Oral history interview with Jules Zaidenweber

Oral history interview with Fred Baron

Oral History

Oral history interview with Gloria Fredkove

Oral History

Gloria Fredkove (née Yolanda Bass), born in Italy in May 1943, describes growing up on the lower East Side of New York; her mother dying in 1971; moving to Colorado at age 29; getting married; moving to Minnesota in 1975; her mother’s upbringing as an ultra-orthodox Jew in Poland before World War II; her mother making a living as a singer in France during the war and escaping to Italy during the German occupation of France; her mother’s siblings perishing in concentration camps; how she, her grandparents, mother, and brother are the only survivors of her family; her mother’s imprisonment in Italy; blocking a lot of the information her mother told her; having a sister who had been adopted; her mother giving birth in 1945 in a shelter in Oswego, NY; life after coming to the United States; feeling isolated and ostracized; her mother being a rebellious youth but retaining her faith; her reluctance to talk about the Holocaust; experiencing survivor’s guilt; attending a meeting of children of survivors; writing about the Holocaust; what her mother told her about her father; being in contact with Ruth Gruber, who wrote a book (Haven) that includes a picture of herself with her mother and brother; her mother’s love for the US; changing her name when she became a citizen; trying to locate her sister Susanah; feeling that she missed out on her childhood; antisemitism; and not telling her children much about the Holocaust.

Oral history interview with Jacob Freier

Oral History

Jacob Freier describes his views on the origins of the Holocaust; being taken with others to clean trucks for two days; returning home (Łódź, Poland); being given soup surreptitiously by one of the SS officers; having to evacuate to the ghetto on various occasions; the shooting of 80 Jews in the ghetto; his middle class family being deported to a textile factory on the Czech border; later being taken to Chancelehow (phonetic spelling); being chosen with his brother to work in the mines; the death of his mother, sister, and brother on August 22, 1942; his work in the ghetto; his Kapo, who was responsible for him corning and going to work; meeting Jewish resistance forces; the brutality increasing after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; being selected for deportation to Treblinka; jumping from the train with others; hiding in barns; sneaking back into the ghetto; being liberated January 1945; and his escape from the Skarzysko ghetto.

Oral history interview with Hinda Kibort

Oral History

Hinda Kibort, born in Lithuania, describes her Latvian parents; attending a German-speaking private school in Riga, Latvia; being transferred to a Hebrew high school in 1933 because her parents were boycotting German schools; attending a university; the beginning of the war; attending school in Vilnius, Lithuania; the Russians arresting whole families and transferring them to Siberia; the German invasion; antisemitism in Lithuania; losing their citizenship and having to wear yellow stars; her father being taken then released; being put into a ghetto; the creation of the Jewish council; her work in the ghetto; radios in the ghetto; the ghetto being surrounded on November 5, 1943 and the Romanian SS being brought in; the removal of the children, elderly, and sick; hearing bombardments in January 1944; being deported to Stutthof concentration camp; the selections upon their arrival; her work digging anti-tank ditches; being marched in January 1945 to a smaller town, where they were told to run into the forest; being shot at by the guards and the death of her mother; surviving with a few other women; hiding in a barn; being liberated by the Russian Army; being taken by truck to Lithuania after a few weeks; receiving passports in October 1945 along with her father and brother, who had survived Dachau; joining an underground organization and going to Brest-Litovsk (Brzesć Litewski, Poland) then Warsaw, Poland; antisemitism in Poland; crossing into Czechoslovakia; going to Austria then Munich, Germany; remaining in Germany until 1950 when they immigrated to the United States; visiting Dachau in 1974 with her family (she shares photographs and films from this trip); and her husband surviving Dachau.

Oral history interview with Robert E. Matteson

Oral History

Robert E. Matteson describes capturing Obergruppenführer Ernest Kaltenbrunner; being in the Third Army head of a counter-intelligence unit under the 80th Infantry Division; coming upon the concentration camp Ebensee; the conditions in the camp; his travels through Austria looking for Kaltenbrunner; tracking Kaltenbrunner to a remote cabin in the mountains; being in charge of security at the Nuremberg trials; visiting some infamous Nazis in their cell blocks, including Herman Goerring and Julius Streicher; the hanging of Kaltenbrunner for his crimes; meeting Albert Speer in Heidelburg, Germany in 1978 and his discussion with him; his 1947 trip with Harold Stassen to Moscow, Russia and meeting with Stalin; and his most recent diplomatic mission trying to open up communications between the US and Cuba.

