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Oral history interview with Henry Krystal

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1993.A.0089.32 | RG Number: RG-50.155.0032

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    Oral history interview with Henry Krystal
    Transcript
    Could you tell me your name, please, and where you're from?
    Henry Krystal.
    And I'm from Sosnowiec, Poland.
    Tell me a little bit about what you remember of Sosnowiec
    before the war.
    Well, it was in a way a kind of a border town
    between the area called Zaglebie, which was more Polish,
    and the Eastern Upper Silesia, which was more German.
    And throughout the area there were
    coal mines and steel smelting, and other industrial plants.
    And there was a great deal of commerce,
    people coming to Sosnowiec to do their shopping
    from further west all the way to the German border.
    And the population of Sosnowiec--
    the Jewish population of Sosnowiec was about 30,000
    and had a main synagogue and many smaller synagogues
    and a religious and secular schools.
    There was a Jewish secular Zionist gymnasium, too,
    which I also attended.
    And--
    You were born--
    I'm sorry.
    You were born in what year?
    1925.
    Did you attend public school besides the Zionist school?
    Or was it--
    Yes, I attended public school until the fourth grade,
    and then I went to that private school from the fourth grade
    through the eighth grade.
    After I finished the eighth grade was the German invasion.
    And what language was spoken at home?
    My parents spoke to us Polish.
    Sometimes they spoke to each other in Yiddish.
    They were brought up on Yiddish, but they were both trying--
    especially my mother was ambitious for our own--
    for our preparation to go to as far as
    we could with our education.
    And that was one of the means of doing it.
    So you would-- you would have had plans to become integrated
    into Polish society.
    Yeah.
    What was the curriculum like at a Zionist school in Sosnowiec?
    Well, we had all the subjects that
    were taught in Polish in the public schools
    and the Polish state-sponsored schools.
    Plus, from the first grade on, we had Hebrew.
    And then as the time progressed, we
    had Jewish history, Hebrew literature, and one course
    on the study of religious laws.
    And both the Bible and these religious laws
    were two different subjects, and we studied them in Hebrew.
    We could speak in Hebrew, and we were discussing them
    more or less like a course, the Bible as literature
    and as history.
    This was not a religious school, was it?
    No.
    I take it then your family was not a particularly
    religious family?
    Well, not totally.
    My father still had attachments to Orthodox religion
    since that was the only kind that was available.
    But as he was growing up, there was a rebellion.
    His brothers rebelled, and his cousins and so on,
    from the Orthodox way of living and dressing.
    They shaved off their beards.
    They moved, went places.
    My father went to Lódz, where he learned
    to be an accountant, a bookkeeper-accountant.
    And his brothers also rebelled in certain ways,
    but the framework was still of the Orthodox Jewish religion,
    which he followed somewhat inconsistently,
    but he had an attachment to it.
    What was your father's name?
    Herschel-- Herman.
    And your mother?
    Dora.
    Her Hebrew name was Dvora.
    And her maiden name?
    Grossman.
    Brothers and sisters, did you have?
    I had one brother who was seven years older than myself.
    His name was Samuel.
    And what about extended family, grandparents, aunts, uncles?
    You said your father had brothers.
    Yes.
    My parents' family-- families lived in the area of Kielce
    in more central Poland.
    We were right next to the German border,
    but they were in central Poland in that area.
    And my paternal grandparents lived
    in a village called Bialogon, and my grandfather
    had a country store and a piece of land on which he mainly he
    had an orchard on it.
    And also there was a foundry in this village,
    and the crystals had a hereditary privilege
    that they were the painters.
    They painted the potbelly stoves and other things
    that turned out.
    They painted them silver or whatever they did.
    They had this kind of a concession, as it were.
    How did they get that?
    Well, the story was that my great grandfather,
    after whom I was named, found a purse filled with money.
    And somehow he returned it.
    He found somehow that it belonged to the owner
    or to the director of that foundry.
    And he returned it to him, and he was awarded.
    He got that job, and it became a sort of a tradition.
    Which would have stopped with your grandfather, it seemed?
    No, it didn't.
    It didn't it went on for three generations.
    For two generations.
    Because then my father had three brothers and three sisters.
    And they all left that village and went different ways,
    and they were of course not interested
    in staying there and painting.
    They went into various kinds of enterprises
    and so as I was growing up, they were just
    my grandparents living there.
    And--
    [BLOWS NOSE]
    Excuse me.
    My maternal grandparents lived in a shtetl called Bodzentyn,
    or in Yiddish, [YIDDISH].
    And that was considerably larger and had a larger
    Jewish population.
    And my grandfather had been a rather well-to-do merchant
    of cloth that he sold.
    People then took it to the tailor,
    had a suit or clothes made, or they made it themselves.
    And my mother was brought up in this atmosphere.
    She was the oldest of four daughters.
    And the youngest of them-- and the youngest of my grandparent's
    children was my uncle.
    One son, they had one son and four daughters.
    And my mother was brought up during the period of prosperity,
    and she was a very ambitious and interested person,
    especially in acquiring education for herself
    and sharing it with the young people of her age.
    And--
    How did she do that?
    Well, for one thing, she apparently
    she organized some teaching, and she organized a library,
    and she had some activities that brought the people together
    outside of the synagogue.
    And how did that sit with her parents
    or with other members of the community?
    Well, not very well.
    Especially since they, at a very early age--
    I believe maybe between 13 and 15,
    they were trying to arrange a marriage for her.
    And she absolutely refused to go through with it
    and had somehow the stamina or the stubbornness
    to make it stick.
    It sounds like they were very Orthodox.
    Yes.
    This grandfather was a Hassid, and he
    was a follower of the rabbi from Ostrowiec, Ostrovtzer rebbe.
    And he even had some Mr. Miracle stories
    to tell about what the rabbi had done for him.
    But during--
    So my mother finally then prevailed, and then she
    married a man that she chose.
    And this grandfather fell on bad times
    during World War I. He was looted three different times.
    Every time the cossacks came in, they looted his store.
    And also during World War I, he developed some kind
    of ear infection, and he was--
    from that time on, he was losing his hearing.
    So after that, he didn't do as well.
    But this part of the family, they stayed together longer,
    and I remember occasions of visiting them.
    Let me step back for a second.
    So you had 10 aunts and uncles.
    Did your aunts and uncles also have children?
    Yes.
    Could you could you estimate how large the first cousins, aunts,
    uncles, grandparents might have been?
    Three, five.
    About 10 on my father's side, grandchildren.
    And on my mother's side, only one of her sisters got married
    and had one son, and then my mother had two sons.
    So there were actually three only on my mother's side
    of the family.
    13 grandchildren, 10, 20 aunts and uncles?
    Roughly 50 people?
    How many survived the war?
    I had three uncles on my father's side
    that emigrated to Israel, and their children survived the war.
    Three brothers, who were the daughters of the sons of an aunt
    survived the war in Germany and went to Israel.
    And on my mother's side, nobody survived the war except myself.
    My mother's cousins survived.
    Some survived the war.
    From a much larger extended family,
    my second cousins once removed.
    And they were two sisters in New York
    and three brothers in Toronto.
    But from your immediate family, you were the only survivor?
    Yes.
    Let me return for a moment to your grandparents.
    You said your maternal grandfather was a Hassid
    and that you remember visiting on occasion.
    What was his reaction to his grandson attending a Zionist
    school?
    Well, we didn't visit that often,
    but the problem started when I went
    to visit my maternal grandparents
    and spent there the summer of 1939.
    And he objected to my whole appearance.
    I was wearing a school uniform, and this was shortly
    after my bar mitzvah, and they gave me
    the honor of being called to the Torah and reading the Torah.
    And I was trained in the Sephardic pronunciation,
    and the people didn't quite understand what I was saying.
    They were not used to it.
    Some knew what it was, but I overheard
    one man asking the other, what is he talking, jargon?
    Jargon was one of the words for Yiddish
    that was used in that area.
    So I was not only by my grandfather
    but by the whole shtetl considered
    as a kind of an enemy alien.
    And I felt very uncomfortable there.
    They did not-- they were not inclined to accept anybody
    like me.
    Did they see you as a shegetz?
    Yes, as a matter of fact, my name in Poland was Henryk.
    This was a nickname from Henry.
    But they sometimes referred to me as Gienek,
    signifying that I was not a Jew.
    So you have less than fond memories of that.
    And that's where you were when the war began?
    Yes, that's where I was.
    And I was about to go home when the war broke out
    September the 1st.
    Before we begin with that, in general, what kinds of feelings
    you have about life before the war for you
    and your family in Poland?
    Well, it wasn't very easy for us because my father
    worked hard, long hours, and we were just making it.
    And then we had extra expenses first
    because when I was five years old
    I had a serious illness, which involved more
    than our resources were at the time.
    And then when I was--
    my brother being seven years older than myself,
    he graduated high school, and then
    he worked for a couple of years or maybe a year with my father
    as a bookkeeper and saved some money.
    And he went to study medicine in Italy, in Pisa and in Bologna.
    And that, again, was really beyond our means.
    So we had financial hardship.
    And my father was a hard worker but not able to really,
    with the exception of some good years,
    to really make a good deal of money
    so that our life would be comfortable.
    However, we managed, and when I was going to the--
    this was a private high school, but I was given a scholarship
    grant that helped me to pay.
    And so financially we were rather tight,
    but we had a good life, and we did things for fun.
    Especially after my illness, I was
    told that I needed to be in the mountains
    every summer to avoid pulmonary problems.
    So the summer, my mother and the two sons, when we were little,
    we would go up in some mountain and rent a room from a farmer
    and spend the mountains-- the summer in the mountains.
    And in the winter, we did other sports, and we just--
    and I had good friends in school,
    and my general recollection is that we were doing pretty well.
    Did you have any non-Jewish friends among them?
    No.
    Well, my father worked for some non-Jewish people,
    and we made some friends with them
    through the parents but not their children.
    And we were-- because of our separate education,
    we were isolated from the non-Jewish population
    and children.
    And the housing was segregated too.
    And I was living in the center of the Jewish part of Poland,
    and I never met any.
    But there was a big field that originally they used.
    There must have been a coal mine there or a steel mine.
    They unloaded the waste products on that huge field,
    and eventually we were playing in it in the winter with sleds
    and the sum of various things.
    This was our playground.
    Well, whenever we encountered non-Jewish kids,
    they would generally attack us.
    There was just no contact on a friendly basis
    that I can recall.
    Do you know of any other personal or family incidents
    of anti-Semitism in Poland?
    Well, the biggest one of all is that in 1938, two men came
    into my grandfather's store.
    This is your paternal grandfather.
    My paternal grandfather.
    And they beat him to death.
    He lived just a couple of days after that.
    My grandmother lived maybe a couple of weeks,
    and she was able to describe what happened at these two men
    came in, and she went to the cash register.
    And she said, what do you want, money?
    Here's money.
    They didn't want any money.
    They didn't take any money.
    They just beat them and left them there.
    This was in a village outside of Kielce, where as you know,
    there were pogroms even after the Nazis left.
    And how long had the Krystal family been there?
    For as many generations as I have been able to trace back.
    So they were not strangers.
    No.
    You were 13 then?
    Yes, I was 13 then.
    Do you recollect what happened when news came of this?
    Well, we were bereaved and shocked.
