food at the railroad track?
    No.
    No, everything from then on was everything downhill.
    It was very, very hard.
    But at that camp, you were given food?
    We used to be fed.
    We used to be fed once a day.
    Yes.
    I don't remember exactly what, but we used to get I do
    know once a day, bread.
    Once a day, we used to get a slice of bread.
    And that was very important in those days.
    But we ran away.
    And just before we got to the railroad track, they found us.
    And they took us back.
    They didn't punish my mom for trying to run off.
    But they said, you're not going to run away again.
    And my mother said, she will.
    So we went back for another few weeks.
    And she tried again.
    And we got away.
    That second time, we got away.
    That's when we caught a--
    I keep saying "train."
    Yeah, one of those railroad--
    one of those cattle trains.
    And we didn't know where it was going.
    But it turned out it was going--
    see, Siberia at the point where we were
    was very close to the Ural Mountains.
    And so we ended up in Asbest, the city of Asbest
    in the Ural Mountains.
    And I even remember the Sverdlovsk Oblast,
    they used to call it.
    That's the county.
    And that's where we kind of settled.
    They gave us a little--
    my mother found one room for all four of us.
    And I can't tell you what we went through over there.
    That's when I went to school.
    I started school.
    We had to-- couldn't stay home.
    My mother found something to do.
    I think she worked at some kind of an asbestos factory
    at the time.
    My aunt worked with her.
    We idled doing nothing the whole day.
    So she wanted us into school no matter what it took.
    And we didn't have any clothing much at all.
    And the winters were bad there, absolutely.
    Still was winter-- it was cold.
    It was very cold.
    Your brother, was he in school, too?
    Yes, he went to school, too, just
    to go for a kindergarten type of a thing just
    to keep with other kids.
    And--
    Were you able to get any coats?
    No.
    I used to run down to school.
    I remember running down that mountain.
    And the teacher knew that I would
    come with rags on my feet, cold, no coat,
    run really fast to get into the class,
    and she'd always put me next to this heater.
    And she saved a seat for me because I
    was one of the refugees that we really didn't
    have anything left anymore.
    And my aunt-- and she would leave--
    no.
    The teacher would always let me sit
    in that corner next to the--
    which I wish she wouldn't have at those times because my feet
    are still frozen today.
    I have a lot of problems with my feet.
    Sitting next to a heater after you run on the snow barefooted,
    it doesn't do much good.
    But this is what she meant very well.
    And this is how I stayed there for nine months.
    We stayed there.
    When the summer came, it was cold summers.
    It wasn't hot summers It was very--
    this is a cold area.
    This is right near Siberia, so it's not that--
    but they had summers.
    And they had warm days.
    And we stayed through the summer.
    My mother organized where she could--
    we had something more to eat by then.
    But my aunt, she found a man she wanted--
    she found a young man that they were going to marry.
    There were eight brothers of them, too.
    And four of them were with this one man that she met.
    And they wanted to get married.
    So my mother said, OK.
    You want to get married?
    Fine.
    That means we cannot travel together anymore.
    So she married her off in that town.
    And she went with--
    she had to go with her husband, because the husband was
    with other brothers.
    And they didn't want to be found because, again, they
    wanted to take these men into the army.
    And sure enough, they didn't want to go into the army,
    in the Russian army.
    So they always had to hide.
    They were Polish Jews.
    Yes.
    They were all Polish Jews.
    They were actually from a town not far from us.
    How did they manage not to get drafted?
    They had to be hiding out.
    They really had to be hiding out.
    I don't know how they managed.
    But all I know that after that, I had a coat.
    We were a little bit better off.
    Well, I used to have a meal, at least, a day.
    And my mother says, we can't stay here.
    This is getting harder and harder.
    The winters were so bad.
    And we're coming to another winter.
    We don't have what to eat and what to wear.
    We're going to go further.
    We'll go with the rest of the crowds of women are running.
    And that's what we started running again.
    We went this time on one of those trains.
    Well, we went on--
    I wanted to mention to you that I was also between--
    when we were going between Siberia,
    we caught a train that ended up in Moscow before we
    came to the Ural Mountains.
    And that train left us off there--
    made everybody get off.
    And there, we didn't know what to do, either.
    And that was the day Stalin declared war on Germany.
    And we walked to the Red Square.
    As shabby as we looked, we walked there.
    It wasn't too far, I remember-- not too bad of a walk
    because everything wasn't--
    and there were thousands of people in the square waiting
    for him to come and speak.
    And I saw him personally.
    I couldn't believe it.
    My mother said, she's not going to miss it for anything.
    Hungry or not, she says, we are going to wait there
    until he comes out.
    And they were shouting as he was talking for his country.
    We have to protect our country and Russia and whatever.
    I can't remember-- unbelievable.
    There were so many people that I don't
    know why they didn't steal a few of us kids in those days.
    But they didn't need any more kids.
    They had enough troubles with their own.
    By nighttime, when it was dark, everybody was gone.
    And he was finished talking.
    He talked for two hours.
    I'll never forget that.
    And we went back to the station--
    station-- back to the tracks to find somewhere to go.
    That's when we ended up in the Ural Mountains.
    I also want to tell you when I lived in the Ural Mountains,
    we didn't know any-- by that time, we didn't know.
    But when I came to Siberia, I wrote a letter.
    Polish-- I didn't even know my alphabet that well.
    But I did my best way I know how.
    I told my aunt to help me.
    And I wrote a letter to Stalin.
    I had an answer from them.
    And I just had this--
    if we knew that any of this meant anything
    these days to have something to document like that.
    He answered me that he cannot help me to let my father come
    in because, like I said, the Bolsheviks wouldn't let him in.
    So they were shooting at him.
    And he finally would sneak away from the Germans
    and try to cross the border.
    But the Bolsheviks wouldn't let him into Russia.
    So that's how he couldn't come in.
    They were very close, and the borders
    were very, very, very tight.
    So how old were you?
    You wrote a letter to Stalin?
    I wrote-- I was over six.
    Yes, I was already, I think, almost seven.
    And I wrote to him in Polish, because I only
    knew Polish at the time still.
    He answered a very brief little note.
    I don't know if it was sent out by--
    I can't remember that.
    But I know I had a note.
    And my aunt, up to this day, she couldn't believe this.
    She still would talk about it that he answered me.
    In the midst of war and chaos, he managed to answer me,
    telling me that he's very sorry, that he's
    got no jurisdiction over Poland, and some more in this way.
    And he says he knows--
    what a hypocrite.
    He knows that kids should have their father and mother
    with them.
    But it's war, and there's nothing he
    can do to bring my father in.
    And I hope after this is over, I'll find my father.
    That's-- something like that.
    But we never saved it.
    During all this time, did you have any communication
    with your father?
    No, but we knew where he was.
    How did you know?
    Because people when they came into Kovel,
    when we were in White Russia, they would say,
    oh, we just saw your family in so and such place.
    They won't budge.
    They won't budge.
    They say the war is going to be over in a few weeks.
    They don't want to go-- a few months.
    They don't want to run away from home.
    And we knew whether my father was there or not
    because he was very well-known, too,
    because of the bus company.
    And people that rode the bus used to know him and so forth.
    So I imagine that's probably why.
    But we knew-- until we went into Siberia.
    From that moment on, we didn't hear anymore about anything.
    We didn't even know what was going on from then on.
    But we did know that we didn't want
    to stay in Siberia, even near Siberia
    in Asbest in Ural Mountains.
    And we headed out to go--
    we traveled-- traveled.
    We ran a long time, for one month only,
    before we came and off and on, off and on on a cattle train
    with very little food, very little ways to relieve
    yourself, and very little ways to have water
    because those cattle cars were so packed with people, who ever
    could get on it, that it was unbelievable that they
    would just not throw you off.
    And it was chaos on those things because everybody
    wanted to go further away from Germany.
    Now, there are other people that didn't do that.
    They settled.
    And if you were like my other aunt and uncle, the one that--
    I had two uncles and one aunt--
    yes, mother's sister-- the two that she married
    and another one that they found later on,
    stay near Leningrad, which is near St. Petersburg now.
    Was it-- no, near Stalingrad, staying in a German camp
    there later on during the rest of the war.
    They were in German concentration camps near--
    that's when they thought they were going to conquer Russia.
    That's why they put--
    and I have a Russian friend here.
    And that was almost the Ukraine.
    So that's how it was.
    And they told us afterwards.
    They survived.
    They told us afterwards.
    So there was from the whole family
    that everyone that went to Russia survived.
    We were lucky.
    We all survived.
    We had it bad, but we survived.
    But everybody that stayed behind, there was not one
    survived.
    Now, you went from Siberia to the Ural Mountains?
    To the Ural Mountains.
    And your mother worked in an asbestos--
    Asbestos kind of factory.
    Yes.
    That's why the town of Asbest was called Asbest.
    It was a big town.
    It's still on the map.
    And your aunt had already left?
    And there, that's where she found her husband.
    And she got married.
    And they went in different directions.
    I think they stayed behind and we left, because life for us
    was very, very bad.
    Where did you go?
    And how did you get there?
    Well, that's when we went back to the--
    that's the only way we knew how to get.
    We went back to the tracks, found
    the train, whichever direction it was going to go again.
    We ended up-- that's where we ended up.
    We came into Uzbekistan.
    We were a long time on the road.
    That was very--
    I remember days and days, people were dying on the road.
    And you have to go down to relieve yourself.
    You couldn't even do that because they only
    stopped to take on water or whatever in different places.
    And if you got down on time and didn't come back on time,
    that's it--
    end, no more.
    Mother doesn't find you.
    Sister won't find you.
    Brother won't find you.
    That's it.
    So everybody was kind of starving.
    People were dying.
    All the people were dying.
    And the kids were screaming.
    Little kids were crying.
    It was constantly like this on those trains.
    Every time I think about it, it just gives me
    the chills, because this is how--
    I just myself cannot believe that all this cold and hunger
    that we survived.
    My mother, my brother, and I, we survived.
    But when we came to Kazakhstan, by that time,
    I mentioned to you that we had a coat.
    I had a coat.
    My brother had a little coat.
    We had some old shoes on.
    We were in the same--
    wealthy at the time with having a little something to wear.
    But when we arrived to Uzbekistan,
    that was the first place--
    Now, was that south?
    Yes, that's where it was warm already.
    They didn't have those harsh winters like-- yeah.
    You didn't know you were going there, though.
    No, we didn't know.
    But in Uzbeks, they wear those little kippahs.
    What do you call them in English?
    Like a turban?
    Not turban.
    They wear little beanies like the Jewish people wear.
    They constantly have a little hat
    on because they were religious Muslims.
    At the time, I didn't know what a Muslim was, either.
    But I do know it was not bad there.
    We only stayed there two days.
    They wouldn't let us stay in Kazakhstan-- in Uzbekistan.
    So we went back on the train, on one of those trains.
    And that time, we had an idea where
    it was going, out of Uzbekistan to Kazakhstan.
    And this is where we remained for the rest of the war.
    We came to Kazakhstan in the middle of the night,
    12 o'clock at night.
    And when that train emptied itself, the whole train,
    all these people got out.
    But they all laid down right at the tracks there.
    And everybody went to sleep.
    Fresh air-- it was a nice evening.
    And we had our little coats on.
    So my brother was sleeping in my mother's arms.
    And I would put--
    no more aunt with us, you see.
    And I did put my head on her knees.
    And we fell asleep like this, my mother sitting.
    And we all fell asleep.
    Would you believe it?
    When I got up, I didn't have anything but underwear on.
    They took everything and stole everything off me, everything
    off my brother.
    And we were in such deep sleep, such worn-out sleep,
    that nobody felt anything.
    And my mother started crying and screaming.
    My kids, they're naked.
    There are no clothes.
    It was unbelievable what she did that night.
    In the morning, we couldn't believe it.
    So these people, they gathered something,
    anything just to cover us up and with so many thousands
    of people sitting on those tracks.
    But it was not too bad because at least it was not so cold,
    like where we came now.
    15 of us walked into--
    they had little-- in Kazakhstan, it's hard to explain.
    They don't have--
    I never-- we went to a kolkhoz.
    A kolkhoz is a collective farm in Russian.
    And that's-- we figured it's quiet.
    We'll sit out the war.
    So 15 of us-- my mother, myself, my brother, and altogether
    15 people, men and women and so forth, got off that train.
    And we headed for that particular place.
    Somebody said, if you set out at kolkhoz,
    then you survive the war.
    If you survive there, you'll survive the war.
    You're going to be able to go back home.
    And that's why we didn't want to run anymore.
    It was just no way to run anymore.
    My mother-- there were 15.
    And the place we were in, it was made out of mud,
    doesn't have windows.
    I don't know.
    It's like made out of clay would be the exact word.
    A kolkhoz doesn't have windows because they never
    had winter over there, particularly that part,
    and was fortunately a little river.
    We bathed in the river.
    We ate out of the river.
    We did everything out of that water.
    But that took its toll, too, because we
    started getting typhoid, every one of the 15 people,
    one at a time.
    And we were having--
    I think my mother and I, the strongest,
    we were the last ones.
    And then I'll say there was another lady with two more
    children.
    During this time while we were there was very bad, too.
    We didn't have food.
    The people that live in Kazakhstan were short people.
    They were oriental-looking, with a million little braids,
    the women.
    And there were no men.
    There were no men.
    Only women?
    Only women.
    They were all gone to the army.
    And then came a little warmer time, summertime.
    At the time when we arrived there, they went to the fields
    to see if they could plant some things.
    And they would make their lodging in the fields.
    So they wouldn't come back from--
    that's why we could stay in some of their places,
    you understand.
    So when they came back-- but fortunately,
    it was a warm country.
    But we all stayed in one little place, a room
    half the size of this.
    That's when a lady delivered, I remember, a baby.
    My mother was the oldest one, so she
    helped her deliver the baby.
    The baby couldn't survive because we
    didn't food to give it to eat.
    And she didn't have food to feed it.
    And the baby didn't survive and, one at a time,
    died in that place of typhoid.
    So the only ones that survived out of 15 people
    was a lady with two children and my mother with two children.
    But when I got my--
    first, my mother got typhoid.
    She got up.
    Then I got typhoid.
    And when I got up, I started screaming and crying
    because she shaved my hair off because I was full with lice.
    And typhoid, you have to-- if you
    are with lice because you're in conditions like that,
    you have to burn your hair.
    First, you've got to just burn-- take this hair.
    Shave them off.
    And she did the best she knew how to shave off my hair.
    I looked horrible.
    I never forgave her for that.
    But she kept telling me, why are you crying?
    She says, hair can grow back.
    But if you would have been--
    thank god that you woke up from the coma of typhoid.
    We had stomach typhoid.
    And then my brother got it, but we all survived.
    Well, sitting in that place was being
    very bad, because there was no food, no food whatsoever.
    The only thing I remember having once in a while over there
    was wild scallions that they grow,
    little onions, green onions.
    And they seem to grow over there because it
    was next to a river, quite a bit of this.
    But after this, you wanted to drink a lot.
    So you're more blowing up than anything.
    But one day, that lady and my mother,
    we kind of stuck together with the kids.
    She said, let's go to a next kolkhoz
    and see maybe we can bring something back
    to eat for the kids.
    While they were gone, we kids were fending for ourselves.
    And I took a walk one day with the rest--
    with the other two kids and my brother
    to search for some food.
    And I got bitten by a scorpion.
    And I was doing screaming and dancing
    on that particular place where I got bitten on my leg
    where some of these little ladies saw me.
    And they knew exactly what's happening to me.
    They threw me on the ground.
    They started sucking out the venom out of me.
    I survived that one, too, believe it or not.
    It was unbelievable.
    And then they had some buttermilk.
    And then they put buttermilk on it.
    And they used to wash their hair with buttermilk.
    They used to make their own buttermilk, if they could,
    and wash their hair because it made their black hair shine--
    very, very shiny used to be, the hair.
    Now, your mother wasn't working during this time.
    No.
    No, there was no place to work-- was nothing to do, just
    to wait out the war and starve.
    And there were many nights I cried myself
    to sleep at night, absolutely many nights.
    I kept praying.
    I said, why can't I have at least something to eat?
    I know I have to live in this condition,
    but something to eat.
    About a week later, she came back, my mother,
    with that other lady.
    I can't remember her name.
    And then they couldn't find any food.
    They came back with such bleeding feet, so worn out.
    Walking barefoot on this dry desert
    where the rocks and stuff, they really were a mess.
    That's when my mother and her decided
    we've got to get out of there.
    We got up one day.
    And she says, we're going to go into the next town
    that we can find some food.
    But we're going to go all together.
    And that's what we did.
    We started walking into the mountains.
    We knew the next town over there is not as warm as this place
    where we are now.
    But we didn't have much clothing left.
    And certainly, we didn't have any shoes.
    We started walking.
    And it took us two days over these mountains.
    We walk.
    And we didn't have any food, but the kids couldn't walk anymore.
    I don't know how the ladies made it, but the kids couldn't.
    We were all about the same-age kids.
    And so she-- we saw a dead--
    I have to tell you this because it's very important.
    We saw a dead mule full with maggots sitting on it.
    And my mother said, we are going to do something about this.
    We're going to eat this.
    And I said, no way.
    I'm going to die right now, and you cannot make--
    this is as much as I would have gone for that thing.
    But she had matches.
    She cut something off, pulled--
    I remember seeing her pulling off a piece of this meat
    and bringing some wood and boiling this over the fire.
    And she says, you're going to take some of that.
    You're going to eat it.
    I'm sure she didn't cut off the one with the maggots.
    But she said, you're going to eat it.
    And we're not moving until you kids eat something.
    You can't go any more longer without food like that.
    Looking at me now, you wouldn't believe it, right?
    But she insisted.
    We didn't budge.
    And we didn't want to eat it.
    But she insisted that us kids would eat it.
    They ate.
    She ate.
    And she ate a dead mouse, too, when
    she found it, because that was the only way she could survive.
    I wouldn't touch it.
    My brother wouldn't hear of it.
    But she made us.
    And she said, either you're doing this,
    or we're going to die right here.
    We can't go any further.
    I swallowed it.
    I ate it.
    And I made it--
    took a few bites out of that somehow.
    She says, now, we can go on.
    And we came into this--
    two days later, we came into the next town.
    Over there was already cold, the town that had-- sometimes,
    it used to snow there.
    It was cold.
    They didn't have right papers to stay in that town,
    to be registered so we can get once a week some bread.
    They had to go back all the way to the kolkhoz
    over the mountains again.
    The two women left us children on the doorstep
    of some building.
    And they had to go back to get the right papers,
    in order when they come back again,
    they could be registered.
    And maybe we can get once a week food, once a week bread, once
    a week something or housing.
    They did go back-- left us children.
    We used to eat out of the garbage then.
    By the time they came back, there was a lady.
    I will never forget.
    We all spent our time in the evening near the garbage can
    where they throw out food.
    They used to throw out some-- people
    had some food, potato peels.
    And we would just eat it and anything we could find.
    By the time my mother came back, I already had dysentery
    from eating out of the garbage.
    So now, she says, I'm going to put you in the hospital.
    They had a hospital there.
    She says, I'm going to see if they're going
    to take you into the hospital.
    And they did confirm it was dysentery.
    And she says, at least--
    please go.
    At least you will have something to eat.
    And this is how I decided, OK.
    Then I'll go to the hospital if they're going to feed me.
    Two days later, I still was laying there another--
    they wouldn't give me anything because they don't
    give anything with dysentery.
    So I ran away.
    And would you believe it?
    I survived that, too.
    I ran away out of the hospital.
    Then she found a little place for us, a room
    with this other lady.
    And she had-- the lady's was the boy was the older one.
    In my family, I was the older one.
    So they'd send us up to get our weekly bread one afternoon.
    We were hungry.
    It was cold.
    And it snowed that day.
    So in Russia, you have to go stay in line.
    And she told us the bread we're going to get is going to be
    next week's.
    But we need it now.
    We have to eat something.
    But you could get next week and next week, too,
    as long as you stay in line.
    So we used up our last week's already.
    So he and I went up.
    And in Russia, when you stay in line,
    it's not just a line where you stay here in America.
    You stay-- you keep each other warm
    because you stay a whole day.
    So you're inside almost like glued together.
    You get out of here and you get out of line,
    you want to do something, forget it.
    You don't get back in.
    There's no way you get back in.
    We stayed a whole day there, two kids holding our breath,
    practically, not being able to go to the bathroom,
    not being able to eat, and freezing cold.
    We stayed there.
    We got our bread.
    We were so happy.
    We were coming down that hill, running down that hill.
    The mother's going to be happy.
    His mother's going to be happy.
    We're going to have some bread tonight.
    Somebody attacked us.
    Two kids attacked us, took our bread, beat us up,
    and we came home beaten up.
    That was the day of our bread.
    On and on and on, these things were just going.
    But then my mother got sick.
    She got malaria.
    And she couldn't take care of us.
    So she was laying in some sort of a basement.
    I can't even tell you what it looked
    like because it was only--
    and the lady would take care of her, her friend
    that we survived all together.
    She said to us, to my brother and myself,
    you have to go to an orphanage.
    I can't do this anymore.
    I'm sick, you're hungry, and you get food in the orphanage.
    And I didn't want to go.
    But she says, you're being selfish.
    You have to take your brother and go.
    So the orphanage was across the street, almost like--
    I keep saying there was something in between, some kind
    of a ravine in between.
    My mother would be on that side.
    And to cross to go to the orphanage,
    I would have to cross something.
    It would be on the other side.
    I don't remember street names.
    At that point, I really don't remember.
    And we went to the orphanage.
    And she was staying with the lady in that place.
    That friend of hers would take care of her.
    But later on, that friend caught malaria.
    And she died because she also had dysentery.
    And she died.
    So my mother was kind of left alone there, too.
    How big was the orphanage?
    The orphanage didn't have any Jewish people or Polish people
    or whatever.
    It was all Russian.
    In one room, they kept them locked up on the--
    and I swear I'll never forget that.
    In one room, they had a bunch of children
    that used to be cannibals, because they were Chechens.
    I'll never forget.
    They were Chechens.
    It's called Chechnya.
    But over there, they call them Chechens.
    They would never let them be near us.
    They could never be near us.
    That was an orphanage that everybody got assignments.
    Oh, by the way, we went with the two other children
    that survived.
    And I had a bed that I was sharing with that girl.
    And my brother was with the boy.
    I remember her name.
    I can't remember his, but I remember her name was Becky.
    And Rebecca, they used to call her then.
    And I would start wetting the bed.
    No, first of all, we had assignments to us.
    And when those assignments came for us, I was supposed to--
    I forgot what you call this, that you carry two buckets.
    Yoke.
    Yoke.
    A yoke.
    We were supposed to bring water from, oh, a half
    a mile away out of the ground because everything was frozen.
    That's how we were supposed-- that was our assignment,
    to bring--
    every other day, we're supposed to bring the water.
    But being so undernourished and so vulnerable
    for every disease at the time, I couldn't handle it.
    I did, but I couldn't handle it.
    So I decided I am not--
    after being punished so much-- you see,
    I shared a bed with her.
    And I wet with my bed not wanting to.
    I did it all until I was about 12 years old.
    I would wet my bed.
    She would change places with me, thinking by drying it out,
    I will not get punished.
    But the spots are still there.
    So I used to get-- they knew it was me.
    So they didn't want-- so they put me on a bench
    without clothes.
    And that's a whole night.
    So the more they did it, the more I wet.
    I was a nervous child, and that's all I could do.
    I couldn't get better.
    So I gave up my--
    I decided I'm not going to give up.
    I'm not going to take this.
    I'll give up my bread and my daily food for somebody else
    to take my chores.
    At the time-- I am sorry, but my tears are getting in my eyes.
    And somebody else took my job to do this.
    And I ran home to mom, back to her.
    And I said, I don't want to go there.
    I'm cold.
    And I don't want to sleep.
    She says, I can't help you, either, at the time.
    How about your brother?
    My brother was there.
    He was all right there.
    He was too young to be able to--
    they took mostly advantage of the older kids that could help.
    They didn't do it just purposely for me.
    But they just did it--
    you have to do your chores.
    But I couldn't do it anymore.
    So my mother said, somebody stopped by before the-- that
    was before--
    after her friend died, somebody stopped by.
    They knew that she's laying there.
    Some of the refugees knew it.
    So they stopped by to visit her.
    And they brought her something to eat.
    And she says, somebody brought me--
    brought you a little coat.
    They found it somewhere.
    And she says, I can't wait to give it to you, a coat.
    And I was so happy.
    She says, but you have to go back there.
    She says, you have no other way.
    I don't want you running on the streets and starving.
    At least of a day, you can get something.
    Well, I listened to mom all the time.
    I'm the good person.
    And I went back there, and I had that coat.
    I was happy it kept me warm.
    And they decided instead of punishing me,
    they saw they couldn't get anywhere.
    They thought-- I didn't stop.
    They thought to do the opposite, put me someplace
    where it's warm.
    They figured maybe that will stop for me wetting myself.
    And they put me in the infirmary and on the floor
    and with a little heater in the middle.
    There's quite a few of us were sleeping.
    And I didn't take my coat off.
    I wouldn't take my coat off.
    So I was so close to that.
    I fell asleep, and I didn't wet the bed that night.
    That's true.
    But my coat caught on fire from the little heater.
    And the next thing I know, I found myself
    rolling in the snow.
    I didn't even know what happened.
    They threw me.
    They picked me up, and the smoke overwhelmed them.
    And they picked me up and threw me in the snow.
    And they rolled me outside in the snow.
    And this is when I looked and I started
    crying not because I survived.
    I started crying because my coat was gone.
    And I think that was the last time I ever
    wet the bed over there.
    It was warm.
    That helped.
    It did help.
    But mother had--
    Couldn't have been too warm if they put you in the snow.
    Well, yeah.
    But it was warm in the room, yes, in the infirmary.
    What I'm saying is that I think that kind of cured me.
    And I think I took--
    I got over all my fears.
    And I don't think I was ever scared again from that moment
    on.
    I think by then, I was already, I think, 11 years old--
    not quite 11, maybe 10.
    These friends that kept looking after my mom,
    even though she was laying there all alone,
    someone asked about her--
    came in another friend from another town.
    And he asked about her.
    A person she never met asked about her.
    Have you heard of this woman with such and such name?
    And this is how it went on all during Russia
    when everybody was running.
    Maybe you heard such and such name.
    It's like after the war, maybe you know this one is alive
    or this.
    Well, during the war in Russia, they also would ask,
    oh, I just came from such and such place.
    Maybe you know such and such person that survived.
    Maybe you would know.
    But this happened to be that somebody
    came in looking for my mom.
    And her sister sent out these messages
