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Oral history interview with Stephen Kalmar

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1999.A.0122.467 | RG Number: RG-50.477.0467

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    Oral history interview with Stephen Kalmar
    Transcript
    We're rolling.
    You can go ahead.
    Today is October 29, 1991.
    I'm Ellen Szakal, an interviewer with the Holocaust Oral History
    Project in San Francisco.
    This evening I will be interviewing Sam Kalmar
    and behind the camera is Laurie Sosna.
    Sam, would you please begin by stating
    your name, your date of birth, and your place of birth.
    My name is Stephen Samuel Kalmar,
    and I was born October 6, 1910.
    I'm married, and I live in Berkeley, California.
    OK, well, tell us about--
    where were you born?
    I was born in Slovakia in a very small village called Sisov
    in Slovakian, and in Hungarian, it's called Siso, S-I-S-O.
    At that time, Slovakia was administered by Hungary.
    It was a part of the Hungarian Austrian monarchy.
    In that village, there lived about 12 to 15 Jews.
    My parents moved from there to Vienna in the middle of 1914
    just about a few months before the First World War started.
    Then we lived in Vienna.
    I was educated in Vienna.
    Did you have any brothers and sisters?
    Yes, family consisted of six children.
    I was the youngest.
    The oldest was quite a bit older than I. The oldest two brothers
    and were two sisters then was a brother just three years older
    than I. My father and my brothers were all
    drafted into the army in the First World War in Vienna,
    and my mother stayed behind with the two girls and the two
    younger boys.
    Two girls had immediately to find jobs there.
    There were about 14 and 16 years old.
    The mother kept the little store where she sold
    eggs and apples and something.
    Whatever there was to sell.
    It was not much during the war, but she kept that going.
    I was four years old then when the war started,
    and my brother seven.
    He went to school already.
    I spent most of the time on the street
    and enjoyed it very much as a little boy,
    but it was not as easy.
    In the morning around six, I had to get up and go to the corner
    shop to wait in line to get some ration and whatever it was.
    No, that is wrong.
    It was the other way around.
    My brother went there at 6 o'clock,
    and I went there at 8:00 to relieve him.
    He went to school already, and I waited
    until the shop opened the door until I
    was able to get to the shop and get the things.
    My father returned from the war when he was 52,
    and the brothers, one became a prisoner in Russia
    came back after the revolution in 1917,
    was drafted to get into the army and stayed
    till the end of the war.
    The other brother was all the time to the end of the war.
    It's a part that is now Yugoslavia.
    That's a coast there.
    He was a telephonist till the last day,
    and had a little notebook that told [INAUDIBLE],,
    don't shoot anymore.
    We are surrendering, but it didn't help them
    when Hitler came in 1938.
    Both of them were taken to Dachau
    and stayed in Dachau until they were able to obtain
    visas for Shanghai.
    And then quite complicated detours.
    They reached Shanghai and survived the war in Shanghai.
    Shanghai the ghetto.
    The eldest brother, Shandor, then went to New York.
    Edmund, who is two years younger, went to Australia.
    During the Hitler years, the sister, Margit,
    which is a bit younger than my sister Estie,
    she stayed in Vienna.
    Her husband was not well.
    They had a boy of eight.
    The three of them were taken to the Theresienstadt,
    in the concentration camp in Theresienstadt.
    My brother-in-law, the husband of my sister, died there,
    and Margit and her son were taken to Auschwitz
    and died there.
    Estie, my other sister, together with her husband
    went illegally over the border through Germany to Belgium
    and stayed there till just a little bit before the war
    started.
    They were able to get to the United States.
    George, the brother that is three years older,
    also went without a passport into France.
    He had studied French at University
    to become a professor in French.
    His wife should have followed, but his wife
    didn't want to leave the mother and father,
    and they all died in a concentration camp.
    He survived the war in France by being
    hidden by the underground in the wine
    fields in the southern France and in the hospital
    all bandaged so that the Germans,
    when they came, the Gestapo couldn't recognize--
    they couldn't see the face, and then they also
    said he had an operation.
    He's a French man who was operated.
    A few times he was saved in that way.
    I myself left Vienna already a few months before Hitler came.
    I had been politically very active already as a high school
    student.
    I had joined the socialist high school student
    organization and then the socialist university students
    organization.
    1934, in Austria, democracy ended
    and Italian-type, Mussolini-type fascism
    was introduced under the leadership of Dollfuss,
    and all parties were outlawed.
    The Austrian Social Democratic Party
    had in all elections about 43%, 45% of all the votes
    but were forbidden and went underground
    and participated still in the underground.
    At 1937, I was arrested.
    Spent only about three weeks in interrogation detention.
    Was released then.
    I sat in jail with two quite high-up Nazis.
    The jails were crowded, and under this regime,
    the Nazi party was outlawed too.
    It was only one party allowed, the Catholic People's Party.
    I was in a cell with two others.
    A single cell with two others.
    The two others were Nazis, and they
    told me, in a few months time, they
    will control Vienna and Austria.
    In the cell, they will not hurt me, but they know me,
    and when then they come to power, I better be not there.
    And I could see how the time changed.
    The former socialist students suddenly
    became anti-Semitic, didn't greet one anymore when
    they saw them on the street.
    I married a girl that I knew already for many years,
    and together we buy food, hitchhiked
    through all Europe via Switzerland, France
    until we came to Sweden.
    Sweden still allowed people with Austrian passport
    to enter for three months as a tourist.
    And when I arrived in Sweden, I declared
    myself a political refugee, and Sweden was on the Social
    Democratic government.
    And they had the special refugee organizations
    that checked one's documents, papers, and references.
    And if one could prove that one was in danger, not only
    as a Jew but mainly as a Social Democrat
    or under Hitler refugees, they allowed one to stay.
    So I was allowed to stay even to work there.
    I expected that the war would very soon start
    and was waiting for it because I thought
    that would be the only way that Hitler could be terminated
    and the new democracy starting in Europe.
    When the war started, the threat was great
    that Sweden or Scandinavia would be occupied by Hitler.
    In the last moment--
    I worked in Sweden as a journalist
    and mainly as a maker of crossword puzzles
    and other puzzles had learned the language quickly.
    It's not very different from German
    or from people who speak English too could learn it quickly,
    easily.
    I started to make crossword puzzles which I could sell
    and wrote some articles.
    I was never receiving any support, financial support,
    from any organization.
    Just by that, we were able to survive modestly,
    but it helped me mainly to get in the last moment
    a visa to Mexico as a correspondent
    for a Swedish daily newspaper, a Social Democratic
    daily newspaper.
    Not really that they expected me to work for them there.
    There was so much interest in Sweden for Mexico,
    but they really wanted to help me.
    And the Mexican government accepted it.
    It was under the presidency of Cardenas
    who had also allowed many other Social Democratic
    refugees into the country.
    I left Sweden early in 1940 already
    after the war had started and arrived in Mexico sometime
    in February after being detained in Ellis Island for three
    weeks.
    I needed a transit visa through the United States.
    That was the hardest thing to get.
    The consulate in Stockholm for an hour I battled with him.
    He wouldn't want to give it to me because he
    was afraid I will never go to Mexico
    but would stay in the United States.
    But then he gave it to me, but apparently,
    informed the government in the United States not to let me in.
    So when we arrived in New York, I was the first one
    to be called up, and I thought that this a special honor
    went down from my cabin to the board
    and then was asked to come down.
    And then with a taxi, I was taken to Ellis Island.
    Only released when the boat came for which
    we had tickets to go to Mexico, and we were taken to Mexico
    to Veracruz in that boat.
    And we had a lot of trouble in landing Veracruz.
    It was not easy.
    Afterwards, I heard that we were the only ones that
    land without bribing the immigration officers there
    or having been expected by relatives or others who
    had arranged the release.
    We didn't expect that we had to do that,
    and we were the last of the boat to get out.
    When we arrived there, it was all pitch dark.
    It was a strike.
    We got to a hotel, and the next day, we got to Mexico City,
    but we had no relatives there I didn't know the language.
    I didn't know anybody.
    Stayed eight years in Mexico.
    How's your Spanish?
    Learned Spanish.
    Started again to make crossword puzzles together
    with a lady that had come to Mexico a few years earlier
    and had been a writer in Germany, Elise [Personal name]
    I taught her how to make the crossword puzzle,
    and her Spanish was already correct.
    We succeeded and again started to earn some money,
    and then I was introduced to a Spanish refugee which
    started in Mexico a weekly film magazine.
    And we convinced him to start a crossword puzzle magazine.
    That survived about six months and did quite well but not well
    enough for him.
    But we were also selling to magazines and newspapers
    the crossword puzzles.
    And I started to export Mexican handicraft products, which
    I bought on the markets in various villages
    in Mexico City and other villages.
    For about $100 that I had saved from the crossword puzzles,
    sent the merchandise to a friend of mine
    in St. Louis, Missouri who had studied with me in Vienna,
    had more or less the same family background as I,
    lived in the same district.
    In fact, he was the one who taught
    me to make crossword puzzles.
    Vienna had about 11 crossword puzzle weekly magazines.
    It was the center of it, because there were so many unemployed
    people, and when they were standing in line for hours
    and hours to get their support, they were solving those
    crossword puzzle magazines, which cost only $0.10 or $0.05.
    And he became the chief editor of three or four
    and needed more puzzles than he could make himself,
    so he taught me how to do them.
    He had started when he was 12, 13 years old doing them
    and supported his family with it.
    I started when I was 14 or 15 and supported myself
    amongst studying in Vienna, and it became
    important to immigration.
    For immigrations, so you have to be flexible and try whatever
    you can where you may not have too
    much competition for others.
    He did never use it again, but for me, it helped.
    Anyhow, I sent through the merchandise to him.
    He sold it with some profit.
    He sent me back my money was half of the profit.
    I bought more, sent it to him, and we built it up to quite--
    not to a big business, but some.
    One could call it already a business.
    Then I found a Czechoslovakian refugee there who had been
    the managing director of the largest bank in Prague
    of the [NON-ENGLISH].
    Like the Bank of America here or even bigger
    compared to the country size.
    He had manage to escape just before Hitler
    came to Prague by some deal with the government
    that they handed over the bank to the government
    and were allowed to take some money out.
    He became my silent partner and financed my business
    to become bigger, and it grew, and we had exports
    to many other countries.
    Mainly still to the United States, but to other countries
    too until the war ended.
    So in some sense, I'm not really a victim of the Holocaust
    insofar as personally I was not in a concentration camp
    and didn't suffer bodily, but many of my family members
    perished beside the immediate family.
    Many uncles and aunts and cousins, friends.
    Both Jewish and political friends that I had.
    While you were living in Mexico, what type of communications
    were going on with you and your family?
    And then I'd also like to hear about what
    was going on with your wife.
    I had no connections with anybody
    outside that one sister in New York.
    We did not know what happened to the others.
    I thought that they are dead, that they were killed too
    like my sister.
    Only when the war ended through the help of the Red Cross,
    they got in touch with us somehow.
    The Red Cross, and we also contacted the Red Cross and
    asked whether they could find out something
    about what happened to them.
    And about a year after the war, we
    heard that the two brothers in Shanghai had survived
    and the brother in France.
    Then we were informed by other people that
    survived the concentration camps that my sister, her husband,
    and their son were taken to the camp but did not survive.
    Did you know anything about the camps during the war?
    Not during the time of the war.
    We started to hear about it very close
    toward the end of the war in no detail.
    Just the rumors, but we have never
    met anybody who had gotten out of the camp with some facts.
    We never had any facts about it.
    So did you have any inkling of the exterminations?
    No, I did not.
    When I was in Sweden, I wrote to my sisters
    and my relatives in Vienna and relatives in Czechoslovakia
    that the situation's extremely dangerous, that the war will
    start, that they should try by all means to get out.
    And if possible, the whole family.
    But if not, at least some of the family, but the answer
    was always the same.
    They had either a shop or a job that they can't give up
    or family or children or somebody ill in the family,
    and they didn't go out.
    We learned later that in Slovakia my parents
    had many brothers and sisters, and they all had many children.
    All of them lived in Slovakia and Hungary, and most of them
    perished.