    And it was terrible, but it was not that surprising
    because there were a number of pogroms
    all over Poland at that time.
    And no one in the family said, let's get out of here.
    Well, my father wanted to get out of there for a long time.
    And my uncle, actually one uncle who was well-to-do,
    he owned a sawmill.
    And he was able to get out in 1938 with his son and daughter
    through a system that the British set up
    that he had to deposit something like 9,000
    pounds with the British, and they
    were supposed to refund it to him when he got to Palestine,
    but they never did refund it.
    But anyway, he made it, and he saved his family.
    But we were not able to go that way.
    As an alternative, we were talking
    about coming to the United States.
    And my father had his favorite older sister lived in Detroit,
    and they were always writing to each other
    and dreaming of him coming here.
    But there were complicated, complicated things involved,
    and we just never could make it.
    Tell me a little bit about the beginning of the war.
    You were away from home with your grandparents.
    How did you find out the war had begun?
    Oh, I was on the newspapers and on the radio
    constantly as the things were approaching,
    and then even in the first days of the war.
    And then my mother came for me.
    I don't know how she came, but in going back,
    Jews were not allowed to use the train,
    so we went back by horse and buggy,
    which I think took us three days and two nights.
    We slept in barns and things like that.
    So she took me back home as soon as she could.
    And do you remember seeing the Germans march in?
    Did they come into that shtetl?
    Yes, they came in, first on motorcycles and then cars
    and just paraded around and didn't do anything
    in that particular shtetl, didn't
    stay there very long either.
    They had bigger places to secure,
    but they went through it.
    At that time, they didn't do anything.
    And what was it like back in Sosnowiec?
    Of course, Sosnowiec was occupied the very first day.
    And a couple of days later, they round up--
    they took some Jewish men, among them my father,
    and they took them into a compound
    where they tortured them.
    They made them run up and down, all kinds of things,
    beating them.
    And they didn't know what was going to happen.
    I think they took a few out, and they killed.
    And at the same time, they were under this--
    I think they may have been organizing the Judenrat as well.
    And then they released my father.
    So we were glad to see him home, but we were all--
    we got the message that this was going
    to be something we couldn't even have imagined before.
    Had he been beaten?
    Yes, but not wounded, just beaten.
    And well--
    So what did your family decide to do?
    Were they just going to wait?
    Well, at that time we couldn't do very much because we didn't
    have the capital, you know?
    But just a short time afterwards, a matter of weeks,
    they round--
    they called up something like 500 young men,
    and they were going to send them somewhere to a camp
    for labor in the East.
    And my brother was one of those that received a notice.
    And so my parents decided that they were not
    going to wait for him to be taken there.
    So they got him ready, and he went and went across
    to the side that has been just occupied by the Soviet Union.
    So he was in the area of Ukraine.
    And since it was certain that this area was
    going to be part of the Reich, my parents
    then packed some things that I could take.
    And there was a Pole from my mother's hometown
    who was working at the post office,
    and he was going to go back to Bodzentyn.
    So I went with him on the train, taking all
    that my parents could bundle up and send, even a bed.
    And we took it back, and I was sent back to Bodzentyn.
    And then, again, while the border was still not that solid,
    my father decided to go across and join my brother.
    So he came to Bodzentyn to say goodbye to me.
    And somehow they felt that I was just a boy,
    so I would be all right but the men would be in greatest peril.
    And I just--
    I don't recall if I ever even asked him,
    take me with you although being in Bodzentyn
    was not my favorite place to be.
    So he went over too, and then so we were divided.
    My mother was still in the apartment, guarding
    our property, and lived through a terrible winter there.
    And then in the spring, in order to come to join me,
    she had to smuggle herself through a frontier,
    like a border.
    Because that area was all part of the Reich,
    and I was in the central general government, Generalgouvernement.
    And she came in the early spring, and she joined me.
    She was in bad condition, emaciated, looking terrible.
    And I was not in very good shape myself.
    Was it a problem with getting food, even in Bodzentyn?
    Well, it was mostly very hard for her there.
    For me at this time, food was not yet
    an acute problem because things were not yet tightened up
    in the small towns and villages.
    But it was getting there.
    Was that the last time you saw your father?
    Yes.
    And your mother then came to you.
    Yes.
    And what happened next?
    Well, my mother and I took a room.
    My parents-- my grandparents had a store and a kind
    of an apartment behind it.
    And then they had another apartment upstairs.
    My mother felt bad.
    I probably contributed to it by telling
    her what had happened to me during the winter, which
    wasn't very nice.
    And so we took a room, and we moved upstairs, just
    the two of us.
    Were there German ordinances passed at this point?
    Yes.
    Was there a ghetto already?
    It was not a ghetto, but it was a Judenrat,
    and they treated the whole area as a kind of a Jewish ghetto
    but not walled in.
    You didn't go to school.
    No.
    Food rationing?
    Yes, I think there was food rationing gradually established.
    But most of the time, yeah, I'm sure that there
    was food rationing on the important items like bread
    and other things.
    And how was it living there with the rest of your family?
    Well, that first winter it was very bad because my aunt
    came home from Lódz with her husband and her son.
    And they became the favorites, and I was out.
    And so it was rather difficult for me.
    But in general, gradually they were establishing a pattern.
    The area was apparently under the jurisdiction
    of some feldgendarmerie.
    That's like supposedly the equivalent of military police.
    But they would come at least once a week
    when there was a market place, and the farmers
    would come in and bring things, sell things and buy things.
    And they started increasingly to kill people
    and sometimes at random, sometimes
    at the flimsiest excuse, like if you were running or if you--
    they started beating you, and they would just
    do it until they killed you.
    And also they started taking people
    to various work camps and various work projects,
    and also the Judenrat then got organized,
    and they were trying increasingly
    to develop local work places so that the people wouldn't
    be sent away.
    And so they worked whatever they could figure out,
    various assignments on the roads and maintenance and things
    like that.
    So there was increasing pressure for slave labor and for control
    and diminished food, and then they send in a transport of Jews
    from the city of Plock, P-L-O-C-K,
    which was in Northwest Poland.
    And that means that the local Jews had to take them
    in into their own homes.
    And we got especially squeezed with that apartment up there so
    that there were three rooms.
    And we were evicted from the large room
    into a smaller room which had a little kitchen,
    and the other people were going through it.
    It wasn't the kitchen.
    It was a stove, an iron stove.
    And it was increasingly also dirty, and lice were starting,
    and then we had a typhus epidemic.
    And both my mother and I went through typhus.
    And my mother again became much weakened by this typhus.
    Do you remember the lice?
    Yes.
    Yes, it was-- it was a terribly humiliating experience.
    It was a feeling of degradation.
    These experiences do you think were
    common to the Jewish population at the time?
    To most, except the few very wealthy maybe.
    People in the Judenrat?
    Yeah.
    Was a ghetto was created in Kielce.
    Yeah.
    Were you sent into the ghetto?
    No, we were actually never sent into the ghetto.
    And the ghetto in Kielce was until fairly late
    not a closed ghetto.
    You could get in there, and you could get out.
    In fact, my mother sent me there once by horse and buggy.
    I was staying there with an aunt, and she had two children.
    One was my age, a daughter, and a son a little younger.
    My mother sent me there, I think,
    because she felt she was coming down with typhus.
    And it took me a little while before I got the news
    that she was taken and put into the synagogue, where
    they established a kind of an isolation for the people
    with typhus.
    And so I came back, and of course I
    was not allowed to go in.
    I just waited outside.
    And she survived it.
    She was hospitalized.
    There was a great-aunt who did not survive.
    Had you already had typhus at this point?
    No, I think I got it later.
    So you came back to--
    and what transpired there?
    I mean, how were your grandparents responding
    to all of this?
    Well, they were also in big trouble themselves.
    Really, my grandparents and their two single daughters,
    for a while they were living downstairs.
    Then the uncle and aunt with their son came up for a while.
    Then they went back down.
    And by going back down, they were all
    compressed together so they didn't
    have to take any strangers in.
    They didn't have much room in there.
    So they actually, from the point of view of the housing,
    did somewhat better, but they were just as badly squeezed
    financially and food-wise and with the danger
    of going getting caught and being sent to labor camps.
    Now, you'd heard about the labor camps?
    We had heard some things, and actually people went there,
    and some came back.
    And other rumors were going around about being sent East.
    That was a mysterious word.
    You were sent East, you don't come back.
    What did you think or what did people
    talk about in terms of this entire experience?
    Did anyone try to figure out what it meant,
    where it was headed?
    Yes, we were talking about it all the time.
    We were trying to find out what was
    going on in other cities, what was
    happening in ghetto Lódz, what was happening in ghetto Warsaw.
    We were constantly talking and worrying about it.
    And in 1942, we became aware that the ghettos
    were being liquidated and that they were being sent away East.
    And you were still-- so you spent that period
    in the village.
    In the shtetl, and I had a hiding place that I made.
    And many times when they were catching people,
    I was hiding there.
    On some occasions, I managed to run away.
    So I was doing some work under these local premises, forced
    labor but I did not get sent to a camp.
    When they did these roundups, what were those like?
    Well, they were just--
    they would bring more German troops
    and use the Polish police and eventually also
    the Jewish police, go from house to house and take all the men
    and send them away.
    Put them on trucks?
    Put them on trucks, beat them, beat along the way living
    daylight out of some.
    If they found somebody hiding, they might just shoot them.
    They just-- they were shooting people and killing people
    all along, sometimes just for recreation.
    And did you see any of that?
    Yeah.
    Being shot?
    Do you remember the first few times you saw that?
    Well, I remember one time we were upstairs,
    and I was looking out, and I saw these gendarmes
    going around and shooting people.
    I got so scared.
    I was shaking.
    And other times, I was just becoming so horrified
    that I think that hiding in there--
    I had a dark place where I was hiding--
    was just as well as much for my safety as for my
    being isolated, so that I wouldn't
    be part of what is going on.
    Had you heard of Treblinka?
    Not at that time.
    Or Auschwitz?
    No, not at that time, not in that place.
    We're still in 1942 at this point.
    What was the next thing that strikes you
    as being the most significant aspect of your experience now?
    Well, then it became clear that they were liquidating
    the ghettos, and then that they were
    coming closer and closer to us.
    And we started to try to imagine what
    was happening to those people.
    And the idea that they were killing them
    was talked about a lot.
    And then, when the cities close by
    were part of that evacuation liquidation program,
    then we were sure it was coming this way.
    It was just a matter of when they were coming.
    Now, we were close to a number of labor camps,
    like Skarzysko was one close by.
    There were a number of labor camps
    around in that vicinity because that
    was the central Polish industrial area, which
    the Germans converted many of to ammunition factories.
    And so they started coming with trucks.
    They just did it on two different days,
    taking people to somewhere, just to Starachowice.
    And the first day, I didn't go.
    I didn't want to go because I didn't want to leave my mother.
    But I had a very good friend there whose name was Chaim.
    And he encouraged me to go, and my mother,
    the first day when I didn't go, she became completely frantic.