    because her sister was good-off by now.
    By now, she was already better-off.
    So she wanted to find her sister and the children.
    And my mother was constantly with malaria.
    Either one day, she'd get better.
    And then right away, she'd get malaria again.
    And somebody told that she knows somebody by that name.
    And they took that man.
    They took that man to her.
    And he told her that your sister is alive
    and they are not too far from here.
    But you're sick, and I don't know how you can get there.
    And how are your kids?
    She wanted to know.
    But I'll tell you what we can do.
    We can let your kids at least come to the place.
    And then maybe they will find a way of getting you
    out when you feel better.
    First, let's get those kids out of here.
    So when I came to see mom, she told me,
    you've got to do something.
    And she says, this is dangerous, but you have to do it.
    And I have no choice.
    They told her exactly how to do it
    and what they're going to do.
    It turned out to be it was a very good friend of--
    this, I have to tell you.
    My mother told me.
    She says, you are going to go tonight.
    And you're not going to tell your brother that you're
    going away because I don't want them
    to get in trouble over there.
    You are going to go to the station again, to the tracks.
    You're going to take a train--
    that's how she told me-- that goes in this direction--
    here she is, facing me--
    that goes in this direction, not that goes in this direction.
    That was how it was told to her.
    You'll get on that train, the first train that's
    going to come going in that direction.
    And you'll get off at the first stop
    after going the whole night at the first stop that
    stops in the morning.
    And I want you to get off there.
    I said, no way.
    I'm not doing this.
    I've survived so much with you and with my brother.
    I'm not going to go get lost someplace.
    I just didn't want to do it.
    She says, you must.
    There's no way out for us because they cannot come
    and get us.
    They couldn't come and get us.
    They have no way of coming to get us.
    And you need to be the first one to do this.
    Well, I went to the train.
    It was nighttime.
    And I went to the train tracks.
    And sure enough, I'm sitting there on the ground.
    And I said, uh-uh, I'm going back.
    I'm not doing this.
    And I got up and I started walking back
    towards wherever my mother was.
    I heard the whistle from the train coming.
    And I stood on.
    And next thing I know, I got on that cattle car.
    And there was a lot of people there.
    I found myself a little corner.
    And I kept dozing off.
    I kept dozing off.
    And I didn't want to miss where he's going to stop,
    because when you're that tired, you
    could go in a very deep sleep and not wake up sometimes, too.
    So all night long, I tried to stay awake
    so I can remember how to get off.
    And down there, when I got off, just like she told me,
    there was a man that recognized me because he
    knew my father, recognized me.
    He was from the same town as my aunt.
    Later on, he was here in America.
    We found him here in America.
    It's unbelievable.
    He knocked on my shoulder.
    He did like this.
    And he said, are you Manya?
    I said, yes.
    He says, I recognize you anywhere.
    You look just like your father, he said.
    He took me home to his place.
    They were a little better off than the rest of us--
    nourished me for one week, bought me some clothes,
    and sent me off on a journey to my aunt.
    And she lived in Tashkent at the time--
    Chimkent.
    In Kazakhstan is Chimkent.
    Tashkent is Uzbekistan.
    And we lived in Chimkent.
    She lived in-- when I got there, I did get--
    I had the most unbelievable ride on a truck
    that I don't know how I survived getting there
    on the back of a truck, cold and everything.
    But I got there.
    And she was so happy to have me.
    And I explained to her exactly where mom is and where Sam was.
    And they tried their best.
    And they brought mom and Sam out of there.
    That's how we got up again.
    And they were better off, because we set out
    with them the war.
    She had two-- she had twins then.
    And we went home together.
    And this is some of my--
    there were so many other things in between
    that I can't think of it right now.
    But--
    How were they able to have it better?
    Were they able to work?
    Well, they stayed out the war.
    Later on, towards the end of the war,
    we knew it's going to be over soon.
    I don't know how.
    I was too young to know all that.
    But somehow, they knew.
    The brothers found a place that somebody took them into work.
    And they worked in a tannery at the time
    because during the war in Russia,
    if you could survive the cold and the hunger,
    they didn't bother us women and children-- not as much men.
    They were hiding out because they
    didn't want to go to the army.
    But everything-- they took everything away
    from the people.
    They wanted everything up in front.
    They wanted so desperately to win the war that they took
    everything away from the people that you
    couldn't-- and my brother from one night,
    he went out to try to get some water for my mom.
    My mother loved to drink water.
    And we could never find it.
    In a cold night, he went out to look for some water
    when he was already seven years.
    He found 300 rubles sitting there on the ground.
    You couldn't buy anything with 300 rubles
    because there was no such thing as stores and go out and buy.
    Where my aunt was, they had a bazaar.
    Bazaar is like--
    Antique place.
    No.
    Market.
    They call it-- yeah, it's like a farmer's market.
    A bazaar is a farmer's market.
    They call it in Russia a bazaar.
    There, he found something to eat.
    But where we were in this particular place was nothing.
    It was just unbelievable.
    It's just like they never--
    I don't know how they even survived there.
    So it was very difficult-- very difficult to live there.
    So my aunt and her brothers--
    my uncle and his brothers, they worked in a tannery.
    So they made some money.
    And they were able to buy things for themselves.
    That's why when we moved in with them afterwards,
    we all lived in the same room, of course.
    And after she had the twins, we still
    lived in the same four square walls.
    But we were together.
    And we were not so-- that's when I went to Polish school.
    I started going back to Polish school and so forth.
    My language was good in Russian, so I wanted to remember Polish.
    I don't know what for.
    I never went back to Poland to do this.
    But that's how we survived the war.
    We set out the war.
    And after the war was over, from that moment on,
    my mother kept having off and on malaria.
    And it took us one month to get home also on cattle trains.
    But we were sent with food and stuff already--
    not much.
    But at least home was--
    to go back to Poland.
    You went back to your hometown?
    No, we did not go back to my hometown.
    We ended up--
    Where did you get that food from?
    Was that government--
    The government was already sending us and taking things
    on loan.
    And if we wanted to go back to Poland, we went back to Poland.
    They couldn't feed everybody there, anyway,
    in this country that lost so much.
    So most of us wanted to go back home.
    And by that time, women--
    one of my uncle's brothers married a Russian Jewish lady.
    So there was more family to go back and so on.
    And meanwhile, he lost a brother that died of dysentery, too.
    So who could survive got back home.
    We survived.
    And a lot of miracles happened in my life.
    And I believe I had really an angel over my shoulder.
    My mother always kept saying, we have had an angel
    over our shoulder that I could bring
    two kids into such environments and survive
    seven years like that.
    It was unbelievable.
    We came back to Poland.
    And we came back to Katowice, the town of Katowice.
    And that's where most of the trains
    came back from all over Russia, the cattle trains and people
    in it.
    And it's like the station.
    And that's as far as the Russian trains will go.
    And that's where we found that we have another--
    that's when my mother found she had another brother that
    survived Russia.
    And he's the one that later on lived in Canada here, Montreal.
    He passed away just a year ago.
    When she found out she found him, so the wife
    and him took us.
    He was the best friend of my father.
    My father would never--
    I have pictures of him.
    And if you look in my book, he's holding my hand.
    My father's holding my hand.
    We're walking always together.
    He was the best friend.
    But it didn't turn out to be like he promised my father.
    He told-- my father asked him, please look out
    for my wife and kids.
    But he took his wife and child, and they ran off first.
    And we've never seen them since.
    But we found each other.
    Where did you find him?
    In one of those towns where we arrived.
    And my aunt-- there were friends, people.
    There were people they knew.
    They knew that my family got killed in Treblinka.
    Nobody survived.
    When I heard my father didn't survive,
    that really blew my mind because I just didn't care.
    All this going through, not seeing him again, it just--
    I didn't care.
    I was old enough to understand everything by then.
    So my aunt and her--
    my uncle and my aunt, the one that we found there,
    they took us.
    And they had a house that somebody gave it
    to them to rent to stay in well after they're coming back.
    It wasn't in the town where we were born or where we lived.
    But this is where most of the people
    kind of stuck around until they found
    their destinations to their own towns back, to find--
    You weren't inside of Poland.
    Oh yeah.
    It wasn't Poland.
    And so we stayed with my aunt.
    We're just three of us.
    We stayed with my aunt.
    And my mother got sick again.
    We only were there less than two weeks.
    Mother got sick again.
    And when she used to get the malaria,
    she used to get into a coma.
    And it just takes a few days for her to really come.
    So she took us two kids, my brother and myself,
    and put us in a kibbutz.
    In that time, thee were kibbutzim from Israel.
    They call them "madrihim."
    They call them the leaders, whatever
    kids they could find that survived the Jewish
    and taking them away to put them in these groups of kibbutzim.
    And I don't know whether you know.
    But in those days, it was called--
    kibbutzim will be Hashomer Hatzair, the name of the--
    would be the left wing.
    Ehud will be the right wing.
    Dror will be the left wing.
    And whatever they can get, all the kids they could find,
    they put them in these different--
    they're different parties, but all going to one goal
    to go to send to Israel, to survive and to pick
    as many as they can save.
    So my aunt went and put my brother
    and myself to one of these kibbutzim.
    Two weeks later, the kibbutz took off.
    My mother didn't know.
    She was still in a coma.
    Two weeks later, the kibbutz went to Germany.
    And we didn't want to go, but I had no choice.
    We were in a kibbutz.
    Nobody came to see us.
    I didn't want to bother my aunt.
    And so we went off, and we went to Germany.
    It took us a whole night.
    They transported us and hid us.
    But we came to Germany across the border.
    There, we came into a big, big, big, big--
    I cannot describe how many kids were there of all Jewish
    surviving kids that they have rounded up.
    And they were going to transport to Israel.
    And that's where we stayed.
    And the UNRRA took over.
    The American took over that place.
    And they helped with the Israeli--
    not at that time-- the Palestinian people
    that work with them and teach them and grill them.
    That's what we're going to do.
    We're all going to Israel.
    We're going to-- we're going to have someday
    a country of our own.
    And this is how it was in the kibbutz
    in that particular camp.
    But my mother didn't know where we want.
    But I want to tell you before I forget,
    we took these two children with us
    back to Poland, the two children that survived with us.
    We put them--
    That the mother had died, huh?
    That the mother had died.
    We put them on a transport.
    My mother put them because she couldn't handle us, let alone
    them, too.
    She put them-- we always-- we took them back with us
    from Russia.
    They traveled with us.
    As soon as we arrived in Poland, we gave them into hands.
    Like my aunt gave us into a different group,
    we gave them in a group at the time.
    And that group took off for Israel.
    So we knew that these children were safe.
    And they're with a group.
    And I never heard from them again.
    It's a shame because they were too
    young to do anything about it.
    And if they remembered, I don't know.
    So they went to Israel.
    My mother wanted to make sure that these kids are
    safe and gone.
    What part of Germany were you in, in this camp?
    First, I arrived to Bremerhaven in Berlin--
    Tempelhof.
    In Tempelhof we stayed there for three weeks.
    And then we came to--
    we crossed the border to Berlin.
    And then we came in to the American zone in Berlin.
    And then as the Jewish people picked us up
    and they put us into a camp, it wasn't too far from Ulm.
    But they were all in Niederschlesien,
    which is in Bayern part of Germany, which is near Munich,
    near Stuttgart, all this.
    That's called Bayern.
    Niederschlesien.
    It's called-- in German, it's called Niederschlesien,
    that part of Germany.
    And we were in one of those camps there.
    But my mother didn't know where we were, what happened to us.
    After surviving all this, she lost us.
    And this is already after the war.
    It was chaos.
    You can't find anybody.
    If you found anybody by--
    who knew where two kids went?
    They found so many kids.
    And that was a children's camp or--
    It was only a children's camp.
    Only children.
    Only children.
    I can't imagine how many--
    I can't imagine even how to tell you how many kids were there.
    What language would they speak to you there?
    All different languages.
    They tried to teach us to speak Hebrew.
    From the moment they brought us there, for as long as
    we would have to wait to be transported back to Palestine--
    illegally, of course-- we knew we were grilled
    and we were everything taught to us in Hebrew.
    We learned that way.
    We didn't waste time.
    And we didn't have such thing as play.
    Soon as they got us into those camps,
    they put us in the classes.
    And there were people that would teach us our names,
    how to pronounce, and what's going
    to happen to the next few years in our life
    and blah, blah, on like this.
    Well, it came the day-- we were there already two months.
    And it came the day that they're sending the transport out
    to one of the illegal ships to go to Israel.
    And they had about 21 trucks.
    I can remember seeing them go and go and go.
    And they put these kids by--
    whatever they could remember their names,
    they put all these children by their alphabetical names
    on those tracks.
    So number-one track would have A and on and on.
    But I was a Z. So you know I would
    be on the end of the trucks.
    My brother and I were Z's, Zelver.
    You were able to stay together with your brother?
    At that moment, I was able to stay with him together,
    yes, because she put us both into the kibbutz.
    Anyway, we went.
    We got loaded on the trucks.
    And it took a while before those trucks--
    to load so many trucks of kids, it takes time.
    And the instructions that we had,
    all the what's going to happen, how are we
    going to survive if we do get on a ship,
    and blah, blah-- the same thing that
    was told to us when I went later on the exodus.
    This was not the exodus we were going on.
    But meanwhile, my mother came across the border.
    My aunt was absolutely sorry that she did this.
    But they came across the border to Germany.
    They never went home to Poland, back
    to where they wanted to go.
    They came searching for us, for the kids.
    Did they have a way to find you?
    Well, my mother went from camp to camp,
    from every children's camp that was possible,
    until she came to this one.
    But listen how she found me.
    She went into this camp after-- this was her last children's
    camp to go to.
    They had a few camps like that, but not as big as this one.
    Later on, they combined them more into the bigger camps.
    As soon as they sent children out, more kids would come.
    A lot of kids survived that from the Polish people
    that kept them, from the camps, without the parents.
    And they needed to be taken care of.
    So these were orphans--
    All orphans, orphans, unless--
    probably later on, they found families.
    But at this moment, everybody was an orphan there
    from different part of-- from Czechoslovakia,
    from Hungary, from different languages
    they spoke and on and on like this and kids
    from Russia that were closer to Poland and so forth.
    We were all loaded up on the trucks.
    And once trucks started moving, the first one started moving,
    then my mother had the last camp to go to, this one.
    They told her, this was a big camp.
    And if you cannot find them there,
    we don't know where to help you.
    So she came.
    And as she was walking in the gate and they opened up
    the gates--
    they kept us under these big camp gates--
    the first truck started going out.
    I could still hear her voice.
    She kept screaming, Manya, Manya.
    She called my brother Shlamech.
    Manya, Shlamech, are you on there?
    The first truck went.
    The next went, and the next went.
    I didn't even hear this because we
    were way somewhere on the end.
    I didn't even hear where she came to the end.
    Some of my friends--
    we were all talking.
    And some of my friends--
    I hear some lady screaming out your name out there.
    And when I looked out, of course, my mother--
    she took us off before the truck went out that gate.
    How's that?
    And that's how we went.
    And then we stayed-- we moved.
    She took us to the next camp where
    we had to stay as a refugee, as a displaced person.
    And that was on the Danube in Ulm, also near Munich.
    It's a big town, but that particular town, Ulm,
    is on the Danube River there.
    And we were there.
    I went to school there.
    I finished Hebrew high school there.
    I went to a nursing school there.
    Even though everybody thought I was 25, I was only, what 14--
    not even 14, 12 when I was--
    I wasn't 16 until I came to this country.
    And I went and got-- for nine months,
    I had a degree of learning to be a nurse.
    I helped at the office over there
    at the hospital infirmary.
    And I did very well.
    And it kept me busy.
    I kept-- until one day, I had a girlfriend which she--
    my mother decided to get married.
    And my girlfriend's father decided
    to get married to somebody.
    And we were just so kids that we lost one of our mother
    or father, we didn't want to have anybody else in our lives.
    We didn't want to have a stranger.
    And I didn't.
    I was old enough to understand I didn't want that now stepfather
    or anything.
    So one day, she joined another kibbutz, which they called them
    in those days.
    And she said she's going to Palestine.
    And she says-- and she left.
    And I was really lonesome without--
    where I go, because we were just so close in our situation,
    except for her, her father survived.
    And for me, my mother survived.
    But they all get married.
    Now, they found spouses.
    And I-- as a teenager, when I think back,
    that was wrong of me because she went through enough.
    She needed to get married and have
    somebody in her life, when I think back
    about all this stuff.
    But she said she was--
    How long were you living at that displaced persons camp?
    We came there in 1945.
    And I didn't leave that place until--
    I didn't come to America until 1950.
    But I was one year in Bad Aibling--
    so I think four years.
    Your brother was there, too, at that time?
    Yes.
    All that time?
    We all were living together.
    And that's where--
    You stayed together as a family.
    Yeah, as a family.
    What were the conditions like there?
    It wasn't bad.
    It wasn't bad.
    It was very crowded.
    And we had to share one room with a stepfather and mother
    and whatever.
    And then we got--
    the food came from the US.
    Did you have enough food?
    Yes, we had enough food there after the war
    with displaced persons, except living was not the best.
    Clothing and things would come from families from America
    and stuff like that.
    That was after the war.
    It wasn't too bad.
    That was the good times.
    Now, you were learning how to be a nurse.
    I was learning-- first, I was learning Hebrew.
    And I needed to be--
    I was getting of age where I needed to be graduating.
    I studied very hard.
    And I spoke Hebrew.
    And I still do very well.
    And my brother went to school there.
    And he went to cheder there because that's
    how life was there.
    But I wasn't happy when my girlfriend left.
    And I wasn't really happy--
    my mother was not married yet.
    She was going-- and I was not going
    to be there when she's going to get married.
    That's-- from the time when I took that train to Russia
    by myself, I was all independent.
    I didn't need anybody, and I went every place myself.
    I got a visa from America that I can
    come to America to my uncle's to stay
    here, one of my father's brothers.
    But I couldn't come with my brother because I was a minor
    and he was a minor.
    We couldn't travel together.
    And at that time--
    so they sent me off on a ship alone.
    That's what I described in the book.
    When I got to Bremerhaven and I was ready to board a ship,
    they took me off.
    And they said, I'm too young to travel alone.
    I'm a minor, and I have to be sent back to camp.
    So they sent me back to camp.
    Instead of sending me home to mom,
    because mother was already married, they sent me back--
    I'm actually running ahead of myself,
    because this was already after--
    this when I went back was after the exodus.
    You see, when I was with mom and before she got married,
    my girlfriend went off and she went off.
    And one day out of the blue, they all
    appeared-- the whole kibbutz appeared on the ground
    in the park in our town, Ulm.
    So she came home to say hi to her father.
    She came by to say hello to me.
    And she says-- I say, where are you going?
    I say, where did you run off to?
    Where are you going?
    She said she's going to Israel--
    at the time, Palestine.
    And I say, why by yourself?
    You don't know what you're doing.
    We were all young kids then.
    She said, I don't want to be here when father gets married.
    And I want to take it on my own.
    She says, you want to go?
    Just like that, she says to me, want to go?
    I say, yes.
    I went home.
    And I took whatever I had on.
    I put on, and I left.
    I said, mom, I'm going to Palestine.
    And there's little she could stop me.
    I went out there where they were all sleeping
    in the park for overnight.
    They gave me a name.
    They grilled me what my new name is going to be.
    And they told me what I'm going to go through
    to get to Palestine.
    We're going on a big ship.
    We're going to be a lot of people on the ship.
    We're going to try to jump in the water.
    This was all that one night, the whole thing.
    When we get to the Palestine shores,
    we're going to jump in the water.
    The Jews on that side will be in the water,
    try to rescue as many people, because the British
    are going to not let us in and on and on and on.
    All night, it took that grilling for me.
    And I was off.
    That's where I went--
    didn't even give it a second thought.
    So I went with her.
    And of course, the more kids they pick up,
    the better it was for them.
    So when I went with her, next thing,
    I found myself going across the French border
    and being in Marseille.
    And there, we hid out for two weeks underground kind of,
    hiding out.
    But we had food.
    We drank a lot of milk-- was not milk.
    It was condensed milk.
    That's where I really started getting the--
    and we stayed there for two weeks waiting for the ship
    to come in to Marseille to get the ship.
    And we were taught Hebrew again.
    And we were grilled about what's going to happen
    and what we're going to do when we get to Israel.
    And if we-- this kibbutz--
    that was a kibbutz called Dror this time.
    It was the left wing, I would call it.
    They were right and left, because the right ones
    were the religious.
    And the left one were non-religious Jews.
    And they said, when we get to Israel,
    if we make it to Palestine, then we're
    going to be going to the Negev.
    And we will have a kibbutz called Mishmar HaNegev.
    And it's there today.
    Let me tell you, it's there today.
    And this is how we were taught what was going to happen.
    Well, I got on the ship.
    And if I thought I had it bad in Russia,
    that was really unbelievable.
    4,500 people were on that ship.
    The ship was so old--
    and at that time, I found out-- not until I came to America
    and I wrote my book that I found out
    that ship come from Baltimore.
    It had two times to go back before it can go forward
    to pick us up in France.
    It was so bad.
    And what it was, it had--
    instead of lodging where you could sleep down somewhere,
    it had these--
    I don't know how to explain it to you.
    You know how you see those pictures from the camps
    that people are all laying on these beds like--
    what do you call these flat--
    Bunks.
    No, like flat wooden--
    and they could only--
    Shelf.
    Shelves like-- yes, shelves.
    That's how this ship was built for--
    the ship only could carry 600 people.
    But 4,500 people were on that ship.
    That was just unbelievable.
    So I found my way up to the top.
    And I stayed on top all the way through.
    And I could see what was going on.
    And I had this little tiny space.
    It was made out of iron.
    And it was just hurting me terribly,
    but that's where I would stay and sleep at night.
    And from that moment on, my mother didn't know where I was.
    My brother wasn't with me.
    I didn't take my brother this time.
    And the first day we were out, we saw the first frigate
    after us.
    By the time we were on the sixth day, we had at least seven
    of them behind us.
    And of course, they stopped us.
    We never made it close enough to jump.
    The British stopped us.
    But the only way my mother knew that I survived,
    because I used to sing when I was young,
    I sang the "Hatikvah" through the radio.
    Whole Europe knew what happened to the ship at the time
    because the exodus was a very big problem there.
    That was the last and only ship that
    had so many people and the last ship
    that they had to declare the state of Israel,
    because it was the kind-- the only ship that they sent back.
    And she knew that I was alive, so that was fine.
    I stayed in the same clothes for three months.
    There were no showers.
    There was nothing.
    We didn't get off.
    We wouldn't get off the ship.
    After they-- I have to tell you this.
    When we-- the wall-- as you know,
    I don't know about the exodus.
    You know how much the--
    one of the complete walls fell out.
    So now, we are being towed into Haifa.
    We have to get off in Haifa.
    And they put us on three ships because they
    put 1,500 people on each ship, on each British ship.
    And they told us we are sent in--
    some of us would get off and fought.
    They had to take the wounded off.
    They fought us with hot water bottle-- with hot hoses--
    with hoses not that hot, but warm hoses.
    And we threw at them potatoes and cans.
    That's our fight.
    A ricochet was near the captain's--
    one of those officers died on the ship and Jewish
    and ricocheted a bullet right through this side of this leg.
    But I was OK.
    When I got off in Haifa, we could see them
    on Mount Carmel, Jews singing and screaming to us.
    We could hear.
    That was middle of the night.
    And they told us, the British, we're
    going to board there and go to Cyprus,
    like all the other Jews went.
    But that's not how it would turn out.
    Eight hours into the journey-- it
    only takes six hours for them to go to Cyprus.
    Eight hours into the journey, and we
    know we are going to Cyprus.
    We found out that we are being sent back to Germany.
    And that's when we got different grilling again.
    We are not to get off the ship.
    We are to fight our way.
    No matter who dies, who gets sick,
    we're not getting off that ship.
    And this is how it was.
    When we arrived in France, they came with--
    they fed us.
    The French Jewish organization over there brought us food.
    And when we are on the ocean and when we are going to France,
    we were protesting.
    They would feed us cereal with maggots in it
    and with worms in it, anything to get off that ship.
    But we did not budge.
    And this is how I came to be on the exodus.
    After they sent us finally back to Germany,
    we went back to France.
    But that's where we started out from.
    But they wanted to send us all the way back to Germany,
    because we wouldn't get off in France.
    They made another German camp just for these kids.
    And they were already negotiating the--
    they would almost-- like Israel was almost there,
    the country was almost going to be there.
    It didn't take much longer after that.
    And then we were told that the first ones--
    besides the Cyprus people from Cyprus,
    we are the first ones from Germany
    that are going back on regular transport
    if the state does become Israel.
    But when I got back to camp, my aunt, the one
    that we survived during the war, she was there waiting for me.
    I got off the ship.
    So she finally forced you to get off the ship.
    Yes.
    In Bremerhaven, we had no choice.
    In Germany, we had no choice.
    Everybody was singing and crying and fighting.
    But we got off.
    And they took us on transports to a certain camp
    that was built special for this occasion with the 4,500 people
    that are coming back.
    And my aunt was there.
    And she took me out.
    She said, I'm going to take you out in a little shop
    and buy you some clothes.
    But she took me out.
    She bought me something to wear.
    And I got cleaned up.
    And I got fed.
    And off on a train, she sent me home to mom.
    She says, that's enough.
    You're going back to the camp where mother is.
    And that's when I went on a regular visa to America.
    But I still got sent back there, too.
    So I ended up-- when they sent me back from going on my own--
    like they wanted me to go to America from the big ship.
    They sent me back to another orphanage,
    which was international.
    It was the biggest orphanage in Germany.
    But there were kids there from all over the world also
    that ran away and got saved during the time.
    But there were also Black children there, Black babies.
    They had a special house with just Black babies
    from the officers.
    And there were a lot of Jewish.
    Every nationality you want to mention
    was there, kids that survived the wars
    and so forth and so forth that could go.
    The only could-- the Czechoslovakians
    could go to Australia.
    And the Jewish kids could go to America
    if they have visas and so on.
    And everybody was going out to Canada.
    And that's how they were transporting these kids
    into different countries.
    And that was where?
    In Bad Aibling, which is near Munich.
    It's called the Children's Home of Bad Aibling.
    We have quite a bit on that, too.
    From that moment-- from then on, that's it.
    I came to America.
    And I came--
    Well, that's a good time to stop.
    We need to take a break.
    Yes.
    I'm almost finished, anyway.