    One family close by where we lived, close by to--
    Siso is the larger--
    it's a town already, Tapolca in Hungarian.
    [Place name] in Slovakian called.
    One family had eight sons.
    Tall, strong men.
    They all were killed, shot in the marketplace.
    And another family, they had also eight children.
    [Place name] by the name of Steiner.
    This family's name was Deutelbaum.
    My mother's name was Deutelbaum, and they
    were relatives of hers.
    One sister of my mother married somebody
    by the name of Steiner, and they lived in [Place name]
    In Hungarian, it was called [Place name]
    And that is the translation of the same.
    Three of their children survived and managed to get to Israel,
    but the parents and the others died.
    In the last days, they were underground with the guerrillas
    in the mountains there.
    And when the Germans withdrew already,
    they thought it's safe to come down.
    The Russians were just at the border just very close to them,
    but the Russians didn't go in, and the Germans
    returned and caught them and killed them.
    Now, one of them, one of the children, was a cousin of mine,
    and two sisters of his still alive in Israel in Tel Aviv.
    He had started out by making little prayer
    books in some unusual, silver-plated cover in books
    and did it himself.
    He and his wife, and it grew more and more.
    A few years back when I visited them in Israel,
    it turned out through the work of his wife
    and the daughters that has grown up,
    they became a very large leather handbag company.
    And they're name, Steiner, is on every bag in every shop
    where you go--
    you could see that name.
    Very orthodox people.
    My family was orthodox, too.
    But when I was 12, 13 years old, became an ardent socialist,
    I gave up any religious obeyance.
    And my parents still kept the holidays,
    but I was not religious anymore.
    No, I want to say that might be interesting.
    When leaving Sweden, I needed $300 of landing money
    in Mexico.
    That was a regulation.
    Nobody was allowed to land who didn't have
    $300 money in his possession.
    And the committee that recognized me
    as a political refugee was not willing to give me this money,
    but insisted that I should try to get it
    through the Jewish community, although I never--
    I considered myself a full socialist and not
    as a Jewish refugee.
    But they were ready to help me.
    Gave me the $300, and when we arrived
    in Mexico City, the first thing we were told,
    there is a Jewish organization there
    of refugees called Menorah.
    And their president was a Jewish refugee from Hamburg,
    a doctor Dr. Ernest Frank.
    He's a physician, and my wife was pregnant
    already in the six months, which fortunately nobody had
    noticed on the trip.
    We would never have gotten the tickets and passage tickets
    on the boat.
    He helped her, and when the first son was born,
    the Menorah sent us a large parcel with all the things
    that were needed for a baby.
    $100 of the $300, it was really not earned money.
    $100 of the $300 were left when I started the export business
    with the Mexican handicraft, which cost only a few cents.
    Straw figures and little, wooden,
    carved things, and small, cheap things.
    Can you tell us a little bit more
    about your father's family and your mother's family
    in Slovakia, and how they came to be there,
    and what were their families like?
    From what I know about the past of my family and of the Jews
    in Slovakia, they had come pretty late there.
    I think around 1820 from Austria and from Germany
    to administer the properties of the aristocracy
    and the large land owners there.
    And we are welcome there.
    They didn't speak Yiddish.
    They spoke German and did quite well.
    I think my family also did, originally, quite well.
    My elder sisters told me that at some stage,
    we were quite wealthy there, but then it all switched around
    when they were not needed anymore.
    They were expropriated by the government
    and had just little shops and rented little farms
    to support themselves.
    In this village-- and that might have
    been the reason why most families tried
    to get to either Budapest, the capital of Hungary,
    or to Vienna, the capital of Austria.
    And during the First World War, I
    went there in 1916, 60 years old,
    to get some good food again.
    Because in Vienna, we were all terribly suffering.
    But there, the Slovakians of country, they still
    had bread, and meat, and milk.
    And at that time, it was very hard on the Jewish holidays.
    They had great trouble to get 11 people together
    for a minyan in the temple.
    The temple in Siso, I remember--
    I was told that, too, by my father,
    was built through the help of my grandfather
    who, around 1900, had gone to Moravia to a health spa
    where the emperor always went with a delegation
    of a few other Jewish people from there
    and made the petition to obtain some money
    and help from the government to build the synagogue.
    And it was granted.
    And that synagogue, I remember the big building--
    it was not a very big building when I later came back.
    It was a two-story building with a woman section
    above and a male section below.
    But there was great trouble from the surrounding villages
    to get 11 people together.
    They had to walk for three or four hours
    to go there on Saturdays for the services.
    I think by the start of the war, there
    was only one Jewish family left.
    Similar was a situation, many villages in Slovakia
    as people moved away to the capital--
    more to Budapest and Vienna than to Prague.
    Prague itself, Moravia, had an old established Jewish
    population, the oldest synagogues,
    I think if I'm not wrong, from the 11th century or more--
    around that time already.
    But they were all speaking German, not Yiddish.
    Why did the rest of the family stay and your mother,
    and your father, and six brothers and sisters
    decided to leave?
    Why did your father make that decision?
    And what did he do actually, professionally, in Slovakia?
    In Siso, he had a little inn and a little farm.
    That was quite common.
    The inn, it was really not an inn
    where you stayed over night.
    It was a little shop where you sold schnapps or vodka,
    or slivovitz to the peasants, and eggs, some
    from the little farm that he had.
    They sold eggs and they made butter from the milk
    from the cows.
    That was what they did.
    He was drafted to the army, a surprising profession
    for a Jewish fellow, he became a trainer of wild horses
    to become military horses.
    I have a photograph still where he's standing next to a horse.
    In the First World War, he was drafted to the cavalry
    both at the Polish or Russian front.
    The brothers had become apprentices in the next larger
    village in a notion shop, selling ribbons
    and threads and things like.
    And when they came to Vienna, they
    got similar jobs in this firm, the company,
    owned by some far relative, and the sisters the same.
    One brother of my mother had emigrated earlier to Vienna
    and started a tie factory.
    And sister Margit, who died in the camp,
    started to work there when she was 14 years old
    and became the manager, finally, of that tie factory who
    provided not only Austria, but all the states controlled
    by Austria, which after the war became independent states.
    That was true with many of the companies.
    They didn't only supply the small Austria.
    Austria-Hungarian monarchy had about 70 million people
    Austria itself, and the war ended in 1918,
    was left with 6 million, which, of course, created
    terrible difficulties-- economic difficulties.
    That explained why so many in Austria
    became socialists and social democrats.
    Communists were very few--
    just 3% or 4%.
    But the social Democrats were very strong.
    The brothers started one a small shop on his own,
    the other a small manufacturing company--
    ladies underwear.
    From Shanghai, he moved after the war ended to Australia.
    That was brother Edmond.
    His son, Kurt, when he was 12, around the time
    when Hitler came to Vienna, he was a very strong boy,
    crossed the Danube swimming into Slovakia,
    and went to the relatives there, then went back to Vienna
    and visited Jewish organizations help, but to England.
    And on a farm in England, when he was 16,
    he falsified his age, and volunteered to the army,
    and joined the English army, and was in Italy
    until the end of the war.
    He had to change his name too because under his own name
    if the Germans would have caught him,
    they would have shot him as a traitor to the country where
    they kill the Jews.
    But they would still have said at that time he's Austrian.
    So he took the name of Lenz.
    And 1948, I moved from Mexico to Australia
    where my brother Edmond had already
    moved a little bit earlier, and then his son came there.
    And then the brother who survived in France also
    came to Australia.
    And I stayed in Australia until 1962 when I came to Berkeley.
    And Shandor, where was Shandor?
    Shandor also survived in Shanghai in the ghetto there.
    Went to New York and started in New York with his wife.
    They both had this retail store in Notions in Vienna.
    Started a similar store in New York, very small, in the area
    where a lot of Jewish people lived around the 98th street,
    92nd, 98th street.
    Now it's all Puerto Ricans, but at that time,
    it was mainly Jewish.
    He died about 10 years ago, and his wife
    died about six years ago.
    My brother Edmond died about seven years ago.
    My sister, Estie, lives in Berkeley, is 94 years old now.
    And her husband, who was 92 years old, died last week.
    My brother George still is in Australia.
    He's in his 85th year.
    Do you speak to him frequently?
    Beg your pardon.
    Do you speak to him frequently?
    Occasionally.
    I was back a few years ago and I telephoned him and he sometimes
    telephones here.
    And Kurt?
    Kurt is still there, has an interesting life.
    His father started a small trouser factory there,
    just he and his wife and I think one other helper.
    When he came to Australia, he first
    worked as an auto mechanic.
    He was a tank driver in the war and became a mechanic.
    And in Australia, he worked as an auto mechanic
    for Jaguar cars.
    Then he joined his father, but instead
    of making men's trousers, he was a great sport--
    start to make ski pants, and more or less
    introduced skiing into Australia.
    He was a ski jumper.
    He became the president of the ski association
    and did rather well.
    And two years back, I guess, he became a member of an OBE,
    of the Order of the British Empire, which
    is quite a distinction for my father, whose name was
    Max Kohn in Siso and Vietnam.
    Yes, his factory did quite well.
    But manufacturing became difficult
    because of competition of imported stuff
    from Japan and Hong Kong and switched over
    to importing himself.
    He's still doing it.
    I carried him in my arms in Vienna, now he's probably 65.
    Sam, you were quite young in Vienna.
    I'd like to know what your life was like.
    I know that your brothers and sisters
    were, with the exception of Julius,
    were quite a bit older than you.
    I'd like to know what your father was like.
    Was he happy?
    Was he serious?
    What did he do professionally there?
    Do you remember songs, or friendships?
    I'd like to know what your early childhood was like.
    My earliest childhood was really spent still
    at Siso in Slovakia.
    I remember very little of it.
    Probably my first language was Slovakian.
    I don't remember anything like that
    of my father, or my mother, or the others,
    or 3 and 1/2 years when I came to Vienna.
    And there in Vienna, my father after a few months
    went to war, although I have little memory of him
    from that time.
    I remember him when he came back and he was already 52 years.
    1916, during these two years, I was brought up really
    by nobody.
    I was a street urchin.
    My mother had no time for me.
    I was all the time on the street.
    And Jules-- Jules was my hero.
    I tried to copy him in everything.
    He was an excellent soccer player, and bicycle rider,
    and ice skater.
    And I couldn't do anything of that yet.
    He was already seven and eight years old,
    and I was three, four, five.
    And my sister Estie, who I remember,
    took a little more care of me than the others--
    more home.
    Not much, a little.
    Jules was in the schools already, and I was not.
    I was almost like a single child without family or parents.
    My father was a very handy man, very practical with his hands.
    I was told by him that in Slovakia, he went from farm
    to farm to drill water wells--
    had developed some method whereby
    he could drill into the soil and find water and other things
    that he could do with his hands.
    When he came back, he got a job for one or two years in spite
    of, I consider him a very old man-- he was 52,
    but he still got a job till the end of the war,
    but then was not working anymore.
    And the elder brothers and sisters
    supported him, and my mother, and Jules,
    and me enough to just survive in a small apartment--
    very little apartments that we had.
    And from 12-year-old, 12 on, I coached other students
    in mathematics and in writing and in shorthand.
    And whatever I learned, I passed on
    to those who were not good enough.
    Jules, we all had scholarships at university
    to go to the university.
    We had relatives in Vienna, quite a large number already,
    brothers and sisters of my mother, mainly--
    of my father also.
    One was a Schweikart in the second district in Vienna,
    which is where we lived.
    Vienna had about 160,000, 180,000 Jews
    and about 120,000 or so lived in the 2nd district.
    It was almost a Jewish town.
    There were the synagogues, and the orthodox Jews,
    and he was a Schweikart.
    His son was already a physician, a very good physician.
    That was the only relative of my father's side.
    My mother's side, her name was Deutelbaum.
    But around 1914, Hungary requested
    that all Jewish people should change their name
    into Hungarian names.
    They called it modernizing.
    And so our name was originally Kohn, and that became Kalmar.
    And many people with Kohn had to choose usually names
    with first starting letter.
    They changed it into Keisch, and into Kaltesch,
    and into Koloman, and all kinds of names that sounded somehow
    Hungarian.
    Now, my mother's name was Deutelbaum and many of them
    changed the name into Denes--
    D-E-N-E-S-- pronounced "Danish" in Hungarian.
    Now, one brother who had come to Vienna
    earlier started a glass company and became the largest glass
