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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.
    For example, Rabbi [? Bulker ?] in Canada
    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 them of being Jewish; living with Sonia and the children at the house of a Latvian lady for two years; choosing to not wear the Star of David as was requried for the Jews by the Nazis; passing as Russian Orthodox; having a Russian lady teach her son how to pray to an icon when bombings occured; working small jobs while in Oryol; being liberated and moving to Leningrad; getting a new passport and stating her nationality as “Jewish” again; reuniting with her husband in Chkalov (possibly Orenburg, Russia) with the help of her sister; experiencing even more antisemitism after the war; and becoming more observant after the war.

    Oral history interview with Genia Likwornik

    Oral history interview with Genia Likwornik

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Mark Malamud

    Oral history interview with Mark Malamud

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Annemarie Roeper

    Oral history interview with Annemarie Roeper

    Oral History

    Annemarie Roeper (née Bondy), born August 27, 1918 in Vienna, Austria, describes her childhood in Vienna; her parents' progressive boarding school; her memories of the Nazi ascension to power; her mother's move to Switzerland in 1936 with Annemarie’s siblings; remaining behind to graduate; her father selling their school; the family's reunion in Switzerland; her psychoanalysis studies in Vienna with Anna Freund; her husband-to-be's warning to flee; immigrating with her family to the United States in 1939; moving to Vermont, where they opened a school; her marriage and move to Michigan with her husband; and opening a progressive school for gifted children there called Roeper School.

    Oral history interview with Irina Rozhanskaya

    Oral history interview with Irina Rozhanskaya

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ilse Sternberger

    Oral history interview with Ilse Sternberger

    Oral History

    Ilse Sternberger (née Naumann), born in 1914, discusses her childhood in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland); her assimilated family life; her education; her marriage and her decision to move to Belgium with her husband in 1933; her life in Belgium; her husband's success as a photographer; their decision to move to London, England in 1936; returning to Germany in 1939 in an attempt to help Jewish children leave the country, and being stymied by the bureaucracy; immigrating to the United States with her husband and children in July 1940; her life in the US; her work as a teacher and writer; and her curation of books and exhibits of her husband's work.

    Oral history interview with Clara Tsukerman

    Oral history interview with Clara Tsukerman

    Oral History

    Clara Tsukerman discusses her childhood in Chisneau, Romania (now Chișinău, Moldova) and her experiences after the war began in her region in 1941; her experiences during her family's journey on foot to Vasylivka, Ukraine; their efforts to evade the advancing German front; and their life in hiding in an unnamed village after the Germans caught up with them; the help and protection they received from the villagers, as well as her experiences during and after the war.

    Oral history interview with Sam Weiss

    Oral history interview with Sam Weiss

    Oral History

    Sam Weiss, born in 1928 in Ricka, Czechoslovakia (now in Ukraine), discusses his childhood in Ricka, Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine); the occupation of the town by Hungarian soldiers; the conscription of Jewish men for forced labor; his father being sent to Germany for forced labor; the institution of anti-Jewish restrictions such as yellow stars and in March 1944, the deportation of the Jews of Ricka; his arrival at Auschwitz; being separated from his family and sent first a children's barracks; being sent to Camp Four in Munich, Germany; being sent to Landsberg, a sub-camp of Dachau, where he was liberated by American troops in 1945; his return to Ricka, where he was reunited with his sister; his attempts to escape Czechoslovakia; his imprisonment by Russian soldiers; his escape to Munich; his immigration to the United States; his service in the United States military; and his family life and career in California.

    Oral history interview with Edith Wertheimer

    Oral history interview with Edith Wertheimer

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Laszlo Vass

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Jakob Atlas

    Oral history interview with Jakob Atlas

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Isaac Silber

    Oral history interview with Isaac Silber

    Oral History

    Isaac Silber, born in 1913 in Złoczów Poland (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), discusses his childhood in Złoczów; the occupation of Złoczów by German troops; the violent and terrifying conditions of the Nazi occupation; his escape from murder by German troops; being conscripted for forced labor in a brick factory; returning to Złoczów to learn of the murder of family members; his experiences in the Złoczów ghetto and in work camps; giving up his baby daughter to be cared for by a non-Jewish family; escaping with his wife and finding refuge in the farmhouse of a Polish man who hid them; and the gratitude he feels to his rescuer.

    Oral history interview with Lotte Grunwald

    Oral history interview with Lotte Grunwald

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Anne Marie Roeper

    Oral History

    Anne Marie Roeper describes her childhood in Vienna, Austria; her parents' progressive boarding school; her memories of the Nazi acsencion to power; her mother's move to Switzerland in 1936 with her siblings; remaining behind to graduate; her father's selling of their school; the family's reunion in Switzerland; her psychoanalysis studies in Vienna with Anna Freund; her husband-to-be's warning to flee; immigrating with her family to the United States in 1939; moving to Vermont, where they opened a school; her marriage and move to Michigan with her husband; and opening a progressive school for gifted children there called Roeper School.

    Oral history interview with Janina Swift

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Polya Liza Pekker

    Oral history interview with Polya Liza Pekker

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Paul Nebenzahl

    Oral history interview with Paul Nebenzahl

    Oral History

    Paul Nebenzahl, born August 9, 1921, discusses his childhood in Long Island, New York; his career in advertising; enlisting in the United States Army in 1942; his experiences as a sergeant in the Signal Corps; being part of a secret OSS operational group; working with the French underground movement in southwestern France to hinder the German retreat in 1944; his military service in India and China for the remainder of the war; his life after the war; marrying; having children; and his leisure activities.

    Oral history interview with Meier Lichtenstein

    Oral history interview with Meier Lichtenstein

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Janice Auerbach

    Oral history interview with Janice Auerbach

    Oral History

    Janice Auerbach, born August 7, 1934 in South London, England, describes her childhood in London; the bombings and fear she felt during World War II; her evacuation to a farm in Cornwall; the discomfort she experienced while there; her reunion with her family after the war; her various employments around the world; and her marriage to a Jewish man in 1962.

    Oral history interview with Helmut Kobler

    Oral history interview with Helmut Kobler

    Oral History

    Helmut Kobler, born on January 18, 1928 in Vienna, Austria, discusses his childhood in Vienna and Pohorelice, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic); his experiences growing up with his Jewish father and Catholic mother; his experiences after the annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938; his mother's decision to move herself and her son to Brno, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic); the conditions they lived under; the Nazis' search for his father; being deported to a camp near Ivancice, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) in 1939; the camp’s transformation from a concentration camp to a forced labor camp; working as a coal miner at the camp; the camp’s liquidation in June 1942; being transferred to another labor camp near Oslavany, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic); the work he continued as a coal miner; the conditions at the camp; the brutality of the Czech and German guards; being transferred in the summer of 1944 to a labor camp near Postoloprty, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic); working to construct an underground fuel pipeline; an accusation against him of sabotage; his subsequent imprisonment in Saaz, Czechoslovakia and Karlsbad, Germany (now Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic); the brutality of the guards; the poor conditions there; his escape from Karlsbad while out on a labor detail; being recaptured in Brno; the executions he witnessed while imprisoned there; being transferred by cattle car to a prison in Mirosov; escaping from Mirosov in May 1945, a few days before liberation by the United States Army; the aid he received from refugee organizations after the war; reuniting with his mother; being educated as a mining engineer; defecting to the west with a sample of uranium ore; moving to Canada; and immigrating to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Ellen Leeser

    Oral history interview with Ellen Leeser

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Anne Marie Yellin

    Oral history interview with Anne Marie Yellin

    Oral History

    Anne Marie Yellin (née Feller), born on December 6, 1928 in Chemnitz, Germany, discusses her childhood in Chemnitz; her family life; the changes she experienced after Kristallnacht in November 1938; her father's arrest and release; her parents' decision to leave Germany; her journey with her parents to Belgium in September 1939; her experiences after the German invasion of Belgium in May 1940 and her father's decision to hide her in a convent; her experiences in the convent; moving between institutions to avoid capture by the Nazis; her conversion to Catholicism; her reunion with her parents after liberation in September 1944; their immigration to the United States at a later point; her life in the US; and the emotional aftermath of her wartime experiences.

    Oral history interview with Adele Silber

    Oral history interview with Adele Silber

    Oral History

    Adele Silber discusses her childhood in Warsaw, Poland; her education in a Catholic school; her family's religious practices; her experiences during the German invasion in 1939; hiding her young daughter with a Catholic family; living in hiding on a farm with a group of partisans; her experiences while in hiding, including the lack of food and the necessity of living in the woods near the end of the war; her reunion with her daughter; her decision to immigrate to the United States with her husband and daughter in 1946; and their life in the US.

    Oral history interview with Sylvie Marshall

    Oral history interview with Sylvie Marshall

    Oral History

    Sylvie Marshall (née Bedel), born on July 1, 1923 in Paris, France, discusses her childhood; her older brother Michel Bedel (born 1918) and her younger brother Alain Bedel (born 1926); her father, who was the president of the largest moving and storage company in France before the war; her adolescence in Paris; being raised Catholic; the participation of her father and brother Michel in the French Resistance; her life with her mother in south central France; the liberation of Paris; the story of her father and brother's arrests by the Gestapo and her father's subsequent death in Buchenwald.