    There is no transcript available for this track

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Marie Brandstetter (née Mania Zelwer), born on January 20, 1933 in Kalisz, Poland, describes her childhood; her father (Haim Luzer Zelwer), mother (Eta Messer), younger brother (Sam), and half sister (Helene Litwak Gordon); her family's bus company; being raised Orthodox; hearing about the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939; her father being drafted into the Polish army (and his death in Treblinka in August 1942); fleeing Kalisz with her mother, brother, and aunt to Russia; their travels through the Soviet Union; her mother's work in a labor camp in Siberia; reuniting with an aunt and uncle in 1944; her mother's illness; her separation from her mother when she and her brother were sent to live on a kibbutz; their reunion at a displaced persons camp; being upset by her mother's remarriage; her decision to immigrate to Palestine; her experiences on the ship "Exodus" and her participation in onboard resistance; her return to her family in the displaced persons camps; immigrating to San Francisco, CA in 1950 with her brother; living with her brother in Homewood Terrace, a Jewish orphanage; getting married in 1953; reuniting with her mother, step-father, and half-sister shortly before her marriage in 1953; and publishing her memoir in 1995 (title: "Mania's angel : my life story").
    Interviewee
    Marie Brandstetter
    Interviewer
    Anne G. Saldinger
    Date
    interview:  2001 February 07
    Credit Line
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Jewish Family and Children's Services of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    2 videocassettes (SVHS) : sound, color ; 1/2 in..

    Rights & Restrictions

    Conditions on Access
    There are no known restrictions on access to this material.

    Keywords & Subjects

    Corporate Name
    Exodus 1947 (Ship)

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    The Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project conducted the interview with Marie Brandstetter on February 7, 2001. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum received the tapes of the interview from the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project in October 2002.
    Funding Note
    The cataloging of this oral history interview has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:45:05
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn511710

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    Oral history interview with Lya Galperin

    Oral History

    Lya Galperin discusses her childhood in a small town near Kishinev, Romania (Chisinau, Moldova); her family's flight after the invasion of Nazi Germany; a traumatic incident in which Romanian soldiers sexually assaulted the women in their group, after which the family returned to their home town; her family’s imprisonment in the local synagogue; her experiences in the ghetto of Beshard, Ukraine from 1943 until her liberation in 1945; her postwar life in the Soviet Union; her marriage; her life in Riga, Latvia; her mother's attempts at helping the family immigrate to the west; and her eventual immigration to San Francisco, California in 1981.

    Oral history interview with Lore Gilbert

    Oral history interview with Lore Gilbert

    Oral History

    Lore Gilbert, born in Worms, Germany in 1929, describes her childhood in Worms; the antisemitism she experienced as a child; the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938 and its impact on her family when her father's assets were confiscated; the family's move to Heidelberg, Germany and their deportation to France; their experiences in Gurs concentration camp; the family's selection by the Dominican Republic Settlement Association (DORSA) to be sent to the Dominican Republic; the Jewish refugee community in Sosua, Dominican Republic; the dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina; the security and safety Jewish refugees enjoyed in the Dominican Republic during the war years; her family's immigration to the United States; her father's difficulties in adjusting to their new life; the experiences of her grandparents, who remained in France during the war years and were sheltered by the French Catholic Church; and the trauma and fear she has felt over the years as a result of her Holocaust-related experiences.

    Oral history interview with Rita Goldman

    Oral history interview with Rita Goldman

    Oral History

    Rita Goldman discusses her childhood in Berlin, Germany; her parents' painful decision to send her on a Kindertransport; leaving Germany for England in 1939; the kindness of the family with whom she stayed; the events of the war years; corresponding with her parents, who had fled to Shanghai, China; her reunion with her parents after the war; and the difficulties she experienced in adjusting to life with them.

    Oral history interview with Mala Holcberg

    Oral history interview with Mala Holcberg

    Oral History

    Mala Holcberg describes her childhood in Poland; her early memories of the Nazi occupation of Poland and crimes committed against Jews and her family's desire to flee Poland; the confiscation of her family's possessions and the family's deportation to an unidentified ghetto; her experiences in the ghetto; the murder of her father; being deported to an unidentified concentration camp, where the inmates were forced to make bombs and grenades; the terrible conditions in the camp and her illnesses; the camp's liberation by Soviet troops; her return to Poland; her marriage and family; her present ill health and the lasting emotional effects of her experiences during the Holocaust; and the loss of many family members.

    Oral history interview with Kate Kaiser

    Oral history interview with Kate Kaiser

    Oral History

    Kate Kaiser describes her childhood in Mistek, Austria (now Czech Republic); her marriage and move to Hamburg, Germany; the rise of antisemitism after the Nazi's rise to power; how she and her husband were affected by the Nuremberg Laws; their decision to leave Germany after their daughter was born; the wait to obtain papers; her husband's move to the United States in advance of them; waiting with her daughter in Mistek until August 1938 when their visas arrived; her adjustment to life as an immigrant in the United States; her attempts to find her family after the war; learning of the death of her family, all of whom perished except for one brother and a cousin; and her trip to Prague, Czech Republic in 1998 to discover the details of her mother's fate.

    Oral history interview with Tatjana Khepoyan-Viner

    Oral history interview with Tatjana Khepoyan-Viner

    Oral History

    Tatjana Khepoyan-Viner describes her childhood in Odessa, Ukraine; her family life and her marriage at age 19; the outbreak of World War II being ejected from her home by her neighbors and being imprisoned with her family in Odessa; the ensuing chaotic events; being separated from two of her brothers; being placed on trains to a small village, where she endured terrible conditions with her younger brother, daughter, and mother; the threat of mass murder; escaping with her mother and daughter; being transported to a series of villages; attempted sexual assault at the hands of a Rumanian officer; being separated from her mother; successfully passing as a non-Jew and working as a cook at a police station until the end of the war; reuniting with her mother and husband; and immigrating to the United States with her family in 1978.