    replace company in Vienna.
    And his name was seen on all the street cars.
    He had some contracts with the city of Vienna
    and was very proud of that.
    That was a Denes, but he kept very little contact
    with us-- visited us once a month or so for a few minutes.
    I remember him well.
    The other was Franz Denes, who had the largest,
    I said before, tie factory together with another Denes.
    They split, and both were manufacturing ties.
    And there was a third Denes who started
    a framing company in the best street,
    or one of the best streets, and close to the castle, Hochberg,
    in the first district in Vienna.
    And I remember well.
    I went often there, and he had paintings to frames
    there of the high aristocracy.
    And everybody who entered was Baron so-and-so
    and Graft, Count, and so on.
    They spoke German with a Viennese accent.
    Nobody would have known that they are Jewish.
    The husband didn't live anymore, only the wife--
    his wife, his widow-- and the two children.
    And they had this store.
    It was a large Jewish community, and they helped one another.
    That Franz Denes was one of the heads of the Jewish community.
    I remember, if it's correct, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]..
    He was the only one, I think, who was religiously active.
    Did the Jewish community stick together?
    Yes.
    Were you a part of the Jewish community?
    Yes.
    There were, of course, very orthodox synagogues and not so
    orthodox.
    And I remember one, the Turkish temple,
    where the Sephardic Jews--
    and all in the same district, a few streets away
    from the other.
    Up to my certainty as I went over Yom Kippur or Rosh
    Hashanah into the temple to visit my parents,
    but stayed not long.
    They were always there.
    And they celebrated Friday night.
    So they were, they weren't religious, your mother
    or father?
    Only the parents were still keeping Jewish rituals
    and holidays.
    None of the other children did anymore.
    If the Deutelbaums were living in Vienna,
    why were they subject to Hungarian authority
    that they would have to change their names?
    They changed it still in Slovakia before they came.
    Some changed it earlier, or some changed it.
    I'd never given that some thought
    when they changed the name.
    It's an interesting question-- why
    did they change the name from the Deutelbaum
    or where did they change it?
    I know there were relatives in Budapest by the name of Denes.
    When your mother married, what was her maiden name?
    Deutelbaum.
    And so her brothers changed that name to Denes
    when they moved to Hungary or to Austria.
    Might be that at that time, they still had Hungarian passports
    and had to do because of that what was required by Hungary--
    may have become Austrian citizens later.
    1918, I had a Czechoslovakian passport still.
    When I visited Slovakia, I traveled on the Czechoslovakian
    passport because Slovakia has then
    become a part of Czechoslovakia, not anymore of Hungary.
    So in my life, I had a lot of passports.
    I had Czechoslovakian passports, Austrian passports.
    From Sweden, I left with a Swedish stateless passport,
    but which looked fully like a Swedish passport
    in Swedish language.
    And fortunately, in some countries, they didn't know it
    and accepted it, otherwise they wouldn't
    have allowed one to go in.
    I had great problems when I got the visa for Mexico,
    I had to provide a valid passport.
    I had only the Austrian passport that I had,
    I had to go to the German embassy--
    Austria was occupied by Germany.
    And I had to receive a German passport.
    So my Austrian passport still showed me as Samuel Kalmar.
    And Stefan was also already in it.
    No, it was only Samuel.
    I used the name Stefan also when I made my crossword puzzles
    and wrote articles as a journalist in Vienna.
    When I studied at university, I studied economics
    and international trade.
    I started to write popular article
    about economics in Vienna.
    But under the name of Samuel, I would have never
    been able to get them accepted.
    So I called myself Stefan Kalmar.
    But in the passport, I was still under Samuel Kalmar.
    So when I got the German passport, that was not
    enough to identify me as a Jew, so I
    got the big Israel added to it, and the sign J for Jewish.
    When I presented that to the Mexican consul,
    he wouldn't accept it because he knew I would not return.
    And he said, I give you only a visa for Mexico
    if you can prove that you have a valid visa and can go back.
    I can't give you an immigrant visa to Mexico
    only as a correspondent for a limited time.
    Through the socialist refugee organization,
    I got this Swedish nansenepass, it
    was called-- a stateless pass.
    But I didn't have the right to return.
    When I presented it to the Mexican consul,
    he wouldn't give me the passport.
    And the last boat leaving, the war had started already,
    was due in two or three days.
    And that was a real struggle.
    I finally got the right to return stamped into that visa.
    And then that consul was also anti-Semitic.
    He knew that I'm Jewish from the German passport,
    the Mexican consul.
    And he said I have to have a letter from the newspaper
    that they will regularly send me money to Mexico
    to pay for my keep there.
    And the chief editor of the newspaper
    was also a member of the parliament in Sweden.
    And the Russian-Finnish war had just started.
    And Sweden debated whether to enter the war,
    or to help Finland, or not to enter.
    And this editor in chief of the daily paper
    was the main speaker of the Social Democratic Party, which
    controlled the government.
    The only way to get it was for me to get into the parliament
    and to get him out from there to induce
    him to give me this letter.
    He was very annoyed that I called him out,
    was so red faced when he came.
    But he signed the letter, took it back to the consul,
    and got the visa, and next day we left.
    Otherwise, we would never have gotten out.
    We left for Mexico.
    Then in Mexico, my first son was born, the name of George,
    but the Spanish, Jorge, Jorgito.
    And due to the fact that I was a father of a Mexican-born child,
    I obtained Mexican citizenship.
    So when we went from Mexico to Australia,
    I traveled on the Mexican passport.
    From Australia in 1962 when we came to America,
    I still had a valid Mexican passport
    and went to Mexico City again.
    I had to wait there about six months
    before I got an immigrant visa to the United States
    and then came to the United States.
    And in the United States, I remained a Mexican citizen
    until Nixon resigned.
    And I consider that such a great show of strength of democracy
    that within a month, I applied for the American citizenship
    and became an American citizen.
    And my first names in all these countries changed
    because first, it was Samuel, pronounced "Sham-well"
    in Hungary, shortened to Shamu.
    At home, I was called Sammy or Saminko in Slovakian.
    In Vienna, I added Stefan to it--
    S-T-E-F-A-N-- and then the Nazis added Israel.
    In Sweden, it became Stefan--
    they liked it more.
    In Australia, they liked Stefan.
    In Mexico, it became Esteban.
    Now, I've got accustomed to use myself, Stephen.
    But as time goes on, those people
    who know me better or longer call me Sam from before,
    and most friends by now call me Sam again.
    So the circle seems to be closed and going back to Sam.
    I started about six years ago to write my memoirs.
    I decided to leave something out of the stories
    that I lived through for my children.
    But the publisher here in San Francisco learned about it,
    and contacted me, and asked me to see the manuscript,
    and published it here.
    But I had it ready only up to leaving Mexico.
    So it covers only the first 40 years
    of my life in Austria, Sweden, and Mexico.
    Just now, I'm finishing, I hope tomorrow,
    I write the last pages of the second 40 years
    of my life in Australia, back in Mexico, then in Berkeley.
    In Vienna already, besides studying economics,
    international trade, I got also very interested in psychology
    in an early age.
    Vienna is the center of all modern psychology
    and psychiatry besides Freud.
    At that time, Adler, who started the school
    of individual psychology became well known too.
    And he was a former disciple of Freud.
    And I liked his teachings more than Freud's and became
    quite involved in Adlerian individual psychology.
    In Berkeley, another former Freudian scholar, disciple,
    who had joined the Adlerian school of psychology,
    formed his own, the so-called third Viennese school
    of psychology, Viktor Frankl.
    And he called it logotherapy.
    I became very involved in it.
    I was, for a long time, the vice president of it.
    My first wife-- the marriage with my first wife--
    broke up a year after I came to Berkeley.
    And the year thereafter, I married my second wife, Vera--
    Vera Lieben.
    And she was a schoolteacher, retired a few years ago,
    and became also very active in local therapy
    and studied psychology and education,
    then obtained her doctorate degree in education
    here in San Francisco and became the training director
    of the local therapy.
    He had survived the war in Russia, and Siberia,
    and the Russian camps.
    And her story is probably much more interesting than mine.
    One day, you should probably interview her.
    One day, we'd like to.
    Can you show us your book and tell us a little bit about it?
    I called my book Goodbye, Vienna.
    I thought I would never return to it.
    When I left Vienna, my first wife and I,
    we took a streetcar to the furthest western streetcar
    station, which is in Hütteldorf, left the train there,
    and started hiking on the street.
    And when we got the first car that took us along,
    we turned back and had still a view of Vienna,
    the dome of St. Stephen, my name.
    And I said, goodbye, Vienna--
    thought I would never return.
    From Australia, I made a return to Europe in 1953.
    I had established myself as an importer there.
    I started an import company.
    And eight years after the war, I didn't
    want to see anything in Austria, but I went to Germany.
    But my second wife's family returned to Vienna in 1945
    and lived there since then.
    And with Vera, my second wife, I went back quite a few times
    to Vienna.
    Now, this book here, Goodbye, Vienna,
    tells in detail what I have just answered to your questions.
    In Mexico, second son was born to us, Tomas.
    And in Australia, a daughter was born to us, Alice.
    So it's an international family.
    I was born in Slovakia, lived in Vienna.
    George was conceived in Sweden.
    And his name is George Gunnar Kalmar,
    after a close Swedish fellow who became a close friend of ours.
    Tom's name is Tom Mario.
    The girl in Australia's name is Elise, Elise Margit, Margit
    after my sister.
    In this book, there are photographs of my family--
    a family picture showing my whole family,
    and separately my brothers and sisters who died.
    You want to hold those up?
    It showed me when I was nine years old,
    after the First World War.
    Through a Jewish children's help organization,
    I was sent to Holland.
    Some others went were sent to Denmark and to Sweden.
    And I lived six months in Holland there
    and forgot all my German, spoke only Dutch.
    But then I came back to Vienna, I quickly learned it.
    Sam, hold that up so she can get it on the camera.
    It's wonderful.
    Thank you.
    There is a picture of my family.
    You can see in the middle, my mother and my father
    on the side.
    There is your mother right in the middle, yeah.
    My mother, my father, my oldest brother, Shandor, the next one,
    Edmond--
    They look alike.
    The oldest sister, Ernestine-- we called her Estie.
    My sister, Margit then Jules, and me.
    I'm probably holding a big, rubber ball in my hands
    beside the picture.
    It has a face on it, and I am holding it
    so that the photographer will take a picture of that face.
    You recall taking that photograph?
    Do you recall?
    Yes, I recall it very well.
    And my brother, still in uniform, was taken 1918.
    This brother, too, was on furlough.
    1917 it must have been taken.
    The war ended in 1918.
    That's probably right-- I'm seven years old there.
    And here is a picture of my membership
    card in the socialist student organization
    when I was 13 years old, and another one
    in the Social Democratic Party.
    Can you tell us about anti-Semitism in Vienna?
    Yes.
    This is a picture of the sister, and her husband,
    and the little boy who died in--
    who was sent first to Theresienstadt.
    And he died there, and she died in Auschwitz.
    The whole family was outstanding, handsome.
    Beautiful.
    Here is a picture of the crossword puzzle magazines
    that I made in Spanish in Mexico City.
    Here, that is a picture in Mexico City--
    a close friend of mine were friends.
    Otto and Elise [Personal name] Otto [Personal name]
    and Elise [Personal name] Elise was
    of a Jewish family, a large furniture manufacturing
    company in Prague.
    He was a labor leader, a member of the Reichstag,
    of the parliament in Germany.
    And they became friends of mine.
    But they were well-known.
    And here you see Diego Rivera, the famous Mexican painter,
    making a portrait of Otto.
    That's amazing.
    They were leftist socialist-- not communist, not Trotskyite.
    They were anti-Trotskyites, too.
    They were for, more or less, what Solidarity's doing now,
    or tried to do in Poland--
    democracy from the ground up--
    small factories, committees, and true democracies.
    But they recognized and respected
    Trotsky, met often with him.
    And here's a picture of Trotsky in Mexico City
    with Elise [Personal last name] and Otto [Personal last name]
    And did you take these photographs?
    No, I came to Mexico.
    I never met Trotsky.
    He was killed just about when I came there.
    I met his wife a few times, but not without knowing her better,
    just was introduced to her.
    Anti-Semitism in Austria, Vienna especially,
    was very strong in every range of society--
    everywhere.
    You could see at school already, Jews
    had no chance to advance in government jobs.
    A few became known as professors or doctors, physicians,
    this government employed.
    But in normal government positions,
    it was 100% non-Jewish occupation.
    A few Jews could establish themselves
    as professionals in various small professions--
    carpentry, tailoring, and electricians.
    At the university, often, the Jewish students
    were beaten by the already strong
    nationalistic, before Hitler, really,
    anti-Semitic student organization.