    Oral history interview with Elena H. Javor

    Oral history interview with Elena H. Javor

    Oral History

    Elena H. Javor (née Gross), born December 15, 1914 in Martin, Czechoslovakia (now in Slovakia), describes her childhood in Martin; her siblings; her medical education and practice; the birth of her three children; the threat of deportation in 1942; her escape from deportation due to her husband's exemption; Allied bombing in spring 1944; the Slovak national uprising in August 1944; her husband's enlistment to fight; fleeing with her children to a monastery, where they were sheltered; joining her husband in Banska Bystrica; her arrest in October 1944; her husband's disappearance; her liberation in April 1945; her reunion with her three children; learning of her husband's, sister's, and parents' deaths in Auschwitz; her return to Martin with her children; her life after the war; how she studied dermatology; her remarriage; and her family's immigration to the United States in 1968.

    Oral history interview with George Denes

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Joseph Welgreen

    Oral history interview with Joseph Welgreen

    Oral History

    Joseph Welgreen, born in 1918 in Sosnowiec, Poland, discusses his childhood in Sosnowiec; his family life and education; the work he performed; the antisemitism he experienced; the changes he experienced after the German invasion of Poland in 1939; being deported to Annaburg in late 1940, and his subsequent transfers to several other labor camps, including Breslau and Klettendorf (both subcamps of Gross-Rosen); the conditions in these camps, his experiences there, the work he performed in highway construction, and his experiences with the guards and Kapos; being transferred to Bunzlau in 1943; the work he performed as a machinist and the conditions there; his experiences on a death march to Dora in February 1945; the work he performed there and the conditions; his liberation at Bergen-Belsen; his journey to Hannover, Germany; the business he established there; and his immigration to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Frank Weinman

    Oral history interview with Frank Weinman

    Oral History

    Frank Weinman, born on July 9, 1914 in Vienna, Austria, discusses his childhood in Vienna and Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia); the introduction of restrictive anti-Jewish laws in Vienna after the Anschluss in March 1938; the family's definitive move to Bratislava soon after; his marriage; his and his wife's forced move to a ghetto camp after Nazis took control of Czechoslovakia; their experiences there doing manual labor; their fortunate escape through a German baggage firm, HAPAG, to Budapest, Cuba, and finally the United States; his parents' escape to Cuba where his father died; his reunion with his mother in October 1942; the assistance he received from his brother who had immigrated to Chicago, IL in 1938; and the success and prosperity he experienced in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Morris Rosnow

    Oral history interview with Morris Rosnow

    Oral History

    Morris Rosnow (né Moishe Raznov), born on January 7, 1927 in Zdzieciol, Poland (now Dzyatlava, Belarus) discusses his experiences during World War II while hiding in the woods as a member of a Jewish partisan group operating under the organization of the Russian partisans; liberation in 1944 by the Soviet Army; his return to his hometown in Poland, where he remained with his sister until the death of their father; moving to Munich, Germany; earning a degree in engineering; immigrating with his sister to join their other sister in the United States; and earning a degree in pharmacy and raising a family.

    Oral history interview with Gary Schoofs

    Oral history interview with Gary Schoofs

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Gerta Wingerd

    Oral history interview with Gerta Wingerd

    Oral History

    Gerta Wingerd (née Alper), born on September 23, 1923 in Bеrhomet, Romania (now Berehomet, Ukraine), discusses her childhood in Czernowicz, Romania (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine); the increase in antisemitism in 1938 after fascist rule was established; the occupation of her town by Soviet forces in 1939; the retreat of the Soviet forces; her two brothers' escape toward Russia; the occupation of the area by Nazi troops; the establishment of a ghetto; her family's release; their eventual internment in a ghetto camp in Transnistria until 1944; the conditions, difficulties, and disease that were prevalent there; the family's liberation by Soviet troops; her return to Czernowicz; her escape from Romania to Vienna, Austria, where she worked for the United States Army; being sponsored by the Joint Distribution Committee to immigrate to the United States in 1949; and her experiences in New York, Minneapolis, and Great Falls, Montana before marrying and settling in Mill Valley, California.

    Oral history interview with Ilse Eden

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sam Genirberg

    Oral history interview with Sam Genirberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Eva K. Breyer

    Oral History

    Eva Breyer, born on August 18, 1936 in Budapest, Hungary, describes her parents, who converted from Judaism to Catholicism after the death of her grandfather; being christened Catholic; her brother, who was born Jewish and converted when he was about a year old; attending Catholic religious classes; antisemitism in Hungary before the Germans invaded; the laws passed against Jews in the 1930s; the bombings after the war started; the drafting of non-Jewish men for the military and Jewish men for labor service; her father being called up for labor service near Budapest; how her mother was able to keep her father from being sent to the front in 1943; the German occupation, at which time the Jewish laws grew worse; having to move to Jewish houses with other families; the round ups led by the Arrow Cross and police in the summer of 1944; her aunt saving her mother from deportation; moving into an apartment building that was under the protection of the Vatican; her brother, who was sent to a monastery for extra protection; being sent to the hospital where a doctor diagnosed her as sick so she could hide with terminally sick children; going to a convent outside Buda; seeing people being shot into the Danube; going to a Swedish house and finding it empty; the arrival of the Russians; her family, who went to the ghetto while she was in hiding; her father’s death from pneumonia in March after the liberation; the mistreatment of the Hungarians by the Russian soldiers; life under the communists; escaping to Austria and then the United States in 1956; and how she identifies as Catholic.

    Oral history interview with Kurt Levi

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Paul Nebenzahl

    Oral History

    Paul Nebenzahl discusses his childhood in Long Island, NY; his career in advertising; enlisting in the United States Army in 1942; his experiences as a sergeant in the Signal Corps; being part of a secret OSS “operational group” working with the French underground movement in southwestern France to hinder the German retreat in 1944; his military service in India and China for the remainder of the war; his life after the war; marrying; having children; and his leisure activities.

    Oral history interview with Frank Weinman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Olga Nepomyashy

    Oral history interview with Olga Nepomyashy

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Floyd Dade

    Oral history interview with Floyd Dade

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Peter Oppenheim

    Oral history interview with Peter Oppenheim

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ellen Van Creveld

    Oral history interview with Ellen Van Creveld

    Oral History

    Ellen Van Creveld, born in 1933 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, discusses her childhood in Amsterdam; her assimilated family life; her lack of awareness of her Jewish heritage; the changes she experienced after the German invasion of Holland in May 1940, including the new restrictions and her transfer to a Jewish school; her relationships with her non-Jewish friends during this period; the fear of arrest and deportation; her family's decision to go into hiding in November 1943; her experiences while living in hiding; her family's move to Brussels, Belgium with the help of the underground; the false identities they acquired; her experiences in Brussels under false papers, her education; the betrayal of the family and their arrest; her reprieve from deportation due to illness; her experiences in the Jewish hospital and orphanage; her subsequent time spent living in hiding on a farm and in an abandoned castle during the winter of 1944-1945; her reunion with one of her brothers after the end of the war and the fates of her other family members; her postwar life in the United States and Holland; the challenges she faced; her marriage and family; her permanent immigration to the United States in 1956; and her life in the US.

    Oral history interview with Lola Welgreen

    Oral history interview with Lola Welgreen

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Semyon Berenshtein

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sara Gelender

    Oral History

    Sara Gelender discusses her childhood in Warsaw, Poland; her memories of the bombing and burning of Warsaw in September 1939; her family's flight 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; marrying 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 the 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, where they lived until 1951; their emigration first to Canada, and finally to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Ilse Sternberger

    Oral history interview with Ilse Sternberger

    Oral History

    Ilse Sternberger (née Naumann), born in 1914, discusses her childhood in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland); her assimilated family life; her education; her marriage and her decision to move to Belgium with her husband in 1933; her life in Belgium; her husband's success as a photographer; their decision to move to London, England in 1936; returning to Germany in 1939 in an attempt to help Jewish children leave the country, and being stymied by the bureaucracy; immigrating to the United States with her husband and children in July 1940; her life in the US; her work as a teacher and writer; and her curation of books and exhibits of her husband's work.

    Oral history interview with Jenny Friedlander

    Oral history interview with Jenny Friedlander

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Leonid Bobrovsky

    Oral history interview with Leonid Bobrovsky

    Oral History

    Leonid Bobrovsky, born on May 4, 1937 in Odessa, Ukraine, describes being only three years old when the war began; his father who fought with the partisans during the war; the Nazi invasion of Odessa, at which time he and his family were in an underground hiding place (“Kotokloomba”) reserved for partisans and their families; hiding with his mother while his older brother and father helped the partisans; getting sick because the hiding place was very wet; the Nazis discovering various entrances to the hiding place and using poisonous gas to force the people out; escaping from the hiding place along with his mother and older brother; getting caught by the Nazis and taken away to the city jail where there were many other Jewish residents; being separated from his mother, who was later murdered by the Nazis; being moved with his brother to a different jail; his brother’s attempted escape and then suicide; being taken to camp Ombarova where he remained until liberation; working even though he was so young; attributing his survival in the ghetto to the women who protected and took care of him; liberation; being taken to an orphanage where he stayed until his father’s return; his father, who remarried after the war; attending school and studying construction at a college; being married twice and having two daughters; and naming his younger daughter, Polina Bobrovskaya, after his mother.