    Oral history interview with Vera J. Lieban-Kalmar

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Nadine Lieberman

    Oral history interview with Nadine Lieberman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Bernard Offen

    Oral history interview with Bernard Offen

    Oral History

    Bernard Offen discusses his childhood in Krakow, Poland; his early experiences with antisemitism; the events he witnessed during the German invasion of Poland in 1939; his experiences in the Krakow Ghetto starting in 1941, including the deportations of many family members and hiding from raids; being deported to Płaszów in 1943; his narrow escape from Płaszów; hiding in a nearby camp with a family member; his deportation to Mauthausen; his subsequent deportation to Auschwitz in August 1944; his experiences in Auschwitz; his transfer in October 1944 to a subcamp of Dachau near Landsberg; his experiences in the subcamp; being on a death march in May 1945; being liberated by the United States Army; his search for other surviving family members; the fates of the rest of his family; immigrating to the United Kingdom after the war; his subsequent immigration to the United States; enlisting in the United States Army to serve in the Korean War; his life after the war; returning to Poland to conduct tours of Holocaust-related sites; the time he spends speaking about his personal experiences.

    Oral history interview with William Pels

    Oral history interview with William Pels

    Oral History

    William Pels, born on May 11, 1924 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, discusses his prewar experiences in Amsterdam; his memories of the German invasion of Holland in 1940; the changes that he witnessed during the occupation; witnessing the arrest and deportation of Jews; the German raids on homes to find hidden Jews; his own close call with deportation; moving to Vienna, Austria in 1942 to work in a hotel; his experiences with wartime Vienna; the bombing campaign by the Soviets in March 1945; travelling into Hungary, where he remained until May 1945; his postwar activities; working for the United States Army; working in a former concentration camp; returning to Holland; marrying his wife in Great Britain; immigrating to the United States in 1957; and his life in America.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Plainfield

    Oral history interview with Ruth Plainfield

    Oral History

    Ruth Plainfield (née Oppenheimer), born on January 27, 1925 in Gau Bickelheim, Germany, discusses her childhood in Mainz, Germany; the rise of the Nazi party to power; her father's arrest in 1935 and the effect that had on her; her childhood encounters with antisemitism; her family's immigration to the United States; living first in New York and then San Francisco, CA; her family's experiences in California; her education; and learning of the fate of family members, including a grandfather who died in Theresienstadt.

    Oral history interview with Thomas Schneider

    Oral history interview with Thomas Schneider

    Oral History

    Thomas Schneider discusses his childhood in Vienna, Austria; being raised as a Catholic child of a Jewish father and a Jewish mother who had converted to Catholicism; being forced to leave school and study at a Jewish school in 1938 after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany; his family's immigration in March 1939 to the United States; settling in New York, NY; his experiences in school, college, and law school; his legal career; and the conflicts he has felt throughout his life about his Jewish identity.

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Shlyapochnik

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Sieradzki

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Sieradzki

    Oral History

    Benjamin Sieradzki, born on February 4, 1927 in Zgierz, Poland, discusses his childhood in Zgierz; his awareness in 1938 about Hitler and the discrimination experienced by German Jews; his memories of the mobilization of the Polish Army, and the invasion of Poland by Nazi forces in September 1939; hiding from the bombing; his brothers' escape to the Soviet section of Poland; his family's move to the Łódź ghetto; the harsh conditions in the ghetto; the first deportations in 1941; Chaim Rumkowski's leadership in the ghetto; a visit by Heinrich Himmler in 1942; the deportation in September 1942 of the ill, elderly, and children, during which his parents were sent to Chelmno and killed in gas vans; the liquidation of the ghetto in 1944; his transport, with one sister, to Auschwitz; watching the selections and seeing his sister being taken to the gas chambers; his experiences in Birkenau, then in a concentration camp in Hannover where he worked for the Continental Rubber factory; being forced to work in a quarry, where he became emaciated, sick with dysentery, and indifferent to his fate; the abandonment of the camp by German troops; being liberated; the state of his health and his experiences in military hospitals and then in convalescent homes in Sweden; experiencing anti-Jewish sentiment in Sweden; being smuggled to Denmark to stay with his uncle; his reunion with his older brothers, who had survived the war; the difficulties of his living situation; his immigration to the United States in 1953; and his marriage and family life in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Gisela Spigel

    Oral history interview with Gisela Spigel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Erika Weingarten

    Oral history interview with Erika Weingarten

    Oral History

    Erika Weingarten (née Mosler), born on October 9, 1918 in Berlin, Germany, discusses her childhood in Berlin; her assimilated family life; her education; the few instances of antisemitism she experienced; her family's decision to send her out of Germany to attend school in Switzerland and her experiences there; her journey in August 1939 to Great Britain, where she reunited with her parents; their immigration to the United States in March 1940; the work she performed; her continued education; passing as Swiss when she tried to get work; her trips to Europe in later years and the closure she experienced; and her thoughts about the German people.

    Oral history interview with Max Weingarten

    Oral history interview with Max Weingarten

    Oral History

    Max Weingarten, born in April 1913 in Lechnau, Poland, discusses his childhood in Vienna, Austria; his education and religious upbringing; studying the law; his work in the film industry with his uncle in London beginning in 1936; his immigration to the United States in 1938 and the work he performed in the film industry; his experiences in the United States Army and his work in intelligence and international law; his life after the war; his marriage and children; his work as a lawyer; his feelings about the United States; and the fates of his other family members.

    Oral history interview with Herman D. Wiener

    Oral history interview with Herman D. Wiener

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Liza Avrutin

    Oral history interview with Liza Avrutin

    Oral History

    Liza Avrutin, born in 1930 in Odessa, Ukraine, describes her big family, which consisted of nine brothers and sisters; how even though her family was not very religious, Liza remembers various religious traditions such as all of the kids saying a Shabbat wish in front of the candles; her mother’s reluctance to leave before the Nazi occupation; her uncle’s evacuation to Tashkent where he and his family survived the Holocaust; the Nazi occupation in October 1941 and the summoning of Jewish residents on December 22; being taken with other Jewish residents to Slobodka (a section of Odessa) where they spent three months; a pogrom in Odessa on October 23-24, 1941 in which much of the remaining Jewish population was murdered; being sent with her family on cattle trains to Vaselinivska; the train journey, during which many passengers died including her father and her four-year-old brother, Boris; her mother’s psychological reaction to their deaths and her eventual death; being taken to Vasnisenska (Voznesensk, Ukraine), where they were sorted and sent to different places; being sent to Babini Balki in Krivoruchka, Ukraine; the lack of food and the death of many of the imprisoned people from starvation; the arrival of the Russians, who murdered all the civilians; being one of two survivors (Rosa Lifchitza also survived) who were rescued by the nearby villagers; waking up in Nadia Zhigalovna’s house with a bullet wound on the top of her head; hiding her Jewish identity by saying her name was “Lida” not “Liza”; changing her name to Valentina Ivanovna Panchivka; her life in the village and the sacrifices her new mother made for her; living with Nadia and her family until 1947; staying in close contact with the family that rescued her; getting married and immigrated to the United States; and changing her name back to Liza when she became a US citizen.

    Oral history interview with Aleksandr Belfor

    Oral history interview with Aleksandr Belfor

    Oral History

    Aleksandr Belfor, born September 18, 1923, describes his childhood in Kishinev, Ukraine (now Chisinău Moldova); the onset of the war and his family's escape from the approaching Nazi forces to Alma-Ata, Khazakstan, where Mr.Belfor lived and studied medicine until he was inducted into the Soviet Army; the stories he heard about the tragic fate of many family members during the Holocaust, including the sexual assault of one aunt; being arrested and imprisoned after the end of the war; his life in the Soviet Union and the antisemitism he encountered there; and his immigration to the United States in 1983.

    Oral history interview with Semyon Berenshteyn

    Oral history interview with Semyon Berenshteyn

    Oral History

    Semyon Berenshteyn discusses his childhood in Moldova; the family's move from Balta to Odesa after the beginning of the war in 1941; the occupation of the area by Nazi troops; the establishment of a ghetto in Balta; working for a Christian friend; passing as a non-Jew by wearing a crucifix; learning of war news from Christian neighbors; the forced labor imposed on Jews; the murders of Jewish men, women and children by German soldiers, including the death of his father; liberation by Soviet troops in March 1944; his service in the Soviet armed forces; his marriage and the birth of his son; and his immigration with his family to the United States in 1988.

    Oral history interview with George Denes

    Oral history interview with George Denes

    Oral History

    George Denes, born on September 9, 1936 in Budapest, Hungary, describes his family and early life; the fates of different family members; growing up Jewish but not Orthodox; the beginning of the war at which point his father was sent to the front to perform forced military labor and his return before the German occupation began; antisemitism before and during the war; Polish refugees arriving in 1939 and 1940; the belief amongst Hungarian Jews that the Nazi policies would not affect them; the German occupation and his father relocating the immediate family to another part of the city; his mother working as a nurse for a wealthy family while he and his brother stayed in a "private day care" for Jewish children; being discovered and escaping; his father acquiring false papers for the family (new surname was Faketta); staying with an older Christian woman until her son, a Nazi sympathizer, had the boys and their father arrested and taken to a local Nazi headquarters; being imprisoned in the basement of the building with other Jews and some other people arrested by the Nazis; being taken on December 29, 1944 with his family to the river to be shot by the Nazis and being saved when the German army prevented the Hungarian Nazis from shooting in this area; escaping the prison a few days later; reuniting with his mother and going with his family to the eastern side of the river; hiding for several weeks in the basement of a villa; having difficulties acquiring food and being near starvation by the time the Red Army liberated the city; being given food, baths, and clean clothes by the Russians; attending a Jewish high school after the war; being refused by the university because he attended a religious high school; befriending the head of the university's engineering department and being accepted the following year (1956) [note that the first interview includes family photographs]; the revolutionary period following 1956 as well as his life as a university student in mechanical engineering; everyday life in post-war Communist Hungary, including some analysis of the political and social climate of that period; his life after the revolution, including his marriage, the birth of his son, and his military career; his family's two attempts to defect, once without help, and once with help (the second one was successful); the time they spent in Vienna, Austria while their refugee status was established; the help given to them by HIAS; the medical care given to Robert, who had contracted typhus during their escape; his life in the United States, including his career as an electrical engineer working in semiconductors and his divorce; and his state of mind at various points in his life.

    Oral history interview with Lev Dumer

    Oral history interview with Lev Dumer

    Oral History

    Lev Dumer, born in 1919 in Odessa, Ukraine, describes the Jewish community in Odessa before the war; experiencing antisemitism before the war; the deaths of his maternal grandparents in pogroms; receiving a degree in radio engineering; working in Kirovograd (Kropyvnyts'kyi, Ukraine) when the war began; the German occupation of Kiev; the Jewish response to the invasion; his family’s evacuation to Chelyabinsk in August 1941; his grandmother, Pena Gershova Dumer, dying while evacuating later in 1943; the Romanians entering Odessa; Jews having to register; the denouncement of Jewish families by antisemitic neighbors living in the same building as his family; the hanging of his college mathematics and physics professor, Foodim, for failing to register; the roundups and mass murders in Odessa; Alexander Sepino, who was able to escape imprisonment; observing a minute of silence every day for five years as a prayer for those who perished; the deportation of the remaining Jews to a ghetto in Slobodka; various righteous people who risked their lives to save Jews, including Oleg Krist and Jora Temoshenko; the experience of his aunt, uncle, and two cousins in Pervopol; the difficulty of living during the Stalin regime; the growing antisemitic trend in Russia during the years following WWII; the Russian government hiding the evidence of the Holocaust from the people; and spending many years gathering information from survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust in Ukraine in order to preserve the memory for future generations.

    Oral history interview with Anisim Dworkin

    Oral history interview with Anisim Dworkin

    Oral History

    Anisim Dworkin, born in 1923 in Smirenskiy, Soviet Union (possibly one of the many Russian places named Smirnovskiy), describes how at the time Jews were required to live in a few designated towns in the Soviet Union; his great-grandfather, who served in the Tsar’s army as a cannon operator for 12 years and was thus given the right to live in a Russian town even though he was Jewish; the regret he feels for having spent his childhood in a Russian town because it stripped him of the rich Jewish culture he saw in his parents, including celebration of Jewish holidays and speaking Yiddish; not experiencing antisemitism as a child but being teased as a child for being part of the lower middle-class; moving with his family to a kolkhoz in Smolensk in 1928; having a good life on the farm until the famine in 1933; several of his aunts and uncles who moved to Brest, Belarus with their families; the arrest of his older brother for writing a letter expressing anti-Hitler sympathies in 1939; the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941; being sent to the east since he was not able to serve in the army because of an injury to the eye; being accepted to serve in the Allied army for four months; studying after the war at a university in Ural (possibly Ural Federal University); working in the oil industry in Ural after the war and being discriminated against because of his religion; being fired from a job as head of the research department at a university because of rumors that he was involved in the Zionist movement; his life now in Perim, North Ural (probably Perm’, Russia); his daughter who is married to a non-Jew; and reuniting with his older brother in 1987.

    Oral history interview with Ernest Feld

    Oral history interview with Ernest Feld

    Oral History

    Ernest Feld discusses his childhood in Lucenec, Slovakia, close to the Hungarian border; the occupation of his town by Hungary in 1938; the onset of anti-Jewish restrictions and curfews; his removal to a ghetto; being conscripted for forced labor in 1944; being able to continue his apprenticeship in a bakery; the advance of the Soviet Army and the ensuing confusion; his return to Lucenec in November 1945; his reunion with his mother; their move to Prague, and then Karlsbad; their decision to immigrate to Israel; the boat trip to Israel; the detention of the group in Cyprus by the British; his life in Cyprus until 1949; emigrating from Cyprus to Israel with his wife, whom he met in Cyprus; his successful bakeries in Israel; his later move to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Lya Galperin

    Oral History

    Lya Galperin discusses her childhood in a small town near Kishinev, Romania; her family's flight after the German invasion; the gang rape of women by Romanian soldiers; her family’s imprisonment in the local synagogue; her experiences in the ghetto of Beshard, in the Ukraine, from 1943 until her liberation in 1945; her postwar life in the Soviet Union; her marriage and life in Riga; her mother's attempts at helping the family immigrate to the west; and her eventual immigration to San Francisco in 1981.

    Oral history interview with Mae Lopatin Herman

    Oral history interview with Mae Lopatin Herman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Inna Kagan

    Oral history interview with Inna Kagan

    Oral History

    Inna Kagan, born in 1937 in Kharkov (Kharkiv), Ukraine, discusses her childhood in Kharkov; being a descendant from Khazars; the evacuation of her family in September 1941 to Khazakstan; her father's later evacuation to Perm, Russia; her family's move to Bukhoro, Uzbekistan; and the family's reunion in Kharkov in December 1944. She dicsusses the destruction of the city and learning of the death of her paternal grandparents at the hands of the Nazis. Ms. Kagan describes the increase in antisemitism that she experienced after the war, and emigrating with her family to the United States in 1989.

    Oral history interview with J. Daniel Khazzoom

    Oral history interview with J. Daniel Khazzoom

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Vilem Kriz

    Oral history interview with Vilem Kriz

    Oral History

    Vilem Kriz discusses his experiences in the Czech Republic (then Czechoslovakia) in the late 1930s and under Nazi occupation; his observations, as a journalist, of the unfolding events of Nazi aggression; an encounter with Reinhard Heydrich in 1936; the mobilization of a small national army in 1937; the betrayal of Czechoslovakia by its allies in 1938; the grief of the Czech people after Nazi troops occupied Prague in March 1939; demonstrations against the Nazis by university students and reprisals that came after; his experiences as part of the Czech underground; and conditions in Czechoslovakia during its occupation and after the war ended.

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Lapan

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Lapan

    Oral History

    Mikhail Lapan, born on March 9, 1920 in Bobruisk, Belarus, discusses his childhood in Bobruisk; his enlistment in 1941 at the age of 16 in the Soviet Army; the German attack on Bobruisk; his hospitalization in 1942 in Stalingrad (Volgograd); the invasion of Stalingrad by the Germans; an incident in which the German troops removed the hospital patients and selected Jews and Communists for execution, and that by using the name of a fellow patient who had died earlier that day, he was able to escape that fate; being forced to work in a salt mine in Peine, Germany; having his Jewish identity betrayed; his escape, recapture, and removal to Braunschweig concentration camp; being liberated by US troops; being returned to the Soviet Union; his work in a coal mine in Harlov; his marriage; his return to Bobruisk, where he discovered that he parents had died during the war; and his eventual immigration to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Sofiya Manoylo

    Oral history interview with Sofiya Manoylo

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Shaya Neys

    Oral history interview with Shaya Neys

    Oral History

    Shaya Neys, born on June 28, 1927 in Liepaja, Latvia, discusses his childhood in Liepaja; the arrest of his family in June 1941 by the Russian security agency NKVD, and the family's transport to a military port, where the men were separated from the women and children; traveling by train with his mother to Krasnoyarsk, Russia; their experiences of forced labor and misery in various locations in Siberia until the end of the war; difficulties in returning to Latvia after the war ended and his return in 1956; his reunion with his son and their lives in Riga, Latvia; learning that his father died in a labor camp, and that many of his relatives from Liepaja perished; and his reflections that their deportation to Siberia probably saved his and his mother's lives.

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Sieradzki

    Oral History

    The interview describes Mr. Sieradzki's childhood in Zgierz, Poland; his awareness in 1938 about Hitler and the discrimination experienced by German Jews; his memories of the mobilization of the Polish Army, and the invasion of Poland by Nazi forces in September 1938. Mr. Sieradzki describes hiding from the bombing; his brothers' escape to the Soviet sector of Poland; and his family's move to the Łódź ghetto. Mr. Sieradzki recalls the harsh conditions there; the first transports in 1941; Chaim Rumkowski's leadership in the ghetto; a visit by Heinrich Himmler in 1942; and the deportation in September 1942 of the ill, elderly and children, during which his parents were sent to Chelmno and killed in gas vans. He describes the liquidation of the ghetto in 1944; his transport, with one sister, to Auschwitz; watching Dr. Mengele make selections and seeing his sister being taken to the gas chambers. Mr. Sieradzki describes his experiences in Birkenau, then in a concentration camp in Hannover where he worked for the Continental Rubber factory, and then in a quarry, where he became emaciated, sick with dysentary, and indifferent to his fate. He recalls the abandonment of the camp by German troops, his liberation, the dreadful state of his health and his experiences in military hospitals and then in convalescent homes in Sweden. Mr. Sieradzki describes anti-Jewish sentiment in Sweden, being smuggled to Denmark to stay with his uncle, and his reunion with his older brothers, who had survived the war. He discusses the difficulties of his living situation, and describes his immigration to the United States in 1953, and his marriage and family life in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Rahilia Sirota

    Oral history interview with Rahilia Sirota

    Oral History

    Rahilia Sirota (née Aizenman), born in 1913, discusses her childhood in Chemirovits (now Chemerivtsi), Ukraine; the Nazi occupation of her town in the summer of 1941; her move to a nearby village; learning that the Jewish community of Chemirovits had been taken to the Kamentsk Podolsky ghetto, where 80 of her relatives were killed days after their arrival (this included her parents and younger brother); living in fear in the village she had moved to, and being rescued by two brothers, Nikolay and Pavlo Kuchman [PH], who hid her and then her boyfriend throughout the remaining years of the war; living in holes in the corn fields and caves; moving from village to village; living in barns and hiding from the Ukrainian SS; the assistance she received from the Kuchman brothers and other Ukrainians; learning of the liberation of the Chemirovits in March 1945; her reunion with her boyfriend; finding that everything they had was gone; getting married; the birth of her son; her life in post-war Ukraine until her immigration to the United States; and her enduring gratitude to those who hid and save her during the war years.