    The police would not defend them.
    You were often called [NON-ENGLISH]..
    It means "big Jew" on the street.
    It was not so amongst the Social Democratic Party.
    There might have been some dormant anti-Semitism in it.
    I did not encounter it until the last few months before
    the Nazis became very strong, my friends were,
    to a great extent, non-Jewish or Viennese--
    all the Jewish ones-- but mainly, non-Jewish ones.
    What was happening in Vienna, like in Germany, the longer
    the Jews stayed there, the more of them became assimilated
    and became Austrians and Germans intermarried.
    But in Austria, contrary to German, especially in Vienna--
    or exclusively almost in Vienna--
    there was a continuous influx of Jewish people
    from the other areas of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy,
    like we who'd come from Slovakia,
    and after us many of us, and from Hungary,
    and from Poland, Galicia and Romania,
    and Herzegovina, and Yugoslavia.
    So the Jewish population grew, but it was
    a switch going on all the time.
    The assimilated Jews didn't find so much anti-Semitism.
    Others didn't recognize them as Jews,
    but those who were recognized as Jew were always treated badly.
    Well, how did some Jews physically
    stand out as Jewish and others not?
    The Jews that came from the Eastern part of Europe
    were all orthodox Jews.
    They spoke Yiddish, which already gave them away.
    They wore black hats.
    They had side locks.
    They often went together.
    They used their hands to speak.
    They were loud.
    The assimilated ones behaved like the others
    that had gone through the same schools,
    had lost their old ways.
    They may have still been religious Jews, obeying Jews,
    but most people wouldn't recognize them--
    in Germany even more so than in Austria.
    Austria was a Catholic country, and to my own experience,
    wherever there is a strong Catholic influence
    in primitive countries, it goes hand-in-hand
    with the strong anti-Semitism.
    That's why Slovakia had strong anti-Semitism
    as a strong Catholic country.
    Slovakia during the Hitler time formed an armed state equally
    brutal, equally killing Jews like the Germans did--
    Austria much more than Germany.
    National socialism became strong in Germany.
    The individual German hardly knew Jews.
    There were only about 500,000, 600,000 Jews in all of Germany.
    In Austria, it was different, especially in Vienna.
    You had many Jews in Vienna.
    About 10% of the population of Vienna was Jewish.
    And of them, a good part was recently
    arrived Jews who was easily visible.
    But you don't need them really to see them and know
    them to be anti-Semitic.
    Anti-Semitism finds sort of his reason
    for anti-Semitism and for hating the Jews.
    What do you think the reasons were
    in Vienna for hating the Jews?
    If it hadn't been the Jews, if it
    had been some other ethnic group that was different,
    they would have hated those and blamed them
    for their shortcomings, and troubles, and poverty,
    and whatever went wrong.
    Now, they have no Jews, and they still are anti-Semitic,
    or they switch over to become anti-Yugoslavs, or anti-Turks,
    or anti-Greeks in Germany and in Austria.
    I think in every country, not only in Austria,
    it's not the exclusiveness of them.
    In the United States or in other country,
    any minority will be hated by or could
    be blamed for the bad things that happen in a country,
    especially if some members of that minority
    become very visible, either in economics or in politics.
    And then even today, you may find
    people who think that there are, again, 100,000 Jews in Austria,
    in Germany, or in Poland, and there are only a few thousand
    there.
    Facts don't count very much if it's
    an easy outlet for your own worries and troubles,
    you don't know the explanations for them,
    you blame people who have a different color,
    or different belief, or different ethnic background.
    Then you'll feel better if you belong
    to the stronger, bigger majority in your country.
    This may be a difficult question,
    but you've lived in many countries.
    And how did anti-Semitism compare to the anti-Semitism
    you experienced in Vienna?
    Greater, lesser, non-existent?
    Probably those who were looking for it could find it everywhere
    .
    But if you were not looking for it, if you came there
    to these countries, tried to establish yourself,
    learned the language, I would say
    I found none personally in Sweden, or in Australia,
    or in Mexico.
    But I know that there were, especially
    in the leading classes of Sweden,
    was a lot of sympathy for Hitler and the Nazis,
    and probably leading positions were never
    available for Jewish people, neither in the government
    nor in industry-- a few, perhaps, outstanding,
    but they did not have the equal chance as a reason.
    But I didn't find any.
    Sweden treated us very well, treated to Jewish immigrants
    there well.
    They were not immigrants.
    They were only allowed to stay until they
    could go to some other country.
    It's a problem that no country want the Jews--
    neither the United States.
    If I had applied for a visa for the United States in 1938
    in Vienna through my brother for an immigrant visa,
    it would have taken five or six years before the quota number
    would come up-- it was a quota system--
    pretty useless.
    Only a small number could come.
    The same other countries would take Jewish people
    if they were married to non-Jews.
    Australia took a few.
    Mexico took some non-married Jews
    if they were willing to marry Mexican people.
    Australia, Argentina, and Brazil, the Quaker
    arranged some visas for them.
    And so people in Sweden only tolerated immigrants.
    And the Jewish people in Sweden didn't want them.
    They were afraid this anti-Semitism may
    grow if they would stay there.
    So that's why they helped people.
    They helped me to get out of Sweden.
    There were are only a few thousand Jews in Sweden.
    In Australia, there were not many, only a few.
    I didn't encounter any, and there is not much to be seen.
    In Mexico, you are not known as a Jew.
    Mexico, you are treated by your nationalities.
    They would not say to him, Mr. Moskowitz, the Jew Moskowitz.
    They would say El Polaco, or the Russian, or the Hungarian.
    If somebody does something wrong and gets into the newspaper,
    you always say, Alleman, for example--
    the German so and so.
    If he was Jewish, had the Jewish name,
    but he went by the nationality that he had.
    And Jewishness was not considered a nationality,
    contrary to Poland and Russia, where the Jews formed and were
    considered a nation by themselves within the bigger
    nation--
    was a nationality.
    They had to say in their passports
    or whatever when they were asked this nation,
    they had to say, Jewish, whereas in Germany, Austria
    you would say German-Austrian.
    And in Mexico, surprisingly, it's the same.
    That's what I could say about it.
    If they know that somebody is Jewish, they don't like them,
    they would say, judeo and that is a swear word in Mexico.
    But they wouldn't recognize them.
    They are just foreigners to them.
    Were you ever beat up for being a Jew?
    Were you ever beaten for being a Jew?
    Beaten.
    Were you ever beaten as a child?
    Beaten.
    I was beaten as a student at the university.
    I remember one thing, especially--
    the socialist student wanted once
    to show them that we can resist them.
    And we went an early morning out to the university, about 60
    of us, armed with sticks, and blocked the door,
    and didn't let the Nazis in.
    But they came in through a back door--
    the professors or the guards.
    The concierge opened the door for them in the back,
    and then they were more than we.
    They opened the door from inside and went at us.
    And we were beaten by them, and then the police
    arrested me and arrested others--
    not them, but arrested us.
    And on the street, no, I was never.
    But I lived in a district that was mainly Jewish.
    The children around were all Jewish.
    These beatings didn't happen before Hitler came to power
    in Vienna or Austria.
    I don't remember to have heard it ever--
    not like in Poland or in Russia, where you had
    that happening in the pogroms.
    That must have been one of the reasons
    why they went to Vienna or to Budapest
    because there it did not happen.
    What is your earliest memory of Hitler?
    And how did people regard him in Vienna?
    I knew about Hitler probably much earlier than most other
    Jews, because being a socialist, I
    knew about Hitler already 1927, '28 when he started
    to become stronger in Germany.
    He had made a coup attempt to take over Germany 1923
    in Munich.
    But he was beaten there and was put in jail for a while.
    And that's where he wrote Mein Kampf.
    I followed keenly the progress of the Nazi party there.
    And I was shocked when the German president, Hindenburg,
    made him the chancellor of Germany.
    And I thought, that will be the end of democracy in Germany.
    That was 1933.
    By that time, there was a small Nazi party in Austria.
    We had German nationalists, quite a large--
    they called them the German nationalists, [GERMAN]..
    Perhaps 8% of the population or 8% of the members of Parliament
    wanted Austria to be a part of Germany,
    but they were not Nazis.
    They were just thinking that East Germany
    should be united with Germany.
    As Hitler grew and became stronger, many of those
    became Nazis.
    And when the Austrian Catholic Party disallowed
    the Austrian Socialist Party.
    And the Austrian Socialist Party did not
    resist it strongly enough.
    Many Austrian socialists became disappointed in socialism
    and fell for the Nazi propaganda.
    It was called National Socialist Labor Party, the Nazis.
    Many said the Jewish leaders--
    there were many Jewish leaders in the socialist party--
    has betrayed you.
    And a good number of them switched over.
    I would say not more than, perhaps, 8% or 10%.
    But still they grew there too.
    Schuschnigg was assassinated by the Nazi coup in Austria,
    which failed in 1936.
    And then he was followed by Schuschnigg,
    the same dictatorship, only one party existing,
    but not such a brutal dictatorship as the German was.
    They put the people in jail, but they didn't kill them.
    They also resisted under the threat of death.
    In 1934 when Dollfuss introduced his fascism,
    there was a resistance.
    And there were about, I can't remember the figure,
    but a few hundred were killed, and I
    think six or seven were hung by the government
    for resisting that fascist coup.
    But in the years from 1936 to 1938,
    there was a change all around where
    people were abandoning the Catholic party
    and joining the Nazi party.
    Still, in an election, he would never have gotten the majority,
    even in Austria.
    But by marching in, of course, and also, everybody
    try to show that they always have been Nazis,
    and welcomed him, and even the day before, they
    were still wearing the socialist party sign on their lapels.
    Why did they capitulate so easily?
    There was no real strength behind the government.
    Since 1934, Dollfuss and then Schuschnigg
    were 100% dependent on Mussolini's support in Italy--
    Mussolini in Italy and fascism in Italy was very strong.
    And Austria had not many choices.
    On the one side, it was endangered by Hitler Germany.
    Alone, the six million Austrians could hardly
    have resisted against the 80 million Nazi Germany.
    But by Mussolini supporting the independence of Austria,
    Mussolini was afraid, to some degree, of Germany, of Hitler.
    This political group believed that the only way
    how they could keep Austria independent--
    and had he not disallowed the Austrian Social Democratic
    Party, then the Catholic Party, together
    with the Austrian Party, could have somehow made
    it harder for Hitler to take it over, perhaps even prevented it
    without the war, because Hitler didn't want, really,
    to start the war.
    But how it was, and knowing that there is hardly
    nobody who supports the government,
    he had it very easy to march in.
    And by that time already, he had made pacts
    with Mussolini that Italy, Germany, and Japan--
    a three anti-communist pact to fight against Russia.
    So Italy became less and less ready to stand up
    against Germany.
    The fascist, Mussolini, was disappointed
    by the Western countries, Western world
    not allowing him to take over Abyssinia when he marched
    into Eritrea, Abyssinia, and boycotted him,
    whereas Germany supported him.
    So by 1938, Schuschnigg tried to get the support of Mussolini,
    but Mussolini simply told him, I can't help you.
    Then he tried to re-establish the right
    of the Austrian Social Democratic Party to exist.
    And for a week, they chased the Nazis from everywhere
    from the streets.
    They were against the old emblems,
    and suddenly everybody was, again, a social democrat.
    And Schuschnigg proposed a referendum.
    And that connection may be interesting--
    that was early-1938.
    I had only the right to stay in Sweden as a tourist.
    So I left Sweden, and went to Finland,
    and lived in Finland for a few months.
    I could make my crossword puzzle in Finland as well as
    in Sweden, and was still sending them to Vienna to my friend,
    Fred Weingarten, who was still the chief editor there
    before Hitler offed his magazines
    and paid for those puzzles.
    When I heard about this referendum,
    I was sure that Hitler will never allow it.
    The referendum was, are you in favor of Austria
    to remain an independent country?
    Or are you in favor of Austria to become a part of Germany?
    And the majority would have voted against it
    because Schuschnigg at the same time
    allowed the Social Democratic Party to exist.
    And they 100% would have voted against Anschluss to Germany.
    So the next day, we went back to Sweden because in Finland, they
    had no support by the political organization,
    went back to Sweden, and within a few days,
    Hitler threatened to march immediately into Austria.
    So the referendum was canceled, and then he marched in anyhow--
    and Mussolini was in favor of it.
    Do you recall the events that led to your decision
    to leave in 1937?
    You may not have many people whom you interviewed who still
    are alive and remember the political details
    of those years-- the last 10 years, say, from 1927 to 1937.
    But up to 1927, there was still great hope for socialism
    and social democracy in Austria or in Germany too.
    The Austrian Social Democratic Party had the self-defense
    organizations that had more members of the military--