    Oral history interview with Sam Genirberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Joseph Schein

    Oral history interview with Joseph Schein

    Oral History

    Joseph Schein discusses his childhood is Sosnowiec, Poland; his experiences with antisemitism, and how his plans to immigrate to the United States were disrupted by the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany; being sent to his mother’s hometown Brzostowica-Wielka, Poland (now Vialikaia Berastavitsa, Belarus); avoiding forced labor in Russia by returning to Sosnowiec; being conscripted for forced labor by the Germans in October 1940; his experiences in several forced labor and concentration camps throughout the war years, which included Geppersdorf, Gross Sarne, Kleinmangersdorf, Wiesau, Waldau, Casper Bowder, Gintersdorf, Rostitz, Hundsfeld, Hirschberg, Gross-Rosen, Dachau, and Buchenwald; the conditions in these camps and the various labors he was forced to perform; being witness to medical experiments at Hundsfeld; enduring a death march from Buchenwald; being liberated by American troops; being hospitalized; his marriage to his childhood sweetheart and their stay in a displaced persons camp in Ainring, Germany; immigrating to the United States in June 1946; being the only member of his family that survived the Holocaust; immigrating with an accordion, which was his only possession at the time; and his experiences in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Nicholas Nagi-Talavera

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Edith Eva Eger

    Oral history interview with Edith Eva Eger

    Oral History

    Edith Eger (née Elefant), born on September 29, 1927 in Kosice, Hungary (now Slovakia), describes her father (Lajos), who was a tailor, and her mother (Helen Klein), who worked for the Hungarian ministry; her two sisters, Magda and Klara; her favorite memories are of her mother's cooking; her childhood, during which she trained in ballet and gymnastics; preparing to compete for the Olympics for Hungary but being disqualified because she was Jewish; her sisters, who were gifted musicians; the story of how her sister Klara was smuggled out of Hungary when the war began by one of her professors from the music academy in Budapest; the German occupation of Hungary; being taken to a brick factory; being deported with her sister, parents, aunts, and uncles to Auschwitz in May 1944; being separated from her parents, and thus spared the gas chambers; being selected to dance for Dr. Josef Mengele; using her talent for gymnastics and dancing to help survive in Auschwitz; conditions in the barracks; how she helped Magda survive in the camp; being liberated from Gunskirchen on May 4, 1945, at which time she had five types of typhoid fever, pneumonia, and no hair left; going to a displaced persons camp, where she met her husband and became pregnant; immigrating to the United States in 1949, going first to New York, and then to Baltimore, where she worked in a factory; moving to Texas, where she had two more children and attended the University of Texas at Austin; earning her doctorate; moving to San Diego, CA and working as a family therapist; and how her grandchildren are her world and how she lives every day for them. Ms. Eger, her parents, aunts and uncles, and her eldest sister Magda, were deported to Auschwitz in May 1944. Ms. Eger was separated from her parents; she and her sister Magda were spared the gas chambers. Because of her talent for ballet, Ms. Eger was selected to dance for Dr. Josef Mengele. She was able to use her talent for gymnastics and dancing to help survive in Auschwitz. Ms. Eger was liberated from Gunskirchen on May 4, 1945. While in a displaced persons camp, she met her husband and became pregnant. She emigrated to the United States in 1949; first to New York, and then to Baltimore, where she worked in a factory. She, her husband and her daughter Marianne moved to Texas, where Ms. Eger had two more children, and attended the University of Texas at Austin where she ultimately received her doctorate. She settled in San Diego and works as a family therapist and with battered wives and abused teenagers.

    Oral history interview with Otto Springer

    Oral history interview with Otto Springer

    Oral History

    Otto Springer discusses his German upbringing in Prague, Bohemia (now Czech Republic); his education; his family life; the antisemitism he witnessed in Prague in the early 1930s; his marriage to his Jewish wife and the discrimination he experienced as a result; his arrest in 1941; his sentence of forced labor; the help he received from a Gestapo officer; his activities in the Czech underground including the rescue of Jews, aided by two members of the Gestapo; his experiences in another labor camp near Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) beginning in October 1944; the work he performed; a forced march he underwent in January 1945; acts of vengeance by Czechs that he witnessed after the war ended; the suspicion he fell under because of his German heritage; the assistance he received from a Czech military commander; and his immigration with his wife and children in September 1948.

    Oral history interview with Greta Stuehler

    Oral history interview with Greta Stuehler

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Magda Silberman

    Oral history interview with Magda Silberman

    Oral History

    Magda Silberman, born on August 17, 1928, discusses her childhood in Pavlovo, Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine); the occupation of her town by the Hungarians; antisemitism that she and her family experienced; the occupation of her town by Nazi troops; the gathering of the Jewish citizens and their deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau in April 1944; her arrival, the selections, and her experiences while at Auschwitz; the death march she endured in January 1945 to Ravensbrück and Leipzig; her liberation in May 1945; and her immigration to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Eric Willgott

    Oral history interview with Eric Willgott

    Oral History

    Eric Willgott, born on February 12, 1925 in Vienna, Austria, discusses his childhood in Vienna; his family life; his Orthodox religious upbringing; his involvement with a Zionist youth organization; his education; the increased antisemitism he experienced after the German annexation of Austria (Anschluss) in March 1938; his experiences during Kristallnacht in November; his family's decision to send him to Great Britain with the Kindertransport in December 1938; his experiences in London during the Blitz; his work with the United States government in Germany after the war; his immigration to the United States in 1948; his marriage; his life in the US; and his work.

    Oral history interview with Cecilia Kornbluth

    Oral history interview with Cecilia Kornbluth

    Oral History

    Cecilia Kornbluth (née Cilli Mehlman), born on October 11, 1920, discusses her childhood in Vienna, Austria; her early experiences with antisemitism in elementary school and gymnasium; her memories of the assassination of Engelbert Dollfuss, Chancellor of Austria, by Austrian Nazis in 1934; the Anschluss in March 1938; the changes that occurred for Jewish Austrians afterward; her two older brothers fleeing to France and to Switzerland; the arrests of her younger brother, father, and mother; her father's eventual deportation to Auschwitz; her brother's incarceration in Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps for 11 months, and his release and move to England; the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938; being sent for by her brother in Switzerland; her illegal crossing into Switzerland; hiding because she lacked legal papers; being questioned and released; living and working in a refugee camp for single Jewish girls in Basel; living there throughout the war; marrying another refugee who was living in a single man's camp in 1942; having a son; being supported by the Jewish community during this period; her immigration to the United States in 1947; and her family and work life in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Steiner

    Oral history interview with Ruth Steiner

    Oral History

    Ruth Steiner discusses her childhood in Dresden, Germany; her well-integrated family life; her education; the changes she experienced after the Nazis came to power in 1933; the necessity of attending a university outside of Germany due to her Jewish heritage; her studies in Geneva; her family's decision to leave Europe in 1939; their immigration to Brazil; their move to the United States in 1940; her life in the US; the work she performed as a librarian; and her husband and family.

    Oral history interview with Trudy Lyons

    Oral history interview with Trudy Lyons

    Oral History

    Trudy Lyons discusses her childhood in Vienna, Austria; the family's assimilated life; the changes that occurred after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in March 1938; having to leave school, and witnessing abuses against Jews. Ms. Lyons describes the family's flight to Czechoslovakia, and their successful immigration to the United States in November 1938; the family's adjustment to life in the US, eventually settling in Indiana; and her education, marriage, and family life in Detroit, MI and San Francisco, CA.

    Oral history interview with Margrit Schurman

    Oral history interview with Margrit Schurman

    Oral History

    Margrit Schurman, born on April 1, 1925 in Essen, Germany, discusses her childhood in Essen; her memories of antisemitism; the flight of her sister to Switzerland and her brother to England; the events of Kristallnacht; being sent with her sisters to a Catholic school in England; their conversion to Catholicism; her life and experiences in England during the war, including her brother's deportation as an enemy alien to Canada; her separation from her mother, who had married an Italian and spent the war years in Italy; her immigration to the United States; her marriage and life in Berkeley, California; being reunited with her family in California; and her return trip to Germany.

    Oral history interview with Edith Deutsch

    Oral history interview with Edith Deutsch

    Oral History

    Edith Deutsch, born on January 21, 1925 in Arnswalde, Germany (now Choszczno, Poland), discusses her childhood in Arnswalde; her father, Fritz Abrahamowsky, and her mother, Lotte Gradnauer; living in a large home and being raised as a young child by servants, rarely seeing her mother or father; her family's move to Berlin, Germany in 1933; the difficulties experienced by her family when Hitler rose to power; going to the Olympic Stadium with her class and seeing the No Jews Allowed signs; having to leave public school after the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938; fleeing Germany with her family in April 1939 for Thailand; traveling by ship to Singapore; abandoning their plans to travel to Bangkok and instead opting to go to Shanghai, China; staying in a camp in Shanghai for a week; her experiences in Shanghai; working as a sales girl and as a beautician; her marriage in 1946 and the birth of her son in 1948; immigrating to Australia in 1949; living in a boarding house; moving to the United States in 1951; living in Oregon and then San Francisco, CA; and her efforts to socialize with other refugees over the years.