    Oral history interview with Tom Szelenyi

    Oral history interview with Tom Szelenyi

    Oral History

    Tom Szelenyi discusses his childhood in Budapest, Hungary; his assimilated family life; his education; his religious upbringing; the antisemitism he experienced while growing up and the increase of antisemitism after the war began in 1939; his family's deportation to the ghetto in Budapest; the anti-Jewish laws; being deported to a Hungarian military labor camp in 1944 and the changes he experienced after the Germans occupied Hungary; his experiences on a forced march in October 1944 from Budapest to Wiener Neustadt, Austria; his journey to Buchenwald by train; the conditions there; the cruelty of the guards; his transfer to Colditz a month later; the work he performed; his experiences on a death march in April 1945 to Terezin (Theresienstadt); his liberation there by the Soviet Army and the conditions after; his return to Budapest; his reunion with his mother; his work with the American Joint Distribution Committee; his experiences in the DP (displaced persons) camp in Ulm, Germany; his immigration to the United States in 1948; his life in the US; his family; and his work.

    Oral history interview with Irving Zale

    Oral history interview with Irving Zale

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Tamara Albukh

    Oral history interview with Tamara Albukh

    Oral History

    Tamara Iosifovna Albukh, born on December 21, 1918 in Minsk, Belarus, describes her childhood; having to leave school after six years to work and contribute to her family financially; getting married and having two daughters (Sara born on May 5, 1940 and Gena born on August 31, 1942); not being able to evacuate once the war started; the German occupation of Minsk; her husband being taken into the army; moving into one of the Jewish ghettos in Minsk; pogroms in the ghettos; doing forced labor in the ghetto and the murder of her daughters one day while she was working; being moved to Trostinetskiy (Maly Trostinec) concentration camp and having to work for the Germans; the murder of inmates every day in the camp and ghetto; escaping the camp on July 29, 1944; the intensification of antisemitism during the war; hearing Russians scream the slogan “Kill Jews, save Russia” which continued even after the war; and having two daughters after the war in 1946 and 1949.

    Oral history interview with Bernard Broclawski

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with George Denes

    Oral History

    George Denes, born on September 9, 1936 in Budapest, Hungary, describes his family and early life; the fates of different family members; growing up Jewish but not Orthodox; the beginning of the war at which point his father was sent to the front to perform forced military labor and his return before the German occupation began; antisemitism before and during the war; Polish refugees arriving in 1939 and 1940; the belief amongst Hungarian Jews that the Nazi policies would not affect them; the German occupation and his father relocating the immediate family to another part of the city; his mother working as a nurse for a wealthy family while he and his brother stayed in a "private day care" for Jewish children; being discovered and escaping; his father acquiring false papers for the family (new surname was Faketta); staying with an older Christian woman until her son, a Nazi sympathizer, had the boys and their father arrested and taken to a local Nazi headquarters; being imprisoned in the basement of the building with other Jews and some other people arrested by the Nazis; being taken on December 29, 1944 with his family to the river to be shot by the Nazis and being saved when the German army prevented the Hungarian Nazis from shooting in this area; escaping the prison a few days later; reuniting with his mother and going with his family to the eastern side of the river; hiding for several weeks in the basement of a villa; having difficulties acquiring food and being near starvation by the time the Red Army liberated the city; being given food, baths, and clean clothes by the Russians; attending a Jewish high school after the war; being refused by the university because he attended a religious high school; befriending the head of the university's engineering department and being accepted the following year (1956) [note that the first interview includes family photographs]; the revolutionary period following 1956 as well as his life as a university student in mechanical engineering; everyday life in post-war Communist Hungary, including some analysis of the political and social climate of that period; his life after the revolution, including his marriage, the birth of his son, and his military career; his family's two attempts to defect, once without help, and once with help (the second one was successful); the time they spent in Vienna, Austria while their refugee status was established; the help given to them by HIAS; the medical care given to Robert, who had contracted typhus during their escape; his life in the United States, including his career as an electrical engineer working in semiconductors and his divorce; and his state of mind at various points in his life.

    Oral history interview with Audrey Doughty

    Oral history interview with Audrey Doughty

    Oral History

    Audrey Doughty, born in San Diego, California in 1921, describes her mother, who died when Audrey was three years old; her father, who was a naval officer and a member of the diplomatic core; going with her father to Berlin when he was stationed there in 1938; transferring from Stanford University to the University of Berlin; being in Berlin during Kristallnacht and taking photos afterward; writing a journal entry describing that night; having little notion of what was really happening in Germany apart from Kristallnacht as well as the antisemitic and anti-American sentiment from the Germans; how soon after arriving in Berlin, she and her father were invited to review the troops with Nazi officials; sitting in the stands three feet from Adolf Hitler, watching endless waves of troops pass underneath; going with her grandmother on a tour of Germany and neighboring countries in 1939; working at the American consulate after she turned 18; her duties, which consisted of convincing refugees applying for visas to leave the country; being evacuated to Copenhagen in 1940; returning to the US after the war ended; graduating from Stanford University; working as a war correspondent in Honolulu and then went to work for the San Francisco Chronicle; working in the Office of War Information and then working as an Associated Press correspondent in China; leaving journalism and pursuing a career as a social worker; becoming the director of the International Institute in San Francisco from 1975 to 1983; spending two and a half years as the director of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation; founding and directing the AIDS Benefits Counselors; directing AIDS Indigent Direct Services; her plans to write a book about her family's history; writing many editorials on possible fascist trends in American society; and her thoughts on Germans [note that artifacts relating to her experiences are shown at the close of the interview].

    Oral history interview with Sara Gelender

    Oral history interview with Sara Gelender

    Oral History

    Sara Gelender (née Buzyn), born circa 1927 in Warsaw, Poland, discusses her childhood in Warsaw; her memories of the bombing and burning of Warsaw in September 1939; her family's escape to a farm near the Russian border; hiding there for several months; being part of a group of Jewish refugees sent to Siberia in June 1940; the primitive conditions in the labor camp; the work she performed in the camp; getting married in the camp; leaving the camp with her husband for a small town; her continual state of hunger during those years; moving with her husband to Ukraine in 1944; returning to Poland in 1946; the antisemitism they encountered in Poland; escaping to Czechoslovakia, Vienna, and then to a displaced persons camp in Germany; moving to Paris, France, where they lived until 1951; their immigration first to Canada, and then to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Sofia Ginzbursky

    Oral history interview with Sofia Ginzbursky

    Oral History

    Sofia Ginzbursky (born on December 27, 1915 in Asipavichy, Belarus) describes her mother, who died at the age of 27, soon after she gave birth; going with her siblings to live with their grandfather, who observed Jewish traditions; studying at a technical school in Gomel (Homel), Belarus; living in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), working as a nanny and secretary; getting married and moving to Gomel; moving later to Belostock (Białystok), Poland; being left alone with their two children when her husband was called up for military duty at the beginning of WWII; evacuating from Belostock by train to Zlobin (ZHlobin, Belarus) and then to Baranovichi, Ukraine; destroying all her documents to hide her Jewish identity; witnessing the persecution of Jews in Ukraine when locals helped the Nazis find Jews; how speaking German helped her find a job at a food exchange center where she received food to feed her children; obtaining false papers with a new last name that showed she was Russian and not Jewish; returning to Gomel to look for remaining family members and being captured by the Nazis and was humiliated by Politsai for several days; being released and living with a woman named Nadia Lisitskaya; passing as a gentile refugee from Poland; washing clothes for the German army in exchange for soap and kerosene; seeing the deportation of hundreds of Jews from the Gomel ghetto; traveling with her friend, Sonia, as well as all their children to Oryol (Orel), Russia; finding a new place of stay every night so no one would suspect them of being Jewish; living with Sonia and the children at the house of a Latvian lady for two years; choosing to not wear the Star of David as was requried for the Jews by the Nazis; passing as Russian Orthodox; having a Russian lady teach her son how to pray to an icon when bombings occured; working small jobs while in Oryol; being liberated and moving to Leningrad; getting a new passport and stating her nationality as “Jewish” again; reuniting with her husband in Chkalov (possibly Orenburg, Russia) with the help of her sister; experiencing even more antisemitism after the war; and becoming more observant after the war.

    Oral history interview with Genia Likwornik

    Oral history interview with Genia Likwornik

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Mark Malamud

    Oral history interview with Mark Malamud

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Annemarie Roeper

    Oral history interview with Annemarie Roeper

    Oral History

    Annemarie Roeper (née Bondy), born August 27, 1918 in Vienna, Austria, describes her childhood in Vienna; her parents' progressive boarding school; her memories of the Nazi ascension to power; her mother's move to Switzerland in 1936 with Annemarie’s siblings; remaining behind to graduate; her father selling their school; the family's reunion in Switzerland; her psychoanalysis studies in Vienna with Anna Freund; her husband-to-be's warning to flee; immigrating with her family to the United States in 1939; moving to Vermont, where they opened a school; her marriage and move to Michigan with her husband; and opening a progressive school for gifted children there called Roeper School.

    Oral history interview with Irina Rozhanskaya

    Oral history interview with Irina Rozhanskaya

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ilse Sternberger

    Oral history interview with Ilse Sternberger

    Oral History

    Ilse Sternberger (née Naumann), born in 1914, discusses her childhood in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland); her assimilated family life; her education; her marriage and her decision to move to Belgium with her husband in 1933; her life in Belgium; her husband's success as a photographer; their decision to move to London, England in 1936; returning to Germany in 1939 in an attempt to help Jewish children leave the country, and being stymied by the bureaucracy; immigrating to the United States with her husband and children in July 1940; her life in the US; her work as a teacher and writer; and her curation of books and exhibits of her husband's work.

    Oral history interview with Clara Tsukerman

    Oral history interview with Clara Tsukerman

    Oral History

    Clara Tsukerman discusses her childhood in Chisneau, Romania (now Chișinău, Moldova) and her experiences after the war began in her region in 1941; her experiences during her family's journey on foot to Vasylivka, Ukraine; their efforts to evade the advancing German front; and their life in hiding in an unnamed village after the Germans caught up with them; the help and protection they received from the villagers, as well as her experiences during and after the war.

    Oral history interview with Sam Weiss

    Oral history interview with Sam Weiss

    Oral History

    Sam Weiss, born in 1928 in Ricka, Czechoslovakia (now in Ukraine), discusses his childhood in Ricka, Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine); the occupation of the town by Hungarian soldiers; the conscription of Jewish men for forced labor; his father being sent to Germany for forced labor; the institution of anti-Jewish restrictions such as yellow stars and in March 1944, the deportation of the Jews of Ricka; his arrival at Auschwitz; being separated from his family and sent first a children's barracks; being sent to Camp Four in Munich, Germany; being sent to Landsberg, a sub-camp of Dachau, where he was liberated by American troops in 1945; his return to Ricka, where he was reunited with his sister; his attempts to escape Czechoslovakia; his imprisonment by Russian soldiers; his escape to Munich; his immigration to the United States; his service in the United States military; and his family life and career in California.

    Oral history interview with Edith Wertheimer

    Oral history interview with Edith Wertheimer

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Laszlo Vass

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Jakob Atlas

    Oral history interview with Jakob Atlas

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Isaac Silber

    Oral history interview with Isaac Silber

    Oral History

    Isaac Silber, born in 1913 in Złoczów Poland (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), discusses his childhood in Złoczów; the occupation of Złoczów by German troops; the violent and terrifying conditions of the Nazi occupation; his escape from murder by German troops; being conscripted for forced labor in a brick factory; returning to Złoczów to learn of the murder of family members; his experiences in the Złoczów ghetto and in work camps; giving up his baby daughter to be cared for by a non-Jewish family; escaping with his wife and finding refuge in the farmhouse of a Polish man who hid them; and the gratitude he feels to his rescuer.

    Oral history interview with Lotte Grunwald

    Oral history interview with Lotte Grunwald

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Anne Marie Roeper

    Oral History

    Anne Marie Roeper describes her childhood in Vienna, Austria; her parents' progressive boarding school; her memories of the Nazi acsencion to power; her mother's move to Switzerland in 1936 with her siblings; remaining behind to graduate; her father's selling of their school; the family's reunion in Switzerland; her psychoanalysis studies in Vienna with Anna Freund; her husband-to-be's warning to flee; immigrating with her family to the United States in 1939; moving to Vermont, where they opened a school; her marriage and move to Michigan with her husband; and opening a progressive school for gifted children there called Roeper School.

    Oral history interview with Janina Swift

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Polya Liza Pekker

    Oral history interview with Polya Liza Pekker

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Paul Nebenzahl

    Oral history interview with Paul Nebenzahl

    Oral History

    Paul Nebenzahl, born August 9, 1921, discusses his childhood in Long Island, New York; his career in advertising; enlisting in the United States Army in 1942; his experiences as a sergeant in the Signal Corps; being part of a secret OSS operational group; working with the French underground movement in southwestern France to hinder the German retreat in 1944; his military service in India and China for the remainder of the war; his life after the war; marrying; having children; and his leisure activities.

    Oral history interview with Meier Lichtenstein

    Oral history interview with Meier Lichtenstein

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Janice Auerbach

    Oral history interview with Janice Auerbach

    Oral History

    Janice Auerbach, born August 7, 1934 in South London, England, describes her childhood in London; the bombings and fear she felt during World War II; her evacuation to a farm in Cornwall; the discomfort she experienced while there; her reunion with her family after the war; her various employments around the world; and her marriage to a Jewish man in 1962.

    Oral history interview with Helmut Kobler

    Oral history interview with Helmut Kobler

    Oral History

    Helmut Kobler, born on January 18, 1928 in Vienna, Austria, discusses his childhood in Vienna and Pohorelice, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic); his experiences growing up with his Jewish father and Catholic mother; his experiences after the annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938; his mother's decision to move herself and her son to Brno, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic); the conditions they lived under; the Nazis' search for his father; being deported to a camp near Ivancice, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) in 1939; the camp’s transformation from a concentration camp to a forced labor camp; working as a coal miner at the camp; the camp’s liquidation in June 1942; being transferred to another labor camp near Oslavany, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic); the work he continued as a coal miner; the conditions at the camp; the brutality of the Czech and German guards; being transferred in the summer of 1944 to a labor camp near Postoloprty, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic); working to construct an underground fuel pipeline; an accusation against him of sabotage; his subsequent imprisonment in Saaz, Czechoslovakia and Karlsbad, Germany (now Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic); the brutality of the guards; the poor conditions there; his escape from Karlsbad while out on a labor detail; being recaptured in Brno; the executions he witnessed while imprisoned there; being transferred by cattle car to a prison in Mirosov; escaping from Mirosov in May 1945, a few days before liberation by the United States Army; the aid he received from refugee organizations after the war; reuniting with his mother; being educated as a mining engineer; defecting to the west with a sample of uranium ore; moving to Canada; and immigrating to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Ellen Leeser

    Oral history interview with Ellen Leeser

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Anne Marie Yellin

    Oral history interview with Anne Marie Yellin

    Oral History

    Anne Marie Yellin (née Feller), born on December 6, 1928 in Chemnitz, Germany, discusses her childhood in Chemnitz; her family life; the changes she experienced after Kristallnacht in November 1938; her father's arrest and release; her parents' decision to leave Germany; her journey with her parents to Belgium in September 1939; her experiences after the German invasion of Belgium in May 1940 and her father's decision to hide her in a convent; her experiences in the convent; moving between institutions to avoid capture by the Nazis; her conversion to Catholicism; her reunion with her parents after liberation in September 1944; their immigration to the United States at a later point; her life in the US; and the emotional aftermath of her wartime experiences.

    Oral history interview with Adele Silber

    Oral history interview with Adele Silber

    Oral History

    Adele Silber discusses her childhood in Warsaw, Poland; her education in a Catholic school; her family's religious practices; her experiences during the German invasion in 1939; hiding her young daughter with a Catholic family; living in hiding on a farm with a group of partisans; her experiences while in hiding, including the lack of food and the necessity of living in the woods near the end of the war; her reunion with her daughter; her decision to immigrate to the United States with her husband and daughter in 1946; and their life in the US.

    Oral history interview with Sylvie Marshall

    Oral history interview with Sylvie Marshall

    Oral History

    Sylvie Marshall (née Bedel), born on July 1, 1923 in Paris, France, discusses her childhood; her older brother Michel Bedel (born 1918) and her younger brother Alain Bedel (born 1926); her father, who was the president of the largest moving and storage company in France before the war; her adolescence in Paris; being raised Catholic; the participation of her father and brother Michel in the French Resistance; her life with her mother in south central France; the liberation of Paris; the story of her father and brother's arrests by the Gestapo and her father's subsequent death in Buchenwald.

    Oral history interview with Elena H. Javor

    Oral history interview with Elena H. Javor

    Oral History

    Elena H. Javor (née Gross), born December 15, 1914 in Martin, Czechoslovakia (now in Slovakia), describes her childhood in Martin; her siblings; her medical education and practice; the birth of her three children; the threat of deportation in 1942; her escape from deportation due to her husband's exemption; Allied bombing in spring 1944; the Slovak national uprising in August 1944; her husband's enlistment to fight; fleeing with her children to a monastery, where they were sheltered; joining her husband in Banska Bystrica; her arrest in October 1944; her husband's disappearance; her liberation in April 1945; her reunion with her three children; learning of her husband's, sister's, and parents' deaths in Auschwitz; her return to Martin with her children; her life after the war; how she studied dermatology; her remarriage; and her family's immigration to the United States in 1968.

    Oral history interview with George Denes

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Joseph Welgreen

    Oral history interview with Joseph Welgreen

    Oral History

    Joseph Welgreen, born in 1918 in Sosnowiec, Poland, discusses his childhood in Sosnowiec; his family life and education; the work he performed; the antisemitism he experienced; the changes he experienced after the German invasion of Poland in 1939; being deported to Annaburg in late 1940, and his subsequent transfers to several other labor camps, including Breslau and Klettendorf (both subcamps of Gross-Rosen); the conditions in these camps, his experiences there, the work he performed in highway construction, and his experiences with the guards and Kapos; being transferred to Bunzlau in 1943; the work he performed as a machinist and the conditions there; his experiences on a death march to Dora in February 1945; the work he performed there and the conditions; his liberation at Bergen-Belsen; his journey to Hannover, Germany; the business he established there; and his immigration to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Frank Weinman

    Oral history interview with Frank Weinman

    Oral History

    Frank Weinman, born on July 9, 1914 in Vienna, Austria, discusses his childhood in Vienna and Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia); the introduction of restrictive anti-Jewish laws in Vienna after the Anschluss in March 1938; the family's definitive move to Bratislava soon after; his marriage; his and his wife's forced move to a ghetto camp after Nazis took control of Czechoslovakia; their experiences there doing manual labor; their fortunate escape through a German baggage firm, HAPAG, to Budapest, Cuba, and finally the United States; his parents' escape to Cuba where his father died; his reunion with his mother in October 1942; the assistance he received from his brother who had immigrated to Chicago, IL in 1938; and the success and prosperity he experienced in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Morris Rosnow

    Oral history interview with Morris Rosnow

    Oral History

    Morris Rosnow (né Moishe Raznov), born on January 7, 1927 in Zdzieciol, Poland (now Dzyatlava, Belarus) discusses his experiences during World War II while hiding in the woods as a member of a Jewish partisan group operating under the organization of the Russian partisans; liberation in 1944 by the Soviet Army; his return to his hometown in Poland, where he remained with his sister until the death of their father; moving to Munich, Germany; earning a degree in engineering; immigrating with his sister to join their other sister in the United States; and earning a degree in pharmacy and raising a family.

    Oral history interview with Gary Schoofs

    Oral history interview with Gary Schoofs

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Gerta Wingerd

    Oral history interview with Gerta Wingerd

    Oral History

    Gerta Wingerd (née Alper), born on September 23, 1923 in Bеrhomet, Romania (now Berehomet, Ukraine), discusses her childhood in Czernowicz, Romania (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine); the increase in antisemitism in 1938 after fascist rule was established; the occupation of her town by Soviet forces in 1939; the retreat of the Soviet forces; her two brothers' escape toward Russia; the occupation of the area by Nazi troops; the establishment of a ghetto; her family's release; their eventual internment in a ghetto camp in Transnistria until 1944; the conditions, difficulties, and disease that were prevalent there; the family's liberation by Soviet troops; her return to Czernowicz; her escape from Romania to Vienna, Austria, where she worked for the United States Army; being sponsored by the Joint Distribution Committee to immigrate to the United States in 1949; and her experiences in New York, Minneapolis, and Great Falls, Montana before marrying and settling in Mill Valley, California.

