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Oral history interview with Harry Thalheimer

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1999.A.0122.745 | RG Number: RG-50.477.0745

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    Oral history interview with Harry Thalheimer
    Transcript
    Where you were born and when?
    Well, I was born in a little town called
    Darmstadt, about 15 miles south of Frankfurt
    in 1922 in September.
    And I lived there until we left Germany.
    What was life like?
    Well, of course, I'm a product of after the First World War,
    was born in '22, and things were not
    too rosy for everybody in Germany.
    But as far as the Jewish life was concerned,
    it was very active.
    And we were members of the Orthodox congregation there.
    And we had Sunday school.
    We had regular school.
    And life was-- we were never rich people there.
    We were, let's say, lower middle class.
    And everything was fairly normal, except as a child,
    I used to notice as many times they
    used to have hunger marches going through the town,
    because there were a lot of unemployed people.
    And later on, we saw the first Nazi uniforms.
    And I do remember as a small boy that my mother saw
    them pass by our window one day, and she told me then and there.
    She says, if they ever get the power,
    they're going to kill us all.
    I remember that very distinctly.
    And then later on, when the Nazis came to power, of course,
    most of the Jewish people, including
    my father who was a veteran of the First World War, decorated.
    He thought, well, this won't last very long.
    The governments have come and gone there over the years,
    and this will be another passing phase.
    And so we had never even thought in the beginning
    of leaving Germany.
    My dad was working yet for his cousins as an office manager.
    And however, I noticed in school,
    tremendous antisemitism.
    And during the day, if I went home from school,
    I either had to run or pull out my belt
    and defend myself from gangs of youth who wanted to fight me.
    And the parents, our parents, noticed that.
    And so they decided that they would form their own schools,
    since we had a lot of Jewish teachers.
    Because the Jewish teachers were all let go by the Nazis.
    They couldn't work for the government any longer.
    So we had our own Jewish school.
    And it was, of course, heaven it was.
    We didn't have the antisemitism anymore.
    And we had our Jewish teachers, and we had a very normal school
    life.
    But then gradually we noticed that things got worse and worse
    for us.
    And of course, many, many people already were leaving.
    Those who were able to leave who had
    visas to go other countries.
    And that wasn't easy to come by anymore after, let's say, 1936.
    Most of the countries closed their borders to us.
    But we were lucky that I don't know
    if you want to know the story, that how
    we got very lucky that we got a waiting
    number through a shipping company that
    solicited us, a waiting number to come to the United States.
    And my dad took the number.
    And so when the time came that we wanted to leave,
    we wrote a relative in the United States.
    And he wrote us back that he was a very sick man.
    He couldn't be responsible for all of us.
    So he sent an affidavit for me.
    But he gave us another name of a man who had the same name as we
    did in Virginia.
    We wrote them, and they sent us affidavits.
    And so we were able in 1900 and late '38,
    to get an appointment to come to the American consulate
    in Stuttgart, to leave Germany.
    But of course, the main thing was in 1938,
    I think you're all familiar with the Kristallnacht.
    And during that day, I was in Frankfurt as an apprentice.
    And I was home that day.
    And that was on a Thursday, November the 9th.
    And I went home.
    And I saw the temples were burning,
    or one temple was burning.
    So we rushed to my temple, I did.
    And when I walked inside the temple,
    I went through the schoolhouse which
    was connected to the temple.
    And I saw inside the temple a big lot
    of mattresses soaked with some kind of a liquid.
    It wasn't burning yet.
    So we ran in there.
    Two of my friends, we wanted to save some Torahs.
    But when I was in there, we were arrested by the Gestapo.
    And they noticed our age, and they sent me home.
    So when I came home, the Gestapo came to our house
    and looked for my father who had just
    left to check on his cousins.
    And so they arrested me instead.
    And they took me into the Gestapo headquarters,
    where we met a lot of my fellow Jewish people from my town.
    Most of them, of course, were much, much older than I was.
    I was only 16 at the time.
    And we sat there all day.
    And at night, they picked us up by trucks and by private cars,
    and that drove us to Buchenwald.
    Now, the funny thing was that in the car that I was riding in,
    the chauffeur who had an SA uniform on,
    he was our baker around the corner from us.
    And in the back was sitting an SS man who was a butcher's son
    that we knew.
    And so they drove us for hours and hours
    it seemed, to Buchenwald.
    We got there at midnight.
    And there the fun began, so to speak.
    I was, as a 16-year-old, very, very scared.
    And I don't know how to describe it really.
    But we were all chased into the camp.
    And in front of the camp, I've never forgotten.
    I could never figure out at that time what
    that sign means in English.
    It means work makes free.
    Arbeit macht frei.
    And I didn't know what they were talking about.
    But in any event, the first night
    there was very, very horrible.
    They put us into a half-finished, huge barrack,
    which had no floor yet.
    And they told us to lie down on the floor.
    And anybody who got up, they shot bullets over their heads.
    So the next day, we were put into a barracks, which
    I think that most people saw the pictures what they looked like.
    In the inside, there were three tiers of boards we slept on.
    And usually there were so many people in there
    that every night some other part of the barracks boards
    would collapse, and they fall on top of each other.
    And anyway I stayed there for four weeks.
    And about three or four days after we were there,
    we got our first meal, which was, I must say,
    I didn't even miss the food.
    The only thing we missed there was water.
    There was no water.
    And so the only time we got water is when it rained.
    And we fetched water in any kind of container
    we could lay our hands on.
    And I remember this fourth or fifth day.
    They took me and all those under 35,
    and put us into work battalions, where
    they gave us a typical uniform.
    And of course, I don't know if you're
    familiar with the signs that were worn there.
    Each one knew exactly what he was in for.
    If he had a green triangle and you were not Jewish,
    it was a criminal.
    If it was a red triangle you were a communist,
    a political prisoner.
    If it was a-- a purple triangle, you were a Jehovah witness.