    Oral history interview with Francis E. Cappel

    Oral history interview with Francis E. Cappel

    Oral History

    Francis Cappel (né Franz Erwin Cappel), born on June 2, 1916 in Cologne, Germany, discusses his childhood in Cologne, Germany;his parents, Dr. Paul H. and Meta Cappel (née Braunschweig); growing up in an apartment flat near a synagogue in a mixed (Jewish and non-Jewish) neighborhood; antisemitism in Germany; the beating of his lawyer father by Nazi storm troopers (Sturmabteilung) in April 1933; the boycott of Jewish business; moving in October 1933 to France, where he worked in the textile business; concealing his Jewish origins as best he could, always carrying French or English newspapers with him; befriending a man who brought him to the German Reich secret headquarters where he got to see rare German stamps (Mr. Cappel was an avid stamp collector); moving to Hamburg, Germany in 1935; immigrating to England in 1937; serving as a corporal in the British Army; his success in obtaining transit visas for his father and mother, thus rescuing his father from Dachau concentration camp; getting married to his wife Margo in 1944; leaving the Army in April 1946 and returning to London; immigrating with his wife, children, and parents to the United States; and settling in San Francisco, CA.

    Oral history interview with George Wittenstein

    Oral history interview with George Wittenstein

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Thomas Trier

    Oral history interview with Thomas Trier

    Oral History

    Thomas Trier, born December 27, 1930 in Frankfurt, Germany, discusses his childhood in Frankfurt; his family's roots in the city; his integrated family life; his education in a Jewish school; his experiences in Nazi-era Germany; the economic difficulties his family faced; their decision to immigrate to the United States; the journey to New York, NY and then Chicago, IL; his experiences as a young immigrant in America; his feeling of isolation among his peers as a boy; his education through graduate school; his life after school; the work he performed; his feelings about his German and Jewish identity; and his marriage and family.

    Oral history interview with Rita Grunbaum

    Oral history interview with Rita Grunbaum

    Oral History

    Rita Grunbaum (née Rita van Leeuwen), born on April 9, 1910 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, discusses her childhood in Holland; her career as a social worker in the Hague; her marriage in 1936;the onset of World War II in September 1939; the bombing of Holland; the German occupation beginning in 1940; the birth of her daughter in 1942; the family's arrest in September 1943; their transport to Westerbork concentration camp; her experiences in Westerbork; receiving papers for Palestine from her in-laws who had fled to Mexico; being selected as part of an exchange program with German prisoners-of-war held in Palestine; being sent with her family to Bergen-Belsen in February 1944; being transported from Bergen-Belsen in April 1945 on the Lost Train (also called Lost Transport); her liberation in Troebtiz, Germany; the deaths of her family members during the Holocaust; and her post-war experiences.

    Oral history interview with Lily Robinson

    Oral history interview with Lily Robinson

    Oral History

    Lily Robinson (née Lily Solomon Leibovitch), born on June 29, 1939 in Sofia, Bulgaria, discusses her childhood with her mother and sister who had been deported to Haskovo, Bulgaria from Sofia in 1940; her experiences there as a young child; her family's return to Sofia in 1945; immigrating to the United States in December 1946; her life in California; and the emotional aftermath of the Holocaust that she witnessed in her brother.

    Oral history interview with Herman Apteker

    Oral history interview with Herman Apteker

    Oral History

    Herman Apteker, born on October 9, 1915 in Dresden, Germany, discusses his childhood in Dresden; his Ukrainian parents; his father (Elieser), who was in business and died when Herman was only four years old; his mother, who started a wholesale business selling clothing out of the family's six or seven room flat; his four older siblings (three brothers and one sister); his male "guardian" (this was a German requirement for children whose fathers had died) Dr. Avraham Borg, who took Herman to synagogue and was the primary source of Herman's religious education; his experiences with antisemitism at public school; his strong desire to leave Germany once Hitler rose to power; his trip to Czechoslovakia in 1933 as part of the Young Macabees, in preparation for immigration to Palestine; spending 10 or 11 months in Slovakia, taking part in agricultural training; his arrival in Palestine in April 1933; becoming very ill with dysentery and malaria; his experiences in Palestine; the immigration of his mother and brothers to Palestine; his work in Haifa; riots that occurred in 1936; becoming a temporary policeman before a British officer offered him a job in the immigration office; his marriage in 1938; the beginning of WWII and his work for the British army (in an office) until he was conscripted into the Israeli Army; working as a commission officer at the Lebanese border; his unique relationship with an Arab officer on the Lebanese side; his divorce and remarriage; his immigration with his second wife to the United States in 1953; and settling in San Francisco, CA.

    Oral history interview with Hanna Cassel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Nicholas Nagy-Talavera

    Oral history interview with Nicholas Nagy-Talavera

    Oral History

    Nicholas Nagy-Talavera, born on February 14, 1929 in Budapest, Hungary, discusses his childhood in Budapest; his time in a Transylvanian ghetto in 1944; his subsequent deportation to Auschwitz; the work he performed in Josef Mengele's medical complex; the experiments he witnessed; his impressions of Mengele; and his subsequent experiences at Mauthausen, Gusen II, and Ebensee.

    Oral history interview with Semyon Veyber

    Oral history interview with Semyon Veyber

    Oral History

    Semyon Veyber, born on December 20, 1927 in Tomashpil, Ukraine, discusses his childhood in Tomashpil; his religious upbringing; the changes he experienced after the German Army invaded in June 1941; his family's attempt to evacuate, their capture by the Germans, and the help given to the Germans by the local Ukrainian people; his escape from an Einsatzgruppen action; being deported with his family to a ghetto in July 1941, and his experiences there; the work he performed and the conditions; the fear he felt as the German Army retreated that he and his family would be killed before they were liberated; the arrival of the Soviet Army in March 1944; the charges of collaboration that he faced; his life after the end of the war; and his immigration to the United States in 1989.

    Oral history interview with Chaya Fuhrman

    Oral history interview with Chaya Fuhrman

    Oral History

    Chaya Ash-Furhman (née Averbuch), born March 19,1920 in Kishinev (now Chisinau), Moldova, describes her childhood; her parents’ involvement in Yiddish theater; her own involvement in theater at a young age; the outbreak of war in June 1941; hiding with her family in the basement of a theater in the Russian section of Tiraspol, Moldova; being transported to cooperative farms in Ukraine and Uzbekistan; being underfed; her father, who suffered from mental distress and dysentery and was taken to a courtyard and shot; how the people who were murdered were then covered in lime, so as not to spread disease; the hardships she and her family endured working on these farms; becoming sick with malaria; working as a seamstress in a nearby town where conditions were better; meeting her first husband; antisemitism that was rampant after the end of the war; her leaving for Poland with her mother and husband, who was Polish by birth; their decision to leave Poland in 1947 while she was pregnant; the family's experiences in a displaced persons camp in Linz, Austria; and their immigration to Israel, where she continued her involvement in Yiddish Theater.

    Oral history interview with Peter Mueller

    Oral history interview with Peter Mueller

    Oral History

    Peter Mueller, born on December 30, 1926 in Hannover, Germany, discusses his childhood in Hannover; his family's decision to leave Germany after Kristallnacht in 1938; his life with his father in England; his decision to immigrate to the United States in 1943; his service in the US Army with the medical corps as an instructor in Texas; and his life after military service.

    Oral history interview with Eva Cohn

    Oral history interview with Eva Cohn

    Oral History

    Eva Cohn (née Eva Maria Rhee), born in 1923 in Dortmund, Germany, describes her parents, Max Rhee and Else Heinemann; experiencing a warm family life and peace in her early childhood; not experiencing antisemitism until 1934 when her friend shunned her, teachers began to treat her unfairly, and Aryan students were being separated and taught antisemitism; being prohibited from attending public schools around 1935; moving to Cologne, Germany, where she attended a Jewish school while staying with a Jewish family; her family’s experience during an anti-Jewish “Aktion” in 1938, during which German soldiers threw rocks at their windows and burned their synagogue; returning to live with the family in Cologne, while her parents moved to Baudin and stayed with a friend; leaving Germany with her family circa 1938 and going to England just before the ill treatment of the Jews became worse; a law in England that prohibited immigrants from working, which meant her family could not make any money; spending one year in England, before being allowed to immigrate to the United States; settling in Los Angeles, CA; attending Whittier College and majoring in English; working at a school as an instructional supervisor; her father’s death in 1941 from a heart condition; meeting and marrying Hans in Salinas, CA in 1949; having three children and moving quite frequently; and her life in Palo Alto, teaching German, participating in the German association, and leading the Bridge to Understanding, which takes a group to Germany each summer.