Oral history interview with Kay Bonner Nee

Oral History

Kay Bonner Nee describes being in Europe during World War II as an entertainer in the special services; being a civilian attached to the 5th Corp. of the First Army Special Services Division; driving around with another woman (Katie Cullen) in a truck that became a stage; spending some time in England before being sent to Utah Beach in Normandy, France 15 days after D-Day; performing even when V-1 rockets were flying; being present at the liberation of Paris, France; being mistaken as a German because her hat was similar to Nazi hats; staying several days in Eupen, Belgium and the death of her companion (Katie Cullen); being part of the second group that entered Buchenwald; conditions in the camp; bringing the towns people to the camp; and the importance of being aware of injustices.

Oral history interview with Rosa Nissenholz

Oral History

Rosa Nissenholz, born in Grobrovo, Poland, describes her parents and older brother; the invasion in 1939; having to wear a yellow star; the anti-Jewish laws; being taken when she was age 15 in January 1940 to a textile factory in Greenberg (possibly Grünberg concentration camp); being in shock when she arrived at the camp and remaining there for four year; the female inmates no longer menstruating; her work in the factory; visiting a factory in Sweden after the war; food in the camp; methods for survival; writing postcards home, but only in German; how on Sundays the prisoners would lie in their bunks and talk about their lives before the war; stealing yarn from the factory; her brother being taken six months after her to a men's forced labor camp; feeling lucky that she never got really sick in the camp; being forced to march for four weeks in the winter; being taken in cattle cars to Bergen-Belsen; conditions in the camp; being liberated by the British; learning of her brother’s death; going to Sweden on a boat and having gangrene in her foot from the death march; being in the hospital for seven months; antisemitism before the war; moving to the United States in 1947; meeting her husband Paul in St. Paul, MN and how he also survived the Holocaust; survivors in the Twin Cities area; and her thoughts on Israel.

Oral history interview with Henry Oertelt

Oral History

Henry Oertelt, born in 1921 in Berlin, Germany, discusses the rise of the concentration camps, including Theresienstadt and Auschwitz; Hitler’s rise to power; book burnings; being excluded from school activities because he was Jewish; antisemitism and the discrimination of Jews; apprenticing as a furniture maker at age 14 in 1935; Kristallnacht in 1938; the beginning of the war and being forced to do manual labor; working on road building; being put in a factory to make furniture; being taken to Theresienstadt; being taken to Auschwitz; conditions in the camp; his work making furniture; being marched to Birkenau and Flossenbürg; and being liberated in April 1945.

Oral history interview with Robert Ross

Oral History

Dr. Robert Ross (the minister of the American Baptist Church and a professor at the University of Minnesota) discusses his research on the American Christian during the Holocaust; the underground religious presses in the 1930s; death camps being named in religious publishing in 1943; the Roman Catholic Church during the war; the myths regarding Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Adolf Hitler; antisemitism in the United States, particularly Minneapolis, MN; how the US could have responded differently; the Evian-Le-Bain Conference in 1938; revisionists and Holocaust deniers; Apartheid; stories of religious perseverance in Dachau; the Depression; and the Chernobyl nuclear accident.

Oral history interview with Felicia Weingarten

Oral History

Felicia Weingarten, born in Poland in 1926, discusses losing her entire family during the Holocaust; antisemitism in Poland; having two siblings; the German invasion and the immediate persecution of Jews; being made to wear the Jewish star; being placed in a ghetto; deportations and deaths in the ghetto; rationing; being deported to Auschwitz; arriving in the camp; the selection process and managing to stay with her mother; being taken to Birkenau; being sent to an underground airplane factory; being marched for three days from Breslau (Wroclaw, Poland) and taken to another camp; being liberated by the British in April 1945; being too weak to eat; finding out about the deaths of her family members; going to New York, NY in 1948; resistance during the war; current antisemitism; and ways she coped with her experience.

Oral history interview with Robert Willis

Oral History

Robert Willis discusses teaching theology and the Holocaust from a Christian point of view; how the Christian tradition contributed to the theory of racial inferiority; massacres and genocides in history; the role played by technology and bureaucracy in the Holocaust; the Christian history of antisemitism; and antisemitism in the United States.

Oral history interview with Dora Zaidenweber

Oral History

Dora Zaidenweber (née Eiger) discusses Holocaust denial; a story from a book by Alexander Donat, Holocaust Kingdom; being liberated by the British from Bergen-Belsen; the influence of propaganda on antisemitism; growing up in Radom, Poland; the German invasion; anti-Jewish laws; mass deportations; ghettoization and conditions in the ghetto; the Einsatzkommandos, which were employed in Eastern Europe for mass executions; continuing her education in the ghetto; hearing rumors of Jewish resistance; being deported to Auschwitz; telling her children about her experiences; the woman who was in charge of their barrack; her work mending clothes; being taken on a death march; going to Gross-Rosen briefly; her interactions with Poles; and her approach to teaching the Holocaust.