    And if you had a yellow triangle,
    you were Jewish with a star, made a star out of.
    And this, I was put in one of those barracks.
    And the man in charge was a prisoner himself.
    He was a brutal person who would just as well knock you
    down and sort of look at you.
    So I stayed there at night, one night only.
    And I remember the only good thing about it
    was they had all the water you wanted.
    And I drank a lot of water.
    And the next day, we had to report for work,
    about 5 o'clock in the morning.
    And the Kommandant of the camp was walking around.
    And he went to his loudspeaker, whatever he had there.
    And he screamed out that he saw--
    he found out that there was a young punk in here, 16
    years of age, and he wants that punk to step forward.
    So I had to step forward.
    And they told me to go back where I came from.
    So I took my uniform off again, and I went back
    to the other camp where all the people from my town were.
    And we stayed there.
    I personally was never physically attacked.
    I saw a lot of it.
    And the brutality was usually meted out at night.
    They had these long--
    I guess what do you call them?
    Tails of-- cat tails.
    And they would pick out people who
    may have done something wrong during the day,
    and beat them 25 lashes, or whatever
    lashes they decided on, or until they became unconscious.
    And, of course, the food there was unspeakable, not inedible.
    But there was one incident that you may be interested in.
    On a Sunday, the reason we were in the camp
    was because at that time the German attache in Paris
    was shot and killed by a Jewish man by the name of Grynszpan.
    I don't know if you knew this.
    That's why they rounded up all the Jews in Germany.
    But on that Sunday when the funeral was held, from this
    von Rath was his name.
    We had to sit down on the camp grounds there all day.
    And in the afternoon, somebody came and brought us food.
    And sitting next to me was a very close friend of my father,
    and who looked up and saw this young man serving the food.
    And he said, my God.
    He said, what are you doing here?
    It was his nephew who had emigrated to Israel.
    And he was in a concentration camp.
    And we found out that his nephew had stolen the car in Israel,
    in Palestine at that time, and the English sent him first
    to Czechoslovakia, and the Czechs sent him to Germany.
    And that's how he wound up in a concentration camp.
    And so after a few more weeks, I was notified the night
    before that I would be released the next day.
    And with 250 others, I was released.
    And of course, we looked terrible.
    We hadn't taken a bath or a shower in four weeks.
    We were filthy.
    So they told us not to go in the Depot, in the railroad station,
    to the regular passengers.
    We should go to third class.
    So as soon as we walked into the railroad station in Weimar,
    there were many Jewish ladies.
    Excuse me--
    Take your time.
    They were volunteer Jewish ladies
    who noticed us right away, and they brought us food,
    and gave us comfort, bought our railroad tickets,
    so that we could go home.
    And then when I finally got home,
    it was early in the morning.
    And my dad had disconnected all the bells to our apartment,
    because the Nazis would play tricks on you,
    and they put matchsticks into the bell.
    So they would keep on ringing so we had disconnected them.
    And I had no way to get in there.
    And so I picked up some pebbles on the street,
    and I threw them against the window
    where my parents were sleeping.
    And after about three or four pebbles,
    they heard something was going on, and I called to my dad
    that I was home.
    And I never heard my dad scream like he screamed that day.
    So I went in.
    And then I made every effort, you know,
    to get out of Germany.
    I had to report to the Gestapo headquarters in Frankfurt.
    And they told me that I must leave Germany by December 31,
    or they would put me back.
    And I did report there.
    And I told them that I was no longer working in Frankfurt,
    that I wanted to report to my hometown.
    And they told me I could do that.
    But that the deadline would stand.
    So when I went to my home town and reported
    to Gestapo headquarters there, I told them what they told me.
    And they said, well, he said, you know,
    we cannot make you go on a certain day.
    But we advise you to go as soon as you can.
    And so it--
    I waited and waited.
    I couldn't go get a visa to anywhere.
    Our papers for the United States had not come through yet.
    And so we waited until about a couple of months later,
    I got a call to come up to the Gestapo headquarters.
    And of course when you were called to the Gestapo
    headquarters, as a Jew, that was like the death penalty,
    so to speak.
    So I went up there and reported.
    And they came out with just with the stuff they had taken away
    from me when they arrested me.
    They want to give it back to me.
    And they told me to check it.
    I said, no everything is all right.
    No, I had to check it out.
    And so after, my dad was relieved.
    He waited for me downstairs, when I came back.
    And so we waited around until September of '39.
    The war had already broken out in Europe.
    And we got a call to come to Stuttgart where
    the American consulate was.
    And we got our visa there.
    Unfortunately, I had a little sister
    who was only five years old at the time.
    She was born prematurely.
    So she was not completely--
    her vocal cords were never fully developed.
    So she wasn't able to talk very well yet.
    So the American consulate refused
    to give her a visa, only the rest of us-- my sister,
    my father, my mother, and myself.
    And so my dad didn't know what to do.
    So he consulted with rabbis.
    And they told him, you have two other children.
    You have to go.
    So we left my sister in an orphanage.
    And she died in Bergen-Belsen in November of '41.
    She was one of the first ones to get
    killed in the same place where Anne Frank died.
    I found that out after the war through the Red Cross.
    I was in the service.
    And they got the information to me.
    And this month, she would have been 55.
    And well, we came to the United States,
    like many, many other people.
    And our guarantor wanted us to come to San Francisco,
    because they thought the weather was better here for us.
    And so we did.
    And we settled here in January 1940.
    And I don't know what you want to know about our life here.
    We were always able to support ourselves.
    We all worked.
    And until 1955, when I met my wife, and we got married.
    And we have a daughter who just got married.
    And so since I came here, I cannot complain anymore.
    Sometimes, I wonder, of course, why we were saved
    and others had to die.
    I don't know.
    Harry?
    Yes?
    Going back to the years between 1936 and 1939,
    when you came over, what was life like?
    Well, we lived.