    She became practically berserk that I should go to the camp.
    So the second day, I did go.
    And Chaim went with me, and some cousins were on the same truck.
    And as we were leaving, I was looking down,
    and my mother was standing there just dissolving in tears,
    knowing that this is a goodbye forever.
    And so they took us to the city of Starachowice.
    Wierzbnik was another name there.
    And they took us to work, and they gave us work cards.
    But then they took us back to the Jewish area for a few days,
    just three or four days.
    And then on Yom Kippur, 1942, they
    surrounded that city, the Jewish--
    the whole city as far as I know.
    And they--
    This is not where you were--
    where your mother was.
    Where I was.
    In the meantime, they had also already done it
    where my mother was.
    My mother, I was told, was trying to smuggle herself out
    and to walk to join me where I was, to the city.
    She couldn't.
    She couldn't have gone to the camp to work,
    and she couldn't have joined me, really, but she tried.
    And they caught her and put her in jail,
    but they released her on the day that they
    took all the Jewish population, loaded them.
    They requested the farmers, the peasants
    to provide horse and buggies, a kind of hay transportation
    wagons.
    And they took them to the railroad, and they shipped them.
    To Treblinka?
    Yes.
    And then on Yom Kippur, they did the same in Starachowice.
    The people with the work cards were marched away,
    and then the rest of the population
    was assembled on the marketplace and also
    shipped by wagon, by train, by those closed
    trains to Treblinka.
    Did you realize this was the last time you
    were going to see your mother?
    Yes.
    I couldn't-- I couldn't prove it, but I had the feeling.
    Yes.
    And had you heard from your father and brother?
    We had heard from my father and from my brother
    during the period that--
    two periods.
    One was when the Germans and the Soviets got along.
    And then the second was after the Germans
    occupied all of Ukraine.
    Then they would on occasion send us a card,
    and I think on one occasion even a parcel.
    And they were somehow thinking of how they could come back
    and join us so that we would be together .
    But apparently, it didn't-- nothing worked out.
    Do you know where they were?
    They were in the area, in the vicinity of Tarnopol.
    So you were taken to Starachowice,
    to the camp because you had you had an Arbeitskarte.
    what were you going to do there?
    Well, I was I was put--
    there were two camps in Starachowice.
    The Strzelnica was one, which was the camp
    was on top of a mountain.
    And there was the another camp for craftsmen
    that worked for the Germans downstairs
    and of that same camp.
    And the water supply, a stream was there,
    and the kitchen was there.
    And I was taken up to the camp up, and in the process
    I was separated from my friend Chaim.
    And I saw a line which the people
    said that there was a line to go down and to get some water.
    This was a very hot day, and I had thought maybe
    I could get some water.
    And really I wanted to see if I could find Chaim and be together
    with him in the camp down below the hill.
    And it turned out that that was not the purpose of that line.
    They were taking that line to work on the night
    shift in the factory.
    So I was taken right that night to the factory,
    and I started working that night in that factory.
    This is an armaments factory.
    An armament factory, yes.
    OK.
    That's a good place to stop, I think.
    Before we come back to the armaments factory
    in Starachowice, let me ask you a question about Bodzentyn.
    Do you recall any specific gendarmes, Polish police,
    any individuals who were particularly bad killers?
    I do as images of those gendarmes especially.
    But peculiarly, I have blocked out their names.
    I don't recall their names.
    But one that was one of the worst killers and sadists, there
    was such a fear of him that on one occasion,
    my friend Chaim and I were walking down the street.
    We came to a crossroad off of the market,
    and he was coming up, and Chaim got scared
    and started running away, and he started running after him
    and hit him over the head with some wooden stick
    that he was carrying and beat him, got him down, and then
    put him to jail.
    And this was already special that he didn't just
    take out his pistol and shoot him right there.
    But once they got into jail, Chaim's older brother
    was a very good friend of the head
    of the Judenrat in Bodzentyn.
    Because he was originally from Sosnowiec,
    but he was now living for many years in Starachowice.
    And anyway, they interfered and probably bribed him
    so that he agreed for Chaim to be released.
    But there were many incidences where
    people were just attacked and killed and maimed.
    And again and again, all the time, the population
    was terrorized increasingly.
    Was it the same in Starachowice, in the labor camp?
    There were in the first place beatings.
    There was a long march a number of kilometers
    from the camp to the factory.
    This is where you worked.
    Where I worked.
    And that was-- the march was an occasion for beatings,
    especially since we had to walk at night,
    and they wanted us to be terrorized.
    And the beatings in the factory were just occasional.
    For instance, one of those early nights when
    I was working in the first part of the plant, a civilian
    came in drunk at night, and he didn't like the way
    that I was transporting those shells,
    and he started beating me.
    And the more I was beaten, the worse he liked what I was doing.
    And he kept it up, and he was finally
    distracted by one of the women that was also working there.
    Otherwise, he might have killed me right then.
    Did she do this deliberately, do you think?
    Yes.
    So she saved your life.
    Yes.
    Another prisoner.
    Yes.
    What kind of work were you doing in the factory?
    Well, at that part, we were taking three kinds of machine
    grenades shells and loading them into this sulfuric acid solution
    and then taking them out and putting them into water
    and then taking them out and drying
    them or something like that and then putting them back
    on the stacks.
    That was this first part.
    Eventually, I was able to get transferred
    to another assignment, where I was working with sandblasting
    on the same shells, but just two at a time,
    putting them in a sandblasting machine,
    taking them out, putting them back on the wagon.
    And I worked there for a while, and then I got good at it,
    and I became the machine maintenance man.
    I kept the machines going, would repair them or fix them or keep
    them going, replace--
    certain parts were replaceable, had to be maintained.
    And so that was another a reason--
    and that was much better work and much less likely to be
    attacked than the other one.
    So that's where I got the idea that being
    a mechanic or a machine maintenance man was safer.
    But this was a tenuous place to be because the step
    before that was that steel was heated
    to a very high temperature, practically orange.
    And then it was put into a press,
    and then the press would then turn this block of steel
    into a shell.
    And we made three sizes, the middle of which
    was 105 millimeters, I think, and the other one
    was even larger, the largest machine grenades
    that I have seen even to date.
    Did anyone sabotage this work?
    Do you know?
    Not in my presence.
    I was not aware of any.
    Do you remember the name of the company?
    Was it the Stalberger?
    It could be.
    I'm not sure now.
    Well, how did you get--
    how did you move on then?
    Well, there was a-- there was a Polish foreman there,
    and I talked to him.
    And occasionally, I was able to get him some money
    to buy home brew vodka and so on and bribe him a little,
    and he promoted me.
    He liked me.
    And how long did you work in that particular factory?
    Until they sent us to Auschwitz.
    What are some of the recollections about that period?
    Was it about a year that you were there?
    It was from '42 to '44.
    In the meantime, in the camp, there was an epidemic of typhus.
    And every morning when we came back from work,
    when I was still working the night shift, we and the people
    that were--
    the other people in the camp were taken out,
    and they had to run.
    If they were sick and they couldn't run,
    they would be shot.
    And then we had to put them in mass graves.
    So this was a selection that you were doing.
    Well, it was a kind of a selection on the basis
    of how ill the people were.
    Did you participate?
    Were you part of this?
    Yes.
    And did you also take part in the burying?
    As it happened, I was not picked.
    They just picked some people.
    I was not picked for the burying.
    But you saw this?
    Yes.
    Did you come down with typhus at this point?
    No, I had had it before.
    Some people who say that they had typhus
    more than once, that's because towards the end they
    had typhoid fever.
    So once you've had typhus, you're immune?
    Yeah.
    Was this the upper camp?
    This was the upper camp, yes.
    And eventually, they liquidated that camp,
    and they sent us all to the other camp, which
    was called Majowka.
    And that camp was close to where the steelworks were,
    the high furnace that melts the ore.
    You have to feed it constantly with ore and coke and calcium
    carbonate, things like that.
    And so this was a much better camp in many ways,
    and we were transferred there.
    Apparently maybe there were fewer people.
    And after a while, a transport arrived there
    that we were told that they had been in some camp,
    like some terrible camp out East, maybe even Treblinka.
    But we didn't know for sure.
    And I didn't--
    I never did find out.
    But they were very angry, and they were also
    hostile to the people that were running the camp, the Jews
    and the Jewish police.
    And eventually, Chaim's brother was the camp commander,
    like the Jewish one.
    And they were angry against him.
    And when they finally sent us to-- when they were sending us
    to Auschwitz, they put these people with the leaders
    into the wagon in one wagon.
    And by the time we arrived in Auschwitz,
    the Jewish leaders were killed.
    Including Chaim's brother?
    Chaim's brother tried to run away
    the night before we were shipped, and he was killed,
    and one of his daughters--
    and one of his daughters survived.
    That was a kind of a run the night before we were sent away.
    And one or two people managed to get away.
    Do you remember if they--
    if you talked to this new group?
    Did they tell you anything about what had gone on at this camp?
    I never got to talk to them, and they never--
    they were not willing to just talk.
    So it's in retrospect that you think that they
    may have actually even come--
    Well, that was the word about them.
    Now, at this point, 1943, the end of '43,
    had you heard more about the East?
    Yes.
    By the time we got to Starachowice, gradually
    the word came to us about what was happening in the East
    and how they were killing the people
    and how the people who had been sent there were now all gone.
    They were all killed, although the details of the killing
    machine that they had developed there
    were not known to us in detail.
    But we knew very well that they had been--
    they had destroyed most of the people
    that they took from the big ghettos, and they killed them.
    The names of the camps, were they--
    Treblinka was known to us.
    But not Auschwitz?
    I don't recall hearing the name of Auschwitz.
    What were the circumstances of your family being shipped out
    of Starachowice?
    Well, we had an idea that it was coming.
    We also had an idea.
    On occasion, we would get at the plant
    a newspaper or something like that.
    We knew that the Soviets were advancing
    and that the Germans were ahead of it, ahead
    of the progress of the Soviets, and they just
    loaded us into a train, a transport train.
    But in this train there were covered wagons
    and there were open wagons.
    And Chaim and I happened to get on an open wagon, which
    made the survival--
    chances of survival of the journey somewhat better.
    This was 1944.
    This was 1944, yes.
    Summer?
    Yes, summer.
    Was it August?
    August, yeah.
    So you were loaded into a boxcar, an open boxcar.
    Yes.
    Then what?
    Well, we were guarded very carefully.
    Every boxcar had a guard, and then there were general guards.
    And we were shipped.
    And of course the crowding was such
    that there was no room to sit down or to lie down.
    You had to stand.
    Or if you lie down, you were dead.
    And some people, actually the weaker ones
    got killed that way, even in the open wagons.
    Trampled, you mean.
    Trampled.
    And how long was the journey?
    Three days and three nights.
    From Starachowice to Auschwitz?
    That's right.
    Why did it take so long?
    Well, they were sending us back and forth.
    Sometimes we would be standing still.
    Was there any food in the train?
    They don't-- I don't think they distributed any food or water.
    If you had it with you and if you didn't lose it,
    and if you could use it, then you were all right.
    If you weren't, then you could just get dehydrated,
    and that would be another reason why you couldn't stand up.
    And what about toilet facilities, anything like that?
    Well, there may have been a bucket.