    Oral history interview with Fred Baum

    Oral history interview with Fred Baum

    Oral History

    Fred Baum (né Efriam Dovid Boymelgreen), born in Slupaianowa, Poland (possibly Nowa Słupia, Poland), on October 1, 1921, describes his childhood; his one younger brother; his parents, Majlech and Miriam Nhuna, whom he lived with until 1930 when their mother died; being raised religious, and studying before the war at a yeshiva in Otwock, Poland; returning home from school after the war started, and seeing Jews being rounded up for forced labor; working in various government factories, and how the situation got worse and worse; his memories of shootings, confiscations, and deportations; how Jews were not allowed to go to school or to religious services and there was no electricity; his memories of several events including a memory of the rabbi of his town being tied to a horse and forced to run after it until he died; being put into Starachowice with his father and brother in August 1942; suffering from typhus and his father’s efforts to keep him out of the "hospital" so he wouldn't be shot; their transfer in July 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau; his father’s death in Birkenau around January of 1945; being sent with his brother to Buna (Monowitz), where they were given striped uniforms; being transferred with his brother to Lara Hut; being moved in early 1945 to Mauthausen and then to Gusen in Austria; spending a week there and then four days without food in an open train to Hannora, where they worked on an unfinished concentration camp; being separated from his brother on April 5, 1945 and sent to Bergen-Belsen; being liberated by the British on April 15, 1945; spending six months in a hospital unit recuperating, and then staying in Bergen-Belsen for five years; meeting his wife, Helen Wiesel, there; getting married in 1946; never returning to Poland; reuniting with his brother, who was his only surviving family member; immigrating in 1950 with his wife and young daughter to the United States; having two more children; and his brother, who also immigrated to the United States and started a family.

    Oral history interview with Fred Baum

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Fred Baum

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Cantor Hans Cohn

    Oral history interview with Cantor Hans Cohn

    Oral History

    Cantor Hans Cohn, born in Berlin, Germany on May 31, 1926, discusses his childhood in Berlin; being forced to leave his public school after the passage of the Nuremberg laws in 1935; antisemitic propaganda; his feelings of exclusion from social and athletic activities; the 1936 Olympic games; the events of Kristallnacht; the long wait for a visa to the United States; the family's decision to leave Germany for Shanghai, China; his impressions upon arrival in Shanghai; the life of his family and the Jewish community in Shanghai; his mother's death; the difficulties and illnesses he endured; moving into the Hongkew ghetto when the Japanese took control of Shanghai in 1942; his experiences there; the Allied bombings of Shanghai that took place in the spring of 1945; his life in post-war Shanghai; stowing aboard a ship to Australia in 1946; living as an illegal immigrant in Australia; his immigration to the United States in 1948; being drafted into the military; volunteering as a cantor in a San Francisco synagogue; returning to school and obtaining a cantorial diploma; working as a singing waiter in the Borscht Belt in New York while he was attending Hebrew Union College in New York; being reunited with his father in 1952; and his later experiences.

    Oral history interview with Gilbert L. van Mourik

    Oral history interview with Gilbert L. van Mourik

    Oral History

    Gilbert L. van Mourik, born June 27, 1930 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, discusses his childhood in Rotterdam; his family life; his Protestant upbringing; the changes he experienced after the German invasion of Holland in May 1940; his experiences during the bombing of Rotterdam; his father's efforts to gather and store food; his parents' decision to become part of the resistance; his family's activities, which included hiding a Jewish child in their home for the duration of the war; and the dangers his family experienced and their efforts at self-preservation as well as the moral challenges they faced.

    Oral history interview with Bernard Broclawski

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sam Zelver

    Oral history interview with Sam Zelver

    Oral History

    Sam Zelver, born in 1935 in Kalisz, Poland, discusses his childhood in Kalisz; fleeing with his family to the Soviet Union after the occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany in September 1939; the attempts of his father, who was in the Polish Army, to join them; the family's journey across Russia to Siberia; his mother doing hard labor in return for housing and food; the hardships they endured for a year and a half; the journeys the family took, which ended in Kazakhstan, where they lived with other Jewish refugees; discovering a relative nearby with whom they stayed from 1942 until the end of the war; the family's post-war journey to Germany, where they lived in a DP (displaced persons) camp; his immigration with his sister in 1947 to San Francisco, CA, sponsored by an uncle who died before they arrived; their stay in the Jewish children's home, Homewood Terrace; his reunion with his mother and stepfather, who emigrated in 1952; his education and service in the United States Army; his work as a salesman; his marriage; family; and religious life.

    Oral history interview with Asya Grunkina

    Oral history interview with Asya Grunkina

    Oral History

    Asya Grunkina, born on March 2, 1936 in Odesa, Ukraine, discusses her childhood in Odesa; her memories of the occupation of Odessa by Nazi troops on October 16, 1941; the orders for Jewish families to identify themselves in preparation for deportation; hiding with her family in their home to escape deportation; the family fleeing with the assistance of a local Russian man in January 1942; hiding in the catacombs and caves nearby; the assistance of their rescuer and his family who brought them food at great risk; the terrible conditions and privations they endured; and leaving their hiding place in April 1944.

    Oral history interview with Kurt Mostny

    Oral history interview with Kurt Mostny

    Oral History

    Kurt Mostny, born on March 3, 1919 in Linz, Austria, discusses his childhood in Linz; the antisemitism he experienced growing up; enlisting in the Austrian army and being posted in Vienna; the Anschluss in March 1938; serving as part of the honor guard surrounding Adolf Hitler when he arrived in Vienna to oversee the transfer of power; evading the roundup of Jews in Linz; escaping from Austria; going to Egypt to join his sister, who was pursuing a doctorate in Egyptology; their subsequent move to Belgium; his mother's friendship with a woman from Chile; her success in obtaining visas for Mr. Mostny, his sister, and herself; the entire family's immigration to Chile in 1939; his experiences in Chile; his work and family; his immigration to the United States with his wife and five children in 1964.

    Oral history interview with Hanna Cassel

    Oral history interview with Hanna Cassel

    Oral History

    Hanna Cassel, born on December 6, 1914, in Berlin, Germany, describes her father Arthur, who owned a shoe store and her mother Rebecca, who helped run the store; her one brother, Werner, who was six years younger than her; her mother's parents, who were very religious, and spending during many holidays going to the temple with them; her parents, who were not religious; attending a private elementary school and then a girls' high school, which she was not able to finish because about a year and a half before she would have graduated, she lost her scholarship (because she was Jewish); her father's business ending because he was Jewish; not experiencing much antisemitism when she was younger, and how at first most people thought Hitler was crazy and he would never amount to anything; her very good non-Jewish friends, especially at school; her family home and her childhood and her love for reading; not having many options after she dropped out of school; her desire to go to Palestine with some of her friends, which her parents did not want her to do; moving to Rome, Italy and working as a nanny for several different families; how by 1939, Hitler had influenced Mussolini's policies and foreign Jews were required to leave Italy; the popular sentiment in Italy about Germany; the government-sponsored persecution growing worse; being arrested in December 1940 and put into a women’s concentration camp (she had avoided the first roundups); living with about 65 other Jews, Roma, and Yugoslavian partisans; conditions in the camp, the people there, and the flourishing black market; the German occupation of Italy and how the villagers in the town around the concentration camp helped free the prisoners because they knew the women of the camp would be killed or deported immediately by the Germans; hiding in the fields and then walking back to Rome, which took her about ten days; eating vegetables she took from nearby fields during her journey; being given fake papers by the police in the concentration camp’s town (the papers identified her as Anna Castelli; she told anyone who asked that she was an Italian fleeing the Allies); hiding with various friends in Rome; how most people at this time were surviving on the black market; the destruction of the synagogue in Rome right after she returned and the liquidation of the ghetto; the deportation of thousands of people; how several years earlier her parents and brother had gone to Shanghai, China, where her brother and father both died; having very little correspondence with her family while she was in Rome; getting some information from listening to the radio, which was illegal; living in hiding on the outskirts of the city when Rome was liberated on June 5, 1944; the euphoria at that moment and the difficulty of life after the liberation; how food was hard to come by; getting a job at the American Joint Distribution Committee; getting a visa to the United States and arriving in the US in December of 1948; her mother’s death and Hanna’s depression; working nights while taking classes at San Francisco State College; earning a BA and wanting to become a librarian; becoming a teacher after earning her Master’s degree; returning to Italy almost every summer once she was a teacher and visiting friends; returning to Germany for the first time in 1972 to visit a cousin; her hesitation to return to Germany; having a Bat-Mitzvah in 1983; experiencing antisemitism in the US, especially at the high school where she worked; and never marrying or having children.