    Of course, under constant fear.
    Because first of all, they could arrest you.
    We had no civil rights at all.
    And naturally when you want to go
    to a store to purchase your--
    whatever you needed to buy, every store had a sign
    on in Germany, Jews not wanted.
    But if they put on the Jews not wanted, you would go in there
    and do your shopping.
    But some stores put on Jews entrance forbidden,
    then you couldn't go in there.
    Or like for me as a young boy, '36, I was 13, 14 years old.
    The biggest punishment was I couldn't go to a movie house.
    There was no entertainment.
    We made our own entertainment in the Jewish community.
    They had their own concerts.
    They had their own little theater
    plays, and so on, and so forth.
    But we were talking about it not too long ago,
    on the swimming pool, the civic swimming pool
    was a sign on there.
    Dogs and Jews not allowed.
    And you, of course, they knew--
    all the non-Jewish friends that used to be your friends,
    they avoided you.
    If they saw you coming one way down the street,
    they would go on the other side.
    And it was only if they knew nobody was watching them,
    they would talk to you.
    I know my dad had many friends.
    He was very active in politics for a while.
    And they even avoided him, only would
    talk to him if it was safe.
    As a matter of fact, when the war broke out in 1939,
    we all had got ration cards.
    Every German got ration cards within one hour
    after the war was declared.
    Every German at his ration card.
    And in our ration card was a J in there, Jew, you know?
    But it happens too that in the city that we came from,
    we could purchase everything what the Germans got to.
    I know in Frankfurt, for instance,
    when there was a J in there, you couldn't buy meat products.
    You couldn't buy butter and things of that sort.
    But in our town, the merchants gave us
    merchandise, whatever we had coming to us know.
    But we didn't socialize at all with non-Jews anymore.
    You couldn't.
    Because if a non-Jew was caught talking to a Jew,
    that was a concentration camp, perhaps, for them.
    So we just lived a very isolated life.
    And of course you would never--
    my dad always wanted to know where I was with my sister.
    And so we were, of course, in fear on all times.
    But we were-- we never, never would
    have thought that in the 20th century a mad man like Hitler
    could want to kill, eliminate all the Jews.
    I mean, nobody thought of that.
    The times would be brutal and bad, yes.
    But that he would-- that he would exterminate us,
    I don't think any civilized person, at least,
    that I ever heard of, would have thought at that time.
    And as we know now, that wasn't decided
    I believe until sometime in 1941 for the final solution.
    So even Hitler wanted to get us out of there.
    But nobody wanted us.
    We all know that today.
    That all the countries closed their borders.
    And so we were just hoping that we could get to some country.
    We tried Palestine.
    We tried every place.
    But finally, we were able to come here.
    And do you remember any examples of incidences that happened
    when you were in Germany that were anti-Semitic, or--
    Well, I'll give you one example.
    I had a very close friend, a school friend of mine,
    and I used to go to his house.
    He used to come to my house.
    But of course, after that, we didn't socialize that much
    anymore.
    But when the temples were burning
    this mother of this best friend of mine, a good friend of mine
    I should say, said right out loud on the street.
    They should have thrown the Jews in there too.
    This is how they--
    this was the reaction.
    The German people were anti-Semitic,
    a great many of them.
    That was before Hitler too.
    But my dad used to call that--
    I don't know how--
    he used to call it healthy antisemitism.
    I don't know why he called it that,
    but that's what he called it.
    But the people there lived in fear themselves,
    the Germans themselves.
    I mean if you did not pretend to be a Nazi,
    and if you had any kind of official position,
    you had to be a Nazi.
    Otherwise, you would lose your job and you lose your income.
    There's no question about that.
    But naturally, we were chased on the street,
    from Nazis, from young men, when we went on the street
    and they recognized as Jews.
    And so like we lived a very isolated life.
    We had our own sports club, where Jewish boys and girls
    would go to.
    And so of course, we were isolated
    from the rest of the Germans.
    We had to be just among ourselves.
    What about your dad?
    What was his business, and how was that affected?
    My dad after the First World War,
    before the First World War, he was a salesman.
    But he wasn't married yet, after the war was over.
    And his mother didn't want to travel anymore.
    So he went to work for his cousins who were in the scrap
    metal business.
    They had quite a nice business.
    And he became the office manager there.
    He was not in his own business.
    And that business was running until 1938.
    In the early part, I think in the middle of '38,
    they had a sell-out.
    They were forced to sell.
    And so my dad didn't work anymore after '38,
    except he did a little bookkeeping help for somebody
    who needed it.
    And that's all he did, after that-- until we
    were ready to go.
    And I tell you, we didn't have much savings either.
    So, it was quite tight for us till we got out of there.
    Now between '38 when he lost his business
    or had to sell out, in '39 when you left,
    what was everyday life like at home?
    What could you do?
    Was it a ghetto?
    Was it could you go out on the street?
    What was it like?
    Well, yes, you could.
    He would go out in the street, but just to go maybe
    from one person's house to another person's house,
    to visit each other, or whatever.
    He would read, or he would write, or things like that.
    I mean it wasn't so that they would come every day
    and look for you.
    That was not the case.
    What got worse and worse was in 1938, it was, I believe.
    It could have been maybe early '39.
    They came to every Jewish house, and picked up all the radios.
    So we had no radios.
    And that was a big punishment too.
    So we mostly sat at home, alone, and we amused ourselves
    while we were waiting.
    And then we would go to shul.
    And as a matter of fact, when we used to go to shul,
    there was usually a Gestapo agent sitting in the temple.
    He wanted to know what the rabbi was going to say, if anything.
    And everybody knew who he was.
    That he was Gestapo agent in temple, you know?
    But it became gradually weaker and weaker, the Jewish life
    because people were leaving.
    I remember in 1939, we were still in Germany,
    on high holidays.
    And which used to be a congregation with,
    I just found out of 5,000 people before Hitler,
    there was two congregations.