    government military.
    By the Treaty of Versailles, Austria
    was only allowed to have, I think,
    26,000 soldiers and no armaments.
    But the Social Democrat Labor Party
    had about 40,000 former soldiers who were taking part
    in the war who has formed a self-defense organization
    against an attempt to re-establish
    the monarchy in Austria.
    And there were fascist forces already attacking
    the socialist Mussolini type fascists.
    And every time some Social Democrat or liberal man
    in Germany or in Austria--
    many in Germany, too, were killed by fascist groups.
    A Jewish minister, a member of government
    in Germany, Rathenau, was shot by the German Social
    Democrats, like Liebknecht and Luxemburg were killed,
    and many others.
    They always were acquitted by the court.
    Nothing happened to the murderers.
    And in Austria, the same happened 1927
    on the 15th of July.
    And some of those Heimwehr fascists
    had killed seven Social Democrats in a demonstration,
    and they were acquitted by the court.
    And the workers in Vienna put on the tools
    and marched into the center of Vienna to protest against it.
    They came through the second district.
    I was 17 years old.
    We marched there peacefully.
    And we came close to the palace of justice, it was called.
    And some people had gone in their age
    into that palace of justice and put fire to it,
    to document that it burned.
    And because so many people were around it,
    the fire brigades couldn't come to it,
    and it burned quite strongly.
    And the police came on horses, and on cars, trucks,
    and started shooting.
    97 people were killed.
    They are peacefully demonstrating people,
    and everybody expect now will come a general strike,
    and the Social Democrats will take over the government.
    And the strike broke down.
    Nothing happened.
    About 1,000 people were arrested and put in jail.
    And on that day, I said, that seemed to have been, really,
    a fairy tale of our strengths.
    We don't have that strength at all.
    And then 1934, the fascist government was introduced,
    and we were outlawed, really very little happened.
    So I still remained a socialist, but I'd given up all hope
    for any future in Austria.
    But I still continued to work for them.
    Then when I was arrested, and there were many others of us,
    they still somehow hoped that Czechoslovakia and Russia may
    change the whole thing around.
    If a war would start, Hitler would be beaten.
    I couldn't see it.
    And then when I sat in jail with those Nazis there,
    I decided I have nothing to hope for anymore in Austria.
    I better leave it.
    And when people started to call me,
    dirty Jew, again, and not anymore,
    though I was attacked on both sides as a Jew
    and as a socialist--
    and I had nothing to lose.
    I had no job.
    I had no shop.
    I had no real or steady income.
    Contrary to other people who had family and could not easily
    leave, I decided instead of fighting
    longer in this poor country without any chances--
    I admired the social democratic system in Sweden,
    and hoped that I could stay there.
    But then when the war started, I was afraid
    that all Scandinavia will very soon
    be occupied by the Germans.
    So I went from one embassy to the other.
    That's what I did most of the time,
    trying to find a place where I could go with my wife until,
    as I said before, I managed to go.
    That was my idea.
    But others could have seen it too and did not.
    Some people say I was smart and intelligent.
    I feel I was just luckier than they.
    What about your mother and father?
    My father, I would say fortunately,
    died a year before Hitler.
    Not the year before, he died about three months
    after I left.
    He was already pretty ill and died when I was in Sweden.
    My mother died still when I was in Vienna.
    But did you talk to your father--
    Not anymore.
    --about leaving?
    About leaving.
    Yes.
    This is shown here.
    I visited him in the hospital where
    he was already for a few weeks with kidney trouble
    and other troubles.
    I told him I'm going to marry that girl.
    She was my friend already for seven years,
    and she came along with me.
    And he said, that's the right thing to do.
    Decent Jewish boys should do that.
    And he gave us his--
    His blessing?
    Yes, his blessing.
    And said both of you will do well.
    I said, I will come back and look after you.
    He said, no you will come back.
    I will not live anymore.
    I said, why do you talk like that?
    And then three months later, he died in the home of my sister
    Estie who is still in Berkeley.
    He was 72 when he died.
    He was also a social democrat.
    He had no education whatsoever.
    I don't think he went ever to school.
    All he did was reading himself.
    But he read a lot of books.
    He even started to read Freud, I remember,
    when he was 70 years old.
    I would see him sitting in the room
    close to the window fixing watches, or clocks--
    he fixed everything himself.
    He made the soles on my shoes.
    He made suits for me.
    The first suit that I got new was when I graduated--
    I bought it myself--
    when I graduated as a PhD in economics.
    Up to then, I only always wore suits of my elder brothers
    or uncles who gave it to us-- shirts my father made.
    I can't remember anything that we bought.
    Your father sewed the suit?
    Hmm?
    Did he sew the suit?
    He made the suit for you?
    I think that was a bit tough for him.
    But he tried to buy a piece of leathers and to do it.
    I think he made some for himself.
    He made the icebox.
    At that time in Vienna, I knew nobody who had a refrigerator,
    I knew nobody who had a telephone.
    I knew nobody who had a car.
    I remember when the first radio came up, the husband
    of my sister, Estie--
    they married pretty early-- they were married,
    but he died last week here in Berkeley.
    They were married 68 years.
    But when they married, they were young, 23 or 24--
    and he built the first radio with a little spool
    and a yellow mineral which was called--
    I've forgotten the name.
    Yellow crystal with a little pin when you carefully
    try to reach that touch it, you could
    hear some voices and noises.
    I knew nobody who had had the radio.
    And we were still better off than others.
    We were still better off than the family
    of my friend, Fred Weingarten.
    They had the smaller apartment, two rooms, with five people
    there in them.
    And his father also went from house to house trying to sell
    shirts, or shoes, or ties in installment payments to poor
    people who paid $0.10 every visit to him or $0.50
    in monthly payments.
    And those people encountered a lot of anti-Semitism.
    He was often thrown out and told to never come back.
    When he tried to collect money, he was called the dirty Jew.
    So you were friends with Fred?
    You were friends with Fred?
    Friends of--
    Fred.
    With Fred Weingarten?
    He was a school buddy?
    He went to school with me.
    We were three--
    Fred Weingarten, Max Diamont, and I.
    He also started to make crossword puzzles.
    We were always staying together.
    He was the only one in my whole class, Max Diamont,
    who still spoke Yiddish.
    His family had come later than me from Poland.
    He spoke Yiddish.
    He was the brightest boy in the whole class.
    He became a Freudian psychologist.
    We fought all the time--
    I tried to convert him to Adlerian psychology,
    and he considered it stupid and foolish.
    He survived and came to St. Louis.
    He, Fred Weingarten, and I studied the same economics
    and became PhD in economics.
    Max Diamont was the only one who made use of it
    and became very wealthy in St. Louis.
    He died about three years ago.
    Fred Weingarten died about eight years ago.
    I have still one schoolmate living in Vienna,
    Fritz Pince, who is half Jewish.
    When Hitler came, he was one of our socialist students
    in our school group.
    When Hitler came, he had a Jewish girlfriend,
    and the Nazis said to him--
    he was half Jewish--
    if you declare yourself as Aryan, as Christian--
    he was an engineer--
    nothing will happen to you, but you have to separate yourself
    from your girlfriend.
    So he said, no, I will stay with her.
    And so he was declared to be Jewish.
    And he fled to Hungary with his girlfriend, was married to.
    They were both sent to Auschwitz,
    then his wife died there.
    He went through all the camps.
    As an engineer, somehow he was not so badly treated
    as the others, and came back in 1945 to Vienna searching
    for his father who he thought had survived in France in Nice,
    but he had died there, I think.
    And he started as a small position in the street
    or streetcar organization in Vienna as an engineer,
    and became a leading man there, and organized change
    into the subways there--
    really responsible for the underground subways
    in Vienna now, still a good friend of mine--
    fine boy.
    All the others died.
    Did he share with you his camp experiences?
    He doesn't like to talk much about it.
    He only told me that when he came back and got
    this job there in the Viennese municipal streetcar
    department, every day somebody came to him and said,
    that other fellow, what he did during the Nazi time,
    he was the worst of them.
    Next, that man would come and tell him, that fellow,
    he was the worst of it.
    And he said to me that's surprising--
    only three or four good Catholics who
    were supporting the Catholic government
    remained all during Hitler's time decent people, never
    did something against Jews, were honest people.
    But the others, former social democrats and former Nazis,
    each one accusing the other of his moral deeds against Jews.
    He could have gotten easily very important positions
    in the government, because former colleagues of his
    were already a member of the parliament.
    When the war ended and they had survived the war,
    there was a shortage of non-Nazis,
    and one became minister of justice--
    Chaldick-- I remember him well.
    One became minister of industry, Wildinger.
    They offered him big jobs.
    And they said, I don't want to have anything to do with you.
    I don't trust any of you.
    If the situation changes, you would become again all Nazis
    again.
    I came back to Vienna only after I had married my second wife.
    Her mother and father still lived there.
    Her father had become in Vienna in 1945, and he had come back.
    He was an engineer and architect.
    There were a few Jews there, but they started
    to form a new congregation.
    And he didn't want to stay in Vienna,
    he wanted only to stay until relatives of his
    in Israel, or in Argentina, or Brazil, where he had relatives,
    would obtain visas for them.
    But they asked him to stay and to look
    after the properties that were still existing
    and were formerly in the hand of the Jewish community,
    to repair them or to save them.
    His main task was to look after the cemeteries and of the burnt
    or bombed or few synagogues that existed,
    especially the one in the center of Vienna,
    the [NON-ENGLISH] temple, and in the big cemetery.
    That cemetery is a few 100,000 Jews
    buried during the centuries of Jews in Vienna--
    all that died.
    Huge cemetery, and whatever could be still saved of it,
    he was doing.
    He rebuilt the ceremony hall there.
    He was responsible for a large monument
    that was built there for the victims of the Hitler time.
    He stayed in Vienna worked for the Jewish communities
    until he died about eight years ago.
    And during that time, I went back
    with my wife to visit her parents there,
    met with some of my former socialist friends
    who had come back--
    had survived in countries and had gotten back.
    When I was in Sweden, I was one of the first one,
    because I had come even before Hitler had come to Vienna.
    But soon after Hitler took over Vienna, a few more came there.
    One of them was Bruno Kreisky, who then became,
    after the war, the Austrian chancellor.
    He retired three years ago and died last year.
    I knew him very well and I sent him one of my books.
    I never agreed with his policies of compromises,
    and opportunism, and pretty strongly anti-Israel position.
    Those who had gone back had become important people
    in Austria.
    Some became presidents of banks, became university professors,
    one became education minister--
    Jewish people.
    What was your impression of the city when you went back?
    What was your impression of the city when you went back?
    The first thing when I came back, I went to the house
    where I lived to show off with it to my wife,
    because I considered it-- it was a very large and beautiful
    house.
    And I was ashamed how shabby it was and how small, really.
    But as a child, you always remember
    those things big and beautiful, and the street wide.
    The street was narrow.
    And the next street where a streetcar moved through, there
    was not room for a car to pass that streetcar.
    Most of the houses were still shops,
    still signs of war damage.
    Even the first time I came back was
    '65, that was already 17 years after the war,
    still many streets showed signs of the war damage.
    I had a very unpleasant feeling.
    I didn't like to have any contact with Austrians that
    were over 60 years of age, because I
    was afraid any of them could have been involved
    in killing my family members, or friends, or Jews altogether.
    But I had good feelings to young people.
    The young people, students, people
    over the age of 18 to 30, 35, they're all
    searching for what happened, all had great guilt feelings.
    They are accusing their parents who
    couldn't explain to them what happened
    and that, in the eyes of the children,
    perhaps somehow participated in that thing.
    I saw the same 1953 already in Germany when I came to Munich
    and went to the university--
    meetings there where they spoke out against the lack
    of anti-Nazi legislation and the lack
    of propagating to form working groups to send to Israel
    to help Israel to build it up.
    I still have the same feeling I've been back many times now.
    I still have the same feeling.
    But now it's changing.
    Now the young people too are becoming again
    to some degree anti-Semitic and not interested, or not
    interested in politics, or anti-foreigners.
    I'm not sure what the future of democracy in Austria
    or in Germany will be.
    I'm pretty certain it will be quite strong for 10, 20,
    30 years--
    perhaps not 30.
    Let's stick to 20.
    But if the general situation changes,
    anything can happen again.
    This may be a good time to take a break.
    I need to change tapes.