    And since we were stopping on occasion,
    sometimes they would let us empty the bucket.
    But I don't know how they did it in the closed wagons.
    People used a bucket?
    If they could get to it.
    There was a problem.
    You couldn't just say, excuse me, I got to get to it,
    you know.
    And if they couldn't get to it?
    Well, they did what they needed to do.
    And that was part of the confrontation
    with one's excrements.
    It was another assault like the lice.
    it was a--
    I remember once in Auschwitz I was looking at my hands,
    and they were dirty.
    The dirt was ingrained.
    And that was a blow to my self.
    Look what's happening to me.
    I'm becoming part of the dirt.
    I'm not myself.
    All of these were part of the assault, and they were--
    and many of them were calculated that way.
    Certainly the assault on the people's autonomy,
    and they emphasized this in Auschwitz,
    and they give us the numbers.
    They'd say, now you're just a number.
    That's your name.
    That's it.
    They were destroying everyone's inner resources
    and self-recognition as a person and the capacity
    of caring for oneself and taking initiative.
    And one of the most punishable crimes
    was helping another prisoner.
    What do you remember, given these dehumanizing,
    degrading circumstances in the train?
    What was it like?
    I mean, it couldn't have been quiet.
    No.
    Although it was quiet, quieter than you would expect.
    Because the people were beyond being depressed.
    They were numbed already.
    This was obviously not going to be an improvement.
    We were expecting the worst.
    We already knew about Treblinka.
    We knew what happened to our families,
    and we didn't know what was going to happen to us.
    So do you have any vivid memories?
    The smells, the sights, sounds of that trip?
    Well, yes.
    There were certain-- the wagon itself was not so terrible
    since it was an open wagon.
    But the confrontation with the dead bodies in our wagon--
    I think that we arrived--
    they kept us going back and forth, sending back and forth.
    But when they finally got us to Birkenau,
    I think it was evening.
    It was getting dark.
    And I think they didn't do a regular selection,
    although they only took the people who could walk
    and looked all right.
    But it wasn't a complete organized selection
    as I had later.
    And so arriving there, one of the most shocking things
    were to see the old prisoners who were very cynical.
    Some of them were cruel, beating us.
    We expected it from the Germans, but these prisoners
    were beyond anything that you could imagine.
    And they were saying the most terrible things to us,
    like, you're not going to come out alive here, so forget it.
    And there were certain smells.
    One smell, that was the chimneys.
    They were predominant smell.
    Another smell was that when you went into the shower
    or into the gas chamber, they would give you a piece of soap.
    It was not a soap made out of soap,
    but it was a soap made with a clay base instead of oil base.
    And that smell for a long time bothered me
    so I couldn't use certain soaps.
    But the sight of these sadistic people
    who were selected for this, and they were also
    the ones that made us then go and undress and leave
    all our properties there, and then
    shave us and put us in the shower.
    So I'm sure that there were--
    that there must have been some kind of selection.
    And in this process, I think we got some prison clothes,
    and they put us--
    they took us to a camp, a barrack
    that turned out to be camp C and the gypsy camp.
    And they put us in one barrack, where we just
    had to sit one in side of the other
    in the crotch of the other.
    There was no way to stand up or do anything.
    We were so crowded in there.
    And during that night, we heard trucks coming
    and beatings and shootings.
    And it turned out that we were in the gypsy camp.
    And at that night, they took away all the Gypsies.
    The next morning, the camp was empty.
    And they were getting that camp ready for Hungarians transports.
    There were transports coming in from Hungary and Slovakia
    and so on, Greece even.
    So you heard what kinds of sounds, shooting?
    Shooting, screaming.
    The Gypsies were there with children,
    and there were screams of children and just
    like a liquidation of a city.
    It was an awful--
    the whole night was a nightmare but beyond anything that--
    we had been on this train all this time,
    also not resting or sleeping or anything.
    And then we arrived there, and then this
    was the particular welcome that we had.
    The next morning, they took us out,
    and they tattooed us and gave us the numbers.
    And again, we were--
    as usual, we were beaten.
    We were told that we were just numbers and called
    all kinds of terrible names and beaten by everybody
    that went past, whether they wore a uniform or a prisoner's
    garb.
    What's your number?
    19210-- A19210.
    Or actually 19270.
    It's funny.
    19210 was my address on Coil.
    And I used to joke about it.
    And I thought it was 19210.
    I already changed it.
    That's probably a good thing.
    Were you with your friend at this point?
    No, we got separated.
    At this point we, got separated, and we
    were so overwhelmed there was no time to look for somebody,
    because they put us in there in the sitting, crouching position.
    The next day, we started looking for each other.
    But we didn't make contact the next day.
    Did Chaim survive?
    Did Chaim live?
    No.
    He died at Auschwitz?
    No.
    As I understand it, from what I heard,
    he died on a death march out of a camp
    to which he was sent from Auschwitz.
    When you were sitting in that position in the first night,
    did anyone talk about what was going on?
    Did you talk to anyone at that time?
    I don't think they allowed us to talk.
    You might whisper something to somebody quickly,
    but I don't think we could-- you could have a conversation.
    And I don't think that people were capable of it.
    Were you-- you and the others you think at this point
    were numb?
    Yeah.
    And you were wedged in between two people that you didn't know.
    And you couldn't go look for your family or friends
    or anyone.
    And the next day, when you saw a panoramic view of Birkenau,
    how did you move through that day?
    Well, it was very confusing and very terrifying.
    And all these barbed wires and barracks
    and the people moving like marionettes, the whole thing
    was further numbing and terrifying.
    The whole the way of interaction,
    the constant beatings, before you
    could figure out what it was about,
    you were into in an Appell.
    You were just standing there.
    First, you were assigned to a barrack,
    and that is where we got separated.
    Chaim and I got assigned to one barrack.
    He got assigned to another barrack which
    happened to be the barrack of the Strafkommando,
    where they used to put people for some transgression
    and kill them in a few days through torture.
    Was not good enough to just shoot them.
    And in this Strafkommando, they were not only beaten,
    but it wasn't actually a Strafkommando at that time.
    It was just the remnants, but they still
    had a work assignment.
    They were working on some kind of a canal,
    and so he had to stand in water while he was working.
    And finally, he found me, and he came.
    After work one time, he found me,
    and he came, and he told me what happened to him
    and that was very dangerous and how terrible it was for him.
    And it so happened that I was able to smuggle
    in a diamond in a tooth cavity.
    I had a large tooth cavity, and so I gave him this diamond,
    and he was able to bribe his way out of there,
    and he was transferred to another barrack.
    And so he was not on the Strafkommando
    because he was not there for any punishment.
    But we couldn't get together in the same barrack in any way.
    Were you sent to work?
    Yes.
    What were the conditions that they had?
    Well, at first I was sent to work on the road, shoveling
    stones and constantly guarded and beaten
    if you didn't take a full shovel and keep it
    constantly and so on.
    And eventually, it may be because I had given
    my occupation as a mechanic.
    I went to another kommando which was called D-A-W--
    or What we did there is that we were taking apart
    shot down airplanes, and we were salvaging good instruments
    that were in it.
    And that was a better kommando, and I was less exposed
    to the danger of being killed at work, and I worked there.
    And still we had the kapo, and we had guards,
    but once we got there, we would just go to work,
    and they would let us alone doing the work.
    And I was there until I realized that I
    had a scabies infection, which is a mite that generally
    is very easy to eliminate.
    But in Auschwitz, there was nothing to treat for it.
    And so I decided to take a chance
    and to report on sick call.
    And they sent me to the sick bay.
    Actually, there was a hospital, which was generally just
    a collecting point of people who were getting ready to be
    sent to the gas chamber.
    But I was lucky.
    There was a doctor there that was from my hometown
    and who knew my brother who also had studied medicine and was--
    anyway, he I don't know how he did it or what he did.
    But anyway, in a few days, he was able to clear it up,
    and I was discharged before they took the people to the gas
    chamber.
    This was a Jewish doctor, a prisoner?
    A Jewish doctor, a prisoner, yes.
    So you got out in time.
    Yes.
    And so on the day that I was returned to Birkenau Camp C,
    they had called out all the schlossers.
    That is the mechanics, tool, diemakers, and others.
    And I think there were 2,000 of them altogether,
    and we all went, filed past a barrack
    where one of those meisters, one German foreman was examining us.
    And he picked me out, and it turned out
    that he picked out 16 Slovak tool and diemakers and engineers
    and me and sent us to Camp Bobrek, which
    was operated by the Siemens Company, Siemens-Schuckert.
    And there were somewhere in the vicinity of 200, maybe 200--
    between 200 and 220 prisoners there,
    who had been assembled from all over Europe.
    But a significant number of them were from Sosnowiec,
    from my home town, who knew me or knew my older brother.
    And when I arrived there, they assigned
    me to work at the bench, which is very specialized precision
    work with a file.
    You have to file things at an exact precise angle to 1,000th
    of a millimeter.
    And of course I couldn't do it, and in the beginning,
    they took me under their wing.
    They started helping me.
    Then they needed to do-- there needed to be
    done a job on the outside.
    So they took me out and put me to work outside
    in doing some repair.
    This building in which this camp was,
    or the factory was operating, had
    been an old abandoned factory that the prisoners themselves
    restored.
    And during that time, they went through some hard times,
    and they had some epidemic, and they had some selections there.
    But by the time I arrived there, things
    were relatively better than in Birkenau.
    And after working on the transport there, then
    I developed pneumonia.
    And I was hospitalized there.
    And there were two doctors.
    They had four beds, and they treated me there.
    There were two other fellows who also had pneumonia.
    But it turned out that they had tuberculosis,
    so they were sent to Birkenau, to the gas chamber.
    But I recovered within a week or so,
    and then I was brought back to the factory
    to start all over to learn what they were going to do with me,
    what I could do.
    I was in great danger because I really couldn't
    do what they wanted me to do.
    So you were among the youngest must have been.
    Curiously, they had a small group
    of teenagers who had been in training
    to be tool and diemakers.
    And they accepted them, and they were already much better
    than I was, but they still called them juveniles.
    And so they were like apprentices,
    and they tolerated a few of them.
    But you said they took you under their wing
    as if you were almost like a mascot for them.
    Yes, well, they did, showing me how to file,
    trying to teach me how to do it, covering up for me,
    making a piece and giving it to me as if I had made it.
    They were helping me.
    So they too saved your life.
    They saved your life too.
    They did.
    Yes.
    And as did Chaim many times over.
    I really was helped a great deal by various people.
    How long did this go on that you were working there?
    This went on until the Soviets came close,
    and they were evacuating Birkenau and Buna,
    and we were marched to Birkenau to start with.
    And then we were put on the death march towards Gleiwitz.
    In Germany.
    On the German side of the border,
    in Silesia, very close to the border.
    And there we were put overnight in a factory.
    Not in a camp but in the factory.
    And the particular group that I was with, the next day they
    loaded us on--
    well, again, I was on an open wagon.
    I think most of them were open wagons,
    and I was together with two Fellows
    from Sosnowiec who were also my friends,
    became my friends there, and we were helping each other.
    And that increased our chances of survival.
    For instance, we were able to get a corner in the wagon.
    And this was a wagon--
    this was a transport where I don't know how many days.
    I think maybe six days they gave us no food, but there was snow.