    And there was, well, actually three.
    There was a little town nearby, which was part of it.
    And they had 5,000 members.
    And we went to the high holiday services in '39,
    and I believe there must have been about 30,
    40 people in attendance.
    And most of them were ready to leave.
    So it just got gradually less and less.
    There was no more Jewish life either anymore.
    There was no more congregations.
    And it was just naturally when the war came,
    there was a completely different attitude.
    First of all, there was blackouts every night.
    And we really got scared, because we
    were afraid that some incident that we could be just picked
    up and taken away.
    So we really stayed home, and it was a very terrible punishment
    for a young person like me that had to be home all the time,
    but nothing we could do about it.
    What else changed once the war came?
    Well, in the beginning, there was not
    that much change, except like I say,
    for blackouts and strict rationing,
    and things even when they were rationed,
    they were not always available.
    But this was not just for us.
    It was for all the people.
    And of course, you wanted to get some news.
    And it was you had to listen and read the German papers.
    And you knew you were not going to get the whole story.
    But there was nothing we could do about it.
    And so there were rumors going around of this and the rumors
    for that.
    And in the end, it didn't make any difference.
    We knew.
    I never saw a bullet fired where I came from,
    or a bomb dropped then.
    That came later, after we left.
    But sure, everything was you saw nothing but uniforms
    on the street, soldiers and so on.
    And we stayed close to home.
    That's the most important thing.
    We just didn't take a chance.
    Harry, from your hometown, from your friends, and cousins,
    and neighbors, what happened to everybody?
    Well, now, my father said, my father had a very small family.
    He had a brother who died quite young, and he had no children.
    He was married.
    And I told you about my sister.
    Now, my mother had a very large family.
    And we don't know exactly how many perished.
    I know one aunt of mine perished that
    was my father's sister-in-law.
    She perished.
    And she was the last one to take care of my sister.
    She lived in Frankfurt, and my sister
    was in the Jewish orphanage in Frankfurt.
    And she took care of her as much as she could,
    and she visited her, and she used to write to us.
    But then all of a sudden in 1941,
    all correspondence stopped.
    So I only read many years later that most of these Jews
    were sent to the Lodz ghetto from Frankfurt.
    I didn't know it at that time.
    And so we never heard from her again either.
    And on my mother's side, I had one interesting.
    My grandfather, for instance, lived in the state of Baden,
    B-A-D-E-N. And the Jews there, for some reason,
    all the Jews in that--
    where Karlsruhe was the main town.
    And they he lived in a very small town
    where my mother was born.
    All the Jews were taken to France into the Pyrenees.
    I don't know if you know this or not.
    And they were sent to a concentration
    camp run by the French called Gurs, right
    on the Spanish border.
    So my grandfather, and my aunt, and my uncle,
    they were sent there.
    And in the meantime, I had an aunt and uncle
    who lived in France.
    They had migrated there right after Hitler.
    And they lived in unoccupied France.
    And they tried everything to get my grandfather out of there.
    And he succeeded in getting him out,
    but he passed away the very next day
    they got him out of the camp.
    He was 79.
    So he had a nice age.
    And my aunt and uncle finally got out
    of that camp I believe in '41 or '42, and came to this country,
    by way of Africa.
    But many, many, many thousands there died of starvation.
    And there was terrible conditions there.
    But they were not put to death there.
    They were there on orders of the German government,
    held by the French, the Vichy French.
    So this is now as far as aunts and uncles,
    other than that, I do not know, no.
    I didn't lose anybody.
    You had talked about the four weeks
    that you were in the camp.
    Yeah.
    Can you tell me what the daily life was like there?
    Well, the daily life was that if you got a few hours sleep
    at night, you got up.
    And believe it or not, the Orthodox
    always found a way to organize a service
    the first thing they did.
    They have a morning service.
    And then you would go outside, and I
    believe you got something called coffee,
    and some kind of a gruel, which amounted to--
    I don't remember all the food.
    There was only it was terrible.
    And then you would just hang around the camp.
    There was nothing to do.
    And all the people would stand together and talk.
    Sometimes you had to line up.
    You had to be counted and all that.
    And of course, things that we usually don't talk about,
    the worst there was the sanitary facilities.
    There was none.
    There was nothing but ditches.
    And if you weren't very capable of balancing yourself,
    you could fall into a ditch and never be seen again.
    There was just no facilities there.
    As I mentioned, there was no way to bathe or wash yourself.
    There was no water there.
    This camp was just put up, this part of the camp I should say,
    was just put up to accommodate these Jews who were coming in
    from the Kristallnacht.
    And there was no water there or anything.
    And so you stuck around all day.
    And later on, I think we were there about a couple of weeks.
    They had organized canteens that was where the Germans, I guess,
    made some money on few Jewish people.
    And you could buy a cracker, or a piece of chocolate.
    But I had no money, so I couldn't buy anything.
    I think one of my relatives, it was,
    they gave me a little money one time to buy something.
    So there was actually in this camp,
    there was no work or anything like that.
    I can give you one incident which was a terrible incident.
    One time, the Germans decided they're
    going to want to do something to all the Jewish lawyers.
    So everybody who was a lawyer, they
    put them in the middle of the barrack.
    And these civilized people took boards and broke their legs,
    because they were lawyers.
    And the doctors were told if anybody
    treats these, people they're going to put them to death.
    So I must say, there was a lot of heroic doctors there,
    because they used underwear.
    They used pieces of wood to make bandages,
    and what do you call it?
    Splint.
    Splints so they could function a little bit.
    And this was one incident.
    And so every day there was something else.
    But I don't know.
    It was just at a moment's notice, something like that
    would come up.
    And sometimes for two or three days, there was nothing.
    So it was hard to predict.
    The only thing that's the worst thing
    there is the hopelessness you feel.
    You feel helpless and hopeless.
    You don't know whether you're going to stay
    there four weeks or 40 years.