    There is no transcript available for this track

    Should I have this in front?
    Or should I have this one in front or not in front?
    Yeah, we'll talk about it.
    And don't worry about that.
    [INAUDIBLE] because of the picture.
    What do you want?
    Oh no, don't-- just put them down in your lap.
    And don't show them now.
    At about 10 to 1:00, we'll talk about all
    those beautiful photographs and the passport,
    since you [? didn't ?] bring the passport.
    What is your involvement now in psychology?
    My interest in psychology started when I was 13--
    14 years old, in high school.
    We had a student, a mate, school mate there, Max [? Diamond, ?]
    who was the brightest student in the whole class.
    And when I told him about me joining
    the socialist high school student organization and about
    Marx, he said, oh, your Marx.
    You should read Freud.
    He's also Jewish like Marx, but he's a real scientist.
    You will-- Marx, that's all blah, blah, blah.
    And he started to explain to the other school mates, especially
    the girls, about Freud.
    And they were very thrilled.
    I got curious and asked him what I should read of Freud.
    And he gave me the title of his explanation
    of dreams and daily mistakes you make
    in your life, what later on was called Freudian lapses.
    And I got interested to read it.
    But I couldn't see at all what he
    was saying was really proven.
    He always said, I found, I found, I found, Freud.
    And I started to look around whether there are
    other explanations of behavior.
    And I got worried.
    I must have had at that time what I think Erikson later
    on called an identity crisis.
    I sat often in a corner and looked to the ceiling,
    and was wondering when I see the other people, elder people,
    they all know so much and know how to behave.
    And when we are in company, I never could say anything.
    And my brother who was three years older
    always said, what happened to you?
    You are a bright boy and never open your mouth.
    And I thought I understood so much already
    what happens in the world, but didn't understand about me.
    So I was sitting in a corner looking at the ceiling.
    And he said, you fool.
    You go up and read something or do something.
    Don't sit around there.
    So I found a thin book that was called Freud and Adler
    and was written by Alice Gerstel-Ruhle.
    And that was 19--
    that was already a bit later.
    And it spoke about individual psychology by Alfred Adler.
    And in everything what Freud said,
    Adler said something else.
    And whatever Adler said made to me a lot of sense.
    On top of it, Adler was a social democrat.
    And I like that.
    And Alder spoke about social interest,
    about the responsibility to others,
    that every human being is born as a social being,
    cannot survive alone without his fellow beings,
    whereas Freud was speaking society is against you
    and oppresses you.
    And as a socialist, I of course hope
    that everybody will be in my favor, in our favor.
    We are all together, not seeing society as enemies.
    And I started to speak up against Max
    [? Diamond ?] wherever I could.
    And I started to gain points against him.
    Especially I said, Adler, [INAUDIBLE]
    he's for four full equality between girls and men,
    whereas Freud has clearly a male chauvinist outlook
    against women.
    And that's what it start--
    I think the interest started already, as I said,
    before when I was on the streets as a little child.
    But from then on, I read more and more books by Adler
    and started to go to the university
    already to his lectures.
    He had the Individual Psychology Association,
    like Freud had his Psychoanalytic Association.
    Every Tuesday were lectures at the university,
    and afterwards more discussions in the coffee shop.
    Everything in Vienna happens in coffee shops.
    And [INAUDIBLE] more and more, I became fully convinced
    that, with those two things, with Marxism
    and individual psychology, I have all the answers
    that one needs.
    Then when we emigrated, in Sweden I met
    another individual psychologist, Paul [? Sender, ?] Dr. Paul
    [? Sender, ?] a Hungarian refugee
    who would come to Germany, from Germany to Sweden.
    And then we went from Mexico.
    He gave us the address and recommendation
    to a friend of his.
    And that turned out to be Alice Gerstel-Ruhle, the same of whom
    I had read the books first.
    So in Mexico, we had, again, deep discussions
    about psychology.
    And my wife was already even more trained
    individual psychologist than I. And by that time,
    Alice Ruhle had developed doubts about that individual
    psychology of Adler had all the answers
    and started to speak of other people who
    were former Freudians, but who had started
    to switch away from him, like Karen Horney, and Erikson,
    and others.
    And it's hard to call them neo-Adlerian
    or former Freudians, which again awoke more interest in me
    to study, to read them, study more about psychology.
    I never became a psychologist, but my interest grew.
    Then in Australia, when we were in Australia,
    there was not much that I was involved with psychology
    directly, except I joined an association somehow
    like adult education association.
    It was called the Worker's Education Association.
    It was run by the people themselves,
    not by the government.
    They choose their organization, what courses to do.
    And the university supplied the professors,
    but it was not government run.
    It was a self [? worker ?] [INAUDIBLE]..
    And they had courses about modern trends
    in psychology, which I took and followed up
    what happened since then.
    When I came to Berkeley, 1980, 60--
    no, 1962, '63, '64, I met a man here,
    [? Joe ?] [? Fabry, ?] quite a well-known person in Berkeley.
    He was an editor at California Press, University Press.
    And he became interested in psychology.
    And I started to explain to him the differences
    between those schools.
    Then his daughter gave him a book
    by Viktor Frankl called Search for Meaning.
    It was published at the time and became very popular,
    had sold a few million copies.
    He read it and gave it to me and said,
    this is the answer to all the questions he had.
    And he then met Frankl a few times, translated his books,
    and started an Institute of Logotherapy--
    that is what Frankl called his school of psychology--
    in Berkeley.
    My wife at that time--
    my wife is a former sister-in-law of Joe
    [? Fabry. ?] Her first husband was the brother of Joe
    [? Fabry's ?] sister, the one who died 1950--
    her husband died in 1953 here in Berkeley.
    So she became acquainted with the main ideas of Frankl
    and thought she could use it very well in education.
    She had found out that, in education, especially
    of handicapped, special education, students,
    their main problem was not lack of intelligence,
    but lack of motivation, that they sat there not knowing
    why they sit in the class, just sitting for hours,
    and did not get involved in learning.
    And by reading Frankl and studying,
    she thought if she could make the children interested in what
    they do, and perhaps by around the [? way ?] way, not
    by teaching them reading, but letting them
    do other activities, letting them start to make decisions
    for themselves for which they have to take responsibility,
    little by little to get them involved in what happens.
    And she started to have quite some remarkable success there.
    So she decided to resign from school.
    She had already taught 20 years there, mainly the last years
    in the [? Richmond ?] School district
    with poor and Black children, and went to university
    to get a PhD in education, and as her dissertation,
    did a program, developed a program
    how to develop decision making and purpose in high schools,
    and found a high school work to evaluate practically,
    and got her PhD degree, and was elected
    to be into the board of that Institute of Logotherapy
    as a secretary of the board and later as the training director.
    I went first there as a guest mainly
    to give them some practical advice.
    They had only intellectual people, academics,
    not any man trained in business and money matters,
    and to help them somehow in that way.
    But I also had quite some knowledge in psychology.
    And I became a member of the board.
    And during the last few years, I was the Vice President
    of the institute, never practicing it.
    But I wrote quite a few articles for their--
    they have a magazine called International Forum
    of Logotherapy.
    They have chapters in the United States, quite a few.
    And they had organized international world congresses,
    the first one in San Diego where Viktor Frankl was teaching
    for a year at the university, and then
    in Connecticut, and in Canada, and in Argentina.
    I attended all of them, one in Regensburg in Germany.
    Frankl developed, had many followers
    in Austria and Germany.
    Institutes were formed there, and in Argentina,
    one since 1956.
    And it's very active there, that institute there.
    It has a hard time-- it became first popular in the United
    States mainly through the book and through the lectures
    of Frankl.
    And from the United, States it got back
    to Austria and Germany.
    And they started to interview him on radio.
    That book Search for Meaning that sold three or four
    million copies here was first published in Austria
    under the title, A Psychologist Survives a Concentration Camp.
    After the concentration camp, Auschwitz-- no, Buchenwald
    was the last one, the liberation,
    he went back to Austria, and stayed in Austria,
    and started to teach again there and published his first books.
    This was the first that was published.
    And then another one was published very soon thereafter,
    The Doctor and the Soul.
    In Germany, it was called Doctor Soul Help, or something
    complicated, a German name.
    In English, it was published in the name Doctor and the Soul.
    But that first book Search for Meaning
    under the title of A Psychologist Survives
    the Concentration Camp sold only 5,000 copies.
    After it was published here in English,
    it had probably 20 editions in Austria and in Germany
    selling 100,000.
    That's equally to all his other books
    which he wrote later and were translated
    20 or more languages.
    He got honorary doctor degrees all over the world,
    more than any other living person,
    more than [? Lawerence ?] or any other person.
    When I last visited in 1990 in Vienna, he invited us.
    We were on quite good terms.
    He has a very good sense of humor, and he appreciates mine.
    Often, the discussion is not so much about logotherapy
    than about telling Jewish jokes one or the other,
    which he tells very well.
    He invited us in his home.
    The wall is covered with his doctoral degree,
    honorary doctorate degrees, his paintings
    that he received from people who had painted
    in the concentration camps, and smuggled it out, and later
    sent it back to him.
    And he has, in my opinion, very much
    to offer the world in psychological insight,
    because he speaks to the problems of people
    today, whereas Freud spoke about problems of 100 years,
    80 years back, mainly sexual oppression.
    And Adler spoke mainly about the impact of economic hardship
    and what that does to a family, whereas Frankl speaks
    to the problem that young people especially
    are lost in our world, can't find any meaning,
    join other peer groups, or cults,
    or gangs, or music groups, don't develop
    own values and own views.
    And that is extremely dangerous for society, but also
    for themselves, because they find nothing
    for what to stand for or how to judge, how to make decisions.
    To make decisions, you have to have your own values.
    You listen to others, and choose yours,
    and live by those values.
    And if you do that, then you can make responsible decisions,
    accept responsibility for your actions
    and the results of your actions.
    Or if you avoid those actions, when you should take actions,
    you have to accept responsibility
    for not having acted when you should have acted.
    That is how he blames the German Nation, that they did not act
    when they should have acted.
    He declares that the German--
    there is no common guilt of the German people.
    There is only individual guilt. But there
    is a common responsibility of the Germans,
    a common accountability of them, because it
    was done by the German State.
    And if the Germans are proud and take [INAUDIBLE] as one
    of their own, they also have to accept Hitler, and Goring,
    and Goebbels as their own.
    And what was done was done [INAUDIBLE]..
    So they have to--
    they cannot simply declare as they haven't known,
    or haven't seen it, or have not acted.
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    And you can only ask yourself to be a hero.
    You can't ask other people to be heroes.
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    been a hero under this threat.
    But many were guilty.
    That was taken badly by many Jewish people against him.
    And they thought he's trying to justify Nazis in Austria.
    The Jewish people in Austria are not great friends of his.
    But there are many rabbis in the world that are his followers.
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    has written many books about Frankl,
    other rabbis in Los Angeles and so on.
    Many non-Jewish clergy people like his writings.
    And many Catholic organization honor
    him, honored in Vienna and in Germany, in Italy, everywhere.
    He got all the medals that one could get, quite an achievement
    for a Jewish person.
    And hundreds and hundreds of doctors
    are being trained now in Austria and in Germany by--
    in those [INAUDIBLE] of Frankl and logotherapy.
    In the United States, it's extremely difficult
    to find followers amongst doctors.
    The reason, it's a very simple economic reason.
    There is a surplus of doctors in Austria and in Germany.
    And the young doctors try to learn,
    are interested in anything new.
    It may help them to go forward.
    In the United States, once you have your doctor degree,
    you start out with earnings of $80,000 or $100,000.
    And you are not keen anymore to learn anything new.
    You think you have all what you need.
    And it's that way.
    And then they say very simply, we--
    or psychologists, like, most of the teaching psychologists
    are still Freudians, taking Freud in schools
    as being scientific, based on cause and effect,
    whereas Frankl's teaching and already with Adler,
    they said they are not scientific
    because they allow you free will and free choice.
    And they tell you, you can do tomorrow differently
    than what you did yesterday.
    You are master of your life.
    They don't like it, because they have
    no handle on what to tell people by when they have a patient
    or client.
    With Freud, it's very simple that.