    Oral history interview with Vera Korkus

    Oral history interview with Vera Korkus

    Oral History

    Vera Korkus, born in 1928 in Vienna, Austria, discusses her childhood in Vienna; the onset of World War II, and the opportunity that she and her sister had to go a Kindertransport, which they both refused; the forced move she and her family made in 1940 to Jewish ghetto in Vienna; their transport in October 1942 to an unnamed camp, where her father died of lung cancer; being sent with her mother to Auschwitz two years later; being separated from her mother; her reunion with her sister; the terrible conditions at Auschwitz; her encounter with Dr. Josef Mengele; being transported to Kurzbach, a subcamp of Gross-Rosen, where she endured forced labor and a 3-day march to Bergen Belsen; her escape from the march; finding protection from the Germans with Russian soldiers; the sexual assaults that occurred; her life after the war; moving to Bohemia (Czech Republic) then Vienna; and her immigration in 1949 to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Steffi Black

    Oral history interview with Steffi Black

    Oral History

    Steffi Black, born on October 17, 1920 in Berlin, Germany, describes her childhood; her Polish parents Charlotte Pink and Felix Israel; her father’s factory in Berlin and his work with his brother, Leo, installing electricity in the city; her complex family dynamic; her lack of a Jewish identity; her parents' divorce; her mother's remarriage to Otto Goetz in Switzerland; her separation from her father; her father's involvement in the Spanish Civil War; spending the summers of 1932 and 1933 in Poland with her grandparents; attending a Jewish school for about nine months, but feeling left out since she was not Jewish; her reunion with her father and their immigration first to Cuba and then to the United States; her father's death in 1946 in Nevada; her marriage and life in the US; visiting Germany in 1980; and her three children.

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Parket

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Parket

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ann Burger

    Oral history interview with Ann Burger

    Oral History

    Ann Burger (née Anni Rosalie Rautenberg), born in 1920 in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland), discusses her childhood; her father Arthur Rautenberg, who was the manager of department stores; being raised religious but not Orthodox; attending private school and then public schools; her experiences with antisemitism in school after Hitler's rise to power in 1933; her Jewish friends at school; the loss of her father's business; the family's move to Berlin, while she remained in school; her move to Berlin after her graduation in 1936; her cousin's immigration to Palestine; the family's decision to flee Germany; the efforts of their American family members to obtain visas for them; the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938; training as a nurse; a job opportunity for work in Sweden, where she remained during the war years; her parents’ journey to Spain, Cuba, and then to the United States; her reunion with them in the US in 1946; and settling in San Francisco, CA, where she married and had a family.

    Oral history interview with Volf Gershaft

    Oral history interview with Volf Gershaft

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Klara Garmel

    Oral history interview with Klara Garmel

    Oral History

    Klara Garmel (née Pleshivaya), born on February 17, 1926, discusses her childhood in Yarun’, Ukraine; her parents' work on a collective farm; her memories of Jewish school as well as participating in a pioneer Ukrainian youth organization; the onset of war with Nazi Germany in 1941; the confusion that ensued; the enforcement of anti-Jewish laws; hiding from a roundup; witnessing brutal acts perpetrated against her grandfather; escaping, with the assistance of non-Jewish friends, to Poland; encountering her mother and sister, who returned to Ukraine; her experiences moving, hiding, and passing for a non-Jew; her conversion to the Russian Orthodox faith; marrying a widower far older than she; the advance of Soviet liberating forces; reclaiming her Jewish identity; leaving her marriage; working until she had sufficient funds to return to her home; learning that all but a sister and brother had perished; remarrying and having a daughter; and immigrating to the United States in 1992 due to the antisemitism she experienced in Ukraine.

    Oral history interview with Polina Sorkin

    Oral history interview with Polina Sorkin

    Oral History

    Polina Sorkin (née Britavskaya), born on November 25, 1931 in Krutye, Ukraine, discusses her childhood in Ukraine; her brother and father's service in Soviet Army; the German invasion and seeing troops in her town; her family's unsuccessful attempt to flee; an incident in which all the Jews were rounded up and marched to a barracks where they were imprisoned; escaping the barracks; traveling from village to village; being sheltered by relatives and strangers; her reunion with family members in a ghetto; traveling to an orphanage in Balta, Ukraine, where she remained until the end of the war; reuniting with her family; her life after the war; and her immigration to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Blank

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Blank

    Oral History

    Mikhail Blank, born on April 22, 1930 in Bershad, Ukraine, discusses his childhood in Bershad; the family's experiences on a collective farm; his memories of antisemitism; the family's move from Bershad to a nearby camp after the occupation of the area by Nazi troops; an incident in which his father and brother with other men were locked in a stable from which they escaped and returned to Bershad; the occupation of the area by Romanian troops and the establishment of a ghetto in September 1941 in Bershad, where he and his family lived until the end of the war; his escape attempts; illnesses he endured; the forced labor his father and brother performed; his father's death; the liberation of Bershad in March 1944 by Soviet troops; his brother joining the fight against the Nazis and his death in battle in July 1944; his life in Bershad after the war; his military service; and his immigration to the United States in 1991.

    Oral history interview with Kurt Gronowski

    Oral history interview with Kurt Gronowski

    Oral History

    Kurt Gronowski, born on July 16, 1923 in Berlin, Germany, discusses his childhood in Berlin; the antisemitism he experienced; the destruction of his family's business during Kristallnacht, November 1938; the family's escape to Shanghai, China; his experiences while on board the ship from Italy; the family's arrival in Shanghai and the assistance they received from the Jewish community; life in the Jewish ghetto in Shanghai; conditions during the Japanese occupation; the improvement of conditions after the war ended; immigrating to the United States; the difficulties he encountered while living in Indiana; and settling in San Francisco, where he became a successful businessman.

    Oral history interview with Rosa Wigmore

    Oral history interview with Rosa Wigmore

    Oral History

    Rosa Wigmore (née Adler), born September 8, 1923 in Ulic, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia), discusses her childhood in Ulic; her family life; the changes she experienced in 1939 following the Hungarian annexation of the region; her experiences during her deportation with her family in 1944 to a ghetto in Ungvar, Hungary (now Uzhhorod, Ukraine); their deportation to Auschwitz; the selection she survived with her sister; her illness; her experiences in the infirmary and the help she received from a doctor who arranged to transfer her to another camp; the work she performed; the assistance she received; her lingering health issues; being liberated in May 1945 by Czechoslovakian partisans; her postwar experiences in Prague; her reunion with her sister; their immigration to the United States; and the fates of her other family members.

    Oral history interview with Gerta Wingerd

    Oral history interview with Gerta Wingerd

    Oral History

    Gerta Wingerd (née Alper), born on September 23, 1923 in Bеrhomet, Romania (now Berehomet, Ukraine), discusses her childhood in Czernowicz, Romania (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine); the increase in antisemitism in 1938 after fascist rule was established; the occupation of her town by Soviet forces in 1939; the retreat of the Soviet forces; her two brothers' escape toward Russia; the occupation of the area by Nazi troops; the establishment of a ghetto; her family's release; their eventual internment in a ghetto camp in Transnistria until 1944; the conditions, difficulties, and disease that were prevalent there; the family's liberation by Soviet troops; her return to Czernowicz; her escape from Romania to Vienna, Austria, where she worked for the United States Army; being sponsored by the Joint Distribution Committee to immigrate to the United States in 1949; and her experiences in New York, Minneapolis, and Great Falls, Montana before marrying and settling in Mill Valley, California.

    Oral history interview with Evelyn Lowen Apte

    Oral history interview with Evelyn Lowen Apte

    Oral History

    Evelyn Lowen Apte (née Eveline Loewenberg), born in 1929 in Goerlitz, Germany, describes her brother Gerald; her father Herman Alexander Lowen, who was a cavalry officer during the First World War; her mother Else (Gradnauer) Lowen, who had a great interest in art and attended an art school in Berlin; how her family did not consider themselves religious but when the war began the Jewish holidays became more culturally significant to the family; having a happy childhood; her father’s desire to emigrate as soon as Hitler came to power; getting around the quota system by becoming property owners in the United States; traveling through Paris, France in 1937 and taking a ship to New York, NY, arriving on February 22, 1937; the fate of her extended family; settling in Portland, Oregon; learning English; the difficult transition to American life, especially for her mother; feeling like an outsider in high school, but beginning to feel American in college; visiting Germany in 1966; how she does not enjoy speaking German with people her age, but is willing to speak German with the younger generation; attending Reed College in Oregon for two years, and then transferring to the University of California at Berkeley, where she did her undergraduate and some graduate work, finishing her education in London; becoming a social worker; considering herself an atheist, but still feeling close to the Jewish culture and traditions; the large community of Jewish refugees in Portland; and her reflections on her experiences as a refugee.

    Oral history interview with Annette Herskovits

    Oral history interview with Annette Herskovits

    Oral History

    Annette Herskovits discusses her experiences as a young child during the Holocaust, including her infancy in Paris, France; the occupation of Paris by Nazi troops; her father's decision that the family should go into hiding; hiding with her older siblings with occasional visits from their parents; the arrest and deportation of her parents in June 1943; her brother's efforts to find a safe place for her outside of Paris; being fostered with a couple in an unidentified location; being visited by her siblings during this period; and understanding that she would never see her parents again.