    Oral history interview with Ilse Eden

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sam Genirberg

    Oral history interview with Sam Genirberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Eva K. Breyer

    Oral History

    Eva Breyer, born on August 18, 1936 in Budapest, Hungary, describes her parents, who converted from Judaism to Catholicism after the death of her grandfather; being christened Catholic; her brother, who was born Jewish and converted when he was about a year old; attending Catholic religious classes; antisemitism in Hungary before the Germans invaded; the laws passed against Jews in the 1930s; the bombings after the war started; the drafting of non-Jewish men for the military and Jewish men for labor service; her father being called up for labor service near Budapest; how her mother was able to keep her father from being sent to the front in 1943; the German occupation, at which time the Jewish laws grew worse; having to move to Jewish houses with other families; the round ups led by the Arrow Cross and police in the summer of 1944; her aunt saving her mother from deportation; moving into an apartment building that was under the protection of the Vatican; her brother, who was sent to a monastery for extra protection; being sent to the hospital where a doctor diagnosed her as sick so she could hide with terminally sick children; going to a convent outside Buda; seeing people being shot into the Danube; going to a Swedish house and finding it empty; the arrival of the Russians; her family, who went to the ghetto while she was in hiding; her father’s death from pneumonia in March after the liberation; the mistreatment of the Hungarians by the Russian soldiers; life under the communists; escaping to Austria and then the United States in 1956; and how she identifies as Catholic.

    Oral history interview with Kurt Levi

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Paul Nebenzahl

    Oral History

    Paul Nebenzahl discusses his childhood in Long Island, NY; his career in advertising; enlisting in the United States Army in 1942; his experiences as a sergeant in the Signal Corps; being part of a secret OSS “operational group” working with the French underground movement in southwestern France to hinder the German retreat in 1944; his military service in India and China for the remainder of the war; his life after the war; marrying; having children; and his leisure activities.

    Oral history interview with Frank Weinman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Olga Nepomyashy

    Oral history interview with Olga Nepomyashy

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Floyd Dade

    Oral history interview with Floyd Dade

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Peter Oppenheim

    Oral history interview with Peter Oppenheim

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ellen Van Creveld

    Oral history interview with Ellen Van Creveld

    Oral History

    Ellen Van Creveld, born in 1933 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, discusses her childhood in Amsterdam; her assimilated family life; her lack of awareness of her Jewish heritage; the changes she experienced after the German invasion of Holland in May 1940, including the new restrictions and her transfer to a Jewish school; her relationships with her non-Jewish friends during this period; the fear of arrest and deportation; her family's decision to go into hiding in November 1943; her experiences while living in hiding; her family's move to Brussels, Belgium with the help of the underground; the false identities they acquired; her experiences in Brussels under false papers, her education; the betrayal of the family and their arrest; her reprieve from deportation due to illness; her experiences in the Jewish hospital and orphanage; her subsequent time spent living in hiding on a farm and in an abandoned castle during the winter of 1944-1945; her reunion with one of her brothers after the end of the war and the fates of her other family members; her postwar life in the United States and Holland; the challenges she faced; her marriage and family; her permanent immigration to the United States in 1956; and her life in the US.

    Oral history interview with Lola Welgreen

    Oral history interview with Lola Welgreen

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Semyon Berenshtein

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sara Gelender

    Oral History

    Sara Gelender discusses her childhood in Warsaw, Poland; her memories of the bombing and burning of Warsaw in September 1939; her family's flight to a farm near the Russian border; hiding there for several months; being part of a group of Jewish refugees sent to Siberia in June 1940; the primitive conditions in the labor camp; the work she performed in the camp; marrying in the camp; leaving the camp with her husband for a small town; her continual state of hunger during those years; moving with her husband to the Ukraine in 1944; returning to Poland in 1946; the antisemitism they encountered in Poland; escaping to Czechoslovakia, Vienna, and then to a displaced persons camp in Germany; moving to Paris, where they lived until 1951; their emigration first to Canada, and finally to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Ilse Sternberger

    Oral history interview with Ilse Sternberger

    Oral History

    Ilse Sternberger (née Naumann), born in 1914, discusses her childhood in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland); her assimilated family life; her education; her marriage and her decision to move to Belgium with her husband in 1933; her life in Belgium; her husband's success as a photographer; their decision to move to London, England in 1936; returning to Germany in 1939 in an attempt to help Jewish children leave the country, and being stymied by the bureaucracy; immigrating to the United States with her husband and children in July 1940; her life in the US; her work as a teacher and writer; and her curation of books and exhibits of her husband's work.

    Oral history interview with Jenny Friedlander

    Oral history interview with Jenny Friedlander

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Leonid Bobrovsky

    Oral history interview with Leonid Bobrovsky

    Oral History

    Leonid Bobrovsky, born on May 4, 1937 in Odessa, Ukraine, describes being only three years old when the war began; his father who fought with the partisans during the war; the Nazi invasion of Odessa, at which time he and his family were in an underground hiding place (“Kotokloomba”) reserved for partisans and their families; hiding with his mother while his older brother and father helped the partisans; getting sick because the hiding place was very wet; the Nazis discovering various entrances to the hiding place and using poisonous gas to force the people out; escaping from the hiding place along with his mother and older brother; getting caught by the Nazis and taken away to the city jail where there were many other Jewish residents; being separated from his mother, who was later murdered by the Nazis; being moved with his brother to a different jail; his brother’s attempted escape and then suicide; being taken to camp Ombarova where he remained until liberation; working even though he was so young; attributing his survival in the ghetto to the women who protected and took care of him; liberation; being taken to an orphanage where he stayed until his father’s return; his father, who remarried after the war; attending school and studying construction at a college; being married twice and having two daughters; and naming his younger daughter, Polina Bobrovskaya, after his mother.

    Oral history interview with Sam Genirberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Joseph Schein

    Oral history interview with Joseph Schein

    Oral History

    Joseph Schein discusses his childhood is Sosnowiec, Poland; his experiences with antisemitism, and how his plans to immigrate to the United States were disrupted by the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany; being sent to his mother’s hometown Brzostowica-Wielka, Poland (now Vialikaia Berastavitsa, Belarus); avoiding forced labor in Russia by returning to Sosnowiec; being conscripted for forced labor by the Germans in October 1940; his experiences in several forced labor and concentration camps throughout the war years, which included Geppersdorf, Gross Sarne, Kleinmangersdorf, Wiesau, Waldau, Casper Bowder, Gintersdorf, Rostitz, Hundsfeld, Hirschberg, Gross-Rosen, Dachau, and Buchenwald; the conditions in these camps and the various labors he was forced to perform; being witness to medical experiments at Hundsfeld; enduring a death march from Buchenwald; being liberated by American troops; being hospitalized; his marriage to his childhood sweetheart and their stay in a displaced persons camp in Ainring, Germany; immigrating to the United States in June 1946; being the only member of his family that survived the Holocaust; immigrating with an accordion, which was his only possession at the time; and his experiences in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Nicholas Nagi-Talavera

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Edith Eva Eger

    Oral history interview with Edith Eva Eger

    Oral History

    Edith Eger (née Elefant), born on September 29, 1927 in Kosice, Hungary (now Slovakia), describes her father (Lajos), who was a tailor, and her mother (Helen Klein), who worked for the Hungarian ministry; her two sisters, Magda and Klara; her favorite memories are of her mother's cooking; her childhood, during which she trained in ballet and gymnastics; preparing to compete for the Olympics for Hungary but being disqualified because she was Jewish; her sisters, who were gifted musicians; the story of how her sister Klara was smuggled out of Hungary when the war began by one of her professors from the music academy in Budapest; the German occupation of Hungary; being taken to a brick factory; being deported with her sister, parents, aunts, and uncles to Auschwitz in May 1944; being separated from her parents, and thus spared the gas chambers; being selected to dance for Dr. Josef Mengele; using her talent for gymnastics and dancing to help survive in Auschwitz; conditions in the barracks; how she helped Magda survive in the camp; being liberated from Gunskirchen on May 4, 1945, at which time she had five types of typhoid fever, pneumonia, and no hair left; going to a displaced persons camp, where she met her husband and became pregnant; immigrating to the United States in 1949, going first to New York, and then to Baltimore, where she worked in a factory; moving to Texas, where she had two more children and attended the University of Texas at Austin; earning her doctorate; moving to San Diego, CA and working as a family therapist; and how her grandchildren are her world and how she lives every day for them. Ms. Eger, her parents, aunts and uncles, and her eldest sister Magda, were deported to Auschwitz in May 1944. Ms. Eger was separated from her parents; she and her sister Magda were spared the gas chambers. Because of her talent for ballet, Ms. Eger was selected to dance for Dr. Josef Mengele. She was able to use her talent for gymnastics and dancing to help survive in Auschwitz. Ms. Eger was liberated from Gunskirchen on May 4, 1945. While in a displaced persons camp, she met her husband and became pregnant. She emigrated to the United States in 1949; first to New York, and then to Baltimore, where she worked in a factory. She, her husband and her daughter Marianne moved to Texas, where Ms. Eger had two more children, and attended the University of Texas at Austin where she ultimately received her doctorate. She settled in San Diego and works as a family therapist and with battered wives and abused teenagers.

    Oral history interview with Otto Springer

    Oral history interview with Otto Springer

    Oral History

    Otto Springer discusses his German upbringing in Prague, Bohemia (now Czech Republic); his education; his family life; the antisemitism he witnessed in Prague in the early 1930s; his marriage to his Jewish wife and the discrimination he experienced as a result; his arrest in 1941; his sentence of forced labor; the help he received from a Gestapo officer; his activities in the Czech underground including the rescue of Jews, aided by two members of the Gestapo; his experiences in another labor camp near Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) beginning in October 1944; the work he performed; a forced march he underwent in January 1945; acts of vengeance by Czechs that he witnessed after the war ended; the suspicion he fell under because of his German heritage; the assistance he received from a Czech military commander; and his immigration with his wife and children in September 1948.

    Oral history interview with Greta Stuehler

    Oral history interview with Greta Stuehler

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Magda Silberman

    Oral history interview with Magda Silberman

    Oral History

    Magda Silberman, born on August 17, 1928, discusses her childhood in Pavlovo, Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine); the occupation of her town by the Hungarians; antisemitism that she and her family experienced; the occupation of her town by Nazi troops; the gathering of the Jewish citizens and their deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau in April 1944; her arrival, the selections, and her experiences while at Auschwitz; the death march she endured in January 1945 to Ravensbrück and Leipzig; her liberation in May 1945; and her immigration to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Eric Willgott

    Oral history interview with Eric Willgott

    Oral History

    Eric Willgott, born on February 12, 1925 in Vienna, Austria, discusses his childhood in Vienna; his family life; his Orthodox religious upbringing; his involvement with a Zionist youth organization; his education; the increased antisemitism he experienced after the German annexation of Austria (Anschluss) in March 1938; his experiences during Kristallnacht in November; his family's decision to send him to Great Britain with the Kindertransport in December 1938; his experiences in London during the Blitz; his work with the United States government in Germany after the war; his immigration to the United States in 1948; his marriage; his life in the US; and his work.

    Oral history interview with Cecilia Kornbluth

    Oral history interview with Cecilia Kornbluth

    Oral History

    Cecilia Kornbluth (née Cilli Mehlman), born on October 11, 1920, discusses her childhood in Vienna, Austria; her early experiences with antisemitism in elementary school and gymnasium; her memories of the assassination of Engelbert Dollfuss, Chancellor of Austria, by Austrian Nazis in 1934; the Anschluss in March 1938; the changes that occurred for Jewish Austrians afterward; her two older brothers fleeing to France and to Switzerland; the arrests of her younger brother, father, and mother; her father's eventual deportation to Auschwitz; her brother's incarceration in Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps for 11 months, and his release and move to England; the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938; being sent for by her brother in Switzerland; her illegal crossing into Switzerland; hiding because she lacked legal papers; being questioned and released; living and working in a refugee camp for single Jewish girls in Basel; living there throughout the war; marrying another refugee who was living in a single man's camp in 1942; having a son; being supported by the Jewish community during this period; her immigration to the United States in 1947; and her family and work life in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Steiner

    Oral history interview with Ruth Steiner

    Oral History

    Ruth Steiner discusses her childhood in Dresden, Germany; her well-integrated family life; her education; the changes she experienced after the Nazis came to power in 1933; the necessity of attending a university outside of Germany due to her Jewish heritage; her studies in Geneva; her family's decision to leave Europe in 1939; their immigration to Brazil; their move to the United States in 1940; her life in the US; the work she performed as a librarian; and her husband and family.

    Oral history interview with Trudy Lyons

    Oral history interview with Trudy Lyons

    Oral History

    Trudy Lyons discusses her childhood in Vienna, Austria; the family's assimilated life; the changes that occurred after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in March 1938; having to leave school, and witnessing abuses against Jews. Ms. Lyons describes the family's flight to Czechoslovakia, and their successful immigration to the United States in November 1938; the family's adjustment to life in the US, eventually settling in Indiana; and her education, marriage, and family life in Detroit, MI and San Francisco, CA.

    Oral history interview with Margrit Schurman

    Oral history interview with Margrit Schurman

    Oral History

    Margrit Schurman, born on April 1, 1925 in Essen, Germany, discusses her childhood in Essen; her memories of antisemitism; the flight of her sister to Switzerland and her brother to England; the events of Kristallnacht; being sent with her sisters to a Catholic school in England; their conversion to Catholicism; her life and experiences in England during the war, including her brother's deportation as an enemy alien to Canada; her separation from her mother, who had married an Italian and spent the war years in Italy; her immigration to the United States; her marriage and life in Berkeley, California; being reunited with her family in California; and her return trip to Germany.

    Oral history interview with Edith Deutsch

    Oral history interview with Edith Deutsch

    Oral History

    Edith Deutsch, born on January 21, 1925 in Arnswalde, Germany (now Choszczno, Poland), discusses her childhood in Arnswalde; her father, Fritz Abrahamowsky, and her mother, Lotte Gradnauer; living in a large home and being raised as a young child by servants, rarely seeing her mother or father; her family's move to Berlin, Germany in 1933; the difficulties experienced by her family when Hitler rose to power; going to the Olympic Stadium with her class and seeing the No Jews Allowed signs; having to leave public school after the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938; fleeing Germany with her family in April 1939 for Thailand; traveling by ship to Singapore; abandoning their plans to travel to Bangkok and instead opting to go to Shanghai, China; staying in a camp in Shanghai for a week; her experiences in Shanghai; working as a sales girl and as a beautician; her marriage in 1946 and the birth of her son in 1948; immigrating to Australia in 1949; living in a boarding house; moving to the United States in 1951; living in Oregon and then San Francisco, CA; and her efforts to socialize with other refugees over the years.

    Oral history interview with Francis E. Cappel

    Oral history interview with Francis E. Cappel

    Oral History

    Francis Cappel (né Franz Erwin Cappel), born on June 2, 1916 in Cologne, Germany, discusses his childhood in Cologne, Germany;his parents, Dr. Paul H. and Meta Cappel (née Braunschweig); growing up in an apartment flat near a synagogue in a mixed (Jewish and non-Jewish) neighborhood; antisemitism in Germany; the beating of his lawyer father by Nazi storm troopers (Sturmabteilung) in April 1933; the boycott of Jewish business; moving in October 1933 to France, where he worked in the textile business; concealing his Jewish origins as best he could, always carrying French or English newspapers with him; befriending a man who brought him to the German Reich secret headquarters where he got to see rare German stamps (Mr. Cappel was an avid stamp collector); moving to Hamburg, Germany in 1935; immigrating to England in 1937; serving as a corporal in the British Army; his success in obtaining transit visas for his father and mother, thus rescuing his father from Dachau concentration camp; getting married to his wife Margo in 1944; leaving the Army in April 1946 and returning to London; immigrating with his wife, children, and parents to the United States; and settling in San Francisco, CA.

    Oral history interview with George Wittenstein

    Oral history interview with George Wittenstein

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Thomas Trier

    Oral history interview with Thomas Trier

    Oral History

    Thomas Trier, born December 27, 1930 in Frankfurt, Germany, discusses his childhood in Frankfurt; his family's roots in the city; his integrated family life; his education in a Jewish school; his experiences in Nazi-era Germany; the economic difficulties his family faced; their decision to immigrate to the United States; the journey to New York, NY and then Chicago, IL; his experiences as a young immigrant in America; his feeling of isolation among his peers as a boy; his education through graduate school; his life after school; the work he performed; his feelings about his German and Jewish identity; and his marriage and family.

    Oral history interview with Rita Grunbaum

    Oral history interview with Rita Grunbaum

    Oral History

    Rita Grunbaum (née Rita van Leeuwen), born on April 9, 1910 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, discusses her childhood in Holland; her career as a social worker in the Hague; her marriage in 1936;the onset of World War II in September 1939; the bombing of Holland; the German occupation beginning in 1940; the birth of her daughter in 1942; the family's arrest in September 1943; their transport to Westerbork concentration camp; her experiences in Westerbork; receiving papers for Palestine from her in-laws who had fled to Mexico; being selected as part of an exchange program with German prisoners-of-war held in Palestine; being sent with her family to Bergen-Belsen in February 1944; being transported from Bergen-Belsen in April 1945 on the Lost Train (also called Lost Transport); her liberation in Troebtiz, Germany; the deaths of her family members during the Holocaust; and her post-war experiences.

    Oral history interview with Lily Robinson

    Oral history interview with Lily Robinson

    Oral History

    Lily Robinson (née Lily Solomon Leibovitch), born on June 29, 1939 in Sofia, Bulgaria, discusses her childhood with her mother and sister who had been deported to Haskovo, Bulgaria from Sofia in 1940; her experiences there as a young child; her family's return to Sofia in 1945; immigrating to the United States in December 1946; her life in California; and the emotional aftermath of the Holocaust that she witnessed in her brother.

    Oral history interview with Herman Apteker

    Oral history interview with Herman Apteker

    Oral History

    Herman Apteker, born on October 9, 1915 in Dresden, Germany, discusses his childhood in Dresden; his Ukrainian parents; his father (Elieser), who was in business and died when Herman was only four years old; his mother, who started a wholesale business selling clothing out of the family's six or seven room flat; his four older siblings (three brothers and one sister); his male "guardian" (this was a German requirement for children whose fathers had died) Dr. Avraham Borg, who took Herman to synagogue and was the primary source of Herman's religious education; his experiences with antisemitism at public school; his strong desire to leave Germany once Hitler rose to power; his trip to Czechoslovakia in 1933 as part of the Young Macabees, in preparation for immigration to Palestine; spending 10 or 11 months in Slovakia, taking part in agricultural training; his arrival in Palestine in April 1933; becoming very ill with dysentery and malaria; his experiences in Palestine; the immigration of his mother and brothers to Palestine; his work in Haifa; riots that occurred in 1936; becoming a temporary policeman before a British officer offered him a job in the immigration office; his marriage in 1938; the beginning of WWII and his work for the British army (in an office) until he was conscripted into the Israeli Army; working as a commission officer at the Lebanese border; his unique relationship with an Arab officer on the Lebanese side; his divorce and remarriage; his immigration with his second wife to the United States in 1953; and settling in San Francisco, CA.

    Oral history interview with Hanna Cassel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Nicholas Nagy-Talavera

    Oral history interview with Nicholas Nagy-Talavera

    Oral History

    Nicholas Nagy-Talavera, born on February 14, 1929 in Budapest, Hungary, discusses his childhood in Budapest; his time in a Transylvanian ghetto in 1944; his subsequent deportation to Auschwitz; the work he performed in Josef Mengele's medical complex; the experiments he witnessed; his impressions of Mengele; and his subsequent experiences at Mauthausen, Gusen II, and Ebensee.