    There was absolutely no way to know that.
    Unless they told you when you got out, we wouldn't know.
    Any other examples you remember?
    Yes.
    I remember a friend of mine, as a matter of fact,
    at the 50th anniversary of this Kristallnacht, I met the son.
    His father and I were in a concentration camp together.
    And he-- I guess lost his mind.
    And he wanted to commit suicide or something.
    He ran against the window, and ran through the window.
    And he was bloody all over.
    So the Nazis carried him out, and they put him
    in a chamber, what was called the water chamber.
    They used to put water in them.
    Some of them died.
    They blew them up with water.
    Now he got the water torture.
    I don't know exactly what it consisted of, only
    what you hear, what I heard.
    And after about three or four days, he came out of there.
    But he never said another word.
    He was absolutely mentally completely gone.
    And I understand when he got home,
    he died very soon afterwards.
    And I know one case where if you got sick,
    that was the end of you.
    There was no treatments.
    If you had any kind of a severe illness, you didn't get out.
    But the funny thing was, when you were released from there,
    they put you in front of a doctor.
    You had to strip naked.
    And the doctor looked you over.
    If you had one spot on you, they would not let you go.
    They would never want you to be able to tell anybody,
    look, what they did to me here.
    I know I had a tooth missing.
    And I had to--
    I had to swear up and down that this had nothing
    to do with my stay in the concentration camp.
    And so there was brutality, like I,
    said beatings practically every night
    that took place of somebody.
    Some people, of course, who lost their mind,
    they jumped in the electrified wires,
    and killed themselves that way, and so on.
    So this was going on all the time.
    And you only had to look a few feet away from me
    on the towers, there were these guards sitting there
    with their machine guns.
    So you couldn't go very far.
    What was the cause of the brutalities?
    Like what happened?
    You mean why there was brutalities?
    Well, I tell you, when you're in a concentration camp,
    I think it goes for everybody.
    First, you get to know the character of a person.
    Some people are able to cope with things,
    and others are not.
    By that I mean the animal instinct often takes over.
    The self-preservation comes into effect.
    And, for instance, it was very difficult to go
    to sleep at night.
    You wouldn't take your shoes off,
    because the next day, you may not find your shoes anymore,
    because somebody else robbed you, took your shoes.
    And who was it?
    It was fellow prisoners, right?
    Or if somebody passed away, they cleaned them out
    if they had any jewelry on them, or any money on them.
    They would take that away from them.
    And some of these people, these who did this robbing,
    was our people too.
    They were caught by the Nazis.
    Because maybe they were released, or they some
    were sent to another camp.
    And before they were taken out, they
    had to take their clothes off, and they were stripped.
    And they were searched.
    And they found this gold and this money
    on them, and such, and jewelry.
    And they knew that it wasn't theirs.
    So they beat them practically to death, if they caught them.
    This was one of the things people did.
    That's why I say it's very easy to be civilized
    when you live in a nice place, when
    you have money in your pocket.
    But when you're in a place like this, where you're
    stripped of everything but your own persona only,
    then a real human being comes to the fore.
    I would think that would happen anywhere,
    if you were stripped of everything, and had no hope,
    so to speak, and you'd do almost anything.
    A lot of people did that.
    And those were our people too.
    So stealing was--
    One of the things, yes.
    I mean this, in other words, some try to enrich themselves.
    They would not rob you while you were alive
    or anything like that.
    They took from the dead people.
    But if they needed shoes, they would steal the shoes from you.
    Whether they sold them or something, I don't know.
    Anything else about the camps you want people
    to know, your experience?
    Well, a camp like this shows man's inhumanity to man.
    That's all.
    And it should be a warning to every civilized person
    that it can happen, and to guard ourselves
    against that, all of us.
    It's very, very important because it can happen
    if some madman takes over.
    When you went back to your town after the camp,
    and after Kristallnacht, what did you find?
    Well, first of all, I have a friend there
    who we went to school together.
    So I knew him.
    He was there.
    First of all, the town, as I knew
    it was not the same anymore, because in September of '44,
    they destroyed about 80% of the town.
    The English came one night, and the whole inner city
    was destroyed.
    The place where I was born that was still there.
    But most of it, so I didn't recognize the city anymore.
    Because what used to be the old city, which
    with their winding little middle-aged streets,
    they were all gone.
    And it was all modern streets now.
    And so what I found there was that the people, when they talk
    about the Nazis now, they talk about their grandparents, not
    their parents anymore.
    That's after 50 years.
    So when I went over there at this time,
    they asked us in a letter before if we
    were willing to appear in a school
    and tell our experiences under the Nazis to children.
    And so when my wife and I went over there,
    a teacher called me on the phone.
    And that was on a list.
    And I went there.
    And there were 17-year-old boys and girls in the high school,
    and we talked.
    I was supposed to be there an hour.
    And the teacher asked me if I could stay there for two hours.
    And we talked and discussed what went on.
    And they asked questions.
    And they couldn't fathom some of the things that were going on.
    But now I understand this new generation
    is learning a lot more about the Holocaust than the old one.
    And also, I may say, while we were there on November
    the 8th, 9th, 10th, all the television stations in Germany
    were full all night long of what went on in '38.
    And there were all the various memorials that were going on,
    and so on.
    It was all over and all the networks over there.
    So could it happen there again?
    Maybe.
    I don't know.
    Who knows?
    You came over here in '40?
    Yeah, in December '39, we arrived in New York, right.
    And what happened once you got to New York?
    Well, in New York, we knew we're not going to stay there.
    We were actually-- we were first thought
    we were going to Richmond, Virginia.
    That's where our guarantor lived.
    But he had an office in New York.
    And he told us to go there, and they'll
    help us out, which we did.
    And they told us that we should go to San Francisco.
    The weather was better there.
    It was.
    And they would take care of us here till we get started.
    And so we stayed in New York a few weeks, and visited around.
