Oral history interview with Helena Ben-Josef

Oral History | Accession Number: 2000.91.87 | RG Number: RG-50.493.0087

Some video files begin with 10-60 seconds of color bars.

Interviewee: Helena Ben-Josef
Interviewer: Dr. Richard J. Prystowsky
Date: interview: 1994 March 20
Language: English
Extent: 3 videocassettes (U-Matic) : sound, color ; 3/4 in..

Expand all

Special Collection: The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive
Topical Term: Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Personal narratives.
Holocaust survivors--United States.
Personal Name: Ben-Josef, Helena.
Holder of Originals: Orange County California Anti-Defamation League
Legal Status: Permanent Collection
Provenance: Richard J. Prystowsky on behalf of the Anti-Defamation League, Orange County, California, conducted the interview with Helena Ben-Josef on March 20, 1994. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum received the copy of the interview from the Anti-Defamation League, Orange County, California on May 3, 2000.
Conditions on Access: There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
Conditions on Use: Restrictions on use
: Record last modified: 2023-11-16 08:56:32
This page: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn512072

Also in The Holocaust Oral History Project of the Anti-Defamation League, Orange County, California collection

Consists of 152 interviews of Holocaust survivors in the Orange County, California area

Date: 1992-1995

Oral history interview with Gloria Rubin

Oral History

Oral history interview with Stanley Bors

Oral History

Oral history interview with Rosalie Wattenberg

Oral History

Rosalie Wattenberg (née Rosalie Fromer), born in 1919 in Warsaw, Poland, describes her family and childhood in a large Jewish community in Warsaw; her father’s work in the leather business; her oldest brother who was a doctor; her middle brother who immigrated to the United States in 1936; her youngest brother who taught in beauty colleges; her youngest sister Helen who was born in 1923 (see RG-50.493.0003); antisemitism in Poland before WWII; the Nazis occupying the city in September 1939, and forming a ghetto; her grand-uncle and grand-aunt moving during the war and both dying of starvation within three months of each other (her grand-uncle was 86 years old when he died); marrying her husband on December 25, 1939; developing spotted typhus and her temperature rising to 105 degrees; getting pregnant at age 22 while in a camp (circa 1941); escaping the camp, going to a gynecologist and having a live abortion without any medication because she would have been killed if she had the child; her father-in-law being shot when the liquidation began; hiding in the Mila 18 bunker in Warsaw while people were grabbed in the street; developing pneumonia; going to a camp with her husband; being taken on trucks to the Warsaw Umschlagplatz (a detention and transfer camp for Jews near the ghetto); being sent to Flugplatz labor camp in Lublin, Poland, and staying there for eight weeks; walking to the Majdanek death camp, where she met two of her husband’s sisters with their children, after which she never saw them again; being given clothes that had lice; she and her sister Helen being sent to Skarzysko ammunition factory then being evacuated from Skarzysko and sent to another factory when the allies were closing in; going to Ravensbrück concentration camp for approximately four weeks then to Burgao, Turkheim, and Dachau just before it was liberated in April 29, 1945; weighing only 60 pounds at liberation; and moving with her sister and their families to the US on April 10, 1948.

Oral history interview with Helen Greenbaum

Oral History

Helen Greenbaum (née Fromer), born in 1923 in Warsaw, Poland, describes her family and childhood; her father working in the leather business; antisemitism in Poland before WWII; radios, fur coats and fur collars being taken from Jewish people; seeing people lying in the streets, swollen from hunger; bodies in the Warsaw ghetto being placed on carts and rolled into mass graves; the shooting of doctors and lawyers; her oldest brother running away with his wife and son toward Russia and hiding; her father being taken away; her youngest brother being taken to a work camp on the outskirts of Warsaw; preparing with her mother to go to the Warsaw Umschlagplatz (a detention and transfer camp for Jews), when a man instead got them work in a Schultz uniform factory in a small ghetto in Warsaw; her mother being taken away; how she and her sister (Rosalie Wattenberg, see RG-50.493.0003) were taken from the ghetto to Flugplatz labor camp in Lublin, Poland, then to Majdanek death camp where they had to do digging and carry boulders; being sent to work at the Skarzysko ammunition factory; she and her sister being sent on January 16, 1945, to the Tschenstochau ammunition factory; how she was beaten for not meeting quota; being sent to Ravensbrück; developing scurvy; walking for several days; American soldiers liberating their camp and treating them with special care; getting married and having a son in Berlin, Germany; moving to the United States in 1948 and settling in New York.

