Oral history interview with Denise Woldenberg

Oral History | Accession Number: 2000.91.97 | RG Number: RG-50.493.0097

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

Interviewee: Denise Woldenberg
Interviewer: Karen Robinson
Date: interview: 1994 June 12
Language: English
Extent: 1 videocassette (U-Matic) : sound, color ; 3/4 in..

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Special Collection: The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive
Topical Term: Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Personal narratives.
Holocaust survivors--United States.
Personal Name: Woldenberg, Denise.
Holder of Originals: Orange County California Anti-Defamation League
Legal Status: Permanent Collection
Provenance: Karen Robinson on behalf of the Anti-Defamation League, Orange County, California, conducted the interview with Denise Woldenberg on June 12, 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 08:56:36
This page: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn512082

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.