    They told us to stay around and relax.
    Then we went to Chicago, stayed there a few days.
    And then we came to San Francisco,
    and we reported to the Jewish Family Agency.
    At that time it was called the Eureka society.
    And they helped us out for the first two months or so.
    And then I got a job, with the Jewish club here,
    the Concordia-Argonaut Club.
    And my mother got a job as I guess you'll call it as a maid,
    she was working cleaning houses for $0.25 an hour.
    And so we slowly established ourselves
    until the war broke out.
    I don't know if you knew this.
    When the war broke out in December 1941, all of a sudden,
    we were Germans again, because there was a decree here
    in San Francisco and all over the West Coast
    that enemy aliens had to be home at 9 o'clock
    at night till I think 6:00 in the morning.
    So all of a sudden, we were enemy aliens again.
    So for several weeks or months, I think,
    we had to stay at home at night after 9 o'clock at night.
    And I, for a while, had permission to go to work,
    because I worked till 10 o'clock at night.
    But that was later on taken away from us.
    And it was only, I believe in, maybe February 1942
    that that ban was lifted.
    So that we could go out again, but we were not
    allowed to go anywhere near the ocean, across the bay,
    across the Golden Gate Bridge.
    We could not be found near the waterfront, as enemy aliens.
    Why?
    Because we were considered Germans.
    You remember the Japanese were evacuated.
    The Germans and the Italians, believe it or not,
    were supposed to be also evacuated from here.
    This was later on canceled.
    But we were restricted.
    For instance, my dad wanted to work for the shipyards,
    to work on ships.
    So he was allowed only to work on one company, which
    had I think they were not right on the waterfront.
    We could not go to the waterfront.
    And later on, the first time that my parents
    could live normal again, this was when
    I was drafted into the army.
    Then this was all taken--
    that was then canceled for my parents,
    because I was in the service.
    What happened when you were drafted?
    What did you do?
    Oh, well I tell you the truth.
    I was drafted actually with limited service,
    because my eyesight was never very good.
    So I was first taken to Monterey.
    And from Monterey, I went to basic training in Idaho.
    And from Idaho, I went to Fort Lewis, Washington.
    And from Fort Lewis, Washington, had the first experience,
    believe it or not, with Germans again.
    Because we got prisoners of war there from the Afrika Korps.
    And they put me in the hospital as interpreter
    when they were sick.
    So these were real Nazis.
    They were absolutely the worst.
    These were kind of elite troops in Africa.
    And then later on I was sent to South Carolina
    into a prisoner of war camp, German prisoners of war.
    Those were already just common soldiers who
    were not the elites anymore.
    And I was an interpreter there.
    In your two experiences as an interpreter,
    did they know you were Jewish?
    Yeah, I'm sure.
    They must have.
    What was that like for you?
    Well, I was warned by my commanding officer.
    You're here as a soldier.
    Your personal feelings, he said if you can't do it,
    then I'll see you'll get another job.
    But I mean the soldiers that were there,
    and for instance the way I felt personally,
    first of all there was some I knew were anti-Nazis.
    Because they separated the anti-Nazis in the prison camps
    from the Nazis.
    If you volunteered and you said you were anti-Nazis,
    you were sent in a separate camp.
    And there you were interrogated very thoroughly
    by all kind of agents from the government.
    And if you pass that, you were sent to a camp,
    I believe, in Massachusetts.
    And they trained you for civil service
    in the post-war Germany or something.
    So there were quite a few of those who were just soldiers.
    I don't think after thinking about it later,
    many years later, that there were many Nazis.
    They were drafted like I was.
    And they were, of course, I had very bad feelings about them.
    But I tried my best to do my job.
    That's all.
    And I mean I had daily contact, but not too many.
    And some of them even spoke English.
    What about the ones from the Afrika Korps, the elite?
    They were absolutely I would say unrepenting Nazis.
    And they didn't think they were defeated.
    The others knew they were defeated.
    Because they were actually what we captured
    in France in the beginning, and the ones who
    came to United States, they were actually second-rate troops.
    Those troops were on the Russian front.
    Some of them were wounded on the Russian front.
    And they send them to rest on the Western Front.
    And then they were caught when the war broke out.
    It was only much later that the more elite troops
    came to the Western Front.
    So these guys were, first of all,
    they were not young anymore, many of them.
    At that time, for me they were older, in their 30s.
    And they were already through the Russian campaign,
    they already had suffered.
    They used to tell me stories about what went on in Russia.
    I mean, I said, thank God it went on that way
    that Russian winter there and all that.
    So they were telling these stories.
    So they were not the best of troops.
    And the African Corps troops, what was that like for you?
    Well, there was--
    I tell you what.
    They had one incident in Washington,
    in Fort Lewis on Hitler's birthday,
    which on the 20th of April.
    They decided to celebrate or something.
    I don't know what they did.
    I think they hoisted a Nazi flag or something.
    I can't-- I don't know the exact thing.
    So anyway, the commander of the camp got about 10 tanks.
    And he said, you go on this bullhorn,
    and you tell them in German, that if they
    don't take the flag down within 10 minutes,
    we're going to level the camp.
    Well when they heard that, they took the flag down.
    And I think there for punishment,
    I don't know what they gave them.
    They gave them bread and water for a couple of days.
    Do you know what became of those guys?
    I do not know.
    Because I left Fort Lewis.
    I tell you, the one thing is that these German prisoners
    feared, that's especially the ones I had in South Carolina,
    when the war was over, they feared
    that they would be sent to France, not home,
    and to work in the coal mines in France, which some of them
    were sent incidentally.
    So there were a few who committed suicide.
    But other than that, we treated them pretty well here.
    They had it pretty good.
    The only fear they had that they were not going to go home.
    And there was always rumors going around camp
    that this would happen.
    But most of them, I think, went home.
    What was it like for you to see these people whose country had
    certainly ruined your normal life being treated pretty
    well in your new country?