    Oral history interview with Semyon Veyber

    Oral history interview with Semyon Veyber

    Oral History

    Semyon Veyber, born on December 20, 1927 in Tomashpil, Ukraine, discusses his childhood in Tomashpil; his religious upbringing; the changes he experienced after the German Army invaded in June 1941; his family's attempt to evacuate, their capture by the Germans, and the help given to the Germans by the local Ukrainian people; his escape from an Einsatzgruppen action; being deported with his family to a ghetto in July 1941, and his experiences there; the work he performed and the conditions; the fear he felt as the German Army retreated that he and his family would be killed before they were liberated; the arrival of the Soviet Army in March 1944; the charges of collaboration that he faced; his life after the end of the war; and his immigration to the United States in 1989.

    Oral history interview with Chaya Fuhrman

    Oral history interview with Chaya Fuhrman

    Oral History

    Chaya Ash-Furhman (née Averbuch), born March 19,1920 in Kishinev (now Chisinau), Moldova, describes her childhood; her parents’ involvement in Yiddish theater; her own involvement in theater at a young age; the outbreak of war in June 1941; hiding with her family in the basement of a theater in the Russian section of Tiraspol, Moldova; being transported to cooperative farms in Ukraine and Uzbekistan; being underfed; her father, who suffered from mental distress and dysentery and was taken to a courtyard and shot; how the people who were murdered were then covered in lime, so as not to spread disease; the hardships she and her family endured working on these farms; becoming sick with malaria; working as a seamstress in a nearby town where conditions were better; meeting her first husband; antisemitism that was rampant after the end of the war; her leaving for Poland with her mother and husband, who was Polish by birth; their decision to leave Poland in 1947 while she was pregnant; the family's experiences in a displaced persons camp in Linz, Austria; and their immigration to Israel, where she continued her involvement in Yiddish Theater.

    Oral history interview with Peter Mueller

    Oral history interview with Peter Mueller

    Oral History

    Peter Mueller, born on December 30, 1926 in Hannover, Germany, discusses his childhood in Hannover; his family's decision to leave Germany after Kristallnacht in 1938; his life with his father in England; his decision to immigrate to the United States in 1943; his service in the US Army with the medical corps as an instructor in Texas; and his life after military service.

    Oral history interview with Eva Cohn

    Oral history interview with Eva Cohn

    Oral History

    Eva Cohn (née Eva Maria Rhee), born in 1923 in Dortmund, Germany, describes her parents, Max Rhee and Else Heinemann; experiencing a warm family life and peace in her early childhood; not experiencing antisemitism until 1934 when her friend shunned her, teachers began to treat her unfairly, and Aryan students were being separated and taught antisemitism; being prohibited from attending public schools around 1935; moving to Cologne, Germany, where she attended a Jewish school while staying with a Jewish family; her family’s experience during an anti-Jewish “Aktion” in 1938, during which German soldiers threw rocks at their windows and burned their synagogue; returning to live with the family in Cologne, while her parents moved to Baudin and stayed with a friend; leaving Germany with her family circa 1938 and going to England just before the ill treatment of the Jews became worse; a law in England that prohibited immigrants from working, which meant her family could not make any money; spending one year in England, before being allowed to immigrate to the United States; settling in Los Angeles, CA; attending Whittier College and majoring in English; working at a school as an instructional supervisor; her father’s death in 1941 from a heart condition; meeting and marrying Hans in Salinas, CA in 1949; having three children and moving quite frequently; and her life in Palo Alto, teaching German, participating in the German association, and leading the Bridge to Understanding, which takes a group to Germany each summer.

    Oral history interview with Fred Baum

    Oral history interview with Fred Baum

    Oral History

    Fred Baum (né Efriam Dovid Boymelgreen), born in Slupaianowa, Poland (possibly Nowa Słupia, Poland), on October 1, 1921, describes his childhood; his one younger brother; his parents, Majlech and Miriam Nhuna, whom he lived with until 1930 when their mother died; being raised religious, and studying before the war at a yeshiva in Otwock, Poland; returning home from school after the war started, and seeing Jews being rounded up for forced labor; working in various government factories, and how the situation got worse and worse; his memories of shootings, confiscations, and deportations; how Jews were not allowed to go to school or to religious services and there was no electricity; his memories of several events including a memory of the rabbi of his town being tied to a horse and forced to run after it until he died; being put into Starachowice with his father and brother in August 1942; suffering from typhus and his father’s efforts to keep him out of the "hospital" so he wouldn't be shot; their transfer in July 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau; his father’s death in Birkenau around January of 1945; being sent with his brother to Buna (Monowitz), where they were given striped uniforms; being transferred with his brother to Lara Hut; being moved in early 1945 to Mauthausen and then to Gusen in Austria; spending a week there and then four days without food in an open train to Hannora, where they worked on an unfinished concentration camp; being separated from his brother on April 5, 1945 and sent to Bergen-Belsen; being liberated by the British on April 15, 1945; spending six months in a hospital unit recuperating, and then staying in Bergen-Belsen for five years; meeting his wife, Helen Wiesel, there; getting married in 1946; never returning to Poland; reuniting with his brother, who was his only surviving family member; immigrating in 1950 with his wife and young daughter to the United States; having two more children; and his brother, who also immigrated to the United States and started a family.

    Oral history interview with Fred Baum

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Fred Baum

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Cantor Hans Cohn

    Oral history interview with Cantor Hans Cohn

    Oral History

    Cantor Hans Cohn, born in Berlin, Germany on May 31, 1926, discusses his childhood in Berlin; being forced to leave his public school after the passage of the Nuremberg laws in 1935; antisemitic propaganda; his feelings of exclusion from social and athletic activities; the 1936 Olympic games; the events of Kristallnacht; the long wait for a visa to the United States; the family's decision to leave Germany for Shanghai, China; his impressions upon arrival in Shanghai; the life of his family and the Jewish community in Shanghai; his mother's death; the difficulties and illnesses he endured; moving into the Hongkew ghetto when the Japanese took control of Shanghai in 1942; his experiences there; the Allied bombings of Shanghai that took place in the spring of 1945; his life in post-war Shanghai; stowing aboard a ship to Australia in 1946; living as an illegal immigrant in Australia; his immigration to the United States in 1948; being drafted into the military; volunteering as a cantor in a San Francisco synagogue; returning to school and obtaining a cantorial diploma; working as a singing waiter in the Borscht Belt in New York while he was attending Hebrew Union College in New York; being reunited with his father in 1952; and his later experiences.

    Oral history interview with Gilbert L. van Mourik

    Oral history interview with Gilbert L. van Mourik

    Oral History

    Gilbert L. van Mourik, born June 27, 1930 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, discusses his childhood in Rotterdam; his family life; his Protestant upbringing; the changes he experienced after the German invasion of Holland in May 1940; his experiences during the bombing of Rotterdam; his father's efforts to gather and store food; his parents' decision to become part of the resistance; his family's activities, which included hiding a Jewish child in their home for the duration of the war; and the dangers his family experienced and their efforts at self-preservation as well as the moral challenges they faced.

    Oral history interview with Bernard Broclawski

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sam Zelver

    Oral history interview with Sam Zelver

    Oral History

    Sam Zelver, born in 1935 in Kalisz, Poland, discusses his childhood in Kalisz; fleeing with his family to the Soviet Union after the occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany in September 1939; the attempts of his father, who was in the Polish Army, to join them; the family's journey across Russia to Siberia; his mother doing hard labor in return for housing and food; the hardships they endured for a year and a half; the journeys the family took, which ended in Kazakhstan, where they lived with other Jewish refugees; discovering a relative nearby with whom they stayed from 1942 until the end of the war; the family's post-war journey to Germany, where they lived in a DP (displaced persons) camp; his immigration with his sister in 1947 to San Francisco, CA, sponsored by an uncle who died before they arrived; their stay in the Jewish children's home, Homewood Terrace; his reunion with his mother and stepfather, who emigrated in 1952; his education and service in the United States Army; his work as a salesman; his marriage; family; and religious life.

    Oral history interview with Asya Grunkina

    Oral history interview with Asya Grunkina

    Oral History

    Asya Grunkina, born on March 2, 1936 in Odesa, Ukraine, discusses her childhood in Odesa; her memories of the occupation of Odessa by Nazi troops on October 16, 1941; the orders for Jewish families to identify themselves in preparation for deportation; hiding with her family in their home to escape deportation; the family fleeing with the assistance of a local Russian man in January 1942; hiding in the catacombs and caves nearby; the assistance of their rescuer and his family who brought them food at great risk; the terrible conditions and privations they endured; and leaving their hiding place in April 1944.

    Oral history interview with Kurt Mostny

    Oral history interview with Kurt Mostny

    Oral History

    Kurt Mostny, born on March 3, 1919 in Linz, Austria, discusses his childhood in Linz; the antisemitism he experienced growing up; enlisting in the Austrian army and being posted in Vienna; the Anschluss in March 1938; serving as part of the honor guard surrounding Adolf Hitler when he arrived in Vienna to oversee the transfer of power; evading the roundup of Jews in Linz; escaping from Austria; going to Egypt to join his sister, who was pursuing a doctorate in Egyptology; their subsequent move to Belgium; his mother's friendship with a woman from Chile; her success in obtaining visas for Mr. Mostny, his sister, and herself; the entire family's immigration to Chile in 1939; his experiences in Chile; his work and family; his immigration to the United States with his wife and five children in 1964.

    Oral history interview with Hanna Cassel

    Oral history interview with Hanna Cassel

    Oral History

    Hanna Cassel, born on December 6, 1914, in Berlin, Germany, describes her father Arthur, who owned a shoe store and her mother Rebecca, who helped run the store; her one brother, Werner, who was six years younger than her; her mother's parents, who were very religious, and spending during many holidays going to the temple with them; her parents, who were not religious; attending a private elementary school and then a girls' high school, which she was not able to finish because about a year and a half before she would have graduated, she lost her scholarship (because she was Jewish); her father's business ending because he was Jewish; not experiencing much antisemitism when she was younger, and how at first most people thought Hitler was crazy and he would never amount to anything; her very good non-Jewish friends, especially at school; her family home and her childhood and her love for reading; not having many options after she dropped out of school; her desire to go to Palestine with some of her friends, which her parents did not want her to do; moving to Rome, Italy and working as a nanny for several different families; how by 1939, Hitler had influenced Mussolini's policies and foreign Jews were required to leave Italy; the popular sentiment in Italy about Germany; the government-sponsored persecution growing worse; being arrested in December 1940 and put into a women’s concentration camp (she had avoided the first roundups); living with about 65 other Jews, Roma, and Yugoslavian partisans; conditions in the camp, the people there, and the flourishing black market; the German occupation of Italy and how the villagers in the town around the concentration camp helped free the prisoners because they knew the women of the camp would be killed or deported immediately by the Germans; hiding in the fields and then walking back to Rome, which took her about ten days; eating vegetables she took from nearby fields during her journey; being given fake papers by the police in the concentration camp’s town (the papers identified her as Anna Castelli; she told anyone who asked that she was an Italian fleeing the Allies); hiding with various friends in Rome; how most people at this time were surviving on the black market; the destruction of the synagogue in Rome right after she returned and the liquidation of the ghetto; the deportation of thousands of people; how several years earlier her parents and brother had gone to Shanghai, China, where her brother and father both died; having very little correspondence with her family while she was in Rome; getting some information from listening to the radio, which was illegal; living in hiding on the outskirts of the city when Rome was liberated on June 5, 1944; the euphoria at that moment and the difficulty of life after the liberation; how food was hard to come by; getting a job at the American Joint Distribution Committee; getting a visa to the United States and arriving in the US in December of 1948; her mother’s death and Hanna’s depression; working nights while taking classes at San Francisco State College; earning a BA and wanting to become a librarian; becoming a teacher after earning her Master’s degree; returning to Italy almost every summer once she was a teacher and visiting friends; returning to Germany for the first time in 1972 to visit a cousin; her hesitation to return to Germany; having a Bat-Mitzvah in 1983; experiencing antisemitism in the US, especially at the high school where she worked; and never marrying or having children.

    Oral history interview with Vera Korkus

    Oral history interview with Vera Korkus

    Oral History

    Vera Korkus, born in 1928 in Vienna, Austria, discusses her childhood in Vienna; the onset of World War II, and the opportunity that she and her sister had to go a Kindertransport, which they both refused; the forced move she and her family made in 1940 to Jewish ghetto in Vienna; their transport in October 1942 to an unnamed camp, where her father died of lung cancer; being sent with her mother to Auschwitz two years later; being separated from her mother; her reunion with her sister; the terrible conditions at Auschwitz; her encounter with Dr. Josef Mengele; being transported to Kurzbach, a subcamp of Gross-Rosen, where she endured forced labor and a 3-day march to Bergen Belsen; her escape from the march; finding protection from the Germans with Russian soldiers; the sexual assaults that occurred; her life after the war; moving to Bohemia (Czech Republic) then Vienna; and her immigration in 1949 to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Steffi Black

    Oral history interview with Steffi Black

    Oral History

    Steffi Black, born on October 17, 1920 in Berlin, Germany, describes her childhood; her Polish parents Charlotte Pink and Felix Israel; her father’s factory in Berlin and his work with his brother, Leo, installing electricity in the city; her complex family dynamic; her lack of a Jewish identity; her parents' divorce; her mother's remarriage to Otto Goetz in Switzerland; her separation from her father; her father's involvement in the Spanish Civil War; spending the summers of 1932 and 1933 in Poland with her grandparents; attending a Jewish school for about nine months, but feeling left out since she was not Jewish; her reunion with her father and their immigration first to Cuba and then to the United States; her father's death in 1946 in Nevada; her marriage and life in the US; visiting Germany in 1980; and her three children.

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Parket

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Parket

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ann Burger

    Oral history interview with Ann Burger

    Oral History

    Ann Burger (née Anni Rosalie Rautenberg), born in 1920 in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland), discusses her childhood; her father Arthur Rautenberg, who was the manager of department stores; being raised religious but not Orthodox; attending private school and then public schools; her experiences with antisemitism in school after Hitler's rise to power in 1933; her Jewish friends at school; the loss of her father's business; the family's move to Berlin, while she remained in school; her move to Berlin after her graduation in 1936; her cousin's immigration to Palestine; the family's decision to flee Germany; the efforts of their American family members to obtain visas for them; the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938; training as a nurse; a job opportunity for work in Sweden, where she remained during the war years; her parents’ journey to Spain, Cuba, and then to the United States; her reunion with them in the US in 1946; and settling in San Francisco, CA, where she married and had a family.

    Oral history interview with Volf Gershaft

    Oral history interview with Volf Gershaft

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Klara Garmel

    Oral history interview with Klara Garmel

    Oral History

    Klara Garmel (née Pleshivaya), born on February 17, 1926, discusses her childhood in Yarun’, Ukraine; her parents' work on a collective farm; her memories of Jewish school as well as participating in a pioneer Ukrainian youth organization; the onset of war with Nazi Germany in 1941; the confusion that ensued; the enforcement of anti-Jewish laws; hiding from a roundup; witnessing brutal acts perpetrated against her grandfather; escaping, with the assistance of non-Jewish friends, to Poland; encountering her mother and sister, who returned to Ukraine; her experiences moving, hiding, and passing for a non-Jew; her conversion to the Russian Orthodox faith; marrying a widower far older than she; the advance of Soviet liberating forces; reclaiming her Jewish identity; leaving her marriage; working until she had sufficient funds to return to her home; learning that all but a sister and brother had perished; remarrying and having a daughter; and immigrating to the United States in 1992 due to the antisemitism she experienced in Ukraine.

    Oral history interview with Polina Sorkin

    Oral history interview with Polina Sorkin

    Oral History

    Polina Sorkin (née Britavskaya), born on November 25, 1931 in Krutye, Ukraine, discusses her childhood in Ukraine; her brother and father's service in Soviet Army; the German invasion and seeing troops in her town; her family's unsuccessful attempt to flee; an incident in which all the Jews were rounded up and marched to a barracks where they were imprisoned; escaping the barracks; traveling from village to village; being sheltered by relatives and strangers; her reunion with family members in a ghetto; traveling to an orphanage in Balta, Ukraine, where she remained until the end of the war; reuniting with her family; her life after the war; and her immigration to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Blank

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Blank

    Oral History

    Mikhail Blank, born on April 22, 1930 in Bershad, Ukraine, discusses his childhood in Bershad; the family's experiences on a collective farm; his memories of antisemitism; the family's move from Bershad to a nearby camp after the occupation of the area by Nazi troops; an incident in which his father and brother with other men were locked in a stable from which they escaped and returned to Bershad; the occupation of the area by Romanian troops and the establishment of a ghetto in September 1941 in Bershad, where he and his family lived until the end of the war; his escape attempts; illnesses he endured; the forced labor his father and brother performed; his father's death; the liberation of Bershad in March 1944 by Soviet troops; his brother joining the fight against the Nazis and his death in battle in July 1944; his life in Bershad after the war; his military service; and his immigration to the United States in 1991.

    Oral history interview with Kurt Gronowski

    Oral history interview with Kurt Gronowski

    Oral History

    Kurt Gronowski, born on July 16, 1923 in Berlin, Germany, discusses his childhood in Berlin; the antisemitism he experienced; the destruction of his family's business during Kristallnacht, November 1938; the family's escape to Shanghai, China; his experiences while on board the ship from Italy; the family's arrival in Shanghai and the assistance they received from the Jewish community; life in the Jewish ghetto in Shanghai; conditions during the Japanese occupation; the improvement of conditions after the war ended; immigrating to the United States; the difficulties he encountered while living in Indiana; and settling in San Francisco, where he became a successful businessman.

    Oral history interview with Rosa Wigmore

    Oral history interview with Rosa Wigmore

    Oral History

    Rosa Wigmore (née Adler), born September 8, 1923 in Ulic, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia), discusses her childhood in Ulic; her family life; the changes she experienced in 1939 following the Hungarian annexation of the region; her experiences during her deportation with her family in 1944 to a ghetto in Ungvar, Hungary (now Uzhhorod, Ukraine); their deportation to Auschwitz; the selection she survived with her sister; her illness; her experiences in the infirmary and the help she received from a doctor who arranged to transfer her to another camp; the work she performed; the assistance she received; her lingering health issues; being liberated in May 1945 by Czechoslovakian partisans; her postwar experiences in Prague; her reunion with her sister; their immigration to the United States; and the fates of her other family members.

    Oral history interview with Gerta Wingerd

    Oral history interview with Gerta Wingerd

    Oral History

    Gerta Wingerd (née Alper), born on September 23, 1923 in Bеrhomet, Romania (now Berehomet, Ukraine), discusses her childhood in Czernowicz, Romania (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine); the increase in antisemitism in 1938 after fascist rule was established; the occupation of her town by Soviet forces in 1939; the retreat of the Soviet forces; her two brothers' escape toward Russia; the occupation of the area by Nazi troops; the establishment of a ghetto; her family's release; their eventual internment in a ghetto camp in Transnistria until 1944; the conditions, difficulties, and disease that were prevalent there; the family's liberation by Soviet troops; her return to Czernowicz; her escape from Romania to Vienna, Austria, where she worked for the United States Army; being sponsored by the Joint Distribution Committee to immigrate to the United States in 1949; and her experiences in New York, Minneapolis, and Great Falls, Montana before marrying and settling in Mill Valley, California.