    We were eating the snow that fell on each other.
    And when we went through Prague, the people
    were going over a viaduct over the train.
    And they threw down, a bread and I caught it.
    But before I could do anything with it,
    everybody that was strong in the wagon jumped on me
    and just tore it apart.
    I don't know who got what.
    It went by power, and I don't even
    know if I got a piece of bread or not.
    And so this transport eventually ended up in Buchenwald.
    And in Buchenwald, they unloaded the dead bodies
    in a big, big pile.
    And they put us in a barrack.
    That was a huge barrack outside of the regular camp.
    And they just left us there.
    There was nothing to do except standing in transport.
    I think on one occasion, I managed
    to get taken to work to Weimar to clean some rubble that they
    wanted cleaned up.
    And this went on for some time.
    And then it turned out that the Siemens Company was looking
    for the people on their list.
    And they managed to find a considerable number
    and took us to a separate barrack,
    and then they got a special train for us
    and gave us a loaf of bread and water
    and loaded us just maybe 10 people in a wagon,
    in a covered wagon with a door open with the Germans
    on the other side of the wagon.
    And they were shipping us to a place
    they wanted us to work in Sudetenland somewhere.
    And on the way there, we saw Dresden after it bombed out.
    It was still smoking.
    It was another awesome sight.
    But for us, before they evacuated us from Auschwitz,
    we could already hear the explosions of various things.
    We didn't know what it was.
    We thought that maybe there were cannons or something like that.
    We could hear cannons all the time.
    So therefore, the sight of Dresden
    made us think that maybe the end is near.
    And also while on this trip, the Germans
    announced that Roosevelt died.
    Well, again, they tried to get us through.
    They kept sending us back and forth.
    And they couldn't get us through,
    so they sent us to Siemensstadt.
    Actually, at this moment, I don't remember
    which was the proper order.
    I think that they took us from Buchenwald
    and sent us to Siemensstadt first.
    And we worked there in the Siemens factory,
    and we stayed in a special camp.
    Not a special camp but a separate camp, and we
    worked there for just a short time.
    And then one day there was a bombardment,
    and we went down to the basement.
    It was like the third basement for shelter.
    And when we came out, Siemensstadt,
    which was a suburb of Berlin, was gone.
    So they kept us for a few days there,
    and then they tried to send us to Sudetenland.
    And then we came back.
    Thereafter they sent us everywhere,
    and they sent us back to Sachsenhausen.
    And Sachsenhausen was also a terrible camp at that time
    because they kept sending people in there
    just as they had in Buchenwald.
    The things were as terrible as usual, plus disorganized.
    Now, there was Buchenwald--
    Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald both had a structured old camp
    where the political prisoners were running things and so on.
    And maybe some of the prisoners of our transports
    were able to make contact with them,
    but I was just not up to that kind of standard by that time.
    I was really run down.
    And so I didn't even know exactly what was happening.
    And after some time, they marched us out on a death march
    again.
    And this one friend that was with me on the train,
    and I somehow got caught in a column that was composed mostly
    of Russians.
    And with them, we started out on a death march westward,
    I presume.
    And we would march all day, and then they would put us
    either in a barn or in a woods.
    They would surround the woods and put us in the woods.
    Sometimes, they would give us a couple of potatoes.
    This was still in the winter?
    Now.
    It's 1945.
    No, this was now in March.
    I know exactly.
    We were marched out of Sachsenhausen on my birthday,
    April the 22nd.
    And--
    It's close to the end at this point.
    Yeah.
    And they kept still killing people.
    And then--
    Were they still shooting people on the death march?
    Yes, they were.
    You said they were burying them along the way?
    Well, I don't know.
    We kept marching on.
    I don't know what they were doing with them.
    I think they were leaving them there,
    and the local population knew of what was going on.
    And the column-- some of us, some of us,
    especially the Russians, started running
    to get potatoes because the Germans were getting out
    their potatoes to put in the ground.
    And of course, the Germans were shooting into the crowd
    and beating us.
    And I ran once--
    I ran probably more than once, but one time I
    was hit on the head with the butt of a rifle.
    And that day I also noticed that my legs
    were getting swollen, which I knew from way back
    that that was a sign of the being very near to death.
    It was the starvation death was preceded usually
    by swelling of the legs, and the swelling would go up,
    and it was just the end of it.
    You were hit in the head with a rifle butt.
    Were you knocked unconscious?
    Were you--
    No, no, just pretty sore and bleeding and so on.
    And I ran back.
    And so this lasted maybe for a day or two more.
    And then we were in another forest surrounded for the night,
    and we realized that the SS man had a truck,
    and we suddenly realized that they were not at the truck.
    So the first thing we did is looted whatever was there,
    and I got some clothes.
    And then this friend of mine and I ran away.
    And when we ran away, we saw a group
    of German soldiers just sitting in the field.
    I don't think they had rifles with them.
    So since they didn't have rifles with them,
    you can see we were dull enough.
    We went up, and we asked them if they
    had a blanket they could spare.
    So they gave us a blanket.
    And we went back into the woods and slept over the wood
    that night.
    What were you wearing?
    Well, the clothes that I got from the truck
    were actually German army uniforms
    but without any insignia.
    But what I was wearing was some form of prisoner garb.
    You still had the prisoners uniform.
    That's right.
    And the next morning, we came out of the forest.
    And I saw some soup that somebody had spilled
    on the grass, and I ate it.
    Looked like German army soup rather than the kind of soup
    that we would be eating.
    And then we saw the German soldiers
    marching and giving themselves up.
    The British were there, and they were taking the prisoners.
    And we walked on for a while.
    I don't know if the British told us.
    I could I could speak to them because all through the years
    in Bodzentyn I was studying whatever I could,
    especially English but also other subjects every time I
    had a chance and whenever I could get some help.
    And so the British directed us towards a river.
    And we went into this river.
    And by this river, some Germans had left their suitcases
    with clothes and other things, and we somehow
    managed to shave, shave off all of our hair
    and get rid of the prison garb and put on these new clothes
    because we wanted to get rid of the lice.
    And then we started looking for food,
    and then we were just going around looking for food.
    And eventually we walked to a city,
    and there was the city of Schwerin.
    And there they had already made a camp or a kind of a-- they
    put the people that came out of the camps
    into an army barracks of the Germans.
    And we managed to get taken in by a German family that
    put us on the attic.
    They had two beds on the attic, and they let us sleep there,
    and they gave us a little shed where
    we started to accumulate food.
    We had to be very careful.
    I didn't realize it at the time, but many people
    died after liberation if they ate fat foods and a lot of food
    and so on.
    Or maybe they just developed the typhoid afterwards.
    Anyway, the folklore is that if you ate too much too fast,
    you would die.
    The name of your friend, you said you were with a friend?
    Yes, his name was Aaron Piltz.
    Was he from Sosnowiec?
    Yes, he was from Sosnowiec.
    And he was in--
    one of the people that were in the Bobrek group.
    And later afterwards, we got separated again
    because he developed tuberculosis
    and had to go to a sanitarium.
    Do you know if his father's name was Moishe Piltz?
    Do you know who his family was?
    No.
    I'm just curious because he was the first head of the Judenrat
    in Sosnowiec, Moishe Piltz.
    This might be a good place to stop for a moment.
    And then we'll come back and conclude.
    OK.
    At this point in your experience,
    did you think of this in terms of liberation?
    Well, I was just thinking about that,
    that although I recognize it--
    I recognized it at the time, that this was liberation
    and that was the end of the persecutions,
    I couldn't muster the feeling of joy, of any celebration or joy,
    or who to celebrate with.
    That maybe a day or two before I was liberated,
    a thought occurred to me, and that is that if I should die--
    when I was thinking that I might die--
    that if I should die, that nobody in the world would know
    and nobody would miss me.
    And so the sense of liberation did not
    evoke the joy, because I was in that kind of a frame of mind,
    that I didn't know what I could look forward to,
    if anybody might be--
    I had some hopes that my father and my brother
    might have survived.
    But I don't recall any celebration, just a struggle
    for continuing survival.
    You didn't see it in the others, either?
    No.
    No cheering.
    No.
    I have heard that in some places,
    the Russians would come into a city.
    They would say to the prisoners, you got a day,
    or you got a few hours to do whatever you want.
    But then they would do some revengeful things, or looting,
    or something like that.
    But I don't-- I have not, other than a picture of a camp being
    liberated, which probably was produced by somebody,
    I don't recall seeing people cheering, like, hooray.
    Like, we saw the SS man ran away, so we ran away too.
    Crazy.
    And in fact, I have seen people who
    develop a crazy reaction to being liberated.
    Did you have any hope that you would find your mother alive?
    No.
    You knew that-- you told me once that there was a song you
    had heard about Treblinka.
    Yes.
    But you heard it before the end of the war.
    Yes, I heard it in Starachowice.
    What was the song?
    (SINGING) Treblinka [NON-ENGLISH]
    That's the--
    Good place.
    --the cemetery.
    Yeah.
    Can you translate it?
    Treblinka, there for every Jew the end, the cemetery.
    Whoever arrives there remains there, remains forever there.
    There they have sent our grandparents, and our mother,
    and mothers and fathers.
    There they were poisoned.
    And there they were left forever.
    And this is their--
    this is their last resting place.
    What do you remember being uppermost in your mind
    after that?
    Is there something that you wanted
    to do that you felt you had to do?
    Go back home?
    Upon liberation?
    Yeah.
    Well, I was really not in a position emotionally
    or mentally to make plans.
    I didn't think of it at the time just that way,
    but I had to recover.
    And so first the British came and took us
    to another place in Lübeck because the city of Schwerin
    was taken over by the Russians.
    And we were there in a camp, in a DP camp, the first DP camp.
    We started eating there, and regularly,
    and then looking for other people,
    finding other people in the DP camp.
    And I was not one of the most active people
    looking for other people.
    One woman found me and--
    no, that was later.
    But it-- we were there for some time.
    And we started getting in touch with United Nations
    lists, things like that.
    And then we heard that there was a camp not far
    called Neustadt which was a kind of an army barracks.
    And so the whole group of us, which
    we assembled a group of Holocaust survivors that
    were in Bobrek--
    I have some pictures of them.
    There were the three of us.
    There was Piltz and I, and then there was one other adult.
    The one that is the first one at this table.
    And then there were some of the youthful fellows--
    I think they were apprentices-- on this last table.
    And so--
    This is a picture of the factory in Bobrek.
    Yes.
    So we went there, and it turned out
    that it was a kind of a small camp,
    and that you could meet some people there and start
    talking a little bit.
    We started walking and thinking.
    Also, I was able to get a self-study book from somewhere,
    and we started to study English again.
    I started to study English.
    And there were-- the British were in a barrack next to us.
    And I went to them.
    And there was a loudspeaker in our barrack.
    And I got connected to their radio.
    So we had radio.
    And then I wrote a letter, one letter to my aunt in Detroit
    whose address I remembered because my father used
    to write to her, and one letter to my uncle in Israel
    because his address was simple.
    I also remembered it.
    And I told them that I was the son of Herschel and Dora,
    and that I had survived the war.
    But I don't know about my family.
    And maybe they have heard about some-- things like that.
    And eventually, I got an answer from my aunt.
    And also, I started studying there.
    Accidentally, I found out that back in the city of Lübeck,