    Well, I felt this way.
    I assumed and I think I was right
    that the American soldier who was captured over there
    was treated maybe not as good as they.
    But they were treated, I don't think very few died
    in the German prison camps.
    Because if they were hungry, they
    were probably hungry because the Germans themselves were hungry.
    And we did not pamper them here.
    We had one commander I remember he used
    to order the food for the camp.
    He said send me 10 sacks of potatoes.
    And I wanted only rotten ones, or things like that.
    So he lost a son in Germany.
    And I think he was shot down in an airplane.
    He hated them.
    But other, they had to work quite hard,
    I mean what was allowed under the Geneva Convention.
    They worked in sugar cane fields.
    They worked in corn fields.
    Cotton, they couldn't pick.
    They were not good enough for that, and other chores
    they had to do.
    And they had to work.
    But other than that, they were not mistreated in any way.
    So personally, you were able to see yourself
    as a soldier, and not as a German Jew?
    Absolutely.
    I was told that.
    And I knew I had to do that.
    As a matter of fact, my dad, there
    was a few American officers, who were quite frankly friendly
    to these German prisoners.
    That shocked me more than anything.
    Could you say anything?
    To the officer?
    No.
    I couldn't say anything to the officer.
    But I mean, you could feel it.
    They wouldn't say anything directly,
    but you could feel it.
    That is shocking.
    Going back to your time in Germany,
    are there any specific times you remember, examples, incidents
    of things that happened that you want to put on the record?
    Well, I mean in a daily life, like I
    said, we knew we were citizens second class,
    because we were not participating in the community
    anymore in the country we lived in.
    We knew this.
    And like I said, for a young person
    who liked a little fun now and then,
    it was very, very difficult. And of course, my parents
    were always afraid that I would do something or go someplace
    and get in trouble that way.
    And the Nazis just picked you up.
    And like I said, it was not uncommon
    that if you were on the street, and a gang of Germans
    came and recognized as a Jew, they would chase you.
    And if possible tried to beat you up, and did
    beat me up at times.
    I remember on my bar mitzvah, I had
    a bar mitzvah with a fat lip.
    Because the day before, some Nazis
    cornered me, and started to fight with me.
    And I always wore glasses.
    I was very afraid and I had to take my glasses off in a hurry
    sometimes.
    So we knew, sure, we knew that like I said, the people who
    were your friends, or were your neighbors,
    kids you went to school with, they
    wouldn't talk to you anymore.
    And all of a sudden, you saw them with Nazi uniforms.
    I mean it was just something we're
    finding we had to get used to, so to speak,
    because we couldn't get out.
    When the gangs would run after you,
    could you defend yourself, or what happened?
    Well, yeah I did.
    I mean I did the best I could.
    But if five or six kids come after you,
    there's not much you can do but cover up.
    That's about all you can do.
    Like I say, I used to go to a what
    was called in those days a gymnasium school.
    It was like a semi-private school.
    And I went there only for one year.
    And the only reason I could go there
    is because my dad was a combat soldier the First World War.
    I was allowed to go to the school.
    And when I went home, every day I used to take my belt off,
    I had a big buckle on it.
    And I would swing that buckle around my head,
    and I ran all the way home.
    Because I knew they'd come after me.
    And that's why I said the parents decided
    to form their own schools, so we didn't have
    to go through that anymore.
    And you went through ninth grade?
    Or no wait, through high school?
    No.
    I tell you.
    I went to what it's called here?
    Till I was 14.
    So it's eighth grade.
    That's as far as the regular school in Germany was.
    And then?
    And then I went as an apprentice, and I stayed.
    I was about two years an apprentice
    in the restaurant business, a Jewish restaurant in Frankfurt,
    two different places.
    And then we emigrated.
    And all the restaurants was closed.
    At the Kristallnacht, they destroyed
    all the Jewish businesses.
    They went in there with the axes, and so on, and so forth.
    And everything was destroyed, and so was his business.
    What was life like in Frankfurt?
    I had not-- the only thing I did in Frankfurt, I went to work
    and I went to sleep.
    Frankfurt had a huge Jewish population.
    There was about 25,000 Jews in Frankfurt, before Hitler.
    And the same thing happened there.
    The Jews there were very much more mistreated in Frankfurt
    than even where I came from, because of the numbers.
    And I remember that I did not see it personally,
    that the Jews who were arrested on Kristallnacht in Frankfurt,
    they were all herded into a huge auditorium.
    And they were beaten already there,
    and mishandled, by the hundreds.
    But this is only what I heard.
    I did not see it.
    Now, when you came back, after Kristallnacht,
    did you go back to Frankfurt, or you went back to your hometown?
    No, I didn't go to Frankfurt.
    I just went to the hometown.
    And what was it?
    We were invited, incidentally, by the government.
    They paid for our fare and hotel.
    And I must say they gave us a tremendous reception.
    First of all, they invited hundreds of people.
    There was 250 came last year in November, and half of them
    were from Israel.
    They were Jewish people who had migrated to Israel.
    And of course you can imagine what it felt like for me,
    to see some of my school chums, boys and girls, 50 years later.
    And of course, the big tragedy is I'll probably never see him
    again.
    And we all had stories to tell, and they
    had tremendous events for us.
    They brought in a chamber orchestra from Israel.
    And they put on the music night.
    They had the reception in a city, a huge,
    not in the City Hall.
    But in a city building, where they had a big luncheon for us.
    And the mayor, who incidentally his father already,
    his father was the first mayor after the war, installed
    by my cousin, who my cousin at that time
    was a captain in the intelligence
    of the American army.
    And he was in charge of installing the government
    in our town.
    And his father was the first mayor there.
    Because he was a known anti-Nazi.
    And now his son is the mayor there.
    And the city there, just to tell you, built a temple.
    It cost 16 million marks.
    There's about 130 Jews there.
    Most of them are from Israel.