Oral history interview with Isaac Green

Oral History

Oral history interview with Stephen Nasser

Oral History

Oral history interview with Erno Rubin

Oral History

Oral history interview with Herman Goslins

Oral History

Oral history interview with Alice Friedmann

Oral History

Oral history interview with Ted Kenig

Oral History

Oral history interview with Harry Fern

Oral History

Oral history interview with Martha Posalsky

Oral History

Oral history interview with Irene Bors

Oral History

Irene Bors, born August 20, 1918, in Selezenivka, Ukraine, discusses her refugee parents Henrik and Helen Bekker; her family’s move to Lublin, Poland in 1921; growing up securely without antisemitism; being educated at home early on and then going to private university in Warsaw, Poland; meeting her husband Stanley in 1937 and getting married in 1939 when Germany had already taken over Poland; her parents staying; leaving with Stanley for a part of Poland occupied by the Soviet Union; trying to get back to her parents who were in the Lublin Ghetto which already being liquidated; her parents’ deportation to Treblinka and perishing at Majdanek; arriving at the Warsaw Ghetto, where Stanley worked in a bakery and she in a factory; their luck in escaping by jumping off of a truck on the way to work on a farm one week before the Warsaw ghetto uprising; getting in touch with her great-uncle in Grodzisk (a suburb of Warsaw) who they went with to Rembertów on the west bank of Warsaw to a villa; getting false Polish documents; being on the run after escaping from the villa once Germans arrived and murdered all who lived there; trying to get back to Lublin in January 1945 once Russian tanks came and finding out her parents were killed and Stanley’s parents were killed; settling in Berlin, Germany, where she became pregnant with her daughter Helene; finally getting papers after four years and going to the United States in August 1949; finding her husband’s family in Boston, MA and then moving to New York, NY and then Chicago, IL; buying a small chicken farm in Hebron, IN; selling the farm after five years and deciding to raise their family in Gary, IN; working for 16 years in a Methodist Hospital in Gary as a medical technologist after getting her license; and moving to California where their daughter had settled.

Oral history interview with Lilo Fern

Oral History

Oral history interview with Henry Palmer

Oral History

Henry Palmer (né Belcman), born in 1913 in Ostrog Nae Horyien, Poland (now Ostroh, Ukraine near Horyn River); his father dying during World War I from dysentery in 1919 when Henry was six years old; living with his mother and two younger sisters; the conditions in the town, which were not very good as there were many poor people; attending both Hebrew school and local Polish school; beginning Polish gymnasium (high school) around the age of 11; becoming a tutor; becoming a teacher after graduation; continuing to teach after the Russians invaded in 1939 because he could speak Russian; feeling the Russians treated them and other displaced people well; fleeing in 1941 with his wife, daughter, and son to Russia due to antisemitic threats to his life; moving to Czelabinsk (Chelyabinsk, Russia); being given citizenship immediately; moving with his family in 1941 to Uzbekistan, where he was a teacher because he could speak German; being a bookkeeper but also having a plot of land which he and his family grew rice; staying in Uzbekistan for five years; working hard but being happy; a 1946 agreement that allowed Polish Jews to return to Poland; deciding to be a director of orphans sent back to Poland; the large amount of antisemitism and numerous returning Jews being killed; the Joint sponsoring his family to go to Paris, France; working for the Jewish Agency in Palestine, the Department for Children which helped moved children in Europe to Israel; living in Paris for eight years; his wife having their third child (son) while in Paris; moving to Detroit, Michigan in 1954 to be near his wife’s brother-in-law; changing his last name to Palmer due to difficulty of last name spelling; working as a bookkeeper with the help of the Joint; attending college and becoming an accountant; retiring in 1978 at the age of 65; and moving to California.