    there was an accelerated high school program
    for Polish ex-prisoners of war.
    And I went there, and they accepted me.
    So I just took my bundle of stuff and went there.
    And that may have been in August or September of 1945.
    And then I got lost.
    I lost my contact with these other friends
    with whom I became liberated.
    And eventually, somehow, they made contact,
    or the people from Israel made contact with them,
    and they all ended up in Israel.
    And I went to the school, which they did not
    expect that I would-- that I would be a Jew
    and come to a Polish school which was taught by Polish army
    officers that had been prisoners of war,
    and the students were also Polish prisoners of war,
    and there were some men and women there-- there
    were two colleges.
    And I finished high school.
    I graduated.
    I took the matriculation exam by June 1946.
    In the meantime, my aunt wrote me
    that my cousin, who was her son-in-law who
    lived in Toronto, that he was coming to Hanover,
    that he was going to be in charge
    of the HIAS in the British zone.
    So I went to Hanover and I found him.
    And as soon as I got my graduation from high school,
    and before they even had the celebration--
    I left before the celebration, I felt in such a hurry.
    And I, with his help, I was able to get to Frankfurt
    in the American zone, where at first I
    was in the DP camp Zeilsheim.
    And I was working.
    I got a job at the HIAS in Frankfurt
    through my cousin's connection.
    And after hanging around for a while,
    they put me in charge of a family tracing bureau.
    And I was helping people to find relatives, and find relatives
    in this country, and so on.
    In the meantime, I went to the university
    and applied to medical school.
    And I was accepted for the fall.
    This is by 19--
    1946.
    '46.
    So I was working at the HIAS--
    That's the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.
    Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.
    And then I found a room in Frankfurt
    so it would be easier for me to work there.
    And then, when the university started,
    I went right to medical school.
    In Germany, they have a five-year medical school.
    You start with anatomy, and chemistry, and biology,
    and things like that.
    The HIAS was very kind to me.
    They let me work there part time.
    And there was a number of Jewish students there.
    And I was elected the president of the group.
    I was able to get, to organize some things for the group--
    extra food-- as a group of students.
    So I was doing this until March of 1947, when my visa came in.
    And I did another very, very risky thing.
    That is, that I just took advantage of my visa,
    taking a chance that I could get accepted to medical school here.
    Well, when I came here, my aunt had a little beer and wine
    and workers' supply store on Michigan and 29th
    Street, which was across the street from the Cadillac plant
    there.
    And so she was in the store all the time.
    My uncle-- it's complicated-- came and picked me up
    at Michigan Central Depot took me to 29th Street.
    I came into the store.
    It was a little store.
    And there were papers spread on the floor.
    It was Purim, and I think it was Friday.
    She had the floor scrubbed, and then she would put newspapers
    on the floor.
    And then the two of us took my suitcases to the house
    and put them down, and I changed to work clothes.
    And I came back to the store and started working.
    So there was not too much of a sense of celebration either.
    Then, they didn't have actually a phone in there.
    They had two payphones.
    And one of the two payphones, my cousin called--
    my cousin called, and she wanted to talk to me and welcome me.
    And she said, how shall we speak?
    And I said, let us speak English.
    So we talked a little bit about my coming there.
    And a couple of days later, her sister took me down to Wayne.
    And I applied to Wayne, and they went through my papers,
    and they said I'd have to go to pre-med for some time,
    and then I could apply to medical school.
    So I did.
    But at the same time, I continued
    to work at my aunt's store.
    And she paid me $10 a week.
    And eventually she paid-- she added $2 for car fare,
    I think through the intervention of my cousin.
    My aunt had a very, very rough life, and my uncle also.
    They were rather tight-fisted.
    But I have to say that they accepted me with a love,
    that they loved me just like they did their own.
    Now this was an uncle by marriage,
    my aunt's second husband.
    And he had left a family in Russia.
    He didn't know what was going on.
    But anyway, we got along pretty well.
    What was it like seeing her for the first time?
    Well, it was-- again, I was--
    I realized that at that time, I was still
    in a kind of a numb state, and for a long time,
    in stressful occasions or on happy occasions--
    even on my wedding day--
    I would go into that numb state.
    Did anyone ask you about what had happened?
    Well, not actually.
    No.
    No.
    Did you tell anyone?
    No.
    Why, do you think?
    Well, I was not angry about it.
    I just, I didn't feel like talking about it anymore
    than they wanted to hear about it.
    And I was just busy trying to get myself so
    that I would be more secure, and that I
    would reach the goal of my professional goals.
    And when I finally--
    when I applied to medical school, at that time,
    the veterans were coming home.
    And it was virtually no chance of being accepted.
    But somehow, I got accepted.
    And so I just went, like, from one job to another.
    And this was another thing to do.
    And I was ready to go.
    When did you decide on psychiatry?
    Not till the end of medical school
    did I even start thinking about it consciously.
    And I really liked internal medicine.
    I was going to go into internal medicine.
    But in retrospect, I feel that the contact with John Dorsey
    had a very big influence on me, and it started my own process
    of working on myself.
    So during my internship, I called him, and I said,
    I decided to go into psychiatry.
    Where would you recommend?
    And he said, without hesitation, Receiving Hospital.
    And that was during my internship,
    and I had already started my analysis while I
    was doing my internship.
    I was going to--
    I was interning at Eloise and started an analysis
    in Grosse Pointe.
    With them.
    And so I was kind of driven, you might say.
    It took me some time before I made the first attempt
    to learn to play--
    to play in any way.
    No fun.
    Do you think this haunted you?
    Is that part of the reason?
    Yes.
    Well, it was this insecurity, the need to work and to learn.
    I was very, very curious, and I was really
    regretting that I couldn't go on with the whole field
    of medicine.
    I was curious about the whole field of medicine.
    And eventually, I tried to integrate psychiatry
    with the rest of the medicine as much as possible.
    Do you think there are certain times, or objects, or events,
    sounds, smells, that maybe trigger a memory
    from the wartime experiences?
    Well, I think so.
    And I think that particularly it is very difficult for me,
    in working with Holocaust survivors, and especially
    depressed ones, it brings back the whole thing.
    And also the defenses.
    You've worked with a lot of them.
    Yeah.
    Do you think that there's a--
    there was, during the war, and continued
    to be certain kinds of coping mechanisms, distractions even,
    that some of the survivors used to get through this?
    Well, yeah, I think that there are,
    depending on the circumstances, there
    were certain talents that were especially helpful.
    And the capacity to retain a kind of infantile faith
    that things will work out all right, the capacity
    sometimes to regress.
    I would sometimes be talking to my mother,
    especially in Auschwitz, I remember.
    You mean in your mind you would talk to--
    In my mind.
    But also, the ability to receive help and to give
    help, to relate to others, not to become insulated.
    How do you-- is that what you draw from the experience.
    I mean, if you look back on the Holocaust and say what,
    if any, meaning can I give to this, is that part of what
    comes to mind?
    Well, I think that in trying to understand
    what made a person survive, I still
    think that it was mostly accidental,
    a number of accidents, and that many people did
    things that were potentially self-destructive,
    but they survived.
    But I think that the ability to maintain
    a little nucleus of hope was probably the strongest asset.
    I would call it "infantile narcissism,"
    but really, this is the way it manifests itself, to,
    against all odds, to be able to continue to struggle and to make
    a comeback.
    Do you think this is at all related to talking about it,
    to telling the story?
    You said that at one point you were-- you thought, if you died,
    no one would know, and no one would have missed you.
    Some survivors have said that they
    thought that they would survive because they
    felt the need, that they were going to be the witnesses.
    At least that's the--
    more folklore.
    Well, I know that for many people,
    this is a very important mission.
    However, I felt keenly already then
    that we were not just persecuted by the Germans,
    but I felt that we were abandoned by the whole world.
    And therefore it seemed to me that to tell
    about this to the world was really
    not going to achieve anything.
    And it turned out that I was right,
    that the British and the Americans
    knew what was going on, and wouldn't even
    bomb the trains to Auschwitz, wouldn't even bomb Auschwitz.
    So I think that among the most terrible things that happened to
    us was this feeling of abandonment.
    And that was why I was more pessimistic about the power
    of witnessing.
    But I think that things have changed, times have changed.
    And we may need the witnessing for ourselves and our people.
    Have you told your family any of this story?
    Not in the running narrative, but in pieces whenever I could,
    whenever.
    And I made-- these numbers on the side
    have to do with copies of these pictures that I made,
    and I gave it to them.
    To your children.
    Yeah.
    And you've told your wife.
    Also in pieces and snatches.
    What do you make of the sort of new interest.
    It's almost chic now to do something with the Holocaust.
    Schindler's List.
    The museum in Washington.
    How have you thought about those sort of unusual phenomena
    since 1980 or so?
    Yes.
    I think that especially some of the other programs
    are kind of geared to a happy ending,
    and the survivors are pleased by it
    in that they can say, well, not only did I survive,
    but I did well.
    I have a family.
    I have grandchildren.
    I have won.
    And I think that this is a kind of a balm to the heart of both
    the survivors and to their children
    because they can see it in their survivor relatives
    that this is uplifting for them, to be
    able to go through this process and say, here I am, I have won.
    Whereas many things-- many things that survivors
    needed to experience, they would not
    allow themselves to do so because they
    felt that this would be granting Hitler a posthumous victory.
    If they had a nervous breakdown, or if they had--
    needed help.
    So I think that there is this new trend,
    that the ones that have survived till now are in two groups.
    Either they are depressed, and they are not
    inclined to do that, or they feel good about themselves
    and want to talk about it.
    Let me ask you two things about this.
    Do you think it also soothes the general public
    to think that there's a sort of happy ending to all this?
    Yes.
    You just said that the world didn't seem to care,
    and abandoned--
    That's right.
    --abandoned the Jews.
    And so now they can feel better about it?
    The Jews, the Jewish public feels better about it.
    But there's a non-Jewish public who
    also feel better about seeing Schindler's List, for example.
    Here is a rescuer, and there's sort of a happy ending.
    But it is a fiction movie.
    Well, that was my other question.
    Yeah.
    This sense of victory, is that the truth?
    Well, not entirely, but in relative human terms, yes.
    Holocaust survivors have not only survived
    and had their families, but became good people, and became--
    give of themselves to good causes,
    and do everything possible of good things.
    OK, is there anything else you want to add to this?
    No.
    That's a good place to stop, I think.
    OK, thank you.
    Thank you.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Henry Krystal, born in Sosnowiec, Poland in 1925, describes the escape of his brother and father to the Soviet occupied zone of Poland shortly after the Nazi invasion while he and his mother stayed in Bodzentyn, Poland; being sent to a labor camp in 1942; his mother’s deportation to Treblinka, where she died; being a member of a labor Kommando sent from place to place, including Starachowice, Bobrek, Birkenau, Siemensstadt, and Sachsenhausen, from 1942 until the end of the war; working in a factory operated by the Siemens company; being in the city of Schwerin (Skwierzyna, Poland) in the British occupied zone of Germany at the end of the war; immigrating to the United States in 1947; settling in Detroit, MI, where he lived with an aunt and uncle; and attending school and becoming a psychiatrist.
    Interviewee
    Henry Krystal
    Date
    interview:  1996 September 19