    And a lot of them studied there.
    There's a technical high school there.
    And some Jews from Romania, from Iran,
    from Russia, very few only very few
    used to live there years ago when I was there.
    And they built a temple for 200-seat capacity,
    and 100 for the men downstairs, and 100
    for the ladies upstairs.
    And it's a beautiful temple.
    And then they even catered kosher dinners.
    They brought all new dishes.
    They imported the rabbi to oversee the kashrut.
    And then they had also an ecumenical service
    there in one of the main churches for Catholics,
    and the Jews, and Protestants.
    And at the opening of the temple there
    was a Protestant and a Catholic minister there too.
    And they even have a rabbi there.
    He's originally from Romania, and a very good cantor
    they have.
    Harry, what I meant was after Kristallnacht, in '38.
    Yeah.
    When you went back to your town in '38--
    Oh, yeah.
    --what did it look like?
    Was anything different?
    You mean after the concentration camp you're talked about?
    Yeah.
    No.
    The town was still the same.
    Well for me, of course, my only aim was to get out of there.
    That was what I was consumed with, and my father
    and mother too.
    We tried to get out of there, and the German
    became very arrogant after Austria
    was taken without anybody doing anything about it, and then
    Czechoslovakia.
    They were all behind Hitler.
    Can you give me any examples?
    Well, they had huge rallies going there.
    The Nazis had rallies and holidays for this.
    And the people would shout themselves
    silly with Nazi slogans.
    And when any of the Nazi leaders came to town,
    I mean they were all behind them, at least,
    I didn't know anybody who was not.
    And I remember my dad telling me the day
    we left Germany, he went to see an old friend of his,
    a doctor, who's a German, anti-Nazi to the core.
    And my dad said goodbye to him.
    And he said, well, he said, I'm glad you're
    getting out of there.
    But I must tell you this.
    We are going to win this war.
    Can you imagine that?
    And he was not even a Nazi, saying that.
    That's how confident they were.
    Was it hard to live?
    Did you have to deal with Nazis?
    Well, you dealt with them when you
    went to business, to stores.
    But I mean as far as having to get out
    of their way or something like that, like I said,
    we never went any place.
    We did our shopping, which was usually in a neighborhood.
    There was no more Jewish stores.
    I don't think there was any more left in late '38,
    they were all gone.
    So we depended to go to non-Jewish stores.
    And they knew us, and they gave us our merchandise.
    And I'm sure that some of them, they
    may have regretted in some way what was going on,
    but nothing they could do about it either.
    When you say there were no Jewish stores left,
    were people not allowed to have stores?
    What happened?
    Well, like I said, most of them were
    destroyed at Kristallnacht.
    They came and they smashed everything to smithereens.
    And so there was no more--
    they didn't couldn't rebuild it.
    And then most of them have left already.
    There was not that many Jews left.
    I bet you out of the 5,000 that lived there in '38,
    well they could have been 2,000 still there.
    Because a lot of the Jewish people from little towns
    around there came to the bigger city,
    kind of to mash into the scenery, so to speak,
    because in these little towns everybody knew them.
    So they came to the bigger city.
    And so we always had people coming in.
    But many more left.
    So I don't think there was even 2,000 people left in '38.
    And I know in '39, most of those were gone.
    Harry, is there anything else that you'd like to talk about?
    Well, the only thing I say this.
    If a future generations see this,
    it should be a warning to all people to be vigilant,
    to take nothing for granted, to make sure
    that their liberties are guaranteed,
    and that they contribute to make sure that it stays that way.
    What happened to us, probably hundreds of years from now
    this be just a little part of history.
    But we can't forget that we lost 6 million people.
    And we shouldn't forget.
    And it's our duty and it's the duty of other generations
    to remind our people what can happen if we are not vigilant.
    Do you think your experience during the war
    made any influence on how you raised your daughter?
    Well, I don't know if it made any.
    We tried to-- she was very Jewish in her upbringing.
    She was very interested in her people.
    But it was not easy for us to tell her what happened to us.
    She heard it from my grandparents at times.
    And we tried to remind her at times.
    And I think she's aware of it.
    But she has to live her own life, I guess.
    And we tried to teach her most of all, to be a good person,
    and to be aware of what can happen.
    But other than that, incidentally she
    was a child who was, when she was five years old,
    she went to Hebrew school, and she was very much brought up
    in a Jewish tradition.
    And she still is.
    And she knows what it's all about, I'm sure.
    I just want to tell you mazel tov on her wedding.
    Oh, thank you very much.
    Yeah.
    Thank you.
    Harry, unless you have anything else to say,
    I think that's about all I can think of to ask.
    Well, I thank you for this interview.
    Thank you.
    And I hope it's some benefit.
    We appreciate it a lot.
    It's very important to do.
    And I know it's hard.
    And every word is so important.
    Thank you.
    Thank you.
    OK.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Harry Thalheimer discusses his childhood in Darmstadt, Germany; the antisemitism he encountered after the Nazi regime rose to power; his family's unsuccessful attempts to leave Germany; the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938, when he was arrested for rescuing Jewish holy books from a burning synagogue; the horrific conditions he experienced when he was interned in Buchenwald concentration camp; his release and the immigration of his family to the United States, with the exception of his young sister who was disabled; learning of his sister’s placement in an orphanage and her later deportation, with an aunt, to Bergen-Belsen, where they perished; adjusting to life in the United States; being placed under quarantine in San Francisco, CA because he and his family were German; being drafted into the army; and serving as a translator for German prisoners of war.
    Interviewee
    Harry Thalheimer
    Interviewer
    Peter Ryan
    Date
    interview:  1989 September 19
    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

    Personal Name
    Thalheimer, Harry.

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    The Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project conducted the interview with Harry Thalheimer on September 19, 1989. The interview was received by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives in July 2003.
    Funding Note
    The cataloging of this oral history interview has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:46:39
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn515448

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    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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