    They analyze you for a year and point out
    this, and this, and that.
    And that is the cause.
    And if it doesn't work with you, then they
    say you are just resisting them.
    And you have to find another psychiatrist.
    They will never accept that their theories are
    only assumptions and theories, not proven by any tests,
    as Freud himself openly admitted.
    They are not tested yet.
    But this is an existential psychology,
    existential philosophy of Frankl that says, we are not only body
    and have not only drives like animals,
    we have a spiritual component in ourselves.
    We have a conscience.
    Nobody can tell us what to do with the conscience.
    We can individually use this conscience for decision making,
    discover former mistakes, and change them, change our values.
    It's not easy, because we are all
    frightened to take on new values, unknown.
    We'd rather stick with our problems
    that we know already then to go out into the open,
    into a strange open void not knowing what will be there.
    But with the help of some understanding persons that
    may not need necessarily to be psychiatrists,
    you may gather enough courage to try new ways.
    Though your decisions are not based by cause and effect
    or by self-persevere, as he has seen
    in camps where people gave their life to save another one.
    We all saw it in the concentration camps.
    In normal life, how often do you sacrifice yourself for somebody
    else or don't defend yourself?
    It's not true that you will always put yourself ahead.
    It's a moral psychology, contrary to others.
    Others think psychologists or psychiatrists should
    be free of any value judgments.
    He openly [INAUDIBLE] into it and makes
    you the judge of your actions.
    Tough.
    So that's my connection with psychology.
    Can we take this time to-- would you
    like to see a photograph with me and my wife [INAUDIBLE]
    with Frankl in his home?
    The bottom one is at the World Congress--
    the bottom one is at his home.
    The top on this at the World Congress in Regensburg.
    It was the first one in Germany.
    It was a great success, about 800 or 900 professional people
    attending it.
    And the lady here is--
    one is his wife.
    And the other here on the side is [? Elizabeth ?] [? Lucas, ?]
    Dr. [? Elizabeth ?] [? Lucas, ?] who has founded an institute
    in Munich and started in Germany to propagate Victor
    Frankl's teaching, and has written herself 12 or more
    books which are all bestsellers in Germany,
    having greater acceptance.
    And there are below is Victor Frankl and my wife [INAUDIBLE]
    and I. And around him are memorabilias
    from the concentration camps, and
    from his honoring doctoral degrees and medals, and all
    that he has received.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    On the same time when I visited him there,
    I also visited the Jewish cemetery in Vienna,
    and the grave of my father, and put some stones on his grave
    there.
    He died before Hitler came to power in 1937.
    I was already in Sweden.
    On top of it is a ceremonial hold
    in that Jewish cemetery which was rebuilt after the war
    by my father-in-law, the father of Vera, 1946 or '47.
    Would you like to see my passport
    with [? Israel ?] in it?
    Memorabilias-- this is small.
    Shall I bring it closer?
    You see the name [? Samuel? ?] Next to it is the name Stefan.
    Due to the anti-Semitism that was already
    in Austria before Hitler, during the time when
    I was composing crossword puzzles
    and later on when I was writing articles about economic things
    when I was studying methods then I was studying economics
    at the university, I knew I couldn't sell them
    under the name of [? Samuel ?] Kalmar,
    so I chose to publish them under the name of Stefan Kalmar.
    And in the past, but I had already Stefan.
    And in Sweden, they added to it [? Israel ?] and the "J"
    [INAUDIBLE],, for Jewish, a red big stamp of the "J."
    And that Stefan in Mexico became Esteban.
    And in Australia, it became Stephen.
    So I have a long range of first names.
    But little by little, I am going back
    to use my original [? Samuel ?] or Sam.
    And friends who know me since the last few years
    just call under Sam.
    My wife calls me [? Saminko, ?] which I
    was called as a child in Slovakia
    when I was two or three years old.
    That's the [INAUDIBLE] kind way of calling somebody
    by the name of [? Samuel. ?]
    And can you show us some of your artwork?
    Artwork?
    OK.
    The same way as I'm not a psychologist,
    I'm not really a painter.
    But I studied painting already at high school.
    We had it three times a week, drawing
    and painting with watercolors, in which I was never good.
    Drawing, I was quite acceptable.
    When I lived in Mexico and saw the beautiful paintings
    and artwork there, I got more and more interested
    in art and paintings.
    And in one place in Mexico, there
    was a small art school in [INAUDIBLE]
    on the lake of Lake Chapala in the State of Jalisco.
    And a German painter taught painting there.
    And he had American painters around--
    people around him, mainly women who had come to Mexico
    and painted there.
    And when I saw what they were painting,
    I at once was tempted and asked whether they
    would lend me a paint brush and two or three paint tubes.
    And I started to paint the surroundings there
    which were very colorful, subtropical, mountainous,
    very beautiful.
    And not knowing how to paint with oil, I took it easy for me
    and painted just dot by dot, always a dot over the other.
    And when it was finished, they looked at it and said,
    oh, what a wonderful painting, a new impressionist pointillist
    painter.
    And I laughed.
    But when I got to Australia, in that Worker's Education
    Association, they also had painting classes.
    And I joined the class, a few classes
    during the years I was there.
    And they had a very good method of teaching.
    They never told you what you were doing was not very good
    or you could improve this or that.
    The painter went around and told each one, oh,
    that is an interesting composition or that
    is an interesting color scheme you have, never a bad word.
    And I thought, how foolish?
    How can one learn anything if everything one does is good?
    But afterwards-- it was in the evenings always--
    he put up those 10 or 12 things that we had done.
    And to my surprise, to the same theme that he
    had given us to paint, they--
    one thing was industry.
    Or one thing was a water hole at the ocean,
    what you see at a little--
    plus some other scene.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    I, to my surprise, could see that, truly, every one of us
    had done a complete-- had a complete different idea of what
    to paint about those things.
    And then he started to compare those things
    and said, what's good in this one is this
    and what's good in this one is that.
    And it opened your eyes how many ways you could really
    use your paint and do things.
    It may have helped me.
    I made a few paintings there.
    In 1965 when we went on our--
    after we had married, Vera and I, Vera
    had studied in Vienna art at the same art institute where Hitler
    tried to be accepted, but was rejected
    as not being good enough.
    Vera was accepted.
    And for two years, she studied painting and art there.
    I said in my book, what a pity.
    If it had been the other way around,
    if Hitler had been accepted, perhaps the world
    would have been saved.
    We would have had a crazy painter, but not
    a crazy murderer.
    Anyhow, she studied in France, in Paris for three months.
    At that time, she was teaching French also at a school here.
    And I was painting.
    And I painted perhaps 10 or 15 paintings there
    and got better in painting.
    I tried out various styles.
    And it always gives me great satisfaction,
    because when you paint, especially with oil,
    you also observe--
    absorb--
    Observe?
    [INAUDIBLE]
    Absorb.
    Absorb-- but you forget everything.
    And you can't correct or change whatever you have done.
    You feel very creative.
    And I myself always liked what I did.
    To my surprise, other people say it's always good.
    But I know mostly, they are surprised that I paint at all
    and don't take it so seriously.
    In the last few years, I haven't painted much.
    One eyesight is bad after a cataract operation
    and degeneration of the center of the retina in my eye.
    The other eye was never good.
    But I'm still drawing.
    And in my book that I just now published,
    there are some examples of what I'm doing and was doing.
    It may interest you, for what it's worth.
    This was one of my first paintings in Australia.
    It's in Sydney.
    It's done from the Harbor Bridge that is spanning the bay there,
    like the Berkeley-Oakland Bridge here, very famous Harbor
    Bridge.
    And from there, you can see where the [? boats ?] are.
    And that was done on a Saturday afternoon.
    I never used more than, at the most, two or three
    hours on any of my paintings except one in Paris.
    We had a little room rented on the sixth floor on the Madame
    Curie Street in the [INAUDIBLE].
    And we were looking down at the institute there.
    And there were some trees.
    And they were in flower.
    And every day, they looked differently.
    And I couldn't get it ever right.
    But usually, I paint very quickly.
    Then next to it is a painting in Salzburg
    where I attended an art class for two weeks
    by on the [? mountain-- ?] on the castle there.
    And again, the teacher didn't teach much.
    He was a pretty conservative teacher.
    But the landscapes were beautiful.
    And I had time.
    And so I tried out various styles.
    This was done in the geometric style, very difficult.
    It's much easier to copy what you see in front of you
    than to invent something that you think
    might be there or not.
    Below is a look down into the Valley
    of Salzburg on a rainy day.
    Next to it is a dream that I had in Paris, a bit of a fantasy
    work, [? realistically. ?] That might
    be a memory of my first wife Edith,
    if you see that lady there floating
    in the air and the scene beneath.
    These are some later things.
    This was done three years ago at the World Congress
    in Kansas City of logotherapy.
    On the 24th floor of that hotel was
    a room, a lounge room or coffee shop looking down
    into the street on this black pen.
    And below it is a view out of-- done
    a few months ago in the living room of Vera's little, Vera's
    daughter Michelle, and their granddaughter, and Bob,
    and me looking out of the window into their backyard
    with trees, quite a difficult task.
    But again, I like it.
    And here you have a picture of Michelle marrying Bob Levine.
    And here a few months ago, Bob Levine and Michelle, Vera
    and I, and their little baby.
    This is Alice, my daughter.
    This is her daughter.
    This is Tom.
    He just married this lady in January this year.
    Tom, when he came to Berkeley, he had been on a trip
    three months, trip in Europe.
    He's very musical, collected folk songs from all the nations
    and started here in Berkeley singing
    in the [INAUDIBLE] restaurants every week
    songs from many countries.
    And that went on for quite some time.
    And here is a picture of him, of his--
    oh here, when he was 19 years old singing
    at the Berkeley University, songs from many countries.
    So the whole family is now made immortal in these photographs.
    [INAUDIBLE] thank you for [INAUDIBLE]..
    And is there anything you'd like to add?
    It's finished?
    It's finished.
    Thank you very much for being so kind to finish it.
    I've never spoken so much in my life.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Stephen Kalmar discusses his childhood in Vienna, Austria; joining the Socialist party at the age of 13; studying economics and obtaining a doctorate degree; the demise of the Socialist Labor party; a protest in 1927 when protestors were shot and arrested; the introduction of a fascist government in 1934; his arrest in 1937 for being a Socialist; his marriage and the couple's decision to leave Vienna for Sweden; their experiences as political refugees; their fear that Nazi Germany would occupy Sweden; their immigration in 1940 to Mexico; his life in Mexico, where they lived for eight years; beginning an export business; the birth of his two sons; the fate of his family (two brothers fled to the Shanghai ghetto, one brother survived in hiding in France, one sister immigrated to the United States, and one sister perished in Auschwitz); immigrating in 1948 to Australia; the birth of a daughter; immigration to the United States in 1962; his divorce and remarriage; and his involvement in the Adlerian school of psychology.
    Interviewee
    Stephen S. Kalmar
    Interviewer
    Ellen Szakal
    Date
    interview:  1991 October 29
    interview:  1992 March 12
    Credit Line
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Jewish Family and Children's Services of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties

    Physical Details

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

    Rights & Restrictions

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

    Keywords & Subjects

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    The Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project conducted the interview with Stephen Kalmar on October 29, 1991 and March 12, 1992. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum received the tapes of the interview from the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project in December 2002.
    Funding Note
    The cataloging of this oral history interview has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
    Related Materials
    Additional Record Group Number: RG-50.477.0468
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:45:22
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn512352

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    Oral history interview with Adda Gerstel

    Oral History

    Adda Gerstel discusses her childhood in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland); her education in a private school and her graduation from business school in 1929; the death of her mother in 1932 and her father in 1934; her brother losing his work as an attorney because of anti-Jewish laws and taking over the family brewery; her marriage in 1937; her memories of the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938, when both her husband and her brother were arrested and imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp; the release of her husband and brother; her brother's immigration to the United States; fleeing Germany for Shanghai, China with her husband and young daughter in June 1939; her experiences in a refugee camp in Shanghai, and in the Hong-Kew (Hongkou Qu) ghetto; immigrating to the United States after the war; her family life in San Francisco, CA; and her brother's return to Germany.