Oral history interview with Rubin Minsky

Oral History

Rubin Minsky, born on February 18, 1919 in Warsaw, Poland, discusses his sisters Tova, Leah, Hanna, and Luba; being the second oldest; his father who made caps, pens, and other products that his mother helped to sell; his family being able to stay together until 1942; the establishment of the large ghetto in 1941 and a smaller ghetto in 1942; the conditions which were very bad and many people were starving; his youngest sister being arrested at the beginning of 1942 and being sent on a transport to Treblinka (she did not survive); Germans arriving in the ghettos with tanks; staying in basement bunkers; being sent to Majdanek for about a month; being sent to Auschwitz and his work building a factory which produced synthetic rubber and synthetic gasoline for three years; being sent to Buchenwald around 1945; arriving in a train which had about 10 wagons that were mostly filled with people who did not survive the journey; being liberated; going to Halberstadt, Germany, where he met and married his wife; sneaking into Belgium after being denied a visa; living in Belgium for four years; the birth of his first son in 1946; moving in 1953 with his family to the United States; his three children; and his tattoo from Auschwitz.

Oral history interview with Rose Minsky

Oral History

Oral history interview with Jacob Eisenbach

Oral History

Oral history interview with Herman Leefsma

Oral History

Oral history interview with Margaret Guiness

Oral History

Margaret Guiness (née Wohl), born in Košice, Czechoslovakia, discusses her childhood; being the youngest of 10 children; her father Theador Wohl who was a very religious man and worked in the lumber business; her mother Anna Ritter; the Hungarian control in 1939 of their part of Czechoslovakia; by law not being allowed to speak their language and having to attend a Hungarian school; having to follow the Nuremberg laws; the German occupation in March 1944; being forced to wear the Jewish star and having to go to local police for to be identified and counted; the Germans taking the most important Jewish community members as hostages, including Margaret’s sister Manya and her husband who owned a car garage; the hostages never being released; his sister Elizabeth (Bozhena) who procured papers for herself and Margaret (age 14) and fleeing for Budapest, Hungary; the deportation of Jews from Košice to Auschwitz, including two of her sisters, her brother-in-law, and their two children; one of her brothers being hanged at Theresienstadt; being arrested along with her sister and held in the Gestapo prison for four months; hiding their Jewish identities; being sent with her sister in 1944 to Ravensbrück concentration camp; the conditions in the camp which were horrifying, cold, and brutal; being determined to survive to ensure that she would be able to tell the world what she saw and what they had all experienced; the horrifying medical experiments conducted at Ravensbrück; volunteering for all types of work, allowing her to smuggle food to her sister and her barrack; volunteering with her sister to work at a factory in Dortmund, Germany to help build rocket bombs; staying there until spring of 1945; being sent to Bergen-Belsen with her sister in February 1945; conditions at Bergen-Belsen being worse than those at Ravensbrück; the typhoid epidemic and people dying quickly and easily; finding one of her other sisters at Bergen-Belsen; sharing a bunk with Anne Frank for a short time; becoming very ill with typhoid and being plagued with many feverish dreams; seeing the camp Commandant and the other guards being stripped of their weapons and their ranks in April 1945 and thinking it was a dream while in fact the British had arrived and they were being liberated; being sent with her sisters to a hospital where they met with Swedish delegates and decided to move to Sweden, where she lived for three years; the death of her sister Elizabeth six months after their liberation; being contacted by an uncle in America who was able to send her papers; and arriving in the United States in 1949.