    Physical Details

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

    Rights & Restrictions

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

    Keywords & Subjects

    Personal Name
    Krystal, Henry, 1925-

    Administrative Notes

    Holder of Originals
    University of Michigan-Dearborn
    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    The Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivors Oral History Archive at the University of Michigan conducted the interview with Dr. Henry Krystal on September 19, 1996. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Archives Branch received the tapes in December 2002.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:18:15
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    Oral history interview with Ruth Kent

    Oral History

    Ruth Kent, born in 1930 in Łódź, Poland, describes her life before the war; her family; living with her family in the Łódź ghetto until it was liquidated in 1944; being deported to Auschwitz where her family was separated and some family members were immediately put to death; being sent with one of her sisters to Stutthof, where they were later separated; surviving a forced march as the Germans evacuated the camps in the face of the advancing Russian Army; being liberated by the Russians; and reuniting with two brothers after the war.

    Oral history interview with Alfred Lessing

    Oral history interview with Alfred Lessing

    Oral History

    An interview with Alfred Lessing, a Holocaust survivor, conducted by Dr. Sidney Bolkosky, Professor of History at the University of Michigan--Dearborn. Mr. Lessing recalls his experiences living with other families as a hidden child in the Netherlands during the war. He talks about the last year of World War II when he was reunited and lived with his father and brothers

    Oral history interview with Abraham Pasternak

    Oral history interview with Abraham Pasternak

    Oral History

    Abraham Pasternak, born in Betlan, Romania, relates his experiences in Romania during the Nazi occupation and his internment in several concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Theresienstadt, Schlieben (a satellite of Buchenwald), and in Zeitz, Germany.

    Oral history interview with Agi Rubin

    Oral history interview with Agi Rubin

    Oral History

    Agi Rubin, born in Monkacs, Czechoslovakia (Mukacheve, Ukraine), describes being deported with her family in 1944 to Auschwitz, where her mother and younger brother were killed; working in a sorting shed in the camp until it was evacuated in January 1945; surviving a forced march of several months; being liberated in Germany when she was 15 years old; and reuniting with her father.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Muschkies Webber

    Oral history interview with Ruth Muschkies Webber

    Oral History

    Ruth Muschkies Webber, born on June 28, 1935 in Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski, Poland, describes her childhood; her family’s limited religious observance; the beginning of the war; learning years after the war that her aunt was sexually assaulted during the German invasion; her sister’s piano studies in Warsaw and placement with a Gentile family to continue her education; the creation of a ghetto around 1942; her family attempts at convincing her to hide with a Gentile family and her refusal; her feelings upon seeing the Germans in their town; her parents getting work at the nearby labor facility (Bodzechów camp) and secretly bringing her along; hiding while her parents worked; sneaking out of the camp with her mother during the selections for transfer; her memories of the winter of 1942 and walking all night long so they wouldn’t freeze; her various hiding places; playing with rodents; her daydreams while in hiding; being separated from her father in 1942-43 when she and her mother were sent to Starachowice; witnessing the German camp guards argue over what to do with she and another child and eventually being allowed into the camp; her work in the camp, peeling potatoes and taking messages around the camp; seeing many deaths; the tension and anxiety she felt in the camp; being in Sandomierz concentration camp; returning to Bodzechów; the effects she still feels from her Holocaust experiences; having to internalize all her emotions while she was in the camp; being sent to Ostrowiec concentration camp then Auschwitz; the journey to Auschwitz; arriving in the camp with her mother; going through the showers with the other women and laughing as they left and searched through the available clothing; how they dealt with corpses; teaching each other how to knit; the gas chambers and crematoriums; contracting measles and pneumonia and going to the hospital; the measles epidemic in Auschwitz; the various blocks in the camp; her camp tattoo; living with other children in her block; the twins being taken and returned continuously; her mother being sent away for a few weeks; being liberated by the Russians in January 1945; being in some of the photographs the Russians took; reuniting with her mother and sister in Krakow, Poland; how her relationship with her mother and sister was more complicated after the war; staying in a children’s home with her sister in Bielsko-Biala, Poland; going to Toronto, where they had family; the complexities of speaking about her experiences after the war; finding out about her father’s fate; her thoughts on being one of the few children to survive concentration camps; and her three children.

    Oral history interview with Franka Charlupski

    Oral history interview with Franka Charlupski

    Oral History

    Franka Weintraub Charlupski, born in 1920, describes living with her family in Łódź, Poland; being in the Łódź ghetto from 1940 until August 1944 when they were transported to Auschwitz and separated; the death of her mother Auschwitz; the death of her father in a labor camp; spending three days with her sister in Auschwitz before being moved to a labor camp outside of Bremen, Germany; the closing of the camp on April 7, 1945 and being transferred to Bergen-Belsen; and being liberated by the British Army on April 15, 1945.

    Oral history interview with Emanuel Tanay

    Oral history interview with Emanuel Tanay

    Oral History

    Dr. Emanuel Tanay, born in Vilna, Poland (Vilnius, Lithuania) in 1928, describes living in Miechow, Poland before the war; living in the Miechow ghetto; escaping with his mother and sister just before it was liquidated; how his father did not escape and was later executed by Amon Goeth; spending part of the war living in a monastery as a novice and passing as a converted Jew; and using false Aryan papers as he moved around Poland and Hungary.

    Oral history interview with Stefa Sprecher Kupfer

    Oral history interview with Stefa Sprecher Kupfer

    Oral History

    Stefa (Sarah) Sprecher Kupfer, describes being 10 years old and living in Sanok, Poland when the war started; the death of her father in the early days of the occupation; going into hiding with her mother and young sister instead of registering with the occupational government; how a Polish woman, Mrs. Orlewska, played a significant role in their survival by hiding them in her house; and being aided by other Poles, some of whom knew they were Jews.

    Oral history interview with Shari Weiss

    Oral history interview with Shari Weiss

    Oral History

    Shari Weiss, born on April 28, 1929 in Herina, Romania, describes going to live with an aunt and uncle in Cluj, Romania at age nine; remaining in Cluj until 1944; the German occupation in 1944; being sent to a transit camp in a brick factory for three weeks; being transported in May 1944 to Auschwitz; living in Auschwitz with her aunt stayed for about five months; being transferred with her aunt to a labor camp in Altenburg, Germany; working in a factory until April 1945; being marched out of the camp with the other inmates; being liberated with her aunt by the American army two days later; and learning that her uncle did not survive the war. [Full transcripts available at http://holocaust.umd.umich.edu/]

    Oral history interview with Leon Salomon

    Oral history interview with Leon Salomon

    Oral History

    Leon Salomon, a born in Maków Mazowiecki, Poland, describes living in Maków Mazowiecki with his family until Poland was occupied by the Germans in 1939; moving with two of his sisters to Kobylnik (Narach, Belarus) to live with their brother; a school teacher who was later killed when the Germans took over the area; the massacre of the town’s Jewish residents by the Germans in a nearby forest in 1942; escaping the shooting and hiding in the forest; being the only member of his immediate family to survive; joining a partisan group fighting in the Vilnius, Lithuania and White Russia area; joining the Soviet Army near the end of the war; and fighting until he was wounded in east Prussia.

    Oral history interview with Martin Adler

    Oral history interview with Martin Adler

    Oral History

    Marton Adler, born in 1929 in Volové, a village in Sub Carpathian Ruthenia (now Mizhhir'ia, Ukraine), describes growing up the oldest child and his two brothers and one sister; his father; the Jewish community in Volové; the Hungarian occupation in 1939; the conscription of his father into a labor unit in Russia from 1941 until the end of 1942; the anti-Jewish laws and his family losing their store; the German occupation in March 1944; being deported with his family to a ghetto in Sokirnitsa, Ukraine; being sent to Auschwitz and the deaths of his mother and siblings; being sent with his father to Buchenwald; being sent to Dora; his father’s death in Dora; and being liberated by the British from Bergen-Belsen. [Full transcripts available at http://holocaust.umd.umich.edu/]

    Oral history interview with Alexander Ehrmann

    Oral history interview with Alexander Ehrmann

    Oral History

    Alexander Ehrmann, born in Kralovsky Chlumec, Czechoslovakia (Král'ovský Chlmec, Slovakia), describes his family; being deported with his family to a ghetto in 1944 and then to Auschwitz, where his parents and a sister and her son were killed; being transferred to Warsaw after the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto ended in order to salvage materials from the ghetto; spending five days in Dachau; being transferred to Muhldorf, where the inmates were building an underground aircraft factory; being evacuated from the camp and put on a train; being and moved back and forth in the unoccupied area until they were liberated by American troops; and reuniting with two sisters and his younger brother after the war ended.

    Oral history interview with Hilma Geffen

    Oral history interview with Hilma Geffen

    Oral History

    Hilma Geffen, born in Berlin, Germany in 1925, describes being an only child; her father serving in the German Army during World War I and being awarded the Iron Cross; moving with her family in 1931 to Rangsdorf, Germany, where they were the only Jewish family in town; her father, an accountant, continuing to commute to Berlin for work; how a couple of nights after Kristallnacht SA (Sturmabteilung) men came to the house and smashed the furniture; moving with her family in 1939 to Berlin because Jews could no longer own property; returning home after work in October 1941 and being told by her mother to run away because people were there to pick them up; using false papers and going into hiding; living with a German couple, who knew only that she was Jewish, until the end of the war; immigrating to the United States; living in Miami Beach, FL, where she had relatives; and how her parents were deported to Auschwitz and did not survive the war.

    Oral history interview with Leo Liffman

    Oral history interview with Leo Liffman

    Oral History

    Leo Liffman, born and raised in Wiesbaden, Germany, relates his experiences with antisemitism as a child and young adult during the closing years of the Weimar Republic and the early Hitler years; being arrested during Kristallnacht and imprisoned for several weeks at Buchenwald concentration camp; fleeing Germany in 1939, leaving his parents behind; and being the only member of his family to survive the war.

    Oral history interview with Helena Manaster

    Oral history interview with Helena Manaster

    Oral History

    Helena Manaster, born in Poland, describes being one of eight children, all of whom were adults at the beginning of the war; the separation of her family after the German invasion in 1939; going with her father and several siblings to Lwów, Poland (L'viv, Ukraine), which was under Soviet control at the time; the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the occupation of Lwów; the deportation of her father and brothers to Belzec, where they died in the gas chambers; being moved with her husband to Lesko, Poland and then Zamosc, Poland; the Germans sending she and her husband to a labor camp in Rokitna because her husband was a doctor; escaping the camp; and making their way to Kraków, Poland, where they remained in hiding until the end of the war.