    Oral history interview with Clara Markovits

    Oral history interview with Clara Markovits

    Oral History

    Clara Markovits describes her childhood in Budapest, Hungary and Satu Mare, Romania; the increase in antisemitism after the Hungarians seized parts of Romania; her family's deportation to a ghetto in Satu Mare after the Nazi German invasion of Romania in 1944; her family’s deportation to Auschwitz, where she remained from June until October 1944; her subsequent work in a bomb factory near Dresden, Germany from October 1944 until her liberation by the Russians in May 1945; her father's and sister's deaths at Auschwitz and her thoughts of suicide; the aftermath of the bombing of Dresden; her postwar experience in a hospital at Terezin, Czech Republic; her life in Romania and Hungary until her immigration to the United States in 1962; and the emotional and psychological effects of her wartime experiences on her postwar life.

    Oral history interview with Laurence Moitozo

    Oral history interview with Laurence Moitozo

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Leo Samuel

    Oral history interview with Leo Samuel

    Oral History

    Leo Samuel, born in 1924, discusses his childhood in Cherna, Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine); the effect of the economic depression of the 1930s on his family; his deportation to Khust, Ukraine in September 1939; the Hungarian annexation of the region; his work as a tailor in Budapest, Hungary and Cherna; his experiences in the ghetto at Khust; the conditions in the ghetto; the things he had heard about the camps; being deported to Auschwitz in early 1944; being separated from his family; his transfer to Płaszów and the conditions there; working as a tailor; his encounters with Göth's assistant Wilek Chilowicz; being transferred to Melk (subcamp of Mauthausen) several months later; the conditions in Melk; the people he encountered; the help he received from a friend; the work he performed building tunnels and crematoria; his transfer to Ebensee; working in the kitchen; his liberation by the United States Army; his postwar life; his immigration to the United States; and his life in the US.

    Oral history interview with Lily Spitz

    Oral history interview with Lily Spitz

    Oral History

    Lily Spitz discusses her childhood in Satu Mare, Romania; her family life; her religious upbringing; the changes she observed after 1939, the increased antisemitism, and the difficulty in attending school; the changes she experienced when her region became part of Hungary in 1944; her family's deportation to a ghetto and the conditions there; her experiences during her family's deportation to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944; the selection process, and her entry into the camp; her experiences in Auschwitz, the work she performed, and the many selections she endured; her transfer by train to Mauthausen in early 1945; being liberated; the medical care she received from the United States Army; her reunion with her surviving siblings and their return to Romania in July 1945; her marriage and family; their immigration to the United States in 1964; and their life in the US.

    Oral history interview with Melvin Suhd

    Oral history interview with Melvin Suhd

    Oral History

    Melvin Suhd discusses his childhood in Detroit, Michigan; the antisemitism he experienced in school; his education as an electrical engineer; his decision to join the military in 1943; his training in weaponry; his arrival in France in December 1944; the military actions he was involved in; his experiences while helping to liberate Dachau and his emotions at the time; his life after he returned from the front; and the psychological aftermath of his wartime experiences.

    Oral history interview with Bernard Benjamin Broclawski

    Oral history interview with Bernard Benjamin Broclawski

    Oral History

    Bernard Broclawski, born January 27, 1917, describes his childhood in Pabianice, Poland; how he began to work at 13 to support his family; his socialist political leanings; his involvement in Jewish socialist organizations from 1936-1939; his awareness of political events in Germany; being drafted into the Polish Army; his time in Soviet-occupied Poland; reuniting with his father and brothers in Grodno, Poland (Hrodna, Belarus); his work as a machinist in Siberian coal mines in January 1940; his work as a German-language teacher in 1941; his arrest for giving a counter-revolutionary speech in 1943; his experiences in prison from 1944 to 1948; his release from prison and return to Poland in 1948; his marriage and the birth of his daughter; his involvement in workers' organizations; his studies at the University of Łódź; the increase of antisemitism in 1968; how and why he immigrated to the United States with his family; their immigration with the assistance of the HIAS (Hebrew Immigration Aid Society); and his life in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Julius Drabkin

    Oral history interview with Julius Drabkin

    Oral History

    Julius Drabkin, born in 1918 in Maritopa, Latvia, describes his parents, Mikhail and Sarah Daviolovna; life before the war when he lived in Riga, Latvia; being a soldier in the Latvian Army until the German invasion in July 1941; living in the ghetto for most of the war; getting married to his first wife, Amalia, in 1941; the liquidation of the ghetto in 1943; being sent to Kaiserwald camp; being liberated on March 10, 1945 at Stutthof; returning to Riga after the war because he was distressed, even though he had the opportunity to emigrate; the perishing of all of his family during the Holocaust, except for one of his aunts; getting remarried shortly after the war (his wife also lost all her family); having two sons and living in Riga until he immigrated to the United States in the late 1970s; emigrating because his older son found it impossible to pursue his career because he was Jewish; and visiting Riga for the World Conference of Holocaust Survivors.

    Oral history interview with Renee L. Duering

    Oral history interview with Renee L. Duering

    Oral History

    Renee Duering, born January 7, 1921 in Cologne, Germany, describes her childhood in Cologne; moving to Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1933; her experiences in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation; getting married in 1941; the time she and her husband spent in hiding; her family's deportation to Westerbork in July 1943; her experiences in Westerbork; her parents’ deportation to Bergen-Belsen; her and her husband's deportation to Auschwitz; how her husband perished in Auschwitz; being a subject of medical experiments, including those involving sterilization; her deportation to three other camps; her experiences on a death march to Ravensbrück in January 1945; her escape during the march; hiding near Dresden, Germany until liberation by the Soviets; living with her sister after the war; moving to Israel; immigrating to the United States; her second marriage; and her joy at becoming pregnant despite the experiments she endured.

    Oral history interview with Werner Epstein

    Oral history interview with Werner Epstein

    Oral History

    Werner Epstein discusses his childhood in Berlin, Germany; the anti-Jewish regulations he and his family encountered when the Nazis rose to power; his decision to leave Germany after the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938; fleeing by bicycle to Belgium, where he prospered until the war began in September 1939; being arrested as an enemy alien; his experiences in a series of detention camps in southern France; his arrest, imprisonment, and deportation to Auschwitz; arriving at Auschwitz; volunteering to work in a coal mine in Silesia, where he remained until December 1944; being ill with malaria, which he contracted while in French detention camps; the death march he endured after the camp’s evacuation in advance of the Soviet Army’s approach; being liberated by Russian Mongol soldiers; journeying to a transit camp in Magdeburg, Germany; reuniting with his fiancee; returning with her to Paris, France, where they settled and he became a chef; and immigrating to California in 1962.

    Oral history interview with Lya Galperin

    Oral history interview with Lya Galperin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lore Gilbert

    Oral history interview with Lore Gilbert

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rita Goldman

    Oral history interview with Rita Goldman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mala Holcberg

    Oral history interview with Mala Holcberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Kate Kaiser

    Oral history interview with Kate Kaiser

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tatjana Khepoyan-Viner

    Oral history interview with Tatjana Khepoyan-Viner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Vera J. Lieban-Kalmar

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Nadine Lieberman

    Oral history interview with Nadine Lieberman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Bernard Offen

    Oral history interview with Bernard Offen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Pels

    Oral history interview with William Pels

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Plainfield

    Oral history interview with Ruth Plainfield

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thomas Schneider

    Oral history interview with Thomas Schneider

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Shlyapochnik

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Sieradzki

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Sieradzki

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gisela Spigel

    Oral history interview with Gisela Spigel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Erika Weingarten

    Oral history interview with Erika Weingarten

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Max Weingarten

    Oral history interview with Max Weingarten

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Herman D. Wiener

    Oral history interview with Herman D. Wiener

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Liza Avrutin

    Oral history interview with Liza Avrutin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Aleksandr Belfor

    Oral history interview with Aleksandr Belfor

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Semyon Berenshteyn

    Oral history interview with Semyon Berenshteyn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Denes

    Oral history interview with George Denes

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lev Dumer

    Oral history interview with Lev Dumer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anisim Dworkin

    Oral history interview with Anisim Dworkin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ernest Feld

    Oral history interview with Ernest Feld

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lya Galperin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mae Lopatin Herman

    Oral history interview with Mae Lopatin Herman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Inna Kagan

    Oral history interview with Inna Kagan

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with J. Daniel Khazzoom

    Oral history interview with J. Daniel Khazzoom

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Vilem Kriz

    Oral history interview with Vilem Kriz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Lapan

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Lapan

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sofiya Manoylo

    Oral history interview with Sofiya Manoylo

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Shaya Neys

    Oral history interview with Shaya Neys

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Sieradzki

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rahilia Sirota

    Oral history interview with Rahilia Sirota

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tom Szelenyi

    Oral history interview with Tom Szelenyi

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irving Zale

    Oral history interview with Irving Zale

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Tamara Albukh

    Oral history interview with Tamara Albukh

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bernard Broclawski

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with George Denes

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Audrey Doughty

    Oral history interview with Audrey Doughty

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sara Gelender

    Oral history interview with Sara Gelender

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sofia Ginzbursky

    Oral history interview with Sofia Ginzbursky

    Oral History

    Sofia Ginzbursky (born on December 27, 1915 in Asipavichy, Belarus) describes her mother, who died at the age of 27, soon after she gave birth; going with her siblings to live with their grandfather, who observed Jewish traditions; studying at a technical school in Gomel (Homel), Belarus; living in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), working as a nanny and secretary; getting married and moving to Gomel; moving later to Belostock (Białystok), Poland; being left alone with their two children when her husband was called up for military duty at the beginning of WWII; evacuating from Belostock by train to Zlobin (ZHlobin, Belarus) and then to Baranovichi, Ukraine; destroying all her documents to hide her Jewish identity; witnessing the persecution of Jews in Ukraine when locals helped the Nazis find Jews; how speaking German helped her find a job at a food exchange center where she received food to feed her children; obtaining false papers with a new last name that showed she was Russian and not Jewish; returning to Gomel to look for remaining family members and being captured by the Nazis and was humiliated by Politsai for several days; being released and living with a woman named Nadia Lisitskaya; passing as a gentile refugee from Poland; washing clothes for the German army in exchange for soap and kerosene; seeing the deportation of hundreds of Jews from the Gomel ghetto; traveling with her friend, Sonia, as well as all their children to Oryol (Orel), Russia; finding a new place of stay every night so no one would suspect