    Oral history interview with Guta Zlotlow

    Oral history interview with Guta Zlotlow

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Alfred Cotton

    Oral history interview with Alfred Cotton

    Oral History

    Alfred Cotton (né Baumwollspinner), born on December 29, 1925 in Hamburg, Germany, discusses his childhood in Hamburg; his Polish parents; his father’s wholesale wine distribution business; his memories of the antisemitism after the Nazis rose to power; his parents' selling their business because of the anti-Jewish boycotts; the expulsion of his father to Poland in 1938; the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938; the arrests of the teachers at the Jewish school he attended; his parents' decision to place him on a Kindertransport; leaving Germany for a boy's camp in Suffolk, England; the arrest and internment of all boys over age 16; being moved to Sheffield, England and living in a camp run by refugee women; attending a public school; learning that his parents and grandparents were deported in 1942 from Poland where they were living; his immigration to the United States in the early 1950s; and his involvement in Kindertransport reunions.

    Oral history interview with Marion Mostny

    Oral history interview with Marion Mostny

    Oral History

    Marion Mostny, born on May 22, 1927 in Berlin, Germany, discusses her childhood in Berlin; the changes she experienced during the 1930s; her parents' decision to leave Germany; her family's immigration to Santiago, Chile in April 1939; the community of Jewish refugees there; the fates of family members left behind in Germany; her life in Chile; her and her husband's decision to immigrate to the United States in 1963; their life in San Francisco, CA; her decision to write her memoirs; and the importance of Holocaust remembrance. [See her memoir titles, Conversations with my grandchildren : a journey through three continents.]

    Oral history interview with Roy Calder

    Oral history interview with Roy Calder

    Oral History

    Roy Calder describes his early life in an assimilated family in Berlin and Dresden; his invovlement in Jewish youth groups; his awareness of increased antisemitism after the Nazi rise to power; his parents' decision to send him to school in Switzerland in 1935; his attempts to convince his family to leave Germany; his regret that they did not; his decision to immigrate to Great Britain; the jobs he held in Birmingham, England; the beginning of World War II in 1939; his internment as an enemy alien in Sherbrooke, Canada; his return to England in late 1940; why he volunteered for the British army; his six year service in Scotland, Nigeria, India, and Burma; his marriage to another Holocaust survivor; his decision to immigrate to the United States in 1953; his Jewish identity; and the effects the events of the Holocaust had on him and his wife.

    Oral history interview with Alfred Batzdorff

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Felberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sandor Hollander

    Oral history interview with Sandor Hollander

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Abraham Jaeger

    Oral history interview with Abraham Jaeger

    Oral History

    Abraham Jaeger, born on March 13, 1916 in Vel'ký Bočkov, Czechoslovakia (now Velykyi Bychkiv, Ukraine), discusses his childhood; his career as a salesman; his escape in October 1939 to Palestine, where he was imprisoned for six months; his experiences serving in the British Army in Egypt, Syria, and Cyprus; joining the Israeli Army in 1948; his career and life in Israel, where he lived until 1958; his immigration to the United States; and the death of his parents and three of sisters in the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Judy Kirkham

    Oral history interview with Judy Kirkham

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Rita Kuhn

    Oral History

    The interviews describe Ms. Kuhn's childhood in Berlin, Germany, her life as the daughter of a Jewish father and non-Jewish German mother as the Nazi regime rose to power, and her growing awareness of antisemitism and change. Ms. Kuhn describes the dismay she felt after the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938, and the privations her family suffered as a consequence of the Nuremberg Laws and her father's unemployment, living with meager ration allotments, detainments, and forced labor. She discusses life trapped in Berlin during the war years, bombings, and forced labor in a small factory. Ms. Kuhn remembers the round-up of Jews in Berlin in February 1943 and her release, because her mother was German. Of particular note, Ms. Kuhn discusses the Rosenstrasse Protest of 1943, when a group of Aryan women protested the imprisonment of their Jewish husbands and children, in which her mother participated. Ms. Kuhn describes the occupation of Berlin by Russian troops, and her family being asked to identify Nazis to them. She recalls her first exposure to information about the concentration camps and the Holocaust, the time she spent in a displaced persons camp, her desire to leave Germany and her immigration to the United States in 1948. Ms. Kuhn describes her return to Berlin for the 50th year memorial of Kristallnacht, when she participated in a silent march from the a synagogue to Rosenstrasse in commemoration of the protest there.

    Oral history interview with Greta Reisman

    Oral history interview with Greta Reisman

    Oral History

    Greta Reisman, born on January 6, 1927 in Mattersdorf (Mattersburg), Austria, discusses her childhood in Nuremberg, Germany; her religious upbringing and assimilated education; the changes she experienced after the Nazis came to power; the increasing antisemitism as well as her family's decision to relocate to Yugoslavia and Hungary; her experiences in Yugoslavia; the actions her grandmother took to allow them to remain there; her decision to join the rest of the family in Hungary; and immigrating to the United States in 1940.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Schein

    Oral History

    The interviews describe Mr. Schein's childhood is Sosnowiec, his experiences with antisemitism, and how his plans to immigrate to the United States were disrupted by the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany. Mr. Schein describes being sent to his mother’s hometown, Brzostowica-Wielka, near Volkovisk, in Russian Poland, and eluding forced labor in Russia by returning to Sosnowiec. He discusses being conscripted for forced labor by the Germans in October 1940, and his experiences in several forced labor and concentration camps throughout the war years, which included Geppersdorf, Gross Sarne, Kleinmangersdorf, Wiessau, Waldau, Casper Bowder, Gintersdorf, Rostitz, Hundsfeld, Hirschberg, Gross-Rosen, Dachau, Buchenwald, and possibly others. Mr. Schein describes the conditions in these camps and the various labors he was forced to perform, being witness to medical experiments at Hundsfeld, and enduring a death march from Buchenwald. He discusses his liberation by American troops, his hospitalization, his marriage to his childhood sweetheart, their stay in a displaced persons camp in Ainring, Germany, and their immigration to the United States in June 1946. Mr. Schein relates that he was the member of his family that survived the Holocaust and his only possession when he emigrated was an accordion. He also describes his experiences in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Dan Dougherty

    Oral history interview with Dan Dougherty

    Oral History

    Dan Dougherty, born May 30, 1925 in Austin, Minnesota, describes being drafted into the United States Army 17 days after his high school graduation; transferring from the 44th Division to the 45th Division; seeing combat on the Sigfried Line and experiencing a slight injury; returning after his recovery and fighting at Aschaffenburg, Germany; the surrender of Germany seven days later; taking part in the liberation of Bavarian US prisoner of war camps and concentration camps; going towards Nuremberg, which had already fallen to the Allies; arriving in Dachau, where they found thousands of emaciated corpselike inmates; coming upon Allach concentration camp; and going to Munich, which they occupied on May 1, 1945.

    Oral history interview with Max Erlichman

    Oral history interview with Max Erlichman

    Oral History

    Max Erlichman, born in November 1931 in Caracas, Venezuela, describes his parents Tobias Erlichman and Bella Galinskaja; spending his childhood years in Amsterdam, Holland until he was taken to Westerbork with his brother and father in mid-November 1942; the deportation of his mother to Auschwitz in September of 1942; the deportation of his older brother Zacharias to Auschwitz in October of 1942; never seeing either Zacharias nor his mother again, and finding out after the war that they were both killed in the camps; being sent with his brother and father to Bergen-Belsen, where they stayed for nine weeks; being sent to a camp in Wülzburg, Germany and remaining there until they were liberated in March or April of 1945 by the American Army; recuperating along with his father and brother in a house provided to them by civilians in the town of Weissenburg in Bayern, Germany; being sent to a displaced persons camp in Würzburg for a week before being sent back to Holland; his father’s travels between Holland and the United States for a few years after the war; and immigrating to the US with his brother.

    Oral history interview with Marianne Gerhart

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Rose Herskovic

    Oral history interview with Rose Herskovic

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Eugene Katz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Tillie Molho

    Oral history interview with Tillie Molho

    Oral History

    Tillie Molho, born on December 25, 1926 in Salonika, Greece, discusses her childhood in Salonika and Athens, Greece; her experience of the Italian and German invasions of Athens; living in hiding for two years with a Christian family; the scarcity of food and the fear of discovery; her reunion with her family after the liberation of Athens; her family's attempt to reclaim their home from German collaborators; her life after the war; and her immigration to the United States in 1951.

    Oral history interview with Edith Newman

    Oral history interview with Edith Newman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Agnes Allison

    Oral history interview with Agnes Allison

    Oral History

    Agnes Allison (née Agnes Suzannah Halàsz), born on October 28, 1926 in Budapest, Hungary, discusses her childhood; her younger sister, Judy; her mother, Ilona Gero and her father, Robert Halász; attending a private German school established for the children of diplomats; the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, and the arrival of Polish refugees; the Hitler Youth movement at her school; her family’s conversion to Catholicism in 1939 and her awareness of the anti-Jewish laws in Hungary; the German occupation of Hungary beginning in March 1944 and the increased restrictions imposed on the Jewish community; her family being forced out of their home; working for the Germans for a short time in exchange for protection; becoming friendly with a German officer's chauffeur, Fritz, who told her that the German soldiers kept watch at night to protect everyone in the apartment from the Hungarian Nazis, the Arrow Cross; going into hiding in December 1944 with the help of a priest, Father Reile; remaining in hiding until the liberation of Budapest in April 1945; learning the fates of family members; and her belief that the Arrow Cross was responsible for the deaths of Budapest Jews.