    Oral history interview with Bernard Offen

    Oral history interview with Bernard Offen

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Nathan Offen, Bernard Offen, and Samuel Offen

    Oral history interview with Nathan Offen, Bernard Offen, and Samuel Offen

    Oral History

    The Offen brothers, Nathan (born December 15, 1922), Bernard (born April 17, 1929), and Samuel (born August 7, 1921), describe growing up in Kraków, Poland; the beginning of the war and life in the Kraków ghetto; being sent to the Płaszów labor camp; Bernard describes being transported with other children out of camp Płaszów, escaping, and being smuggled into another sub-camp to be with an uncle; reuniting as a family at Płaszów; being transported to Mauthausen; the separation of Bernard and his father from Sam and Nathan; the transfer of Sam and Nathan to Auschwitz; the death of their father in Auschwitz; Sam and Nathan going to Italy after the war ended; and Bernard finding his brothers in Italy. [Full transcripts available at http://holocaust.umd.umich.edu/]

    Oral history interview with Marton Adler

    Oral history interview with Marton Adler

    Oral History

    Marton Adler, born in 1929 in Volové, a village in Sub Carpathian Ruthania (possibly Mizhhir'ya, Ukraine), describes being the oldest of his two brothers and sister; the Hungarian occupation of his village in 1939; the conscription of his father into a labor unit in Russia from 1941 until the end of 1942; how the family eventually lost their store due to the anti-Jewish laws; the German occupation of the area in March of 1944 and being deported with his family soon after; being sent first to a ghetto in Sokirnitsa (Sokyrnytsia), Ukraine and then to Auschwitz, where his mother and siblings were gassed; being sent with his father to Buchenwald and then to Dora, where his father was killed; and being liberated by the British from Bergen-Belsen.

    Oral history interview with Nathan Roth

    Oral history interview with Nathan Roth

    Oral History

    Nathan Roth, born in Veliky Bereznyy, Czechoslovakia (Velykyĭ Bereznyĭ, Ukraine), describes being deported with his mother, father, and eight siblings to the ghetto in Ungvár (Uzhhorod, Ukraine) in 1944 after the German annexation of his town; the split up of his family; being deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and then to Jaworzno, a sub-camp of Auschwitz; working for I.G. Farben at Jaworzno on an excavation project; being liberated by the Russians while on a death march following the evacuation of the Jaworzno camp; returning to Veliky Bereznyy after the war; and immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Zolton Rubin

    Oral history interview with Zolton Rubin

    Oral History

    Zolton Rubin, born in Kapúsány, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia), describes being the youngest child in a large family of eight sons and three daughters; how his family was fairly well off since his father owned a large farm and several mills; being protected with his parents from deportation because of an economic exemption until 1942 when the exemption was eliminated and his parents were deported; avoiding deportation because he used Gentile papers given to him by friends; being captured with a group of partisans in 1944 and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp near Jena, Germany, where he was part of a forced labor detail digging tunnels for the Germans; escaping towards the end of the war with three others and living off the land for about six weeks until the American Army arrived in the area; and reuniting with an older brother, who was a doctor with the Czechoslovakian Army.

    Oral history interview with Martin Schlanger

    Oral history interview with Martin Schlanger

    Oral History

    Martin Shlanger was born in Vel'ke Kapusany, Czechoslovakia (Velké Kapušany, Slovakia), describes moving to Budapest, Hungary in 1942 to work in a factory; the German occupation of Budapest in March 1944; acquiring false papers but being identified soon after as a Jew and arrested; being sent to Jaworzno, a sub-camp of Auschwitz; surviving a death march to Blechhammer in 1945 as the Russian Army invaded the area; hiding when the Germans left Blechhammer and being left behind at the camp and eventually encountering the Soviet Army; reuniting for a short time with his brother, who was serving with the Czechoslovak Brigade in the Soviet Army; and returning to his hometown where he lived until 1949 when he immigrated to Detroit, MI.

    Oral history interview with Abraham Pasternak

    Oral history interview with Abraham Pasternak

    Oral History

    Abraham Pasternak, born in 1924 in Beclean, Romania, describes his parents and siblings; the religious practices in his family; the Jewish community; the Hungarian occupation; restrictions placed on Jews; being forced out of Beclean and sent to Daiysh (possibly Dej, Romania); the forcing of Jewish men to shave off their beards; being sent to Auschwitz and life there; being sent to Schlieben and his work there; his work in Zeitz, Germany (Tröglitz concentration camp); being sent to Buchenwald for two months; being separated from his brothers; life in Buchenwald; religious practices in the camp; being beaten by a SS woman; food rations in the camp; life in Theresienstadt and reuniting with his brothers; liberation; returning to Beclean; going to Hungary and then the United States; and settling in Detroit, MI.

    Oral history interview with Szymon Binke

    Oral history interview with Szymon Binke

    Oral History

    Szymon Binke, born in 1931 in Łódź, Poland, describes how shortly after the Nazi invasion his family was moved to the city's Baluty district, which became the Łódź ghetto; being deported with his family in 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where his mother and sister were gassed; being placed in the Kinderblock; escaping from the Kinderblock to join his father and uncles in the main camp of Auschwitz; and being transferred later to a series of forced labor camps until he was liberated in May 1945.

    Oral history interview with Noemi Engel Ebenstein

    Oral history interview with Noemi Engel Ebenstein

    Oral History

    Noemi Engel Ebenstein, born in 1941, retells the stories told to her by her mother about how the family survived the Holocaust; the deportation of her father being to a forced labor camp when she was a baby; being deported in May 1944 with her brother and mother from Subotica, Yugoslavia to several camps; going to Strasshof labor camp; and being sent to Moosbierbaum, where she and her family were liberated by the Soviet Army.

    Oral history interview with Alexander Karp

    Oral history interview with Alexander Karp

    Oral History

    Alexander Karp, born in Baktaloranthaza, Hungary, describes moving into the Kisvarda ghetto with his mother and 15 year old sister in 1944 when he was about 19 years old; the arrest of his father in Russia in 1942 and how they did not know if he was alive or dead; being transported with his family to Birkenau, where he was separated from his mother and sister; spending four months with an uncle in Birkenau; how he and his uncle claimed to be tool and die makers and were sent to several different camps; eventually ending up at an underground airplane factory in the Kochendorf area (Bad Friedrichshall, Germany); being evacuated in March 1945 to Dachau and then to Mittenwald, Germany, where they were liberated; and being reunited with his father in August 1945.

    Oral history interview with Bernard Klein and Emery Klein

    Oral history interview with Bernard Klein and Emery Klein

    Oral History

    Bernard and Emery Klein, brothers born in Humenné, Slovakia, describe their immediate family, including their parents and younger sister; the German occupation in 1939 and the deportations of Jews in 1941; how their family was not deported until 1944 because their father was an important farming advisor; Emery being sent with the family to Auschwitz without Bernard, who had become separated; the immediate gassing of their mother and sister; Bernard being reunited with his brother and father at Auschwitz a month later; being sent with their father to Gleiwitz, where Emery and his father worked in a factory while Bernard worked in the concentration camp kitchen; the evacuation of the camp in 1945 as the Russian Army advanced into the area and being sent to Blechhammer; how the German guards fled the camp, leaving the prisoners; walking with their father and several others back to Humenné; moving to Israel and Montreal, Canada; and eventually going to Detroit, MI.

    Oral history interview with Michael Weiss

    Oral history interview with Michael Weiss

    Oral History

    Michael Weiss, born in Kascony, Czechoslovakia, chronicles his experiences under the Czechoslovakians, Hungarians, and Germans, both prior to and during World War II; being transported with his family to the Hungarian ghetto of Beregszasz (Berehove, Ukraine) in 1944; being deported with his family to Auschwitz, where his mother was gassed by the Germans; and being sent with his father to Buchenwald and then on to Zeitz, Germany.

    Oral history interview with Manya Feldman

    Oral history interview with Manya Feldman

    Oral History

    Manya Feldman, born in Dombrovitsa, Poland (Dubrovytsia, Ukraine) in 1923, describes her large Orthodox family; the Soviet occupation of her town in 1939; the German invasion in 1941; how the Jews in Dombrovitsa immediately felt the effects of the German’s antisemitic measures; the liquidation of the ghetto in August 1942; escaping with her father, brother, and eldest sister into the forest; the deportation of her mother and her two sisters to Sarny, Ukraine, where they were murdered; joining the Kovpak partisan movement with her family; being separated from her family and spending the remainder of the war hiding in several small villages in the region and serving in different partisan units; the death of her father and siblings in combat; being placed in a displaced persons camp in Berlin, Germany following the end of the war; and immigrating to the United States.

    Oral history interview with David Kahan

    Oral history interview with David Kahan

    Oral History

    Born in 1928, in Gheorgheni, Romania, David Kahan was part of a large extended family, consisting of his mother, father, several siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins. In April 1944, the Germans invaded Hungary and immediately began the full-scale persecution of Hungarian Jewry. The Kahan family was detained by Hungarian Gendarmerie and placed in a school room for several days. After their initial detainment, the family was shipped to an ad hoc ghetto in Szaszregen (Reghin, Romania). The family remained incarcerated in a brick factory in Szaszregen for approximately four weeks. They were then shipped to Auschwitz. Upon arrival in Auschwitz, David was separated from his family, who were gassed, and David was shaved, deloused, and held for future use on work details. Of the camp itself, David remembers very few details. After approximately four weeks, David was shipped to the Mühldorf labor camp in Southern Germany. While there, David worked for Organization Todt, clearing trees for the construction of an underground airplane factory. David contacted typhus after he was liberated and was hospitalized in the displaced persons camp at Feldafing. Following his recovery, David showed no desire to return to Romania and made his way to the United States, arriving in New York in May 1949. From New York, David moved to Minneapolis and eventually made his way to Detroit around 1950. He married in 1953 and had three sons.

    Oral history interview with Rene Lichtman

    Oral history interview with Rene Lichtman

    Oral History

    Rene Lichtman, born in Paris, France in 1937, describes being the only son of Polish immigrants who arrived in France in the 1930s; his father joining the French Army shortly before the outbreak of World War II; the death of his father while in combat just outside of Paris in Compiègne; how after the fall of France his mother sent him to stay with a family in the countryside, where he was kept hidden from the Germans for the remainder of the war; his mother going into hiding in Paris in 1942; the survival of he and his mother and the death of most of his maternal and paternal family members in Poland; and his mother’s marriage in 1950 to an American Orthodox Jew, after which the two moved from France to Williamsburg, NY.

    Oral history interview with Jack Gun

    Oral history interview with Jack Gun

    Oral History

    Jack Gun, born in Rozhishche, Poland (Rozhyshche, Ukraine), describes living in Rozhishche with his father, mother, older brother, and sister; the annexation of Rozhishche to Ukraine by the Soviets at the outbreak of the war in September 1939; how after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 his family was forced into the ghetto and were used as forced laborers; the liquidation of the ghetto in August of 1942 and the murder of his father, mother, and sister; fleeing with his brother and receiving help from their father's non-Jewish friend; how upon this man's urging he and his brother hid first in the woods and then in a bunker they dug in a field; several near-misses with the occupation authorities; and hiding in a non-Jewish Ukrainian household, where they remained until the Russians liberated Ukraine in 1944.

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