Oral history interview with Ilse Wolfson

Oral History | Accession Number: 2000.91.108 | RG Number: RG-50.493.0108

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

Interviewee: Ilse Wolfson
Interviewer: Sally Schwartz
Date: interview: 1994 August 30
Language: English
Extent: 2 videocassettes (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: Wolfson, Ilse.
Holder of Originals: Orange County California Anti-Defamation League
Legal Status: Permanent Collection
Provenance: Sally Schwartz on behalf of the Anti-Defamation League, Orange County, California, conducted the interview with Ilse Wolfson on August 30, 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 08:56:40
This page: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn512093

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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