    Oral history interview with Ann Gabor Arancio

    Oral history interview with Ann Gabor Arancio

    Oral History

    Ann Gabor Arancio, born on September 2, 1926 in Gyula, Hungary, discusses her childhood in Gyula; her childhood experiences with antisemitism; her experiences passing as a Christian with false identity papers; being captured in November 1944 by Nazi troops; doing forced labor in a brick factory; her escape with her mother and sister; going into hiding in several locations; the liberation of Hungary; studying in Holland; immigrating to the United States with her husband in 1950; and her divorce, remarriage, and family life in the United States. [Ms. Arancio was featured in the book, A Time to Flee: Unseen Women of Courage.]

    Oral history interview with Valerie Balint

    Oral history interview with Valerie Balint

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Yanina Cywinska

    Oral history interview with Yanina Cywinska

    Oral History

    Yanina Cywinska, born on October 28, 1929, describes growing up with her Ukrainian family, including her parents, Wladyslaw and Ludwika, and her older brother, Theodor; traveling a lot as a child; living mostly in and around Warsaw, Poland; attending ballet classes; being raised Catholic; her father’s Jewish friends; being taught by her parents to not look down on Jews or ever make an antisemitic comment; her father, who was a doctor and was asked by the Nazis, once they had invaded Poland, to perform some medical experiments on Jewish twins; his refusal to conduct the experiments and his subsequent imprisonment in jail for a short period; the Warsaw Ghetto, which was constructed in 1939; her father’s realization that he had a moral obligation to help the Jews and his failed attempts to get the local priest to help; her family’s participation in the underground movement; making several trips a day through tunnels and sewer lines into and out of the ghetto; carrying ammunition, jewelry, furs, medicine, and poison for the black market; witnessing executions and other violence; the various tunnels that they used to get in and out of the ghetto; being arrested and sent to a detention center; being taken out in the middle of the night with other people into the forest, where they dug ditches and then were lined up and shot; surviving the massacre because she was behind another woman, and she fell into the pit and pretended to be dead; climbing out of the pit and hiding in a haystack, where a farmer found her; reuniting with her parents at the detention center; her aunt, Stasha, paying the Gestapo to get Yanina and her brother out of the detention center; returning to her aunt’s house; being beaten and abused by her aunt for being a “Jew-lover”; her brother, who ran away; working as a servant for her aunt; ending up homeless and wandering around the streets of Warsaw for a while; staying for a few weeks with a couple she met at the detention center; reuniting with her parents at the detention center; being sent with the other prisoners to Auschwitz in cattle cars; the journey; arriving at Auschwitz; surviving a gas chamber after being revived by another inmate; being given a uniform; the shaving of her hair; being tattooed with a number; working in various places, including a factory, a kitchen, in the labs, and at the crematorium (note that it is generally thought that only men worked in the Sonderkommando doing the jobs that Yanina said she did); her methods for survival; being forced on a death march to Dachau; being liberated by American soldiers; staying in a displaced persons camp for a while, where she was sexually assaulted and impregnated by a soldier; her two abusive marriages after the war; meeting her third husband; the effects of the war on her emotionally; giving up on God; and her long recovery from her traumatic experiences.

    Oral history interview with Yanina Cywinska

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ilse Lewy

    Oral history interview with Ilse Lewy

    Oral History

    Ilse Lewy, born on February 26, 1920 in Wuppertal, Germany, discusses her childhood in Wuppertal (now part of Elberfeld); her memories of the increase in antisemitism after Hitler rose to power 1933; being forced to leave school and move with her family; working at a factory until 1936; her move to a children's school in Sweden that prepared students for immigration to Palestine; her travels there by train and her experiences in the school for the next two years; being summoned back to Germany to immigrate with her parents and sister to the United States; the voyage on a ship through the Panama Canal; arriving in San Francisco, CA; returning to school; her attempts at and final success in being admitted to nurse training; her experiences with antisemitism in the United States; volunteering for the United States Army; being stationed in the Philippines where she met her future husband; and their marriage and family life.

    Oral history interview with Esther Kemeny

    Oral history interview with Esther Kemeny

    Oral History

    Esther Kemeny, born on August 19, 1912 in Michalovce, Slovakia, discusses her childhood in Michalovce; attending law school and graduating 1936; incidents of antisemitism; her disbarment in 1939 because she was Jewish; meeting her husband and their marriage; the escape of her brothers and father to the United States in 1940; being deported with her husband to Auschwitz in 1944; the deplorable conditions at Auschwitz; the birth and tragic loss of her son in Auschwitz; her work in the hospital at Auschwitz; the death march she endured; her experiences at Ravensbrück concentration camp; being liberated by Russian soldiers; the assistance she received from the Red Cross; her return to Slovakia and her reunion with her husband who was in the hospital in Bratislava; their immigration to the United States in 1949; their move to New York and then Ohio; her husband's medical practices; and the birth of her daughter in 1952.

    Oral history interview with Ray Redel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Roma Barnes

    Oral history interview with Roma Barnes

    Oral History

    Roma Barnes (née Rosenmann), born on March 15, 1930 in Demblin (Deblin), Poland, describes being subjected to a lot of antisemitism in school when she was growing up; the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany in September 1939; the roundup of Jews; fleeing the roundups several times; her parents, who were caught in the first roundup and sent to Sobibor, where they were killed immediately upon arrival; returning to her town, where she met up with her uncle and stayed with him; her uncle’s preparation of fake passports for all of them to go to Switzerland; watching as her uncle was captured by the Nazis and shot; being caught and sent to a work camp, where she witnessed such atrocities as watching the hanging of her friend; being sent to Chesokova, where she was liberated; and staying in Egland after the war before going to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Margot Braun

    Oral history interview with Margot Braun

    Oral History

    Margot Braun (née Feibush), born January 28, 1923 in Berlin, Germany, describes growing up in a suburb of Berlin, where there were very few Jews; being forced to go to a Jewish school in Berlin when Hitler came to power in 1933; her family’s experience of a "pre-Kristallnacht" in June of 1938, at which time she and her family were awakened and forced to leave their businesses and move in with their relatives; her father’s many siblings, including his brother who was an extremely wealthy businessman in San Francisco, CA; leaving with her family for England in March 1939; the arrest of her parents at the beginning of the war; living with her cousin in a foster home in England; her parents’ eventual release; and her family’s immigration in October 1948 to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Ted Ellington

    Oral history interview with Ted Ellington

    Oral History

    Theodore “Ted” Ellington, born in February 1928 in Vienna, Austria, describes being an only child; growing up around antisemitism and being defensive of his Jewish identity; the religious nature of Vienna schools and having to attend Christian educational activities; being also required to go to Jewish education sessions; how there were about eight Jewish students in his elementary school class of 35 children; his father, who made a living selling foodstuffs for livestock; the economic inequality in Vienna and his family’s practice to provide lunch for an unemployed family once a week; the violence that erupted in Vienna in 1934; the Anschluss in 1938; seeing tanks in the streets and army planes flying overhead daily; the Nazi flags and swastikas all over Vienna and the pro-Nazi sentiment of many Austrians; the Nuremberg laws; being forced to attend an all-Jewish school, where Nazi children would gather outside and taunt the Jewish students; the burning of synagogues and the destruction of his grandfather's store; his memories of Nazis entering their family home and beating his father after he asked the officers for paperwork stating that they were allowed to conduct the search; how the officers took virtually everything the family owned, including his cherished stamp collection; his parents’ desire to relocate to the United States; his parents’ decision to enroll Ted in a program that was run by the Quakers that took children from Austria and placed them temporarily with a family in England; going to Belgium in April 1939 to live with his uncle; going to England in May 1939 and staying with a family there until 1946; being treated well by the English family; attending school in London; his parents’ migration to San Francisco, CA in 1940; traveling to New York, NY in 1946 and a train to San Francisco, where he reunited with his parents in May 1946; attending San Francisco City College for one year and then UC Berkeley; earning his degree in accounting in 1950; joining the US Army for two years and then becoming a CPA; getting married in 1965; and his two daughters.

    Oral history interview with Anna Hollander

    Oral history interview with Anna Hollander

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Theo Joseph

    Oral history interview with Theo Joseph

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Katz

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Katz

    Oral History

    Elisabeth Katz (née Rosenthal), born on April 23, 1920 in Fürth, Germany, discusses her childhood in an assimilated Jewish family; her mother's conversion to Judaism and reversion to Lutheranism; the ambivalent position that she felt placed in because of this difference; having to change schools once Hitler rose to power in 1933; attending a Jewish boarding school; entering nursing school in Frankfurt in 1938; her memories of the events surrounding Kristallnacht in November 1938, including the arrest of her father; immigrating to London in late 1938 to work in a hospital; being interned as an enemy alien; returning to London and working as a nurse during the Blitz; visiting her parents in 1947 in Germany, where they had remained throughout the war; her father being one of the three Jews in Furth who survived the Holocaust; immigrating to the United States in 1949; moving to San Francisco, CA; and marrying a fellow refugee.

    Oral history interview with Jim Sanders

    Oral history interview with Jim Sanders

    Oral History

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