    Oral history interview with Evelyn Lowen Apte

    Oral history interview with Evelyn Lowen Apte

    Oral History

    Evelyn Lowen Apte (née Eveline Loewenberg), born in 1929 in Goerlitz, Germany, describes her brother Gerald; her father Herman Alexander Lowen, who was a cavalry officer during the First World War; her mother Else (Gradnauer) Lowen, who had a great interest in art and attended an art school in Berlin; how her family did not consider themselves religious but when the war began the Jewish holidays became more culturally significant to the family; having a happy childhood; her father’s desire to emigrate as soon as Hitler came to power; getting around the quota system by becoming property owners in the United States; traveling through Paris, France in 1937 and taking a ship to New York, NY, arriving on February 22, 1937; the fate of her extended family; settling in Portland, Oregon; learning English; the difficult transition to American life, especially for her mother; feeling like an outsider in high school, but beginning to feel American in college; visiting Germany in 1966; how she does not enjoy speaking German with people her age, but is willing to speak German with the younger generation; attending Reed College in Oregon for two years, and then transferring to the University of California at Berkeley, where she did her undergraduate and some graduate work, finishing her education in London; becoming a social worker; considering herself an atheist, but still feeling close to the Jewish culture and traditions; the large community of Jewish refugees in Portland; and her reflections on her experiences as a refugee.

    Oral history interview with Annette Herskovits

    Oral history interview with Annette Herskovits

    Oral History

    Annette Herskovits discusses her experiences as a young child during the Holocaust, including her infancy in Paris, France; the occupation of Paris by Nazi troops; her father's decision that the family should go into hiding; hiding with her older siblings with occasional visits from their parents; the arrest and deportation of her parents in June 1943; her brother's efforts to find a safe place for her outside of Paris; being fostered with a couple in an unidentified location; being visited by her siblings during this period; and understanding that she would never see her parents again.

    Oral history interview with Guta Zlotlow

    Oral history interview with Guta Zlotlow

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Alfred Cotton

    Oral history interview with Alfred Cotton

    Oral History

    Alfred Cotton (né Baumwollspinner), born on December 29, 1925 in Hamburg, Germany, discusses his childhood in Hamburg; his Polish parents; his father’s wholesale wine distribution business; his memories of the antisemitism after the Nazis rose to power; his parents' selling their business because of the anti-Jewish boycotts; the expulsion of his father to Poland in 1938; the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938; the arrests of the teachers at the Jewish school he attended; his parents' decision to place him on a Kindertransport; leaving Germany for a boy's camp in Suffolk, England; the arrest and internment of all boys over age 16; being moved to Sheffield, England and living in a camp run by refugee women; attending a public school; learning that his parents and grandparents were deported in 1942 from Poland where they were living; his immigration to the United States in the early 1950s; and his involvement in Kindertransport reunions.

    Oral history interview with Marion Mostny

    Oral history interview with Marion Mostny

    Oral History

    Marion Mostny, born on May 22, 1927 in Berlin, Germany, discusses her childhood in Berlin; the changes she experienced during the 1930s; her parents' decision to leave Germany; her family's immigration to Santiago, Chile in April 1939; the community of Jewish refugees there; the fates of family members left behind in Germany; her life in Chile; her and her husband's decision to immigrate to the United States in 1963; their life in San Francisco, CA; her decision to write her memoirs; and the importance of Holocaust remembrance. [See her memoir titles, Conversations with my grandchildren : a journey through three continents.]

    Oral history interview with Roy Calder

    Oral history interview with Roy Calder

    Oral History

    Roy Calder describes his early life in an assimilated family in Berlin and Dresden; his invovlement in Jewish youth groups; his awareness of increased antisemitism after the Nazi rise to power; his parents' decision to send him to school in Switzerland in 1935; his attempts to convince his family to leave Germany; his regret that they did not; his decision to immigrate to Great Britain; the jobs he held in Birmingham, England; the beginning of World War II in 1939; his internment as an enemy alien in Sherbrooke, Canada; his return to England in late 1940; why he volunteered for the British army; his six year service in Scotland, Nigeria, India, and Burma; his marriage to another Holocaust survivor; his decision to immigrate to the United States in 1953; his Jewish identity; and the effects the events of the Holocaust had on him and his wife.

    Oral history interview with Alfred Batzdorff

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Felberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sandor Hollander

    Oral history interview with Sandor Hollander

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Abraham Jaeger

    Oral history interview with Abraham Jaeger

    Oral History

    Abraham Jaeger, born on March 13, 1916 in Vel'ký Bočkov, Czechoslovakia (now Velykyi Bychkiv, Ukraine), discusses his childhood; his career as a salesman; his escape in October 1939 to Palestine, where he was imprisoned for six months; his experiences serving in the British Army in Egypt, Syria, and Cyprus; joining the Israeli Army in 1948; his career and life in Israel, where he lived until 1958; his immigration to the United States; and the death of his parents and three of sisters in the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Judy Kirkham

    Oral history interview with Judy Kirkham

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Rita Kuhn

    Oral History

    The interviews describe Ms. Kuhn's childhood in Berlin, Germany, her life as the daughter of a Jewish father and non-Jewish German mother as the Nazi regime rose to power, and her growing awareness of antisemitism and change. Ms. Kuhn describes the dismay she felt after the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938, and the privations her family suffered as a consequence of the Nuremberg Laws and her father's unemployment, living with meager ration allotments, detainments, and forced labor. She discusses life trapped in Berlin during the war years, bombings, and forced labor in a small factory. Ms. Kuhn remembers the round-up of Jews in Berlin in February 1943 and her release, because her mother was German. Of particular note, Ms. Kuhn discusses the Rosenstrasse Protest of 1943, when a group of Aryan women protested the imprisonment of their Jewish husbands and children, in which her mother participated. Ms. Kuhn describes the occupation of Berlin by Russian troops, and her family being asked to identify Nazis to them. She recalls her first exposure to information about the concentration camps and the Holocaust, the time she spent in a displaced persons camp, her desire to leave Germany and her immigration to the United States in 1948. Ms. Kuhn describes her return to Berlin for the 50th year memorial of Kristallnacht, when she participated in a silent march from the a synagogue to Rosenstrasse in commemoration of the protest there.

    Oral history interview with Greta Reisman

    Oral history interview with Greta Reisman

    Oral History

    Greta Reisman, born on January 6, 1927 in Mattersdorf (Mattersburg), Austria, discusses her childhood in Nuremberg, Germany; her religious upbringing and assimilated education; the changes she experienced after the Nazis came to power; the increasing antisemitism as well as her family's decision to relocate to Yugoslavia and Hungary; her experiences in Yugoslavia; the actions her grandmother took to allow them to remain there; her decision to join the rest of the family in Hungary; and immigrating to the United States in 1940.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Schein

    Oral History

    The interviews describe Mr. Schein's childhood is Sosnowiec, his experiences with antisemitism, and how his plans to immigrate to the United States were disrupted by the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany. Mr. Schein describes being sent to his mother’s hometown, Brzostowica-Wielka, near Volkovisk, in Russian Poland, and eluding forced labor in Russia by returning to Sosnowiec. He discusses being conscripted for forced labor by the Germans in October 1940, and his experiences in several forced labor and concentration camps throughout the war years, which included Geppersdorf, Gross Sarne, Kleinmangersdorf, Wiessau, Waldau, Casper Bowder, Gintersdorf, Rostitz, Hundsfeld, Hirschberg, Gross-Rosen, Dachau, Buchenwald, and possibly others. Mr. Schein describes the conditions in these camps and the various labors he was forced to perform, being witness to medical experiments at Hundsfeld, and enduring a death march from Buchenwald. He discusses his liberation by American troops, his hospitalization, his marriage to his childhood sweetheart, their stay in a displaced persons camp in Ainring, Germany, and their immigration to the United States in June 1946. Mr. Schein relates that he was the member of his family that survived the Holocaust and his only possession when he emigrated was an accordion. He also describes his experiences in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Dan Dougherty

    Oral history interview with Dan Dougherty

    Oral History

    Dan Dougherty, born May 30, 1925 in Austin, Minnesota, describes being drafted into the United States Army 17 days after his high school graduation; transferring from the 44th Division to the 45th Division; seeing combat on the Sigfried Line and experiencing a slight injury; returning after his recovery and fighting at Aschaffenburg, Germany; the surrender of Germany seven days later; taking part in the liberation of Bavarian US prisoner of war camps and concentration camps; going towards Nuremberg, which had already fallen to the Allies; arriving in Dachau, where they found thousands of emaciated corpselike inmates; coming upon Allach concentration camp; and going to Munich, which they occupied on May 1, 1945.

    Oral history interview with Max Erlichman

    Oral history interview with Max Erlichman

    Oral History

    Max Erlichman, born in November 1931 in Caracas, Venezuela, describes his parents Tobias Erlichman and Bella Galinskaja; spending his childhood years in Amsterdam, Holland until he was taken to Westerbork with his brother and father in mid-November 1942; the deportation of his mother to Auschwitz in September of 1942; the deportation of his older brother Zacharias to Auschwitz in October of 1942; never seeing either Zacharias nor his mother again, and finding out after the war that they were both killed in the camps; being sent with his brother and father to Bergen-Belsen, where they stayed for nine weeks; being sent to a camp in Wülzburg, Germany and remaining there until they were liberated in March or April of 1945 by the American Army; recuperating along with his father and brother in a house provided to them by civilians in the town of Weissenburg in Bayern, Germany; being sent to a displaced persons camp in Würzburg for a week before being sent back to Holland; his father’s travels between Holland and the United States for a few years after the war; and immigrating to the US with his brother.

    Oral history interview with Marianne Gerhart

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Rose Herskovic

    Oral history interview with Rose Herskovic

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Eugene Katz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Tillie Molho

    Oral history interview with Tillie Molho

    Oral History

    Tillie Molho, born on December 25, 1926 in Salonika, Greece, discusses her childhood in Salonika and Athens, Greece; her experience of the Italian and German invasions of Athens; living in hiding for two years with a Christian family; the scarcity of food and the fear of discovery; her reunion with her family after the liberation of Athens; her family's attempt to reclaim their home from German collaborators; her life after the war; and her immigration to the United States in 1951.

    Oral history interview with Edith Newman

    Oral history interview with Edith Newman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Agnes Allison

    Oral history interview with Agnes Allison

    Oral History

    Agnes Allison (née Agnes Suzannah Halàsz), born on October 28, 1926 in Budapest, Hungary, discusses her childhood; her younger sister, Judy; her mother, Ilona Gero and her father, Robert Halász; attending a private German school established for the children of diplomats; the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, and the arrival of Polish refugees; the Hitler Youth movement at her school; her family’s conversion to Catholicism in 1939 and her awareness of the anti-Jewish laws in Hungary; the German occupation of Hungary beginning in March 1944 and the increased restrictions imposed on the Jewish community; her family being forced out of their home; working for the Germans for a short time in exchange for protection; becoming friendly with a German officer's chauffeur, Fritz, who told her that the German soldiers kept watch at night to protect everyone in the apartment from the Hungarian Nazis, the Arrow Cross; going into hiding in December 1944 with the help of a priest, Father Reile; remaining in hiding until the liberation of Budapest in April 1945; learning the fates of family members; and her belief that the Arrow Cross was responsible for the deaths of Budapest Jews.

    Oral history interview with Ann Gabor Arancio

    Oral history interview with Ann Gabor Arancio

    Oral History

    Ann Gabor Arancio, born on September 2, 1926 in Gyula, Hungary, discusses her childhood in Gyula; her childhood experiences with antisemitism; her experiences passing as a Christian with false identity papers; being captured in November 1944 by Nazi troops; doing forced labor in a brick factory; her escape with her mother and sister; going into hiding in several locations; the liberation of Hungary; studying in Holland; immigrating to the United States with her husband in 1950; and her divorce, remarriage, and family life in the United States. [Ms. Arancio was featured in the book, A Time to Flee: Unseen Women of Courage.]

    Oral history interview with Valerie Balint

    Oral history interview with Valerie Balint

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Yanina Cywinska

    Oral history interview with Yanina Cywinska

    Oral History

    Yanina Cywinska, born on October 28, 1929, describes growing up with her Ukrainian family, including her parents, Wladyslaw and Ludwika, and her older brother, Theodor; traveling a lot as a child; living mostly in and around Warsaw, Poland; attending ballet classes; being raised Catholic; her father’s Jewish friends; being taught by her parents to not look down on Jews or ever make an antisemitic comment; her father, who was a doctor and was asked by the Nazis, once they had invaded Poland, to perform some medical experiments on Jewish twins; his refusal to conduct the experiments and his subsequent imprisonment in jail for a short period; the Warsaw Ghetto, which was constructed in 1939; her father’s realization that he had a moral obligation to help the Jews and his failed attempts to get the local priest to help; her family’s participation in the underground movement; making several trips a day through tunnels and sewer lines into and out of the ghetto; carrying ammunition, jewelry, furs, medicine, and poison for the black market; witnessing executions and other violence; the various tunnels that they used to get in and out of the ghetto; being arrested and sent to a detention center; being taken out in the middle of the night with other people into the forest, where they dug ditches and then were lined up and shot; surviving the massacre because she was behind another woman, and she fell into the pit and pretended to be dead; climbing out of the pit and hiding in a haystack, where a farmer found her; reuniting with her parents at the detention center; her aunt, Stasha, paying the Gestapo to get Yanina and her brother out of the detention center; returning to her aunt’s house; being beaten and abused by her aunt for being a “Jew-lover”; her brother, who ran away; working as a servant for her aunt; ending up homeless and wandering around the streets of Warsaw for a while; staying for a few weeks with a couple she met at the detention center; reuniting with her parents at the detention center; being sent with the other prisoners to Auschwitz in cattle cars; the journey; arriving at Auschwitz; surviving a gas chamber after being revived by another inmate; being given a uniform; the shaving of her hair; being tattooed with a number; working in various places, including a factory, a kitchen, in the labs, and at the crematorium (note that it is generally thought that only men worked in the Sonderkommando doing the jobs that Yanina said she did); her methods for survival; being forced on a death march to Dachau; being liberated by American soldiers; staying in a displaced persons camp for a while, where she was sexually assaulted and impregnated by a soldier; her two abusive marriages after the war; meeting her third husband; the effects of the war on her emotionally; giving up on God; and her long recovery from her traumatic experiences.

    Oral history interview with Yanina Cywinska

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ilse Lewy

    Oral history interview with Ilse Lewy

    Oral History

    Ilse Lewy, born on February 26, 1920 in Wuppertal, Germany, discusses her childhood in Wuppertal (now part of Elberfeld); her memories of the increase in antisemitism after Hitler rose to power 1933; being forced to leave school and move with her family; working at a factory until 1936; her move to a children's school in Sweden that prepared students for immigration to Palestine; her travels there by train and her experiences in the school for the next two years; being summoned back to Germany to immigrate with her parents and sister to the United States; the voyage on a ship through the Panama Canal; arriving in San Francisco, CA; returning to school; her attempts at and final success in being admitted to nurse training; her experiences with antisemitism in the United States; volunteering for the United States Army; being stationed in the Philippines where she met her future husband; and their marriage and family life.

    Oral history interview with Esther Kemeny

    Oral history interview with Esther Kemeny

    Oral History

    Esther Kemeny, born on August 19, 1912 in Michalovce, Slovakia, discusses her childhood in Michalovce; attending law school and graduating 1936; incidents of antisemitism; her disbarment in 1939 because she was Jewish; meeting her husband and their marriage; the escape of her brothers and father to the United States in 1940; being deported with her husband to Auschwitz in 1944; the deplorable conditions at Auschwitz; the birth and tragic loss of her son in Auschwitz; her work in the hospital at Auschwitz; the death march she endured; her experiences at Ravensbrück concentration camp; being liberated by Russian soldiers; the assistance she received from the Red Cross; her return to Slovakia and her reunion with her husband who was in the hospital in Bratislava; their immigration to the United States in 1949; their move to New York and then Ohio; her husband's medical practices; and the birth of her daughter in 1952.

    Oral history interview with Ray Redel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Roma Barnes

    Oral history interview with Roma Barnes

    Oral History

    Roma Barnes (née Rosenmann), born on March 15, 1930 in Demblin (Deblin), Poland, describes being subjected to a lot of antisemitism in school when she was growing up; the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany in September 1939; the roundup of Jews; fleeing the roundups several times; her parents, who were caught in the first roundup and sent to Sobibor, where they were killed immediately upon arrival; returning to her town, where she met up with her uncle and stayed with him; her uncle’s preparation of fake passports for all of them to go to Switzerland; watching as her uncle was captured by the Nazis and shot; being caught and sent to a work camp, where she witnessed such atrocities as watching the hanging of her friend; being sent to Chesokova, where she was liberated; and staying in Egland after the war before going to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Margot Braun

    Oral history interview with Margot Braun

    Oral History

    Margot Braun (née Feibush), born January 28, 1923 in Berlin, Germany, describes growing up in a suburb of Berlin, where there were very few Jews; being forced to go to a Jewish school in Berlin when Hitler came to power in 1933; her family’s experience of a "pre-Kristallnacht" in June of 1938, at which time she and her family were awakened and forced to leave their businesses and move in with their relatives; her father’s many siblings, including his brother who was an extremely wealthy businessman in San Francisco, CA; leaving with her family for England in March 1939; the arrest of her parents at the beginning of the war; living with her cousin in a foster home in England; her parents’ eventual release; and her family’s immigration in October 1948 to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Ted Ellington

    Oral history interview with Ted Ellington

    Oral History

    Theodore “Ted” Ellington, born in February 1928 in Vienna, Austria, describes being an only child; growing up around antisemitism and being defensive of his Jewish identity; the religious nature of Vienna schools and having to attend Christian educational activities; being also required to go to Jewish education sessions; how there were about eight Jewish students in his elementary school class of 35 children; his father, who made a living selling foodstuffs for livestock; the economic inequality in Vienna and his family’s practice to provide lunch for an unemployed family once a week; the violence that erupted in Vienna in 1934; the Anschluss in 1938; seeing tanks in the streets and army planes flying overhead daily; the Nazi flags and swastikas all over Vienna and the pro-Nazi sentiment of many Austrians; the Nuremberg laws; being forced to attend an all-Jewish school, where Nazi children would gather outside and taunt the Jewish students; the burning of synagogues and the destruction of his grandfather's store; his memories of Nazis entering their family home and beating his father after he asked the officers for paperwork stating that they were allowed to conduct the search; how the officers took virtually everything the family owned, including his cherished stamp collection; his parents’ desire to relocate to the United States; his parents’ decision to enroll Ted in a program that was run by the Quakers that took children from Austria and placed them temporarily with a family in England; going to Belgium in April 1939 to live with his uncle; going to England in May 1939 and staying with a family there until 1946; being treated well by the English family; attending school in London; his parents’ migration to San Francisco, CA in 1940; traveling to New York, NY in 1946 and a train to San Francisco, where he reunited with his parents in May 1946; attending San Francisco City College for one year and then UC Berkeley; earning his degree in accounting in 1950; joining the US Army for two years and then becoming a CPA; getting married in 1965; and his two daughters.

    Oral history interview with Anna Hollander

    Oral history interview with Anna Hollander

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Theo Joseph

    Oral history interview with Theo Joseph

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Katz

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Katz

    Oral History

    Elisabeth Katz (née Rosenthal), born on April 23, 1920 in Fürth, Germany, discusses her childhood in an assimilated Jewish family; her mother's conversion to Judaism and reversion to Lutheranism; the ambivalent position that she felt placed in because of this difference; having to change schools once Hitler rose to power in 1933; attending a Jewish boarding school; entering nursing school in Frankfurt in 1938; her memories of the events surrounding Kristallnacht in November 1938, including the arrest of her father; immigrating to London in late 1938 to work in a hospital; being interned as an enemy alien; returning to London and working as a nurse during the Blitz; visiting her parents in 1947 in Germany, where they had remained throughout the war; her father being one of the three Jews in Furth who survived the Holocaust; immigrating to the United States in 1949; moving to San Francisco, CA; and marrying a fellow refugee.

    Oral history interview with Jim Sanders

    Oral history interview with Jim Sanders

    Oral History

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