Oral history interview with John Friedmann

Oral History

John Friedmann, born October 19, 1913 in Vrbove, Czechoslovakia (now Slovenia), describes his life before the war; his parents Adolph and Rudolphina; his father’s occupation as an electrician and cameraman; his family’s move to Austria when he was three months old; his father’s service in the military; his education in public school; his parent’s divorce; his graduation and occupation as a linoleum businessman; his arrest by the Gestapo and transport to Dachau; his time in Dachau until July 1938 when he was transferred to Buchenwald; his transfer to Linz, Austria in October 1938; his release from Linz; his acquisition of a passport that allowed him to travel to Shanghai; his job working for the British City Government of Shanghai supervising trash dumps; his jobs for Toyota and Nissan that allowed him to escape the ghetto; his survival in Shanghai; his mother who stayed in Shanghai; his time in Canada after his unsuccessful attempt to enter the United States; his marriage in 1950; his and his family’s immigration to California in 1952.

Oral history interview with Katalin Rubin

Oral History

Oral history interview with Marianne Dazzo

Oral History

Oral history interview with Jenny Zavatsky

Oral History

Oral history interview with Fanny Labin

Oral History

Oral history interview with Nathan Caron

Oral History

Oral history interview with Mary Kress

Oral History

Oral history interview with Mel Mermelstein

Oral History

Oral history interview with Francis Derkum

Oral History

Oral history interview with Hans Goldsmith

Oral History

Oral history interview with Anatol Chari

Oral History

Oral history interview with Gerda Seifer

Oral History

Oral history interview with Rita Kaaren

Oral History

Oral history interview with Henry Kress

Oral History

Henry Kress (né Heniek Krzesiwo), born on July 26, 1924 in Sosnowiec, Poland, describes his family life and childhood; his parents, sister, and close extended family; his father who worked for a large fabric company; graduating in 1939 from school and going to Krakow, Poland due to the impending war; his parents deciding to move 25 miles outside of Krakow because of the bombings; the destruction caused by the German occupation; Jews being ordered to wear the Star of David; getting up every day at 2:00 AM to stand in line until 7:00-8:00 AM to get bread for his family; the liquidation of the ghetto in August 1943 and the subsequent deportations; hiding in a bunker with his parents and several others until they were found; being placed on a train and sent to Auschwitz; his mother telling him “I am going to die, but you are young, try to survive”; arriving in Auschwitz and being separated from his parents, which was the last time he saw them; being sent to Birkenau but eventually placed in Auschwitz Block 1 and then Block 23; working to deliver coal and discovering his sister alive in Birkenau and sneaking over to see her; Henry and his friend Leo escaping from a Death March in January 1945; making it back to Poland and being given a job with the Russian Secret Service; leaving for the American zone in Germany; waiting for three years for his visa to the United States; arriving in the US in 1940 and meeting up with his sister; getting married to Mary Kress in 1951 (he had met her in Germany in 1946 and she had also survived Auschwitz); and having two children and living in Irvine, CA.

Oral history interview with Helena Leefsma

Oral History

Helena Leefsma (m. Van Hasselt), born on June 27, 1928 in Groningen, Netherlands, discusses being the youngest of four daughters; her father’s work trading cattle; having a very loving family and happy childhood; living in a very friendly community; the German invasion of Holland in May 1940; their friends who got papers to go to the United States before the Germans invaded; her father’s reluctance to leave Holland because of his business and family (they didn’t think Holland would experience what was taking place in Germany); the restrictions placed on Jews; her father boarding up their windows every evening because rocks were thrown at them; the arrest of her father in May 1942 and never seeing him again (he perished in Auschwitz); her oldest sister Selma, who was part of the resistance and urged their family to go into hiding in August 1942; staying with her mother throughout the war as they hid in many homes in Holland; the arrest of Selma in 1943 (she died in 1943 in Buchenwald); the death of her sister Henrietta in 1943; being liberated May 5, 1945; returning with her mother to their home in Groningen; getting married in 1948; and immigrating to the United States in December 1974.